THE USA AND THE NEW WORLD ORDER, Notas de estudo de Bioquímica

Baixe THE USA AND THE NEW WORLD ORDER e outras Notas de estudo em PDF para Bioquímica, somente na Docsity! THE USA AND THE NEW WORLD ORDER A Debate Between Olavo de Carvalho and Aleksandr Dugin THE INTER-AMERICAN INSTITUTE FOR PHILOSOPHY, GOVERNMENT, AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 2012 2 Contents 3 The Structure of the Debate The Debaters 4 FIRST SEGMENT Olavo de Carvalho’s Answer Aleksandr Dugin’s Answer: Global Transition and Its Enemies 25 SECOND SEGMENT Aleksandr Dugin’s Reply: The West Against the Rest Olavo de Carvalho’s Reply 67 THIRD SEGMENT Aleksandr Dugin’s Response Olavo de Carvalho’s Response 143 FOURTH SEGMENT Olavo de Carvalho’s Closing Remarks Aleksandr Dugin’s Closing Remarks: Against the Post-Modern World ◊ Olavo de Carvalho’s answers and replies were translated from the Portuguese by Alessandro Cota. THE INTER-AMERICAN INSTITUTE FOR PHILOSOPHY, GOVERNMENT, AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 2012 5 Olavo de Carvalho’s Answer Words change their meaning, weight and value according to the situations of speech. Upon entering this debate I must clarify from the outset that it is not a debate at all. The very idea of a debate presupposes both an opposite symmetry between the contending parties, from the point of view of their convictions, and some direct symmetry of their respective socio- professional status: intellectuals discuss with intellectuals, politicians with politicians, professors with professors, preachers of religion with preachers of atheism, and so forth. As for convictions, if we understand this term as only general statements about the structure of reality, mine do not differ from Professor Dugin’s in many essential points. Does he believe in God? So do I. Does he think a metaphysics of the absolute is possible? So do I. Does he wager that life has a meaning? So do I. Does he understand traditions, homeland, and family as the values that must be preserved above supposed economic and administrative conveniences? So do I. Does he see with horror the globalist project of the Rockfellers and Soros? So do I. It is not possible to organize a debate between two people who are in agreement. On the other hand, from the standpoint of the actual positions we occupy in society, our differences are so numerous, so deep and so irreducible that the very proposal of putting us face to face has a certain comic incongruity to it. I am just a philosopher, writer, and professor, committed to the search of what seems to me to be the truth and to educating a group of people who are so kind as to pay attention to what I say. Neither these people nor I hold any public job. We do not have any influence on national or international politics. We do not even have the ambition—much less an explicit project—for changing the course of history, whatever it may be. Our only hope is to know reality to the utmost degree of our power and one day leave this life aware that we did not live in illusions and self- delusion, that we did not let ourselves be misled and corrupted by the Prince of this World and by the promises of the ideologues, his servants. In the current power hierarchy of my native country, my opinion is worthless, except maybe as a negative example and an incarnation of absolute evil, which is a source of great satisfaction to me. In the country where I live, the government considers me at worst an inoffensive eccentric. No political party, mass movement, government institution, church or religious sect considers me its mentor. So I can give my opinion as I wish, and change my opinion as many times as it seems right to me, with no THE INTER-AMERICAN INSTITUTE FOR PHILOSOPHY, GOVERNMENT, AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 2012 6 devastating practical consequences beyond the modest circle of my personal existence. Now Professor Dugin, the son of a KGB officer and the political mentor of a man who is the very incarnation of the KGB, is the creator and guide of one of the widest and most ambitious geopolitical plans of all time—a plan adopted and followed as closely as possible by a nation which has the largest army in the world, the most efficient and daring secret service and a network of alliances that extends throughout four continents. To say that Professor Dugin is at the center and pinnacle of power is a simple matter of realism. To implement his plans, he has at his disposal Vladimir Putin’s strong arm, the armies of Russia and China and every terrorist organization of the Middle East, not to mention practically every leftist, fascist and neo- Nazi movement which today operate under the banner of his “Eurasian” project. As for myself, I not only lack a plan for my own retirement, but my only available war resources are my dog Big Mac and an old hunting shotgun. This tremendous existential difference (fully illustrated by the pictures below) makes our opinions, even where their verbal expressions coincide to the letter, signify entirely different things in the framework of our respective goals. The answers to the questions that inspire this debate will show this, I hope, as clearly as do the photos. There are two questions: who are the actors in the world scene and what is the position of the United States in it? Mr. de Carvalho and his two dogs, Big Mac and Missy. Mr. Aleksandr Dugin. THE INTER-AMERICAN INSTITUTE FOR PHILOSOPHY, GOVERNMENT, AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 2012 7 As for the first question: aside from Catholic and Protestant Christianity, which I shall address later on, the historic forces that today contend for power in the world array themselves into three projects of global dominance, which I will tentatively call the “Russian-Chinese,” the “Western” (sometimes mistakenly called “Anglo-American”) and the “Islamic” projects. Each of these has a well documented history, which shows their remote origins, the transformations they have gone through in the course of time and the present state of their implementation. The agents that personify these projects today are as follows: 1. The ruling elite of Russia and China, and particularly the secret services of these two countries. 2. The Western financial elite, as represented particularly in the Bilderberg Club, the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission. 3. The Muslim Brotherhood, the religious leaders of several Islamic countries and the governments of some Muslim countries. Of these three agents, only the first can be conceived of in strictly geopolitical terms, since its plans and actions correspond to well-defined national and regional interests. The second, which is more advanced in the implementation of its plans for world government, places itself explicitly above any national interests, including those of its countries of origin, which serve as its base of operations. In the third, conflicts of interests between national governments and the overarching goal of a Universal Caliphate are always ultimately resolved in favor of the latter, which, though currently existing only as an ideal, enjoys symbolic authority founded upon Koranic commandments that no Islamic government would dare to overtly challenge. The conceptions of global power that these three agents strive to implement are very different from one another because they owe to heterogeneous and sometimes incompatible inspirations. Therefore, they are not similar forces, or as it were, species of the same genus. They do not fight for the same goals and, when they occasionally resort to the same weapons (for example, economic warfare) they do so in different strategic contexts, where employing such weapons does not necessarily serve the same objectives. Although nominally the relationships among them are competitive and antagonistic, sometimes even of a military nature, there are vast areas of fusion and collaboration, as flexible and changeable as they may be. This phenomenon disorients observers, producing all sorts of misguided and phantasmagorical interpretations, some in the form of “conspiracy theories,” THE INTER-AMERICAN INSTITUTE FOR PHILOSOPHY, GOVERNMENT, AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 2012 10 universal consensus, opposed only by slightly insane marginal and religious groups 3. The Islamic block describes its Western enemy in terms that only reveal its disposition to hate it per fas et per nefas, presenting it sometimes as the heir to the ancient Crusaders and sometimes as the personification of modern materialism and hedonism. The generous collaboration of Russian and China with terrorist groups is clearly the reason why these two countries are absent from the Islamic ideological discourse. This way, irreconcilable theoretical incompatibilities are circumvented. Some theoreticians of the Caliphate allege that socialism, once triumphant in the world, will need a soul, and Islam will provide it with one. Just as each of the three blocks cultivates a false image of its competitors, so does each also project a false image of itself. Leaving aside for now the Islamic and Western projective fantasies, let’s address the Russian-Chinese ones. The Russian-Chinese block presents itself as an ally of the United States in the “fight against terrorism,” while at the same time providing weapons and all sorts of support to practically all terrorist organizations of the world and to the anti-American regimes of Iran, Venezuela, etc., and propagates the legend that the attack on the World Trade Center was the work of the American government.1 Russia complains that she was “corrupted” by Boris Yeltsin’s liberal reforms, as inspired by America, as if before them she had lived in a temple of purity and not in the endless rot of the Communist regime. It is worth recalling that the Soviet government lived essentially from theft and extortion for over 60 years without ever having to account for this. At the same time, it corrupted its population through the institutionalized habit of kickbacks, exchange of political favors and influence peddling, without which the state machinery would simply grind to a halt.2 When its assets were distributed after the official dissolution of the regime, the beneficiaries were the members of the nomenklatura themselves, who became billionaires overnight, without severing the ties that joined them to the old state apparatus, particularly to the KGB (“there is no such thing as former KGB,” confessed Vladimir Putin). Imagine what would have happened in 1 See Olavo de Carvalho, “Suggestion to the Right-Thinking: Check into an Asylum,” Diário do Comércio, January 30, 2002, http://theinteramerican.org/commentary/265-a- suggestion-to-the-right-thinking-check-into-a-mental-hospital-.html. 2 See, for exampple, Konstantin Simis, URSS: The Corrupt Society: The Secret World of Soviet Capitalism (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982) and Alena V. Ledeneva, Russia’s Economy of Favours (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). THE INTER-AMERICAN INSTITUTE FOR PHILOSOPHY, GOVERNMENT, AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 2012 11 Germany after WWII if the winners, instead of prosecuting and punishing the supporters of the old regime, had awarded them access to the assets of the Nazi State. That is exactly what happened in Russia: as soon as the USSR was officially dissolved, its agents of influence in Europe and in the United States launched a successful operation to block any investigation of Soviet crimes.3 Nobody was ever punished for the murder of at least tens of millions of civilians and for the creation of the most efficient machinery of state terror known to mankind. On the contrary, the chaos and corruption that followed the dismantling of the Soviet State were not caused by the new system of free enterprise, but by the fact that the first to benefit from it were the masters of the old regime, a horde of thieves and murderers such as never before seen in a civilized country. What’s more, while whining about being corrupted by American capitalism, Russia forgets that it was she who corrupted it. Since the 1930s Stalin’s government, aware that the strength of America resided in “its patriotism, its morality and its spiritual life” (sic), unleashed a gigantic operation, in the words of its main perpetrator, Willi Münzenberg, designed to “make the West so corrupt it stinks.” The purchase of consciences, the involvement of high-level officers in espionage and shady businesses, the intense propaganda campaigns to debilitate the moral beliefs of the population and the generalized infiltration of the educational system wound up producing results, particularly after the 1960s, radically modifying American society to the point of rendering it unrecognizable. It was also the Soviet action that gave planetary dimensions to drug trafficking since the 1950s. Its history is well documented in Red Cocaine: The Drugging of America and the West, by Joseph D. Douglass. When Russia wails that after the fall of Communism she was invaded by the drug culture, she is simply harvesting what she sowed. Nothing of this vast corrupting action is a thing of the past. Nowadays there are more Russian agents in the United States than during the Cold War.4 China, well fed by American investments, shows evidence that the apparent liberalization of its economy was only a cover-up for consolidating 3 Vladimir Boukovski, Jugement à Moscou: Un dissident dans les archives du Kremlin (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1995). 4 Maureen Calahan, “1000’s of Russian Spies in U.S., Surpassing Cold War Record,” New York Post, July 4, 2010, http://www.nypost.com/p/news/national/ record_mole_russia_cold_surpass_K6S6j9QENZeRCOSEvhvYtO. THE INTER-AMERICAN INSTITUTE FOR PHILOSOPHY, GOVERNMENT, AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 2012 12 the totalitarian regime, making it increasingly solid and seemingly indestructible. As for the position of the United States in the world scene, let us first look at how Prof. Dugin describes it, and then see how it is in reality. According to the Eurasian doctrine, the United States are the incarnation, par excellence, of liberal globalism.5 The face of liberalism that Prof. Dugin sees in America is, essentially that of the “open society” advocated by Sir Karl Popper. This is how Prof. Dugin summarizes the liberal idea: To understand the philosophical consistency of the national-Bolshevik ideology . . . it is absolutely necessary to read the fundamental book of Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies. Popper developed a fundamental typology for our subject. According to him, the history of humanity and the history of ideas divide themselves in two (unequal) halves. On the one hand, there are the partisans of the ‘open society,’ which represents in his view the form of normal existence of rational individuals (so are for him all men), who base their conduct upon reasoning and the supposedly free personal will. The sum of such individuals must logically form the ‘open society,’ essentially ‘non- totalitarian, since it lacks any unifying idea or value system of a collectivist nature, be it supra-individual or non-individual. The ‘open society’ is open precisely because it ignores all ‘teleologies,’ all ‘absolutes,’ all established typological differences; therefore it ignores all limits that emanate from the non-individual and non-rational domain (supra-rational, a-rational, or irrational, the latter being the more frequent term in Popper). On the other hand, there is the ideological camp of the ‘enemies of open society, where Popper includes Heraclitus, Plato, Aristotle, the medieval Schoolmen, as well as the German philosophy of Schlegel, Fichte, and above all of Hegel and Marx. Karl Popper . . . points the essential unity of their approaches and discerns the structure of their common Weltanschauung, whose characteristic traits are the denial of the intrinsic value of the individual, whence stems the loathe for autonomous rationalism, and the tendency to submission of the individual and his reason to the ‘non-individual’ and ‘non-rational’ values, which always and 5 The two elements that this definition fuses into a unity do not have the same origin, and were not friendly to each other at birth. The first liberal movements of the nineteenth century, coming on the top of the wave of independence movements against the colonial powers, were highly nationalistic, and the first projects for global government that appeared in the beginning of the twentieth century were inspired by notoriously interventionist and statist ideas. THE INTER-AMERICAN INSTITUTE FOR PHILOSOPHY, GOVERNMENT, AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 2012 15 6. Russia is not at all the “fortress of spirituality and tradition,” appointed by a celestial mandate to castigate the flesh of the United States for the sins of the immoral and materialist West. Today as in Stalin’s time, Russia is a den of corruption and wickedness such as never before seen, dedicated to the spreading of its mistakes around the world, as announced in the prophecy of Fatima. It should be noted that this prophecy never referred particularly to Communism, but to “the errors of Russia” in a generic way, and it announced that the dissemination of these errors, with all its ensuing retinue of disgrace and suffering, would only cease if the Pope and all Catholic bishops of the world would perform the rite of consecration of Russia. Since this rite has never been performed, there is no reason not to see in the Eurasian project a second wave and an upgrade of the “errors of Russia,” the announcement of a catastrophe of incalculable proportions. 7. If Russia today, through the medium of Prof. Dugin, presents to the world as the bearer of a great redeeming spiritual message, we need only recall that she has done so twice before: (a) In the nineteenth century, all the thinkers of the Slavophile stripe, as Dostoyevsky, Soloviev and Leontiev, saw the West as the source of all evils and announced that in the following century Russia would teach the world “true Christianity.” What happened was that all this spiritual arrogance was impotent to stop the advance of communist materialism in Russia herself. (b) Russian communism promised to bring to the world an era of peace, prosperity and freedom beyond the most beautiful dreams of previous generations. All it managed to do was to create a totalitarian inferno of which neither Attila nor Genghis-Kahn could have glimpsed in a nightmare. It would be wonderful if each country learned how to exorcise its own evils before pretending to be the savior of humanity. Aleksandr Dugin’s Russia seems to have taken the opposite lesson from her crimes and failures. Aleksandr Dugin’s Answer Global Transition And Its Enemies The World Order questioned New World Order as a concept was popular in a concrete historical momentum—precisely that when the Cold War ended (late 80’s, Gorbatchev era) and the global cooperation between the USA and Soviet Union was considered near and very probable. The basis of NWO was presumably realization of the convergence theory predicting the synthesis of Soviet socialist and Western capitalist political forms and near cooperation of the Soviet Union and USA in the case of regional issues—for example first Gulf War in the beginning of 1991. Hence, as the Soviet Union split soon after, this project of NWO was naturally set aside and forgotten. After 1991 the other World Order was considered as something being created under our eyes—Unipolar World with open global hegemony of USA. It is described well in Fukuyama’s political utopia “End of history.” This World Order ignored any other poles of power except the USA and its allies (first of all Europe and Japan) and was thought as universalization of free market economy, political democracy and human rights ideology as global pattern accepted by all countries in the world. The skeptics thought that it was rather illusion and the differences between the countries and people would reappear in other forms (for example, in the famous clash of civilizations of S. Huntington or ethnic or religious conflicts). Some experts regarded unipolarity not as the properly speaking World Order but as the unipolar momentum (J. Mearsheimer). In any case, what is questioned in all these projects is National Statehood. The Westphalian system did not correspond any more to the present global balance of powers. New actors of transnational or subnational scale affirm their growing importance and that was clear that the World was in need of new paradigm of International Relations. So our actual contemporary world cannot be regarded as properly realized NWO. There is no definitive World Order of any kind at present. There is a Transition from the World Order we knew in XX century to the some other paradigm whose full features rest to define. Will the future be really global? Or the regionalist tendencies will win? Will there be a unique Order? Or there will be different local or regional Orders? Or may be we are THE INTER-AMERICAN INSTITUTE FOR PHILOSOPHY, GOVERNMENT, AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 2012 17 going to deal with World Chaos? It is not clear yet, the Transition is not accomplished. We are living in the middle of it. If the global elite (first of all the United States political elite) has the clear vision of the desired future (that is rather doubtful), even so the circumstances can prevent the realization of it in practice. If the global elite lack the consensual project—the issue is much more complicated. So only the fact of Transition to some new paradigm is certain. The paradigm as such is on the contrary quite uncertain. World Order from USA point of view USA position in this shift is absolutely assured but the future of USA is under question. The USA undergoes now the test of global imperial rule and they have to deal with many challenges—some of them quite new and original. They could proceed in three different ways: 1) Creating an American Empire strictu sensu with a consolidated technically and socially developed central area (Imperial Core) while the outer spaces would keep divided and fragmentized in the state of permanent unrest (near the chaos); it seems the neo-cons are in favor of such a pattern. 2) Creating multilateral unipolarity where the USA would cooperate with other friendly powers (Canada, Europe, Australia, Japan, Israel— possibly other countries) in solving the regional problems and making pressure on the “rogue countries” (Iran, Venezuela, Belarus, Northern Korea) or on the hesitating counties striving to assure their own regional independence (China, Russia and so on); it seems that democrats and Obama are inclined to do so; 3) Promoting accelerated globalization with the creation of World Government and swift desovereignization of the National States in favor of creation of United States of the World ruled by the global elite on the legal terms (that is the CFR project represented by the strategy of George Soros and his foundations; the colored revolutions are viewed here as the most effective weapon destabilizing and finally destroying States). It seems that USA tries to go by these three ways simultaneously promoting all three strategies at the same time. This three directions strategy of USA creates the global context in International Relations, USA being the key actor on the global scale. Beyond the evident differences of these three images of future they have some essential points in common. In any case USA is interested in affirming its strategic, economical and political domination; in strengthening of the control or other global actors and in weakening them; in gradual or accelerated desovereignization of now more THE INTER-AMERICAN INSTITUTE FOR PHILOSOPHY, GOVERNMENT, AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 2012 20 reaffirm its independence in front of the USA global strategy and once can become the main factor of the competition. The Russian, Iranian, Venezuelan and some other relatively independent (from USA) countries control over the huge amount of the natural resources puts the limits to the American economical influence. The economy of European Community and the Japanese economic potential represent the two poles of competition inside the strategic partners and military allies of USA. So the USA tries to solve all these problems using not only purely economic instruments but also politics and sometimes military power. We could interpret in this manner the intrusion in Iraq and Afghanistan, the possible intervention in Libya, Iran and Syria. Indirectly promoting opposition in Russia, Iran and Chine and trying to cause some problems with Turkey and radical Islamism in general for Europe USA wants to reach the same goal. But these are only technical solutions. The main challenge is how organize the post-modern and financially-centered economy with granted growth overcoming the more and more critical gap between the real sector and the financial instruments whose logic become more and more autonomous. So we have observed the main and asymmetric actor USA situated in the center of the present Transition state of world affairs. This actor represents the true hyperpower (H.Vidrine) and the strongest geopolitical field (that includes all the levels revised before) is structured around this American Core, representing its multilevel networks. The question can be raised here: is this actor fully conscious of what it does and whether it understand well what he will obtain in the end; which kind of Order it is going to get? It seems that the opinions on this most important point are divided: the neocons proclaim the New American Century being optimistic as to the future American Empire. But in their case it is obvious that they have clear (that doesn’t mean necessary realistic) vision of the future (American, more precisely North-American future). In this case the World Order will be American Imperial Order based on the unipolar geopolitics. At least theoretically is has some positive point: it is clear and honest. The multilateralists are more cautious and insist on the necessity to invite the other regional powers to share with the USA the burden of the planetary rule. It is obvious that only similar (regarding the USA) societies can be partners, so the success of promoting democracy becomes here the essential care. The multilateralists act not only in the name of USA but also in the name of the West, considered as something universal. The image of the future World Order is foggier. The fate of the global democracy is misty and not so clearly defined as the image of American Empire. THE INTER-AMERICAN INSTITUTE FOR PHILOSOPHY, GOVERNMENT, AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 2012 21 Yet hazier is the extreme version of promoters of accelerated globalization. It could effectively overthrow the existing national states but in some cases it will only open the way to much more archaic, local, religious or ethnic forces. So the earth-scale open society is such fantastic a perspective that it is much easier to imagine the total chaos and the war of everybody against everybody. So the image of the future World Order differs with regard to the group of American ideologists and decision makers. More consequent strategy is at the same time more ethnocentric, openly imperialistic and hegemonic. It is unipolar World Order. The other two versions are much more dim and uncertain. Up to certain point they can give way to world disorder. They are called summarily “non-polar” (R. Haass). So the Transition in question, in any case, is Americano-centric by its nature and the global geopolitical field is structured so that main global processes would be moderated, orientated, directed and sometimes controlled by the unique actor performing its work lonely or with the help of the essentially pro-American Western (or at least pro-Western) allies. The World Order from the non-USA point of view The Americano-centric world perspective described above being the most important and central as global tendency is not the only one possible. There can be and there are the alternative visions of World architecture that can be taken into consideration. There are secondary and tertiary actors that are inevitable losers in the case of the success of USA-strategy: the countries, states, peoples, cultures that would loose all and gain nothing when the USA strategy realizes. They are multiple and heterogeneous. We could group them in the different categories. 1) The first category is composed by the more or less successful national States that are not happy to let their independence to the supranational exterior authority—not in the form of open American hegemony, nor in the Western-centered kind of World Government, nor in the chaotic dissolution. There are many of such a countries—beginning from China, Russia, Iran, India, including many Southern American and Islamic States. They don’t like the Transition at all, suspecting (with good reasons) the inevitable loss of the sovereignty. So they are inclined to resist the main trends of the planetary Americano-centric geopolitical field or adapt to it in such a manner that it would be possible to avoid the logical consequences of the success of American general strategy (it doesn’t make difference whether imperialistic or globalist). The will of the conservation of the THE INTER-AMERICAN INSTITUTE FOR PHILOSOPHY, GOVERNMENT, AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 2012 22 sovereignty represents the natural contradiction and the point of resistance in front of the pro-American (or globalist) trends. These countries in general hardly possess the alternative vision of the future World Order. What they want—it is to preserve the status quo and national States in the present form adjusting and modernizing them if necessary. Between the members of this national Statehood clubs there are three kinds of actors: 1) those who try to adapt their societies to the Western standards and to keep friendly relations with the West and USA, but to avoid the direct desovereignization (India, Turkey, Brazil, up to the certain point Russia, Kazakhstan); 2) Those who are ready to cooperate with USA but under condition of the non-interference in their inner affairs (Arabia Saudi, Pakistan and so on); 3) Those who, cooperating with USA, strictly observe the particularity of their society making permanent filtration of what is compatible in Western culture with domestic culture or what is not, at the same time trying to use the dividends received by this cooperation to the strengthening of nation independence (China); 4) Those who try to oppose the USA directly rejecting the Western values, the unipolarity and the USA hegemony (Iran, Venezuela, North Korea). All these groups lack the global alternative strategy that could be symmetrically comparable with the American (there is not even a consensual or clear) vision of the future. Everybody acts by themselves and in their own direct interests. The difference consists only in the radicalism of the rejection of Americanization. We could define their position as reactive. This strategy of reactive opposition varying from the rejection to adaptation is sometimes effective, sometimes it is not. In sum it doesn’t give any kind of future vision. The future of the World Order is considered as eternal conservation of status quo—Modernity, national Statehood, Westphalian systems, current ONU configuration and so on. The Second category of actors who reject the Transition consists of subnational groups, movements and organizations that oppose Americanism as the structures of the global geopolitical field by ideological, religious or cultural reasons. These groups are quite different and vary from one concrete state to another. They are mostly based on the religious faith incompatible with the secular doctrine of americanization, westernization and globalization. But they could be motivated by the ethnical or ideological (for example, socialist or communist) doctrines. Some other act on the regionalist grounds. The paradox is that in the globalization ambiance that aims to uniform all particularities and collective identities on the basis of purely individual identity, such subnational actors easily become THE INTER-AMERICAN INSTITUTE FOR PHILOSOPHY, GOVERNMENT, AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 2012 25 Second Segment Aleksandr Dugin’s Reply The West Against the Rest Answering the interesting and very relevant text of Professor Olavo de Carvalho, I would like to stress some important points: Individualism and holism First of all, it seems clear to me that our discussion (if the term “debate” doesn’t fit exactly here—as Professor de Carvalho has pointed out) is something more than the exchange of the opinions of the two isolated individuals. There is something very symbolic in the accentuation of a certain asymmetry in our mutual positions, noted by Professor de Carvalho at the beginning of his introductory text. Describing this asymmetry, he defines himself as a pure individuality that can speak only in his own name, expressing a highly personal point of view. He isn’t speaking on the name of anything except himself: he wants to stress this point from the very beginning. At the same time he tries to construct the opposite image of my person, underlining the fact of my implication in the political, public and scientific circles and my involvement in concrete politics and in the process of decision making and ideological struggle. It seems to be a correct observation, but it has one less evident dimension. Speaking so, Professor Olavo de Carvalho drives our attention to the really existing differences between the Western and the Russian (Eurasian) civilizations. The metaphysical basis of the West is individualism. The French sociologist Louis Dumont in his works—Essai sur l’individualism,1 Homo Aequalis I2 and Homo Aequalis II3— has described clearly enough the individualistic nature of the Western society and Western civilization from the Middle Ages until now. So, accentuating purely personal position in our debates, Professor Olavo de Carvalho is acting in accordance with most general and “collectivist” manner, reflecting the social particularity of Western culture and system of values. For the Western man a declaration of individualism is 1 Louis Dumont, Essais sur l'individualisme. Une perspective anthropologique sur l'idéologie moderne (Paris: Le Seuil, 1983). 2 Louis Dumont, Homo Æqualis I: genèse et épanouissement de l'idéologie économique (Paris: Gallimard/BSH, 1977). 3 Louis Dumont, Homo Æqualis II: l'Idéologie allemande (Paris: Gallimard/BSH, 1978). THE INTER-AMERICAN INSTITUTE FOR PHILOSOPHY, GOVERNMENT, AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 2012 27 a natural thing (socially defined), and, being a “natural” thing, it is social and therefore more than individualistic. In other words, individualism is a common feature of the West. So there is little of “individual” in individualism, it is rather a stereotype. The same stereotype is clearly seen in the projection of the opposite identity on the representatives of Russian (Eurasian) society. This identity should be collectivist a priori, manifesting holistic or totalitarian (in the case of pejorative attitude) features. And Professor de Carvalho finds easily the confirmation of such projection in the biographical details of his vis-a-vis. The context is thus well defined and the mutual photos add to it more visual expression. The “hunter” vs the “soldier”. The “lonely man” vs the “collective man”. The “West” against the “Rest”. I accept it fully and agree to recognise the fact that our Russian (Eurasian) individuation consists in the desire to manifest something more general than our individual features. So, being a collective entity (the Russian name “sobornost’“ fits here better) for me is rather an honour. The more holistic is my position, the better it is. That is precisely the symbolic dimension mentioned earlier. In the debate of two personalities there are two massive structures of different civilizations, different systems of values that affront each other through us. The Western individualism confronts the Russian (Eurasian) holism. Here we need to make one precision. As far as I understand, Brazilian society and Brazilian culture are not fully Western and individualistic. There are many collectivist and holistic features in them. So, Latin America and Brazil in particular have some social and cultural differences in comparison with the European or North American societies and cultures. And in the case of Professor de Carvalho, the fact of his living in the USA, plays an important role. Not his geographical residence, I mean, but his cultural identification. This is confirmed by the texts of Professor de Carvalho, that I’ve managed to read. They witness of his adherence to the North American tradition (in its “right” or “traditionalist” version) and of his distance from the main features of Brazilian cultural (critical) attitude towards USA. Being politically on the right wing (I presume) Professor de Carvalho castigates Latin (and Brazilian) “leftism” (le gauchisme). My sympathy in this case is rather on the Latin America’s side. Being critical in front of USA and the Western civilization as a whole, I find a lot of very charming (Eurasian) features in the South and Central American societies. So, I am in some way more pro-Brazilian than the “brazileiro puro” Professor de Carvalho, who rather defends the West as a whole and certain (conservative) sides of USA. THE INTER-AMERICAN INSTITUTE FOR PHILOSOPHY, GOVERNMENT, AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 2012 30 civilizations made famous by S. Huntington: The West against the Rest.6 That is (in the terms of Professor Olavo de Carvalho) the Western finance elite against Eurasians and Islamists as well as against all other instances who reject USA hegemony and absoluteness of free market, human rights, liberalism, individualism and parliamentarian democracy Standards. So, operating with the world map proposed by Professor Olavo de Carvalho, I admit that I would rather take consciously position in the “Eurasian (Russian-Chinese) militarism” camp, accompanied by great sympathy to the world of anti-Western Islamic movement (not sharing its theological positions, being orthodox Christian). The critical and pejorative description by Professor Olavo de Carvalho of the Russian-Chinese and Islamic project makes me suggest that his own choice is quite different and opposite to mine. If we remain in the limits of the Global World Map, proposed by him, the only logical solution is the choice of the global West and the hegemony of the Western global financial elite. If there are only three forces (it is Professor Olavo de Carvalho who affirms it, not me) the realistic choice should be made accepting one of them as a position. But this point is not clearly affirmed in Professor Olavo de Carvalho’s text. We see that he hates the Russian-Chinese “statism” and Islamic fundamentalism. It is explicit. So, from this point of view we are waiting for the next step—the defense of the West. But some remarks of Professor Olavo de Carvalho indicates that it is no so. He treats the Western globalization in skeptical and critical terms as well. So we rest perplexed and hope he would make this point clear in the future. Theoretically we could suggest that he is against any kind of global project whatsoever and rejects them all, hating all scenarios of globalistic visions and praxis. If that is the case, he should attack first of all heaviest, most serious and most impressive one—the USA hegemony, the unipolar world and the rule of the financial elite. This is the first and most powerful trend—much more effective than two others. But Prof. Carvalho lives in the USA and in his introductory texts fiercely attacks the Eurasianism and Islamic fundamentalism before anything else. So his position rests a little bit enigmatic and intriguing. For his style of discussion this seems to be a rather clever stylistic step—so that the observers would follow the discourse with closer attention, being intrigued as me myself. KGB, the Communist Party and Al-Quaeda sins are sufficiently exposed by the professor. But what about CIA, Bilderberg, Pentagon, neocons, PNAC, “imperial grunts”, 6 Samuel P. Huntington. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996). THE INTER-AMERICAN INSTITUTE FOR PHILOSOPHY, GOVERNMENT, AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 2012 31 Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, the bombing of Serbia? The validity of the classical geopolitics Second point: Prof. Carvalho affirms: Even though in current debates these three blocks are almost invariably designated by names of nations, States and governments, to depict their interactions as a dispute among nations or national interests is a residual habit of the old geopolitics that does not help us at all to understand the present situation. I can not agree with the affirmation concerning “a residual habit of the old geopolitics that does not help us at all to understand the present situation”. I am convinced that classical geopolitical analysis is still relevant and does help us “to understand the present situation”. The modern (and postmodern as well) USA global power and its allies in Europe or elsewhere during the last centuries up until nowadays manifested themselves as the direct incarnation of the Sea Power, exposed by Halford Mackinder,7 Nicholas J. Spykmen,8 K.Haushofer9 and all other geopolitical thinkers and analysts. The American global hegemony geographically, strategically and (most importantly) sociologically is a pure “tallassocracy”, the classic manifestation of the eternal Carthage, which became a worldwide phenomenon. The Atlantic localization of the Core of the global world (the Rich North), the capitalist essence of its rule, the material innovative technology as the basis of the conquest of the colonies, the strategic control of the sees and oceans with the NAVY forces—all these features of the globalization and present days unipolarity (sometimes in the soft version, presented as multilateralism) are the classical characteristics of the Sea Power. And the Sea Power is in the permanent quest against the Heartland, being on its direct way to the world domination. 7 Halford J. Mackinder, “The geographical pivot of history,” The Geographical Journal, no. 23 (1904): 421–437; Halford J. Mackinder, “The Round World and the Winning of the Peace,” Foreign Affairs 21, no. 4 (July 1943); Halford J. Mackinder, Democratic Ideals and Reality: A Study in the Politics of Reconstruction (Washington, D.C.: National Defense University Press, 1996). 8 Nicholas J. Spykmen, The Geography of the Peace (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1944). 9 Klaus Haushofer, Geopolitik der Pan-Ideen (Berlin: Zentral-Verlag, 1931). THE INTER-AMERICAN INSTITUTE FOR PHILOSOPHY, GOVERNMENT, AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 2012 32 That is why the old geopolitical analysis is highly relevant. It reflects perfectly the main goals of the implementation of the thallassocratic world system. If we observe the major projects opposite to the globalization (described by Professor Olavo de Carvalho) we see the other half of the classical geopolitical Mackinder’s map. What are Russia and Chine geopolitically? They form together whole Eurasia, the Heartland’s zone, two greatest continental spaces. So, we deal with tellurocracy in its essence. Geopolitics allows the visualization of both political-geographical and sociological spheres. It makes a synthesis of the political powers, borders and “les dispositifs” on the one hand, and cultural, social and value system, on the other. So, tellurocracy, the Rome’s paradigm, is the geopolitical continental kind of the strategy and civilization taken together. So the hostility between USA-unipolarity-globalization-financial oligarchy- modernization-capitalism and Russia-Chine-militarism- sovereignty of state- traditional society-(crypto-socialism) is perfectly geopolitical. Where is the place of Islam in classical geopolitical vision? It corresponds to the Rimland, precisely to the large part of Rimland going from the Maghreb through Middle East to the Central Asia and further to Islamic societies of the Pacific. Geopolitical nature of Islam opens to it two options: Sea Power or Land Power, the thallassocracy or tellurocracy? The radical Islam rejecting the West, the USA, the globalization and consequently the thallassocracy, is logically inclined to the alliance with the Land Power. But this zone as a whole can optionally make the other decision, preferring the alliance with the West (as some Arab regimes). The balance between the thallassocracy and tellurocracy today is in favour of the first. So the present situation can be correctly evaluated in the classical (“old”) geopolitical terms. The Sea Power, striving to control the Heartland (Eurasia) in order to rule the World (imposing everywhere its market/human rights/individualist patterns and values), is confronting with the Eurasian forces (Russia-China) and its temporary allies (Islamists, Latin America anti-colonialists, neo-socialists and “independentistas” and so on). The “open society” heresy and the American crimes Next point: Professor Olavo de Carvalho points out that Eurasian analysis of the American society is wrong, concerning the identification of Olavo de Carvalho’s Reply Prestad noblemente vuestro auxilio a los que son los menos contra los que son los más. —José ORTEGA Y GASSET, Advice to Spanish Youth1 § 1 Our respective missions in this debate Political Science, as I have said, was born at the moment when Plato and Aristotle distinguished between the discourse of political agents and the discourse of the scientific observer who seeks to understand what is going on among the agents. It is true that political agents may, over time, learn how to use certain instruments of scientific discourse for their own ends; it is also true that the scientific observer may have preferences for the politics of this or that agent. But this does nothing to alter the validity of the initial distinction: the discourse of the political agent aims to produce certain actions that favor his victory, while the discourse of the scientific observer seeks to obtain a clear view of what is at stake, by understanding the objectives and means of action of each of the agents, the general situation where the competition takes place, its most probable developments, and the meaning of such events in the larger picture of human existence. The function of the scientific observer becomes even more distinct from that of the agents when he neither wishes nor can take sides with any of them and keeps himself at a necessary distance in order to describe the picture with the maximum realism available to him. From the outset of this exchange of messages with Professor Dugin, I have tried to make two points clear: 1. He is declaredly a political agent, and all the description he presents of the state of things is determined by the practical objectives that he seeks to achieve. It is therefore natural that he sees the world as divided in two, with a good and a bad side, and that he strives to win sympathies for the side he considers to be good, while at the same time throwing the maximum amount of hatred available against the side he considers to be bad. 1 The epigraph by Ortega Y Gasset reads: “Nobly lend thy assistance to those who are the least against those who are the greatest.” THE INTER-AMERICAN INSTITUTE FOR PHILOSOPHY, GOVERNMENT, AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 2012 36 2. On the other hand, my description of the picture presents a world divided among three main disputing forces, neither of which enjoys the least sympathy on my part, though, in terms of immediate physical danger to the human species, one of them has already demonstrated overwhelming superiority over the other two. Killing an approximate total of 140 million people in a few decades—more than all wars, epidemics, and natural catastrophes of any kind had ever killed at least since the beginning of the Christian Era—the Russians and Chinese have already proved to have a degree of truculence, wickedness, and disrespect for human life that transcends the possibilities of the most odious Islamic suicide bomber or the coldest, Machiavellian Western banker. This is a pure and simple fact, and not even all the Eurasian blather in the world can ease the scandal of the two hordes of murderers who, instead of paying for the crimes they committed against their own people, now demand, with an air of innocence, of sanctity and even of divine authority, a chance for extending those crimes to a global scale. Nevertheless, the two other globalizing currents do not seem to me to be worthy of greater admiration and respect—at the very least for having been accomplices in the Russian-Chinese genocide, one, between the 30s and the 60s, favoring with money aplenty and paternal diplomatic concessions the building of the two most deadly tyrannies of all time, the other even now, walking hand in hand, in the World Social Forum and everywhere, with the ostensible or disguised spokesmen of an ideology that their very religion condemns. The photos that I attached to my first message, by way of a humorous synthesis, document all the difference between the political agent invested with global plans and means of action of imperial scale and the scientific observer not only divested of both, but firmly decided to reject them and to live without them until the end of his days, since they are unnecessary and inconvenient to the mission in life that he has chosen and that is for him the only reasonable justification for his existence.2 2 Among the readers, there were some—fortunately only a few—who were fool enough to interpret those photos as captatio benevolentiae, without noticing that they are the most exact and realistic humorous translation of a pure and simple fact (which on its turn illustrates without the least rhetorical emphasis the fundamental Platonic-Aristotelian distinction), and even as an indication of self-pity, as if I were regretting, and not thanking the heavens, the nullity of my stockpile of weapons of mass destruction and other instruments of war action that abound in the hands of my opponent. I wonder where I could hide, in my home’s garden, an arsenal of atomic bombs and some tons of chemical weapons, and to whom I could sell all this junk in the case that a world war does not happen. THE INTER-AMERICAN INSTITUTE FOR PHILOSOPHY, GOVERNMENT, AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 2012 37 § 2 From argumentation to pure and simple gossip This asymmetry in the respective roles of the political agent and the scientific observer is then reflected in the descriptions of the world situation that both make: the first one painting it as a struggle between Good and Evil and, quite modestly, claiming to himself the role that incarnates the Good; the second one presenting it rather as a dispute among three pestiferous evils, not nurturing many illusions as to what may result for humanity in the following decades from their competition. Both professor Dugin and I are performing our respective tasks with utmost dedication, seriousness and honesty. But these tasks are not one and the same. His task is to recruit soldiers for the battle against the West and for the establishment of the universal Eurasian Empire. Mine is to attempt to understand the political situation of the world so that my readers and I are not reduced to the condition of blind men caught in the gunfire of the global combat; so that we are not dragged by the vortex of history like leaves in a storm, without ever knowing whence we came or whither we are being carried. The difference between the missions we have embraced determines the intellectual and verbal means used in our respective accounts. He employs all the usual instruments of political propaganda: Manichean simplification, defamatory labeling, perfidious insinuation, the phony indignation of a culprit pretending to be a saint and, last, not least, the construction of the great Sorelian myth—or self-fulfilling prophecy—which, while pretending to describe reality, builds in the air an agglutinating symbol in hopes that the false may become true by the massive adherence of the audience. For my part, all I can do is use the means of analytic clarification created by philosophy through the millennia—beginning with the very distinction between the discourses of agent and observer—, applying them to a multitude of facts gathered from the most varied sources, including those remote and poorly known to the public, and not from those of the popular media, which reflect rather the persuasive and manipulatory effort of one of the agents than a serious intent to apprehend reality. It is not a coincidence that my opponent appeals most of all to the credibility of popular media, playing with the magnetic power of established commonplace—“the unipolar world,” “American aggressiveness,” “Imperialism,” the “anarchy of the free market,” “individualism,” and so on—, without noticing two details: (1) These topoi are put into circulation by the same media that belongs to the THE INTER-AMERICAN INSTITUTE FOR PHILOSOPHY, GOVERNMENT, AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 2012 40 I do not hesitate to say that in the last decades Brazilian nationalism, of a noble tradition, has degraded to the point of becoming a histrionic anti- Americanism used to cover up the sacrifice of national sovereignty to the demands of globalism. In this regard, Professor Dugin is on the side of a Brazil made of papier maché, while I, with the modest instruments at my disposal, take up the task of defending the real homeland against enemies of flesh and blood. If, on the one hand, he pretends to minimize the importance of my place of residence, while at the same time stressing it to insinuate that I am anti-Brazilian and pro-American, all I have to declare is that the very contradiction of his discourse on this point reveals that hide-and-seek game typical of demagogical labeling. Must I remind Professor Dugin that the founder of National-Bolshevism himself, Eduard Limonov, lived in the USA for even longer than I; also that he wrote a novel that takes place in the USA and reflects his deep integration in the American environment? Why, in his case, the same criterion of “cultural identification” used for me does not apply? After having confused social position and ideological belief, Professor Dugin confuses the latter with geographical residence, to which he, at the same time and paradoxically, denies any importance. It would be nice if he could decide by which means he intends to damage my reputation: by appealing to two contradictory insinuations he only displays the vacillation characteristic of the timid gossiper who says evil things and at the same time swears not to be saying anything at all. I do not take any of this as offense—I do not know a slower soul in taking offense than mine—, I only judge that the problem we are discussing is already complicated enough without these feinting and dodging that only serve to confuse the readers. Likewise, it does not make sense to paint me as a defender of the “West as a whole,” precisely when I am highlighting the division of this West and, in it, taking the side of those who at this moment do not hold State power in the USA or in Europe. If he would say that I defend one-half of the West against the other half, and that I accuse the latter of complicity with Eurasianism, Professor Dugin would be closer to the truth.3 3 It is true that he says that, if there are two Americas, one of them, the one I defend, is “purely virtual,” that is, “only a possibility,” and only the other one exercises significant political action. But the value of this reasoning is demonstrated by him later, when he says that, from the three globalist groups I distinguished, only one is politically active and relevant, while the other two, poor things, are only striving to defend themselves. If being limited to defensive attitudes before a greater power is the same that being only a possibility, then this reasoning should not apply only to conservative America, but to the Russian-Chinese and the Islamic blocks. In my understanding, the lesser power enjoyed THE INTER-AMERICAN INSTITUTE FOR PHILOSOPHY, GOVERNMENT, AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 2012 41 § 3 The Syndicate If he falsifies even the identity of his opponent in this debate, with what even greater ardor will Professor Dugin not do the same to his bête noire, Western globalism, which he deliberately seeks to confuse with American national power? The globalist elite is not only a vague social class of capitalists and bankers. It is an organized entity, with continuous existence for over a century, which meets periodically to ensure the unity of its plans and the continuity of their implementation, with the minuteness and scientific precision with which an engineer controls the transmutation of his blueprint into a building. The very expression “global elite,” which I have used, does not give an exact idea of the nature of this entity. Much better is the name suggested by the title of the book by Nicholas Hagger, The Syndicate.4 The Syndicate is an organization of big capitalists and international bankers committed to establishing a worldwide socialist dictatorship (we will see shortly why socialist). There are so many documents and studies that meticulously depict its origin, history, membership, and modus operandi that no excuse can be accepted for ignorance in this matter, most of all from people who intend to opine about it. No, this is not an insinuation against Professor Dugin. He is perfectly informed about it, and if he commits errors in the conclusions he presents, it is not due to ignorance. It is because the essentially bellicose nature of his approach impels him to divide the panorama into two symmetrically opposed halves, falsifying the whole picture and sending to the limbo of non-existence all the facts that refute this Manichean simplification. So abundant is the bibliography on the Syndicate that any attempt to summarize it here would be vain. All that can be done is to indicate some essential titles, which the reader will find mentioned here and there in this by a faction does not turn it into a merely possible faction, because it is from the weaker factions that comes, in the course of time, the great historical changes. If the two anti- Western blocks are fighting to dislodge a more powerful enemy, the same is being done by conservative America, comprised today of at least half of American voters. It would be great if Professor Dugin would use the terms “real” and “possible (virtual)” in a more serious fashion, instead of employing them to erase from the picture the factors that debilitate his argument. 4 Nicholas Hagger, The Syndicate. The Story of the Coming World Government (Ropley, Hants: O-Books, 2004). THE INTER-AMERICAN INSTITUTE FOR PHILOSOPHY, GOVERNMENT, AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 2012 42 exposition, and to highlight some points which are indispensable for the understanding of this debate. 1. The Syndicate was formed more than a hundred years ago by initiative of the Rothschilds, a mutlipolar family, with branches in England, France, and Germany since at least the eighteenth century. 2. The Syndicate gathers a few hundreds of billionaire families for the accomplishment of global plans that ensure the continuity and expansion of their power over the entire terrestrial orb. These are very long-term plans, transcending the duration of the lives of individual members of the organization and even of the historical existence of many states and nations involved in the process. 3. The Syndicate is a dynastic organization, whose continuity of action is secured by the succession from parents to children since many generations. We will see below (§ 9 “Geopolitics and History”) that this type of continuity is the distinguishing factor between the true agent subjects of the historical process and the apparent formations, as venerable as they may be, which flutter upon the surface of epochs as Chinese shadows projected on a wall. 4. The Syndicate acts through a multiplicity of subsidiary organizations scattered around the world, as for example the Bilderberg Group or the Council on Foreign Relations, but it does not have itself a legal identity. This is an essential condition for its agency in the world, enabling it to command innumerable political, economic, cultural, and military processes without ever being held directly accountable for the results (or by the iniquity of the means), be it before the courts, or before the court of public opinion. Having most faithful agents spread out in various governments—and in the command of some of them—it is upon these governments that falls, in the public debate, the responsibility for the decisions and actions of the Syndicate, so that states and nations used as tools become also, automatically and without the least difficulty, their scapegoats. This is the explanation why so many political decisions manifestly contrary to the interests and even to the survival of involved nations are later, paradoxically, attributed to nationalist and imperialist ambitions founded upon the “national interest.” Historical examples abound, but to remain in the present it is enough to notice that President Obama, a notorious server of the Syndicate, spent in just a week, US$ 500 million in a war effort destined to deliver the government of Libya to declared anti- American political factions, so that he can be then accused of tyrannical imposition of American power at the very instant he debilitates this power and puts it at the service of its enemies, thus becoming the target of the THE INTER-AMERICAN INSTITUTE FOR PHILOSOPHY, GOVERNMENT, AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 2012 45 Whoever attempts to do this with the definition of “socialism” will reach conclusions which, for the mechanical reasoner and the devout reader of popular media, will seem shocking and terrifying. Now what is “property of the means of production”? It is not mere possession; it is legal property, the acknowledgement by legitimate state authority of the right of the owner to make use of his property as he wishes, within, of course, the limits of the law. “Private property of the means of production” means that the state guarantees this right to particular citizens wealthy enough to own a factory, a farm, a bank—the so-called “bourgeois;” “State property of the means of production” means that the state guarantees that right only to itself, ripping off the bourgeois. It so happens that, from the viewpoint of Marxism, which created these terms and their corresponding interpretation, the very notion of “legal property” is a bourgeois fabrication, designed to cover up crude and brutal class domination. The whole world of constitutions, laws and decrees is, according to Marxism, an “ideological superstructure” that does not make any sense in itself and can only be explained as a misleading adornment used to legitimize the exploitation of the poor by the rich. So it is necessary to investigate what is behind the idea of “legal property” in order to uncover the conditions for real, practical control—in short, the structure of power. The bourgeois does not hold the control of the means of production because he has a “legal right” to them, but because he has at his service a whole apparatus of repression, intimidation, marginalization and even physical elimination of anyone who puts his property in jeopardy, really or hypothetically. The structure of power—the order of terror—is the reality behind the legal camouflage. This means, first of all, that the shift of the control of the means of production, from the bourgeois class to the revolutionary vanguard, cannot ever, in any hypothesis, be a legal transfer of property. This transfer would presuppose the existence of a legal order that would legitimate it, and the socialist revolution cannot destroy only private property: it has to deny and destroy the whole legal order. Even worse: in creating a new legal order to replace the old one, it cannot, as the bourgeois, pretend to believe that it is a reality in itself. The revolution has to admit, frankly, ostensibly, that the new order is not a legal order, but raw and naked power of revolutionary force. In socialism there is no legal order above the power of the Party. This is not only so in reality, but revolutionary socialists are proud to proclaim it is so. In addition, in the bourgeois context, property entails some legal responsibility. The capitalist proprietor is accountable to state authority for the bad use he makes of his property—if not against proletarians, at least THE INTER-AMERICAN INSTITUTE FOR PHILOSOPHY, GOVERNMENT, AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 2012 46 against other bourgeois. But to whom will an authority that is above the legal order itself be accountable? Revolutionary government cannot be a “proprietor” in the same sense that the bourgeois were. They were proprietors for the legal order, guaranteed by it and accountable to it. Socialist government is not a proprietor: it is an absolute controller, independent from and above any legal order. Many decades ago the greatest minds in the socialist field already realized that this placed before them an unavoidable choice: either they created immediately an implacable, totalitarian, bloody dictatorship, of which they would never be able to rid themselves of, and that would end up sending to prison or to the firing squad the revolutionaries themselves, as it indeed happened everywhere where this alternative was chosen;6 or, in contrast to that, it would be necessary to establish socialism by gradual and bloodless means, using as a tool the very juridico-political apparatus of bourgeois society and retaining, as much as possible, the minimal quota of legal rights and responsibilities necessary to protect, if not the population in general, at least the revolutionary elite itself. Which of these paths was chosen? Both, with only a territorial distinction: where it was possible to take power by violence, the dictatorship was the only acceptable path; in other countries it was necessary to promote the progressive ascension of state control of the economy, without making the state the direct legal proprietor of the means of production, which would have rendered it subject to legal responsibilities and demands that could slow down and obstruct the very march towards socialism. It should be noted, therefore, that in neither case was one dealing with “state property of the means of production”. In socialist dictatorship, there was the brutal, direct control immune to the legal responsibilities of a proprietor. Karl Marx himself called this “raw capitalism”—something much more cruel and arbitrary than what later would be labeled as “savage capitalism”. In the other countries, where the “peaceful” strategy was adopted, the State dodged the direct responsibilities of a proprietor, while at the same time subjugating legal proprietors through fiscal, labor, sanitary, technical, controls, to the point that capitalists would become simple managers at the service of the state, shouldering moreover the legal responsibilities evaded by it. Karl Marx also predicted this possibility when teaching that the transition of property from the bourgeoisie to the state 6 This alternative entailed, in addition, the creation of a more powerful and indestructible ruling class than the bourgeoisie itself ever was. THE INTER-AMERICAN INSTITUTE FOR PHILOSOPHY, GOVERNMENT, AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 2012 47 should be slow and gradual, to be carried out through indirect instruments such as progressive income taxation. In spite of sporadic conflicts, the two strategies have always worked in a convergent fashion. The collaboration was so close that the Fabian Society, the greatest incarnation of the “peaceful path towards socialism” in the West, received instructions directly from the Soviet government, at the very moment when, in Russia, the latter was implementing, by fire and sword, the militarized takeover of the means of production by the state. With time, though, those who favored the radical strategy had to agree that the growth and development of the modern state apparatus of social and economic control –under the inspiration, by the way, of socialism itself—rendered unfeasible the takeover of power through insurrectional means. Thereafter, only the “revolutions from above” were possible—the revolutions directed by the state itself, through administrative, legal, fiscal means, and police force. Moreover, the complete nationalization of the means of production by the state proved to be unfeasible not only in practice, but even in theory. In 1922 the economist Ludwig von Mises explained that, by eliminating the free market, all prices would have to be determined by the state. Yet, on the one hand, the number of products in circulation at any given moment was too large for a state agency to calculate their prices in advance. On the other, in order to control prices the government would need to have foreknowledge of all financial resources at the public’s disposal at each moment. In short: price control implied total control of the economy, which on its turn had to begin with price control. Only a divine intelligence could overcome this vicious circle. Price control being impossible, there was no general control of the economy; therefore there was no socialism at all. The maximum that could be achieved was a nominal socialism, with a vast residual freedom of the market which could never be abolished. Though some theoreticians of socialism cried out, as for example Edvard Kardelj, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Yugoslavia, the majority had to admit, growling between their teeth, that von Mises was right. Until the end, all communist economies in the world had to bear a clandestine capitalism that came to reveal itself as a sine qua non condition for the survival of the regime. From this, two consequences followed unavoidably: 1) Socialism ceased to be a “regime” or a “state of affairs” to become a “process.” There was no “socialist state” to be reached once and for all, but only a “socializing State,” condemned to moving toward socialism without ever arriving at it, like an asymptote. All socialist states which have already existed have been this way, and the ones that may come THE INTER-AMERICAN INSTITUTE FOR PHILOSOPHY, GOVERNMENT, AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 2012 50 communist and anti-American movements everywhere. That the findings of the Committee would not result in any measure being taken, be it punitive, or aimed to stop the flow of money to subversion, is the most evident proof of the power of the Syndicate to manipulate American resources against the most obvious national interests of the USA. Finally, the industrial blossoming of China since the 1990s and its transfiguration from continental slum quarter into the most powerful potential enemy of the USA would be unthinkable without the investments of the USA and without the planned self-destruction of the American industrial park. It is true that, after the liberalizing economic reforms of Yeltsin, Russia entered into accelerated economic decadence, from which some American capitalists profited a lot. Yet, what were Russian leaders expecting after the extinction of the communist regime? To be awarded with fantastic economic progress? The normal thing would be, instead of this, that the nation be put to work hard, with low wages, in order to pay compensation to the families of the sixty million victims of communism, like the Germans did and do with the victims of Nazism. Who prevented this from taking place? The Syndicate. Read it in Vladimir Bukovski’s Jugement à Moscou: big media and international organizations—two arms of the Syndicate— opposed so much resistance to judicial investigation of Soviet crimes that of all former communist countries only one, Cambodia, was able to establish a court for judging the crimes of the communist regime, and even so did it with a significant delay, thanks to the boycott lead by the UN against the initiative. The Russians, who are most responsible for the advent of communism, were treated in the last decades with a scandalous generosity— and they still complain that, once the murderous regime was extinct, they did not get as much money as they wanted. They did not receive, for their heinous crimes, the award they expected from the West. § 5 Whose side am I on? Of course, this does not mean that I am in favor of nothing, or that I do not see positive forces acting in the world. Yet, precisely, these forces cannot be counted among the main agents in dispute, and do not have, at least at the moment, any global plan or strategy that may neutralize or disarm the three monsters. Among them I would single out: (1) Christian, THE INTER-AMERICAN INSTITUTE FOR PHILOSOPHY, GOVERNMENT, AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 2012 51 Catholic or Protestant, communities from all countries;8 (2) The Jewish nation; (3) American conservative nationalism. Neither of the three is fighting for world domination. But the reality is quite different: by unanimous decree of the globalist blocks, all of them are singled out to die. If my sympathy goes to anyone, it is to these three who are sentenced to death. Not that I wish to oppose to the three projects of global domination three alternative projects which are presently anemic. If there were plans for the establishment of a Christian or Jewish or redneck world dictatorship, I would be among the first to denounce them, as I denounce the Russian- Chinese militarists, the Western oligarchs, and the apostles of the Universal Caliphate. But these plans do not exist. The fight of the three disadvantaged factions that I mentioned is not for world power: it is for pure and simple survival. That the extinction of Catholic-Protestant Christianity, of the state of Israel and of nationalist America is on the program of the three globalist blocks is something that does not need to be proved, so blatant is the cultural, media-driven, political and legal assault at work against these entities from three diverse and convergent directions (I will return to this on one of the next messages). It is also needless to prove, since it is too evident, that up to now these three communities have only responded to the attack by occasional, sporadic and totally unconnected reactions, without any comprehensive strategic coordination, be it within each of those blocks, be it, even more so, among the three of them. A worldwide united front of Christians, Jews, and American nationalists would not be a bad idea, but for now I do not see any sign pointing in this direction. It seems that the representatives of the three communities are afraid of thinking about it, imaginarily anticipating the brutal reaction of their enemies. On the other hand, it is known that Russia and China are the largest suppliers of weapons to terrorist movements. Why does the American government not denounce this and force the two powers, under the penalty of economic sanctions, to stop it? It is simple: the Syndicate will not permit it. No one in the globalist elite agrees to defend his country against the most harmful “allies” America ever had. Finally, it is not necessary to highlight all the initiatives undertaken by international organizations and by various Western governments—beginning 8 Particularly those in Africa and Asia, which today flow to Europe and North America, in a heroic effort to re-Christianize those who one day had Christianized them. By the way, the priest of my parish is an African from Uganda. THE INTER-AMERICAN INSTITUTE FOR PHILOSOPHY, GOVERNMENT, AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 2012 52 with England—to favor the Islamic invasion and debilitate, at the same time, the Christian tradition that would obviously be the sole cultural resistance possibly effective against the advance of militant Islam in Europe and the USA. If confronted with all this facts Professor Dugin still insists that the Syndicate is the great enemy of the Russian-Chinese and Islamic blocks, it can only be for two reasons: (1) Eurasianism, as leftism, is one more trick with which the Syndicate strengthens itself by means of a fake enemy; (2) the Eurasian movement is genuine, but stems from that neurosis which is typical of the proud poor, who, in view of the help he received, feels envy and resentment rather than gratitude and, instead of returning friendship for generosity, only thinks about destroying his benefactor, taking his place and then telling the story upside-down, pretending to be a victim instead of a beneficiary.9 It is still early to know which of the two hypotheses is true. But one thing is certain: there is no third one. § 6 Individualism and collectivism I began my opening message pointing out the asymmetry between the isolated observer, who speaks only in his own name, and the leader who expresses the political will of a party, a movement, a state or group of states. Professor Dugin saw in this the symbolic crystallization of the opposition between individualism and collectivism, West and East. This does not seem to me to be a correct application of the rules of symbolism, which both he and I learned in René Guénon. A genuine symbolism must respect the borders between different planes of reality instead of confusing them. Where Professor Dugin saw a symbol, I see only a metaphor, and a rather far-fetched one. Individualism as the name of an ideological current is one thing; something entirely different from, and having no connection with it, is the position of a human being at the bottom, middle, or top of a hierarchy of command. From the latter one cannot deduce the former; neither can one see in the social position of an individual a “symbol” of his real or supposed 9 Additional explanations on this and other topics of this message were given in my lecture number 99 (March 26, 2011) as part of a weekly seminar course on philosophy. The transcript of the lecture is available at www.seminariodefilosofia.org and www.olavodecarvalho.org. THE INTER-AMERICAN INSTITUTE FOR PHILOSOPHY, GOVERNMENT, AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 2012 55 individual, whom propaganda covers with all the pomp of a heaven-sent man, is never an example of sanctity, virtue, and heroism, but rather of wickedness, abjection, and cowardice. Absolute collectivism is the triumph of Absolute Egoism. Individualism taken in its negative sense, on its turn, not only can never reach its ultimate political consequences, but it cannot even be put in practice in the realm of the most modest individual actions. The total disaffection to peers, the exclusive devotion to the pursuit of individual advantages, excludes by hypothesis the desire to share them with other people. By denying to the neighbor the benefits obtained in the egoistic activity, this hypothetic extreme individualist would exclude himself from all human interaction and would fall into the darkest solitude, becoming ipso facto impotent for any social activity, and therefore also for the attainment of his egoistic objectives. The type of the misanthropic usurer who locks himself up in his money bin to lonely enjoy the possession of riches that he cannot use is perhaps a good character for fairy tales and comic strips, but he cannot exist in real life. On the most daring hypothesis, the egoistic pleasure that he could attain would be to masturbate in the bathroom, refusing to take as the object of his erotic fantasy anyone else but his own person. It is the nature of things that collectivism can be carried to that extreme point where it becomes its opposite—the kingdom of the Absolute Individual—, while egoistic individualism can only be practiced within the strict limits that do not allow it to go much beyond affectation and pretense. Egoistic individualism is not a line of practical action; it is the phony justification with which an individual who is neither more nor less egoistic than the average of mankind pretends to be a tough guy. And it is obvious that even the most obdurate tough guy prefers to enjoy pleasures in the company of friends, relatives, a lover, instead of locking himself in the bathroom with his own person so he does not have to admit that he did something good to his neighbor. As for individualism, taken in the sense of respect and devotion to the integrity of individuals, its practice is not only viable, but constitutes the sole basis upon which one can create that environment of humanitarian solidarity that is the proclaimed goal—though never attained—of collectivism. § 7 The sentiment of community solidarity in the USA It is no coincidence that the country where the freedom of individuals was most cultivated is also the country where participation in charitable and THE INTER-AMERICAN INSTITUTE FOR PHILOSOPHY, GOVERNMENT, AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 2012 56 humanitarian community activities is the largest in the world. This feature of American life is largely unknown outside the USA (and totally concealed by Hollywood’s militant anti-Americanism), but I do not see any motive to believe rather in the deformed opinions and hateful fantasies of the international media industry than in what I see with my own eyes every day, and that can be confirmed anytime with substantial quantitative data. Here are some of them:11 1. Americans are the people who contribute the most to charitable causes in the world. 2. The USA is the only country where individual contributions to charitable causes surpass total government aid. 3. Among the 12 peoples who give the most in voluntary contributions—USA, UK, Canada, Australia, South Africa, Ireland, the Netherlands, Singapore, New Zealand, Turkey, Germany, and France—, American contributions are more than twice those of the runner-up (UK). If any smart guy wishes to diminish the importance of these figures, alleging that “they give more because they are richer,” he better forget it: the contributions are not ranked in absolute numbers, but as a percentage of GDP. Americans simply pull out more of their own pocket to help the poor and the sick, even in enemy countries. The most solidary Russia and China do not even make it to the list. 4. Americans adopt more orphan children—including from enemy countries—than all other peoples of the world combined. 5. Americans are the only people who, in every war they fight, rebuild the economy of the defeated country, even at the cost of making it a trade competitor and a powerful enemy in the diplomatic field. Compare what the USA did in France, Italy, Germany, and Japan with what China did in Tibet, or Russia in Afghanistan (details in subsequent messages). 6. Americans do not offer only their money to the poor and the needy. They give them their time in the form of voluntary work. Voluntary work is 11 See The Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University, Giving USA 2010. The Annual Report on Philanthropy for the Year 2009 (Glenview IL: Giving USA Foundation, 2010); The Center for Global Prosperity, The Index of Global Philanthropy and Remittances 2010 (Washington D.C.: Hudson Institute, 2010); Charities Aid Foundation, International Comparisons of Charitable Giving, November 2006, CAF Briefing Paper (Kent: Charities Aid Foundation, 2006); Virginia A. Hodgkinson et al., Giving and Volunteering in the United States. Findings from a National Survey Conduced by The Gallup Organization (Washington D. C.: Independent Sector, 1999); Lori Carangelo, The Ultimate Search Book: Worldwide Adoption, Genealogy and Other Secrets (Baltimore: Clearfield, 2011). THE INTER-AMERICAN INSTITUTE FOR PHILOSOPHY, GOVERNMENT, AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 2012 57 one of the oldest and most solid American institutions. Half of the American population dedicates its time to work for free for hospitals, childcare centers, orphanages, prisons, etc. What other people in the world has made active compassion an essential element of its style of existence? 7. In addition, the value attributed by American society to works of generosity and compassion is such that no big shot in finance or industry may dodge the duty of making immense annual contributions to universities, hospitals, and so on, because if he refuses to do it, he will be immediately downgraded from the status of honored citizen to that of public enemy. Professor Dugin opposes American individualism to Russian-Chinese “holism.” He says that in the first one people only act according to their individual preferences, while in the second they integrate themselves into the greater objectives proposed by the government. Yet, quite clearly, the governments of Russia and China have proposed to their peoples rather to kill their peers than to help them: no charitable work, in Russia or China, ever had the dimensions, the cost, the power and the social importance of the Gulag, of the Laogai, and the secret police, tentacular organizations in charge of controlling all sectors of social life through oppression and terror. Secondly, it is true that Americans do not do good because they are forced to by the government, but because they are stimulated to do it by the Christian values they believe in. Freedom of consciousness, instead of degenerating into sheer anarchy and the war of all against all, is moderated and channeled by the unity of Christian culture which, notwithstanding all the efforts of the globalist elite to destroy it, is still hegemonic in the USA. John Adams, the second president of the USA, already said that a Constitution such as the American, granting civil, economic, and political freedom to all, was made only for a moral and religious people and no other. The proof that he was right is that, as soon as the principles of Christian morality began to be corroded from above, by the action of the government allied to the globalist forces and to the international left which Professor Dugin so much praises as the moral reserve of humanity, the environment of honesty and puritan rigidity that prevailed in the American business world gave way to an epidemic of frauds as never before seen in the history of the country. The phenomenon is abundantly documented in Tamar Frankel’s book Trust and Honesty: America’s Business Culture at a Crossroad (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). What I say is not based on statistics alone. I have lived for six years in this country and here I am treated with an affection and understanding that no Brazilian, Russian, French, German, or Argentinean ever enjoyed in his own country. As soon as I settled in these boondocks in Virginia, neighbors THE INTER-AMERICAN INSTITUTE FOR PHILOSOPHY, GOVERNMENT, AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 2012 60 difference come from? The old ones were raised in the environment of old compassion, while the young ones grew up in the environment of state welfarism that poisons them with “politically correct” resentment. Life in the countryside in the USA is the best proof that community solidarity has nothing to do with state collectivism and is even contrary to it. The more "holistic” intervention there is, the more natural bonds are undone, the more people get away from each other, the more the “society of confidence” of which Alain Peyrefitte14 spoke allows itself to be replaced by the society of suspicion, of mutual hostility, of hatred and of group exclusivism. It is that path that leads, ultimately, to the Police State. Professor Dugin knows this perfectly well, so much so that his defense of “holism” against “individualism” culminated in an open and frank apology of the dictatorial regime as a model for the whole world. § 8 Evil deeds compared Professsor Dugin also says that even though I sufficiently expose the sins of the KGB, of the Communist Party, and of Al-Qaeda, I do not mention the crimes of America, as “Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, the bombing of Serbia”. He asks me what I have to say about this. Now, what I have to say are two things: First: Do the math.—According to Professor R. J. Rummel, who is probably the most respected expert in the matter, the number of victims of all violent actions in which the American government was involved from 1900 to 1987 is 1,634,000 people (this includes two world wars, with Hiroshima and Nagasaki included, plus the Vietnam war, and all military interventions abroad). The USSR, in a shorter period, from 1917 to 1987, killed 61,911,000, and China, from 1949 to 1987 only, killed 76,702,000. It is a matter of elementary arithmetic to conclude that American individualists, at worst, are one hundred times less murderous than the solidary Russians and Chinese. No human brain in its normal functioning can judge that the levels of dangerousness are equal on all sides. In order of deadly threats that hang over the human race, China comes first, Russia ranks second, and the USA one hundredth. When humankind has rid itself of ninety nine of its armed enemies, I will begin to worry about the much trumpeted “American aggressiveness.” Professor Dugin seeks to draw 14 Alain Peyrefitte, La Societé de Confiance. Essai sur les Origines et la Nature du Développement (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1995). THE INTER-AMERICAN INSTITUTE FOR PHILOSOPHY, GOVERNMENT, AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 2012 61 attention to the latter, inflating it through words, in order to invert the hierarchy of reasonable precautions and try to cover up the actions of the true agents of genocide, of the true enemies of the human race. Second: Look at the map.—The totality of the victims killed by the USA is made up of foreigners, killed in combat in enemy soil. In counting the victims of China and Russia, I purposefully excluded military casualties: the numbers, therefore, refer to unarmed civilians, murdered in times of peace by their own governments. When the government of the USA, in time of peace, begins to kill American citizens by the millions, by reason of mere political disagreement, I will be as concerned with this as Professor Dugin should now be with the Tibetans, murdered in bulk by the Chinese and forbidden to freely practice their national religion. § 9 Geopolitics and history Further on, Professor Dugin defends geopolitics against my ostensive downplaying of this science or pseudoscience. With good reason, he asks me for an explanation about it. Here it goes: My problem with geopolitics is that, while it provides a relatively accurate description of the state of affairs at each moment, it conceals the decisive causes of historical happening under a phantasmagoria of geographical entities covered over with an appearance of having a life of their own. The figures that the practitioner of geopolitics projects on the map, with the names of nations, states, empires, power zones, etc., giving the impression that these entities act and constitute the true characters of history, are only the crystallized result of the actions of much deeper and more durable historical forces. Those figures move about on the screen as Chinese shadows, giving the impression that they have a life of their own, but they are only names and disguises of agents that are very different from them. I have already explained this point in my class handouts, “Method in the social sciences,” and “Who is the subject of history,” and here I cannot but summarize them in a drastic and somewhat rough fashion. The basic questions are: (1) What is historical action? (2) Who is the subject of history? Action is a deliberate change of a state of affairs. Every action presupposes (a) the temporal continuity of the subject; (b) the unity and continuity of his intentions, such as they reveal themselves in the sequence that goes from a plan to its accomplished effects. THE INTER-AMERICAN INSTITUTE FOR PHILOSOPHY, GOVERNMENT, AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 2012 62 All transformations in the historical scene result from human actions, but these actions mutually mix, hinder, neutralize, and modify themselves, so that nobody controls the process. Mixed actions do not have a determinate acting subject, since they result precisely from the impossibility of a single agent to make his objectives prevail over the others.’ These are transformations, but not properly actions. We can only speak of “historical action,” in a strict sense, when a determinate agent succeeds in controlling, to the extent possible, the situation as a whole and, following an identifiable line of continuity, imposes a deliberate course to the process. Examples of historical action are the crossing of the Red Sea by the Jews, the Christianization of Europe by the Catholic Church, the Protestant Reformation, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, and the Chinese Revolution. In all these cases, a determinate agent managed to control the process, preventing his actions from being neutralized by the interference of other agents, and therefore to arrive at results which are approximately identical to the ones willed for. History is composed of two kinds of processes: controlled and uncontrolled ones. Only the first ones are historical actions and have a determinate agent. The second ones have multiple subjects, do not follow a predeterminate course and nobody can allege to be the author of the results achieved. In second place, one can only call historical action that which produces long-lasting results beyond the lifespan of the individual agents involved in it. Durability in time is the hallmark of historic action. Whatever melts into air before the death of the individual agent only enters history, precisely, as a frustrated action, dissolved into the general mass of concomitant or subsequent actions, and incapable of imposing a course to events. Now, the second question: Who can be an agent of a historical action? States? Nations? Empires? Of course not. These entities result from the combination of heterogeneous forces which struggle to dominate them from within. They do not have their own will, but they reflect, at each moment, the will of a dominant group, which may be replaced by another in the next moment. A state, nation or empire is an apparent agent, manipulated by other, more durable, more stable agents, capable of dominating it and using it for their objectives, which frequently transcend even the duration of the national, state and imperial formations which they utilized. An expression such as “History of Brazil” or “History of Russia” is only a metonymy, which denominates as the subject of an action the mere geographical area where the action took place. Of course, following the narrative over several THE INTER-AMERICAN INSTITUTE FOR PHILOSOPHY, GOVERNMENT, AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 2012 65 § 10 The true historical agent behind Eurasianism An example of historical force that infinitely transcends the borders and the duration of states and empires is the Orthodox Church, of which Professor Dugin says he is a believer. She gave cultural unity and content to the empire of Kiev. She survived it when the Muscovite center of power established a new empire. She survived the fall of this empire and the six decades of terror that followed, and came out of it unscathed to the point of inspiring Professor Dugin with a new Russian imperial project. The successive national and state formations which appeared and disappeared from the Russian map during this history are only shadows that the gigantic body of the Orthodox Church projects over the Eastern world, preserving her unity of purpose while the political forces come into being and melt into air as bubbles of soap. Professor Dugin: look at your Church, and you will know what a historical agent is. Geopolitical unities are born out of the initiative of historical agents, and they only appear to act by themselves because the genuine agents, besides being by nature discrete, act according to a deeper rhythm, slower than the very formation and dissolution of geopolitical unities. The strength of the Orthodox Church as a historical agent has penetrated deeply into the mind of Professor Dugin, shaping his “holistic” notion of theocratic empire. He does not conceive of the empire but as a structure emanated from the Church and united to her, symbolically, in the person of the Czar. In an interview given in 1998 to a Polish magazine16 he qualifies as “heresy” the distinction between Church and Empire that shaped Western civilization. But without this separation, the only hypothesis left is that the borders of religious expansion coincide with the map of the empire with pinpoint accuracy. Now, the various empires and imperial nations existing in history have always had well-defined borders that separated them from other empires and independent nations. In this case, the imperial religion becomes only an expanded national religion. What is then the Czar? One of two things: either he is the head of a mere national religion having no possibility of expanding itself beyond its borders and looking with deadly envy at the expansion of her Western competitor, or, alternatively, if he wants his religion to impose itself as universal belief, he has to invade all countries and become the emperor of the world. Both the National- 16 Aleksandr Dugin, “Czekam na Iwana Groźnego” [I am Wating for Ivan the Terrible], interview by Grzegorz Górny, Fronda (Warsaw), December 11, 1998, 130-146. Also available at http://niniwa2.cba.pl/rosja10.htm. THE INTER-AMERICAN INSTITUTE FOR PHILOSOPHY, GOVERNMENT, AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 2012 66 Bolshevik project and its Eurasian version are born from an internal contradiction of the Russian imperial religion. The Eurasian project is the only way out for the Orthodox Church if she does not want to remain confined to the limits of the Russian nation, failing in her declared mission as a universal religion. Meanwhile, the Roman Catholic Church can expand comfortably to the last frontiers of Paraguay and China without the need to carry an empire on its back. And that was, in fact, what happened, while the Orthodox Church, through the medium of Professor Dugin, is still looking for an exit leading to the world and does not see other means of finding it but to constitute herself into a World Empire. All the world of ideas of Professor Dugin is a reflex of an inner, structural drama of the Orthodox Church. All the talk about geopolitical borders is only a strategic arrangement to try, once again, to fulfill the impossible dream of this grand and portentous historical agent which, in choosing to be an imperial religion, condemned herself to either remain imprisoned within national borders, or begin a world war. THE INTER-AMERICAN INSTITUTE FOR PHILOSOPHY, GOVERNMENT, AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 2012 67 Third Segment THE INTER-AMERICAN INSTITUTE FOR PHILOSOPHY, GOVERNMENT, AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 2012 70 other”. Finally in the arms of Mr. Carvalho is a gun. Not a cross, for example. By the way, there are some photos of myself bearing a big orthodox cross during religious ceremonies. So, that would illustrate nothing. Our religions are different as our civilizations are. Both professor Dugin and I are performing our respective tasks with utmost dedication, seriousness and honesty. But these tasks are not one and the same. His task is to recruit soldiers for the battle against the West and for the establishment of the universal Eurasian Empire. Mine is to attempt to understand the political situation of the world so that my readers and I are not reduced to the condition of blind men caught in the gunfire of the global combat; so that we are not dragged by the vortex of History like leaves in a storm, without ever knowing whence we came or whither we are being carried. I agree here in one point. It is true that “to recruit soldiers for the battle against the West and for the establishment of the universal Eurasian Empire” is my goal. But it is possible only after having achieved the correct vision of the world global situation based on the accurate analysis of the balance of forces and main actors. So up to this moment Mr. Carvalho and myself we have the strictly one and the same task. If our understanding of the leading world forces and their identification differs that doesn’t mean automatically that I am motivated exclusively by political and geopolitical choice and himself by the “neutral”, purely “scientific” reasoning. We are both trying to understand the world we live in, and I presume that we both are doing it honestly. But our conclusions don’t fit. I wonder why and try to find deeper reasons than simply the obvious fact of my own ideological and political involvement. We both want to make our world better and not worse. But we both have different visions of what is the Good and Evil. And I wonder where lies difference. I believe it is rather the result of the divergence of the mutual civilizations; we have respectively different ontologies, anthropologies and sociologies. So the culpabilization and demonization of each other is the result of the necessary mutual “ethnocentric” positions and not the final arguments for the choice of lesser evil. He employs all the usual instruments of political propaganda: Manichean simplification, defamatory labeling, perfidious insinuation, the phony indignation of a culprit pretending to be a saint and, last, not least, the construction of the great Sorelian myth—or self-fulfilling prophecy— which, while pretending to describe reality, builds in the air an THE INTER-AMERICAN INSTITUTE FOR PHILOSOPHY, GOVERNMENT, AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 2012 71 agglutinating symbol in hopes that the false may become true by the massive adherence of the audience. Stressing the presumed fact of the communist Russian-Chinese “genocide” Mr. Carvalho does exactly the same game of the pure political propaganda playing on the false humanitarian sensibility of the Western audience, not remarking, by the way, the real, existing here and now, massive and planned genocide conducted in Afghanistan, Iraq or Libya by American bloody murders (I imitate here the very “scientific” style of polemic imposed by Mr. Carvalho). Of course, I do not say that Professor Dugin is dishonest. But he is honestly devoting himself to a kind of combat that, by definition and ever since the world began, has been the embodiment par excellence of dishonesty. This thesis I find really stupid. I don’t affirm that Mr. Carvalho is stupid himself, no way, but I feel sincerely that the usurpation of the right of global moral judgment in such affairs as what is “honest” or “dishonest” fits perfectly into the old tradition of extreme stupidity. So being really clever and smart, Mr. Carvalho consciously supplies very stupid argument in order to be nearer to the American right “Christian” public he tries to influence. And one philosophic point: Yet, the millennial philosophical technique, which those people totally ignore, teaches that the definitions of terms express only general and abstract essences, logical possibilities and not realities. The question what reality is and how it corresponds to the “definitions” or “ideas” differs considerably in various philosophical schools. The term itself “reality” is based on the Latin word “res”, “re”, “thing”. But that word fails in Greek. By Aristotle there is no such word—he speaks about pragma (deed), energia, but mostly about on, the being. So the “reality” as something independent (or partly dependent—in Berkley, for example) from the mind is Western post-Medieval concept and not something universal.3 Different cultures don’t know what “the reality” means. It is a concept, nothing else. A concept among many others. Thus, to impose it as something universal and ostensive is a kind of intellectual “racism”. Before speaking of the “reality” we need to study carefully the 3 George Berkeley, Berkeley's Philosophical Writings, ed. David M. Armstrong (New York: Collier, 1974). THE INTER-AMERICAN INSTITUTE FOR PHILOSOPHY, GOVERNMENT, AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 2012 72 concrete culture, civilization, ethnos and language. The Sapir/Whorf rule and the tradition of the cultural anthropology of F. Boaz and structural anthropology of C. Levy-Strauss teach us to be very careful with the words that have full and evident meaning only in the concrete context. The Russian culture or the Chinese society have different understandings of “reality”, “facts”, “nature”, “object”. The corresponding words have their own meaning. The subject/object dualism is rather a specific feature of the West. The “logic essence” is the other purely Western concept. There are the other philosophies with different conceptual structures—Islamic, Hindu, Chinese. From a definition it is never possible to deduce that the defined thing does exist. To prove the existence is not an easy task. Heidegger’s philosophy and before him Husserlian phenomenology tried to approach the “existence” as such with problematic success. In order to do this, it is necessary to break the shell of the definition and analyze the conditions required for the existence of the thing. If these conditions do not reveal themselves to be self-contradictory, excluding in limine the possibility of existence, even then this existence is not proved. In order to arrive at that proof, it is necessary to gather from the world of experience factual data that not only corroborate the existence, but that confirm its full agreement with the defined essence, excluding the possibility that the existing thing is something very different, which coincides with the essence only in appearance. It is a kind of positivist approach completely dismissed by the structuralism and late Wittgenstein.4 It is philosophically ridiculous or too naïve statement. But all these considerations are details with no much importance. The whole text of Carvalho is so full of such pretentious and incorrect (or fully arbitrary) affirmations that I can not follow it any more. It is rather boring. I’d rather come to the essential point. What Mr. Olavo de Carvalho hates? The text of Mr. Carvalho breaths with the deep hatred. It is a kind of resentment5 (in the Nietzsche sense) that gives him a peculiar look. The 4 Ludwig Wittgestein, Philosophische Untersuchungen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1984). 5 Max Scheler, Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen (Frankfurt am Mein: Vittorio Klostermann, 1978) THE INTER-AMERICAN INSTITUTE FOR PHILOSOPHY, GOVERNMENT, AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 2012 75 by Takashi Shimitsu). But we have what we have. Let us try to find the reason why a serious Brazilian-American professor take the risk of looking a little bit loony making appeal to the conspiracy theories? It seems that I know the answer. The serious side of this not much serious argumentation consists in the necessity for Mr. Carvalho to differentiate the West he loves from the West he doesn’t love. So Mr. Carvalho proves to be idiosyncratic. He not only detests the East (so Eurasianism and myself), but also he hates the part of the West itself. To make the frontier in the West he uses the conspiracy and the term “Syndicate” (he could use also “Synarchy”, “Global Government” and so on). Let us accept it for a while, we agree on the “Syndicate”. The description of “Syndicate” is amazingly correct. Maybe the feeling of correctness of Mr. Carvalho analysis from my side can be explained by the fact that this time I fully share the hatred of Mr. Carvalho. So I agree with the caricature description of the globalist elite and with all furious images applied to it. Here our hatred coincides. Mr. Carvalho affirms that the Syndicate takes control over the world against the will and the interest of all people, their cultures and traditions. I agree with it. Maybe the Rothschild or Fabian myths are too simplistic and ridiculous, but the essence is true. There is such thing as global elite and it is acting. But this elite deals with concrete ideological, economical and geopolitical infrastructure. In other words this elite is historically and geographically identified and linked with special set of values and instruments. All these values and instruments are absolutely Western. The roots of these elite goes into the European Modernity, Enlightment and the rise of the bourgeoisie (see W. Sombart).16 The ideology of this elite is based on the individualism and hyper-individualism (G. Lipovetsky,17 L. Dumont18). The economical basis of this elite is Capitalism and Liberalism. The ethos of this elite is free competition. The strategic and military support of this elite is from the first quart of the XX century USA, and after the end of the WWII—Nord-Atlantic Alliance. So the global elite, let it be called “Syndicate”, is Western and concretely North American. 16 Werner Sombart, Händler und Helden: Patriotische Besinnungen (Munich and Leipzig: Duncker and Humblot, 1915). 17 Gilles Lipovetsky, L’ère du vide. Essais sur l'individualisme contemporain (Paris, Gallimard, 1983). 18 Louis Dumont, Essais sur l’individualisme (Paris: Le Seuil, 2002). THE INTER-AMERICAN INSTITUTE FOR PHILOSOPHY, GOVERNMENT, AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 2012 76 Eurasian war against Syndicate Seeing that clearly I, as the conscious representative of the East, make appeal to the humanity to consolidate all kinds of the alternatives and to resist the globalization and Westernization linked in it. I appeal first of all to Russians, my compatriots, inviting them to refuse pro-Western and pro- globalist corrupted elite that rules now my country and to come back to the spiritual Tradition of Russia (Orthodox Christianity and multi-ethnic Empire). At the same time I invite Islamic people and their community, as well as all other traditional societies (Chinese, Indian, Japanese and so on) to join the battle against the Globalization, Westernization and the Global Elite. The enemy is fighting with new means—with post-modern informational weapons, financial instruments and global network. We should be able to fight them on the same ground and to appropriate the art of the network warfare. I sincerely hope that Latin Americans and also some honest North Americans enter in the same struggle against this elite, against the Post- Modernity and unipolarity for the Tradition, social solidarity and social justice. S. Huntington19 used to say the phrase “the West against the Rest”. I identify myself with the Rest and incite it to stand up against the West. Exactly as first Eurasianists (N. S. Trubetskoy, P. N. Savitsky and other) did. I think that to be concrete and operational the position of Mr. Carvalho should be rather or with us (the East and Tradition) or with them (the West and Modernity, the modernization). He refuses obviously such a choice pretending that there is a “the third position”. He prefers not to struggle but to hate. To hate the East and to hate the globalist elite. That is his personal decision or maybe the decision of some North American Christian right, but it is in any case too marginal and of no interest for me. Loosing the rest of the coherence Mr. Carvalho tries to merge all he hates in one object. So he makes the allusion that the globalist elite and the East (Eurasianism) are linked. It is new purely personal conspiracy theory. It could enlarge the panoply of the other extravaganzas. It should sound something like this: “the globalist elite itself is directed by hidden devilish center in the East” or “the East (and socialism) is the puppet in the hands of the devilish bankers and fanatics from CFR, Trilateral and so on”. Congratulations. It is very creative. The free fantasy at work. 19 Samuel P. Huntington, “The clash of civilizations,” Foreign Affairs 72 (Summer 1992- 1993):22-49. THE INTER-AMERICAN INSTITUTE FOR PHILOSOPHY, GOVERNMENT, AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 2012 77 What Mr. Carvalho loves? Here I would rather finish the debates. But I think that it is possible to pay little more attention to “the positive” forces described by Carvalho as victims of the global elite. They represent what Mr. Carvalho loves. It is important. He names them: Western Christianity (ecumenical style—see his description of his visit to the Methodist Church, being himself Roman Catholic), Zionist Jewish State and American nationalist right wingers (I presume he excludes neocons from the list of love, because of their evident belonging to the global elite). He admires also the simple Americans of the countryside (personally I also find them rather very sympathetic). This set of positive example is eloquent. It is trivia of the American political right. We can consider it as right side of the modern West. Or better “paleoconservative” side of the Modern West. Historically they are losers in all senses. They have lost (as P. Buchanan shows)20 the battle for the USA, including for the Republican party where the main positions were taken by neoconservative with clearly globalist and imperialist vision21 (see PNAC).22 They are losers in front of the globalist elite controlling now both political parties in USA. They are living in the past that immediately precedes the actual (Post-Modern and globalist) moment. But at the same time they don’t have the inner strength to stand up to the Conservative Revolution23— Evolian or wider European style.24 The yesterday of the West prepared the today of the West as global West. The yesterday Western values (including the Western Christianity) prepared the today hypermodern values. You can deplore this last step, but the precedent step in the same direction can not be regarded as serious alternative. The Western Christianity stressed the individual as the center of the religion and made the salvation the strictly individual affair. The 20 Patrick J. Buchanan, The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002). 21 Patrick J. Buchanan, Where the Right Went Wrong: How Neoconservatives Subverted the Reagan Revolution and Hijacked the Bush Presidency (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2004). 22 Elliott Abrams, Gary Bauer, William J. Bennett, Jeb Bush, Dick Cheney, Eliot A. Cohen, Midge Decter, et al., “Statement of Principles,” Project for the New American Century, http://www.newamericancentury.org/statementofprinciples.htm. 23 Julius Evola, Rivolta contro il mondo moderno (Roma: Edizioni Mediterranee, 1969). 24 Mohler Armin, Die Konservative Revolution in Deutschland 1918–1932. Ein Handbuch (Graz: Ares, 2005). Olavo de Carvalho’s Response Against Right-Wing Bolshevism (or Leftist Traditionalism) A point-by-point answer Introduction What did Prof. Dugin reply to my refutation of the mechanic contrast between individualism and collectivism? Nothing. What did he reply to my demonstration that the “holistic” sentiment of community solidarity is more alive in the USA than in any country of the Eurasian block? Nothing. To my comparison between the respective evil deeds of the USA, Russia, and China? Nothing. To my explanation about the nature of historic action and the identity of the true agents of history? Nothing. To my fathoming of the structural conflict that transforms the Orthodox Church into a docile instrument of any Russian imperialist project? Nothing. He preferred to dodge all the decisive questions and, feigning offended dignity, to leave the stage thumping his feet, as a cabaret prima donna. And yet he says that I am the hysterical one. On his way out, he nibbled around the edges, touching on secondary points of my message, to which he offered no satisfactory answer as well, limiting himself to pounding his chest in a display of affected superiority, and to ascribing me ideas I do not have, which were invented by him with the aim of easily impugning them, so he could celebrate victory in his imaginary battle. Of course I will not pay him back in his own coin. My theatrical gifts are nil or negligible, as attested by the great Russian-Brazilian actor and director Eugênio Kusnet with the sovereign authority of a former student of Stanislavsky, when he declared, rightly, that I was the worst student in his acting course. To his great relief, I attended the course out of mere curiosity, without any malignant intent of imposing my abominable performances on the public. On the other hand, I am a trained scholar and a practitioner of the art of argumentation, on which I have published at least two ground-breaking THE INTER-AMERICAN INSTITUTE FOR PHILOSOPHY, GOVERNMENT, AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 2012 81 books.1 Hence, I know what a debate is, and I am certain that it is not what Prof. Dugin imagines it to be, that is, a circussy gesticulation aimed at making him look nice and at fastening a repugnant mask to his opponent’s face. That is only a dispute of vanities, a silly game that for me has as much interest as a fight among earthworms for a hole on the ground. What I will do here is to answer Prof. Dugin point by point, with the systematic thoroughness of someone who does not wish to destroy him, but rather to rescue him from the muddy confusion in which he is drowning. In the following lines, each of Prof. Dugin’s slippery circumlocutions will be carefully steered back to the central questions he tried to avoid, and answered with direct candor, without posing or making faces. In order to facilitate the reading, I divided Prof. Dugin’s text into 60 numbered paragraphs, in which I also include his quotes of my second message. Both are reproduced in a smaller font and followed by my replies. The length of this message does not stem from any erotic pleasure I may feel in writing long texts, but from the simple fact that—to quote myself for a thousandth time—the human mind is made up in such a way that error and lies can always be expressed in a more succinct way than their refutation. A single false word requires many words to disprove it. 1. Disappointment To say the truth, I am a little bit disappointed by this debate with Mr. Olavo de Carvalho. I thought I would find in him a representative of Brazilian traditionalist philosophers in the line of R. Guenon and J.Evola. But he turned out to be something different and very queer indeed. On my part, I am not disappointed. In spite of being called queer—an adjective whose connotations Prof. Dugin pretends that he does not know—, now I am really starting to like this debate. When my opponent begins to get irritated, and resorts to derogatory labeling, shameless bluffs, and arguments of authority, answering to practically nothing of the substance of what I have said, I begin to understand that I was even more right than I had imagined at the outset. 1 Aristóteles em Nova Perspectiva. Introdução à Teoria dos Quatro Discursos [Aristotle in a New Perspective. Introduction to the Theory of the Four Discourses] (Rio de Janeiro: Topbooks, 1996 and Como Vencer um Debate sem Precisar Ter Razão. A Dialética Erística de Arthur Schopenhauer [How to Win a Debate without the Need to be Right. The Eristic Dialectics of Arthur Schopenhauer] (Rio de Janeiro: Topbooks, 1997). THE INTER-AMERICAN INSTITUTE FOR PHILOSOPHY, GOVERNMENT, AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 2012 82 I am especially glad when my contender uses words that contrast in such a way with his real conduct that in order to wholly disprove him, all I need to do is to invoke the testimony of his own actions. Prof. Dugin is an ostensible preacher of war and genocide. He confesses that he hates the whole West and that his declared goals are to incite a Third World War, to wipe the West off the face of the Earth, and to establish everywhere what he himself defines as a universal dictatorship. He has already said that nothing makes him sadder than the fact that Hitler and Stalin did not join forces to destroy France, England, and everything else they found on their way, distributing to the whole universe the benefits that they had already lavished on the inmates of the Gulag and Auschwitz.2 When a man with these ideas calls me aggressive and rancorous, I cannot but conclude that I am facing a living example of delusional interpretation,3 one of the defining traits of the revolutionary mentality, I feel as satisfied as Dr. Charcot did when, before an academic audience, his patients reacted exactly as according to the point of clinic psychiatry he wished to illustrate. 2. Attacks I am also sad with his hysterical and aggressive attacks against my country, my tradition and myself personally. (1) No, Prof. Dugin. Who attacked your country and your tradition was not I. It was Lenin and Stalin, whom you consider preferable to Ronald Reagan and even to Barack Obama. I just said the obvious: that all Russians who applauded those two should work to pay compensation to the families of their victims. Is this offensive? Or was Justice created only for Germans, while the Russians and the Chinese have a celestial certificate of immunity? Of your religious tradition I also did not say anything that you had not said before: that it is a state religion, which has as its chief the czar or whoever is on his place; that therefore it cannot expand beyond its borders except by 2 See Aleksandr Dugin, “Czekam na Iwana Groźnego” [I am Wating for Ivan the Terrible], interview by Grzegorz Górny, Fronda (Warsaw), December 11, 1998, 130-146. Also available at http://niniwa2.cba.pl/rosja10.htm. 3 A pathological framework firstly described by French psychiatrist Paul Sérieux in 1909 which is distinguished from other forms of psychotic delusion for not bearing sensorial disturbances, but only a morbid reorganization of the data of a situation. See Paul Sérieux, Les Folies Raisonnantes, Le Delire d’Interpretation (Paris: Alcan, 1909). Also available at http://web2.bium.univ-paris5.fr/livanc/?cote=61092&p=27&do=page. THE INTER-AMERICAN INSTITUTE FOR PHILOSOPHY, GOVERNMENT, AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 2012 85 that of the agents when he neither wishes nor can take sides with any of them and keeps himself at a necessary distance in order to describe the picture with the maximum realism available to him.” I argue that that is simply impossible. There is no such place in the realm of thought that can be fully neutral in political terms. Every human thought is politically oriented and motivated. It is I who was not prepared for something like that. I grew up listening to this gibberish about inevitable political engagement, universal politicization of every human act, and I could not have imagined that Prof. Dugin would try to intimidate me with this silly trick, a meaningless cliché that no philosopher with some training can take seriously for a single minute. Like every expression of thick ignorance, this one carries with it, concentrated and compacted, a multitude of vulgar confusions that only education over time can undo. I do not have the least pretension of remedying Prof. Dugin’s educational flaws, but as a mere suggestion, I will present here a list of questions to which he would do well in paying some attention in the coming years. Let us see: (1) “Every human thought is politically oriented and motivated” is a statement based upon a mere confusion between a concept and a figure of speech. All human acts “may,” theoretically and ideally, have closer or more distant relations with politics, but not all of them can be “politically oriented and motivated” to the same degree and in the same sense. No political intention moves me when I go to the bathroom, put on my pants, drink a soda, eat a sandwich, listen to a Bach cantata, arrange the papers in my office or mow the lawn in my yard (unless the purpose of avoiding an invasion of snakes be a political prejudice against these gentle creatures). The connection between human acts and politics is distributed on a scale that goes from 100 percent to something like 0.00000001 percent. When, for instance, George W. Bush went for a pee, was this be a political act to the same degree and in the same sense as the declaration of war against Iraq? Quite clearly, the proposition “Every human thought is politically oriented and motivated” jumps from the simple notice of a participation that may be vague and extremely remote to the peremptory assertion of a perfectly non- existent substantial identity and of an impossible quantitative equality. It is not a concept. It is a figure of speech, a hyperbole. And as such, it does not depict any objective reality, but rather the emphasis that the speaker wishes to confer on the issue—on a scale that can go from a plain demand for attention all the way to the psychotic abolition of the sense of proportions. Prof. Dugin’s assertion is clearly included in the latter category. THE INTER-AMERICAN INSTITUTE FOR PHILOSOPHY, GOVERNMENT, AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 2012 86 (2) Every human act, by definition, participates to a greater or lesser degree in all the dimensions not only of human life, but of existence in general. No one participates in all of them at the same level and with the same intensity. Thus, statements like “everything is physics,” “everything is atoms”, “everything is psychology,” “everything is biology,” “everything is theater,” “everything is a game,” “everything is religion,” “everything is will to power,” “everything is economics” “everything is sex,” and “every human thought is politically oriented and motivated” are at the same time irrefutable and void. They cannot be refuted because they do not say anything. (3) The statement “There is no such place in the realm of thought that can be fully neutral in political terms” is an elementary confusion between genus and species: between politics as one of the general dimensions of existence and the various historically existing disputes in particular. Even if one would accept, ad argumentandum, the hypothesis that all human acts are political, this would in no way imply that each human being has to take a position in every political contest taking place in his time. The very possibility of taking a position implies a previous selection of what contests are relevant and what are indifferent or false. Neutrality towards a multitude of political questions is not only possible, but is an indispensable condition for taking a position in any one of them in particular. (4) I cannot believe that Prof. Dugin is naïve to the point of not knowing that the definition of the goals of the political game and the delimitation of the opposing camps are themselves fundamental political attitudes. “Shaping a debate” is the fastest and most efficient way to win in advance. Now, once a political contest is defined, instead of taking sides with one team or the other, nothing prevents a citizen from rejecting this very contest, and proposing in its place a totally different one, disregarding the first one not only as irrelevant, but as false, thus refusing to choose between opponents that, in his opinion, are only shadows projected on a wall in order to deceive him. In this case, he must remain neutral towards the other contest precisely in order to be able to take a position in his own. This debate itself exemplifies this with the utmost clarity. Prof. Dugin, just as Western globalists, wishes to force me to choose between “the West and the Rest.” He yells that no one can remain neutral concerning this contest and insists that, in order to bring it to an end, we all have to quietly accept the simple prospect of a Third World War, necessarily vaster and more destructive than the two previous ones. From my point of view, even if the whole population of the planet would swallow this proposal and decide to join one of the two armies, this THE INTER-AMERICAN INSTITUTE FOR PHILOSOPHY, GOVERNMENT, AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 2012 87 would not make the contest morally legitimate, it would not prove it to be an unavoidable historical fatality, nor would it in any way make it an adequate expression of the true antagonisms that divide mankind. Why, by the way, should the fundamental choice be of a geopolitical nature and not, for example, of a moral or religious one? Why should good and bad people be distributed into separate geographical borders instead of being scattered a bit here, a bit there, without any national or racial uniformity? For me, much more than a hypothetical and artificial contest between “Westerners” and “Easterners,” what is at stake today is the mortal fight between the whole of globalism—in its triple Western, Russian-Chinese, and Islamic versions— and the millennial spiritual and civilizational values which will be necessarily destroyed in the course of the fight for global dominance, no matter who turns out to be the “winner.” These values are not “Western.” Who does not know, for example, that the Orthodox Church cannot join the “Eurasian project” without becoming a passive instrument in the hands of the KGB (whose name has been switched for the nth time), as it has in fact already become under the leadership of a patriarch who is a notorious agent of this macabre institution? Read the works of the great Orthodox tradition, as Philokalia or The Way of a Pilgrim, and compare them with the ideological speeches of Prof. Dugin. What can there be in common between the apotheosis of contemplative life and the prostitution of everything to the dictates of the political fight? What agreement can there be between Our Lord Jesus Christ and the devil? In the same way, practically everything in Islamic spirituality—and even in Islamic philosophy—has been lost ever since generations of enraged youths decided to Islamicize the world on the basis of terrorist attacks, inspired in the doctrines of the Muslim Brotherhood, which are but a “liberation theology,” a gross politicization of that which Islam once was. Compare the writings of Mohieddin Ibn ‘Arabi or Jalal-ed-Din Rûmi with those of Sayyd Qutub, the mentor of the Brotherhood, and you will have an idea of what a free fall really is. The general politicization of life—one of the typical features of Western modernity, which Prof. Dugin says he hates, but to which, as we shall see later, he is a helpless and passive ideological slave— evidently also had spiritually disastrous results in the West. The degradation of Judaism by a modernizing liberalism since the beginning of the nineteenth century, as THE INTER-AMERICAN INSTITUTE FOR PHILOSOPHY, GOVERNMENT, AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 2012 90 stake, by understanding the objectives and means of action of each of the agents, the general situation where the competition takes place, its most probable developments, and the meaning of such events in the larger picture of human existence.” In short: when Prof. Dugin speaks as a scientific observer, he tries to understand a given situation. When he speaks as an agent, he tries to promote actions which may lead to the victory of his party. And who, by Jupiter, does not do the same? The intellectual and verbal means of scientific observation are so different from the means of political action that the very efficacy of the latter requires a preliminary separation between the two viewpoints, a preparatory measure without which their subsequent application in the domain of practice would only bring about confusion, lies and endless self-deceit, as the history of the Marxist movement has demonstrated with evidence to spare. If Prof. Dugin, in his academic activity, observes the same distinction that I do, he obviously does not believe in himself when he says that this distinction was “overthrown” by Karl Marx. The sole difference that could exist between us in this case—and I say “could” because it does not necessarily have to exist—is that he assures us that, once a sufficiently clear description of the contending forces is obtained, that is, once the task of the scientific observer is completed, it is necessary to make a choice and “this choice is not only the freedom (sic) but also the obligation (sic). You are free to choose but you are not free to choose not.” Now, an obligation to take a position cannot be absolute. It is relative by definition. It is only valid if we accept that the scientific description is truthful, that it is the only possible one, or at least the most accurate of all, and that the contest it describes is so important, so vital for human destiny, that every refusal to take a position in it would be unforgivable cowardice. Come on, how many university professors can brag about having reached such a certain and definitive description of reality, such a precise equation of essential antagonisms that whoever listens to them is morally obliged to take a position according to the terms of the opposition they have defined? In my modest opinion, the only one who reached such a correct and final description was Our Lord Jesus Christ when He said that we had to choose between Him and the Prince of this World. University professors by and large project onto the audience the conflict that agitates itself in their souls, and only the more presumptuous among them proclaim it is the essential conflict of the world, towards which nobody has the right to remain neutral. The question then fatally arises: What if the description is false? If I disagree THE INTER-AMERICAN INSTITUTE FOR PHILOSOPHY, GOVERNMENT, AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 2012 91 with the description, why should I take sides in a hypothetical conflict that exists only in the mind of my professor, and that does not correspond to the facts as I see them? Why would I not have the right to remain neutral between professorial hypotheses and to pick myself my own fight? Once more, neutrality reveals itself not only as possible, but as a necessary condition for taking a position. Prof. Dugin does not understand these subtleties. Resting on the infallible authority of Karl Marx, he sincerely expects the world to accept to play the game by his own rules and, without further ado, to enroll in one of the teams. For my part, I have better things to do. With no intention of offense I return my enrollment form—blank. 7. Will to power The will to power permeates the human nature in its depths. The distance evoked by Mr. Carvalho is ontologically impossible. Plato and Aristotle were both politically engaged not only in practice but also in theory. (1) Prof. Dugin claims to be the apostle of the Absolute, of Tradition, of the Spirit, but he cannot be that at all since he decrees the primacy of the political and denies the autonomy (or even the possibility) of contemplative life, reducing it to an instrument or camouflage of the “will to power.” The hypothesis that St. Theresa, for example, in contemplating Our Lord Jesus Christ was “doing politics” or exerting the “will to power” reflects the same aforementioned confusion [6(1) e 6(2)] between a most remote participation and a quantitative equality. (2) Having this confusion been undone, it is not true that “Plato and Aristotle were both politically engaged not only in practice but also in theory.” Plato explains in his Seventh Letter that he decided to dedicate himself to philosophy precisely after he became disillusioned with politics. That his philosophy could have had later political developments does not imply that it was itself political activism, just as Prof. Dugin is not engaged in political activism when describing a political situation, as he himself confirms it. As for Aristotle, his foreign status automatically prevented him from participating in Athenian politics in any way, and throughout the works he bequeathed us his positions are so prudent and moderate, that is, so politically neutral, that they were able to equally inspire the most diverse politics, from St. Thomas Aquinas to Karl Marx. (3) The appeal to “will to power” as a universal explanatory key is highly meaningful. This Nietzschean topos comes back on the scene every THE INTER-AMERICAN INSTITUTE FOR PHILOSOPHY, GOVERNMENT, AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 2012 92 time someone wishes to deter us from seeking a rational solution for human conflicts and to invite us to participate in redemptive bloodshed. Prof. Dugin does not hide that this is exactly his goal. But in order to achieve it, he needs to incur once more into the unpardonable confusion between proportional participation and quantitative identity. Are all human acts permeated by “will to power”? Certainly. But to what degree? And what is the proportion between this motivational force and the other forces involved? When you have sex with your wife, there is certainly a tiny amount of will to power at play. But if it predominates over will to pleasure, affection, the impulse to please the beloved one, etc., then that will not be an act of licit sex anymore, but rape. Ask your wife whether she cannot tell the difference. The apology of “will to power” as the ultimate explanation of human acts is not a valid description of reality; it is not even a theory: it is a morbid projection, in phony theoretical language, of a compulsion to extinguish all other human motivations, especially love and the will to knowledge. It is no surprise that the inventor of this contraption was a poor wretch, with no money, with no prestige, with not even a girlfriend, forced to have recourse to prostitutes who ended up infecting him with syphilis, which made him insane and eventually killed him. It was no coincidence that the second explanatory key in which he placed his bet was … resentment. 8. Eurasianism and communism 8. “The photos that I attached to my first message, by way of a humorous synthesis, document all the difference between the political agent invested with global plans and means of action of imperial scale and the scientific observer not only divested of both, but firmly decided to reject them and to live without them until the end of his days, since they are unnecessary and inconvenient to the mission in life that he has chosen and that is for him the only reasonable justification for his existence.” The indignity demonstrated a little above against “Russian-Chinese” poles and completely ridiculous identification between the Eurasianism and the communism is the bright testimony of the extreme partiality of Mr. Carvalho. I have never “identified” Eurasianism with communism, at least not from the ideological point of view, though I include both in the category of revolutionary movements, in the precise meaning I give to this expression.8 8 See my lecture The Structure of the Revolutionary Mind (Richmond: The Inter- American Institute for Philosophy, Government, and Social Thought, 2009), 1 h., 47 THE INTER-AMERICAN INSTITUTE FOR PHILOSOPHY, GOVERNMENT, AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 2012 95 11. The duty to choose At the same time this choice is not only the freedom but also the obligation. You are free to choose but you are not free to chose not. There is never such a thing as political or ideological “neutrality”. We now return to the issue of being forced to choose. The right to choose does not mean a thing if it does not also imply the right to choose between the various proposals of choice. Why would we have the obligation to choose precisely between the alternatives offered by Prof. Dugin, without being able to propose different alternatives, or a different set of possible choices? Prof. Dugin himself, with exemplary candor, exercises this very right that he denies to others. “National-Bolsheviks [in whose name he speaks in this passage] affirm objective idealism . . . and objective materialism . . ., refusing to choose between them.”9 Only God has the right to impose the ultimate, final, unappealable choice upon us. “He that is not with me is against me,” and “He that gathereth not with me scattereth,” said the Lord. Since then His apish satanic imitators have not stopped pretending to have in their hands the definitive, obligatory choice, crystallized in a macabre dualism. I could not show the absurdity of this better than Otto Maria Carpeaux did I in a memorable essay on Shakespeare, which summarizes the issue: For years European consciousness was mistreated by the supposed obligation of choosing between Hitler and Stalin—“there is no other alternative!” Then, they wished to force the world’s consciousness to choose between Stalin and Foster Dulles—“there is no other alternative!” And now and everywhere they continue to impose these alternatives upon us, which are so similar to the absurd fight between the two Houses of Montague and Capulet, which is the true theme of Romeo and Juliet . . . It is this truth which Mercutio recognizes in that extreme lucidity of the hour of agony, shouting—and we shout with him: A plague o’ both your houses!, and amen.10 9 Alexandre Douguine, Le Prophète de l’Eurasisme (Paris: Avatar Éditions, 2006), 133. 10 Otto Maria Carpeaux, A política, segundo Shakespeare [Politics, according to Shakespeare], in Ensaios Reunidos 1942-1978, [Collected Essays 1942-1978], vol. 1, ed. Olavo de Carvalho (Rio de Janeiro: Universidade da Cidade and Topbooks, 1999), 783- 784. THE INTER-AMERICAN INSTITUTE FOR PHILOSOPHY, GOVERNMENT, AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 2012 96 If there are three houses instead of two, may the plague come threefold. No Duginism in the world can force me to choose between the Syndicate, the Caliphate, or the Russian-Chinese Empire. But Prof. Dugin even simplifies things for me, by synthesizing the latter two in the Eurasian Empire, reducing the alternatives to the good old dualism of the Montagues and the Capulets, and trying to make us wear a straitjacket of obligatory choice. A plague o’ both your houses! 12. Arms So it is quite erroneous to present Mr. Carvalho himself as “neutral” and “impartial” and myself as “engaged” and “ideologically motivated”. We are both ideologically engaged and scientifically involved. So I continue to regard our photos not as “professor vs the warrior” but rather two “professors/warriors vs each other”. Finally in the arms of Mr. Carvalho is a gun. Not a cross, for example. By the way, there are some photos of myself bearing a big orthodox cross during religious ceremonies. So, that would illustrate nothing. Our religions are different as our civilizations are. It is certain that both of us appear in the photos holding guns, but what guns? Mine is a hunting shotgun, which may occasionally be used for home defense, but which is normally used for sport and, in my case, has served eminently (see new photo) to kill snakes before they bite my smaller dogs (not the big one, which eats them thinking they are moving sausages). Prof. Dugin’s guns, on the other hand, are war weapons reserved for the exclusive use of governments, created specifically to kill human beings (nobody has ever hunted snakes or armadillos with bazookas or tanks). Moreover, this kind of weapon was not designed to kill one or two people, but rather to kill them wholesale, by the hundreds, by the thousands. How can he say that this difference “does not illustrate anything”? Is there really no difference between self-defense and mass murder? 13. Dugin contra Dugin (2) “Both professor Dugin and I are performing our respective tasks with utmost dedication, seriousness and honesty. But these tasks are not one and the same. His task is to recruit soldiers for the battle against the West and for the establishment of the universal Eurasian Empire. Mine is to attempt to understand the political situation of the world so that my readers and I are not reduced to the condition of blind men caught in the gunfire of the global combat; so that we are not dragged by the vortex of THE INTER-AMERICAN INSTITUTE FOR PHILOSOPHY, GOVERNMENT, AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 2012 97 History like leaves in a storm, without ever knowing whence we came or whither we are being carried.” I agree here in one point. It is true that “to recruit soldiers for the battle against the West and for the establishment of the universal Eurasian Empire” is my goal. But it is possible only after having achieved the correct vision of the world global situation based on the accurate analysis of the balance of forces and main actors. Once more Prof. Dugin confirms, after having denied it, the formal and indispensable distinction between the viewpoint of the scientific observer and that of the political agent. 14. The difference between us So up to this moment Mr. Carvalho and myself we have the strictly one and the same task. If our understanding of the leading world forces and their identification differs that doesn’t mean automatically that I am motivated exclusively by political and geopolitical choice and himself by the “neutral”, purely “scientific” reasoning. We are both trying to understand the world we live in, and I presume that we both are doing it honestly. But our conclusions don’t fit. I wonder why and try to find deeper reasons than simply the obvious fact of my own ideological and political involvement. We both want to make our world better and not worse. But we both have different visions of what is the Good and Evil. And I wonder where lies difference. The difference is the following: after having taken positions on issues with that indecent hurry of youth, I soon climbed down over my views and spent thirty years—not thirty days—struggling with my own doubts, among countless perplexities, without being able to bring myself to make common cause with anything, except in an experimental and provisional way. I only resumed expressing my political opinions at 48 years of age, after having reached some conclusions that seemed reasonable to me, and even so, I have always warned people about the possibility that I might be wrong. Prof. Dugin has never been in doubt for even a single day: he took side with National Bolshevism when he was very young, and has hitherto remained faithful to the same program, now amplified as Eurasianism. He simply did not go through that period of real abstinence of opinions which is absolutely necessary to the education of a serious intellectual.