The Invisible Empire: Introduction to Alexander Dugin’s “Foundations of Geopolitics”, pt. 1

We commence the analysis of the core political and strategic ideas of Alexander Dugin as laid out in his main work “Foundations of Geopolitics – Geopolitical Future of Russia”, based on a close reading of the text. In this segment we explain mainly the proverbial foundations or “the principal duality” of Dugin’s megalomaniac eschatology falsely posing as, and today curiously popular, political science stressing the role of geography. This is the first close reading analysis of the foundational neo-Eurasianist text in the English language. Give it a look, we guarantee you won’t like it if you are busy cheering for Russia to defeat the “globalists”. But maybe, if you are displaying some symptoms of Duginitis chronica in its early stages, it could just make you re-think what you’re getting yourself into.

(If for some reason the Mixcloud presents you with problems, the podcasts are available on Kali Tribune’s Youtube channel. Podcasts can be downloaded via this link . If it doesn’t work, try this one)

Read/listen to Part 2

Transcript with notes/references:

“A specter is haunting the world – a specter of geopolitics.”

Paraphrasing the Communist Manifesto is, admittedly, not entirely fair because the specter-like characterization of Communism was due to an alarm it provoked in then Europe.

Unfortunately, the strange prevalence of the “geopolitical approach”, haunting the “dissident” communication channels in the West, seems to provoke no such worries: all of a sudden everybody is “a geopolitical analyst” providing “geopolitical explanations”.

And nobody is alarmed about the fact that this practically came out of nowhere just a few years ago. Nobody, especially in the mainstream media or academia, poses the question, how come the geopolitical explanations of just about everything are so popular all of the sudden.

In  Western Europe and the USA this is so, but in Russia some would say, no surprises there, because:

“The development of information dissemination, active inclusion of common man into events playing out throughout the continent, “mondialization” of media – all those things push spatial thinking in geopolitical terms into forefront; it is useful for “sorting out” peoples, nations, regimes and religions on the unified, simplified scale in order to make even the most elementary TV or radio news at least relatively comprehensible. If the simplest geopolitical scheme of heartland, rimland and world island is applied to any given news about international events, the clear explanatory model is instantly provided, with no need for special expert knowledge. “Expansion of  NATO towards the East” if viewed through these lenses signifies “enlarging the rimland for the benefit of Talasocracy (sea power, KT)”; “agreement between Germany and France on forming independent, purely European, military” means “a step towards creating continental telurocratic (Telurocracy – land power, KT) structure”(…)”

Well, “no need for special expert knowledge” is quite a tempting proposition for an average man who, on average, tends to see himself as above averagely knowledgeable, although I would, perhaps, reformulate it to: “no need for functioning brains department”.

Surely, the author of this quote, as we shall see in the following, would not disagree, because this is what he really meant hiding behind academic lingo.

It is Alexander Dugin, the man who turned hiding what he really

means into a profitable ideological operation with a global scope, and the quote comes from the book that catapulted him from the fringe towards the centre of Russian political culture in the late Nineties. Its title is Foundations of Geopolitics – Geopolitical Future of Russia (we are using Serbian edition, Osnovi geopolitike – geopolitička budućnost Rusije. Zrenjanjin: Ekopres, 2004. The quote is from pg. 35 – 36 ch. 5 “Geopolitics as destiny”; further in the text: FG).

In the following we’ll analyze its content in order to expose what this omnipresent bearded patriarch of such disparate groups as the radical left, Alt Right, Christian traditionalist et al. is really  all about.

And, rest assured, FG yields that answer in no uncertain terms.

Dugin’s development of the notion of geopolitics, both as an absolute explanatory model and the structure of reality, is an exercise in megalomania and nihilism dwarfing at times even the most ludicrous Western models of globalization.

While the majority among the precious few relevant Western critics of Dugin focus on his occult and philosophical musings, FG provides us with a far more important thing: a political plan of creating a world empire with eschatological underpinnings he devised with the aid and approval of elements of the Russian establishment, most notably: the army.[1]

Being at the center of this global Eurasian empire is the geopolitical destiny – a manifest one in Dugin’s eyes – of Russia and the messianic duty of the Russian people. Anything less would be a treachery to the role bestowed upon the “Christ-bearing” Russian saviors of the world by their geographical position at the centre of the Eurasian landmass. This treachery, that is, a failure to create a global empire, can end up only in the disappearance of Russians from  history.[2]

As it always goes with people like Dugin, it’s an either or choice bestowed upon his people solely by impersonal forces of history – by the apocalyptic final clash of two “floods”: the Sea and the Land.

The only thing that matters, not only for Russia but for all of the world and its peoples, is the clash of this great land-based empire, imagined into existence by Dugin and his supporters, with the USA. Everything going on in politics, culture, religion, etc. is just a shadow of this great conflict – a struggle between land power Behemoth and sea power Leviathan.

In the following we’ll explain these terms and provide an introduction into the basic principles of Dugin’s geopolitical eschatology. This will constitute the first part of our analysis. The second part we’ll devote to outlining the concrete plan for the creation of a Eurasian empire with all its ominous implications.

In the process, we’ll do our best to shake up, insult and/or disturb the reader belonging to the “alt media” community. This is for a simple reason: reading the FG seems like learning the grammar and phraseology of contemporary alt media all over again and – lo and behold! – the book never was, nor probably ever will be, translated into English. There are multiple reasons for this, but essentially the result is that the uneasy alliance of “truth seekers” is today, in general, nothing more than a dissonant choir singing the neo-Eurasian hymn.

You know how it goes:

“it’s geopolitics, stupid”.

“A comprehensive handbook of the overlords”

 

It is a common notion today that geopolitics is a science of gas and oil pipelines about which you can immediately learn everything from the on line articles starting with an image of Vladimir Putin, a pipeline or a Russian jet. This is not by accident, because, as we see from the above Dugin quote, one of the main purposes of this technique is communicating complex information to the consumer by simplifying, that is: dumbing it down to the level of an average news consumer.

The other, somewhat less common, notion is that geopolitics is a method of politics based on taking into account geography as a cause and condition of political actions, encompassing a wide spectrum of social, economic, political and military decisions. In this sense, every unit of international politics, i.e. a more or less autonomous state or (con)federation thereof has, or at least should have, an ability to make geopolitical decisions.

This seems like a common sense point of view and many Western observers are being (self)duped into thinking that it is precisely what geopolitics means. Moreover, the idea is quite appealing because it provides the observer with a sense of stability and the timelessness of principles sorely lacking in the chaos of postmodern politics. More often than not it serves as a “gateway drug” to uncritical advocacy of Russian foreign policy and, if untreated, to duginitis chronica.

However, this is not what geopolitics is. On the contrary, this is what it is:

“Geopolitics is a worldview and as such it is not prudent to compare it to science but to the system of sciences. It is on the same level with Marxism, Liberalism, etc., that is: explanatory systems of society and history that extrapolate the most important principle as their criteria and then reduce all innumerable aspects of man and nature to it. (…) In contrast to “economical ideologies” it is founded on the thesis: “geographical conditions as destiny”. Geography and space in geopolitics serve the same function that money and means of production serve in Marxism and Liberalism – all fundamental aspects of human being are reduced to them, they are the main method of explaining the past, the main factors of human being, around which all other aspects of existence are being organized.” (FG, ch.1 “Definition of geopolitics”, pg. 23-24)

So, is geopolitics an ideology – a reductionist all-explanatory system that serves the purpose of correspondingly reductionist – and correspondingly totalitarian – politics, like Marxism and Liberalism? Well, yes and no. It is all that but it is still much, much more:

“The fact of man being conditioned by space – the fundamental thesis of geopolitics – becomes visible only when a certain distancing from the individual has been undertaken. This is why geopolitics – regardless of its fundamental presuppositions – never became an ideology as such or, to be more precise: “a mass ideology”. Its conclusions and methods, objects of its investigations and fundamental theses are comprehensible only to those social instances concerned with all encompassing problems – strategic planning, investigating the global social and historical laws, etc. (…) The geopolitics is a worldview of those in power, the science of those that rule and for those that rule (Serbian word “vlast” denotes at the same time “governance” and “those in power”, with the emphasis on “those in power” – a testament to the melancholic wisdom of Balkan’s linguistics. The literal English rendering of “governance” would miss Dugin’s point completely, KT). Only insofar as one is approaching the top social strata (i.e. the elites, KT) geopolitics starts to make sense for him (…) while before it was merely an abstraction. Geopolitics is a discipline belonging to political elites (…). Without pretending to scientific rigor, geopolitics on its own level is free to decide what is and what is not significant. Humanities and natural sciences are being applied only when they don’t contradict the fundamental principles of geopolitical method. Geopolitics is in certain sense free to choose the sciences (…) that seem useful, disregarding others. In the contemporary world it represents a “comprehensive handbook of the overlords”, the textbook of those who rule, providing an abridgement of those things that should be kept in mind when global (destiny-making) decisions are being made (…) Geopolitics is the science of how to rule (emphasis by Dugin).  (FG, pg. 24 – 25.)

Therefore, geopolitics in the broad sense is a hyper-ideology, or political metaphysics, based on the reduction of man and being in general on geographical determinations.

It transcends Marxism and Liberalism not because it is closer to the truth – because ideology has nothing to do with the truth at all – but because it is as far removed from the common human being and as close to the elites as possible. What makes it hyper- is precisely that it can be implemented solely by the autonomous – and in Dugin’s optics, autocratic – will of those who rule, without the need to somehow include the “ordinaries” in the political process.

In this sense geopolitics is neither the science of pipelines nor a method of political orientation in space.

It is the political metaphysics of the global Empire.

As Dugin points out in overwhelming abundance further down the line, the only geopolitics is the imperial – and this unequivocally means global – geopolitics. There’s no national or federal geopolitics because the very nature of it is that it is not a science or technique but a worldview of those who hold, or strive for, absolute power bestowed upon them primarily by geographical factors. Moreover, this power is global in its scope, because it takes into account only “destiny-making” decisions, that is: decisions which affect not only some portion of space but all the space of the planet.

Before we develop the implications of this notion and lay out the main, inherently dual, principle of geopolitical reality, let us note one apparent contradiction.

 

Alt-mainstream: dupes and geopolitics

 

Dugin proposed that geopolitics provides a useful explanatory model for understanding the media presented reality, by reducing it to simplistic propositions. This obviously means that at least in some sense geopolitics has to be accessible to the masses. How does this fly with his statement that its practice and insights are reserved for the elites?

Indeed, the Foundations of Geopolitics made Dugin a literary celebrity in the late Nineties Russia:

“The influence of Foundations was profound if measured by book sales; but even more profound if measured by the true yardstick of the scribbler – plagiarism. Dugin’s ideas became a ‘virus’, as he put it. They were reprinted in dozens of similar manuals and textbooks, all of which devoted themselves to the theories of Mackinder, Haushofer and others. Bookstores began to have a “Geopolitics” section (…). Geopolitics was ‘like an open-source computer software’, as Dugin put it. He wrote the programme and everyone copied it.” (Charles Clover Black Wind, White Snow. Yale: Yale University Press, 2016., pg. 356)

Well, bearing in mind that the ‘virus’ metaphor comes from author’s interviews with Dugin himself, one has to wonder: how come the book intended for the elites was so widely read by the plebs that it was sold out in four editions, and that it produced a virus like torrent of copy cats?

For one thing it tells us something about the mass reading habits of “Christ-bearing” people, but also it proves Dugin’s point: the reductionist explanations served to media consumers are in fact quite congruent with the unconditionally elitist nature of geopolitics.

While Marxist or Liberal Governments treat their subjects with cartoonish economical explanations, the Empire based on geopolitics as its civic religion treats them with explanations for imbeciles, because that’s how it is bound to act from the inaccessible height of power.

Geopolitical explanations are by far the most reductionist, the most simplified and the most unscientific ideological lenses imaginable, and as they are solely based on the deliberation of those in power – and not in any way on aspects of reality they choose not to appreciate – the breadcrumbs thrown to the plebs require a minimum of thinking and a maximum of acceptance.

By following this logic, we can assume that media outlets pervaded by the geopolitical outlook would be the most ideologically driven and dumbed down oracles of public opinion yet hatched by postmodern power politics. They would be merely echoing the voice of the “overlords” in simple statements, presumably accompanied by an appropriate image of a pipeline, Putin or a Russian jet without any explanation necessary.

Correspondingly, we can also assume that this eventuality would provide the consumers with an intense feeling of participating in “elite-thinking”, divining the minds of great players – in the case of Russians: chess players, but one can also imagine checkers and monopoly – and discussing their decisions as if they themselves would make them if they were in power.

Sounds familiar, Westerners?

If not, you don’t have to learn Russian and get your hands on Russian newspapers from the Nineties. Just gird your virtual loins and go check out the plethora of alt media outlets, especially those prone to quoting the ultimate alt media Shambala, RT – read the comments some, try to argue a bit and, above all, observe the images and phraseology and you’ll soon get that funky feeling of geopolitics always being a final answer to every question.

“Ukraine wants accession  to the EU” – “NATO is pushing to the East” and nothing else; “Trump wins the presidency – USA is shrinking from its imperial role” and nothing else; “Serbs had toppled Milošević – CIA did a regime change” and nothing else; “Rumble in Macedonian Parliament – Soroš color revolutionaries face retaliation from the people” and nothing else.

The only statements containing some truth out of these four are the first and the third, yet they would need to be carefully qualified and extrapolated from the other causes of the political turmoil in those countries. But almost no one bothered to do that, because the above explanations can satisfy the average alt media consumer. Indeed, anything more than that would necessarily induce unwanted complexity and, as we have already seen, the reduction of complexity is the reason why plebs should have geopolitical explanations anyway.

While mainstream media in the West does not provide them and manipulates their consumers into placidity by other means – mostly by chanting moralistic slogans on democracy and human rights or, when things get really serious, sustainable development and climate change – the Russian media consumers are exposed to reductio ad geopolitica all the way from the late Nineties.

Nowadays, however, this model of feeding the informational GMO a la Russe has spread into the West via alt media. One of the reasons for this is that, aside from being absolutely simplified, geopolitical explanation provides its consumers with a remarkable sense of being “elite” and “different” from the “sheeple” who don’t understand what’s going on.

It is my contention that this only proves that the Western public, and especially Western dissident intellectuals across the political spectrum, are prone to think in  terms of being the subjects of the Empire no matter how much they deride the term. The very fact that they en masse accepted Russian mainstream and internet media as an absolutely reliable source of information, with no possibility of it also being  information outlets with at least some tendency to manipulate, testifies to this.

Because, you see, the will to know can also be the will to power. And the will to understand all is the will to rule all. The fact that Russian truth became Western alt media truth – turning a good deal of these outlets into de facto Russian media – is a testament to the truth that modern man in the West, with all his ravings about freedom and self determination, can swallow only the truth served to him by the figure posing as Tzar. It’s not about being an enemy of global power in principle, but about choosing to support, as a diminutive atom in the mass of people, the global power whose reproductive organ best fits the shape of your lips.

Well, suckers are gonna suck … that’s the way of the world. It’s just so insulting to good taste when they swallow and mumble: “we are thinking critically” instead of discretely flushing their throats.

The theme of the geopolitical virus infecting Western alt media and the imperialistic tendencies of  plebs is a separate story, although we already gave it some attention elsewhere. Now we’ll proceed to inspect the virus itself.

So what are these foundations of geopolitics that made Dugin such a successful ideologue? Before we provide an analytic response let us remark in passing upon one curious fact: they are the same ones that made people like Brzezinski and Huntington successful ideologues. Keep this in mind throughout this analysis because precisely the inability and/or unwillingness of mainstream Western detractors of Dugin and Russian foreign policy to admit that obvious fact makes a good deal of mainstream criticism invalid.

 

War never changes – the dual principle of geopolitics

So what is the main thing an aspiring world ruler has to know to practice his craft? It’s simple:

“The affirmation of primordial duality displayed by geographical structure of the planet and historical typology of civilizations is the basic law of geopolitics. This duality is being expressed in the opposition between “Telurocracy” (land power) and “Talasocracy” (sea power). The character of this opposition is being reduced to a conflict between mercantile civilization (Carthage, Athens) and military-authoritarian civilization (Rome, Sparta) or, in other words, to a duality between ‘democracy’ and ‘ideocracy’.

Fundamentally, this duality possesses the character of enmity of its constitutional poles (…) Therefore, the history of human societies is said to be constituted by two floods – ‘water’ (‘fluid’, ‘unstable’) and ‘land’ (‘solid’, ‘stable’).” (FG, ch. 2 “Telurocracy and Talasocracy”, pg. 26)

So, quite similarly to Marxist theory of the relation of structure and superstructure, the wholeness of Being has been reduced to a material, in fact: environmental, cause of inherently dual, i.e. contradictory, nature. The forms of civilizations and everything Dugin subsumes unto them – religion, philosophy, art, economy, etc. are nothing else but expressions of this primordial geographical enmity of elements; a clash of two avalanches or floods.

Throughout FG this fascination and indeed almost erotic longing for total war shines through occasional cracks in academic lingo:

“Geopolitical outlook on history is a model of the development of planetary duality to its final extremes. The Land and the Sea expand their primordial conflict onto the whole world. The history of the human kind is nothing else but the expression of this struggle and the path towards making it absolute.” (FG, 29)

The history of geopolitics reflects the development of the original geographical opposition to the point of final global conflict. In this sense, on the most elementary basis, geopolitics is evolutionary and apocalyptic – it is a somewhat Hegelian notion of the world gradually becoming conscious of its inner Being. But while in Hegel’s dialectic of history this essence of Seculum is the absolute spirit or idea, expressed through the development of the history of artistic, religious, political and scientific accomplishments of mankind, the dialectics of geopolitics is moving towards the conscious reduction of all this to the final conflict of the geographical determinants of Land and Sea.

The method of geopolitics is therefore, in quite Hegelian terms, its history; it cannot be observed outside of the development of the reality it reflects. This means that although Rome and Carthage can be seen as expressions of the duality of the geopolitical principle, they’re such only in a highly qualified and restricted sense, because their conflict was not yet global in nature.

The great war of the continents, as was the title of Dugin’s article that won him the attention of the Russian military in the first place[3], can only be a total war – an actualization of the primordial seed of the catastrophe hatching through millennia of struggle interrupted by unfortunate moments of respite, now to reach the stage when it can finally flower to its full destructive potential and usher in the end of the world and new Eurasian aeon.

The outline of the geopolitical principle in its nucleus has been reached in antiquity, after the Punic wars and “acquires its full meaning in the period when England becomes the great maritime power – from XVII to XIX century.” (FG, 27) The period of the great geographical discoveries serves as a prelude to globalization of the conflict – it is the moment when Talasocracy accomplished its final detachment from Telurocracy as “a self sufficient planetary formation detached from Eurasia and its shores, fully concentrated in the Anglo-Saxon world and its colonies. The ‘New Carthage’ of Anglo-Saxon capitalism and industrialism has been molded into something unique and wholesome, and from then on geopolitical duality acquired clearly recognizable ideological and political forms” (ibid.)

The fullness of duality, in Dugin’s view, has been reached by the Cold War where cultural-political forms of Marxism and Liberal Capitalism perfectly fitted the so called Mackinder’s map, namely when the two geopolitical poles took their “natural” places – one seated in the heartland, the other on the outer crescent of the World Island.

Halford Mackinder is one among the main inspirers of Dugin’s outlook and we will get back to him later. For now, let us just provisionally define his terms that Dugin is applying here.

Heartland is the land mass constituting the central part of the Eurasian landmass, while the outer crescent represents the furthermost continental formations divided from the Heartland by sea, and the so called inner crescent or Rimland – the landmass representing the shore belt of Eurasia. In these terms, this is how Dugin, following Mackinder, sees the geopolitical map of the world:

“1 Inner continental spaces become ‘the immobile platform’, Heartland (the heart of the world), “geographical pivot of history” preserving stably the Telurocratic civilization character.

2‘Inner or continental crescent’, ‘zone of the shores’, Rimland is the space of intense cultural development. The Talasocratic characteristics are visible there, but balanced by numerous Telurocratic impulses.

3‘Outer or insular crescent’ represents ‘unexplored’ lands that can only be reached by sea. For the first time it becomes visible in Carthage and mercantile Phoenician civilization that influenced the ‘inner crescent’ of Europe from the outside” (ibid.)

Obviously this map is neither complete nor was it indeed possible before the discovery of Americas which, in Mackinder and Dugin’s eyes, finally provided ground to make it global. As the “spiritual” forms are nothing more than the reflection of geographical duality, geopolitics proper is not possible until they find their opposite symmetry filling this map. In this sense, the Cold War is a prelude to the final conflict and fulfilment of the geopolitical destiny that will come after it, i.e. now.

The end of history

 

While Dugin’s notion of geopolitics is completely deterministic in its reductionism – the Sea and the Land power are expanding until the moment there’s no other option but final conflict – its eschatological fulfilment is anything but:

“While the character of fundamental geopolitical process of history – the greatest possible spatial expansion of Talasocracy and Telurocracy – for this discipline its final outcome remains in question. In this sense there’s no determinism.” (FG, ch. 3 “Geopolitical teleology”, pg. 30)

Why is that, Sasha? Are you being completely honest with us, your God-bearing people and its military hard liners?

Of course not. The reason why Dugin makes this purely rhetorical sidestep is to propose a desired outcome and incite his readers to work towards it. If the fulfilment of the global destiny would be purely deterministic, there would be no incentive to write the rest of this mammoth book and outline the design for the creation of a multipolar world a.k.a. global Eurasian Empire.

No, the outcome is not determined. It is destined and Russians are here to fulfil it on behalf of all humanity:

“Without a doubt the Russian people belongs among messianic peoples. And, as any other messianic people, it possesses a universal, all-humankind encompassing, character which does not merely compete with other national ideas but with different types of other universal civilizations. (…) Russian universalism, the foundation of Russian civilization, radically differs from the Western one in all essential characteristics. In the certain sense, those are two mutually exclusive, competing models. Therefore, the strategic interests of the Russian people must be anti-Western (emphasis Dugin’s) oriented, while, in perspective, its civilizing expansion remains a possibility. (…) Russia (=Russian people) in its essence keeps even more global, soteriological (being a “savior” figure, KT) perspective, which is of planetary importance. This is not simply about the infinite expansion of Russian “living space” but about defining the special “Russian” type of worldview, eschatological in nature, aspiring to present the final (emphasis Dugin’s) word on history of the planet earth. This is the highest aim of the nation as “God-bearing people”. (FG, ch.2.3. “Russian people – the center of the concept of geopolitics”, pg. 167 – 169.)

Well, you can’t induce megalomania by determinism – you just formulate it as a Geography-given destiny instead, in order to leave some room for the will of the overlords. And only then you can commence the finlandization of the rest of the world, if only in your own head.

But we are running ahead of ourselves. Let’s see how Dugin lays out the possible outcomes of our epoch that will have to be deliberated by the geopolitical wills of two world Empires:

“First possibility. Victory of Talasocracy completely annihilates the civilization of Telurocracy. The whole planet is being pervaded by the identical liberal-democratic system. (…) This model has two advantages: (…) It is logically consistent, because it displays linear end of geopolitical history – from the absolute rule of the Land (traditional world) to the absolute rule of the Sea (modern world); the other advantage is – this is precisely what’s happening in reality”.(FG, 30)

Dugin considers the Land to be the original nucleus of civilization while the Sea represents the deviation from it, i.e. the unfolding of history from “traditional” towards the “modern” world. This is based on Dugin’s occultist musings, stemming from his study of thinkers like Herman Wirth, Julius Evola, Alvyedre and  a downright – and demonstrable – perversion of some ideas proposed in Rene Guenon’s Reign of the Quantity and the Signs of the Times. As this will likely be the subject of separate analysis, suffice it to say that they constitute Dugin’s writings before FG. The basic ideas of geopolitical “textbook” are in fact developed from attempts at constructing geopolitical conspiracy theory.

The important point is that tradition and modernity are being flatly opposed as two geographical – spatial – opposites, what in the eyes of someone like Rene Guenon would probably look like pure Satanism, because it inverts the order of the principles: the Highest has been founded on the absolute Lowest – the spiritual character of what Dugin deems to be “traditional civilization” of Eurasia is founded solely on interaction of its soil with forests, mountains, rivers and finally the ultimate bogeyman – the Sea. In this way he can still more flatly divide the world into a Russian-led ideocratic, conservative and stable Empire of the Land and the USA-led democratic, unstable and modern Empire of the Sea.

“Second possibility. The victory of Talasocracy ends the cycle of the conflict between two civilizations, but doesn’t spread its model upon the entire world, but simply finalizes the geopolitical history, by erasing its problematic. (…) This is also ‘the end of the history’, only its further development cannot be submitted to as strict an analysis as in the case of previous one. In both cases, the defeat of Telurocracy is taken as the irrevocable and final. (…)” (ibid.)

Note that both possibilities in fact display what really happened and are not mutually exclusive, but evolve one from the other, when observed through Dugin’s optics. As the defeat of Soviet Union represents for him the defeat of global Telurocracy, these two models display the post-Soviet development of the “New American Century”. While the first roughly corresponds to the extreme messianic outlook of radical Neocons, the second is nothing else but Francis Fukuyama’s vision of the “end of history” in the vaguer notion of liberal democracy and a dynamic progression of free market economy throughout the globe.

“Third possibility. The defeat of Telurocracy is only temporary. Eurasia will return to its continental mission in the new form. (…) In that case, the world will again return to bipolar mode, but this time of a completely different quality and on another level.

 Fourth possibility. (representing the development of the former). In the new conflict Telurocracy wins. It strives to extrapolate its own civilizational model upon entire planet and ‘close the cycle of history’ on its own accord. The whole world will be typologically transformed into Land and “ideocracy” will reign everywhere. The ideas of “World revolution” and the planetary rule of the Third Reich were premonitions of this outcome.” (ibid.)

Now, what would Sasha chose from those four …

Yes, you guessed it: the fourth. The one anticipated and desired by both Bolsheviks and Hitler, QED.

But you have to work for it because,

“As in our times the role of the subjective and rational factors in the analysis of historical processes has become significant as never before, these four possibilities are not to be understood solely as abstract description of probable development of the geopolitical process, but also as active geopolitical attitudes that can become guidelines for actions of global scope.” (ibid.)

In translation: get to work comrades; we have the global ideocracy to build!

This ideocratic Land power, poised to fulfil the dream of National Socialism by other means – i.e. finally letting it embrace  Bolshevism, is the Eurasian Empire (Union) and Russian (multipolar) world supposedly here to eradicate the Western liberal-democratic globalism.

 The Empire of the End

That would be the outline of the elementary propositions of Dugin’s geopolitics. However, as we’ve already seen, it is above all an eschatological praxis, masquerading as science. In this sense it can be properly understood only by practicing it, that is: by fulfilling the global continental destiny it reflects.

Therefore, the real understanding of the true depth of what Dugin is saying – and this depth is not one of profoundness but of megalomania – can be probed only by analyzing two things: the history of the development of geopolitical theory in general and, far more importantly, the future development of its praxis in the global endgame Dugin expects to be playing out in our own times.

The second aspect, of course, is where the stress of the analysis will be laid in the second part. In advance, suffice it to say that no non-Russian or Russian of the sane disposition when exposed to these ideas in the comprehensive form – and Dugin himself doesn’t burden us with riddles, he’s very straightforward – can be left without an ominous feeling of danger.

Not because Dugin or Russia itself posseses – or indeed will ever possess – the real power to accomplish what he proposes; not because  the Russian people are “God-bearing” and messianic; not because  history is something you can reduce to  total war of torrents.

It’s because he’s so crazy that he appears sane.

FG is a book displaying a singular will completely bent to the fulfilment of its purpose with no scruples and no reflection on consequences or indeed on its own contradictions. The fact that this will comes originally from the fringe, makes it, in the light of the current zeitgeist, even worse.

In the next episode we’ll analyze both the background of Dugin’s project, i.e. the theoretical background of FG and outline his plan for world conquest – because, as is already obvious from the principles we have laid out above, there’s no other term to use about his geopolitics but this.

It’s either or. Because, after all,

“In contrast to Imperial Rome, Moscow, Russia in its imperial impulse possesses deep teleological, eschatological meaning. Hegel developed an interesting notion about Absolute Idea in eschatological situation has to manifest itself in the final ‘conscious’ mode as Prussian state. However, in planetary sense, both Prussia and even Germany (…) are geopolitically insufficient to have a serious relationship towards fulfilment of this notion. Therefore Russia, the Third Rome, perfectly fits this teleological outlook on the essence of history in the religious, cultural, spatial and strategic sense, obviously striving towards the fulfillment of precisely such mission. Hegel’s Absolute Idea is in the case of Russia a spiritual root of Empire building, striving towards the civilizational conquest of Eurasian continent. It is meaningless to apply such serious Hegelian criteria to ‘nation state’ that obviously presupposes the existence of other ‘nation states’ (…) It is fairly absurd to endow such relative structure with absolute value (…) it is not an accident that ancient empires were dubbed ‘holly’: the quality of ‘holiness’ was bestowed upon them by task to fulfill the special spiritual mission, set in advance by the archetype of ‘Empire of the End’, the continental Empire of Absolute Idea.” (FG, ch.3 “Russia is unthinkable without the Empire”, pg. 174 – 175.)

Let us recall “the planetary rule of the Third Reich” as a premonition of Eurasian Empire. Therein you have an explanation what this means: Nazism was a botched attempt at creating the global ideocratic Empire simply because it was based on the supremacy of one nation. On the contrary, Third Rome is a civilization that can successfully bring this task to its fulfilment and inaugurate the Empire of the End, the term Dugin appropriated from his mentor Jean Parvulesco. As we won’t go into the occult shenanigans that gave birth to this idea, we’ll just point out something that will be demonstrated by other means in the second part of this analysis.

Namely, Dugin’s appropriation of the history of geopolitics clearly reveals that the real theoretical foundation of his neo-Eurasianism is not to be found primarily either in the classical Russian Eurasianism of Troubetsky et al, or in the Eurasianism of Lev Gumilev. On the contrary it stems essentially from the Western, post-Nazi tradition mediated by the European New Right, most notably from the idea of National-Bolshevism.

This idea is in fact an attempt to re-imagine the outcome of WWII on the assumption that the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact was honored by Hitler. Such an outcome would mean the victory of the Axis powers and the creation of a Europe “from Dublin to Vladivostok”, based on the global axis of Berlin-Moscow-Tokyo.

Precisely this geopolitical horizontal is what Dugin argues for in the programmatic part of Foundations of Geopolitics we’ll focus on in the second part of our analysis.

And, to finish on an occult note after all, let us hear what this Empire of the End would look like:

“During one of our conversations, when I was explaining the meaning of the term ‘ours’ (nashi, KT) in Russian political terminology, Parvulesco lit up and showed me the place in one of his early novels (mid-1970’s), where he providentialy uses the same term in an amazingly similar fashion. ‘Ours’ for his were members of the ‘conspiracy of Being’, secret network of agents of influence, who are united by a common occult goal to the other side of political disagreements and which resist the cosmopolitical and profane civilization being established on the planet. More than that, my Italian friends sent me a copy of Parvulesco’s article from the late 1960’s, in which he talked about ‘eurasianism’, geopolitical project of the Continental Bloc, about the necessity of a Russian-German alliance (reanimation of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact), and even about the necessity of rapprochement between the reds and the browns in a united, revolutionary, antimondialist front! (…) Besides the disdainful and pejorative term “red-brown,” which has long been used to label the most interesting political forces in Russia, there exists a royal shade of this color – as a final eschatological coronation with Alchemical Gold of the great continental Eurasian Revolution, which ‘ours,’ secret and obvious ‘agents of Being’ are preparing and implementing today. Another character of the sacral tradition is represented by this color. We are talking about the Hindu god Shiva, liturgicaly called ‘red-brown’ and ‘frightening.’ The personality of this god is close to the element of our red-browns.

Yes, this element is frightening and devastating in its external manifestation. But it is exactly the terrible, red-brown Shiva that serves as the protector of the mystery of Eternity, opening in its completeness at the moment of the End of Time, negating with its ‘terrible’ appearance the beginning of the “era of Aquarius.” Red-brown Shiva – is the guardian of tradition of sacral Love, Tantra. That Tantra, to which Jean Parvulesco devoted one of his first books, ‘The Merciful Crown of Tantra.’

Agents of the inner Continent are awake. Already there appears on the night sky of our sickening civilization a magic Star, heralding the soon-to-be transformation of the Internal into the External. This – is the Star of an Invisible Empire, Empire of Jean Parvulesco.“ (source)

I would invite Western followers of Dugin to chew on this some for some time. And I would only add one additional remark, though. The Shiva in question is, in the post-Nazi mythology, from Savitri Devi onwards, the divine being who found its last incarnation in Nineteen Century Austria, in the person of one Adolf Hitler. This seemingly failed Avatar waits for the appropriate moment of a Second Coming in the fullness of time. He is “a man of destiny”, “a man against time”. (corrigendum: Hitler is an Avatar of Vishnu, not of Shiva in Savitri Devi’s Nazi soteriology)

I’ll leave the rest of the implications to reader’s discretion.

Read/listen to Part 2

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[1] We can’t be sure how many co-authors Dugin had alongside then Director of Moscow General Staff Academy N.P. Klokotov, who is billed as „scientific consultant“.

[2] „If we (…) repress this vector (Empire building, KT), we’ll pierce the very heart of Russian people, we’ll deprive them of national identity, turn them into historical rudiment and we’ll prevent the global, teleological, eschatological process.“ (FG, 175)

[3] The initial Dugin’s effort was an article „The Great War of the Continents“ written in 1991. for Alexander Prokhanov’s publication Den. See Clover, 289 and further.

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Branko Malić

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