Lecture 2 (讲座二)
GEOPOLITICS
地缘政治
Theories, concepts, schools, debates
理论, 概念, 学派,论争
The origins of Geopolitics
Geopolitics studies relations and interactions of Spaces (Territories), States, Civilizations, Peoples, Economics
International Relations &
Geopolitics
国际关系 和 地缘政治
Academic course of prof. Alexander Dugin (Alexander Dugin 教授的学术课程)
4 lectures (四个讲座)
1. International Relations (国际关系)
2. Geopolitics (地缘政治)
3. Multipolarity, unipolarity, hegemony (多极, 单极, 霸权)
B.N.:You're working on your own, in my opinion, capital work, under the heading "Noomahiа". In it you paid attention to Slavic and Serbian Logos? Can you say something more about this?
A.D.:I have already published two volumes on East European civilization and the part is dedicated to Serbian Logos. I have discovered that Serbs are essentially warriors. That is the heritage of White Serbia and the ancient history – it seems that Sarmatian factor played here important role. But Serbs have settled in the Balkan region where long before first indo-europeans prevailed ancient matriarchy – the civilization of the Great Mother – its rests we see in Lepenski Vir, Vincia and so on. So there is hidden influence of Logos of Cybele in Serbian tradition as well.
I think that Kosovo battle and the epic choice of king Lazar is key to Serbian identity: Serb is that who prefers the glorious death for Orthodox faith and Serbian motherland to any richness and gifts from the enemy. So I think Serbs are not only people… You Serbs are a kind of mystical community, a Church of king Lazar devoted to the Kosovo as eternal example of loyalty, will, dignity and special kind of purely Serbian sanctity… All that I tried to explore in Noomakhia dedicated to Slavs and to Balkan civilization as such.
By the way I have discover that it is wrong to represent Balkans as periphery of Europe. In some sense it is cradle of European peasantry and it is European peasantry that is responsible for many crucial elements of European identity… So I would be happy if my new books would be translated in Serbian as the other that are already translated and published in my beloved country.
The escalation of tension in Russian-Ukrainian relations after the conflict in the Sea of Azov demands analysis.
The formal side of the conflict is obvious: Poroshenko is not capable of winning the upcoming elections, so he arranged a provocation to impose state of emergency and disrupt them. That`s how Russian experts have commented on the situation, with a smile. This analysis is correct to a certain degree, but the decision is not spontaneous: Poroshenko has a plan, and it is more serious than some momentary trick.
If the current escalation gradually calms down, then martial law will eventually be repealed, and elections will be held. Poroshenko will look like an idiot because the “Russian threat” will not be enough to improve his popularity. He must have another plan in mind. The only thing that would make Poroshenko's action logical, is a deeper orientation toward war with Russia. If such a war does not occur, Poroshenko will only have worsened his situation. Poroshenko needs more than escalation, he needs war.
First of all, the fact that populist movements are directed against the political elite as a whole, without making a distinction, whether it is right or left-wing, is striking. This is the 'uprise of the periphery of society against its center'. In his famous work, the American sociologist Christopher Lasch (1932–1994) designated the form of government that prevails in modern Western society as the “elite revolution”.
At the beginning of the XXth century, it was customary to follow José Ortega y Gasset's discourse about the “revolt of the masses”, whose increasing influence on politics threatened, it seemed, to destroy Western culture - the European Logos.
But Christopher Lasch noted a new political trend: it is the elites that are destroying culture and European Logos today. These new western elites, who have reached the pinnacle of power only by their resourcefulness and immense will to power, are much worse and more destructive than the masses.
The task of describing Turanian civilization in the recent volume of Noomakhia was inseparable from the fact that Turan is gone. The book was therefore a reconstruction of a past society, an archaeological volume, in which Turanian civilization had to be restored bit by bit on the basis of archaeological research, linguistic analysis, what we know about ethnology and ethnography, and essentially artificial methods.
A few Turanian peoples can be named. For example, the Ossetians are the last heirs of the Sarmatians, there are the various Pashtun tribes, and the direct descendants of the Indo-European nomads in the Great Steppe. There are also descendants in Nuristan, the Kalash in Pakistan and Afghanistan, enclaves of direct Turanian cultures and Indo-Europeans nomadic tribes. But, of course, this is largely a conditional reconstruction.
Every thing is what it is thanks to its borders. After all, it is they that separate it from another thing. This distinction carries the most important meaning of the concept of the border not just for international law, defense doctrine, or the structuring of a country’s armed forces, but also for philosophy as such. The border is not just an instrument of philosophy, but its essence, seeing as the highest philosophical concept – transcendence -in Latin literally means “that what lies on the far side of the border”.
The border externally reflects that which lies inside it, while simultaneously confining the essence of the thing in its confrontation with other things. The border is something sacred. The ancient Greeks knew a special god, Terminus, whose name meant ‘limit’, ‘border’. This was not just the guardian-deity of borders, but a “border-deity”, a kind of special, sacred concept that played a central role in the worldviews of the ancient Indo-European peoples.
In magic, there also exists the important concept of the “Guardian of the Threshold”, a special being that is located at the intersection of two worlds: the beyond and the present, the vulgar and subtle, that of life and that of death, the waking world and the dreaming world. This is the very same ancient Terminus, with only slight modifications.
This is also where some of his most useful observations are found—his discussion of potlatch, for example, the ethnic destruction of property to demonstrate power, can be very useful in understanding the tendency of certain demographics to riot as a means of demonstrating or celebrating power. Civilized societies, of course, consider such riots as counter-productive because when a fully realised narod riots, it is usually an expression of frustrated powerlessness, not a demonstration of social power. Dugin enables us to draw qualitative distinctions having nothing to do with environment or circumstance between the bread riots preceding the French Revolution and the Ferguson and Baltimore riots following the death of Black criminals in the United States or the more recent riots in places like Johannesburg. Another interesting observation is his understanding of slavery as a function that only higher civilization, the narod, is truly capable, since slavery creates irreconcilable contradictions within the structure of the ethnos. The primitive ethnos has no category for a slave, since the balance of the ethnos requires the “other” to be an absolute evil to be destroyed, while a slave is allowed to exist and remain “other” to the ethnos (he observes that the Egyptians referred to slaves as “living dead” for this reason – those who by all right should have been deprived of life but instead were kept alive to become tools for ethnic labour). The necessary connexion of slavery with complex societies and higher thought is rich fodder for Reactionary thought in particular.
Where right-wing liberals and conservatives preach “you can’t do anything against the progression of modernity, it’s only possible to gradually influence the process”, Alexander Dugins Ethnos and Society tells you the exact opposite: When one realizes the fact, that there are still ethnic societies around this planet in the Amazon, that the Muslim communities of the Middle East still live in the community of their narod, that in Russia and India the modern nation state is just a thin layer, then it’s obvious that the decay of modernity is just a possibility and not our destiny. If we want to continue the suicide of Europe and follow modernity to its conclusion and change nothing. But if we want to restore our tradition and ensure the existence of our people, we have to radically change our habits, morals and our way of life.
Whereas The Fourth Political Theory tells us to return to pre-modernity in order to protect our Dasein (narod), Ethnos and Society shows us how the preconditions for a return to pre-modernity work. Therefore, Ethnos and Society, is not only important to better understand the work of professor Dugin, but also in order to fight post-modernity to the last blood. If one doesn’t let oneself be scared off by the theoretical depth of this book, it’ll greatly improve one’s understanding of the current processes of globalization, decadence and the Great Replacement. This book is exactly what all the right-wing populist parties in Europe would need in order to change their policies of fake populism and realize what is really necessary to revive European identity.
1. Noological analysis of present situation.
2. Globalization, anthropology of Post-Modernity, Artificial intelligence, artificial immortality, Post-humanism, feminism, EU.
3. Post-liberalism.
4. Russia in noology.
5. Is the restoration of Logos of Apollo possible?
We are playing the same melody, if we`re not happy, we can`t say `stop` here, it`s impossible. We should go this route to the beginning – to the first note of this symphony. We should ask now: who is the author and began this process of urbanization, who has created trains, liberalism, democracy, progress, missile, computer, nuclear synthesis. Who is the real author? And that is essential: because it was human decision, that wasn`t kind of `natural process`. In one moment of the history we`ve decided to go that way, and now we can just slow it down or accelerate. But why we don`t ask ourselves: are we going the right direction from the beginning? Was this decision right one? We should go back to this moment, to the beginning of this melody – that is my idea. It could be too late, to wake up with robots around, perfect tax-payers, making democratic decisions, sending each other SMS messages from robot to robot... The conversation between robots is already possible, in neuro-network the special language is possible, during the conversation two computer have recently created the language without knowledge of the operator. So, they will replace us easily.
Cold war was the confrontation between two ideological camps. Now there is no more clear distinction in the field of ideology, rather between two versions of the same liberal-democracy – advanced in the case of USA and EU and delayed in the case of Russia. So we would presume that should reduce considerably the tension. But it is not the case. So we have to search the reason of growing tensions in other field than ideology. The most likely the reasons of the “new cold war” are this time geopolitical. But it is legitimate to ask the question: That it was not in reality an ideological cold war between capitalism and socialism the moment of much more broader historically context the moment of Great War of Continents.
This GWoC is the very basis of geopolitical understanding of history – Sea Power against Land Power, Eurasia against Atlantica. If we can agree on that everything becomes logical and clear. There is the everlasting battle between two types of civilizations – dynamic (progressive, merchant) Sea civilization and static (conservative, heroic) Land civilization: Carthage against Rome, Athens against Sparta.
1. Serbs as southern slavs. Indo-European level of Serbian identity.
2. Serbian peasantry. Slavic matriarchy (Gasparini). Piatak. Vila. Mother Friday. Lepenski Vir, Vincha cultures.
3. The factor of Thracians, Illyrians.
4. White Serbia. Serbian came to Balkan. From where? Polabian slavs. Luzhitza. Sorbs. The style of Polabian slavs – sarmatians (Scythians) Pure Turanic. Differences with sclavins (bulgarians).
5. The relations with Byzance. Orthodoxy. Katekhonic concept.
6. Nemanici. Raska as new kingdom. Saint Sava holy Athos mountain tradition. Patriarchy of Pech.
7. The Empire. Byzantine - Bulgarian, Serb, Valachia, Russia.
8. Dushan the Strong. The control over Balkans.
1. The Modernity as paradigmatic phenomenon. The structure of Modernity is based on the denial of Tradition (Guenon, Evola, Schuon, Burkhardt, Valsan, Nasr). What Tradition destroys Modernity? The answer is clear: apollonian Logos in form of Christianity.
2. The origins of scientific world picture reveals the special philosophical tendency – atomism of Democritus and Epicurus. Later Roman Lucretius.. That was pre-socratic tendencies of Logos of Cybele in greek culture. Plato, Aristotle, Parmenides, Pythagoras and Stoia are based on Logos of Apollo and sometimes of Dionysus. Atomism and epicureanism are based on Logos of Cybele. So in Christianism Democritus and Epicurus were absent. They have reappeared with Galliley, Newton, Gassendi, Boyl, Descartes, Hobbes.
3. The Modernity is based on refutation of Platonism and Aristotle. It is basically titanic or in Christian terms Luciferian. The Modernity refuses verticality, hierarchy, warrior values (knights ethos of Middle Age), theology as ruling paradigm, sacralization of State (modern State as profane), democracy and individualism.
1. Noological analysis of Christianity is not dogmatic but based on typology.
2. The main structure of Christianity is heavenly patriarchy and verticality. God is Father and He is in Heaven. He is transcendent from creature so it is Logos of Apollo. Hence Platonism and Aristotelian logic in Joan Damascine and scholastics.
3. In Christology we see Dionysian features: two nature of Christ, death and resurrection, descent into the Hell, the Christ as future God and King. But it is apollonian type of dionysism – free from chtonic motives and figure, purified, patriarchal.
4. In the field of gender there is anelegyny and patriarchy: two branches of sedentary Indo-European society relation between sexes.
The US, UK, and France’s first missile airstrikes were rather improvisational and symbolic in nature.
Iranian, Russian, and Hezbollah forces were not attacked. Assad did not suffer strategically. The Syrian opposition, which expected much more, did not gain any serious advantages. Mass demonstrations in support of Assad are being held in Damascus.
Russian commentators have pointed out that France itself did not launch any missiles - all those launched were by British and American military forces.
Judging by the fact that all the missiles were launched at targets at a careful distance from the location of Russian soldiers, it seems that Mattis’ line won out in the US, as opposed to that of Bolton, who has insisted on directly attacking Iranians and Russians.