Authored by J.Michael Waller via American Greatness,
Russian theorist Alexandr Dugin offers a vision to address widespread cultural despair and the desire for a revival of national sovereignty and Christian tradition.
He offers a way out of wokeness and globalism.
His price? The end of the United States and Western civilization.
Dugin has tapped into a legitimate vein of frustration and fear about where sacred traditions have gone and what the future holds. But he is a false prophet. His traditionalism is a form of paganism and Russian imperialism.
Here are 10 reasons why any red-blooded American traditionalist would stay away from Dugin and his acolytes.
First, Dugin believes that the United States must be destroyed. He has developed a geopolitical theory premised on the U.S. as the main enemy. “Main enemy” was the Soviet term for the United States. The U.S., with Britain, leads what Dugin calls an “Atlanticist empire,” which he says must be taken down. And not just the post-Christian cultural rot of critical theory and globalism. In his early writings, Dugin argued that the U.S. should be neutralized as a sea power to “destroy the notorious ‘American myth.’” Now he calls for our whole country to be taken down, not by military force, but through subversion.
Since 1997, in Foundations of Geopolitics, Dugin has written about exploiting divisions within the United States to pit Americans against one another and tear apart the country through race riots and terrorism. Moscow and its friends should stoke “all forms of instability and separatism within the borders of the United States,” he argues. One of the softer ways to wreck a political community, he wrote in Conspirology, a rambling operations manual of sorts compiled between 1991 and 2005, is to promote conspiracy theories, which can never be proved nor disproved but which polarize and destroy.
Second, Dugin thinks that American founding principles are literally rotten—his word—built of straw spun 250 years ago from the modernist Enlightenment and Reformation. All Christian Protestantism of the American Founders, he argues, must be swept away. Not for theological reasons, but for political ones.
Third, Dugin says he’s okay with certain parts of Marxism. “The Marxism which we can accept is mythic, sociological Marxism,” he wrote in The Fourth Political Theory, or 4PT. Dugin values Marxism for its propaganda utility as demolition equipment against Western civilization while rejecting Marxist materialism as an alternative political theory, which is heavily socialist.
The Western democratic tradition and individualism, developed mainly in England and the United States, is Dugin’s “first political theory.” The second is communism. The third is fascism and national socialism. His fourth political theory, Dugin says, accepts the useful parts of the first three and rejects the errors.
He says that people must rid themselves of the “prejudice” of anti-communism. He co-founded a political party called the National Bolsheviks and built his 4PT ideology around National Bolshevism. “So we arrive at the national-bolshevism that represents socialism without materialism.” His involvement as an intellectual leader of the “red-brown” axis of communists and fascists shortly after the Soviet collapse brought him to National Bolshevism.
Which brings us to the fourth issue: As with Marxism, Dugin has a soft spot for Italian fascism and German National Socialism. His theoretical development shows how he borrowed heavily and transparently from Italian fascist Julius Evola, the Belgian convicted Nazi collaborator Jean Thiriart, and the German Nazi party member Martin Heidegger, among others. Mussolini and Hitler made positive contributions, Dugin argues, because they were traditionalists at heart. Mussolini tried to revive the traditions of pre-Christian Rome. Hitler attempted a revival of Norse traditions, runes, and Aryanism.
Fifth, Dugin is a new kind of Russian imperialist, not an advocate of national sovereignty. He envisions “Eurasia,” a Russia-centered empire of empires stretching from Ireland to Japan and from the Arctic to Iran. His “multipolar” world includes only the sub-empires within his Eurasian empire: a Europe-Moscow axis based in Germany, an Iran-Moscow axis based in Tehran, and a Japan-Moscow axis based in Tokyo. Africa and the Middle East would be placed back under European administration, subservient to Russia.
Sixth, Dugin wants to erase individual freedom. He rejects the very concept of individual freedoms as “modernist” creations of the Reformation and Enlightenment, even though this concept is firmly grounded in the heavy overlap between the Orthodox and Catholic churches, which respectively teach free will as fundamental to the dignity and moral agency of each person. Dugin places political limits on freedom, subsuming them to collective identities within his multipolar Eurasian empire of empires and ultimately to a state of “Being.” To Dugin, “the nation is everything; the individual is nothing.”
Seventh, for all his talk and pretended Orthodox mysticism, Dugin is no Christian. His 1980s embrace of the occult was not just a youthful mistake but a foundation upon which he has built his philosophy. He mines the veins of Christian theology and intellectual thought but reduces Christianity to one of many equal religions and treats them all as empty shells to be filled with 4PT ideology.
Dugin takes the open, exoteric nature of Christianity, in which truth is revealed to all the faithful, and flips it as an esoteric or secretive system of hidden meanings and symbols understood only by a chosen elite few. This page is taken straight out of the Soviet Communist Party nomenklatura.
Dugin borrows from radical particularists, those who believe that no general moral rules can reliably determine right from wrong. This extreme view rejects the foundations of Judeo-Christian tradition and morality, the Ten Commandments. Rejection of basic Judeo-Christian beliefs makes it an easy—and for him, a necessary—step to treat all “traditional” religions as equal. Dugin’s theology is not confessional but political.
This takes us to the eighth point: Political indoctrination and control. Dugin’s esoteric approach finds religions like Eastern Orthodoxy and Catholicism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam as useful empty vessels on which to build and administer his empire. Each is authoritative to its faithful. Each would be obedient to the earthly Eurasian empire.
This is why a “multipolar world” is so important to Dugin: Co-opt those religious institutions and gradually use their authority and structures to indoctrinate the faithful with 4PT ideology. Those institutions, with their own ecclesiastical or social hierarchies, would become political machines to build a multipolar global order. In return, they would preserve their traditional distinctiveness from the rest of the world, and would ensure his Eurasian empire would reign supreme.
Dugin boils the Christian church down to one universal polyreligious “being,” or Dasien, borrowing from his favorite German philosopher, Heidegger, who spent 1933–45 as a dues-paying member of the National Socialist Party.
Speaking of Nazis, we get to the ninth point, the Jewish Question. Dugin is not the crude antisemite he was in the late 1980s. His approach is esoteric. He sees Hitler’s extermination of Jews based on creed or ethnicity as excessive. He views all Jews of an Atlanticist tradition—those in Western Europe and North America, assimilated and largely Zionist—as part of the decadent system that his Eurasian empire must subdue and defeat. Zionists, he says, “are a kind of Satanic Jews” who “serve not Yahweh but Ba’al, like in so many cases in the Old Testament.” This train of thought feeds into the logic that anything Satanic must be destroyed.
Eastern European and Eurasian Jews, on the other hand, especially the Hasidim, are less noxious to Dugin because they tend to be pre-Enlightenment traditionalists who remain unassimilated from the rest of society. Jews tend to be subversive of other cultures, he argues, and historically they have been subversive of Russia. Even so, he accepts pre-modern Judaism as one of his traditional religions.
As a practical matter to destabilize targeted societies like the United States, Dugin devotes considerable attention in Conspirology to the value of promoting Jewish conspiracy theories as powerful psychological warfare devices to polarize and destroy. They can be neither proved nor disproved, and so they persist.
Tenth, Dugin seeks a pagan future of the world. Whether the gods of ancient Rome or those of the Norse who called themselves Rus’ and built what became Russia, paganism is the tradition he seeks to revive. Dugin’s trinity, which he describes in his most ambitious work to date, the multi-volume Noomakhia project (Greek for “War of the Mind”), is a strategy of subversive resistance against Western civilization, built on a triad of ancient Greek philosophy and metaphysics.
This is where traditional religions’ structure, hierarchy, and ritual again fit in, providing the architecture and transmissions of authority through which to mobilize Dugin’s ideology.
The call for his traditional religions to unite is at odds with the teachings of all of them. But for him, the goal is geopolitical, not spiritual: “We need to unite the Right, the Left and the world’s traditional religions in a common struggle against the common enemy.”
Dugin is reinstating the pagan metaphysics against which Christianity defended itself. His geopolitics are a cosmic struggle to the death. They are esoterically divine. The universal dialectic is the oppressed versus the oppressor—the “sociological Marxism” that he says he accepts.
Dugin’s ideology would subvert and neuter Christianity while pretending to restore it. He claims to fight the Antichrist without being a Christian. The United States, he believes, is the “kingdom of the Antichrist.” His context again is not supernatural but geopolitical. In March, he used another Old Testament allegory: “The Angels of Wrath will destroy America like Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed.” He spoke not of the hedonism rampant in American culture. He was referring to U.S. military action against the Islamic Republic of Iran, which he considers part of his Eurasian empire.
He sees Russia as the biblical katechon, the divine restrainer of the Antichrist. That apocalyptic evil, in Dugin’s world, is led by the United States of America.