We need to do a mental experiment and imagine what else—other than a nuclear strike—could the West at war with us do to us? What sanctions to impose? Who to expel? How to humiliate? Kick us out of where? Deprive us of what? (We are not considering a nuclear strike, because they won’t, and if they do, it won’t matter, because we will).
Well, the West will do it all. And nothing will stop it.
And there is no need to build illusions here—in fact, the West does not depend on us for almost anything substantial. And if it does, it is intensively looking for a replacement. And more often than not, it finds one. Trying to pin it down with some natural resources or something else is unlikely to have any effect. It is good that we have stopped reassuring ourselves with “severe European winter, which Europe will not survive, allegedly, without us.” It survived the last one and it will survive this one. And Ukraine will not collapse and surrender by itself—until we ruin it and force it to surrender. By will, by force and by relying on ourselves. Only on ourselves.
We have to learn to live without the West. Completely.
We simply discard everything that binds us to it. Radically cut off all contacts, cut off all forms of dependence, stop all transactions, stop all interaction in the technical, economic and humanitarian spheres.
No grain and no fertilizer. No publications in Western scientific journals, withdrawal from SCORUS, revision of RINC criteria. Not waiting until Russian scientists are given an ultimatum: either betray your homeland or you are no longer scientists. And even now it is already practically so.
In sports that is how it is. In politics, it’s even more than that. In economics and finance—everything is moving in the same direction.
The West is cutting us off from itself, and putting forward conditions as to not cut us off further—betray the country, the people, the society, Russia, betray Putin. And then we will see whether you are still an oligarch or no longer an oligarch, a scientist or no longer a scientist, a politician or no longer a politician.
Anything that they can hit us with, the West will hit us with it. With whatever it has already; and with what it does not yet have, it will hit us gradually.
It’s easy to imagine. And if you imagine it, prepare yourself.
We are condemned henceforth to live without the West.
It’s completely unexpected. But it makes perfect sense.
Everything Western is deeply toxic from now on (frankly, it always has been). It is, after all, an addiction to what we do not control, but what the enemy controls. Any hint of liberalism, any recognition of Western universalism, any acceptance of the normativity of anything that comes from the West, any acceptance of Western rules, criteria, practices, anywhere and in anything, is already a step toward betrayal, if not betrayal itself.
That’s what it means to be a Civilized State.
Not to depend in anything and in any way on another civilization, and above all on the one that is waging a merciless war against us.
Once we completely sever all relations with this global model (of degeneration and dehumanization) called the modern “collective West,” we can focus on establishing our own civilizational foundations.
Frankly speaking, we have not looked in this direction at all yet. Everyone has tried to integrate into the West while preserving sovereignty. It is impossible, unrealistic and pointless. And that is exactly what it was at once. The West does not need any “corporation Russia,” even if it is loyal to the West. The good Russia for them is the absent Russia. It is not even Yeltsin’s Russia; it simply does not exist.
It is costly to prolong this process. It is time to cut this thread, because these are civilizational fetters, not the desire to join the “mainstream of development.” The West is a dead end. But that is their business. For us it is just an enemy, death and the end.
Russia will live only in a world where the West does not decide and means nothing. At least for us. In any other cases, it will be the torture of the Etruscan bride, when the criminal was tied alive to a decomposing corpse. There is nothing more horrible than such torture. A man dies slowly, necrosis enters his body cell by cell.
The modern West, too, is a decaying, rotting corpse tied to humanity.
It is not enough for it to perish; it wants to drag everyone else with it into the abyss.
Look at Ukraine, what they have done to it—a poisoned, twisted, psychologically broken people. A destroyed state. Massively crushed on the fronts of a senseless and obviously lost war, or a distraught society fleeing the country. The dead bride of Western control is firmly bolted to that still (barely) breathing country. But death in Ukraine is winning. Staring out of the eyes of its rabid rulers—already crossed over to the other side, already dead but still outwardly alive.
Complete liberation from the West is the only way to salvation. Everything bad in modern Russia is from it. Its miasmas have eaten away our politics, economy, culture, science, psychology, everyday life, youth. This is a carcinogenic process. And the faster and harder we cut off the affected cells, the more chances for salvation and revival of our Motherland, the great Russia.
Alexander Dugin is a widely-known and influential Russian philosopher. His most famous work is The Fourth Political Theory (a book banned by major book retailers), in which he proposes a new polity, one that transcends liberal democracy, Marxism and fascism. He has also introduced and developed the idea of Eurasianism, rooted in traditionalism. This article appears through the kind courtesy of Geopolitica.
Featured: Disparate n. 7, Disparate matrimonial, by Francisco Goya, ca. 1816 and 1823.