We are an empire, as the heirs of the monarchy and as the heirs of the Soviet Union.
There can be no neutral position in this war, because there are only two camps. And that is all. Anyone who hesitates or is indecisive, sooner or later (it seems to me much sooner than it seems), will be forced to take up arms and simply go to the front, and the front is everywhere today. It is impossible to return this long, difficult and terrible war to where it was before February 24, 2022; nor can it be stopped; it can only be won. Or it can still be left to human history. Then there will be no winner. Death will win.
For now, it’s war, which means we’re alive.
If you do not support the Special Military Operation, then you are not for Russia, you are not for the country, you are not for our people, and then the time will come when you will have to kill Russians, destroy Russia as a country, blow up cars, houses and railways, hide terrorists in your homes, shoot. There is no more security.
So, it is better to decide now, and this applies to all Russians; but it also applies to all other countries.
If you want to preserve sovereignty, it is clear that it is impossible under the auspices of the collective West, because liberalism in international relations cancels sovereignty and recognizes only the World Government, in other words, Western hegemony; and in the fight for a multipolar world in which sovereignty is possible, you have to fight with the West, and that is what Russia is doing now. And, it is doing that for everyone.
That’s what World War III is all about. Anyone who really cares about sovereignty will either have to side with us or willfully and forever give up and submit completely to the West—and the West is now at war with Russia and will force others to do the same.
This is what happened to Ukraine; this is what is happening to Georgia and Moldova and what is threatening Turkey and even China.
Us and them.
Ukrainians have been massively, actively, obsessively and constantly taught to hate Russians and everything Russian for the last thirty years. Entire generations were raised with Russophobia.
And since 2014, Ukrainians have been trained to kill, burn, dismember, fry, roast and remove Russians from the face of the earth. They were all trained—men, women and children. This is how the image of the enemy, “Moskal”, was created. He is presented as a cruel “lower being,” “a monster,” “stupid,” “merciless,” “crude,” an undefined mass who only wants to make fun of the peaceful Ukrainian paradise and turn it into rivers of blood; and in order to prevent that, the Ukrainian had to be ready to attack first, to bring war to enemy territory, to reduce it to a bloody mess, so that Ukraine would not turn into such a mess. And so it went on, for years, decades.
Many people wonder why Ukrainians resist so fiercely? Because they are not even at war with us, but with the image that lives in their heads. In the TV series Black Mirror, there was an episode where people fight scary monsters; but it turns out that they are monsters made with special optical devices, which people had to wear (to avoid being punished) and what appeared to them to be “monsters” were only people.
Ukrainians see us as monsters, as chimeras imposed on them. And those chimeras are creepy, but they can’t see anything else.
We did not prepare for this war. We didn’t understand what we were dealing with. We did not create such an image of the enemy. That’s why we don’t even understand what is happening. Perhaps it is right that it is so; but it is clear that we did not understand the full weight of what was happening.
The fiercer the battles, the greater the anger of our people. At the same time, on the front, in a certain sense, an image of the enemy was created. On the domestic front, we are still in doubt. How can they do things like that? At the front, this question no longer arises, but another: how to defeat the enemy and, frankly, how to destroy him. You can only destroy what you hate; and those who hate the most fight fiercely and achieve the most in this war.
I am convinced that Russia should not allow this process to develop. If we allow it, hatred will gradually spill over from the front to the rear and we will be more and more like the enemy. That is, hatred will also enter our hearts. It has been in the hearts of Ukrainians for a long time. Now it’s up to us. One cannot but notice that during the duration of the war we gradually adopted the characteristics of the enemy. Reluctantly and belatedly, but still.
The authorities are currently only trying to contain the events, but they are like a river. At some point, the “humanist dam” will burst and the whole society will remember Simonov’s words: “Whenever you meet him, kill him.” No one will care what the authorities allow or forbid.
We need a different way, a true ideologization of war, complete and systematic, not partial and patchy, as it is now.
First, we are at war with the West. The main enemy is the West. Ukrainians are not the main enemy. That is why the West is the one that really needs to be rejected. And this is where Simonov is important: he believes that we must banish the West from ourselves, otherwise we cultivate double standards: the West kills us and we bow to it. Liberalism is more dangerous than Ukrainian Nazism, because Western liberals are the ones who started, created and armed Ukrainian Nazism. Consistent de-liberalization is necessary (because it is more important than the ongoing denazification of the country).
Denazification is also necessary, but it is a consequence, not a cause; it is a symptom, not the essence of the disease.
Furthermore, we are fighting against nationalism, but we must not turn into nationalists ourselves. We are the Empire, as the heirs of the monarchy and as the heirs of the Soviet Union, we are more than a nation. Our ideology must be imperial, open, clear and aggressive. The empire must present itself charismatically. Our Empire, Rome, is fighting a deadly battle with the opposite “Empire,” and essentially the anti-Empire, Carthage.
Only when the army, people, state and society fight against Carthage—the liberal West—we will defeat Ukrainian Nazism. The only thing left for us is to trample the enemy. Before that formidable and serious enemy, this obsessive pettiness will be insignificant.
If you tell a Russian that Russia does not exist, he will shrug his shoulders. If you tell an American that America doesn’t exist, he’ll shrug his shoulders too. And, if you tell a Ukrainian that Ukraine doesn’t exist, he will get mad like a beast, because Ukraine doesn’t exist. But that is when we are an empire, and our consciousness is imperial. A firm, strong, self-confident, determined conscience.
The strong identity of the enemy can be overcome not by an equally strong identity (Russian nationalism), but by a stronger identity: the imperial identity.
This ideological transformation of society is inevitable. It can be delayed for some time, but it cannot be prevented.
I am convinced that our authorities did not want this war. They tried really hard to put it off. It was possible to postpone it, but also impossible to avoid it. And now it’s impossible to stop it. Either you win or you disappear. It is clear that part of the elite is in a panic. They are unable to accept the perniciousness of what is happening, hoping, despite all common sense, to somehow return to the state of the past. Not possible. It is possible to postpone and procrastinate, but it is impossible to stop and go back to the old way. All that awaits us is war and a difficult, incredibly arduous victory. Our country will be irrevocably changed along the way. The country will change, society will change.
No one is ever so desperate to change themselves, but anything else has become impossible. It’s about fate. Change will be imposed with iron necessity.
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: La esfinge (The Sphinx), by Davegore; painted in 1988.