Counter-Currents
The Fable of Darya Dugina: A Trumpetess of Empire
Nicholas R. Jeelvy
If you’re a dissident, you shouldn’t act surprised when these guys show up at your door.
1,951 words
A Trumpeter, prisoner made,
Hoped his life would be spared when he said
He’d no part in the fight,
But they answered him “Right,
But what of the music you made?
On August 20, 2022, Darya Dugina, journalist and daughter of Aleksandr Dugin, was assassinated by means of a car bomb near Moscow. She was 29 years old at the time. I won’t pretend to know who did it, or why. The FSB has put out an obviously bullshit claim that the attack was carried out by Ukrainian state security with the help of an Azov Regiment member. A nebulous “National Republican Army” of dissident Russians has claimed responsibility, but there’s little evidence that they did this, or even exist as a coherent force, so I’m not convinced.
I have my own speculations, but I have no evidence for them, so I will not voice them here. As for the motives, there is still confusion about whether she or her father was the target of assassination. To a Westerner who speaks no Russian and does not monitor the Russian Federation’s internal media scene, Alexander is by far the greater of the Dugins and obviously the intended target, but few know that Darya Aleksandrovna herself was a commentator on television, online, and in print media and was a public figure of rising eminence, sometimes even eclipsing her ageing father. It is therefore conceivable that Darya herself may have been targeted, rather than Alexander.
Having stated my reluctance to play internet sleuth and given you the skinny on what is known and as of yet unknown, let me get to the crux of the matter: Regardless of who assassinated her and for whatever reason, we can be reasonably certain firstly that neither Darya nor Alexander had killed anyone themselves, and secondly that they were targeted for their activities as philosophers and/or journalists. This has made people in the West, and particularly dissident commentators, visibly uncomfortable, as they too are primarily men of the word and pen rather than of the sword, and as such expect some immunity from the sword. This may be a good time to disabuse people of that illusion.
But first, a personal anecdote. In November of 2021, I was arrested on suspicion of hate speech. I didn’t publicize this fact at the time because I saw no need. Specifically, I was arrested for quoting Carl Schmitt on the difference between a private (inimicus) and a public (hostis) enemy and the concept of the political; the friend-enemy distinction. Agents of the state, specifically chosen from among ethnic minority cops, came to my home and put me in handcuffs, then dragged me to the police station because I had at some point in my life publicly uttered the same words as an old German jurist and theorist of state.
I was never charged, but I won’t pretend it was a pleasant experience. Owing perhaps to the discipline of mind I try to cultivate in myself, I said nothing to the cops and never lost my composure or even good humor while in custody, at one point helpfully pointing out to the arresting officer that his fly was undone. When it was all done, my family was obviously upset, but I wasn’t. They asked me how I could remain calm. That got me thinking.
It’s not natural to be calm under pressure. It is a learned behavior. Soldiers and athletes are trained to retain discipline under stress. Spies and special ops forces are trained not to break under interrogation. Even attorneys receive some training in how not to respond to provocation (and the arresting officers certainly did their fair share of provocation). How was I able to remain calm while being put in cuffs by ethnic outsiders and perp-walked through my neighborhood into the police van? Part of it is definitely my learned tolerance for adrenaline: Having acted on stage, argued in court, given political and educational speeches, and fought both in the ring and in the streets has left me with a very high tolerance for stress hormones. But another element was that I had expected to be arrested for a very long time. At some point, probably in late 2018, I realized that being arrested, attacked, or even killed for my public speech and activism is definitely in the cards. I was calm because I had mentally prepared for this, as a soldier mentally prepares for the possibility of being captured by the enemy.
But how can that be? What have I done except write articles, run Internet shows, and fundraise? I’m not and have never been a soldier. I’ve never killed a man. I’ve never engaged in illegal violence: strictly sport and defensive fighting. But that’s all irrelevant. We’re at war. I may not be a soldier, but I am a trumpeter.
In Aesop’s fable, the trumpeter is taken prisoner by the opposing army who intend to put him to death. He protests, claiming that he has never taken up a weapon or killed anyone. But the opposing soldiers retort that with his trumpeting, he enticed and encouraged the enemy soldiers to kill them, and for that, he is as guilty as they are. And so the trumpeter was put to death.
The good and liberal-minded people of the West will often repeat that ideas are more powerful than guns and the pen is mightier than the sword, but then act surprised when states and groups around the world move to disarm their opponents of ideas as well as guns and swords. They proclaim the great power of the philosopher, the poet, the journalist, and the dreamweaver, and then act surprised when these genuinely powerful men are targeted for assassination, intimidation, bribery, attack, and deception. Good and liberal-minded people, not necessarily liberals, are aghast at the thought of killing someone for the words he said, no matter how much actual death those words have caused, facilitated, or attempted to justify after the fact.
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All wars are wars of ideas, and ideas are invented, discovered, promulgated, implemented, and carried by men. The Russo-Ukrainian War is fought between opposing states, opposing armies, and soldiers, but it is also fought by opposing ideas. It is a war not only between Zelensky and Putin, but also between Ivan Sirko and Bohdan Khmelnytsky on one side, and Peter I and Joseph Stalin on the other. It is a battle between Taras Shevchenko and Aleksandr Pushkin. A battle between wild Cossacks and prim Imperial guardsmen. And it is a battle between the living intellectuals, artists, and statesmen of the opposing forces.
When Russia proclaims Ukraine a “fake nation,” it declares its intention to destroy the ideas and culture which concretize the Ukrainian ethnicity in nationhood. They do not merely intend to throw out Taras Shevchenko’s “farts” and replace it with the verses of Pushkin, as the Jewish Russian poet Joseph Brodsky trumpets in his poem mocking the Ukrainians for wanting independence, nor will they content themselves with changing Ukraine’s flags, iconography, language, and festivals. The much-vaunted “denazification” would entail the wholesale murder of the Ukrainian nation’s culture-bearing stratum — anyone who can remember Shevchenko and proclaim him as “ours,” especially more “ours” than Pushkin. The Kremlin regime, which cannot abide the very idea of a Ukrainian nation distinct from Russia, will target these trumpeters for execution — for “denazification,” as they like to call it — because it is these trumpeters in particular which offend them.
In the 2017-2020 period, even the illiberal and authoritarian Dissident Right found itself shocked and appalled at the censorship and prosecution that the West’s states and large corporations brought against them after Donald Trump’s election and the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally. These trumpeters of an army which had not yet been mustered were shocked that the opposing force hounded and arrested them, or at the very least took away their social media trumpets before they could sound the call to muster. They stood with mouths agape when the regime they decried as foolish and decadent took action to defend itself from their attacks. They pointed and sputtered at the illiberal acts that this supposedly weak and ineffectual liberal regime performed to rid itself of challengers. As our friend James J. O’Meara has pointed out when discussing Justin Trudeau’s response to the trucker protest:
Now Trudeau has shown us what real sovereignty is. He is the most dynamic leader in the world, beyond Putin or Orbán. Where other “leaders” talk, Trudeau takes action. He’s not afraid to send in the Cossacks, even if some citizens get trampled.
The greatest trick liberal ideology played on man was to convince him that something as powerful as an idea, especially expressed in words and broadcast to a wide audience, can be unserious. Speech is “just speech.” There is no such thing as “fighting words.” It is immoral and irrational to kill a man because he insulted your honor, or your wife’s honor. When Darya Dugina calls Ukrainians subhumans who ought to be exterminated on television, those are just ideas, and they do not justify retributive action. When her Kabbalah-reading anti-white father calls for Russian subjugation of Eastern Europe, or declares all Anglo-Saxons to be the scourge of the world for their racism, colonialism, and (ironically) imperialism, it’s wrong for either Eastern Europeans or Anglo-Saxons to strike back. When Nicholas R. Jeelvy calls for the dismantlement of the current Western order and its replacement with a European order of mutually-respecting nation-states, he should expect this declaration of ideological war to go unanswered by the Western order.
Alas, all of us — even nice, liberal-minded people — have to live in the real world. And in the real world, ideas are trumpet calls. They call an army to muster, and they relay orders to group, regroup, charge, and defend. When I was a gym-rat, I’d often play patriotic music on my headphones while working out because listening to it literally made me stronger, while the modern R&B which the gyms usually blare makes me weaker. When I play chess and attain deep concentration, I often catch myself (or rather my unattended subconscious mind) singing inspirational music, with patriotic songs being the ones likeliest to manifest themselves. When I develop and deepen the ideas of White Nationalism, I am crafting a political formula — an order of battle for an army yet to be formed. When I deconstruct enemy ideas, I am destroying enemy weapons. When I identify enemy discourse and enemy attempts to subvert our own discourse, I am performing counterintelligence for a state that has yet to be founded.
Should I be surprised that the opposing forces target me? If I had it my way, they’d at the very least lose power and the non-whites among them would be deported back to the countries where they came from. But I’m not just some fantasist on the Internet. I bear no weapon — or at least not one that can kill. But men with guns read these words and are inspired by these ideas. Better to snuff the fight out at the fount than to battle each of them.
Whoever killed Darya Dugina lives in this real world and not the fantasy world where words are “just words.” The police captain who ordered my arrest lives in the real world. The censors of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Google live in this selfsame real world. They correctly recognize that rebellions, wars, and great, world-changing events begin as words and ideas. With that in mind, we must not be surprised when states, groups, and corporations defend themselves against words and ideas, sometimes by taking the trumpets away and sometimes by killing the trumpeters.
* * *
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29 comments
I feel some sympathy for her father, i can’t imagine what it’s like to lose a child. But she was a public figure, a mouthpiece for Eurasian imperialism and supremacy, she had her (((oligarch))) handlers just like her dad, she was playing a dangerous game (The russian federation is not a nation, it’s a global gas station run by (((certain people))) ).
But as much as i can feel i her father’s pain i can’t sympathise with her. She was a pure bred antifa, going on and on about how Europeans are evil nazis and how we should die and submit to the eurasian order.
When I read how Dugin is called a geopolitician and a Eurasianist, it makes me smile. He really did write on the topics of geopolitics and Eurasianism, but his geopolitics and his Eurasianism are completely different from ordinary geopolitics and real Eurasianism. It is enough to read, for example, the German professor of geography Richard Hennig, who wrote back in the Weimar Republic and in the Third Reich, to see that real geopolitics is very different from Dugin’s geopolitical views, which are more like some kind of Manichaeism, everywhere seeing only the opposition of the Sea and the Land.
With regard to Eurasianism, this is even more noticeable. It’s just that in the West, real Eurasianists, such as Prince Trubetskoy and Professor Savitsky, or the great geographer and historian-türcologist Lev Gumilyov, are little known. Those who read them, and I read them, know that the Eurasianism is an intellectual, scholarly and very humane line of thought aimed at achieving a mutually beneficial symbiosis between the peoples of Northern Eurasia, Slavs, Türks, Iranoaryans, Caucasians, Eastern Finns, Mongols and others, without any chauvinism or domination of ones over others. Their anti-European orientation was exclusively internal. The Eurasianists believed that the Russians should stop mindlessly imitating Europe and turn to the East. But nowhere did they call for wars, for the conquest of other peoples, or for the conquest of Europe. They were not hostile to Europe as such, they simply believed that Russia was not Europe and should not be forcibly Europeanized. They seen Russia as descendants of the so-called Golden Horde (wrong name, because the state of Tatars has never been called so, but only Great Ulus, Ulug Ulus, and the word Golden Horde, Altin Orda, emerged two hundred years laterm than the state ceased to exist. I laugh when some of my Türkic brothers use with pride exactly this name, and not the historically correct one).
I think the old Eurasianists were right here. But they did not dream about any new Cingizid-style military campaign against Europe. They just wanted Russians stay Russians, and not the slaves of European “Übermenschen”.
There was nothing in common with Dugin’s aggressiveness. And Lev Gumilyov, in general, all his life was not only an anti-communist, but also an opponent of Russian chauvinism, and the Russian imperialists persecuted him in Soviet times no less than the Soviet communist internationalist ideologists.
So I would call Dugin perhaps a pseudo-Eurasianist, but not more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_journalists_killed_in_Russia
It’s a hecatomb of the trumpeters out there. Deeply impressed by the number of choices. Poison, bombs, knifes, guns, cars, axes, rope, and lots of buildings and trains to jump from and in front of. Interesting how the killers are never found, or swiftly acquitted – even twice.
Trumpeter is a dangerous job in the Russian Empire. The official truth is changing faster than the trumpeters can learn the newest play. Or their trumpeter father can learn. It is the same thing, because the Christian God and the Russian Tsar are jealous and vengeful, they punish the parents through their kids.
It was a case few years ago when the military trumpeter father had to be corrected so his trumpetess daughter was beheaded in her Moscow apartment. Is this history repeating? Maybe.
Wow, that was an artful, smart article. People would not suppress speech if it was not effective, of course. How strong or serious a chess player is Nick?
1400 (ish) ELO. Not very strong or serious.
My rating would convert to about 1850 fide.
DarkPlato,
Playing in the State Championship at Loyola this Labor Day Weekend?
No, I’ve got other engagements, but I definitely would have been there every other year. Why, did you just move to Louisiana?
I left Louisiana years ago and chess many years before that, but I was state champion at one time
The pro-Ukrainian intellectual gymnastics are getting more absurd by the day. This assassination was US tax dollars at work. To pretend otherwise is dishonest or just low-IQ. If you’re going to be pro-Ukraine you need to own all of this too. Hitting soft targets like this is not a source of strength but desperation. Just a nasty thing to do by a sore loser that is getting pummeled on ‘their’ own land. They have done this repeatedly with ‘traitors.’ This was just the worst example yet. The ‘Third Position’ doesn’t work in a war like this. You don’t get to be ‘above it all’ when one side is actively fighting to expand the writ of NATO/EU and the other side is countering it. There is one good side and one bad side. It is not a war of annihilation, yet one side is serving themselves up like it is. ‘Martyrdom’ is just suicide. They have made their choice and there is no need to pity them. I don’t care that some ‘nonwhites’ are fighting on one side because the other side is being run by nonwhites. It doesn’t get much clearer than that. That’s what they are fighting and dying for. Pretty unbelievable.
Russia is and will be for a long time to come the absolute champion at killing journalists. But this fact is not real, it is I am dishonest or low IQ.
Do you know what shame is?
Get out of Ukraine, get out of every occupied and colonized piece of land. Get out. Go home and stay there. And keep your lies for yourselves, you honest and high IQ …
Mr. Unserer, you are a disgrace and undeserving for me to call you Mr. Razvan is right about you. Normally I would laugh at your attempt to spin Russia’s defeat in Ukraine into a “Russia is totally winning guys! Kyev falls in 48 hours guys! Putin the man!” narrative, but I suspect you are simply so full of hate and stupidity towards white people that the mockery would fly over your head. Cope and seethe, little vatnick. Cope and seethe.
Killing someone because of their ideas is absurd. Ideas are transitory, a person’s compass will move throughout their life, as i’m sure yours has. I’ve known many people that hold “based” opinions now, but you look back a few years and see they were full on marxists. They weren’t murdered, they were convinced. Their held beliefs were challenged with new ones and the stronger idea won out. Actions merit action of course. An action is concrete, you can’t take it back. If you must defend your life, do so without shame. But ideas merit ideas, if your position is right and just, it can hold out. The reason we even think of resorting to violence is because our governments have been overrun by people who don’t respect your opinion and use their office to suppress your voice. This isn’t right nor just. These are not ideas, these are actions, and merit action in return. Violent or nonviolent? I can’t say.
The dehumanizing effect of our current globohomo society is intolerable for sure, but using that as justification for your own dehumanizing efforts is no better. I want to hold onto my humanity, not turn into an animal.
You are quite right. Mr. Jeelvy’s point that we shouldn’t be surprised that the “real world” often treats intellectuals as combatants is a reasonable one. Still, he seems to misunderstand the idea of free speech. At least in theory, it is not intended as a form of warfare, but rather an alternative to warfare. It is premised on the idea that there is a such a thing as right and wrong, and we can figure it out by hashing out our differences rather than killing and maiming each other.
Repression of White dissidents is not reasonable self-defense. It is naked aggression, speaking power to truth. No, we shouldn’t be surprised, but we should be outraged.
You do not seem to realize that ‘democracy’ and feminism will be casualties of the next world war. Thank God. This is a race war of ethnic Russian vs ethnic Ukrainian. There are no rules. All of this talk of ‘free speech,’ ‘civil rights’ and all that nonsense is but an interlude in world history. I’m amazed just how much women take it for granted and believe it to be evergreen.
You are a confused individual. Race is a biological concept, ethnicity is more cultural than biological. The war in Ukraine is not a racial war, but Russian gangster-ism.
“Free speech” is a modern <<lie>> intended to weaken traditional values by promoting the most obscene and gratuitous utterances at the expense of necessary speech and needed silence for self-reflection.
No, “free speech” is necessary for a healthy social and political life. The problem is the bad taste, aggressiveness, manipulation, straight up lies, or impoliteness, i.e. the toxic waste that the paid Russian propagandists are pouring in the public discourse.
This is what should be banned if we would have the means to correctly detect these. Not the “free speech”.
Otherwise we all will have a Putin to praise incessantly and parrot whatever a Vladimir Solovyov Shapiro (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Solovyov_(TV_presenter)) has to say. Guess no one needs this.
So long live the “free speech”.
I would like to point out that the video going around of Darya Dugin calling Ukrainians subhumans omits the fact that her talk started with talking about the Azov battalion, which then further went onto talking about the war crimes being perpetrated some of their members, calling on having tribunals set up to judge “these people, these non-humans”.
If I didn’t know Russian I would have bought the lie being sold by the Intermarium telegram group. Thankfully I do know the language and was thus able to factcheck what they wrote against what the video they helpfully provided actually showed her saying.
So while one could say that she technically called Ukrainians subhumans, she called a subset of a subset of the group “Ukrainians” subhuman for understandable reasons. After all, do we not have our own war criminals, who we also go as far as to question their humanity?
In that specific video where she calls for the execution of Azov Regiment members, she doesn’t discuss any specific acts they may have committed, but rather their ideology, which she calls inhuman and monstrous.
Mind you, their main ideological plank is the independence of Ukraine, and this is what Dugin and the rest of Moscow consider monstrous. The very idea of an Ukrainian nation offends the Muscovite’s imperial sensibilities.
No, she is talking about them committing war crimes. The video starts out that way, but at around 45 seconds in (if you have the same clip I am watching right now on the side from the intermarium telegram group) then you will see her use the word “преступление” ie crimes/wrong-doings/atrocities. I am paraphrasing here but it went like “but if you look at the atrocities done there by them, by these people (gets interrupted) then you will see that we need tribunals in each city (lists several) to investigate these people, no, not people, for they aren’t people anymore.”
Putin’s attitude toward Ukraine is reminiscent, at least to me, of Ape Lincoln’s
view of the South’s past and future Confederacy.
For me it is just like Mao Zegong´s conquer of Tibet and Eastern Türkestan in the end of 1940´s, but really this is just one of many examples of “Russian” imperialism since at least the 9th century.
No, Putin was reacting to real strategic threats, such as Ukraine joining nato. Russia does not want to be encircled by western powers. It’s exactly what Mearshimer predicted Russia would do and Ukraine was provoking in 2014.
I’m not necessarily saying Russia was right to invade, but those were the reasons, not spiritual imperialism. There were specific geopolitical reasons.
Of course not.
Ukraine wanted to join NATO, due to the Russian existential threat.
What do you think would happen with the Ukrainian men if they would have surrendered to Putin?
They would be used as cannon fodder against the next target of Russia, as any other Calmuc, Chuvash, Tuvanian, or whatever.
Next target? Plenty of them. However you spin the story, Russia has the most threatening history. There was no moment in time when the Russian people behaved with honor. Not one single moment. Everybody knows that.
Russians kill intellectuals with the utmost delight. Why don’t you decry the hundreds of intellectuals killed by Putin’s regime? Don’t lie yourself, Putin killed her.
Those security concerns are real and should have been addressed, but the reason the RF chose to invade rather than settle those concerns diplomatically was precisely because they see Ukrainian nationhood as an aberration, if not an outright abomination (Nazism).
Russians are 10 times better diplomats than they are soldiers, but they chose to solve the Ukrainian question with military, rather than diplomatic means because diplomacy is how nations deal with one another and denial of Ukrainian nationhood is central to the RF’s state-forming mythos. This is also why the Kyiv, Sumy and Chernihiv offensives happened the way they happened in February and March – they were a (failed) police action. It’s also why the RF isn’t officially at war, but waging a “special military operation.” They see Ukraine as a gang of criminals and madmen, rather than as a nation.
You don’t negotiate with criminals. You don’t even wage war against them. And so, the (valid) security concerns couldn’t be resolved without bloodshed, because that would have meant recognizing Ukrainian nationhood.
The problem with Mr. Jeelvy’s argument “It is war, you see” is that it sounds all very tough and manly and ‘realistic’, but it abdicates any moral judgment whatsoever, including calling Putin’s government a ‘regime’. This argument can be used to justify anything, including fire bombing cities, because “Well, they elected Hitler, didn’t they?”. And if we are talking about the power of ideas: if you ignore morality your ideas become powerless, because whites will not listen to you if they think you present an immoral argument.
By the way: the idea that making a difference between army and civilians is nothing more than a liberal invention is contradicted by the age old Church teachings about the ‘just war’. And already in Ancient Greece, the brutal treatment of Melos by the Athenians was severely criticized, for example.
I’m sure that the criticism stopped Athens from becoming the preeminent power of the Hellenic world.
Best comment. If people would listen carefully.
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