Alexander Dugin

Author: Alexander Dugin

Translator: Jafe Arnold

Chapter 8 of Mysteries of Eurasia (Moscow, Artktogeya: 1991) 

Our study of the sacred-geographical layout of Russia and in a broader sense Eurasia has led us to the necessity of considering the purely religious aspect of “Russian uniqueness”, i.e., the aspect directly connected to the Orthodox Church in which one of the most important elements of the identity of “Continent Russia” is concentrated. The vastness of such a topic compels us to choose but a single layer of the problem and determine an angle that will form the basis of our study. We believe that the most essential and most interesting perspective would be a consideration of the specificity of Russian Orthodoxy in the context of René Guénon’s works. In order to accomplish this or, more precisely, in order to lay the groundwork for such an approach which would offer unlimited possibilities for a deep and unexpected understanding of Russian Orthodoxy, we must first briefly outline Guénon’s most important propositions in regards to exotericism, esotericism, initiation, and counter-initiation. Basing ourselves on these provisions, we can then better and more clearly grasp the secret of Russia and the meaning of its historical mission.

Religion and Initiation according to Guénon

According to Guénon, Tradition (the entirety of sacred knowledge dating back to the primordial and inhuman divine source) has, in the final period of our cycle – the Kali Yuga, which has already been counting down for several millennia – been divided into two parts: exotericism and esotericism. Exotericism can manifest itself in the form of religion (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) or in a non-religious form (Hinduism, Confucianism, Buddhism, etc.) and represents the socio-psychological, ordering aspect of Tradition, i.e., the face of Tradition oriented exclusively outwards toward people and made available to all members of traditional society without exception. Esotericism, for its part, is the purely spiritual sphere. On this level, Tradition appeals to the “elite” and the “chosen” who have been called to go deep into sacred doctrines and myths. Esotericism is the underside of Tradition, while exotericism remains the outer side.

Religious society conventionally has two types of rituals intended for the initiation of the neophyte into the bosom of the Sacred. The first is acceptance into an exoteric organization (“conversion”) and the second is initiation, this time into an esoteric organization. Initiation is the foundation of esotericism, and in certain cases it can be constructed not only as a ritual, but also a complex of associated esoteric and symbolic doctrines, or even as a manifestation of concrete spiritual influences exceeding the scope of the outer, exoteric tradition. According to Guénon, the existence of precisely such a dual structure in traditional society is a necessary condition for any society to be considered normal and fully-fledged.

The uniqueness of Christianity

Such a schematic presentation, however, requires special explanation in regards to the Christian religion. Guénon believed that the Christian tradition, unlike Judaism and Islam, was originally incomplete, possessing only an esoteric and initiatic level. As evidence of this is cited the absence of any consideration in the New Testament of any legal or social dimension, which constitutes the essence of any exotericism. Only in later eras did Christianity “descend” to the exoteric level in adopting the socio-religious basis of a revised code of Roman law. This original and essential esotericism of the Christian tradition should be borne in mind in order to understand further considerations.

The Shiite problem through the lens of Henry Corbin

The image of Tradition as divided into internal and external spheres is particularly inapplicable in the special case of Shiism in the Islamic tradition. The most authoritative Western scholar of Islam, Henry Corbin, pointed out this very interesting feature of Iranian Islam, which is by and large Shiite. On the one hand, Shiite Islam is replete with numerous explicit references to esotericism and the foundation of Shiite doctrine rests on the recognition of the central place of the “light of the Imamate” and the sacred mission of Ali, the first of the imams whose figure corresponds to the deeply esoteric level of the Muslim religion. On the other hand, “Sufi” initiatic organizations are least widespread of all in Shiism. Corbin asserts that Shiite Sufism is a rare encounter and, thus, Shiite Islam does not comply with the norm of the strict division of tradition into external and internal planes as is the case in Sunni Islam. Guénon himself, however, recognized that Iranian Islam was a special phenomenon, and he associated its lack of bans on the depiction of humans or animals in sacred art (such bans are strictly observed in Sunni Islam) with the specific Aryan origin of the Iranians who, in comparison to Semites, are much less inclined toward idolatry.

In Shiism, and particularly in Iranian Shiism, we are thus dealing with an esoteric tradition more open and less formalized or institutionalized than at-Tasawwuf and Sufism. In the case of extreme Shiism (“Islamism”), this is totally evident given the virtual absence of any exotericism at all. It should also be noted that the Iranians occupy the more “eastern” geographical and intellectual regions of the Islamic Umma, or in more general terms the Caliphate (let us recall the “Oriental Theosophy” of Suhrawardi).

Orthodoxy and the East

Taking the above-mentioned into account, an analogy can be suggested between Catholicism and Sunnism on the one hand and Orthodoxy and Shiism on the other. Firstly, unlike in Catholicism, it is practically impossible to record any special esoteric organizations in the history of the Eastern Church, whether hermetic orders, companionships, or gnostic brotherhoods. Despite their absence, however, the esoteric underpinnings of Orthodoxy can be clearly traced and are evident in the sacred architecture of churches, initiatic iconography, and a widespread apophatic theology (which was practically erased by exoteric Catholicism with the introduction of the dogma of the Filioque [1]), as well as in the monastic contemplative practices in Hesychasm, the Old Believers, and the traditions of the Holy Fools, etc.

Secondly, Orthodoxy never evolved into a purely social religion, but remained above this level. The Orthodox Patriarch, unlike the Pope, is first and foremost the spiritual center of the Church, who does not directly influence public and political life. The social role of the Roman Pope was indeed the subject of severe criticism of Catholicism expressed by the Orthodox. It can be said that this “descent” of Christianity into society in the West never happened in the East. In some sense, the “Ghibelline archetype” was realized in Russia with the Sacred Emperor as the center of the state and the Patriarch fulfilling strictly sacred functions.[2] 

Thirdly, this “Ghibelline archetype” mentioned above was embodied in the sacred attitude towards the Russian Tsars. It was the Tsar who was the sacred center of the Russian imperial ecumene in whose figure were concentrated all of the immanent religious energies of the [empire’s] peoples. Unlike Catholic eschatology, in which the “anti-Pope” and the usurpation of the throne of St. Peter are discussed in an apocalyptic sense, Orthodox prophecies never mentioned an “anti-Patriarch.” Instead, all negative, counter-sacred forces are gathered in the singular personage of the “anti-Tsar,” the “Antichrist-Emperor.” In principle, this “Ghibelline” aspect is typologically close to the Shiite understanding of the sacred nature of Authority, as Shiite doctrine (unlike Sunni) insists on the rule of only the Aliites, the sacred descendants of the first of the Imams. The Shiites believe that no-one outside of this line has any “sacred” or “initiatic” right to rule.

Fourthly, the eastern geographical location of Russian Orthodoxy logically puts it in close proximity to the lines of the eastern fathers, i.e., the saintly fathers from Greece, Anatolia, Syria, Lebanon, Cappadocia, etc.

Fifthly, the tradition of “Hesychasm”, or “light gnosis” from the first anchorites and the Athos monastery was not the product of some kind of formal organization within the framework of Russian Orthodoxy. Hesychasm literally permeates the Orthodox tradition all the way to the point of its external aspects. Of course, the division between internal and external aspects remained, but there have never existed any structural differences between the Hesychasts and Old Believers on the one hand, and the clergy and believers on the other. This differs from the strict organization of initiatic orders in Catholicism, where this border is clearly marked.

Sixthly and finally, the esoteric specificity of Orthodoxy has been preserved in Church ritual itself and particularly in the presence of iconostasis which separates the altar of the Sacrament from the laity. Catholic ritual involves the openness of the altar, its accessibility to viewing by all the laity at any time during service and outside of it. [3] Thus, the sacrament of the altar is genuinely exoteric and “descends” to the outer level. In Orthodoxy, however, the gates of Iconostasis – the Royal Gates – are open only for a short period during the key moments of the liturgy (the exception being on certain holidays). This symbolizes the unique revelation of the apophatic, unknowable Principle on the other side of the cataphatic vision of the sacred world which in a normal state is presented only by symbols – the images of iconostasis, the Deesis near, etc., as if they replace the altar. This unique feature of Orthodox ritual is connected to the historical absence of a developed “scholastic” and rational theological tradition in Russia, as theology itself in the Orthodox Church relates to the initiatic and super-rational level, whereas the openness of the altar in the Catholic Church relates the sacrament to the sphere of the rational and dogmatic. When the Catholic believer is in search of initiation, he must to appeal to special non-church authorities (esoteric societies, brotherhoods, associations, etc.), but the Orthodox can attain such as desired in the liturgy itself and enter into the most profound transcendent dimension without the aid of other sacred institutions.

Thus, it should be grasped that the Orthodox Church, similarly to the Shiite trend in Islam, is not subject to the strict division into exoteric and esoteric levels, this being true at least on the level of its archetypal organization of the sacred system. However, this does not mean that all of Orthodoxy is esoteric or that all the Orthodox are esotericists. Without a doubt, the division of “internal” and “external” planes is maintained in Orthodoxy as it is everywhere else, depending on the personal qualities and “spiritual caste” of this or that human being. However, in our case, this division is not formalized, and the degree of initiatic quality depends exclusively on the internal nature of the believer and his efforts to realize his given spiritual possibilities.

Of course, the degree of spiritual realization strictly corresponding to the general structure of the initiatic sphere is preserved in Orthodoxy, but its character is more flexible and less structured than it is in closed esoteric organizations.

The question of “virtual initiation”

Speaking of initiation, Guénon distinguished between “virtual initiation” and “effective” or “realized” initiation. From his point of view, the Christian religion, since becoming “exoteric,” cannot offer any sort of “initiation.” In Catholic ritual and in the Catholic sacrament, purely spiritual energies of the same nature as in initiatic rituals are also in action, but they are not oriented towards perfect interiorization and, consequently, affect only the outer side of the individual structure of believers. “Salvation” is guaranteed, but the path to higher, super-individual levels of existence is not opened as happens in purely esoteric mysteries.

An initiation received by means of esotericism might remain a forever “virtual,” untapped possibility if there is a lack of knowledge of the secrets of the “initiatic work,” the “Great Work,” or if the “initiated” prefers to use the “wealth” attained for goals opposite to the great goal of spiritual exaltation and the realization of purely heavenly, spiritual states.

Orthodox Initiation

Building on the particularities of the Orthodox Tradition and basing ourself on the typological parallel with the Shiite tradition, an extremely important conclusion can be drawn: Orthodoxy is an operative instrument for transferring “virtual initiation.” Thus, Orthodox ritual itself, unlike Catholic ritual, preserves an initiatic character peculiar to original Christianity.

On the symbolic level, the Church of St. Andrew the First-Called – the Orthodox Church – never fully separated itself from the esoteric Church of St. John, as happened in the case of the Church of St. Peter.

In addition, the Medieval legend of “the Kingdom of Prester John” located somewhere in the East, can be symbolically related not only to the main sacred center of the Primordial Tradition, but also by analogy to Russia itself where, in fact, “John” (Ivan, Ioan) has always been the most widespread name.

This particularity and uniqueness of Russian Orthodoxy has its doctrinal reflection in the Orthodox “Formula of Faith,” in which the rejection of the Catholic innovation of the “Filioque” – i.e., the assertion that the Holy Spirit comes not only from the Father, the First Entity of the Trinity, but also from the Son, the Second Entity – bears the character of a rejection of “mediating” entities between the sacred, spiritual Cosmos (the “Holy Spirit”) and the Genesis. In other words, it rejects exotericism as a mediating force between the believer and initiation. The omnipresence of the Holy Spirit and its direct link to the Father, along with the apophatic hypostasis of the Trinity, means a direct totality of the “Spiritual Light” accessible to the Orthodox which permeates Being in every sense and opens the initiatic “dispensation” in Orthodox life. This Orthodox principle of “divine housebuilding” which is central to the entire Eastern Church and its practices, precisely corresponds to the “church-building” line of Western Christian initiation pronounced in the sphere of special non-church organizations of the initiatic type later concentrated in “Christian Masonry” and “companionships”.[4]

Such an initiatic phenomenon in Orthodoxy and especially the absence of the Filioque explain the fact that, unlike Catholic esotericism, in Orthodoxy there are no traces to be found of “hermeticism” as a separate and independent discipline. As a sacred cosmology, “hermeticism” actually focuses on the consecration of the Sacred Cosmos – the realm of the Holy Spirit – as the direct product of the Father, i.e., in the forthright “God-likeness” of the Cosmos, the “theophany” of the Cosmos free from the passage of the “censorship of Logos.” If in full-fledged theology the Logos-Son is naturally shifted onto the supra-individual level that is transcendental in relation to the human mind, then in terms of the degeneration of theological consciousness this hypostasis of the Holy Trinity is in danger of being identified with the human mind, which is precisely what happened in Catholic theology beginning with the exclusion of the apophatic approach. This reaches its conclusion with “rationalism” and “humanism” of a semi-profane character. Orthodox doctrine, by virtue of its natural, “informal Hermeticism”, did not undergo a similar transformation and has preserved its initiatic, super-individual and super-rational nature.

Here it should be noted that there is a second, equally troubling aspect of the arrangement under examination. Being common to the entire people without strict division into “elite” and “common” forms of spirituality, the Russian Orthodox Church is also faced with the risk of offering mere “virtual initiation,” albeit of a different type than that in the Catholic tradition. In the majority of cases, the “virtual initiation” afforded by Orthodoxy to all Christians can fail to be taken to its logical conclusion in the form of a positive and final goal which, on the one hand, is totally understandable taking into account the necessary difference between the inner nature of people and the overall exclusivity of a fully-fledged initiatic path (there are many “called”, but very few “chosen”). On the other hand, however, this orientation towards the “super-personal” or “beyond-personal” aspects of apophatic Orthodox theology serves almost exclusively the discursive and rational forms of initiatic doctrines, sometimes extremely important at the preparatory stage. Thus, the realization of “virtual initiation” gradually becomes more and more problematic.

Of course, the chosen, the saints, the elders, and the monks, or any simply exceptional personalities, can indeed reach the end of this path, but the majority are compelled to limit themselves to mere “virtual initiation.” Such a stipulation especially explains the phenomenon of the widespread tradition of “holy fools” in Rus, i.e., those people who have acquired the opportunity of spiritual contemplation, but are incapable of harmoniously combining it with the normal functioning of the individual, rational level of their personality. On the other hand, “holy foolishness”, as a phenomenon of Russian spirituality, is a particularly telling aspect of Russian Orthodoxy which once again confirms the Eastern Church’s initiatic nature (after all, without any special “initiation,” no holy fools would have existed). The difficulty associated with the complete realization of “virtual initiation”, however, is thus quite clear.

The dark mystery of Cosmism

When René Guénon spoke of “counter-initiatic” organizations of the West, he of course did not put quotation marks around the issue, as the very nature of this topic demands certain precautions. After all, if one summates all of what Guénon said on this question (including in the form of innuendos and assumptions), the following picture unfolds: in the past centuries, “counter-initiation” has manifested itself all the more clearly in the degraded initiatic organization of the “hermetic type” in the West. This can refer to the “offshoots of Masonry” as well as neo-Rosicrucianist or neo-alchemical organizations. These groups, which inherited the secrets and rituals of “virtual initiation”, gave rise to a whole range of pseudo-initiatic occult and theosophist societies in the 19th century which later formed the basis of what has come to be  called “neo-spiritualism” (Guénon ranked magnetism, spiritism, the Theosophism of Madame Blavatsky and Besant, the occultism of Papus, the Anthroposophy of Steiner, and all the extensions and variations of such neo-mysticist and pseudo-esoteric trends as “neo-spiritualisms.” Today the majority of such neo-spiritualist organizations are united under the sign of the syncretic New Age movement. Neo-spiritualism itself is not directly “counter-initiatic”, but is an instrument aimed at the destruction of the remnants of the true Tradition in the West under the guise of a “return to spirituality”, which in turn leads the profane into the abyss of dissolution in psychic chaos. In turn, “counter-initiation” belongs to a much deeper level of reality, being associated with what has been called the “Devil’s Mission.”

René Guénon considered the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor [5] to be one of the most dangerous counter-initiatic organizations. The line is drawn from this to all the more massive neo-spiritualist tendencies, including even those sometimes opposed to its teachings, such as Theosophism, occultism, perverted neo-Hinduism (“Auroville,” Sri Aurobindo Ghosh) and others. It is extremely telling that the doctrine of the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor was called “the Cosmic Philosophy,” “the Cosmic Doctrine”, or sometimes “Cosmism.” The essence of the “Cosmism” of the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor consists of contact with the “cosmos” or “cosmic consciousness”, which means the attainment of the “light nature” of the Cosmos (the “light” theme is embodied in the very name of the order, Luxor, the Egyptian city whose name is similar to the Latin word Lux or “light” and the name Lucifer, or “light-bringer”). The “Cosmic Doctrine” concentrates all attention on the “psychic” or “subtle” plane, practically identifying the “spiritual” and the “super-psychic” with that of the “soul” or “mental” element. [6] This is not a special form of philosophically abstract “pantheism”, but a “magical,” “concrete”, “operative” and “aggressive” one. Besides actually ignoring the transcendental aspects of the Spirit, the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor’s Comism also threatened transferring many “initiatic” sacred and spiritual symbols and rituals to the “mental” and material level, which entails a “parodying” of true initiation, and its grotesque and dangerous imitation. The members of the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor, possessing indisputable paranormal capabilities, were not only the first to formulate the foundations of “neo-spiritualist” theories, but also, through provoking mysterious phenomena, achieved their speedy introduction into the most diverse cultural and scholarly environments. Historically, the roots of this secret society date back to several German Masonic lodges of the 18th century in which the members of the highest degree practiced “operative magic.” Roots can also be traced back to the unconventional Masonry of the Egyptian Rite (the Memphis-Mizraim) and the “sexual magic” groups of Randolph which displayed considerable “Satanic characteristics.” In fact, the Cosmism of the counter-initiatic Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor was later inherited by openly Satanic centers such as the Order of the Templars of the Orient (O.T.O.) of Kellner and Aleister Crowley, who called himself the “Beast of 666.”

If we turn to Russia in the second half the 19th century, we discover a quite striking phenomenon which was called “Russian Cosmism”, whose most famous representative was Nikolay Fedorovich Fedorov, the author of the famous work The Philosophy of the Common Cause. In Fedorov’s biography there is no mention of any contact with “counter-initiatic” organizations, but his works remain a compendium of counter-initiatic doctrines that almost exactly match those of the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor. Fedorov even maintained the theory of “artificially resurrecting the dead” which Tradition considers to be an outspoken sign of the “Kingdom of the Antichrist.” In addition, Fedorov’s ideas to a certain extent formed the paradigm for the transfer of spiritual, symbolic, and religious doctrines to the psychic-materialist level. Among these we find the theories of “the management of atmospheric phenomena,” the “conversion of churches into museums,” and, finally, the “project for establishing a universal and indivisible human brotherhood to include all the ‘resurrected love of the ancestors’ and become the crown of history.” Fedorov’s moral utopianism and pantheistic messianism inspired a number of Russian philosophers, scholars, writers, and theoreticians and, what’s more, his “Cosmism” was extremely popular in Bolshevik circles, who identified the “brotherhood of the risen and resurrected” (sic!) with communism. In some sense, the ideas of Fedorov reflected the exalted revolutionary messianism of the era.

However, Fedorovist Cosmism in fact possesses a purely Orthodox Christian form which was not the only (although perhaps the most striking) manifestation of counter-initiatic Cosmism in Russia. In a broader sense, Russian Cosmism can be called a clearly formulated tendency of Orthodox “virtual initiation” which (if we recall its universal nature ensured by the mere fact of confessional belonging) was realized not by means of positive ascent from the mental world to the purely spiritual, heavenly, super-individual one, but by means of “fusing” with the intermediately psychic world, that is, the “thin Cosmos.” This Cosmisist specificity of “natural” Russian “counter-initiation” negatively reflected the issue of the Filioque, for if the path from the spiritual universe, from the Cosmos of the Holy Spirit to the apophatic Principle of the Father itself is not completed, then no mere “rational” or “formalized” structures can hold back individual beings from “fusing” with the subtle plane and immersing in the Chaos and excitement of what Tradition calls the “Lower Waters.” Russian Cosmism is thus the ultimate form of degradation of the “Orthodox Holy Fooldom”, a demonic form of this foolishness in which the “Holy Fools of Christ” become the “Holy Fools of the Antichrist.” It is this character of Cosmism which sharply distinguishes practically all of Russian philosophy, science, and culture from European profanity, as “Cosmisist” consciousness is drawn specifically to the non-rational, paradoxical, and powerful node of “subtle” energy which breaks through the structure of logical constructions.

If in Russia in the 20th century the most heinous persecution of the Church was indeed carried out under the communist regime, then we should see in this the “natural counter-initiation” of the Orthodox nation deprived of its vertical, holy perspective which, for lack of rational, “logos-related” boundaries, lapsed into the extreme forms of demonic, aggressive, and anarchic Cosmisist “foolishness”, and above all the “foolishness of the Antichrist.”

Conclusion

The unique features of the Russian Church and its specificity which we have broken down might help understand the bizarre and strange world of the Russian conscience, which is similar neither to Western nor to Eastern forms. In his book East and West, Guénon identified the Russians as a “people which imitates” the archetypes inherent to the “truly Eastern” peoples. In another place, he noted how “occultist” and “spiritualist” practices are widespread in Russia, something which he saw as evidence of Russians’ special propensity for “psychism.” Finally, he put forth the quite mysterious statement that “Russian communism” is most likely something other than what it is commonly believed to be. Despite their criticality, these assessments indeed very fairly describe this Orthodox people, whose true spiritual elite, albeit too small and too weak, pushed “virtual initiation” to the point of universality, while at the lowest levels it is as if the masses imitated the possession of the true spiritual mystery of the East.

Perhaps the Russian idea of sobornost (“catholicity”) and “universality” (such as that of the Slavophiles) and later the communists and socialists’ idea of “universal equality” were in fact the expressions of a vague consciousness of the “general initiation” of the nation, its “universal brotherhood” (indeed, members of esoteric organizations call each other “brothers” as do “lodges,” “orders”, and monastic communities). It also cannot be excluded that the Bolshevik Revolution was an explosion of part of this justified conviction of “universal initiation” seeking to cancel the “exoteric” hierarchy, the “master system,” as something unnecessary and vicious imposed by the “alien West,” the “Grand Inquisitor” of Dostoevsky, and as a social Filioque which remained a barrier between the people and the “light Cosmos of the Holy Spirit.” But properly speaking, these same tendencies, only on a closed, conspiratorial level, also enlivened the majority of “counter-initiatic” organizations which were not only anti-Catholic but also foreign to the “socialist” and “communist” pathos. For example, Theodor Reuss, who initiated Aleister Crowley, the Beast of 666, into esotericism, was a known anarchist and socialist. However, in no other country or region of the Earth have such counter-initiatic, thoroughly Cosmisist, and mystical-communist trends manifested themselves to such an extent as in Russia, which for more than 70 years became the epitome of the “Red Woman” of the Apocalypse, the Whore of Babylon.

But even long before this period, in the dark political mysticism and plotting of the Time of Troubles (coupled with the succession of the Impostors), in the grandiose stagings of the Apocalypse by the sinister Emperor Peter I [7], in the grotesque parody of the Russian Enlightenment of the time of Catherine and, finally, in the disturbing and psychedelic literature (Gogol, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Sologub) and philosophy (Khomyakov, Solovyov, Rozanov, etc.) of Russia, the sprouts of “the red Cosmos sowed by the virtual initiation of Russian Orthodoxy” matured and produced flowers that pointed not upwards towards the sun of Russian Holiness, the spiritual sun of Sergey Radonezhsky, Nil Sorsky, and Seraphim Sarovsky, but downwards.

The current state of Russia cannot be defined in purely economic or political terms. The seeds of “virtual initiation” (it should not be forgotten that even under the communist dictatorship the majority of Russians baptized their children!) are too significant and active to expect any kind of transformation of Russia into a purely secular, capitalist, or profane state of the “Western” model. The roots of the “Russian phenomenon” are too deep and tragic to count on such an outcome. The Russian soul and, more precisely, the complexity of those “Russians virtually initiated” who form the mystical body of the “Inner Church” cannot abandon their “initiatic” and crucial function. Either there will be a catastrophe even more frightening and profound than under communism or, contrary to all external circumstances, a “spiritual elite” will appear which will halt the rapid decline into the abyss, “instantly” casting the “Nation of the Red Beast” into the Spiritual Heavens of the Holy Trinity much like Christ himself, freeing Old Adam from the snares of hell. If the possibility of salvation still exists for our “counter-initiatic” civilization, then does “initiatic” Orthodox Russia not remain the best place for ascension?

[1] See “Ver la Tradition”; Nicolas Vardikhas “Est et Oest” N. 43 (1991). The Filioque is the dogma concerning the Holy Spirit’s coming not only from the Father, but also the Son (Filio) which was introduced at the insistence of Charlemagne.

[2] Guénon considered such a relationship between “spiritual authority” and “temporal/secular authority” to be the only normal form, since it strictly adheres to the hierarchical structure of reality as a whole. It is important to note that “temporal power”, or the “authority of emperors and kings” is not considered to be something profane in Tradition. On the contrary, imperial sacrality is practically identified with the exoteric side of Tradition. Hence why Guénon, in his “Christianity and Initiation”, quotes Christ saying “Render unto Caesar.” This can be seen as a recognition and “sanctification” of imperial sacrality. The desire of representatives of “spiritual sovereignty”, i.e., the Church, to interfere in administrative and political issues (which is characteristic of Catholicism) is a sign of the degeneration of the spiritual nature of this form of government, and an attempt to restore the dignity of the imperial function which thus appears not as a phenomenon of usurpation by the Kshatriyas (warriors; the second caste) of the first caste (“priests”), but rather the legitimate defense of certain sacred rights. This observation helps to explain why Guénon himself, being a radical opponent of the “revolution of the Kshatriya” and an unequivocal supporter of the superiority of the “Brahmins” (the first caste) over the Kshatriyas (as opposed to Julius Evola), so sympathetically treated the Ghibelline tradition and in particular the great Ghibelline poet Dante Alighieri.

[3] It is important to note that the appearance of Iconostasis in the Ancient Church chronologically coincides with the transition from esotericism to exotericism. If parallel to the actual “exotericization” of the Western Church the altar, as the “super-heavenly” (iperuranios) element of the Church became visually and spatially open, then the preservation of the altar in the Eastern Church meant its “refrain” from complete “exotericization” by keeping the esoteric element in the center of the church itself, not outside of it as in the case of Catholicism. Indeed, the “super-heavenly,” “hyper-Uranian” relevant cannot be exhibited for public meditation without changing the very quality of spiritual influences “theurgically” associated with this space. But if the alter is kept a mystery behind the forbidden (for the exoteric) wall of iconostasis which both “unveils” the essence of the sacrament of the alter through the holy presence of icons of the Diesis type as well as “hides”such from unqualified view, thus allowing for a delicate balance to be maintained between esotericism and exotericism even without strict formalization. This in fact is the meaning etymologically contained in the term revelare which means both “to hide” and “to open.” A similar idea is inherent in the Latin word coelus or “sky”, which comes from the root meaning of “cover” or “cover over” thus connoting both “hidden” and “open.” It is also important to note the symbolism of the division of the Orthodox church into three parts: the altar, or “super-heavenly component,” the church itself, or the “heavenly component,” and the vestibule, or “terrestrial component.” Simeon of Thessolonica compared these three parts to the Holy Trinity, the three triads of Angelic orders, and the three categories of the Orthodox people – the priests, the “totally faithful” and the “leaning and converts.” Passing through these three stages of the Orthodox hierarchy typologically (or virtually) corresponds to the three phases of initiation: the “work of black,” “work of white,” and “work of red.” It is possible, however, that during the transfer of the initiatic rituals of Orthodoxy to the masses of people, special shifts are undergone in the preparatory, first phase of “proclamation” and “repentance”, as the baptized infant obviously cannot repent or become a convert, i.e., accept the theoretical aspects of the doctrine. The “work of black” is transferred to the post-baptism stage of a person’s spiritual realization, and the responsibility of “repentance and conversion” is taken over by godfathers and godmothers who act as a kind of “collateral” for the effective realization of the stage which is completed upon the infant’s baptism. In some cases, such a peculiarity yields an extremely negative result, since the the spiritual absence of initiatic grain received at the time of the “second birth” ritual chronologically precedes the basic intellectual entry into the teachings of the Church. Consequently, such a presence is bound to establish a special status for a person which, although raising him above the level of the profane, nevertheless makes it difficult to achieve consistent spiritual realization. Orthodoxy calls this prelest. The extremely widespread distribution of this phenomenon in Russia among parishioners demonstrates the seriousness of the cost which the Eastern Church has to bear in order to preserve its initiatic nature.

[4] Undoubtedly, in the last century Western Freemasonry has significantly altered its operative and initiatic character typical of earlier Masonry. In this case, we are dealing with the transformation of “virtual initiation” into “counter-initiation.” Only in such terms is it possible to consider the activities of all of later Masonry to be anti-Christian, anti-Church, and anti-Tradition.

[5] As we have learned from a competent representative of one Western initiatic organization, Guénon was in the possession of the most accurate information concerning the Hermetic Brotherhood, since he himself apparently joined it in his youth!

[6] In Guénon’s opinion, this confusion is the main source of diabolical substitution which is unleashed by counter-initiatic forces. In his book The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times, Guénon explains in detail the “mechanism” of this phenomenon. The Devil belongs to the subtle, psychic world, the world of the soul. Purely spiritual regions, such as the realm of the Spirit, are closed to him. In the world of the soul, during special periods in cyclical history (such as at the end of a cycle), he may occupy a “central” position, but this “centrality” is imaginary and illusory. This illusion is obvious in reference to purely spiritual reality. Thus, the creation of the illusion of the “omnipotence of the devil” is possibly only under the condition of “concealing” the actual spirit level and placing the main emphasis on the medium, spiritual world in which the efficiency of the Devil is indeed overwhelming at times. As follows, mixing the spiritual with that of the soul is not only misleading, but a dangerous and malignant trend actively and consciously introduced into life by “Satan’s agents” or “Satan’s saints” (ali ash-Shaytan).

[7] See the colorful description of the “eschatological” amusements of Peter in Merezhkovsky’s Antikhrist (Petr i Aleksei).

© Jafe Arnold – All Rights Reserved. No reproduction without expressed permission. 

Author: Alexander Dugin

Translator: Jafe Arnold

Chapter 7 of Mysteries of Eurasia (Moscow, Arktogeya: 1999)

Liberalism: A Totalitarian Ideology

What is the dominant ideology of the contemporary West and its geopolitical vanguard, the United States of America? This is an absolutely urgent question as it absolutely affects every one of us. Let us be frank: we have lost the global geopolitical conflict. We are defeated. Therefore, we have been obliged to precisely and rigidly know the answers to the following questions: who is the boss in the new planetary arrangement of forces? What are the basic features of his worldview? What does he think about the world, history, the fate of humanity, and about us? The latter question in particular is just as necessary for anyone who intends to reconcile with and humbly serve the new masters as it is for anyone who refuses to accept such a state of affairs and strives to rise up and reconquer newfound geopolitical freedom.

The belief has been instilled in us that there is no ideology in the West, that a pluralism of positions and convictions reigns there, and that everyone there is free to believe, think, speak, and do whatever they want. This is an absolute lie, a simple propagandistic ploy borrowed from the Cold War arsenal (a war against us). In fact, there is a dominant ideology in the West which is no less totalitarian or intolerant than any other ideology. Only its forms and principles are peculiar, its philosophical roots different, and its historical basis differing from those ideologies which are more familiar to us. This is the ideology of liberalism. It is based on the dogma of the “autonomous individual”, i.e., consistent individualism, “applied rationalism,” faith in technological progress, the notion of the “open society,” and the introduction of the “market” and “free trade” principle into not only the economic, but also the ideological, social, and philosophical absolute.

Liberal ideology is “right” in a narrowly economic sense and “left” in the sense of humanitarian rhetoric. Moreover, all combinations of right with left, or simply right and left by themselves, are rejected, disassembled, marginalized, and are forced into the background by liberalism. Liberalism is totalitarian in its own way. Instead of the direct, physical repression of dissidents, it resorts to tactics of soft strangulation, gradually pushing opponents into the margins of society, the economic disadvantaging of dissidents and opponents, etc. But a fact is a fact: the dominant ideology of the West (Liberalism) actively fights against alternative political and ideological projects, using merely subtler, “softer,” and more refined methods to achieve its goals than other forms of totalitarianism. This does not mean that it is any less effective. Liberal totalitarianism is veiled, ghostly, and invisible rather than openly brutal, but it is no less cruel.

The existence of a “dominant ideology” in the West is gradually becoming more clearly recognized in our society. The reality of liberalism and liberal ideology has become obvious and, consequently, we have gained greater certainty as to its existence. The supporters of the West are now necessarily distinguished by their sharing of all the specific ideological premises of liberalism (and not merely some kind of vague “democracy” under which everyone is free to understand anything vague and uncertain), and its opponents are united by a simple hostility to this ideology. Yet liberalism has one more, more hidden layer: the distinct theological and religious assumptions which ultimately led the West to the ideological model which once took root in it and has now come to prevail. This layer is not as universally and unambiguously recognized as the vulgar cliches of the “open society” and “human rights,” but, nevertheless, it is precisely this part which is the basis and secret source of the liberal ideology which rules the planet, which itself is just the tip of the iceberg.

The matter at hand is none other than Protestant eschatology.

The USA – the quintessence of the West

Today, there is no longer any doubt that the world is ruled by the only remaining, fully-fledged superpower, the United States of America. This is not only the most powerful state in the West in a military sense, but is also the product of the entire Western path of development, its peak, its maximum achievement. The USA was founded and built as an artificially constructed formation devoid of historical inertia, traditions, etc. measured by only the most radical recipes worked out over the course of Western civilization. The US is the pinnacle of Western civilization, the crown of its becoming.

The US is the sum of the West and its geopolitical, ideological, and religious vanguard. Only in the US have the principles of liberalism been so totally and consistently implemented. For quite some time, the West and liberalism have come to be authoritatively identified with the USA.

America is the hegemon of the modern world, a gigantic geopolitical, strategic, and economic empire which controls all of the most important processes on the planet not in the capacity as merely another, usual state, even a strong or developed one, but precisely as an ideological model, a path of development, and as the judge and shepherd of mankind which imposes its distinct system of ideological, philosophical, and political values. The US Empire is the empire of liberalism, the empire of capital, the empire of the post-industrial society as the highest stage of the bourgeois system’s development.

Without a doubt, the US is the direct descendent of Europe and European history, but the uniqueness of this formation consists in that the US took from Europe only the most refined and purified trajectory of its civilization in the form of liberal rationalism, the theory of the “social contract,” individualism, dynamic technological industrialism, and the absolutized notions of the “trade system.” Earlier, these tendencies were concentrated in Protestant England, and the British Empire was the first (if we do not take into account Ancient Phoenicia) purely “trade civilization” model to which all of Western history logically led. It is no accident that the major theoreticians of Liberalism were Englishmen – Adam Smith, Ricardo, etc, as were the philosophers of individualism – Locke, Hobbes, Mandeville, etc. Max Weber and the even brighter Werner Sombart have shown how Western capitalism was born out of the Protestant ethic and just how essential the ethno-religious factor is to the emergence of particular socio-economic forms.

The baton of the “trade system” was gradually passed from England to the US whose leadership, since the second half of the 20th century, has become an indisputable historical fact in the general context of Western civilization.

The USA is the epitome of the West, Western capitalism, and its center and axis, its essence. Now, from the standpoint of our experience, in which the US has become the sole boss of the entire planet, for which it had been striving for so long, we can easily recognize the logic of history as leading in focus up to a single point (which, for historical reasons, could not have been seen by those thinkers who did not live to see the dramatic turning point of the geopolitical, social, and economic Cold War confrontation).

Thus, all of Western history leads up to the United States of America.

The “West” as a geopolitical phenomenon actually emerged out of the schism of the Christian Church into Orthodoxy and Catholicism. The Catholic zone became the basis for what has since then been known as the “West” as a concept. From this point on, the people of the Catholic world identified themselves with all of humanity and identified their history with world history and their civilization with civilization in general. All remaining civilizations and traditions were contemptuously likened to “savages” and “barbarians.” It is telling that not only Christian nations but the entire Orthodox world, which in fact was the zone of real, undistorted, authentic Christianity, fell into such an “inhuman” category. In fact, the Orthodox countries – at first Byzantium and later Russia – were Christians and were the ones to challenge the Catholics’ aggressive hostility. Orthodoxy presented an example of a different Christianity, a universal, open, non-sectarian, radically alternative civilizational model which prevailed in the West prior to the time when it claimed to be the only form of Christian statehood. It follows that the seed of the dialectical development of civilization and geopolitical processes in the succeeding centuries is to be sought in Catholicism’s opposition to Orthodoxy.

The history of the West is to be accounted for only after the schism of the Church. At that time, Catholicism became the head of purely “Western” trends. After a certain period of time, however, certain elements of Catholic teachings retained from the heritage of the Orthodox unity of the Church came into contradiction with the main trajectory of the West’s development. The Reformation appeared as a fracture. At that moment, the most “Western” trends isolated themselves and became concentrated in the Protestant type. Protestantism spread precisely in those countries and among those peoples who moved in the direction dictated by the schism – estrangement from the East, arrogant contempt for “savage peoples,” the identification of themselves and their technological development with the peak of civilization, and the individualistic and rationalistic trends which were no longer satisfiable within the Catholic framework (although they, in turn, were an essential step away from the traditional and faithful spirit of the original teachings of Orthodoxy)

The Protestant countries, and first and foremost England, represented the path of “sea civilization” and gravitated to the absolutization of the liberal model and the universalization of the “trade system.” Henceforth the English began to play the role of the vanguard of the West, the “Far West.”

The most extreme and radical Protestant sects of England later formed the basis of American civilization and designed and realized the project of the United States of America. They went to the extreme West to the “promised land” to build a perfect society, the “ideal” and “absolute West.” The United States of America as a state was established by the consensus of fundamentalist Protestant sects, and the overwhelming majority of the American political class to this day remain unchanged as the representatives of these Protestant confessions. This, nevertheless, is quite logical. The country is still ruled by the legal, ideological heirs of those who created, organized, and led it to material prosperity and the rank of a planetary power.

The Americans themselves call this “Manifest Destiny.” In other words, the Americans see their history as a consistent upward path towards civilizational triumph and the victory of this philosophical model upon which American civilization is founded as the quintessence of the entire history of the West.

Protestantism as an Ideology

The following argument can be made: “Contemporary Western society, and especially American society, have already long been atheist, religion maintaining only a small number of followers. Thus, fundamentalism, such as of the Protestant type, can in no way be equated to the official ideology of the USA, much less to that of the West as a whole.”

In fact, it is necessary to point out that religion is not obliged to act as a cult or as a set of doctrines. In the contemporary world, religion manifests itself implicitly as a set of psychological predispositions, as a system of cultural and existential cues, and as a semi-conscious geopolitical intuition. Religion can even be compared to ideology – some (the minority) master the entirety of the conceptual system, while others (the majority) merely intuitively grasp the ideology. More often than not, today religion functions more through the cultural background, family psychology, and the norm of social ethics. In this regard, the US is absolutely a Protestant country, and this “Protestantism” affects not only this confession’s open believers, but also the vast masses of people of other religious beliefs and even atheists. The Protestant spirit can be easily spotted not only among Puritans, Baptists, Quakers, Mormons, etc., but also in American Krishnaism, the Moon sect, among the American Jesuits, and even in the plainly non-religious American citizen. All of them are to a certain degree affected by “Protestant ideology” even though it may be recognized as a cult and dogma only by a relative minority.

The second argument that could be made is that the political class in the US does not proportionally reflect all of society. In this view, it is sufficient to look at the negligible number of colored politicians and administrators. The traditional, “majority-type” American politician, after all, is a “WASP” – a “White Anglo-Saxon Protestant.” Consequently, a fully-fledged Protestant fundamentalism is more probable among the elites than among other layers of society.

Finally, more concretely, the US Republican Party, one of the two parties possessing a de facto political monopoly, is openly and consistently guided by a Protestant, fundamentalist worldview fully in line with the axis of American civilization and the dogmatic religious incarnation of the US’ Manifest Destiny. An intermediate layer between the generally-accepted secular liberalism of the masses and the Protestant, eschatologically fundamentalism of the political elite is filled by geopolitical centers of analysts serving the government who employ a synthetic technique in their projects in which the main religious and philosophical postulates of Protestantism are taken  minus the details and the prophetic fanaticism of their preachers and combined with the more pragmatic sides of liberal doctrine, albeit freed from the pathetic demagogy of “human rights” and “democracy.” In other words, the geopolitical thinking which is extremely developed among the US political elite is non-antagonistically combined with eschatological fundamentalism which in turn forms the idea of the “US as the New Israel called to rule peoples at the end of history” as well as the idea of free trade as the maximal rationalization of social order based on the priority of “rational egoism” and the “atomic individual.”

The Protestant messianism of American geopolitics is thus combined with the proposal of a universal market model of governance and the liberal system of cultural values.

“The Evil Empire”

For many centuries, the main geopolitical and ideological opponent of the West has been Russia.

This is entirely natural. On a theological level, this is rooted in the confrontation between Catholicism (+ Protestantism) and Orthodoxy and the opposition of the Western Roman Empire to Byzantium. The Western and Eastern forms of Christianity represent two choices, two paths, two incompatible, mutually exclusive ideals. Orthodoxy is oriented towards the spiritual transformation of the world in the rays of the uncreated Tabor light, while Catholicism focuses on the material restructuring of Earth under the administration of the Vatican [40]. Orthodox Christians praise contemplation above all, while Catholics worship action. Orthodox political doctrine insists on the “symphony of authorities” which strictly delineates the secular (the Basileus, the Tsar) and the spiritual (the patriarch, the clergy). Catholicism strives to spread the Pope’s power into secure life, thereby provoking responsive usurpation on the part of secular monarchs who aspire to subjugate the Vatican. Orthodox Christians consider Catholics to be “apostates” breeding “apostasy” which Catholics consider the Orthodox to be a “barbarian spiritualist sect.”

The most anti-Orthodox traits – including the refusal of service and many dogmas – were stretched to their limit by Protestants.

Rus was the direct and sole spiritual, political, and geopolitical successor to Byzantium after the fall of Constantinople. For this reason and this reason alone was it called “Holy Rus.” It was made “holy,” “God-bearing,” and “chosen by God” by the providential adoption of the Byzantine heritage and full faithfulness to the Orthodox tradition (including its socio-political and even economic aspects). It is especially important to emphasize that it is not merely a fact that Orthodoxy spread as a confession and lent this holiness. Orthodox churches exist in other countries and among other peoples. What is important is that the combination of the Orthodox faith with a powerful and free political empire, the Tsardom, and the Tsar in conjunction with the national Russian Patriarch ensured the dogmatic and theological, eschatological validity of its name. Strictly speaking, Rus ceased to be “holy” when the “symphony of powers” and the Orthodox political system was rejected firstly by the second Romanov (the split) and then by his son Peter the Great, the Westerner and liquidator of this sacred heritage.

Be that as it may, since the 16th century Rus acted as the main ideological and civilizational opponent of Europe. Later followed the prolonged geopolitical duel with England in the East, and, most recently, the Cold War.

History is not linear. It often backtracks, sidetracks, projects nuances, and accentuates paradoxes and anomalies. But the central line is evident. Without a doubt, there exists some kind of “Manifest Destiny” in a broad sense. It led the West to the American model, the American way of life, and to being a superpower. The East, on the other hand (at least the Christian East), became embodied in Russia over the course of centuries. The socialist faith in the golden age of the Soviet Russians was an absolutely symmetrical antithesis to the market-based eschatologism of the Protestant Anglo-Saxons. There was the “end of the world” according to the liberal scenario and its opposite, the “end of the world” according to the Orthodox-Russian, social, Eurasian, Eastern scenario. For them, this means total enslavement and rationalization. For us, this means total transformation and liberation.

The logic of history constantly highlights this fundamental dualism on many different levels, whether in the form of the USA vs. USSR, West vs. East, or America vs. Russia. In economics, politics, geopolitics, theology, and culture there is a frighteningly clear antithesis which has clearly unfolded in front of us, the plot of a global drama involving two poles of a physical and spiritual continental duel, a great war of continents.

Dispensationalism

Do Americans themselves recognize the theological background of their geopolitical confrontation with Eurasia and Russia? Undoubtedly, they do, and sometimes even more clearly than Russians.

There exists a particular Protestant eschatological teaching known as “Dispensationalism” (from the Latin word “despensatio” which can be translated as “plot”, “plan,” or “design”). According to this theory, God has one “plan” for the Anglo-Saxon Christians, another one for the Jews, and a third for all other peoples. The Anglo-Saxons consider themselves to be the “descendants of the ten tribes of Israel who did not return to Judea from Babylonian captivity.” These ten tribes “recalled their origins and adopted Protestantism as their main confession.”

According to the adherents of Dispensationalism, the “plot” for the Protestant Anglo-Saxons is the following: a troubling era will arrive before the end times (the “great tribulation”). At this moment, the forces of evil and the “Evil Empire” (when Reagan called the USSR the “Evil Empire,” he had in mind precisely this eschatological Biblical meaning) will attack the Protestant Anglo-Saxons (as well as other “born again” peoples), and a short period of “the abomination of desolation” will reign. The main villain of this “troubled epoch” (tribulation) is King Gog, and here lies a very important point: in Dispensationalist eschatology, this character has steadily come to be identified with Russia.

This was first formulated most clearly during the Crimean War in 1855 by the Evangelist John Cumming when he identified Russian Tsar Nikolai II with the Biblical “Gog, the Prince of Magog” – the leader of the invasion of Israel foretold in the Bible [41]. This line was once again unleashed with particular force in 1917 and in the Cold War era when it became the virtually official position of the “moral majority” of religious America.

God has yet another “plan” for Israel according to Dispensationalist teachings. By “Israel” they understand the literal restoration of the Jewish state before the end times. Unlike Orthodox and all other normal Christians, Protestant fundamentalists believe that they are related to the Jews still practicing Judaism today and are convinced that the Biblical prophecies on the nation of Israel’s participation in the events of the “end times” are to be understood literally, strictly according to the Old Testament. In the end times, the Jews are supposed to return to Israel, restore their state (this “Dispensationalist prophecy” strangely enough was literally fulfilled in 1947) and then be subjected to the invasion of Gog, i..e, the “Russians,” the “Eurasians.”

Then begins the strangest part of “Dispensationalism.” It is presumed that at the moment of the tribulation, the Anglo-Saxon Christians will be “taken up” (“raptured”) to Heaven as if on a “space ship or saucer” and there they will ride out the war between Gog (the Russians) and Israel. Then, the Anglo-Saxons, together with the Protestant “Christ,” will descend to Earth again where they will meet the Israeli victors over Gog, who will convert to Protestantism. Then begins the “thousand-year reign” and America, together with Israel, will dominate the stable paradise of the “open society,” the “one world.”

This extravagant theory, if not for certain circumstances, would remain in the domain of marginal fanatics. But…

First of all, one such convinced “Dispensationalist”, a sincere believer in the literal fulfillment of such an eschatological scenario, was none other than Cyrus Scofield, famous for being the original producer of the popular English Bible, the “Scofield Reference Bible.” which has sold many millions of copies. In America, this book can be found in every corner, and it was Scofield who inserted his own historical commentary and prophecies on future events authored in the spirit of Dispensationalism into Biblical text, thus rendering it difficult for the inexperienced reader to distinguish the actual Biblical text from its treatment by Scofield. Christian propaganda in the Anglo-Saxon world, and particularly in the US, thus intrinsically presents such “patriotic” American education, Manifest Destiny, Russophobic eschatological indoctrination, and outright Zionism. In other words, the newest form of the centuries-old ideology that lies at the heart of the dualism of the West in opposition to the East which we have discussed is fully embodied in Dispensationalism.

In some contemporary Dispensationalist texts, such “plans” are connected to the newest technological advancements, which then gives rise to a “nuclear Dispensationalism,” i.e., the consideration of “nuclear weapons” as some kind of apocalyptic asset. Once again, Russia (and earlier the USSR) is presented as among the “forces of evil” of the “nuclear King Gog.”

The person responsible for popularizing this “atomic Dispensationalism” was the evangelist Hal Lindsey, the author of a book interpreting prophecies titled The Late, Great Planet Earth [42] which has sold 18 million copies (in its time, it was the second bestseller after the Bible itself). An ardent follower of Lindsey was none other than Ronald Reagan who regularly invited Lindsey to lecture nuclear strategists at the Pentagon [43].

Another “nuclear Dispensationalist” is the televangelist Jerry Falwell, who became Regan’s closest government advisor and participated in Reagan’s private meetings and top military consultations in which questions of nuclear security were discussed. Thus, archaic religious, eschatological notions perfectly coexist with secular and progressive ones in American society along with high technology, geopolitical analysis, and brilliantly efficient systems of political management.

In fact, Dispensationalism itself remains inexplicable without considering the unconditional pro-Israeli position of the US which in fact quite often directly contradicts the geopolitical and economic interests of the United States. Protestant fundamentalists’ solidarity with the fate of earthly Israel as restored in 1947 – which in the eyes of Protestants was a direct and impressive confirmation of Scofield and his Bible’s interpretations – is founded on these deeply theological and eschatological tales.

For us, it is very important just how profound and sustained are the anti-Russian, anti-Eastern, and anti-Eurasian principles of American thinking. These are the depths of denial and hatred rooted in and carefully nurtured over the course of centuries.

The Final Trick of the Antichrist

Putting all the pieces together, we obtain a quite frightening picture (for Russians). The forces, groups, worldviews, and state formations collectively called the “West”, which after victory in the Cold War became the sole rulers of the world behind the facade of “liberalism”, profess a concrete eschatological, theological doctrine in which the events of secular history, technological progress, international relations, social processes, etc. are interpreted from an apocalyptic perspective. The civilizational roots of this Western model date back to deep antiquity and, in some cense a certain archaism has been preserved in them up to the present day parallel to technological and social modernization. These forces consistently identify us, Russians, as the “spirits of hell,” demons of the “order of King Gog from the land of Magog”, and as the bearers of “absolute evil.” The Biblical reference to the apocalyptic “princes of Rosh, Meshech, and Tubal” are revealed as an unambiguous identification of Russia – “Rosh” being Russia, “Meshech” being Moscow, and “Tubal” being an ancient name for the Scythians. In other words, the West, and particularly the United States’ Russophobia does not arise merely out of pharisaical care about the “victims of totalitarianism” or notorious “human rights.” Instead, we are dealing with a consistent and “rationalized” doctrinal demonization of Eastern European civilization in all of its aspects – historical, cultural, theological, geopolitical, ethical, social, economic, etc.

Particular attention should be paid to the multi-dimensional coincidence of the remotely distant conceptual levels of “Western ideology,” i.e., the convergence of the supporters of capitalism in the economic sphere with the theoreticians of individualism in the socio-philosophical realm, geopolitics on the strategic level of continents, and the brand of theology operating with the eschatological and apocalyptic doctrines of Dispensationalism. All of these elements converge in an unambiguous and constant identification of Russia as the “Evil Empire”, as the historical negative, and as the repugnant villain of world drama.

This is all very, very serious. World wars, the collapse of empires, the disappearance of entire peoples and races, class conflicts, and revolutions are but episodes of a great conflict, the culmination of which is supposed to be the final, apocalyptic battle, the Endkampf, in which we will play the most important role. In the eyes of the West, our role is overall and entirely negative. The role assigned to us is that of the planetary scapegoat.

The Western Antichrist is striving to convince the world that his planetary and spiritual enemy is the real “Antichrist,” that is, Continent Russia and its secret pole: us.

Footnotes:

[40] See F.M. Dostoevsky’s The Grand Inquisitor and The Brothers Karamazov

[41] Ezekiel 38-39

[42] Hal Lindsey, The Late, Great Planet Earth, New York, 1977

[43] See Gregory Krupey’s The Christian Right, Zionism, and the Nearing Penteholocaust in Adam Parfery’s Apocalypse Culture, New York,1988

© Jafe Arnold – All Rights Reserved. No reproduction without expressed permission. 

Author: Alexander Dugin

Translator: Jafe Arnold

Chapter 6 of Mysteries of Eurasia (Moscow, Arktogeya: 1999)

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 Secret Map

Today, hypotheses on the Old World’s discovery of America long before Christopher Columbus’ voyage are becoming all the more popular. It has been proven that Scandinavian Vikings visited North America (Vinland) with their ships, and runic inscriptions are being found across the eastern coast of Canada, the Labrador, in Newfoundland, etc. There exist, moreover, the sufficiently reasonable theories of the scholar Jacques de Maio on the link between Incan civilization and these same Vikings, and there are other versions which claim that Europe had always known of the existence of the American continent, yet for specific reasons related to its sacred nature, did not widely disseminate this information. But, the most interesting instance in this regard is the mysterious story of the map of Muhiddin Piri Reis. Let us dwell on this map in detail. 

In 1520, Muhiddin Piri Reis, an admiral in the Turkish navy, published the navigational atlas Bahriye which is still preserved in the National Museum of Istanbul. Some of the maps contained in this atlas depict North and South America, Greenland, and Antarctica with remarkable precision, yet these areas simply could not have been known to mariners at that time unless, of course, official historians are to be believed. 

Admiral Piri explains the origin of these maps as being discovered among one of the Spaniards who participated in the three expeditions of Christopher Columbus and later captured by the Turkish officer Kemal during a naval battle. In his remarks, Piri Reis notes that only thanks to these maps was Columbus able to discover the New World, and this fact was indirectly confirmed in the book of Christopher Columbus’s son, Fernando, The Life of Admiral Christopher Columbus. It reads: “He [Columbus] worked through mounds of information before he came to the conviction that he would discover a number of countries lying to the West of the Canary Islands.” Columbus’ maps, which fell into the hands of Piri Reis, were drawn in 1498. But Piri Reis himself claims that the collection dated back to the times of Alexander the Great long before Columbus. Indeed, some of the maps’ details – such as the portrayal of Antarctica and Greenland as having no ice cover, which allows one to note that Greenland in particular consists of two islands (a fact confirmed only recently by a French expedition) – could only be relevant to a geographical map of the world from five-thousand years ago! The analysis by Dr. Afetinan Tarikh Kurumu in his book The Oldest Map of America(Ankara, 1954), along with the examination carried out by the American Institute of Marine Hydrocartography, have revealed the incredible accuracy of these maps which, among other things, display the mountain ranges of Antarctica and Greenland which were only recently discovered by geologists. In addition, according to some experts, such precision could only be obtained today with the aid of aerial photography. 

No matter what, knowledge of America’s existence necessarily had to have been present among the peoples of Eurasia before Columbus. Knowledge never disappears, but merely descends into the sphere of the unconscious or into the depths of esoteric secrets. That being said, the American continent is, by all logic, an important link in the “sacred geography” of the ancient peoples, and America’s modern role as a distinct civilization represents none other than the awakening of dormant archetypes.

Why not “Columbia?”

Many explain the modern naming of the continent after Amerigo Vespucci and not after Christopher Columbus as an historical misunderstanding and accidental injustice. In no way can we agree with this, as it is not difficult to note that even on the most local scale among purely “rational” name christenings, only those names survive which accord with the semi-conscious archetypes manifested in the well-known phenomenon of so-called “folk etymology.” At times, the similarity of words’ soundings plays an important role, but the identification of concepts on the basis of similarities in sound does not so much demonstrate their “erroneousness” (as the purely “positivist” and “anti-psychological” science of the 19th – 20th centuries presumed) as it does the stability of semantic structures on the level of entire words as well as on the level of the autonomous meaning of letters and letter-combinations. On a basic level, elements referring to “folk etymology” are based on such metaphysical, complete, and far from “folk” sacred methods such as Hindu Nirukta or Jewish Kabbalah. Be that as it may, we presume that the word “America”, in order to match the giant continent’s importance by virtue of its geopolitical mission, should consist of sound concepts associated with the archaic models of the proto-language rudimentarily preserved by the sub-consciousness of the nations of Eurasia. 

First and foremost in the sacred form (and, accordingly, the name) of America, the idea of its “extreme Western” origin should be reflected. According to the works of Professor Wirth [35], the ancient Western sacred center was the land of Mo-Uru, or the islands of Mo-Uru located in the Northwestern Atlantic. This name is mentioned in the Bundahishn, a Zoroastrian scripture, in which it is named third after the Ariana-Vedja, the land of the great Aryan ancestors. (Ariana-vedja itself lay directly at the north pole, the Arctic continent “Arktogeya” which disappeared many thousands of years ago). It is precisely with the aid of this key word “Mo-Uru”, and based on the decoding of the oldest runic and proto-runic symbols (and in particular, the decoding of the liner pre-dynastic writing of Egypt and the Minoan inscriptions, and even ancient rock tracings), that Professor Wirth was able to penetrate the secrets of many of pre-history’s ethnic and racial cataclysms. In its phonetic variations, Mo-Uru is mentioned in the Bible (Moria is the name of the country where Moses was supposed to offer Isaac as a sacrifice to God) and in the Celtic sagas, where the country of “Morias” or “Murias” is referred to as the homeland of the divine northern tribes of Tuatha Dé Danann, as well as in the Scandinavian cults in which the famous stone circle of the cultic pagan center in Uppsala was called “Mora-walls” or “Stone of Mora,” etc. Wirth proposes (and convincingly proves in his detailed and throughly-reasoned works The Origin of Mankind and The Sacred Proto-Writing of Mankind) that the “Amorites,” “Moors,” and even the oceanic “Maori” were the descendants of the ancient natives of this sacred center in the Northern Atlantic, and that the geography of this land was later transferred into the historical toponyms of the “peoples of Mo-Uru’s” new settlements. Curiously enough, “Amorites” means “People of the West” (am uru) in ancient Hebrew. There also exists the sacred doctrine mentioned by Guenon which claims that the Jewish tradition itself is “Western” in its symbolic and pre-historical origins as evidenced by, in particular, the Jewish custom of celebrating the New Year in the fall and the change of day in the evening, stressing the importance of the “Western” orientation corresponding to the universal historical correlations between evening and autumn, the “sunset” period of the day or year. In this perspective, Chaldean Ur, which Abraham left for the promised land is perhaps a substitute of Mo-Uru, the “North-Atlantic Ur”, just as the Zohar asserts that “Ur”, where Abraham originally resided, symbolizes “the highest spiritual state” from which Abraham “descended” downwards by virtue of providential necessity. (It is curious to note that Jews themselves often share this point of view stressing this Western origin of their tradition, as can be seen among the early Zionist projects of the “Jewish state” organization in America, in Simon Wiesenthal’s books on the Jewish pre-history of America, and in Edmund Wiseman’s America: The New Jerusalem). 

So, the mysterious Mo-Uru denotes a sacred continent beyond Europe which lies to the West in the Atlantic. Moreover, “mouru”, “amuru,” or “amoru” (such forms are encountered in historically different traditions) are phonetically similar to the word “America.” It can thus not be excluded (and it is indeed quite likely) that precisely such a “coincidence,” or, more precisely, a providential correspondence, served the unconscious or half-conscious basis for consolidating such an externally profane yet internally sacred name for the New World. 

Atlantis and Beyond Atlantis: the mystery of the dollar

It is only natural that “America” and “Mo-Uru” have a direct relationship to the myth of Atlantis, the paleo-continent about which Solon, Plato, and many before and after them spoke. Atlantis was the Western, sacred continent upon which a spiritual civilization flourished only to be destroyed as a result of a great cataclysm and flood. The death of the continent is most often described as comprising several stages. After the sinking of the mainland located to the West of Eurasia and Africa, for some time after separate islands in the North Atlantic were preserved on which the last tribes of the Atlantians were concentrated, the carriers of the ancient tradition. In Wirth’s opinion, Mo-Uru was such a remnant of Atlantis which in turn came to be flooded only much later, perhaps a few millennia following the main cataclysm. 

Judging by everything, the American continent was not the westernmost continent in sacred geography as Atlantis was, but rather its further-Western “continuation.” In other words, America was “beyond Atlantis”, the lands located “on the other side of the West.” It is possible that the sacred, symbolic location of America explains the disturbing secrets associated with it in the sacred geography of Eurasia’s traditional civilizations. 

According to this sacred geography, located in the West is a “Green Country,” the “Land of the Dead,” or some kind of quasi-material world resembling Hades or Sheol. This is the country of dusk and dawn in which there is no escape for mortals and whom only the initiated can reach. It is believed that the name Greenland (literally “Green Land”) refers to this same symbolic complex. But this “Green Country” is not Atlantis (and not even Mo-Uru!). This has to be one laying even further West as the “world of death,” the “kingdom of shadows.” And it is thus the supernatural dimension of the American continent which is quite miraculously revealed in such a, at first glance, banal thing as the dollar sign. Rene Guenon once noted that this symbol on American money is the graphic simplification of the sacred seal found on ancient coins of the Mediterranean zone. Originally, the two vertical bars were depictions of the two “pillars of Hercules” which, according to legend, stand in the far West beyond the Gibraltar Strait. The loop on this mark was once a slogan with the symbolic inscription “nec plus ultra”, which literally means “onward to nowhere.” Both of these symbols were meant to mark the border, or the Western limit of human sacred geography beyond which were found “inhuman worlds.” This “border” symbol, which indicates that it is impossible to go beyond the Gibraltar, paradoxically became the financial emblem of America, the country lying “beyond the borders” precisely “where it is impossible to go,” where the inscription on the original dollar sign categorically prohibited travel. It is here that the “otherworldly” symbolism of America appears, revealing the shady, forbidden sacred-geographical aspects of human civilization.[36] 

In this view, Columbus’ newfound discovery of the American continent bears a rather sinister meaning, as it signifies the emergence of “sunken Atlantis” on the horizon of history. But not even Atlantis itself, but its “shadow,” its negative continuation of the symbolic West to the point of the “world of the dead.” It is quite characteristic in this regard that this “new discovery” temporally coincided with the beginning of the severe decline of European (and pan-Eurasian) civilization, which rapidly began to lose its spiritual, religious, qualitative, and sacred principles from this time on. 

On a cultural, philosophical level, it is America that went on to become the perfect projection of purely profane, atheistic, and poly-atheistic utopias. Social models based on purely human rationality, beginning with Thomas Moore, increasingly settled on this continent.

Here once again, we see how it is not only the “unexplored” quality of these lands rendering it favorable for the realization of utopia, but also the archetypes of the “land of the dead where eternal peace and order reigns” and the image of the “green country” of the West that influenced the choice of this geographical space. 

The historical cycle of America, its rise from the watery depths as the “New Atlantis,” can be likened not to the true and risen[37] return of the “golden age”, but to the chimerical, fake, and illusory bearing the noxious smell of a continental grave. 

Sunrise in the West, Sunset in the East 

The well known metaphysician and Traditionalist Geydar Dzhemal once pointed to an interesting peculiarity stemming from the geographical location of the American continent: for Americans, every morning the sun rises from the direction of Europe (that is, from the side which sacred geography constantly associates with the West) and sets on the side of Asia (the symbolic East). In a strange way, such a shift in the symbolism of orientations in the natural “worldview” of this continent’s residents resonates with the famous eschatological prophecy foreseeing that “in the last days” the sun will rise in the West and set in the East. Such an exception necessarily influences the archaic dimension of the continental American psyche, complementing the already entirely specific role of America as the re-emerging Beyond Atlantis, the “green country of the dead.” If we add to this the “rationalist utopianism” characteristic not only of the theorists of the Old World but also the founding fathers of the North American states, then, indeed, we derive a variant of an eschatological, messianic complex forming the paradigm and structure of American continental consciousness as a whole, and particularly those aspects which are most deeply connected with geopolitics, universalism, and self-identity. This eschatological scenario, in its most general features, is the same in the most remotely distant religions. In Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and in the majority of the Aryan pagan traditions, and even in the Melanesian cargo-cults, the “messianic era” is characterized by “the resurrection (or return) of the dead,” “the restoration of heavenly prosperity”, the “revealing of everything lost over the course of history,” the “appearance of new lands and new heavens,” the “presence of everlasting grace,” etc. If one more attentively looks at the American mentality in its North American variation, we see nearly all aspects of this eschatological plan. The “resurrection of the dead” is reflected in the practice of freezing the corpses of wealthy Americans searching for resurrection with the aid of scientific techniques in the coming century, as well as in a number of American neo-spiritualist sects who preach thanatophilia and scientifically (using quack devices) prove the “immortality of the soul.” Such “heavenly prosperity” is translated into the concept of “material prosperity”; the “new land” is the American continent itself, the base of the new “golden age” termed in some occult and astrological milieus as the “Age of Aquarius” or “New Age” (the widespread pseudo-religious movement highly developed in the US). 

This eschatology permeates the very concept of “new world order” producing the current slogan of a “global community” (repeating and developing American ideological projects), and these notions presume the expansion of the American model to every last bit of territory on the planet. Thus, the “New World” or “new land” emerging from the depths of disturbing mystery and esoteric secrets pretends to be the new, spiritual land foretold of the Apocalypse which is to appear after the End Times. For continental America, the post-apocalyptic epoch has already arrived. The Allies’ victory in the Second World War that led the US to world domination, the persecution of Jews in Germany (provably explaining the accomplishment of the apocalyptic “Holocaust”), the symbolism of the state of Israel’s re-establishment, and the recent collapse of the USSR, the last planetary opponent of the West, are interpreted by the leaders of America as the undoubtable signs of global victory and the arrival of the “new eon”, the epoch of sole world domination, the “end of history,” and the triumph of the world market. 

In the USA, the countdown to messianic times has already begun. 

Holy America 

The archaic, unconscious complex of the “American ideal” is an entirely clear, straightforward expression manifested in the the “political theology of Americanism.” We have in mind the neo-Protestant concept of “America the promised land.” In this notion, the energy of the continent yields a particular theological construction, and if certain terms of this mystical “Protestant Americanism” are perceived not as rhetorical metaphors, but as a precise formation of eschatological constructions, then a rather unexpected and disturbing picture emerges. For example, George Washington himself stated that the “United States is the New Jerusalem determined by Providence as the territory on which man should attain his full development, where science, freedom, happiness, and fame shall spread with peace.” Here it is important to note the concept of the “New Jerusalem” which, in the language of a Christian (even a Protestant) necessarily points to the Apocalypse and refers to the last stage of the eschatological scenario, the descent of the spiritual “Hail of the Lord,” the “New Jerusalem” from heaven. [38] 

For his part, John Adams clearly defined globalism as an American mission, calling the USA “a pure and virtuous republic whose task is to rule the world and establishes the oneness of people.” 

In recent times, this special “patriotism” has gained new energy thanks to the development of television, which has led to the formation of the “televangelism” phenomenon which Isidro Palacios called “e-Christianity.” For example, the famous televangelist Jerry Howell now formulates the “American ideal” in the following way: “The USA is a country blessed by Almighty God which like no other country on earth is now exposed inside and out to the attacks of devilish machinations which could end in the destruction of the American nation. The devil is battling with the will of God, which put the US above all other nations, like ancient Israel…” These theological motives of Protestant eschatology are typical of modern American presidents. In 1984, Reagan stated: “I don’t think that the Lord, who blessed this country like no other, would ever want want us to trade it away because of its weakness.”

Without taking into account the symbolic role of Beyond Atlantis in its supra-temporal, supra-historical complex, this messianic pathos remains unclear, and the mass-scale spiritual fraud behind it cannot be completely assessed and understood. In the most general sense, as in all parodical eschatologies, we are dealing with the displacement of the spiritual golden age which is supposed to arrive immediately after the End of History, its shift to the period preceding the End. 

Apollo, Diana, and the Truncated Pyramid 

This same parodical logic, when applied to the material level of spiritual reality, distorts sacred meaning and stands behind the technological progress of “America the continent” especially in such illustrative spheres as space research. It is quite revealing that the Americans were the first to land on the moon where, according to various archaic traditions, the “souls of our ancestors” reside. (It is especially important that Soviet cosmonauts belonging to a similarly significantly eschatological political formation did not manage to achieve this). In esoteric tradition, there exists a direct link between the “green land of the dead” and the Moon, and this very link can be traced to the objective, material, and spiritually profane history of modernity. 

American cosmonauts’ space flights consciously bore a “ritualistic meaning”, as is evident even in the name of the “Apollo” spacecraft, Apollo being the traditional mythological companion of Diana, the moon. Moreover, as was reported even in the secular press, the American astronauts brought Masonic rings with them to the moon. This in fact means that the “ritualistic” character of the events could not have but been obvious to them, given that “entering the sphere of the moon” means passing through the lesser mysteries in Masonic ritual. Here once again there is a symbolic parallel: the initiation into the lesser mysteries brings a Mason into the so-called “Edenic (heavenly) state” returning him to the spiritual completeness which characterized the people of the Golden Age. In the case of the individual, all of this is realized on an internal, “microcosmic” level. The flight to the moon ritual took on an external, material, “macrocosmic” character, then “sacralized” not only by the individual, but also the entire “continent”, the messenger of which is the individual. On a symbolic level, the interplanetary journey from America to the moon was equivalent to the journey from “America” to “America,” and this paradoxical ritual strengthened and intensified the messianic pride of America as a whole, the American subconscious. It should also be noted that the Masonic tradition is extremely developed in America, and in this regard there exist certain theories that insist on the originality, uniqueness, and “chosenness” of American Masonry in comparison to other branches. In American Masonic lodges, the legend is widespread that the last Knights Templar, having been in hiding for some time since their persecution by French monarchs and Catholic authorities in Europe, later fled to America and brought their treasures and relics with them. Some have even claimed that the Holy Grail itself was brought to America. Be that as it may, American Masons are convinced that the true “sacred” center of Masonry is to be found in the USA, while European Masonry is “too archaic and helpless” and is nothing other than a “relic of the past.” It is undeniable, moreover, that Masonic signs make up many of the US’ state symbols, such as the white five-pointed star (the symbols of “Adam of Paradise” – again the “heavenly” theme) and the truncated pyramid whose peak is separated from the base by a ring of 13 stars symbolizing the 13 tribes of Israel. (Joseph’s tribe is often symbolically represented as the double tribe of Ephraim and Manasseh, which yields 13 instead of 12 and such a doctrine is peculiar to Masonic arithmetic). The truncated pyramid bears a disturbing symbolic meaning, as it refers to hierarchy devoid of its sacred peaks and its sacred center. It is possible that this emblem was originally designed to express the anti-authoritarian and anti-monarchical orientation of the US political system and the absence of a single ruler, but the symbol itself has never been limited to a purely emblematic function. The truncated pyramid necessarily implies the idea of “interrupted consecration,” and precisely this incompleteness in the initiative cycle is completely characteristic of “black magicians” as understood by Tradition. 

Gifs from the “Ancestors’ World”

Mircea Eliade and other scholars dealing with the structure of archaic beliefs have dwelled in similar terms on the logic of the so-called “cargo-cults” [39] and the Melanesian, eschatological “local religions” associated with the abolition of all religious rules and the onset of a special “Messianic” age in which promiscuity, unlimited alcoholic ecstasy, and idleness are permitted and which is characterized by “the return of the dead” bearing gifts on huge ships from “America.” In addition to the symbolic underpinnings of these cults, it is impossible to rule out the rudimentary subconscious archetypes in them known to forgotten sacred geography. On this note it is important that the relationship between cargo-cultists and white “Americans” is ambiguous. One the one hand, “Americans” are considered to be usurpers of the goods “produced” by the natives’ ancestors and their “gods,” while on the other hand, in certain aspects, cargo-cultists themselves begin to imitate the whites, imitate some of their mannerisms, behaviors, habits, and postures. No matter if “Americans” are the usurpers and no matter if they do or do not look like the “real” inhabitants of the land of the dead, they have nonetheless had direct contact with them. And this alone renders them distinguished, special. Over all, the cargo-cult complex predicts the nearing beginning of a “golden age” and absolute abundance beyond all conceivable limits. 

In analyzing cargo-cults, Eliade showed just how much in common they have, with only minor variations, with those found in Africa and among the Hindus, the peoples of Oceania, and elsewhere. Thus, eschatological cargo-cultism represents a fairly universal complex characterized by rooted structures of the unconscious to which is attached a primordial sacred meaning submerged over the course of thousands of years in the the psychic and rudimentary spheres. The cargo-cultist complex is something in the likes of an perfecting component of the “land of the dead” – “mystical America,” “Beyond Atlantis.” The indigenous consciousness of non-American territories being pulled away from the vertical and genuine eschatological perspective at the expense of metaphysical value commit a shift similar to the one which occurs in the American conscience itself. The spiritual is translated into the material and the other-worldly is translated into that which is of this world. It is this and nothing else which explains the complex relationship of many archaic peoples to Americanism and its representatives. On the one hand, Americans attract rejection, repulsion, and the desire to shut off their influence (and sometimes even “expose” or “expropriate” them), but on the other hand, the “magical presence of the dead ancestors” behind “Americans”, as a guarantor of their material success, evokes an irresistible desire to imitate them. 

Bury America (1) 

That disturbing and sinister country on the other side of the ocean. Without history, without tradition, without roots. Artificial, aggressive, an intrusive reality completely devoid of spirit, focused only on the material world and technical efficiency; cold, indifferent, glowing with neon advertisements and senseless luxury, shrouded in pathological poverty, genetic degeneration, and the rupture of any and all connections between people, things, nature, and culture – the result of a pure experiment by the European utopian rationalists.

Today, America is asserting its planetary domination, the triumph of its lifestyle, and the need for all peoples of the earth to adopt its civilizational model, imposing it upon us. America sees in herself and only in herself “progress” and the “norms of civilization,” thus denying everyone else the right to their own path, their own culture, and their own system of values. How accurately does this all precisely recall the prophecy of the coming of the Antichrist…the King of the “green country” of the dead rising from the abyss of ancient crime…

Burying America is our religious duty.

Translator’s notes:

(1) In Russian, Dugin uses the verb zakryt’, which could be translated as “to close”, “to un-discover”, “to cover”, etc., hence “to bury”.

Footnotes: 

[35] H.Wirth “Heilige Urshrift der Menshheit”

[36] On the symbolism of the “green country” and the West, see Gustav Meyrink’s Angel zapadnogo okna, St. Petersburg, 1991

[37] The English visionary, poet, and artist William Blake established a mythological image of America as a “positive Atlantis” designed for the purpose of putting an end to the alienation and degradation of contemporary Europe. But this proved to be an incorrect mythologem. 

[38] The Revelation of St. John the Evangelist 21:10-27. 

[39] See M. Eliade’s “The Cosmic Renovation” in Konets sveta

© Jafe Arnold – All Rights Reserved. No reproduction without expressed permission. 

Author: Alexander Dugin

Translator: Jafe Arnold

Foreword to Mysteries of Eurasia (Moscow, Arktogeia: 1991)

Sacred geography belongs to the category of those disciplines which are unknown to the vast majority of our contemporaries. The rampant spread of the ideas of the European Enlightenment, with its characteristic mechanism, materialism, positivism, and pragmatism, has transformed human consciousness so much in the last century that the gap with the world of Tradition and its laws has become final and irrevocable. This process of the West’s transition to the position of profanity was described in great detail by René Guénon in his works, The Crisis of the Modern World and The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times, which have finally seen the light of day in Russian translation. Therefore, sacred geography and the studies associated with it, belonging entirely to the sphere of Tradition, are unlikely to be easily understood and, as follows, this book cannot count on a wide range of readers. Nevertheless, there always exists a certain number of people who are radically dissatisfied with the intellectual substitution of profane science and culture, who are searching for deeper, truer explanations, and who are striving to break free from cliche and trite opinions which do not clarify the essence of the problem. This means that the world of Tradition, its laws, its principles, and its logic are always of particular interest to a potential “intellectual elite” which is longing for the truth.

Sacred geography is a part of Tradition associated with the qualitative structure of space and the symbolism of parts of the world, continents, landscapes, etc. Tradition affirms that the place in which this or that people lives, in addition to a physical dimension, also has a metaphysical dimension corresponding to some spiritual archetypes beyond the material. Just as man himself is composed of body, soul and spirit, so do countries, continents, rivers, seas, and mountains have their hidden, secret, mystical dimension similar in structure to the emotional and spiritual worlds of people. Consequently, the country in which this or that people lives is connected with this people and, as follows, with a given representative of this people on a subtle level. They constantly engage in mutual influence, analogous to that which occurs between man and the environment on a physical level. But the “soul” of a country, its sacred dimension, interacts with the soul of the nation, with national sacrality, and this interface and interpretation is the sum of the reality which is called “civilization,” “cultural type,” or “geopolitical predisposition.” Thus, sacred geography explores the deeper mysteries of the history and laws of nations and peoples not in their existing, but in their archetypal, spiritual aspect. In a sense, it can be said that sacred geography is “secret geography” or “genuine geography” which studies, as all traditional sciences, not the world of effects, but the world of causes.

Orientation in space is not only the task of sailors, travelers, and cartographers. It is an existential, spiritual task of each and every human. And it is no accident that sacred places of worship, temples, altars, and burial grounds, and even more broadly, all human constructions, were primordially strictly correlated with the rays of light which are evident in relation to a sacred place, the directions of which have a fixed, symbolic meaning. Moreover, ancient religious rituals and gestures, which in traditional civilization were the same as the actions of a person in official, social life and in everyday life, were strictly correlated with sacred space. Of course, the meaning of the symbolic significance of a spatial orientation may change depending on the varying traditions of one or another civilization or people, but some things remain universal and are maintained everywhere. For example, an appeal to the East has always harbored a meaning of sacred positivity. The East is the land where the sun rises, the region of completeness and abundance of the heavenly, spiritual Source. Therefore, to this day, Christian churches in particular always have their alter facing East. The West, on the contrary, is traditionally considered to be the boundary between the lands of people and the world of the dead, an entrance to the “underworld regions,” the lands of death.

For peoples and nations, which are formed in a particular space and absorb the sacred meaning of this space as an integral part of their national soul, the qualitative organization of space bears even more importance. Thus, for example, Russians regard the fact of the location of “Holy Rus” on the plains as a sign of objective selection by God, and in ancient Russian legends there is a tale in which the hero Yegory the Brave banishes the “mountains” to the periphery, thereby forming a paradise and rounded land chosen by God. The flat part of Russian territory is an essential element in the national mentality, and we can expect that at some point in history this “flat” archetype of the collective psyche will certainly make itself known in one way or another.

This book, Mysteries of Eurasia, is titled such because its task is to study the sacred geography of precisely this continent and especially its central part, which long ago became the country of the Russians. Without a doubt, this is not a dry and detached study, because the author is far from indifferent to the fate of the soul of our people, the Russian people. The Russian people is considered here to be the subject of mystical Eurasia, its beating heart, its mysterious center. This is due to both subjective and objective principles. It is subjective insofar as the author is Russian, and it is fully natural that he feels a deep responsibility for his people, for their historical, spiritual path, and for their past, present, and future, as should be the case for every Russian. The objective reasoning lies in that Russia is located at the center of the Eurasian continent, and this central position, from a sacred point of view, is neither arbitrary nor accidental. The task at hand is understanding, in adequate terms, the validity of this centrality and its fateful meaning. In this case, the subjective and the objective merrily complement each other.

Russia is an Orthodox country. Consequently, the Christian tradition plays a definite role on the subtle, providential level for both the Russian people and the territories which they historically inhabit. Moreover, Russia remains the only independent Orthodox power, the “Third Rome,” to which, according to church doctrine, the eschatological mission within Christian civilization and the history of mankind as a whole is entrusted. Consequently, Russian Orthodox sacrality must have its own special, unparalleled features. These features cannot be reduced merely to the letter of Church dogma, although they do not contradict it. They have a special, esoteric and mysterious meaning, to the deciphering of which several chapters of this book are dedicated. This is also one of the Mysteries of Eurasia and, quite possibly, one of the most important.

This work is based entirely on Tradition, the highest authority on which is René Guénon, an author whose profound works allow one to discover the salvational path to the realm of the Sacred in our Dark Age in which even religious institutions are often so profane that achieving true light through them is impossible. But Guénon and his works cannot be the final answer to all questions or remain immutable catechisms, as some of his Western followers think. Upon clarifying his ideas and views on the true essence of Tradition, one should turn to Tradition itself, submerge oneself in it, and initiate the Wise Deed of being within the framework of the Sacred, the path of cognition. One must master its secrets and take the path of initiation and spiritual realization. For Russia and Russians, following Guénon means appealing to Russian Orthodoxy and the sacred Russian tradition, whose traces are preserved in icons, hagiographies, chronicles, temples, our legends, myths, fairy tales, proverbs, the mysterious Russian language, our ancient literature, our national soul, and our great and glorious history. Such is the position of the author which, logically, should be the position of every Russian person who strives fully and consciously, spiritually and actively, and in thoughts, feelings, and deeds to be Russian.

– 1991

© Jafe Arnold – All Rights Reserved. No reproduction without expressed permission. 

Author: Alexander Dugin

Translator: Jafe Arnold

From the journal Elements No. 9 (1999); The Russian Thing (Moscow, Arkotgeya: 2001); The Philosophy of War (Moscow, Arktogeya: 2004)

The final degree of generalization

Analyzing civilizations and their relations, confrontations, development, and interconnections is such a complex problem that results can be obtained which are not simply different, but totally opposite depending on the methodology and the level of research. Therefore, in order to obtain even the most approximate conclusions, it is necessary to apply a reduction which brings a number of criteria down to a single, simplified model. Marxism unambiguously prefers the economic approach, which becomes a substitute and the common denominator for all other disciplines. Liberalism, in essence, though less explicitly, does as well.

A qualitatively different method of reduction is offered by geopolitics which, although less known and less popular, is nonetheless no less effective or less illustrative in explaining the history of civilizations.

Various forms of an ethnic approach, including “racial theory” on the extreme end, offer another version of reductionism. Lastly, religions also offer their own reductionist model of the history of civilizations. These four models represent the most popular paths of generalization and although a number of other methods exist, they are unlikely to be rivaled by these in terms of degree of clarity or simplicity.

Since the concept of “civilization” remains extremely massive – perhaps one of the largest concepts that the historical consciousness of mankind is capable of generating – methods of reduction should be extremely approximate and leave aside nuances, details, and factors of moderate or minor significance. Civilizations are human conglomerates which possess extensive spatial, temporal, and cultural boundaries. Civilizations, by definition, should possess a considerable volume, i.e., they should last a long time, control significant geographical areas, and produce a special, expressive cultural and religious (and sometimes ideological) style.

At the beginning of the third millennium A.D, a summary of some of the results of the history of civilizations begs itself, as the significance of the date suggests the reaching of some kind of threshold or brink. Hence arises the desire to bring different trajectories of civilizational analysis into a single, universal paradigm. Of course, the degree of simplification, coarsening, and reduction here will be even greater than in the four above-mentioned reductionist models, but this is unlikely to be considered an insurmountable obstacle. Any generalization (successful or not, justified or not) will necessarily be faced with violent criticism from “narrow specialists” who have long since forgotten the original principles amidst a maelstrom of details, as well as from conscious (or unconscious) supporters of the generalization, who purely pragmatically use contradictions in the details in order to discredit the whole.

No matter what, the subject of the “end of history” (Francis Fukuyama), the “clash of civilizations” (Samuel Huntington), the “New World Order (George Bush), the “new paradigm” (New Age), “messianic times”, “end of utopia,” “artificial paradise,” or “apocalypse culture” (Adam Parfrey) is becoming more popular as we approach the end of the century, the border of the millennium. And all of these topics, to varying degrees, operate with complex reductionist models which are the results of consolidating more restricted methodologies of, first and foremost, the four listed above.

The Real Marxism

Marx’s doctrine was so popular in the 20th century that it is difficult to discuss it, especially in Russia where Marxism was proclaimed the official ideology for many decades. This question is just as painful and saturated with illusions and connotations for Western intellectuals, for whom polemics and discussions concerning Marx have been central to philosophical and cultural discourses. Marx influenced modern history like no other and it is difficult to name a thinker comparable to him in fame, popularity, or the circulation of books. Yet, the excessive exploitation of Marxism at one point yielded the reverse result – his ideas and doctrines turned out to be so universal that at one point they ceased to be remembered and Marxism was turned into a “dogma,” a gadget, an unintelligible stamp which came to be used and interpreted quite arbitrarily. The orthodox Marxists froze their reflections in this field and canonized the views of Marx even in those spheres where they were clearly refuted by the course of history itself (both economically and politically). Heretics and revisionists stretched Marxism a bit too much and incorporated into it theories which, strictly speaking, have no relevance in a Marxist context. We have been gradually faced with a paradoxical picture in which the most popular and famous modern thinker and his theories have turned out to be unclear, unknown, and impenetrable for the majority. In the end, the gordian knot of Marxism was simply liquidated by the recognition of its philosophy and its political economy as “mistaken.” And then came the wholesale rejection of this ideology. Excessive arrogance and dogmatization turned into equally excessive subversion and relativization. And the seemingly rapidly constructed building of Marxism was suddenly and totally destroyed. Moreover, the most zealous liquidators were precisely those forces responsible for the creation of an alienated, dogmatic cult of Marx. Be that as it may, Marx’s ideas now have practically no heirs, but they have not become any less profound or strikingly exact in resolving certain issues. Thus a situation arises in which Marxism, having completely lost its traditional supporters, can be adopted as a weapon by quite different forces that remained aloof from Marxism at the time that its ideas prevailed among intellectual and political excitement.

Such distance and absence of engagement in one or another Marxist camp at the previous stages of its intellectual history allows Marxism to be rediscovered again, and his message to be read in a way previously impossible. It is completely clear that a massive part of the cultural-historical views of Marx are hopelessly outdated, and many aspects of his doctrine should be rejected because of their inadequacy. However, it is more productive to impartially consider those aspects of his teaching which, on the contrary, are still completely relevant and can help understand the essential aspects of the paradigm of history in its economic and socio-political key. And there is no one equal to Marx here. It was Marx who formulated a capacious, reductionist model of economic history capable with amazing authenticity, clarity, and credibility of explaining essential processes and orientations. Therefore, it would be worth recalling the fundamentals of the Marxist understanding of the formula of history.

Marx’s approach to history is dialectical and presupposes the dynamic development of relations between the main subjects of historical events. Together with this, a fundamental dualism of these actors that determines the dialectic, forming its content and ethical basis for interpretation, clearly shines through his theory. The two subjects of Marx are defined as Labor and Capital. Marx considers Labor the creative impulse of existence, the central axis of life and movement, as some kind of positive, solar principle. Using Darwinist imagery, Marxism argues that “labor created man out of monkey.” The point is that the means of creation or production are the main existential vector which directs processes from the horizontal, inertial state into a vertical, willed state. Labor, according to Marx, is a positive start, a “light” principle. Unlike Biblical ethics, in which labor is understood as the result of the Fall and is a kind of curse upon Adam for transgressing the divine commandments (such an attitude towards lLabor is true for other religious traditions), Marx unequivocally asserts the sacred and wholly positive nature of Labor, its holiness, primacy, autonomy, and self-sufficiency. But in its primordial state, Labor, as the first impulse of development and the starting moment of history – like the Absolute Idea of Hegel – is not yet aware of itself and cannot realize the completeness of its inherently bright nature. Achieving this requires a long, complex process of dialectical movement through the labyrinth of history. However terrifying are the ordeals and feats of Labor, it will be able to reach its triumphant, victorious state, become conscious, happy, and free through a series of dialectical self-negations. According to Marx, all of history stretches from “primitive communism” – the original state in which Labor was free, but neither conscious nor universal – to simply communism, when, through the mazes of estrangement, it will return to the light of self-sufficiency, albeit in a total, universal, and finally conscious form. Man became man after he came upon labor. But he will become a man only when he will be able to recognize the absolute value of this means and liberate it, through communism, from all the impurities of the negative start.

What is the negative pole in Marxism? What opposes the bright nature of Labor? Marx calls this “exploitation” and the supreme and holistic form of this exploitation is supposed to be Capital. In Marxism, Capital is the name of the world’s evil, the dark beginning, the negative pole of history. A long period of “exploitation”, the alienation of Labor from its essence, and trials and tribulations of the sun in the labyrinths of darkness lay between “primitive communism” and the appearance of man and final communism. This, essentially, is the content of history.

Capital arises not immediately, but gradually manifests itself as the tools and mechanisms of exploiting the light of Labor by the dark forces of the usurpers are improved. The development of Labor contributes to the development of the means of exploitation. The complex dialectic of the continuous dynamics between the ratio of productive forces and the relations of production leads both poles of economic history along a spiral of development. Conflicting aims and the activities of workers and exploiters objectively contribute to the intensification of a single political-economic process. The productive forces are the internal structure of Labor and its organization. The relations of production are the model of interaction of this subordinate base structure with exploitation. The fruits of Labor are the fruits of abundance. Labor always produces more than is necessary to meet the immediate needs of workers. This is the essence of its positive, constructive, bright, solar beginning. Labor produces plus.

This plus, this surplus, is extracted by the dark pole, the parasite of history. Throughout all economic history, the relations of production boil down to the expropriation of substance from the bearers of plus by the bearers of minus. Improvements in the productive forces refine the paradigms of exploitation. But already from the very first steps of human history, it is possible to detect characteristic features of the two essences which collide with each other in full force only at the end of it. The primitive toiler is the germ of the industrial proletariat. The tribal head is the embryo of capital.

Long millennia of human history pass, and the two subjects of the global drama reach their purest state, finally realizing and summating all previous stages. From the slave-owning system through feudal relations capitalism emerges, and this is the most important and largely eschatological stage of Marxist doctrine. Here all of the complex social situation boils down to the clear duality of the proletariat as the class which embodies the result of historical and economic development of the elements of Labor, and the bourgeoisie which concentrates in itself the absolutized, most total, finished, and conscious pole of pure exploitation. The light pole completes its tragic path through the mazes of alienation, and the dark pole comes close to complete victory. Proletariat and Capital. Pure Labor is the proletariat without any kind of property (“except chains”) and Pure Capital transforms from that which is had to that which has, into the element of Pure Alienation or Absolute Exploitation.

Marx brings all other historical, philosophical, cultural, social, and scientific and technical problems into this political-economic scheme, considering them to be derivative and secondary to the underlying paradigm.

Further, Marx proclaims that the second industrial revolution, signifying capitalism’s achievement of its peak, is the turning point in world history. From this moment, both historical subjects – both Labor and Capital – become not simply toys in the hands of the objective logic of history, but self-conscious and self-sufficient subjects capable not only of complying with necessity, but also governing the most important historical processes, furnishing them, provoking them, designing them, and assuring their autonomous will. The point is not the individual or the group, but the class subject. The proletariat, becoming a class, becomes a historical personality, conscious Labor, and the heir of the plus in all stages of its development. Capital concentrates in itself the global minus, extraction, alienation, but merely in a free, volitional, personal state. Now it is capable of planning history and controlling it.

At this stage, Labor and Capital move on to the level of ideas or ideology, and henceforth exist not only in the objective fabric of reality, but also in the ideological space of thought. The arrival of these two personages in the sphere of thought finally lays bare the essential dualism in this field – there is the thought of Labor and there is the thought of Capital; there is the worldview of the plus and the worldview of the minus. Both of these worldview obtain the greatest possible independence and freedom so that the whole zone of consciousness is turned from a sphere of reflection into a sphere of creativity and design. The worldview of Labor (proletarian philosophy) here retains its creative character. It creates and manufactures a project. The outlook of Capital (bourgeois philosophy) remains essentially negative  – it does not usurp the inherent energy of mental labor, but reproduces the void, conceptualizes immobility, freezes life, and postulates reality while denying task.

The supreme and most complete formula of Capital is, according to Marx, English liberal political-economy, especially the theories of “free exchange” and the “universal market” of Adam Smith and his followers. But apart from its most distinct form, there exist a number of more nuanced, complex, and drawn out constructed worldviews which hide behind the pernicious, parasitic breath of Capital. Bourgeois philosophy henceforth becomes the most effective weapon of exploitation and its supreme form. But, in contrast to this, so does the doctrinal corpus of the working class emerge, whose fundamental contours are made clear by communist ideology. Marx viewed his own work in precisely this context. He sensed that his ideas formed the basis of “proletarian philosophy” and would become a critical tool of Labor in its eschatological, final battle against the eternal enemy.

Marx proclaimed a kind of “Gospel of Labor.” He argued that now, at the turning point of political-economic history, Labor, in becoming Pure Labor, should instantly become aware of itself and its history, completely take over the function of one of the two teleological poles of history, and identify the mechanism of exchange and alienation which lies at the heart of exploitation, expose the negative, vampiric, purely negative function of Capital (through clarifying the logic of of production and the expropriation of surplus value), and carry out the Proletarian Revolution which would cast Capital into the abyss of oblivion and tear up world evil by the roots. After a short phase of transitional formation (socialism), “paradise on earth” will come and Labor will be fully liberated from the dark beginning.

This, in the most general terms, is the meaning of the Marxist political-economic model. It should be recognized that it is so convincing and reliable that it is no wonder that the views of Marx possessed so many people in the 20th century, becoming a sort of religion for which unprecedented sacrifices were offered. How did the scenario of Marx realize itself in practice? What turned out to be inaccurate, and what was disproven? How should the content of the political-economic history of our century be assessed while remaining within the intended Marxist philosophy of history?

As we enter the third millennium, we can confirm that Capital beat Labor, managed to avoid the impending Revolution, dissolved the complete historical manifestation of Labor as a revolutionary subject, and prevented the perilous prospect of proletarian philosophy concentrating into a unified, full-fledged philosophical system. But, nevertheless, Labor, inspired by Marx, tried to give a “final and decisive fight” to its primordial enemy. Labor was defeated, but the fact of this great battle cannot be denied. It was the main content of the socio-political history of the 20th century fully in accordance with Marx, only with a different (bad) ending. Global evil won. Minus turned out to be stronger and more cunning than plus. The subjectivity of Capital proved its superiority over the subjectivity of Labor.

How did this happen in practice?

The first failure of Marxist orthodoxy occurred at the time of the Great October Socialist Revolution. This event was the key turning point of post-Marxist history. On the one hand, the uprising of the Bolshevik Marxists proved that the ideas of Marx were correct and confirmed by practice. The proletarian, communist workers party was able to make a revolution, overthrow the exploitative system, destroy the power of Capital and the bourgeois class, and build a socialist state proceeding from the basic provisions of Marx himself. Moreover, the predominant ideology of this state was declared to be Marxism. In other words, the Russian experience provided the first confirmation of the correctness and effectiveness of revolutionary Marxist doctrine. However, over the course of the Russian revolution one important circumstance was discovered: a successful proletarian revolution had not happened where and when Marx himself had predicted. The spatial, temporal error was not a quantitative, but a qualitative factor. Therefore, it was loaded with immense doctrinal value.

Marx believed that the final formation of the proletariat as a class and its formalization into a revolutionary party would occur in the most developed countries of the industrial West, i.e., exactly where bourgeois mechanisms had reached their most thorough development and the industrial proletariat was the social dominant of all productive forces. Moreover, Marx believed that proletarian revolutions would immediately trigger a chain reaction in the other states and societies. Marx was sure that socialist revolution could not occur in other spacial and temporal points, since both historical subjects – Labor and Capital – had in those places not yet reached the stage at which a full and adequate translation of the material into the ideal, the objective into the subjective, and the limited state of development into an adequate system were possible. The Russian experience demonstrated that socialist revolution was possible and could be successfully implemented in a country with underdeveloped capitalism far behind the mass-scale accomplishment of the second stage of the industrial revolution, in a country with a very small percentage of industrial proletarians. After the victory of the Bolsheviks, revolutionary processes did not spread to Europe, but stopped at the borders of the former Russian Empire. Labor had formed a political party and beat Capital in completely different conditions than those anticipated by Marx. In other words, the historical revolution in Russia corrected the theory of its founding father.

The meaning of this historical correction is perhaps most succinctly grasped by referring to the phenomenon of National-Bolshevism discussed by Mikhail Agursky [1]. The proletarian revolution in Russia proved that the victory of Labor over Capital was possible and realistic provided that, in this political-economic act, additional dimensions were involved, such as national messianism (highly developed among Russians and Eastern European Jews), mystical and chiliastic sectarian tendencies (of the people and the intelligentsia), and a Blanquist, conspiratorial, and Order-style political party (Leninism, and later Stalinism). In fact, an analogous although much less radical case ensured victory to different anti-capitalist forces – Italian Fascism and German National-Socialism – which in practice managed to implement quasi-socialist revolutions. In other words, Marxism turned out to be historically realizable in a heterodox, National-Bolshevik execution which differed from the strict concept of Marx himself. Marxism came true in reality, but only in combination with other factors and, concretely, where the political-economic doctrine of Marx was linked with cultural-religious tendencies quite far from the discourse of the author of Capital. In contrast to the success of the historical realization of Marxism in a National-Bolshevik form, at that moment in the bourgeois West, when capitalism had reached the limit of its development, i.e., was at the threshold of the third industrial revolution (this happened in the ’60’s-’70’s of the 20th century), the transition to socialism did not take place. If the heterodox version of Marxism turned out to be feasible, then the orthodox version was disproved by history. Capitalism in its most developed form managed to overcome the most dangerous moment of development, effectively dealt with the threat of proletarian uprising, and moved on to an even more developed level of domination at a time when the alternative, oppositional subject itself – the proletariat as a class as the eschatological, revolutionary party of Labor – was dissolved, dispersed, and evaporated in the complex system of the uncontested “society of the spectacle” (Guy Debord). In other words, post-industrial society, in becoming a reality, finally revealed that the literally understood prophecies of Marx were not realized in practice. This, in fact, is the reason for the deep crisis of contemporary European Marxism.

Today, we know about the sad end of the socialist state which liquidated itself as a result of purely internal processes that led the National-Bolshevik system to the edge of hell with the bourgeois Perestroika. And 40 years earlier, the other non-capitalist regimes of Europe – Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany – fell. Thus, Capital had beaten Labor in all of its ideological manifestations by the end of the 20th century including in the form of orthodox Marxism (represented by European Social-Democracy), the National-Bolshevik version of the Soviets and the approximately close and compromised variants of the so-called “Third Way” European regimes.

The victory of Capital over Labor above all shows the greater degree of consciousness of this pole of history which was capable of remaining faithful to its original purpose in the long-term and being ready to draw conclusions from studying the conceptual models of its historical enemies in order to master, in practice, as preventive measures, some of the methodologies and paradigms revealed by the revolutionary genius himself. After Marx, the camp of Labor, on the global political-economic scale, was divided into three disharmonious, conflicting ideological camps – Soviet socialism (National-Bolshevism), Western Social-Democracy and (with some reservations) fascism. The capitalist camp remained essentially unified and skillfully used the contradictions among the ideologies of Labor. Instead of a single proletarian revolutionary communist party, at the critical moment in history in the bourgeois West, there appeared pro-Soviet, radical Bolshevik organizations under the control of the Comintern, and this means geopolitically linked with Moscow as the capital of the Third International and carrying its will; indigenous social-democratic parties fighting against pro-Moscow forces for influence in proletarian circles; and, finally, the national-socialist movements projecting the National-Bolshevik experience of Moscow (but in a much milder version) onto their national context.

The strategy of Capital lay in consistently opposing the three varieties of the ideological expressions of the forces of Labor against each other so as to avoid any chance of their consolidation into a single, historical socio-political organism. To this end, social-democracy and Bolshevism were opposed to fascism, and fascism itself against social-democracy and bolshevism. The peak of this strategy was the “Popular Front” in France in the time of Leon Blum and the alliance between the USSR, England, and the US in the war against the Axis countries.

On the other hand, the Western social-democrats (as the bearers of non-National-Bolshevik Marxist orthodoxy) were actively drawn into political collaborationism with the bourgeois establishment through parliamentary representation, corrupted through cooperation with the system, and simultaneously turned against the “agents of Moscow” from the Bolshevik, Leninist parties (the line of Karl Kautsky to a a great degree is telling in this sense). And finally, a complete doctrinal formulation of National-Bolshevism in a conscious and consistent ideology within the framework of the Soviet state did not take place, in which the points and strict guidelines would have been set in approaching the legacy of Marx (what was to be accepted and what was to be rejected). Instead of such a correction, Soviet ideologists continued to insist that Leninism and orthodox Marxism were adequate, denied the most obvious and irrefutable, and therein lost the opportunity for a consistent and coherent, enlightening reflection.

Instead of a clear and unambiguous picture of the confrontation between Labor and Capital in the form of the Soviet socialist regime, on the one hand, and the capitalist countries of the West on the other, a partial mosaic arose in which the compromises (from a political-economic standpoint) of the fascist regimes and Western collaborationist social-democracy played an extremely negative role. These half-baked fascist and social-democratic components irreparably hindered the process of forming a united international proletarian communist party which could have considered the ideological and spiritual experience of the Russian Revolution. This is the external factor. The internal factor consisted of the refusal of the Soviet system itself to draw important ideological conclusions – including the necessary correction of the cultural-philosophical views of Marx – and refusing what, in turn, could have been a success in facilitating productive dialogue with fascism, especially in its extremely left versions. Finally, Western social-democracy itself, instead of a “popular front” and anti-fascist pact with radically bourgeois forces and regimes, could have found understanding with nationally-oriented socialists in the framework of united anti-bourgeois bloc.

Soviet Bolshevism, European Social-Democracy, and even fascism, as essentially anti-capitalist movements, should have been obliged to agree on a single ideological platform, somewhere halfway between an explicit revaluation of Marx by the orthodox and his obvious underestimation by the fascists. Such a hypothetic ideology, a kind of absolute, universal National Marxism could have taken into account other cultural-philosohpical, spiritual, and national points along with the brilliantly correct historical paradigm of Marx in order to form a meaningful, ideal National-Bolshevism, an effective social-economic platform in which the principle of Labor would be translated into the most perfect form. But, alas, this has only been discovered a posteriori now that it is possible to summarize and analyze the experience of such a great historical catastrophe. As a subject, Capital turned out to be not only stronger, but smarter than Labor. It did not allow the “specter of communism” to be fully realized in history, and doomed it to remain a mere ghost. This is a tragic ascertainment. But from the point of view of cognition and elaborating a succinct historical paradigm which allows us to clearly understand what point of history we are in at the current movement, the significance of this conclusion is difficult to overestimate. 

The geopolitical paradigm of history

Geopolitical reduction is known significantly less than the economic model, but its cogency and clarity are nevertheless fully comparable to the paradigm of Labor vs. Capital. In geopolitics there also exists a teleological pair of conceptions which present themselves as the subjects of history, but in this case they are not seen from the point of economics, but rather in the context of political geography. There are two geopolitical subjects: Sea (thalassocracy) and land (tellurocracy). Their synonymous pair is West and East, in which East and West are considered not as mere geographical notions, but as civilizational blocs. The West, according to geopolitical doctrine, equals Sea. The East is tantamount to Land.

At the present moment, what interests us is a summary of history translated into geopolitical terms, the eschatological point which is so clearly observed at the level of economics. From that standpoint, Labor battled with Capital and lost. We live in a time of defeat, which the liberal economic school considers final (hence the theme “the end of history” of Fukuyama or the final “money order” of Jacques Attali). Is it possible to see some kind of analogy of this state of affairs in geopolitics?

Amazingly so, such an analogy not only exists, but is so obvious and evident that it leads us fully on towards some very interesting conclusions.

The dialectic of geopolitics is the struggle between Sea and Land. Sea, or the Sea civilization, embodies permanent mobility, “agitation,” and an absence of fixed centers. The only real boundaries of the Sea are the continental masses at its edges, i.e., something opposite to itself. Land, or the civilization of Land, on the contrary, embodies the principles of permanence, fixation, and “conservatism.” The boundaries of Land can be strict, clear, natural, and in different spaces on Land itself. And it is only Land civilization which provides the basis for sacred, legal, or ethically fixed systems of values. Land (East) is order. Sea (West) is dissolution. Land (East) is masculine. Sea (West) is female. Land (East) is tradition. Sea (West) is modernity. And so on.

These two subjects of geopolitical history hint towards the most comprehensive and discernible expression in moving from a multipolar, complex system to a global scheme of blocs. Land and Sea acquired planetary features only in the 20th century, and especially in its second half when the contours of the bipolar model were finally established. Sea found its final expression in the USA and NATO, while Land was incarnated in the conglomerate of socialism countries, the Warsaw Pact. A teleological division of the plane into two camps took place, each of which represented the purest form of this geopolitical, civilizational pair. The civilization of the Sea passed through history to the US and Atlanticism, although the path was not straightforward. Land civilization was incarnated in bulk form in the USSR. Atlantis and Eurasia were strategically integrated, and the latent geopolitical trends ingeniously recognized by Mackinder in terms of the historical logic of terrestrial spaces acquired impressive weight and supreme visibility in the “Cold War.”

But, at the point of geopolitical history’s culmination in the 20th century, a geopolitical pivot was witnessed which at one point clouded the transparent logic of the geopolitical model. The emergence of a separate strategic bloc – the Axis countries – in Europe in the ’20’s and ’30’s became the greatest obstacle that prevented the organic development of the Land civilization into a full-fledged geopolitical subject, and thus laid the foundations for eventual defeat.

The Axis countries attempted to assert their geopolitical independence and self-sufficiency. In doing so, they rejected all the facts and recommendations of [geopolitical] scholarly schools. European fascism was, from a geopolitical point of view, a barrier to the natural, Eurasianist expansion of the Soviets to the West, but it also refused to obediently implement a purely Atlanticist strategy. Such ambiguity seriously disturbed the bipolar map of the world and gave rise to intercontinental wars and conflicts which harshly prevented the Eurasian land continental subject from fully realizing itself and affirming its own coherent geopolitical strategy. European fascism generated geopolitical irresponsibility and the untenable illusion of common interests between Sea (West) and Land (East) in the form of some kind of third identity which, from the point of view of geopolitical doctrine, can not be anything but fictitious and does not have sufficient geopolitical, geographical, historical, or civilizational scale. Europe (fascist or not) has only two geopolitical perspectives: either being the western outpost of the East (as, for example, in the Orthodox Roman Empire before the schism) or acting as a strategic coastal area under the control of Sea and directed against the continental mass of Eurasia. The Axis countries’ strategy was neither the first nor the second. The defeat of Germany was already evident when a two-front war began. Such an unnatural adventure was not only knowingly suicidal for Germany (and for Europe at large), but also laid down a half-baked, unfinished geopolitical base for the entire Eurasian continent that, in the end, led to the death and collapse of the whole Land civilization. This latter comment is based on the brilliant analysis of Jean Thiriart of the collapse of the USSR and the Warsaw Pact, which he concluded 20 years before this became a fact. Thiriart showed that, from a geopolitical point of view, the strategic space controlled by the socialist countries was incomplete and would not be able to withstand prolonged confrontation with the West. Thiriart considers the main reason of this to be the problem of a divided Europe, which gave all the strategic benefits to the overseas power at the expense of the USSR. Thiriart argued that, in order to solve this radical problem that Eurasia inherited from the suicidal policies of Hitler, it would be necessary to either conquer Western Europe and including its countries in the socialist camp or, on the contrary, insist on the withdrawal of strategic assets and troops of the USSR from Eastern Europe with the parallel dissolution of NATO and the removal of all US strategic bases. This would have led to the creation of a neutral space in Europe that would provide Moscow with the opportunity to fully focus on the southern direction and wage a decisively positional battle in Afghanistan and the Far East and Middle East.

But the civilization of Sea carefully studied the geopolitical theories of Mackinder and Mahan, not merely comparing them with its strategy but, understanding the severity of the threat posed by progressive Eurasian, continental integration under the aegis of the Soviets, made every possible effort in every way to prevent it. And once again, as in the case of the struggle between Labor and Capital, not only did objective historical forces act, but the active, direct intervention of the subjective factor was witnessed, i.e., the agents of Western influence did their utmost to prevent the implementation of a “continental bloc”, a Berlin-Moscow-Tokyo pact, the project of which had been put forth by the greatest German geopolitician, Karl Haushofer. Along with developing geopolitical research, Sea found a logical, effective, intellectual, and conceptual apparatus for acting in history not by mere inertia, but consciously.

In geopolitical terms, the end of the Soviet bloc and the collapse and disintegration of the USSR meant the victory of Sea over Land, thalassocracy over tellurocracy, and West over East. And again, as in the case of the Labor-Capital pair, we see in the history of the 20th century a teleological identification of two major, previously not fully manifested geopolitical subjects – only this time this is Sea and Land -, their planetary duel, and the final victory of Sea and the West.

If we compare the plot of economic reduction with the geopolitical model for explaining history, a distinct parallelism immediately catche the eyes which can be traced at all stages. There is the impression that the same trajectory repeats itself on different, parallel levels not directly related to each other. Therefore, the following identification suggests itself:

The fate of Labor = the fate of Land and the East. The fate of capital = the fate of Sea and the West. Labor is fixated, while capital is liquid. Labor is the creation of values and ascent [2] while Capital is exploitation, alienation, the fall of things.[3] Sea civilization is the civilization of Liberalism. Land civilization is the civilization of socialism. Eurasia, Land, East, Labor, and socialism are a synonymic group. Atlanticism, Sea, West, Capital, and Liberalism are also a synonymic grouping.

The comparison of political-economy and geopolitics offers an exceptionally systematic conceptual picture.

The “‘end of history,” in geopolitical terms, therefore means “the end of Land,” the “end of the East.” Does this not recall the Biblical symbolism of the “global flood?”

The war of nations

Yet another model of interpretation can be found in diverse ethnic theories which consider nations, sometimes races, and other times this or that people opposed to all the rest to be the fundamental subjects of history. Countless versions exist in this field. One of the most prominent theorists of an ethnic approach was the German Enlightenment figure, Gerder, whose ideas were developed by the German romanticists, partially borrowed by Hegel, and finally adopted by the representatives of the German “Conservative Revolution,” especially the prominent thinker, jurist, and philosopher Carl Schmitt. The racial approach was outlined in the writings of Count Gobineau and was then taken up by the German National Socialists. The same side of viewing history through the prism of one ethnos has been most clearly represented in Judaistic and Zionist circles on the basis of the specificities of the Judaistic religion. In addition, one can always find trends close to the idea of national exclusiveness during a rise of national feelings, but the difference is that these theories have nowhere else acquired such a pronounced religious content, been so stable and developed, and possessed such a long historical tradition as among the Jews.

There are several unusual, but extremely convincing ethnic theories which do not fit any of the above-mentioned categories. The “theory of passionarity and ethnogenesis”, for example, of the genius Russian scientist Lev Gumilev is one such. It also considers world history as a result of the interaction of ethni understood as organic, living beings from youth to old age and death. Although this theory is highly interesting and reveals many enigmatic civilizational patterns, it does not possess the degree of teleological reduction which interests us. Gumilev’s views do not claim to be a final generalization. Moreover, Gumilev was prone to consider eschatological views (explicit or disguised) as expressions of a “decadent” stage of an ethnos’ development, as chimeras which emerge upon approaching the threshold of the death of cultures and peoples with the decay and loss of passionarity. Accordingly, for him the statement of the question concerning the interpretation of the “end of history” would have been nothing more than an expression of deep decadence. For this reason, Gumilev must be put aside.

In the case of Gumilev, only the first criterion, the ethnos, can be taken, upon which all theories of the ethnos as an historical subject are based and divided into two parts – some of these theories have a teleological, eschatological dimension, and others not. What do we have in mind?

There exist such conceptions of history which see the reflection of the meaning of the entire historical process in the fate of this or that people (the variants being several peoples or a race) and, consequently, the ultimate triumph, rebirth, or, vise verse, defeat, humiliation, and disappearance of a nation are considered to be results of world history, the ultimate expression of its secret meaning. These ethnic theories of an eschatological orientation interest us most of all. Others might be just as extravagant or interesting, but insofar as they do not possess any teleological dimension, they do not add anything to the understanding of the problem under study. Russian, American, Jewish, Kurdish, and English nationalisms, as well as German racism obviously gravitate towards the eschatological posing of the question. Polish, Hungarian, Arab, Serbian, Armenian, or Italian nationalisms, although they might be no less vivid, intense, or dynamic, are obviously teleologically passive. The first group believes that the prioritized subject is the history of their given people and its vicissitudes which form the content of the global historical process, with the ultimate triumph of these peoples and the trampling of hostile nations putting an end to history. The second group does not have such a global scale and insists only on the pragmatic and less pretentious approval of national characteristics, culture, and statehood in the face of surrounding nations and cultures. Here is the important dividing line. A study of the second group of ethnic doctrines does not bring us closer to identifying historical paradigms, as they take too small of scale to begin with. The first group, on the contrary, meets our requirements, although here we should distinguish between “the globalism of wishes” and the “globalism of what is real.” Even a pure theoretical consideration of this ethnic interpretation of eschatology requires a particular ethnos to have a significant historical scale (in time and space). Otherwise, in the opposite case, the picture turns out to be ridiculous.

But, even in limiting the range of consideration to “teleological nationalism,” we still do not have a systematic picture. Insofar as the analogy between political-economy and geopolitics turned out to be whole and vivid, we will try – a bit artificially – to extend the same model to ethnic history. Only then can such an identification turn out to be explanatory, justified, or unjustified.

Geopolitics allows us to take the first step in this respect. Just as Sea = West, the “ethnos of the West” is the bearer of thalssocratic tendencies on an ethnic level. And just as our equation already has the formula Sea=Capital, then a (so far) hypothetical “ethnos of the West” becomes the third member of the identity – Sea = “ethnos of the West” = Capital. Constructing the opposite pole of Land = “ethnos of the East” = Labor is just as easy. Now what remains is relating the concepts of “ethnos of the West” and “ethnos of the East” to some kind of fixed historical realities and explaining the presence of corresponding eschatological doctrines.

It is here that the Russian Eurasianists (Trubetskoy, Savitsky, etc.) come to our aid. Following Danilevsky, they identified the “ethnos of the West” with the “Romano-Germanic” peoples, and the “ethnos of the East” with the “Eurasians,” at the pole of which stand the Russians as a unique synthesis of Slavic, Turkic, Ugric, German, and Iranian ethni. Of course, speaking of “Roman-Germans” as an ethnos is not entirely accurate, but there are nonetheless some common historical and civilizational features which are clearly present. The Romano-Germans are unified by geography, culture, and religion, as well as common technological development. The cradle of what might be called the “Romano-German civilization” is considered to be the Western Roman Empire and later the “Holy Roman Empire of the German Nations.” Ethnocultural unity is present, but does this authorize one to speak of a single eschatological concept which can be considered the fate of this ethnic group as a paradigm of history? If we look closely at the logic of the Romano-German world’s development, then we see that this world practically usurped and appropriated exclusively for itself the concept of “ecumene”,i.e., “universal,” which earlier characterized the aggregate of all parts of the Orthodox Empire. But after the split with Byzantium, the West reserved the concept of “ecumene” only for itself, reducing universal history to the history of the West and leaving out not only the non-Christian world, but also all of the Eastern Orthodox peoples and, moreover, the axis of genuine Christianity, Byzantium. Thus, the very center of authentic Christianity, the Orthodox East, fell outside of the Romano-German “Christian world.” Further, this concept of the “European ecumene” was inherited by the peoples of the West after the violation of its Catholic religious unity and after secularization. The Romano-German world identified its ethnic history with the history of humanity, and this in particular provided the ground for N.S. Trubetskoy to title his book Europe and Humanity, in which he convincingly showed that the the self-identification of the West with humanity turns real humanity, in the whole and normal sense of the word, into the West’s enemy. In such a perspective, the factual self-identification of Europe and Europeans as the ethnic subject of history begins to reveal that the positive (in the Romano-Germans’ consciousness) outcome of history would be tantamount to the final triumph of the West, its cultural and political “ecumene”, over all the other peoples on the planet. This in particular suggests that the Romano-German political, ethical, cultural, and economic norms developed over the course of its history should be universal and universally accepted, and that all resistance from indigenous peoples and cultures should be broken.

The conceptual eschatology of European nations passed through several phases of development. In the beginning, it had a Catholic-Scholastic expression parallel with the development of purely mystical doctrines such as the concept of the “Third Kingdom” of Joachim de Flora. The Romano-German world was supposed to complete the “evangelization” of barbarians and heretics (including Orthodox Christians!) to be followed by “paradise on earth” whose picture represents more or less analogously the universal domination of the Vatican, only raised to the level of absolute. In the 16th century, European eschatology found expression in the Reformation and later found its final formal in the Anglo-Saxon Protestant doctrine of the “lost tribes.” This doctrine considers the Anglo-Saxon peoples to be the ethnic descendants of the ten lost tribes of Israel who, according to Biblical history, did not return from Babylonian captivity. Thus, the true Jews, the Israelites, the “chosen people,” are the Anglo-Saxons, the “golden grain” of the Romano-German world who are destined to establish supremacy over all other peoples of the earth in the end times. In this extreme doctrine formulated in the 17th century by the supporters of Oliver Cromwell, all of the logic of Europe’s ethnic history is condensed and concentrated, unequivocally confirming the ethnic and cultural universalism of the West’s claims to world dominance. Such is the clarification of the ethnic subject of the Romano-German world, which gradually and all the more distinctly became the Anglo-Saxons and Protestant fundamentalists of this eschatological orientation [4]. But the roots of this doctrine can be found in the Catholic Middle Ages in the Vatican. On this note, there is the brilliant analysis of Werner Sombart in his book The Quintessence of Capitalism.[5] The Anglo-Saxons, parallel to the crystallization of conceptions of ethnic selection, are the first to be included into the two fateful processes which lay at the heart of contemporary political-economy and geopolitics. England makes an industrial breakthrough, is the first of the European powers to enter the industrial revolution which rapidly led to the flourishing of capitalism, and simultaneously conquers the sea space of the planet, winning the geopolitical duel against the more archaic, “soil-based” and traditionalist Spanish. Carl Schmitt beautifully revealed the relationship between these two turning points in modern history.[6]

Little by little, another “daughter” state adopted the initiative of England. This was the USA, which was originally founded on the principles of “Protestant fundamentalism” and was conceived by its founders as a “space of utopia” and “promised land” in which history must end with the planetary triumph of the “10 lost tribes.” This idea is manifested in the American concept of Manifest Destiny which views the “American nation” as the ideal human community, the apotheosis of the history of the world’s peoples.

Having compared the abstract theory of the “ethnic exceptionalism of the Anglo-Saxons” with historical practice, we see that the actual influence of England as the vanguard of the Romano-German world on Europe more broadly, and on the whole world and world history is, indeed, massive. In the second half of the 20th century, when the US became a de facto synonym for the “Western peoples” and a symbol of the eschatological reasoning of Anglo-Saxon nationalism, it is difficult to doubt the presence of such in Manifest Destiny. If, for example, the Masonic-Catholic nationalism of a Frenchman, despite its lofty myths of the “last kind” was only a relative and regional one, then the Anglo-Saxon conception of Protestant fundamentalism is confirmed not only by the striking successes of the “mistress of the seas,” but also by the existence of the gigantic, contemporary hyper-power which remains the only one of its kind in the world today.

Now let us turn to the “ethnos of the East”, to the Eurasians. Here attention should also be paid, first and foremost, to the peoples that have proven their historical significance. Naturally, there can be no doubt that the only ethnic community which was able to assert its national eschatology on a huge scale at the height of history was the Russian people. This was not always so, and in some periods of the history of the East, the Russians were little more than one of many peoples, alongside others, which widened or narrowed with varying success the borders of their cultural, political, and geographical presence.

Despite being the most ancient and superior traditional civilizations and despite their scale and spiritual importance, China and India have never raised their own eschatological concepts of nationalism, have not identify their ethnic history with the history of mankind, and thereby have not lent such a dramatic element to international relations or conflicts. In addition, neither the Chinese nor the Hindu traditions were characterized by “messianism” or claims of the universality of their religious and ethnic paradigms. This is the static, “permanent”, relatively “conservative” East incapable of and not willing to accept the challenge of the West. National theories in which the Chinese or Indians are expected to rule the world never existed in China and India. Only among the Iranians and Arabs did such national, racial theories of an eschatological orientation exist. The history of the previous centuries has shown that the real scale of this ethnic teleology – which was clearly expressed by the Islamic religious component – is too insufficient to consider it a serious contender to the counterpart of the “peoples of the West.” The function of the vanguard of “the ethnos of the East” has therefore been uniquely assigned to the Russians, who were able to develop a universal, messianic ideal on a scale comparable to the Anglo-Saxon ideal, and implement it in historical reality at large. The eschatological idea of the Orthodox Kingdom – “Moscow as the Third Rome” – was later transferred to secularized Petersburg Russia, and eventually to the USSR. Orthodoxy came from Byzantium through Holy Rus to the capital of the Third Rome. This is analogous to how the Anglo-Saxons proceeded from the ethnic concept of the “tribes of Israel” to the American melting-pot as an “artificial eschatological liberal paradise.” Russian messianism, originally based on the concept of the “open ethnos” became the formula of “Soviet patriotism” in the 20th century which gathered the peoples, ethni, and cultures of Eurasia under a massive, universal cultural and ethical project.

Yet another confirmation of this ethnic, dual teleology is the fact that American Protestants unanimously equate Russia with the “land of Gog,” i.e., the space from which the Antichrist will come. The doctrine of “Dispensationalism” unambiguously asserts that the final battle of history will unfold between the Christians of the Empire of Good (the USA) and the heretic dwellers of the Eurasian Empire of Evil (Russians and the peoples of the East united around them). This equating of Russia with the “land of Gog” become especially widespread in American Protestant circles in the middle of the last century. Similar views are also characteristic of many Protestant denominations in England and among Catholic Jesuits. The first foundations of the concept of “dispensionalism” was formulated by the Spanish, “Judaizing” Catholic priest (a Jesuit), Emmanuel La Concha who wrote under the pseudonym “Rabbi Ben Ezra.” The Scottish preacher of the Pentecostal sect, Martha McDonald, borrowed this dispensationalist theory from him, which subsequently became the cornerstone of the doctrine of the English fundamentalist preacher Derby, who founded the sect “Plymouth Brethren” or the “Brothers.” All of this Protestant (and sometimes Catholic) eschatology, extremely popular in the modern West, asserts that Western Christians and Jews have a common fate in the “End Times,” while Orthodox Christians and other non-Christian nations of Eurasia embody the “entourage of the Antichrist” who act against the forces of “Good”, bring much harm to the “righteous” but, in the end, “will be defeated and crushed on the territory of Israel, where they will find death.” The extent of belief in this theory and its prevalence among ordinary people in the US is constantly growing. The Bolshevik revolution, the establishment of the state of Israel, and the Cold War perfectly fit into this “prophetic” conception of the “dispensationalists” and strengthened their faith in their correctness.

Let us briefly consider two more varieties of ethnic teleology and formulate a conclusion which the attentive reader has most likely already done himself. That which we have revealed and which is easily verifiably in the history of ethnic dualism – the “ethnos of the West” (whose kernel is the Anglo-Saxons) and the “ethnos of the East” (whose kernel is the Russians) – ignores two famous ethnic doctrines which, as a rule, first come to mind whenever we discuss “eschatological nationalism.” We have in mind the “racism” of the German Nazis and the Zionist conceptions of the Jews. For what reasons have we left these realities on the side and prioritized the study of American and Russian-Soviet “nationalisms” which are not even as visible and radical as Nazism, which borders on barbarity, or the accentuated anthropological dualism of the Jews[7]?

We will answer this question a bit later, but now let us recall in a few words the point of these two variants of national eschatology.

German racism reduced all history to the racial opposition of the Aryans, or Indo-Europeans, to all the other nations and races considered “defective.” At the heart of this approach is the mythological concept of the “ancient Aryans”, the first cultured inhabitants of the earth and the magical race of the kings and heroes of the high Nord. This “Nordic race” was notable for all of its virtues and all cultural innovations are attributed to its authorship. Gradually, the white race descended to the South and mixed with the rough, animalistic, sensual, and wild ethni. Thus arose mixed cultural forms and contemporary ethnic groups. All that is good in modern civilization is the achievement of the whites. Everything that is bad is the product of mixing with the colored races and their influence. The Germans are the vanguard of the white race as they have maintained pure blood, cultural, and ethnic values. The Jews are the vanguard of the colored peoples, i.e., the main enemies of the white race who are plotting endless machinations against it.

This racial eschatology demands that the Germans lead the white race, begin to cleanse its blood, separate the colored peoples from the non-colored, and achieve world domination which would reproduce, at a new stage, the original dominance of Aryan kings. German racism is, of course, an extravagant, quite artificial, and purely modern doctrine, although it is based on some genuine ancient myths and religious teachings. In Germany itself, racism spread under the influence of occult circles associated with Theosophy to varying degrees.

Jewish messianism, on the other hand, is the archetype of all other variants of national eschatologies. The “Old Testament” exhaustively details it and it is deciphered in the Talmud and Kabbala. Jews are considered to be the chosen people par excellence, and the Jewish ethnicity acts as the main subject of world history. On the opposite end of the model are the “Gentiles,” “Goim,” “nations,” “pagans,” “heathens,” or “forces of the left side” (according to “Zohar”). In the esoteric interpretation of Kabbala, the “Goim” are not “people,” but “evil spirits in human form,” and therefore even theoretically they lack the prospect of salvation or spiritualization. But the Jews, despite being the chosen ones, often depart from the right path, go astray down the path of evil, and go along the roads of the “Goim” and their “false deities.” For this, Yaweh punishes his people by sending them to and scattering them among the “Goim,” who mistreat the Jews in every way, causing them pain and resentment. After the  destruction of the Second Temple in 70 A.D by Titus Flavius, the Jews were sent into the “fourth scattering” for their sins, which was to be the last. After centuries-long suffering, this dispersion ends in “catastrophe,” “Holocaust,”  and “Shoah,” followed by the return to the promised land, the restoration of the state of Israel, and from this point on the Jews are to rule the whole world.

Here we note a curious correlation between German racism and Jewish messianism, even though the examined symbols are polar opposites. German racists saw the Jews as the focal point of “racial evil,” and the Jews themselves, especially after the Second World War, recognized Nazism as, on the contrary, the embodiment of “Gentile evil.” It is no coincidence that the religious and historiosophical concept of the “Shoah” was applied to the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany. The very creation of the state of Israel was the direct consequence of the fate of Hitler’s regime. In the eyes of the international community, the Jews obtained the moral right to their own state as a kind of compensation for the victims of Nazism.

German Nazism and Jewish messianism are very intense forms of ethnic eschatology which proved the reality of their importance and involvement in the course of world history by their large and significant scale. Yet, neither Hitler’s Nazism nor Zionism  embodied such distinctness, clarity, or historical visibility as the basic trends of the historical process as in the case of Americanism and Sovietism. The purely geographical layout is curious: racism was widespread in Europe and the state of Israel is located in the Middle East. It is as if they oppose each other vertically, while the Anglo-Saxon and Eurasian worlds oppose each other horizontally. If Hitler’s racism appealed to “Nordism,” then Jewry accentuated the “Southern” or “Mediterranean” orientation. Eurasianism clearly relates to the East, and Atlanticism to the West.

On this note, the historical scale of the horizontal pair of Anglo-Saxons and Russians is much more significant and of greater weight than the case of the vertical pair. Although the Nazis were able to achieve significant territorial gains, they were geopolitically doomed from the very start as their ethno-eschatological paradigm was insufficiently universal and comprehensive and their history did not form an independent spiritual pole (which differs from the case of Russia). Precisely the same, despite the enormous influence of the Jewish factor in world politics, is the case with the Jews who are nonetheless very far from their messianic ideal. The state of Israel is still negligible or purely instrumental in the context of larger geopolitics, in which genuinely serious meaning is only possessed by the blocs comparable to NATO or the former Warsaw Pact.

German racism (although historically eliminated) and Jewish messianism (which, on the contrary, was strengthened after the second half of the 20th century) should not be disregarded. But their importance should not be overestimated as we have a far more significant reality in the form of the USA and Russia.

In this regard, it is more constructive to undertake the following operation: we should break down the pair of Hitlerite racism and Zionism into two components. Just as in the terms of political-economy fascism was somewhat of a compromise between capitalism and socialism, and just as how in geopolitical terms the Axis countries were something intermediate between the clear Atlanticism of the West and the clear Eurasianism of the East, so in the terms of of ethnic eschatology is the confrontation between Nazism and Zionism little more than a veil covering the significantly more serious confrontation between the Anglo-Saxons (and their Manifest Destiny) and Russians. This means that both Nazism and Zionism can be understood as a combination of internally heterogenous factors gravitating to one of the two more fundamental ethnic poles. The first approximation of this idea was developed by the Eurasianist Bromberg, and its other version belongs to the famous writer Arthur Koestler.

Jewish messianism can be divided into two components. One of them is in solidarity with Anglo-Saxon messianism. This is the “Western component” in Jewry. The Dutch Jewish communities originally associated with the promotion of Protestant fundamentalism are representatives of such. This can be called “Jewish Atlanticism” or “right Jewry.” This sector identifies the eschatological expectations of the Jews with the victory of the Anglo-Saxon nation, the US, Liberalism, and capitalism.

The second component is “Jewish Eurasianism,” which Bromberg termed “Jewish Easternness.”[8] At a base level, this sector of Eastern European Jewry is in solidarity with Russian messianism and especially with its communist version. This partially explains the large-scale participation of Jews in the October Revolution and their vanguard role in the communist movement which acted as a cover for the realization of the planetary Russian messianic idea. Generally speaking, it was this “left Jewry” which represented a stable and large-scale reality that the Nazis identified with “communism” and “Jewry” in their propaganda, typologically associated with the Eurasian complex and solidarity with the Russian-Soviet eschatological ideal. “Jewish Eurasianists” often appealed to the astonishing historical formation of the “Khazar Khaganate” in which the Jewish religion was combined with a powerful, imperial military hierarchy based on the Turko-Aryan ethnic element. Besides the extremely negative appraisal of “Khazars” (which Lev Gumilev outlined), there exist other “revisionist” versions regarding the history of this form which, in its continentalist stylistics and sharp deviation from the ethnic particularism of traditional Judaism, strongly contrasts with other, especially Western, forms of Judaistic social organization. Thus, A. Koestler advanced the curious theory that Eastern European Jews are, in fact, the descendants of the ancient Khazars, and their otherness in relation to the Jewry of the West outweighs their racial difference. Here what is important is not how “scientific” such an idea is, but rather that this concept mythologically reflects deep, inter-Jewry dualism.

Now on to German racism. Here the picture is not so clear, and breaking down this phenomenon into two components is not so easy. First of all, this is because the Russophile and pro-Soviet line in Nazism and, more broadly, the German nationalist movement, almost always had an anti-racist orientation. This positive Ostorientirung was characteristic of many representatives of the German Conservative Revolution (Arthur Mueller van den Bruck, Friedrich Georg Junger, Oswald Spengler, and especially Ernst Nikisch), and associated Prussia with ideals of statehood rather than with racial motives. But certain varieties of racism can be related to Eurasianism. Such “Eurasian racism”, undoubtedly, was a position of the minority, marginal, and was not indicative [of the phenomenon as a whole]. A typical representative of this was the professor Herman Wirth who believed that the “Aryan,” “Nordic” element can be found in the majority of the earth’s nations, including among Asians and Africans. Moreover, in this regard, Germans do not represent any kind of social exception, but instead are a mixed people in which both “Aryan” and “non-Aryan” elements are accounted for. Such an approach denied any allusion to “jingoism” or “xenophobia,” and for this reason Wirth and his associates very quickly became the opposition to Hitler’s regime. In addition, some representatives of this trend believed that the Hindus, Slavs, Persians, Tajiks, Afghans, Pakistanis, etc. are the “Aryans” of Asia and stand closer to the Nordic tradition than Europeans or Anglo-Saxons. Consequently, such racism acquired quite distinct “Eastern” features.

But the other, “Western” line was still the most widespread version of racism which insisted on the superiority of the white race (in the literal sense) and especially the Germans above all other peoples. The technological successes of whites and the advantages of their civilization were glorified in every way. Other peoples were demonized and exhibited by the caricature of the “undermensch.” In the most radical version, the “Aryans” were recognized only as Germans while Slavs or Frenchmen were treated as second-rate people. At this point, this was already not racism, but the ultimate form of German ethnic chauvinism. Such commonplace racism, in fact, was characteristic of Hitler personally and was fully in the spirit of solidarity with the ethnic eschatology of the Anglo-Saxons, although it presented a competing version founded on the specificity of German psychology and German history. It is telling that both varieties of this ethnic eschatology were founded on two branches of the once unified Germanic tribe (Anglo-Saxons were originally Germanic tribes) and on two varieties of Protestantism (German Lutheranism and the Anglicanism of England and the USA). However, German racism was significantly laced with pagan elements and appeals to pre-Christian mythology, barbarism, and hierarchy. In contrast to Anglo-Saxon “racism,” German racism was more archaic, extravagant, and wild, and this aesthetic contrast in style hid under itself a common historical and geopolitical orientation. The Anglophilia of Hitler is a widely known fact.

Thus, the pair of Nazism and Zionism turns out to be too insufficient in scale to be considered an axis of eschatological drama in its ethnic dimension. If it is an “axis,” then it is only a secondary, auxiliary, and additional one. It helps to explain many things, but it does not uncover the essence of the problem. In this perspective, it is possible to consider “Jewish Easternness” as one of the specific varieties of “Eurasianism” (or the “ethnos of the East”) in general terms agreeable with the universal formulation of the Russian-Soviet messianic ideal. It follows that this “Eurasianist” complex includes some (minority) forms of the “Eastern” racism of supporters of the “Aryan” value system.

On the opposing end, “Jewish Westernness” fits exclusively into the Anglo-Saxon ethno-eschatological project upon which the deep alliance of the Mondialist Iobby of Israel and the USA is actually based. The “10 lost tribes”, in the face of the Anglo-Saxons (and especially Americans), is combined with the two other branches in agreement with this eschatological expectation. The “Western” version of racism is adjoined to this signaling the supremacy of “white civilization” – the market, technological progress, liberalism, human rights – over the archaic “barbaric” and “underdeveloped” peoples of the East and the Third World.

Now we can clearly discern the same historical trajectory which already became clear to us from the previous section, but on the new, ethno-eschatological level.

History is a rivalry and battle between the two “macro-ethni” oriented towards the universalization of their spiritual and ethnic ideals up to the climactic moment of history. These are the “ethnos of the West” (the Romano-German world) and the “ethnos of the East” (the Eurasian world). These two formations gradually arrive at the large-scale, purified, and refined expression of their “manifest destinies.” The Manifest Destiny of the “ethnos of the west” is embodied in the concept of the “10 lost tribes” of Protestant fundamentalists which lies at the heart of the planetary dominance of the English and later makes up the foundation of American civilization that, in fact, is close to realizing sole control over the world. “Russian truth” ascended from the nation-state to the level of empire and was embodied in the Soviet bloc which rallied half of the world around itself. This duel formed the heart of the ethnic (or more precisely the macro-ethnic) history of the 20th century. European fascism became a significant obstacle in the way of the clear designation of roles and functions (once again!) by transforming the problem from a clear duality into a confusing and secondary complex of contradictions that undermined the natural logic of the great ethnic war and led to the conclusion of opposition alliances that shifted the center of gravity to an incorrect formulation of the question. Asserting what was in many aspects the artificial and insufficient antipode of “Germans-Aryans-Jews” at the center of ethnic eschatology rather than the real dualism between the “Romano-German,” and later Anglo-Saxon and then “American” camp on the one hand and the “Eurasian”, Russian-Soviet camp on the other, the Nazis veered the natural course of events off course, diverted attention towards a false goal, and asserted contradictions where they were not historically or eschatologically significant or central. Once again, the “Eurasian” camp was the one that suffered.

The Anglo-Saxon ideal and the “ethnos of the West” inflicted a crushing defeat upon the “ethnos of the East.” “Soviet” universalism yielded before the Anglo-Saxon one.

We shall therefore complement our formula by linking the political-economic and geopolitical models of history with yet another level:

Labor=Land (East) = Russian (Soviet, Eurasian) ethnos. Capital=Sea (West)=Romano-German (Anglo-Saxon, American) ethnos.

A duel between these two multidimensional poles has taken place over centuries and epochs, reaching a climax at the beginning of the third millennium A.D.

We must pay attention to the fact that European fascism, at almost every level, fulfilled an analogous function. On the economic level, it claimed to remove the contradictions between Labor and Capital, but it indirectly contributed to the victory of Capital. On a geopolitical level, it denied the fundamental reality of the confrontation between Land and Sea, instead claiming an independent geopolitical significance, but it did not cope with this task and suddenly disappeared, once again aiding the final victory of Sea over Land. And finally, on the level of ethnic eschatology, the Nazis’ racism diverted attention from the great confrontation between the Anglo-Saxons and Russians towards the false alternative between “Aryans” and “Jews” with the Great Russians falling (without any kind of justification) under the category of “colored subhumans.” In the end, it turned out to be in the hands of the Anglo-Saxons. In fact, in the latter case on an ethnic level, it should be recognized that the second pole of this ethnic dualism (the Jews) also turned out to be mostly on the side of the “ethnos of the West,” and “Jewish Easternness” was significantly weakened and almost came to naught. Moreover, this decline coincided with the moment of the creation of the state of Israel for which the Eastern European Jews of a predominantly socialist orientation (“Jewish Eurasianists”) had originally fought. Therefore, Stalin hurried to recognize the legitimacy of this state, but almost immediately after its establishment it oriented towards the West and became a loyal champion of Anglo-Saxon policies, primarily those of the US, in the Middle East.

Clash of Religions

The final large-scale level of reducing history to a simple formula should be sought in the history of religions and inter-confessional problems. Since the general trajectory of the historical process which we outlined from the standpoint of the economic paradigm in the very beginning turned out to be applicable to the other breakdown levels, we can also safely search for its analogue in the religious sphere.

One of the poles – that of “Capital-West-Sea-Anglo-Saxons” – was built, as we saw, in the Western Roman Empire, the sources and starting point of all those tendencies which gradually crystallized at this pole. In a religious sense, the Western Roman Empire was linked with the Vatican and the Catholic version of Christianity. Consequently, it is fully logical to refer to Catholicism as the religious matrix of this pole.

The opposing “Eurasian” pole is directly connected with “Byzantinism” and Orthodoxy, as Russians are an Orthodox people, the authors of the first socialist revolution, as well as those who occupy the land of the continental heartland which, according to Mackinder, is the axis of all Land forces. To the same extent to which the contemporary Liberal West was secularized, generalized, modernized, and universalized as a result of Catholicism, so did the Soviet model represent a development, although secularized, generalized, and modernized to a certain extent, of the Orthodox Empire. Regarding the secondary nature of the rest of the world’s religions in the context of the eschatological drama, it is possible to carry out the same considerations which we applied when discussing ethnic eschatology. The eastern traditions are not too eschatologically inclined and they do not accentuate the theme of the “end of times” or the “final battle” at the center of their systems. It is not that they do not know about this reality, but rather they do not accord a central place to it comparable to the distinct and prioritized eschatologism of Christianity (or Judaism). This consideration explains the absence of eschatological forms of nationalism (about which we spoke above) in the East, as their ethnic and religious worldview are closely related and mutually define each other.

This scheme is quite intuitive and perfectly superimposes itself over the previous models. The only point requiring further clarification is the question of Protestantism.

The Reformation was a crucial point in the history of the West. It was not simply a multilevel phenomenon, but also involved two strictly opposite orientations which eventually gave rise to polarized forms. We cannot go into theological arguments here, but we can refer the reader to our detailed monograph on this subject [9]. We will only describe this schema.

Catholicism is a fragment of Orthodoxy. After all, at one point before the schism the West was Orthodox to the same extent as the East until this fragment was distorted and claimed priority and completeness. Catholicism is anti-Byzantinism, while Byanztinism is the full and authentic Christianity which includes not only simple dogmatic purity, but also fidelity to the socio-political and state doctrine of Christianity. Roughly approximating, it is possible to say that the Orthodox conception of the symphony of powers (vulgarly called “Caesar-papism”) involves an understanding of the eschatological meaning of not only the Christian Church, but also the Christian State and the Christian Empire. Hence the teleological and soteriological function of the Emperor based on the second Epistle of Saint Paul the Apostle to the Thessalonians in which “maintaining” and “Katehon” are discussed. “The maintainer” equates the Orthodox exegetes (particularly Saint John Chrysostom) to the Orthodox emperor and the Orthodox empire.

The falling away of the Western Church was based on the rejection of the symphony of power and the rejection of simultaneously the socio-political and eschatological doctrine of Orthodoxy. It is eschatological because it links Orthodoxy and the existence of the politically independent Orthodox state, in which secular power (Basileus) and spiritual power (Patriarch) are strictly defined in correlation as derived from the principle of the symphony, to the presence of the “maintainer”, who prevents the “coming of the son of perdition” (the Antichrist). As a result, deviation from this symphonic, Byzantine paradigm means “apostasy,” or falling away. Catholicism originally, i.e., immediately upon splitting from the united Church, instead of the symphonic model took a different one in which the power of the Roman Pope is extended to those areas which in the symphonic scheme were strictly considered to be the jurisdiction of the Basileus. Catholicism violated the providential harmony between the secular and spiritual dominions and, according to Christian teachings, fell into heresy.

The spiritual crisis of Catholicism made itself felt with special force in the 16th century and the Reformation was the culmination of this process. However, it should be noted that even in the Middle Ages there existed in Europe tendencies which to one degree or another tended towards restoring the proper model in the West. The Ghibelline part of the Hohenstaufen dynasty was a shining example of “unconscious Orthodoxy” and quasi-Byzantine resistance to Latin heresy. Even then, representatives of noble German birth stood at the center of the anti-Papist movement. Centuries later, similar forces – once again German princes – supported Luther in his anti-Roman actions. It is interesting that Luther’s claims against Rome were very similar to those originally put forth by the Orthodox. Worship in national language (a strictly Orthodox feature associated with the understanding of the mystical meaning of speaking in tongues embodied in the linguistic varieties of local churches), the rejection of administrative dictates from the Roman Curia, the significance of “Katehon”, and refusing celibacy for “priests” – all of these typically Lutheran theses can be called quite “Orthodox.” The other points – rejecting the veneration of icons, liturgical rituals, freedom for individual interpretations of scripture – these traits cannot be called Orthodox as they were the negative aspects of anti-Papism which relied more on spiritual intuition and protest rather than the truths consecrated by Tradition.

As a rejection of Rome for the sake of pure Christianity, the Reformation was fully justified. But what was proposed in turn? Here is what is most important. Instead of appealing to fully Orthodox doctrine, Protestants went through dubious intuitions and personal interpretations. This gave rise to a galaxy of brilliant visionaries and mystics on the level of higher manifestations (Boehme, Gichtel, etc.). But even in this case no approach to the heights of Orthodox metaphysics took place. In the worst cases, this gave rise to Calvinism and a number of extreme Protestant sects in which nothing is left of Christianity besides the name.

A dualism exists between Luther and Calvin, between Russian (and French and Huguenot) protestantism and Swiss protestantism, and later Dutch and English versions. Lutherism rejected the hypocrisy and the “nomocracy” of Catholicism, i.e., the Judeo-Christian component of Papism. Calvinism, by contrast, arrived at typically Old Testament historicism and denied the divinity of Christ who became a “cultural or moral hero.” Calvinism developed the most un-Orthodox tendencies previously present in Catholicism at the time when Luther’s critique was directed against them.

Thus, there were two opposite trends present in the Reformation. One was conditionally anti-Catholic from the Orthodox angle (Lutheranism). The other was anti-Catholic from an anti-Orthodox angle. Catholicism, especially abundant and metabolized in Latin countries, turned out to be between two versions of Protestantism whose main carriers were the Germanic peoples. The most eastern Germans – the Prussians who were originally Slavic and Baltic tries that were Germanized – adopted Lutheranism, while the extremely western Germans (the Anglo-Saxons) took Calvinism and Judeo-Christian tendencies to their conclusions.

From such a perspective, one version of Protestantism (Calvinism and Protestant fundamentalism) became the vanguard of the Western-Sea-Capitalist pole, while the other, on the contrary, acts as some kind of Western Christianity nearing Orthodoxy (but nonetheless still far from Orthodoxy). Max Weber wonderfully and in great detail showed the relationship between Protestantism and Capitalism in his book The Protestant Ethics of Capitalism [10]. The difference between Calvinism and Lutheranism is also explained there. An indicative example: In England, Protestantism led to capitalist reforms, but in Prussia, Protestantism strengthened the feudal order. Therefore, Weber concludes, we are dealing with profoundly different tendencies. Weber’s pupil, Werner Sombart, goes even further in a similar analysis [11] which portrays the source of capitalism as not only Protestantism, but the very basic scholastic doctrine of Catholicism. Interesting considerations on this same topic are also made by Oswald Spengler in his work “Prussianism and Socialism.” [12]

The paradigm of religious confrontation is defined as that between Orthodoxy and Catholicism and (later) extreme Protestant fundamentalism. In this antithesis, critical importance is given to the proportion of worldly and otherworldly in religious ethics. The Orthodox ethical ideal lies in the assertion of a reverse proportion of the human world and divine world. The basis of such as approach is laid out in the Gospel (“I came not to call the righteous, but the sinners to repentance,” [13] “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God,” [14] etc.) and in Orthodox traditions, including the social ethics of the Eastern Church. Earthly wealth is considered to be ephemeral, insignificant, while the improvement of life and the world is considered to be secondary and essentially unimportant in the face of the main task standing before a Christian, i.e., the tasks of acquiring the Holy Spirit, salvation, and transfiguration. In this picture, poverty and modesty represent not so much a disadvantage as much as, on the contrary, a useful background for what are seen as the highest callings: the spiritual quest, penance, monasticism, abstraction from worldly affairs. Earthly suffering is not only a punishment, but a glorious and bright repetition of the path of Christ. The otherworldly enters the worldly, realizes it, makes the worldly insignificant, transparent, and transient. Hence the traditional (albeit, of course, relative) disregard of lifestyle that is typical to Eastern Christianity. It cannot be argued that such an Orthodox approach always gives positive results. In the highest manifestation, it is Holiness, non-possession, and the peak of spiritual and mental deeds and contemplation. In its lower manifestation, it is a caricature of laziness and negligence.

The Western Church was originally characterized by increased concern for worldly issues, political intrigue, and the accumulation and distribution of worldly goods. Protestant fundamentalism absolutized this aspect, directing all attention exclusively towards the world. Protestant ethics assert that poverty in itself is a vice while wealth is a virtue. The otherworldly is reduced entirely to the worldly and reward and punishment of the other world are moved into this world. This results in an unprecedented leap into the sphere of lifestyle while minimizing or altogether rejecting the contemplative, purely spiritual aspect of religion. In its extreme forms, neither spirit nor word from Christian doctrine remain. Hence modern attempts to censor the “New Testament” in those places in which it blatantly contradicts the wishes of the extreme Protestant spirit.

This opposing code of religious ethic secularizes and produces socialism on the one hand and liberal-capitalism on the other.

In this view, two main subjects of history are defined: the Eastern Church (Orthodoxy) and the Western Church or perhaps rather the mosaic of Western confessions at the vanguard of which stands “Protestant fundamentalism”, which we have already dealt with. Their dialectics of opposition reveal the secret trajectory of the religious content of history.

Now what remains is considering other religious confessions in which the eschatological factor is manifested and which are sufficiently large enough in scale to qualify for the leading role in the final drama of history. Only Islam and Judaism can pretend to claim this role.

Judaism represents a paradigm of eschatologically oriented religion. Christianity itself is closely linked with Judaistic eschatology. Judaistic religion gives the most complete conceptual picture of the end times and the participation of peoples and churches in it. The meaning of Jewish eschatology, in the most general terms, boils down to the following.

The Jews are not only an ethnos, but simultaneously a religious community. Such an identification of the ethnic element with the religious one forms the uniqueness of Judaism. In this sense, everything associated with what was said in the above section concerning the Jews as nation is fully applicable to Judaism as a religion. Judaism is the subject of religious history, its axis. For a long time, the Jewish faith was in a period of persecution by other “Gentile” confessions, but in the end times, with the coming of the Messiah and the gathering of Jews in the promised land and the rebuilding of the Temple, Judaism is to flourish and stand at the head of the earth. The secular expression of this religious eschatology is modern Zionism.

That the Jews did not dissolve as a nation or religion in the sea of other peoples over the course of long centuries of dispersion, that they kept their faith in future triumph, and that, having pressed on through so many trials, they were able to realize the long-awaited dream of re-creating their state – all of this cannot fail to give a big impression to the impartial observer. Such a literal fulfillment of the eschatological hopes and expectations of the Jews clearly shows that this tradition is indeed deeply linked with the mystery of world history and cannot be dismissed by skeptics, positivists, or anti-Semites. Moreover, over the last century the position of Judaism as a religion has become so strong that it came from being the disenfranchised periphery in the eyes of Christian nations to the point that this confession gained the right to vote in discussing and solving the most important global issues. However, attention must be paid to the fact that the confessional unity of Jews is not as monolithic as it might appear at first glance. In the most rough approximation, two version of Judaism exist: the spiritual (mystical) and the materialistic (lifestyle). The first vision corresponds to the various tendencies of traditional Jewish mystics – Kabbala, Hasidism, and some heretical trends in the likes of “Sabbatism.” The second version relates to the Talmudist, literal, rationalist, nomocratic, and ritualistic interpretation of the Torah which determines everyday life. In this dualism, we see a direct analogue of the corresponding reality in the Christian tradition itself – the lifestyle of Western Christianity (from Catholicism to Protestant fundamentalism) and the contemplative, mystical Eastern Christianity (Orthodoxy). This topic is covered in great detail by the greatest modern Jewish thinker, Gerschom Scholem.[15]

The spiritualist sector of Judaism – and this probably surprises no one – is primarily characteristic for Eastern European Jews, and Hasidic Baal-Shem Tov itself emerged and developed on the territory of the Russian Empire. It is from precisely this extreme spiritualistic environment that the majority of revolutionary Jewish Marxists, Bolsheviks Social-Revolutionaries, etc. emerged. Eurasianist, “Orthodox” ethics and the messianic ideal of brotherhood corresponded precisely with this spiritual, mystical variety of the Judaistic tradition. In secular form, this gave rise to “social-Zionism.”

The opposite branch of Talmudic Orthodoxy continues the rationalist line of Maimonides, such as the ancient Sadducees, tends to minimize the otherworldly to the point of implicitly denying the “resurrection of the death”, and leads to the immanent ethics of lifestyle. The eschatological key of Talmudism is considered to be the future triumph of the Jews as an exclusively immanent, socio-political victory, the achievement of enormous material power. Instead of the world’s transfiguration in the end times or its “restoration” (“Tikkun”), which Jewish mystics focused on, the rationalists identify the messianic era with the reorganization of existing elements so that the levers of power and control are passed to the representatives of Judaism and the restored Israeli state. Such general, immanentized orientation and ethics centered on the resolution of worldly, material, and organizational questions unite both secular rabbis and some Zionists.

In other words, as in the case of its ethnic eschatology, the religious field of Judaism is stretched between two poles – the eastern (incarnated in Orthodoxy) and the western (incarnated in Catholicism and extremely Judeophilic Protestantism).

The Islamic tradition is connected with the Semitic religious heritage, but is nevertheless incomparably less eschatological than Christianity and Judaism. Although there exists a developed eschatological doctrine in Islamic, it is clearly secondary before the massive logic of asserting a monotheism that is independent of cyclical considerations. The most eschatological versions of Islam are spread not among the pure Arabs of North Africa, but in Iran, Syria, Lebanon, and especially among Shiites. The Shiite line of Islam is closest of all to Christian ethics and eschatological orientation. A number of parallels exist with the spiritualist trend in Judaism. Extreme Shiite sects such as the Ismailites, Alawaites, etc. general base their traditions on the eschatological problem of awaiting the arrival of the “Hidden Imam” or “al-Qayyim” (“Savior”), who will restore the genuine tradition that has been spoiled by centuries of compromises and deviations, and return mankind to the kingdom of justice and brotherhood. This eschatological trend in Islam -in both the Shiite context and beyond – can be fully considered to be a form of “Eurasianism” in the most general understanding. Although it naturally operates with different dogmatic and confessional terminology, it resonates with the Orthodox eschatological perspective.

Another non-eschatological version of Islam finds clear expression in Saudi Wahhabism or extreme Hanifism (in the likes of the Pakistani movement “Tablighi” from which the Taliban movement came). Despite powerful mechanisms of fanatic mobilization, it is quite neutral in terms of conceptualizing the role of Islam in the end times or considering this problem from a technical, material perspective. As the Islamic population steadily grows, the importance of the Islamic factor naturally increases. In Wahhabist pragmatism and other non-eschatological forms of Islamic fundamentalism, it is quite possible to distinguish features typologically similar to the lifestyle fundamentalism of Protestants or Jewish rationalists.

At the present moment, it is not possible to seriously speak of an “Islamic factor” as something united, in solidarity, or sufficiently large enough in scale to offer its own independent religious version of the “end times.” It is only possible to note that “anti-Judaism”, or rather “anti-Zionism” is common for the Islamic world. In this sense, the imposition of this ethno-religious formulation on the first framework would be to the detriment of the accentuated focus on the confrontation of Orthodoxy and Western Christianity and reminds us of the situation which we encountered in analyzing the significance of German racism. The gravitation of many Islamic ideologists to making “Israel” and “Jews” a central question of modern history, absolutizing the Islamic and Jewish contradiction, once again brings us to deadlock and an insolvable situation which has brought so much harm to clarifying the roles and identities of the main actors of human history, which is readily approaching its climax. It should be noted that Islam itself is beginning to be viewed as some kind of “scarecrow” against which “progressive forces” or even “Christian countries” should stand together. In other words, Islam or notorious “Islamic fundamentalism” are beginning to fulfill the role that fascism did in its day. We have seen how ambiguous the role of fascism was on all levels of the real eschatological duel. It would be extremely dangerous if we reproduced a similar situation, only this time with Islam.

The final formula

Summarizing the results of our brief analysis, we clarified that on all levels of the most generalized reductionist models of historical teleology there exists a congruent trajectory of the development of the historical process. Now all that remains is putting all of the derived components into a generalized formula.

Thus, two subjects, two poles, two ultimate realities act throughout history. Their confrontation, their struggle, their dialectic makes up the dynamic content of civilization. These subjects become all the more distinct and explicit in moving from vague, covert, and “ghostly” existence to a clear and definitive, strictly fixed form. They universalize and absolutize.

The first subject is:

Capital=Sea (West) = Anglo-Saxons (more broadly, “Romano-Germans”) = Western Christian confessions

The second subject is:

Labor=Land (East) = Russians (more broadly, “Eurasians”) = Orthodoxy

The twentieth century was the culminating point of the maximum severity of the confrontation between these two forces. It is the final battle, the Endkampf.

At the present moment, it can be stated that the first subject managed to overcome the second subject in almost all respects. The main instrument constantly used at all levels as a tactical ploy in this victory of the West was the utilization of some intermediate (third) reality, a third pseudo-subject of history which each time turned out be an incorporeal mirage designed to disguise the true nature of eschatological confrontation.

The West’s victory (in its entirety) can be understood in two ways. The liberal optimists claim that it is final, that “history is successfully concluded.” Those more cautious say that this is only a temporary stage, and that the fallen giant can rise up again under different circumstances. Moreover, the winner faces a new and totally unfamiliar situation – a situation in which there is no longer the enemy, the duel with which made up the content of the winner’s historical being. Consequently, the actual subject of history, being left alone, must resolve the problem of post-history which puts a new challenge before it: will it remain a subject in post-history, or will it transform into something else?

But that is an entirely different subject.

And what of the vanquished? It is difficult to expect clear and balanced thinking from it. In the majority of cases, it does not understand what happened to it. The amputated organ – in this case the heart – continues to hurt and ache as is what happens with the patient after surgery. Few are conscious of what happened at the turn of the ’90’s and what side opened the “paradigm of the End” in front of humanity…

Footnotes:

[1] See Elementy. Evraziiskoe obozrenie, 1997, No. 9 with a collection dedicated to this phenomenon

[2] Here Dugin compares the etymology of “vostok” (Russian for “East”) and “voskhozhdenie” (or “ascent”).

[3] Here Dugin compares the etymology of “zapad” (Russian for “West”) which literally can mean “sinking” or “falling” with the dark nature of Capital and the West associated with the Fall.

[4] See “The crusade approach against us” in A. Dugin’s Foundation of Geopolitics (Moscow, 2000)

[5] Published in Russian in Moscow in 1994 under the title “Burzhua”

[6] See Carl Schmitt’s “The Planetary Tension between East and West and the Confrontation between Land and Sea” in A. Dugin’s Foundation of Geopolitics (Moscow, 2000)

[7] Something analogous can be found in the ancient Iranian tradition or even in the Hindu caste system, where the lower castes (especially the chandala) are not seen as humans in the full sense of the word. For a similar dimension of this theory, see A. Dugin’s Konservativnaia revoliutsiia (Moscow, 2004) (the chapter “Metaphysics of National Bolshevism) and in the almanac Konets sveta (Moscow, 1997).

[8] One of the founding fathers of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, wrote “The Eastern form of Zionism – the Western and Eastern Essences”

[9] See A. Dugin’s The Metaphysics of the Gospel (Moscow, 1996)

[10] Weber, Max. Selected Works. Moscow, 1990.

[11] Sombart, Werner. The Bourgeois. Moscow, 1994.

[12] Spengler, Oswald. Preußentum und Sozialismus. Berlin, 1920.

[13] Mark, 10:25

[14] Luke, 5:32

[15] Scholem, Gerschom. Ursprung und Anfange der Kabbala. Berlin, 1962.

© Jafe Arnold – All Rights Reserved. No reproduction without expressed permission.