The point is that both the Slavs and the Rus (like the Franks and Celts) ethnologically belonged to one Northern Aryan ethnos today known as the Veneti. In the days of old, one could stumble upon the name mentioned by Strabo – Vindelicum or Vendelicum (and the Baltic Sea was the Sinus Venedicus). Moreover, one of their names was Franks (the “free ones”) and the other was Slavs. As Eckhard wrote, “The Franks once dwelled near the Baltic Sea, where there is now the Vagria” (Franci olim ad mare Balthicum, ubu nune est Vagria). It should thus be clearly borne in mind that all of these ethnonyms are from later times. “The Franconian Slavs,” writes the 19th century Russian scholar Y.I. Venelin (Gutsa), “did not call themselves Vindelicum, just as they did not call themselves Slovene as the name existing only in ethnographic books. The very word Franks is a modern ethnonym derived from one of the names of the kings who ruled the ancient Vagria called Reges Francorum and who, according to Fredegar and the later chroniclers, were the descendants of the Trojan kings (the line of Priam). These are the Trojan Veneti settlers who formed the ruling, princely caste of whom Polybius wrote. According to him, they “differ little from the Celts, but speak their own language. The writers of tragedies often mention this people and speak of its many miracles.”

“The Swamp” is to become the new name for the globalist sect, the open society adepts, LGBT maniacs, Soros’ army, the post-humanists, and so on. Draining the Swamp is not only categorically imperative for America. It is a global challenge for all of us. Today, every people is under the rule of its own Swamp. We, all together, should start the fight against the Russian Swamp, the French Swamp, the German Swamp, and so on. We need to purge our societies of the Swamp’s influence. Instead of fighting between ourselves, let us drain it together. Swamp-drainers of the whole world unite!

Although the concept of hegemony in Critical Theory is based on Antonio Gramsci’s theory, it is necessary to distinguish this concept’s position on Gramscianism and neo-Gramscianism from how it is understood in the realist and neo-realist schools of IR.

The classical realists use the term “hegemony” in a relative sense and understand it as the “actual and substantial superiority of the potential power of any state over the potential of another one, often neighboring countries.” Hegemony might be understood as a regional phenomenon, as the determination of whether one or another political entity is considered a “hegemon” depends on scale. Thucydides introduced the term itself when he spoke of Athens and Sparta as the hegemons of the Peloponnesian War, and classical realism employs this term in the same way to this day. Such an understanding of hegemony can be described as “strategic” or “relative.”

In neo-realism, “hegemony” is understood in a global (structural) context. The main difference from classical realism lies in that “hegemony” cannot be regarded as a regional phenomenon. It is always a global one. The neorealism of K. Waltz, for example, insists that the balance of two hegemons (in a bipolar world) is the optimal structure of power balance on a world scale[ii]. R. Gilpin believes that hegemony can be combined only with unipolarity, i.e., it is possible for only a single hegemon to exist, this function today being played by the USA.

In both cases, the realists comprehend hegemony as a means of potential correlation between the potentials of different state powers. 

Gramsci's understanding of hegemony is completely different and finds itself in a completely opposite theoretical field. To avoid the misuse of this term in IR, and especially in the TMW, it is necessary to pay attention to Gramsci’s political theory, the context of which is regarded as a major priority in Critical Theory and TMW. Moreover, such an analysis will allows us to more clearly see the conceptual gap between Critical Theory and TMW.

No religion resisted against the extensive hegemony of the modern culture as Islam did. In other words, Islam is the only religion that didn’t melt into the modern culture. Other religions like Christianity reacted against the modern culture and civilization, but soon they gave it up and came to recognize it. The internal structure of Islam is in a way that calls its followers to a permanent struggle against anything strange other than itself. this is a religious obligation that one’s success in this world and hid salvation in the next world is bound to this. If Muslims give up this duty for a while it isn’t going to cease forever. From the time that the third world came to know the modern civilization a process began to grow; the enlightened class of these societies were influenced by the new civilization and it went on to the level of being bewitched and crazy with it. They rejected their ethnic and local cultures in all aspects. There was an unquestionable sovereignty for the modern civilization and its values in the decisions made for these societies. On the other side there was an implicit confession from the lay people who in spite of living in their traditional atmosphere, submitted the priority of the modern culture or at least didn’t express their disagreement.

In Samuel Huntington’s famous article describing the impending “clash of civilizations”, Huntington mentions a very important formula: “modernization without westernization.” This formula describes the relationship to problems of socio-economic and technological development experienced by some countries (as a rule, those of the Third World) who, while understanding the objective necessity of the development and improvement of their social systems’ political and economic mechanisms, refuse to blindly follow the West, instead striving to put some of Western technology – in isolation from its ideological content – in service of their traditional value systems and national, religious, and political characters. Many representatives of the elites of the East, having received higher Western educations, return to their home countries with important technical knowledge and methodologies which they then use to strengthen their own national systems. Thus, instead of the rapprochement between civilizations expected by liberal optimists, what ensues is the arming of certain “archaic,” “traditionalist” regimes with new technologies which render civilizational confrontation all the sharper. 

The faith in Christ is the Russian faith. It can be objected: Orthodoxy is the universal Church, it is open to all mankind. Identifying it with the Russians means to narrow its value, reduce it to the national religion. There is a notion of the phyletism heresy, religious “love toward a nation.” For the enemies of Orthodoxy, especially for Western Christians, it is the central argument against the Byzantine Empire and against Russia. Unfortunately, in 1872, the patriarch of Constantinople, the head of the Phanar fell for it. But what do they know? They abolished the sacred Julian Calendar, giving up the basics of Orthodoxy for the Uniate... What do they know, my friends?..

The role of the USA, the last remaining superpower in the world, is central to global geopolitics today. Beginning with the end of the 19th century, this peripheral, marginal continent, previously but a European province secondary and complimentary to the Old World, increasingly became an independent political and cultural power. After the Second World War, the USA even came to act as the paradigmatic, universal model for the countries of Europe themselves and even Asia. The significance of the steady growth of America and the totality of the American ideological, cultural, psychological, and even philosophical complex goes beyond the framework of purely economic or military influence. “Mythological America,” “America as a concept,” and “America as the American Ideal” are today manifesting themselves all the more visibly. 

There must be compelling reasons why the “American idea” has taken root and implanted itself as something “neo-sacred” in global geopolitical consciousness connected to the collective unconsciousness of humanity and the mysterious continental geography that can be traced back millennia, the memory of which still lives in the archetypes of the psyche. Considering the “mythological” underpinnings of America as an “internal continent” is the main task of this chapter.

The Traditionalists’ (Guenon, Evola, Georgel, etc.) perception of the relationship between the paleo-continents, cardinal directions, and cyclical periods of ancient civilizations boils down to the following [30]: the North was the original orientation whose ancient paleo-continent located at the North pole was Arktogeya, or Hyperborea, with its sacred capital as Thule or Tula (for the Greeks and Aztecs) or Vara in the Zoroastrian Iranian tradition. It is important to note the similarity between the Iranian “Vara” – the northern city, capital of Aryan-Vedj, and the homeland of the Persians’ ancestors – and the Hindu term Varahi (literally “boar”, or “land of the boars”), as well as the Nordic designation of the continent. The Golden Age of mankind, lasting 25,920 years [31] is associated with this ancient, primordial continent. In the ancient tradition, the New Year came at the point of the winter solstice (or winter eclipse), i.e., the most obvious moment in the transition of the sun and light’s movement from descent to ascent. The priority of the northern orientation and celebrations of the New Year on the day of the winter solstice are signs of the Primordial Tradition itself. 

The second cardinal direction was that of the South and the southern paleo-continent conventionally called Gondwana. The period of the southern orientation’s predominance falls on the Silver Age lasting 19,440 years. The New Year that falls on the day of the summer solstice corresponds to this orientation. Thus, the initial periods of our cycle, the Manvantara, were moved by way of the main migrations of the sacred proto-peoples along the vertical axis from North to South, which corresponds to the priority of the vertical over the horizontal (the axis of East-West) as a qualitative space in sacred geometry. 

As the point of departure of our investigation we shall take the extremely interesting data concerning the sacred geography of the southernmost (or, more precisely, the south-western) territorial sector of Gardariki (the Galician principality) gathered in the book Hyperborean Dacia [13] by the Romanian Traditionalist author of a Guenonian orientation, Geticus (Basil Lovinescu). In this work, the author convincingly demonstrates on the basis of sacred toponymies and a deep analysis of Romanian folklore that ancient Dacia (modern Romania and Moldova) was once the sacred center of the Hyperborean tradition, albeit secondary in regards to Polar Hyperborea which was far more original than other indirect spiritual centers of traditional civilizations. In our opinion, the thesis of Hyperborean Dacia looks quite convincing and we would especially like to dwell on the mystery of the Danube delta which, according to Geticus, was the location of one of the main sanctuaries of Hyperborean Apollo. 

The author of Hyperborean Dacia notes the following peculiarity of the Danube delta and its cult center: river Danube flows into the Black Sea on the 45th parallel, i.e., on the belt dividing the entire northern hemisphere in half. Thus, the cult center of Apollo in Dacia was located in the far north for the entire southern half of the northern hemisphere whose establishment has only recently become known to modern historians of civilization. We note that the 45th parallel in general plays an extremely important role for Eurasia and in the far West. In France, two of the most important sacred centers, Lyon (the “city of meadows, i.e., the center of the geographical spiral of the druids as examined in Louis Charpentier’s book The Giants and the Mystery of the Origin [14]) and Grenoble (the “land of the Dauphins” [15] whose solar, Hyperborean symbolism was researched by the scholars Eugene Canseliet – Sevren Bafrue and Guy Beatrice in the book Land of the Dauphin [15]). At the same time in the Far East, in Mongolia, at approximately the same latitude is located the sacred center of Genghis Khan’s empire, the city of Urga. In addition, it is interesting note that the borders of the Russian Empire also more or less followed this parallel over a gigantic space resembling a sinusoid with a recess in the South in the Caucasus, Kazakhstan, and in the Pamir mountains, and a rise in the North in South-Eastern Siberia, Altai, and across the Amur River. In addition to such an important parallel at which the center of the Apollonian cult of “Hyperborean Dacia” was located, what is also extremely important for us is that the longitude of this place was 30 degrees east. It can be said that this meridian, in its northern part, was the axis of the Slavs’ settlement. To its west were the Poles, Czechs, Slovenes, Serbs, Croats, Ukrainians, and Belarussians, and to its east are the Great Russians. Thus, in addition to the “extremely northern” location of “Hyperborean Dacia” in relation to the mediterranean world, the extreme South of its situation can also be considered in regards to the Slavo-Baltic-Scandinavian world and Gardariki Rus. In fact, the mouth of the Danube was always the southern sacred-geographical pressure point of the “masses” of the Slavic, Russian world to the north. 

Sacred geography differs substantially from conventional, physical geography. We are accustomed to consider the earth as an orb, as a globe (in Latin, globus means “orb”). For us, the North is the top of the orb, and the South is the bottom. A globe can be rotated and, consequently, concepts of East and West slip away from our geographical attention. But when we present our earth as rotating in the solar system and in outer space, we generally digress from such concepts as cardinal directions. All of this seems to be so conventional! Understanding the world as standing on three pillars and the earth appearing to be a disk are relics of the “dark ages.” 

For a long time, scientific discoveries which have opened new horizons and succeeded each other at a furious pace have been accepted by people uncritically and with excessive enthusiasm. In turn, many have come to treat our ancestors’ map of the world with disdain and disgust and we have been inclined to consider our ancestors to be “dark,” “wild,” “primitive,” or having only recently ceased to be “apes.” 

Such a positivist attitude quickly finds itself confronted with a number of contradictions. The development of science has arrived at the problem of consciousness and the human factor in relation to natural phenomena. Here everything changes. It turns out that the mythological archetypes and systems of consciousness formed by culture, history, the environment, geography, and language have a strong influence on scientific methodology to the point that they “deform” these so-called “objective” material studies. 

The most profound Russian thinkers of the 20th century were undoubtedly the Eurasianists, the ideologists of the special Third Way wing of the first Russian emigration who expressed genuinely important and reliable considerations on the fate of Russia. In their conceptions, the geographical location of Russia between East and West plays a central role. For them, Eurasia amounts to Russia and the Russian ethnos (in the supranational sense of the word) is considered to be the modern carrier of Turanism, a special imperial psycho-ideology accordingly passed down to the people of Rus by the Turkic-Mongolian tribes of the Horde. Thus, the Eurasianists, in contrast to the representatives of the monarchist camp, were not so much “Panslavists” as Turkophiles. And this is not a paradox since a significant part of the Russian nobility and, in particular, many Slavophile ideologists of the 19th century who constituted a significant percentage of the top Russian elite,were representatives of the Turkic heritage. For many Eurasianists, Russia-Turan was a supra-political concept whose value was defined by its geopolitical mission.

The intuition of the Eurasianists proved to be quite true, but the origins of this concept stretch back to pre-history, to the epochs prior not only to the conquests of Genghis Khan and his successors, but also prior to even the appearance of Slavs on Russian lands. Where did Russia-Turan come from?

One of the few European geopolitical schools which has preserved an uninterrupted link with the ideas of the pre-war German continentalist geopoliticians is that of the “New Right.” This trend appeared in France in the late ’60’s and is associated with the philosopher and publicist Alain de Benoist, the leading figure of the movement. 

The “New Right” sharply differs on practically all matters from the traditional French right consisting of monarchists, Catholics, Germanophobes, chauvinists, anti-communists, conservatives, etc. The “New Right” includes those who support “organic democracy,” pagans, Germanophiles, socialists, modernists, etc. At the beginning, the “left camp” so conventionally, extremely influential in France considered such to be a “tactical maneuver” by typical rightists, but with time the gravity of this evolution was proven and came to be recognized by all. 

One of the fundamental principles of the “New Right’s” ideology, analogues of which soon appeared in other European countries, is the principal of “continental geopolitics.” In contrast to the “old right” and classical nationalists, de Benoist believed that the principle of the centralized Nation-State has been historically exhausted and that the future belongs only to “Great Spaces.” The basis of such “Large Spaces” are to be not so much associations of various states in a pragmatic political bloc, but the equal-footed conglomeration of ethnic groups of different scales into a “Federal Empire.” Such a “Federal Empire”  is supposed to be strategically unified, yet ethnically differentiated. Moreover, such strategic unity is to be underpinned by the unity of primordial culture.

There is a second agenda the US has concerning Europe. There is official, open American agenda – US wants to continue the liberal strategy of the integration of Europe within the existing framework. America will continue to proceed with this as long as everything is going well. However, the second agenda is much more radical – an emergency or alternative agenda. This agenda would entail the American instigation of a civil war in Europe. The real state of things (rather than at the propaganda level) would be that mass immigration provokes more and more of a reaction, anti-systemic parties and groups start to gain power and influence, gender politics start to be rejected, and the middle class continues to decline. This wouldn’t fit with what we hear, so it makes sense that there would be another agenda of the US concerning Europe. There is a growing interest in the US and above all Israel in funding and influencing the far right movement in Europe, the identitarian movement being the most obvious example. 

Though he prefers not to dwell on it, Dugin alludes to the possibility that the attractions of the West will win out, that Putin lacks the resources or even the will to thwart liberalism.  In this regard, other Russia observers have even raised Thomas Molnar’s concept of the “counterrevolutionary hero”—an archetypal figure who is not really counterrevolutionary, and who will inevitably disappoint right-wing followers drawn to his personality and mystique.  The anxious handwringing of liberals notwithstanding, it’s conceivable that Putin may in the long run prove their best friend by letting down the very patriotic base that elevated him to power.  The legacy of Charles de Gaulle comes to mind, as does Reagan’s. Then again, liberals have put their cards on the table awfully soon, and may have backed Russia into a corner.  It would be foolish to continue appeasing Western elites who have time and again demonstrated an insatiable appetite for regime change—and whatever else one may say of Putin, he is no fool.  Hawkish rhetoric and overtly perverse policies on behalf of queer power may backfire, pushing the Russian state toward the pursuit of consciously and assertively antiliberal empire.  

What struck me on arriving in the US was the interest in and presence of other cultures, especially in relation to spirituality. Spiritual, New Age and occult centers (or at least bookstores) existed and seemed relatively vibrant. Religion was also far more important than in England, whether that was Christianity, Judaism, Tibetan Buddhism, or something else. There was (and of course still is) a big Chinatown, where Chinese was spoken (London’s is tiny). I practiced Kung fu in the early morning at a park in Chinatown and went for tea at a Chinese place afterward; I went to read in a French cafe that was always empty and the owners were actually French; I went to the spiritual and occult bookstores; to the museums, to Japanese events with my Japanese friends; and so on. Moving to the US, my life was steeped much more consciously in the archaic and the “Traditional” than in the much older culture of England.

Capitalism, of course, always seizes on what is different and exciting, and repackages it for the mainstream, often destroying the culture-creating roots as a consequence. But, if we leave aside this aspect, and get back to the people, America’s history is one with as much depth as anywhere else. Indeed, while Britain and Europe ape the most crass aspects of the USA, Americans often look to something more integral.

According to Alexander Dugin, the twenty-first century will be defined by the conflict between Eurasianists and Atlanticists. The Eurasianists defend the need for every people and culture on Earth to be allowed to develop in its own way, free of interference, and in accordance with their own particular values. Eurasianists thus stand for tradition and for the blossoming variety of cultures, and a world in which no single power holds sway over all the others. Opposing them are the Atlanticists. They stand for ultra-liberalism in both economics and values, stopping at nothing to expand their influence to every corner of the globe, unleashing war, terror, and injustice on all who oppose them, both at home and abroad. This camp is represented by the United States and its allies around the world, who seek to maintain America’s unipolar hegemony over the Earth. The Eurasianists believe that only a strong Russia, working together with all those who oppose Atlanticism worldwide, can stop them and bring about the multipolar world they desire. This book introduces their basic ideas. Eurasianism is on the rise in Russia today, and the Kremlin’s geopolitical policies are largely based on its tenets, as has been acknowledged by Vladimir Putin himself. It is reshaping Russia’s geopolitics, and its influence is already changing the course of world history.

From the moment of its inception in the 1920s, Eurasianism has always opposed the global domination of the West, European universalism, and supported the uniqueness of the Russian civilization. Therefore, Eurasianism is, indeed, an anti-Western ideology in the sense that it rejects the Western society’s right to impose its criteria of good and evil as the universal norm. Russia is an independent Orthodox-Eurasian civilization, rather than the periphery of Europe, insisted Eurasianists, following their ideological predecessors, the Slavophiles, along with other Russian conservatives.

Gradually, Eurasianism was enriched with the methods of classic geopolitics that were based upon the dualism of the Land and Sea civilizations. Englishman Halford Mackinder introduced this concept in the first half of the twentieth century; it was further developed by American strategists such as Nicholas Spykman and Zbigniew Brzezinski. Here, Russia serves as the core of the Land civilization, Eurasia’s Heartland, and is thus doomed to carry out a centuries-old battle against the Anglo-Saxon world. In the past, its core was the British Empire, and, from the second half of the twentieth century onward, this was the United States. Therefore, Eurasianists oppose Western hegemony, American expansionism, and Liberal values and support the distinct Russian civilization, religion, and tradition. Furthermore, Eurasianists not only oppose the West, but also Russia’s own Westernizers and moderates: Liberals, first and foremost.

Alexander Dugin was in Paris on the 25th of may 2013 for a joint conference with Alain de Besnoist, of GRECE, Krisis and Nouvelle Ecole fame and Laurent James, a controversial writer and artist who deals with esotericism and metaphysical Revolution.

The conference was held in the historical center of Paris, place Saint-Germain-des-Prés, in the “Salle Lumière” wich translates as the “Room of Light” – there are no coincidences. It took place four days after the ritual suicide of Dominique Venner in the cathedrale of Notre Dame on the 21st of may, thus asserting itself as the first metaphysical and geopolitical conference of a new aeon. The day after, on the 26th, the massive anti-gay marriage demonstrations escalated into violence all night long, protesting the postmodern liberal “coup” of the despised pseudo-socialist government who had just passed the law in a quasi totalitarian fashion, ignoring the millions of people on the street and the growing anger of the population against the state of the country. Some said this was an anti-May 68, or a conservative revolution taking the streets ; whatever will come out of it nobody knows, but it could be the starting point of mass disillusion with the system and its globalist-deconstructivist agenda.

Ernst Jünger. Ninety Flown By (Video)

We see this dearly when we remember what an important role was assigned to the concept of security in the bourgeois epoch just past. The bourgeois person is perhaps best characterized as one who places security among the highest of values and conducts his life accordingly. His arrangements and systems are dedicated to securing his space against the danger that at times, when scarcely a cloud appears to darken the sky, has laded into the distance. However, it is always there: it seeks with elemental constancy to break through the dams with which order has surrounded itself.

The modern thought police is hard to spot, as it often seeks cover under soothing words such as “democracy” and “human rights.” While each member state of the European Union likes to show off the beauties of its constitutional paragraph, seldom does it attempt to talk about the ambiguities of its criminal code. Last year, in June and November, the European Commission held poorly publicized meetings in Brussels and Strasbourg whose historical importance regarding the future of free speech could overshadow the recent launching of the new euro currency.

At issue is the enactment of the new European legislation whose objective is to counter the growing suspicion about the viability of the multiracial European Union. Following the events of September 11, and in the wake of occasionally veiled anti-Israeli comments in some American and European journals, the wish of the European Commission is to exercise maximum damage control, via maximum thought control.

America is not just a continent which, more or less randomly, takes place in the far West on the maps of the world, but at the same time is, according to the logic of things, and the West in terms of metageography. We can even say: America is the West in absolute, metaphysical sense of the term. America is absolute West. It is the undisputed leader and center of the Western world (Western civilization) and compared with it, all other Western countries are only second-rate units, subsidiaries, including its European provinces (European Union), in a tightly integrated "Trans-Atlantic structures" (NATO). Still more, America is likely to become a paradigm, a universal model, obligatory to all mankind. Thus, like a raised torch in the hand of the Statue of Liberty, yet mysterious essence of this country really shines all over the planet, over Earth, illuminating different nations and continents, as well as a new and unknown radiation. Indeed, America" offer the hand to the whole of humanity", and offered him its eschatology, a messianic revelation, its "Annunciation".

North and South, at the same time, have a much greater significance. It is evident from the earliest times. Migration of peoples and races, sacred geography and toponymy, the role that this sides of the world have in the traditions and legends of diverse, but most of all in tradition of Indo-European people, all that very clearly confirmed this opinion. The importance of North-South axis, as is in our epoch, may be obscured, suppressed, but it does not become less real and less important. North-South axis remains vertical axis of history and sacred geography. In contrast, the East-West dualism only has a modest significance and meaning, therefore also raised later in the human history than the former axis (North against South). It, at best, belong to the history and its contingency; dualism North and South is a prehistoric or, rather, over-historical and meta-historical.

In the last spasms of the unipolar system that shook the world, stirring the global geopolitics, emerges ever more clearly the underground and never faded conflict between telluric forces and oceanic power. In the context of the international relations, the rising conflict between the East and the Far West of the world increasingly becomes acute, while in the macrocontinental space nations and countries rediscover their own imperial natural vocation, extending their influence for the creation of specific major regional areas, to achieve greater stability and definitely afford to reappear again in the stage of international politics, coming up again even as pawns of the great global chessboard.

The idea of Iran, as a federating civilization,  both absorbing and prevailing over the ancient kingdoms of West and South Asia arises with the conquests and universal claims of Cyrus (Kurosh) the Great, the founder of the Achaemenid Empire in 549 B.C. but the great Median Kings, before him, had already laboured to unite the tribes of the Iranian plateau   while   throwing   covetous   glances   at  Assyria   and  Babylonia.   Indeed   the Mitannians, the Hittites and the Kassites, to mention three illustrious predecessors, had built mighty “Indo-Iranian” states (for want of a better cultural definition) in the Near East, several centuries before Cyrus. Indeed the Kassites   ruled Babylonia during the second half of the second millennium BC.

Further back in history, it is now possible to trace the roots of Iranian civilization at least to the fourth millennium BC, and not, as was held so far in Mesopotamia, the supposed cradle of humanity hailed in the Bible, but  much farther to the East, in what is today Kerman province, on the site of Jiroft which was only discovered in 2001, not far from the shores of the Persian Gulf, on the Halil river.

On June 5, 2007, the Ukrainian government declared Russian intellectual Aleksandr Dugin persona non grata and banned him from entering the country for a period of five years. This exceptional decision was motivated by a series of inflammatory remarks made by Dugin and his followers about Russia’s various pro-Western neighbors, the Ukraine foremost among them. It was not long, however, before Kiev retracted its decision, fearing further deterioration in its relationship with the superpower to the east. Dugin, after all, is not merely a philosopher. He has influential friends in the Russian presidential cabinet and is associated with many leading politicians, as well as prominent academics and celebrities. And indeed, Ukrainian apprehension was justified by the events that followed: That very evening, Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykola Zhulynsky and his family, who had arrived in St. Petersburg to visit the graves of their relatives, were deported by the Russian government. This retaliation had no mitigating effects on Dugin’s aggressive public campaign against the Ukraine. On October 12, activists from Dugin’s International Eurasian Movement sawed through the country’s national emblem—a statue of a trident situated on Mount Hoverla—and announced that they had thus "castrated” the Ukraine of its sovereignty. Following this ostentatious act of vandalism, Dugin was again banned from entering the Ukraine. This did not, however, prove to be the end of the affair. Authorities in Moscow were quick to show their support for the provocative thinker, and promptly deported Ukrainian political analyst Sergei Taran. The Russian Foreign Ministry left no doubt about Moscow’s motivations when it announced that Taran’s expulsion was a direct response to the Ukrainian ban.