Rev Left Radio - Aleksandr Dugin: Traditionalism, Eurasianism, and Russian Nationalism

Episode Date: March 25, 2022

In this very special episode, Jules (@realjulestaylor) sits down with Brett (@RevLeftRadio) to have a long conversation about the Russian Nationalist philosopher Aleksandr Dugin. They examine his philosophy, core concepts, and influence in Russia. They also discuss the current war in Ukraine at lenght. Check out No Easy Answers: https://smarturl.it/noeasyanswers Outro Music: https://bit.ly/julestaylorbio Music for this episode: Lewis And Dekalb by Kevin MacLeod:    https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4989-lewis-and-dekalb Severe Tire Damage by Kevin MacLeod:    https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/5004-severe-tire-damage ----- Support Rev Left Radio: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio or make a one time donation: PayPal.me/revleft LEARN MORE ABOUT REV LEFT RADIO: www.revolutionaryleftradio.com

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. On today's episode, I have on the show Jules Taylor from the No Easy Answers podcast to discuss the philosophical work and ideas and concepts of the Russian nationalist philosopher Alexander Dugan. This is very timely with regards as a topic because of what's going on, and we get into a lot of the Russia, Ukraine, NATO conversation throughout this episode on Dugan and his ideas. And we have some some friendly, comradly, maybe disagreements about certain things and where to place certain emphases, which we get into specifically in the latter half of the episode. And I found that back and forth and some of those disagreements to be very interesting.

And the conversations that they spawn to be rewarding and important and useful for people listening to sort of navigate some of these differences. But overall, it was a fascinating episode. Jules is a really interesting, really well-spoken, very knowledgeable comrade, friend, and person in general. So I think you'll definitely enjoy this conversation. And I do promote it in the episode, but by the time this episode comes out, it'll probably be a week before we drop an episode on Red Menace on the book by Julius Ivola called Riding the Tiger. Avola is obviously a famous fascist and traditionalist thinker, intellectual, and is a major influence on many fascists and many fascist movements, including Alexander Dugan. So listening to this episode on Dugan and then going over a few days later and checking out the Red Menace episode on Avala, you can really start to see, you know, that line of influence and learn a lot about the fascist ideology and its origins.

because just like with any other ideology, fascism has its hallmark thinkers and its core concepts that you can trace back to thinkers in the past and we can examine how those ideas are carried forward into the present. And I think that's a fascinating and important line of inquiry for those of us who are opposed to fascism. We have to understand it. And I think this episode and that Red Menace episode go a long way in pushing in that direction and helping us

understand that and as always if you like what we do here at rev left radio you can support us on patreon patreon.com forward slash rev left radio we are always have been and always will be 100% listener funded um both dave and i have large families with multiple children and um my my wife has been out of work since the beginning of covid so uh the donations that that come through rev left are really really important for me and my family and i deeply deeply appreciate anybody who tosses a few dollars our way every month. And in exchange for that, you not only have access to bonus episodes going forward, but you have access to our whole backlog of Patreon exclusive episodes that go back five years at this point. So if you're interested

in that, we deeply appreciate it. If you don't have money, totally understand. You can share this episode with friends, or you can leave us a positive review on iTunes and Spotify. It goes a long way in pumping the algorithm in our favor. So we appreciate that if you subscribe to us as well. But without further ado, here's my conversation with Jules Taylor on the philosophy of Alexander Dugan. Enjoy. Hey, my name is Jules Taylor and I have a podcast called No Easy.

answers. My background is music. My hobbies are philosophy and chess, and I'm here today to talk about Alexander Dugan. Yeah, Jules, welcome to the show. This is a long time coming. I know that we've been sort of fans of each other's work broadly, and we're aware of each other, but we've never had like a specific topic to tackle together, and I think we're going to change that today. I know on your show, no easy answers. You've been doing a few back-to-backs on Alexander Dugan, and that's what the focus of this episode is going to be. I think it'll be really interesting to dive into this stuff. And given not only the

political element, but the philosophical elements of Dugan's work, I think you and I might be uniquely positioned to sort of wrestle with a lot of that stuff. But before we get into to Dugan proper and how you became interested in him, in particular, do you have any like caveats, any opening

statements you want to make clear before we get into this stuff? Yeah, I have a couple things, man. Like, you know, I want to say that although we're going to approach this episode and the way that we might approach an episode when we're first encountering a thinker or philosopher.

I want to go on record from the start by saying that I'm reluctant to dignify Duggan with the title of philosopher. And if we have time, I can go into some of the specific reasons I have for that reluctance, but that's only going to make sense

within the context of the entire episode. I'm also kind of expressly rejecting the notion that one must be an expert in Dugin or Dugin's thought in order to understand or convey his ideas. One thing that the writings of Alexander Dugin share with the rest of the fascist canon is that the writing is terrible. And I mean, if you read Dugan, his writings are very similar to like Julius Evela in that they're badly worded, they're inconsistent, they're full of contradictions, and sometimes they're conspiratorial and deeply anti-Semitic. And I don't

think the ideas themselves are fruitful or generative. But the important part of this is that simply recognizing the project and the concepts, you know, hopefully that will go towards, or do a good job towards explaining, you know, sort of the angles Dugan is riding from. Because like a lot of ideologies or political programs, the bits and pieces can be gibberish, but, you know, it's that these ideas affect people in an emotional way and stimulate political action. I mean, that alone means they're important. And, you know, we'll definitely be talking about like Russian nationalism today. And I just want to acknowledge from the get-go as well that there are, of course, other types of harmful nationalism. And we have our own unique, you know, brand of harmful

American nationalism. And India, with Modi, has their own type of national going on. I mean, there's just nationalism on the rise globally. And I know the word nationalism carries a certain connotation to Russians that's, they disapprove of that. And I understand all. of that. And so with all that being said, when we talk about Russian nationalism today, we're talking about it because, you know, there's a war that's broken out in Ukraine. And I think that this needs to be part of the context and the analysis. So that's what I have is like an opening sort of preface. For sure, yeah, with your, well, with, first with regards to Evola in particular,

for those interested, obviously, Avala is an influence on Dugan, which we'll get into here. But over on our sister podcast, Red Menace, we are tackling Aval's work, writing the tiger next month. So by the time this episode comes out, this will probably come out first and then a week later that Red Menace episode will come out. But I think they'll make really good dual, you know, complementary listenings if you're interested in really trying to

understand this stuff. And we also have some stuff planned on Red Menace to tackle the work of Carl Schmidt, the sort of fascist philosopher as well. So, you know, these things kind of tie into each other. When you have a full episode on Dugan and then you go and study Evola, and then you've studied Schmidt, you're really coming to a

pretty well-rounded understanding of some of the the main elements of modern fascism, the world over. And then just to touch on your point about your reluctance to call him a philosopher, I'm interested, because, you know, professionally, I think he is one. He works as a philosophy professor. But I myself sort of share a certain skepticism. I mean, he's clearly very well read. He's read lots and lots of stuff.

But when I've listened to interviews with him, explain his ideas and his philosophy, even very sympathetic interviews with him, I'm not personally overly impressed. Like, I don't really see, like, these fireworks of novel intellectual creations, you know, coming forth from him. So, yeah, do you have anything to more to say specifically on why you are reluctant to specifically call him a philosopher? Yeah, well, you know, I think that part of why Dugan is so, it's partly just that the guy is so offensive to me. Like, and what I mean by offensive is that, like, if you're a thoughtful person that values philosophy and sort of evaluating your own world views and working towards the, project of egalitarian politics, like, it's offensive because he takes all these ideas and he kind of turns them against you. You know, if you are a person of faith, which, you know,

full disclosure, I'm an atheist and I, my lack of knowledge is probably most pronounced within the realms of theology or spiritual engagement. But if you're a person of faith, which I, plenty of comrades are, he also takes that faith and sort of weaponizes it in a certain way. So in terms of like egalitarian politics, in terms of faith, in terms of philosophy, like he just, the weaponization of all of these ideas is something that is so greatly offensive to me that I feel like to call him a philosopher would be to deride the entire tradition of philosophy in some senses. Interesting. Absolutely. All right. Well, let's go ahead and get into it. And then some of these things, as you said, might become more clear as we work through

it. I'm assuming that a lot of listeners out there, you know, above averagely informed, especially with recent events, you've probably heard the name. But I would be willing to bet that most listeners don't have a deep knowledge on Alexander Dugan. But before we get into his work specifically, I'm just kind of interested

how you personally got interested in Dugan, and just generally, why is he someone worth understanding? Well, you know, man, I started asking questions engaging with philosophy. Like when the pandemic kid, I started a podcast as I went to a very existential place, right?

So I started asking questions about meaningfulness and purpose and telos. And from there, I started reading some Nietzsche and Heidegger, and I understood that there's, like, left Nietzscheanism and there's left Heidegarianism. But typically, like, I mean, I just started asking the question, like, why would anyone on the left be taking these ideas from Nietzsche or from Heidegger or from Carl Schen? Schmidt, for that matter. So it began as a sort of like sharpening of my ideological blade. And from there, I read a book called War for Eternity by Benjamin Titlebaum. And I didn't expect, like, books like on the genealogy of morals and being in time by Heidegger and these works of philosophy to become the sort of context that floats around

Ben's book. And so in reading Ben's book, I became introduced out. Alexander Dugin, and understood that Dugin, part of the sort of mystical character this guy has, or the sort of mystic that he's viewed as, comes from a knowledge and siding of all of these various thinkers. And it turns out the guy is a deep Heidegarian. Turns out he has Nietzschean commitments. And so it was through my research into like why people on the left are taking these ideas or should they be even. that I became fascinated with Dugin and the way he utilizes these ideas. And, you know, from there, it just, it kind of snowballed. Like, I didn't, I, I had the interview with Benjamin Titlebaum, and then I started reading

a book called Dangerous Minds about Heidegger and Nietzsche, and I requested an interview from the author who was Professor Ronald Beiner out of the University of Toronto. He was professor emeritus, and it turns out, and this is all public knowledge, but, like, He was actually the dissertation advisor to one of Dugan's translators, and then he resigned out of protest from that. And so I was able to gain additional insight from Professor Beiner about the dangers of Dugent and why he's been sounding the alarm since 2015 or so. So all of this sort of fueled an interest And once Once the Ukrainian situation broke out last month

I felt like this stuff was not safe to ignore anymore Yeah Yeah very interesting I know like we'll probably get into it here in a second But one of the things that initially You know sort of interested me in his work Was this like this fourth political theory I think we can talk about whether or not

That really holds up under examination But this idea that You know I'm not a fascist I'm not a communist, and I'm not a liberal. It's an interesting first opening move, at least. Now, what you do after that says a lot, and I think we'll see that he doesn't really get rid of the fascism by any means. But perhaps he shifts it a little bit, but I think the ideas that he's promoting, at least my understanding of them, and I haven't read everything he's ever written, because he's written a lot, they're not really fully up to snuff.

They're not totally original. These have iterations historically that, you know, us are aware. of this sort of, you know, whether it's, you frame it as a right-wing communism or a left-wing fascism, this flirtation on the borderlands between the left and the right and trying to integrate elements of both is nothing new for sure. But I think, yeah, we'll flesh this out as we go. So just to kind of open up, you know, maybe you could talk a little bit about who Alexander Dugan is, sort of biographically, what he's known for generally, and kind of the broad outlines of his specific ideology before we get into the details.

Right, right. And I just want to totally echo your sentiments as well that he's unoriginal. And we'll get into some of that, definitely. But as for like who Alexander Duggan is, you know, the guy's a lot of things, man. He's said to be a traditionalist, a philosopher, an author of more than 30 books. Wikipedia says he's authored more than 30 books. But Dugin himself, I've heard him say he's authored over 60 books. He is a geopolitical strategist, a political advisor. He's described as, is a fascist or a fascist intellectual. And I see him as kind of the key linchpin of the Russian far right. And Dugent speak several languages, so his ability to publish in diverse media outlets and speak to different audiences, combined with a bit of Western obsession has kept him in the spotlight. He's really an impressive aggregator of radical right ideologies. I mean, he brings together stuff like vocus cultism, traditionalism, Parts of the conservative revolution, the French New Right, and Eurasianism.

You know, in the 90s after the fall of the Soviet Union, he and Edward Limonov were key members in creating the National Bolshevik Party. He began his intellectual career as a critic of the Soviet Union. He identified with some of the underground nationalist and spiritualist movements. Some of these groups who were involved with were expressly anti-Semitic, like the ultra-nationalist Pamiot. and he was also a part of the Uzinsti circle and this was a group that trafficked in some of the main thinkers of traditionalism

like René Guinan and Julia Sevela, who we mentioned earlier. Some of the, they also trafficking some of like the German conservative revolution theories. They had a, they instituted like a Masonic style initiation ritual. And all this as part of the Uzinstki circle was done

in an ironic denunciation of the political correctness of the late Soviet regime and its ideological it was like in protest to its ideological rigidity and this wasn't like an expressly political group but Dugan attempted to transform this group into an engine

for political activism so you know he also I mean Dugan he's a lot of things right he eventually disavowed a lot of these ties and emerged as the leading spokesperson for Eurasianism and we can get into what Eurasianism Asianism is, and he's most known for a book called Foundations of Geopolitics, one of the two

books we'll probably talk about. And this was published in 1997. It's basically a manifesto for Russian expansion. It's looked at as kind of like the Russia's version of Manifest Destiny. He was a professor at the Academy of the General Staff. Foundations of Geopolitics was actually published with the assistance of the Academy of the General Staff, which is like the Russian equivalent of West Point like a military school you know and so I think that's that's quite a bit about Dugan here

but that's that's I guess a start into who Alexander Dugin is now with a national Bolshevism he was one of the co-founders of that entire formation interesting yes with Edward Liemannoff and that's who I knew as yeah Lemanov is who I was aware of I wasn't aware

Dugan was equal with him in the creation of this yeah um so you know what I know about Dugan which is kind of funny man a guy named Charles Clover describes Dugan and we might talk about

Charles Clover and the author in a bit but he describes Dugin during the early 90s as a sort of coffee house conservative like you know long hair, beard, guitar playing and Liemannoff in the early 90s was part

of the punk scene and he has quite the discography of like punk and other types of music that went on in the early 90s. And, you know, I'm an audio engineer by trade, so part of my interest in this did initially get sparked from understanding that there was this huge underground Russian punk scene that happened. So, yeah, they were co-founders on the National Bolshevik thing. But they, I think they came together for reasons.

In addition to that, some of it being like this sort of coffee house conservative, bohemian sort of aesthetic or lifestyle at that point that drew them together as well. Very interesting, yeah. Now, I've heard a lot of people talking about Dugin, you know, there's like this obvious go-to historical analogy they reach for, which is Rasputin, right? The Raspuant's relationship to the Romanov's, but then like people call Dugin, you know, Putin's Rasputin.

How deep is that relationship? How much do we know about how much they actually personally know each other and clearly Putin is aware of Dugan. I'm sure they've met numerous times, but is it actually as deep as the Rasputin relationship, or is it ambiguous? Well, you know, like Charles Clover, he's the author of a book called Black Wind, White Snow,

and he writes about the kind of history of Eurasian ideas as they evolve where they started from. But he became pen pals with Alexander Dugin for over several years, unlikely pen pals, he says. And so during these interactions with Dugan, he claims to have never found a link, between, like a direct link between Dutian and Putin.

And he suggests what the accurate sort of take away from this is that there's probably, like there's motives within the Duma or within Putin, that he looks to ideologists in order to justify. So he kind of like wags, he's like a wagging the dog kind of

theory behind that. But you know, Dugan himself doesn't even, I mean, he claims openly to have the ear of Putin, to say that Putin follows his ideology, advised by him. And, you know, when you look at some of the things that Dugan has written about as far back as 97, which is like the Georgian invasion, the invasion of Crimea, annexing of Ukraine, the entirety of like the geopolitical program seems to be what Putin is sort of aligned with during his third term. So there's a lot of circumstantial stuff about these that people observe and are right to draw. uh, to notice similarities or, and, and perhaps even draw a few conclusions. Um, so I, I, I can't sit here and say, hey, there's a, there's a direct line from Putin to Dugan, um, but there's a ton of stuff

outside of it. Um, and like I said, I've been reluctant to sort of like, you know, to, to say, hey, this is real, this is going on. It seemed a bit conspiratorial, uh, in a lot of ways. Um, but the, the, the geopolitical program being followed by Dugan, or being followed by Putin, it's a big tip off and I think that's kind of what pushed me to the other side of being like hey this isn't safe to ignore this stuff seems like it's real

like there's something to it so yeah I hope that answers that question yeah for sure that's very interesting I know later we're going to talk more about what Putin's real motivations are but I think that where I saw the coalescence between Putin and Dugan's theories

was in that hour long sort of speech that Putin gave as he's commencing the invasion, which he's dressing it up in this justification regarding Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia really being one people. And I've heard

Dugan talk about great Russia, literally Russia, little Russia, Belarus, and what he's called, white Russia, Ukraine? Yeah. Is that right? Yeah, I think so. Yeah, so, you know, in Dugan's philosophy, this is all one people, and there's an obvious need first and foremost to reunify these

people. And Putin was definitely using some version of that argument in the justification. I'll get into later that I think that that's kind of a ideological sprinkling on top of an already material cake, but we'll get there when we get there. Right, right. And just, you know, the talking points that Putin has adopted, you see the kind of resemblance of, like, those talking points he said versus what Dugan says, right? And it should be noted that there's, like, expressed sort of Eurasian vocabulary that's

been picked up by Dugan as well, or, I'm sorry, picked up by Putin. So there is this adoption of talking points and language going from Dugan to Putin. Definitely, definitely. So let's go ahead and dive into some of these core concepts. And the first one is Eurasianism. So can you talk about what that is in the role it plays in Dugan's philosophy? Yeah, Eurasianism, man, it's a big sort of thing to define. But I think it's helpful to think of Eurasianism as a sort of civilizational nationalism.

So it's a form of nationalism, but it's more of a civilizational nationalism with Russia at the core of a unique civilization that Russia has dominion. So Russia has this dominion over a core geography in Asia. It is in a way also like a multinational nationalism because, you know, obviously in the Russian past it's been like a confederacy of nations, you know. So the idea of Eurasianism has only entered the discourse rather recently, but it's not a new idea. This goes back to some of the unoriginality we talked about. The first place this kind of pops up is in an article from 1904 from a guy named Sir Halford MacKinder. And he wrote an article called The Geographical Pivot of History for the Royal Geography Society. He was a British guy, a British geographer.

But in this article, he took a map of the world, and he drew a big oval over all of Asia and most of Europe and most of China, and he labeled it Heartland. And then he drew an even bigger oval over that initial oval, and that included, like, most of the rest of Africa, the rest of China. And he labeled that the Rimland. And it Dugan actually replicates this map with the ovals labeled Heartland and Rimland in his book, Foundation, the Geopolitics. And we'll get into that book in a bit. But some of Duden's vocabulary and concepts come directly from the geographical pivot of history. Like Heartland military capacity, he calls it land power, with the rest of it comprising what he's called sea power. Like, all this stuff is straight from Halford McKinder.

So there are some ideas also that came from there. Like Halford also wrote in this 1904 book, he said, whoever rules East Europe commands the heartland. And so part of the idea of a core geographical dominion by Russia stems from this work of Halford McKinder. So there's also like, you know, the Eurasianism as a slogan, it originated in Europe by a group of Russian or Soviet exiles. So there were two guys actually linguists. Prince Nikolai, Trubetskoy, and Roman Jacobson. So these guys were pen pals, they were friends, they were both linguists, and Trubitskoy gets exiled in 1917 during the First World War.

He tries to get away and go to Turkey at the time. But Trubiskoi, his project as a linguist, was searching for, like, universal phonological laws, and he ended up being a proponent of Eurasianism, but also added. certain things to Eurasianism like the concept of there being sort of unconscious linguistic borders known as isoglosses that that kind of divided East and West. So the ideas of like the ideas of like a common sort of language or forming a geographical barrier to the East and West was added to Eurasianism via the work of Jacobson and Trubetskoy.

And so you have the Halford-McKindr stuff with the Heartland and the Rimland. You have the Soviet exiles coming up with ideas for Eurasianism while they're exiled from the Soviet Union after the Bolshevik Revolution. And then you also have Trubetskoy taking up like political pamphleting where he writes all these ideas. And I think it's important to kind of note the political climate at this point. You know, like three major empires that just collapsed, right? So, like, you had the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and the German Empire that all collapsed. Plus, Russia that had collapsed rather quickly into the Soviet, the Bolshev revolution happened rather quickly. And all of this combined to create a mood where deeply embedded truths were suddenly open to question.

So with all this in mind, Trubitskoy, the linguist, he ends up writing a pamphlet, and in this pamphlet, he takes some ideas from other obscure pamphleteers, and he calls it Europe and mankind. And this pamphlet is a blistering attack on Europe's claim to universalism and progress. He founds the Eurasianist movement. So basically, like, this idea of criticizing the West, like the shine of European society after the First World War, I kind of worn off, right? This idea of criticizing Europe's claim to, like, enlightenment values and being the pinnacle of

progress, we're all questioned, and he sort of excoriated this notion that the West has any claim to universality of truth, of other things like the universality of human rights, or the universality of enlightenment values. So, all this sort of comprises, these are all constituent ideas into Eurasianism, which is that Russia occupies a unique geographical dominion that is bordered by unconscious barriers of language, and that Russia itself should be rejecting of trying to Europeanize itself It looks to like, I think, Peter the Great as a Tsar who attempted to integrate Russia with Europe and how the Russian intelligentsia was wrong to do that, and that Russia should be its own thing over its own dominion.

Like, all this stuff is part and parcel with Eurasianism, including, like, critiques of modernity, critiques of the West, and a sort of notion that Russia should pull back. and be its own empire, like an empire of empires, if you will. Yeah, very interesting. So, Eurasianism, just try to kind of nail down this concept for some questions I have about it. You know, when you hear Eurasianism, you might sometimes think a union between Europe and Asia. That's not what is meant here. What role does, like, China and Mongolia and Korea, play in this Eurasian philosophy?

Is that just the East, and then there's the West, and then there's Eurasia? Is that how he conceives it? I mean, it depends on how you look at it. it, because, like, there's plans for Russian domination of these areas within foundations of geopolitics. I mean, that book as a sort of manifesto

and political program for Eurasianism is also one that expressly states it's for, like, the world rule of Russians. So, insofar as there are plans or roles to be played with any of this, I don't think we should have rose-colored

glasses looking at any sort of, like, friendly unionization of Asian countries. It's, you know, to Dugin, even though he may profess a sort of multinational pluralism that he's in favor of, he's written, you know, concretely that there are plans for domination and for Finlandization and all these different aspects of imperialist dominion of a Eurasianist sort of union, which is basically, it's basically Russian imperialism is what it is. Yeah. Or a plan for that, rather. Yeah.

A plan for it, yeah. Yeah, and I think it's worth noting just to help people understand that, you know, this is some, Dugan is anti-modernity, right? Right. He's very anti-liberal, and he's, like, as you said, this anti-universalism is this opposition to the pretense that the Western world, America, Europe, you know, North America and Europe, have about their values. So he's like, no, those are yours, you know, that's fine if you want stuff like gay marriage and all these things over there.

but stop pretending they're universal stop pretending that Russians should adopt your way of life and your visions we are a unique and different civilization and so you know you can have what you believe is right over there and we'll have what we believe is right over here but don't try to impose anything on us

is that more or less correct? Yeah like what Dugan opposes I think most sternly is the universalism that Western society seeks to hold on like things like human dignity like he takes real issue with like universal human rights.

The universal part of that is what he considers to be totalitarian, is what he considers to be fascist in his own way of reversing that term. And, you know, this train of thought, the rejection of the universalism, I think it goes back to like a philosopher like Gian Battista Vico with like the particularism, that there are multiple human ways to go about life in an, affirming way, which are, if in commensurate, still equally valid. And so that in itself is not like a harmful idea, and I think there's a lot of beauty that can be taken from something like that.

But when you take these ideas and you turn them against the notion of human rights being something that should be afforded to all human beings, that's where you lose me and I start to see a more sort of nefarious game plan going on there. Absolutely, yeah. He will often talk in certain ways. Like, you know, I'm not against, like, gay rights or gay marriage. I'm just against this idea that it should be universally applied to all, you know. So he'll kind of say, like, I'm not racist.

You know, I just think, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so he kind of like, you know, as opposed to like these hardcore fascists who can't wait to tell you how racist they are and, you know, how much they hate gay people, etc. he is kind of playing this little tap dance game where he's like I'm not against these things but we should be able to decide for ourselves stop pretending that all society should immediately embrace what you Europe and America embrace you know that we're fundamentally different we don't need to necessarily embrace that we can if we want but that's our choice and so he kind of does this thing where he's like I'm not anti-gay and I'm not

racist but you know I don't believe that these are universal rights that apply to us all the time so what he's basically saying is we reserve the right to be racist and to be anti-gay. We just haven't decided if we want to be yet, right? Is that kind of right? I mean, I know it's a simplified version, but that's kind of what I get for his interviews. Yeah, I mean, I think it's a very complicated

and dressed up way of saying blood and soil in a way. Like, it's like a... And what I mean by that is, like, what better way to sort of dismiss the universalism of human rights than by beautifying the particular, you know,

saying that, like, we have our land, we have our truth, we have, you know, our language, we have our traditions. And so this sort of, I suppose, beautification of the particular quickly can dissolve into a sort of like reification of strong borders of ethnic, central sort of philosophical programs, you know. So it's like, it's about, to use a term here, it's like a, it's a value of rootedness. of tied to the soil, to the land, to the culture, to the tradition, which on its face can seem very, it can seem innocuous. But like I said, within the belief system, if you follow Dugan far enough and do enough

of his writings, his past, and things that he's, ideas that he traffics in, you understand that this is, like I said, a dressed up way of saying blood and soil. Yeah. Well, I think that leads next into this next concept, which is also incredibly important, which is traditionalism. So can you talk about what that is and how Dugan understands that term? Yeah, and I think it's important to

because when I first came into this concept, I was not familiar with capital T traditionalism. It's not like just being in the traditional term of traditionalism. It's a whole different concept. And so traditionalism is like, and this is all stuff that like has been said many times by Benjamin Titlebaum. So Ben, if you're listening, hello.

You know, but like, so first and foremost traditionalism is like a spiritual and a religious school and it's also known as like the philosophy perennis which is you know basically like long ago there was one central religion that had

a central core truth to it but over time this truth and this tradition has been splintered and broken and lost and bastardized And so traditionalists, they look at all religions, maybe not an equal in degree, but all religions as kind of a pathway to that central truth. There's certain things about traditionalism, like some of the belief in cyclical time, a disbelief in progress. You know, some of the main traditionalists were like Julius Evela and René Gwynon. and so

traditionalism in taking from these writers it's a very sort of pessimistic and fatalistic perspective meaning that like the disbelief in progress is the opposite they not only don't believe in progress they believe that like

basically like there was the Garden of Eden and everything else has been downhill since then like society has just gotten worse and worse and worse and so within this concept since they don't believe

that you can actively make society better, it's hard to sort of reckon with how something like traditionalism could become politically active or, you know, be something that's discussed in the mainstream at this point. So there's a lot with traditionalism. Alexander Dugan is said to be a traditionalist. He certainly carries influence from traditionalism. But there is also like this sort of a scatological

you know, sort of aspect to traditionalism in that their disbelief in progress leads them to believe that there will be like one cataclysmic moment of destruction when we are returned to like a golden age of truth,

insight, social order, and beauty. And, you know, this has to do with like the sort of Cali Yuga cyclical time, which is taken out of the Hindu tradition. And, you know, know, as far as like traditionalists believing in certain religions to be a pathway to this

timeless eternal truth that's lost to us, right? They, they tend to prefer religions like Hinduism, Sufi Islam, and maybe in third place is like Catholicism, mostly because those religions, their doctrine is the oldest and is said to be the most developed. With Sufi Islam, they really particularly like the fact that there's like an esoteric practice in addition to an exoteric practice with Sufi Islam. And so all this being said, like traditionalists are, it's, traditionalism is kind of a new topic, like it's not something that's been discussed out very much. It's only recently, like I learned about the stuff why I read Benjamin Titlebaum's book,

but I think we'll get into more of those thinkers and why they're important and how they influenced Dugan in just a little bit. Yeah, I wonder, well, first, let me say, the cyclical time really stuck out to me and the use of the Kaliuga, this Hindu term, and then this idea that progress, especially under the liberal worldview, right? Like, the moral arc of history is long, but bends towards justice. We have the feminist movements, and we have the gay rights movements, and we have the black liberation movements, all these other movements, etc.

that a lot of people in the West, even, you know, radicals and communists and stuff, well, think of that in terms of this march towards getting things progressively better, progressively more equal, et cetera. Now, I think there's a communist critique of that very liberal line of reasoning and the way that liberalism advances and whether or not it's even capable of the sort of progress it proclaims to be capable of. But the fascist or the traditionalist critique is just like, that's just a mirage.

Like, this is not a long-standing march towards, you know, ultimate progress. These things like gay rights and feminism and stuff, they're just ephemera that bubble up in a specifically dark period of cyclical time, the Kaliuga, and they will be washed away, will be returned back to a more natural state. And also included with all of that is this reification of natural hierarchies. And I've even heard Dugan talk about this as like, you know, the inner capacity of people like he talks about like

if you have a contemplative soul then you belong in the clergy or as a philosopher if you have a warrior soul then you belong in the military right so he's like really bio-essentializing hierarchies and right when you start right when you start talking about

biological hierarchies and the need to impose those on human society you're talking about reaction you're talking about fascism you're talking about brutal hierarchies of domination and he's very much, you know, thumbs up for all of that. Yeah, I mean, I think it's, you know, in terms of, like, the narrative of progress, you know,

I think it's important to distinguish traditionalism from fascism in such a way that, like, you know, we think of fascism as, like, the most extreme sort of political ideology, that if you're the worst of the worst, then you are a fascist. But part of understanding traditionalism is understanding that, you know, traditionalism, nationalism is a little more depraved than the concept of fascism. And when you look at fascism, with liberalism and communism, you know, fascism is still, like, you know, it's still, it may be a bourgeois-driven sort of social hierarchy, but it is still working towards a world that fascist deem is better, right? So, so, like, traditionalism doesn't even share any of that sentiment, right? Traditionalism says no, it's anti-modernity, meaning that, like, the West and liberal society is decadent and must be destroyed, so that way we return to pre-modernity back to the roots of tradition.

And with that comes this discussion of the gold, silver, bronze, and dark ages as it relates correspondingly to the ideal caste society that traditionalists. taken from Julia Sevilla, mean that, like, there would be a spiritual elite on the top, and there would be followed by a warrior caste. So, like, Gold Age is, like, the spiritual elite with Brahmins, and the Silver Age is the warrior caste. Bronze Age is the mercantile class, and then Dark Age is the slave class.

So, like, all this traditionalism, it wants to return to a time of highly stratified society with the spiritual elite at the top, with slavery at the bottom, And as it relates to, like, gay rights and feminism, you know, those are things that are seen to be, like, part of decadent Western society. And part of the, you know, like, you can't have a critique of fascism without understanding that it's highly patriarchal, right? And part of that is the subjugation of women, of knowing your place, of always remaining there and being a tool of the patriarchy of society. So all of this wraps together in a way that is the antithesis of progress, the antithesis of like emancipation campaigns.

This is really dark stuff, and this is, you know, stuff that Dugan has obviously taken a lot of influence from these ideas, these writers, and part of the Eurasianist project for him is forwarding the destruction of modernity, the destruction of liberal society. You know, all the way down to philosophically deconstructing the Cartesian subject. Like, you know, like, so it's not only on a philosophically meta level, but it's also like the literal destruction of Western society. And all this ties back into the notion of like multicultural pluralism, right? It's not a true multicultural pluralism because even the universalists don't have the right to choose the things for themselves, right? It's like, this is, and I'll get into later on, why people have described the project of Dugan as a sort of ecumenical jihad, meaning if you're anti-fascist, anti-liberal, anti-communists, come together and destroy modernity with us. You know, that's basically like how he's trying to bring people into the fold that way.

So there's room for traditionalists, there's room for Eurasianists, there's room for neo-Nazis, there's room for anti-liberals, there's room for, so it's like an ecumenical jihad in that respect. But, yeah, I know that's a lot, but yeah. Yeah, that's so interesting. Yeah, like what he would say is like what you call progress, we call the darkest age as possible, which is like a complete reversal of everything that most moderns believe. But I think that idea that you delineated between fascism and traditionalism is really important because Duget himself says the fight between liberalism,

communism, and fascism was the fight for who was going to lead into modernity or who was going to take control of modernity. All of them were modern. Which he rejects, right? But he's like, fascism was the least modern. It lost out first. Communism was the second least modern. And liberalism was the most modern.

And we know that's true because liberalism ultimately won out. And so that represents modernity. Therefore, that's what I want to critique. But, yeah, even for him, traditional fascism of Italy and Germany was modern as well and believed in its own version of progress, which he fully rejects. And he talks about himself as both pre and postmodern. Like, he has pre-modern ambitions, but he uses, he says this explicitly, I use postmodern critiques and methodology to attack modernity from both sides, which I thought was kind of interesting because he makes great use of a lot of quote unquote postmodern thinkers in his analysis and his methodology, even though he disagrees with them about many other things. Right, right. And, you know, he says in a video, like, we have our own special Russian truth, meaning that, like, if truth is all relative in the postmodernist sense, then we should be entitled to our own truth, which determines our own reality. You know, yeah, it's wild stuff, man. But it's scarier, the more that you get into it, especially when you start looking up, like, articles he wrote, because you talk about fourth political theory and how that's like this fourth follow-up to liberalism, communism, fascism. know it's fourth political theory really just kind of recreates fascism and and and it's kind of

scary when you read like an article he wrote called fascism a borderless and red where he talks about like a new fascism being uh born into russia that is as borderless as our lands and as red as our blood uh so but it's important man to i think there's a space here within the sort of critique of modernity again this this is unoriginal this is not an idea that do has come up with on its own. You know, the critiques of maternity have come as far back as like 1789 with Joseph de Maestra reacting to the French Revolution. You know, some of the more recent interpretations of Nietzsche, particularly from

Domenico Lacerdo, the Italian Marxist scholar, you know, he basically says that the project of Nietzsche was to create, for those who were eligible, was to create a pan-European master cast. whose project it is to forward culture politics and aesthetics, right? So, like, Nietzsche's project was also to undo the French Revolution

and to undo the moral workings of Christianity. Right? So, like, this Nietzschean scorn against modernity, Nietzsche was really, like, the first, one of the most prominent or credited with, like, kind of being the first critique of modernity, in a way.

But Heidegger had these same sort of traditional beliefs, So, you can see that Dugin has taken the projects of Nietzsche in his anti-modernity commitments and the project of Heidegger in his traditionalism or against maternity stuff. You can go read it to a speedle article about this stuff. It's really cool, actually. But, yeah, he's taken these ideas, and he's relocated into Moscow for the 21st century, basically. And that's how Ronald Beiner would describe the ambitions of Dugian as well.

in that he's just basically taking the Heidegarian and Nietzschean anti-modernity projects and has relocated in Moscow and has implemented a geopolitical program to accomplish these ends. Yeah, and all of that plus the pre and postmodern stuff I was talking about before, it does give me this sense of cherry-picking. You know, it's not so much like I'm generating these great ideas or I'm like systematically and without contradiction adopting certain philosophers. It's like I'll take this from Heidegger, I'll take this from Nietzsche, I'll take this from here, this from Avola, et cetera, and sort of mix them together for my own kind of the sense I get pre-existing commitment to something like, you know,

some version of Russian nationalism and traditionalism. And so as opposed, there's lots of contradictions is what I want to say, that emerge when you cherry pick. And those contradictions are alive and well in his work really quick before we move on. though. I know orthodox, you mentioned Catholicism and Hinduism, but orthodox Christianity is obviously huge for Dugan, for Russia, for that entire area. So I don't know if you have deep thoughts on this, but do you want to touch on the role that the Orthodox Church plays in his conception of traditionalism? Yes, I do. And thank you for asking that, because, so here's a deal with, like, the Orthodox Church. First of all, like, some of the Eurasianist theories,

that started out, like some of the original ideas, was that there was also a dividing line between Catholic and the West and Orthodox in the East. But this also goes back to Julius Evela as well, because Julius Evela, he was a critic of the Italian fascist movement when it started. He called it a laughable revolution. And Evela had a sort of non-biological form of racism that he was a tentative. attempting to infuse into the Italian fascist party. And this was a sort of what's been described as a spiritual racism. In that, you know, Mussolini was looking for a form of racism that could, like, distinguish Italian fascism from German fascism. And so part of why Mussolini took a liking to the writings of Avela, specifically Evela's writings called Synthesis of the Doctrine of Race,

was because he, you know, in that book, Avela says stuff like, you know, a man could be Aryan in appearance, but Jewish of the soul. So it was like, right, right. So it's this twisted stuff that ultimately, if Mussolini used it, his appeal, the reason why this appealed to him was because it would allow Mussolini to decide who was Aryan and who was not Aryan. So, but this infusion of spirituality was,

what Julius Evela sought to accomplish with the Italian fascist movement. And after he wasn't able to do that, he actually went and tried to cozy up to the German fascist to try to do the same thing. And Heinrich Himmler himself, like, dismissed him and wrote a letter to his people that was like, yo, we need to watch this guy. We should send him back to Italy. We should monitor what he's doing. He's an aristocratic reactionary is what he is. But, you know, Evela, in this attempt to, like, infuse spirituality into fascism, called it, said that he wanted a consistent fascist fascism.

And that's something that Dugin has also said that, in that fascism borderless and red, he says something to the extent of like, you know, we're looking for an actual fascist fascism. He's lifting that from Julius Evela. So the spiritual aspects of Dugin have, and the

nationalism of Russia now contains this element of orthodoxy, right? And And so, in my whole analysis of understanding this sort of, what I believe to be a sort of Russian fascism emerging, it's, you can see the sort of dots connected from Avala's need to spiritualize fascism to Dugan taking the influence of Avala. And that is where the Russian orthodoxy stuff comes in now. Yeah.

That's very interesting. I just want to linger on this point for a little bit because I'm somebody who is very interested in spirituality. and the merging of egalitarian left radical politics with spiritual investigations. I think, you know, inner work and outer work are important transformation on both sides of that particular coin. But I, naively, when I first got into this, I was quickly disabused, but I think in general a lot of people will assume that spiritual communities tend towards the left. If not communism, certainly liberalism, this New Age, granola bar, progressivism, you know, that people sort of have in their mind when they think the spirituality is certainly there, but that can obscure the fact that there is a long-standing, hard-right sort of co-option of various versions of spirituality, including esotericism,

including the occult, including outright mysticism, and you can even see some of their interests in things like Buddhism and Hinduism coming out even in this discussion, which is sort of jarring at first. As somebody who wants these things to be so obviously left, the fact that there's such a breeding ground for the right in these places should make us pause and reconsider. And one article I read that was really helpful, I forget the full title, but if you Google the cosmic right, there's this article. I read it about a year ago, but it really lays out a right-wing understanding of spirituality, and a lot of it has to do with the esoteric and the idea that there is hidden knowledge, but the hidden knowledge should only be revealed to very

certain people in very specific hierarchies. You know, so I'm at the top, you know, like you just talked about Dugan placing the clergy as the golden age, right? So, like, yes, these people run society because they are unique in their ability to have access to this esoteric knowledge. Everybody else is cattle to be dealt with, right? I mean, you know, that's kind of oversimplified, but you get my point. Yeah. And the hierarchies that arise out of spiritual accomplishment should be reified and institutionalized. And so it is an anti-egalitarian spirituality that says it's actually only for a very select few at the top of a hierarchy.

It's not for everybody. Whereas I come to the complete opposite conclusion, like, no, these mystical truths, these spiritual practices can be engaged by anybody, anywhere in the world, etc., right? And complete juxtaposition to this idea. But I was kind of thinking about this, because on your last episode you had on a Sufi, and he was talking about his spirituality and his egalitarian politics. and I deeply resonated with that, but also this other side of things, which we have to take account of. So, yeah, if you're out there and you're interested, Google the cosmic right and start learning. It's a long and deep and torturous rabbit hole, but it's fascinating for sure. Yeah, man.

Yeah, like the whole cosmic right thing and spiritual understandings being only for a select few, it reminds me of kind of the tonality that, like, Nietzsche, and also Julius Evela write in, in that when they write, part of the reason why they're writing, why Nietzsche's writing anyway, can be seductive and thrilling and enthralling and engage you. It's not just as he's a, Nietzsche was a great writer, but also because it's in his writing for a select few who are eligible for this project,

it's very natural for the reader to think, oh, well, I'm one of those individuals. Exactly. And so you start to believe that you are part of this select few that is here to forward politics and aesthetics and culture, and yeah, I should eat steak, and I'm reading Nietzsche. So, of course, I'm an overman, you know. And so all this being said, dude, is that, like, you know, I don't know, man.

Like, I always thought, like, we should read Nietzsche from the perspective of a loser. Like, what happens when you read Nietzsche from the perspective of someone who is not eligible for that product, or for that project, you know? But, yeah, you're exactly right. It's the same sort of thing, like, hey, this is only for a select few. It just so happens to be that those select few are not women, you know, know, there's like men that are selected, that are few that are held up, that are at the top of a hierarchy. I mean, it's all the antithesis of any sort of political and philosophical commitments you and I have, I think, so. Yeah, absolutely.

And, yeah, I was just going to say, it's a brilliant move, if you're a writer, to give the reader a sense that I'm letting you in on something, and actually the fact that you're even reading this means that you're already special. I mean, that's just a brilliant move if you want to sell books and have the audience. But, yeah, you know, it's clear to me that Nietzsche had spiritual experiences. He talks about going on walks and falling to his knees and hysterical fits of, like, mystical ecstasy and stuff. But, yeah, when combined with concepts like the Ubermensch and just Nietzsche's disdain for the masses, for the herd, as you would, you know, those things are right for the picking of this sort of right-wing spiritualism. And on Red Menace, we recently did an episode on the philosophy of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and kind of talked about some of these. lines and that's why we're going to Ovala next

because there's a line from Nietzsche and Schopenhauer to Avala that we're going to continue to investigate so if you're interested definitely go check that out but I think we've touched on some of this but maybe there's a few that we haven't mentioned which is Dugan's major influences and sort of what he takes from them

we've talked about Ebola at length is there any more that we haven't talked about that you want to highlight? I think I want to talk about Heidegger a bit because we've talked enough about Nietzsche but I think we can get to that within the context of the next question, actually. Okay. So you just want me to move on to the next question?

Yeah, let's go on the next question there, yeah. All right, so what are Dugan's major works, and what are some of the core themes expressed therein, in addition to what we've already discussed? All right, so I want to talk about two of his works, one being Foundations of Geopolitics, and the other being Fourth Political Theory, and I'll talk about Heidegger underneath the Fourth Political Theory. Okay. But it's important for Foundations of Geopolitics to, you guys can look this book up, right you can go find this book online

you can download it and you can search for these words right um dugian literally says that russia should be ruling from dublin to uh... Vladivostok so like Vladivostok is like over near the North Korean border Dublin is in Ireland

uh he says like the absolute imperative of Russian geopolitics on the black sea coast is the total and unlimited control of Moscow throughout its entire link from the Ukrainian into Abzaz territories. So, like, he's basically talking

about the northern coast of the Black Sea should be exclusively Eurasian and centrally subordinate to Moscow. So, he also talks about, like, the battle for the world rule of Russians is not over, and he brings up that Halford McKinder phrase of, like,

he who controls Eastern Europe dominates the heartland, he who dominates the heartland dominates the world island, he who dominates the world island dominates the world. Like, basically the annexation of Ukraine calling for the

Finlandization of all of Europe Finlandization means like you take a smaller subordinate country or you take a smaller country and you give it sort of nominal independence but you also that that country is not going

to misalign from you politically and so you allow it to have this nominal independence but it's really like a subservient state that forward your own agenda of the larger state and Dugan is calling for the Finlandization of all of Europe.

He calls for the annexation of Ukraine. And part of the reason why this is so alarming is, again, is like if Russian foreign policy wasn't strictly about controlling the northern coast of the Black Sea for the last 10 years, you know, maybe I wouldn't be as, maybe I wouldn't be here talking to you. And unfortunately, that's what we've seen it turn out to be. And so there's also like, you know, the stuff about like, more verbiage taken from Halfer McKinder of like Atlantis' powers versus land power and sea power, stuff we've talked about there.

But Foundations of Geopolitics is this first major work. It was written in 1997. So it's pretty harrowing to understand that this geopolitical program has been something that the Kremlin has been aware of and helped produce as far back as 1997. And then there's fourth political theory, which we've talked a little bit about. So the fourth political theory, he doesn't call it a name, right? So he says like there's liberalism, communism, and fascism. Those make up the first three political theories with liberalism having like individualism as its subject, communism having class as a subject. and with fascism having

race or a nation as a subject and then fourth political theory he doesn't name it right because he wants to leave it sort of intentionally vague but he says the subject of fourth political theory is Dazine

so I don't know of all of our listeners are familiar with Dazine but briefly in order to explain this Dazine thing I have to explain a little bit about Heidegger so Heidegger thinks that Dazine is a Heidegarian word.

It's a word he introduces, and the word means being there. And what he means by that is that human beings tend to get lost in their everydayness. And in that everydayness, we lose touch with our authentic selves. And Dazine is a way of rescuing our authentic selves from our everydayness. And the way that you do that is you live toward death because in living towards death and encountering your own mortality, you can find authentic versions of yourself, authentic truths,

and therefore you can achieve Dazine by being your most authentic self. Now, Heidegger was a phenomenologist, meaning that this was like, phenomenology is like a first philosophy. It's like the experiential or the ontology, the being, like what it is to be is a central question of Heidegger's project.

And Duden feels that in the Heidegarian sense, the West has lost its question of being, like it has forgotten the question of being. And it is only through Dazine, meaning like a return to an authentic self and reestablishing the question of being, can fourth political theory and take shape the dazine of the people, re-connecting them with their authentic truths bringing traditionalism a little bit here, right? He thinks that we need to return to pre-modernity through a Heidegarian sort of notion of rediscovering the question of being. So fourth political theory, it reads like

it's very inconsistent. All the chapters are meant to be taken on their own, and I don't think Duden gives a shit about consistency from chapter to chapter. so there's lots of contradictions in there and that's a really rough job of explaining this concept of like a dozyne of the people and what Fourth Political Theory ultimately is calling for

it reads that the book Fourth Political Theory kind of reads as like a work of Heidegarian mysticism there's a bit of like almost like Russian messianic sort of element to it but yeah he goes into this whole like I'm anti-modern, I'm

anti-liberal, anti-communist, anti-fascist, and within that, he kind of sculpts out through the need for the West to get back in touch with its authentic being. He kind of calls for this sort of ecumenical jihad against

liberalism and against Western society. And within this context, there's really, there's no place for feminism. There's a fascist affirmation of patriarchy. And he's drawn know a lot of thinkers to do this like he's he's actually appropriating some of the language of deluz and guatari uh calling for like a multiplicity of pluralities um this is all like an affirmation

of strong borders stratified caste society rejection of universal human rights and values and uh and all of this is kind of in service of this nietzschean and hidegarian commitment towards the destruction of modernity or the return to pre-modernity um uh and yeah so That's basically like what fourth political theory is. I don't know if you have any questions around that. Yeah, so definitely a few things. So there's so much to impact here. So just for people that don't know, you know, phenomenology, you kind of alluded to it,

but, you know, so it's sort of like using the immediate subjectivity of existing as your starting point for philosophical investigation. Now, a lot of philosophers are not doing that, right? They start ontologically. They try to understand the outside world and then make sense of the inner in relation to that. So that's a whole different starting point for philosophy, and so that's interesting, because that's certainly a huge thing that he sees himself as carrying forward. But this Dysin, you know, like, yeah, the liberal centers individual, the communist centers class,

the fascist centers, race, or nation, this Dacine is this fourth, is the focal point of this fourth political theory, but it exists, and correct me if I'm wrong here, not in individuals in the way that Heidegger meant, but in communities of people or civilizations of people with a common starting point so there's like not a dizine in an individual but the Russian dizine

right or maybe the Chinese dizine the American dizine is that's how he's using the term right yeah he's explicitly rejecting a universal d'a zine that applies to all people at all times and places he's making it more of like a cultural or national dazine yeah right interesting

and then so so like you know there are things that we agree with right we've talked about like this idea of a pluralistic multiplicity and i do think that there's a totalitarian nature to liberal universalism this idea that we as good western liberals are right about our core economic political and social beliefs and we are helping the world by making these ideas spread around the world and you know u.s imperialism is like we're doing it by force and so there is this totalitarian nature liberals think that what's good for them good for everybody. And so these two things, these starting points of like reject this liberal pretense

to universality and this idea that liberals have, they have a right to impose their ideas on the whole world, and this idea of let a million flowers bloom. Let every civilization, every culture, every community blossom in its own way without outside interference, and there's something deeply

beautiful and human in that. And I believe, like, I don't want a world where liberal capitalism is the only way of life. And we see liberals devastate specifically indigenous communities at home and abroad because their entire way of life cannot be shoehorned

into the liberal capitalist way of organizing a society. So there is that totalitarian nature, but the direction he takes it from those two starting points that I think a lot of people could agree with, anti-liberals on the left could possibly agree with. He takes it in a hardcore reactionary opposite direction from anything

that we would ever want to promote. So I think that's sort of the lure, but we'll get into a little bit later about the red-brown alliances or the threat they're in, sort of a lure because if you can advance some basic ideas, some starting points that a leftist would be like, you know what? Yeah.

I agree with that. And obscure some of the more reactionary parts. You can bring them into your gravitational orbit and then, you know, slow-dose them with that more right-wing reaction stuff. And I think that is a potency and a real danger in this stuff. But yeah, do you have any thoughts

on anything I laid out there? Yeah, I think you're totally right. There's a lot of coded language depending on who Dugan is talking to, what crowd he's addressing, right? And I want to say that, like, you know, if you study the stuff for long enough and you start disagreeing with Dugan,

it's not that you automatically agree with, like, universalism of liberal values, but there is part of this, like, I mean, I'm a communist through and through, and part of me feels like I've adopted viewpoints of, like, muscular liberals throughout this process because you're, you know, because you're reading this stuff and you're like, wait a second,

And human rights are good. Universal human rights and dignity is good. And, you know, rights, democracy. Yeah. But then, you know, you're also, like, disagreeing with Dugin. And you're kind of, you know, these ideas, like I said, they're not original, right? So, like, I think that Dugin took the sort of criticism of universalism, maybe from, like, John Mearsheimer. You know, because John Mearsheimer is like, you know, he's kind of getting some slack right now because he's come out and said that, yeah, that the West is responsible primarily for this tragedy going on in. Ukraine. But he wrote the myth of liberal hegemony. He talked about how liberalism started to form within the United States taking on the project of liberal

hegemony globally after the end of the Second World War. He talks about other totalitarian aspects to liberal universalism. So, yeah, I totally get it, man. And it's wild to think that a lot of these ideas, like, who knew phenomenology?

and linguistics to be so problematic, dude. You know? Yeah, absolutely. But, yeah, the John Meersheimer point is very interesting. Obviously, he's not a communist. He's giving a realist, you know, I are perspective. But I found it very helpful, especially at the beginning of the crisis, specifically because that entire viewpoint is obliterated

from mainstream corporate liberal reporting on the issue here in the West. I actually just listened to an Ezra Klein episode where he's presenting as like, okay, I'm a liberal, right? We all know Ezra Klein's a liberal. I'm going to take on this John Mearsheimer argument, and I'm going to have on a realist in international relations on the show to do this, but then immediately that person he brings on also disagrees with John Mearsheimer. And so it just goes into like a defense of liberalism without actually giving proper due to Mearsheimer's criticism.

Because, you know, an Ezra Klein type figure or any sort of liberal pundit is going to want to obscure, hide, or just be ignorant of the role that U.S. escalation and bring has played in this. Even if you ultimately say, that's just one variable, it's still Putin's fault for invading. Okay, okay, okay. But you just at least have to acknowledge

that NATO and U.S. have played a brinkmanship, have pushed things in this direction, and have brought this crisis to a boiling point, and there's enough culpability to go around. And, you know, for very obvious reasons, liberals want to, especially well-off liberals in the ruling class as a member of the elite wants to obscure that.

And they really want to see, like, we are the good guys. Maybe we weren't the good guys in Iraq. Maybe we weren't even the good guys in Afghanistan. But we're definitely the good guys here. And you can see how an American patriot or somebody that sees themselves as fundamentally invested in the American project would want to take that line. And so it's just interesting to see liberal squirm around that. And it's really strange, too, considering, like, if you take the perspective that NATO is,

and the expansion of NATO was responsible for this crisis, well, surprise, you're actually like agreeing with George Kennan and the Big New Brzynski, you know, so they forwarded those ideas as well. Yeah, it's funny. Okay, so, yeah, let's go moving the next one, which is, and again, we've touched on this, but I'm interested to hear how you elaborate. How is Dugan relevant to contemporary geopolitics, and what are maybe his relationships to right-wing movements globally outside of Russia? Yeah, so this goes back to Benjamin Titlebaum's book, War for Eternity, because he actually discovered that Alexander Dugin had met with Steve

Bannon. And so that was a really wild thing, man. Alexander Dugin has a sort of network, like after 97, after he started teaching for the Academy of the General Staff, he was somehow able, I mean, I don't know if it was funded

or what, it's an interesting question to pose, but he was able to travel to Europe and connect with members of the far right. You know, he was able to connect with people like Elaine de Benoit. He was able to, you know, in last like five, seven years meet with Steve Bannon. He has connections to a Brazilian far right conspiracy theorist and philosopher and a political pundit named Alavo del Carvajo.

He actually, Alavo just died in January of 2022 this year. So, but yeah, like, you know, how is he contemporary, how is he relevant to contemporary geopolitics? There's obviously the, the aspect of like how foundations of geopolitics seems like a Russian geopolitical. program being implemented now. But there's also the, you know, if you think about things like, like Steve Bannon and his connections to Cambridge Analytica, if you think of Olavo having the ear of Jerobol Sonaro, if you think of the totality of the sort of way that Dugin ties in with the French New Right, Identity Europa.

I mean, one of Dugent's translators was actually Richard Spencer's ex-wife. Yeah. So there's a network here you can kind of start to see, and I believe that Doegan is the key linchpin, at least within Russia, that ties a lot of these groups together. Yeah, it's interesting. I do want to, so I want to ask you,

because you just mentioned, you know, this idea about NATO, and I'm just, I am curious, and we'll get maybe into some disagreements here in a second, but what role do you think NATO has played in bringing this situation, right? Because, like, there's a, there's a fear here that, and I've seen liberals do this. I've seen, like, the Ezra Klein's of the world and stuff, do this, which is, in order to under-emphasize the role of NATO and the role of the U.S. and the Maidongu and the funding of Nazis, they over-emphasize the ideas in Putin's head.

Either they go, either they say Putin's a madman, he's crazy, there's no rational reason why he's doing this, or they turn, and Ezra Klein did this explicitly, to whether or not they tall it doganism or not. They turned to what Putin justified the invasion in the initial thing as the main explanation. Putin is doing this because he believes these ideas about the world and about Russia and about the real Russian people, and he's going to reclaim what he sees as a segment of the Russian people. And this is used as a way to not talk about the other things. And I think there's a real issue there. So your personal opinion, where do you fit in that spectrum of understanding the role? of the NATO and of the U.S. in this current conflict?

I mean, I think everybody's wrong in this entire situation, dude. Like, I'm no friend or advocate of NATO or U.S. imperialism. Likewise, I'm no friend of, like, part of me is just really suspicious around the discourse of, like, multipolarity. Like, I had tweeted at some point, like, I don't know if people understand how much work the word multipolarity is doing to posit Russia as a great power. Like that, so I'm a little suspect over this entire discourse. But I'm also like, you know, is Putin rational at this point? You know, the invasion of Ukraine does not seem like a rational decision to make, considering that every, you know, intelligence agency or, you know, pundit didn't even see this happening

because it seemed like an irrational action at that point. So I get it, man. There's like, I come down as like no war but class war, because I'm not going to like side with a capitalist entity. fighting another capitalist entity over expansionism for one or the other. But I also like, I mean, somebody had mentioned at one point that

like, yeah, you know, like you can dismiss the victims of U.S. imperialism by, because they don't have the right economic system or something. I'm like, you know, I think there's an argument to be made that the whole of this endeavor is linked to a revanchism which is highly

fascistic, patriarchal. And it's got all, I mean, If it walks like a duck and sings like a duck, whatever, you know, it's got all the markings of a, of a Russian neo-fascism. So I, you know, I'm not a pro-Russia person. I'm certainly not a pro-U.S. person. And as far as the independence of Ukraine is concerned, I don't, I've just like, can we stop killing people? Because, like, I don't want, I'm not supporting either side that's leading to atrocities of working people.

You know, at the end of the day, I feel like communism is, you're supposed to advocate for the working class. And you can't just advocate one side of a war like it's a game of football or something, you know? And it goes back to like this Eurasianism thing is like, you know, nationalism is like, it's like when you go to a football game and you just cheer because you want to cheer, you're not actually cheering because the team is something that's important to you. You know, like, and nationalism kind of has a participatory angle in it that's similar to that. And I think it's similar on the Eurasian front that way as well. but yeah I just I think man everybody's wrong in this situation I can't cheer for one side or the other I'm really worried about fascism in my studies and what I'm interested in you know and and I don't you know I and I know there's like rushophobia going on right now and and I'm and I'm really like you know part of the 10,000 foot view in all of this man getting rid of like RT recently right part of the big 10,000 foot view is I think that like it's a bit of Western chauvinism to think that the United States is the only country

that is able to deploy effective propaganda or to muddy the information waters or to build a fifth column or any of those things, right? So I look at the last 10 years and I'm like, I think, you know, back in the 2016 election, if you were a communist or anywhere further left than liberal, if you brought up Russia gate, people did not take that kindly and you couldn't speak of those things. but also there's this aspect of like so if there was Russian interference and I think we might have to take a step back and look at that now and maybe examine the possibility that there was we also have to look at you know the engineering of Brexit and you don't just like

disrupt an American election and engineer Brexit through the ban in Cambridge Analytical stuff just so you can take Ukraine Like, I think there's a larger geopolitical motive that could be answered for within the context of foundations of geopolitics and perhaps this new Russian geopolitical program that's taking shape right now. But, yeah, so I don't know, if I'm answering your original question, like, where I come down with NATO is, I just think everybody's wrong in this situation. and I'm especially fearful of a sort of spiritually driven fascism because one thing that that Dugian talks about is a national idea and the concept of a national idea within the context of Russian history with the ideological bottom falling out of like, you know, the fall of the Soviet Union, you know, just, you know, 70 years, 80 years before that, like that Russia, the empire had fallen, right? So, like, I couldn't imagine what it would be like to go through an ideological collapse like that. Some of the characters that I've been researching lived through both of those things, right?

So when the Soviet Union fell in 91, there was this resurgent of patriotism, and there was patriotic socialism that happened in Russia at that point. And there's still people that carry on in Russia a sort of political party of a patriotic socialism. But there is all sorts of ideological contradictions that came about as a result of this need for a national idea. And if you don't think the national idea is like an important enough concept, right? Well, it turns out that like the Azov Battalion, in their symbols, it looks like an N with an eye through the middle of it. It's actually a reworked Nazi symbol. But some of the guys from Azal Battalion have said that that N in the eye is arranged in that way to specifically symbol. the concept of N and I for national idea.

Interesting. Yeah, so, okay, I'll give you some of my thoughts, and we can move on after this, but I think this is interesting, and especially on the left, these disagreements kind of do exist, and just rather, I think between you and I is not really a matter of disagreements, it's a matter of where we place the emphasis. Sure. Perhaps, so I'll just go off in a few points here. One, just to talk about the Russia-gave scenario.

Now, like, you know, do I think that Russia attempted to interfere in some extent? extent with just the, especially the narratives going around, around the election. Absolutely, because I think Russia sees in its interest a splitting, you know, a intensification of the contradictions that exist in, quote, unquote, enemy states or unfriendly states. And so, you know, Russia does not need to come into the United States and create conflict. I mean, America is divided every which way already. We do not need any outside influence to do that. And I think the election and everything would have gone exactly the same as it did, whether or not Russia even existed as a country. You know, that's my personal opinion.

Now, they'll play on splits, and it behooves them to split off the UK from Europe. In fact, that's been explicitly stated as one of the goals. Split the UK off from the rest of Europe, split Europe off from their relationship with the United States, etc. So you can see why that works. Now, anytime we're in America talking about government interference and interference in elections, we just have to point out that America does it more and worse than anybody in the whole world. And I just think we have to play that role because we live in this society where the U.S.'s ruling classes narratives are the ones being propagated.

Just like over in Russia, certain narratives are prioritized, including completely made up nonsense, because it serves the ruling elite of that society. But we have to focus on our ruling elite here. And so, you know, I don't want to over-emphasize the role Russia plays in things like Brexit or the election of Trump. I think those things would have happened regardless, and they are the results of variables much outside of anything that Russia could possibly hope to influence. And then the other point I wanted to make is you're 100% right that I think the principled communist position on this conflict. We want peace ASAP. You know, the Russian masses are suffering under the brutal sanction regime. The Ukrainian masses are being brutalized.

The pictures coming out of Ukraine break my fucking heart. And even, I mean, to a much lesser extent, the people in the West are just like working people have to pay fucking $5, $6, $7 a gallon for gas now because we've got to stick it to Putin. So the masses, the regular working people in all countries are being fucked. And I think a communist not thinking about that and just emphasizing which state they prefer to win out, I think is an error. And I think we're seeing that quite a bit. I agree with you. There are no good guys. And I would even include Ukraine.

as not a good guy. The Ukrainian state itself is not, you know, we hear this line, Ukraine's fighting for their democracy, no. Ukraine has no more of a democracy than the United States or Russia, which is to say regular people have no say in policy, in how their lives are shaped, anything like that. And Ukraine is just as corrupt. In Russia and in the U.S., oligarchs with lots of money and corporations dictate policy

much more than regular working people. So what Ukraine is fighting for is not a democracy, in any socialist sense, but for their independence, which I do support. I think the Ukrainian people have the right to self-determine and take their society and their people in whatever direction that they deem fit democratically.

But, you know, here in the U.S., we're just given this Disney movie-ass breakdown of, here are the good guys, and here are the bad guys, and Putin's a madman, super villain, and you know, Zelensky is like Harry Potter fighting Voldemort, and like, that really is the narrative, not the Harry Potter,

stuff, but that good, bad, easy binary is a narrative that not only takes a hold of the American mind, but that the American ruling class loves. After what it did in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and Libya, and Syria, and Somalia, in Yemen, it gets to pretend that it is on the moral high horse for the first

time in a long time, and people that are invested in the American project are gulping that up. So, I don't know. All those, I think we mostly agree on this. I just think we kind of place the emphasis in slightly different areas. Yeah, no, totally. I think if we're asking the question, like, whose actions caused Putin to do this?

It's certainly on the West, right? But I think if we're asking, like, what caused this? There's multiple answers. So it's just a distinction of the question as well, I think. But yeah, you're absolutely right. And there is a very worrying, huge, larger than just the Azov Battalion, fascist president in the Ukrainian state. We just saw Zelensky ban 11 parties ostensibly because they have Russian ties, but that the Socialist Party, the Progressive Party, the Progressive Socialist Party,

it's left-wing movements, most of all. No Nazi parties or far-right parties were banned, but they're nationalists, so that makes some sense if you're going with the Russian connection narrative, I guess. But then just the presence of the right sector, the presence of ultra-nationalists within Ukraine, the hyper-ante-Black racism that exists, and these horrific pictures coming out of Western Ukraine,

of Roma women, you know, tied around light poles and having this fucking chemical concoction thrown on their face to make it appear green. They're just being brutalized while Ukrainian men and women and soldiers and regular people are just walking around, milling around like it's normal. So Russia has definitely fascist forces and certainly ultra-nationalist forces. The U.S., we know damn well, has those same forces, and so does Ukraine. And so I think our job is to kind of complicate this. this easy binary narrative that most Americans are being forced-fed and accepting.

Yeah, I also, because I haven't mentioned this so far, man, I also want to say that in 2014, part of the reason why Alexander Dugian is unable to teach at Moscow State University anymore is because he called for the genocide of Ukrainian people as far back as 2014, dude. And he's even, like, compared these people like saying they're not real Russians. And, you know, so it's, it's tragic. Western Ukrainians? Just talking about Ukrainians in general, man. Wow.

Yeah. He's called for it on Facebook. He's been on television in Russia saying kill, kill, kill. There's really, it's horrific stuff, you know, but like, I also don't think that Dugan is at all disapproving of what's happening there. Yeah. Not at all. Yeah. Yeah.

So let's go ahead and talk about this red-brown stuff because I think it's interesting and you talk about it in your episode. So in your recent episode. we need to talk about Alexander Dugan on your podcast, No Easy Answers, you end the episode with some thoughts on what this all means for the world and the left, and you discuss a red-brown alliances and the need for communists to not dismiss these charges out of hand, but to take them seriously, even if they're not a huge chunk of our movement, they're still there, and they need to be taken seriously by communists. Can you talk about this, how big the actual threat is,

and sort of what specific formations on the left have succumbed to or are at least flirting with this Dugan style fascism or red-brown alliance attempt. Right. So, I don't know that I can give a specific answer to how large this threat is, but I think that if you have listened to this conversation so far and you've absorbed the concepts

and the vocabulary, I think you'll understand that this is, at least, it's very widespread on the left, because Dugan's ideology is seductive, man. and I'm especially concerned for young comrades who are eager to assume a political identity on the Cartesian graph, right? So if you're one of these people that's looking around, that's like, hey, maybe I'm an anarcho-communist, or, you know what, maybe anarcho-sindicalist, or I'm a paleo-go-da, I don't know, man. I think that if you're trying to, like, identify somewhere and find a sort of ideological home, there is, with, the coded language and sort of ulterior motivations, I think the stuff can be very seductive

and I'm worried about that, you know? In addition to that, like, in a recent interview I had with Dr. Wazid Azal, or Wahid Azal, he's a Sufi Muslim, right? And he was searching for left activist spaces after 9-11 that were ecologically minded and spiritually affirming. And he wrote a 2016 article about Duganist actually recruiting specifically anti-imperialists and anti-Salafi Muslims via social media.

So, and tragically, you know, like Wahid, you know, when I spoke to him, he actually told me about how he and his wife became kind of, they were living in Berlin and they became kind of the resident Antifa organizers of the area, but

mysteriously his wife was poisoned and she passed away and he has a he reported that to the police in berlin and they basically told him that he needed to move away for safety so he he moved to australia with his daughter uh for safety and he's uh convinced that douganus that uh that he was in the midst of in berlin in these organizing spaces are connected to the uh mysterious uh death of his wife um so that's especially tragic and something that i i just covered recently on no easy end censors. But there's also like, you know, like this group called CPI Center for Political Innovation. I mean, they are the main proponents of this sort of patriotic socialism thing you've seen pop up in the discourse. And certain streamers have taken this up, namely like Jackson Hinkle and Peter Coffin. And, you know, of course, these two are under the umbrella of Caleb Moppin, who is formerly of Russia today. And they recently held a conference in Austin. I don't know if you guys saw that on Twitter with like the Russian flag and the United States flag

and the bust of Abraham Lincoln behind him. I mean, it's really wild man. And so you see these guys on the internet also that subscribe to various aspects of Dugan's thought, whether it's patriotic socialism, which Dugan himself was trying to revamp patriotism

during perestroika towards the end of the Soviet Union, right? That's a Duganus connected concept as well. But you see them, you know, these people online that like subscribing to patriotic socialism or multinational

pluralism. These guys have like a bunch of flags in their handles. Well that is basically dougainist ideology working under the banner of multiculturalism or national pluralism and speaking to these guys speak to multipolarity using the concepts of the less, which is like

diversity and inclusion, but they weaponize these things against the left itself. And again, like to be reminded of like the end of Dugan's article called fascism borderless and red you know he says

not a faded brownish pinkish national capitalism but the blinding dawn of a new Russian revolution fascism borderless as our lands and red as our blood so I mean so I don't know how widespread this is

but it's certainly like if if listeners have been listening to this and understanding this the more they sit with these ideas I am certain that if you spend time online on Twitter, on YouTube, if you take in some of the various voices around the left, anti-imperialists at this point, since they were recruiting them, you will actually pick up little bits and pieces of this ideology present in these voices, and it's out there. And I just want folks to be aware of it and take it seriously, especially younger comrades who are looking for an ideological home that are maybe – I mean, as part of this is dangerous to even study because, you feel yourself sympathetic to some of the arguments being posed and this is where it goes back to like

sharpening your own ideological blade right like you come out on the other side adhering stronger more strongly to your principles especially your first principles and being a principled Marxist but you understand that the slipperiness and seductiveness of these

texts is real and it's just something that I think folks need to be aware of yeah you make a really good point about the the allure of some of these critiques because you know, I'm somebody that is very, I know who the fuck I am, I know what the fuck I believe.

I read fascist literature because I'm curious, I want to understand this movement, it's obviously something that communists need to deal with. And I find the fascist critiques of liberalism, interesting. I mean, like, it's very interesting, sometimes completely aligns with my own

critiques of liberalism, right? And so you can, now, I walk out of that, knowing, as you say, who I am, what I believe, I'm not swayed towards fascism because they make some good points about liberals, right? The three-way fight all day. But you're 100% right about young people coming into the left, trying to

find themselves, having all these voices pulling them every which way, especially if you're white, especially if you're not ready to really critique Americanism and you're like, well, I kind of like the flag, and you know, you can easily be pulled in that direction. And there's a hesitance on

the part of the left broadly to, especially the communist left, to indulge or to even pay heed to this idea that their red-brown alliance is real because it is overused by some anarchists but mostly by liberals against Marxists. I mean, you know, they over-emphasize

this. They're always using the horseshoe theory, for example, which is basically a red-brown claim. The further left you go, the closer to fascism you get, which we completely and utterly reject. Liberalism is closer to fascism than communism and actually liberalism has this amazing tendency of giving

rise to fascism over and over and over. again, which should be maybe investigated if you're a liberal. So I can see why there's some hesitance. Like, no, fuck you. Red Brown Alliance is just this liberal trope launched at Marxist. It's not real. But again, that's over-correcting too far in the other direction.

And for young people, it's certainly true for some European factions. I can see this Red-Brown alliance being particularly potent. But then, yeah, here at home, and, you know, these are not your words, these are mine, but I will straight up call these patriotic socialists, these CPI people, fucking clowns.

And looking at their conference, okay, if you're a communist in the United Fucking States of America and you go to a communist anti-imperalist organization or a conference and it's almost all white guys wearing business casual outfits waving the American flag, my friend, you have taken a radical detour in your political development and you've ended up at a cul-de-sac.

So, I mean, it's worth dunking on these guys. Because they are clowns, but their message is potent to a certain sort of person or a certain naive person looking for left-wing, you know, sort of analyses. And for that reason, they should be called out and combated. And you talk about Kayla Maupin, in particular, meeting with Dugan and actually having conversations with him. Do you want to touch on that a little bit? I don't care if I get blown back from these guys at all that point. No, man, dude, like, I mean, yeah, it's not so much that he met with Dugan, as much as he sat down at a table with him in, in front of a flag with the Eurasian

eight pointed arrows symbol on top of like Asia on this flag right so he's sitting in front of a Eurasianist flag being highly deference to Dugan's ideas talking about how people should engage with his work

and you know it's when you get paid to go out to like I don't know like a seminar an anti-war seminar in Iran and Claudio Muti is on that same panel with you who is a influencer of Dugan or is rather an inspiration as someone that that Dugan takes influence from like the dots again this goes back to the

circumstantial stuff but then you have the coded language and your entire organization is useful for fascists and yeah I mean and so there is this this notion that like I mean this is, it's, I, I strongly disagree, and Caleb has been a subject of investigation for me because of how useful for fascists, that entire organization is. And like you said, when you end up in a conference full of a bunch of white guys, specifically with people who are actually, I mean, the people that gave speeches there, you can go, you can, all these speeches are online now. So you can, you can go listen to Haas talk about how leftists should stop being a reservoir that uh communist uh recruit from i mean like what is that like you're it's like you've

gone from being like hey maybe we should talk to some of these qanon january six people to now we should specifically recruit from uh fascist and conservatives and you know it's it's completely misguided at best and and crypto fascist at worst um and it's and like said i don't even want to give them the credit of import because they're small fries right they're they're little people and they're they're small it's a small organization But, you know, they've stimulated some of the discourse, and that, honestly, that's, we're losing comrades to this. We're losing people that, like, fall into the orbit of people like Caleb Moppin. We're losing people who were otherwise comrades who have been deceived and fall into this sort of supporting of multipolarity.

But actually, it's underneath like a dougainess sort of operation versus, like, fighting. for a better world that all principal communists should be doing you know so advancing the interest of a certain state over the interest of the masses at large yeah I mean it's nationalist at its root for sure um and so

that's primarily uh one of the main reasons why I got interested in this stuff is I I'm just tired of losing comrades man you go from trusting a voice one day to having a guy being a COVID conspirationalist you know the next day you know um yeah I mean yeah so a lot of this stuff man I

And your listeners, everybody out there, after you listen to this and you really absorb this stuff, go listen to what, you know, go look at, like, stuff from the gray zone. Go look at, you know, some of the work from Alexander Reed Ross. Go, just take all this stuff and understand that it's real, it's out there, it's geopolitically important, it's topical at the moment, and we're talking about all this stuff. But, I mean, I'm not sitting over here like Charlie in the basement kind of thing, Like, you know, with a bulletin board with red yarn drawn from point to point. I mean, these are all things that you can find for yourself.

And I don't look at this as conspiratorial. I look at this as, like, kind of self-evident in many different scattered ways. Yeah. Yeah, we did an episode on Rev. Left and Redmond is called On Patriotism, where we really take this entire idea that the American left should embrace patriotism to task. And so if you're interested in us demolishing that argument, you can go check. that out for sure. But yeah, specifically, I think definitely with young people in particular, as the center falls out of American politics,

people are looking for alternatives. And you can look left or you can look right. And there's a lot of different options on both directions. But we have to know that a lot of these people looking will be on YouTube. They'll be out algorithmically primed. They'll be sent in certain directions. And yeah, we have to battle on this front for the minds of young people looking for alternatives so that they turn real left, not right, or turning right under the pretense that they're actually turning left, right? We have to do that work. And we can do that without lending credence to the over application of these terms. We can combat liberalism as well, but we have to combat

fascism at the same time. So let's go ahead and move on up. One more question before we wrap up here. And this is sort of a multi-pronged. It's sort of a long one, but I'm going to lay it out there so that it's very clear what we're discussing, and I want to give you the opportunity to respond to some of these things. So I liked your episode on Dugan. It was very informative. It was part of my prep for this episode. It was really great, but not but.

But, you know, at the end, you make some claims, and I'd like to talk to you about those. So in that episode, you argue that the largest threat from Dugan and his theories are the attack that they pose to the Enlightenment, and then you go on to say that, you know, these are Western values versus East. Eastern values, irrationalism versus reason, mysticism versus science, reaction versus progress, and this is the polarization of the world.

Then you go on to suggest that Putin might not stop at Ukraine. You don't make a hard claim, but you say might not stop at Ukraine's border, but they might even continue westward. Now, I personally fundamentally sort of question both of these assertions, insofar as I even understand them. For the latter claim, I would argue that while Dugan's theories certainly hold some sway in Russia, Putin is primarily acting out. out of material and geopolitical interests, not, you know, about gas pipelines and NATO expansion,

not on the ideas that Dugan has generated and popularized. I think Putin probably puts Dugan's ideas forward to help flesh out the justifications for this invasion, you know, I.E. Ukraine is not a separate people from Russia. We should unite the Russian people across great, little and white Russia, etc. But I ultimately think he is acting out of other interests. As for the former claim, I would argue that this binary that you've set up is too simplistic. and reductive. I think there is no real clear divide between East and West

ultimately. It's a sort of shorthand that we use to talk about geopolitical blocks but you don't want to reify that. And I think the ideas that you pit against each other actually flourish simultaneously and fully in both Eastern and Western societies of all different kinds. I also think there's a

fundamental irrationalism, mystification and reaction at the core of the liberal world order and liberal ideology as well, as within every Western liberal capitalist society on earth. And I think framing it as a liberal, rational, rational, radical, and perhaps despotic east is simply incorrect. Now, I could have misunderstood your argument, so please correct me if I'm wrong. But if I'm not, and these are more or less correct, can you kind of

let me know what your response and thoughts are to these critiques and concerns of mine? Yeah, absolutely. And thanks for asking that, man. So in that podcast, when I was trying to like pan out to this 10,000 foot view. What I had said was that this is the biggest culture war in the world dating back to the French Revolution. These are Western values,

secularism, individualism, and universalism versus Eastern values of the non-secular, collective, and particular. And I went on to say, and I, there's, this is kind of a grammatical thing where like, this is a start of a whole new sentence.

And I could understand why, when I say, This is irrationalism versus reason. Some might take that to be like, oh, well, he's attributing your rationalism to all the East. And when I say this is mysticism versus Scientism, maybe mysticism being the East and Scientism being the West, I could see how this could be, especially when I say like this is reactionary versus progressive. Now, this could be all seen as if, like, I'm attributing irrationalism and mysticism to the East, and that could be seen as sort of problematic.

way of stating that. But that wasn't my intention. My intention was to compare the secularism, individuality, and liberalism to Eastern values of non-secularism, being like religious things, collectivity, and particularism of cultures, right?

But so within all this, though, I'm saying all this because this is the way that Alexander Dugan sees it. Alexander Dugan sees the war in Ukraine, not just against the U.S., but, or not just against Ukraine, but against Western modernity, the United States at the center of that, you can go and find these things like, you know, he literally, you know, crucial to Dugent's politics is the classical conception of the conservative revolution that overturns the post-enlightenment world. You know,

even the Nazis during their time had aspirations of overturning the French Revolution. You know, this is also something that speaks to, like, the Nietzschean and Heidegarian commitments of destroying modernity, right? So when I say it's like polarizing East versus West, I mean, I understand it, like, if Russia has a tradition of orthodoxy and traditional sort of Russian values, well, they also have individuals who, have traditions of wanting universal human rights and democracy within the geographic area of Russia, right? So it is an oversimplification

to the degree that this is like the giant war of continents, the giant continental confrontation that Halford McKinder described that Dugan wishes to implement a political program towards. So this is described by Dugan

as like land power versus sea power, other like, McKinder, terminology. This is also something that Dugan spoke about in terms of, you know, in a recent speech he addressed like Western Press in English

and he said something to the extent of like Francis Fukuyama was absolutely wrong and Samuel Huntington was absolutely right. Fukuyama meaning like the end of history and that we had moved from like a path of progress to a path of perfection

and the liberalism had won out. And Samuel Huntington, what he means by that is Samuel Huntington wrote like class of civilizations and the remaking of the world order. And he basically said the primary source of conflict in the post-Cold War world would be people's cultural and religious identities and that future wars would be fought not by countries but between cultures. So you can see how like Dugan is, when I say it's a culture war, I don't mean it like Mr. Potato Head. I mean like it is a war, a literal war of cultures, of what cultures value of a polarization of Dugan seeming to represent Eastern values, a return to tradition that is native within the peoples that he represents in greater Russia, the sort of multi-ethnic, Eurasian, multinational nationalism, with Russia being the core of a multi-ethnic geographical area in Asia. Like, all of this only makes sense in the full context of what Dugent's project is. So I hope that, like, listeners can understand if they go back and listen to that episode or if they already have listened to that episode, I did get a little bit of pushback on that from a YouTube commenter.

And that's on the YouTube comment. You can go and read that. But, yeah, like, I say that this is the biggest pushback against enlightenment values, because that is exactly what Dugan wants to do. And I also, I've been very hesitant to, like part of the reason why going back to the very beginning of this conversation when I said I've been hesitant that Dugan, to dignify him as a philosopher, because what do you do with philosophers? You, you situate them, you study them, you learn about them, you learn about their lives and how that may have influenced their perspectives, right? But if you look at Dugan, if we're going to place Dugan historically as it relates to previous thinkers throughout the sort of, anti-enlightenment, you know, train of thought from everybody from like Joseph de Maestra to

Edmund Burke to maybe even like Michael Oakshot, all the way to Heidegger and Nietzsche, then Dugan would perhaps be something far more dangerous and real than any of these thinkers because we've had nothing but reactionaries, right? We've had people that react to the French Revolution, that criticize the French Revolution. We've had people that critique modernities. This has been purely critique coming from the reactionary school of thought. And so Dugan, insofar as he is implemented

or insofar as he is drafted up and Putin is loosely following a geopolitical program for Duden, this being a pushback against enlightenment values, that would give Dugan sort of primacy as like a major philosopher that we'd have to teach him in the university,

universities, you know, and history would have to write this stuff down in such a way that gives him great import. And I really hope it doesn't come to that because I think that Dugan is inconsistent, his writing is terrible, his ideas are the worst, and I am reluctant to give him that sort of import. So all that being said, I hope that that answers your question towards like uh towards the concept of like um you know dougan in the east versus west thing um and you had one more yeah i'll rephrase that second question just really quickly so would you say it's fair that that your argument here is that um part of it is that there is a false sense of continuity across sentences that you didn't mean and that you're actually talking about dougan's binary

that he props up you're not you are not advocating for this sort of binary am i correct Sure, sure. Yeah, yeah. Like, it was a 10,000-foot view that I tried to sort of put in place from a Dugan sort of ideological perspective, thinking through to the logical end with all of its various implications that that might have. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, and then the other point I just wanted to make is about liberal and Marxism relationship to modernity and the Enlightenment. Because I think as a Marxist, we need to defend the promise of the Enlightenment against. against the reaction. Yeah. But at the same time, we need to critique liberalism for its failure to actually live up to the standards that it pretends to in the Enlightenment. Because, you know, we've had episodes where we just talk about the liberal modernity, the liberal version of enlightenment, and the Marxist critique of like this half-enlightenment,

like this sort of, you know, half-developed enlightenment of liberalism where they take these ideas and they promote them and they actually say this is what we're all about, but the way they actually act in the world is in direct opposition to those supposed values. So we have to defend certain elements of modernity and the full enlightenment from fascists, and we also have to critique the half-born or, you know,

the aborted version, of the Enlightenment that liberals proclaim to carry forward. And as Marxists, we say we believe in the Enlightenment, we actually want to carry it to its full extent. And that means not just seeing through the mystifications of religion versus secularism or science,

but also the mystifications liberalism props up about itself. And the ways that liberalism fails to live up in so many ways to the ideals that they proclaim that they stand by. And so again, this three-way fight narrative becomes very

helpful here because we don't want to take the size of fascist, nor do we want to find ourselves aligning fully with liberals in our fear and desperate attempt to fight the fascists, because we know liberalism itself creates the conditions that fascism grows out of. And so I think that three-way fight is very helpful here conceptually. Yeah, man. And the other thing you asked about, like, I mean, there was this notion when, I don't know that it's being even spoken about at this point now with the stalls that the Russian army have have had. But there was this notion when he first invaded Ukraine that he wasn't going to

stop at Leviv or the western border of Ukraine. And in the same sort of way that I feel like Dugan is not safe to ignore anymore, in the same way that he's predicted the annexation of Ukraine, the war in Georgia, the taking of Crimea, and the way that he has a fully developed political program in foundations of geopolitics. There is no line in foundation of geopolitics that says, hey, take Ukraine and then stop at the western border. It's like, no, dude, like there's plans for the Finlandization of all of Europe. You know, there's also this notion within Russian history that Russia is messianic in a way that it has a responsibility to protect Europe or to save

Europe, insofar that Russian is partly European, but they have historically stopped Napoleon, you know, they have historically marched all the way to Berlin to save Europe from fascism, right? So there is this sort of concept within Eurasianism of saving Europe from Europe, of having Europe return to its own sort of authentic dazine, to use Heidegger and doing this sort of terminology, right? So all that being said, just in the same way, it's not safe to ignore Dugan anymore. Dugin doesn't want to stop at the western

border of Ukraine, and if he's been accurate at predicting what's going on so far, and if we think he's following foundations of geopolitics, well, that's what foundations of geopolitics said, and that's why I said, hey, you know, this guy may not stop at the western border of Ukraine. Yeah, so in my estimation, based on where we are, and you did record that episode right as the invasion was happening. So there's that fog of war moment.

everybody's ripping off analysis and firing it off. You know, we don't really know how things are developing. Now we can see a little bit later that things have developed in a certain direction. My argument and my sense of it would be that it's not that Putin is pursuing a Duganist line in its entirety. I think Putin is probably engaged with and taken on board certain elements of Dugan's philosophy, used it opportunistically to justify his invasion. But ultimately, and I also think, think that he is a Duganist in the sense that there's certain strategic things he's trying

to accomplish like splitting off the UK from Europe and splitting off Europe from U.S.-led domination, but it's clear that that has implications for NATO, right? NATO is dominated by the U.S. If you can split that alliance between Western Europe and the U.S., you could advance Russian interests much more easily. So for me, I feel like Putin's doing a pared-down version, opportunistically taking some things from Dugan, but certainly not taking his entire worldview and entire

project on board. And I think ultimately what we're going to see is that there's no way in hell, in my opinion, and you can disagree, that Putin is going to go westward. I don't think that is in the cards whatsoever. I think the absolute most that he would do would be

a partitioning eastern Ukraine, taking it over, or making it a client state like Belarus, allowing Western Ukraine to basically do whatever. One, under the Zelensky administration. But I think actually what's more likely is it's this bomb and negotiate

attempt on Putin's part. You've pushed us, from Putin's perspective, NATO, the U.S., Ukraine, you've pushed us into a corner. We're great Russia. We're not taking it. We're striking out. I'm going to fuck up your capacity to militarily attack us in the future. And I'm going to

continue to devastate your country infrastructurally and economically until you agree to certain demands. And those demands are not crazy irrational demands, nor are they, I want to take over the world like Hitler did demands. They are, let me have Crimea, let Dombos be an independent state, and please promise that Ukraine is going to remain neutral with regards to NATO and with regards to acting as a staging ground for NATO's weapons.

So even though Ukraine is not a part of NATO and perhaps would never even be allowed to become formally a part of NATO, at least before this, they are using Ukraine and have been using Ukraine as a sort of staging ground. Specifically, since 2014 and the Maidang Kua Revolution, however you want to talk about it, the U.S. has been funding, funneling, and supporting this war in the Dombas. And they are on the side of the Ukrainian nationalists, which have amongst them, literal fascist, literal Nazis, et cetera. So I think all of those things are more likely than we take Ukraine and we continue westward.

What are your thoughts? Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, I think it comes down to like a question of rationality, you know, because we didn't think it was a rational choice for him to go into Ukraine when heretofore he's been a seemingly rational character, right? So it's a question of like, is he going to all of a sudden return to rationality and just take what he can get out of negotiations and this war? Or is he going to continue with irrational decision making? And it may not even just be like progressing further west and maybe something else. I'm not even sure. but that's kind of the thing right is like how do you predict irrationality it kind of is beyond reason um the second thing the independent states dude like i i yeah sure he recognized the independent states but i i think in terms of uh putin i think he i don't think that it'll be long before if those are completely recognized independent states they'll have russian forces occupying those states totally at some point soon thereafter right um and the third thing is that um and i and i know i didn't mention this before but like going back to dougain and foundations of geopolitics he actually

literally says in that book, like, that Russia should be the staging ground for an anti-American revolution. So take that for what it will, you know. I mean, I think that all of these things are connected. And I don't have any doubts that Putin somehow sees the occupation of Ukraine or the military incursion as a pushback against American hegemony, as a push back against sort of Western dominance and maybe on a philosophical level like Dugan feels that it's a pushback against enlightenment values. I don't know if like Dugan thinks about like, oh, we're a one in one for Joseph de Maestra or something. You know, I don't think that like he's doing that. But I, but I do think that it holds a specific significance for both Putin and for Dugin. Doogan more

in a philosophical, eschatological sort of great confrontation of land and sea power sort of thing. And for Putin, it's probably just a pushback against, like, the dominance of liberal hegemony and a sort of reassertion of Russia as a capable and powerful state to not to be trifled with in a way. So, yeah. For sure. Yeah. Just one point about because we've talked about it a few times. It's a rationality point.

And, you know, this is a widespread thing. Not necessarily that Putin is a crazy man, although that is a narrative, but that, this move was fundamentally irrational and that he's not getting out of it what he might have thought, right? We hear the word miscalculation. And so, if you try to take for granted that Putin is a rational

actor, what he could have thought is this is going to put huge pressure on already existing divides within NATO and actually weaken that formation. It's done the opposite, but you can see how a reasonable rational person could come to the conclusion with Germany getting 30% of its gas from Russia and Europe

in general, getting huge portions of its natural gas from Russia, and the U.S.'s belligerence and uncompromising nature, that you could facilitate, especially after Trump and the delegitimization of the U.S. Empire, you could actually widen these cracks, and that's not wholly irrational, even if it was ultimately wrong. But then I'd also say that there's a fucking fine line between irrationally invading Ukraine, and this is a surprise attack. I am not showing my cards. I've obviously had to plan it for a year out because this the amassing of forces on the border took a year. I'm going to not do anything that would indicate that I'm about to make this move as much as as as possible.

And when it, when it hits, it's going to be felt like it's irrational because it's going to come out of seemingly nowhere. But we've been planning it for a long time. These are my goals. This is what I want to do. It's a strong fucking move. It's a move that only certain countries would ever even think of doing. But we're Russia. You know, we're proud and we're a fucking super power. We have a long civilizational history and we're not going to take shit. You can see how that would be in his mind whether you agree with it or not. And that

obliterates, in my opinion, this idea that even that move into Ukraine was fundamentally irrational. It could have been miscalculated. You could have been wrong about it. But tactically, it could have been, this is going to be a surprise attack. They're going to have to scramble to get their shit together and we could actually make some gains.

Especially from Putin's perspective, he feels like we've tried to compromise We've tried to ask for a neutral or Ukraine. We're continually getting pushed further and further back into a corner, so I'm letting it rip this time. So, I don't know. That, to me, does not qualify as irrational, but I'd love to hear your thoughts. Right, right. Well, you know, I don't really have a whole lot to say about the irrational action sort of thing.

I mean, I think we can only get so far in psychologizing, you know, the head of Putin. But I will say that, like, also written in 1997 foundations of geopolitics, well, actually there was a book by is a big new Brazil. called the Grand Chess Board. And in some of the latest public remarks by Alexander Dugin, he specifically talks about the move into Ukraine being a pushback against, like, a game of chess between Zabignau, Brasinski and Putin. And basically, U.S. Agemini being dominant, he relates it to, like, Zabignau, Brzinski or the U.S. playing a one-player game of chess.

And it's Putin asking if I can join the... the game and move a piece. And this is him moving a piece, asserting that Fukuyama was wrong, and Samuel P. Huntingham was absolutely right. So this is, it all ties back into a lot of like John Meersheimer realist perspective stuff as well. And so I think that there's multiple layers that you have to look at this stuff through. There's the layer of Realpolitik, you know. there's the layer of say Russian interest and Putin interests there's the layer of ideology

with Dugin and his ultimate aspirations for returning to pre-modernity and being a lynchpin of the far right and there's also like different layers of Russian history blended into this within like you know Russia feeling if they have to save Europe from Europe and having a history of actually saving Europe

in the Second World War so it's a really complex topic man And I'm really happy that you allowed me to talk at length about all this stuff. Because this is where my head's been at for a little while now. And it's just, you know, it's great to be able to have a conversation like this to where you can kind of point people to. It's like if you really want to learn about the multiple layers and nuance of this entire topic, one conversation that covers a really wide landmass. You know, it's really cool to have, yeah. Yeah, well, absolutely.

man. And this has been a wonderful conversation. I'm really glad he reached out to me with this idea. I had not dug into Dugan before this, and then after we agreed to do this, I went down the full rabbit hole. And it's a fascinating rabbit hole for sure. And I really appreciate you coming on here, not only to flesh some of this stuff out and talk about Dugan and understand his ideas and his influence, but also to be a really good sport and kind of go back and forth a little bit around our disagreements. You know, it doesn't happen a lot where people on the left, can sit down and have a principal disagreement about certain elements. We agree on most of it.

Here's where I think you're a little off. Here's where you think I'm a little off, et cetera. That's an important thing to do, and I really appreciate you being willing to come and do that. And, yeah, it's been fascinating. I would love to have you back on because, as I said before, we started recording, I think, we have lots of shared interests, including in philosophy,

and I think we could do a lot of really interesting stuff working together on the philosophical front. But, yeah, but before I let you go, though, Can you, do you have any last words? Do you have anything that you wanted to say that you didn't get out? Anything you want to say before we wrap up? You know, I think that, I mean, there's a couple books that are, let have guided me a lot through this process. One of them is War for Eternity by Benjamin Titlebaum.

If you want like a quick kind of hook, line, and sinker into all these things we've been discussing, Benjamin's book is incredible. And he goes through, I mean, he actually sat down an interview. Steve Bannon for 20 on the hour, or on the record hours. And the content of that book is fascinating and that's what queued my initial

interest into all of this stuff. Another book is called Black Wind, White Snow by Charles Clover, and that book is fascinating because it details some of the things we talked about with like Nikolai, Trubitskoy and Roman Jacobson.

He also has a lengthy, like, the latter half of the book is all about Alexander Dugan, and I have not gotten to that point yet in that book. But the book is fascinating as it details the origins of Eurasianism as an ideology, as ideas. Let's see, there's a, I can't remember her name right now, but there's a French scholar, and I sent you the PDF of this, of her section on Alexander Dugan. Her last name is Larlal. I believe. leave um anyway so that she has a wonderful um she is probably the world's foremost expert in alexander dougan and so uh her work is um it's it's very you know i i learned a lot from

reading her stuff um there's a lot of youtube videos out there you can look a lot of the stuff up it's not hard to find um but again a lot of the stuff that i'm telling you it's just stuff that i read that i absorbed that i spoke with other people about and um you know i'm also i mean any of the listeners are free to contact me with questions about this stuff if they like as well um you know there'll be links to my socials and stuff like that and show notes i presume so i would encourage anyone that has questions about this to reach out as well i'm always happy to chat about this endlessly fascinating horrible or sort of shit man you know so yeah sweet yeah and um you know there's he also as as you mentioned he speaks many

language including uh english so there are plenty of interviews out there even very recent ones uh where he's speaking in his own words to an english audience keep in mind as you said earlier that he knows who his audiences are. And if you listen to multiple interviews with different, you know, perspectives from the interviewer, you'll kind of see how he shifts some of his ideas and some of the ways he talks and his emphasis, depending on who he's talking to. And I think that in and of itself is pretty interesting and revealing. But yeah, lots of great recommendations. Now, before I let you go, though, can you let listeners know where they can find you, your podcast, and your work in general online? Yeah, so my podcast is called No Easy Answers. And you can find that wherever you find

podcast. It's a Marxist podcast about politics, philosophy, and the human condition. And that's kind of my main project at the moment. You can find me on Twitter. I am at Real J-E-L-E-L-E-L-E-L-E-S-T-A-L-R-E-A-L-L-R. I'm also a musician. I have a couple albums out, and that stuff is on all the streaming platforms if you just look up Jules Taylor.

During the pandemic, my focus has been on this podcast and facilitating communities, so I'm just like running a bunch of sound these days because I missed people gathering. in, you know, dark rooms with loud music and dancing and experiencing joy. So that's what I had, you know, sort of, that's what I've been doing for work lately. But, yeah, you don't follow me on Twitter.

You can find me on social media. No easy answers wherever you can find podcast. And my music is just if you look up Jules Taylor, there's a couple of albums where I play a bunch of instruments on them. Beautiful. Yeah, I will link to as much of that as possible in the show notes so people can easily find you. Thank you again, my brother. This was a fascinating conversation. Let's do it again sometime.

All right. As long as the sky's been blue As long as the sun's been rising You know I've been pining for you You know I've been pining for you As long as the days are in August As long as the springtime knows As long as the snow on the mountain

I'll just keep pining for you You know I'll keep pining for you Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh

As long as the canyons are empty As long as the north of stars true As long as the salt in the ocean You know I'll keep on in for you. No, I'll keep on in for you. Oh, who, who, oh, who. Thank you.