Olavo - Introduction

 "What are the historical, political, ideological and economic factors and actors that now define the dynamics and configuration of power in the world and what is the U.S. position in what is known as New World Order?”


Olavo de Carvalho

Words change their meaning, weight and value according to the situations of speech. Upon entering this debate I must clarify from the outset that it is not a debate at all. The very idea of a debate presupposes as much an opposite symmetry between the contending parties, from the point of view of their convictions, as some direct symmetry of their respective socio-professional status: intellectuals discuss with intellectuals, politicians with politicians, professors with professors, preachers of religion with preachers of atheism, and so forth.

As for convictions, if we understand this term as only general statements about the structure of reality, mine do not differ from Professor Dugin’s in many essential points. Does he believe in God? So do I. Does he think a metaphysics of the absolute is possible? So do I.  Does he wager in a meaning of life? So do I. Does he understand traditions, homeland, and family as the values that must be preserved above supposed economic and administrative conveniences? So do I. Does he see with horror the globalist project of the Rockfellers and Soros? So do I.  It is not possible to organize a debate between two people who are in agreement.

On the contrary, from the viewpoint of the real positions we occupy in society, our differences are so many, so deep and so irreducible that the very proposal of putting us face to face has a certain comic incongruity to it. I am just a philosopher, writer, and professor, committed to the search of what seems to me to be the truth and to educating a group of people who are so kind as to pay attention to what I say.  Neither these people nor I hold any public job.  We do not have any influence on national or international politics. We do not even have the ambition – much less an explicit project – of changing the course of History, whatever it may be.  Our only hope is to know reality to the utmost degree of our strength and one day leave this life aware that we did not live in illusions and self-delusion, that we did not let ourselves be misled and corrupted by the Prince of this World and by the promises of the ideologues, his servants.  In the current power hierarchy of my native country, my opinion is worthless, except maybe as an anti-example and an incarnation of absolute evil, which is a great satisfaction to me.  In the country where I live, the government considers me, on the most hyperbolical hypothesis, an inoffensive eccentric.

No political party, mass movement, government institution, church or religious sect considers me its mentor. So I can give my opinion as I wish, and change my opinion as many times as it seems right to me, with no devastating practical consequences beyond the modest circle of my personal existence.

Now Professor Dugin, the son of a KGB officer and the political mentor of a man who is the very incarnation of the KGB, is the creator and guide of one of the widest and most ambitious geopolitical plans of all time – a plan adopted and followed as closely as possible by a nation which has the largest army in the world, the most efficient and daring secret service and a network of alliances that stretches itself through four continents. Saying that Professor Dugin is at the center and pinnacle of power is a simple question of realism.  In order to fulfill his plans, he counts on Vladimir Putin’s strong arm, the armies of Russia and China and every terrorist organization of the Middle East, not to mention practically every leftist, fascist and neo-Nazi movements which today place themselves under the banner of his “Eurasian” project. As for myself, besides not having a plan not even for my own retirement, I count only, as far as war resources go, on my dog Big Mac and an old hunting shotgun.

This tremendous existential difference (fully illustrated by the attached photos) makes our opinions, even when their verbal expressions coincide to the letter, signify entirely different things in the framework of our respective goals. The answers to the questions that inspire this debate will show this, I hope, as clearly as the photos do. 

 

The questions are two: who are the actors in the world scene and what is the position of the United States in it?

As for the first question: aside from Catholic and Protestant Christianity, of which I shall speak later on, the historic forces that today fight for power in the world arrange themselves into three projects of global dominance, which I will provisionally call the “Russian-Chinese,” the “Western” (sometimes mistakenly called “Anglo-American”) and the “Islamic” one.

Each of them has a well documented history, which shows their remote origins, the transformations they have gone through in the course of time and the present state of their implementation.

The agents that personify these projects today are respectively:

1. The ruling elite of Russia and China, especially the secret services of those two countries.

2. The Western finance elite, as represented especially in the Bilderberg Club, the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission.

3. The Muslim Brotherhood, the religious leaders of several Islamic countries and the some Muslim countries governments.

Of these three agents, only the first one can be conceived of in strictly geopolitical terms, since its plans and actions correspond to well-defined national and regional interests.  The second one, which is more advanced in the implementation of its plans for world government, places itself explicitly above any national interests, including those of the countries where it originated and which serve as its basis for operations. In the third one, conflicts of interests between national governments and the overarching goal of a Universal Caliphate end up always being resolved in favor of the latter, which, though currently existing only as an ideal, enjoys a symbolic authority founded upon Koranic commandments that no Islamic government would dare to overtly challenge.

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.

Although nominally the relations among them are of competition and dispute, sometimes even of military nature, there are vast zones of fusion and collaboration, as flexible and changing as they may be. This phenomenon disorients the observers, producing all sorts of misguided and fabulous interpretations, some under the form of “conspiracy theories,” others as self-proclaimed “realistic” and “scientific” refutations of those theories.

A good deal of the nebulosity in the world scene is produced by a more or less constant factor: each one of the three agents tends to interpret in its own terms the plans and actions of the other two,  partly for deliberate propaganda purposes,  partly due to  genuine misunderstanding of the situation.

The strategic analyses from all involved reflect, each of them, the ideological bias that is proper to it. Even though they attempt to take into account the totality of available factors, the Russian-Chinese scheme stresses the geopolitical and military viewpoint, the Western scheme the economic, and the Islamic scheme the dispute among religions.

This difference reflects, on its turn, the sociological composition of the ruling classes in the respective geographical areas:

1) Stemming from the communist Nomenklatura, the Russian-Chinese ruling class is essentially made up of bureaucrats, intelligence service agents and military officers.

2) The preponderance of financiers and international bankers in the Western establishment is too well known and it is not necessary to insist on it.

3) In the various countries of the Islamic complex, the authority of the ruler depends substantially on the approval of the umma – the multitudinous community of authoritative interpreters of the traditional religion. Even though these countries display great variety in their domestic situations, it is not an exaggeration to describe the structure of their ruling power as “theocratic.”

Thus, for the first time in the history of the world, the three essential modalities of power – politico-military, economic and religious – find themselves personified in distinct supranational blocks, each of them with its own plans for world dominance and its peculiar mode of action. This does not mean that they do not act in all fronts, but only that their respective historical views and strategies are ultimately delimited by the modality of power they represent. It’s not far-fetched to say that the world today is the object of a dispute among the military, bankers and preachers.

Even though in current debates these three blocks are almost invariably designated  by names of nations, States and governments,  to depict their interactions as a dispute among nations or national interests is a residual habit of the old geopolitics that does not help us at all to understand the present situation.

It is only in the Russian-Chinese case that the globalist project symmetrically corresponds to national interests, and that the principal agents are the respective States and governments. This is so for the simple reason that the Communist regime, ruling there for decades, has dissolved or eliminated all the other possible agents.  The globalist elite of Russia and China is the government of these two countries.

On its turn, the Western globalist elite does not represent any national interest and does not identify itself with any particular State or government, though it controls several of them. On the contrary, when its interests collide with those of the nations where it originated (and this necessarily happens), it does not hesitate to turn itself against its own homeland, to subjugate it and, if necessary, to destroy it.

Islamic globalists serve, in principle, the general interests of all Muslim States, united in the grand project of a Universal Caliphate. Divergences arising from clashes of national interests (as for example between Iran and Saudi Arabia) have not proved sufficient to open incurable wounds in the unity of the long-term Islamic project. The Muslim Brotherhood, main leader of the process, is a transnational organization: it governs some countries and in others it is the political opposition party, but its influence is omnipresent in the Islamic world.

The heterogeneity and asymmetry of the three blocks is reflected in the image that they have of each other, as it becomes manifest in their propaganda speeches – a system of errors suggesting that the fate of the world is in the hands of delirious madmen:

1. The Russian-Chinese perspective (enlarged today under the form of Eurasianism, which will be one of the topics of this debate) describes the Western block as (a) a global expansion of American national power; (b) the materialized expression of the “open society” liberal ideology, such as eminently proposed by Sir Karl Popper; (c) the living incarnation of the Enlightenment’s materialist, scientistic and rationalist mentality, and therefore the enemy par excellence of all traditional spirituality.

2. Western globalism declares it does not have any enemies other than “terrorism” – which it does not identify at all with the Islamic block, describing it a residue of barbaric beliefs on the way to extinction – and “fundamentalism,” a notion that indistinctly blends the ideological spokesmen of Islamic terrorism and the “Christian right,” as if it the latter were an ally of the former and not one of its main victims. This way, fear of Islamic terrorism is used as a pretext to justify the official boycott to the Christian religion in Europe and in the United States!  Russia and China are never presented as possible aggressors, but as allies of the West. In the worst case, China is portrayed as a trade competitor. In short: the ideology of Western globalism speaks as if it already personified an established universal consensus, opposed only by slightly insane marginal and religious groups

3. The Islamic block describes its Western enemy in terms that only reveal its disposition to hate it per fas et per nefas, presenting it sometimes as the heir to the ancient Crusaders and sometimes as the personification of modern materialism and hedonism. The generous collaboration of Russian and China with terrorist groups is certainly the reason why these two countries are non-existent in the Islamic ideological discourse.  This way, incurable theoretical incompatibilities are circumvented.  Some theoreticians of the Caliphate allege that socialism, once triumphant in the world, will need a soul, and Islam will provide it with one.

In the same measure as each of the three blocks cultivates a false image of their competitors, so does each of them also project a false image of itself.  Leaving aside for now the Islamic and Western projective fantasies, let’s address the Russian-Chinese ones.

The Russian-Chinese block presents itself as an ally of the United States in the “fight against terrorism,” while at the same time it provides weapons and all sorts of support to practically all terrorist organizations of the world and to the anti-American regimes of Iran, Venezuela, etc., and spreads the legend that the attack on the World Trade Center was the work of the American government.[1]Russia complains that she was “corrupted” by Boris Yeltsin’s liberal reforms, of American inspiration, as if before them she lived in a temple of purity and not in the endless rot of the Communist regime. It is worth recalling that the Soviet government lived essentially out of theft and extortion for over 60 years without ever having to account for it. At the same time, it corrupted its population through the institutionalized habit of kickbacks, exchange of political favors and influence peddling, without which the state machinery would simply not work.[2]  When its assets were allotted after the official dissolution of the regime, those benefitted were the members of the nomenklatura  themselves, who became billionaires overnight, without severing the ties that united them to the old state apparatus, especially to the KGB (“there is no such thing as former KGB,” confessed Vladimir Putin). Imagine what would have happened in Germany after WWII if the winners, instead of prosecuting and punishing the supporters of the old regime, had awarded them access to the assets of the Nazi State.  That is exactly what happened in Russia: as soon as the USSR was officially dissolved, its agents of influence in Europe and in the United States launched a successful operation to block any investigation of Soviet crimes.[3] Nobody was ever punished for the murder of at least tens of millions of civilians and for the creation of the most efficient machinery of state terror known to mankind. On the contrary: the chaos and corruption that followed the dismantling of the Soviet State were not caused by the new system of free enterprise, but by the fact that the first to benefit from it were the masters of the old regime, a horde of thieves and murderers as never before seen in any civilized country.

There’s more: while whining about being corrupted by American capitalism, Russia forgets that it was she who corrupted it.  Since the 1930s the Stalin government, aware that the strength of America resided in “its patriotism, its morality and its spiritual life” (sic), unleashed a gigantic operation, in the words of its main perpetrator, Willi Münzenberg, designed to “make the West so corrupt it stinks.” The purchase of consciences, the involvement of high-level officers in espionage and shady businesses, the intense propaganda campaigns to debilitate the moral beliefs of the population and the generalized infiltration in the educational system ended up producing results particularly after the 1960s, radically modifying American society to the point of rendering it unrecognizable.

It was also the Soviet action that gave planetary dimensions to drug-trafficking since the 1950s. Its history is well documented in Red Cocaine: The Drugging of America and the West, by Joseph D. Douglass.  When Russia wails that after the fall of Communism she was invaded by the drug culture, she is simply harvesting what it sowed.

Nothing of this vast corrupting action is a thing of the past. Nowadays there are more Russian agents in the United States than during the Cold War.[4]China, well-fed by American investments, gives evidence that the apparent liberalization of its economy was only a cover-up for maintaining the totalitarian regime, ever more solid and seemingly indestructible.

As for the position of the United States in the world scene, let us first take a look at how Prof. Dugin describes it, and then see how it is in reality.

According to the Eurasian doctrine, the United States are the incarnation, par excellence, of liberal globalism.[5]  Liberalism as Prof. Dugin sees in the face of America is, essentially, the one of the “open society” advocated by Sir Karl Popper. This is how Prof. Dugin summarizes the liberal idea:

“To understand the philosophical consistency of the national-Bolshevik ideology... it is absolutely necessary to read the fundamental book of Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies.

“Popper developed a fundamental typology for our subject. According to him, the history of humanity and the history of ideas divide themselves in two (unequal) halves. On the one hand, there are the partisans of the ‘open society,’ which represents in his view the form of normal existence of rational individuals (so are for him all men), who base their conduct upon reasoning and the supposedly free personal will. The sum of such individuals must logically form the ‘open society, essentially ‘non-totalitarian, since it lacks any unifying idea or value system of a collectivist nature, be it supra-individual or non-individual. The ‘open society’ is open precisely because it ignores all ‘teleologies,’ all ‘absolutes,’ all established typological differences; therefore it ignores all limits that emanate from the non-individual and non-rational domain (supra-rational, a-rational, or irrational, the latter being the more frequent term in Popper).

“On the other hand, there is the ideological camp of the ‘enemies of open society, where Popper includes Heraclitus, Plato, Aristotle, the medieval Schoolmen, as well as the German philosophy of Schlegel, Fichte, and above all of Hegel and Marx.  Karl Popper… points the essential unity of their approaches and discerns the structure of their common Weltanschauung, whose characteristic traits are the denial of the intrinsic value of the individual, whence stems the loathe for autonomous rationalism, and the tendency to submission of the individual and his reason to the ‘non-individual’ and ‘non-rational’ values, which always and fatally, according to Popper, leads to the apology of dictatorship and political totalitarianism. (…)

“National-Bolsheviks…accept absolutely and without reservations Popper’s dualist view and are totally in agreement with his classification. However, in contrast, they consider themselves to be the resolute enemies of the ‘open society’ and their philosophical foundations, that is, the primacy of the individual, the value of rational reasoning, the progressive social liberalism, egalitarian atomic numeric democracy, free criticism, the Cartesian-Kantian Weltanschauung…”[6]

As for globalism:

“Nowadays, it is evident that the World State conceived as a World Market is not a distant or chimerical perspective, because that liberal doctrine [Karl Popper’s] is little by little becoming the governing idea of our civilization. And this presupposes the final destruction of nations, as vestiges of a bygone era, as the last hurdle to the irresistible expansion of globalization…The globalist doctrine is the perfect and finished expression of the ‘open society’ model.”[7]

Therefore, liberal globalism is the project in progress that aims to establish throughout the world the Popperian model of the “open society,” necessarily destroying on its way national sovereignties and every metaphysical or moral principle that aspires to be superior to individual rationality. It is the end of nations and of all traditional spirituality, the former substituted for a global scientific-technocratic administration, the latter by a mix of scientism, materialism and relativistic subjectivism that inspires the globalist elites of the West.

Being the United States the main radiating focus of this project, and Russia its main focus of resistance (for motives we shall see later), the clash is inevitable:

“The main thesis of the neo-Eurasianism is that the struggle between Russia and the United States is inevitable, since the United States is the engine of globalization seeking to destroy Russia, the fortress of spirituality and tradition.”[8]

I made a point of quoting with some detail my opponent’s opinion because, though I do not consider it to be false with respect to the mentality of globalist elites, which are really inspired on Popperian ideals, I can prove with a narrow margin of error that:

1. The description cannot in any way be applied to the United States, a nation where Popperianism is a recent implant, with no local roots and totally hostile to American traditions.

2. The United States are not the command center of the globalist project, but on the contrary, its priority victim, marked to die. 

3. The globalist elite is not an enemy of Russia, China or the Islamic countries potentially associated to the Eurasian project, but, on the contrary, it is their collaborator and accomplice in the effort to destroy the sovereignty, the politico-military power and the economy of the United States.

4. Far from favoring free-enterprise capitalism, the globalist project has supported statist and controlling policies everywhere. And in this, it does not differ from the interventionism advocated by the Eurasianists.  Globalism is only “liberal” in the local sense that the term has in the United States, as a synonym for “leftist.” The globalist project is a direct heir and continuator of Fabian socialism, a traditional ally of the Communists.  Popperian ideology itself is not liberal-capitalist, in the sense of classical liberalism, but above all else “a ‘test and evaluate’ approach to social engineering.”[9]

5. Eurasianism turns against the Popperian “open society” as an abstract ideological model.  However, as Eurasianism is not only an abstract ideological model, but a geopolitical strategy, it is obvious that it fires at the Popperian ideology to reach, behind it, a specific national power, that of the United States, which has nothing to do with the Popperian ideology and can only expect evil from it.  Even worse: American nationalism is a powerful Christian resistance to the globalist ambitions which have been trying to take over the country in order to destroy it as an autonomous power and use it as a tool for their essentially anti-national plans. The destruction of American power will remove the last reasonable hurdle to the establishment of a world government. Then all that will be left is the sharing of the spoils among the three globalist schemes, the Western, the Russian-Chinese and the Islamic one.

6. Russia is not at all the “fortress of spirituality and tradition,” appointed by a celestial mandate to castigate the flesh the United States for the sins of the immoral and materialist West.  Today as in Stalin’s time, Russia is a den of corruption and wickedness as never before seen, one dedicated to the spreading of its mistakes around the world, as announced in the prophecy of Fatima.  It should be noted that this prophecy never referred particularly to Communism, but to “the errors of Russia” in a generic way, and it announced that the dissemination of these errors, with all its ensuing retinue of disgrace and suffering, would only cease if the Pope and all Catholic bishops of the world perform the rite of the consecration of Russia.  Since this rite has never been carried out, there is no reason not to see in the Eurasian project a second wave and an upgrade of the “errors of Russia,” the announcement of a catastrophe of incalculable proportions.

7. If Russia today, through the lips of Prof. Dugin, presents itself to the world as the bearer of a great saving spiritual message, it is necessary to recall that she has done it twice before: (a) In the nineteenth century, all the thinkers of the Slavophile stripe, as Dostoewsky, Soloviev and Leontiev, saw the West as the source of all evils and announced that in the following century Russia would teach the world “true Christianity.” What happened was that all this spiritual arrogance was impotent to detain the advance of communist materialism in Russia herself. (b) Russian communism promised to bring to the world an era of peace, prosperity and freedom beyond the most beautiful dreams of previous generations.  All it managed to do was to create a totalitarian inferno of which neither Attila nor Genghis-Kahn could have caught a glimpse in a nightmare.

It would be wonderful if each country learned how to heal its own evils before pretending to be the savior of humanity. Alexandre Dugin’s Russia seems to have taken the opposite lesson from her crimes and failures.

[1] See my article “Suggestion to clear thinkers: check into an asylum,” Diário do Comércio, January 30 2002, at http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/semana/060130dc.htm.

[2] See Konstantin Simis, URSS: The Corrupt Society: The Secret World of Soviet Capitalism, New York, Simon & Schuster, 1982, and Alena V. Ledeneva, Russia`s Economy of Favours, Cambridge University Press, 1998.

[3] See Vladimir Boukovski, Jugement à Moscou.

[4] See: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2010/07/04/painting-town-red-russian-spies-report-says/.

[5] The two elements that this definition fuses into a unity do not have the same origin, and were not friendly to each other at birth. The first liberal movements of the nineteenth century, coming on the top of the wave of independence movements against the colonial powers, were highly nationalistic, and the first projects for global government that appeared in the beginning of the twentieth century were inspired by notoriously interventionist and statist ideas.

[6] Alexandre Douguine, “La métaphysique du national-bolchevisme,” Le Prophète de l’Eurasisme, Paris, Avatar Éditions, 2006, pp. 131-133.

[7] Id., p. 138.

[8] Vadim Volovoj, “Will the prediction of A. Dugin come true?,” in Geopolitika, 10.11.2008,  at http://www.geopolitika.lt/?artc=2825.

[9] Ed Evans, “Do you really know this person?” at http://itmakessenseblog.com/tag/karl-popper/.




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