The Fourth Political Theory

beyond left and right but against the center

Well-known pro-Kremlin political analyst Alexander Dugin spoke on the basis of his research about the latest events in Syrian Idlib. Dugin's article was published in some of the Turkish media. According to the Russian expert, the dramatic situation in Idlib could cause a crack in the Moscow-Ankara geopolitical axis. Dugin predicts: in case of continuation of the Turkish policy in Syria, the split between Moscow and Ankara is inevitable. We present Azeri Daily readers with interesting conclusions of the Russian author.

After Damascus won a decisive victory over the Islamic state and the most serious opponents from among the Salafi groups, which were relying on the support of Qatar, Saudi Arabia and indirectly the United States and Israel, those forces that are winners in the tragic and bloody Syrian war -- that is, Russia , Iran and Turkey -- face new problems.

It is significant that the Eurasianists rejected all three of these projects (and political theories), and even exposed their disastrous nature. The Eurasianists also predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union from the very onset of its establishment. The Eurasianists discussed the importance of religion to the life of the people and the state, and the Eurasianists insisted on the peaceful coexistence of cultures and ethnoi. Although the Eurasianist movement proper existed only during the interwar period, it found successors in the Soviet Union and now in contemporary Russia. Of extreme interest in this regard are the ideas of the philosopher Alexander Dugin, who has proposed the model of a Fourth Political Theory. This variation of “society D” continues the line of classical Eurasianity and rejects the three historical political theories of Liberalism, Fascism, and Communism. If Muhammad Iqbal spoke of the need to obtain the collective self (Ijtimayi Khudi) for a new society, then Professor Dugin is employing the terminology of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger in speaking about the Selbst and Dasein.

The whole discourse of post-colonial criticism lies within the unequal and uneven depiction of culture, in contrast to political and social authority within the liberal world order. Hence, the emergence of post-colonial discourse as a domain knowledge explored the marginalization of subaltern identities and became a historical testimony of the marginalized “Third world” with a broader focus on minorities within the geopolitical division of East and West. Moreover, the whole context of post-colonial revolves around the ideological state apparatus by digging out the differences between culture, social gap and political discrimination within the rationalization of Liberal modernity.

Today, there is a heated continental debate between the Liberal Atlanticists and Eurasianists, the latter of whom reject the liberal led modernity of Europe. Moreover, the Eurasianist traces their racial and cultural identity from the Indo-European Chronology and calls themselves as indo-Europeans instead of Liberal modern Europeans – which despite the civic, legalistic criteria of the latter, is in fact a cultural, historical, economic supremacism over the broader Eurasian identity rooted in its people.

In Moscow, Eurasianist scholar Alexander Dugin influenced the policy of President Vladimir Putin and diverted Russian policy towards Eurasianism. The ultimate purpose of this diversion was aimed at Russian revisionism in order to bolster Russia’s role for the creation of a multi-polar, and multi-stakeholder, world.

According to Dugin, European civilization has degenerated and it must be destroyed. However, to fight the European civilization, Dugin suggests the Eurasianist Federation based on the strategic unity and ethnic plurality with a principle judicial element of the rights of people.

Postmodenism and Speculative Realism reflects this on philosophical level

Real as nothing (Lacan)
Active nihilism  non-philosophy (F.Laruelle, Ray Brassier)
Rizoma and schizo-masses (Deleuze, Guattari)
Object Orientated Ontology ( Harman, Meillassoux, Toscana)
Accelerationism (left -- Nick Schrnichek, Alex Williams --and right – Nick Land -
Possession of radical Other (Reza Negarestani)
Singularity (Kurzweil)
Cannibal metaphysics (Viveiros de Castro)
Anti-essentialism (subjectivity without subject)

We need to begin forming the philosophy of multipolarity that should replace the liberal globalist theory (end of history, Western hegemony, world capitalism, unipolarity and so on)

The basis of the MPW is Russia-China multipolar allience. If there is such allience, MPW exists already today. Russia is one of the two major nuclear powers. China is one of the two major economic powers. If we unite Russian and China in multipolar allience, MPW is already here. India joins immediately after. Entrance of India and Pakistann in SCO is symbol of great importance.

BRI project wnen it includes Russia, is precisely the decisive step toward this multipolar allience. Putin recently suggested to link to BRI Northern Polar Road. So BRI goes eurasian.

In order to effectively oppose Sea Power Heartland has to restructure the Rimland zone.

USSR being strong and powerful wasn’t capable to do that alone. Reduced Russia obviously couldn’t afford it at all. So the idea of conquest by forced was immediately abandoned.
The only way to achieve the goal was the politics of alliances directly or indirectly against Sea Power. Rimland can not be Russian. Well, it shouldn’t be American (or West European). That’s the fundamental.
At that moment Russian geopolitical school has discovered the concept of Big Spaces (Grossraum), accepted plurality of civilizations that have reappeared after the end of bipolar era and started to develop Theory of Multipolar World.
 

Democracy today cannot be discussed objectively. It is not a neutral concept: behind “democracy,” as a political regime and corresponding value system, stands the West, Europe and the USA. For them “democracy” is a form of secular cult or a tool of political dogmatics, thus, to be fully accepted into society in the West, it is necessary by default to be “for” democracy. One who calls it into question falls out of the field of political correctness. Marginal opposition is tolerated; but if it is more than marginal, democracy sets its machines of oppression against its alternatives like any regime, any ideology, and any dominant religion. It is not possible to talk about “democracy” impartially. That is why in discussions about democracy we must say at once whether we are completely for or completely against it. I’ll respond with extreme candor: I’m against it, but I’m against it only because the West is for it. I’m not prepared to accept anything thoughtlessly and uncritically on faith, even if everyone believes it, and all the more so if this is accompanied by a concealed (or clear) threat. You suggest that I rely on my own reason, no? I’ll begin with the fact that reason advises me to reject all suggestions [predlozheniy, offers, proposals]. No one can give us freedom. It either is or it is not [we either have it or we don’t]. A slave will convert even freedom into slavery, or at least into swinishness, and a free person will never be a slave even in fetters. From his time enslaved Plato did not become either less Plato or less free, while we still pronounce the name of the tyrant Dionysus with contempt, so which of them is a slave? At any rate, as a popular textbook on technical analysis says, “the majority is always wrong.”

Where is thought? On a different plane. Thought is born and comes into being in a completely different dimension. Compared to what we are doing when (it seems to us that) we are “thinking”, it is something radically other. The experience of thought means the collapse of everything we usually take such to mean. Thought can begin only when what we make thought out to be is finished. Both everyday delirium and intellectual “scholarly citations” are barriers to the birth of thought. They should be abolished. Thought is born out of the moment of madness or nonsense, when the rotation of the gears of both everyday and scientific consciousness is suddenly stopped. In the face of death, this feels good. But not for everyone. Pseudo-thinking reliably protects us from death by barricading against the very possibility of experiencing it with countless instances, fears, calculations, plans, and hopes (for doctors, miracles, police, common sense, science, and the “light at the end of the tunnel”). Everything is subject to death, but death is the lot of the chosen. Death is intimately connected to thought. Thought is born only in the face of death. That which is born freely and horribly in the face of death, when everything else that we have held “thought” to be has been destroyed – that is real thought. Only at this moment does subjectivity make itself known, having been in all other cases dissolved amidst the alienated fields of unfocused consciousness.

Alexander Dugin’s Political Platonism offers a seminal analysis of the contemporary philosophical crisis from one of the best-known writers and political commentators in post-Soviet Russia. Through a series of essays, course transcripts, and a single long interview—each remarkable for the depth of its learning and the boldness of its vision—Dugin exposes the profoundest roots of the Western philosophical tradition, offering his view of why it has reached its final terminus, and his indication of where a new beginning must be sought.

The works collected in this volume present Dugin’s theory of Political Platonism as a fundamental philosophical and political orientation, capable at once of reviving higher political and social forms and furnishing solid ground for resistance to the collapse of the contemporary world. His multi-perspective thesis offers a thorough and thought-provoking critique of modernity and a masterful survey of Western philosophy, reaching from before Heraclitus to beyond Heidegger. In its provocative, clear-sighted analyses and its visionary flights, this book provides an invaluable reference for those already familiar with Dugin, and an intriguing introduction for those coming to him for the first time.

From the point of view of Orthodox esotericism, Judaism and Kabbalah are undoubtedly counter-initiatic.[4] From the Zohar’s point of view, the esotericism of the Goyim, especially the “descendants of Ishmael and Esau” (Muslims and Christians), is “the false teaching of the demon Samael” who “leaps on the serpent Lilith.” From the point of view of Hindu esotericism, Iranian dualism is rooted in the fact that Zoroastrians worship demons, the Asura, (Iranian Ahura), whom they (Hindus) call “gods.” Buddhist esotericists, meanwhile, are convinced that the initiatic doctrines of Hinduism are the ultimate evil, insofar as they only increase the attachment of beings to Samsara – after all, the higher divine worlds are distinguished in the Buddhist perspective by an even greater illusory quality than the worlds of humans, as the absence of suffering only alienates the prospect of achieving Nirvana. In Islamic civilization, the most radical representatives of manifestationist esotericism – such as al-Hallaj, Suhrawardi, etc. – were executed as malicious heretics.

A number of various, altogether interesting conclusions can be extracted from Sedgwick’s analysis.[4] Here we will fixate on merely one point, that of the conceptual unity of 20th century Traditionalism (Guénon, Evola, etc.) and Renaissance Platonism (Plethon, Ficino, Steuco, etc.). Both of these philosophical currents can be generalized with the notion of “Perennialism.” If we can historically trace Guénon’s philosophical inspirations back to the Renaissance, which Guénon himself harshly criticized for misunderstanding the sacred civilization of the Middle Ages, and if we can find there the first formulations of Sophia Perennis or the Prisca theologia which compose the foundation of Traditionalist philosophy, then in it becomes completely obvious that these currents came to Western Europe in the Renaissance from the much deeper past and, to a certain extent, from a different cultural context (more specifically, the Byzantine-Greek). Of course, Platonism was well known in Medieval European Scholasticism, but it had long since yielded to Averroism and Aristotelianism enshrined virtually dogmatically in the realism of Thomas Aquinas. Hermeticism had existed in the form of alchemical currents and esoteric fraternities, but in the Renaissance these tendencies surfaced in rather vivid and magistral form, such as in the forms of open Neoplatonism and philosophically-formulated Hermeticism (with numerous direct or indirect polytheistic elements), which claimed to be not merely a secret tradition parallel to the dominant Scholasticism, but a foundational, universal worldview. Renaissance Platonism and Hermeticism directly opposed Catholic Tomism and formulated the agenda of Renaissance Humanism. This humanism was magical and sacred: man was understood to be the “perfect man”, the Platonic philosopher, the Angel-Initiator.

The spirit of of old Europe is alive in Heidegger’s work, just as much as in Evola’s work. Both represent the spirit of an age that knew – intimately, perhaps – the Nietzschean drive to its deep modernistic roots and its essence, and perhaps could be depicted in a certain sense as representing the age of the (aspiring) Overman, the active nihilist, and of the regimes that sought a new model of man – many of them Fascist, Communist or even Liberal – as opposed to the current age of the Last Man, a man who has lost the Faustian drive almost entirely and therefore succumbed to passive nihilism, and to the spirit of an age that has fully transitioned from Modernity to Post-Modernity. An age that now consequently, in our current epoch, faces complete dissolution. Evola addresses this age of dissolution just as intensively and concisely as Heidegger deconstructs the essence of Western logos and of its Metaphysics focused on unreal abstract presences, on reified essences, and on the thinking subject.

Kemi Seba is a man of his time. Speaking loudly, echoing the indignation of the proletarian layers of Africa and its diaspora. His speeches are the soundtrack of a people who can no longer be anesthetized, their resistance is like that of a young woman who has been so struck so many times that she no longer feels the blows landed on her. In the space of the former French colonies, since the death of Lumumba and Sankara, we have not seen in Africa young Africans arousing the enthusiasm of the masses and expressing the desire for total sovereignty of the people as Seba does in part in their struggle for self-determination populations of Francophone Africa.

Paganism envisions for the end times not a return to a unity lost in manifestation, but a return to primordial duality. It is no accident that Zoroastrian cyclology calls the final stage of sacred history vicharishn, literally “separation.” Only at the moment of contact between being and non-being is the pagan revealed the whole depth of his doctrine, with all the paradoxical implications. This border realized at the final point of manifestation is the point of departure for the questioning of the subject, who here can only view both metaphysical realities (both exhaustive being and incumbent non-being) as something that does not principally satisfy him, hence his turn to the source which might be beyond both being and non-being. On the pragmatic level, eschatologism is an essential feature of metaphysically fully-fledged paganism, since the true immanentism of authentic tradition cannot and should not be a doctrine of absoluteness and the non-transcendence of “this world”, which would render it an anti-tradition and anti-nomist materialism. For the subject of pagan immanentism, being is not the final sought-after shore or “paradise.” Rather, it is a symbol of the fact that non-being itself is not this “paradise.”

“Let them call you racists. Let them call you xenophobes. Let them call you nativists”. In other words, Bannon's call for European patriots is not to be intimidated by the pernicious accusations of corporate media. Well, denigration and demonization of the opponents of international mafia like Soros network continues. And this is a sure sign that European populists are on the right track. This shows that Dugin and his followers everywhere are not just right, but also successful. 

 I agree with Brandon W. Hawk in the essence. I love the Middle Ages and I hate Modernity. For me, the Enlightenment is totally wrong, and Modern science and the broader Modern “scientific” world vision is based on a lie. I believe in God, Angels and the Holy Spirit, not in Descartes, F. Bacon, or Einstein. I think Plato and Aristotle were absolutely right and their atomist detractors absolutely wrong. I am sure that the Church Fathers are bearers of absolute truth and that Modern philosophy is the radiation of the mind of the fallen Angel – Satan. I am sure that the Apocalypse is near, and I regard liberalism and globalization as clear signs of the approaching Antichrist and End Times. I am a Traditionalist and follower of the Russian Slavophiles, of Dostoevsky, of Soloviev, of various Russian religious philosophers and monarchists. I appreciate very much the ideas of René Guénon and Julius Evola. I am absolutely in favor of Antiquity and the Middle Ages and absolutely against Modernity in all its forms. So I have an anti-Modern and anti-Western (when the Modernity and the West mean the same) worldview, and I see Modernity as the catastrophe and decline of the West. Philosophically, I agree with Heidegger that Modernity is based on the Oblivion of Being, and I call on thinking people to awaken to the new discovery of Being. I regard Artificial Intelligence as the final personification of das Man (or Gestell) and I consider it to be the Antichrist, or one of his heads.

Bannon’s return should raise concerns. It became clear during his time in the Trump campaign and then the administration that the former head of Breitbart was a key player in the mainstreaming of the alt-right in the United States. But Bannon’s reemergence is tied to the global spread of the far right in the United States and Europe. And Bannon is using a racist version of the history of the Middle Ages to justify and legitimize his vision for nationalist imperialism.