Alexander Reid Ross writes:

At how many conferences can you be guaranteed to meet Iranian Revolutionary Guards, Russian imperialists, anti-Ukrainian fascists, Chinese spies, Qaddafi devotees, Corbyn fans, Assad apologists, neo-Nazis, Trump devotees, French Holocaust deniers, Western anti-war feminists, African American separatists, Venezuelan socialists and anti-Semites of every conceivable form and type?

There’s really only one, and it’s run by an organization that the U.S. Treasury designates as a front for the Iranian regime’s most hardline power-brokers.

And the New Horizon conferences recently achieved another layer of infamy this February, when former U.S. Air Force intelligence officer Monica Witt was charged with helping Iran launch a cyber-spying operation on her erstwhile intelligence community colleagues. Witt attended the conference in 2012, and at the 2013 she attended again – and defected to Iran, where she remains.

For years, New Horizon has drawn a host of far left and hard right ideologues – from Robert Faurisson to CodePink to the Nation of Islam – from the underbelly of European and North Atlantic political life to consort with Iranian officials, and with Alexander Dugin, the rising Russian fascist ideologue, occult philosopher and guru to Donald Trump’s alt-right base.

“We are in a transition of the unipolar moment,” Dugin declared, during his keynote speech at last year’s conference. With the 9/11 attacks and rise of Putin in Russia came the emergence of the “multipolar world,” Dugin told the assemblage of anti-Semites, conspiracy theorists and acolytes of his “neo-Eurasianist” ideology, defined by the “rise of China, the resistance of Iran against globalization, [and] the growth of [the] populist moment in the West. Trump’s election was a sign that the American people have chosen multipolarity.”

That “multipolarity” really means, Dugin-style, a “traditionalist” federation of ethnostates throughout Eurasia which, he hopes, will be engineered by far right parties and states such as the Austrian Freedom Party, Italy’s League, Iran and Syria – with Moscow as a kind of de facto imperial center. The Kremlin both openly and quietly facilitates and funds this political pivot away from NATO and a united Europe, through all manner of influence and funding campaigns. [Continue reading…]