Alexander Dugin

Vladimir Putin & Donald Trump

by Robert Zubrin

THE NATIONAL REVIEW

June 18, 2014 4:00 AM

{Emphasis and {commentary} in red type by Abyssum }

His Eurasianism is a satanic cult.

Men of action cut a large figure in the history books, but it is the ideas placed in their heads by men of thought that actually determine what they do. Thus the scribblings of mad philosophers can lead to the deaths of millions.

As the modern-day heir to this tradition, Alexander Dugin bids fair to break the record. Most Americans don’t know anything about Alexander Dugin. They need to, because Dugin is the mad philosopher who is redesigning the brains of much of the Russian government and public, filling their minds with a new hate-ridden totalitarian ideology whose consequences can only be catastrophic in the extreme, not only for Russia, but for the entire human race.

In recent months, as the embrace of Duginist ideas by the Putin regime has become ever more evident, a number of articles have been written calling attention to the threat. But now, with the appearance of “The American Empire Should Be Destroyed”: Alexander Dugin and the Perils of Immanentized Eschatology, by James Heiser, we finally have a book-length treatment. It is well worth reading.

Heiser is a bishop of the Lutheran church, and, accordingly, he deals with both the political and the theological aspects of Dugin’s allegedly conservative but actually neopagan “Eurasianist” ideology. The subtitle of the book may put off a number of readers, but as a plain-spoken engineer who would cross the street to avoid terms like “immanentized eschatology,” I found the writing to be clear enough overall, and in some places elegant.

Heiser follows Dugin’s career, moving from his expulsion from the Moscow Aviation Institute for involvement in proto-Nazi mystical circles in the early 1980s, through his continued development in association with various Thule Society–like organizations through the late Eighties, his contacts with the anti-democratic European Nouvelle Droite, his co-founding and career with the National Bolshevik Party in the 1990s, and his subsequent move into the Russian political mainstream following from his realization that he could gain far more influence as an adviser to those in power than he ever could operating as a splinter party on his own.

Heiser then proceeds to dissect Dugin’s political and geopolitical ideology of Eurasianism. The core idea of this is that “liberalism” (by which Dugin means the entire Western consensus) represents an assault on the traditional hierarchical organization of the world. Repeating the ideas of Nazi theorists Karl Haushofer, Rudolf Hess, Carl Schmitt, and Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Dugin says that this liberal threat is not new, but is the ideology of the maritime-cosmopolitan power “Atlantis,” which has conspired to subvert more conservative land-based societies since ancient times. Accordingly he has written books in which he has reconstructed the entire history of the world as a continuous battle between these two factions, from Rome vs. Carthage to Russia vs. the Anglo-Saxon “Atlantic Order” today.

If it is to win its fight against the subversive oceanic bearers of such “racist” (because foreign imposed) ideas as human rights, Russia must unite around itself all the continental powers, including Germany, Central and Eastern Europe, the former Soviet republics, Turkey, Iran, and Korea, into grand Eurasian Union strong enough to defeat the West. In order to be so united “from Lisbon to Vladivostok,” this Eurasian Union will need a defining ideology, and for this purpose Dugin has developed a new “Fourth Political Theory” combining all the strongest points of Communism, Nazism, Ecologism, and Traditionalism, thereby allowing it to appeal to the adherents of all of these diverse anti-liberal creeds.

He would adopt Communism’s opposition to free enterprise. However, he would drop the Marxist commitment to technological progress, a liberal-derived ideal, in favor of Ecologism’s demagogic appeal to stop the advance of industry and modernity. From Traditionalism, he derives a justification for stopping free thought. All the rest is straight out of Nazism, ranging from legal theories justifying unlimited state power and the elimination of individual rights, to the need for populations “rooted” in the soil, to weird gnostic ideas about the secret origin of the Aryan race in the North Pole. What Russia needs, says Dugin, is a “genuine, true, radically revolutionary and consistent, fascist fascism.” On the other hand, “Liberalism, is an absolute evil. . . . Only a global crusade against the U.S., the West, globalization, and their political-ideological expression, liberalism, is capable of becoming an adequate response. . . . The American empire should be destroyed.”

Heiser then provides a chilling analysis of Dugin’s theology: It would be our contention that Dugin’s fusion of Traditionalism and Eurasianism has become a “gnostic mass movement” of the third type, “activist mysticism.” It is not an exaggeration to state that Dugin’s intended goal, his telos, is the End of the World, and that the accomplishment of that end is dependent, he believes, on the implementation of his ideology. As Dugin has proclaimed in his recent book, The Fourth Political Theory: “The end times and the eschatological meaning of politics will not realize themselves on their own. We will wait for the end in vain. The end will never come if we wait for it, and it will never come if we do not. . . . If the Fourth Political Practice is not able to realize the end of times, then it would be invalid. The end of days should come, but it will not come by itself. This is a task, it is not a certainty. It is an active metaphysics. It is a practice.” This desire to bring about the end of the world is not a sudden development in Dugin’s thought. As noted in the quotation at the beginning of this chapter, as early as 2001, Dugin’s intentions were being published abroad, and could be read by an English-speaking audience.

In 2001, [Stephen] Shenfield observes that Dugin’s eschatological view is “Manichean” — which is to say, a dualistic form of Gnosticism which views the world as a battleground of equally matched forces of good and evil, in which spiritual forces of light contend with material forces of evil. Into this Manichaenism, Dugin admixes Christian concepts, oft repeating the notion that the West is the realm of “Antichrist.” As Shenfield quotes Dugin: “The meaning of Russia is that through the Russian people will be realized the last thought of God, the thought of the End of the World. . . . Death is the way to immortality. Love will begin when the world ends. We must long for it, like true Christians. . . . We are uprooting the accursed Tree of Knowledge. With it will perish the Universe.” Shenfield then observes: “Alexander Yanov, quoting these lines, concludes that Dugin’s ‘real dream is of death, first of all the death of Russia.’

In his reply, Dugin avoids dealing directly with the substance of Yanov’s critique, but observes that he fails to appreciate the positive significance of death . . .” It is hard to know how to react to someone who claims to want to bring about the end of the world. When that desire is expressed with a thick Russian accent, the hearer is all the more likely to simply dismiss the speaker as some sort of “super villain” from a bad “action/adventure” movie. It is a claim which evokes the snicker — until one realizes that the man who thinks that the “meaning of Russia” is “the End of the World” is the man whose geopolitical doctrine is being implemented by the ruler of Russia.

Heiser continues: Dugin is quite keen on the notion that the coming age is the third, and final, age. As Dugin wrote in “The Metaphysics of National-Bolshevism”: “Beyond ‘rights’ and ‘lefts,’ there’s one and indivisible Revolution, in the dialectical triad ‘third Rome — Third Reich — third International.” The realm of national-bolshevism, Regnum, their Empire of the End, this is the perfect accomplishment of the greatest Revolution of history, both a continental and universal one. It is the angels’ return, heroes’ resurrection, the heart’s uprising against the reason’s dictatorship. This last revolution is a concern of the acephal, the headless bearer of the cross, sickle and hammer, crowned by eternal sun fylfot.” This “Empire of the End” is marked by the “dialectical triad” which combines “Third Rome — Third Reich — Third International.” All the expectations of historic Russian messianic delusions, combined with the Joachimite aims of Nazism and Soviet Bolshevism, purportedly find their highest expression in this new ideology, according to Dugin.

Finally, Heiser comments on Dugin’s worship of Chaos, and the adoption of the occult symbol of the eight-pointed “Star of Chaos” as the emblem (and, when inscribed in gold on a black background, the flag) of the Eurasianist movement. “For Dugin, logos is replaced by chaos, and the very symbol of chaos magic is the symbol of Eurasia: ‘Logos has expired and we all will be buried under its ruins unless we make an appeal to chaos and its metaphysical principles, and use them as a basis for something new.’ Dugin dressed his discussion of logos in the language of Heidegger, but his terminology cannot be read outside of a 2,000-year-old Western, biblical tradition which associates the Logos with the Christ, and Dugin’s invocation of chaos against logos leads to certain inevitable conclusions regarding his doctrines.” In short, Dugin’s Eurasianism is a satanic cult.

This is the ideology behind the Putin regime’s “Eurasian Union” project. It is to this dark program, which threatens not only the prospects for freedom in Ukraine and Russia, but the peace of the world, that former Ukrainian president Victor Yanukovych tried to sell “his” country. It is against this program that the courageous protesters in the Maidan took their stand and — with scandalously little help from the West — somehow miraculously prevailed. It is on behalf of this program that the Putin regime has created a bloodbath in eastern Ukraine, which, following Dugin, it now terms “New Russia.” It is on behalf of this program that Dugin, with massive support from the Russian government, has organized a fascist international of European fringe parties, and on behalf of this program that the Quislings leading those parties are willing to betray their nations to Kremlin domination.

Without Ukraine, Dugin’s fascist Eurasian Union project is impossible, and sooner or later Russia itself will have join the West and become free, leaving only a few despised and doomed islands of tyranny around the globe. But with Ukraine underfoot, the Eurasianist program can and will proceed, and a new iron curtain will fall into place imprisoning a large fraction of humanity in the grip of a monstrous totalitarian power that will become the arsenal of evil around the world for decades to come. That means another cold war, trillions of dollars wasted on arms, accelerated growth of the national-security state at home, repeated proxy conflicts costing millions of lives abroad, and civilization itself placed at risk should a single misstep in the endless insane great-power game precipitate the locked and loaded confrontation into a thermonuclear exchange. Only this time, our cold-war opponents will not be secular Communists, but true believers of a death-worshipping cult that would like to bring about the end of the world.

Every victory for their expansionist program abroad enhances the Eurasianists’ power within Russia. As a result of the Western capitulation so far, the Duginite movement is growing exponentially, while the forces of sanity are being cowed or crushed. If Ukraine falls, Vladimir Putin may discover that, like the German generals who empowered Hitler, he has fostered the birth of a monster he can no longer control. Maybe he should read Heiser’s book too.

{ I hope that you will forgive an old man this reflection on his 93 years on this earth.  I was born shortly after the Russian Revolution which had its inspiration in the writings of Marx and Lenin.  I grew up during the rise of the Third Reich which had its inspiration in the writings of Adolph Hitler (Mein Kampf) and I fought in the Second World War  caused by the clash of these to ideologies and now as I prepare to leave this world I read of the growth of a new radical ideology that has taken root in Russia, Eurasianism, that yearns for the Apocalypse, which is set forth as the goal in the writings of Alexander Dugin.  We have seen the Islamization of Europe and America under our Muslim President, Barack Hussein Obama, and now we are faced with faced with the prospect that Donald Trump who is a great admirer of Vladimir Putin who is a great admirer of Alexander Dugin may unwittingly facilitate the realization by Putin and Dugin of the goals of Eurasianism and bring on World War III.  Perhaps now you will understand why I have said that under no circumstances can a Christian vote for Donald Trump.  It is not that he is an evil man, because he is not an evil man.  But there is no question but that he will not be equal to the challenges that will face the United States in the next Decade.  Of course it should not really be necessary for me to state that Hillary Rodham Clinton does not belong in the White House, she belongs in prison.  It was the votes of the ignorati in the Spring Primaries that gave us this impossible-to-resolve dilemma for November 8, 2016.   God help America, God help us !!!  

— Robert Zubrin is president of Pioneer Energy of Lakewood, Colo., and the author of Energy Victory. The paperback edition of his latest book, Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism, was recently published by Encounter Books.