Against Right-Wing Bolshevism (or
Leftist Traditionalism)
A point-by-point answer
Third Message for the debate with
Prof. Aleksandr Dugin
Olavo de Carvalho
Introduction.
1. Disappointment
2. Attacks.
3. Surprise.
4. Insult and retaliation.
5. Delight
6. Is everything politics?
7. Will to power
8. Eurasianism and communism.
9. Counting corpses.
10. Dugin contra Dugin
11. The duty to choose.
12. Arms.
13. Dugin contra Dugin (2)
14. The difference between us.
15. The difference between us (2)
16. Anesthetic quotes.
17. A question of style.
18. My stupid opinion.
19. Judgement by guesswork
20. Reality was invented in the Middle Ages.
21. Reality and concept
22. Intellectual racism..
23. Absolute and relative relativism..
24. Absolute and relative relativism (2)
25. Subject and object
26. Logical essence.
27. Existence and proof
28. Just stage business.
29. Oh, how hateful I am!
30. Resentment
31. Putting words in my mouth.
32. Oh, how hateful I am! (2)
33. Guénon and the West
34. The world upside-down.
35. The Seven Towers of the Devil
36. Asymmetry.
37. Conspiracy Theory.
38. Conspiracy Theory (2)
39. Free competition ideology?.
40. American national interest?.
41. Fabricating unity.
42. Putting words in my mouth (2)
43. Putting words in my mouth (3)
44. Putting words in my mouth (4)
45. Western or Catholic Church?.
46. The Catholic Church and the American right
47. Love for the strong.
48. The two utopias compared.
49. Christianity and “organic society”
50. Syncretism..
51. Protestantism and individualism..
52. Jews.
53. Jews (2)
54. Jews (3)
55. Love for the strong (2)
56. Multiculturalism.
57. Warrior spirit
58. Revolt and post-modernism.
59. Salvation by destruction.
60. Not even a fart’s worth of effort
1. Disappointment
2. Attacks.
3. Surprise.
4. Insult and retaliation.
5. Delight
6. Is everything politics?
7. Will to power
8. Eurasianism and communism.
9. Counting corpses.
10. Dugin contra Dugin
11. The duty to choose.
12. Arms.
13. Dugin contra Dugin (2)
14. The difference between us.
15. The difference between us (2)
16. Anesthetic quotes.
17. A question of style.
18. My stupid opinion.
19. Judgement by guesswork
20. Reality was invented in the Middle Ages.
21. Reality and concept
22. Intellectual racism..
23. Absolute and relative relativism..
24. Absolute and relative relativism (2)
25. Subject and object
26. Logical essence.
27. Existence and proof
28. Just stage business.
29. Oh, how hateful I am!
30. Resentment
31. Putting words in my mouth.
32. Oh, how hateful I am! (2)
33. Guénon and the West
34. The world upside-down.
35. The Seven Towers of the Devil
36. Asymmetry.
37. Conspiracy Theory.
38. Conspiracy Theory (2)
39. Free competition ideology?.
40. American national interest?.
41. Fabricating unity.
42. Putting words in my mouth (2)
43. Putting words in my mouth (3)
44. Putting words in my mouth (4)
45. Western or Catholic Church?.
46. The Catholic Church and the American right
47. Love for the strong.
48. The two utopias compared.
49. Christianity and “organic society”
50. Syncretism..
51. Protestantism and individualism..
52. Jews.
53. Jews (2)
54. Jews (3)
55. Love for the strong (2)
56. Multiculturalism.
57. Warrior spirit
58. Revolt and post-modernism.
59. Salvation by destruction.
60. Not even a fart’s worth of effort
Introduction
What did Prof.
Dugin reply to my refutation of the mechanical contrast between individualism
and collectivism? Nothing.
What did he reply
to my demonstration that the “holistic” sentiment of community solidarity is
more alive in the USA than in any country of the Eurasian block? Nothing.
To my comparison
between the respective evil deeds of the USA, Russia, and China? Nothing.
To my explanation
about the nature of historic action and the identity of the true agents of
history? Nothing.
To my fathoming of
the structural conflict that transforms the Orthodox Church into a docile
instrument of any Russian imperialist project? Nothing.
He preferred to
dodge all the decisive questions and, feigning offended dignity, to leave the
stage thumping his feet, as a cabaret prima donna. And yet he
says that I am the hysterical one.
On his way out, he
nibbled around the edges, touching on secondary points of my message, to which
he offered no satisfactory answer as well, limiting himself to pounding his
chest in a display of affected superiority, and to ascribing me ideas I do not
have, which were invented by him with the aim of easily impugning them, so he
could celebrate victory in his imaginary battle.
Of course I will
not pay him back in his own coin. My theatrical gifts are nil or negligible, as
attested by the great Russian-Brazilian actor and director Eugênio Kusnet with
the sovereign authority of a former student of Stanislavsky, when he declared,
rightly, that I was the worst student in his acting course. To his great
relief, I attended the course out of mere curiosity, without any malignant
intent of imposing my abominable performances on the public.
On the other hand,
I am a trained scholar and a practitioner of the art of argumentation, on which
I have published at least two ground-breaking books. [1] Hence, I know what a debate is, and
I am certain that it is not what Prof. Dugin imagines it to be, that is, a
circussy gesticulation aimed at making him look nice and at fastening a
repugnant mask to his opponent’s face. That is only a dispute of vanities,
a silly game that for me has as much interest as a fight among earthworms for a
hole on the ground.
What I will do here
is to answer Prof. Dugin point by point, with the systematic thoroughness of
someone who does not wish to destroy him, but rather to rescue him from the
muddy confusion in which he is drowning. In the following lines, each of Prof.
Dugin’s slippery circumlocutions will be carefully steered back to the central
questions he tried to avoid, and answered with direct candor, without posing or
making faces.
In order to
facilitate the reading, I divided Prof. Dugin’s text into 60 numbered
paragraphs, in which I also include his quotes of my second message. Both are
reproduced in a smaller font and followed by my replies.
The length of this
message does not stem from any erotic pleasure I may feel in writing long
texts, but from the simple fact that—to quote myself for a thousandth time—the
human mind is made up in such a way that error and lies can always be expressed
in a more succinct way than their refutation. A single false word
requires many words to disprove it.
1. Disappointment
To say the
truth, I am a little bit disappointed by this debate with Mr. Olavo de
Carvalho. I thought I would find in him a representative of Brazilian
traditionalist philosophers in the line of R. Guenon and J.Evola. But he turned
out to be something different and very queer indeed.
On my part, I am
not disappointed. In spite of being called queer—an adjective whose
connotations Prof. Dugin pretends to ignore—, now I am really starting to like
this debate. When my opponent begins to get irritated, and resorts to
derogatory labeling, shameless bluffs, and arguments of authority, answering to
practically nothing of the substance of what I have said, I begin to understand
that I was even more right than I had imagined at the outset.
I am especially
glad when my contender uses words that contrast in such a way with his real
conduct that in order to wholly disprove him, all I need to do is to invoke the
testimony of his own actions.
Prof. Dugin is an
ostensible preacher of war and genocide. He confesses that he hates the whole
West and that his declared goals are to incite a Third World War, to wipe the
West off the face of the Earth, and to establish everywhere what he himself
defines as a universal dictatorship. He has already said that nothing makes him
sadder than the fact that Hitler and Stalin did not join forces to destroy
France, England, and everything else they found on their way, distributing to
the whole universe the benefits that they had already lavished on the inmates
of the Gulag and Auschwitz.[2]
When a man with
these ideas calls me aggressive and rancorous, I cannot but conclude that I am
facing a living example of delusional interpretation,[3] one of the
defining traits of the revolutionary mentality, I feel as satisfied as Dr.
Charcot did when, before an academic audience, his patients reacted exactly as
according to the point of clinic psychiatry he wished to illustrate.
2. Attacks
I am also sad with
his hysterical and aggressive attacks against my country, my tradition and
myself personally.
(1) No, Prof.
Dugin. Who attacked your country and your tradition was not I. It was Lenin and
Stalin, whom you consider preferable to Ronald Reagan and even to Barack Obama.
I just said the obvious: that all Russians who applauded those two should work
to pay compensation to the families of their victims. Is this offensive? Or was
Justice created only for Germans, while the Russians and the Chinese have a
celestial certificate of immunity? Of your religious tradition I also did not
say anything that you had not said before: that it is a state religion, which
has as its chief the czar or whoever is on his place; that therefore it cannot
expand beyond its borders except by politico-military occupation of foreign
lands. What have you been doing if not demonstrating this with notable
constancy?
By the way, if you
really believe in holism and collectivism, you have to admit that it makes no
sense to individualize the faults of politicians while at the same time
absolving the collective entity that gave them power and support. Either we are
all free and responsible individuals—but you consider this an abominable
Western ideology—, or then, my son, the collectivity whose soul is projected
and condensed into a Stalin or czar is guilty of the acts of Stalin and the
czar.
(2) It is highly
significant your choice of the word “attack” instead of “offend” or “insult,”
either of which being much more adequate to designate a merely verbal assault.
Prof. Dugin openly preaches the destruction of Catholicism by force, by
military and police means, especially in Eastern European countries,[4] where the Catholic Church has
suffered all sorts of persecution and restriction. It is understandable that by
nurturing this bloody dream he feels “attacked” at the least sign of criticism
against the Orthodox Church by an unarmed man with no intention of wiping it
off the map. It is also highly significant that after this
disproportional reaction, which is hysterical in the most literal and technical
sense of the term, he says that I am the hysterical one. The revolutionary mind
lives off projective inculpation.
3. Surprise
It is something I
was not prepared to meet.
Oh, really? With
his bazookas and tanks, he was prepared to stimulate the slaughtering of some
hundreds of millions of people, but he could never have expected that one of
them would complain a little.
4. Insult and retaliation
Knowing his manners
of conduct better before, I would not have agreed to participate in such a
debate – I don't like at at all this kind of hollow accusations and direct insults.
The first to insult
was Prof. Dugin, and I have the awful habit of retaliating. There is no worse
insult than the thinly-veiled insinuation, in the style of the best opera
buffa schemer. Prof. Dugin tried to portray me to my compatriots as a
traitor to the homeland, an enemy of my country. A country where he has never
been to, of which he knows next to nothing, and whose support he now intends to
win based on cheap flattering, without warning it that in the Universal
Eurasian Empire it will hardly have a better luck than Ukraine had under
Russian dominion, or Tibet under Chinese occupation. Did he really expect that
after this he would get kid-gloves treatment from me? Those who know me know
that I hate word-mincing, sweet poisons, and deceitful intrigues whispered
in mellifluous tones. If you want to argue with me, either you respect
me, or hold your tears after I am done with you. Be a man.
5. Delight
So I am going to
continue only because of some obligations in front of the group of gentle
Brazilian young traditionalists that invited me to enter this unpleasant kind
of dialogue – that in other circumstances I would prefer to avoid.
Why “unpleasant”?
This is delightful!
6. Is everything politics?
For the beginning
there are some short remarks concerning some affirmations of Mr. Carvalho.“Political
Science, as I have said, was born at the moment when Plato and Aristotle
distinguished between the discourse of political agents and
the discourse of the scientific observer who seeks to understand what is going
on among the agents. It is true that political agents may, over time, learn how
to use certain instruments of scientific discourse for their own ends; it is
also true that the scientific observer may have preferences for the politics of
this or that agent. But this does nothing to alter the validity of the initial
distinction: the discourse of the political agent aims to produce certain
actions that favor his victory, while the discourse of the scientific observer
seeks to obtain a clear view of what is at stake, by understanding the
objectives and means of action of each of the agents, the general situation
where the competition takes place, its most probable developments, and the
meaning of such events in the larger picture of human existence.” The
thesis is overthrown by Marx in his analysis of the ideology as the implicit
basis for the science as such. Not being Marxist myself, I am sure that
observation is correct. “The function of the scientific observer
becomes even more distinct from that of the agents when he neither wishes nor
can take sides with any of them and keeps himself at a necessary distance in
order to describe the picture with the maximum realism available to him.”I
argue that that is simply impossible. There is no such place in the realm of
thought that can be fully neutral in political terms. Every human thought is
politically oriented and motivated.
It is I who was not prepared for
something like that. I grew up listening to this gibberish about inevitable
political engagement, universal politicization of every human act, and I could
not have imagined that Prof. Dugin would try to intimidate me with this silly
trick, a meaningless cliché that no philosopher with some training can take
seriously for a single minute. Like every expression of thick ignorance,
this one carries with it, concentrated and compacted, a multitude of vulgar
confusions that only education over time can undo. I do not have the least
pretension of remedying Prof. Dugin’s educational flaws, but as a mere
suggestion, I will present here a list of questions to which he would do well
in paying some attention in the coming years. Let us see:
(1) “Every human thought is
politically oriented and motivated” is a statement based upon a mere
confusion between a concept and a figure of speech. All human acts “may,”
theoretically and ideally, have closer or more distant relations with politics,
but not all of them can be “politically oriented and motivated” to the same
degree and in the same sense. No political intention moves me when I go to the
bathroom, put on my pants, drink a soda, eat a sandwich, listen to a Bach
cantata, arrange the papers in my office or mow the lawn in my yard (unless the
purpose of avoiding an invasion of snakes be a political prejudice against
these gentle creatures). The connection between human acts and politics
is distributed on a scale that goes from 100 percent to something like
0.00000001 percent. When, for instance, George W. Bush went for a pee, was this
be a political act to the same degree and in the same sense as the declaration
of war against Iraq? Quite clearly, the proposition “Every human thought is
politically oriented and motivated” jumps from the simple notice of a participation
that may be vague and extremely remote to the peremptory assertion of
a perfectly non-existent substantial identity and of an impossible quantitative
equality. It is not a concept. It is a figure of speech, a hyperbole. And as
such, it does not depict any objective reality, but rather the emphasis that
the speaker wishes to confer on the issue—on a scale that can go from a plain
demand for attention all the way to the psychotic abolition of the sense of
proportions. Prof. Dugin’s assertion is clearly included in the latter
category.
(2) Every human act, by definition,
participates to a greater or lesser degree in all the dimensions not only of
human life, but of existence in general. No one participates in all of them at the
same level and with the same intensity. Thus, statements like “everything is
physics,” “everything is atoms”, “everything is psychology,” “everything is
biology,” “everything is theater,” “everything is a game,” “everything is
religion,” “everything is will to power,” “everything is economics” “everything
is sex,” and “every human thought is politically oriented and motivated”
are at the same time irrefutable and void. They cannot be refuted because they
do not say anything.
(3) The statement “There is no
such place in the realm of thought that can be fully neutral in political terms”
is an elementary confusion between genus and species: between politics as one
of the general dimensions of existence and the various historically existing
disputes in particular. Even if one would accept, ad argumentandum, the
hypothesis that all human acts are political, this would in no way imply that
each human being has to take a position in every political contest taking place
in his time. The very possibility of taking a position implies a previous
selection of what contests are relevant and what are indifferent or
false. Neutrality towards a multitude of political questions is not only
possible, but is an indispensable condition for taking a position in any one of
them in particular.
(4) I cannot believe that Prof. Dugin
is naïve to the point of ignoring that the definition of the goals of the
political game and the delimitation of the opposing camps are themselves
fundamental political attitudes. “Shaping a debate” is the fastest and most
efficient way to win in advance. Now, once a political contest is defined,
instead of taking sides with one team or the other, nothing prevents a citizen
from rejecting this very contest, and proposing in its place a totally different
one, disregarding the first one not only as irrelevant, but as false, thus
refusing to choose between opponents that, in his opinion, are only shadows
projected on a wall in order to deceive him. In this case, he must remain
neutral towards the other contest precisely in order to be able to take a
position in his own.
This debate itself exemplifies this
with the utmost clarity. Prof. Dugin, just as Western globalists, wishes to
force me to choose between “the West and the Rest.” He yells that no one can remain
neutral concerning this contest and insists that, in order to bring it to an
end, we all have to quietly accept the simple prospect of a Third World War,
necessarily vaster and more destructive than the two previous ones.
From my point of view, even if the
whole population of the planet would swallow this proposal and decide to join
one of the two armies, this would not make the contest morally legitimate, it
would not prove it to be an unavoidable historical fatality, nor would it in
any way make it an adequate expression of the true antagonisms that divide
mankind.
Why, by the way, should the
fundamental choice be of a geopolitical nature and not, for example, of a moral
or religious one? Why should good and bad people be distributed into separate
geographical borders instead of being scattered a bit here, a bit there,
without any national or racial uniformity?
For me, much more than a hypothetical
and artificial contest between “Westerners” and “Easterners,” what is at stake
today is the mortal fight between the whole of globalism—in its triple Western,
Russian-Chinese, and Islamic versions— and the millennial spiritual and
civilizational values which will be necessarily destroyed in the course of the
fight for global dominance, no matter who turns out to be the “winner.”
These values are not “Western.” Who
ignores, for example, that the Orthodox Church cannot join the “Eurasian
project” without becoming a passive instrument in the hands of the KGB (whose
name has been switched for the nth time), as it has in fact already become
under the leadership of a patriarch who is a notorious agent of this macabre
institution? Read the works of the great Orthodox tradition, as Philokalia or The
Way of a Pilgrim, and compare them with the ideological speeches of Prof.
Dugin. What can there be in common between the apotheosis of contemplative life
and the prostitution of everything to the dictates of the political fight? What
agreement can there be between Our Lord Jesus Christ and the devil?
In the same way, practically
everything in Islamic spirituality—and even in Islamic philosophy—has been lost
ever since generations of enraged youths decided to Islamicize the world on the
basis of terrorist attacks, inspired in the doctrines of the Muslim
Brotherhood, which are but a “liberation theology,” a gross politicization of
that which Islam once was. Compare the writings of Mohieddin Ibn ‘Arabi
or Jalal-ed-Din Rûmi with those of Sayyd Qutub, the mentor of the Brotherhood,
and you will have an idea of what a free fall really is.
The general politicization of
life—one of the typical features of Western modernity, which Prof. Dugin says
he hates, but to which, as we shall see later, he is a helpless and passive
ideological slave— evidently also had spiritually disastrous results in the
West. The degradation of Judaism by a modernizing liberalism since the
beginning of the nineteenth century, as depicted by Rabbi
Marvin Antelman in To Eliminate the Opiate,[5] was a sort of miniature laboratory
which prepared the way for an identical operation carried out in the twentieth
century, on a much larger scale, in the Catholic Church, culminating in the
complete disaster of Council Vatican II. As for the Protestant churches: who is
not aware that the World Council of Churches, which gathers together so many of
them, is a communist institution, and that those not infected by communism have
fallen sick with a “theology of prosperity” as materialist as communism itself?
To all these cases, Eric Voegelin’s
warning applies: “The modern form by which a mass democracy is organized [therein
included, and even preeminently, the “totalitarian democracies” of Russia,
China, and the Islamic world] is spiritually the more dangerous to the
individual personally, for the political propaganda fills his spirit with
abstract clichés, which are infinitely distant from any essential genuineness
of the personal, and therefore radically negate the best and unique features of
the entire human being.”[6]
Confronted with facts such as this,
the man who is more interested in the eternal life than in political fights,
instead of taking part in the contest among globalisms, very likely will do
what he can to depreciate it, discredit it and dilute it into the greater
contest between the City of God and the City of Men, and included in the latter
are the Syndicate, the Eurasian Empire, and the Caliphate.
This is my fight,
not the one which Prof. Dugin tries to engage me in against my will, putting on
me the strait jacket of a party which is not mine
and never could be. For this purpose, he twists the meaning of my words until he makes them say the opposite of
what they say, thus committing against me the most grave offense one can commit against a philosopher: denying the
individuality of his ideas and reducing them to a copy of the collective
discourses he despises.
(5) As if revealing a universally known truth to a hillbilly to
whom it is an absolute novelty, Prof. Dugin informs me that the
Platonic-Aristotelian distinction between the viewpoints of the agent and of
the observer no longer applies because it was “overthrown” by Karl Marx. Prof.
Dugin chose the wrong customer to sell his product to. Two decades ago I
already critically examined this Marxist presumption and demonstrated its utter
absurdity in my book O Jardim das Aflições,[7] to which I refer those who are
interested, relieving me from repeating here what I explained there. Karl
Marx did not “overthrow” a thing; he just fabricated, under the name of praxis, a
psychotic confusion between theory and practice, from which many intellectuals
have not yet recovered. When Prof. Dugin brandishes this confusion before my
eyes as if it were a truth definitely established—to the extent that in order
to disarm his opponent it would sufficient to mention it in passing, without
the need to even argue in its favor—, he is only demonstrating he has never
examined it critically, limiting himself to incorporating it, as dogma, into
his personal ideology. A sucker is born every minute, as P.T. Barnum already
taught.
(6) Besides the obvious fact
highlighted above, namely, that in order to take a position in a single contest
it is necessary to stay neutral in a multitude of others—since the denial of
all neutrality would bring with it the impossibility of taking a position—the
fact remains that even in the mind of a particular agent, even if he is the
most politically active and engaged one, the viewpoint of theoretical
observation must remain formally distinct from the viewpoint of the planner of
actions, or the agitator of the masses, that is, the agent must first be a
neutral observer so that he might later act upon a situation that he has
mastered intellectually. Prof. Dugin himself bears witness to this when,
a few lines down, he confesses that: “In my courses in the sociological
faculty of Moscow State University, where I chair the department of the
Sociology of International Relations, I never profess my own political views
and I give always the full spectrum of the possible political interpretations
of the facts, but I don’t insist on one concrete point of view, always
stressing that there is a choice.”
What is this if not a differently
phrased reproduction of what I had said in my second message? Please read it
again: “It is true that political agents may, over time, learn how to use
certain instruments of scientific discourse for their own ends; it is also true
that the scientific observer may have preferences for the politics of this or
that agent. But this does nothing to alter the validity of the initial
distinction: the discourse of the political agent aims to produce certain
actions that favor his victory, while the discourse of the scientific observer
seeks to obtain a clear view of what is at stake, by understanding the
objectives and means of action of each of the agents, the general situation
where the competition takes place, its most probable developments, and the
meaning of such events in the larger picture of human existence.”
In short: when Prof. Dugin speaks as
a scientific observer, he tries to understand a given situation. When he speaks
as an agent, he tries to promote actions which may lead to the victory of his
party. And who, by Jupiter, does not do the same? The intellectual and
verbal means of scientific observation are so different from the means of
political action that the very efficacy of the latter requires a preliminary
separation between the two viewpoints, a preparatory measure without which
their subsequent application in the domain of practice would only bring about
confusion, lies and endless self-deceit, as the history of the Marxist movement
has demonstrated with evidence to spare.
If Prof. Dugin, in his academic
activity, observes the same distinction that I do, he obviously does not
believe in himself when he says that this distinction was “overthrown” by Karl
Marx.
The sole difference that could exist
between us in this case—and I say “could” because it does not necessarily have
to exist—is that he assures us that, once a sufficiently clear description of
the contending forces is obtained, that is, once the task of the scientific
observer is completed, it is necessary to make a choice and “this choice
is not only the freedom (sic) but also the obligation (sic). You
are free to choose but you are not free to choose not.”
Now, an obligation to take a position
cannot be absolute. It is relative by definition. It is only valid if we accept
that the scientific description is truthful, that it is the only possible one,
or at least the most accurate of all, and that the contest it describes is so
important, so vital for human destiny, that every refusal to take a position in
it would be unforgivable cowardice. Come on, how many university
professors can brag about having reached such a certain and definitive
description of reality, such a precise equation of essential antagonisms that
whoever listens to them is morally obliged to take a position according to the
terms of the opposition they have defined? In my modest opinion, the only one
who reached such a correct and final description was Our Lord Jesus Christ when
He said that we had to choose between Him and the Prince of this World.
University professors by and large project onto the audience the conflict that
agitates itself in their souls, and only the more presumptuous among them
proclaim it is the essential conflict of the world, towards which nobody has
the right to remain neutral. The question then fatally arises: What if the
description is false? If I disagree with the description, why should I take
sides in a hypothetical conflict that exists only in the mind of my professor,
and that does not correspond to the facts as I see them? Why would I not have
the right to remain neutral between professorial hypotheses and to pick myself
my own fight? Once more, neutrality reveals itself not only as possible, but as
a necessary condition for taking a position.
Prof. Dugin does not understand these
subtleties. Resting on the infallible authority of Karl Marx, he sincerely
expects the world to accept to play the game by his own rules and, without
further ado, to enroll in one of the teams. For my part, I have better things
to do. With no intention of offense I return my enrollment form—blank.
7. Will to power
The will to power
permeates the human nature in its depths. The distance evoked by Mr. Carvalho
is ontologically impossible. Plato and Aristotle were both politically
engaged not only in practice but also in theory.
(1) Prof. Dugin claims to be the apostle of the Absolute, of Tradition, of the
Spirit, but he cannot be that at all since he decrees the primacy of the
political and denies the autonomy (or even the possibility) of contemplative
life, reducing it to an instrument or camouflage of the “will to power.”
The hypothesis that St. Theresa, for example, in contemplating Our Lord Jesus
Christ was “doing politics” or exerting the “will to power” reflects the same
aforementioned confusion [6(1) e 6(2)] between a most remote participation and
a quantitative equality.
(2) Having this confusion been undone, it is not true that “Plato and Aristotle
were bothpolitically engaged not only in practice but also in
theory.” Plato explains in his Seventh Letter that he decided to dedicate
himself to philosophy precisely after he became disillusioned with politics.
That his philosophy could have had later political developments does not imply
that it was itself political activism, just as Prof. Dugin is not engaged in
political activism when describing a political situation, as he himself
confirms it. As for Aristotle, his foreign status automatically prevented him
from participating in Athenian politics in any way, and throughout the
works he bequeathed us his positions are so prudent and moderate, that is, so
politically neutral, that they were able to equally inspire the most diverse
politics, from St. Thomas Aquinas to Karl Marx.
(3) The appeal to “will to power” as a universal explanatory key is highly
meaningful. This Nietzschean topos comes back on the scene every time someone
wishes to deter us from seeking a rational solution for human conflicts and to
invite us to participate in redemptive bloodshed. Prof. Dugin does not hide
that this is exactly his goal. But in order to achieve it, he needs to incur
once more into the unpardonable confusion between proportional participation
and quantitative identity. Are all human acts permeated by “will to power”?
Certainly. But to what degree? And what is the proportion between this
motivational force and the other forces involved? When you have sex with
your wife, there is certainly a tiny amount of will to power at play. But if it
predominates over will to pleasure, affection, the impulse to please the
beloved one, etc., then that will not be an act of licit sex anymore, but rape.
Ask your wife whether she cannot tell the difference. The apology of “will to
power” as the ultimate explanation of human acts is not a valid description of
reality; it is not even a theory: it is a morbid projection, in phony
theoretical language, of a compulsion to extinguish all other human
motivations, especially love and the will to knowledge. It is no surprise
that the inventor of this contraption was a poor wretch, with no money, with no
prestige, with not even a girlfriend, forced to have recourse to prostitutes
who ended up infecting him with syphilis, which made him insane and eventually
killed him. It was no coincidence that the second explanatory key in which he
placed his bet was… resentment.
8. Eurasianism and communism
8. “The
photos that I attached to my first message, by way of a humorous synthesis,
document all the difference between the political agent invested with global
plans and means of action of imperial scale and the scientific observer not
only divested of both, but firmly decided to reject them and to live without
them until the end of his days, since they are unnecessary and inconvenient to
the mission in life that he has chosen and that is for him the only reasonable
justification for his existence.” The indignity demonstrated a little
above against “Russian-Chinese” poles and completely ridiculous identification
between the Eurasianism and the communism is the bright testimony of the
extreme partiality of Mr. Carvalho.
I have never “identified” Eurasianism
with communism, at least not from the ideological point of view, though I
include both in the category of revolutionary movements, in the precise meaning
I give to this expression.[8] Yet, politics is not a mere
confrontation of ideologies. It is a contest for power between well defined and
concrete human groups. Prof. Dugin will not be cynical enough to deny that the
group currently in power in Russia is the same that dominated the country at
the time of communism. Substantially, that group is the KGB (or FSB, whose
periodical change of name has never changed the nature of the institution).
What is worse, it is the KGB with its power monstrously amplified: on one hand,
if in the communist regime there was one police agent for every 400 citizens,
today there is something like one for every 200, which unmistakably
characterizes Russia as a police state; on the other, the allotment of state
properties among the agents and collaborators of the political police, who
became “oligarchs” overnight without breaking their bonds of subjection to the
KGB, provides this entity with the privilege to act in the West under several
layers of disguise, with a freedom of movement that would have been unthinkable
at the time of Stalin or Khrushchev.
Ideologically, Eurasianism is
different from communism. It is, as Jeffrey Nyquist said, “right-wing Bolshevism”.
Yet ideology, as Karl Marx himself defined it, is just a “dress of ideas”
concealing a scheme of political power. The scheme of political power in Russia
has changed its dress, but continues to be the same—maintaining the same people
in the same positions, performing the same functions, with the same
totalitarian ambitions as ever.
There is no partiality in saying the
obvious.
9. Counting corpses
The evaluation of
the major global forces is based on the presumption of the scale that could be
taken as the measure – the quantity of humans killed.
Huh? And what is it that differentiates a personal misfortune from a global
tragedy if not the number of victims? This is no “presumption;” it is the very
definition of the terms being used. “Genocide” is the systematic annihilation
of an ethnic, political, or religious community. “Democide” is the
extermination of a civilian population by initiative of its own government.
Period. If the number of human beings murdered does not serve as a measure of
the gravity of a genocide or democide, why then should we distinguish between
the Holocaust and any individual homicide committed by an isolated racist, with
no power of government? What’s more: if the amount of victims does not make any
difference, how can one tell apart a serial killer from the author of a single
crime? What, then, is to be done with the notion of recidivism, which universal
jurisprudence proclaims to be an aggravating factor for crime? Could jurists of
all times and countries have been mistaken in raising penalties according to
number of crimes?
It is no coincidence that those guilty of the greatest genocides and democides
are always the ones who try, in a paroxysm of rhetorical desperation, to throw
mud in the water, by appealing to the absurd and insulting argument that
numbers do not make any difference.
Prof. Dugin goes even a bit farther: he places the term “genocide” between
attenuating quotation marks when referring to the murder of 140 million
unarmed civilians by the governments of Russia and China, but he uses
the same term without any quotes—thus denoting literal and precise meaning—
when he talks about the deaths which occurred in combat during
American interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, and which are
incomparably smaller in number.
That is a complete inversion of all sense of proportion, an insane logorrhea of
one who, having no argument, desperately tries to bewilder the audience to
prevent it from seeing the bare and crude reality.
10. Dugin contra Dugin
It is not so
evident and is rather example of political anti-communist and anti-Russian
propaganda than the result of “scientific analysis”. Yes, I am political agent
of EurasianWeltanschauung. At the same time I am political analyst and
scientist. The two aspects don’t correspond fully. In my courses in the sociological faculty of Moscow State
University, where I chair the department of the Sociology of International
Relations, I never profess my own political views and I give always the full
spectrum of the possible political interpretations of the facts, but I don’t
insist on one concrete point of view, always stressing that there is a choice.
As I have commented above, Prof.
Dugin demonstrates here, through his own example, that it is not possible to
understand a political situation, and much less to efficiently act upon it,
without first observing the Platonic-Aristotelian distinction between the
viewpoint of the observer and that of the agent, a distinction to which, a few
lines before, he had denied any validity. Even when the observer and the
agent are synthesized in the same person, the perspectives from which that person
looks at the facts must remain formally distinct and unconfusable.
11. The duty to choose
At the same time
this choice is not only the freedom butalso the obligation. You are
free to choose but you are not free to chose not. There is never
such a thing as political or ideological “neutrality”.
We now return to the issue of being
forced to choose. The right to choose does not mean a thing if it does not also
imply the right to choose between the various proposals of choice. Why
would we have the obligation to choose precisely between the alternatives
offered by Prof. Dugin, without being able to propose different alternatives,
or a different set of possible choices? Prof. Dugin himself, with exemplary
candor, exercises this very right that he denies to others.
“National-Bolsheviks [in whose name he speaks in this passage] affirm objective
idealism…and objective materialism…, refusing to choose between them.”[9]
Only God has the right to impose the ultimate, final, unappealable choice upon
us. “He that is not with me is against me,” and “He that gathereth not with me
scattereth,” said the Lord. Since then His apish satanic imitators
have not stopped pretending to have in their hands the definitive, obligatory
choice, crystallized in a macabre dualism. I could not show the absurdity of
this better than Otto Maria Carpeaux did I in a memorable essay on Shakespeare,
which summarizes the issue:
“For years European consciousness was
mistreated by the supposed obligation of choosing between Hitler and
Stalin—“there is no other alternative!” Then, they wished to force the world’s
consciousness to choose between Stalin and Foster Dulles—“there is no other
alternative!” And now and everywhere they continue to impose these
alternatives upon us, which are so similar to the absurd fight between the two
Houses of Montague and Capulet, which is the true theme of Romeo and
Juliet…It is this truth which Mercutio recognizes in that extreme lucidity
of the hour of agony, shouting —and we shout with him: A plague o’ both
your houses!, and amen.”[10]
If there are three houses instead of
two, may the plague come threefold. No Duginism in the world can force me to
choose between the Syndicate, the Caliphate, or the Russian-Chinese Empire. But
Prof. Dugin even simplifies things for me, by synthesizing the latter two in
the Eurasian Empire, reducing the alternatives to the good old dualism of the
Montagues and the Capulets, and trying to make us wear a straitjacket of
obligatory choice. A plague o’ both your houses!
12. Arms
So it is quite
erroneous to present Mr. Carvalho himself as “neutral” and “impartial” and
myself as “engaged” and “ideologically motivated”. We are both ideologically
engaged and scientifically involved. So I continue to regard our photos not as
“professor vs the warrior” but rather two “professors/warriors vs each other”.
Finally in the arms of Mr. Carvalho is a gun. Not a cross, for example. By the
way, there are some photos of myself bearing a big orthodox cross during
religious ceremonies. So, that would illustrate nothing. Our religions are
different as our civilizations are.
It is certain that both of us appear
in the photos holding guns, but what guns? Mine is a hunting shotgun, which may
occasionally be used for home defense, but which is normally used for sport
and, in my case, has served eminently (see new photo) to kill snakes before
they bite my smaller dogs (not the big one, which eats them thinking they are
moving sausages). Prof. Dugin’s guns, on the other hand, are war weapons
reserved for the exclusive use of governments, created specifically to kill
human beings (nobody has ever hunted snakes or armadillos with bazookas or
tanks). Moreover, this kind of weapon was not designed to kill one or two
people, but rather to kill them wholesale, by the hundreds, by the thousands.
How can he say that this difference “does not illustrate anything”? Is there
really no difference between self-defense and mass murder?
13. Dugin contra Dugin (2)
“Both professor
Dugin and I are performing our respective tasks with utmost dedication,
seriousness and honesty. But these tasks are not one and the same. His task is
to recruit soldiers for the battle against the West and for the establishment
of the universal Eurasian Empire. Mine is to attempt to understand the
political situation of the world so that my readers and I are not reduced to
the condition of blind men caught in the gunfire of the global combat; so that
we are not dragged by the vortex of History like leaves in a storm, without
ever knowing whence we came or whither we are being carried.” I agree here
in one point. It is true that “to recruit soldiers for the battle against the
West and for the establishment of the universal Eurasian Empire” is my goal.
But it is possible only after having achieved the correct vision of the world
global situation based on the accurate analysis of the balance of forces and
main actors.
Once more Prof. Dugin confirms, after having denied it, the formal and
indispensable distinction between the viewpoint of the scientific observer and
that of the political agent.
14. The difference between us
So up to this moment
Mr. Carvalho and myself we have the strictly one and the same task. If our
understanding of the leading world forces and their identification differs that
doesn’t mean automatically that I am motivated exclusively by political and
geopolitical choice and himself by the “neutral”, purely “scientific”
reasoning. We are both trying to understand the world we live in, and I presume
that we both are doing it honestly. But our conclusions don’t fit. I wonder why
and try to find deeper reasons than simply the obvious fact of my own
ideological and political involvement. We both want to make our world better
and not worse. But we both have different visions of what is the Good and Evil.
And I wonder where lies difference.
The difference is the following:
after having taken positions on issues with that indecent hurry of youth, I
soon climbed down over my views and spent thirty years—not thirty
days—struggling with my own doubts, among countless perplexities, without being
able to bring myself to make common cause with anything, except in an
experimental and provisional way. I only resumed expressing my political
opinions at 48 years of age, after having reached some conclusions that seemed
reasonable to me, and even so, I have always warned people about the possibility
that I might be wrong. Prof. Dugin has never been in doubt for even a single
day: he took side with National Bolshevism when he was very young, and has
hitherto remained faithful to the same program, now amplified as Eurasianism.
He simply did not go through that period of realabstinence of
opinions which is absolutely necessary to the education of a serious
intellectual.
15. The difference between us (2)
I believe it is
rather the result of the divergence of the mutual civilizations; we have
respectively different ontologies, anthropologies and sociologies. So the
culpabilization and demonization of each other is the result of the necessary
mutual “ethnocentric” positions and not the final arguments for the
choice of lesser evil.
Absolutely wrong. As we will see
later, Prof. Dugin’s mind was molded much more by Western intellectuality than
by any Eastern spiritual tradition, while one of my main formative influences
was Swami Dayananda Saraswati, director of the Academy of Vedic Studies of
Bombay.[11] After that experience, I still allowed myself to be imbued
with orientalism, to the point of becoming the author of Islamic studies that
won an award from the government of Saudi Arabia. The difference between
us lies in our personal intellectual experience, not in our “civilizations.”
16. Anesthetic quotes
“He employs all the
usual instruments of political propaganda: Manichean simplification, defamatory
labeling, perfidious insinuation, the phony indignation of a culprit pretending
to be a saint and, last, not least, the construction of the great Sorelian myth
– or self-fulfilling prophecy – which, while pretending to describe reality,
builds in the air an agglutinating symbol in hopes that the false may become
true by the massive adherence of the audience.” Stressing the
presumed fact of the communist Russian-Chinese “genocide” Mr. Carvalho does
exactly the same game of the pure political propaganda playing on the false
humanitarian sensibility of the Western audience, not remarking, by the way,
the real, existing here and now, massive and planned genocide conducted in Afghanistan,
Iraq or Libya by American bloody murders. [sic]
I have already explained above the
monstrous falsity of that comparison, which is based on a complete inversion of
the sense of proportion. The slaughter of 140 million of their unarmed fellow
citizens does not turn the rulers of Russia and China into genocidal murderers,
except when the word genocide is placed in paternally cushioning quotation
marks. However, the total of deaths of soldiers in combat, two thousand times
less numerous, is “massive and planned genocide conducted by American bloody
murders [sic]”. No quotation marks in the original.
17. A question of style
I imitate here the
very “scientific” style of polemic imposed by Mr. Carvalho.
What a farce! Prof. Dugin has already
been calling Americans “bloody murderers” for many years now, and he has never
needed my literary incentive to do so. Moreover, the scientific character of a
text does not reside in the politeness or impoliteness of its style, but rather
in the substance of its arguments. Prof. Dugin himself accepts as
scientific the writings of Karl Marx, whose style is a thousand times more
violent than mine and, in addition to that, devoid of that humoristic
attenuation which is never lacking in what I write.
18. My stupid opinion
“Of course, I do
not say that Professor Dugin is dishonest. But he is honestly devoting himself
to a kind of combat that, by definition and ever since the world began, has
been the embodiment par excellence of dishonesty.» This thesis I
find really stupid. I don't affirm that Mr. Carvalho is stupid himself, no way,
but I feel sincerely that the usurpation of the right of global moral judgment
in such affairs as what is «honest» or «dishonest» fits perfectly into the old
tradition of extreme stupidity.
(1) To begin with, the opinion that politics, by and large, is the realm of
impostors and crooks is the same as that illustrated by Shakespeare in Romeo
and Juliet and other plays; therefore my stupidity is at least
grounded in an illustrious historical precedent that certainly does not
legitimatize it, but, in any case, ennobles it.
(2) Yet, what is most fascinating in this passage is that Prof. Dugin suddenly
emerges speaking as a mouthpiece for radical cultural relativism, the latest
and prettiest offshoot of the Western modernism he says he hates with all of
his strength.
It is useless to demand consistency from a man who makes a profession of faith
in militant irrationalism,[12] but only for the benefit of myself and my
readers I ask how Prof. Dugin can possibly reconcile the non-existence of
universal moral norms with his publicly expressed Christian belief in the
universal validity of the Ten Commandments.
(3) It should be noted that even though he qualifies my opinion as “stupid,” he
does not even try to show why it is stupid. This adjective, he supposes,
should make proof of itself. Once stamped as stupid, my opinion automatically
becomes stupid by the mere power of the rubber-stamp. According to
Aristotle, this manner of speaking that pretends that a proposition is obvious,
universally acknowledged, and in the public domain, when in fact it is none of
those things, is the very definition of eristic or contentious
argumentation, the false rhetoric of demagogues and deceivers. “Again (c),
reasoning is eristic if it starts from opinions that seem
to be generally accepted, but are not really such.”[13]
19. Judgement by guesswork
So being really
clever and smart, Mr. Carvalho consciously supplies very stupid argument in
order to be nearer to the American right «Christian» public he tries to
influence.
(1) Again, Prof. Dugin’s judgment about me is pure
guesswork; he does not have the least idea of what my real activities are. I
have never sought to influence the American right, though I do not exclude the
possibility of trying to do it one day, if it seems convenient to me. I have
only addressed that audience when invited, on rare and sporadic occasions. All
my work as professor, writer, and lecturer is directed to the Brazilian public,
through articles published in the São Paulo press, a radio program in Portuguese,
and weekly classes (also in Portuguese) for the 3,000 students of my online
course, Philosophy Seminar. The recently founded Inter-American
Institute has as its goal the congregation of intellectuals of the three
Americas for the exchange of information and opinion. It is not a militant or a
propaganda organization, although it may and must make moral pronouncements in
extreme cases, such as the imprisonment of one of our fellows in
Venezuela. In fact, the Institute is so indifferent to all “Westernist” politics
that it counts, among its first fellows, Dr. Ahmed Youssif El-Tassa, a Muslim
who lives in China.
(2) The reiterated use of pejorative quotation marks, characteristic of a
crude, second-rate literary style, turns up here to deny, by a mere graphic
artifice, that American Christians are Christians. Now, as for Prof. Dugin, who
openly denies the universality of the Ten Commandments through his relativistic
profession of faith, make no mistake that he is a genuine Christian.
20. Reality was invented in the Middle Ages
And one philosophic
point: “Yet, the millennial philosophical technique, which those people
totally ignore, teaches that the definitions of terms express only general and
abstract essences, logical possibilities and not realities.” The
question what reality is and how it corresponds to the “definitions” or “ideas”
differs considerably in various philosophical schools. The term itself
“reality” is based on the Latin word “res”, “re”, “thing”. But that word fails
in Greek. By Aristotle there is no such word – he speaks about pragma (deed), energeia,
but mostly about on, the being. So the “reality” as something
independent (or partly dependent – in Berkley, for example) from
the mind is Western post-Medieval concept and not something universal.
(1) Absolutely wrong. The
non-existence of a word in a certain language does not automatically make the
corresponding concept unthinkable to the speakers of this language, since the
concept may also be expressed in paraphrases, symbols, or mathematical
formulae, or even remain implicit. For native tongues to effectively limit the
cognitive possibilities of their speakers, as claimed by the unfortunate
Benjamin L. Whorf, it would be necessary to demonstrate first that they are
incapable of drawing, building, imitating by gestures, making music, dancing,
etc. If the stock of words could limit the stock of perceptions and ideas, each
person would only be able to perceive things whose names he had already known
in advance, and babies would be unable to correctly use pacifiers before they
could pronounce the word “pacifier.” The universe abounds not only with
nameless things, but also with nameless ideas. I challenge Prof. Dugin,
for example, to find a word in Portuguese or Russian that names the concept
which I have just expressed in the last sentence. This word does not exist,
whence one concludes, according to the criterion of Prof. Dugin, that the
aforementioned sentence was never thought, nor written, nor read.
(2) It is true that the term realitas, realitatis,
only appeared in Medieval Latin, as derivative from the Ancient Latin res,
rei. This latter term, usually translated as “thing,” already has in
classical Latin the meaning of “all that is, or somehow exists.”[14]
Since the time of Cicero it has served as one of the possible translations of
the Greek word on, “being.” The term realitas,
therefore, brings nothing new, designating only the quality of being res.
To imagine, based upon a precarious knowledge of Latin, that nobody had known
of the existence of a being independent of the human mind until medieval
vocabulary moved the term res from the substantive class to
the category of quality is the same as to suppose that nobody had noticed the
existence of the virile force before the term “virility” was invented. Why,
why, porca miseria, does Prof. Dugin compel me to explain to
him these things which he could well have asked his Latin teacher in school?
(3) For Plato, the Ideas or Forms are
objectively existing beings, independent of the human mind. For Aristotle, the
same applies to the universal principles of ontology and the objects of
physical nature. The so-called “realism of Ideas” is such an essential
component of Platonism that practically no Plato scholar has ever questioned
it.[15] I do not need to recommend to Prof. Dugin some years of study of
a Platonic bibliography of oceanic dimensions, from Diogenes Laertius to
Giovanni Reale. I do not even need to remind him of Plato’s persistent combat
against sophistic doctrines that made truth a servant of human will.[16] A
simple reading of the most famous passage of The Symposium is
enough to show the magnitude of his error. The Ideas are defined there as
“everlasting—not growing and decaying, or waxing and waning.”[17] What
does this have to do with the human psyche which, dependent on the senses, is
therefore marked by mutability and inconstancy? Giovanni Reale sums it up:
“Ideas are repeatedly qualified by Plato as the true being, being in itself,
stable and eternal being.”[18] In the Phaedo, Plato
contrasts the stable eternity of Ideas with the inconstancy of the human mind,
which seeks to get closer to them “through questions and answers,” without ever
being able to completely apprehend them.[19]
Independent of the human mind are,
for Plato, not only the eternal Ideas, but even the phenomena of the physical
world that illustrate them before our eyes: “God devised and bestowed upon us
vision to the end that we might behold the revolutions of Reason in the Heaven
and use them for the revolving of the reasoning that is within us.”[20] The
visible heaven is not only external to the human mind, but superior to it to
the point of serving as its measure and model, helping it overcome its
inconstancy and fallibility through the contemplation of a natural symbol of
the eternal ideas.
A good account of the Platonic
studies throughout the times is Images de
Platon et Lectures de Ses Oeuvres, by Ada Neschke-Hentschke,[21] in
which twenty scholars review the most renowned interpretations of Platonism,
from Antiquity through the twentieth century. Look it up: you
will not find a single interpretation denying the existence of the “realism of
Ideas.” But, in fact, in order to understand this, Prof. Dugin does not even
have to read anything. He has but to type in “Plato’s realism” on Google, and
he will get 1.960.000 hits. How many people are discussing something that
according to Prof. Dugin does not exist!
It is subjective idealism, which
reduces everything or almost everything to projections of the human mind, thus
going far beyond sophistical relativism or Pyrrhonian skepticism, that is
the truly modern phenomenon—unknown to Ancient Greece. This is another point
that historians of philosophy have never questioned.[22]
21. Reality and concept
Different cultures
don't know what “the reality” means. It is a concept, nothing else. A concept
among many others.
Reality cannot be a concept because,
meaning “all that is,” it is the total realm of experience, open and therefore
irreducible to any concept, the realm within which men exist and produce
concepts (besides sausages, cars, poems, crimes, laws, etc.). If reality were
but a concept, we would not be able to exist within it and would need to use
some other name— “universe,” “world,” “being,” “totality,” or whatever one
wishes—to designate that which transcends, encompasses, and contains us.
Perhaps the word “reality” is not the best one for this, but the intentional
content at which it points, lying behind a variety of words and symbols that
point at the same thing, is universally clear. Prof. Dugin here commits the
classical error of psychologism, so well analyzed by Husserl, which consists in
mistaking thought for the thing thought of, attributing to the latter the
limitations of the former.[23] For example, when we think “universe,” this
thought has some positive content, but we know immediately—or we should—that
the real universe infinitely transcends this content. This capacity to
subjugate thought to the consciousness concerning the unthinkable, or
extra-thinkable, or supra-thinkable, is in all epochs and cultures the mark of
sound human intelligence—which Henri Bergson called the “open soul,” in
opposition to the “closed soul” which only acknowledges the existence of what
it thinks. Open souls are Confucius and Lao-Tse, Plato and Aristotle, Ibn
‘Arabi and Rûmi, Shânkara and Râmana Maharshi, Soloviev and Berdiaev. Closed
souls are Spinoza and Rousseau, Kant and Fichte, Marx and Lenin, Mao and
Pol-Pot, in short, all revolutionaries.
22. Intellectual racism
Thus, to impose it
as something universal and ostensive is a kind of intellectual «racism».
Every charge of racism, whether in quotes or not, presupposes the equal dignity
of all races, which is a universal concept founded on the general uniformity of
human nature. The denial of the universal identity of human nature in the name
of the diversity of races and cultures would set them as the insurmountable
limit of all human knowledge, automatically justifying, for example, the
incommensurability between a “Jewish science” and an “Arian science,” and thus
leading to the most stupid and truculent racism. Tertium non datur:
either there is a universal human nature, or nothing can be argued against
racism except in the name of a cultural convention that, on its turn, cannot
rationally allege anything against strange or adverse cultures which may have
opposite conventions.
23. Absolute and relative relativism
Before speaking of
the “reality” we need to study carefully the concrete culture, civilization,
ethnos and language.
Yes, of course, but we need not to fall into the snare of taking mere cultural
facts as epistemological norms. The simple possibility of studying
comparatively various cultures presupposes the universality of the criterion of
comparison. Yet, whenever this criterion is impugned by empirical data, one
will recognize it was not as universal as it should have been—or as was
initially supposed. Precisely because of that, the criterion will need to be
corrected. This is the exact opposite of denying the possibility of a universal
criterion. For a science cannot study different cultures and at the same time
proclaim that it is doing so based on cultural prejudices devoid of any
scientific foundation. Relativism is, by definition, relative, that is,
limited.
24. Absolute and relative relativism (2)
The Sapir/Whorf
rule and the tradition of the cultural anthropology of F. Boaz and structural
anthropology of C. Levy-Strauss teach us to be very careful with the words that
have full and evident meaning only in the concrete context. The Russian culture
or the Chinese society have different understandings of «reality», «facts»,
«nature», «object». The corresponding words have their own meaning.
We go back to the same point: either cultural relativism is relative, or no
comparison between cultures is possible. If, say, among different images
of elephants, images which are documented in various cultures, we cannot
discern a common structure and its reference to a certain animal that exists in
nature— an animal which was not invented by any of those cultures—, how can we
compare these images and say that different cultures have different ideas about
elephants? By definition, every comparison between points of view presupposes a
comparative grid that encompasses all of them and cannot bereduced to any of
them.
25. Subject and object
What nonsense! No oriental doctrine has ever denied this dualism as a datum of
experience, a datum, by the way, implicit in the simple fact that we do not
know everything that is around us. Actually, what some doctrines did was to
deny absolute validity to dualism on the plane of metaphysical universality. I
say “some doctrines” because even the most extreme proponent of the doctrine of
Absolute Unity, Mohieddin Ibn ‘Arabi, acknowledged an insurmountable residual
dualism between the soul and God, as a requirement resulting from Divine love
itself.
26. Logical essence
The «logic essence»
is the other purely Western concept.There are the other philosophies with
different conceptual structures – Islamic, Hindu, Chinese.
To say that “‘logic essence’ is a purely Western concept” amounts to saying
that, outside the West, nobody has ever been able to distinguish between the
content of mere idea (its logic essence) and the real nature of a being ( its
real or ontological essence). Oh, how dumb these Orientals should be in
order for Prof. Dugin’s statement to be worth something! And yet he says that I
am the one who is offending them.
27. Existence and proof
“From a definition
it is never possible to deduce that the defined thing does exist.”To prove the
existence is not an easy task. Heidegger’s philosophy and before him Husserlian
phenomenology tried to approach the “existence” as such with problematic
success.
(1) Prof. Dugin here falls into a gross confusion between being aware of
existence and explaining it. If we could not be aware of it, the desire to
explain it would never occur to us. This applies to both existence in general
and the existing objects. As for the former, I believe I cannot add
anything to the words of Louis Lavelle: “There is an initial experience which
is implicit in all others and which provides each one of them with its gravity
and depth: it is the experience of the presence of being. To acknowledge this
presence is to acknowledge, in the same act, the participation of the self in
being.”[24]
Without this basic experience, no other one is possible, and it would be an
unthinkable foolishness to try to make the awareness of the presence of being
depend upon the possession of a “proof.” Existence is an initial datum, not a
subject of proof. No proof of anything would be possible, as Mário Ferreira dos
Santos taught, without the initial admission that “something exists” or “there
is something”.[25]
(2) It is also silly to say that Husserl or Heidegger tried to “prove
existence.” In order to save the honor of Prof. Dugin, which would be much
tarnished by his saying such a thing, I even put forward the hypothesis that
his translator might have mistaken the English verb “probe” for “prove,”
writing “prove” where he should have written “probe”. Neither Husserl nor
Heidegger ever tried to “prove existence.” What they did was to probe existence.
Leibniz already said that the fundamental question of all philosophical
investigation is: “Why is there something, rather than nothing?”. Note well:
“why” and not “if.” If nothing ever existed, nothing would be ever
investigated. The existence of existence cannot be an object of doubt or
investigation; but one may investigate or doubt its causes, its foundations,
its reason for being, its forms, its structure, and so forth.
As for the existence of this or that being in particular, being aware of them
is also a precondition for seeking any explanation.
28. Stage-play
28. “In
order to do this, it is necessary to break the shell of the definition and
analyze the conditions required for the existence of the thing. If these
conditions do not reveal themselves to beself-contradictory, excluding
in limine the possibility of existence, even then this existence is not proved.
In order to arrive at that proof, it is necessary to gather from the world of
experience factual data that not only corroborate the existence, but that
confirm its full agreement with the defined essence, excluding the possibility
that the existing thing is something very different, which coincides with the
essence only in appearance.” It is a kind of positivist approach
completely dismissed by the structuralism and late Wittgenstein. It is
philosophically ridiculous or too naïve statement. But all these considerations
are details with no much importance. The whole text of Carvalho is so full of
such pretentious and incorrect (or fully arbitrary) affirmations that I can not
follow it any more. It is rather boring. I'd rather come to the essential
point.
(1) This is not an argument; it is mere stage-play. It is name-dropping and
feigning superiority as a pretext to evade a discussion that one is shamefully
losing. What I described in the paragraph quoted by Dugin is an
elementary precept of scientific methodology that—at least since there is no
other to substitute for it— continues to be used in all laboratories and
research institutes of the world, which could not care less about what
Wittgenstein, Lévi-Strauss, Boas, Whorf, Sapir, and tutti quanti think.
Note that, exactly as he did with the latter three authors, Prof. Dugin did not
make the least effort to defend the opinions of the former two. He did not even
say what their opinions were. He did not present or summarize them; he did not
even point at where they could be found. He limited himself to indicating them
vaguely, fleetingly, by adding footnotes containing a few titles of books, but making
no reference to page numbers. After he had done so, he took all of those
opinions to be so infallible and demonstrated as if suggesting that whoever
does not accept them in totum and without discussion is
automatically disqualified for the debate and does not even deserve any
comment. Who cannot see that this is not philosophy, not argumentation, but
rather a grotesque attempt at intimidation through the appeal to authorities
who are taken as so incontestable and so universally accepted that it is not
even necessary to repeat what they say, for simply mentioning their names is
taken to be enough to instill immediately in the poor interlocutor the most
pious and genuflecting sentiment of reverential awe? This is not even an argumentum
auctoritatis, but rather a caricature of one. This is, as
Aristotle would say, taking “opinions that seem to be generally accepted, but
are not really such” as premises. It is eristic at its most ignoble,
abject, and contemptible.
Note that some lines above [20(3)], I relied on an interpretation of Plato that
is indeed a millennially established unanimity— and whose knowledge is in fact
mandatory to every philosophy student—, but not even then did I allow myself to
the privilege of taking that interpretation as so universally accepted so as to
exempt me from producing proof of what I had said. I summarized the
interpretation, provided exact primary and secondary textual sources, and
argued in favor of it in a way that all could understand what I was talking about
and then judge by themselves whether I was right or wrong. Prof. Dugin, on the
other hand, would not take the trouble of doing this: he simply alluded to half
a dozen names in passing and moved on, inflating his chest, simulating
superiority, and throwing contempt on his half-cocked and uncultured adversary,
who is not even deserving of explanations about such obvious and
eminently-known things. What a comedy!
(2) Prof. Dugin, in believing that
anything that these folks have “dismissed” is automatically excluded from the
decent intellectual universe, reveals an uncritical, and indeed fanatical
submission to the crème de la crème of the relativist,
structuralist, and deconstructionist modern Western intellectuality which, from
that traditionalist perspective he claims to be his own, should not and could
not have any authority at all.
Beset by an adversary to whom he does
not know what to answer, the apostle of Orthodox Christianity divests himself
of his religious garb and suddenly begins to speak like a Parisian intellectual
or an editor of Social Text.
(3) In all erudite debate, it is
basic and essential to distinguish between that which is still under discussion
and that which can be taken as presupposed by reason of its universal
acceptance and its being a part of the usual academic education. Without
a common ground of shared superior culture, no discussion is possible.
The basic data of the history of philosophy are the most typical example of
what I am talking about. No one can enter a philosophical debate without
taking for granted that his opponent knows the essentials of Platonism,
Aristotelianism, Scholasticism, Cartesianism, etc., and is able to distinguish,
in the history of philosophy, between consensual points, established by a long
tradition of studies, and problematic areas, still subject to investigation and
discussion. Therefore, it is not tolerable that an academic debater, on the one
hand, ignore the basic data of the history of Platonism and, on the other hand,
take a few recent doctrines, quite disputed and impugned, as if they enjoyed
universal and consensual acceptance, and as if going against them were a sign
of ignorance and ineducation. Whence I can only conclude that Prof. Dugin’s
education was very deficient as regards ancient philosophy and overladen with
fashionable readings which made an impression upon him to the point of
consolidating themselves on his mind as bearers of definitive conclusions—so
definitive as the universal consensus of historians concerning Platonic realism
or the modern origin of gnoseological subjectivism. It is difficult to discuss
with a mind that inverts the proportions between the certain and the doubtful,
by ignoring universally accepted premises and resorting to the authority of a
non-existent consensus.
(4) What is worse, the fellow does
not even realize, or pretends not to, that all those presumed authorities he
rubs on my nose with a triumphant air stand in the line of succession of the
Kantian heritage which, according to him,[26] is the supreme incarnation
of Western perversity.
Since an impassable chasm of a
priori forms was opened by Kant separating
subject and object, the most typical and notorious Western thinkers have
fallen prey to an obsessive passion for discovering some aprioristic constraint
that, behind our backs, limits and molds the perception we have of the world.
Each one of them seeks to widen that chasm by trying to prove we cannot know
anything directly, that everything comes to us through deforming lenses,
through an iron veil of previous interpretations that the illustrious author of
each new theory, like a Kant redivivus, is the first to uncover. Large is the
roster of discoverers of aprioristic constraints. I will confine myself
to mentioning the most eye-catching ones. These constraints are not
always a priori in a strict, Kantian, sense; some of them are
formed in the course of experience. Yet, remaining unknown to all
individual cognoscent subjects whose frame of knowledge they form and
determine, they function as authentic a priori forms as
regards the conscious cognitive acts performed by such poor unfortunate
creatures. Here we go:
1. Hegel says that the invisible laws
of History supersede every individual consciousness (his own excepted, of
course), so that when we believe to know something, we are in fact deluded: it
is History who thinks, it is History who knows, it is History who, possessing
the “cunning of reason,” moves us hither and thither, according to a secret
plan.
2. Arthur Schopenhauer declares that
individual consciousness lives in a world of illusion and that it is moved,
unknowingly, by the force of the universal Will, which determines all for no
reason at all.
3. Karl Marx says that class
ideology—a system of implicit beliefs which pervades with invisible omnipotence
all the culture around us—pre-forms and deforms our worldview. Only the
proletariat can tear this veil apart and see things as they are, since its
class ideology, as it is not based on any interest to exploit its neighbors,
coincides with objective reality.
How it was possible that the first
one to discover this objective reality was precisely Karl Marx himself, a
bourgeois who only knew proletarians from a distance, is something he does not
explain, and neither do I.
4. Dr. Freud says that our entire
view of things is molded and deformed, from the earliest childhood, by
virtue of the struggle between Id and Superego, so that what we understand as
reality is generally no more than a projection of unconscious complexes, a
distortion from which we can only free ourselves through several years of
attending psychoanalytical sessions twice or thrice a week—which cost a fortune
by the way.
5. Carl G. Jung says nobody has yet
gotten to the real bottom of this issue. We are not separated from reality merely
by the structure of our childhood psyche, but also by cognitive schemes
remounting to the dawn of time—the “archetypes of the collective
unconsciousness.” The Jungian path to liberation, offering no guarantee of
success, goes through some decades devoted to the study of mythology,
comparative religions, alchemy, magic, astrology, you name it. The only
difference between Jung and the other delvers into “a priori forms”
is that, in his last years, he at least had the manliness to recognize that he
no longer understood a thing, and that only God knows the answers.[27]
6. John B. Watson and B. F. Skinner
say that individual consciousness does not even exist; it is a false impression
created by the mechanical interplay of conditioned reflexes.
7. Alfred Korzybski and Benjamin L.
Whorf say that we only imagine to know reality, but unfortunately “Aristotelian
prejudices” embedded in the structure of our language, and deeply ingrained in
our subconscious, preclude us from seeing things as they are.
8. Ludwig Wittgenstein says that we
know next to nothing about reality; all we do is to go from one “language game”
to the next, having hardly any control, if any, over what we do.
9. Lévi-Strauss says that when we
intend to know the external world and act as masters of ourselves, we are but
unconsciously following structural rules embedded in society, culture, family
order, language, etc.
10. Michel Foucault goes all out
and says that human beings do not even think: They “are thought” by
language, having no active say in the matter.
11. Jacques Derrida’s
deconstructionism puts the last nail on the coffin of the cognitive pretensions
of human consciousness, by swearing that nothing we say refers to data of the
external world, since all human discourse only points to another discourse, which,
in its turn, points to yet another, and so on and so forth; thus the universe
of human cognition is beset on all sides by a wall of words with no
extra-verbal meaning whatsoever.
Do I need to say more? Whoever knows
the standard universe of readings assigned to philosophy students nowadays, in
Europe or in the Americas, will recognize that these eleven stages—and their
many intermediaries—describe the most influential line of evolution of Western
thought in the last 200 years. Well, we observe in this line a pronounced trait
of uniformity: the general and increasingly ostensible proclamation of the
inanity of individual consciousness, its ever more complete submission to
anonymous and unconscious forces that determine and set limits to it on all sides.
So many are the aprioristic determinants, such is their force, and so high are
the walls they raise between the knowing subject and the known object, that it
is startling that, with so many metaphysical, gnoseological, sociological,
anthropological, and linguistic handicaps, the poor human individual is still
capable of noticing that cows give milk and chickens lay eggs.
Based upon these findings we can
raise some questions:
1. Faced with such a general and
implacable assault launched against individual consciousness on behalf of
impersonal and collective factors, how much chutzpah or how much ignorance does
it take for a person to continue to proclaim that “individualism” is the
defining feature of modern Western culture?[28]
2. How can this fellow openly declare
his hatred of the Kantian heritage and at the same time rely on it, by taking
it as an absolute and unappealable authority that dispenses with the need for
arguments and whose mere mention is supposed to be enough to shut his
opponent’s mouth?
3. How can this strange sort of mind
conciliate its avowed horror of the “separation of subject and object” with the
devout confidence it places in those doctrines that most emphasized this
separation, to the point of denying the human individual every and any access
to universal and even particular truths?
According to Aristotle, human beings
have a natural gift for knowing the truth, a gift which is only hindered by
accidental factors, or forced deprivations. According to those
illustrious discoverers of “a priori forms,” precisely the opposite
is the case: knowing the truth is a rare and exceptional event that, on
the most hopeful hypothesis, may have happened to them, the pioneer uncoverers
of forbidding veils, but which could never happen to the rest of the human
species.
A phenomenon which has always caught
my attention is the fact that the governments of some of the most powerful
nations on Earth have always strived so hard and spent so much money on
research aimed at creating technical means to subjugate and enslave something
so insignificant and defenseless, according to those masters, as individual
human consciousness. Why put so much effort into debilitating and subjugating
that which, by itself, can do nothing and can know nothing? Pavlov dogs,
behaviorist control, Chinese brain-washing, MK-Ultra, Kurt Levin’s social and
psychological engineering, neuro-linguistic programming—the list could go on
forever. The plain observation of the grotesque contrast between the alleged
debility of the victim and the magnitude of the resources mobilized to tame it
is enough to show that there is something wrong with all philosophies of the
aprioristic determinant, that is, with the whole intellectual lineage of the
legitimate and bastard children of Immanuel Kant. The appeal to this lineage
made by Prof. Dugin, with the devotion of a believer, only shows that, in his
effort to intimidate his opponent, he feels no shame in resorting to the most
inept, contradictory, and inconsistent resources.
I sincerely hope that he acting like
this out of Machiavellian posturing, because if he really believes in this
whole kaleidoscope of incongruities, we are facing a case of “delusional
interpretation” to a degree never before envisioned by the discoverers of this
pathology.
29. Oh, how hateful I am!
The text of Mr. Carvalho breaths with
the deep hatred. It is a kind of resentment (in the Nietzsche
sense) that gives him a peculiar look. The hatred is in itself fully
legitimate. If we can't hate, we can't love. Indifference is much worse. So the
hatred that tears Mr. Carvalho apart is to be praised. Let us now search what
he hates and why he does it. Pondering on his words I come to the conclusion
that he hates the East as such.
Many things have I hated in this
world, almost always unjustly. During my childhood, penicillin shots, above
all, though they saved my life. Later on I came to hate bread pudding—which
almost killed me once, not through any fault of its own, but through mine
alone—when I stuffed myself with its fluffy substance way beyond anything
recommended by human prudence and, amidst the gripping of a Homeric intestinal
colic, I wound up becoming disgusted with that innocent dish forever. I hated
those hideous institutions called musical conservatories, where no one
understood the mathematical incommensurability between ten fingers and seven
keys, which for me was an invincible obviousness. I also eventually came to
hate Euclidian geometry, after suspecting that my teacher had the perverse intention
of making a fool out of me when he stated, with the most innocent face in the
world, that points with no extension at all, when added together, would make up
a line segment. Later in my life I hated practically all the Brazilian
governments I got to live under, with the exception of the brief and honorable
administration of President Itamar Franco. I also hated several kinds of movies
and even made a list of them, under the title “I hate with all my strength”:
court-room movies, movies about suffering millionaires, movies about neurotic
families, medical doctor movies, Americans-on-holiday movies, etc.
Yet, throughout the 64 years of my
existence, and I say this in all sincerity and after a careful examination of
conscience: I have never hated a single human being, at least for longer than a
few minutes. When someone irritates me beyond what is bearable, I shoot him a
fulminating look, say couple of terrible things, and make lurid threats
against him, and two minutes later I am laughing and patting the fellow on the
back. Who knows me knows that I am like that.
The hypothesis that I might have
hated entire civilizations, or that I still hate them, is the most clownish
psychotic projection I have ever seen, particularly if it is claimed that the
object of my insane hatred is the East. I have hated Eastern civilizations so
much that I dedicated to them many years of my life, giving my best to
understand and explain them to my students in a spirit of undeniable sympathy
and devotion, always inspired by the rule of Titus Burckhardt, a traditionalist
author whom Prof. Dugin has or should have as one of his reference points: “In
order to understand a civilization it is necessary to love it, and this is only
possible due to the universal values it contains.”[29] If I hate Eastern
civilizations, why did I write a whole book to show the presence of these
values in the Hindu doctrine of caste?[30] Why did I dig out of a dusty
file the Commentaries on René Guénon’s Oriental Metaphysics written
by my master of Chinese martial arts, Michel Veber, and also published that
work with an introduction and notes?[31] Why did I talk so much about The
Way of a [Russian] Pilgrim, which was then totally unknown in Brazil,
that even a leftist publisher took notice and became interested in its
publication? Why was I the first Brazilian scholar to deliver a lecture on René
Guénon in the hostile precinct of a school at University of São Paulo? Why did
I spend twenty years respectfully studying the mystic practices of Islamic esoterism,
seeing in them, according to the perspective of Frithjof Schuon’s
“transcendental unity of religions,” a spiritual treasury of universal value?
Why was I, in the Brazilian big media, the first columnist to call the public’s
attention to the names of René Guénon, Titus Burckhardt, Seyyed Hossein Nasr,
and so many other spokesmen of characteristically Eastern doctrines? Why then
did I write a symbolic exegesis of some of the Islamic prophet’s ahadith—a
work, by the way, for which I was awarded a prize by both the El-Azhar
University and the Saudi government?[32] In fact, Prof. Dugin, even you
only became known and won some audience in Brazil thanks to my newspaper
articles and radio programs, in which I mentioned you several times, sine
ira et studio,highlighting the international importance of your
work and recommending it to the attention of Brazilian students in a time when
nobody in the country, not even in high academic, political and military
circles had ever heard your name. I must indeed be a madman: so much love for
an object of hatred can only be cured with electroshock therapy.
On this point, the true barrier that
separates me from Prof. Dugin is not that which distinguishes a fanatic
Occidentalist from an enragé Orientalist. The difference is that,
imbued by the Aristotelian creed in the power of knowing the truth beyond all
my personal and cultural limitations, I looked to those civilizations with the
loving gaze of one who saw in them the values Burckhardt referred to, values
which, being universal, were also mine. Prof. Dugin, in his turn, looking
to them with his mind cluttered by cultural conditionings that he believes to
be insuperable, denies to those civilizations universality of values and can
only see in them an invincible antagonism, whose only resolution must be war
and the destruction of half of the human species.
30. Resentment
That explains the structure of his
resentment.
Resentment against what? What evil
have Eastern civilizations done to me besides a couple of falls that I suffered
in martial arts gyms?
31. Putting words in my mouth
He attacks Russia and Russian
holistic culture (that he dismisses with one gesture of indignation), the
Orthodox Christianity (that he consider “morbid”, “nationalist” and
“totalitarian”), China (with its collectivistic pattern), the Islam (that is
for him the equivalent of “aggression” and “brutality”), Socialism and
Communism (in the time of the cold war they were synonyms of the East),
Geopolitics (which he arrogantly denies the status of science to), the
hierarchy and traditional vertical order, the military values…
Here comes Prof. Dugin again putting
in my mouth words which I neither said nor thought, which are of his own and
exclusive invention, words calculated to be easily demolished so that he might
simulate a landslide victory. I cannot remember having criticized the Russian
culture for being “holistic,” only for producing so many murderers of Russians.
In truth I cannot see any “holism,” any sense of community solidarity, in a
society where people dedicate themselves more than anywhere else in the world,
with the exception of China, to killing their compatriots. And I do not refer
only to the time of socialism. In the two tables elaborated by Prof. R. J.
Rummel showing the ten biggest mass murderers, one for the twentieth century
and one for all previous human history, the Russian and the Chinese show up
twice: they have killed like madmen since they came into the world and have
doubled their fury in the turn of the last century.[33] If the Russians
were already among the leaders in violence before communism, they continue to
occupy this position after it. According to data from the Polish magazine Fronda—the
same one to which Prof. Dugin gave his 1986 interview—in Russia, 80,000
Russians are murdered every year, 10,000 abortions are performed each day, the
population is visibly decreasing and, though seven million couples do not have
children, the number of child adoptions is so meager that there are more
orphans in that country today than at the end of World War II (how much
“community solidarity” in comparison with the Americans, world champions in
child adoption!).[34] I do not have any historico-sociological theory to
explain these facts, but to pretend that so much violence, so much cruelty has
no roots in the Russian culture, that everything is the fault of mean
foreigners infiltrated in the local government, is the ultimate “conspiracy
theory,” one of the basest and most stupid kind that can be imagined. And if
Prof. Dugin still insists that all this is the fault of the “liberal
privatizations” of the Yeltsin era, he better stop blaming foreigners and go
ask a few questions to his leader, Vladimir Putin, who, as head of the
privatizations committee at that time, lined the pockets of his KGB colleagues
with money, as he did in fact with his own as well.[35]
As for Islam as such, I cannot
remember saying a single word against it, but rather against the modern
politicization of its theology, which does as much harm to the Islamic religion
as “liberation theology” did to Christianity.
32. Oh, how hateful I am! (2)
In his hysterical hatred toward all
this he finds the goal in my person. So he hates me and makes it feel. Is he
right to see in me and in Eurasianism the conscious representation of all this?
Am I the East and the defender of the Eastern values? Yes,it is exact.
So his hatred is directed correctly. Because all what he hates I love and I am
ready to defend and to affirm. For me is rather difficult to insist on the
greatness of my values.
This paragraph, as so many others by
Prof. Dugin, has only value as self-fulfilling prophecy. I have never
hated Prof. Dugin, but now I am seriously considering the possibility of
beginning to do it if he does not drop this foolishness. He is certainly the
most elusive and stubborn debater I have ever confronted. Incapable of refuting
a single one of my ideas in the field of logic and factual argumentation, he resorts
to the terrain of divinatory pejorative psychology and, attributing to me bad
sentiments that in truth exist only in his mind, he tries to destroy my
reputation in the public square. And notice that he does so with the inflamed
eloquence of a person who piously believes in what he is saying. This is not,
therefore, simply an artifice. It is hysterical feigning stricto sensu.
Imagining things, getting emotional with them as though they were really
happening, and making a public display of emotion in a convincing performance
is the very definition of hysterical behavior. When he calls me “hysterical,”
he is just calling me names. When I apply the same word to him, I am not trying
to insult him; I am only making an objective, scientific diagnosis, based
upon patent facts.
33. Guénon and the West
There are many other thinkers who
methodically describe the positive sides of the East, order, holism, hierarchy
and negative essence of the West and its degradation. For example, Guenon. It
is sure that he hadn't much of enthusiasm regarding communism and collectivism,
but the origin of the degradation of the civilization he saw exclusively
in the West and Western culture, precisely in Western individualism (see
«The crisis of the modern world» or «The East and the West»). It is obvious
that modern Eastern societies have many negative aspects. But they are mostly
the result of modernization, westernization and the perversion of the ancient
traditions.
René Guénon does say that the West is
the vanguard of decadence, but he casts the blame for this, and for all the
evil in the world, on the underground action of the “Seven Towers of the
Devil,” which are more Eastern than Prof. Dugin himself (see further
explanations below on item 35). I am not subscribing to this theory; I am just
pointing out that it is neither viable, nor honest, to appeal to René Guénon as
a legitimating authority for an anti-Occidentalism à outrance.
Furthermore, Guénon never had an
interest in destroying the West. He was interested in saving it, and the main
path that he advocated for this end was the full restoration of the Catholic
Church in its providential mission as Mother and Master. The hypothesis of an
“Eastern occupation” only occurred to him as a secondary alternative in the
case of a complete failure of the Catholic Church, and even so, he never
conceived of this alternative in the form of a war, of military occupation.
What he imagined was a sort of Islamic cultural revolution, in which Sufi
sheiks would conquer, through subtle influence, the hegemonic control over
Western intellectuality (Frithjof Schuon and Seyyed Hossein Nasr tried to
implement this program).
He never suggested war as a solution.
On the contrary, he said that war and generalized chaos would follow almost
inevitably from the failure (or the non-adoption) of the two previous
alternatives. In short, he did not see war and chaos as solutions, but as parts
of the problem. Nothing, absolutely nothing warrants the appeal to Guénon’s
authority in order to justify a war enterprise of such proportions as that
which the Eurasian Empire promises to us.
34. The world upside-down
In my youth (early 80-s) I was
anticommunist in the Guenonian/Evolian sense. But after having known modern
Western Civilization and especially after the end of Communism I have
changed my mind and revised this traditionalism discovering the other
side of the socialist society, which is the parody on the true Tradition, but
nevertheless is much better than absolute absence of the
Tradition in Modern and Post-Modern Western world.
(1) I understand perfectly the
mutation which Prof. Dugin’s mind went through. There are no people more
isolated and hopeless in the world than traditionalist intellectuals, who see
everything sacred and precious be mercilessly destroyed, day after day, by the
advance of materialism, of cynic relativism, of brutality and, what may be even
worse, of banality. Few of them are prepared to carry their option for the
spirit to its ultimate consequences by accepting total historic defeat, the
complete humiliation of spiritual values, as a divine sentence destined to
precede the apocatastasis, the end of all things and the advent of a “new
heaven and a new earth.” They are beset by that great temptation of clinging to
some last earthly hope, to some politico-ideological life-raft which promises
to “restore Tradition” through material, politico-military, action. It is at
the moment of such temptation that the desperate soul goes through a mutation,
turning 180 degrees, and starts to see everything upside-down. A woman
who has been raped once may go to the police and report the perpetrator, but if
she is raped repeatedly, fifty, sixty times, she might end up seeking some
relief in the stupid idea that rape is, after all, an act of love. No government
in the world made a more obstinate and brutal effort to wipe the traditional
religions off the face of Earth than the communist regimes in Russia and its
satellite-countries like China, Vietnam, Cambodia (and China is still working
on it in Tibet). To say that there was “anti-religious persecution” in these
countries is a euphemism. What happened there was genocide pure and simple, the
systematic annihilation of religious culture and of clergymen themselves.
Pastor Richard Wurmbrand tells us that, in the communist prisons in Romania,
each priest was asked to renounce his religion or else, and before his eyes,
the teeth of a priest of another religion would be pulled out in cold blood.
But the soul of the desperate traditionalist, incapable of withstanding the
sight of so much evil, may in a moment of weakness hold on to the mad hope that
there might be some secret good in all that evil, some divine secret conveyed
to the world in paradoxical language. He will then begin to see monsters as
angels, taking Lenin, Mao, Stalin and Pol-Pot for messengers of providence
disguised as devils. The most ostensible and hatefully anti-traditional society
that ever existed begins to appear to him as a mere “parody of tradition,”
which is preferable, after all, to the “absolute absence of the
Tradition in Modern and Post-Modern Western world.” When that happens, he is
ready to join the Eurasian movement.
(2) Moreover, what “absence of
Tradition” is that? As an Orthodox Christian, Prof. Dugin should admit the
obviousness that the Christ did not come to save nations, but souls. The
strength of Christian tradition in a society is not measured by the degree of
centralizing authoritarianism that prevails in it, even if in the name of
ecclesiastical authority, but by the vigor of the Christian faith in the souls
of believers. In this respect, a few recent statistical data might enlighten
Prof. Dugin’s mind. In 2008, research conducted by the German institute
Bertelsmann Stiftung presented Russia as the country where young people are the
least religious. Can this be a sign of the vigor of “tradition”? In
comparison, Brazil came in third place among the countries with the most
religious youth,[36] but the universe of beliefs of these young people was
rather confuse: many did not believe in heaven or hell, others doubted eternal
life, still others mixed up Catholicism with reincarnation, and many ignored
the most basic elements of the Catholic dogma. Ultimately, the poll showed that
Pope John Paul II was right when he said that “Brazilians are Christian in
their sentiments, but not in their faith.” The same applies to Russia, where,
according to an Ipsos/Reuters poll, 10% of those who say they are faithful in
fact believe “in many gods.”[37] With an Orthodox Church headed by KGB agents,
the sole “tradition” that seems to be really alive in Russia is shamanism
(after all, two of the Seven Towers are located in Russia, and a third one in a
territory that belonged to the former USSR).[38] Is there a place in the
world where the majority of people have not merely a vague belief “in God” or
“in gods,” but rather a defined and clear Christian faith, solid and
unshakable? Yes, there is. A recent Rasmussen poll revealed that 74% of
Americans—three quarters of the population—declare, loud and clear, that they
believe that Our Lord Jesus Christ is the living Son of God, who came to the
world to redeem the sins of humanity.[39] This is the central dogma
of Christianity, be it Catholic, Orthodox, or Protestant. This is the
irradiating center of Christian tradition. Tradition is alive where faith is
alive, not where communo-fascist dreams of an “organic society” usurp the
authority of faith while its population turns its back on “the only necessary
thing.”
35. The Seven Towers of the Devil
So, I love the East in general and
blame the West. The West now expands itself on the planet. So the globalization
is Westernization and Americanization. Thereforee, I invite all the rest to
join the camp and fight Globalism, Modernity/Hypermodernity, Imperialism
Yankee, liberalism, free market religion and unipolar world. These phenomena
are the ultimate point of the Western path to the abyss, the final station of
the evil and the almost transparent image of the antichrist/ad-dadjal/erev rav.
So the West is the center of kali-yuga, its motor, its heart.
No, it is not. He who seeks to secure
the prestige of Guenonism for the Eurasian cause should at least read René
Guénon correctly. Guénon never interpreted the East-West symbolism as a gross
Manichean opposition between good and evil. As a profound scholar in Islamic
tradition, he always took into consideration one of the most renowned ahadith, in
which the Islamic prophet, pointing towards the East, stated: “The Antichrist
will come from there.” Among the main centers of diffusion of
“counter-initiation,” as Guénon called them, there is none, according to him,
located in the West; but there is one in Sudan, one in Nigeria, one in Syria,
one in Iraq, one in Turkestan (inside the former USSR), and — surprise!—there
are two in the Urals, well within Russian territory.[40] Projected on a
map, the Seven Towers form the exact contour of the constellation of Ursa
Major. The bear, Russia’s national emblem, represents in traditional symbolism
the military class, kshatriya, in cyclical rebellion against
spiritual authority. Jean-Marc Allemand mentions, respecting this matter, “the
forced militarization that inevitably accompanies Marxism and serves as its
basis.” And he continues: “This excessive warlike feature—and utterly inverted
in relation to the original and subordinate function of the military caste—is
the ultimate result of the revolt of thekshatriyas; in this sense, the
USSR is really the land of the Ursa.”[41] How can a great expert in
“sacred geography” ignore, or pretend to ignore, so basic a piece of
information? And how has Putin’s Russia changed if not towards an even greater
militarization of society? And is this phenomenon not in line with the Eurasian
project? And is it not concomitant with the domination of the Chinese society
by the military and with the “Sovietization of Islam,” which Jean Robin, an
authoritative spokesman for Guenonism, considers to be one of the most sinister
features of modern spiritual degradation?[42]
36. Assymmetry
36. Mr. Carvalho blames the East and
loves the West. But here begins some asymmetry. I love the East as a whole
including its dark sides. The love is the strong, very strong feeling. You
don't love only good and pure sides of the beloved one, you love him wholly.
Only such love is real one. Mr. Carvalho loves the West but not all the West,
only its part. The other part he rejects.
Prof. Dugin recognizes a basic
difference between us: while he adheres to the East as a whole, with its
virtues and sins, with its saints and its criminals, its sublime accomplishments
and its abominations, I do not do the same with the West. For I examine it
critically, and I can only approve, with a sound conscience, part of it—that
part which is consistent with the Christian values that first established
it. Prof. Dugin realizes all that, but he fails to grasp the obvious
meaning of this difference: he identifies himself with a geographic area and a
geopolitical power; I with general values which are not embodied in any
geographic territory or in any of the powers of this world. When Christ
said, “my Kingdom is not of this world,” He implied that no mundane power would
ever embody His message except in a provisional and imperfect way, so that none
of them would ever have the authority to represent Him in plenitude. For even
greater clarity, He also taught that “the gods of nations are demons,”
forbidding Christians to offer to any of them the devotion and loyalty that
were due only to Him. When I decline to make common cause with any of the
geopolitical alternatives offered by Prof. Dugin, I am only refusing to worship
demons, and more importantly, to do it under a Christian pretext. Never as
today have the powers of this world been so ostensibly hostile to Christianity.
And if it is true that “the Spirit blows where it will,” the obligation of
every Christian is to follow it wherever it goes, instead of letting himself be
hypnotically paralyzed in the worship of false divinities.
37. Conspiracy Theory
To explain his attitude in front of
the East he makes appeal to the conspiracy theory. Scientifically it is
inadmissible and discredits immediately Mr. Carvalho thesis but in this debate
I don’t think that scientific correctness is that does mean much. I don't try
to please or convince somebody. I am interested only in the truth (vincit omnia
veritas). If Mr. Carvalho prefers to make use of the conspiracy theory let him
do it. The conspiracy theory exposed by the Mr. Carvalho is however a
banal and flat one. There are other many theories of a more
extravagant and brilliant kind in their idiotism. I have written thick volume
on the sociology of the conspiracy theory, describing much more esthetic
versions (for example assembled in the Adam Parfrey books, “extraterrestrial
ruling the world”, David Icke’s “reptiles government” or R. Sh. Shaver
underground «dero's» impressively evoked in the Japanese film «Marebito» by
Takashi Shimitsu). But we have what we have. Let us try to find the reason why
a serious Brazilian-American professor take the risk of looking a little bit
loony making appeal to the conspiracy theories?
Any resemblance between my theory of
the subject of history and any “conspiracy theory” which raises the alarm about
alien invasions or the “reptilian government” is only an artificial, insulting,
and forced analogy, to which an inept debater will resort, in desperation, to
get away from the discussion. Here again Prof. Dugin proves himself incapable
of finding his bearings amidst the complexity of the questions I have raised
and hides his lack of intellectual preparation behind a theatrical affectation
of superiority. I never expected he would perform, in front of the audience,
such an act of obscene moral strip-tease.
Anyone who knows how to read will
understand right away that my explanations on the nature of historical action
are exactly the opposite of a “conspiracy theory.” I demonstrated in a
previous message that the actual contest for power in the world makes use of
instruments which are not only normal and inherent in the political fight, but
which are indeed the only existing ones. Without continuity over generations,
there is no historical action, and only a few types of human groups have the
means to fulfill this requirement. If among those means the control over the
flow of information is included, this is only due to a trite observation,
actually a commonplace in historical methodology, according to which the
dissemination of facts produces new facts; therefore, the control over the flow
of information is absolutely essential to any group or entity that plans long-term
historical actions. The Council on Foreign Relations, for example,
managed to remain totally secret and unknown for fifty years, even though its
membership included practically all the owners of the major media outlets of
the West.[43] Once the period of obligatory discretion was over, David
Rockefeller publicly thanked journalists for their five-decade old silence.
Should we hide this fact only out of a yokelish fear of being called
“conspiracy theorists”? Whatever our interpretation of these facts may be, we
cannot deny that they convey a long-term and constant purpose of controlling
the information that reaches the public and of exercising great
dominance—within the bounds of what is humanly possible—over the direction of
political events. To compare obvious statements such as these with the
announcement of a “Martian invasion” is childish hyperbolism, and one that can
only expose its author to humiliation and mockery.
38. Conspiracy Theory (2)
It seems that I know the answer. The
serious side of this not much serious argumentation consists in the
necessity for Mr. Carvalho to differentiate the West he loves from the West he
doesn't love. So Mr. Carvalho proves to be idiosyncratic. He not only
detests the East (so Eurasianism and myself), but also he hates the part of the
West itself. To make the frontier in the West he uses the conspiracy and the
term «Syndicate» (he could use also «Synarchy», «Global Government» and so on).
Let us accept it for a while, we agree on the “Syndicate”. The description of
«Syndicate» is amazingly correct. Maybe the feeling of correctness of Mr.
Carvalho analysis from my side can be explained by the fact that this time I
fully share the hatred of Mr. Carvalho. So I agree with the caricature
description of the globalist elite and with all furious images applied to it.
Here our hatred coincides. Mr. Carvalho affirms that the Syndicate takes
control over the world against the will and the interest of all people, their
cultures and traditions. I agree with it. Maybe the Rothschild or Fabian myths
are too simplistic and ridiculous, but the essence is true. There is such
thing as global elite and it is acting.
In admitting that the Syndicate
exists and operates in the way I described, Prof. Dugin shows that either my
version of this phenomenon is not a conspiracy theory at all, or that he
himself is not averse to entertaining conspiracy theories whenever it is
convenient for him to do so.
39. Free competition ideology?
But this elite deals with concrete
ideological, economical and geopolitical infrastructure. In other
words this elite is historically and geographically identified and linked with
special set of values and instruments. All these values and instruments are absolutely
Western. The roots of these elite goes into the European Modernity,
Enlightment and the rise of the bourgeoisie (see W.Sombart). The ideology of
this elite is based on theindividualism and hyper-individualism (G.
Lipovetsky, L. Dumont). The economical basis of this elite is Capitalism and
Liberalism. The ethos of this elite is free
competition.
I limit myself to
responding to the last sentence, which summarizes the whole paragraph. When I
read Prof. Dugin’s affirmation that the ethos of the globalist
elite, the Syndicate, is free competition, I started wondering: On what planet
does he spend most of his time? Is it really possible that he ignores the
history of this entity so completely? Does he really not know that the most
constant activity of this elite in the USA, for at least fifty years, has
consisted in trying to impose, not only upon economic activity, but upon all
domains of human existence, all sorts of restrictions and state controls? Does
he not know, moreover, that the clash between the policies of state-control
imposed by the establishment and the good and old market
freedom so dear to traditional Americans is the fundamental conflict in
American politics? Then, let him read articles by Thomas Sowell, Rush Limbaugh,
Michael Savage, Phyllis Schlafly, Star Parker, Neil Cavuto, Larry Elder, Ann
Coulter, Cal Thomas, Walter Williams and hundreds, thousands of other
conservative commentators who, for decades, have not done anything but protest
against the elite’s obsessions about monopolism and statism. For it is one
thing to pass judgment based on stereotyped impressions; but it is quite
another to look up close, from the realm of facts, at the political fight. The
history of the confrontation between conservatism and statism has been told so
many times that I can confine myself to recommending to Prof. Dugin the reading
of a few books, well-known to the American public, which give an account of it
in a rather clear and definitive way.[44]
True, at the international level, the
globalist elite does promote freedom of market among nations; but then, a
question needs to be asked: why exactly does it try impose abroad the opposite
of that which it tries to impose at home? As early as the nineteenth
century Karl Marx himself was among the most ardent defenders of the opening up
of markets to international trade because he knew that national borders were a
considerable obstacle to the expansion of the revolutionary movement. Note well
that the behavior of the elite in every country manifests the same apparent
contradiction: draconian state controls within, market freedom abroad. But it
is no coincidence that such freedom is restricted to the economic realm; for also
at the international level, the same elite that promotes it is busy trying to
establish all sorts of state controls by means of organizations such as the UN,
the WHO, the ILO, etc.—controls which span over nutrition, health, education,
security, and, in short, over all dimensions of human life. Quite
clearly, this freedom of international trade is only a dialectical moment in
the process of instituting global state control.
40. American National Interest?
The strategic and military support of
this elite is from the first quart of the XX century USA, and after
the end of the WWII –Nord-Atlantic Alliance. So the global elite, let it
be called “Syndicate”, is Western and concretely North
American.
To use a nation as strategic and
military support is one thing; to defend its interests is something else
entirely. As I have explained already, the Syndicate lodges itself into the
governments of several Western nations in order to use their strategic
resources and military power to its own ends, which are generally opposed to
those countries’ most obvious national interests. What “American national
interest” did the Syndicate serve when it helped the USSR—even after World War
II—transform itself into an industrial military power capable of threatening American
security? What “American national interest” did it serve when it helped China
in the same way? What “American national interest” do the likes of Soros and
Rockefellers serve when they subsidize everywhere, and especially in Latin
America, the most outrageously anti-American leftist movements? What “American
national interest” does the Syndicate serve today in helping the Muslim
Brotherhood, the spearhead of Islamic anti-Americanism, to seize power in
nations that were previously allied or inoffensive to the USA?
41. Fabricating unity
Seeing that clearly I, as the
conscious representative of the East, make appeal to the humanity to
consolidate all kinds of the alternatives and to resist the globalization and
Westernization linked in it. I appeal first of all to Russians, my compatriots,
inviting them to refuse pro-Western and pro-globalist corrupted elite that
rules now my country and to come back to the spiritual Tradition of Russia
(Orthodox Christianity and multi-ethnic Empire). At the same time I invite
Islamic people and their community, as well as all other traditional societies
(Chinese, Indian, Japanese and so on) to join the battle against the
Globalization, Westernization and the Global Elite. The enemy is fighting with
new means -- with post-modern informational weapons, financial instruments and
global network. We should be able to fight them on the same ground and to
appropriate the art of the network warfare. I sincerely hope that Latin
Americans and also some honest North Americans enter in the same struggle
against this elite, against the Post-Modernity and unipolarity for the
Tradition, social solidarity and social justice. S.Huntington used to say the
phrase «the West against the Rest». I identify myself with the Rest and
incite it to stand up against the West. Exactly as first
Eurasianists (N.S.Trubetskoy, P.N.Savitsky and other) did. I think that to be
concrete and operational the position of Mr. Carvalho should be rather or with
us (the East and Tradition) or with them (the West and Modernity, the modernization).
He refuses obviously such a choice pretending that there is a “the third
position”. He prefers not to struggle but to hate. To hate the East and to hate
the globalist elite. That is his personal decision or maybe the decision of
some North American Christian right, but it is in any case too marginal and of
no interest for me.
Here Prof. Dugin completes his
strip-tease, divesting himself of his last piece of garment. Given that it is
obviously impossible to reconcile, at the doctrinal level, proposals as
antagonistic as communism and Islamism, fascism and anarchism, traditional
spirituality and dictatorships that crush religion by fire and sword,
Eurasianism artificially builds a negative unity, based on sheer hatred of a
supposed common enemy. Hence he has to divide the world in two—the West against
the Rest, and the Rest against the West—and then set out to build the “Ideal
City” based on nuclear war and the destruction of the planet. It is no wonder
that such a man can only imagine himself to be hated, because hatred is quite
clearly the sole sentiment he knows.
What is even more significant is that
he excludes as irrelevant the possibility of allying with forces that are alien
and oblivious to this conflict, by calling them “too marginal and of no interest
for me.” Whatever values which are not capable of being embodied in a
geopolitical power are indeed contemptible and are of no interest to him.
Throughout history, the highest values have been many times on the weak side
and with the few. The history of the origins of Christianity illustrates that
in the clearest way. Actually, the Christianization of Russia, undertaken by
unarmed monks surrounded by countless dangers, is also an exemplary case. Prof.
Dugin forbids us to take side with that which is simply right. He forbids us to
love the good simply for its own sake. He only allows us a choice between
powers. Powers which are armed to their teeth. Had he been a Bible character,
he would have obviously refused to take the side of that minority sect whose
leader was flayed with a whip and hung defenseless on the Cross. Armed with
that air of infinite superiority, he would have invited us to forget the Christ
and choose between the powers of this world, between Pilate and Caiaphas.
42. Putting words in my mouth (2)
Loosing the rest of the coherence Mr. Carvalho tries to
merge all he hates in one object. So he makes the allusion that the globalist
elite and the East (Eurasianism) are linked. It is new purely personal
conspiracy theory.
I do not remember having attempted to fuse together the
Syndicate, the Eurasian Empire, and the Caliphate into a single global entity.
On the contrary, in my first message I had already made it clear that “the
conceptions of global power that these three agents strive to implement are
very different from one another because they stem from heterogeneous and
sometimes incompatible inspirations. Therefore, they are not similar forces,
species of the same genus. They do not fight for the same goals and, when they
occasionally resort to the same weapons (for example, economic warfare) they do
so in different strategic contexts, where employing such weapons does not
necessarily serve the same objectives.” There could be no clearer expression of
the mutual independence of the three forces. If between them, in spite of the
contest that keeps them separated, there are “vast zones of fusion and
collaboration, as flexible and changing as they may be,” this does not
retroactively affect the heterogeneity of their origins and of the values that
inspire them. In fact, “vast zones of fusion and collaboration” have always
existed between antagonistic powers, as, for example, in the case of the USSR
and Nazi Germany, and yet, this has never led to the fulfillment of Prof.
Dugin’s golden dream: the unification of tyrannies in a total war against the
West.
Collaborations between the Syndicate, the Russian-Chinese scheme, and the
Caliphate are so notorious and well documented that there is no point in
insisting on this. The wars that the American government is right now waging
for the exclusive benefit of the Muslim Brotherhood, the massive American
investments that transformed a bankrupt China into a threatening industrial
power (against the protests of so many conservatives!), or the very special aid
given by the USA to the reconstruction of the USSR after World War II, on terms
far more generous than those offered to the other Allied countries—such are
historically indisputable examples that no Duginian straw-man is big enough to
hide from view.
His attempt at spinning my
explanations, so simple and clear, into a mythological construction of the
world headquarters of evil—something like KAOS from the “Get Smart” series—is
so artificial, so ridiculous, that his impulse to caricature backfires on him,
the author of such a spinning feat, and shows him as a true clown.
43. Putting words in my mouth (3)
It could enlarge the panoply of the
other extravaganzas. It should sound something like this: “the globalist elite
itself is directed by hidden devilish center in the East”…
A tireless builder and demolisher of
straw-men, here comes Prof. Dugin again, attributing to me ideas which are not
and could not be mine, and which are in fact—and here comes a twist of the
utmost irony—his own. The belief in “Eastern devilish centers,” which are
supposedly directing the course of evil in the world, is an integral part of
the “traditional doctrine” of René Guénon, a doctrine to which he subscribes
without reservations and to which I have accorded, over the last twenty years,
a prudent and critical admiration at most.
44. Putting words in my mouth (4)
…or “the East (and socialism) is the
puppet in the hands of the devilish bankers and fanatics from CFR, Trilateral
and so on”. Congratulations. It is very creative. The free fantasy at work.
I have never stated that Soviet
socialism or the government of the USSR were puppets in the hands of “devilish
bankers,” “Atlanticist conspirators,” or anything of the sort. Who stated that
was Aleksandr Dugin himself when, based on the opinion of his fellow
Eurasianist Jean Parvulesco, he said he believed that “the KGB was the Atlantic
Order’s center of most direct influence …the mask of that Order” and that “it
is well possible to speak of a ‘convergence of special services’ of a ‘fusion’
of the KGB and the CIA, of their unity in lobbying at the geopolitical level.”[45]
Not having anything more intelligent
to say against me, Aleksandr Dugin accuses me of…believing in Aleksandr Dugin!
It is a sin I have committed occasionally, but not with respect to this point,
regarding which I clearly insisted on the mutual independence of those three
blocks—both in what concerns their historical origins and their objectives and
respective ideologies—and pointed out just local and occasional collaborations
that do not jeopardize this independence at all.
As usual, Prof. Dugin, incapable of
responding to my statements, substitutes them for his own and, throwing punches
and kicks at himself, he swears that he is beating the hell out of me. How does
he expect me to react to this if not with a mix of compassion and hilarity?
Also, this topic provides me with a
timely occasion to make it clear that the Duginian theory of the “war of
continents” itself is every inch a “conspiracy theory,” one which plainly has
its roots in the occult, as for example, in the ideas of Helena P. Blavatski
and Alice Bailey. Since I have no space to explain this here, I would like to
draw the readers’ attention to my study entitled “Aleksandr Dugin and the War
of Continents” which, beginning today, May 23, 2011, will be published in
chapters on my website www.olavodecarvalho.org.
Read it and tell me whether Prof. Dugin, in labeling me as a “conspiracy
theorist,” is or is not putting into practice an old communist trick: “Accuse
them of what you are doing, call them what you are.”
45. Western or Catholic Church?
What Mr. Carvalho
loves? Here I would rather finish the debates. But I think that
it is possible to pay little more attention to «the positive» forces described
by Carvalho as victims of the global elite. They represent what Mr.
Carvalho loves. It is important. He names them: Western
Christianity (ecumenical style – see his description of his visit to
the Methodist Church, being himself Roman Catholic), Zionist Jewish
State andAmerican nationalist right wingers (I presume he
excludes neocons from the list of love, because of their evident belonging to
the global elite). He admires also the simple Americans of the countryside
(personally I also find them rather very sympatethic).
Why does Prof. Dugin label “Western”
that Church which has denominated itself Catholic (universal) since its origin,
that Church which has always had saints and martyrs of all races and countries,
that Church whose influence has penetrated much deeper and more lastingly the
Middle and the Far-East than that of the Russian Orthodox Church and which
today places more hope in its African and Asian faithful than in its
debilitated and corrupt Western clergy?
His insistence on considering
everything through the bias of geopolitics, as if the phenomena of spiritual
nature were determined by the whims of the powers of this world, leads him to
twist and caricature even historical facts of the greatest magnitude.
46. The Catholic Church and the American right
Prof. Dugin, no doubt, ignores the
vast rabidly anti-Catholic bibliography poured onto the market every year by
the American political right, a phenomenon that makes me sad, but whose
existence I cannot deny. No, the Catholic Church is not “trivia of the
American political right”.
47. Love for the strong
We can consider it as right
side of the modern West. Or better “paleoconservative” side of the Modern
West. Historically they are losers in all senses. They have
lost (as P. Buchanan[20] shows) the battle
for the USA, including for the Republican party where the main positions were
taken by neoconservative with clearly globalist and imperialist vision. They
are losers in front of the globalist elite controlling now both political
parties in USA. They are living in the past that immediately precedes the
actual (Post-Modern and globalist) moment. But at the same time they don't have
the inner strength to stand up to the Conservative Revolution - Evolian or
wider European style.
Even supposing that paleoconservatives are
indeed a chronically losing minority (I will leave this to be discussed later),
why should we always take the side of the victors of the day? Has Prof. Dugin
not read the epigraph by José Ortega y Gasset in my previous message, where I
proclaim loud and clear my aim to do exactly the opposite of this, and support
what is good and right even when its chances of victory are minimal? With the
greatest naïveté, he thus exposes one of the ugliest features of his thought:
the worship of power as such, the cult of the victorious, the idolatry of Force
well above the Truth and the Good. To me, Prof. Dugin’s Christianity seems more
and more as a publicity-façade concealing a very different religion.
48. The two utopias compared
The yesterday of the West prepared
the today of the West as global West. The yesterday Western values
(including the Western Christianity) prepared the today hypermodern values. You
can deplore this last step, but the precedent step in the same direction can
not be regarded as serious alternative.
Why not? If Prof. Dugin believes in
making a miserable and tattered Russia of today into the great world empire of
tomorrow, what can there be of so infeasible and utopian, a priori,
in the hope for restoring a Christianity that is visibly growing while even
Russia’s population is dwindling?[46]
49. Christianity and the “organic society”
The Western Christianity stressed the
individual as the center of the religion and made the salvation the strictly
individual affair. The Protestantism led this tendency to the logical end.
Denying more and more the holistic ontology of the organic society the Western
Christianity arrived with the Modernity to self-denial (deism, atheism,
materialism, economism). French sociologist Louis Dumont in his excellent books
«Essai sur l'Individualism» and «Homo Aequalis» shows that the methodological
individualism is the result of the oblivion and direct purge by the Western
scholastic of the early and original Greco-Roman theological tradition
conserved intact in the Byzance and Eastern Church as whole.
(1) Neither in the Gospels nor in the writings of the First Fathers do I find
the slightest mention of an “organic society” whose construction should have a
logical or a chronological priority over the salvation of individual
souls. Can Prof. Dugin show me where—in what verse—Our Lord revealed any
intention of merging his Church with the kingdom of Caesar? Quite to the
contrary, the Church was born, grew, and saved millions of souls in an overtly
anti-Christian society, and all the expansion it enjoyed after the conversion
of Constantine cannot be compared, in proportion, with the transformation of a
group of twelve apostles into a universal religion whose area of influence
that, at that time, went far beyond the borders of the Roman Empire. If an
“organic society” were a conditio sine qua non for the existence
and expansion of Christianity, none of that could have happened. The very
advent of the Church would have been impossible. The absolute and
unquestionable priority of the salvation of individual souls over the creation
of an ‘organic society” was definitively established by Our Lord Jesus Christ
when he declared that “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.”
Therefore, from a Christian point of view, societies should be judged not by
their greater or lesser “organicity,” but by whether they foster or debilitate
the faith, or the salvation of souls.
(2) If we admit ad argumentandum that Western Christianity led
to “individualism” by its own fault (and that in condemning it for
this, as a whole, we are not committing the crime of “intellectual racism,”
denounced by Prof. Dugin on item 22), then we also have to consider what
results the “holism” of the Orthodox church has yielded in Russia? How hard can
it be for someone to see the affinity between an “organic society” dominated by
a state Church and the Soviet society, which was presided over by a Party
endowed with an infallible doctrine? Prof. Dugin himself stresses this
affinity. Thus, if Western Christianity “produced” individualism, the Eastern
Christianity “produced” communism, the slaughter of 140 million people and the
largest wave of anti-Christian persecution that the world has ever known.
Nothing that has happened in the Western world is comparable to such
monstrosity.
If we take into account that in the highest temple of “individualism,” that is,
in the USA, Christian faith and community solidarity are still alive and
active— while, in contrast, the Russians turn their back on the faith and
refuse to perform the most obvious gesture of human solidarity, the adoption of
orphans—, it becomes obvious that Western “individualism,” as detestable as it
may seem, has been less harmful to the salvation of souls than Russian
“holism.” I cannot say that this double connection of cause and effect has
actually existed (an in-depth discussion of this point would require hundreds
of pages)[47]: I just limit myself to reasoning according to Prof. Dugin’s
premises.
It is true that the Christian faith has declined in Western Europe as much as
in Russia, but we have just seen [28(4)] that the prevailing current of
European thought since Hegel cannot be called “individualist” in any
identifiable meaning of the term, since it stresses the inanity of individual
consciousness and its absolute subjection to impersonal and collective factors.
It is also notorious that, in the field of politics, statist and collectivist
policies—like fascism, socialism, Fabianism, laborism, and third-worldism—have
prevailed in Europe, throughout the twentieth century, to a degree incomparably
greater than they have ever reached in the USA.
If American “individualism” is compatible with the persistence of Christian
faith, then it cannot be an evil comparable to anti-Christian genocide and to
the later dwindling of the Christian faith in “politically correct” Europe or
in Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
50. Syncretism
This social vision of the Church as
the body of Christ in the Catholicism is more developed than in Protestantism
and in the Catholicism of the Latin America more than in other places. The
Catholicism was imposed here by force in the time of the colonization. But the
traditional spirit of aborigine cultures and the syncretic attitude of the
Spanish and Portuguese elites gave birth to the special religious form of
Catholicism – more holistic than in the Europe and much more traditional than
extremely individualistic Protestantism.
Substantially, the paragraph above is
divided into two propositions, one unnecessary, and the other wrong. After all,
how could an older religion not be “more traditional” than its revolutionary
dissidence? And his statement that Catholicism was more syncretic in Latin
America than in Europe is but proof of boundless historical ignorance. The
contribution of indigenous cultures to Latin American Catholicism was
negligible in comparison to the ocean of symbols, myths, and artistic forms
from European paganism which the Church absorbed and transmuted.[48]
51. Protestantism and individualism
Mr. Carvalho prefers Western kind of
the Christianity that was according to L. Dumont and W. Sombart (as well as to
M.Weber) the direct forerunner of Modern secularism.
I do not know to what degree Dumont,
Sombart, and Weber can be blamed for that monstrouspost hoc, ergo propter
hoc sophism (i.e., "after this, therefore
because of this"), which consists in attributing to scholasticism the
errors of Protestantism. Even nominalism could not, by itself, generate such a
spectacular disaster without the interference of other factors, entirely
foreign to this question. I will examine this later. But, to begin with,
the qualification of Protestantism as “individualistic” is based on the
unforgivable simplism which confuses doctrinal proclamations with real
political conduct. Protestantism, in its Calvinist variety, created the first
totalitarian society of the Modern Age, in an “organicist” version very similar
to the Russian one, where state and Church formed a compact unit, exerted
draconian control over all areas of social and cultural existence, and
smothered, with prison and death sentences, any impulses toward individualism,
even in private life.[49] The English Reformation, which began by killing
in a year more people than the Inquisition killed in many centuries, was
essentially an endeavor of civil government and resulted in the creation of a
state church that, in the name of freedom of conscience, had among its
priorities the implacable persecution of those who dared to exert such freedom
in a pro-Catholic sense. Quite clearly, “individualism” was, in that context, a
mere ideological pretext for the establishment of a ferociously centralizing
“holism.”[50]
52. Jews
Some words about the Jewish state.
From the point of view of the quantity of violence the tender love of
Mr.Carvalho to the Zionism is quite touching. The inconsistency of his views
reaches here the apogee. I have nothing against Israel, but its
cruelty in repressing the Palestinians is evident.
Prof. Dugin attempts to be ironic,
but only manages to be ridiculous. The rockets that the Palestinians fire
practically every day at non-military areas of Israel are never reported by the
international big media, whereas any raid by Israel against Palestinian
military installations always provokes the greatest outcry all over the world.
In a similar fashion, Prof. Dugin—who, as an intellectual, should be immune to
the Western media, but is in fact its slave—wishes me to judge everything
according to the sole sources of information he knows or acknowledges—which,
for him, are the voice of God Himself.
Do you really want to impress me with
this silly journalistic cliché, Prof. Dugin? I know the facts, my friend. I
know the dose of violence on both sides. I know, for instance, that the
Israelis never use human shields, while the Palestinians almost always do it. I
know that, in Israel, Muslims have civil rights and are protected by the
police, while, in countries under Islamic rule, non-Muslims are treated as dogs
and often stoned to death. The number of Christians murdered in Islamic
countries reaches several tens of thousands every year.[51] I have not read any of this in the New
York Times; I saw it with my own eyes in documentaries which the big media
hides. I do not live in a make-believe world.
53. Jews (2)
In Israel there are traditionalists
and modernists, antiglobalist forces and representatives of the global
elite.
Oh, really? So Israel is a democracy
where all currents of opinion have a right to freedom of expression? Now, tell
me: what is the fate of Christians and of friends of America in territories
dominated by your cherished anti-imperialist, leftist, and Eurasian friends?
54. Jews (3)
The antiglobalist front is formed
there by the anti-American, ant-liberal and anti-unipolar religious groups and by
the left anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist circles. They can be good, that
to say “Eurasian” and “Eastern”. But the Jewish State itself is not something
«traditional». As a whole it is a modern capitalist and Atlantist entity and an
ally of American imperialism. Israel was different at the time and could be
different in the future. But in the present is rather on the other side of the
battle. More than that, the conspiracy theories (Syndicate and so on) include
almost always the Jewish bankers in the heart of the globalist elite or world
conspiracy. Why Mr. Carvalho modernizes the conspiracy theory excluding from
the main version the «Jews» rests a mystery.
(1) How wonderful it would be if
Prof. Dugin could reach an agreement with himself and tell us, once and for
all, whether my description of the Syndicate “is accurate,” or it is a
“conspiracy theory.” I cannot argue with a double-mouthed monster.
(2) The presence of Jewish bankers in
the high circles of the Syndicate is the most obvious thing in the world, as
also is the presence of Jewish militants in the revolutionary elite that
established Bolshevism in Russia. It is also obvious that these two groups of
Jews have collaborated to bring misfortune upon the world.[52] They continued to collaborate even
during the time when Stalin started a general persecution against the Jews and
your dear KGB began to return to Hitler the Jewish refugees who had fled from
Germany. Their collaboration lasts to this day. Baron Rothschild, for example,
is the owner of Le Monde, the most leftist and anti-Israeli
newspaper of the European big media, just as the Sulzbergers, another Jewish
family, are the owners of the American daily which is the most ferocious
publisher of lies against Israel. Mr. George Soros, a Jew who helped the Nazis
to seize the property of other Jews, finances all sorts of anti-American and
anti-Israeli movements in the world. Just recently, a mission of American Jews,
subsidized by billion dollar NGOs and impressed by the brutal murder of a
Jewish family committed by a Palestinian terrorist, traveled to the region to
pay a visit of solidarity… to whom? To the relatives of the dead? No. To the
murderer’s mother!
Such are the Jews you speak of,
pretending that they are the most genuine and pure expression of universal
Judaism. If they were so, I would be an anti-Semite. But who actually are these
Jews you mention? They are the ones whom Our Lord called the Synagogue of Satan
and defined as “those who say they are Jews, yet are not.” These are people
who, like the members of the infamous Jewish Committee of the Communist Party
of the USSR, avail themselves of their ethnic origin in order to remain
infiltrated in the community that has generated them and to be able to betray
it more easily, to hand it over to its executioners, to lead it into the
slaughterhouse.[53]These are the ones you serve when you judge victims by their
murderers.
(3) My position on the State of
Israel is very simple and strictly personal. It has nothing to do with
Atlantism versus Eurasianism. I do not intend to impose it on anyone. In the
first place, it seems to me that, after all the suffering the Jews went through
in Germany, in Russia, and a little bit everywhere in Europe, it would have
been sheer inhumanity to deny them a piece of land where they could live in
peace and safety among their own. I am proud that a Brazilian—the great Oswaldo
Aranha—was the head of the General Assembly of the UN when the State of Israel
was created. The content of the policies that would come to be adopted by the
Israelis in their newly-established nation is of little importance in all this
matter. Even if they intended to eventually institute a communist dictatorship
there, this could never justify taking away their land and scattering them in a
new Diaspora. In the second place, as a Catholic, I believe the Jews will have
a providential mission to fulfill at the end of times[54] and that
therefore it is the duty of Christians to protect them or, at least, to save
them from extinction when they are threatened. The bull by Pope Gregory X
(1271-1276), which, having incorporated sentences by his predecessors Innocence
III and Innocence IV, forbids false accusations to be brought against the Jews
and commands the faithful to let them live in peace, has been a constant
inspiration for me.[55]
55. Love for the strong (2)
My opinion: American
paleoconservatives, traditional American right are doomed. Their discourse
is incoherent, weak and too idiosyncratic.
(1) A man who takes post-modernism as
an absolute authority and, at the same time, condemns it as the utmost
expression of Western corruption should not call anyone incoherent.
(2) The same applies to the man who
curses traditional right-wingers and, a few lines later, calls out for their
support.
(3) Even if paleoconservatives were
condemned to defeat, to allege this reason to deny them support would be
immoral and extremely cowardly. The man who only takes the side of those who
seem to be strong should not call anyone weak. To run under the wings of the
strong is the conduct of a cheap woman, not of a man. How can Prof. Dugin talk
so much about the “ethics of warriors” and forget that one of the foremost
commandments of this ethics is the duty to protect “los que son los menos
contra los que son los más”?
(4) Finally, it is not true that
traditional conservatives are doomed to extinction. It was they who elected the
most beloved American president of all times (chosen in several polls as the
“greatest of Americans,” ahead of Washington and Lincoln), and it was they who
created the largest popular movement that ever existed in the USA—the Tea
Party. Eurasianism does not have one hundredth of this support even in Russia.
56. Multiculturalism
If some honest and brave people among
North Americans want to fight the globalist elite as the last stage of the
Western history, as the end of the history, please join our Eurasian troops.
Our struggle is in some sense universal as universal is the globalist
challenge. We have different traditions but defending them we confront the
common enemy of any tradition. So we will explore where lie our respective
zones of influence in the multipolar world only after our
common victory over the Beast,
american-atlantist-liberal-globalist-capitalist-Post-Modern Beast.
This is very beautiful. What does
Eurasianism promise us for after the world war that will destroy the West? A
multicultural society where different ethnicities will each have their
representation in Parliament.[56] But is this not what we see already in
the parliaments of all Western nations? Could it really be that Prof. Dugin has
never heard of the Black Caucus, Islamic lobby, etc.? Why start a world war
with the purpose of getting to the exact place where we already are?[57]
57. Warrior spirit
Once the West had its own tradition.
Partly it has lost it. Partly this tradition has given the poisonous germs. The
West should search in its deep ancient roots. But these roots lead to the
common indo-european Eurasian past, the glorious past of the
Scyths, Celts, Sarmats, Germans, Slavs, Hindus, Persians, Greeks, Romans and
their holistic societies, warrior style hierarchical culture and spiritual
mystic values that had nothing in common with present day Western mercantile
capitalist degenerated civilization.
It really would be very good if the
West could recover its warrior spirit and get rid of its bourgeois
pusillanimity.[58] But I can assure you that this spirit has no roots
whatsoever in Persia, India, or Russia. The Western warrior spirit goes back to
the Christian knighthood in the Middle Ages, the great navigations, the
conquest of America, and the “Westernization of the world”—in short, it goes
back to everything that Prof. Dugin abominates and that leftist activists,
subsidized by the Syndicate, the KGB, and chic third-worldism, have strived to
discredit and to disparage through a cultural “dirty war”. But as Nietzsche
used to say, one cannot completely destroy a thing except when one substitutes
it. It is not enough to cut the West off from its roots and then accuse it of
not having roots: it is necessary to insert a Eurasian graft into it and
persuade the West that Eurasianism is its true roots.
58. Revolt and post-modernism
To return to the Tradition we need to
accomplish the revoltagainst modern world and against modern West
-- absolute revolt – spiritual (traditionalist) and social (socialist).
The West is in agony. We need to save the world from this agony and may be to
save the West from itself. The Modern (and Post-Modern) West must die.
How can post-modernism possibly die
having such devout followers even in Vladimir Putin’s Russia?
59. Salvation by destruction
And if there were the real
traditional values in its foundations (and they certainly were) we will save
them only in the process of the global destruction of the
Modernity/Hypermodernity.
“Salvation by destruction” is one of
the most frequent clichés of the revolutionary discourse. The French Revolution
promised to save France by the destruction of the Ancien Regime: it
brought her fall after fall, down to the condition of a second-class power. The
Mexican Revolution promised to save Mexico by the destruction of the Catholic
Church: it transformed that nation into a supplier of drugs to the world and of
miserable people to the American social security system. The Russian Revolution
promised to save Russia by the destruction of capitalism: it transformed her
into a graveyard. The Chinese Revolution promised to save China by the destruction
of bourgeois culture: it transformed China into a slaughterhouse. The Cuban
Revolution promised to save Cuba by the destruction of imperialist usurpers: it
transformed the island into a prison of beggars. Brazilian positivists
promised to save Brazil by the destruction of the monarchy: they destroyed the
only democracy that then existed in the continent and threw the country into a
succession of coups and dictatorships which only ended in 1988, in order to
give way to a modernized dictatorship under another name. Now Prof. Dugin
promises to save the world by the destruction of the West. Sincerely, I prefer
not to know what comes next. The revolutionary mentality, with its
self-postponing promises, which are always prepared to turn into their
opposites with the most innocent face in the world, is the worst scourge that
has afflicted humanity. The number of its victims, from 1789 to this day, is
not less than three hundred million people—more than all epidemics, natural
catastrophes, and wars among nations have killed since the beginning of time.
The essence of its discourse, as I believe to have already demonstrated, is the
inversion of the sense of time: it consists in inventing a future and then
reinterpreting, in light of this future—as if it were a certain and
totally-proven premise,—the present and the past. It is a matter of inverting
the normal process of knowledge, an inversion according to which the known is
understood though the unknown, the certain through the dubious, the categorical
through the hypothetical. It is a structural, systematic, obsessive, hypnotic
falsification—a politico-cultural crystallization of “delusional
interpretation.” First Prof. Dugin conceived a Eurasian Empire and then he
rebuilt the history of the world as if it were a long preparation for the
advent of that beautiful Eurasian thing. He is a revolutionary like any other.
Just immensely more pretentious.
60. Not even a fart’s worth of effort
So the best representatives of
the West, of the deep and noble West should be with the Rest[30] (that is with us, Eurasians) and not
against the Rest. It is clear that Mr. Carvalho chose the other camp
pretending to choose neither. It is a pity because we need friends. But it is
up to him to decide. We accept any solution – it is the inner dignity of
a man to find his own path in History, Politics, Religion, and Society.
If Prof. Dugin needs allies to help
him combat the Syndicate, he may count on me. But frankly, for his Eurasian
Empire I will not make even a fart’s worth of effort.
Richmond, May 23, 2011.
[1] Aristóteles em Nova Perspectiva.
Introdução à Teoria dos Quatro Discursos, Rio, Topbooks, 1996, [“Aristotle in a
New Perspective. Introduction to the Theory of the Four Discourses”] and Como
Vencer um Debate sem Precisar Ter Razão. A Dialética Erística de Arthur
Schopenhauer, Rio, Topbooks, 1997. [“How to Win a Debate without the Need to be
Right. The Eristic Dialectics of Arthur Schopenhauer”].
[2] See the interview to Fronda, mentioned in the previous message.
[3] A pathological framework firstly described by French psychiatrist Paul Sérieux in 1909 which is distinguished from other forms of psychotic dellusion for not bearing sensorial disturbances, but only a morbid reorganization of the data of a situation. See Paul Sérieux, Les Folies Raisonnantes, Le Delire d’Interpretation, Paris, Alcan, 1909. Available in PDF at http://web2.bium.univ-paris5.fr/livanc/?cote=61092&p=27&do=page.
[4] See Fronda, loc. cit.
[5] Jerusalem, Zahavia, 1974. Volume II was published in 2002 by Jerusalem’s Zionist Book Club.
[6] Eric Voegelin, Published Essays 1929-1933, Collected Works, vol. 8, University of Missouri Press, 2003, p. 238.
[7] O Jardim das Aflições: De Epicuro à Ressurreição de César. Ensaio sobre o Materialismo e a Religião Civil, [“The Garden of Afflictions: From Epicurus to the Resurrection of Caesar. An Essay on Materialism and the Civil Religion.”]Rio, Diadorim, 1995 (Second edition, São Paulo, É-Realizações, 2004, pp. 107-119), available at http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/traducoes/epicurus.htm).
[8] See my conference “The Structure of the Revolutionary Mind” at http://philosophyseminar.com/multimedia/video/166-the-revolutionary-mentality.html.
[9] See Alexandre Douguine, Le Prophète de l’Eurasisme, Paris. Avatar Éditions, 2006, p. 133.
[10] Otto Maria Carpeaux, “A política, segundo Shakespeare”, [“Politics, according to Shakespeare”] in Ensaios Reunidos 1942-1978, [Collected Essays 1942-1978] Organization, introduction, and notes by Olavo de Carvalho, Rio, Universidade da Cidade and Topbooks, Rio, 1999, vol. I, pp. 783-784.
[11] See my testimony about it on the Introductory Note to A Longa Marcha da Vaca para o Brejo & Os Filhos da PUC. O Imbecil Coletivo II [“The Collective Imbecile II, The Long March of the Cow Down to the Swamp & The Sons of PUC”], Rio, Topbooks, 1998.
[12] See Alexandre Douguine, Le Prophète de l’Eurasisme, op. cit., pp. 146-147.
[13] Topics, 103b23.
[14] Francisco Antônio de Souza, Novo Dicionário Latino-Português, [“New Dictionary Latin-Portuguese”] Porto, Lello, 1959, p. 856.
[15] Not even Paul Natorp, who in 1903 presented a Kantian interpretation of Platonism, explaining the Ideas as a priori forms, came to reducing them to projections of the human mind. A priori forms, after all, are preconditions that mold the possibilities of the mind and, for this very reason, do not depend on it at all. See Plato's Theory of Ideas. An Introduction to Idealism, transl. by Vasilis Politis and John Connolly, Academia Verlag, 2004.
[16] See on this the magisterial essay by Jean Borella, “Platon ou la restauration de l’intellectualité Occidentale” in http://rosamystica.kazeo.com/Platon-ou-la-restauration-de-l-intellectualite,r249002.html.
[17] Symposium, 210e2.
[18] Giovanni Reale, Por Uma Nova Interpretação de Platão,[Toward a New Interpretation of Plato] transl. by Marcelo Perine, São Paulo, Loyola, 1997, p. 126.
[19] Phaedo, 78d1.
[20] Timaeus, 47b-c. See also The Republic, X, 530d e 617b.
[21] Ada Neschke-Hentschke avec la collaboration de Alexandre Etienne, Images de Platon et Lectures de Ses Oeuvres. Les Interpretations de Platon à travers les Siècles, [Images of Plato and Readings of His Works. The Interpretations of Plato Over the Centuries] Louvain-Paris, L’Institut Supérieur de Philosophie / Éditions Peeters, 1997.
[22] The books on this are numerous, and the only difficulty in citing them is the embarras de choix. I randomly suggest four of the best: Alain Renaut, L’Ère de l’Individu. Contribution à l’Histoire de La Subjectivité, Paris, Gallimard, 1989; Ferdinand Alquié, La Découverte Métaphysique de l’Homme chez Descartes, Paris, P.U.F., 1950; Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self. The Making of Modern Identity, Cambridge, Mass., The Harvard Univ. Press, 1989; Georges Gusdorf, Les Sciences Humaines et la Pensée Occidentale, II: Les Origines des Sciences Humaines, Paris, Payot, 1967 (esp. pp. 484 ss.).
[23] See my handout “Edmund Husserl contra o psicologismo” [“Edmund Husserls against psychologism”], an unedited transcription of classes taught in 1987 in Rio de Janeiro. Available in a pirated version at www.4shared.com/document/Xvsi6WJo/CARVALHO_Olavo_-_Edmund_Husser.htm.
[24] Louis Lavelle, La Présence Totale [Total Presence], Paris, Aubier, 1934, p. 25.
[25] Mário Ferreira dos Santos, Filosofia Concreta, [“Concrete Philosophy”] São Paulo, É-Realizações, 2009, p. 67.
[26] V. Le Prophète de l’Eurasisme, op. cit., pp. 132-133.
[27] Memoirs, Dreams, Reflections, transl. Richard and Clara Winston, New York, Pantheon Books, pp. 354 e 359.
[28] This individualism does exist, indeed, but not without internal contradictions that sometimes turn it into the reverse of what it seems to be. Who can deny, for instance, that the impact of egalitarian and collectivist ideologies, apparently adverse to all individualism, ended up fomenting in the masses all sorts of individualistic ambitions reinforced by an impatient spirit of demand. Who can deny that “sexual liberation,” one of the strong points of modern leftism, awakens an anxiety of erotic satisfaction that raises selfish individualism to its ultimate consequences? Without the “collectivist” demands of feminism, no woman would have the supremely selfish pretension of “being the owner of her own body” to the point of believing in the right to kill a baby just to keep her waist slim.
[29] Titus Burckhardt, La Civilización Hispano-Arabe, trad. Rosa Kuhne Brabant, Madrid, Alianza Editorial, 1970.
[30] Elementos de Psicologia Espiritual [“Elements of Spiritual Psychology”], 1987. Unpublished, like so many other writings of mine, this work circulates in the format of a handout in the Philosophy Seminar.
[31] Michel Veber, Comentários à “Metafísica Oriental” de René Guénon [Commentaries on René Guénon’s “Oriental Metaphysics”], organized, introduced, and annotated by Olavo de Carvalho, São Paulo, Speculum, 1983.
[32] O Profeta da Paz. Ensaio de Interpretação Simbólica de Alguns Episódios da Vida do Profeta Mohhamed, [The Prophet of Peace. Essays of Symbolic Interpretation of Some Episodes in the Life of the Prophet Mohammed] Unpublished.
[33] See http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/MEGA.HTM.
[34] Fronda , March 16, 2011: http://www.fronda.pl/news/czytaj/rosja_w_cyfrach_rozpad_i_degeneracja
[35] See the excellent documentary by Jean-Michel Carré, The Putin System, which can be bought at Amazon or downloaded from Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D49CVOlkpQI.
[36] http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/folha/mundo/ult94u425463.shtml.
[37] http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/04/25/us-beliefs-poll-idUSTRE73O24K20110425.
[38] Jean-Marc Allemand, op. cit., pp. 117 ss.
[39] http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?pageId=291121.
[40] Jean-Marc Allemand, René Guénon et les Sept Tours du Diable, Paris, Guy Trédaniel, 1990, p. 20. See also Jean Robin, René Guénon. La Dernière Chance de l’Occident, Paris, Guy Trédaniel, 1983, pp. 64 ss.
[41] Jean-Marc Allemand, op. cit., p. 130.
[42] Jean Robin, op. cit., p. 64.
[43] V. Gary Allen, The Rockefeller File, Seal Beach, CA., ’76 Press, 1976, pp. 52-53.
[44] See George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America since 1945, Wilmington, Del., The Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 1996; Lee Edwards, The Conservative Revolution. The Movement that Remade America, New York, The Free Press, 1999; Mark C. Henrie (editor), Arguing Conservatism. Four Decades of the Intercollegiate Review, Wilmington, Del., The Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2008; Robert M. Crunden (editor), The Superfluous Men. Conservative Critics of the American Culture, Wilmington, Del., ISI Books, 1999; Jeffrey Hart, The Making of the American Conservative Mind. National Review and its Times, Wilmington, Del., ISI Books, 2005.
[45] Alexandre Douguine, La Grande Guerre des Continents, Paris, Avatar Éditions, 2006, p. 40.
[46] See for example http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/catholic_church_shows_robust_growth_in_u.s._membership_new_report_says/.
[47] And this effort should take into account that Louis Dumont himself, on whose authority Prof. Dugin’s argument rests, recognizes that individualism was already present in the Church since its beginnings. Therefore, it cannot be a later “distortion.”
[48] Friedrich Heer, The Intellectual History of Europe, transl. Jonathan Steinber, New York, Doubleday, 1968, Vol. I, pp. 1-26.
[49] See Michael Waltzer, The Revolution of the Saints. A Study on the Origins of Radical Politics, Harvard University Press, 1982.
[50] See the classic study by Michael Davies, Liturgical Revolution, vol. I, Cranmer’s Godly Order. The Destruction of Catholicism Through Liturgical Change, revised edition, Ft. Collins (CO), Roman Catholic Books, 1995.
[51] See the testimony of Michael Horowitz in http://www.aina.org/news/20101204231447.htm. Horowitz is one of the most renowned researchers of anti-Christian persecution in the world.
[52] See Alexandre Soljénitsyne, Deux Siècles Ensemble. 1795-1995, Paris, Fayard, 2002, especially Vol. II, pp. 40, 50, 53, 264, 336.
[53] See the memoirs of Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, Prince in Prison, Brooklin, Sichos, 1997.
[54] See Roy H. Schoeman, Salvation Is from the Jews. The Role of Judaism in Salvation History from Abraham to the Second Coming, San Francisco, Ignatius Press, 1995.
[55] Document available at: http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/g10-jews.html.
[56] Le Prophète de l’Eurasisme, p. 30.
[57] In fact, in the economic field he promises us the same thing: “regulation by the State of strategic sectors (industrial-military complex, natural monopolies and similar ones) and maximal economic freedom for medium and small commerce.” Note well: there is no big private industry, nor big private commerce. Small and medium commercial companies prosper under the wings of the omnipotent State. If I am not mistaken, this is what already exists in China.
[58] J. R. Nyquist wrote excellent things about this in The Origins of the Fourth World War, Black Forest Press, 1999.
[2] See the interview to Fronda, mentioned in the previous message.
[3] A pathological framework firstly described by French psychiatrist Paul Sérieux in 1909 which is distinguished from other forms of psychotic dellusion for not bearing sensorial disturbances, but only a morbid reorganization of the data of a situation. See Paul Sérieux, Les Folies Raisonnantes, Le Delire d’Interpretation, Paris, Alcan, 1909. Available in PDF at http://web2.bium.univ-paris5.fr/livanc/?cote=61092&p=27&do=page.
[4] See Fronda, loc. cit.
[5] Jerusalem, Zahavia, 1974. Volume II was published in 2002 by Jerusalem’s Zionist Book Club.
[6] Eric Voegelin, Published Essays 1929-1933, Collected Works, vol. 8, University of Missouri Press, 2003, p. 238.
[7] O Jardim das Aflições: De Epicuro à Ressurreição de César. Ensaio sobre o Materialismo e a Religião Civil, [“The Garden of Afflictions: From Epicurus to the Resurrection of Caesar. An Essay on Materialism and the Civil Religion.”]Rio, Diadorim, 1995 (Second edition, São Paulo, É-Realizações, 2004, pp. 107-119), available at http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/traducoes/epicurus.htm).
[8] See my conference “The Structure of the Revolutionary Mind” at http://philosophyseminar.com/multimedia/video/166-the-revolutionary-mentality.html.
[9] See Alexandre Douguine, Le Prophète de l’Eurasisme, Paris. Avatar Éditions, 2006, p. 133.
[10] Otto Maria Carpeaux, “A política, segundo Shakespeare”, [“Politics, according to Shakespeare”] in Ensaios Reunidos 1942-1978, [Collected Essays 1942-1978] Organization, introduction, and notes by Olavo de Carvalho, Rio, Universidade da Cidade and Topbooks, Rio, 1999, vol. I, pp. 783-784.
[11] See my testimony about it on the Introductory Note to A Longa Marcha da Vaca para o Brejo & Os Filhos da PUC. O Imbecil Coletivo II [“The Collective Imbecile II, The Long March of the Cow Down to the Swamp & The Sons of PUC”], Rio, Topbooks, 1998.
[12] See Alexandre Douguine, Le Prophète de l’Eurasisme, op. cit., pp. 146-147.
[13] Topics, 103b23.
[14] Francisco Antônio de Souza, Novo Dicionário Latino-Português, [“New Dictionary Latin-Portuguese”] Porto, Lello, 1959, p. 856.
[15] Not even Paul Natorp, who in 1903 presented a Kantian interpretation of Platonism, explaining the Ideas as a priori forms, came to reducing them to projections of the human mind. A priori forms, after all, are preconditions that mold the possibilities of the mind and, for this very reason, do not depend on it at all. See Plato's Theory of Ideas. An Introduction to Idealism, transl. by Vasilis Politis and John Connolly, Academia Verlag, 2004.
[16] See on this the magisterial essay by Jean Borella, “Platon ou la restauration de l’intellectualité Occidentale” in http://rosamystica.kazeo.com/Platon-ou-la-restauration-de-l-intellectualite,r249002.html.
[17] Symposium, 210e2.
[18] Giovanni Reale, Por Uma Nova Interpretação de Platão,[Toward a New Interpretation of Plato] transl. by Marcelo Perine, São Paulo, Loyola, 1997, p. 126.
[19] Phaedo, 78d1.
[20] Timaeus, 47b-c. See also The Republic, X, 530d e 617b.
[21] Ada Neschke-Hentschke avec la collaboration de Alexandre Etienne, Images de Platon et Lectures de Ses Oeuvres. Les Interpretations de Platon à travers les Siècles, [Images of Plato and Readings of His Works. The Interpretations of Plato Over the Centuries] Louvain-Paris, L’Institut Supérieur de Philosophie / Éditions Peeters, 1997.
[22] The books on this are numerous, and the only difficulty in citing them is the embarras de choix. I randomly suggest four of the best: Alain Renaut, L’Ère de l’Individu. Contribution à l’Histoire de La Subjectivité, Paris, Gallimard, 1989; Ferdinand Alquié, La Découverte Métaphysique de l’Homme chez Descartes, Paris, P.U.F., 1950; Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self. The Making of Modern Identity, Cambridge, Mass., The Harvard Univ. Press, 1989; Georges Gusdorf, Les Sciences Humaines et la Pensée Occidentale, II: Les Origines des Sciences Humaines, Paris, Payot, 1967 (esp. pp. 484 ss.).
[23] See my handout “Edmund Husserl contra o psicologismo” [“Edmund Husserls against psychologism”], an unedited transcription of classes taught in 1987 in Rio de Janeiro. Available in a pirated version at www.4shared.com/document/Xvsi6WJo/CARVALHO_Olavo_-_Edmund_Husser.htm.
[24] Louis Lavelle, La Présence Totale [Total Presence], Paris, Aubier, 1934, p. 25.
[25] Mário Ferreira dos Santos, Filosofia Concreta, [“Concrete Philosophy”] São Paulo, É-Realizações, 2009, p. 67.
[26] V. Le Prophète de l’Eurasisme, op. cit., pp. 132-133.
[27] Memoirs, Dreams, Reflections, transl. Richard and Clara Winston, New York, Pantheon Books, pp. 354 e 359.
[28] This individualism does exist, indeed, but not without internal contradictions that sometimes turn it into the reverse of what it seems to be. Who can deny, for instance, that the impact of egalitarian and collectivist ideologies, apparently adverse to all individualism, ended up fomenting in the masses all sorts of individualistic ambitions reinforced by an impatient spirit of demand. Who can deny that “sexual liberation,” one of the strong points of modern leftism, awakens an anxiety of erotic satisfaction that raises selfish individualism to its ultimate consequences? Without the “collectivist” demands of feminism, no woman would have the supremely selfish pretension of “being the owner of her own body” to the point of believing in the right to kill a baby just to keep her waist slim.
[29] Titus Burckhardt, La Civilización Hispano-Arabe, trad. Rosa Kuhne Brabant, Madrid, Alianza Editorial, 1970.
[30] Elementos de Psicologia Espiritual [“Elements of Spiritual Psychology”], 1987. Unpublished, like so many other writings of mine, this work circulates in the format of a handout in the Philosophy Seminar.
[31] Michel Veber, Comentários à “Metafísica Oriental” de René Guénon [Commentaries on René Guénon’s “Oriental Metaphysics”], organized, introduced, and annotated by Olavo de Carvalho, São Paulo, Speculum, 1983.
[32] O Profeta da Paz. Ensaio de Interpretação Simbólica de Alguns Episódios da Vida do Profeta Mohhamed, [The Prophet of Peace. Essays of Symbolic Interpretation of Some Episodes in the Life of the Prophet Mohammed] Unpublished.
[33] See http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/MEGA.HTM.
[34] Fronda , March 16, 2011: http://www.fronda.pl/news/czytaj/rosja_w_cyfrach_rozpad_i_degeneracja
[35] See the excellent documentary by Jean-Michel Carré, The Putin System, which can be bought at Amazon or downloaded from Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D49CVOlkpQI.
[36] http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/folha/mundo/ult94u425463.shtml.
[37] http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/04/25/us-beliefs-poll-idUSTRE73O24K20110425.
[38] Jean-Marc Allemand, op. cit., pp. 117 ss.
[39] http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?pageId=291121.
[40] Jean-Marc Allemand, René Guénon et les Sept Tours du Diable, Paris, Guy Trédaniel, 1990, p. 20. See also Jean Robin, René Guénon. La Dernière Chance de l’Occident, Paris, Guy Trédaniel, 1983, pp. 64 ss.
[41] Jean-Marc Allemand, op. cit., p. 130.
[42] Jean Robin, op. cit., p. 64.
[43] V. Gary Allen, The Rockefeller File, Seal Beach, CA., ’76 Press, 1976, pp. 52-53.
[44] See George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America since 1945, Wilmington, Del., The Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 1996; Lee Edwards, The Conservative Revolution. The Movement that Remade America, New York, The Free Press, 1999; Mark C. Henrie (editor), Arguing Conservatism. Four Decades of the Intercollegiate Review, Wilmington, Del., The Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2008; Robert M. Crunden (editor), The Superfluous Men. Conservative Critics of the American Culture, Wilmington, Del., ISI Books, 1999; Jeffrey Hart, The Making of the American Conservative Mind. National Review and its Times, Wilmington, Del., ISI Books, 2005.
[45] Alexandre Douguine, La Grande Guerre des Continents, Paris, Avatar Éditions, 2006, p. 40.
[46] See for example http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/catholic_church_shows_robust_growth_in_u.s._membership_new_report_says/.
[47] And this effort should take into account that Louis Dumont himself, on whose authority Prof. Dugin’s argument rests, recognizes that individualism was already present in the Church since its beginnings. Therefore, it cannot be a later “distortion.”
[48] Friedrich Heer, The Intellectual History of Europe, transl. Jonathan Steinber, New York, Doubleday, 1968, Vol. I, pp. 1-26.
[49] See Michael Waltzer, The Revolution of the Saints. A Study on the Origins of Radical Politics, Harvard University Press, 1982.
[50] See the classic study by Michael Davies, Liturgical Revolution, vol. I, Cranmer’s Godly Order. The Destruction of Catholicism Through Liturgical Change, revised edition, Ft. Collins (CO), Roman Catholic Books, 1995.
[51] See the testimony of Michael Horowitz in http://www.aina.org/news/20101204231447.htm. Horowitz is one of the most renowned researchers of anti-Christian persecution in the world.
[52] See Alexandre Soljénitsyne, Deux Siècles Ensemble. 1795-1995, Paris, Fayard, 2002, especially Vol. II, pp. 40, 50, 53, 264, 336.
[53] See the memoirs of Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, Prince in Prison, Brooklin, Sichos, 1997.
[54] See Roy H. Schoeman, Salvation Is from the Jews. The Role of Judaism in Salvation History from Abraham to the Second Coming, San Francisco, Ignatius Press, 1995.
[55] Document available at: http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/g10-jews.html.
[56] Le Prophète de l’Eurasisme, p. 30.
[57] In fact, in the economic field he promises us the same thing: “regulation by the State of strategic sectors (industrial-military complex, natural monopolies and similar ones) and maximal economic freedom for medium and small commerce.” Note well: there is no big private industry, nor big private commerce. Small and medium commercial companies prosper under the wings of the omnipotent State. If I am not mistaken, this is what already exists in China.
[58] J. R. Nyquist wrote excellent things about this in The Origins of the Fourth World War, Black Forest Press, 1999.
FONTE: http://www.midiasemmascara.org/mediawatch/noticiasfaltantes/denuncias/15023-2014-03-12-04-43-43.html
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