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'Both they (New World Order) and we (Eurasians) want to deprive you of your Catholicism; Orthodoxy...is much closer to what we call paganism' - Dugin

#1 · July 9, 2023, 22:42

Quote from Timothy Fitzpatrick on July 9, 2023, 22:42

06/26/2016

Alexander Dugin: I am waiting for Ivan the Terrible

- Students of the Diplomatic Academy in Moscow, with whom I spoke, told me that from the reading they were given in class, i.e. your book The Foundations of Geopolitics, the chapter devoted to sacral geography was the most memorable to them. In Poland, I have not met anyone who would deal with this issue. Could you tell us what place Poland occupies in sacral geography?

- I have never dealt specifically with the case of Poland, although its place is very specific. After all, it is the north of Eurasia, an important region of pre-Christian Slavism, the Baltic Sea basin. Regarding the archetypes of sacred geography, I would like to point out two things.

Firstly, in the Orthodox reality there is a synergy between the pre-Christian and the Christian models of the world - which overlap homologously, without conflict. Different figures and phenomena from different orders overlap each other painlessly and even harmoniously. In the case of Poland, there is a much more conflicting relationship between these two models, due to Catholicism, which is a completely different tradition than Orthodoxy. René Guenon clearly separates tradition from religion. Tradition is a broader concept than religion. Orthodoxy is a tradition, Catholicism is a religion. Tradition is able to absorb elements of other religious beliefs without conflict. Religion, on the other hand, comes into conflict with other beliefs. This is related to the different historical experience of the Eastern and Western Churches after the Great Schism. The West was not always purely religious, Catholic, there was a period when it was more traditional, Orthodox. After the Great Schism, however, Catholicism moved away from tradition and narrowed down to religion. At least that's our Byzantine version.

How does this relate to sacred geography? Well, in our understanding, the West, understood as a territory dominated by Catholicism and Protestantism, is in a relationship opposite to religious norms and elements. Of course, there are many elements of other religions in the West, but they exist in conflict with the Catholic religion. Institutions that deal with sacred geography or the remnants of pre-Christian tradition in the West after the Great Schism were relegated to autonomous spheres - to magic, esotericism, hermetic orders. There was no such split in Orthodoxy.

In this context, Poland is on the border between the Catholic and Orthodox worlds. From my Eurasian point of view, the archetype of Poland's sacral geography is deeply dualistic: on the one hand, a pre-Christian, pagan, magical, heterodox tradition whose roots remain Slavic; on the other - Catholicism of Germano-Roman origin. There is a conflict between them. The situation of Poland is a border situation. She cannot unite with the Eastern world religiously and with the Western world ethnically. In geopolitics, Poland remains part of the sanitary cordon separating the Eurasian continent into two parts, which is very convenient for the anti-traditional Anglo-Saxon forces. Poland cannot fully realize its Eurasian-Slavic essence, because it is hindered by Catholicism, nor its Western European identity, because it is hindered by its own Slavicness, i.e. language, customs, archetypes, climate of places, etc. As a result of this duality, this borderline situation, Poland always falls victim to the third force, just like today mondialism or Atlanticism. This location on the border between Russia and Germany means that the problem of Poland's partitions between the East and the West will always be present in history. This is the result of this sacral-geographical and geopolitical duality. As noted by Toynbee, the attempt to build an independent Polish-Lithuanian civilization between these two forces ended in failure. Central European civilization is too weak to withstand the tension between East and West. The countries of this region must define themselves: either here or there. The Polish-Lithuanian civilization did not want or could not define itself so she had to disappear. It's a really dramatic situation.

- Are there any elements in the Polish tradition that seem attractive to you?

- I am definitely closer to the Slavic-Eurasian sources of Polishness, their ethnic and even pagan element. I am attracted to certain eastern or oriental elements, minority culture. I think that the best thing about Polish history is the Jewish tradition in small towns in eastern Poland. In fact, I am interested in everything that was anti-Catholic in Poland: Polish freemasonry and occultists, Jan Potocki and Hoene-Wroński, Mienżyński and Dzierżyński... They all chose the Eurasian path.

- You talk about Poland's position between East and West, that is between Russia and Germany. Meanwhile, many scholars emphasize that Germany, and especially Prussia, is more similar to Russia than to England or Spain. Feliks Koneczny even believed that Prussia, like Russia, belonged to Byzantine and not Latin civilization.

Konecki was right. Germany is internally divided. Bavaria leans towards the West, Prussia towards the East. Prussia is a little Russia inside Germany.

- We have always seen this as the greatest danger for us: a friendly alliance between Germany and Russia.

- That's our job. Unite with Germany and create a powerful continental bloc.

- What about Poland then?

- We Russians and Germans reason in terms of expansion and we will never reason otherwise. We are not interested simply in preserving our own state or nation. We are interested in absorbing, through our own pressure, the maximum number of categories that complete us. We are not interested in colonizing like the English, but in demarcating our strategic geopolitical borders without even special Russification, although there should be some Russification. Russia, in its geopolitical and sacral-geographic development, is not interested in the existence of an independent Polish state in any form. Nor is it interested in the existence of Ukraine. Not because we don't like Poles or Ukrainians, but because these are the laws of sacral geography and geopolitics.
Poland must choose: either a Slavic identity or a Catholic one. I understand it's hard to separate one from the other, but it's inevitable. Hitler also could not fight on two fronts, he had to choose: either with England against Russia, or with Russia against England, as Haushofer advised him. But Hitler did not want to choose. "I don't want to tear myself apart, I want to remain myself," he said and started a two-front war. It brought down Germany, 20 million Russians and a nice chunk of the world. For what? For McDonald's to open its bars in Berlin now, for the Soviet Union to collapse and for NATO soldiers to be stationed everywhere. The identity of Germany was so important to Hitler at that time that he did not want to choose. In the same way, Poland has to choose, identity is not important. If Poland persists in preserving its identity,
There are nations that can expand to the size of a civilization. They lose their identity, their race, sometimes even their language, but that's a risk you have to take if you want to be an empire. This is the United States, this is Russia. Poland was unable to create its own civilization and must make a choice. I think there's still a possibility for you to make the normal choice, which is Byzantine. It requires a lot of courage, non-conformism, unusual forms of action, some skinheads, anarchists, mystics. Polish chaos against Polish order.

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- In short, from your point of view, any anti-Catholic activities in Poland are beneficial?

- Exactly. It is necessary to dismantle Catholicism from the inside, strengthen Polish Freemasonry, support destructive secular movements, and promote heterodox and anti-papal Christianity. Catholicism cannot be absorbed into our tradition unless it is deeply reoriented in a nationalistic and anti-papal direction. If a lodge like the Irish Golden Dawn operated in Poland, whose leaders, e.g. William Butler Yeats or Maud Gonne, were Catholics on the one hand, and fanatical occultists inspired by Celtic culture on the other, then one might have some hope. Such people could dismantle Catholicism from within and reorient it in a more heterodox and even esoteric direction. My friends in Poland tell me that there are such groups in your country that are related to telemism or the achievements of Alistair Crowley.

- To tell the truth, the opinion is more widespread in Poland that if there are forces in Poland that are destroying Catholicism, they are closer to the West than the East.

- As I said, you are between two conflicting blocs, two civilizational concepts: Eurasianism and Atlanticism, which wants to create a New World Order, i.e. a civilization devoid of tradition, sacrum and metaphysics.

- If the New World Order is presented in this way in Poland, it is almost always added that only Catholicism can save us from total secularization.

- Catholicism cannot be a guarantee of defense against the New World Order, because it is a transitional stage to this order. I do not believe in such an evolution and such a mutation of Catholicism that it could take on a Eurasian character. What's there to hide... I'm not like Zyuganow, who promises something pleasant to every lame orphan encountered on the road. Poland is in a tragic geopolitical situation. Both they (ie New World Order) and we (Eurasians) want to deprive you of your Catholicism. However, our offer is better, because with us you will at least be able to develop and realize your Slavic identity. So the less influential the pro-Eastern forces are in the anti-Catholic lobby, the more dire your situation becomes. I hope, however, that the forces gravitating towards Eurasianism will appear in you, maybe there will be some synthesis of the extreme right with the extreme left. It is a pity that in Poland communism never had an esoteric trend, as in Russia...

- Before the war, there was actually only one significant representative of mystical-gnostic communism in the KPP, Jan Hempel, the author of the Piast Sermons, volkist in spirit.

- So perhaps more hopes should be attached to your extreme right. If your national current broke away from liberalism and turned towards paganism, it would necessarily gravitate towards the East. Before the war, there was the phenomenon of the anti-Catholic and pagan "Zadruga".

- What you say reminds me of what I read recently about Russian Christianity. Some of the historians of religion believe that Russia was never thoroughly Christianized, that Christianity was adopted very superficially, and that pagan beliefs and customs were still alive among the majority of the common people.

- It all depends on what we call Christianity. Orthodoxy and Christianity are two different things. When you say "Christianity", you mean Catholicism or something analogous to Catholicism. Meanwhile, Orthodoxy is defined as non-Catholicism. So if Catholicism is Christianity, then Orthodoxy is non-Christianity. And vice versa: if we are Christians, you are not. I rely here not only on the claims of our fathers after the Great Schism, but also on authorities from the 8th or 9th century, such as Photius. Orthodoxy, which is not a religion but a tradition, is much closer to what we call paganism. It embraces and includes paganism. The teaching of the Cappadocian or Palamite fathers does not come into total conflict with pagan norms, it only transforms pre-Christian archetypes in Orthodox contexts. Orthodoxy is more than a religion, both vertically, since it includes paganism, and horizontally, because it is open to metaphysics, which has completely disappeared in post-scholastic Catholicism. Orthodoxy and Catholicism are two completely separate genre phenomena, tradition and religion are as if a whole and a part. Therefore, it is not possible to unite Orthodoxy and Catholicism.

- Specialists in ecumenical dialogue emphasize that between Catholicism and Protestantism the differences in culture and civilization are minimal, but the gulf between them is dogmatically widening. The situation is different with Catholicism and Orthodoxy: dogmatic differences are small, while cultural and civilizational differences are huge.

- Werner Sombarth, developing Max Weber's theses, stated that not only Protestantism, but also Catholicism was at the root of capitalism. Catholicism with its filioque and the idea of individual salvation. The idea of individual salvation is not Christian, but typically Catholic. There is no such concept in Orthodoxy. There is no concept of a unit at all. In Orthodox anthropology, the word individual, individual, does not occur. On the other hand, as we know, the entire social system, the entire civilization model, is built on anthropology. Sombarth believed that Catholic anthropology assumed a specific development of socio-economic relations because it attached great importance to the concept of individuality. Orthodox anthropology, in turn, always emphasized the supra-individual personality. A person then sees himself as part of a larger whole. Therefore, he is not saved, but someone is saved through him. In Catholicism, man is an individual, and therefore an indivisible whole, in Orthodoxy, a man is a dividuum, a separate person, and therefore divisible. In Catholicism, man is a finite being, he is responsible for himself - before God, before people, etc. Protestantism made this conviction even more absolute. In Orthodoxy, on the other hand, man is part of the Church, part of the community organism, just like a leg. How can a man be responsible for himself? Can the leg be responsible for itself? This is where the idea of the state, the total state, comes from. Therefore, the Russians, because they are Orthodox, can be real fascists, unlike artificial Italian fascists like Gentile or the local Hegelians. True Hegelianism is Ivan Peresvetov - a man who in the 16th century invented oprichnina for Ivan the Terrible. He was the true founder of Russian fascism. He formulated the thesis that the state is everything and the individual is nothing. The state is salvation, the state is the Church. It is enough to read the writings of our Orthodox saint, Joseph of Volokolamsk, to see that these two organisms are identical, identical. And now this whole organism pushes towards salvation, everyone strives for salvation without fragmenting, like one collective soul, one collective body.

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- Indeed, in Orthodoxy you have a certain inclination towards apocatastasis, towards the idea of universal salvation...

- That's true. The most important thing is that we do not have individuality. The individual dissolves into the collective. This is how the Russian works for salvation.

- Whose salvation?

- The salvation of the archetype, the salvation of Adam. Russians, through the state, strive for salvation not for themselves, but for Adam...

- Adam Kadmon, it sounds cabalistic.

- No, this is a holistic approach. In Orthodoxy, it is about the salvation of the Old Testament Adam through the coming of the new Adam, i.e. Christ, and nature saves itself through people. The state, especially the holy state, is the instrument of this salvation. That is why the Russian tsar is an active participant in the soteriological mystery. After the fall of Byzantium, he became the last guardian of the katechon, the tradition whose usurper at the turn of the 8th and 9th centuries turned out to be Charlemagne. After all, it was the Byzantine emperor who was the true emperor of both the East and the West.

- I have come across the claim that the real split between East and West took place not in 1054, when the great schism took place, nor in 1204, when the Crusaders ravaged Constantinople, but on Christmas 800, when Pope Leo III placed the imperial crown on Charlemagne's head.

- It was a usurpation. Therefore, the imperial function of the West, whether under the Stauffenbergs or the Habsburgs, has always remained in doubt. Because an ecumene can only have one emperor. One of them must be fake. According to all the norms of orthodoxy, such a sacred, anointed figure was, regardless of any negative personal character traits, the Byzantine emperor, and after the fall of Constantinople the Russian tsar. It can be said that the whole of Western philosophy and culture arose from the rejection and ignoring of the Byzantine tradition. In the West, the Orthodox version of Christianity or metaphysics is not taken into account at all, treated as if they did not exist.

- I think that if there was a process of increasing separation between Catholicism and Orthodoxy in the last millennium, it was bilateral. Orthodoxy was also isolated from Catholicism.

"That's right, but the thing is, only one side can be right." If Catholicism is right, then neither Russia nor Serbia have a reason to exist, culture should be Americanized and Protestantized, because this is the right direction of development. After all, Protestantism is a child of Catholicism, disgusting, I admit, and disgusting, but legitimate. So if Orthodoxy is wrong, then one should choose the Protestant path and, as in the Anglican Church, vote that there is no hell. Right, however, is on the side of Orthodoxy, which remains the most perfect form of traditionalism, sacralism and conservatism. In the beginning was East and West. East is paradise, fullness, West is exile, nothingness. Eastern empire - legitimate, western - apostate. These are not just archetypes. There is a great struggle going on between Byzantium and Rome, Russia and the West, Eurasianism and Atlanticism, socialism and capitalism, barbarism and civilization. We do not represent civilization, but culture. We all - Russians, Serbs, Tatars, etc. - represent the barbaric element. Barbarism is life, it is the sacred world of tradition. We live in shacks, we beat drums, we drink vodka, and Daniel Bell, postmodernism, post-Protestant information society, the New World Order are attacking us. In this great clash of Atlantic civilization and Eurasian culture, everything that lies between us - Poland, Ukraine, Central Europe, and who knows, maybe even Germany - must disappear, be absorbed. - we represent the barbaric element. Barbarism is life, it is the sacred world of tradition. We live in shacks, we beat drums, we drink vodka, and Daniel Bell, postmodernism, post-Protestant information society, the New World Order are attacking us. In this great clash of Atlantic civilization and Eurasian culture, everything that lies between us - Poland, Ukraine, Central Europe, and who knows, maybe even Germany - must disappear, be absorbed. - we represent the barbaric element. Barbarism is life, it is the sacred world of tradition. We live in shacks, we beat drums, we drink vodka, and Daniel Bell, postmodernism, post-Protestant information society, the New World Order are attacking us. In this great clash of Atlantic civilization and Eurasian culture, everything that lies between us - Poland, Ukraine, Central Europe, and who knows, maybe even Germany - must disappear, be absorbed.

- Samuel Huntington in his Clash of Civilizations writes that states that are hybrids of two civilizations have no chance of surviving in the shape they are today; that Bosnia, Ukraine, Turkey and Mexico will eventually have to take sides. Huntington's remarks, however, did not apply to Poland or Germany.

- Huntington is right: a clash of civilizations is imminent. There is no room for countries in the middle. I have already spoken about Poland. And Germany? What can Germany do? It's an occupied country. The Germans blew their chance during the war. It was necessary to fight with us against England, turn the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact to the West, and then Hitler-Stalin forever. Today, instead of English, Russian and German would be spoken everywhere. The Germans did not go for it and lost. Now there is an American occupation there and such "murderism" that you can't even open your mouth. I hope, however, that the Germans will shake off this state and sooner or later will throw off the dependence. I am convinced that in the common Eurasian home there will be a place for Germans, Poles, French and Italians. We Russians will impose only a barbaric, sacral attitude to life on the whole of Eurasia, and how it will manifest itself in the case of a particular nation will depend on its own national predispositions. I see Poles, for example, as defenders of Slavic racism. The Slavic element always bursts the framework of individualism, it strives for community.

- You talk so much about community and collectivity, but in fact you are an individualist.

- How is it? Why? Based on what do you think so?

- Even here, in the premises of the National-Bolshevik Party, you only need to look around to see that everyone looks the same in their black uniforms, even has a similar facial expression, only you are definitely different from them.

- I'm just like them. I don't think about myself, I think about others. I don't think for myself, I think for others. There are two concepts: personalism and individualism. Individualism is the opposite of community, because the center of the world, the constitutive element of the worldview, becomes a human being, an individual. There is no place for community or holism here, there is only a rational, logical, relative agreement between individual individuals. What do we propose? We are not against the person, but for a supra-individual understanding. This is, in a sense, a Nietzschean idea. Man is a dynamic phenomenon, constantly overcoming himself. This overcoming means the growth of man, growth beyond the limits of his individuality. In the vertical dimension, a man then becomes a part of a community, an organ of an organism. But horizontally... someone has to think. Together you can't think, together you can act. If you mix them all together, then the head of this collective organism that will arise will not be the sum of the individual brains, but one brain, the most enlightened one. There must be a certain gnoseological hierarchy. This community of material unity, the horizontal unity of bodies, contains hierarchy. Often people who fight against individualism are personalists. The spirit of unity, the spirit of community, the spirit of the nation can be manifested in them in a very condensed way. They are not individualists, but distinct, discrete incarnations of the all-unity. This is their authority. This is the idea of a monarch, a people's leader, a führer. This is the phenomenon of the Russian tsars, but also of Pugachev, Lenin and Stalin. And it's not like that at all that some individualist invents collectivism for himself, because then he would be a fraud, a charlatan, a hypnotist. It's like in chemistry: when you mix different substances, the lightest ones, i.e. gases, float the highest. Similarly in society: when various human elements are mixed together, the most subtle ones, i.e. the brains, float the highest. That is why for some this idea of community is concentrated in the brain, for others in the soul, and for others in the legs or hands. Nevertheless, it is the same idea for everyone. In this way, one organism is created - Behemoth (as Carl Schmitt would call it), a Eurasian Tatar-Scythian monster, which includes not only people, but also elements, elements of nature, soils, winds, rivers, mountains. The sublimation of this terrible dark cluster is the Russian monarchs, Stalin...

- You said that Russia's internal imperative is expansion. But what is the purpose of this expansion, what is the idea behind the postulated ideocracy?

- The goal of Russian expansion is total soteriological science. We have sensed this for centuries, since the times of Metropolitan Ilarion of Kiev, but now it is more obvious to us than ever that we are not one nation among many, but that we have a mission to reveal a certain truth to the world. We want a different end to history than the one proposed by the West. We want a sacred end, not a profane one. We are convinced, and we live by it, that we have a certain key to the spiritual, eschatological truth. Every Russian knows that. Everyone.

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- What is the essence of this truth?

- Our whole millennial history is an attempt to reveal this truth, to look for forms of its expression. This is the truth that the West has plunged into its depths, this is the truth about salvation, the transformation of the world, a new pleroma, a new quality of being, resurrection from the dead, transformation of bodies, about the sunlight that should come from the mouth of the Great Mother. We Russians, due to our ethnic and religious predispositions, are called to this. Our entire history, including the last battle of communism against capitalism, are just different attempts to realize the same messianic dream.

- To be honest, it's hard for me to imagine communism as a struggle for the sacred in the world. Especially during the times of Stalin, so praised by Mr. Stalin, it was a deeply anti-Orthodox movement: churches were demolished and closed, bishops were tortured and murdered, believers were imprisoned and sent to Siberia, forced atheization was carried out...

- First of all: Orthodoxy, which Stalin was destroying, was very Westernized - imbued with the spirit of the West, alienated from the nation. Secondly, the messianic dream I mentioned could live outside Orthodoxy and develop in other forms. Communism was an attempt to liberate this messianism from a purely religious understanding. Perhaps this attempt failed precisely because it was so far removed from theology. So I think that for the next expansion we should use all our experiences, both purely sacred and socialist. Socialism is nothing but a secularized version of Byzantineism, it is Red Byzantium, Orthodoxy in a sectarian, exalted form. It can be said that the people's monarch Stalin, with the people's faith, i.e. communism, acted against the alienated, lordly, noble, Westernized monarchy and the Church. I am by no means such an ardent supporter of the Stalinist system, but I can clearly see the pulsation of our historical existence also in communism. So if I say my unconditional "yes" to Bolshevism, Lenin and Stalin, it is not because it was an ideal system, but because it was the only solution for us. This time we have not yet succeeded, but next time we will purify Orthodoxy and Communism and reject those elements which caused these models to alienate themselves from the nation. Our next stage will be Orthodox communism - Eurasian, missionary, pan-Slavic, philotatar... So if I say my unconditional "yes" to Bolshevism, Lenin and Stalin, it is not because it was an ideal system, but because it was the only solution for us. This time we have not yet succeeded, but next time we will purify Orthodoxy and Communism and reject those elements which caused these models to alienate themselves from the nation. Our next stage will be Orthodox communism - Eurasian, missionary, pan-Slavic, philotatar... So if I say my unconditional "yes" to Bolshevism, Lenin and Stalin, it is not because it was an ideal system, but because it was the only solution for us. This time we have not yet succeeded, but next time we will purify Orthodoxy and Communism and reject those elements which caused these models to alienate themselves from the nation. Our next stage will be Orthodox communism - Eurasian, missionary, pan-Slavic, philotatar...

- It almost sounds like a postmodern project.

- We include a lot, but we also exclude a lot. We exclude individualism, the individual, the free market, ideological neutrality, tolerance, and we include barbaric, fanatical, exalted elements. This is not postmodernism, but let's say: postmodernism. Postmodernism is the objective state in which we live after the victory of the West over us. Modern is over. Postmodernism is only one answer to the challenge of postmodernism, the liberal answer. There may also be an anti-liberal answer, i.e. ours - anti-postmodern postmodernism. The reflection of the West decomposes everything into its prime factors, and at the same time sterilizes and dries everything like exhibits in a flowerbed. Our reflection, on the other hand, does not deprive us of the aroma of life, the almost erotic delight of our ideas, it intoxicates us, we are drunk with Eurasia...

- Already in the eighteenth century, Nikita Panin described the history of Russia as a polar pulsation of deadness and chaos. Similarly, two centuries later, Yuri Lotman - as leaps in entropy and organization. Today's columnists often compare Russia's current situation to the Weimar era in German history...

- A very apt comparison.

- The West is aware of this, which is why it does not want to humiliate the Russians, humiliate their national pride, as it did with Germany after the First World War, when it extracted huge contributions from them. The West rather wants to value Russia, invites it to the G-7 group, pumps millions of dollars into the Russian economy. He wants to avoid the Weimar scenario...

- The West treats Russia very harshly. I don't think he learned the lessons of Weimar, though. The more he puts pressure on us, the more he will have to pay for it. It works like a spring: the harder you push, the harder it will hit back. The West is the geographic Satan, the geographic Antichrist. The West should pay for everything. It would be best to settle it with Chinese, Tatars, Muslims, all this Eurasian nomadism. As I was walking through the streets of Paris recently, I suddenly noticed that something was missing. And I realized that it was the lack of smells, some kind of sterility, asepticity. The only fragrance in the West is perfume. The earth, air, flowers, trees began to smell only in Poland, and when I returned to Russia, I immersed myself in the madness of fragrances. The West is a dead land. It will revive only when the Cossacks inhabit it, Tajiks, Kazakhs. They will bring life with them, they will bring scents.

- At almost every step you refer to the Orthodox tradition. But does Orthodoxy itself admit to your ideas? I spoke with many representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church in Moscow and none of them consider you an orthodox believer, you are rather a heretic.

- Who said that?

- For example, deacon Andrei Kuraev.

- And the deacon Alexander Mumrikov said that I am fully Orthodox. And what about this? The opinion of one deacon against the opinion of another. Fortunately, we do not have Catholicism, where the office of the pope is and everyone must obey him. I, too, can safely say that deacon Kuraev is not fully Orthodox. There are two Orthodox churches at the moment: the first - lively, full of spirit, and the second - official, formalized, cadre. Deacon Kuraev represents a formal, pro-system, I would even say profane branch of Orthodoxy. He writes lyrics that are Catholic in spirit. For example, he believes that the merit of Christianity was the impulse for the development of exact sciences, which resulted in the desacralization of the cosmos. Hesychasts would immediately call him a heretic. Fortunately, Orthodoxy is broader than just the Church and includes a branch of the Old Believers as well. I myself belong to the Moscow Patriarchate, but I am with the Old Believers in spirit. Besides, they consider themselves to be the only true Orthodox. If there is ever a real revival of Orthodoxy, it will come not from the ossified structures of the official Church, but from the depths of the Russian national spirit, which has been most fully preserved among the Old Believers.

- And which faction of the Old Believers is closer to you? Rounders or non-rounders?

- This division concerns the Biały Krynica hierarchy. However, I am more interested in a different division: into pop and bezpopowców. I am closer to the bezpopovtsy who reject priests as more radical. Among them, however, the closest to me is the faction of non-teachers who believe that the kingdom of the Antichrist has already arrived, and it is the Catholic and Protestant West.

- I see that you have a very closed mind system. However, what are the chances that the ideas you preach will find resonance in society? Observing you, one can say: some obsessed idealist is sitting in the basement, something raving under his breath, but his delusions have absolutely no effect on people. Oh, another frustration that our century is full of...

- I will try to answer this question in three stages. First, even if I am an idealist who sits in the basement and whose ideas play no role, I am not worried because all great ideas started with idealists who sat in the basement and played no role. The fate of ideas is specific. The man who deals with ideas is immersed in a theurgic atmosphere where the invisible and inaudible appear to him as visible and audible, even in the form of text or discourse. And even if I remained unknown to anyone until my death and left no written word behind me, what counts is the very fact of capturing the main vectors of history, the main ideas of civilization.
Second: I am active in the National-Bolshevik Party. It is not a big party, but it has a clear direction: we are particularly trying to influence young people, especially students, who will be the elite of the young generation in the future. We are actually the only party that deals with the thoughts of young people. We teach them to think and live. We are indoctrinating the next generation. Nobody in Russia does that: neither liberals nor communists...

- That's what television does.

- That's right, but it forms average and passive people. We, on the other hand, shape people, as Gumilow called them, passionate, above-average people, those whom Pareto called the counter-litetes of the future. Other nationalist parties, such as the Barkasz supporters, do not form counter-elites of the past, but defensive units. Their militant organizations are not elite. We, on the other hand, focus on those who will set the tone for life in Russia in the future, we prepare them conceptually. We organize seminars for them, publish magazines and books. You could say that our party is purely intellectual. All these pickets and demonstrations are only an addition to the basic task, which is the intellectual preparation of the generation. We already have hundreds of people all over the country formed this way.
Thirdly, my ideas are not limited to the party alone. Since 1987, I have been actively involved in the ideologization of the broadly understood patriotic camp. The two largest parties in the current Duma - Zyuganov's communists and Zhirinovsky's nationalists - took over from me, especially from my earlier texts, the main ideological and geopolitical thoughts. Many politicians, whom I personally did not even know, also referred to the ideas I put forward, e.g. General Liebiedź.

'Maybe because one of Liebed's advisers was Heydar Dżemal. In 1991, you published the book Orientacja: Północ (Orientation: Północ) for him in your publishing house.

- Our paths with Dżemal parted because his traditionalism and Eurasianism is Muslim, and mine - Russian. But back to the previous topic. It doesn't matter if I personally know Rutskoy or Khasbulatov who adopt my ideas. I am like Ivan Peresvetov, who invented oprichnina for Ivan the Terrible. I am a thought lab. I don't think for myself, I think for the state, for the nation, for history. I'm waiting for my Ivan the Terrible. All politicians who will look for a real and great idea for Russia will come to me sooner or later. Not because I am a great individual and I personally invented something, but because there is an objective idea of Russia, and I am only its exponent. My latest book, Fundamentals of Geopolitics, is read by all opposition politicians and the more serious officials of the Yeltsin administration. The idea of the Moscow-Berlin-Paris axis that Yeltsin spoke about recently is directly taken from my writings. If you add Tokyo to the mix, you have a classic element of the Eurasian geopolitical concept. In addition, many circles in other former Soviet republics are interested in our ideas of a conservative revolution. For example, in Armenia, the milieu of Robert Kocharian, who has just come to power, the so-called the war party, are people largely shaped by our writings. So to sum up: with or without me - what I write about will happen anyway. Who will be the clerk, who will put these ideas into practice - I do not know and I do not undertake to answer. Maybe it will be the current government that will change its face, maybe it will be some opposition force, maybe it will happen in many years, but it is an inevitable process. I may disappear, but my geopolitical ideas will not disappear.

- Your milieu is often said to be the Russian equivalent of the Western European New Right. This orientation, assuming that the battle for the fate of humanity will take place not in the political but in the cultural field, proclaimed a kind of kulturkampf...

- The Kulturkampf of the New Right is a wonderful idea, Alain de Benoist is a heroic activist and brilliant thinker, but their thirty-year struggle has brought no results. They said that culture would be the clash, but Americanization has made its greatest triumphs in culture. Right-wing grammar is in a sorry state, it has never gone beyond the margins. How to explain it? I think the conceptual model of the New Right is very interesting, but the temperament of its European activists is insufficient for the implementation of such ideas. They're too civilized, too conservative, too cowardly, such warm blobs. That's why I don't like being compared to them, because it's basically being compared to losers. During the years of the opposition in Russia, I did things that they never dreamed of. I did not deal with the Kulturkampf, but with the ideological fertilization of serious political forces. I was working with living history, not archaeology. The only man in the West whose breadth of views struck me was Jean Thiriart, the author of the idea of a Euro-Soviet empire. Before his death, he even came to Moscow; I hosted him here, introduced him to Yegor Ligachev, Zyuganov, Baburin...
Europe today has a choice: Eurasianism or Atlanticism. It will either go with Russia or with America. If the European New Right chooses us, that is, it chooses the barbaric element, so it must adopt our methods of operation. You have to organize attacks, deal with sabotage, set fires, blow up bridges. True antimondialism is destruction and terror. What is the New Right doing? It turned into an intellectual sect. Overweight men with gray hair have been gathering at seminars for thirty years and frothing. Of course, you have to read books, but that's not enough. You need to create a guerilla. If you're against the New World Order, then take a knife, put on a mask, go out at night and kill at least one yankie. That is why the New Left, the Red Brigades and the Rote Armee Fraktion are so close to me. Our task is not limited only to culture, our task is to make a real revolution. For this, ideology and intellectual preparation are needed, but without concrete participation in the action, without front-line experience, without combat baptism - it will remain unattainable for us. I don't know if any of the activists of the New Right were ever under artillery fire, but our people not only go to meetings or fight on barricades, but also go to real wars, for example to Transnistria or Yugoslavia. The New Right is just a project, and we are designers and implementers, architects and builders. The future is ours. whether any of the activists of the New Right were ever under artillery fire, but our people not only go to meetings or fight on barricades, but also go to real wars, for example to Transnistria or Yugoslavia. The New Right is just a project, and we are designers and implementers, architects and builders. The future is ours. whether any of the activists of the New Right were ever under artillery fire, but our people not only go to meetings or fight on barricades, but also go to real wars, for example to Transnistria or Yugoslavia. The New Right is just a project, and we are designers and implementers, architects and builders. The future is ours.

- Thank you for the conversation.

Interviewer: Grzegorz Górny

Moscow, March 1998

The interview was published in the Fronda quarterly, no. 11-12

Source: https://www.fronda.pl/a/aleksander-dugin-czekam-na-iwana-groznego,45653.html

06/26/2016

Alexander Dugin: I am waiting for Ivan the Terrible

- Students of the Diplomatic Academy in Moscow, with whom I spoke, told me that from the reading they were given in class, i.e. your book The Foundations of Geopolitics, the chapter devoted to sacral geography was the most memorable to them. In Poland, I have not met anyone who would deal with this issue. Could you tell us what place Poland occupies in sacral geography?

- I have never dealt specifically with the case of Poland, although its place is very specific. After all, it is the north of Eurasia, an important region of pre-Christian Slavism, the Baltic Sea basin. Regarding the archetypes of sacred geography, I would like to point out two things.

Firstly, in the Orthodox reality there is a synergy between the pre-Christian and the Christian models of the world - which overlap homologously, without conflict. Different figures and phenomena from different orders overlap each other painlessly and even harmoniously. In the case of Poland, there is a much more conflicting relationship between these two models, due to Catholicism, which is a completely different tradition than Orthodoxy. René Guenon clearly separates tradition from religion. Tradition is a broader concept than religion. Orthodoxy is a tradition, Catholicism is a religion. Tradition is able to absorb elements of other religious beliefs without conflict. Religion, on the other hand, comes into conflict with other beliefs. This is related to the different historical experience of the Eastern and Western Churches after the Great Schism. The West was not always purely religious, Catholic, there was a period when it was more traditional, Orthodox. After the Great Schism, however, Catholicism moved away from tradition and narrowed down to religion. At least that's our Byzantine version.

How does this relate to sacred geography? Well, in our understanding, the West, understood as a territory dominated by Catholicism and Protestantism, is in a relationship opposite to religious norms and elements. Of course, there are many elements of other religions in the West, but they exist in conflict with the Catholic religion. Institutions that deal with sacred geography or the remnants of pre-Christian tradition in the West after the Great Schism were relegated to autonomous spheres - to magic, esotericism, hermetic orders. There was no such split in Orthodoxy.

In this context, Poland is on the border between the Catholic and Orthodox worlds. From my Eurasian point of view, the archetype of Poland's sacral geography is deeply dualistic: on the one hand, a pre-Christian, pagan, magical, heterodox tradition whose roots remain Slavic; on the other - Catholicism of Germano-Roman origin. There is a conflict between them. The situation of Poland is a border situation. She cannot unite with the Eastern world religiously and with the Western world ethnically. In geopolitics, Poland remains part of the sanitary cordon separating the Eurasian continent into two parts, which is very convenient for the anti-traditional Anglo-Saxon forces. Poland cannot fully realize its Eurasian-Slavic essence, because it is hindered by Catholicism, nor its Western European identity, because it is hindered by its own Slavicness, i.e. language, customs, archetypes, climate of places, etc. As a result of this duality, this borderline situation, Poland always falls victim to the third force, just like today mondialism or Atlanticism. This location on the border between Russia and Germany means that the problem of Poland's partitions between the East and the West will always be present in history. This is the result of this sacral-geographical and geopolitical duality. As noted by Toynbee, the attempt to build an independent Polish-Lithuanian civilization between these two forces ended in failure. Central European civilization is too weak to withstand the tension between East and West. The countries of this region must define themselves: either here or there. The Polish-Lithuanian civilization did not want or could not define itself so she had to disappear. It's a really dramatic situation.

- Are there any elements in the Polish tradition that seem attractive to you?

- I am definitely closer to the Slavic-Eurasian sources of Polishness, their ethnic and even pagan element. I am attracted to certain eastern or oriental elements, minority culture. I think that the best thing about Polish history is the Jewish tradition in small towns in eastern Poland. In fact, I am interested in everything that was anti-Catholic in Poland: Polish freemasonry and occultists, Jan Potocki and Hoene-Wroński, Mienżyński and Dzierżyński... They all chose the Eurasian path.

- You talk about Poland's position between East and West, that is between Russia and Germany. Meanwhile, many scholars emphasize that Germany, and especially Prussia, is more similar to Russia than to England or Spain. Feliks Koneczny even believed that Prussia, like Russia, belonged to Byzantine and not Latin civilization.

Konecki was right. Germany is internally divided. Bavaria leans towards the West, Prussia towards the East. Prussia is a little Russia inside Germany.

- We have always seen this as the greatest danger for us: a friendly alliance between Germany and Russia.

- That's our job. Unite with Germany and create a powerful continental bloc.

- What about Poland then?

- We Russians and Germans reason in terms of expansion and we will never reason otherwise. We are not interested simply in preserving our own state or nation. We are interested in absorbing, through our own pressure, the maximum number of categories that complete us. We are not interested in colonizing like the English, but in demarcating our strategic geopolitical borders without even special Russification, although there should be some Russification. Russia, in its geopolitical and sacral-geographic development, is not interested in the existence of an independent Polish state in any form. Nor is it interested in the existence of Ukraine. Not because we don't like Poles or Ukrainians, but because these are the laws of sacral geography and geopolitics.
Poland must choose: either a Slavic identity or a Catholic one. I understand it's hard to separate one from the other, but it's inevitable. Hitler also could not fight on two fronts, he had to choose: either with England against Russia, or with Russia against England, as Haushofer advised him. But Hitler did not want to choose. "I don't want to tear myself apart, I want to remain myself," he said and started a two-front war. It brought down Germany, 20 million Russians and a nice chunk of the world. For what? For McDonald's to open its bars in Berlin now, for the Soviet Union to collapse and for NATO soldiers to be stationed everywhere. The identity of Germany was so important to Hitler at that time that he did not want to choose. In the same way, Poland has to choose, identity is not important. If Poland persists in preserving its identity,
There are nations that can expand to the size of a civilization. They lose their identity, their race, sometimes even their language, but that's a risk you have to take if you want to be an empire. This is the United States, this is Russia. Poland was unable to create its own civilization and must make a choice. I think there's still a possibility for you to make the normal choice, which is Byzantine. It requires a lot of courage, non-conformism, unusual forms of action, some skinheads, anarchists, mystics. Polish chaos against Polish order.

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- In short, from your point of view, any anti-Catholic activities in Poland are beneficial?

- Exactly. It is necessary to dismantle Catholicism from the inside, strengthen Polish Freemasonry, support destructive secular movements, and promote heterodox and anti-papal Christianity. Catholicism cannot be absorbed into our tradition unless it is deeply reoriented in a nationalistic and anti-papal direction. If a lodge like the Irish Golden Dawn operated in Poland, whose leaders, e.g. William Butler Yeats or Maud Gonne, were Catholics on the one hand, and fanatical occultists inspired by Celtic culture on the other, then one might have some hope. Such people could dismantle Catholicism from within and reorient it in a more heterodox and even esoteric direction. My friends in Poland tell me that there are such groups in your country that are related to telemism or the achievements of Alistair Crowley.

- To tell the truth, the opinion is more widespread in Poland that if there are forces in Poland that are destroying Catholicism, they are closer to the West than the East.

- As I said, you are between two conflicting blocs, two civilizational concepts: Eurasianism and Atlanticism, which wants to create a New World Order, i.e. a civilization devoid of tradition, sacrum and metaphysics.

- If the New World Order is presented in this way in Poland, it is almost always added that only Catholicism can save us from total secularization.

- Catholicism cannot be a guarantee of defense against the New World Order, because it is a transitional stage to this order. I do not believe in such an evolution and such a mutation of Catholicism that it could take on a Eurasian character. What's there to hide... I'm not like Zyuganow, who promises something pleasant to every lame orphan encountered on the road. Poland is in a tragic geopolitical situation. Both they (ie New World Order) and we (Eurasians) want to deprive you of your Catholicism. However, our offer is better, because with us you will at least be able to develop and realize your Slavic identity. So the less influential the pro-Eastern forces are in the anti-Catholic lobby, the more dire your situation becomes. I hope, however, that the forces gravitating towards Eurasianism will appear in you, maybe there will be some synthesis of the extreme right with the extreme left. It is a pity that in Poland communism never had an esoteric trend, as in Russia...

- Before the war, there was actually only one significant representative of mystical-gnostic communism in the KPP, Jan Hempel, the author of the Piast Sermons, volkist in spirit.

- So perhaps more hopes should be attached to your extreme right. If your national current broke away from liberalism and turned towards paganism, it would necessarily gravitate towards the East. Before the war, there was the phenomenon of the anti-Catholic and pagan "Zadruga".

- What you say reminds me of what I read recently about Russian Christianity. Some of the historians of religion believe that Russia was never thoroughly Christianized, that Christianity was adopted very superficially, and that pagan beliefs and customs were still alive among the majority of the common people.

- It all depends on what we call Christianity. Orthodoxy and Christianity are two different things. When you say "Christianity", you mean Catholicism or something analogous to Catholicism. Meanwhile, Orthodoxy is defined as non-Catholicism. So if Catholicism is Christianity, then Orthodoxy is non-Christianity. And vice versa: if we are Christians, you are not. I rely here not only on the claims of our fathers after the Great Schism, but also on authorities from the 8th or 9th century, such as Photius. Orthodoxy, which is not a religion but a tradition, is much closer to what we call paganism. It embraces and includes paganism. The teaching of the Cappadocian or Palamite fathers does not come into total conflict with pagan norms, it only transforms pre-Christian archetypes in Orthodox contexts. Orthodoxy is more than a religion, both vertically, since it includes paganism, and horizontally, because it is open to metaphysics, which has completely disappeared in post-scholastic Catholicism. Orthodoxy and Catholicism are two completely separate genre phenomena, tradition and religion are as if a whole and a part. Therefore, it is not possible to unite Orthodoxy and Catholicism.

- Specialists in ecumenical dialogue emphasize that between Catholicism and Protestantism the differences in culture and civilization are minimal, but the gulf between them is dogmatically widening. The situation is different with Catholicism and Orthodoxy: dogmatic differences are small, while cultural and civilizational differences are huge.

- Werner Sombarth, developing Max Weber's theses, stated that not only Protestantism, but also Catholicism was at the root of capitalism. Catholicism with its filioque and the idea of individual salvation. The idea of individual salvation is not Christian, but typically Catholic. There is no such concept in Orthodoxy. There is no concept of a unit at all. In Orthodox anthropology, the word individual, individual, does not occur. On the other hand, as we know, the entire social system, the entire civilization model, is built on anthropology. Sombarth believed that Catholic anthropology assumed a specific development of socio-economic relations because it attached great importance to the concept of individuality. Orthodox anthropology, in turn, always emphasized the supra-individual personality. A person then sees himself as part of a larger whole. Therefore, he is not saved, but someone is saved through him. In Catholicism, man is an individual, and therefore an indivisible whole, in Orthodoxy, a man is a dividuum, a separate person, and therefore divisible. In Catholicism, man is a finite being, he is responsible for himself - before God, before people, etc. Protestantism made this conviction even more absolute. In Orthodoxy, on the other hand, man is part of the Church, part of the community organism, just like a leg. How can a man be responsible for himself? Can the leg be responsible for itself? This is where the idea of the state, the total state, comes from. Therefore, the Russians, because they are Orthodox, can be real fascists, unlike artificial Italian fascists like Gentile or the local Hegelians. True Hegelianism is Ivan Peresvetov - a man who in the 16th century invented oprichnina for Ivan the Terrible. He was the true founder of Russian fascism. He formulated the thesis that the state is everything and the individual is nothing. The state is salvation, the state is the Church. It is enough to read the writings of our Orthodox saint, Joseph of Volokolamsk, to see that these two organisms are identical, identical. And now this whole organism pushes towards salvation, everyone strives for salvation without fragmenting, like one collective soul, one collective body.

[end_page]

- Indeed, in Orthodoxy you have a certain inclination towards apocatastasis, towards the idea of universal salvation...

- That's true. The most important thing is that we do not have individuality. The individual dissolves into the collective. This is how the Russian works for salvation.

- Whose salvation?

- The salvation of the archetype, the salvation of Adam. Russians, through the state, strive for salvation not for themselves, but for Adam...

- Adam Kadmon, it sounds cabalistic.

- No, this is a holistic approach. In Orthodoxy, it is about the salvation of the Old Testament Adam through the coming of the new Adam, i.e. Christ, and nature saves itself through people. The state, especially the holy state, is the instrument of this salvation. That is why the Russian tsar is an active participant in the soteriological mystery. After the fall of Byzantium, he became the last guardian of the katechon, the tradition whose usurper at the turn of the 8th and 9th centuries turned out to be Charlemagne. After all, it was the Byzantine emperor who was the true emperor of both the East and the West.

- I have come across the claim that the real split between East and West took place not in 1054, when the great schism took place, nor in 1204, when the Crusaders ravaged Constantinople, but on Christmas 800, when Pope Leo III placed the imperial crown on Charlemagne's head.

- It was a usurpation. Therefore, the imperial function of the West, whether under the Stauffenbergs or the Habsburgs, has always remained in doubt. Because an ecumene can only have one emperor. One of them must be fake. According to all the norms of orthodoxy, such a sacred, anointed figure was, regardless of any negative personal character traits, the Byzantine emperor, and after the fall of Constantinople the Russian tsar. It can be said that the whole of Western philosophy and culture arose from the rejection and ignoring of the Byzantine tradition. In the West, the Orthodox version of Christianity or metaphysics is not taken into account at all, treated as if they did not exist.

- I think that if there was a process of increasing separation between Catholicism and Orthodoxy in the last millennium, it was bilateral. Orthodoxy was also isolated from Catholicism.

"That's right, but the thing is, only one side can be right." If Catholicism is right, then neither Russia nor Serbia have a reason to exist, culture should be Americanized and Protestantized, because this is the right direction of development. After all, Protestantism is a child of Catholicism, disgusting, I admit, and disgusting, but legitimate. So if Orthodoxy is wrong, then one should choose the Protestant path and, as in the Anglican Church, vote that there is no hell. Right, however, is on the side of Orthodoxy, which remains the most perfect form of traditionalism, sacralism and conservatism. In the beginning was East and West. East is paradise, fullness, West is exile, nothingness. Eastern empire - legitimate, western - apostate. These are not just archetypes. There is a great struggle going on between Byzantium and Rome, Russia and the West, Eurasianism and Atlanticism, socialism and capitalism, barbarism and civilization. We do not represent civilization, but culture. We all - Russians, Serbs, Tatars, etc. - represent the barbaric element. Barbarism is life, it is the sacred world of tradition. We live in shacks, we beat drums, we drink vodka, and Daniel Bell, postmodernism, post-Protestant information society, the New World Order are attacking us. In this great clash of Atlantic civilization and Eurasian culture, everything that lies between us - Poland, Ukraine, Central Europe, and who knows, maybe even Germany - must disappear, be absorbed. - we represent the barbaric element. Barbarism is life, it is the sacred world of tradition. We live in shacks, we beat drums, we drink vodka, and Daniel Bell, postmodernism, post-Protestant information society, the New World Order are attacking us. In this great clash of Atlantic civilization and Eurasian culture, everything that lies between us - Poland, Ukraine, Central Europe, and who knows, maybe even Germany - must disappear, be absorbed. - we represent the barbaric element. Barbarism is life, it is the sacred world of tradition. We live in shacks, we beat drums, we drink vodka, and Daniel Bell, postmodernism, post-Protestant information society, the New World Order are attacking us. In this great clash of Atlantic civilization and Eurasian culture, everything that lies between us - Poland, Ukraine, Central Europe, and who knows, maybe even Germany - must disappear, be absorbed.

- Samuel Huntington in his Clash of Civilizations writes that states that are hybrids of two civilizations have no chance of surviving in the shape they are today; that Bosnia, Ukraine, Turkey and Mexico will eventually have to take sides. Huntington's remarks, however, did not apply to Poland or Germany.

- Huntington is right: a clash of civilizations is imminent. There is no room for countries in the middle. I have already spoken about Poland. And Germany? What can Germany do? It's an occupied country. The Germans blew their chance during the war. It was necessary to fight with us against England, turn the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact to the West, and then Hitler-Stalin forever. Today, instead of English, Russian and German would be spoken everywhere. The Germans did not go for it and lost. Now there is an American occupation there and such "murderism" that you can't even open your mouth. I hope, however, that the Germans will shake off this state and sooner or later will throw off the dependence. I am convinced that in the common Eurasian home there will be a place for Germans, Poles, French and Italians. We Russians will impose only a barbaric, sacral attitude to life on the whole of Eurasia, and how it will manifest itself in the case of a particular nation will depend on its own national predispositions. I see Poles, for example, as defenders of Slavic racism. The Slavic element always bursts the framework of individualism, it strives for community.

- You talk so much about community and collectivity, but in fact you are an individualist.

- How is it? Why? Based on what do you think so?

- Even here, in the premises of the National-Bolshevik Party, you only need to look around to see that everyone looks the same in their black uniforms, even has a similar facial expression, only you are definitely different from them.

- I'm just like them. I don't think about myself, I think about others. I don't think for myself, I think for others. There are two concepts: personalism and individualism. Individualism is the opposite of community, because the center of the world, the constitutive element of the worldview, becomes a human being, an individual. There is no place for community or holism here, there is only a rational, logical, relative agreement between individual individuals. What do we propose? We are not against the person, but for a supra-individual understanding. This is, in a sense, a Nietzschean idea. Man is a dynamic phenomenon, constantly overcoming himself. This overcoming means the growth of man, growth beyond the limits of his individuality. In the vertical dimension, a man then becomes a part of a community, an organ of an organism. But horizontally... someone has to think. Together you can't think, together you can act. If you mix them all together, then the head of this collective organism that will arise will not be the sum of the individual brains, but one brain, the most enlightened one. There must be a certain gnoseological hierarchy. This community of material unity, the horizontal unity of bodies, contains hierarchy. Often people who fight against individualism are personalists. The spirit of unity, the spirit of community, the spirit of the nation can be manifested in them in a very condensed way. They are not individualists, but distinct, discrete incarnations of the all-unity. This is their authority. This is the idea of a monarch, a people's leader, a führer. This is the phenomenon of the Russian tsars, but also of Pugachev, Lenin and Stalin. And it's not like that at all that some individualist invents collectivism for himself, because then he would be a fraud, a charlatan, a hypnotist. It's like in chemistry: when you mix different substances, the lightest ones, i.e. gases, float the highest. Similarly in society: when various human elements are mixed together, the most subtle ones, i.e. the brains, float the highest. That is why for some this idea of community is concentrated in the brain, for others in the soul, and for others in the legs or hands. Nevertheless, it is the same idea for everyone. In this way, one organism is created - Behemoth (as Carl Schmitt would call it), a Eurasian Tatar-Scythian monster, which includes not only people, but also elements, elements of nature, soils, winds, rivers, mountains. The sublimation of this terrible dark cluster is the Russian monarchs, Stalin...

- You said that Russia's internal imperative is expansion. But what is the purpose of this expansion, what is the idea behind the postulated ideocracy?

- The goal of Russian expansion is total soteriological science. We have sensed this for centuries, since the times of Metropolitan Ilarion of Kiev, but now it is more obvious to us than ever that we are not one nation among many, but that we have a mission to reveal a certain truth to the world. We want a different end to history than the one proposed by the West. We want a sacred end, not a profane one. We are convinced, and we live by it, that we have a certain key to the spiritual, eschatological truth. Every Russian knows that. Everyone.

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- What is the essence of this truth?

- Our whole millennial history is an attempt to reveal this truth, to look for forms of its expression. This is the truth that the West has plunged into its depths, this is the truth about salvation, the transformation of the world, a new pleroma, a new quality of being, resurrection from the dead, transformation of bodies, about the sunlight that should come from the mouth of the Great Mother. We Russians, due to our ethnic and religious predispositions, are called to this. Our entire history, including the last battle of communism against capitalism, are just different attempts to realize the same messianic dream.

- To be honest, it's hard for me to imagine communism as a struggle for the sacred in the world. Especially during the times of Stalin, so praised by Mr. Stalin, it was a deeply anti-Orthodox movement: churches were demolished and closed, bishops were tortured and murdered, believers were imprisoned and sent to Siberia, forced atheization was carried out...

- First of all: Orthodoxy, which Stalin was destroying, was very Westernized - imbued with the spirit of the West, alienated from the nation. Secondly, the messianic dream I mentioned could live outside Orthodoxy and develop in other forms. Communism was an attempt to liberate this messianism from a purely religious understanding. Perhaps this attempt failed precisely because it was so far removed from theology. So I think that for the next expansion we should use all our experiences, both purely sacred and socialist. Socialism is nothing but a secularized version of Byzantineism, it is Red Byzantium, Orthodoxy in a sectarian, exalted form. It can be said that the people's monarch Stalin, with the people's faith, i.e. communism, acted against the alienated, lordly, noble, Westernized monarchy and the Church. I am by no means such an ardent supporter of the Stalinist system, but I can clearly see the pulsation of our historical existence also in communism. So if I say my unconditional "yes" to Bolshevism, Lenin and Stalin, it is not because it was an ideal system, but because it was the only solution for us. This time we have not yet succeeded, but next time we will purify Orthodoxy and Communism and reject those elements which caused these models to alienate themselves from the nation. Our next stage will be Orthodox communism - Eurasian, missionary, pan-Slavic, philotatar... So if I say my unconditional "yes" to Bolshevism, Lenin and Stalin, it is not because it was an ideal system, but because it was the only solution for us. This time we have not yet succeeded, but next time we will purify Orthodoxy and Communism and reject those elements which caused these models to alienate themselves from the nation. Our next stage will be Orthodox communism - Eurasian, missionary, pan-Slavic, philotatar... So if I say my unconditional "yes" to Bolshevism, Lenin and Stalin, it is not because it was an ideal system, but because it was the only solution for us. This time we have not yet succeeded, but next time we will purify Orthodoxy and Communism and reject those elements which caused these models to alienate themselves from the nation. Our next stage will be Orthodox communism - Eurasian, missionary, pan-Slavic, philotatar...

- It almost sounds like a postmodern project.

- We include a lot, but we also exclude a lot. We exclude individualism, the individual, the free market, ideological neutrality, tolerance, and we include barbaric, fanatical, exalted elements. This is not postmodernism, but let's say: postmodernism. Postmodernism is the objective state in which we live after the victory of the West over us. Modern is over. Postmodernism is only one answer to the challenge of postmodernism, the liberal answer. There may also be an anti-liberal answer, i.e. ours - anti-postmodern postmodernism. The reflection of the West decomposes everything into its prime factors, and at the same time sterilizes and dries everything like exhibits in a flowerbed. Our reflection, on the other hand, does not deprive us of the aroma of life, the almost erotic delight of our ideas, it intoxicates us, we are drunk with Eurasia...

- Already in the eighteenth century, Nikita Panin described the history of Russia as a polar pulsation of deadness and chaos. Similarly, two centuries later, Yuri Lotman - as leaps in entropy and organization. Today's columnists often compare Russia's current situation to the Weimar era in German history...

- A very apt comparison.

- The West is aware of this, which is why it does not want to humiliate the Russians, humiliate their national pride, as it did with Germany after the First World War, when it extracted huge contributions from them. The West rather wants to value Russia, invites it to the G-7 group, pumps millions of dollars into the Russian economy. He wants to avoid the Weimar scenario...

- The West treats Russia very harshly. I don't think he learned the lessons of Weimar, though. The more he puts pressure on us, the more he will have to pay for it. It works like a spring: the harder you push, the harder it will hit back. The West is the geographic Satan, the geographic Antichrist. The West should pay for everything. It would be best to settle it with Chinese, Tatars, Muslims, all this Eurasian nomadism. As I was walking through the streets of Paris recently, I suddenly noticed that something was missing. And I realized that it was the lack of smells, some kind of sterility, asepticity. The only fragrance in the West is perfume. The earth, air, flowers, trees began to smell only in Poland, and when I returned to Russia, I immersed myself in the madness of fragrances. The West is a dead land. It will revive only when the Cossacks inhabit it, Tajiks, Kazakhs. They will bring life with them, they will bring scents.

- At almost every step you refer to the Orthodox tradition. But does Orthodoxy itself admit to your ideas? I spoke with many representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church in Moscow and none of them consider you an orthodox believer, you are rather a heretic.

- Who said that?

- For example, deacon Andrei Kuraev.

- And the deacon Alexander Mumrikov said that I am fully Orthodox. And what about this? The opinion of one deacon against the opinion of another. Fortunately, we do not have Catholicism, where the office of the pope is and everyone must obey him. I, too, can safely say that deacon Kuraev is not fully Orthodox. There are two Orthodox churches at the moment: the first - lively, full of spirit, and the second - official, formalized, cadre. Deacon Kuraev represents a formal, pro-system, I would even say profane branch of Orthodoxy. He writes lyrics that are Catholic in spirit. For example, he believes that the merit of Christianity was the impulse for the development of exact sciences, which resulted in the desacralization of the cosmos. Hesychasts would immediately call him a heretic. Fortunately, Orthodoxy is broader than just the Church and includes a branch of the Old Believers as well. I myself belong to the Moscow Patriarchate, but I am with the Old Believers in spirit. Besides, they consider themselves to be the only true Orthodox. If there is ever a real revival of Orthodoxy, it will come not from the ossified structures of the official Church, but from the depths of the Russian national spirit, which has been most fully preserved among the Old Believers.

- And which faction of the Old Believers is closer to you? Rounders or non-rounders?

- This division concerns the Biały Krynica hierarchy. However, I am more interested in a different division: into pop and bezpopowców. I am closer to the bezpopovtsy who reject priests as more radical. Among them, however, the closest to me is the faction of non-teachers who believe that the kingdom of the Antichrist has already arrived, and it is the Catholic and Protestant West.

- I see that you have a very closed mind system. However, what are the chances that the ideas you preach will find resonance in society? Observing you, one can say: some obsessed idealist is sitting in the basement, something raving under his breath, but his delusions have absolutely no effect on people. Oh, another frustration that our century is full of...

- I will try to answer this question in three stages. First, even if I am an idealist who sits in the basement and whose ideas play no role, I am not worried because all great ideas started with idealists who sat in the basement and played no role. The fate of ideas is specific. The man who deals with ideas is immersed in a theurgic atmosphere where the invisible and inaudible appear to him as visible and audible, even in the form of text or discourse. And even if I remained unknown to anyone until my death and left no written word behind me, what counts is the very fact of capturing the main vectors of history, the main ideas of civilization.
Second: I am active in the National-Bolshevik Party. It is not a big party, but it has a clear direction: we are particularly trying to influence young people, especially students, who will be the elite of the young generation in the future. We are actually the only party that deals with the thoughts of young people. We teach them to think and live. We are indoctrinating the next generation. Nobody in Russia does that: neither liberals nor communists...

- That's what television does.

- That's right, but it forms average and passive people. We, on the other hand, shape people, as Gumilow called them, passionate, above-average people, those whom Pareto called the counter-litetes of the future. Other nationalist parties, such as the Barkasz supporters, do not form counter-elites of the past, but defensive units. Their militant organizations are not elite. We, on the other hand, focus on those who will set the tone for life in Russia in the future, we prepare them conceptually. We organize seminars for them, publish magazines and books. You could say that our party is purely intellectual. All these pickets and demonstrations are only an addition to the basic task, which is the intellectual preparation of the generation. We already have hundreds of people all over the country formed this way.
Thirdly, my ideas are not limited to the party alone. Since 1987, I have been actively involved in the ideologization of the broadly understood patriotic camp. The two largest parties in the current Duma - Zyuganov's communists and Zhirinovsky's nationalists - took over from me, especially from my earlier texts, the main ideological and geopolitical thoughts. Many politicians, whom I personally did not even know, also referred to the ideas I put forward, e.g. General Liebiedź.

'Maybe because one of Liebed's advisers was Heydar Dżemal. In 1991, you published the book Orientacja: Północ (Orientation: Północ) for him in your publishing house.

- Our paths with Dżemal parted because his traditionalism and Eurasianism is Muslim, and mine - Russian. But back to the previous topic. It doesn't matter if I personally know Rutskoy or Khasbulatov who adopt my ideas. I am like Ivan Peresvetov, who invented oprichnina for Ivan the Terrible. I am a thought lab. I don't think for myself, I think for the state, for the nation, for history. I'm waiting for my Ivan the Terrible. All politicians who will look for a real and great idea for Russia will come to me sooner or later. Not because I am a great individual and I personally invented something, but because there is an objective idea of Russia, and I am only its exponent. My latest book, Fundamentals of Geopolitics, is read by all opposition politicians and the more serious officials of the Yeltsin administration. The idea of the Moscow-Berlin-Paris axis that Yeltsin spoke about recently is directly taken from my writings. If you add Tokyo to the mix, you have a classic element of the Eurasian geopolitical concept. In addition, many circles in other former Soviet republics are interested in our ideas of a conservative revolution. For example, in Armenia, the milieu of Robert Kocharian, who has just come to power, the so-called the war party, are people largely shaped by our writings. So to sum up: with or without me - what I write about will happen anyway. Who will be the clerk, who will put these ideas into practice - I do not know and I do not undertake to answer. Maybe it will be the current government that will change its face, maybe it will be some opposition force, maybe it will happen in many years, but it is an inevitable process. I may disappear, but my geopolitical ideas will not disappear.

- Your milieu is often said to be the Russian equivalent of the Western European New Right. This orientation, assuming that the battle for the fate of humanity will take place not in the political but in the cultural field, proclaimed a kind of kulturkampf...

- The Kulturkampf of the New Right is a wonderful idea, Alain de Benoist is a heroic activist and brilliant thinker, but their thirty-year struggle has brought no results. They said that culture would be the clash, but Americanization has made its greatest triumphs in culture. Right-wing grammar is in a sorry state, it has never gone beyond the margins. How to explain it? I think the conceptual model of the New Right is very interesting, but the temperament of its European activists is insufficient for the implementation of such ideas. They're too civilized, too conservative, too cowardly, such warm blobs. That's why I don't like being compared to them, because it's basically being compared to losers. During the years of the opposition in Russia, I did things that they never dreamed of. I did not deal with the Kulturkampf, but with the ideological fertilization of serious political forces. I was working with living history, not archaeology. The only man in the West whose breadth of views struck me was Jean Thiriart, the author of the idea of a Euro-Soviet empire. Before his death, he even came to Moscow; I hosted him here, introduced him to Yegor Ligachev, Zyuganov, Baburin...
Europe today has a choice: Eurasianism or Atlanticism. It will either go with Russia or with America. If the European New Right chooses us, that is, it chooses the barbaric element, so it must adopt our methods of operation. You have to organize attacks, deal with sabotage, set fires, blow up bridges. True antimondialism is destruction and terror. What is the New Right doing? It turned into an intellectual sect. Overweight men with gray hair have been gathering at seminars for thirty years and frothing. Of course, you have to read books, but that's not enough. You need to create a guerilla. If you're against the New World Order, then take a knife, put on a mask, go out at night and kill at least one yankie. That is why the New Left, the Red Brigades and the Rote Armee Fraktion are so close to me. Our task is not limited only to culture, our task is to make a real revolution. For this, ideology and intellectual preparation are needed, but without concrete participation in the action, without front-line experience, without combat baptism - it will remain unattainable for us. I don't know if any of the activists of the New Right were ever under artillery fire, but our people not only go to meetings or fight on barricades, but also go to real wars, for example to Transnistria or Yugoslavia. The New Right is just a project, and we are designers and implementers, architects and builders. The future is ours. whether any of the activists of the New Right were ever under artillery fire, but our people not only go to meetings or fight on barricades, but also go to real wars, for example to Transnistria or Yugoslavia. The New Right is just a project, and we are designers and implementers, architects and builders. The future is ours. whether any of the activists of the New Right were ever under artillery fire, but our people not only go to meetings or fight on barricades, but also go to real wars, for example to Transnistria or Yugoslavia. The New Right is just a project, and we are designers and implementers, architects and builders. The future is ours.

- Thank you for the conversation.

Interviewer: Grzegorz Górny

Moscow, March 1998

The interview was published in the Fronda quarterly, no. 11-12

Source: https://www.fronda.pl/a/aleksander-dugin-czekam-na-iwana-groznego,45653.html

'Both they (New World Order) and we (Eurasians) want to deprive you of your Catholicism; Orthodoxy...is much closer to what we call paganism' - Dugin

Alexander Dugin: I am waiting for Ivan the Terrible

Alexander Dugin: I am waiting for Ivan the Terrible

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