11 February 2010

Russian Nationalism Yahoo group

In September 2007 Andreas Umland established a Russian Nationalism group on Yahoo groups.

The group is designed as a forum of exchange and an open archive serving researchers, journalists and others interested in the history and current permutations of Russian right-wing thought and politics. While everybody is invited to join, this forum is reserved for the spread of substantive, analytical information as well as for the announcement on relevant conferences, publications, and other academic projects. This is not a discussion group.

In addition to extremely useful Links and Files sections, there is also a biweekly "Russian Nationalism Bulletin" (RNB) that has started to appear on 1 November 2007
.

Although you can freely see the messages, Links and Files sections are available only for the members of the group. Joining is pretty easy and you are not required to have a Yahoo account.

7 February 2010

Flight from Death: The Quest for Immortality

If you read Roger Griffin's magnum opus Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler, you may find this documentary film really fascinating -

Flight from Death: The Quest for Immortality (Wiki)



Flight from Death is the first film to investigate the psychological effects of death anxiety, or fear of death. This 90-minute documentary about the effects that our reactions to death anxiety have on a psychological, spiritual, and cultural level reveals convincingly that death denial is a root cause of human behavior and more importantly, violence and aggression.

The effects of death anxiety are embedded within everything we do across the globe. Our architecture, our careers, the children we raise, and the wars we wage, are all manifestations of our desire to gain a sense of permanence in defiance of our mortality. This film is a cinematic approach to these theories, placing them in a modern context and portraying them in ways that are both stimulating as well as reflective of the importance and magnitude of their implications.

Flight from Death is the culmination of many years of research and shooting all over the world in locations such as Egypt, Israel, Guyana, Greece, and China. It features interviews with leading scholars, philosophers, researchers and authors such as Robert Jay Lifton, Irvin Yalom, and Sam Keen culminating in the most comprehensive, multidisciplinary, and mind-blowing investigation of humankind’s relationship with death ever captured on film.


FFD crew with psychohistorian Robert Jay Lifton.

(I remember referring to Lifton in my article on "clerical fascism".)

4 February 2010

The Palingenetic Thrust of Russian Neo-Eurasianism

A new issue of Russian-language version of German online academic journal Forum für osteuropäische Ideen- und Zeitgeschichte features my article on Aleksandr Dugin -

Палингенетический проект неоевразийства: идеи возрождения в мировоззрении Александра Дугина

It was previously published in Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions and is available here.

The new issue of Forum also features important articles by Andreas Umland, Marina Peunova, Marlene Laruelle, Leonid Luks and other authors.