Alexander Dugin /Geopolitica/ – “We need to liberate ourselves, all the peoples, Turkish people, Russian people, Chinese people, European people, American peoples, from this international liberal swamp. We need to liberate ourselves from the totalitarian discourse constructed on the ‘self-evident’ dogma that only liberalism can be accepted as a universal ideology, that only Western values should be assimilated as something universal. With the growth of China and Putin’s insistence on defending and strengthening Russian sovereignty, the Belt and Road Initiative was transformed into something new in the last two years. It now represents a strategy to secure Chinese and Russian independence, working together, in alliance. Now, we can speak about the Russian-Chinese alliance as a geopolitical alliance opposed to the Atlanticist world order. Nation-states cannot independently establish, secure and keep real sovereignty. We need to oppose this global pressure together. Above all, on the present stage, we need to establish a multipolar alliance between all the powers, all the states, all the countries and civilizations fighting for their independence. That is the logical continuation of decolonization. Decolonization is not finished; it has just started.”
Alexander Dugin answers the questions of Fikret Akfırat, Editor-in-Chief of BRIQ.
Fikret Akfırat: The July 19 edition of the Turkish newspaper Milliyet features an op-ed by United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, where he expresses the following view: “Above all, we cannot return to the system that has caused the current crisis. What we need is to build a better system that allows for the growth of societies and economies with greater sustainability, inclusivity, and gender equality”. What kind of a New World Order do you think humanity needs? What is to be done to achieve such a goal?
Alexander Dugin: I think that these are purely senseless words. Not real thoughts. The current crisis is a logical result of the decay of the global liberal system, clearly under the leadership of the West. That is the way it all unfolds. It is a kind of liberal hegemony doubled by geopolitical unipolarity. So, the crisis is caused by Western liberalism and the unipolar Western system.
We are all in some sense “the West”. In a sense, the modern western liberal civilization was a path to follow for all other societies. And I think that the problem with this present-day crisis is precisely the direct consequence of the impossibility to overcome the coronavirus on a global scale through the western-liberal international institutions that have proved utterly ineffective.
This economic crisis, the fall of general demand, the crash of oil prices and the beginning of a real civil war in the US, represent a clear sign of the end of the western-centred world. It is a double-faced crisis. On one side, we see liberalism as a historical social vision, as a philosophy. It is not only economic liberalism, the defense of free market or political liberal democracy, parliamentarianism and so on. It is also the metaphysical understanding of the nature of humankind as a mass of individuals. For liberalism, the man is equal to the individual. That is the basis of all liberal ideology as well as progress, understood as accumulation of liberty. More and more liberty, more and more progress in the eyes of liberals themselves is just the same as the progress and growth of liberalism. With this growth of liberalism, the West affirmed its own hegemony, its own domination.
In order to be more modern, developed and prosperous you are obliged to be more liberal, more liberal democratic, to have more open society, more civil society. In that global context, the West itself has secured or thought to secure for itself a kind of leading role, a pattern to follow. The history of the West is presumed to be equivalent to the universal destiny of humanity. On this ideological level liberalism is thought of as a necessary universal ideology that must be adopted by all. If you resist you will be put among “rogue countries” with all the consequences, war and regime change operations.
The political ideology of globalist liberalism is paired with other aspects, with the geopolitical, economic and political leadership of Western countries and above all that of the US. So, we have on one side ideological unipolarity with the domination of liberals. On the other side, we have the geopolitical, military, political, strategic and economical unipolarity of the West.
The Crisis of Unipolar System
The crisis, which we are speaking of, is precisely the crisis of this unipolar geopolitical/ideological system. When United Nations Secretary-General Guterres says that “we should build a better system” and immediately after refers to the “growth of societies and economies”, he rests totally inside the liberal paradigm. Economic growth is the key measure to define the success of economic activity in liberal theory. The concept of economic growth is thus purely liberal. That is the system we already have. But Guterres, just one line before, affirmed that “we need to build a better system”. Guterres proposes to cure the crisis, created by liberalism, with more liberalism, with “more growth of economy” On the other hand, the concept of “greater sustainability” is the thesis developed by the Club of Rome1. The very idea of sustainable development is promoted by left liberalism and it means that the rich should take care of the poor in order to avoid proletarian revolutions and all kinds of social protests. That is the Fabian society2 style of political agenda. Finally, the same Club of Rome who pretended to promote sustainable development insisted on the reduction of human population on the planet, stressing the limits of growth. So Guterres should choose either economic growth (the classical liberal thesis) or the Club of Rome’s brand of sustainability.
LIBERAL ANTI-RACISM ITSELF IS WESTERN-CENTRIC AND PROFOUNDLY RACIST. THE OTHER FOR THE WEST BELONGS TO ITS OWN UNCONSCIOUSNESS. IT IS PATHOGENIC AND PATHOLOGICAL.
Next point: inclusivity. The main problem with inclusivity is the fact that Western culture cannot imagine an “Other” outside of itself. The Western Cartesian subject3 considers the “Other” as its own unconsciousness. According to Lacan4, it is some entity, some unconscious subject5 that lives inside the Western man. So, when we speak about inclusivity with western man, he naturally means precisely this kind of inclusivity – i.e. concerning his own unconscious self. This psychoanalysis helps us to understand why the West is so deeply racist. It is racist including when it obliges all to fight racism – it is obligatory because of the fact the West itself has decided to do that… So liberal anti-racism itself is Western-centric and profoundly racist. The Other for the West belongs to its own unconsciousness. It is pathogenic and pathological.
Finally, gender equality, which is perhaps the most senseless point. To obtain to real gender equality, we need to destroy the gender as such. Because the relations between man and woman are based on asymmetry, i.e. precisely on the absence of the equality, on the non-equality, and non-equivalence, to use the terms of Jacques Lacan. To proclaim gender equality is to destroy man and woman as such. It was realistically described in the “Cyborg manifesto” of the famous modern feminist Donna Haraway.
So, what do we have in Guterres’ statement that “We need the better system” That means we need more liberalism for economic growth, and at the same time we need to impose more limits on economic growth in line with the Club of Rome’s concept of sustainability, more inclusivity of the unconscious Other (that means we need a more ego-centric, western-centric racism, that totally absorbs its own psychic diseases – capitalist neurosis or post-modernist psychosis) and we need to destroy the gender. The words of UN Secretary-General, Guterres, are thus extremely senseless and deeply contradictory. That is an idiotic speech of someone who does not understand a bit of the meaning of the concept of words. People like that try to build a better system based on the premises of the existing one. How can one cure liberalism in decay with more liberalism, adding with elements of Deleuzian6 far-left post-modernism and cyberfeminism7?
The problem is not Guterres, personally. The problem is the global liberal elite desperately insisting on curing all the logical disasters and crises proceeding from liberalism with more liberalism, mixed with extravagant post-modernist concepts.
It follows that we need to mix liberalism with elements of Fabianism, anarchism and cultural Marxism. To hear Guterres is the same as to be put in some psychiatric clinic. What he describes is the symptom, not correctly formulating the problem or speaking of a diagnosis or cure.
The problem is not Guterres, personally. The problem is the global liberal elite desperately insisting on curing all the logical disasters and crises proceeding from liberalism with more liberalism, mixed with extravagant post-modernist concepts.
I think we are already in this new world order if we follow the description of Guterres. If we understand the new world order as the continuation of liberal globalization, we need not to improve and embellish it, but instead to get out of it, get rid of it – of all these idiots: Guterres, United Nations officials, and global liberal elites. They try to cure us with poison, to cure all the crises made by domination of liberal ideology with more liberalism. We need to liberate ourselves, all the people, Turkish people, Russian people, Chinese people, European people, American peoples, from this international liberal Swamp.
We need to liberate ourselves from the totalitarian discourse constructed on the “self-evident” dogma that only liberalism can be accepted as a universal ideology, that only Western values should be assimilated as something universal. They try to improve technical functional problems of their system with the same approach. We need real alternatives to Guterres, to the United Nations, to liberalism, to western modern technological civilization. It is the civilization of hell. We need to find the way out of it, not to go deeper in it.
The Belt & Road Initiative: United Eurasianist Initiative
Fikret Akfırat: Your portrayal of Eurasia and Eurasianism connotes something more than a mere geographical description. It also extends to the political alliance of all those opposed to the Atlanticist world order. In this regard, how would you interpret the China-proposed Belt & Road Initiative from a Eurasianist perspective?
Alexander Dugin: The Belt & Road Initiative had started as a kind of Atlanticist project, conceived by the Chinese elite with the help of American globalists. Initially, the idea was to create a direct tie between China and Western Europe, linking together all coastal areas in order to avoid Russia, to encircle it and cut its access to the warm seas. This is traditional geopolitics of Atlanticists. The Belt & Road Initiative started precisely as such. China considered it a very good opportunity to develop and secure its markets as well as to promote its own political and economic interests outside of China. Western globalist elites supported that, because the project excluded Russia.
But many things have changed in recent years. First, China became so powerful, so independent, so sovereign that it began to represent a new challenge to the globalists themselves, to the West. China became the second pole. Observing China becoming more and more independent, a part of the globalist/western elite started to oppose China. We see this with Huawei, with Trump’s campaign to get all Chinese assets out of the US, with the mutual closure of consulates in USA and in China. We see economic war with China. These changes have reshaped the Belt & Road Initiative in a new geopolitical context.
LITTLE BY LITTLE CHINA CAME TO THE CONCLUSION THAT RUSSIA IS TO BE INCLUDED IN THE BELT & ROAD INITIATIVE, MAKING IT A UNITED EURASIANIST INITIATIVE. SO, THE WHOLE PROJECT STARTED TO BECOME A “EURASIAN ROAD”.
Little by little China came to the conclusion that Russia is to be included in the Belt & Road Initiative, making it a united Eurasianist initiative. So, the whole project started to become a “Eurasian road”. Initially it was conceived as an Atlanticist project, trying to encircle with a “cordon sanitaire”8 – in geopolitics a “cordon sanitaire “ is viewed as an important tool to separate Russia from neighboring countries – but with the growth of China and Putin’s insistence on defending and strengthening Russian sovereignty, the Belt & Road Initiative was transformed into something new in the last two years. It now represents a strategy to secure Chinese and Russian independence, working together, in alliance. That was confirmed by a recent Russian and Chinese agreement.
So, the meaning of the Belt & Road Initiative has drastically changed and we can now speak about the Russian-Chinese alliance as a geopolitical alliance opposed to the Atlanticist world order, to its unipolarity.
Initially the BRI was supported by the West, but now, it is rather under attack. The West tries to use Japan and India in order to reduce the importance of the project, and even by trying to directly sabotage it sometimes.
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