Tuesday, August 2, 2011
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
Olavo's Conclusion
Olavo de Carvalho
My debate with Prof. Aleksandr Dugin is over, there only remaining for each side to present their conclusions, which, since they will be published in tandem, will break away from the pattern of replies and rejoinders that properly constitutes a debate.
I have a clear conscience of having proven my points, whereas my opponent has proven absolutely nothing. Nor did I expect him to. It is of the nature of ideological discourse to take as unquestionable premises the very beliefs and values that it seeks to uphold, thus enclosing itself in a circular reasoning that excludes, in limine, the possibility of proof.
Diderot never proved anything, nor did Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx, Lenin, Adolf Hitler, Che Guevara.
Ideological discourse does not prove anything: it gives orders, concealing them, so as not to offend the most sensitive, beneath an imitation of judgments about reality.
A proof is only possible when you descend from the semantic level of current discussions, which is stuffed with hidden assumptions and murky connotations, analytically dismember a whole topic into explicit judgments, and confront them with the initial, universal, and self-evident data of human existence.
Philosophical meditation essentially consists in stepping back from ideas and opinions toward the founding experiences of all human knowledge. These experiences are at the same time universal and individual: they repeat themselves more or less equally in all human beings and incorporate themselves at the bottom of the soul of each one of them as data of their deepest intimacy.
An example is the experience of the structure of space, which I described in two notes posted on a blog which I have abandoned to the moths, if there are electronic moths (see “The Junior Philosopher” and “Memoirs of a Brontosaurus” at www.olavodecarvalho.org/blog). Another instance is the experience of the continuity of the substantial, real self beneath the mutability of psychic states and of the form of the body, as well as the inconstancy of the subjective, Cartesian self. I explained this extensively in my course “The Consciousness of Immortality,” which I hope will be published in book form this year (see the program of the course at : www.olavodecarvalho.org/avisos/curso_out2010.html).
The discourse of the political agent is inevitably based on conventions and pseudo-consensuses which must be insulated from every possibility of analytical examination for that discourse to achieve its goals.
Philosophical meditation decomposes these conventions, revealing and bringing their implicit premises to judgment at the tribunal of the founding experiences, the utmost—or maybe sole—measure of our sense of reality.
The reader who is patient enough to compare my newspaper articles with the explanations on the philosophical method which I have scattered through my books, class handouts, and recorded courses, will understand that those articles never have a “stand-taking” character, but are examples—terribly condensed ones—of application of the philosophical method to the analysis of current political discourse.
The fact that some hasty readers try to explain them as expressions of some “ideology” of mine only shows that they ignore the basic condition of possibility of all ideological discourse: the existence of a social and political group to which the speaker is bound by organic ties of commitment and participation. As this condition in my case is not filled even in dreams, that is, as this group does not exist, my ideological cataloguers find themselves forced to make one up, nominating me as a representative of the Israeli government, of “Opus Dei,” of the “Tea Party,” or of any other organization with which I only maintain relations of complete mutual ignorance. In this, Prof. Dugin has exceeded my most depressing expectations, classifying me as spokesperson of Western globalism, which I abominate, or at least of its “conservative wing,” which for me is not at all different from its opposite wing.
Overlooking these theatrical displays which denote some insecurity in my opponent, I would wish only to add to what has been said a few notes of a historical nature, which I hope will be useful for the understanding of the issue being debated.
In the field of conspiracy theories Prof. Dugin is something like an authority. Not only has he written a book about them—covering Martian invasions, underground temples, and even a caste of ruling reptiles—, but he has also distinguished himself, if not as an inventor, at least as a successful propagandist of one such theory, certainly the most presumptuous of them all.
That theory is presumptuous not only in the reach of its alleged explanatory power, which encompasses nothing less than all human history, but also in the politico-military effects that it aspires to unleash: the alliance of Russia with China and the Islamic countries, as well as with part of Western Europe, in a total war against the United States and Israel, followed by the establishment of a worldwide dictatorship.
Prof. Dugin is not a dreamer, a macabre poet creating imaginary hecatombs in a dark dungeon infested with rats. He is the mentor of the Putin government and the brains behind Russian foreign policy. His ideas have long ceased to be mere speculations. One of their material incarnations is the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which gathers together Russia, China, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan and intends to be the center of a restructuring of military power in the world.[1] Another one is the Paris-Berlin-Moscow axis, which has been the apple of the eye of Russian diplomacy for years.[2]
The “war of the continents” theory was created by the English geographer Halford J. Mackinder at the turn of the twentieth century,[3] under the impact of one of the most interesting episodes of that time: England’s struggle against Germany and Russia for dominion of Central Asia. The “Great Game,” as Rudyard Kipling called it, was an entangled story which involved, besides military personnel and diplomats, a whole cast of spies, bribed politicians, thieves, smugglers, tribe chieftains, secret sects, visionary mystics, sorcerers, corrupt maharajahs, seductive courtesans, and an army of men of science: geographers, linguists, botanists, zoologists, and ethnologists.[4] At the time, what the London government feared the most was that an alliance between Russia and Germany would sink its claws into that area which was so much coveted by its natural wealth and strategic position and thereby put the security of the British Empire at risk. The conflict dragged on for decades, with an advantage now for one side now for the other, ultimately flowing into World War I.
In Mackinder’s theory, the following features are visible:
1) He does not propose any general theory of history, except for a methodological rule, quite obvious, by the way, according to which “the actual balance of political power at any given time is, of course, the product, on the one hand, of geographical conditions, both economic and strategic, and, on the other hand, of the relative number, virility, equipment, and organization of the competing peoples.”[5]
2) The generalizations he puts forward are quite prudent and limited to a determined length of time, accessible to historic verification: the period that begins with the first barbarian invasions and culminates in the epoch of the “Great Game”.
3) He does not create any plan for world domination; on the contrary, he insists on the balance among the relative forces of the several powers—the “balance of power”. Describing Russia’s growth potential, he does not, in any moment, suggest it should be obstructed or frustrated, but only that measures should be taken in order to avoid that the incomparable land-power of the Russian Empire might be also transfigured into a dominant sea-power, for if that came to pass, “the world empire would then be at hand.”
Prudent, rational, and balanced at each of its steps, Mackinder’s exposition has become a model of that which could have become a “geopolitics” with a just claim to being a scientific study.
Yet, his successors would transform it into something very different.
Mackinder, of course, described the situation from the point of view of a “sea-power”. His theory, however, was enthusiastically adopted by the adversary power, but with an inverted sign, and soon it became one of the foundations of the new science, or pseudoscience, of “geopolitics”. Its name was coined by Swedish political scientist Rudolf Kjellén (1864-1922), a disciple of German geographer Friedrich Ratzel, who was a friend of Darwin and Haeckel and who created the racial concept of the state. One of the first to reform Mackinder’s theory according to a “land” perspective, however, was German general Karl Haushofer, who, according to several sources, was a disciple of the Armenian thaumaturge Georges Ivanovitch Gurdjieff and also founded the secret society Vril, which held a belief in a civilization of superior men which existed in the center of the Earth. According to the testimony of the respected physicist Willy Ley, who fled Germany in 1933, Vril, which was founded on the eve of the Nazi’s rise to power, proclaimed to have secret knowledge that would enable the improvement of the German race to the point of making it identical with the underground men. The name of the organization was inspired by Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s novel The Coming Race (1871), where the word “vril” meant a subtle energy, distantly analogous to the Chi of the Chinese traditional cosmology and the Hara of the Japanese, and capable of conferring extraordinary powers on those who managed to awaken it through ascetical practices.
When Adolf Hitler was in jail with his collaborator Rudolf Hess, Haushofer, who had been Hess’ professor, visited both of them several times and conveyed to them, if not the teaching of Vril, at least the rudiments of his own geopolitical doctrine, whose influence became quite visible in Mein Kampf.
The origins of this doctrine go back to Haushofer’s sojourn in Japan, where he was able to verify how effective the local government’s international plans were in comparison with the resounding failure of Kaiser William II’s imperialist projects.
At the time, the government of Prime Minister Prince Katsura kept the population in a permanent state of alert by warning it, through vast propaganda campaigns, against the imminent risk the Japanese economy’s destruction should the following two closely linked problems not be vigorously attacked:
1. Surrounded by countries with a much larger population, Japan would soon be out of the game if the number of Japanese did not rise by 40 million, reaching the figure of 100 million.
2. It was impossible to squeeze 100 million people into the exiguous Japanese territory.
The obvious conclusion, soon accepted by all the population, was that the country needed to enlarge its territory through a bold policy of conquest.
Redoing the calculations, Haushofer noted that if the first premise was a reasonable conjecture, the second one was a patent lie: the density of Japan’s population was smaller than that of Germany, and the Japanese territory could house another 40 million people without any inconvenience. The policy proposed by the Katsura government did not stem from any objective need, but from a choice, an act of will. Japan did not need foreign territories: it just really, really wanted to become an imperialistic power.
However, rather than being a disappointment to Haushofer, this policy was received by him with enthusiasm, and gave him the idea of adopting it as a model for German policy-making: if the Japanese government obtained the enthusiastic adherence of its population to its imperialistic projects through a system of lies and half-truths based on demographic data well-arranged for this end, why could the German government not do the same?[6]
Yet, lying to the people should not imply that the government would fool itself. A serious study of political and economic geography, well coordinated with an objective strategic consideration of the possibilities of imperialistic expansion, should lay the groundwork for the unification of the national will through the impact of an intense campaign of propaganda.
It was to this synthesis of geography, strategy, deceit and propaganda that he gave the name of “geopolitics”. However, those three elements have not always remained distinct and rationally coordinated throughout his works and the intense pedagogical action that Haushofer came to exert upon German intellectuals, politicians, and military men .
Karl Haushofer (left) with Rudolf Hess.
The theory of the “war of the continents” was also adopted by Russian nationalists, such as the renowned linguist Nicolay Trubetskoy, and many changes and additions have been made to it over the decades until it has been given its current form by the hands of Prof. Aleksander Dugin.
Dugin gives Mackinder a non-negligible credit for having “understood the precise objective laws of the political, geographic and economic history of mankind,”[7] an honor which had previously been bestowed upon Montesquieu, Hegel, Giambattista Vico, Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer (in partnership with Charles Darwin) and Karl Marx, although each one of them discovered “objective laws” which were quite different from those of the others.
The Mackinder-Dugin Theory certainly enjoys the merit of simplicity: everything in history is reduced to contest for power between world powers that dominate the seas and those that rule over great extensions of land. Cultures, laws, institutions, costumes, values, symbols, and even religions are all born out of that contest. As simple as that. It is indeed the case of asking: “Why hasn’t anyone told me about that before?”
I cannot swear that Mackinder, a simple geographer and strategist with no greater philosophical ambitions, would approve of the transfiguration of the “war of the continents” into that metaphysical duel of titans depicted by Aleksander Dugin. Clarifying this issue would require a time investment which I cannot make now. In any case, I use the expression “Mackinder-Dugin theory” in order to distinguish it from Mackinder’s original theory. Also the Duginian theory could not have gone very far in its generalizing impulse had it started from Mackinder’s ideas alone. In order to formulate it, Dugin had to dig for other sources, especially the teachings of Helena Petrovna Blavatski (1831-1891)[8] and Alice Bailey (1880-1949).
For Dugin, the conflict is not just about a struggle among states. It takes on the proportions of a war between two worldviews, two systems of opposed and irreconcilable values which preserve their respective identities through the ages and go on as if reincarnating, since the remotest times, in successive historical agents—states and nations—, which are not always aware of being moved, as Chinese shadows on a wall, by these invisible and omnipotent super-agents: “Atlantism” and “Eurasianism”:
“In the ancient history the ‘maritime’ powers who became the historical symbol of the ‘maritime civilization’ as a whole were Phoenicia and Carthage. The overland empire opposing Carthage was Rome. The Punic war is the purest image of the opposition of ‘maritime civilization’ and ‘overland civilizations’. In the Modern Age and in the recent history the ‘insular’ and ‘maritime’ pole became England, ‘Mistress of the seas’, and later the giant island-continent America. England, as well as the ancient Phoenicia, mostly employed sea trade and the colonization of the coastal areas as its basic instrument for domination. The Phoenician-Anglo-Saxon geopolitical type generated a special ‘mercantile-capitalist-market’ pattern of civilization founded first of all on economic and material interests and the principles of economic liberalism Therefore, despite all possible historical variations, the most general kind of ‘maritime’ civilization is always linked to the ‘primacy of economics above politics”.
As against the Phoenician pattern, Rome represented a sample of warlike-authoritarian structure based on administrative control and civil religiosity, on the primacy of ‘politics above economics’. Rome is the example of a non-maritime, overland, purely continental type of colonization, with its deep penetration into the continent and assimilation of the submitted peoples, automatically ‘Romanized’ after the conquest. In Modern History incarnations of the ‘overland’ power were the Russian Empire and also Central European imperial Austro-Hungary and Germany. ‘Russia – Germany – Austro-Hungary’ are the essential symbols of ‘geopolitical land’ during Modern History.”[9]
Dugin insists on the essential and millennial unity and continuity of the conflict, as well as of the two adversaries considered separately:
“So generalizing the ideas of Mackinder, it is possible to say that there is an historical ‘conspiracy of the Atlantists’, pursuing through the centuries the same geopolitical purposes oriented to the interest of the ‘maritime civilization’ of neo-Phoenician kind.”[10]
The theory clearly fits into the Kantian tradition of aprioristic determiners, which set boundaries to the field of human perceptions and actions, from above the horizon of individual consciousness, and secretly guide the course of events:
“Therefore, we are dealing with a ‘secret conspiracy’ of the most ancient kind, whose meaning and intrinsic metaphysical cause frequently remain completely obscure to its basic participants and even to its leading characters.”[11]
Mackinder’s ideas, limited as they were to the British outlook, could not reach such a level of generality prior to being complemented by their opposite—“oriental” and “terrestrial”—version. Dugin informs us that this fusion took place during the “frequent meetings of Russian Eurasianists with Karl Haushofer in Prague,” and he also tells us that around 1920 the overall Eurasian strategy, which stressed the need for a geopolitical alliance between Russia, Germany, and Japan, was ready—that very alliance which the cleverness of the British policy had been successful in frustrating since the middle of the preceding century.
In formulating this new strategy, continues Dugin, the Eurasianists and Haushofer “for the first time (…) expressed what stood behind the whole European political history of the last millennium, having traced the path of the ‘Roman imperial idea,’ which from Ancient Rome through Byzantium had passed to Russia, and through the Medieval Holy Empire of the German nations to Austria-Hungary and Germany.”[12]
The millenary opposition between the two blocks was not only geopolitical, but ideological and cultural:
“Against ‘Atlantism’ personifying the primacy of individualism, ‘economic liberalism’ and ‘democracy of a Protestant kind’, stands ‘Eurasianism’, necessarily presupposing authoritarianism, hierarchy and the establishment of ‘communitarian’, national-state principles over the simply human, individualistic and economic concerns.[13]
The struggle between the two blocks crosses the millennia by means of two networks of mysterious agents who invisibly direct the course of events. On the Atlantist side,
We can define . . . the “Atlantic ideology”, the ideology of “New Carthage”- the one that is common to all “influential agents”, to all secret and occultist organizations, to all lodges and semi-closed clubs which served and serve the Anglo-Saxon idea in the 20th century, penetrating the network of all continental “Eurasian” powers. And naturally, in the first place this immediately concerns English and American reconnaissance services (especially the CIA), which are not simply the “sentinels of capitalism” or “Americanism”, but the sentinels of “Atlantism” . . . working not only in the interests of each separate country, but in the interest of a special geopolitical and, in the end, metaphysical doctrine representing an extremely multi-planed, miscellaneous and wide, but nevertheless essentially uniform worldview.[14]
On the Eurasian side,
“All those who restlessly worked for the Eurasian union, those who hindered for centuries the propagation on the continent of individualist, egalitarian and liberal-democratic concepts (reproducing as a whole the typical Phoenician spirit of the ‘primacy of economics above politics’), those who aspired to unite the great Eurasian peoples in the atmosphere of the East, instead of in an atmosphere of the West – be it the East of Genghis Khan, the East of Russia or East of Germany – all of them were ‘Eurasian agents’, bearers of the special geopolitical doctrine, ‘the soldiers of the continent’, ‘the soldiers of Land’. The Eurasian secret society, the Order of the Eurasianists, does not start at all with the authors of the manifest ‘Exodus to the East’ or with Haushofer’s ‘Geopolitical Journal’. This was, briefly speaking, only the revelation, the outcome of a definite knowledge which existed since the beginning of time, together with its relative secret societies and network of ‘influential agents.”[15]
Dugin leaves no room for doubt that all or practically all wars in history are nothing more than chapters of that sole and endless war between Atlantists and Eurasianists, and that such war constitutes therefore the ultimate explanation of all human glories and miseries:
Order of Eurasia against Order of Atlantic (Atlantides). Eternal Rome against Eternal Cartage. Occult Punic war invisibly continuing during millennia. Planetary conspiracy of Land against the Sea, Earth against Water, Authoritarianism and Idea against Democracy and Matter. Does not the endless paradoxes, contradictions, omissions and vagaries of our history become more clear, more logical and more reasonable, if we to look at them from the perspective of an occult geopolitical dualism? [16]
What is more: geopolitical dualism not only offers a causal explanation for so many evils and sufferings, but also their definitive moral justification:
“Will not in this case the countless victims, by which mankind in our century pays the bill for unclear political projects, receive a deep metaphysical justification?”[17]
The excerpts quoted thus far suffice to uncover an eminent feature of Prof. Dugin’s style, one which, for being purely graphic, is not obscured by translation: I refer to his alternating use of certain expressions which are now written with attenuating quotation marks and now without them, denoting his free transition, or better said, confusion between literal and figurative meaning.
So, for example, the term Eurasian Order sometimes appears as a figure of speech meant to amass into a hypothetical unit “all those who restlessly worked for the Eurasian union” (sic), even though they had no idea that they had been serving some secret organization; and sometimes it designates the organization itself as a concrete historical entity with a date of foundation, hierarchies, rules, oaths, initiation rites, etc.
This introduces into the mind of the reader a twofold confusion. On one hand, it mixes into an indistinct paste both historical research and “conspiracy theory”. On the other, it violates Georg Jellinek’s classic warning, already mentioned in my second message to the debate with Prof. Dugin, that historical processes cannot be explained according to the same criteria when they arise from planned and controlled action and when they result from a purely accidental convergence of actions of several separate and unconnected agents. In the first case, the rational nexus precedes the action; in the second it is projected upon the action, ex post facto, by the imagination of the historian. The degree of certainty in both cases is rather different.[18]
This twofold confusion enables Prof. Dugin to concoct pseudo-historical conceptions which are infected to their marrow with the three typical features of the revolutionary mentality—the inversion of time, the inversion between subject and object, and the inversion of moral responsibility—, which rigorously reduces the scientific value of his speculations to nothing, while at the same time strengthening the force of their appeal to the imagination of the militant masses, over which the confusion itself exerts the fascination of a Sorelian myth.
In order to see this with utmost clarity, one must begin by realizing that “a great war of the continents” has never happened in history. If there were some wars of “sea-powers” against “land-powers,” there also were just as many wars of sea-powers among themselves, and the same being true for the land-powers, and precisely the latter two groups of wars are among the most notable and devastating of all time. The Napoleonic wars and the invasion of Russia by Adolf Hitler are examples that speak for themselves.
Never, at any point in history, do we find a general alliance of “Eurasianists” against a confederation of “Atlantists”. At most, there were localized conflicts between the two blocks, punctuated with equally significant conflicts within each block (supposing, ad argumentandum, that they are blocks). The “great war of the continents” is not a chapter of history: it is a future goal, a plan conceived by Prof. Dugin and his predecessors to be carried out in the subsequent decades, creating a conflict between Russia, China, and the Islamic countries on one side, and America and her allies on the other.
It is by taking this future ideal as a premise for the interpretation of the past that Prof. Dugin performs the magic trick of making a typical and demential “conspiracy theory” look like a respectable historical hypothesis.
To this end, he has to dissolve all borders between well-characterized ideological groups—Nazis and communists, for example—and reassign their members one by one, by forcedly enlisting them in the secret troops of “Atlantism” or “Eurasianism,” often attributing to them unconscious intentions which do not have anything to do with their avowed goals and with the visible course of their actions.
For example: since Germany and Russia are defined beforehand as “land powers,” being therefore natural allies against “Atlantism,” the mortal struggle between the two during World War II has to be attributed to the action of “infiltrated British agents” who manipulated Hitler and Stalin—the poor devils, so naïve!—and induced them into a fratricidal conflict instead of joining them as brothers in the fight against the common enemy.[19] What happened in the first half of the twentieth century is thus explained according to what Prof. Dugin thinks would have been better for the attainment of his plans for the twenty-first century.
Among the British agents in the German High Command, he singles out Admiral Canaris, “betrayer of the Reich,”[20] as being one of those most responsible for turning Germany against Russia instead of uniting them against England. For decades, Hitler had promised to “crush Bolshevism,” making this one of the avowed goals of the Nazi regime. Once in power, he unleashed ferocious persecution against the communists, while at the same time he prepared an attack against the USSR well in advance. But to Prof. Dugin all this does not mean anything. It was all the fault of some “British agent”.
Likewise, World War I—when Russia sided with “Atlantist powers” against its “natural allies,” Germany and Austria-Hungary—resulted from the action of Atlantists infiltrated among Slavophile patriots, who convinced the Tsar that Russian racial identity was more strategically decisive than the territorial unity among different ethnicities (a hypothesis that Dugin imagines would have led to an alliance with Germany). An identical maneuver would have been carried out by Atlantist agents in the Germany of the 1930s, who deceived the poor Nazis into believing in the identity of “Blood and Soil” when they should have noticed that it was necessary to choose between either one or the other.
Thus, the greatest events of the real history of the twentieth century were nothing more than illusions. The true history is Prof. Dugin’s ideal narrative, which those events have maliciously concealed.
For the hypothesis of a “war of the continents” to enjoy some historical viability it would be necessary to prove, at least, that the wars among land and sea powers were more frequent or had more portentous consequences than other wars, above all the ones fought among land powers or among sea powers themselves. But it will be hard to find in Russian history wars which were vaster and more full of consequence than the invasions of Russia by France and Germany— two land-powers, according to Haushofer and Dugin—or than the war between Russia and Japan, also a land-power according to the same authors.
If the mere existence of a “war of the continents” is a hypothesis that goes up in smoke, even more chimerical would be to try to prove the existence of permanent conspiracies behind those wars, not to mention the existence, over the millennia, of secret organizations—an “Atlantist Order” against a “Eurasian Order”—devoted to their waging. Prof. Dugin sidesteps any confrontation with this question by his alternating use of words written with quotation marks or without them, by sometimes denoting a mere figure of speech and sometimes a presumption of the concrete existence of the organizations in question. In this way he is free to reason as if such organizations really existed, drawing from this the most daring conclusions, as well as to escape from trouble. when pressed against the wall with a demand for concrete evidence, by alleging that the names of the organizations were just figures of speech used to designate the spontaneous and unpremeditated convergence of the actions of “all those who restlessly worked for” the Atlantist or the Eurasian cause, even if they had imagined they had been doing something entirely different (fighting for mere national interests, money, or the propagation of faith, for example). At this point, the confusion between the anticipated unity of a plan and the retroactive unity of a historical account is more than evident.
By reason of its own confusion, the “Eurasian” idea hangs in the air like a chiaroscuro cloud, fascinating the audience with the power of a poetic-rhetorical discourse adorned with false scientific glitter.
[1] See my article “A Suggestion to the Right-Thinking: Check into a Mental Hospital,” Diário do Comércio (Sao Paulo), January 30, 2006, http://www.theinteramerican.org/commentary/265-a-suggestion-to-the-right-thinking-check-into-a-mental-hospital-.html .
[2] See Jean Parvulesco, Vladimir Poutine et l’Eurasie.
[3] Halford J. Mackinder, “The geographical pivot of History”, The Geographical Journal, No 4, April, 2004, Vol. XXIII, pp. 421-444. A more detailed explanation can be read at my website, www.olavodecarvalho.org, under the title “The ‘Pivot of History’ according to Halford J. Mackinder”.
[4] See Peter Hopkirk, The Great Game. The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia, New York, Kodansha, 1994, e Karl Mayer and Shareen Blair Brysac, Tournament of Shadows. The Great Game and the Race for Empire in Central Asia, Washington D.C., Counterpoint, 1999.
[5] P. 437.
[6] See Andreas Dorpalen, The World of General Haushofer. Geopolitics in Action, Port Washington (NY), Kennikat, 1942, pp. 7-13.
[7] Alexandre Douguine, La Grande Guerre des Continents, Paris, Avatar Éditions, 2006, p. 12. An English version is available at: http://www.amerika.org/texts/the-great-war-of-continents-aleksandr-dugin/
[8] See Helena P. Blavatski, Isis Unveiled, London, J. W. Bouton, 1877, and The Secret Doctrine, London, Theosophical Publishing House, 1888. See also René Guénon, Le Théosophisme, Histoire d’une Pseudo-Réligion, Paris, 1921.
[9] Alexandre Douguine, op. cit., pp. 13-14.
[10] Alexandre Douguine, op. cit., pp. 16-17.
[11] Loc. cit.
[12] Op. cit., p. 18.
[13] Op. cit., p. 14.
[14] Op. cit., p. 15.
[15] Op. cit., p. 19. I do not know what date for the publication of the manifesto Dugin refers to, but the first issue of the Haushofer’s “Geopolitics Review” (Zeitschrift für Geopolitik) was published in January 1924.
[16] Loc. cit.
[17] Loc. cit.
[18] Here I use the same recourse to quotation marks, but with an opposite goal: when the word comes between quotes, it desginates what Prof. Dugin seems to understand by it; without quotes, what I understand myself.
[19] Op. cit., p. 25.
[20] Loc. cit.
Dugin's Conclusion
Endnotes.
Against Post-Modern World
I would like, at the conclusion of this debate with Mr. Carvalho, to sum up the most important points:
Now I see that he was rather right in the beginning stressing that the asymmetry in our respective positions would eventually damage the whole task. So it was. I don’t see any use in continuing the mutual critics because it doesn’t help understand anything at all (for us and for the readers). I can now sincerely confess that I find the position of Mr. Carvalho too personal, idiosyncratic and irrelevant. So I would like to concentrate myself on other theoretical points that seem to me of real importance for the cause of the Tradition, of anti-imperialist and antimodern struggle that is my first and only concern.
First of all I insist that the current world is unipolar with the global West in its centre and with the United States as its core. The opposite arguments of Mr. Carvalho didn’t convince me at all.
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.
Ideologically the unipolarity is based on the Modernist and Post-Modernist values that are openly anti-traditional ones. I share the vision of Rene Guenon and Julius Evola who considered the Modernity and its ideological basis (the individualism, the liberal democracy, the capitalism, the comfortism and so on) to be the cause of the future catastrophe of the humanity and global domination of the Western attitudes as the reason of final degradation of the earth. The West is approaching to its end and we should not let it push all the rest with it into the abyss.
Spiritually the globalization is the creation of the Grand Parody, the kingdom of the Antichrist. And the United States is in centre of its expansion. The American values pretend to be “universal” ones. That it is new form of ideological aggression against the multiplicity of the cultures and the traditions still existing in the other parts of the world. I am resolutely against the Western values that are essential Modernist and Post-Modernist ones and promulgated by the United States by force or by the obtrusion (Afghanistan, Iraq, now Libya, tomorrow Syria and Iran) .
So, all traditionalists should be against the West and the globalization as well as against the imperialist politics of United States. It is the only logical and consequent position. So the traditionalists and the partisans of the traditional principles and values should oppose the West and defend the Rest (if the Rest shows the signs of the conservation of the Tradition – partly or entirely).
There can be and there are really men in the West and in the United States of America who don’t agree with the present state of things and don’t approve the Modernity and Post-Modernity being the defenders of the spiritual tradition of the Pre-Modern West. They should be with us in our common struggle. They should take part in our revolt against Modern World and Post-Modern world. And we would fight together against a common enemy. Unfortunately that is not the case of Mr. Carvalho. He shows himself partly critical of the modern Western civilization, but partly agrees with it and attacks its enemies. It is a kind of “semi-conformism” so to say. It is frankly irrelevant and of no interest to me. There are friends and there are foes. Only that matters. All the rest is without any importance. Mr. Carvalho is neither. It is his choice. His anti-soviet and anti-Russian pejorative myths, stupid conspiracy theories, implicit cultural Western racism, the ressentiment to his own native country are not even worth of critics. No comments.
The other question is the structure of the possible anti-globalist and anti-imperialist front and its participants. I think that we should include in it all forces that struggle against the West, the United States, against the liberal democracy, against Modernity and Post-Modernity. The common enemy is the necessary instance for all kinds of political alliances. The Muslims, the Christians, the Russians and the Chinese, the leftists or the rightists, the Hindus or the Jews who challenge the present state of things, the globalization and the American imperialism are virtually friends ands allies. Let our ideals be different but we have in common one very strong thing: the present reality that we hate. Our ideals that differ are potential (in potentia). But the challenge we are dealing with is actual (in actu). So that is the basis for new alliance. All who share negative analysis of the globalization, westernization and post-modernization should coordinate their effort in creation of new strategy of the resistance to the omnipresent evil. And we can find the «ours» in the United States also – among those who choose the Tradition against the present decadence. Mr Carvalho doesn't belong to such kind of persons. He has convincingly explained that during the debate.
At this point we could raise a really important question: what kind of ideology should we use in our opposition to the globalization and its liberal democratic capitalist and Modernist (Post-Modernist) principles? I think that all anti-liberal ideologies (the communism, socialism as well as fascism) are not anymore relevant. They tried to fight the liberal-capitalism and they failed. Partly because in the end of time it is evil that prevails; partly because of their inner contradictions and limitations. So it is time to make the accomplish deep revision of the antiliberal ideologies of the past. What is their positive side? - The very fact that they were anti-capitalist and anti-liberal, as well as also anti-cosmopolite and anti-individualist. So these features should be accepted and integrated in the future ideology. But the communism doctrine is Modern, atheist, materialist and cosmopolite. That should be thrown out. On the contrary, the social solidarity, social justice, the socialism and general holistic attitude to the society are good in themselves. So we need to separate the materialist and Modernist aspect and reject them.
On the other hand in the theories of Third way (dear up to certain point to some traditionalists as Julius Evola) there were some unacceptable elements – first of all racism, xenophobia and chauvinism. That is not only moral failures but also theoretically and anthropologically inconsistent attitudes. The difference between the ethnos doesn't mean superiority or inferiority. The difference should be accepted and affirmed without any racist appreciation. There is not common measure dealing with the different ethnic groups. When one society tries to judge the other it applies its own criteria and so commits the intellectual violence. The same attitude is precisely the crime of the globalization and Westernization, as well as the American imperialism.
If we free the socialism from its materialist, atheist and Modernist features and if we reject the racist and narrow nationalist aspects of the Third way doctrines we arrive at a completely new kind of the political ideology. We call it Fourth Political Theory (first being the liberalism, that we essentially challenge, the second the classical form of communism, the third the national-socialism and the fascism). Its elaboration starts from the point of intersection between different antiliberal political theories of the past (the communism and the Third way theories). So we arrive to the national-bolshevism that represents the socialism without materialism, atheism, progressism and Modernism and the Third way theories without racism and nationalism. But that is only first step. The mechanical addition of deeply revised versions of the antiliberal ideologies of the past doesn’t give us the final result. It is only first approximation, preliminary approach. We should go further and make appeal to the Tradition and to Pre-Modern sources of inspiration. There we have Platonic ideal State, the medieval hierarchic society and theological vision of the normative social and political system (Christian, Islamic, Buddhist, Jewish or Hindu) . This Pre-Modern source is very important development of the national-bolshevism synthesis. So we need to find a new name for this kind of ideology and “Fourth Political Theory” is quite appropriate for this. It doesn't tell us what this Theory is, but rather what it isn't. So it is a kind of invitation and appeal rather than the dogma.
Politically we have here the interesting basis for conscious cooperation of the left-wingers and the right-wingers as well as with the religious or other anti-modern movements (the ecologists for example). The only thing that we insist on in creating such cooperation is to put aside anti-communist as well as antifascist prejudices. These prejudices are the instruments in the hands of liberals and globalists with which they keep their enemies divided. So we should strongly reject anticommunism as well as antifascism. Both of them are counter-revolutionary tools in the hands of the global liberal elite. At the same time we should strongly oppose any kind of the confrontation between the religions – Muslims against Christians, the Jews against Muslims, the Muslims against the Hindus and so on. The interconfessional wars and hatred work for the cause of the kingdom of Antichrist who tries to divide all the traditional religions in order to impose its own pseudo-religion, the eschatological parody. Mr. Carvalho works here as proponent of such division of the religions. That is very logical for his position.
So we need to unite the right, the left and the religions in the common struggle against common enemy. The social justice, the national sovereignty and the Traditional values are three principles of such ideology. It is not easy to put all this together. But we should try if we want to overcome the foe.
In French there is a slogan: “la droite des valeurs et la gauche du travail” (Alain Soral). In italian it goes: “La Destra sociale e la Sinistra identitaria”. How exactly it should sound in English we will see later.
We could go further and try to define the subject, the actor of the Forth Political Theory. In the case of the communism in the centre there was the class. In the case of the Third way movements in the centre was the race or the nation. In the case of religions – it is the community of the faithful. How the Fourth Political Theory could deal with this diversity and the divergence of subjects? We propose, as a suggestion, that the The subject of the Fourth Political Theory can be found in the Heideggerian concept of Dasein (being-t/here). It is a concrete but extremely profound instance that could be the common denominator for the further ontological development. What is crucial here – that is the authenticity or non-authenticity of the existence of the Dasein. Fourth Political Theory insists on the authenticity of the existence. So it is the antithesis to any kind of alienation – social, economic, national, religious or metaphysical.
But the Dasein is a concrete instance. Any man and any culture possess their own Dasein. They differ between each other but they are present always. Here I can only mention a topic that needs further explanations (given in my books and articles).
The last point is the place of Brazil and the Latin America as whole in the actual global structure of the world. I see the role of Brazil as something comparable with the role of Russia-Eurasia. That is the very particular country with specific culture where the Western elements are mixed with the indigenous components. It is based on the mixtures of different blocks of values. Exactly as Russian culture is. We call this feature in our country “Eurasianism” stressing that we are dealing with original synthesis of the European and Asiatic patterns and attitudes. The Brazil in some metaphoric way is also «Eurasian»; the West is mixed with non-West in the very roots of the society. The Brazil as well as the other Latin America countries has its own particular identity. But among the other countries that is Brazil that is developing now with the greater speed and is managing to affirm more and more its political and economical independence. Such independence is considered first of all vis-a-vis the USA. So here the affirmation of cultural identity goes hand in hand with the growth of the economical and geopolitical power. We need to interpret the leftist sympathies of the major part of the Brazilian society as a sign of a search for its particular social identity that doesn't fit into individualist and liberal pattern of North-American society. So, Brazilian and wider Latin American socialism has in itself many ethnic and national features. The catholic religious factor and the spiritual synthesis of the popular religious beliefs are very important elements in the present awakening of the new sovereign identity of Brazil. It is in some aspects comparable with the geopolitical, cultural and spiritual renaissance of the modern Russia.
So this affinity on the geopolitical, cultural and social levels makes our situation similar and gives us the ground of the mutual cooperation and geopolitical alliance. The Russia as well as the Latin America or Islamic countries, or China see the future world essentially as multipolar, where the United States and the West in general should be no more than the separate poles among the other. Any claim of imperialism, colonialism or universalism of values should be severely rejected. So we are in the same camp. And we must concentrate on it.
Accepting that we should progress to the elaboration of the common strategy in the process of the creation of the future that should fit to our demands and our visions. So such values as social justice, national sovereignty and traditional spirituality can serve us as the clue.
I sincerely believe that the Fourth Political Theory, the national-bolshevism and eurasianism can be of the great use for our peoples, our countries and our civilizations. The key word is “multipolatity” in all senses – geopolitical, cultural, axiological, economical and so on.
The important vision of Nous (Intellect) of Greek philosopher Plotinus that correspond to our ideal. The Intellect is one and the multiple at the same time, because it has all kinds of the differences in itself – not uniform or mixed, but taken as such with all their particularities. The future world should be noetic in some way – the multiplicity, diversity should be taken as the richness and the treasure and not as the reason of inevitable conflict: many civilizations, many poles, many centres, many sets of values on one planet in one humanity.
But there are some who think otherwise. Who are against such a project? Those who want to impose the uniformity, the unique thought, the one (American) way of life, One World. And they are doing it by force and by persuasion. They are against the multipolarity. So they are against us. Mr. Carvalho is one among those. From now on we know it. The debate is closed but our struggle is in the very beginning.
I hope sincerely there are in Brazil other kinds of the traditionalists, intellectuals and philosophers who are closer to Eurasian point of view and more consistent and coherent in their rejection of the Modernity and Post-Modernity as well as the globalization, the liberalism and North-American Imperialism and more Brazilian also…
Alexander Dugin
Monday, May 23, 2011
[R4] Olavo (Eng.)
Against Right-Wing Bolshevism (or Leftist Traditionalism)
A point-by-point answer
Third Message for the debate with Prof. Aleksandr Dugin
Olavo de Carvalho
Introduction.
1. Disappointment
2. Attacks.
3. Surprise.
4. Insult and retaliation.
5. Delight
6. Is everything politics?
7. Will to power
8. Eurasianism and communism.
9. Counting corpses.
10. Dugin contra Dugin
11. The duty to choose.
12. Arms.
13. Dugin contra Dugin (2)
14. The difference between us.
15. The difference between us (2)
16. Anesthetic quotes.
17. A question of style.
18. My stupid opinion.
19. Judgement by guesswork
20. Reality was invented in the Middle Ages.
21. Reality and concept
22. Intellectual racism..
23. Absolute and relative relativism..
24. Absolute and relative relativism (2)
25. Subject and object
26. Logical essence.
27. Existence and proof
28. Just stage business.
29. Oh, how hateful I am!
30. Resentment
31. Putting words in my mouth.
32. Oh, how hateful I am! (2)
33. Guénon and the West
34. The world upside-down.
35. The Seven Towers of the Devil
36. Asymmetry.
37. Conspiracy Theory.
38. Conspiracy Theory (2)
39. Free competition ideology?.
40. American national interest?.
41. Fabricating unity.
42. Putting words in my mouth (2)
43. Putting words in my mouth (3)
44. Putting words in my mouth (4)
45. Western or Catholic Church?.
46. The Catholic Church and the American right
47. Love for the strong.
48. The two utopias compared.
49. Christianity and “organic society”
50. Syncretism..
51. Protestantism and individualism..
52. Jews.
53. Jews (2)
54. Jews (3)
55. Love for the strong (2)
56. Multiculturalism.
57. Warrior spirit
58. Revolt and post-modernism.
59. Salvation by destruction.
60. Not even a fart’s worth of effort
Introduction
What did Prof. Dugin reply to my refutation of the mechanical contrast between individualism and collectivism? Nothing.
What did he reply to my demonstration that the “holistic” sentiment of community solidarity is more alive in the USA than in any country of the Eurasian block? Nothing.
To my comparison between the respective evil deeds of the USA, Russia, and China? Nothing.
To my explanation about the nature of historic action and the identity of the true agents of history? Nothing.
To my fathoming of the structural conflict that transforms the Orthodox Church into a docile instrument of any Russian imperialist project? Nothing.
He preferred to dodge all the decisive questions and, feigning offended dignity, to leave the stage thumping his feet, as a cabaret prima donna. And yet he says that I am the hysterical one.
On his way out, he nibbled around the edges, touching on secondary points of my message, to which he offered no satisfactory answer as well, limiting himself to pounding his chest in a display of affected superiority, and to ascribing me ideas I do not have, which were invented by him with the aim of easily impugning them, so he could celebrate victory in his imaginary battle.
Of course I will not pay him back in his own coin. My theatrical gifts are nil or negligible, as attested by the great Russian-Brazilian actor and director Eugênio Kusnet with the sovereign authority of a former student of Stanislavsky, when he declared, rightly, that I was the worst student in his acting course. To his great relief, I attended the course out of mere curiosity, without any malignant intent of imposing my abominable performances on the public.
On the other hand, I am a trained scholar and a practitioner of the art of argumentation, on which I have published at least two ground-breaking books. [1] Hence, I know what a debate is, and I am certain that it is not what Prof. Dugin imagines it to be, that is, a circussy gesticulation aimed at making him look nice and at fastening a repugnant mask to his opponent’s face. That is only a dispute of vanities, a silly game that for me has as much interest as a fight among earthworms for a hole on the ground.
What I will do here is to answer Prof. Dugin point by point, with the systematic thoroughness of someone who does not wish to destroy him, but rather to rescue him from the muddy confusion in which he is drowning. In the following lines, each of Prof. Dugin’s slippery circumlocutions will be carefully steered back to the central questions he tried to avoid, and answered with direct candor, without posing or making faces.
In order to facilitate the reading, I divided Prof. Dugin’s text into 60 numbered paragraphs, in which I also include his quotes of my second message. Both are reproduced in a smaller font and followed by my replies.
The length of this message does not stem from any erotic pleasure I may feel in writing long texts, but from the simple fact that—to quote myself for a thousandth time—the human mind is made up in such a way that error and lies can always be expressed in a more succinct way than their refutation. A single false word requires many words to disprove it.
1. Disappointment
To say the truth, I am a little bit disappointed by this debate with Mr. Olavo de Carvalho. I thought I would find in him a representative of Brazilian traditionalist philosophers in the line of R. Guenon and J.Evola. But he turned out to be something different and very queer indeed.
On my part, I am not disappointed. In spite of being called queer—an adjective whose connotations Prof. Dugin pretends to ignore—, now I am really starting to like this debate. When my opponent begins to get irritated, and resorts to derogatory labeling, shameless bluffs, and arguments of authority, answering to practically nothing of the substance of what I have said, I begin to understand that I was even more right than I had imagined at the outset.
I am especially glad when my contender uses words that contrast in such a way with his real conduct that in order to wholly disprove him, all I need to do is to invoke the testimony of his own actions.
Prof. Dugin is an ostensible preacher of war and genocide. He confesses that he hates the whole West and that his declared goals are to incite a Third World War, to wipe the West off the face of the Earth, and to establish everywhere what he himself defines as a universal dictatorship. He has already said that nothing makes him sadder than the fact that Hitler and Stalin did not join forces to destroy France, England, and everything else they found on their way, distributing to the whole universe the benefits that they had already lavished on the inmates of the Gulag and Auschwitz.[2]
When a man with these ideas calls me aggressive and rancorous, I cannot but conclude that I am facing a living example of delusional interpretation,[3] one of the defining traits of the revolutionary mentality, I feel as satisfied as Dr. Charcot did when, before an academic audience, his patients reacted exactly as according to the point of clinic psychiatry he wished to illustrate.
2. Attacks
I am also sad with his hysterical and aggressive attacks against my country, my tradition and myself personally.
(1) No, Prof. Dugin. Who attacked your country and your tradition was not I. It was Lenin and Stalin, whom you consider preferable to Ronald Reagan and even to Barack Obama. I just said the obvious: that all Russians who applauded those two should work to pay compensation to the families of their victims. Is this offensive? Or was Justice created only for Germans, while the Russians and the Chinese have a celestial certificate of immunity? Of your religious tradition I also did not say anything that you had not said before: that it is a state religion, which has as its chief the czar or whoever is on his place; that therefore it cannot expand beyond its borders except by politico-military occupation of foreign lands. What have you been doing if not demonstrating this with notable constancy?
By the way, if you really believe in holism and collectivism, you have to admit that it makes no sense to individualize the faults of politicians while at the same time absolving the collective entity that gave them power and support. Either we are all free and responsible individuals—but you consider this an abominable Western ideology—, or then, my son, the collectivity whose soul is projected and condensed into a Stalin or czar is guilty of the acts of Stalin and the czar.
(2) It is highly significant your choice of the word “attack” instead of “offend” or “insult,” either of which being much more adequate to designate a merely verbal assault. Prof. Dugin openly preaches the destruction of Catholicism by force, by military and police means, especially in Eastern European countries,[4] where the Catholic Church has suffered all sorts of persecution and restriction. It is understandable that by nurturing this bloody dream he feels “attacked” at the least sign of criticism against the Orthodox Church by an unarmed man with no intention of wiping it off the map. It is also highly significant that after this disproportional reaction, which is hysterical in the most literal and technical sense of the term, he says that I am the hysterical one. The revolutionary mind lives off projective inculpation.
3. Surprise
It is something I was not prepared to meet.
Oh, really? With his bazookas and tanks, he was prepared to stimulate the slaughtering of some hundreds of millions of people, but he could never have expected that one of them would complain a little.
4. Insult and retaliation
Knowing his manners of conduct better before, I would not have agreed to participate in such a debate – I don't like at at all this kind of hollow accusations and direct insults.
The first to insult was Prof. Dugin, and I have the awful habit of retaliating. There is no worse insult than the thinly-veiled insinuation, in the style of the best opera buffa schemer. Prof. Dugin tried to portray me to my compatriots as a traitor to the homeland, an enemy of my country. A country where he has never been to, of which he knows next to nothing, and whose support he now intends to win based on cheap flattering, without warning it that in the Universal Eurasian Empire it will hardly have a better luck than Ukraine had under Russian dominion, or Tibet under Chinese occupation. Did he really expect that after this he would get kid-gloves treatment from me? Those who know me know that I hate word-mincing, sweet poisons, and deceitful intrigues whispered in mellifluous tones. If you want to argue with me, either you respect me, or hold your tears after I am done with you. Be a man.
5. Delight
So I am going to continue only because of some obligations in front of the group of gentle Brazilian young traditionalists that invited me to enter this unpleasant kind of dialogue – that in other circumstances I would prefer to avoid.
Why “unpleasant”? This is delightful!
6. Is everything politics?
For the beginning there are some short remarks concerning some affirmations of Mr. Carvalho.“Political Science, as I have said, was born at the moment when Plato and Aristotle distinguished between the discourse of political agents and the discourse of the scientific observer who seeks to understand what is going on among the agents. It is true that political agents may, over time, learn how to use certain instruments of scientific discourse for their own ends; it is also true that the scientific observer may have preferences for the politics of this or that agent. But this does nothing to alter the validity of the initial distinction: the discourse of the political agent aims to produce certain actions that favor his victory, while the discourse of the scientific observer seeks to obtain a clear view of what is at stake, by understanding the objectives and means of action of each of the agents, the general situation where the competition takes place, its most probable developments, and the meaning of such events in the larger picture of human existence.” The thesis is overthrown by Marx in his analysis of the ideology as the implicit basis for the science as such. Not being Marxist myself, I am sure that observation is correct. “The function of the scientific observer becomes even more distinct from that of the agents when he neither wishes nor can take sides with any of them and keeps himself at a necessary distance in order to describe the picture with the maximum realism available to him.” I argue that that is simply impossible. There is no such place in the realm of thought that can be fully neutral in political terms. Every human thought is politically oriented and motivated.
It is I who was not prepared for something like that. I grew up listening to this gibberish about inevitable political engagement, universal politicization of every human act, and I could not have imagined that Prof. Dugin would try to intimidate me with this silly trick, a meaningless cliché that no philosopher with some training can take seriously for a single minute. Like every expression of thick ignorance, this one carries with it, concentrated and compacted, a multitude of vulgar confusions that only education over time can undo. I do not have the least pretension of remedying Prof. Dugin’s educational flaws, but as a mere suggestion, I will present here a list of questions to which he would do well in paying some attention in the coming years. Let us see:
(1) “Every human thought is politically oriented and motivated” is a statement based upon a mere confusion between a concept and a figure of speech. All human acts “may,” theoretically and ideally, have closer or more distant relations with politics, but not all of them can be “politically oriented and motivated” to the same degree and in the same sense. No political intention moves me when I go to the bathroom, put on my pants, drink a soda, eat a sandwich, listen to a Bach cantata, arrange the papers in my office or mow the lawn in my yard (unless the purpose of avoiding an invasion of snakes be a political prejudice against these gentle creatures). The connection between human acts and politics is distributed on a scale that goes from 100 percent to something like 0.00000001 percent. When, for instance, George W. Bush went for a pee, was this be a political act to the same degree and in the same sense as the declaration of war against Iraq? Quite clearly, the proposition “Every human thought is politically oriented and motivated” jumps from the simple notice of a participation that may be vague and extremely remote to the peremptory assertion of a perfectly non-existent substantial identity and of an impossible quantitative equality. It is not a concept. It is a figure of speech, a hyperbole. And as such, it does not depict any objective reality, but rather the emphasis that the speaker wishes to confer on the issue—on a scale that can go from a plain demand for attention all the way to the psychotic abolition of the sense of proportions. Prof. Dugin’s assertion is clearly included in the latter category.
(2) Every human act, by definition, participates to a greater or lesser degree in all the dimensions not only of human life, but of existence in general. No one participates in all of them at the same level and with the same intensity. Thus, statements like “everything is physics,” “everything is atoms”, “everything is psychology,” “everything is biology,” “everything is theater,” “everything is a game,” “everything is religion,” “everything is will to power,” “everything is economics” “everything is sex,” and “every human thought is politically oriented and motivated” are at the same time irrefutable and void. They cannot be refuted because they do not say anything.
(3) The statement “There is no such place in the realm of thought that can be fully neutral in political terms” is an elementary confusion between genus and species: between politics as one of the general dimensions of existence and the various historically existing disputes in particular. Even if one would accept, ad argumentandum, the hypothesis that all human acts are political, this would in no way imply that each human being has to take a position in every political contest taking place in his time. The very possibility of taking a position implies a previous selection of what contests are relevant and what are indifferent or false. Neutrality towards a multitude of political questions is not only possible, but is an indispensable condition for taking a position in any one of them in particular.
(4) I cannot believe that Prof. Dugin is naïve to the point of ignoring that the definition of the goals of the political game and the delimitation of the opposing camps are themselves fundamental political attitudes. “Shaping a debate” is the fastest and most efficient way to win in advance. Now, once a political contest is defined, instead of taking sides with one team or the other, nothing prevents a citizen from rejecting this very contest, and proposing in its place a totally different one, disregarding the first one not only as irrelevant, but as false, thus refusing to choose between opponents that, in his opinion, are only shadows projected on a wall in order to deceive him. In this case, he must remain neutral towards the other contest precisely in order to be able to take a position in his own.
This debate itself exemplifies this with the utmost clarity. Prof. Dugin, just as Western globalists, wishes to force me to choose between “the West and the Rest.” He yells that no one can remain neutral concerning this contest and insists that, in order to bring it to an end, we all have to quietly accept the simple prospect of a Third World War, necessarily vaster and more destructive than the two previous ones.
From my point of view, even if the whole population of the planet would swallow this proposal and decide to join one of the two armies, this would not make the contest morally legitimate, it would not prove it to be an unavoidable historical fatality, nor would it in any way make it an adequate expression of the true antagonisms that divide mankind.
Why, by the way, should the fundamental choice be of a geopolitical nature and not, for example, of a moral or religious one? Why should good and bad people be distributed into separate geographical borders instead of being scattered a bit here, a bit there, without any national or racial uniformity?
For me, much more than a hypothetical and artificial contest between “Westerners” and “Easterners,” what is at stake today is the mortal fight between the whole of globalism—in its triple Western, Russian-Chinese, and Islamic versions— and the millennial spiritual and civilizational values which will be necessarily destroyed in the course of the fight for global dominance, no matter who turns out to be the “winner.”
These values are not “Western.” Who ignores, for example, that the Orthodox Church cannot join the “Eurasian project” without becoming a passive instrument in the hands of the KGB (whose name has been switched for the nth time), as it has in fact already become under the leadership of a patriarch who is a notorious agent of this macabre institution? Read the works of the great Orthodox tradition, as Philokalia or The Way of a Pilgrim, and compare them with the ideological speeches of Prof. Dugin. What can there be in common between the apotheosis of contemplative life and the prostitution of everything to the dictates of the political fight? What agreement can there be between Our Lord Jesus Christ and the devil?
In the same way, practically everything in Islamic spirituality—and even in Islamic philosophy—has been lost ever since generations of enraged youths decided to Islamicize the world on the basis of terrorist attacks, inspired in the doctrines of the Muslim Brotherhood, which are but a “liberation theology,” a gross politicization of that which Islam once was. Compare the writings of Mohieddin Ibn ‘Arabi or Jalal-ed-Din Rûmi with those of Sayyd Qutub, the mentor of the Brotherhood, and you will have an idea of what a free fall really is.
The general politicization of life—one of the typical features of Western modernity, which Prof. Dugin says he hates, but to which, as we shall see later, he is a helpless and passive ideological slave— evidently also had spiritually disastrous results in the West. The degradation of Judaism by a modernizing liberalism since the beginning of the nineteenth century, as depicted by Rabbi Marvin Antelman in To Eliminate the Opiate,[5] was a sort of miniature laboratory which prepared the way for an identical operation carried out in the twentieth century, on a much larger scale, in the Catholic Church, culminating in the complete disaster of Council Vatican II. As for the Protestant churches: who is not aware that the World Council of Churches, which gathers together so many of them, is a communist institution, and that those not infected by communism have fallen sick with a “theology of prosperity” as materialist as communism itself?
To all these cases, Eric Voegelin’s warning applies: “The modern form by which a mass democracy is organized [therein included, and even preeminently, the “totalitarian democracies” of Russia, China, and the Islamic world] is spiritually the more dangerous to the individual personally, for the political propaganda fills his spirit with abstract clichés, which are infinitely distant from any essential genuineness of the personal, and therefore radically negate the best and unique features of the entire human being.”[6]
Confronted with facts such as this, the man who is more interested in the eternal life than in political fights, instead of taking part in the contest among globalisms, very likely will do what he can to depreciate it, discredit it and dilute it into the greater contest between the City of God and the City of Men, and included in the latter are the Syndicate, the Eurasian Empire, and the Caliphate.
This is my fight, not the one which Prof. Dugin tries to engage me in against my will, putting on me the strait jacket of a party which is not mine and never could be. For this purpose, he twists the meaning of my words until he makes them say the opposite of what they say, thus committing against me the most grave offense one can commit against a philosopher: denying the individuality of his ideas and reducing them to a copy of the collective discourses he despises.
(5) As if revealing a universally known truth to a hillbilly to whom it is an absolute novelty, Prof. Dugin informs me that the Platonic-Aristotelian distinction between the viewpoints of the agent and of the observer no longer applies because it was “overthrown” by Karl Marx. Prof. Dugin chose the wrong customer to sell his product to. Two decades ago I already critically examined this Marxist presumption and demonstrated its utter absurdity in my book O Jardim das Aflições,[7] to which I refer those who are interested, relieving me from repeating here what I explained there. Karl Marx did not “overthrow” a thing; he just fabricated, under the name of praxis, a psychotic confusion between theory and practice, from which many intellectuals have not yet recovered. When Prof. Dugin brandishes this confusion before my eyes as if it were a truth definitely established—to the extent that in order to disarm his opponent it would sufficient to mention it in passing, without the need to even argue in its favor—, he is only demonstrating he has never examined it critically, limiting himself to incorporating it, as dogma, into his personal ideology. A sucker is born every minute, as P.T. Barnum already taught.
(6) Besides the obvious fact highlighted above, namely, that in order to take a position in a single contest it is necessary to stay neutral in a multitude of others—since the denial of all neutrality would bring with it the impossibility of taking a position—the fact remains that even in the mind of a particular agent, even if he is the most politically active and engaged one, the viewpoint of theoretical observation must remain formally distinct from the viewpoint of the planner of actions, or the agitator of the masses, that is, the agent must first be a neutral observer so that he might later act upon a situation that he has mastered intellectually. Prof. Dugin himself bears witness to this when, a few lines down, he confesses that: “In my courses in the sociological faculty of Moscow State University, where I chair the department of the Sociology of International Relations, I never profess my own political views and I give always the full spectrum of the possible political interpretations of the facts, but I don’t insist on one concrete point of view, always stressing that there is a choice.”
What is this if not a differently phrased reproduction of what I had said in my second message? Please read it again: “It is true that political agents may, over time, learn how to use certain instruments of scientific discourse for their own ends; it is also true that the scientific observer may have preferences for the politics of this or that agent. But this does nothing to alter the validity of the initial distinction: the discourse of the political agent aims to produce certain actions that favor his victory, while the discourse of the scientific observer seeks to obtain a clear view of what is at stake, by understanding the objectives and means of action of each of the agents, the general situation where the competition takes place, its most probable developments, and the meaning of such events in the larger picture of human existence.”
In short: when Prof. Dugin speaks as a scientific observer, he tries to understand a given situation. When he speaks as an agent, he tries to promote actions which may lead to the victory of his party. And who, by Jupiter, does not do the same? The intellectual and verbal means of scientific observation are so different from the means of political action that the very efficacy of the latter requires a preliminary separation between the two viewpoints, a preparatory measure without which their subsequent application in the domain of practice would only bring about confusion, lies and endless self-deceit, as the history of the Marxist movement has demonstrated with evidence to spare.
If Prof. Dugin, in his academic activity, observes the same distinction that I do, he obviously does not believe in himself when he says that this distinction was “overthrown” by Karl Marx.
The sole difference that could exist between us in this case—and I say “could” because it does not necessarily have to exist—is that he assures us that, once a sufficiently clear description of the contending forces is obtained, that is, once the task of the scientific observer is completed, it is necessary to make a choice and “this choice is not only the freedom (sic) but also the obligation (sic). You are free to choose but you are not free to choose not.”
Now, an obligation to take a position cannot be absolute. It is relative by definition. It is only valid if we accept that the scientific description is truthful, that it is the only possible one, or at least the most accurate of all, and that the contest it describes is so important, so vital for human destiny, that every refusal to take a position in it would be unforgivable cowardice. Come on, how many university professors can brag about having reached such a certain and definitive description of reality, such a precise equation of essential antagonisms that whoever listens to them is morally obliged to take a position according to the terms of the opposition they have defined? In my modest opinion, the only one who reached such a correct and final description was Our Lord Jesus Christ when He said that we had to choose between Him and the Prince of this World. University professors by and large project onto the audience the conflict that agitates itself in their souls, and only the more presumptuous among them proclaim it is the essential conflict of the world, towards which nobody has the right to remain neutral. The question then fatally arises: What if the description is false? If I disagree with the description, why should I take sides in a hypothetical conflict that exists only in the mind of my professor, and that does not correspond to the facts as I see them? Why would I not have the right to remain neutral between professorial hypotheses and to pick myself my own fight? Once more, neutrality reveals itself not only as possible, but as a necessary condition for taking a position.
Prof. Dugin does not understand these subtleties. Resting on the infallible authority of Karl Marx, he sincerely expects the world to accept to play the game by his own rules and, without further ado, to enroll in one of the teams. For my part, I have better things to do. With no intention of offense I return my enrollment form—blank.
7. Will to power
The will to power permeates the human nature in its depths. The distance evoked by Mr. Carvalho is ontologically impossible. Plato and Aristotle were both politically engaged not only in practice but also in theory.
(1) Prof. Dugin claims to be the apostle of the Absolute, of Tradition, of the Spirit, but he cannot be that at all since he decrees the primacy of the political and denies the autonomy (or even the possibility) of contemplative life, reducing it to an instrument or camouflage of the “will to power.” The hypothesis that St. Theresa, for example, in contemplating Our Lord Jesus Christ was “doing politics” or exerting the “will to power” reflects the same aforementioned confusion [6(1) e 6(2)] between a most remote participation and a quantitative equality.
(2) Having this confusion been undone, it is not true that “Plato and Aristotle were both politically engaged not only in practice but also in theory.” Plato explains in his Seventh Letter that he decided to dedicate himself to philosophy precisely after he became disillusioned with politics. That his philosophy could have had later political developments does not imply that it was itself political activism, just as Prof. Dugin is not engaged in political activism when describing a political situation, as he himself confirms it. As for Aristotle, his foreign status automatically prevented him from participating in Athenian politics in any way, and throughout the works he bequeathed us his positions are so prudent and moderate, that is, so politically neutral, that they were able to equally inspire the most diverse politics, from St. Thomas Aquinas to Karl Marx.
(3) The appeal to “will to power” as a universal explanatory key is highly meaningful. This Nietzschean topos comes back on the scene every time someone wishes to deter us from seeking a rational solution for human conflicts and to invite us to participate in redemptive bloodshed. Prof. Dugin does not hide that this is exactly his goal. But in order to achieve it, he needs to incur once more into the unpardonable confusion between proportional participation and quantitative identity. Are all human acts permeated by “will to power”? Certainly. But to what degree? And what is the proportion between this motivational force and the other forces involved? When you have sex with your wife, there is certainly a tiny amount of will to power at play. But if it predominates over will to pleasure, affection, the impulse to please the beloved one, etc., then that will not be an act of licit sex anymore, but rape. Ask your wife whether she cannot tell the difference. The apology of “will to power” as the ultimate explanation of human acts is not a valid description of reality; it is not even a theory: it is a morbid projection, in phony theoretical language, of a compulsion to extinguish all other human motivations, especially love and the will to knowledge. It is no surprise that the inventor of this contraption was a poor wretch, with no money, with no prestige, with not even a girlfriend, forced to have recourse to prostitutes who ended up infecting him with syphilis, which made him insane and eventually killed him. It was no coincidence that the second explanatory key in which he placed his bet was… resentment.
8. Eurasianism and communism
8. “The photos that I attached to my first message, by way of a humorous synthesis, document all the difference between the political agent invested with global plans and means of action of imperial scale and the scientific observer not only divested of both, but firmly decided to reject them and to live without them until the end of his days, since they are unnecessary and inconvenient to the mission in life that he has chosen and that is for him the only reasonable justification for his existence.” The indignity demonstrated a little above against “Russian-Chinese” poles and completely ridiculous identification between the Eurasianism and the communism is the bright testimony of the extreme partiality of Mr. Carvalho.
I have never “identified” Eurasianism with communism, at least not from the ideological point of view, though I include both in the category of revolutionary movements, in the precise meaning I give to this expression.[8] Yet, politics is not a mere confrontation of ideologies. It is a contest for power between well defined and concrete human groups. Prof. Dugin will not be cynical enough to deny that the group currently in power in Russia is the same that dominated the country at the time of communism. Substantially, that group is the KGB (or FSB, whose periodical change of name has never changed the nature of the institution). What is worse, it is the KGB with its power monstrously amplified: on one hand, if in the communist regime there was one police agent for every 400 citizens, today there is something like one for every 200, which unmistakably characterizes Russia as a police state; on the other, the allotment of state properties among the agents and collaborators of the political police, who became “oligarchs” overnight without breaking their bonds of subjection to the KGB, provides this entity with the privilege to act in the West under several layers of disguise, with a freedom of movement that would have been unthinkable at the time of Stalin or Khrushchev.
Ideologically, Eurasianism is different from communism. It is, as Jeffrey Nyquist said, “right-wing Bolshevism”. Yet ideology, as Karl Marx himself defined it, is just a “dress of ideas” concealing a scheme of political power. The scheme of political power in Russia has changed its dress, but continues to be the same—maintaining the same people in the same positions, performing the same functions, with the same totalitarian ambitions as ever.
There is no partiality in saying the obvious.
9. Counting corpses
The evaluation of the major global forces is based on the presumption of the scale that could be taken as the measure – the quantity of humans killed.
Huh? And what is it that differentiates a personal misfortune from a global tragedy if not the number of victims? This is no “presumption;” it is the very definition of the terms being used. “Genocide” is the systematic annihilation of an ethnic, political, or religious community. “Democide” is the extermination of a civilian population by initiative of its own government. Period. If the number of human beings murdered does not serve as a measure of the gravity of a genocide or democide, why then should we distinguish between the Holocaust and any individual homicide committed by an isolated racist, with no power of government? What’s more: if the amount of victims does not make any difference, how can one tell apart a serial killer from the author of a single crime? What, then, is to be done with the notion of recidivism, which universal jurisprudence proclaims to be an aggravating factor for crime? Could jurists of all times and countries have been mistaken in raising penalties according to number of crimes?
It is no coincidence that those guilty of the greatest genocides and democides are always the ones who try, in a paroxysm of rhetorical desperation, to throw mud in the water, by appealing to the absurd and insulting argument that numbers do not make any difference.
Prof. Dugin goes even a bit farther: he places the term “genocide” between attenuating quotation marks when referring to the murder of 140 million unarmed civilians by the governments of Russia and China, but he uses the same term without any quotes—thus denoting literal and precise meaning— when he talks about the deaths which occurred in combat during American interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, and which are incomparably smaller in number.
That is a complete inversion of all sense of proportion, an insane logorrhea of one who, having no argument, desperately tries to bewilder the audience to prevent it from seeing the bare and crude reality.
10. Dugin contra Dugin
It is not so evident and is rather example of political anti-communist and anti-Russian propaganda than the result of “scientific analysis”. Yes, I am political agent of Eurasian Weltanschauung. At the same time I am political analyst and scientist. The two aspects don’t correspond fully. In my courses in the sociological faculty of Moscow State University, where I chair the department of the Sociology of International Relations, I never profess my own political views and I give always the full spectrum of the possible political interpretations of the facts, but I don’t insist on one concrete point of view, always stressing that there is a choice.
As I have commented above, Prof. Dugin demonstrates here, through his own example, that it is not possible to understand a political situation, and much less to efficiently act upon it, without first observing the Platonic-Aristotelian distinction between the viewpoint of the observer and that of the agent, a distinction to which, a few lines before, he had denied any validity. Even when the observer and the agent are synthesized in the same person, the perspectives from which that person looks at the facts must remain formally distinct and unconfusable.
11. The duty to choose
At the same time this choice is not only the freedom but also the obligation. You are free to choose but you are not free to chose not. There is never such a thing as political or ideological “neutrality”.
We now return to the issue of being forced to choose. The right to choose does not mean a thing if it does not also imply the right to choose between the various proposals of choice. Why would we have the obligation to choose precisely between the alternatives offered by Prof. Dugin, without being able to propose different alternatives, or a different set of possible choices? Prof. Dugin himself, with exemplary candor, exercises this very right that he denies to others. “National-Bolsheviks [in whose name he speaks in this passage] affirm objective idealism…and objective materialism…, refusing to choose between them.”[9] Only God has the right to impose the ultimate, final, unappealable choice upon us. “He that is not with me is against me,” and “He that gathereth not with me scattereth,” said the Lord. Since then His apish satanic imitators have not stopped pretending to have in their hands the definitive, obligatory choice, crystallized in a macabre dualism. I could not show the absurdity of this better than Otto Maria Carpeaux did I in a memorable essay on Shakespeare, which summarizes the issue:
“For years European consciousness was mistreated by the supposed obligation of choosing between Hitler and Stalin—“there is no other alternative!” Then, they wished to force the world’s consciousness to choose between Stalin and Foster Dulles—“there is no other alternative!” And now and everywhere they continue to impose these alternatives upon us, which are so similar to the absurd fight between the two Houses of Montague and Capulet, which is the true theme of Romeo and Juliet…It is this truth which Mercutio recognizes in that extreme lucidity of the hour of agony, shouting —and we shout with him: A plague o’ both your houses!, and amen.”[10]
If there are three houses instead of two, may the plague come threefold. No Duginism in the world can force me to choose between the Syndicate, the Caliphate, or the Russian-Chinese Empire. But Prof. Dugin even simplifies things for me, by synthesizing the latter two in the Eurasian Empire, reducing the alternatives to the good old dualism of the Montagues and the Capulets, and trying to make us wear a straitjacket of obligatory choice. A plague o’ both your houses!
12. Arms
So it is quite erroneous to present Mr. Carvalho himself as “neutral” and “impartial” and myself as “engaged” and “ideologically motivated”. We are both ideologically engaged and scientifically involved. So I continue to regard our photos not as “professor vs the warrior” but rather two “professors/warriors vs each other”. Finally in the arms of Mr. Carvalho is a gun. Not a cross, for example. By the way, there are some photos of myself bearing a big orthodox cross during religious ceremonies. So, that would illustrate nothing. Our religions are different as our civilizations are.
It is certain that both of us appear in the photos holding guns, but what guns? Mine is a hunting shotgun, which may occasionally be used for home defense, but which is normally used for sport and, in my case, has served eminently (see new photo) to kill snakes before they bite my smaller dogs (not the big one, which eats them thinking they are moving sausages). Prof. Dugin’s guns, on the other hand, are war weapons reserved for the exclusive use of governments, created specifically to kill human beings (nobody has ever hunted snakes or armadillos with bazookas or tanks). Moreover, this kind of weapon was not designed to kill one or two people, but rather to kill them wholesale, by the hundreds, by the thousands. How can he say that this difference “does not illustrate anything”? Is there really no difference between self-defense and mass murder?
13. Dugin contra Dugin (2)
“Both professor Dugin and I are performing our respective tasks with utmost dedication, seriousness and honesty. But these tasks are not one and the same. His task is to recruit soldiers for the battle against the West and for the establishment of the universal Eurasian Empire. Mine is to attempt to understand the political situation of the world so that my readers and I are not reduced to the condition of blind men caught in the gunfire of the global combat; so that we are not dragged by the vortex of History like leaves in a storm, without ever knowing whence we came or whither we are being carried.” I agree here in one point. It is true that “to recruit soldiers for the battle against the West and for the establishment of the universal Eurasian Empire” is my goal. But it is possible only after having achieved the correct vision of the world global situation based on the accurate analysis of the balance of forces and main actors.
Once more Prof. Dugin confirms, after having denied it, the formal and indispensable distinction between the viewpoint of the scientific observer and that of the political agent.
14. The difference between us
So up to this moment Mr. Carvalho and myself we have the strictly one and the same task. If our understanding of the leading world forces and their identification differs that doesn’t mean automatically that I am motivated exclusively by political and geopolitical choice and himself by the “neutral”, purely “scientific” reasoning. We are both trying to understand the world we live in, and I presume that we both are doing it honestly. But our conclusions don’t fit. I wonder why and try to find deeper reasons than simply the obvious fact of my own ideological and political involvement. We both want to make our world better and not worse. But we both have different visions of what is the Good and Evil. And I wonder where lies difference.
The difference is the following: after having taken positions on issues with that indecent hurry of youth, I soon climbed down over my views and spent thirty years—not thirty days—struggling with my own doubts, among countless perplexities, without being able to bring myself to make common cause with anything, except in an experimental and provisional way. I only resumed expressing my political opinions at 48 years of age, after having reached some conclusions that seemed reasonable to me, and even so, I have always warned people about the possibility that I might be wrong. Prof. Dugin has never been in doubt for even a single day: he took side with National Bolshevism when he was very young, and has hitherto remained faithful to the same program, now amplified as Eurasianism. He simply did not go through that period of real abstinence of opinions which is absolutely necessary to the education of a serious intellectual.
15. The difference between us (2)
I believe it is rather the result of the divergence of the mutual civilizations; we have respectively different ontologies, anthropologies and sociologies. So the culpabilization and demonization of each other is the result of the necessary mutual “ethnocentric” positions and not the final arguments for the choice of lesser evil.
Absolutely wrong. As we will see later, Prof. Dugin’s mind was molded much more by Western intellectuality than by any Eastern spiritual tradition, while one of my main formative influences was Swami Dayananda Saraswati, director of the Academy of Vedic Studies of Bombay.[11] After that experience, I still allowed myself to be imbued with orientalism, to the point of becoming the author of Islamic studies that won an award from the government of Saudi Arabia. The difference between us lies in our personal intellectual experience, not in our “civilizations.”
16. Anesthetic quotes
“He employs all the usual instruments of political propaganda: Manichean simplification, defamatory labeling, perfidious insinuation, the phony indignation of a culprit pretending to be a saint and, last, not least, the construction of the great Sorelian myth – or self-fulfilling prophecy – which, while pretending to describe reality, builds in the air an agglutinating symbol in hopes that the false may become true by the massive adherence of the audience.” Stressing the presumed fact of the communist Russian-Chinese “genocide” Mr. Carvalho does exactly the same game of the pure political propaganda playing on the false humanitarian sensibility of the Western audience, not remarking, by the way, the real, existing here and now, massive and planned genocide conducted in Afghanistan, Iraq or Libya by American bloody murders. [sic]
I have already explained above the monstrous falsity of that comparison, which is based on a complete inversion of the sense of proportion. The slaughter of 140 million of their unarmed fellow citizens does not turn the rulers of Russia and China into genocidal murderers, except when the word genocide is placed in paternally cushioning quotation marks. However, the total of deaths of soldiers in combat, two thousand times less numerous, is “massive and planned genocide conducted by American bloody murders [sic]”. No quotation marks in the original.
17. A question of style
I imitate here the very “scientific” style of polemic imposed by Mr. Carvalho.
What a farce! Prof. Dugin has already been calling Americans “bloody murderers” for many years now, and he has never needed my literary incentive to do so. Moreover, the scientific character of a text does not reside in the politeness or impoliteness of its style, but rather in the substance of its arguments. Prof. Dugin himself accepts as scientific the writings of Karl Marx, whose style is a thousand times more violent than mine and, in addition to that, devoid of that humoristic attenuation which is never lacking in what I write.
18. My stupid opinion
“Of course, I do not say that Professor Dugin is dishonest. But he is honestly devoting himself to a kind of combat that, by definition and ever since the world began, has been the embodiment par excellence of dishonesty.» This thesis I find really stupid. I don't affirm that Mr. Carvalho is stupid himself, no way, but I feel sincerely that the usurpation of the right of global moral judgment in such affairs as what is «honest» or «dishonest» fits perfectly into the old tradition of extreme stupidity.
(1) To begin with, the opinion that politics, by and large, is the realm of impostors and crooks is the same as that illustrated by Shakespeare in Romeo and Juliet and other plays; therefore my stupidity is at least grounded in an illustrious historical precedent that certainly does not legitimatize it, but, in any case, ennobles it.
(2) Yet, what is most fascinating in this passage is that Prof. Dugin suddenly emerges speaking as a mouthpiece for radical cultural relativism, the latest and prettiest offshoot of the Western modernism he says he hates with all of his strength.
It is useless to demand consistency from a man who makes a profession of faith in militant irrationalism,[12] but only for the benefit of myself and my readers I ask how Prof. Dugin can possibly reconcile the non-existence of universal moral norms with his publicly expressed Christian belief in the universal validity of the Ten Commandments.
(3) It should be noted that even though he qualifies my opinion as “stupid,” he does not even try to show why it is stupid. This adjective, he supposes, should make proof of itself. Once stamped as stupid, my opinion automatically becomes stupid by the mere power of the rubber-stamp. According to Aristotle, this manner of speaking that pretends that a proposition is obvious, universally acknowledged, and in the public domain, when in fact it is none of those things, is the very definition of eristic or contentious argumentation, the false rhetoric of demagogues and deceivers. “Again (c), reasoning is eristic if it starts from opinions that seem to be generally accepted, but are not really such.”[13]
19. Judgement by guesswork
So being really clever and smart, Mr. Carvalho consciously supplies very stupid argument in order to be nearer to the American right «Christian» public he tries to influence.
(1) Again, Prof. Dugin’s judgment about me is pure guesswork; he does not have the least idea of what my real activities are. I have never sought to influence the American right, though I do not exclude the possibility of trying to do it one day, if it seems convenient to me. I have only addressed that audience when invited, on rare and sporadic occasions. All my work as professor, writer, and lecturer is directed to the Brazilian public, through articles published in the São Paulo press, a radio program in Portuguese, and weekly classes (also in Portuguese) for the 3,000 students of my online course, Philosophy Seminar. The recently founded Inter-American Institute has as its goal the congregation of intellectuals of the three Americas for the exchange of information and opinion. It is not a militant or a propaganda organization, although it may and must make moral pronouncements in extreme cases, such as the imprisonment of one of our fellows in Venezuela. In fact, the Institute is so indifferent to all “Westernist” politics that it counts, among its first fellows, Dr. Ahmed Youssif El-Tassa, a Muslim who lives in China.
(2) The reiterated use of pejorative quotation marks, characteristic of a crude, second-rate literary style, turns up here to deny, by a mere graphic artifice, that American Christians are Christians. Now, as for Prof. Dugin, who openly denies the universality of the Ten Commandments through his relativistic profession of faith, make no mistake that he is a genuine Christian.
20. Reality was invented in the Middle Ages
And one philosophic point: “Yet, the millennial philosophical technique, which those people totally ignore, teaches that the definitions of terms express only general and abstract essences, logical possibilities and not realities.” The question what reality is and how it corresponds to the “definitions” or “ideas” differs considerably in various philosophical schools. The term itself “reality” is based on the Latin word “res”, “re”, “thing”. But that word fails in Greek. By Aristotle there is no such word – he speaks about pragma (deed), energeia, but mostly about on, the being. So the “reality” as something independent (or partly dependent – in Berkley, for example) from the mind is Western post-Medieval concept and not something universal.
(1) Absolutely wrong. The non-existence of a word in a certain language does not automatically make the corresponding concept unthinkable to the speakers of this language, since the concept may also be expressed in paraphrases, symbols, or mathematical formulae, or even remain implicit. For native tongues to effectively limit the cognitive possibilities of their speakers, as claimed by the unfortunate Benjamin L. Whorf, it would be necessary to demonstrate first that they are incapable of drawing, building, imitating by gestures, making music, dancing, etc. If the stock of words could limit the stock of perceptions and ideas, each person would only be able to perceive things whose names he had already known in advance, and babies would be unable to correctly use pacifiers before they could pronounce the word “pacifier.” The universe abounds not only with nameless things, but also with nameless ideas. I challenge Prof. Dugin, for example, to find a word in Portuguese or Russian that names the concept which I have just expressed in the last sentence. This word does not exist, whence one concludes, according to the criterion of Prof. Dugin, that the aforementioned sentence was never thought, nor written, nor read.
(2) It is true that the term realitas, realitatis, only appeared in Medieval Latin, as derivative from the Ancient Latin res, rei. This latter term, usually translated as “thing,” already has in classical Latin the meaning of “all that is, or somehow exists.”[14] Since the time of Cicero it has served as one of the possible translations of the Greek word on, “being.” The term realitas, therefore, brings nothing new, designating only the quality of being res. To imagine, based upon a precarious knowledge of Latin, that nobody had known of the existence of a being independent of the human mind until medieval vocabulary moved the term res from the substantive class to the category of quality is the same as to suppose that nobody had noticed the existence of the virile force before the term “virility” was invented. Why, why, porca miseria, does Prof. Dugin compel me to explain to him these things which he could well have asked his Latin teacher in school?
(3) For Plato, the Ideas or Forms are objectively existing beings, independent of the human mind. For Aristotle, the same applies to the universal principles of ontology and the objects of physical nature. The so-called “realism of Ideas” is such an essential component of Platonism that practically no Plato scholar has ever questioned it.[15] I do not need to recommend to Prof. Dugin some years of study of a Platonic bibliography of oceanic dimensions, from Diogenes Laertius to Giovanni Reale. I do not even need to remind him of Plato’s persistent combat against sophistic doctrines that made truth a servant of human will.[16] A simple reading of the most famous passage of The Symposium is enough to show the magnitude of his error. The Ideas are defined there as “everlasting—not growing and decaying, or waxing and waning.”[17] What does this have to do with the human psyche which, dependent on the senses, is therefore marked by mutability and inconstancy? Giovanni Reale sums it up: “Ideas are repeatedly qualified by Plato as the true being, being in itself, stable and eternal being.”[18] In the Phaedo, Plato contrasts the stable eternity of Ideas with the inconstancy of the human mind, which seeks to get closer to them “through questions and answers,” without ever being able to completely apprehend them.[19]
Independent of the human mind are, for Plato, not only the eternal Ideas, but even the phenomena of the physical world that illustrate them before our eyes: “God devised and bestowed upon us vision to the end that we might behold the revolutions of Reason in the Heaven and use them for the revolving of the reasoning that is within us.”[20] The visible heaven is not only external to the human mind, but superior to it to the point of serving as its measure and model, helping it overcome its inconstancy and fallibility through the contemplation of a natural symbol of the eternal ideas.
A good account of the Platonic studies throughout the times is Images de Platon et Lectures de Ses Oeuvres, by Ada Neschke-Hentschke,[21] in which twenty scholars review the most renowned interpretations of Platonism, from Antiquity through the twentieth century. Look it up: you will not find a single interpretation denying the existence of the “realism of Ideas.” But, in fact, in order to understand this, Prof. Dugin does not even have to read anything. He has but to type in “Plato’s realism” on Google, and he will get 1.960.000 hits. How many people are discussing something that according to Prof. Dugin does not exist!
It is subjective idealism, which reduces everything or almost everything to projections of the human mind, thus going far beyond sophistical relativism or Pyrrhonian skepticism, that is the truly modern phenomenon—unknown to Ancient Greece. This is another point that historians of philosophy have never questioned.[22]
21. Reality and concept
Different cultures don't know what “the reality” means. It is a concept, nothing else. A concept among many others.
Reality cannot be a concept because, meaning “all that is,” it is the total realm of experience, open and therefore irreducible to any concept, the realm within which men exist and produce concepts (besides sausages, cars, poems, crimes, laws, etc.). If reality were but a concept, we would not be able to exist within it and would need to use some other name— “universe,” “world,” “being,” “totality,” or whatever one wishes—to designate that which transcends, encompasses, and contains us. Perhaps the word “reality” is not the best one for this, but the intentional content at which it points, lying behind a variety of words and symbols that point at the same thing, is universally clear. Prof. Dugin here commits the classical error of psychologism, so well analyzed by Husserl, which consists in mistaking thought for the thing thought of, attributing to the latter the limitations of the former.[23] For example, when we think “universe,” this thought has some positive content, but we know immediately—or we should—that the real universe infinitely transcends this content. This capacity to subjugate thought to the consciousness concerning the unthinkable, or extra-thinkable, or supra-thinkable, is in all epochs and cultures the mark of sound human intelligence—which Henri Bergson called the “open soul,” in opposition to the “closed soul” which only acknowledges the existence of what it thinks. Open souls are Confucius and Lao-Tse, Plato and Aristotle, Ibn ‘Arabi and Rûmi, Shânkara and Râmana Maharshi, Soloviev and Berdiaev. Closed souls are Spinoza and Rousseau, Kant and Fichte, Marx and Lenin, Mao and Pol-Pot, in short, all revolutionaries.
22. Intellectual racism
Thus, to impose it as something universal and ostensive is a kind of intellectual «racism».
Every charge of racism, whether in quotes or not, presupposes the equal dignity of all races, which is a universal concept founded on the general uniformity of human nature. The denial of the universal identity of human nature in the name of the diversity of races and cultures would set them as the insurmountable limit of all human knowledge, automatically justifying, for example, the incommensurability between a “Jewish science” and an “Arian science,” and thus leading to the most stupid and truculent racism. Tertium non datur: either there is a universal human nature, or nothing can be argued against racism except in the name of a cultural convention that, on its turn, cannot rationally allege anything against strange or adverse cultures which may have opposite conventions.
23. Absolute and relative relativism
Before speaking of the “reality” we need to study carefully the concrete culture, civilization, ethnos and language.
Yes, of course, but we need not to fall into the snare of taking mere cultural facts as epistemological norms. The simple possibility of studying comparatively various cultures presupposes the universality of the criterion of comparison. Yet, whenever this criterion is impugned by empirical data, one will recognize it was not as universal as it should have been—or as was initially supposed. Precisely because of that, the criterion will need to be corrected. This is the exact opposite of denying the possibility of a universal criterion. For a science cannot study different cultures and at the same time proclaim that it is doing so based on cultural prejudices devoid of any scientific foundation. Relativism is, by definition, relative, that is, limited.
24. Absolute and relative relativism (2)
The Sapir/Whorf rule and the tradition of the cultural anthropology of F. Boaz and structural anthropology of C. Levy-Strauss teach us to be very careful with the words that have full and evident meaning only in the concrete context. The Russian culture or the Chinese society have different understandings of «reality», «facts», «nature», «object». The corresponding words have their own meaning.
We go back to the same point: either cultural relativism is relative, or no comparison between cultures is possible. If, say, among different images of elephants, images which are documented in various cultures, we cannot discern a common structure and its reference to a certain animal that exists in nature— an animal which was not invented by any of those cultures—, how can we compare these images and say that different cultures have different ideas about elephants? By definition, every comparison between points of view presupposes a comparative grid that encompasses all of them and cannot bereduced to any of them.
25. Subject and object
What nonsense! No oriental doctrine has ever denied this dualism as a datum of experience, a datum, by the way, implicit in the simple fact that we do not know everything that is around us. Actually, what some doctrines did was to deny absolute validity to dualism on the plane of metaphysical universality. I say “some doctrines” because even the most extreme proponent of the doctrine of Absolute Unity, Mohieddin Ibn ‘Arabi, acknowledged an insurmountable residual dualism between the soul and God, as a requirement resulting from Divine love itself.
26. Logical essence
The «logic essence» is the other purely Western concept. There are the other philosophies with different conceptual structures – Islamic, Hindu, Chinese.
To say that “‘logic essence’ is a purely Western concept” amounts to saying that, outside the West, nobody has ever been able to distinguish between the content of mere idea (its logic essence) and the real nature of a being ( its real or ontological essence). Oh, how dumb these Orientals should be in order for Prof. Dugin’s statement to be worth something! And yet he says that I am the one who is offending them.
27. Existence and proof
“From a definition it is never possible to deduce that the defined thing does exist.”To prove the existence is not an easy task. Heidegger’s philosophy and before him Husserlian phenomenology tried to approach the “existence” as such with problematic success.
(1) Prof. Dugin here falls into a gross confusion between being aware of existence and explaining it. If we could not be aware of it, the desire to explain it would never occur to us. This applies to both existence in general and the existing objects. As for the former, I believe I cannot add anything to the words of Louis Lavelle: “There is an initial experience which is implicit in all others and which provides each one of them with its gravity and depth: it is the experience of the presence of being. To acknowledge this presence is to acknowledge, in the same act, the participation of the self in being.”[24]
Without this basic experience, no other one is possible, and it would be an unthinkable foolishness to try to make the awareness of the presence of being depend upon the possession of a “proof.” Existence is an initial datum, not a subject of proof. No proof of anything would be possible, as Mário Ferreira dos Santos taught, without the initial admission that “something exists” or “there is something”.[25]
(2) It is also silly to say that Husserl or Heidegger tried to “prove existence.” In order to save the honor of Prof. Dugin, which would be much tarnished by his saying such a thing, I even put forward the hypothesis that his translator might have mistaken the English verb “probe” for “prove,” writing “prove” where he should have written “probe”. Neither Husserl nor Heidegger ever tried to “prove existence.” What they did was to probe existence. Leibniz already said that the fundamental question of all philosophical investigation is: “Why is there something, rather than nothing?”. Note well: “why” and not “if.” If nothing ever existed, nothing would be ever investigated. The existence of existence cannot be an object of doubt or investigation; but one may investigate or doubt its causes, its foundations, its reason for being, its forms, its structure, and so forth.
As for the existence of this or that being in particular, being aware of them is also a precondition for seeking any explanation.
28. Stage-play
28. “In order to do this, it is necessary to break the shell of the definition and analyze the conditions required for the existence of the thing. If these conditions do not reveal themselves to be self-contradictory, excluding in limine the possibility of existence, even then this existence is not proved. In order to arrive at that proof, it is necessary to gather from the world of experience factual data that not only corroborate the existence, but that confirm its full agreement with the defined essence, excluding the possibility that the existing thing is something very different, which coincides with the essence only in appearance.” It is a kind of positivist approach completely dismissed by the structuralism and late Wittgenstein. It is philosophically ridiculous or too naïve statement. But all these considerations are details with no much importance. The whole text of Carvalho is so full of such pretentious and incorrect (or fully arbitrary) affirmations that I can not follow it any more. It is rather boring. I'd rather come to the essential point.
(1) This is not an argument; it is mere stage-play. It is name-dropping and feigning superiority as a pretext to evade a discussion that one is shamefully losing. What I described in the paragraph quoted by Dugin is an elementary precept of scientific methodology that—at least since there is no other to substitute for it— continues to be used in all laboratories and research institutes of the world, which could not care less about what Wittgenstein, Lévi-Strauss, Boas, Whorf, Sapir, and tutti quanti think. Note that, exactly as he did with the latter three authors, Prof. Dugin did not make the least effort to defend the opinions of the former two. He did not even say what their opinions were. He did not present or summarize them; he did not even point at where they could be found. He limited himself to indicating them vaguely, fleetingly, by adding footnotes containing a few titles of books, but making no reference to page numbers. After he had done so, he took all of those opinions to be so infallible and demonstrated as if suggesting that whoever does not accept them in totum and without discussion is automatically disqualified for the debate and does not even deserve any comment. Who cannot see that this is not philosophy, not argumentation, but rather a grotesque attempt at intimidation through the appeal to authorities who are taken as so incontestable and so universally accepted that it is not even necessary to repeat what they say, for simply mentioning their names is taken to be enough to instill immediately in the poor interlocutor the most pious and genuflecting sentiment of reverential awe? This is not even an argumentum auctoritatis, but rather a caricature of one. This is, as Aristotle would say, taking “opinions that seem to be generally accepted, but are not really such” as premises. It is eristic at its most ignoble, abject, and contemptible.
Note that some lines above [20(3)], I relied on an interpretation of Plato that is indeed a millennially established unanimity— and whose knowledge is in fact mandatory to every philosophy student—, but not even then did I allow myself to the privilege of taking that interpretation as so universally accepted so as to exempt me from producing proof of what I had said. I summarized the interpretation, provided exact primary and secondary textual sources, and argued in favor of it in a way that all could understand what I was talking about and then judge by themselves whether I was right or wrong. Prof. Dugin, on the other hand, would not take the trouble of doing this: he simply alluded to half a dozen names in passing and moved on, inflating his chest, simulating superiority, and throwing contempt on his half-cocked and uncultured adversary, who is not even deserving of explanations about such obvious and eminently-known things. What a comedy!
(2) Prof. Dugin, in believing that anything that these folks have “dismissed” is automatically excluded from the decent intellectual universe, reveals an uncritical, and indeed fanatical submission to the crème de la crème of the relativist, structuralist, and deconstructionist modern Western intellectuality which, from that traditionalist perspective he claims to be his own, should not and could not have any authority at all.
Beset by an adversary to whom he does not know what to answer, the apostle of Orthodox Christianity divests himself of his religious garb and suddenly begins to speak like a Parisian intellectual or an editor of Social Text.
(3) In all erudite debate, it is basic and essential to distinguish between that which is still under discussion and that which can be taken as presupposed by reason of its universal acceptance and its being a part of the usual academic education. Without a common ground of shared superior culture, no discussion is possible. The basic data of the history of philosophy are the most typical example of what I am talking about. No one can enter a philosophical debate without taking for granted that his opponent knows the essentials of Platonism, Aristotelianism, Scholasticism, Cartesianism, etc., and is able to distinguish, in the history of philosophy, between consensual points, established by a long tradition of studies, and problematic areas, still subject to investigation and discussion. Therefore, it is not tolerable that an academic debater, on the one hand, ignore the basic data of the history of Platonism and, on the other hand, take a few recent doctrines, quite disputed and impugned, as if they enjoyed universal and consensual acceptance, and as if going against them were a sign of ignorance and ineducation. Whence I can only conclude that Prof. Dugin’s education was very deficient as regards ancient philosophy and overladen with fashionable readings which made an impression upon him to the point of consolidating themselves on his mind as bearers of definitive conclusions—so definitive as the universal consensus of historians concerning Platonic realism or the modern origin of gnoseological subjectivism. It is difficult to discuss with a mind that inverts the proportions between the certain and the doubtful, by ignoring universally accepted premises and resorting to the authority of a non-existent consensus.
(4) What is worse, the fellow does not even realize, or pretends not to, that all those presumed authorities he rubs on my nose with a triumphant air stand in the line of succession of the Kantian heritage which, according to him,[26] is the supreme incarnation of Western perversity.
Since an impassable chasm of a priori forms was opened by Kant separating subject and object, the most typical and notorious Western thinkers have fallen prey to an obsessive passion for discovering some aprioristic constraint that, behind our backs, limits and molds the perception we have of the world. Each one of them seeks to widen that chasm by trying to prove we cannot know anything directly, that everything comes to us through deforming lenses, through an iron veil of previous interpretations that the illustrious author of each new theory, like a Kant redivivus, is the first to uncover. Large is the roster of discoverers of aprioristic constraints. I will confine myself to mentioning the most eye-catching ones. These constraints are not always a priori in a strict, Kantian, sense; some of them are formed in the course of experience. Yet, remaining unknown to all individual cognoscent subjects whose frame of knowledge they form and determine, they function as authentic a priori forms as regards the conscious cognitive acts performed by such poor unfortunate creatures. Here we go:
1. Hegel says that the invisible laws of History supersede every individual consciousness (his own excepted, of course), so that when we believe to know something, we are in fact deluded: it is History who thinks, it is History who knows, it is History who, possessing the “cunning of reason,” moves us hither and thither, according to a secret plan.
2. Arthur Schopenhauer declares that individual consciousness lives in a world of illusion and that it is moved, unknowingly, by the force of the universal Will, which determines all for no reason at all.
3. Karl Marx says that class ideology—a system of implicit beliefs which pervades with invisible omnipotence all the culture around us—pre-forms and deforms our worldview. Only the proletariat can tear this veil apart and see things as they are, since its class ideology, as it is not based on any interest to exploit its neighbors, coincides with objective reality.
How it was possible that the first one to discover this objective reality was precisely Karl Marx himself, a bourgeois who only knew proletarians from a distance, is something he does not explain, and neither do I.
4. Dr. Freud says that our entire view of things is molded and deformed, from the earliest childhood, by virtue of the struggle between Id and Superego, so that what we understand as reality is generally no more than a projection of unconscious complexes, a distortion from which we can only free ourselves through several years of attending psychoanalytical sessions twice or thrice a week—which cost a fortune by the way.
5. Carl G. Jung says nobody has yet gotten to the real bottom of this issue. We are not separated from reality merely by the structure of our childhood psyche, but also by cognitive schemes remounting to the dawn of time—the “archetypes of the collective unconsciousness.” The Jungian path to liberation, offering no guarantee of success, goes through some decades devoted to the study of mythology, comparative religions, alchemy, magic, astrology, you name it. The only difference between Jung and the other delvers into “a priori forms” is that, in his last years, he at least had the manliness to recognize that he no longer understood a thing, and that only God knows the answers.[27]
6. John B. Watson and B. F. Skinner say that individual consciousness does not even exist; it is a false impression created by the mechanical interplay of conditioned reflexes.
7. Alfred Korzybski and Benjamin L. Whorf say that we only imagine to know reality, but unfortunately “Aristotelian prejudices” embedded in the structure of our language, and deeply ingrained in our subconscious, preclude us from seeing things as they are.
8. Ludwig Wittgenstein says that we know next to nothing about reality; all we do is to go from one “language game” to the next, having hardly any control, if any, over what we do.
9. Lévi-Strauss says that when we intend to know the external world and act as masters of ourselves, we are but unconsciously following structural rules embedded in society, culture, family order, language, etc.
10. Michel Foucault goes all out and says that human beings do not even think: They “are thought” by language, having no active say in the matter.
11. Jacques Derrida’s deconstructionism puts the last nail on the coffin of the cognitive pretensions of human consciousness, by swearing that nothing we say refers to data of the external world, since all human discourse only points to another discourse, which, in its turn, points to yet another, and so on and so forth; thus the universe of human cognition is beset on all sides by a wall of words with no extra-verbal meaning whatsoever.
Do I need to say more? Whoever knows the standard universe of readings assigned to philosophy students nowadays, in Europe or in the Americas, will recognize that these eleven stages—and their many intermediaries—describe the most influential line of evolution of Western thought in the last 200 years. Well, we observe in this line a pronounced trait of uniformity: the general and increasingly ostensible proclamation of the inanity of individual consciousness, its ever more complete submission to anonymous and unconscious forces that determine and set limits to it on all sides. So many are the aprioristic determinants, such is their force, and so high are the walls they raise between the knowing subject and the known object, that it is startling that, with so many metaphysical, gnoseological, sociological, anthropological, and linguistic handicaps, the poor human individual is still capable of noticing that cows give milk and chickens lay eggs.
Based upon these findings we can raise some questions:
1. Faced with such a general and implacable assault launched against individual consciousness on behalf of impersonal and collective factors, how much chutzpah or how much ignorance does it take for a person to continue to proclaim that “individualism” is the defining feature of modern Western culture?[28]
2. How can this fellow openly declare his hatred of the Kantian heritage and at the same time rely on it, by taking it as an absolute and unappealable authority that dispenses with the need for arguments and whose mere mention is supposed to be enough to shut his opponent’s mouth?
3. How can this strange sort of mind conciliate its avowed horror of the “separation of subject and object” with the devout confidence it places in those doctrines that most emphasized this separation, to the point of denying the human individual every and any access to universal and even particular truths?
According to Aristotle, human beings have a natural gift for knowing the truth, a gift which is only hindered by accidental factors, or forced deprivations. According to those illustrious discoverers of “a priori forms,” precisely the opposite is the case: knowing the truth is a rare and exceptional event that, on the most hopeful hypothesis, may have happened to them, the pioneer uncoverers of forbidding veils, but which could never happen to the rest of the human species.
A phenomenon which has always caught my attention is the fact that the governments of some of the most powerful nations on Earth have always strived so hard and spent so much money on research aimed at creating technical means to subjugate and enslave something so insignificant and defenseless, according to those masters, as individual human consciousness. Why put so much effort into debilitating and subjugating that which, by itself, can do nothing and can know nothing? Pavlov dogs, behaviorist control, Chinese brain-washing, MK-Ultra, Kurt Levin’s social and psychological engineering, neuro-linguistic programming—the list could go on forever. The plain observation of the grotesque contrast between the alleged debility of the victim and the magnitude of the resources mobilized to tame it is enough to show that there is something wrong with all philosophies of the aprioristic determinant, that is, with the whole intellectual lineage of the legitimate and bastard children of Immanuel Kant. The appeal to this lineage made by Prof. Dugin, with the devotion of a believer, only shows that, in his effort to intimidate his opponent, he feels no shame in resorting to the most inept, contradictory, and inconsistent resources.
I sincerely hope that he acting like this out of Machiavellian posturing, because if he really believes in this whole kaleidoscope of incongruities, we are facing a case of “delusional interpretation” to a degree never before envisioned by the discoverers of this pathology.
29. Oh, how hateful I am!
The text of Mr. Carvalho breaths with the deep hatred. It is a kind of resentment (in the Nietzsche sense) that gives him a peculiar look. The hatred is in itself fully legitimate. If we can't hate, we can't love. Indifference is much worse. So the hatred that tears Mr. Carvalho apart is to be praised. Let us now search what he hates and why he does it. Pondering on his words I come to the conclusion that he hates the East as such.
Many things have I hated in this world, almost always unjustly. During my childhood, penicillin shots, above all, though they saved my life. Later on I came to hate bread pudding—which almost killed me once, not through any fault of its own, but through mine alone—when I stuffed myself with its fluffy substance way beyond anything recommended by human prudence and, amidst the gripping of a Homeric intestinal colic, I wound up becoming disgusted with that innocent dish forever. I hated those hideous institutions called musical conservatories, where no one understood the mathematical incommensurability between ten fingers and seven keys, which for me was an invincible obviousness. I also eventually came to hate Euclidian geometry, after suspecting that my teacher had the perverse intention of making a fool out of me when he stated, with the most innocent face in the world, that points with no extension at all, when added together, would make up a line segment. Later in my life I hated practically all the Brazilian governments I got to live under, with the exception of the brief and honorable administration of President Itamar Franco. I also hated several kinds of movies and even made a list of them, under the title “I hate with all my strength”: court-room movies, movies about suffering millionaires, movies about neurotic families, medical doctor movies, Americans-on-holiday movies, etc.
Yet, throughout the 64 years of my existence, and I say this in all sincerity and after a careful examination of conscience: I have never hated a single human being, at least for longer than a few minutes. When someone irritates me beyond what is bearable, I shoot him a fulminating look, say couple of terrible things, and make lurid threats against him, and two minutes later I am laughing and patting the fellow on the back. Who knows me knows that I am like that.
The hypothesis that I might have hated entire civilizations, or that I still hate them, is the most clownish psychotic projection I have ever seen, particularly if it is claimed that the object of my insane hatred is the East. I have hated Eastern civilizations so much that I dedicated to them many years of my life, giving my best to understand and explain them to my students in a spirit of undeniable sympathy and devotion, always inspired by the rule of Titus Burckhardt, a traditionalist author whom Prof. Dugin has or should have as one of his reference points: “In order to understand a civilization it is necessary to love it, and this is only possible due to the universal values it contains.”[29] If I hate Eastern civilizations, why did I write a whole book to show the presence of these values in the Hindu doctrine of caste?[30] Why did I dig out of a dusty file the Commentaries on René Guénon’s Oriental Metaphysics written by my master of Chinese martial arts, Michel Veber, and also published that work with an introduction and notes?[31] Why did I talk so much about The Way of a [Russian] Pilgrim, which was then totally unknown in Brazil, that even a leftist publisher took notice and became interested in its publication? Why was I the first Brazilian scholar to deliver a lecture on René Guénon in the hostile precinct of a school at University of São Paulo? Why did I spend twenty years respectfully studying the mystic practices of Islamic esoterism, seeing in them, according to the perspective of Frithjof Schuon’s “transcendental unity of religions,” a spiritual treasury of universal value? Why was I, in the Brazilian big media, the first columnist to call the public’s attention to the names of René Guénon, Titus Burckhardt, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, and so many other spokesmen of characteristically Eastern doctrines? Why then did I write a symbolic exegesis of some of the Islamic prophet’s ahadith—a work, by the way, for which I was awarded a prize by both the El-Azhar University and the Saudi government?[32] In fact, Prof. Dugin, even you only became known and won some audience in Brazil thanks to my newspaper articles and radio programs, in which I mentioned you several times, sine ira et studio, highlighting the international importance of your work and recommending it to the attention of Brazilian students in a time when nobody in the country, not even in high academic, political and military circles had ever heard your name. I must indeed be a madman: so much love for an object of hatred can only be cured with electroshock therapy.
On this point, the true barrier that separates me from Prof. Dugin is not that which distinguishes a fanatic Occidentalist from an enragé Orientalist. The difference is that, imbued by the Aristotelian creed in the power of knowing the truth beyond all my personal and cultural limitations, I looked to those civilizations with the loving gaze of one who saw in them the values Burckhardt referred to, values which, being universal, were also mine. Prof. Dugin, in his turn, looking to them with his mind cluttered by cultural conditionings that he believes to be insuperable, denies to those civilizations universality of values and can only see in them an invincible antagonism, whose only resolution must be war and the destruction of half of the human species.
30. Resentment
That explains the structure of his resentment.
Resentment against what? What evil have Eastern civilizations done to me besides a couple of falls that I suffered in martial arts gyms?
31. Putting words in my mouth
He attacks Russia and Russian holistic culture (that he dismisses with one gesture of indignation), the Orthodox Christianity (that he consider “morbid”, “nationalist” and “totalitarian”), China (with its collectivistic pattern), the Islam (that is for him the equivalent of “aggression” and “brutality”), Socialism and Communism (in the time of the cold war they were synonyms of the East), Geopolitics (which he arrogantly denies the status of science to), the hierarchy and traditional vertical order, the military values…
Here comes Prof. Dugin again putting in my mouth words which I neither said nor thought, which are of his own and exclusive invention, words calculated to be easily demolished so that he might simulate a landslide victory. I cannot remember having criticized the Russian culture for being “holistic,” only for producing so many murderers of Russians. In truth I cannot see any “holism,” any sense of community solidarity, in a society where people dedicate themselves more than anywhere else in the world, with the exception of China, to killing their compatriots. And I do not refer only to the time of socialism. In the two tables elaborated by Prof. R. J. Rummel showing the ten biggest mass murderers, one for the twentieth century and one for all previous human history, the Russian and the Chinese show up twice: they have killed like madmen since they came into the world and have doubled their fury in the turn of the last century.[33] If the Russians were already among the leaders in violence before communism, they continue to occupy this position after it. According to data from the Polish magazine Fronda—the same one to which Prof. Dugin gave his 1986 interview—in Russia, 80,000 Russians are murdered every year, 10,000 abortions are performed each day, the population is visibly decreasing and, though seven million couples do not have children, the number of child adoptions is so meager that there are more orphans in that country today than at the end of World War II (how much “community solidarity” in comparison with the Americans, world champions in child adoption!).[34] I do not have any historico-sociological theory to explain these facts, but to pretend that so much violence, so much cruelty has no roots in the Russian culture, that everything is the fault of mean foreigners infiltrated in the local government, is the ultimate “conspiracy theory,” one of the basest and most stupid kind that can be imagined. And if Prof. Dugin still insists that all this is the fault of the “liberal privatizations” of the Yeltsin era, he better stop blaming foreigners and go ask a few questions to his leader, Vladimir Putin, who, as head of the privatizations committee at that time, lined the pockets of his KGB colleagues with money, as he did in fact with his own as well.[35]
As for Islam as such, I cannot remember saying a single word against it, but rather against the modern politicization of its theology, which does as much harm to the Islamic religion as “liberation theology” did to Christianity.
32. Oh, how hateful I am! (2)
In his hysterical hatred toward all this he finds the goal in my person. So he hates me and makes it feel. Is he right to see in me and in Eurasianism the conscious representation of all this? Am I the East and the defender of the Eastern values? Yes, it is exact. So his hatred is directed correctly. Because all what he hates I love and I am ready to defend and to affirm. For me is rather difficult to insist on the greatness of my values.
This paragraph, as so many others by Prof. Dugin, has only value as self-fulfilling prophecy. I have never hated Prof. Dugin, but now I am seriously considering the possibility of beginning to do it if he does not drop this foolishness. He is certainly the most elusive and stubborn debater I have ever confronted. Incapable of refuting a single one of my ideas in the field of logic and factual argumentation, he resorts to the terrain of divinatory pejorative psychology and, attributing to me bad sentiments that in truth exist only in his mind, he tries to destroy my reputation in the public square. And notice that he does so with the inflamed eloquence of a person who piously believes in what he is saying. This is not, therefore, simply an artifice. It is hysterical feigning stricto sensu. Imagining things, getting emotional with them as though they were really happening, and making a public display of emotion in a convincing performance is the very definition of hysterical behavior. When he calls me “hysterical,” he is just calling me names. When I apply the same word to him, I am not trying to insult him; I am only making an objective, scientific diagnosis, based upon patent facts.
33. Guénon and the West
There are many other thinkers who methodically describe the positive sides of the East, order, holism, hierarchy and negative essence of the West and its degradation. For example, Guenon. It is sure that he hadn't much of enthusiasm regarding communism and collectivism, but the origin of the degradation of the civilization he saw exclusively in the West and Western culture, precisely in Western individualism (see «The crisis of the modern world» or «The East and the West»). It is obvious that modern Eastern societies have many negative aspects. But they are mostly the result of modernization, westernization and the perversion of the ancient traditions.
René Guénon does say that the West is the vanguard of decadence, but he casts the blame for this, and for all the evil in the world, on the underground action of the “Seven Towers of the Devil,” which are more Eastern than Prof. Dugin himself (see further explanations below on item 35). I am not subscribing to this theory; I am just pointing out that it is neither viable, nor honest, to appeal to René Guénon as a legitimating authority for an anti-Occidentalism à outrance.
Furthermore, Guénon never had an interest in destroying the West. He was interested in saving it, and the main path that he advocated for this end was the full restoration of the Catholic Church in its providential mission as Mother and Master. The hypothesis of an “Eastern occupation” only occurred to him as a secondary alternative in the case of a complete failure of the Catholic Church, and even so, he never conceived of this alternative in the form of a war, of military occupation. What he imagined was a sort of Islamic cultural revolution, in which Sufi sheiks would conquer, through subtle influence, the hegemonic control over Western intellectuality (Frithjof Schuon and Seyyed Hossein Nasr tried to implement this program).
He never suggested war as a solution. On the contrary, he said that war and generalized chaos would follow almost inevitably from the failure (or the non-adoption) of the two previous alternatives. In short, he did not see war and chaos as solutions, but as parts of the problem. Nothing, absolutely nothing warrants the appeal to Guénon’s authority in order to justify a war enterprise of such proportions as that which the Eurasian Empire promises to us.
34. The world upside-down
In my youth (early 80-s) I was anticommunist in the Guenonian/Evolian sense. But after having known modern Western Civilization and especially after the end of Communism I have changed my mind and revised this traditionalism discovering the other side of the socialist society, which is the parody on the true Tradition, but nevertheless is much better than absolute absence of the Tradition in Modern and Post-Modern Western world.
(1) I understand perfectly the mutation which Prof. Dugin’s mind went through. There are no people more isolated and hopeless in the world than traditionalist intellectuals, who see everything sacred and precious be mercilessly destroyed, day after day, by the advance of materialism, of cynic relativism, of brutality and, what may be even worse, of banality. Few of them are prepared to carry their option for the spirit to its ultimate consequences by accepting total historic defeat, the complete humiliation of spiritual values, as a divine sentence destined to precede the apocatastasis, the end of all things and the advent of a “new heaven and a new earth.” They are beset by that great temptation of clinging to some last earthly hope, to some politico-ideological life-raft which promises to “restore Tradition” through material, politico-military, action. It is at the moment of such temptation that the desperate soul goes through a mutation, turning 180 degrees, and starts to see everything upside-down. A woman who has been raped once may go to the police and report the perpetrator, but if she is raped repeatedly, fifty, sixty times, she might end up seeking some relief in the stupid idea that rape is, after all, an act of love. No government in the world made a more obstinate and brutal effort to wipe the traditional religions off the face of Earth than the communist regimes in Russia and its satellite-countries like China, Vietnam, Cambodia (and China is still working on it in Tibet). To say that there was “anti-religious persecution” in these countries is a euphemism. What happened there was genocide pure and simple, the systematic annihilation of religious culture and of clergymen themselves. Pastor Richard Wurmbrand tells us that, in the communist prisons in Romania, each priest was asked to renounce his religion or else, and before his eyes, the teeth of a priest of another religion would be pulled out in cold blood. But the soul of the desperate traditionalist, incapable of withstanding the sight of so much evil, may in a moment of weakness hold on to the mad hope that there might be some secret good in all that evil, some divine secret conveyed to the world in paradoxical language. He will then begin to see monsters as angels, taking Lenin, Mao, Stalin and Pol-Pot for messengers of providence disguised as devils. The most ostensible and hatefully anti-traditional society that ever existed begins to appear to him as a mere “parody of tradition,” which is preferable, after all, to the “absolute absence of the Tradition in Modern and Post-Modern Western world.” When that happens, he is ready to join the Eurasian movement.
(2) Moreover, what “absence of Tradition” is that? As an Orthodox Christian, Prof. Dugin should admit the obviousness that the Christ did not come to save nations, but souls. The strength of Christian tradition in a society is not measured by the degree of centralizing authoritarianism that prevails in it, even if in the name of ecclesiastical authority, but by the vigor of the Christian faith in the souls of believers. In this respect, a few recent statistical data might enlighten Prof. Dugin’s mind. In 2008, research conducted by the German institute Bertelsmann Stiftung presented Russia as the country where young people are the least religious. Can this be a sign of the vigor of “tradition”? In comparison, Brazil came in third place among the countries with the most religious youth,[36] but the universe of beliefs of these young people was rather confuse: many did not believe in heaven or hell, others doubted eternal life, still others mixed up Catholicism with reincarnation, and many ignored the most basic elements of the Catholic dogma. Ultimately, the poll showed that Pope John Paul II was right when he said that “Brazilians are Christian in their sentiments, but not in their faith.” The same applies to Russia, where, according to an Ipsos/Reuters poll, 10% of those who say they are faithful in fact believe “in many gods.”[37] With an Orthodox Church headed by KGB agents, the sole “tradition” that seems to be really alive in Russia is shamanism (after all, two of the Seven Towers are located in Russia, and a third one in a territory that belonged to the former USSR).[38] Is there a place in the world where the majority of people have not merely a vague belief “in God” or “in gods,” but rather a defined and clear Christian faith, solid and unshakable? Yes, there is. A recent Rasmussen poll revealed that 74% of Americans—three quarters of the population—declare, loud and clear, that they believe that Our Lord Jesus Christ is the living Son of God, who came to the world to redeem the sins of humanity.[39] This is the central dogma of Christianity, be it Catholic, Orthodox, or Protestant. This is the irradiating center of Christian tradition. Tradition is alive where faith is alive, not where communo-fascist dreams of an “organic society” usurp the authority of faith while its population turns its back on “the only necessary thing.”
35. The Seven Towers of the Devil
So, I love the East in general and blame the West. The West now expands itself on the planet. So the globalization is Westernization and Americanization. Thereforee, I invite all the rest to join the camp and fight Globalism, Modernity/Hypermodernity, Imperialism Yankee, liberalism, free market religion and unipolar world. These phenomena are the ultimate point of the Western path to the abyss, the final station of the evil and the almost transparent image of the antichrist/ad-dadjal/erev rav. So the West is the center of kali-yuga, its motor, its heart.
No, it is not. He who seeks to secure the prestige of Guenonism for the Eurasian cause should at least read René Guénon correctly. Guénon never interpreted the East-West symbolism as a gross Manichean opposition between good and evil. As a profound scholar in Islamic tradition, he always took into consideration one of the most renowned ahadith, in which the Islamic prophet, pointing towards the East, stated: “The Antichrist will come from there.” Among the main centers of diffusion of “counter-initiation,” as Guénon called them, there is none, according to him, located in the West; but there is one in Sudan, one in Nigeria, one in Syria, one in Iraq, one in Turkestan (inside the former USSR), and — surprise!—there are two in the Urals, well within Russian territory.[40] Projected on a map, the Seven Towers form the exact contour of the constellation of Ursa Major. The bear, Russia’s national emblem, represents in traditional symbolism the military class, kshatriya, in cyclical rebellion against spiritual authority. Jean-Marc Allemand mentions, respecting this matter, “the forced militarization that inevitably accompanies Marxism and serves as its basis.” And he continues: “This excessive warlike feature—and utterly inverted in relation to the original and subordinate function of the military caste—is the ultimate result of the revolt of the kshatriyas; in this sense, the USSR is really the land of the Ursa.”[41] How can a great expert in “sacred geography” ignore, or pretend to ignore, so basic a piece of information? And how has Putin’s Russia changed if not towards an even greater militarization of society? And is this phenomenon not in line with the Eurasian project? And is it not concomitant with the domination of the Chinese society by the military and with the “Sovietization of Islam,” which Jean Robin, an authoritative spokesman for Guenonism, considers to be one of the most sinister features of modern spiritual degradation?[42]
36. Assymmetry
36. Mr. Carvalho blames the East and loves the West. But here begins some asymmetry. I love the East as a whole including its dark sides. The love is the strong, very strong feeling. You don't love only good and pure sides of the beloved one, you love him wholly. Only such love is real one. Mr. Carvalho loves the West but not all the West, only its part. The other part he rejects.
Prof. Dugin recognizes a basic difference between us: while he adheres to the East as a whole, with its virtues and sins, with its saints and its criminals, its sublime accomplishments and its abominations, I do not do the same with the West. For I examine it critically, and I can only approve, with a sound conscience, part of it—that part which is consistent with the Christian values that first established it. Prof. Dugin realizes all that, but he fails to grasp the obvious meaning of this difference: he identifies himself with a geographic area and a geopolitical power; I with general values which are not embodied in any geographic territory or in any of the powers of this world. When Christ said, “my Kingdom is not of this world,” He implied that no mundane power would ever embody His message except in a provisional and imperfect way, so that none of them would ever have the authority to represent Him in plenitude. For even greater clarity, He also taught that “the gods of nations are demons,” forbidding Christians to offer to any of them the devotion and loyalty that were due only to Him. When I decline to make common cause with any of the geopolitical alternatives offered by Prof. Dugin, I am only refusing to worship demons, and more importantly, to do it under a Christian pretext. Never as today have the powers of this world been so ostensibly hostile to Christianity. And if it is true that “the Spirit blows where it will,” the obligation of every Christian is to follow it wherever it goes, instead of letting himself be hypnotically paralyzed in the worship of false divinities.
37. Conspiracy Theory
To explain his attitude in front of the East he makes appeal to the conspiracy theory. Scientifically it is inadmissible and discredits immediately Mr. Carvalho thesis but in this debate I don’t think that scientific correctness is that does mean much. I don't try to please or convince somebody. I am interested only in the truth (vincit omnia veritas). If Mr. Carvalho prefers to make use of the conspiracy theory let him do it. The conspiracy theory exposed by the Mr. Carvalho is however a banal and flat one. There are other many theories of a more extravagant and brilliant kind in their idiotism. I have written thick volume on the sociology of the conspiracy theory, describing much more esthetic versions (for example assembled in the Adam Parfrey books, “extraterrestrial ruling the world”, David Icke’s “reptiles government” or R. Sh. Shaver underground «dero's» impressively evoked in the Japanese film «Marebito» by Takashi Shimitsu). But we have what we have. Let us try to find the reason why a serious Brazilian-American professor take the risk of looking a little bit loony making appeal to the conspiracy theories?
Any resemblance between my theory of the subject of history and any “conspiracy theory” which raises the alarm about alien invasions or the “reptilian government” is only an artificial, insulting, and forced analogy, to which an inept debater will resort, in desperation, to get away from the discussion. Here again Prof. Dugin proves himself incapable of finding his bearings amidst the complexity of the questions I have raised and hides his lack of intellectual preparation behind a theatrical affectation of superiority. I never expected he would perform, in front of the audience, such an act of obscene moral strip-tease.
Anyone who knows how to read will understand right away that my explanations on the nature of historical action are exactly the opposite of a “conspiracy theory.” I demonstrated in a previous message that the actual contest for power in the world makes use of instruments which are not only normal and inherent in the political fight, but which are indeed the only existing ones. Without continuity over generations, there is no historical action, and only a few types of human groups have the means to fulfill this requirement. If among those means the control over the flow of information is included, this is only due to a trite observation, actually a commonplace in historical methodology, according to which the dissemination of facts produces new facts; therefore, the control over the flow of information is absolutely essential to any group or entity that plans long-term historical actions. The Council on Foreign Relations, for example, managed to remain totally secret and unknown for fifty years, even though its membership included practically all the owners of the major media outlets of the West.[43] Once the period of obligatory discretion was over, David Rockefeller publicly thanked journalists for their five-decade old silence. Should we hide this fact only out of a yokelish fear of being called “conspiracy theorists”? Whatever our interpretation of these facts may be, we cannot deny that they convey a long-term and constant purpose of controlling the information that reaches the public and of exercising great dominance—within the bounds of what is humanly possible—over the direction of political events. To compare obvious statements such as these with the announcement of a “Martian invasion” is childish hyperbolism, and one that can only expose its author to humiliation and mockery.
38. Conspiracy Theory (2)
It seems that I know the answer. The serious side of this not much serious argumentation consists in the necessity for Mr. Carvalho to differentiate the West he loves from the West he doesn't love. So Mr. Carvalho proves to be idiosyncratic. He not only detests the East (so Eurasianism and myself), but also he hates the part of the West itself. To make the frontier in the West he uses the conspiracy and the term «Syndicate» (he could use also «Synarchy», «Global Government» and so on). Let us accept it for a while, we agree on the “Syndicate”. The description of «Syndicate» is amazingly correct. Maybe the feeling of correctness of Mr. Carvalho analysis from my side can be explained by the fact that this time I fully share the hatred of Mr. Carvalho. So I agree with the caricature description of the globalist elite and with all furious images applied to it. Here our hatred coincides. Mr. Carvalho affirms that the Syndicate takes control over the world against the will and the interest of all people, their cultures and traditions. I agree with it. Maybe the Rothschild or Fabian myths are too simplistic and ridiculous, but the essence is true. There is such thing as global elite and it is acting.
In admitting that the Syndicate exists and operates in the way I described, Prof. Dugin shows that either my version of this phenomenon is not a conspiracy theory at all, or that he himself is not averse to entertaining conspiracy theories whenever it is convenient for him to do so.
39. Free competition ideology?
But this elite deals with concrete ideological, economical and geopolitical infrastructure. In other words this elite is historically and geographically identified and linked with special set of values and instruments. All these values and instruments are absolutely Western. The roots of these elite goes into the European Modernity, Enlightment and the rise of the bourgeoisie (see W.Sombart). The ideology of this elite is based on the individualism and hyper-individualism (G. Lipovetsky, L. Dumont). The economical basis of this elite is Capitalism and Liberalism. The ethos of this elite is free competition.
I limit myself to responding to the last sentence, which summarizes the whole paragraph. When I read Prof. Dugin’s affirmation that the ethos of the globalist elite, the Syndicate, is free competition, I started wondering: On what planet does he spend most of his time? Is it really possible that he ignores the history of this entity so completely? Does he really not know that the most constant activity of this elite in the USA, for at least fifty years, has consisted in trying to impose, not only upon economic activity, but upon all domains of human existence, all sorts of restrictions and state controls? Does he not know, moreover, that the clash between the policies of state-control imposed by the establishment and the good and old market freedom so dear to traditional Americans is the fundamental conflict in American politics? Then, let him read articles by Thomas Sowell, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, Phyllis Schlafly, Star Parker, Neil Cavuto, Larry Elder, Ann Coulter, Cal Thomas, Walter Williams and hundreds, thousands of other conservative commentators who, for decades, have not done anything but protest against the elite’s obsessions about monopolism and statism. For it is one thing to pass judgment based on stereotyped impressions; but it is quite another to look up close, from the realm of facts, at the political fight. The history of the confrontation between conservatism and statism has been told so many times that I can confine myself to recommending to Prof. Dugin the reading of a few books, well-known to the American public, which give an account of it in a rather clear and definitive way.[44]
True, at the international level, the globalist elite does promote freedom of market among nations; but then, a question needs to be asked: why exactly does it try impose abroad the opposite of that which it tries to impose at home? As early as the nineteenth century Karl Marx himself was among the most ardent defenders of the opening up of markets to international trade because he knew that national borders were a considerable obstacle to the expansion of the revolutionary movement. Note well that the behavior of the elite in every country manifests the same apparent contradiction: draconian state controls within, market freedom abroad. But it is no coincidence that such freedom is restricted to the economic realm; for also at the international level, the same elite that promotes it is busy trying to establish all sorts of state controls by means of organizations such as the UN, the WHO, the ILO, etc.—controls which span over nutrition, health, education, security, and, in short, over all dimensions of human life. Quite clearly, this freedom of international trade is only a dialectical moment in the process of instituting global state control.
40. American National Interest?
The strategic and military support of this elite is from the first quart of the XX century USA, and after the end of the WWII – Nord-Atlantic Alliance. So the global elite, let it be called “Syndicate”, is Western and concretely North American.
To use a nation as strategic and military support is one thing; to defend its interests is something else entirely. As I have explained already, the Syndicate lodges itself into the governments of several Western nations in order to use their strategic resources and military power to its own ends, which are generally opposed to those countries’ most obvious national interests. What “American national interest” did the Syndicate serve when it helped the USSR—even after World War II—transform itself into an industrial military power capable of threatening American security? What “American national interest” did it serve when it helped China in the same way? What “American national interest” do the likes of Soros and Rockefellers serve when they subsidize everywhere, and especially in Latin America, the most outrageously anti-American leftist movements? What “American national interest” does the Syndicate serve today in helping the Muslim Brotherhood, the spearhead of Islamic anti-Americanism, to seize power in nations that were previously allied or inoffensive to the USA?
41. Fabricating unity
Seeing that clearly I, as the conscious representative of the East, make appeal to the humanity to consolidate all kinds of the alternatives and to resist the globalization and Westernization linked in it. I appeal first of all to Russians, my compatriots, inviting them to refuse pro-Western and pro-globalist corrupted elite that rules now my country and to come back to the spiritual Tradition of Russia (Orthodox Christianity and multi-ethnic Empire). At the same time I invite Islamic people and their community, as well as all other traditional societies (Chinese, Indian, Japanese and so on) to join the battle against the Globalization, Westernization and the Global Elite. The enemy is fighting with new means -- with post-modern informational weapons, financial instruments and global network. We should be able to fight them on the same ground and to appropriate the art of the network warfare. I sincerely hope that Latin Americans and also some honest North Americans enter in the same struggle against this elite, against the Post-Modernity and unipolarity for the Tradition, social solidarity and social justice. S.Huntington used to say the phrase «the West against the Rest». I identify myself with the Rest and incite it to stand up against the West. Exactly as first Eurasianists (N.S.Trubetskoy, P.N.Savitsky and other) did. I think that to be concrete and operational the position of Mr. Carvalho should be rather or with us (the East and Tradition) or with them (the West and Modernity, the modernization). He refuses obviously such a choice pretending that there is a “the third position”. He prefers not to struggle but to hate. To hate the East and to hate the globalist elite. That is his personal decision or maybe the decision of some North American Christian right, but it is in any case too marginal and of no interest for me.
Here Prof. Dugin completes his strip-tease, divesting himself of his last piece of garment. Given that it is obviously impossible to reconcile, at the doctrinal level, proposals as antagonistic as communism and Islamism, fascism and anarchism, traditional spirituality and dictatorships that crush religion by fire and sword, Eurasianism artificially builds a negative unity, based on sheer hatred of a supposed common enemy. Hence he has to divide the world in two—the West against the Rest, and the Rest against the West—and then set out to build the “Ideal City” based on nuclear war and the destruction of the planet. It is no wonder that such a man can only imagine himself to be hated, because hatred is quite clearly the sole sentiment he knows.
What is even more significant is that he excludes as irrelevant the possibility of allying with forces that are alien and oblivious to this conflict, by calling them “too marginal and of no interest for me.” Whatever values which are not capable of being embodied in a geopolitical power are indeed contemptible and are of no interest to him. Throughout history, the highest values have been many times on the weak side and with the few. The history of the origins of Christianity illustrates that in the clearest way. Actually, the Christianization of Russia, undertaken by unarmed monks surrounded by countless dangers, is also an exemplary case. Prof. Dugin forbids us to take side with that which is simply right. He forbids us to love the good simply for its own sake. He only allows us a choice between powers. Powers which are armed to their teeth. Had he been a Bible character, he would have obviously refused to take the side of that minority sect whose leader was flayed with a whip and hung defenseless on the Cross. Armed with that air of infinite superiority, he would have invited us to forget the Christ and choose between the powers of this world, between Pilate and Caiaphas.
42. Putting words in my mouth (2)
Loosing the rest of the coherence Mr. Carvalho tries to merge all he hates in one object. So he makes the allusion that the globalist elite and the East (Eurasianism) are linked. It is new purely personal conspiracy theory.
I do not remember having attempted to fuse together the Syndicate, the Eurasian Empire, and the Caliphate into a single global entity. On the contrary, in my first message I had already made it clear that “the conceptions of global power that these three agents strive to implement are very different from one another because they stem from heterogeneous and sometimes incompatible inspirations. Therefore, they are not similar forces, species of the same genus. They do not fight for the same goals and, when they occasionally resort to the same weapons (for example, economic warfare) they do so in different strategic contexts, where employing such weapons does not necessarily serve the same objectives.” There could be no clearer expression of the mutual independence of the three forces. If between them, in spite of the contest that keeps them separated, there are “vast zones of fusion and collaboration, as flexible and changing as they may be,” this does not retroactively affect the heterogeneity of their origins and of the values that inspire them. In fact, “vast zones of fusion and collaboration” have always existed between antagonistic powers, as, for example, in the case of the USSR and Nazi Germany, and yet, this has never led to the fulfillment of Prof. Dugin’s golden dream: the unification of tyrannies in a total war against the West.
Collaborations between the Syndicate, the Russian-Chinese scheme, and the Caliphate are so notorious and well documented that there is no point in insisting on this. The wars that the American government is right now waging for the exclusive benefit of the Muslim Brotherhood, the massive American investments that transformed a bankrupt China into a threatening industrial power (against the protests of so many conservatives!), or the very special aid given by the USA to the reconstruction of the USSR after World War II, on terms far more generous than those offered to the other Allied countries—such are historically indisputable examples that no Duginian straw-man is big enough to hide from view.
His attempt at spinning my explanations, so simple and clear, into a mythological construction of the world headquarters of evil—something like KAOS from the “Get Smart” series—is so artificial, so ridiculous, that his impulse to caricature backfires on him, the author of such a spinning feat, and shows him as a true clown.
43. Putting words in my mouth (3)
It could enlarge the panoply of the other extravaganzas. It should sound something like this: “the globalist elite itself is directed by hidden devilish center in the East”…
A tireless builder and demolisher of straw-men, here comes Prof. Dugin again, attributing to me ideas which are not and could not be mine, and which are in fact—and here comes a twist of the utmost irony—his own. The belief in “Eastern devilish centers,” which are supposedly directing the course of evil in the world, is an integral part of the “traditional doctrine” of René Guénon, a doctrine to which he subscribes without reservations and to which I have accorded, over the last twenty years, a prudent and critical admiration at most.
44. Putting words in my mouth (4)
…or “the East (and socialism) is the puppet in the hands of the devilish bankers and fanatics from CFR, Trilateral and so on”. Congratulations. It is very creative. The free fantasy at work.
I have never stated that Soviet socialism or the government of the USSR were puppets in the hands of “devilish bankers,” “Atlanticist conspirators,” or anything of the sort. Who stated that was Aleksandr Dugin himself when, based on the opinion of his fellow Eurasianist Jean Parvulesco, he said he believed that “the KGB was the Atlantic Order’s center of most direct influence …the mask of that Order” and that “it is well possible to speak of a ‘convergence of special services’ of a ‘fusion’ of the KGB and the CIA, of their unity in lobbying at the geopolitical level.”[45]
Not having anything more intelligent to say against me, Aleksandr Dugin accuses me of…believing in Aleksandr Dugin! It is a sin I have committed occasionally, but not with respect to this point, regarding which I clearly insisted on the mutual independence of those three blocks—both in what concerns their historical origins and their objectives and respective ideologies—and pointed out just local and occasional collaborations that do not jeopardize this independence at all.
As usual, Prof. Dugin, incapable of responding to my statements, substitutes them for his own and, throwing punches and kicks at himself, he swears that he is beating the hell out of me. How does he expect me to react to this if not with a mix of compassion and hilarity?
Also, this topic provides me with a timely occasion to make it clear that the Duginian theory of the “war of continents” itself is every inch a “conspiracy theory,” one which plainly has its roots in the occult, as for example, in the ideas of Helena P. Blavatski and Alice Bailey. Since I have no space to explain this here, I would like to draw the readers’ attention to my study entitled “Aleksandr Dugin and the War of Continents” which, beginning today, May 23, 2011, will be published in chapters on my website www.olavodecarvalho.org. Read it and tell me whether Prof. Dugin, in labeling me as a “conspiracy theorist,” is or is not putting into practice an old communist trick: “Accuse them of what you are doing, call them what you are.”
45. Western or Catholic Church?
What Mr. Carvalho loves? Here I would rather finish the debates. But I think that it is possible to pay little more attention to «the positive» forces described by Carvalho as victims of the global elite. They represent what Mr. Carvalho loves. It is important. He names them: Western Christianity (ecumenical style – see his description of his visit to the Methodist Church, being himself Roman Catholic), Zionist Jewish State and American nationalist right wingers (I presume he excludes neocons from the list of love, because of their evident belonging to the global elite). He admires also the simple Americans of the countryside (personally I also find them rather very sympatethic).
Why does Prof. Dugin label “Western” that Church which has denominated itself Catholic (universal) since its origin, that Church which has always had saints and martyrs of all races and countries, that Church whose influence has penetrated much deeper and more lastingly the Middle and the Far-East than that of the Russian Orthodox Church and which today places more hope in its African and Asian faithful than in its debilitated and corrupt Western clergy?
His insistence on considering everything through the bias of geopolitics, as if the phenomena of spiritual nature were determined by the whims of the powers of this world, leads him to twist and caricature even historical facts of the greatest magnitude.
46. The Catholic Church and the American right
Prof. Dugin, no doubt, ignores the vast rabidly anti-Catholic bibliography poured onto the market every year by the American political right, a phenomenon that makes me sad, but whose existence I cannot deny. No, the Catholic Church is not “trivia of the American political right”.
47. Love for the strong
We can consider it as right side of the modern West. Or better “paleoconservative” side of the Modern West. Historically they are losers in all senses. They have lost (as P. Buchanan[20] shows) the battle for the USA, including for the Republican party where the main positions were taken by neoconservative with clearly globalist and imperialist vision. They are losers in front of the globalist elite controlling now both political parties in USA. They are living in the past that immediately precedes the actual (Post-Modern and globalist) moment. But at the same time they don't have the inner strength to stand up to the Conservative Revolution - Evolian or wider European style.
Even supposing that paleoconservatives are indeed a chronically losing minority (I will leave this to be discussed later), why should we always take the side of the victors of the day? Has Prof. Dugin not read the epigraph by José Ortega y Gasset in my previous message, where I proclaim loud and clear my aim to do exactly the opposite of this, and support what is good and right even when its chances of victory are minimal? With the greatest naïveté, he thus exposes one of the ugliest features of his thought: the worship of power as such, the cult of the victorious, the idolatry of Force well above the Truth and the Good. To me, Prof. Dugin’s Christianity seems more and more as a publicity-façade concealing a very different religion.
48. The two utopias compared
The yesterday of the West prepared the today of the West as global West. The yesterday Western values (including the Western Christianity) prepared the today hypermodern values. You can deplore this last step, but the precedent step in the same direction can not be regarded as serious alternative.
Why not? If Prof. Dugin believes in making a miserable and tattered Russia of today into the great world empire of tomorrow, what can there be of so infeasible and utopian, a priori, in the hope for restoring a Christianity that is visibly growing while even Russia’s population is dwindling?[46]
49. Christianity and the “organic society”
The Western Christianity stressed the individual as the center of the religion and made the salvation the strictly individual affair. The Protestantism led this tendency to the logical end. Denying more and more the holistic ontology of the organic society the Western Christianity arrived with the Modernity to self-denial (deism, atheism, materialism, economism). French sociologist Louis Dumont in his excellent books «Essai sur l'Individualism» and «Homo Aequalis» shows that the methodological individualism is the result of the oblivion and direct purge by the Western scholastic of the early and original Greco-Roman theological tradition conserved intact in the Byzance and Eastern Church as whole.
(1) Neither in the Gospels nor in the writings of the First Fathers do I find the slightest mention of an “organic society” whose construction should have a logical or a chronological priority over the salvation of individual souls. Can Prof. Dugin show me where—in what verse—Our Lord revealed any intention of merging his Church with the kingdom of Caesar? Quite to the contrary, the Church was born, grew, and saved millions of souls in an overtly anti-Christian society, and all the expansion it enjoyed after the conversion of Constantine cannot be compared, in proportion, with the transformation of a group of twelve apostles into a universal religion whose area of influence that, at that time, went far beyond the borders of the Roman Empire. If an “organic society” were a conditio sine qua non for the existence and expansion of Christianity, none of that could have happened. The very advent of the Church would have been impossible. The absolute and unquestionable priority of the salvation of individual souls over the creation of an ‘organic society” was definitively established by Our Lord Jesus Christ when he declared that “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.” Therefore, from a Christian point of view, societies should be judged not by their greater or lesser “organicity,” but by whether they foster or debilitate the faith, or the salvation of souls.
(2) If we admit ad argumentandum that Western Christianity led to “individualism” by its own fault (and that in condemning it for this, as a whole, we are not committing the crime of “intellectual racism,” denounced by Prof. Dugin on item 22), then we also have to consider what results the “holism” of the Orthodox church has yielded in Russia? How hard can it be for someone to see the affinity between an “organic society” dominated by a state Church and the Soviet society, which was presided over by a Party endowed with an infallible doctrine? Prof. Dugin himself stresses this affinity. Thus, if Western Christianity “produced” individualism, the Eastern Christianity “produced” communism, the slaughter of 140 million people and the largest wave of anti-Christian persecution that the world has ever known. Nothing that has happened in the Western world is comparable to such monstrosity.
If we take into account that in the highest temple of “individualism,” that is, in the USA, Christian faith and community solidarity are still alive and active— while, in contrast, the Russians turn their back on the faith and refuse to perform the most obvious gesture of human solidarity, the adoption of orphans—, it becomes obvious that Western “individualism,” as detestable as it may seem, has been less harmful to the salvation of souls than Russian “holism.” I cannot say that this double connection of cause and effect has actually existed (an in-depth discussion of this point would require hundreds of pages)[47]: I just limit myself to reasoning according to Prof. Dugin’s premises.
It is true that the Christian faith has declined in Western Europe as much as in Russia, but we have just seen [28(4)] that the prevailing current of European thought since Hegel cannot be called “individualist” in any identifiable meaning of the term, since it stresses the inanity of individual consciousness and its absolute subjection to impersonal and collective factors. It is also notorious that, in the field of politics, statist and collectivist policies—like fascism, socialism, Fabianism, laborism, and third-worldism—have prevailed in Europe, throughout the twentieth century, to a degree incomparably greater than they have ever reached in the USA.
If American “individualism” is compatible with the persistence of Christian faith, then it cannot be an evil comparable to anti-Christian genocide and to the later dwindling of the Christian faith in “politically correct” Europe or in Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
50. Syncretism
This social vision of the Church as the body of Christ in the Catholicism is more developed than in Protestantism and in the Catholicism of the Latin America more than in other places. The Catholicism was imposed here by force in the time of the colonization. But the traditional spirit of aborigine cultures and the syncretic attitude of the Spanish and Portuguese elites gave birth to the special religious form of Catholicism – more holistic than in the Europe and much more traditional than extremely individualistic Protestantism.
Substantially, the paragraph above is divided into two propositions, one unnecessary, and the other wrong. After all, how could an older religion not be “more traditional” than its revolutionary dissidence? And his statement that Catholicism was more syncretic in Latin America than in Europe is but proof of boundless historical ignorance. The contribution of indigenous cultures to Latin American Catholicism was negligible in comparison to the ocean of symbols, myths, and artistic forms from European paganism which the Church absorbed and transmuted.[48]
51. Protestantism and individualism
Mr. Carvalho prefers Western kind of the Christianity that was according to L. Dumont and W. Sombart (as well as to M.Weber) the direct forerunner of Modern secularism.
I do not know to what degree Dumont, Sombart, and Weber can be blamed for that monstrous post hoc, ergo propter hoc sophism (i.e., "after this, therefore because of this"), which consists in attributing to scholasticism the errors of Protestantism. Even nominalism could not, by itself, generate such a spectacular disaster without the interference of other factors, entirely foreign to this question. I will examine this later. But, to begin with, the qualification of Protestantism as “individualistic” is based on the unforgivable simplism which confuses doctrinal proclamations with real political conduct. Protestantism, in its Calvinist variety, created the first totalitarian society of the Modern Age, in an “organicist” version very similar to the Russian one, where state and Church formed a compact unit, exerted draconian control over all areas of social and cultural existence, and smothered, with prison and death sentences, any impulses toward individualism, even in private life.[49] The English Reformation, which began by killing in a year more people than the Inquisition killed in many centuries, was essentially an endeavor of civil government and resulted in the creation of a state church that, in the name of freedom of conscience, had among its priorities the implacable persecution of those who dared to exert such freedom in a pro-Catholic sense. Quite clearly, “individualism” was, in that context, a mere ideological pretext for the establishment of a ferociously centralizing “holism.”[50]
52. Jews
Some words about the Jewish state. From the point of view of the quantity of violence the tender love of Mr.Carvalho to the Zionism is quite touching. The inconsistency of his views reaches here the apogee. I have nothing against Israel, but its cruelty in repressing the Palestinians is evident.
Prof. Dugin attempts to be ironic, but only manages to be ridiculous. The rockets that the Palestinians fire practically every day at non-military areas of Israel are never reported by the international big media, whereas any raid by Israel against Palestinian military installations always provokes the greatest outcry all over the world. In a similar fashion, Prof. Dugin—who, as an intellectual, should be immune to the Western media, but is in fact its slave—wishes me to judge everything according to the sole sources of information he knows or acknowledges—which, for him, are the voice of God Himself.
Do you really want to impress me with this silly journalistic cliché, Prof. Dugin? I know the facts, my friend. I know the dose of violence on both sides. I know, for instance, that the Israelis never use human shields, while the Palestinians almost always do it. I know that, in Israel, Muslims have civil rights and are protected by the police, while, in countries under Islamic rule, non-Muslims are treated as dogs and often stoned to death. The number of Christians murdered in Islamic countries reaches several tens of thousands every year.[51] I have not read any of this in the New York Times; I saw it with my own eyes in documentaries which the big media hides. I do not live in a make-believe world.
53. Jews (2)
In Israel there are traditionalists and modernists, antiglobalist forces and representatives of the global elite.
Oh, really? So Israel is a democracy where all currents of opinion have a right to freedom of expression? Now, tell me: what is the fate of Christians and of friends of America in territories dominated by your cherished anti-imperialist, leftist, and Eurasian friends?
54. Jews (3)
The antiglobalist front is formed there by the anti-American, ant-liberal and anti-unipolar religious groups and by the left anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist circles. They can be good, that to say “Eurasian” and “Eastern”. But the Jewish State itself is not something «traditional». As a whole it is a modern capitalist and Atlantist entity and an ally of American imperialism. Israel was different at the time and could be different in the future. But in the present is rather on the other side of the battle. More than that, the conspiracy theories (Syndicate and so on) include almost always the Jewish bankers in the heart of the globalist elite or world conspiracy. Why Mr. Carvalho modernizes the conspiracy theory excluding from the main version the «Jews» rests a mystery.
(1) How wonderful it would be if Prof. Dugin could reach an agreement with himself and tell us, once and for all, whether my description of the Syndicate “is accurate,” or it is a “conspiracy theory.” I cannot argue with a double-mouthed monster.
(2) The presence of Jewish bankers in the high circles of the Syndicate is the most obvious thing in the world, as also is the presence of Jewish militants in the revolutionary elite that established Bolshevism in Russia. It is also obvious that these two groups of Jews have collaborated to bring misfortune upon the world.[52] They continued to collaborate even during the time when Stalin started a general persecution against the Jews and your dear KGB began to return to Hitler the Jewish refugees who had fled from Germany. Their collaboration lasts to this day. Baron Rothschild, for example, is the owner of Le Monde, the most leftist and anti-Israeli newspaper of the European big media, just as the Sulzbergers, another Jewish family, are the owners of the American daily which is the most ferocious publisher of lies against Israel. Mr. George Soros, a Jew who helped the Nazis to seize the property of other Jews, finances all sorts of anti-American and anti-Israeli movements in the world. Just recently, a mission of American Jews, subsidized by billion dollar NGOs and impressed by the brutal murder of a Jewish family committed by a Palestinian terrorist, traveled to the region to pay a visit of solidarity… to whom? To the relatives of the dead? No. To the murderer’s mother!
Such are the Jews you speak of, pretending that they are the most genuine and pure expression of universal Judaism. If they were so, I would be an anti-Semite. But who actually are these Jews you mention? They are the ones whom Our Lord called the Synagogue of Satan and defined as “those who say they are Jews, yet are not.” These are people who, like the members of the infamous Jewish Committee of the Communist Party of the USSR, avail themselves of their ethnic origin in order to remain infiltrated in the community that has generated them and to be able to betray it more easily, to hand it over to its executioners, to lead it into the slaughterhouse.[53] These are the ones you serve when you judge victims by their murderers.
(3) My position on the State of Israel is very simple and strictly personal. It has nothing to do with Atlantism versus Eurasianism. I do not intend to impose it on anyone. In the first place, it seems to me that, after all the suffering the Jews went through in Germany, in Russia, and a little bit everywhere in Europe, it would have been sheer inhumanity to deny them a piece of land where they could live in peace and safety among their own. I am proud that a Brazilian—the great Oswaldo Aranha—was the head of the General Assembly of the UN when the State of Israel was created. The content of the policies that would come to be adopted by the Israelis in their newly-established nation is of little importance in all this matter. Even if they intended to eventually institute a communist dictatorship there, this could never justify taking away their land and scattering them in a new Diaspora. In the second place, as a Catholic, I believe the Jews will have a providential mission to fulfill at the end of times[54] and that therefore it is the duty of Christians to protect them or, at least, to save them from extinction when they are threatened. The bull by Pope Gregory X (1271-1276), which, having incorporated sentences by his predecessors Innocence III and Innocence IV, forbids false accusations to be brought against the Jews and commands the faithful to let them live in peace, has been a constant inspiration for me.[55]
55. Love for the strong (2)
My opinion: American paleoconservatives, traditional American right are doomed. Their discourse is incoherent, weak and too idiosyncratic.
(1) A man who takes post-modernism as an absolute authority and, at the same time, condemns it as the utmost expression of Western corruption should not call anyone incoherent.
(2) The same applies to the man who curses traditional right-wingers and, a few lines later, calls out for their support.
(3) Even if paleoconservatives were condemned to defeat, to allege this reason to deny them support would be immoral and extremely cowardly. The man who only takes the side of those who seem to be strong should not call anyone weak. To run under the wings of the strong is the conduct of a cheap woman, not of a man. How can Prof. Dugin talk so much about the “ethics of warriors” and forget that one of the foremost commandments of this ethics is the duty to protect “los que son los menos contra los que son los más”?
(4) Finally, it is not true that traditional conservatives are doomed to extinction. It was they who elected the most beloved American president of all times (chosen in several polls as the “greatest of Americans,” ahead of Washington and Lincoln), and it was they who created the largest popular movement that ever existed in the USA—the Tea Party. Eurasianism does not have one hundredth of this support even in Russia.
56. Multiculturalism
If some honest and brave people among North Americans want to fight the globalist elite as the last stage of the Western history, as the end of the history, please join our Eurasian troops. Our struggle is in some sense universal as universal is the globalist challenge. We have different traditions but defending them we confront the common enemy of any tradition. So we will explore where lie our respective zones of influence in the multipolar world only after our common victory over the Beast, american-atlantist-liberal-globalist-capitalist-Post-Modern Beast.
This is very beautiful. What does Eurasianism promise us for after the world war that will destroy the West? A multicultural society where different ethnicities will each have their representation in Parliament.[56] But is this not what we see already in the parliaments of all Western nations? Could it really be that Prof. Dugin has never heard of the Black Caucus, Islamic lobby, etc.? Why start a world war with the purpose of getting to the exact place where we already are?[57]
57. Warrior spirit
Once the West had its own tradition. Partly it has lost it. Partly this tradition has given the poisonous germs. The West should search in its deep ancient roots. But these roots lead to the common indo-european Eurasian past, the glorious past of the Scyths, Celts, Sarmats, Germans, Slavs, Hindus, Persians, Greeks, Romans and their holistic societies, warrior style hierarchical culture and spiritual mystic values that had nothing in common with present day Western mercantile capitalist degenerated civilization.
It really would be very good if the West could recover its warrior spirit and get rid of its bourgeois pusillanimity.[58] But I can assure you that this spirit has no roots whatsoever in Persia, India, or Russia. The Western warrior spirit goes back to the Christian knighthood in the Middle Ages, the great navigations, the conquest of America, and the “Westernization of the world”—in short, it goes back to everything that Prof. Dugin abominates and that leftist activists, subsidized by the Syndicate, the KGB, and chic third-worldism, have strived to discredit and to disparage through a cultural “dirty war”. But as Nietzsche used to say, one cannot completely destroy a thing except when one substitutes it. It is not enough to cut the West off from its roots and then accuse it of not having roots: it is necessary to insert a Eurasian graft into it and persuade the West that Eurasianism is its true roots.
58. Revolt and post-modernism
To return to the Tradition we need to accomplish the revolt against modern world and against modern West -- absolute revolt – spiritual (traditionalist) and social (socialist). The West is in agony. We need to save the world from this agony and may be to save the West from itself. The Modern (and Post-Modern) West must die.
How can post-modernism possibly die having such devout followers even in Vladimir Putin’s Russia?
59. Salvation by destruction
And if there were the real traditional values in its foundations (and they certainly were) we will save them only in the process of the global destruction of the Modernity/Hypermodernity.
“Salvation by destruction” is one of the most frequent clichés of the revolutionary discourse. The French Revolution promised to save France by the destruction of the Ancien Regime: it brought her fall after fall, down to the condition of a second-class power. The Mexican Revolution promised to save Mexico by the destruction of the Catholic Church: it transformed that nation into a supplier of drugs to the world and of miserable people to the American social security system. The Russian Revolution promised to save Russia by the destruction of capitalism: it transformed her into a graveyard. The Chinese Revolution promised to save China by the destruction of bourgeois culture: it transformed China into a slaughterhouse. The Cuban Revolution promised to save Cuba by the destruction of imperialist usurpers: it transformed the island into a prison of beggars. Brazilian positivists promised to save Brazil by the destruction of the monarchy: they destroyed the only democracy that then existed in the continent and threw the country into a succession of coups and dictatorships which only ended in 1988, in order to give way to a modernized dictatorship under another name. Now Prof. Dugin promises to save the world by the destruction of the West. Sincerely, I prefer not to know what comes next. The revolutionary mentality, with its self-postponing promises, which are always prepared to turn into their opposites with the most innocent face in the world, is the worst scourge that has afflicted humanity. The number of its victims, from 1789 to this day, is not less than three hundred million people—more than all epidemics, natural catastrophes, and wars among nations have killed since the beginning of time. The essence of its discourse, as I believe to have already demonstrated, is the inversion of the sense of time: it consists in inventing a future and then reinterpreting, in light of this future—as if it were a certain and totally-proven premise,—the present and the past. It is a matter of inverting the normal process of knowledge, an inversion according to which the known is understood though the unknown, the certain through the dubious, the categorical through the hypothetical. It is a structural, systematic, obsessive, hypnotic falsification—a politico-cultural crystallization of “delusional interpretation.” First Prof. Dugin conceived a Eurasian Empire and then he rebuilt the history of the world as if it were a long preparation for the advent of that beautiful Eurasian thing. He is a revolutionary like any other. Just immensely more pretentious.
60. Not even a fart’s worth of effort
So the best representatives of the West, of the deep and noble West should be with the Rest[30] (that is with us, Eurasians) and not against the Rest. It is clear that Mr. Carvalho chose the other camp pretending to choose neither. It is a pity because we need friends. But it is up to him to decide. We accept any solution – it is the inner dignity of a man to find his own path in History, Politics, Religion, and Society.
If Prof. Dugin needs allies to help him combat the Syndicate, he may count on me. But frankly, for his Eurasian Empire I will not make even a fart’s worth of effort.
Richmond, May 23, 2011.
[1] Aristóteles em Nova Perspectiva. Introdução à Teoria dos Quatro Discursos, Rio, Topbooks, 1996, [“Aristotle in a New Perspective. Introduction to the Theory of the Four Discourses”] and Como Vencer um Debate sem Precisar Ter Razão. A Dialética Erística de Arthur Schopenhauer, Rio, Topbooks, 1997. [“How to Win a Debate without the Need to be Right. The Eristic Dialectics of Arthur Schopenhauer”].
[2] See the interview to Fronda, mentioned in the previous message.
[3] A pathological framework firstly described by French psychiatrist Paul Sérieux in 1909 which is distinguished from other forms of psychotic dellusion for not bearing sensorial disturbances, but only a morbid reorganization of the data of a situation. See Paul Sérieux, Les Folies Raisonnantes, Le Delire d’Interpretation, Paris, Alcan, 1909. Available in PDF at http://web2.bium.univ-paris5.fr/livanc/?cote=61092&p=27&do=page.
[4] See Fronda, loc. cit.
[5] Jerusalem, Zahavia, 1974. Volume II was published in 2002 by Jerusalem’s Zionist Book Club.
[6] Eric Voegelin, Published Essays 1929-1933, Collected Works, vol. 8, University of Missouri Press, 2003, p. 238.
[7] O Jardim das Aflições: De Epicuro à Ressurreição de César. Ensaio sobre o Materialismo e a Religião Civil, [“The Garden of Afflictions: From Epicurus to the Resurrection of Caesar. An Essay on Materialism and the Civil Religion.”]Rio, Diadorim, 1995 (Second edition, São Paulo, É-Realizações, 2004, pp. 107-119), available at http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/traducoes/epicurus.htm).
[8] See my conference “The Structure of the Revolutionary Mind” at http://philosophyseminar.com/multimedia/video/166-the-revolutionary-mentality.html.
[9] See Alexandre Douguine, Le Prophète de l’Eurasisme, Paris. Avatar Éditions, 2006, p. 133.
[10] Otto Maria Carpeaux, “A política, segundo Shakespeare”, [“Politics, according to Shakespeare”] in Ensaios Reunidos 1942-1978, [Collected Essays 1942-1978] Organization, introduction, and notes by Olavo de Carvalho, Rio, Universidade da Cidade and Topbooks, Rio, 1999, vol. I, pp. 783-784.
[11] See my testimony about it on the Introductory Note to A Longa Marcha da Vaca para o Brejo & Os Filhos da PUC. O Imbecil Coletivo II [“The Collective Imbecile II, The Long March of the Cow Down to the Swamp & The Sons of PUC”], Rio, Topbooks, 1998.
[12] See Alexandre Douguine, Le Prophète de l’Eurasisme, op. cit., pp. 146-147.
[13] Topics, 103b23.
[14] Francisco Antônio de Souza, Novo Dicionário Latino-Português, [“New Dictionary Latin-Portuguese”] Porto, Lello, 1959, p. 856.
[15] Not even Paul Natorp, who in 1903 presented a Kantian interpretation of Platonism, explaining the Ideas as a priori forms, came to reducing them to projections of the human mind. A priori forms, after all, are preconditions that mold the possibilities of the mind and, for this very reason, do not depend on it at all. See Plato's Theory of Ideas. An Introduction to Idealism, transl. by Vasilis Politis and John Connolly, Academia Verlag, 2004.
[16] See on this the magisterial essay by Jean Borella, “Platon ou la restauration de l’intellectualité Occidentale” in http://rosamystica.kazeo.com/Platon-ou-la-restauration-de-l-intellectualite,r249002.html.
[17] Symposium, 210e2.
[18] Giovanni Reale, Por Uma Nova Interpretação de Platão,[Toward a New Interpretation of Plato] transl. by Marcelo Perine, São Paulo, Loyola, 1997, p. 126.
[19] Phaedo, 78d1.
[20] Timaeus, 47b-c. See also The Republic, X, 530d e 617b.
[21] Ada Neschke-Hentschke avec la collaboration de Alexandre Etienne, Images de Platon et Lectures de Ses Oeuvres. Les Interpretations de Platon à travers les Siècles, [Images of Plato and Readings of His Works. The Interpretations of Plato Over the Centuries] Louvain-Paris, L’Institut Supérieur de Philosophie / Éditions Peeters, 1997.
[22] The books on this are numerous, and the only difficulty in citing them is the embarras de choix. I randomly suggest four of the best: Alain Renaut, L’Ère de l’Individu. Contribution à l’Histoire de La Subjectivité, Paris, Gallimard, 1989; Ferdinand Alquié, La Découverte Métaphysique de l’Homme chez Descartes, Paris, P.U.F., 1950; Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self. The Making of Modern Identity, Cambridge, Mass., The Harvard Univ. Press, 1989; Georges Gusdorf, Les Sciences Humaines et la Pensée Occidentale, II: Les Origines des Sciences Humaines, Paris, Payot, 1967 (esp. pp. 484 ss.).
[23] See my handout “Edmund Husserl contra o psicologismo” [“Edmund Husserls against psychologism”], an unedited transcription of classes taught in 1987 in Rio de Janeiro. Available in a pirated version at www.4shared.com/document/Xvsi6WJo/CARVALHO_Olavo_-_Edmund_Husser.htm.
[24] Louis Lavelle, La Présence Totale [Total Presence], Paris, Aubier, 1934, p. 25.
[25] Mário Ferreira dos Santos, Filosofia Concreta, [“Concrete Philosophy”] São Paulo, É-Realizações, 2009, p. 67.
[26] V. Le Prophète de l’Eurasisme, op. cit., pp. 132-133.
[27] Memoirs, Dreams, Reflections, transl. Richard and Clara Winston, New York, Pantheon Books, pp. 354 e 359.
[28] This individualism does exist, indeed, but not without internal contradictions that sometimes turn it into the reverse of what it seems to be. Who can deny, for instance, that the impact of egalitarian and collectivist ideologies, apparently adverse to all individualism, ended up fomenting in the masses all sorts of individualistic ambitions reinforced by an impatient spirit of demand. Who can deny that “sexual liberation,” one of the strong points of modern leftism, awakens an anxiety of erotic satisfaction that raises selfish individualism to its ultimate consequences? Without the “collectivist” demands of feminism, no woman would have the supremely selfish pretension of “being the owner of her own body” to the point of believing in the right to kill a baby just to keep her waist slim.
[29] Titus Burckhardt, La Civilización Hispano-Arabe, trad. Rosa Kuhne Brabant, Madrid, Alianza Editorial, 1970.
[30] Elementos de Psicologia Espiritual [“Elements of Spiritual Psychology”], 1987. Unpublished, like so many other writings of mine, this work circulates in the format of a handout in the Philosophy Seminar.
[31] Michel Veber, Comentários à “Metafísica Oriental” de René Guénon [Commentaries on René Guénon’s “Oriental Metaphysics”], organized, introduced, and annotated by Olavo de Carvalho, São Paulo, Speculum, 1983.
[32] O Profeta da Paz. Ensaio de Interpretação Simbólica de Alguns Episódios da Vida do Profeta Mohhamed, [The Prophet of Peace. Essays of Symbolic Interpretation of Some Episodes in the Life of the Prophet Mohammed] Unpublished.
[33] See http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/MEGA.HTM.
[34] Fronda , March 16, 2011: http://www.fronda.pl/news/czytaj/rosja_w_cyfrach_rozpad_i_degeneracja
[35] See the excellent documentary by Jean-Michel Carré, The Putin System, which can be bought at Amazon or downloaded from Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D49CVOlkpQI.
[36] http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/folha/mundo/ult94u425463.shtml.
[37] http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/04/25/us-beliefs-poll-idUSTRE73O24K20110425.
[38] Jean-Marc Allemand, op. cit., pp. 117 ss.
[39] http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?pageId=291121.
[40] Jean-Marc Allemand, René Guénon et les Sept Tours du Diable, Paris, Guy Trédaniel, 1990, p. 20. See also Jean Robin, René Guénon. La Dernière Chance de l’Occident, Paris, Guy Trédaniel, 1983, pp. 64 ss.
[41] Jean-Marc Allemand, op. cit., p. 130.
[42] Jean Robin, op. cit., p. 64.
[43] V. Gary Allen, The Rockefeller File, Seal Beach, CA., ’76 Press, 1976, pp. 52-53.
[44] See George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America since 1945, Wilmington, Del., The Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 1996; Lee Edwards, The Conservative Revolution. The Movement that Remade America, New York, The Free Press, 1999; Mark C. Henrie (editor), Arguing Conservatism. Four Decades of the Intercollegiate Review, Wilmington, Del., The Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2008; Robert M. Crunden (editor), The Superfluous Men. Conservative Critics of the American Culture, Wilmington, Del., ISI Books, 1999; Jeffrey Hart, The Making of the American Conservative Mind. National Review and its Times, Wilmington, Del., ISI Books, 2005.
[45] Alexandre Douguine, La Grande Guerre des Continents, Paris, Avatar Éditions, 2006, p. 40.
[46] See for example http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/catholic_church_shows_robust_growth_in_u.s._membership_new_report_says/.
[47] And this effort should take into account that Louis Dumont himself, on whose authority Prof. Dugin’s argument rests, recognizes that individualism was already present in the Church since its beginnings. Therefore, it cannot be a later “distortion.”
[48] Friedrich Heer, The Intellectual History of Europe, transl. Jonathan Steinber, New York, Doubleday, 1968, Vol. I, pp. 1-26.
[49] See Michael Waltzer, The Revolution of the Saints. A Study on the Origins of Radical Politics, Harvard University Press, 1982.
[50] See the classic study by Michael Davies, Liturgical Revolution, vol. I, Cranmer’s Godly Order. The Destruction of Catholicism Through Liturgical Change, revised edition, Ft. Collins (CO), Roman Catholic Books, 1995.
[51] See the testimony of Michael Horowitz in http://www.aina.org/news/20101204231447.htm. Horowitz is one of the most renowned researchers of anti-Christian persecution in the world.
[52] See Alexandre Soljénitsyne, Deux Siècles Ensemble. 1795-1995, Paris, Fayard, 2002, especially Vol. II, pp. 40, 50, 53, 264, 336.
[53] See the memoirs of Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, Prince in Prison, Brooklin, Sichos, 1997.
[54] See Roy H. Schoeman, Salvation Is from the Jews. The Role of Judaism in Salvation History from Abraham to the Second Coming, San Francisco, Ignatius Press, 1995.
[55] Document available at: http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/g10-jews.html.
[56] Le Prophète de l’Eurasisme, p. 30.
[57] In fact, in the economic field he promises us the same thing: “regulation by the State of strategic sectors (industrial-military complex, natural monopolies and similar ones) and maximal economic freedom for medium and small commerce.” Note well: there is no big private industry, nor big private commerce. Small and medium commercial companies prosper under the wings of the omnipotent State. If I am not mistaken, this is what already exists in China.
[58] J. R. Nyquist wrote excellent things about this in The Origins of the Fourth World War, Black Forest Press, 1999.
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