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The Fourth Political Theory and Its Reception: A Review of a Non-Review Posted on May 1, 2013

Michael O’Meara is the author of the definitive English-language overview of the French Nouvelle Droite’s ideas, New Culture, New Right. Anti-Liberalism in Postmodern Europe. An acute and perceptive writer himself, O’Meara is also the author, as Michael Torigian, of Every Factory a Fortress. The French Labor Movement in the Age of Ford and Hitler. For all those who gravitate towards the ideas of the Groupement de recherche et d’études pour la civilisation européenne (GRECE) and are serious about seeing them come to fruition in the real world, they could do worse than read the latter book and its account of what a militant labor movement can accomplish (That’s right, the working class also plays a role in a revolutionary struggle. Metapolitics alone and publishing articles on “Implicit Whiteness in the Second Season of Veronica Mars” are not going to cut it, no matter how many footnotes they have.)

Annunciation of America

America is not just a continent which, more or less randomly, takes place in the far West on the maps of the world, but at the same time is, according to the logic of things, and the West in terms of metageography. We can even say: America is the West in absolute, metaphysical sense of the term. America is absolute West. It is the undisputed leader and center of the Western world (Western civilization) and compared with it, all other Western countries are only second-rate units, subsidiaries, including its European provinces (European Union), in a tightly integrated "Trans-Atlantic structures" (NATO). Still more, America is likely to become a paradigm, a universal model, obligatory to all mankind. Thus, like a raised torch in the hand of the Statue of Liberty, yet mysterious essence of this country really shines all over the planet, over Earth, illuminating different nations and continents, as well as a new and unknown radiation. Indeed, America" offer the hand to the whole of humanity", and offered him its eschatology, a messianic revelation, its "Annunciation".

 

AGAINST POST-MODERN WORLD

The conference Against Post-Modern World took place in Moscow suburbs city Zvenigorod in the autumn of 2011.
The conference Against Post-Modern World was dedicated to the problematics of Tradition and Post-Modern. It has gathered the most outstanding and presentable traditionalist of Russia and Europe.
It was a true gathering of traditionalists from different countries from Russia and Europe most of the traditionalist movements and schools, publications and magazines.. They gathered to ask the most daring questions and to fearlessly offer their bold answers to them.
The catastrophe is acknowledged by everyone. But it has been described in different ways, and different solutions have been offered.

We truly were looking for an alternative

I would have to say I rediscovered the Forth Political Theroy over the past few years with my return to Political Activism. For those who do not know me before the inception of New Resistance, in the 1990’s I was a highly active member of the American Front. Our brand of Third Position was unlike any Third Position at the time or any currently being espoused today. We truly were looking for an alternative beyond facisim, communism, and liberalism. We had early influences from Christian Bouchet and Alexander Dugin so it was natural that we looked to Europe and Russia for inspiration. The promotion of such ideologies breaking away from reationary norms along with symbolism and tactics from the classical Left  sped up the progress of us fighting a war on “two fronts” here at home, being called “commies” from the racial right and “nazi” from the liberalized left. So with that being said what I have seen happen since my departure in 2001 is beyond encouraging. What I have found in Professor Dugin’s work on the Forth Political Theroy, being optimistic, can see it taking foothold as an ideology to be taken seriously. As far as the U.S. is concerned nothing short of complete disaster would shake the foundation of liberal democracy.  

Different Europe

I personally consider Russia as a European country, of course with diverse ethnic groups. And of course it has its own culture, traditions, and identity. But every European country has its own culture and traditions. The only difference is, we Europeans are told nonstop by the Brussels propaganda that we are all somehow “the same”. The Russians have the benefit not being bombarded by that ridiculous nonsense. For me as a German, Russia should be our close friend and ally. We share a lot of interests, we share a common history of course with ups and downs – at least Moscow is closer to us than Washington. A close relationship to Russia would be in the national interest of Berlin and Moscow.

Eurasia will bring the world to multipolarity

there is two Europe’s. Now the politics are not allowed except those who serve the NWO but each conservative organization considered as terrorist or neo-Nazi even its not. You know communist fear fascist or the fascist side of conservatism but who calls these organizations as terrorist one THE Government which serves the liberation of each community so 50% for each side.
“There is nothing more tragic than a failure to understand the historical moment we are currently going through; - notes Alain de Benoist – this is the moment of postmodern globalization”. The French philosopher emphasizes the significance of the issue of a new Nomos of the Earth or a way of establishing international relations. What do you think the fourth Nomos will be like? Would you agree that the new Nomos is going to be Eurasian and multipolar (transition from universum to pluriversum)? I believe in case the globalizations won you know it’s too easy to control 5 people more than 10 its real slavery anyway. The answer yes I believe in Eurasia will bring the world to multipolarity also you can add after that I believe in triple -world which atlantist west as first and Eurasia also china as third so the second and the third against first and the second united with the third in one side.

The struggle between Europe and West

The struggle between the "two Europes" - I would say: between Europe and West - is a struggle for life or death, because the final instauration of liberal totalitarism, with the monsters created by its atheistic anthropology, by its cult of profit, by its technological prometheism, would mean to sink to the bottom of a subhuman barbarity which never existed in the world history. I don't know if Europe will find in itself the necessary energies to invert the liberal trend, nor we can see the "help from East” hypothized by René Guénon, so that I am tempted to repeat that "only a god can save us". In every case, "good Europeans" must do their duty and continue to struggle, never mind the chances of victory.

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.

 

Russia connects Asia and Europe.

I discovered the Fourth Political Theory through a dear companion of many years whom we have discussed philosophical and political matters.  This person has remained with me for many years even through dark or desperate times.

Some books change our life:  The fourth political theory is one such example.

 In my humble opinion upon evaluation I already see this major ideology taking root and precedent in the hearts and minds of our spiritual warriors who are standing against oppression.  We do not want to be slaves in western and eastern spheres from the negatively defined liberal hegemony stemming regarding such countries which support terrorism.  This has been a problem for decades. 

The current situation has been made clear by the fourth political theory and many of us are reaching out for the historic future in the spirit of Dugin and Eurasia.

The Fourth Political Theory: beyond right and left

So, I discovered Third-positionism, and became a supporter of national-revolutionary movements in a multipolar geopolitical order (In the Arab countries they have Baathism, Nasserism; in Latinamerica they have Peronism, Bolivarianism; and in our countries we have Eurasianism). This is also known as "international nationalism"; against chauvinism and racism but for the preservation of all identities and of all cultures. I see Eurasianism, or the Fourth Political Theory, as a contemporary way of resistance  for those of us who live “from the Canary Islands to Vladivostok”. For resistance against the plutocratic, materialistic, economicist sytem disguised as "democracy", and against american cultural imperialism.
 
The chances to become a major ideological force are now still low in my opinion (at least for westerners), because of the constant brainwashing that our society is exposed to. Consumerism, individualism, mammonism, and all kind of filth is being pumped in the brains of our people by the media on a daily basis. But the first step should be to spread the idea, to open the eyes of the people, letting them know that other ways of social organization are possible. Then, we need good leaders able to organize the people and who can stand strong and defiantly against the NWO, always defending national soveraignity, at all costs. 
 

The Fourth Political Theory: Serbian vision

Liberalism is, undoubtedly, a totalitarian ideology. It strives for global domination, and its rise is associated with the American planetary hegemony. Liberalism has not issued any "liberation" but a new enslavement of man, reducing the individual to an uprooted, atomized individual – to the "consumeristic", "economic animal". It is a totalitarian structure, the Society of planetary nomads with no identity, the most complete embodiment of the contemporary United States or the EU, and in the perspective of a single "world market". This is Hobbes' Leviathan, where everyone fights against everyone. The consequences of its triumph were just a disaster: the ecological destruction of the Earth, an unsustainable economy, depletion of resources, the growing poverty of a large part of humanity, brutal wars around the globe, the new slavery, the new colonialism, economic inequality so far unrecorded in history...

I understand future existentially

The Eurasianism regards Russia not as country but as civilization. So it should be compared not with European or Asiatic countries but with Europe or Islam or Hindu civilizations. The Russia-Eurasia consist of modern and pre-modern features, of European and Eastern cultures and ethnies. This particular identity should be recognized and reaffirmed in the context of the new integration project. The eurasianism deny the universality of Western civilization and the unidemensionality of the historic process (directed to the liberalism, democracy, human right, marker economy and so on). There are different cultures with different anthropologies, ontologies, values, times and spaces. The West is nothing else as hypertrophied and insolent world province with megalomania. It is abject case of the hybris. The humanity should struggle against the West in order to put its pretensions in the legitimate limits. The world province should be become what it is – the province, the historic isolated case, the choice – not universal fate, normative or the common goal.

Renaming the New Right?

”The fourth political theory”, Alexander Dugin explains in his new book with this title, is a collaborative project involving also the French intellectual leader of la nouvelle droite, Alain de Benoist, with whom Dugin has apparently reestablished his former close relation. The two thinkers seem to have met for a prolonged period in Moscow to discuss the concept, and in connection with this, Dugin also published a Russian translation of a collection of essays by de Benoist, the title of which, in English, is Against Liberalism: Towards the Fourth Political Theory - a title which could be said to be simply a more precise indication of the content of Dugin’s own book.

This indicates that what we have to do with here is an attempt on the part of  Dugin and de Benoist to launch the concept of the fourth political theory as the most adequate designation of their shared philosophical and political positions. But this in turn raises the question if this is all simply a matter of renaming the New Right. If that is the case, there are, to begin with, two things that must be said about it.

Traditionalism and Sociology/The Figure of the Radical Subject

Traditionalism emphasizes the dualism that exists between two worlds: the world of tradition and the modern world. This dualism corresponds to two sociological categories: pre-modernity and modernity. This parallelism between traditionalism and sociology is very important and it is necessary to develop this affinity in the future.

In Paris, in 2011 I gave a lecture under the title: "René Guénon as a sociologist." René Guénon in his book "The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times" used the traditional and sacred symbol of the Egg of the World. In Guénon’s perspective, the pre-modern world corresponds to the Egg of the World open on the top and closed on the bottom. The spiritual rays enter the world and so the cosmic and material things receive the sacred qualities.

Modern society corresponds to the Egg of the World closed on the top and on the bottom. It is the materialistic, atheistic, consumerist civilization. That is, the scientific, mechanical and atomistic worldview. Postmodern society corresponds to the Egg of the World open on the bottom and closed on the top. It is the demonic post-human and post-social civilization. The reality in which we live. But for now let us put aside momentarily postmodernity, despite the great interest with which we could develop this correspondence.

Multipolarity as challenge

- The collapse of the Soviet Union has indeed led directly to an American domination of the world affairs. When Bush father proclaimed the new world order in the sands of Iraq, many (in the Western world) even thought that it would be so forever, that the history of ideas had stopped and that the world would from now on forever be under American domination. 

We can see today that those who thought so were wrong, and it only took a decade for History to take back its rights, leading America into wars that will accelerate its decline, while paradoxically, they were supposed to establish its domination. 

During the same decade, Russia was reborn from its ashes and has once again become a strong regional power, a power that has visions of domination of Eurasia, as Vladimir Putin hammered during his first speech as the elected president on May 7, 2012. 

We hear a lot more about the Russia / America confrontation than at the beginning of this century but these countries will probably never be anymore the main key players in the world of tomorrow, unlike America and the USSR in the world of yesterday. 

Global Revolutionary Alliance

The end of capitalism. The development of capitalism has reached its natural limit. There is only one path left to the world economic system — to collapse in upon itself. Based on a progressive increase of purely financial institutions, first banks, and then more complex and sophisticated stock structures, the system of modern capitalism has become completely divorced from reality, from the balance of supply and demand, from the production and consumption ratio, from connection with a real life. All the wealth of the world is concentrated in the hands of the world’s financial oligarchy by complicated manipulations of constructed financial pyramids. This oligarchy has devalued not only labor, but also the capital connected to the market fundamentals, secured through financial rent. All other economic forces are in bondage to this impersonal transnational ultraliberal elite. Regardless of how we feel about capitalism, it is clear now, that it is not just going through another crisis, but that the entire system stands on the verge of total collapse.
No matter how the global oligarchy tries to conceal the ongoing collapse from the masses of the world’s population, more and more people begin to suspect that this is inevitable, and that the global financial crisis, caused by the collapse of the U.S. mortgage market and major banks is only the beginning of a global catastrophe.

Dugin’s America

Alexander Dugin is a popular, well-connected, and academically respected professor at Moscow State University. Unlike his North American and Western European counterparts, his ideas are not censored by Russia’s mainstream media, and he more or less enjoys the favor of Putin’s Russian government. While he’s indubitably the most prominent New Right thinker in Russia, his domestic influence and his ambitious efforts to build international partnerships and relationships have made him arguably the most prominent New Right thinker in the world. 

His recently written and translated book, The Fourth Political Theory is a critical milestone in the global development of a New Right school of thought. In it, he strives to speak to a truly global audience, though his parochial biases and perspectives are a regular distraction from that goal. He strives to speak above and beyond modern liberal paradigms and values, but there’s a fair share of self-censorship, cleverness, and . . . Realpolitik . . . to wade through.

 

Dugin Gets in the Ring. Whither the Fourth Political Theory?

The Fourth Political Theory is a book that is clearly not short on ambition. I haven’t actually read it, but I already know more or less what is in it from past writings by its author Professor Alexander Dugin, as well as the lengthy video presentation he gave of his ideas at the Identitarian Ideas conference held earlier this year in Stockholm.

Dugin believes there have been three great ideologies in modern history – Liberalism, Communism, and Fascism/National Socialism – and that we are now seeing the formation of the Fourth, which is still waiting to be properly christened and so is known by an ordinal. In the footsteps of Locke, Marx, and Mussolini, we now have Dugin.

I greatly respect and like Dugin. With his Tolstoyan beard and aura of an old church father, he’s a personable and reassuring presence. But I also know how the academic world works, and how it finds all sorts of clever ways to serve different masters, and Professor Dugin is certainly well-connected to a lot of people in the Russian establishment. Is it a coincidence that his ideas support the existence of the Russian Orthodox Church or the multi-ethnic imperialism that is the unavoidable basis for a strong Russian state?

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.

Civilization as political concept

Problems stemming from the West during the “unipolar moment” has led many to say that this “moment” is over, that he could not yet be a “destiny” of humanity.That is, a “unipolar moment” should be interpreted very broadly – not only geopolitical, but also ideologically, economically, axiologically, civilization wide. The crisis of identity, about which you ask, has scrapped all previous identities – civilizational, historical, national, political, ethnic, religious, cultural, in favor of a universal planetary Western-style identity  – with its concept of individualism, secularism, representative democracy, economic and political liberalism, cosmopolitanism and the ideology of human rights.Instead of a hierarchy of identities, which have traditionally played a large role in sets of collective identities, the “unipolar moment” affirmed a flat one-dimensional identity, with the absolutization of the individual singularity.  One individual = one identity, and any forms of the collective identity (for example, individual as the part of the religious community, nation, ethnic group, race, or even sex) underwent dismantling and overthrow. Hence the hatred of globalists for different kind of “majorities” and protection of minorities, up to the individual.

The Uni-polar Democracy of our moment - this is a democracy, which unambiguously protects the minority before the face of the majority and the individual before face of the group.  This is  the crisis of identity for those of non-Western or non-modern (or even not “postmodern”) societies,since this is where customary models are scrapped and liquidated. The postmodern West with  optimism, on the contrary, asserts individualism and hyper-liberalism in its space and zealously  exports it on the planetary scale.

Alexander Dugin on Global Revolution

The status quo of the West’s liberal hegemony has become global. It is a Westernization of all of humanity. This means that its norms, such as the free market, free trade, liberalism, parliamentarian democracy, human rights, and absolute individualism have become universal. This set of norms is interpreted differently in the various regions of the world, but the West regards its specific interpretation as being both self-evident and its universalization as inevitable. This is nothing less than a colonization of the spirit and of the mind. It is a new kind of colonialism, a new kind of power, and a new kind of control that is put into effect through a network. Everyone who is connected to the global network becomes subjected to its code. It is part of the postmodern West, and is rapidly becoming global. The price a nation or a people has to pay to become connected to the West’s globalization network is acceptance of these norms. It is the West’s new hegemony. It is a migration from the open hegemony of the West, as represented by the colonialism and outright imperialism of the past, to an implicit, more subtle version.

To fight this global threat to humanity, it is important to unite all the various forces that would, in earlier times, have been called anti-imperialist. In this age, we should better understand our enemy. The enemy of today is hidden. It acts by exploiting the norms and values of the Western path of development and ignoring the plurality represented by other cultures and civilizations. Today, we invite all who insist on the worth of the specific values of non-Western civilizations, and where there other forms of values exist, to challenge this attempt at a global universalization and hidden hegemony.

 

Fourth Political Theory

In today's world, the impression is growing that politics has ended – at least the politics that we used to know.  Liberalism stubbornly fought it out with its political enemies, which had offered alternative recipes – with conservatism, monarchism, traditionalism, fascism, socialism, and communism – and, finally, at the end of the 20th century, it beat them all.  It would have been logical to surmise that politics would become liberal, while all of liberalism's opponents, having turned up on the periphery, would begin to rethink strategies and to form a new front: the periphery against the centre (Alain de Benoist).  But at the beginning of the 21st century everything followed a different script.

Liberalism, having always insisted upon the minimization of the political, decided after its victory to countermand politics altogether, possibly in order not to allow formation of political alternatives and to make its rule eternal, or from the completion of the political discussions of the day due to the lack of enemies, who are necessary, according to Carl Schmitt, for the proper constitution of a political position.  In any case, liberalism drove the matter to the wrapping up of politics.  At the same time it itself changed, having moved on from the level of ideas, political programs and declarations and entered into the very make-up of social reality, which became liberal, not in a political but in a natural, every-day manner.  As a consequence of such a turn of history, all the political ideologies that feuded passionately with one another over the last century lost their currency.  Conservatism, fascism and communism, together with their secondary variations, lost; but liberalism, having won, quickly mutated into a way of life: consumerism, individualism, and a post-modern style of fragmented and sub-political being.  Politics became bio-politics, redeployed on an individual and sub-individual level.  It turns out that not only the defeated political ideologies but politics as such left the scene – including the liberal variant.  For that reason, the formulation of alternatives is proliferating.  Those who do not agree with liberalism found themselves in a difficult situation: the victorious enemy dissolved and disappeared; they're fighting with the air.  How, then, is one to engage in politics, when politics is no longer?

Against Post-Modern World

The current world is unipolar with the global West in its centre and with the United States as its core

This kind of the unipolarity has geopolitical and ideological sides. Geopolitically is the strategic dominance of the earth by North-American hyperpower and the effort of Washington to organize the balance of forces on the planet in such a manner to be able to rule the whole world in accordance with its own national (imperialistic) interests. It is bad because it deprives other states and nations of their real sovereignty.

When there is only one instance to decide who is right and who is wrong and who should be punished we have a kind of the global dictatorship. I am convinced that is not acceptable. So we should fight against it. If someone deprives us from our freedom we have to react. And we will. The American Empire should be destroyed. And at one point it will be.

If we want to say something let's say it in English

The second point. When we speak or write Russian, French, Serbian, Polish, German, Arab, Turkish, Iranian and so on we are linked to the regional perspective. Our native languages impose on us the concrete national borders, historical experiences and idiosyncrasies. So we count on understanding and presume that listeners know the contexts. So the social context dictates the form of expression and affects thus the various semantic levels. Using English we are free from all these, so we try to be understood by anyone including by those whose historical experience is different from ours. So we choose the words and terms carefully, explaining the details and doing so we rethink what we are to say.

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. 

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