“The most dangerous man in the world”—this is how the Russian philosopher and geopolitician Alexander Dugin is referred to by his American counterparts. This alone is enough for a decent person to pay the closest attention to Dugin’s ideas.
Dugin is the undoubted enemy of the civilizing West, in all its manifestations, from the simple—the geopolitical project of Western global domination (globalization), through the negation of the Western ideological project (liberalism), to the high philosophical level of justification of dehumanization (object-oriented ontology). Dugin contrasts the first with a multipolar world, the second with the Fourth Political Theory, the third with Tradition.
Based solely on the Schmittian formula for the definition of the political—friend-enemy—it is not difficult to find one’s place in relation to Dugin: those who are for the West, globalization, and dehumanization (the transformation of man into a posthuman being, from a subject into an object) are against Dugin. The rest of us are “for him!”
You might ask, why, in fact, do we need to identify ourselves precisely with Dugin? Very simply. Because it was Dugin who created the theoretical foundation for all post-Soviet patriotic thought, grounding each point of this alternative to the West worldview matrix in the deepest way possible, having worked out each thesis in detail.
Everything you wanted to know from the realm of thought, but were afraid to ask, is in Dugin. Even if you are a liberal, a globalist, and a supporter of transhumanism, you need, if you are a serious thinker of course, to find an antithesis to each of your theses (to prove them, such is the law of scientific thought). No problem—Dugin has it all.
Even at the very beginning of the collapse of the Soviet bloc, when only liberalism (then called democracy) was offered as the sole alternative to Sovietism (at the suggestion of the West), Dugin developed and offered for public discussion the ideology of the Third Way, an independent ideological model of the new Russia, alternative to both Sovietism (with Marxism at its core) and the ideology of the West (with liberalism at its core).
Dugin contrasted the West’s assertion that there is no alternative to its model of development based on Modernism—with Tradition, the negation of which has been the foundation of Modernism with materialism, progressivism and positivism at its core for the last three centuries.
Dugin responded to the assertion that there was no alternative to the dominance of time with the thesis of the inviolability of Eternity. When people began to accuse him of proposing a Third Way as an alternative to the first (liberalism) and second (Marxism) ways, Dugin pointed out that it was then nothing more than fascism (the third political theory). Thus, Dugin pointed out that we are talking in general about going beyond the Modern; that is, about the Fourth Political Theory, which is based on Eternity, Tradition, God—everything that the Modern, with its liberalism, Marxism and fascism, has fully denied.
In response to the West’s assertion of the “objectivity” and “inevitability” of globalization (the thesis that all “advanced” members of the Russian political class have repeated like a spell since the early 1990s), Dugin proposed a multipolar world theory, based on an assertion of geopolitical pluralism.
In fact, geopolitics at that time, by Soviet inertia, remained “a pseudoscience justifying bourgeois imperialist expansion.” It was Dugin who took and translated all the fundamental works of the classics of geopolitics—from Mackinder and Mahan to Schmitt and Haushofer, and in between all the other major authors—and summarized all the basic criteria of geopolitical science in his Fundamentals of Geopolitics, written in 1995-1996 and published in early 1997. It was then that a whole galaxy of Russian geopoliticians appeared, rewriting Dugin’s textbook with varying degrees of diligence and zeal; while before that book, there was not a single one.
Dugin responded to the West’s proclamation of the project of European integration and the creation of the European Union by declaring a Eurasian Union, which he had previously worked out on an ideological level from as early as the late 1980s. It was Dugin’s neo-Eurasianism that first substantiated the need to position post-Soviet Russia as the basis for a special, non-Western and non-Eastern Eurasian civilization, Russia-Eurasia.
Dugin responded to the West’s assertion about the benchmark of its historical path of development and the universality of the model of Western society, a Western civilization proper, to which there is no alternative, with 23 volumes of Noomakhia, describing in a first approximation, the types of civilizations, their depth, metaphysical, cultural and geopolitical validity, as an alternative to the emasculated, primitive and superficial civilization of the collective West.
There is not a single statement by Western ideologues, thinkers, and philosophers to which Dugin and his intellectual group have not provided a similarly substantiated, conceptually elaborate, and profound response. It is no exaggeration to say that Dugin has it all!
When people ask me what I read, I half-jokingly (or maybe half-seriously) answer that “I only read Dugin.” Not literally, not because there is nothing else to read, but because before approaching any question, topic, concept, or philosophical idea, one must first look at what Dugin has written about it. This is only because Dugin has already read and comprehended all of this, and has presented it in a capacious, paradigmatic, and concentrated manner, in accessible language, drawing attention to the most important, while not emphasizing the secondary, and summarizing it in meaningful conclusions.
In order to be convinced of this, it is enough to conduct a little experiment, which I think I have already mentioned somewhere: just type in any meaningful combination of concepts, an intellectual formula, or a concept in combination with the name Alexander Dugin into any search engine, and you will get a selection of links to texts in which these ideas, models, or concepts have already been conceptualized, stated, and framed.
This is how Dugin’s ideas came to dominate the intellectual field not only in today’s Russia, but also in the thinking environment of the rest of the world, including the West, where the thinking part of society represents an alternative camp to the liberals, globalists and transhumanists. It was precisely because Dugin triumphed, took the intellectual upper hand, and forced everyone to think paradigmatically and holistically, that he worked through the entire sphere of the Ideas in all of their manifestations. He has already reversed the course of history, if we take the sphere of thought. But it takes time to be convinced of this firsthand, for the Idea descends from the sphere of the philosophical, where it is contemplated as an ideal image by the inner sight, through the sphere of the scientific, into the expert, and then into the media community, from where it becomes the property of the masses; and how long it will descend there depends not on the philosopher, but on the quality of the media in which the idea lives, develops (if it develops), and is conceptualized.
This unpredictability of the quality of environments affects the accuracy of predictions. As Dugin himself notes, a philosopher, giving a forecast, is never wrong about what will happen, but is almost always wrong about when it will happen. Maybe that’s because he is focused on Eternity, disregarding time.
Everything Dugin has written, said, elaborated on an intellectual level, is unfolding, coming true, incarnating before our eyes. You don’t have to be a profound philosopher yourself in order to open his books, articles and interviews, to read, listen to, comprehend and understand that everything, everything Dugin wrote and talked about in the 1990s and 2000s, has either already been realized or is being realized before our eyes, at this very moment. And what has not yet been realized is sure to come true. I cannot say when.
This is exactly why Dugin is, for example, “Putin’s advisor,” which the West and the rest of the world are convinced of. I have had to answer this question more than once everywhere—in Iran, in Turkey, in conversations with intellectuals in Latin America, Europe, Asia or Africa. Everywhere where thought matters, they are convinced that it is Dugin who determines the main vectors of Putin’s policy. Simply because everything Putin implements has previously been written or said by Dugin. What can I say to this? I don’t dare argue.
This is why we live in Dugin’s time. And this is why he is the most dangerous man for the West. If only because Dugin destroyed all the myths, so carefully and meticulously created in the West, about the standard of the Western way of historical development and the development of Western thought, about the universality of Western civilization, about the no-alternative to, and objectivity of, globalization, about the advantages of liberalism, about the objectivity of man. Everything, in fact, that the West needed to dominate the world, humanity, to be the ruler over all.
At the same time, no one in the West could demonstrate his intellectual superiority over Dugin (who was invited to hundreds of intellectual discussions with Western ideologists and philosophers), to demonstrate the primacy and validity of Western intellectual thought in an open dialogue—neither Brzezinski, nor Fukuyama, nor Bernard Henry Levy (deified by the contemporary Western intellectual community).
In an open intellectual confrontation with Dugin, they look pathetic and unconvincing. In plain English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Dugin leaves no stone unturned in Western liberal-globalist concepts, justifying his rightness at any level of discussion—from television broadcasts with one-second running time, to scientific audiences in hours-long debates.
This is where all the baseness and meanness of the West comes into play. Unable to defeat Dugin in an open debate, Western political technologists stoop to the level of meanness, dirty tricks, and petty sordidness. An entire section at the State Department has been working to discredit Dugin, ordering one discriminatory campaign after another for nearly a decade and a half. The array of political and technological methods used to smear Dugin does not lack originality or variety. What is the West most afraid of? Fascism (they have suffered from it there and created it themselves) and the occult (which is just scary in itself).
The next step is then easy—just identify Dugin with these two terrible phenomena. Fortunately (for them), the same method works here—type “fascism” and “occultism” into a search engine and—voila. Dugin has studied and described all of Western thought—from the Presocratics and Plato and Aristotle, through the fall into Scholasticism and Cartesianism, to New Age, Modern and Postmodern.
Naturally, this includes the twentieth century period, including such European phenomena as Fascism, National Socialism with its racial theory, occultism, and so on. By the same logic, you can accuse someone who writes about insects of being an insect. This is exactly how they operate—if Dugin wrote about fascism, then he is a fascist; and if he wrote about the occult, then he is an “occult fascist.”
In order to discredit Dugin, American political technologists hire a contractor, local subcontractors, and all kinds of State Department sub-suckers who for small pay endlessly have cutting & pasting unreadable hodge-podge for ten years, endlessly combining the words “Dugin,” “fascism” and “occultism” with all their derivatives. The results are very silly; but they are many; and it is then easy to refer to one another endlessly, portraying the “scientificity,” “thoroughness” and “validity” of each other’s libels. The calculation is the same—if you type “Alexander Dugin” into a search engine, with such an abundance of ordered filth, something containing “fascist” and “occultist” is sure to pop up, and the ordinary reader does not even follow the links, being satisfied with the headlines.
All of this, according to the Western clientele, was supposed to make Dugin “toxic,” as young people now say it, in order to even theoretically rule out a synthesis between the main politician of today’s world, Vladimir Putin, and the main intellectual. In a sense, as it turned out, they did achieve this. However, Dugin himself, with the dignity of a philosopher whose eyes are turned inward, contemplating an ideal image of thought, continued to remain silent on the matter, while Putin continued to implement the strategies described by Dugin, also ignoring the stink and untidy machinations of Western “partners.”
Desperate to change any one thing at all, the Western perpetrators decided on the nastiest meanness of all—murder. However, the prince of this world has someone to confront him. Russia has entered the final eschatological battle for the end of history. God and the devil came together in the final battle, and the field of battle, as Dugin himself says—the human soul, as well as the human mind. The wars of the mind. Noomachy. Dugin’s time. Endkampf.
Valery Korovin is a journalist and sociologist. This article appears courtesy of Zavtra.ru.