Our interlocutor is Russian philosopher, political scientist and sociologist Alexander Gelyevich Dugin, professor at Moscow's Lomonosov State University.

- Alexander Dugin, we increasingly hear the leaders of our country define modern western civilisation with the word 'Satanism'. What do you think is meant by this?

- The statement that the West is a 'satanic civilisation' was uttered by the President in his keynote speech during the admission of new subjects to the Russian Federation. We should take it seriously and try to understand what is behind this formulation, especially since it was then repeated by many of our senior political and public figures. It seems to me that this is a very serious and profound statement.

After the start of the Special Military Operation, we began to realise more and more clearly that there was something wrong with the West. That modern Western civilisation had lost its way, or strayed from the path it was on when we accepted it, embraced it, imitated it, or, even more likely, that something had been wrong with it for a long time. A civilisation that we admire, in which we try to integrate, whose values and rules we share and embrace with all our soul, cannot suddenly turn out to be satanic? In parallel, we see the question of values being raised at various levels in our state. Let us begin by repeating: let us defend our values. A year ago, the President adopted a decree on the defence of traditional values, including the superiority of spirit over matter. This is absolutely extraordinary! The traditional values of Russia are recognised as, if you like, idealism, religiosity, the dominance of the spirit. And of course, if we begin to realise ourselves - not yet with certainty, but more and more - as the bearers of traditional values, then it is precisely in the face of these traditional values, which we are just beginning to discover in ourselves, which we are just beginning to understand, to comprehend and to defend, in the face of these values, of course, Western values seem like pure Satanism. They are the exact opposite. They are based on the idea that matter is more primary than spirit, that man is simply a biosocial being who is a cognitive reflection of the outside world. The West perceives man as an evolved animal, who has reached his final stage to pass the initiative to a post-human species, to transhumanist constructs, to cyborgs, to artificial intelligence. And the preparation, the warm-up phase for this is the politics of gender, when people change sex at will - even at their whim - and will soon change species - choosing between being a man, a machine or an animal, which is already being seriously discussed at the highest levels by Western figures.

Having discovered that the West is something monstrous and breaking away from the human species before our eyes, Russia has turned away from it. A local problem, the conflict with Ukraine, has suddenly led us to a fundamental conclusion: the West is going in the wrong direction, dragging humanity into the abyss, and we must confront it. This is the most important news, something absolutely incredible, because before we had modestly limited ourselves to the struggle for sovereignty.

And here the concept of 'Satanism' takes on a very serious meaning for the first time. It is not just a fringe occult movement, there is such Satanism in the West, there is Antoine LaVey's Church of Satan, there is the direct Satanism of the ultra-capitalist writer Ayn Rand (Alice Rosenbaum) - by the way, it was popular among Russian oligarchs and liberals in the 1990s. But all these are, by and large, fringe phenomena, occult sects and theatrical productions. By 'the Satanism of Western civilisation' Putin meant something else, something much deeper. Satanism is the putting of matter before spirit, postmodern relativism, that is, the relativity of all values, including the values of the human being and the spirit. And this is the road that the West took not yesterday, but some 500 years ago, with the beginning of the New Age.

Who is Satan? There is no Satan when there is no God, no faith, no religion. This term remains in a vacuum, if for us the terms 'God', 'faith', 'eternity', 'immortality', 'resurrection of the dead', 'universal judgement', 'salvation of the soul'... are equally empty. If we follow the modern Western scientific picture of the world, then, of course, it is ludicrous to speak of Satanism, for in it there is no God, no devil, no faith, no immortal soul, no post-mortal life, but there is only a fluctuation of biological units, atoms, which come together, split apart and then disappear into the abyss of black dead space. Such a world-image became established in the West about 500 years ago, and is usually called the 'scientific world-image'. It was accompanied by a gradual and complete de-Christianisation of Western culture. Thus, Satan as a phenomenon has disappeared from the 'scientific world picture' along with God. When we seriously say that Western civilisation is Satanic, we draw attention to the fact that this was a hasty, erroneous, premature and, in fact, profoundly wrong conclusion. Wrong was the estrangement from Tradition, from spirit, from God, from religion - from which the Modern Age of Western Europe began. We perceived it uncritically as early as the 18th century, when we were carried away by the European Enlightenment, but until 1917 we somehow maintained the religious character of our society. Then we plunged into the materialist abyss, and after the collapse of the USSR we descended even deeper into this abyss, into an even more unbridled liberal capitalist materialism, and eventually found ourselves on the periphery of western Satanic civilisation, as its province.

In other words, the concept of Satan today, in the course of SMO, the war with the West, takes on a completely different meaning in our society along with the concept of God. If there is God, if there is faith and the Church, Tradition and traditional values, then it means that there is also the antithesis of God, there is he who has rebelled against God. And then the history of the West, the history of so-called progress, the age of modernity of the last 500 years opens up in a completely new light. It turns out that the West has rejected God, has said: there is neither God nor the devil, and the devil, as if after some time, objects: there is no God, but there is me, because I am the one who told you that there is no God.

- Can what you call Satanism be considered an ideological construct or is it just a principle of denial, of destruction?

- We should not start from Satanism, but from Satan, from the figure that is called by this name, if we are believing people, then for us it is an ontological fact. And for non-believing people, Satanism is meaningless.

Who is Satan, Lucifer the Black? He is an angel, that is, the eternal celestial mind. He is the first, supreme creation of God who rebelled against God. This is the origin of all attacks on God, of materialism, of atheism, of the idea that men without God can build a better world. We see this principle in humanism, in the development of modern science and in the social doctrine of progress. Satan is not just destruction or entropy, but a conscious will to destroy. It is rebellion, destruction of unity in the name of the triumph of multiplicity. It is not just a weakening of the divine order, but the will to break it. When the body is weakened, it is one thing, but when there is a force, such as cancer or other natural diseases, that leads the body to decay, it is another thing. Satan is the mind, the will to decay, not just the decay itself, which is already a consequence. In a way it is a creed, a religion, an anti-church. It is the 'black church' embodied in modern Western culture, in science, in education, in politics. Here we see not only decadence, but the unwillingness to build order, hierarchy, to raise the principles of science, mind, thought, culture to the highest unity, as in traditional civilisation, to the hierarchical beginning - because the earthly hierarchy imitates the angelic rank. In addition to this refusal to do good, there is also the will to do something directly opposite, to do evil. When we look at the Ukrainians, at Biden, at Soros, at Macron, we see an active and aggressive will to destruction. Satanism necessarily presupposes a conscious strategy and a deliberate impulse that generates a vigorous movement of human masses. The masses can destroy traditional culture with their stupidity, passivity, inertia - this is a property of the mass as such, but someone pushes this mass in a destructive direction, someone directs it, orients it. It is here that the principle of the subject as opposed to God (as well as man in his highest meaning) appears. It is in all religions: we are talking about this conscious will of the subject to build an anti-God, inverted civilisation. Not only to destroy what exists, but to create something disgusting, perverse, like the LGBT bearded women of the West.

- Is there, then, an image of the future?

- René Guénon, a philosopher and advocate of a traditional spiritual society, called it the Great Parody. This is what Satanic civilisation is leading to. If in the first phase of materialism it was the negation of all spirituality, i.e. it was affirmed that there is no spirit, but only matter, man, the earthly world, then gradually, as this Great Parody takes shape, a new project emerges: not only the rejection of the church, but the construction of an anti-church, not only the oblivion of the spirit, but the creation of a new, inverted spirituality. You start with the destruction of the church, you compare everything to the earth, only man remains, but then you start building an underground temple downwards, in the opposite direction, you make a hole in matter. The French writer Raymond Abellio wrote the novel 'The Pit of Babylon', the construction of civilisation in the underground direction. This inverted hierarchy, inverted power, inverted spirituality is what Western Satanism represents.

- It seems that even the vices are reversed. It is absolutely incomprehensible to me how a person can be seduced by these things, by the deviations with which the West is now fascinated....

- Unlike virtues, vices change, virtues are immutable and vices are always progressing. For a progressive person, the debauchery of the 'old regime' at some point ceases to excite, to affect. When a person stops at a certain level of vice, he stops there, it no longer feels like vice. Vice is a progressive decomposition, and decomposition has no limits, one cannot decompose to a certain point and rest there. A man needs something to take him and drag him further and further down, decomposition must go further and further. The very history of Western depravity is a history of progress. At every stage new vices are discovered, perversion itself becomes the norm. For example, today homosexuality in the West is in fact recognised as the norm, it is no longer a vice, so we must go further, towards paedophilia, incest, cannibalism, sex reassignment.... All this is driven by legislation. Western legislators rush to recognise decomposition, to legalise what was only yesterday forbidden and immoral.... Michel Foucault wrote of it: decomposition is the overcoming of law, transgression, and now in the West there is no more law, no more virtue, no more boundaries, and consequently no more vice after its legalisation. If we consider vice as a social convention, then there is no vice. There is only a 'widening of experience', a 'liberation from prejudices' - such as shame, conscience, morality, virtue, innocence, constraint. When something is no longer considered a vice or a crime, it becomes uninteresting, unattractive, so one must move on: changing sex twenty times, merging with animals, barking, walking on all fours, demanding that children who think they are cats be fed from a plate by teachers at school. Decomposition has no limits, as soon as decomposition is legalised it ceases to be attractive, new forms are needed. The Marquis de Sade, one of the heralds of western 'satanic civilisation', said that the most important thing in vice is innovation.

- Is this passion for decadence and self-destruction in us from the very beginning?

- If we consider the situation without Satan, there is only one man and the aspiration for the deification of man, in this case man's reluctance to make an effort and go upwards, towards the salvation of the soul, paradise and immortality could be attributed to natural causes, to inertia, to matter, to the body. They drive man not to preserve his image of God, to disperse it in material objects, in low attractions, but this is not Satanism, it is simple human decay. Satanism begins when the process of decay is combined with a will, with a plan, with a mind, because fallen spirits according to Christianity are not just material (spirits are not material), they are spiritual, intelligent, they have a will and a mind. A demon is a subject. Therefore, Satanism must be understood strictly as a strategy of decay, the will to decay, the elevation of decay to an ideology, a programme, a project. It is not just an animal instinct. This will, which comes from the depths of ontology, from the mind, from the spirit, is imposed, as orthodox ascetics say, through prilogies and additions.

- We say: this is Satanism, yet we continue to exist in the system that the West has created. How likely is a new global confrontation with the West, as in the days of the USSR?

- Actually, we are already in a state of civilisation war, where our enemy - the civilisation of the West - is called by its real name. It is a satanic, anti-God, anti-human civilisation. We have designated it, but the question arises: if they are a 'satanic civilisation', who are we? It turns out that our only way is to be a traditional, religious civilisation, uniting traditional denominations, but then we have to be different. In essence, we have to rethink our inner state. Who they are we have already expressed, who we are we have not yet understood.

We are already at war with Satan, but we do not yet know on whose behalf. There is not much choice, this choice is suggested to us by our ancestors, our great writers, philosophers, thinkers, elders, this choice is suggested to us by our culture: we are Holy Russia, we are the God-bearing people. We can, of course, fall, Blok saw Russia fall, he called Russia 'the soul of the world', but he piously believed that we Russians, as the soul of the world, had fallen to rise again. We do not yet fully realise who we are, what we are called upon to do, what we are fighting for, what we are giving our blood and life to in this struggle. We have only just begun to wage this war, not only to fight it, but above all to carry it out. And now this war has gone from a physical massacre to a metaphysical confrontation of civilisations. What remains for us to do is to make a fundamental effort, to finally forget the decompositional mentality of the last 40 years.

I remember what a culture of decay there was in the last decade of the Soviet era. Total decadence, total degeneration. And it is not surprising that this was followed by the monstrous hallucinations of the decadent 1990s. Having travelled all the way to the end, all the way to the bottom of the 1990s - it seems to me that Russian history has never taken us lower - we began to emerge from this nightmarish era of liberal dictatorship with Putin. Not from a localised pit, but from a deadly peak, from the nadir of Russian history, from the lowest, blackest point. At this lowest point, we know not only externally but also internally what Satan is. It is the bloody 1990s, when the West came here, to us, when we were bought for our jewels, humiliated, trampled on, raped and made to applaud.

- Do you not think, then, that somehow we will make peace with the West, with a compromise?

- Satan, seeing that someone has challenged him, will not allow us to go back to half-way solutions. He will now demand that we finally renounce God, something we did not do even in the worst times of atheism and impiety. It is a mystery, we cannot explain it rationally, but we remained a God-bearing people even in Soviet times - despite all the atheism, materialism, progressivism, the 'scientific picture of the world', all forms of Western degeneration.... This time, if we backtrack, there will be no secret holes left for the Russian spirit. Therefore, there is only one prospect: win or nothing. As the President said: if we don't win, nobody will win.

We have allies - other traditional societies, they are not like us, but they are traditional, they are also in opposition to the West, maybe we will be able to win the multipolar world together with them in the union of traditions and civilisations, and only then can we have a more balanced conversation with the West, to explain our position to it - because we do not want to follow its path to the abyss.

Perhaps the conflict will move into a hot phase and, who knows, end with the death of human civilisation. We are on the threshold of a transformation so fundamental and decisive that we cannot afford long planning horizons. Absolutely everything is being decided: the fate of humanity, of mankind, of Adam as such. The fate of existence, and we are involved. If we win, the world will be completely different; if we don't win, there will be no world. It is impossible without the Russians.

Translation by Lorenzo Maria Pacini

Source : https://portal-kultura.ru