Theory

The Eurasian Oracle

The Eurasian movement, which seeks to restore Russian power and prestige, is a form of National Bolshevism based on the geopolitical theory that Moscow, Berlin, and Paris form a natural political axis and potential power center. Alexander Dugin, the founder of the Eurasian Party, writes: The new Eurasian empire will be constructed on the basic principle of opposition to the common enemy: Atlanticism and the American New World Order. A multipolar world must replace the current unipolar world currently dominated by the United States.

Much has been written over the past several years about the Russian university professor, Alexander Dugin, who has become a prominent Putin advisor although he has no official government position, nor in fact does he have the academic credentials to head the Sociology Department at Moscow State University. His advisory role as resident intellectual without portfolio appears to be based on his expertise in matters dealing with political philosophies and forms of government. Although the Russian Federation has a Constitution, the Government is quite new and untested in many regards. An intellect like Alexander Dugin could certainly be helpful in advising the President on the fundamental laws and principles that prescribe the nature, function, and limits of both the Russian and foreign governments.

Deleuze, Guattari, & the New Right

Although it is common for New Right thinkers to extend the search for examples of anti-democratic and anti-egalitarian thoughts and practices to the Greeks, those still confined to the corridors of State academia tend to begin their search for such odious refutations of truth and justice with reactions to the Enlightenment and French Revolution. It is this latter tendency that has given us an intellectual tradition called the Counter-Enlightenment. While there are serious consequences for choosing to begin with the Enlightenment itself – the most obvious of which are the normalization of the Enlightenment principles of reason, humanity, and equality; and subsequent denial of the ontological power and legitimacy of anti-democratic thought – one may still use Counter-Enlightenment as a valid designation of the vast current in Western thought that overruns the ramparts of the “city upon a hill.”

This current is comprised of an array of concepts – among them aristocracy, warrior-caste, tradition, particularity, reverence, and honor – and thinkers – such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Joseph de Maistre, Johann Herder, Georges Sorel, and Julius Evola.

KNOW YOUR ENEMY: MEDITATION ON THE FOURTH POLITICAL REALITY

According to Professor Dugin, there have been three distinct ideologies since the dawn of the modern age – Liberalism, Marxism, and Fascism – and we are now moving into the era of the Fourth Ideology. Dugin clearly hopes that he can influence how this turns out, but this is a paradoxical belief because underlying Dugin’s ideas is the notion of a kind of natural progression of ideologies.

This deterministic pattern is apparent if we consider the subjects of the three ideologies, which are, in ascending order, the individual, the class, and the nation. Dugin’s hope is that the subject of the Fourth Ideology will be Heidegger’s concept of Dasein, which, in its essence, is almost a kind of animism in that it is a rejection of the hyper-connectivity and hyper-standardization of modernity.

TRANSITIONING FROM MODERNITY: A REVIEW OF ALEXANDER DUGIN’S "THE FOURTH POLITICAL THEORY" (PART 2)

For the second part of my review of Alexander Dugin’s "The Fourth Political Theory," I will focus on the more esoteric and abstract aspects, and attempt to relate it to real political concerns and issues. Although such ideas may seem irrelevant to a lot of people, they do have significance in the sense that they allow us to trace the trajectory of Dugin’s ideas, as well as their implications on the political sphere. In other words, they can tell us where Dugin is “coming from.”

Having said that, there’s always the possibility that I have misinterpreted certain parts of Dugin’s thesis, but this is an inevitable risk when studying such an abstract work. But we should remember that Dugin's book is an invitation to a struggle, rather than a full dogmatic declaration of finished truth. Any predictions that Dugin might make in his work are attempts to articulate how the epistemological landscape might change, and not necessarily how such changes might affect human affairs. This is why the book can be a little hard to decipher at times, particularly when we consider its apparent lack of a central and cohesive overarching theme.

It is best to approach the "The Fourth Political Theory" as the marking out of a philosophical arena wherein new and more concrete ideas can develop in the future. Having said all this, it’s important to begin deciphering the book by first looking at its own proposed ontological subject: Dasein.

Alexander Dugin’s “The Fourth Political Theory”

Alexander Dugin’s book is a very timely work; by which I mean it is almost exclusively a response to the twentieth century—“the century of ideology” (p. 15) — from the twenty-first. It is a right-wing critique of modernity that has learned its lessons from left-wing post-modernity. It joins a flurry of works in a similar genre of post-war “alternative politics,” spanning from Julius Evola’sFascism Viewed from the Right of 1964 to Guillaume Faye’s Archeofuturism of 2010. Authors can be Christian, neo-pagan, or atheist; they can be reformed fascists, “paleo”-conservatives, or Traditionalists. They all, however, seem to send the same message and understand the same thing about the present state of the Western world: everything that is wrong with the way we act is rooted in something desperately wrong with the way we think. It is, in many ways, set apart from the radical right-wing not only in conclusions but the quality of the authors. While some are certainly pamphleteers in spirit, there is a distinctly intellectual strain running through it all—exemplified by the Nouvelle Droitphenomenon in France. It should come as no surprise, then, that Dugin is Professor of Sociology at Moscow State University (as well as Chair of that department’s Centre for Conservative Studies).

Counter-hegemony in Theory of Multi-polar World

Counter-hegemony is the major aspect of the Theory of Multi-polar World. It originally appeared in the context of the critical theory of International Relations (IR). This concept undergoes certain semantic transformations in the transition from the critical theory of International Relations to the Theory of Multi-polar World (TMW). Those transformations should be considered in more details. In this case, we need to recall the basic principles of the hegemony theory in the framework of the critical theory.

The Wise Counsellor

Alexander Dugin, a youngish, stylish, slim, neat, hip and bearded don at the Moscow U, is a cult figure at his homeland; people throng to his lectures; his plentiful books cover a vast spectre of subjects from pop culture to metaphysics, from philosophy to theology, from international affairs to domestic politics. He is fluent in many languages, a voracious reader, and he made the Russians aware of many less known Western thinkers. He is ready to wade deepest waters of mystical and heterodox thought with mind-boggling courage. He thrives on controversies; adored and hated, but never boring.

He is a scholar and a practitioner of Mysticism, akin to Mirchea Eliade and Guenon; a church-going adherent of traditionalist Orthodoxy; an ardent student of conspiracy theories from Templers and the Holy Grail to Herman Wirth’s Arctogaia; he is a master of tools sharpened by Jean Baudrillard and Guy Debord; but first and foremost, he is a dedicated fighter for liberation of mankind from the vise of liberal tyranny in American-dominated New World Order, or even from Maya, the post-modernist post-liberal virtuality - by political means.

Multipolarism and Globalism, the two geopolitical Cosmovisions and their spiritual backgrounds

During the so-called Cold War, we lived in a bipolar world. At least, this is what most people think. But how bipolar was it really? There were two superpowers (USA and Soviet Union), with their respective geopolitical areas of influence (West and East), trying to control the world resources and the world population, and competing with each other.

In reality, this bipolar system was an experiment. West (“American”) and East (“Soviet”) were (since the death of Stalin) not really enemies, but rather two systems working as tools in the service of the same masters. The globalists controlling both of them, were trying to see which of the both systems worked “better” (better for them, obviously) in order to achieve their final goal; total world domination after the destruction of a natural multipolar world and a pluricultural order (of sovereign nations), based on organic communities.

Knowing this, it is not surprising anymore to see how many of the current top-globalists (Wolfowitz, Podhoretz, etc) serving as warmongers for Washington´s imperialism, are former Communists from the Trotskist branch.

On “White Nationalism” and other Potential Allies in the Global Revolution

There are different tendencies in the new generation of revolutionary, non-conformist movements in Europe (on the Right as well as the Left), and some of them have been successful in attaining high political positions in their respective countries. The crisis of the West will grow broader and deeper every day, so we should expect an increase in the power and influence of our own Eurasianist resistance movement against the present global order, which is a dictatorship by the worst elements of the Western societies.

Those from either the Right or the Left who refuse American hegemony, ultra-liberalism, strategic Atlanticism, the domination of oligarchic and cosmopolitan financial elites, individualistic anthropology and the ideology of human rights, as well as typically Western racism in all spheres – economic, cultural, ethical, moral, biological and so on – and who are ready to cooperate with Eurasian forces in defending multipolarity, socio-economic pluralism, and a dialogue among civilizations, we consider to be allies and friends.

 

THE FOURTH POLITICAL THEORY - A REVIEW

What is perhaps initially most appealing about this publication – aside from the promise of an offer of a fresh, viable alternative to the present stagnant political void, this “end of history” in which we find ourselves – is the comprehensive critique of the prevailing liberal ideology from a perspective which neither wholly aligns itself with the traditional positions in opposition to liberalism, nor stations itself against these.

The principal aim of Professor Dugin's work is not simply to deconstruct the previous failed political theories, which he lists as fascism, communism, and liberalism, but to fashion a new fourth theory, utilising what may be learnt from some of the previous models after their deconstruction rather than dismissing them outright on the basis of particulars worthy of rejection. That is not to say that the Fourth Political Theory is simply a synthesis of ideas that in their singular form have seen their day. Dugin is conscious of the necessity to bring something new to the table, with one of the principal of these novel ideas being the rejection of the subjects of the old ideologies, such as class, race, or the individual, in favour of the existential Heideggerian concept of Dasein (roughly Being or being-in-the-world. Literally da – there; sein– being) as the primary actor.

Greece and Great Britain in the 1930s and 1940s A Couple of Revealing Documents

On October 28, 1940, Italy attacked Greece. We know now that Italian invasion was due not to Mussolini’s initiative but to Ciano’s one. For the latter was in contact with the British; and the British wished Greece to be involved into the Second WW in order to establish air bases on Greek territory and bombard the oil fields in Ploieşti, Romania.

Iōannēs Metaxas was by then Greece’s Prime Minister. He was a brilliant Engineers officer and a noted pro-German as well. On August 4, 1936, he managed to have an authoritarian system imposed on Greece – under his own leadership. Still Metaxas was dependent on King George II of the Hellenes. The Sovereign had expressed during the First WW the same pro-German sentiments as Metaxas. But his mind was changed in the 1930s: he had fully understood that Greece was run (and she keeps being run) by a supra-masonic government closely associated to Great Britain’s “deep state”.

4PT Prospects

America is being overwhelmed with social meltdown, uncontrolled poverty and unemployment.  This has been combined with the constant media bombardment of an entertainment complex meant to cause intellectual and emotional retardation, combined with a security culture on overdrive.  The USA is being eaten out from the inside by a cancer of its own creation.  American Revolutionaries on ‘both sides’ of the so-called political spectrum were right, have been right all along, and are right today.  This is a twofold phenomenon, a meltdown occurring on both the cultural and economic front.

These two are connected and inseparable, creating a ‘chicken or egg’ paradox when one tries to untangle them. Today’s revolutionary Political Soldiers need to have a basic grasp of the present situation beyond being a percipient witness to their daily lives.  From this, a more coherent analysis of what is now and ‘What is to be Done?’ will be possible.  That will lead the best of them to the conclusion that the groundbreaking thesis of Alexander Dugin provides them with the most coherent set of usable tools for the coming American revolution.

EUROPE AS FAR AS VLADIVOSTOCK

In the French dictionary "Le Petit Larousse" it is written that the conditions of uniformity for an ethnos are its language and its culture. 
For the purposes of this analysis, I will give my own extended interpretation of this concept, having said that the unity of the ethnic state has its roots in the unity of race, religion, language, common imageries, common memories, common frustrations or fears.  
The concept of the political state (as an open, expanding system) is fully opposite to the concept of the ethnic state (as a closed, fixed system). The political state is the expression of the will of free men to have a common future.  

Eurasia and Europe: Dialogue of “Big Spaces”

Carl Schmitt regarded the earth as a single whole and was looking for its global mission. This "whole" was formed by Schmitt in the concept of Nomos. He used the Greek word derived from the verb «nemein», which is identical to German “nehmen” - “to take”. Nomos comprises three acts of the drama: "taking", "division and distribution of the taken", "exploitation and use of the taken and distributed." According to Schmitt, Nomos of the Earth existed always. First Nomos is described as a "promised land" of ancient peoples. It is the Nomos of the ancient times and the Middle Ages. It ceased to exist after the exploration of the great oceans and the American continent. Thus began the Second Nomos, the Nomos of national sovereign states that had the Eurocentric structure. Events of the World War II led to its destruction, so that the land was divided into east and west, which were in a state of "cold war". It is not about mere geographic opposites, but a more original and profound contradistinctions. Carl Schmitt wrote: "The whole history of the planetary confrontation of East and West in its entirety is reducible to the fundamental dualism of the elements: Earth and Water, Land and Sea. What we now call the East, is a single mass of solid land: Russia, China and India - a huge piece of land, the "Middle Earth", as named by the great English geographer Sir Halford Mackinder. What we call today the West, is one of the world's oceans, hemispheres, where the Atlantic and Pacific oceans are placed. Confrontation of the sea and land powers, worlds - is the global truth that lies at the heart of explanation of civilization dualism that constantly generates a planetary stress and stimulates the whole process of history ." Thus, the birth of a third Nomos was caused by division of the world between the West and the East. However, it was destroyed with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

 

Eurasian keys to the future

The Eurasianism is a very large set of ideas, attitudes, approaches and concepts, which represent a complete model of world outlook, applicable to different levels. Eurasianism also contains, along with the political component, also the purely philosophical, historic-cultural, historical, sociological and geopolitical ones.

Therefore, when we analyze Eurasianism, we must, first of all, clarify what is the subject and within what level we want to explore it. For example, if it is about the current international situation, then Eurasianism is to be associated with the theory of the multipolar world. At this level, Eurasianism proceeds from the principle that the unipolar models, where dominate the Western values, claiming also the title of universal models, are totally one-sided and unacceptable and require a radical revision. A multipolar world represents the idea that the world must have several poles and not only one, as it is, for instance, the Western pole, nor only two, as it was during the Soviet times, but a series of poles in a mutual equipoise. And namely among these poles the Eurasian one should take its place: the American, European andFar Eastpoles… Particularly this Eurasian world-view has given birth to the idea of the necessity to integrate the post-Soviet space: in order to be a pole of a multipolar world,Russiaalone is not enough.

Aleksandr Dugin’s Foundations of Geopolitics

One perceptive observer of the Russian political scene, Francoise Thom, noted as far back as 1994 that fascism, and especially its “Eurasianist” variant, was already at that time displacing Russian nationalism among statist Russian elites as a post-communist “Russian Idea,” especially in the foreign policy sphere.  “The weakness of Russian nationalists,” she emphasized, “stems from their inability to clearly situate Russian frontiers.  Euras[ianism] brings an ideological foundation for post-Soviet imperialism.”
There has probably not been another book published in Russia during the post-communist period which has exerted an influence on Russian military, police, and statist foreign policy elites comparable to that of Aleksandr Dugin’s 1997 neo-fascist treatise, Foundations of Geopolitics.3

The impact of this intended “Eurasianist” textbook on key elements among Russian elites testifies to the worrisome rise of fascist ideas and sentiments during the late Yeltsin and the Putin periods.

Unthinking Liberalism:
Alexander Dugin’s The Fourth Political Theory

For Dugin, triumphant liberalism is embodied by Americanism; the United States, through its origins as an Enlightenment project, and through its superpower status in the twentieth and twenty-first century, is the global driver of liberal practice. As such, with the defeat of Marxism, it has created, and sought to perpetuate, a unipolar world defined by American, or Atlanticist, liberal hegemony. Russia has a long anti-Western, anti-liberal tradition, and for Dugin this planetary liberal hegemony is the enemy. Dugin would like the world to be multipolar, with Atlanticism counterbalanced by Eurasianism, and maybe other “isms.” In geopolitics, the need for a fourth political theory arises from a need to keep liberalism permanently challenged, confined to its native hemisphere, and, in a word, out of Russia.

Critique of Liberal Ideology

By the end of the nineteenth century, however, adjustments had to be made to the purely economic logic of society’s regulation and reproduction. These adjustments were less the result of conservative resistance than of the internal contradictions of the new social configuration. Sociology itself arose from real society’s resistance to political and institutional changes as well as those who invoked a “natural order” to denounce the formal and artificial character of the new mode of social regulation. For the first sociologists, the rise of individualism hatched a double fear: of “anomie” resulting from the disintegration of social bonds (Émile Durkheim) and of the “crowd” made up of atomized individuals suddenly brought together in an uncontrollable “mass” (Gustave Le Bon or Gabriel Tarde, both of whom reduce the analysis of social facts to “psychology”). The first finds an echo among counter-revolutionary thinkers in particular. The second is mainly perceptible among the bourgeoisie concerned above all with protecting itself from the “dangerous classes.”

While the nation-state supported and instituted the market, antagonism between liberalism and the “public sector” grew in tandem. Liberals never cease fulminating against the welfare state, without realizing that it is precisely the market’s extension that necessitates ever-increasing state intervention. The man whose labor is subject solely to the market’s play is indeed vulnerable, for his labor might find no takers or have no value. Modern individualism, moreover, destroyed the organic relations of proximity, which were above all relations of mutual aid and reciprocal solidarity, thus destroying old forms of social protection. While regulating supply and demand, the market does not regulate social relations, but on the contrary disorganizes them, if only because it does not take into account demands for which one cannot pay. The rise of the welfare state then becomes a necessity, since it is the only power able to correct the most glaring imbalances and attenuate the most obvious distresses.

Existential geopolitics of Carlo Terracciano

 

Russian Eurasian geopolitics met the European continentalism in 1992 - during a joint visit to Moscow of Carlo Terracciano and Jean Thiriart. Jean Thiriart  was the author of the concept "Euro-Soviet empire from Vladivostok to Dublin" and Carlo Terracciano at that time has written his programmatic work "In the foam of history" (“Nel fiume della Storia”). Since European continentalism and Russian eurasianism became almost the same geopolitical line. Something similar was described in the project Haushofer continental concept of geopolitical block “Berlin-Moscow-Tokyo”. The same idea was revived on the theoretical level in the early 90s in Russia. The close Russian – European geopolitical dialogue started then in Moscow and is continuing and growing up to present day. At the same time, other European geopolitics, in particular, Alain de Benoist, Claudio Mutti visited Moscow, entering the same direction of geopolitical considerations. In France, a very similar views were held by an excellent traditionalist writer Jean Parvulesco.

 

GLOBAL TRANSITION AND ITS ENEMIES

New World Order as a concept was popular in a concrete historical momentum – precisely that when the Cold War ended (late 80’s, Gorbatchev era) and the global cooperation between the USA and Soviet Union was considered near and very probable. The basis of NWO was presumably realization of the convergence theory predicting the synthesis of Soviet socialist and Western capitalist political forms and near cooperation of the Soviet Union and USA in the case of regional issues – for example first Gulf War in the beginning of 1991. Hence, as the Soviet Union split soon after, this project of NWO was naturally set aside and forgotten.

After 1991 the other World Order was considered as something being created under our eyes – Unipolar World with open global hegemony of USA. It is described well in Fukuyama’s political utopia “End of history”. This World Order ignored any other poles of power except the USA and its allies (first of all Europe and Japan) and was thought as universalization of free market economy, political democracy and human rights ideology as global pattern accepted by all countries in the world. 

The West should be rejected

1.The human world is not one (Modern-Western) civilization as universal one and example of the development to all other, but rich variety  of civilizations, cultures, religions, ethnics and societies. Each one of them has absolute right of stay what it is or change at its own will in any direction. No society can judge another society because there is no common measure. Any judgment of the sort will be necessarily ethnocentric. The is only one universal think - total absence of any universality (concerning human society).

2. So we need to construct multipolar world where the Western (and North American) society will be one possibility among many other (and not common destiny).

3. The Russia is not a country like Germany or Italy, o Greece. It is something more. It is civilization on its own. It is cultural, geopolitical, historical and social pole of the human world charged with the mission. The Russia in not part of the West nor East. It is completely aside. To understand Russia we should compare it with Europe as whole or with Islamic civilization, or with chinese civilization.

Knights Templars of the PROLETARIAT

 

From the depths of being, the contemporary Russian Worker sullenly glazes at this bustle. Awkward and concrete, tenacious as a machine, and sluggish like a thinker. He does not believe and will never believe the social demagoguery of the “pinks.” Them again? No, enough. For the “capitalists,” the reckoning will also be short. Only the dense, passionately melancholic power of arising nationalism can touch these solid and temperate people. But when there is talk of a “ruling dynasty,” “restoration of privileges to nobility,” gonfalons, cossacks, or “national entrepreneurship,” the patriots face gloomy indifference: “Maskers.” Each morning, with sunrise (nobody except these people has thought of the sun for a long time now) they crawl out of apartment cages from fat and stupid wives and snotty toddlers, move in a measured pace into the concrete womb of Production. So that - toiling without inspiration - persistently, rhythmically, uninterruptedly wage a cosmic battle with matter, so inflexible, raw, rough, so poisonous. Gloomy workers know - evil demon of substance has taken hostage delicate and frail Life, the Sun Maiden. It is the form stolen by a harsh usurper of matter. It can be saved only by heroic deed, a stubborn, terrifying, relentless war against the ground ice of reality.

 

MAIN PRINCIPLES OF EURASIST POLICY

 

The first pattern represents the inertial cliché of the Soviet (mainly later Soviet) period. It has somehow taken roots in the psychology of some Russian managing systems, often unconsciously, pushing them into adopting such or such decision on the basis of the precedents. This pattern is supported with the “relevant” argument: «It worked earlier, it will work also now». It concerns not only those political leaders who consciously exploit the nostalgic complex of the Russian citizens. The Soviet reference pattern is much wider and deeper than the structures of the KPFR [Communist Party of the Russian Federation], which now stands at the rim of  executive power, far from the decisional centres. Everywhere politicians and officials, formally not identifying themselves in any way with communism, are guided by it. It is an effect of education, life experience, formation. In order to understand the substance of the undergoing processes in Russian politics, it is necessary to admit this “unconscious sovietism”. The second pattern is the liberal-democrat, pro-American one. It started taking shape with the beginning of “perestroyka” and became some kind of dominant ideology in the first half of the 1990s. As a rule, the so-called liberal-reformers and the political forces close to them identify themselves with it. This pattern is based on choosing as system of reading of the American socio-political device, copying it on the Russian ground and following US national interests in international issues. Such pattern has the advantage to allow to lean on the quite real “foreign present”, as against the virtual “domestic past” around which the first pattern gravitates. The argument here too is rather simple: «It works for them, it will work for us too». Here it is important to stress that we are not simply talking about “foreign experience”, but about the orientation towards the US, as to the flagship of the successful Western capitalist world.

 

Eurasian Path

 In contrast to the absolutization of the liberal pattern laying at the economic base of the «new world order», the Eurasist Project supposes the reference to a wide spectrum of the socially oriented patterns of a social system, which can be sometimes globally called as «socialism» or «socially oriented community». The social environment is the natural habitat of the man, and in his basic features man is defined just as in relation to a definite community. As against dogmatical Marxism, this community can be understood in very different ways —as a cultural type, as community collective unconscious, as ethnic identity, as religious faith, as a social-historical formation, as a class-professional belonging etc. All these social features can be taken into account in a common summary pattern, which, conditionally, it is possible to call as the «eurasist socialism», free from the dogmatists, creative, open, incorporating both traditional forms of social identification and new social forms growing in modern conditions. The social feature of Eurasism does not exclude at all the value of the  individual, and the more so it does not reject some definite elements of market management. It is a common spirit, a priority attitude toward the social system, where in the economic, social, scientific and political areas the models based on the principle of the general social subject are encouraged, and the major basic instance is the organic collective of an old or new kind. 

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