1,757 words
Interview by Maxime Le Nagard for Front Populaire, translation by Greg Johnson
Front Populaire: You know Alexander Dugin. Can you explain to us who he is, especially on an intellectual level? What are his ideas, his philosophical and political influences, etc.?
Alain de Benoist: Alexander Dugin, whom I have known for more than 30 years, is a theoretician of Eurasianism. This current of thought appeared in the 1920s, both in Russian émigré circles (the “White Russians”) and in the early Soviet Union, within the framework of the quarrel between the Slavophiles and Occidentalists (Zapadniki) which divided the Russian elites as far back as the 1840s.
The Occidentalists saw modern Russia as the result of a “Westernization” of Russian society that began in the eighteenth century on the initiative of Peter the Great, while for Slavophiles, such as Alexis Khomiakov, Constantin Aksakov, or Ivan Kirevsky (in literature, we must of course also cite Dostoyevsky), the “real” Russia was the one before the Petrovian reforms, the Russia of the Moscow Patriarchate organized on the model of the conciliar unity of the Orthodox Church, and therefore had to combat the deleterious influences of Western Europe (rationalism, individualism, obsession with technical progress), which were seen as undermining the identity of the Russian people.
The Eurasianists, among whom figured such personalities as the linguists Nikolai Trubetzkoy, author of Europe and Humanity (“Europe” corresponding to the West), and Roman Jakobson, the economist Piotr N. Savitsky, the jurist and political scientist Nicolas N. Alexeiev, the historian and geopolitician George V. Vernadsky, and many others, believe like the Slavophiles that Russia and the West constitute totally different worlds, but they add new elements to this idea. According to them, Russian identity is based on the superposition, on a Slavo-Finno-Turanian substrate, of a “Kievan” culture, born in contact with the Varangians and strongly marked by Byzantine Christianity, and a “Muscovite” culture largely inherited, particularly as regards the forms of power, from the Tatar-Mongolian empire which dominated Russia for three centuries. Spiritually, Russia is Byzantine, therefore “eastern” (this is the theme of the “Third Rome”). Finally, for the Eurasianists Russia is neither a “country” nor a nation, but a distinct civilization of necessarily imperial form.
Alexander Dugin, born in 1962, belongs to the second Eurasianist generation. His main contribution to this school of thought stems from the importance he attaches to geopolitics, which he taught for a long time at Lomonosov University in Moscow (Fundamentals of Geopolitics, 1997), along with a visceral attachment to Orthodox mysticism (he himself belongs to the Starovere or “Old Believer” current of the Orthodox Church, born of the rejection of the reforms introduced in the seventeenth century by Patriarch Nikon), according to which religiosity must be based on faith, not on reason.
The English geopolitician Halford Mackinder, who died in 1947, had developed the idea (taken up by many others after him, starting with Carl Schmitt) of a fundamental opposition between the maritime powers and the land powers, the former having been successively represented by England and the United States, the latter by the great Eurasian continent, whose “heart,” the Heartland, corresponds to Germany and Russia. According to Mackinder, whoever manages to control the Heartland, controls the world. It is with this conviction in mind that Zbigniew Brzezinski, in The Grand Chessboard (1997), was able to write that “America must absolutely take over Ukraine, because Ukraine is the pivot of Russian power in Europe. Once Ukraine is separated from Russia, Russia will no longer be a threat.”
This makes it easier to understand Alexander Dugin’s political positions, since he sees not only in the confrontation between Ukraine and Russia a “fratricidal war,” but also a military projection of an ideological war that goes far beyond national borders, a world war between the liberal democracies — which are today in crisis, and that are considered as ordered by the idea of a universal State and bearers of decadence — and the illiberal democracies ordered by the idea of the historical continuity of peoples wishing to maintain their own social forms and their sovereignty.
But to fully answer your question, we would also have to talk about the many authors who influenced Dugin. The latter, who is fluent in a good dozen languages (which he learned on his own), very early became familiar with authors as different as the historian and geographer Lev Gumilev, son of the poetess Anna Akhmatova and the theoretician of “place-development” (mestorazvitiye); Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, the German “young conservative” supporter of an “orientation to the East,” Vico, Danilevski, Mircea Eliade, René Guénon, Jean Baudrillard, Marcel Mauss, Gilbert Durand, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Louis Dumont, Friedrich List, Heidegger, etc. But that is beyond the scope of our interview!
FP: In your book Against the Spirit of the Times, you write that you sympathize with his idea of a “fourth political theory.” So what is this theory, and why do you find it interesting?
ADB: Three great competing political doctrines were successively engendered by modernity: liberalism in the eighteenth century, socialism in the nineteenth century, fascism in the twentieth century. In the book he devoted to this subject, Dugin develops the idea that it is necessary to bring out a “fourth political theory,” which would take stock of those which preceded it — without, however, identifying itself with any of them. It is a stimulating proposition for the mind.
In Dugin’s eyes, the twenty-first century will also be that of a fourth Nomos of the Earth (the general order of power relations on an international scale). The first Nomos, that of peoples living relatively apart from each other, ended with the discovery of the New World. The second Nomos, represented by the Eurocentric order of modern states (the Westphalian order), ended with the First World War. The third Nomos was the one that reigned from 1945, with the Yalta system and the American-Soviet condominium. What will the fourth Nomos be? For Dugin, either it will take the form of an American-centric unipolar world, or on the contrary that of a multipolar world where the “civilizational states” and the large continental spaces, both autonomous powers and crucibles of civilization, would play a regulatory role vis-à-vis globalization, thus preserving the diversity of lifestyles and cultures.
You can buy Greg Johnson’s Toward a New Nationalism here
Dugin still believes that we have entered a Fourth World War. The First World War (1914-18) led to the dismantling of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires. The two big winners of the Second World War (1939-45) were the United States of America and Stalinist Russia. The Third World War corresponds to the Cold War (1945-89). It ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the Soviet system, mainly to the benefit of Washington. The Fourth World War began in 1991. It is the war of the United States against the rest of the world; a multifaceted war, military as well as economic, financial, technological, and cultural, inseparable from the general enthrallment of the world with the boundary-dissolving logic of capital.
FP: “Far Right,” “red-brown,” “anti-modern,” “ultra-nationalist,” “traditionalist,” “neo-fascist” are all terms used to define or refer to Dugin. Are these definitions relevant?
ADB: When journalists, whose culture in terms of political philosophy and the history of ideas is almost nil, are confronted with a phenomenon they understand nothing about, they mumble the dominant vulgate and recite mantras. The “extreme Right,” a rubber word, is the favorite Swiss army knife of these lazy minds. All these qualifiers — with the possible exception of “antimodern traditionalist,” but on the condition of understanding the term in Guénon’s sense — are simply ridiculous. They tell us nothing about Alexander Dugin, but tell a lot about those who employ them. The most grotesque is undoubtedly the moniker of “nationalist” or “ultra-nationalist,” which most commentators constantly use in reference to him. Dugin, I repeat, is a Eurasianist. But Eurasianism is incompatible with nationalism, since it embraces the idea of Empire, that is to say the refusal in principle of the logic of ethnic nationalism and the nation-state (which also explains the close ties that Dugin maintains with representatives of the Jewish and Turkish-Muslim communities).
FP: For the past few days, Alexander Dugin has been presented a lot in the media as Putin’s “brain” in foreign policy, and as a kind of somewhat mysterious Rasputin. What is his level of influence with Putin? Is he listened to by Russian civil society?
ADB: Putin’s “brain!” The fact that Dugin and Putin have never met once face-to-face is a good measure of the seriousness of those who use this expression. The reality is more prosaic. Alexander Dugin, who has been translated into ten or twelve different languages, is a well-known and widely read author, both in Russia and abroad. He has his networks and his influence. Back in April 1992, when I had the opportunity to give a press conference at the Pravda headquarters in Moscow and to discuss geopolitics with generals and senior army officers, I could already hear the resonance of Eurasianist ideas within public opinion. Since then, Dugin launched the International Eurasianist Movement in 2003, which has greatly developed among the non-Russian populations of Russia, and he was even received in Washington by Zbigniew Brzezinski and Francis Fukuyama.
Dugin undoubtedly knows Putin’s entourage well, but he was never one of his intimates or his “special advisers.” He is certainly grateful to Putin for having broken with Boris Yeltsin’s liberal Atlanticism, but he thinks that he is only a “Eurasianist in spite of himself.” The book he wrote a few years ago on Putin [Putin vs. Putin –Tr.] is far from being an exercise in admiration: Dugin on the contrary explains both what he approves of in Putin and what he dislikes. But obviously those who hold forth in France about him have never read a line of his.
FP: You know Alexander Dugin and his work well. You also recently published a critical work on the media entitled Surviving Disinformation (2021). How do you judge Dugin’s overall treatment in the media and that of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict?
ADB: The media’s treatment is what you know. The major French media are so accustomed to relaying the dominant ideology, they find it so normal that there are no longer any debates worthy of the name in this country, that it seems to them just as natural to never give a voice to those whose ideas they ignore or caricature. This is as true in the case of Dugin as in that of the war in Ukraine: the Ukrainian point of view is omnipresent; the Russian point of view is not even mentioned. This creates a tremendous repression. Always be wary of the repressed.
* * *
Counter-Currents has extended special privileges to those who donate $120 or more per year.
- First, donor comments will appear immediately instead of waiting in a moderation queue. (People who abuse this privilege will lose it.)
- Second, donors will have immediate access to all Counter-Currents posts. Non-donors will find that one post a day, five posts a week will be behind a “paywall” and will be available to the general public after 30 days.
- Third, paywall members have the ability to edit their comments after publishing them. At Counter-Currents, every man can be an editor! (The edit option ends when the comment thread closes. Currently, that is in 100 days.)
- Fourth, Paywall members can “commission” a yearly article from Counter-Currents. Just send a question that you’d like to have discussed to [email protected]. (Obviously, the topics must be suitable to Counter-Currents and its broader project, as well as the interests and expertise of our writers.)
- Fifth, Paywall members will also have access to the Counter-Currents Telegram chat group.
To get full access to all content behind the paywall, sign up here:
Paywall Gift Subscriptions
If you are already behind the paywall and want to share the benefits, Counter-Currents also offers paywall gift subscriptions. We need just five things from you:
- your payment
- the recipient’s name
- the recipient’s email address
- your name
- your email address
To register, just fill out this form and we will walk you through the payment and registration process. There are a number of different payment options.
16 comments
He’s an anti-White liberal buffoon similar to Richard Spencer. Best ignored.
As long as Whites think the ‘left’ versus ‘right’ paradigm is more important than ‘White’ versus ‘non-White’, it will be possible to bamboozle some Whites into attacking other Whites.
Thanfully few people take him seriously. He’s basically a meme in Russia, just like Limonov. Western media make him out to be some kind of monster, Putin’s court philosopher. Putin has probably barely heard of him. Of course middle class murkkkan whites with a penchant for 2deep4u trad/postmodernist bullshit eat it up.
Well someone must take him seriously since they just blew up his daughter in her dads trad land rover two weeks ago.
Great interview.
As pro-Whites we need to found our thinking on biological reality. Duginism is a waste of time, with poisonous antiwhite implications.
Alain de Benoist has an interesting perspective on the conflict in Ukraine:
https://www.thepostil.com/the-return-of-the-iron-curtain
As almost every Frenchman Monsieur de Benoist is very mild to Russia and very critical to America, but he seems not to be a big specialist in Eastern European/Euroasian matters, or maybe he looks at them too much through the Russian lens. For example, it should be noted that the opposition to Russia in Ukraine comes from below, from grass-roots. The elites would well before 2022 find an agreement with RF, and let Crimea to the Russians, but the public opinion is strongly against it. Zelenskiy was not particularly political satiricist and actor, but when he did something political, it was not at all anti-Russian, rather anti-Western. In year 2004, during the first Maydan against Yanukovich´s allegedly rigged electoral victory, Zelenskiy and his show troupe were FOR Yanukovich and AGAINST Maydan. 2013-2014, during the so-called Euro-Maydan, Zelenskiy was FOR Yanukovich and AGAINST Maydan, untill it has become violent. In his satirical TV-series “Servant of the People” Zelenskiy played a role of a village teacher, who was elected to the President of Ukraine. And this character was strongly anti-Western, anti-globalist and anti-IWF. He was not pro-Russian, rather neutralist, but anyway NOT pro-Western. In all his artictical activities Zelenskiy critized pro-Western orientation, Ukrainian nationalists, he always spoke positively about the Soviet past, and so on. I do not think that Zelenskiy as a man or as an actor has any pro-Western or pro-European views. But as an elected President he should listen to the majority of his people. And that majority, if M. Benoist likes it or not, does not like Russia and does not want to surrender to it. Maybe when Zelenskiy was a dictator, he would find a compromise agreement with Putin, but the problem is that this agreement would not be supported by the population. And the problem here is not some racial or ethnical controversies, but rather social and economical. It is simply that the Ukrainians fundamentally dislike the present social order of Russian Federation – the state capitalism, ruled by the State Security and the cronies of high officials. Well, Ukrainians are historically independent peasants and petite bourgeoisie, and such people simply everywhere in the world do not like to live in rigid State Capitalism and to be ruled by KGB. Oligarchs may be bad, but even they are more acceptable than the State Capitalism.
Thank you for translating this iterview.
… Dugin … fluent in a good dozen languages (which he learned on his own), very early became familiar with authors as different as the historian and geographer Lev Gumilev, son of the poetess Anna Akhmatova and the theoretician of “place-development” (mestorazvitiye); Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, the German “young conservative” supporter of an “orientation to the East,” Vico, Danilevski, Mircea Eliade, René Guénon, Jean Baudrillard, Marcel Mauss, Gilbert Durand, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Louis Dumont, Friedrich List, Heidegger, etc.
Good grief! While I’ve heard of all these persons (except Durand, who was new to me), I’ve read almost nothing by any of them, which yet again reminds me of my longstanding annoyance with how the Left has completely stacked the intellectual deck in favor of itself. Even if we on the Right are at least as intelligent (in raw IQ terms) as the Left, it is nearly impossible for us, the vast bulk of whom are amateurs (defined here as “people who do not earn their livelihoods from their academic pursuits”), to compete with professionals who can devote their whole lives to reading and scholarship because they get paid for doing so. Most WNs are unable to develop their real intellectual talents because they have to work at unrelated jobs. And even when they can obtain valuable academic sinecures, they must specialize in uncontroversial studies other than WN, which should be an academic sub-discipline all its own (like CRT, though this latter is really a faux-discipline, a form of “anti-knowledge” like the Ptolemaic theory of the solar system).
Dugin, I repeat, is a Eurasianist. But Eurasianism is incompatible with nationalism, since it embraces the idea of Empire, that is to say the refusal in principle of the logic of ethnic nationalism and the nation-state (which also explains the close ties that Dugin maintains with representatives of the Jewish and Turkish-Muslim communities).
So basically Dugin is an erudite and talented racial POS disloyal to his blood and soil fatherland.
I hope Europeanists in Russia eventually prevail over slavophiles and euroasianists, although ZOG has done its best to discredit them.
The Europeanists in Russia have discredited themselves so much more than any ZOG could do it. For Russians and other peoples of Russia (Altaic, Uralic, Siberian; Caucasian etc.) the rule of Western or pro-Western (proxy) elites always were the times of big sufferings, mass murders, and imposing of alien and harmful ideological notions like capitalism, communism or democracy.
I do not like Dugin´s pseudo-Euroasianism (but I have some sympathy to OLD Euroasianists and to Gumilyov), but even that his pseudo-Euroasianism is only respond to the wrong and imposed by aliens Europeanization and Westernization of Russia and its peoples.
In a previous post on C-C, the Sufi Muslim Charles Upton described Dugin’s political philosophy as being eschatological in its division of the decadent West and the Eurasian East, calling them “The Whore of Babylon” and “Babylon” and theorizing that, in the end, “Babylon wins”.
From what little I know about Dugin (or Putin), they do view their struggle in Biblical terms, even if they would only be a “guiding light” for the future triumph of Chinese Communism around the world.
The kind of future would certainly be like turning out the lights on humanity.
I principially would not identify Dugin as Euroasianist, but only as pseudo- or quasi-Euroasisanist, because his “ideology” is very different of the real Euroasianism. Neither he is “Euroasianist” of the 2nd generation. If there was any Euroasianist of 2nd generation, then that was Gumilyov. But Gumilyov was geographer and historian, and not geopolitician.
the “real” Russia was the one before the Petrovian reforms
Yes, but the real Russia ended for ca. 100 years earlier, with the rising of the usurper pro-Western RomanOFFs dynasty, which destroyed the Orda-Moskovia symbiosis, known in the West as “La Grande Tartarie” (wrong name, but that does not matter). Peter who called his subjects half-animals and murdered them in thousands, was only one in those long line of Western proxies on the Russian throne. Yes, and Russian Imperialism was born only when the Western proxies began to rule Russia as some kind of Golem, created by the West, before there were no such things as Russian aggressiveness or Russian Imperialism or Russian expansion to the West (and all those were not in the interest of Russian peoples and other peoples of Moscowia, but only of pro-Western usurpers).
Russian rock-musician Egor Letov tells about Dugin:
“And there was also a story: once we lived at Kuryokhin – Dugin, me and Nyurych. We wake up, I open the window, Dugin lies thoughtfully on the bed, asks: “But where is Omsk located?” I say: “Well, where: in the south of Siberia. Near Qazaqstan.” – “Qazaqstan is near you? And what if the Qazaqs poisoned the wind? They can poison the wind! Well, immediately close the window: the wind is poisoned!” And, in all seriousness: he was scared terribly, he began to walk around the room. “The Qazaqs, damn it, poisoned the wind – how can I go? So it is, for sure. I know they have reed people. They have Lake Balkhash, and reeds and reeds grow in large quantities there. And reeds live there, reed people who never stick out, only breathe through a tube. Then he thought again, thought and said: “And in the middle of Balkhash there is a huge island, where lives a gigantic, really gigantic cat, whom they all worship.” These are Kuryokhin’s affairs, unambiguously. Where else can he get this? He says: “Damn, reeds! Reed people are all around, what can we do? They can arrange an invasion! That’s all – then we’ll be finished! If the reed people get out – and they will climb on us with their cat! And the cat is huge, three meters tall! “
I think Dugin’s philosophical importance to Russian governance is vastly overstated in Western MSM. I don’t care for Eurasianism, there are too many differences between Russians, Caucasians and Central Asians. I see them everyday in Moscow. However, I like Dugin’s take on 4 world wars. It seems like a good framework for analyzing the geopolitical course we’re all on. A more favorable outcome would be a return to ethno nationalism and respectful cooperation between Europe nations, including Russia. Letting the others do whatever the hell they want in their own countries. I think removing the “J” factor from the equation, would go a long way in achieving this outcome.
I would say that there are incomprehensible or strange moments in Dugin’s biography. For example, it is known that he entered the Moscow Aviation Institute (MAI), but was expelled from the second year for poor progress. Some sources write that he was kicked out for participating in some underground, almost dissident circles. But we must remember that Dugin’s father was a political general in the GRU, i.e. he was a nomenklatura child, and such people were untouchable in the late USSR. Most likely, he was kicked out really just for poor study. Given that Dugin knows several foreign languages and is neither stupid nor idle, he most likely simply did not go where he should have. At the Institute of Foreign Languages, he would have achieved much greater success, and at the Moscow Aviation Institute, he essentially stole a place from some other person, who, perhaps, could become the new Tupolev, Korolyov or Yangel.
As for his translations of books by Western traditionalists, it should also be remembered that in late Soviet times it was not enough just to know foreign languages. It was also necessary to be able to purchase foreign books. Amazon and Abebooks did not exist at that time, and all books sent to the USSR from abroad were subject to KGB censorship. If Dugin received such books, then only with the sanction of state security, because he was not an official scholar at some state institute and could not refer to the fact that he needed foreign books for academic work. However, there were rumors that some of the books published as Dugin’s translations were actually translated by other people. Italians, in particular Evola, were translated by Victoria Vanyushkina, who died in 2013. The Germans and the French were translated by Dugin’s wife Natalya Melentyeva. I can neither confirm nor deny this information, but it is interesting anyway.
Comments are closed.
If you have a Subscriber access,
simply login first to see your comment auto-approved.
Note on comments privacy & moderation
Your email is never published nor shared.
Comments are moderated. If you don't see your comment, please be patient. If approved, it will appear here soon. Do not post your comment a second time.