Posted on 06/20/2022 6:08:34 PM PDT by Greetings_Puny_Humans
Twilight of the Magicians: Aleksandr Dugin and the War Against the West
"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 active metaphysics. It is a practice.”
ALEKSANDR DUGIN, THE FOURTH POLITICAL THEORY [I]
The “philosopher” who has done the most to justify Russia’s war against the West is Aleksandr Dugin. He was the first to advocate a Russian invasion of Ukraine. He has also advocated what he calls “the last war of the world-island” – a future conflict against the United States and NATO. His arguments are as fascinating as they are troubling. Disillusioned conservatives in the West imagine that Dugin – like Putin – is a conservative and a Christian. This is the impression he gives, though his writings blend themes of the far left and far right. On close examination his ideas are not something Edmund Burke (the father of conservatism) would have approved.
Aleksandr Gelyevich Dugin refers to himself as a Russian philosopher and strategist. He is sometimes described as “Putin’s brain.” As we discover in his writings, Dugin wants to bring about “the end of days.” This was the grand objective of the “Yuzhinskii Circle,”[ii] from whence he emerged long ago. It was a group of Russian occultists born out of the 1960s, working to bring back the antediluvian “Golden Age.” They would follow in the footsteps of Nimrod in the construction of a Tower of Babel. In fact, Dugin has attempted to intellectually link all cultures and traditions according to the formula of “Traditionalism.” Only the Western tradition, debunked as “liberalism,” is excluded from this “project.” According to Dugin, the “Atlanticists” (i.e., the West) must be destroyed and their territories absorbed.
The Yuzhinskii Circle, as political philosopher Eric Voegelin might say, was dedicated to immanentizing the gnostic eschaton. It is not that they were Gnostics with a capital G. They were what Voegelin would have called “parousiastic gnostics” – parousia signifying the Second Coming of Christ. Of course, such people do not actually believe in Christ. According to Voegelin, “The aim of parousiastic gnosticism is to destroy the order of being, which is experienced as defective and unjust, and through man’s creative power to replace it with a perfect and just order.” In order to accomplish this, noted Voegelin, the transcendental origin of being must be “obliterated,” which “requires the decapitation of being – the murder of God.” This murder takes place “speculatively by explaining divine being as the work of man.”[iii] Here we find a form of occultism that shares the same practice as Marxism-Leninism. Where the Marxist-Leninist uses “dialectics” the parousiastic gnostics use esotericism (secret doctrines hidden behind intellectual formulae and symbols). As Dugin biographer James Heiser has hinted, the Yuzhinskii circle was Hermetic rather than Gnostic, yet their aims coincide with Marxism – which may explain the story that Dugin “started [in his youth] working in a KGB archive where he gained access to, and read, large amounts of forbidden literature on Masonry, fascism and paganism.”[iv]
The Yuzhinskii Circle had access to the USSR’s largest Lenin library. Who gave them that access? Who gave them the means to live and work in the USSR? It seems the existence of this group served some dark clandestine purpose. Has there been, deep inside the Soviet regime, a hidden occult circle? No proof of this has been found. According to Russian monographs that do not exist in English, Alexy Shchusev’s design for Lenin’s Mausoleum was influenced by the ideas of Madam Blavatsky, author of The Secret Doctrine.[v] Can we verify this? No. But the design of Lenin’s tomb cannot be accounted for. It is a mock pyramid, built of red granite and black labradorite, in which Lenin’s remains have been mummified. What this implies about Leninism, and the inner workings of the CPSU Central Committee, is hard to evaluate. Men are inconsistent creatures. Ideologies and theologies have been known to join together in unexpected ways.
It is doubly curious that members of the Yuzhinskii Circle started calling themselves “The Black Order of the SS” when led by the philologist Evgenii Golovin (b. 1936), under the inspiration of Yurii Mamleev (b. 1931), a Russian mystic and novelist described as “a representative of the aesthetics of evil.”[vi] Just as Putin’s outward adoption of Russian Orthodoxy is a disguise, so was the adoption of Russian Orthodoxy by the Yuzhinskii Circle. As James Heiser’s research indicates, Dugin merely pays lip service to Orthodoxy, but does not actually practice the religion. At the same time Dugin has adopted all the weapons of cultural Marxism. As he explained in his book, The Fourth Political Theory, “classical Marxists consistently call for insanity….”[vii] Turning to his own theory he added, “Madness is part of the gender arsenal of the Fourth Political Theory.”[viii]
As might be expected from a “former” KGB operative, Dugin’s Fourth Theory aligns with recent Marxian innovations. Dugin seeks to overcome “white European man” through “global egalitarianism.” This is not classic Marxism, as Marx was not an egalitarian; but Soviet strategists long ago found egalitarianism a useful weapon for subverting Western institutions (since egalitarianism is inherently destructive of social order). It is therefore not surprising that Dugin, as an alleged Traditionalist, says that white European males are enemies of “Tradition” because white European males uphold liberalism (the First Political Theory). Therefore, noted Dugin, gender identity must be broken. Here Dugin sets up Western liberalism as a straw man, describing it as a Marxist would – as racism, sexism and classism. “Now we are in this moment of a postmodern re-extension,” wrote Dugin, “and the final breaking of gender. The stages of this break are feminism, homosexuality, sex change operations, and transhumanity.”[ix]
Dugin has also commented on the extent to which Western elites have been influenced by Marxist theories. He is gratified that these elites are prepared to overcome sex by rejecting opposites and making mankind into “cyborgs.” What better operation could there be for immanentizing the eschaton? According to Dugin, “We stand on the transition between the hypermodern and the postmodern, and we do not know where the truth and reality lies.” Therefore, he continued, “in a post-modern construction of gender, there will not be any men.”[x]
To destroy the order of being, Dugin advocates destroying the archetype of man. This archetype, he wrote, is falling to pieces. Conservatives can try though they may, but they cannot reconstruct “man” once he has been deconstructed. The only option will then be “androgyny as practiced by angels.” Here we see that Dugin is a sorcerer putting ideas from various thinkers into a pot over which he repeats dark incantations like those of the weird sisters in Shakespeare’s Macbeth.
I could understand talking about this guy in 2005 but not now.
He doesn’t have significant influence these days in Russia
Isn't that precisely what Soros is doing to the USA..?
Perhaps, just perhaps Soros is working with the ?secret? SS in Russia...maybe. We know he worked with them during WW2. Maybe that's not such a far reach... (?)
I could understand talking about this guy in 2005 but not now.
He doesn’t have significant influence these days in Russia
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That may be, but it is interesting to learn that such tendencies are evidently global.
Too many parallels to the 4th Industrial Revolution, 4th Reich, transhumanism for comfort.
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