“Prestad noblemente vuestro auxilio
a los que son los menos
contra los que son los más.”
("Nobly lend your assistance
to those who are the least
against those who are the greatest.")
(José Ortega y Gasset,
Advice to the Youth of Spain)
§ 1. Our respective missions in this debate
§ 2. From argumentation to pure and simple gossip
§ 3. The Syndicate
§ 4. Why the Syndicate wants socialism
§ 5. Whose side am I on?
§ 6. Individualism and collectivism
§ 7. The sentiment of community solidarity in the USA
§ 8. Evil deeds compared
§ 9. Geopolitics and History
§ 10. The true historical agent behind Eurasianism
§ 1. Our respective missions in this debate
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 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.
From the outset of this exchange of messages with Professor Dugin, I have tried to make two points clear:
1. He is declaredly a political agent, and all the description he presents of the state of things is determined by the practical objectives that he seeks to achieve. It is therefore natural that he sees the world as divided in two, with a good and a bad side, and that he strives to win sympathies for the side he considers to be good, while at the same time throwing the maximum amount of hatred available against the side he considers to be bad.
2. On the other hand, my description of the picture presents a world divided among three main disputing forces, neither of which enjoys the least sympathy on my part, though, in terms of immediate physical danger to the human species, one of them has already demonstrated overwhelming superiority over the other two. Killing an approximate total of 140 million people in a few decades – more than all wars, epidemics, and natural catastrophes of any kind had ever killed at least since the beginning of the Christian Era –the Russians and Chinese have already proved to have a degree of truculence, wickedness, and disrespect for human life that transcends the possibilities of the most odious Islamic suicide bomber or the coldest, Machiavellian Western banker. This is a pure and simple fact, and not even all the Eurasian blather in the world can ease the scandal of the two hordes of murderers who, instead of paying for the crimes they committed against their own people, now demand, with an air of innocence, of sanctity and even of divine authority, a chance for extending those crimes to a global scale. Nevertheless, the two other globalizing currents do not seem to me to be worthy of greater admiration and respect – at the very least for having been accomplices in the Russian-Chinese genocide, one, between the 30s and the 60s, favoring with money aplenty and paternal diplomatic concessions the building of the two most deadly tyrannies of all time, the other even now, walking hand in hand, in the World Social Forum and everywhere, with the ostensible or disguised spokesmen of an ideology that their very religion condemns.
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.[1]
§ 2. From argumentation to pure and simple gossip
This asymmetry in the respective roles of the political agent and the scientific observer is then reflected in the descriptions of the world situation that both make: the first one painting it as a struggle between Good and Evil and, quite modestly, claiming to himself the role that incarnates the Good; the second one presenting it rather as a dispute among three pestiferous evils, not nurturing many illusions as to what may result for humanity in the following decades from their competition.
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.
The difference between the missions we have embraced determines the intellectual and verbal means used in our respective accounts. 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. For my part, all I can do is use the means of analytic clarification created by philosophy through the millennia – beginning with the very distinction between the discourses of agent and observer –, applying them to a multitude of facts gathered from the most varied sources, including those remote and poorly known to the public, and not from those of the popular media, which reflect rather the persuasive and manipulatory effort of one of the agents than a serious intent to apprehend reality. It is not a coincidence that my opponent appeals most of all to the credibility of popular media, playing with the magnetic power of established commonplace – “the unipolar world,” “American aggressiveness,” “Imperialism,” the “anarchy of the free market,” “individualism,” etc. –, without noticing two details: (1) These topoi are put into circulation by the same media that belongs to the Western globalist elite, and by using them as the basis of his persuasive effort, Professor Dugin accepts as supreme judge of reality the very same enemy that he himself labels as the origin of evil and the father of lies. (2) In making his anti-Americanism rest on that of the globalist media, he implicitly – but with the explosive vehemence of repressed contradictions – advocates against his explicit allegation (which I will comment later on) that globalism is Americanism, that the goal of the global elite is to increase the power and the glory of the USA.
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. In view of this, one should not find it surprising that he attempts to remodel the debate situation itself in order to force it to take his side in the great combat, such as he conceives it.
To this end, he has to falsify, first and foremost, the position of his opponent, turning me into a spokesman and follower of Western globalism, against which, nevertheless, I have written pages without end in the Brazilian media, to the point of being accused, for this reason, of being “a conspiracy theorist,” the standard defamatory label that the globalist elite uses most frequently to intimidate those who dare to investigate it.
Not satisfied with this, he has to throw against me the hostility of my compatriots, insinuating that, for living in the USA and having written some pieces in favor of American conservatism, I am something like a traitor of my homeland.
Let’s see how he brings off this tour de force:
“Latin America and Brazil in particular have some social and cultural differences in comparison with the European or North American societies and cultures. And in the case of Professor de Carvalho, the fact of his living in the USA, plays an important role. Not his geographical residence, I mean, but his cultural identification. This is confirmed by the texts of Professor de Carvalho, that I’ve managed to read. They witness of his adherence to the North American tradition (in its “right” or “traditionalist” version) and of his distance from the main features of Brazilian cultural (critical) attitude towards USA. Being politically on the right wing (I presume) Professor de Carvalho castigates Latin (and Brazilian) “leftism” (le gauchisme). My sympathy in this case is rather on the Latin America’s side. Being critical in front of USA and the Western civilization as a whole, I find a lot of very charming (Eurasian) features in the South and Central American societies. So, I am in some way more pro-Brazilian than the “brazileiro puro” Professor de Carvalho, who rather defends the West as a whole and certain (conservative) sides of USA.
This paragraph is of a magisterial incoherence. If what matters is not my “geographical residence,” but my “cultural identification,” the fact that I live in the USA or in Zambia cannot make any difference. And if Professor Dugin mentions my place of residence while at the same time affirming that it plays no role, what does he mention it for? It serves only as an excipient for the venomous insinuation that comes next: for being as anti-American as the Brazilian left, he would be “much more pro-Brazilian” than I, as if the leftism in force in Brazil were the purest expression of patriotic culture and not the imported graft it really is. In qualifying Brazilian leftism as “Eurasian,” Professor Dugin shows, moreover, that he knows practically nothing of the Brazilian situation. Whoever has followed the great shifts in economic, legal, and cultural policy in Brazil in the last 20 years knows that all of them came ready-made from the globalist centrals – UN, WHO, UNESCO, Bilderberg, Rockefeller, Ford Foundation, George Soros, etc. In economic policy the last Brazilian governments have done nothing but faithfully follow the instructions of the World Bank. In the area of healthcare, all reforms adopted were express recommendations from the World Health Organization. The “politically correct” principles imposed by the government on the whole Brazilian society were, in turn, imposed on the government by the UN and the billion dollar foundations. And I do not need to mention the obscene joy with which the Lula Administration relinquished even parts of the Brazilian territory to international administration, against the express will of the local population. All this is widely-known in Brazil, but news does not seem to have made it to Russia.
That such an abject servitude comes together with histrionic demonstrations of anti-Americanism is the most evident proof that one can be against the USA and in favor of the globalist elite at the same time. How could it be any different if for the past half century worldwide anti-Americanism has been widely financed by this same elite?
If Professor Dugin would point me a single bill approved in Brazil, over the past 20 years, that was inspired by him and not by the likes of Rockefeller or Soros, I will admit that Brazil is “Eurasian.”
His allegation of being “more pro-Brazilian” than I is only gossip, a puerile attempt to turn my compatriots against me, painting me as pro-American and anti-Brazilian. As a matter of fact, in the Brazilian big media I have been practically the only columnist to protest against the globalist arrogance which considers itself the owner of our territory.
I do not hesitate to say that in the last decades Brazilian nationalism, of a noble tradition, has degraded to the point of becoming a histrionic anti-Americanism used to cover up the sacrifice of national sovereignty to the demands of globalism. In this regard, Professor Dugin is on the side of a Brazil made of papier maché, while I, with the modest instruments at my disposal, take up the task of defending the real homeland against enemies of flesh and blood.
If, on the one hand, he pretends to minimize the importance of my place of residence, while at the same time stressing it to insinuate that I am anti-Brazilian and pro-American, all I have to declare is that the very contradiction of his discourse on this point reveals that hide-and-seek game typical of demagogical labeling. Must I remind Professor Dugin that the founder of National-Bolshevism himself, Eduard Limonov, lived in the USA for even longer than I; also that he wrote a novel that takes place in the USA? Why, in his case, the same criterion of “cultural identification” used for me does not apply? After having confused social position and ideological belief, Professor Dugin confuses the latter with geographical residence, to which he, at the same time and paradoxically, denies any importance. It would be nice if he could decide by which means he intends to damage my reputation: by appealing to two contradictory insinuations he only displays the vacillation characteristic of the timid gossiper who says evil things and at the same time swears not to be saying anything at all. I do not take any of this as offense – I do not know a slower soul in taking offense than mine –, I only judge that the problem we are discussing is already complicated enough without these feinting and dodging that only serve to confuse the readers.
Likewise, it does not make sense to paint me as a defender of the “West as a whole,” precisely when I am highlighting the division of this West and, in it, taking the side of those who at this moment do not hold State power in the USA or in Europe. If he would say that I defend one-half of the West against the other half, and that I accuse the latter of complicity with Eurasianism, Professor Dugin would be closer to the truth.[2]
§ 3. The Syndicate
If he falsifies even the identity of his opponent in this debate, with what even greater ardor will Professor Dugin not do the same to his bête noire, Western globalism, which he deliberately seeks to confuse with American national power?
The globalist elite is not only a vague social class of capitalists and bankers. It is an organized entity, with continuous existence for over a century, which meets periodically to ensure the unity of its plans and the continuity of their implementation, with the minuteness and scientific precision with which an engineer controls the transmutation of his blueprint into a building.
The very expression “global elite,” which I have used, does not give an exact idea of the nature of this entity. Much better is the name suggested by the title of the book by Nicholas Hagger, The Syndicate.[3]
The Syndicate is an organization of big capitalists and international bankers committed to establishing a worldwide socialist dictatorship (we will see shortly why socialist). There are so many documents and studies that meticulously depict its origin, history, membership, and modus operandi that no excuse can be accepted for ignorance in this matter, most of all from people who intend to opine about it. No, this is not an insinuation against Professor Dugin. He is perfectly informed about it, and if he commits errors in the conclusions he presents, it is not due to ignorance. It is because the essentially bellicose nature of his approach impels him to divide the panorama into two symmetrically opposed halves, falsifying the whole picture and sending to the limbo of non-existence all the facts that refute this Manichean simplification.
So abundant is the bibliography on the Syndicate that any attempt to summarize it here would be vain. All that can be done is to indicate some essential titles, which the reader will find mentioned here and there in this exposition, and to highlight some points which are indispensable for the understanding of this debate.
1. The Syndicate was formed more than a hundred years ago by initiative of the Rothschilds, a mutlipolar family, with branches in England, France, and Germany since at least the eighteenth century.
2. The Syndicate gathers a few hundreds of billionaire families for the accomplishment of global plans that ensure the continuity and expansion of their power over the entire terrestrial orb. These are very long-term plans, transcending the duration of the lives of individual members of the organization and even of the historical existence of many states and nations involved in the process.
3. The Syndicate is a dynastic organization, whose continuity of action is secured by the succession from parents to children since many generations. We will see below (§ 9 “Geopolitics and History”) that this type of continuity is the distinguishing factor between the true agent subjects of the historical process and the apparent formations, as venerable as they may be, which flutter upon the surface of epochs as Chinese shadows projected on a wall.
4. The Syndicate acts through a multiplicity of subsidiary organizations scattered around the world, as for example the Bilderberg Group or the Council on Foreign Relations, but it does not have itself a legal identity. This is an essential condition for its agency in the world, enabling it to command innumerable political, economic, cultural, and military processes without ever being held directly accountable for the results (or by the iniquity of the means), be it before the courts, or before the court of public opinion. Having most faithful agents spread out in various governments – and in the command of some of them – it is upon these governments that falls, in the public debate, the responsibility for the decisions and actions of the Syndicate, so that states and nations used as tools become also, automatically and without the least difficulty, their scapegoats. This is the explanation why so many political decisions manifestly contrary to the interests and even to the survival of involved nations are later, paradoxically, attributed to nationalist and imperialist ambitions founded upon the “national interest.” Historical examples abound, but to remain in the present it is enough to notice that President Obama, a notorious server of the Syndicate, spent in just a week, US$ 500 million in a war effort destined to deliver the government of Libya to declared anti-American political factions, so that he can be then accused of tyrannical imposition of American power at the very instant he debilitates this power and puts it at the service of its enemies, thus becoming the target of the “anti-imperialist” fury of the latter in the very act of paternally helping them to demolish the force and the prestige of the USA. Lyndon Johnson did not do anything different than this when he dispatched American soldiers to war while at the same time tying up their hands so that they could not possibly win it, thus becoming, in the eyes of the leftist media, the supreme imperialist aggressor, when in truth he was the best secret friend of the Vietcong. The very same disgrace was produced by President Clinton when, in providing assistance to Colombia to combat the drug-trade, he imposed as a condition that “political organizations” involved in drug-trafficking be left unharmed: drug trade did not diminish, but its control was transferred from apolitical gangs to the FARC. Enriched and free of competition, the FARC could then finance the building of the São Paulo Forum and the transformation of almost the whole of Latin America in a fortress of militant anti-Americanism. Thus doubly gifted, the Latin-American left could then benefit from a fabulous increase of power and at the same time protest, with an air of indignation, against the “imperialist intervention” to which it owed the most generous favor. Examples could be multiplied ad infinitum.[4] This is the mode of action that is characteristic of the Syndicate: to use governments as tools for plans that harm their nations, and afterwards to still accuse them of nationalist and imperialist tyranny.
5. Formed by families of diverse nationalities, the Syndicate is a characteristically supra-national entity, being independent and sovereign in face of any possible or imaginable national interest. A brief survey of the list of these families is enough to demonstrate it with abounding evidence. To suppose that the Onassises, the Duponts, the Agnellis, the Schiffs, the Warburgs, the Rothschilds, Prince Bernhard and Queen Beatrix of Holland, King Juan Carlos of Spain, King Harald V of Norway, are all American patriots, devoted to exalting the power and the glory of the USA is such a silly and puerile hypothesis that it does not even merit discussion. The identification of globalist power with American national interest – as in the past with the British Empire or with various colonialisms – is just the usual camouflage with which this omnipresent entity confers upon itself the advantages and comforts of relative invisibility, beating and stealing with the hands of others so as to avoid burning its fingers in the fires it sets around the world (and counting, for this purpose, on the servile collaboration of the international media, which belongs to members of the same Syndicate).
§ 4. Why the Syndicate wants socialism
All available bibliography on the Syndicate attests that its objective is the establishment of a worldwide socialist dictatorship. But people who do not know this bibliography and who, in addition, are used to reasoning based upon the usual meaning of words, without considering the dialectic tension between them and the real objects they designate, find it frightfully hard to understand that capitalists and bankers may desire socialism. After all, is socialism not the state property of the means of production? Is capitalism not private property? How could capitalists want the state to take their property away from them? Based upon this cute reasoning, which a computer program would perform as well as they, if fed with the respective terms and definitions, those creatures then deny that the Syndicate exists or resolutely affirm that it is pro-capitalist, anti-Communist, pro-American, anti-Russian, anti-Chinese and anti-Islamic. Having done that, they are ready to admit that the division of the world as it is delineated by Professor Dugin is a pure expression of reality.
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. From a definition it is never possible to deduce that the defined thing does exist. 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.
Whoever attempts to do this with the definition of “socialism” will reach conclusions which, for the mechanical reasoner and the devout reader of popular media, will seem shocking and terrifying.
Now what is “property of the means of production”? It is not mere possession; it is legal property, the acknowledgement by legitimate state authority of the right of the owner to make use of his property as he wishes, within, of course, the limits of the law. “Private property of the means of production” means that the state guarantees this right to particular citizens wealthy enough to own a factory, a farm, a bank – the so-called “bourgeois;” “State property of the means of production” means that the state guarantees that right only to itself, ripping off the bourgeois.
It so happens that, from the viewpoint of Marxism, which created these terms and their corresponding interpretation, the very notion of “legal property” is a bourgeois fabrication, designed to cover up crude and brutal class domination. The whole world of constitutions, laws and decrees is, according to Marxism, an “ideological superstructure” that does not make any sense in itself and can only be explained as a misleading adornment used to legitimize the exploitation of the poor by the rich. So it is necessary to investigate what is behind the idea of “legal property” in order to uncover the conditions for real, practical control – in short, the structure of power. The bourgeois does not hold the control of the means of production because he has a “legal right” to them, but because he has at his service a whole apparatus of repression, intimidation, marginalization and even physical elimination of anyone who puts his property in jeopardy, really or hypothetically. The structure of power – the order of terror – is the reality behind the legal camouflage.
This means, first of all, that the shift of the control of the means of production, from the bourgeois class to the revolutionary vanguard, cannot ever, in any hypothesis, be a legal transfer of property. This transfer would presuppose the existence of a legal order that would legitimate it, and the socialist revolution cannot destroy only private property: it has to deny and destroy the whole legal order. Even worse: in creating a new legal order to replace the old one, it cannot, as the bourgeois, pretend to believe that it is a reality in itself. The revolution has to admit, frankly, ostensibly, that the new order is not a legal order, but raw and naked power of revolutionary force. In socialism there is no legal order above the power of the Party. This is not only so in reality, but revolutionary socialists are proud to proclaim it is so.
In addition, in the bourgeois context, property entails some legal responsibility. The capitalist proprietor is accountable to state authority for the bad use he makes of his property – if not against proletarians, at least against other bourgeois. But to whom will an authority that is above the legal order itself be accountable? Revolutionary government cannot be a “proprietor” in the same sense that the bourgeois were. They were proprietors for the legal order, guaranteed by it and accountable to it. Socialist government is not a proprietor: it is an absolute controller, independent from and above any legal order.
Many decades ago the greatest minds in the socialist field already realized that this placed before them an unavoidable choice: either they created immediately an implacable, totalitarian, bloody dictatorship, of which they would never be able to rid themselves of, and that would end up sending to prison or to the firing squad the revolutionaries themselves, as it indeed happened everywhere where this alternative was chosen;[5] or, in contrast to that, it would be necessary to establish socialism by gradual and bloodless means, using as a tool the very juridico-political apparatus of bourgeois society and retaining, as much as possible, the minimal quota of legal rights and responsibilities necessary to protect, if not the population in general, at least the revolutionary elite itself.
Which of these paths was chosen? Both, with only a territorial distinction: where it was possible to take power by violence, the dictatorship was the only acceptable path; in other countries it was necessary to promote the progressive ascension of state control of the economy, without making the state the direct legal proprietor of the means of production, which would have rendered it subject to legal responsibilities and demands that could slow down and obstruct the very march towards socialism.
It should be noted, therefore, that in neither case was one dealing with “state property of the means of production”. In socialist dictatorship, there was the brutal, direct control immune to the legal responsibilities of a proprietor. Karl Marx himself called this “raw capitalism” – something much more cruel and arbitrary than what later would be labeled as “savage capitalism”. In the other countries, where the “peaceful” strategy was adopted, the State dodged the direct responsibilities of a proprietor, while at the same time subjugating legal proprietors through fiscal, labor, sanitary, technical, controls, to the point that capitalists would become simple managers at the service of the state, shouldering moreover the legal responsibilities evaded by it. Karl Marx also predicted this possibility when teaching that the transition of property from the bourgeoisie to the state should be slow and gradual, to be carried out through indirect instruments such as progressive income taxation.
In spite of sporadic conflicts, the two strategies have always worked in a convergent fashion. The collaboration was so close that the Fabian Society, the greatest incarnation of the “peaceful path towards socialism” in the West, received instructions directly from the Soviet government, at the very moment when, in Russia, the latter was implementing, by fire and sword, the militarized takeover of the means of production by the state.
With time, though, those who favored the radical strategy had to agree that the growth and development of the modern state apparatus of social and economic control –under the inspiration, by the way, of socialism itself – rendered unfeasible the takeover of power through insurrectional means. Thereafter, only the “revolutions from above” were possible – the revolutions directed by the state itself, through administrative, legal, fiscal means, and police force.
Moreover, the complete nationalization of the means of production by the state proved to be unfeasible not only in practice, but even in theory. In 1922 the economist Ludwig von Mises explained that, by eliminating the free market, all prices would have to be determined by the state. Yet, on the one hand, the number of products in circulation at any given moment was too large for a state agency to calculate their prices in advance. On the other, in order to control prices the government would need to have foreknowledge of all financial resources at the public’s disposal at each moment. In short: price control implied total control of the economy, which on its turn had to begin with price control. Only a divine intelligence could overcome this vicious circle. Price control being impossible, there was no general control of the economy; therefore there was no socialism at all. The maximum that could be achieved was a nominal socialism, with a vast residual freedom of the market which could never be abolished. Though some theoreticians of socialism cried out, as for example Edvard Kardelj, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Yugoslavia, the majority had to admit, growling between their teeth, that von Mises was right. Until the end, all communist economies in the world had to bear a clandestine capitalism that came to reveal itself as a sine qua non condition for the survival of the regime.
From this, two consequences followed unavoidably:
1) Socialism ceased to be a “regime” or a “state of affairs” to become a “process.” There was no “socialist state” to be reached once and for all, but only a “socializing State,” condemned to moving toward socialism without ever arriving at it, like an asymptote. All socialist states which have already existed have been this way, and the ones that may come to exist will be this way eternally. The definition of socialism as state property of the means of production is self-contradictory, and every attempt to implement in practice a self-contradictory theory ends up generating insoluble real contradictions. Conclusion: what ends up being implemented is something very different from what was defined at the outset. So is the fatal dialectics of the relations between thought and reality. The cute mechanic reasoners I mentioned at the beginning of this paragraph will never understand this.
2) As state controls increased in number and complexity, small businesses did not have financial resources to meet them and went bankrupt or were sold to larger companies – ever larger companies. The result: “socialism” became the mere alliance between government and big capital, in a process of centralization of economic power which favors both partners without ever risking to come up to the complete nationalization of the means of production.
The great beneficiaries of this situation are, on one hand, leftist intellectual and political elites; on the other, those I have called “metacapitalists”: capitalists that have grown so wealthy in the regime of economic freedom that they can no longer acquiesce to the fluctuations of the markets:
“If the Medieval system lasted ten centuries, Absolutism did not last more than three. Even shorter will be the reign of liberal bourgeoisie. One century of economic and political freedom was enough to make some capitalists so formidably rich that they no longer wish to submit to the whims of the markets that made them rich. They want to control them, and there are three instruments for this: dominion of the State, in order to enact the statist policies necessary to make the oligopoly eternal; stimulus to socialist and communist movements that invariably favor the growth of state power; and the drafting of an army of intellectuals who prepare public opinion to bid farewell to bourgeois freedoms and happily step into a world of omnipresent and obsessive repression (extending itself to the last details of private life and everyday speech), presented as a paradise adorned both with the abundance of capitalism and the “social justice” of communism. In this new world, the economic freedom indispensable for the functioning of the system is preserved in the strict measure necessary to subsidize the extinction of freedom in the political, social, moral, educational, cultural and religious domains.
“This way, metacapitalists change the very basis of their power. They do not rely on wealth as such, but in the control of the socio-political process. This control, freeing them from the adventurous exposition to the fluctuations of the market, makes them into a durable dynastic power, a neo-aristocracy capable of crossing unscathed the variations of fortune and the succession of generations, sheltered at the castle-fortress of the State and of international organizations. They are no longer megacapitalists: they are metacapitalists – the class that has transcended capitalism and transformed it into the only socialism that ever existed or will ever exist: the socialism of the grand masters and of the social engineers at their service.”[6]
“Socializing-socialism,” destined to replace forever an impossible “socialized socialism,” may be the hell of the majority of entrepreneurs, but it is the paradise of the biggest capitalists – precisely the billion dollar dynasties that form the Syndicate.. Eternally guaranteed by the state bureaucracy against the freedom of the market, and by the intrinsic unfeasibility of socialism against a definitive nationalization of the means of production , they are still helped in both directions by a faithful ally: technology, which, on the one hand, perfects the instruments of social control to the point of being able to determine even the private conduct of citizens without them even noticing that they are being manipulated; and, on the other hand, breathes creativity into the free market so that it can continue to grow even under oppressive state control.
Thus one can clearly understand why the mega-fortunes of the Syndicate have stimulated and subsidized socialism and leftist subversion in such a universal, obsessive, and systematic fashion, since at least the 1940s.
It is an undeniable fact that the building of the Soviet industrial park, as well as its military force, was substantially due to American money (of the Syndicate's members), which flowed there expecting never to return. Whoever has any doubt about it should check the three volumes of the classic study by British economist Antony Sutton: Western Technology and Soviet Technological Development (Hoover Institution Press, Stanford University, 1968-1973), as well as his books National Suicide: Military Aid to the Soviet Union (Arlington House, 1974), Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution (Buccaneer Books, 1999) and The Best Enemy Money Can Buy (Liberty House, 1986).
René A. Wormser’s Foundations: Their Power and Influence (Covenent House Books, 1993) reports the work of the Reese Committee in the American Congress, which as early as in the 1950s proved the active collaboration of the major billion dollar foundations with communist and anti-American movements everywhere. That the findings of the Committee would not result in any measure being taken, be it punitive, or aimed to stop the flow of money to subversion, is the most evident proof of the power of the Syndicate to manipulate American resources against the most obvious national interests of the USA.
Finally, the industrial blossoming of China since the 1990s and its transfiguration from continental slum quarter into the most powerful potential enemy of the USA would be unthinkable without the investments of the USA and without the planned self-destruction of the American industrial park.
It is true that, after the liberalizing economic reforms of Yeltsin, Russia entered into accelerated economic decadence, from which some American capitalists profited a lot. Yet, what were Russian leaders expecting after the extinction of the communist regime? To be awarded with fantastic economic progress? The normal thing would be, instead of this, that the nation be put to work hard, with low wages, in order to pay compensation to the families of the sixty million victims of communism, like the Germans did and do with the victims of Nazism. Who prevented this from taking place? The Syndicate. Read it in Vladimir Bukovski’s Jugement à Moscou: big media and international organizations – two arms of the Syndicate – opposed so much resistance to judicial investigation of Soviet crimes that of all former communist countries only one, Cambodia, was able to establish a court for judging the crimes of the communist regime, and even so did it with a significant delay, thanks to the boycott lead by the UN against the initiative.
The Russians, who are most responsible for the advent of communism, were treated in the last decades with a scandalous generosity – and they still complain that, once the murderous regime was extinct, they did not get as much money as they wanted. They did not receive, for their heinous crimes, the award they expected from the West.
§ 5. Whose side am I on?
Of course, this does not mean that I am in favor of nothing, or that I do not see positive forces acting in the world. Yet, precisely, these forces cannot be counted among the main agents in dispute, and do not have, at least at the moment, any global plan or strategy that may neutralize or disarm the three monsters. Among them I would single out: (1) Christian, Catholic or Protestant, communities from all countries;[7] (2) The Jewish nation; (3) American conservative nationalism. Neither of the three is fighting for world domination. But the reality is quite different: by unanimous decree of the globalist blocks, all of them are singled out to die.
If my sympathy goes to anyone, it is to these three who are sentenced to death. Not that I wish to oppose to the three projects of global domination three alternative projects which are presently anemic. If there were plans for the establishment of a Christian or Jewish or redneck world dictatorship, I would be among the first to denounce them, as I denounce the Russian-Chinese militarists, the Western oligarchs, and the apostles of the Universal Caliphate. But these plans do not exist. The fight of the three disadvantaged factions that I mentioned is not for world power: it is for pure and simple survival.
That the extinction of Catholic-Protestant Christianity, of the state of Israel and of nationalist America is on the program of the three globalist blocks is something that does not need to be proved, so blatant is the cultural, mediatic, political and legal assault at work against these entities from three diverse and convergent directions (I will return to this on one of the next messages).
It is also needless to prove, since it is too evident, that up to now these three communities have only responded to the attack by occasional, sporadic and totally unconnected reactions, without any comprehensive strategic coordination, be it within each of those blocks, be it, even more so, among the three of them. A worldwide united front of Christians, Jews, and American nationalists would not be a bad idea, but for now I do not see any sign pointing in this direction. It seems that the representatives of the three communities are afraid of thinking about it, imaginarily anticipating the brutal reaction of their enemies.
On the other hand, it is known that Russia and China are the largest suppliers of weapons to terrorist movements. Why does the American government not denounce this and force the two powers, under the penalty of economic sanctions, to stop it? It is simple: the Syndicate will not permit it. No one in the globalist elite agrees to defend his country against the most harmful “allies” America ever had.
Finally, it is not necessary to highlight all the initiatives undertaken by international organizations and by various Western governments – beginning with England – to favor the Islamic invasion and debilitate, at the same time, the Christian tradition that would obviously be the sole cultural resistance possibly effective against the advance of militant Islam in Europe and the USA.
If confronted with all this facts Professor Dugin still insists that the Syndicate is the great enemy of the Russian-Chinese and Islamic blocks, it can only be for two reasons: (1) Eurasianism, as leftism, is one more trick with which the Syndicate strengthens itself by means of a fake enemy; (2) the Eurasian movement is genuine, but stems from that neurosis which is typical of the proud poor, who, in view of the help he received, feels envy and resentment rather than gratitude and, instead of returning friendship for generosity, only thinks about destroying his benefactor, taking his place and then telling the story upside-down, pretending to be a victim instead of a beneficiary.[8]
It is still early to know which of the two hypotheses is true. But one thing is certain: there is no third one.
§ 6. Individualism and collectivism
I began my opening message pointing out the asymmetry between the isolated observer, who speaks only in his own name, and the leader who expresses the political will of a party, a movement, a state or group of states.
Professor Dugin saw in this the symbolic crystallization of the opposition between individualism and collectivism, West and East.
This does not seem to me to be a correct application of the rules of symbolism, which both he and I learned in René Guénon.
A genuine symbolism must respect the borders between different planes of reality instead of confusing them. Where Professor Dugin saw a symbol, I see only a metaphor, and a rather far-fetched one.
Individualism as the name of an ideological current is one thing; something entirely different from, and having no connection with it, is the position of a human being at the bottom, middle, or top of a hierarchy of command. From the latter one cannot deduce the former; neither can one see in the social position of an individual a “symbol” of his real or supposed ideological identity. Otherwise, every writer without support in a political organization would necessarily be a follower of ideological individualism, including the founders of National-Bolshevism, Limonov and Dugin at the time when they began to form their first ideas, alone and ignored by the world. To be an isolated individual is one thing; to be an individualist is another, whether we employ the word “individualist” in the sense of a moral habit or an ideological conviction. The implicit deduction in the “symbolism” that Professor Dugin believes to have found is a perfect non sequitur. Authentic symbolism, according to René Guénon, must go beyond and above logic instead of falling below its most elementary requirements.
Moreover, instead of forcefully attaching to my lapel the badge of a follower of Western individualism, Professor Dugin could have asked what I think about it. After all, freedom of expression in a debate does not consist only in the power each of the opponents has to give this or that answer to a certain question, but also, and eminently, in his possibility of rejecting the formulation of the question and reshaping the whole question from its foundations, as he sees fit.
In my most modest and individual opinion, “individualism” and “collectivism” are not the names of substantive historical entities, distinct and independent, separated as material beings in space, but rather labels that some political movements use to brand themselves and their opponents. Now, political science, as I already affirmed, was born at the moment when Plato and Aristotle began to understand the difference between the discourse of the various political agents in conflict and the discourse of the scientific observer who tries to understand the conflict (the fact that political agents would later learn to imitate the language of science does nothing to invalidate this initial distinction). Thus, our main duty in an intellectually serious debate is to analyze the terms of political discourse, to verify what real actions insinuate themselves underneath them, instead of naively taking them as direct and frank translations of effective realities.
Quite clearly, the terms “individualism” and “collectivism” do not express linear and univocal principles of action, but two clusters of dialectic tensions, which manifest themselves in real contradictions every time one attempts to put in practice, as if it were possible, a linearly “individualistic” or “collectivistic” policy.
First of all, and to remain only in the most simple and banal aspects of the matter, each of these terms immediately evokes a morally positive meaning along with a negative one, and it is not possible, not even in the realm of pure semantics, to separate one meaning from the other in order to assign to each one of the terms an invariably good or bad connotation.
“Individualism” suggests, on one hand, selfishness, indifference to your neighbor, the concentration of each one on the pursuit of his own exclusive interests; on the other, it suggests the duty to respect the integrity and the freedom of each individual, which automatically forbids that we use him as a mere instrument, and therefore places limits to the attainment of our selfish purposes.
“Collectivism” evokes, on one hand, solidarity, the self-sacrifice that each one makes for the good of all; on the other, it evokes also the crushing of real and concrete individuals in the name of abstract and hypothetical collective benefits.
When we go beyond mere semantics and observe the self-named “individualistic” and “collectivistic” policies in action in the world, we note that the duality of meaning built-in in the terms themselves transmutes itself into paradoxical political effects, which are the opposite of the goods or evils presumed in the use of these terms as adornments or stigmas.
Old Hegel already taught that a concept only transmutes itself into concrete reality through the inversion of its abstract meaning.
This transmutation is one of the most notable constants of human history.
Collectivism, as a policy of general solidarity, only realizes itself through the dissolution of individual wills in a hierarchy of command that culminates in the person of the enlightened guide – the Leader, Emperor, Führer, Father of the Peoples. Nominally incorporating into his person the transcendent forces that unify the mass of nobodies and legitimize as many sacrifices as are imposed on it, this creature, in reality, not only retains in himself all the weaknesses, limitations, and defects of his initial individuality, but almost invariably lets himself be corrupted and degraded to a point which is below the level of moral integrity of the common individual, transforming himself into a despicable mental patient. Hitler rolling on the floor in trances of persecutory mania; Stalin delighting himself in the sadistic pleasure of condemning to death his most intimate friends on the allegation of crimes they had not committed; Mao Dzedong sexually abusing hundreds of peasant girls who he had promised to defend against the lubricity of landowners, show that the political power accumulated in the hands of these individuals did not increase in a single milligram their power of self-control, it only put at their disposal the means to impose their individual whims upon the mass of de-individualized subjects. Collective solidarity culminates in the empire of the “Absolute Individual”.[9] And this individual, whom propaganda covers with all the pomp of a heaven-sent man, is never an example of sanctity, virtue, and heroism, but rather of wickedness, abjection, and cowardice. Absolute collectivism is the triumph of Absolute Egoism.
Individualism taken in its negative sense, on its turn, not only can never reach its ultimate political consequences, but it cannot even be put in practice in the realm of the most modest individual actions. The total disaffection to peers, the exclusive devotion to the pursuit of individual advantages, excludes by hypothesis the desire to share them with other people. By denying to the neighbor the benefits obtained in the egoistic activity, this hypothetic extreme individualist would exclude himself from all human interaction and would fall into the darkest solitude, becoming ipso facto impotent for any social activity, and therefore also for the attainment of his egoistic objectives. The type of the misanthropic usurer who locks himself up in his money bin to lonely enjoy the possession of riches that he cannot use is perhaps a good character for fairy tales and comic strips, but he cannot exist in real life. On the most daring hypothesis, the egoistic pleasure that he could attain would be to masturbate in the bathroom, refusing to take as the object of his erotic fantasy anyone else but his own person. It is the nature of things that collectivism can be carried to that extreme point where it becomes its opposite – the kingdom of the Absolute Individual –, while egoistic individualism can only be practiced within the strict limits that do not allow it to go much beyond affectation and pretense. Egoistic individualism is not a line of practical action; it is the phony justification with which an individual who is neither more nor less egoistic than the average of mankind pretends to be a tough guy. And it is obvious that even the most obdurate tough guy prefers to enjoy pleasures in the company of friends, relatives, a lover, instead of locking himself in the bathroom with his own person so he does not have to admit that he did something good to his neighbor.
As for individualism, taken in the sense of respect and devotion to the integrity of individuals, its practice is not only viable, but constitutes the sole basis upon which one can create that environment of humanitarian solidarity that is the proclaimed goal – though never attained – of collectivism.
§ 7. The sentiment of community solidarity in the USA
It is no coincidence that the country where the freedom of individuals was most cultivated is also the country where participation in charitable and humanitarian community activities is the largest in the world. This feature of American life is largely ignored outside the USA (and totally concealed by Hollywood’s militant anti-Americanism), but I do not see any motive to believe rather in the deformed opinions and hateful fantasies of the international media industry than in what I see with my own eyes every day, and that can be confirmed anytime with substantial quantitative data. Here are some of them:[10]
1. Americans are the people who contribute the most to charitable causes in the world.
2. The USA is the only country where individual contributions to charitable causes surpass total government aid.
3. Among the 12 peoples who give the most in voluntary contributions – USA, UK, Canada, Australia, South Africa, Ireland, the Netherlands, Singapore, New Zealand, Turkey, Germany, and France –, American contributions are more than twice those of the runner-up (UK). If any smart guy wishes to diminish the importance of these figures, alleging that “they give more because they are richer,” he better forget it: the contributions are not ranked in absolute numbers, but as a percentage of GDP. Americans simply pull out more of their own pocket to help the poor and the sick, even in enemy countries. The most solidary Russia and China do not even make it to the list.
4. Americans adopt more orphan children – including from enemy countries – than all other peoples of the world combined.
5. Americans are the only people who, in every war they fight, rebuild the economy of the defeated country, even at the cost of making it a trade competitor and a powerful enemy in the diplomatic field. Compare what the USA did in France, Italy, Germany, and Japan with what China did in Tibet, or Russia in Afghanistan (details in subsequent messages).
6. Americans do not offer only their money to the poor and the needy. They give them their time in the form of voluntary work. Voluntary work is one of the oldest and most solid American institutions. Half of the American population dedicates its time to work for free for hospitals, childcare centers, orphanages, prisons, etc. What other people in the world has made active compassion an essential element of its style of existence?
7. In addition, the value attributed by American society to works of generosity and compassion is such that no big shot in finance or industry may dodge the duty of making immense annual contributions to universities, hospitals, etc., because if he refuses to do it, he will be immediately downgraded from the status of honored citizen to that of public enemy.
Professor Dugin opposes American individualism to Russian-Chinese “holism”. He says that in the first one people only act according to their individual preferences, while in the second they integrate themselves into the greater objectives proposed by the government. Yet, quite clearly, the governments of Russia and China have proposed to their peoples rather to kill their peers than to help them: no charitable work, in Russia or China, ever had the dimensions, the cost, the power and the social importance of the Gulag, of the Laogai, and the secret police, tentacular organizations in charge of controlling all sectors of social life through oppression and terror.
Secondly, it is true that Americans do not do good because they are forced to by the government, but because they are stimulated to do it by the Christian values they believe in. Freedom of consciousness, instead of degenerating into sheer anarchy and the war of all against all, is moderated and channeled by the unity of Christian culture which, notwithstanding all the efforts of the globalist elite to destroy it, is still hegemonic in the USA. John Adams, the second president of the USA, already said that a Constitution such as the American, granting civil, economic, and political freedom to all, was made only for a moral and religious people and no other. The proof that he was right is that, as soon as the principles of Christian morality began to be corroded from above, by the action of the government allied to the globalist forces and to the international left which Professor Dugin so much praises as the moral reserve of humanity, the environment of honesty and puritan rigidity that prevailed in the American business world gave way to an epidemic of frauds as never before seen in the history of the country. The phenomenon is abundantly documented in Tamar Frankel’s book Trust and Honesty: America's Business Culture at a Crossroad (Oxford University Press, 2006).
What I say is not based on statistics alone. I have lived for six years in this country and here I am treated with an affection and understanding that no Brazilian, Russian, French, German, or Argentinean ever enjoyed in his own country. As soon as I settled in these boondocks in Virginia, neighbors appeared from everywhere bringing cakes and gifts, offering to take our kids to school, to introduce us to the church of our preference, to show us the interesting places in the region, to help us solve bureaucratic problems, and so on. Good neighborhood is not an advertising slogan. It is a living reality. It is an American institution, which does not exist anywhere else in the world and was not created by the government. It comes from the time of the Jamestown Colony (1602). Though my family and I are Catholics, the first place we visited here was a Methodist Church, the one closest to my home. Just guess what the faithful were doing when we arrived there. They were collecting money for the “street children”… in Brazil! And the collection of donations was accompanied by speeches and exhortations able to break anyone’s heart. I felt ashamed to tell those people that, according to official studies, the majority of Brazilian “street children” has a home, and a father and a mother, and the only reason they live on the streets is because they like it. American compassion ignores the lies and shamelessness of many of its foreign beneficiaries: it arises from the naïve belief that all the children of God are, at least deep inside, faithful to the Father.
Americans are shy and always have the impression that they are bothering you. Soon after the initial reception, they prefer to keep a distance, not to meddle in your life. They only come close if you invite them to do so. “I don’t want to impose” is an almost obligatory sentence when they visit someone. But if you have any problem, any difficulty, they will make haste to help you with the solicitude of old friends. And this is not only with the newly arrived. Sometimes it is the Americans themselves who, used to hearing bad things about their people, get surprised when they find an inexhaustible reserve of goodness in the hearts of their fellow countrymen. Read this testimony by Bruce Whitsitt, a champion in martial arts who every now and then writes for the American Thinker:
“Both before and after Dad died, good Samaritans came out of nowhere to offer aid and comfort. I discovered that my parents were surrounded by neighbors who had known them and cared about them for many years…
After it was all over, I was struck by the unbelievable kindness of everyone who helped.
At the end of the day, this tragedy reopened my eyes to the deep-running goodness of Americans. So many people in this country are decent and good simply because they have grown up in the United States of America, a society that encourages charity and neighborliness. Decency is not an accident; in countries such as the old Soviet Union, indifference was rampant and kindness rare because virtue was crushed at every turn. America, on the other hand, has cultivated freedom and virtuous behavior, which allows goodness to flourish. Even in Los Angeles -- that city of fallen angels, the last place on earth where I would have expected it -- I experienced compassionate goodness firsthand.
Goodness is not something that a beneficent government can bestow; it flows from the hearts of free citizens reared in a tradition of morality, independence, and resourcefulness.”[11]
The American nation was founded upon the idea that the unifying principle of society is not the government, the armed state bureaucracy, but society itself, in its culture, its religion, its traditions, and in its moral values. Professor Dugin, who does not seem to conceive of other model of social control aside from Russian imperial theocracy, where the police and the Church (and later the Party) act hand in hand to fetter the people, can only imagine the USA as a selva selvaggia of conflicting egoisms, proving that he knows nothing about American life.
Perhaps there is no other country in the world where the sense of solidary community is as strong as in the USA. Whoever has lived here for some time knows this and will be at least surprised by the presumption that China or Russia are, in this aspect, models that Americans should copy.
It is also true that this sense of community can only flourish in an environment of freedom, where the government does not impose upon society any “holistic” model of official goodness. The biggest proof of this is the open conflict that today exists between what Marvin Olasky, in a classic book, called “old compassion” and the state charity that for four decades has been trying to replace it. Wherever the latter has prevailed, crime rates go up, families are dissolved, and selfish individualism stifles the spirit of goodness inherent to traditional libertarian individualism [12] It was not only in books like Olasky’s that I learned this. I see it everyday with my own eyes. In Virginia, where the black population is proportionally as large as Brazil’s, the difference in conduct between older black people and the younger ones strikes every visitor. The former are the gentlest people in the world, they have a kind of natural elegance that is the exact balance between humility and uprightness. The youth are irritable, arrogant, and ready to exhibit a superiority that does not exist, to feel offended by any foolishness and to call whites to a fight without the least motive. Where does the difference come from? The old ones were raised in the environment of old compassion, while the young ones grew up in the environment of state welfarism that poisons them with “politically correct” resentment.
Life in the countryside in the USA is the best proof that community solidarity has nothing to do with state collectivism and is even contrary to it. The more "holistic” intervention there is, the more natural bonds are undone, the more people get away from each other, the more the “society of confidence” of which Alain Peyrefitte[13] spoke allows itself to be replaced by the society of suspicion, of mutual hostility, of hatred and of group exclusivism. It is that path that leads, ultimately, to the Police State. Professor Dugin knows this perfectly well, so much so that his defense of “holism” against “individualism” culminated in an open and frank apology of the dictatorial regime as a model for the whole world.
§ 8. Evil deeds compared
Professsor Dugin also says that even though I sufficiently expose the sins of the KGB, of the Communist Party, and of Al-Qaeda, I do not mention the crimes of America, as “Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, the bombing of Serbia”. He asks me what I have to say about this.
Now, what I have to say are two things:
First: Do the math. – According to Professor R. J. Rummel, who is probably the most respected expert in the matter, the number of victims of all violent actions in which the American government was involved from 1900 to 1987 is 1,634,000 people (this includes two world wars, with Hiroshima and Nagasaki included, plus the Vietnam war, and all military interventions abroad). The USSR, in a shorter period, from 1917 to 1987, killed 61,911,000, and China, from 1949 to 1987 only, killed 76,702,000. It is a matter of elementary arithmetic to conclude that American individualists, at worst, are one hundred times less murderous than the solidary Russians and Chinese. No human brain in its normal functioning can judge that the levels of dangerousness are equal on all sides. In order of deadly threats that hang over the human race, China comes first, Russia ranks second, and the USA one hundredth. When humankind has rid itself of ninety nine of its armed enemies, I will begin to worry about the much trumpeted “American aggressiveness.” Professor Dugin seeks to draw attention to the latter, inflating it through words, in order to invert the hierarchy of reasonable precautions and try to cover up the actions of the true agents of genocide, of the true enemies of the human race.
Second: Look at the map. – The totality of the victims of the USA is made up of foreigners, killed in combat in enemy soil. In counting the victims of China and Russia, I purposefully excluded military casualties: the numbers, therefore, refer to unarmed civilians, murdered in times of peace by their own governments. When the government of the USA, in time of peace, begins to kill American citizens by the millions, by reason of mere political disagreement, I will be as concerned with this as Professor Dugin should now be with the Tibetans, murdered in bulk by the Chinese and forbidden to freely practice their national religion.
§ 9. Geopolitics and history
Further on, Professor Dugin defends geopolitics against my ostensive downplaying of this science or pseudoscience. With good reason, he asks me for an explanation about it. Here it goes:
My problem with geopolitics is that, while it provides a relatively accurate description of the state of affairs at each moment, it conceals the decisive causes of historical happening under a phantasmagoria of geographical entities covered over with an appearance of having a life of their own.
The figures that the practitioner of geopolitics projects on the map, with the names of nations, states, empires, power zones, etc., giving the impression that these entities act and constitute the true characters of history, are only the crystallized result of the actions of much deeper and more durable historical forces. Those figures move about on the screen as Chinese shadows, giving the impression that they have a life of their own, but they are only names and disguises of agents that are very different from them.
I have already explained this point in my class handouts, “Method in the social sciences,” and “Who is the subject of history,” and here I cannot but summarize them in a drastic and somewhat rough fashion. The basic questions are: (1) What is historical action? (2) Who is the subject of history?
Action is a deliberate change of a state of affairs. Every action presupposes (a) the temporal continuity of the subject; (b) the unity and continuity of his intentions, such as they reveal themselves in the sequence that goes from a plan to its accomplished effects.
All transformations in the historical scene result from human actions, but these actions mutually mix, hinder, neutralize, and modify themselves, so that nobody controls the process. Mixed actions do not have a determinate acting subject, since they result precisely from the impossibility of a single agent to make his objectives prevail over the others’. These are transformations, but not properly actions. We can only speak of “historical action,” in a strict sense, when a determinate agent succeeds in controlling, to the extent possible, the situation as a whole and, following an identifiable line of continuity, imposes a deliberate course to the process.
Examples of historical action are the crossing of the Red Sea by the Jews, the Christianization of Europe by the Catholic Church, the Protestant Reformation, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, and the Chinese Revolution. In all these cases, a determinate agent managed to control the process, preventing his actions from being neutralized by the interference of other agents, and therefore to arrive at results which are approximately identical to the ones willed for.
History is composed of two kinds of processes: controlled and uncontrolled ones. Only the first ones are historical actions and have a determinate agent. The second ones have multiple subjects, do not follow a predeterminate course and nobody can allege to be the author of the results achieved.
In second place, one can only call historical action that which produces long-lasting results beyond the lifespan of the individual agents involved in it. Durability in time is the hallmark of historic action. Whatever melts into air before the death of the individual agent only enters history, precisely, as a frustrated action, dissolved into the general mass of concomitant or subsequent actions, and incapable of imposing a course to events.
Now, the second question: Who can be an agent of a historical action? States? Nations? Empires? Of course not. These entities result from the combination of heterogeneous forces which struggle to dominate them from within. They do not have their own will, but they reflect, at each moment, the will of a dominant group, which may be replaced by another in the next moment. A state, nation or empire is an apparent agent, manipulated by other, more durable, more stable agents, capable of dominating it and using it for their objectives, which frequently transcend even the duration of the national, state and imperial formations which they utilized. An expression such as “History of Brazil” or “History of Russia” is only a metonymy, which denominates as the subject of an action the mere geographical area where the action took place. Of course, following the narrative over several centuries, it is possible to pick up some constants, which will give an appearance of unity of action to what is just the recurrence of impersonal, mixed causes, which are beyond anybody’s control. Strictly speaking, one is not dealing with an “action,” but with the simple unpremeditated result of thousands of unconnected and heterogeneous actions and reactions. For example, one notes that since the Revolution of 1789, France has increasingly lost prestige and power, but this certainly was not in the plans of the monarchy, nor of the revolutionaries, nor of the republican governments that followed since then. This process, like other similar ones, is not an action; it does not have a subject, it has only passive objects which suffer it without being able to control it and, more often than not, without even being able to understand the line of causes and consequences that drags them as leaves blown by the wind.
Clearly, historical action cannot be understood through the same methods used to study an unpremeditated causal process. In the case of the latter, it is necessary to reconstitute the various unconnected actions and verify how they came to produce a result that no one could control. In the case of historical action, there is at the beginning of the process a deliberate project; in the duration of its course, a sequence of coherent actions, adjustments, and readjustments that lead the process to a determinate end. The rationality of historical action is that of means and ends, while the rationality of uncontrolled processes is an interpretative conjecture designed a posteriori by a historian, often as an attempt to confer meaning to what is meaningless. In this process, the interpreter of historical events may be led to attribute substantial unity – and therefore capacity for historical action – to composite pseudo-agents, without a unifying will, such as nations, states, social classes, and even geographical features.
As with nations, “social classes” cannot be historical agents. None of them has had and will never have a unity of purposes able to follow a coherent plan of action through two, three, four generations.
To be a historical agent, the group or entity must:
(a) Nurture permanent or long-term objectives.
(b) Be capable of continuing the pursuit of these objectives beyond the lifespan of its individual agents, beyond the duration of the present state of affairs, and beyond the duration of even the states, nations and empires involved.
(c) Be capable, therefore, of reproducing individual agents able to continue the action through the centuries and to adapt the original plans to the different situations that may emerge without losing view of the initial goals.
Only the following entities fulfill these conditions:
(1) The great universal religions.
(2) Initiatory and esoteric organizations.
(3) Royal and noble dynasties and similar entities.
(4) Ideologically revolutionary movements and parties.
(5) Spiritual agents: God, angels, and demons.
Everything, absolutely everything that happens in the historical scene either comes from one of these forces, or is the result of an uncontrolled combination of forces. The very creation and dissolution of nations, states, and empires derive from this – which means, ultimately, that these entities are not acting subjects, but results, and for this very reason also instruments of the agency of forces that transcend, comprehend, and determine them. These forces are constituted either by genuine historical agents, or by the uncontrolled combination of diverse actions.
Already in the first page of his classic work, General Theory of the State, the great Georg Jellinek taught that: “The phenomena of human social life are divided into two classes: those that are essentially determined by a directing will, and those that exist or may exist without an organization due to acts of the will. The first ones are necessarily subjected to a plan, an order; they emanate from a conscious will, in opposition to the second ones, whose order rests on very different forces.”[14]
From this warning some unavoidable methodological rules must be deduced:
1) Never confuse the two types of processes, and never indistinctly apply to one the explicative concepts developed for the other.
2) Do not forget that uncontrolled processes also result, at least in part, from deliberate, though partial, actions, which intermingle and modify each other without an overall control.
Breaking rule number 1 is the primordial occupation of the interpreters mentioned above, chiefly those who seek to identify, under the heteroclite mass of events, a “meaning of history.” At the least sign of a consistency, a similarity, an analogical repetition in the long-term results of uncontrolled actions, these metaphysicians of pseudo-being are ready to discover there unconscious premeditations, collective intentions and, in short, to attribute the unity of action of the true subjects to collective phantasms, to abstractions, and to entia rationis.
§ 10. The true historical agent behind Eurasianism
An example of historical force that infinitely transcends the borders and the duration of states and empires is the Orthodox Church, of which Professor Dugin says he is a believer. She gave cultural unity and content to the empire of Kiev. She survived it when the Muscovite center of power established a new empire. She survived the fall of this empire and the six decades of terror that followed, and came out of it unscathed to the point of inspiring Professor Dugin with a new Russian imperial project. The successive national and state formations which appeared and disappeared from the Russian map during this history are only shadows that the gigantic body of the Orthodox Church projects over the Eastern world, preserving her unity of purpose while the political forces come into being and melt into air as bubbles of soap. Professor Dugin: look at your Church, and you will know what a historical agent is. Geopolitical unities are born out of the initiative of historical agents, and they only appear to act by themselves because the genuine agents, besides being by nature discrete, act according to a deeper rhythm, slower than the very formation and dissolution of geopolitical unities.
The strength of the Orthodox Church as a historical agent has penetrated deeply into the mind of Professor Dugin, shaping his “holistic” notion of theocratic empire. He does not conceive of the empire but as a structure emanated from the Church and united to her, symbolically, in the person of the Czar. In an interview given in 1998 to a Polish magazine[15] he qualifies as “heresy” the distinction between Church and Empire that shaped Western civilization. But without this separation, the only hypothesis left is that the borders of religious expansion coincide with the map of the empire with pinpoint accuracy. Now, the various empires and imperial nations existing in history have always had well-defined borders that separated them from other empires and independent nations. In this case, the imperial religion becomes only an expanded national religion. What is then the Czar? One of two things: either he is the head of a mere national religion having no possibility of expanding itself beyond its borders and looking with deadly envy at the expansion of her Western competitor, or, alternatively, if he wants his religion to impose itself as universal belief, he has to invade all countries and become the emperor of the world. Both the National-Bolshevik project and its Eurasian version are born from an internal contradiction of the Russian imperial religion. The Eurasian project is the only way out for the Orthodox Church if she does not want to remain confined to the limits of the Russian nation, failing in her declared mission as a universal religion. Meanwhile, the Roman Catholic Church can expand comfortably to the last frontiers of Paraguay and China without the need to carry an empire on its back. And that was, in fact, what happened, while the Orthodox Church, through the medium of Professor Dugin, is still looking for an exit leading to the world and does not see other means of finding it but to constitute herself into a World Empire. All the world of ideas of Professor Dugin is a reflex of an inner, structural drama of the Orthodox Church. All the talk about geopolitical borders is only a strategic arrangement to try, once again, to fulfill the impossible dream of this grand and portentous historical agent which, in choosing to be an imperial religion, condemned herself to either remain imprisoned within national borders, or begin a world war.
[1] Among the readers, there were some – fortunately only a few – who were fool enough to interpret those photos as captatio benevolentiae, without noticing that they are the most exact and realistic humorous translation of a pure and simple fact (which on its turn illustrates without the least rhetorical emphasis the fundamental Platonic-Aristotelian distinction), and even as an indication of self-pity, as if I were regretting, and not thanking the heavens, the nullity of my stockpile of weapons of mass destruction and other instruments of war action that abound in the hands of my opponent. I wonder where I could hide, in my home’s garden, an arsenal of atomic bombs and some tons of chemical weapons, and to whom could I sell all this junk in the case that a world war does not happen.
[2] It is true that he says that, if there are two Americas, one of them, the one I defend, is “purely virtual,” that is, “only a possibility,” and only the other one exercises significant political action. But the value of this reasoning is demonstrated by him later, when he says that, from the three globalist groups I distinguished, only one is politically active and relevant, while the other two, poor things, are only striving to defend themselves. If being limited to defensive attitudes before a greater power is the same that being only a possibility, then this reasoning should not apply only to conservative America, but to the Russian-Chinese and the Islamic blocks. In my understanding, the lesser power enjoyed by a faction does not turn it into a merely possible faction, because it is from the weaker factions that comes, in the course of time, the great historical changes. If the two anti-Western blocks are fighting to dislodge a more powerful enemy, the same is being done by conservative America, comprised today of at least half of American voters. It would be great if Professor Dugin would use the terms “real” and “possible (virtual)” in a more serious fashion, instead of employing them to erase from the picture the factors that debilitate his argument.
[3] Nicholas Hagger, The Syndicate. The Story of the Coming World Government, Ropley, Hants (UK), O-Books, 2004.
[4] And these are not only isolated examples. This has been the overall strategy of the Syndicate in its relations with the American government since many decades: to destroy the power, the economy, and the sovereignty of the USA through measures that will later be attributed to an exactly opposite motivation and imputed to “Yankee imperialistic voracity.”. See for instance the succession of global monetary agreements celebrated since Bretton Woods (1944). All of them are explained as stages in the process of domination of the world economy by the USA. It is nothing more than an interpretation, but one that for being so often repeated conceals and makes invisible the hard fact that, when these agreements began, the USA was the largest creditor in the world; today it is the largest debtor, at the brink of bankruptcy. If it is true that “by their fruits you shall know them,” then the obvious truth is that the power of the Syndicate and of the USA do not grow in direct, but rather in inverse proportion.
[5] This alternative entailed, in addition, the creation of a more powerful and indestructible ruling class than the bourgeoisie itself ever was.
[6] Olavo de Carvalho, “História de quinze séculos” [“History of Fifteen Centuries”], Jornal da Tarde (Sao Paulo), June 17, 2004, available at: www.olavodecarvalho.org/semana/040617jt.htm.
[7] Particularly those in Africa and Asia, which today flow to Europe and North America, in a heroic effort to re-Christianize those who one day had Christianized them. By the way, the priest of my parish is an African from Uganda.
[8] Additional explanations on this and other topics of this message were given in my lecture number 99 (March 26, 2011), ,as part of a weekly seminar course on philosophy. The transcription is available at: www.seminariodefilosofia.org and www.olavodecarvalho.org.
[9] The term is from Julius Evola, but here I use it in a sense that is not necessarily his.
[10] See The Center on Philantropy, Indiana University, Giving USA 2010. The Annual Report on Philantropy for the Year 2009, Giving USA Foundation, 2010; The Center for Global Prosperity, Hudson Institute, The Index of Global Philantropy and Remittances, Hudson Institute, 2010; Charities Aid Foundation, International Comparisons of Charitable Giving, 2006; Virginia A. Hodgkinson at al., Giving and Volunteering in the United States. Findings from a National Survey Conduced by The Gallup Organization, Washington D. C., Independent Sector, 1999; Lori Carangelo, The Ultimate Search Book: Worldwide Adoption, Genealogy and Other Secrets, Baltimore (MD), Clearfield, 2011.
[11] “The great goodness of America”, in: http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/01/ the_great_goodness_of_america_1.html.
[12] See Marvin Olasky, The Tragedy of American Compassion, Wheaton, IL, Crossway Books, 1992 (republished 2008).
[13] Alain Peyrefitte, La Societé de Confiance. Essai sur les Origines et la Nature du Développement, Paris, Odile Jacob, 1995.
[14] Georg Jellinek, Teoría General del Estado, translated by Fernando de los Rios, México, FCE, 2004, p. 55.