The Clashing Dance – Dugin-Fukuyama-Krastev's Meeting

http://4wplatform.wix.com/texts#!the-clashing-dance/c1jyk

Steve Paikin from TVO—anchor of Canadian educational media from Ontario, the same interviewing Michael Millerman last December—invites Russian philosopher Alexandr Dugin, North-American political scientist Francis Fukuyama and the chairman of the Center for Liberal Strategies (Sofia), Bulgarian Ivan Krastev, to discuss their views on a number of themes in the political field.

The Characters

Steve Paikin is the TVO's anchor—not very intelligent, but smart enough to do two important things: throw the ball to Fukuyama any time needed; invite a person to play the role he couldn't as a host, but needs as a liberalism's employee: Krastev, the discreditor. 

Fukuyama appears as an old-fashioned liberal: operating through physical and metaphysical lies, carrying on his liberal credo and liberal ways, for Paikin's great undisguised contentment. He is certainly an habitué at the show and feels comfortable, and also somewhat worn-out. What is he doing there? Selling his book, pleasing his employers, fooling people with some refined technique—the usual. 

Krastev, on the other hand, is a contemporary-to-post-modern liberal, proceeding via virtual truths, that is, truths that do not convey humaneness. He is, then, more prepared to the dividualistic aspects of the next epoch (Post-Modernity), offering his blessings in a talk that will end up feeling like, "Why trust the institutions that have failed us? In our days, your are free to create/recreate the shape of your relationships, the way you work, your sex; therefore, it is only natural that  you also choose your politics, a politics that fits you with precision! Just wait ten minutes, I'm preparing an app that will help you doing that." 

The app doesn't come, not because his masters cannot forge it, but because his duty is to generate a topos of mistrust, an epistemic vacuum, an epistemic hopelessness. And he is good at it.

Alexandr Dugin is patiently and ethonosociologically playing the role of the Other, that which liberalism cannot stand at all. He explains that other peoples might want, and do want, destinies sewed by themselves and that the right of non-interference is something worthy fighting for, amongst other values that do not figure in the liberal handbook, but are very understandable in a great number of civilizations. He also weaves a very avangardistic, but difficult to grasp, bridge between past and future, between tradition and a Light Post-Modernity drawn by each people without West intrusion. He explains how suffering, for example, is seen as a natural part of Russians' life. He is asking for trouble.

The Main Tenets

Fukuyama's main tenets

• never getting to the core of things – "We [USA] are not good at democratizing countries". But then again, who in the world asked you to do that "for us"? This question has to be answered honestly—as a matter of fact, it is Paikin not asking this that proves the show to be sold in advance;

• replacing truth for political correctness – "Liberal democracies don't fight each other". The idea is mischievous at least for three reasons:

• • the problem with this assumption relies not only in the accuracy of the claim itself (there has been wars between democracies), but also in the fact that its credo is precisely what leads to war against other kinds of regime, who are considered intrinsically a crime punishable by war; therefore, the claim recognizes its prejudicial vision of the Other as a phenomenon and legitimizes the necessity of their killing;

• • war, then, assumes a variety of functions that, above all, weakens the value of life, which liberalism pretends to defend, precisely, at all costs; war is a closed-system business with the participation of several thirdparties, fitting the interests of very specific groups and, for those extremely important reasons, it does not have to follow any international rule, including the "gentlmen's agreement" stated above;

  • even before war, though, we need to take into consideration other forms of constraint, such as economy, violence, corruption, sponsored dictatorships, narcobusiness, pharmacopsychology, replacement of culture for subcultures, and so on, all of them pretty much "correct" in the discoursive layer;

• as long as principles sound politically correct or have reached the level of blind comformity, the means to them and the consequences don't count, ceasing to exist in the liberal epistemic discourse – "There is a moral obligation to support people who want to be self-determining." Yes, just like in Iraq, bringing democracy through the bloodshed of  the people they are supposed to save from non-democracy.

Krastev's main tenets

• agreeing and disagreeing in the same sentence to conceal his real views and yet keep himself working for his master, accomplishing his assignment: discredit, confuse and, most of all, leave no room for a personal conclusion from the part of the viewer. Krastev goes like: I don't know, I don't see, I don't believe. He sounds like a man in the middle path, but he is really very well seated in the chair of his Center for Liberal Strategies;

• there is no possible trust. What went right is ultimately what is going wrong. Work things out yourself. Or, in the bottomline, create an NGO and get some research money from liberals, that is the best we can do;

• and, of course, support the European Union at all costs (this is not said there, but almost everywhere else in his work).

Dugin's main tenets

• he represents the total Other: everything that was before virtua, everything that must exist after. Dugin must go on—we are the true majority, but we have very few prophets to fight in the velocity arenas. Moreover, to wrestle with virtuality. Truth to be told, only non-liberals could grasp his message. However, we are many and what we mostly need now is representation.

The moral: let's translate more of his works, train more people to be in the forefront and let's unite for our freedom. 

The Final Meaning

Both Fukuyama and Krastev always bring subjects to an institutional frame, never reaching the role of spirituality, collectivity, family as entities other than that which institutions are ready to answer for. For instance, the Church is there to attend religious "moments"; as voting or political participation substitutes collectivity and family is really under attack. The person is not viewed as a whole, and this non-anthropology or post-anthropology is as important to their concelead ideology as our holistic anthropology is central to the Fourth Political Theory. 

This comes out very clearly when Fukuyama says, "I don't think culture overrides human characteristics that transcends culture—that is political institutions role, to account for human culture," or with Krastev repeating, "Cultures change." The result of this thinking is that identities can be replaced by any ideological construct. This is precisely the reason why a liberal understands culture as a set of institutions instead of the dynamic expression of one's identity.

But, as said before, Fukuyama (or fukuyamism) no longer represents a danger to the realm of instances such as the Fourth Political Theory, Eurasianism and Multipolarity. That rhetoric lacks post-modernness, it is still full of a blind belief in the wonders of the liberal world even if Fukuyama calls his book "Political Order and Political Decay". There is still a taste of human hope there, and this must stay in the past. This is another era when people are being prepared for a deep delve into nihilism. They need a discourse in that direction. They need to be disconnected from the inside, disrupted, fragmented. A virtual existence will work as a refuge for the lies that politics, a shallow religiosity and easy entertainment creates for them. Krastev is their perfect match.

So, ultimately we got the following table:

• Fukuyama: stands for liberalism (liberal democracy, individual freedom from, individualism, relativity, free-market, Unipolarity, imperialism, politcal correctness);

• Krastev: stands for post-liberalism (post-humanity, dividuum and dividualism, North-American/NATO hegemony disguised as globalization, vacuum of values, virtuality);

• Dugin: stands for the Fourth Political Theory (Tradition, Eternity, Light Post-Modernity, Multipolarity, Eurasianism, Family, the Sacred).

Our Future Tasks

We need to reshape the way we transmit information and our central ideas through media. We cannot emulate the liberal way, it does not work for us—way too hollow, and we are creatures of the depth, of the amplitude and of the height. Whole is the name of our identity, with several different hows. Our main task is the deconstruction of liberalism.