Return of the Sith Lord: Evola & Traditionalism

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Return of the Sith Lord: Evola & Traditionalism

Postby American Dream » Sun Feb 12, 2017 12:32 pm

The Return of the Sith Lord

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Anyone who was waded through online conspiracy theories has no doubt encountered ample stories and allegations surrounding Aleister Crowley: that the famed British magi was a Satanist and intelligence asset engaged in nefarious schemes and that he left a fanatical group of followers in his wake that manage a shadowy underground network engaged in terrorism, drugs, pedophilia and ritual murder. Or something along those lines.

While there can be no doubt that Crowley was an occultist (but not a Satanist, as if often alleged) and that he had a relationship with British intelligence, much of everything else one encounters in this regard concerning Crowley is highly suspect, to say the least. This is partly the result of the Christian right's obsession with some type of Satanic conspiracy at the heart of modern liberalism and/or the New Age movement.

If they were to set their gaze upon the murky netherworld of what is commonly referred to as "Traditionalism," they would be on much firmer footing.

Traditionalism is a philosophical school that emerged in the early twentieth century. It derived in part from perennial philosophy, the notion that all of the world's great religions all share a similar origin. To Traditionalists, this philosophy has been gradually lost and/or degraded in the West since roughly the onset of the Renaissance. It went into overdrive in the twentieth century with the increasing abandonment of traditional social structures and the rise of materialism in both communist and capitalist societies.

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Rene Guenon

Rene Guenon, a Frenchman who eventually converted to Sufism, is often cited as the first individual to conceptualize the concept of "Traditionalism." Guenon began his spiritual journey in pre-WWI France where he became fascinated with Theosophy and Martinism after a Catholic upbringing. While eventually breaking with these ideologies, they would nonetheless serve as some of principal inspirations for Guenon's particular philosophical bent according to Mark Sedgwick, a leading authority on Traditionalism.


Mr. Evola

In the years following the First World War Traditionalism became increasingly associated with fascism. One of the most influential thinkers in Traditionalism was Julius Evola, who briefly courted Mussolini before his views were deemed to extreme for Italian fascism. From there Evola's gaze would shift to Nazism, which he ultimately found too tame as well. He saw both ideologies as displaying great potential but ultimately being derailed by the pandering to the Church and the working class that both Mussolini and Hitler engaged in.

Evola, a philosopher and occultist, was in many ways everything the conspiratorial right has long accused Crowley of being. In the post-war years he appears to have played a key role in the spread of right wing terrorism and US intrigues in the Italian state and beyond.

"Evola and members of the radical fascist group Fasci d'Azione Rivoluzionaria (FAR) were arrested in April 1951 and charged with plotting to overthrow the state. The crackdown was orchestrated by Christian Democratic Interior Minister Mario Scelba in conjunction with SIFAR, Italy's postwar secret service. After six months in jail, Evola was charged with being 'the spiritual father' of FAR. Although ultimately acquitted of the charges, his arrest had clearly been a warning from the Christian Democratic establishment, as well as the CIA, to get in line.

"Two years later Evola published Gli uomini e la rovine (Men Among the Ruins), in which he seemingly abandoned his anti-American stance. He now argued that 'the immediate task is that of "reinforcing the state," while malgre soi [in spite of oneself] keeping it within the Western alliance (malgre soi because American materialism is as much an enemy of traditional values as Russian totalitarian collectivism).'

"What did Evelyn mean by 'reinforcing the state'? And why did he now argue for keeping Italy 'within the Western alliance'? Had he yielded to American pressure? Or did his decision have something to do with the fact that Men Among the Ruins was published in 1953, shortly after Allen Dulles became the new director of the CIA? One clue comes from the man who wrote the introduction to the book, Prince Junio Valerio Borghese, the 'Black Prince' of Italian far-right politics...

"At the end of the war Borghese opened up contact with the OSS's James Jesus Angleton. Angleton, who later became one of the CIA's most powerful officials, ran the OSS's 'X-2' counterintelligence branch for Italy during the war. He personally saved Borghese from certain partisan execution by dressing him up in an American uniform and driving him south to Rome for interrogation. Although Borghese was convicted of war crimes, the Italian Supreme Court of Appeals ordered him released from jail in 1949. After regaining his freedom, the Black Prince became a hero for MSI hard-liners.

"Borghese was also courted by the American embassy, the Vatican, and the Christian Democrats. All them wanted him to become the leader of the new pro-NATO 'national front' because the MSI was still considered an unreliable 'hotbed of anti-American and anti-Atlantic sentiment' that could hinder Italian integration into the Western alliance 'unless the party's moderates were able to obtain control and enforce internal discipline.' Given his reputation, the CIA believed that Borghese was the perfect candidate to lead the new front. The MSI, however, was terrified of losing him. Some Salo veterans visited his castle at Artena to warn him about 'reactionary forces' behind the 'national front' and begged him to join the MSI. MSI Secretary Augusto De Marsanich even offered to make him the group's honorary president. The Evolians also hoped that he would help in the struggle against the MSI's parliamentary 'softs.' Borghese officially join the MSI in November 1951, and one month later, on 2 December 1951, he became the MSI's honorary president.

"Borghese's importance for the CIA went beyond politics. The CIA-backed SIFAR spy agency began organizing secret squadrons (many composed of ex-officials of the SID, Mussolini's a secret police) for espionage and 'counter-espionage' operations against the left in 1949. The CIA then created an underground army of ex-fascist combat veterans in an operation codenamed 'Operation Gladio' (Gladio being the name for a Roman double-edged sword). Gladio, however, couldn't succeed without Borghese's tactic approval."


(Dreamer of the Day, Kevin Coogan, pgs. 330-332)

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Continues at: http://visupview.blogspot.com/2017/02/t ... -lord.html
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Re: Return of the Sith Lord: Evola & Traditionalism

Postby American Dream » Fri Oct 06, 2017 7:45 am

How ‘Hobbit Camps’ Rebirthed Italian Fascism
From 1977, crowds of militant youth gathered to discuss Tolkien and totalitarianism.


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A sign at Camp Hobbit reads, “European youth fight against / communist subversion / capitalist slavery.” Camp Hobbit attendees saw themselves as staking out a “third position” in Italian politics beyond right and left.


Across Europe, the cultural dominance of the Left, cemented by the defeat of fascism, was beginning to be challenged by a new movement called the nouvelle droite or “New Right.” The central claim of the New Right was that they were not your father’s fascists, and not to blame for the horrors of Nazism. They were your grandfather’s fascists, better, your great-great grandfather’s, fascists who still worshipped the pagan gods and yearned for simpler times of cultural homogeneity and ethnocentrism.

The movement found great success in Italy, where Evola had already laid much of the philosophical groundwork. For Italy’s disillusioned youth, Tolkien’s books seemed to affirm the noble struggle of traditional societies against the encroaching menace of industrialization, progressive politics, and groupthink.

Tolkien quickly became required reading for the serious among Italy’s “neo-fascist” youth groups. But even with the adventures of Sam and Frodo to bond over, many in this crowd felt isolated and overwhelmed in the face of a culturally dominant Left.

In 1977, leaders from Italy’s far right party and youth movement planned to change that. They proposed a fascist Woodstock, a two-day “back to nature” retreat organized around the celebration of Tolkien’s work. They called it “Camp Hobbit.”

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Generoso Simeone, head of Italy’s far right Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI), speaks at Camp Hobbit. The MSI was one of the organizers of Camp Hobbit, but quickly fell to infighting following a widely successful Camp Hobbit III in 1981.



http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/ho ... atlas-page
"If you don't stand for something, you will fall for anything."
-Malcolm X
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Re: Return of the Sith Lord: Evola & Traditionalism

Postby American Dream » Fri Nov 17, 2017 8:41 pm

A letter to a Friend on Tolkien, racism and the European New Right

All the authors who charge Tolkien with racist attitudes mention the Orcs. This race is obviously the most wicked in his world. Usually the following statement of Tolkien is quoted:
The Orcs are definitely stated to be corruptions of the "human" form seen in Elves and Men. They are (or were) squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes: in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types (From a letter to Forrest J. Ackerman [Not dated; June 1958]).


There’s another interesting quote from one of his letters. When Tolkien was asked "if the notion of the Orcs, an entire race that was irredeemably wicked, was not heretical", he replied:
With regard to The Lord of the Rings, I cannot claim to be a sufficient theologian to say whether my notion of orcs is heretical or not. I don't feel under any obligation to make my story fit with formalized Christian theology, though I actually intended it to be consonant with Christian thought and belief, which is asserted somewhere, Book Five, page 190, where Frodo asserts that the orcs are not evil in origin. We believe that, I suppose, of all human kinds and sons and breeds, though some appear, both as individuals and groups to be, by us at any rate, unredeemable... (From a letter to W. H. Auden, 12 May 1965)


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I think that the last sentence casts light on Tolkien’s perception of races (not only in his imaginary world, but also in the real world). It seems to me that Tolkien (1) acknowledges the existence of distinct anthropomorphous/human races, (2) considers that different races have their own innate abilities, (3) believes that no race is naturally evil in its origin, but (4) admits that it is normal for "us" (Europeans) to consider some races as wicked. If this assumption is true, then Tolkien's racism is actually a mixture of two racisms – biological and cultural.

It is also interesting that cultural racism prevails over the biological one, because Tolkien actually realizes that all the races are equal in their rights and have equal opportunities for salvation. This reminds me of the "new racism" of the ENR. Even if we ignore Tolkien's notion of the Orcs, his Middle-earth is in fact an ENR's paradise, where all the anthropomorphous races/ethic groups live in their predetermined lands and do not – as well as cannot – mix with each other. It's not the point that Men are better/worse than Hobbits, or Elves, or Dwarves. They simply cannot not mix and it seems that everyone enjoys this inability. At least, no one complains.

So, the ENR’s fascination with Tolkien is probably based on the idea of the existence of the heroic era when "people" shared the total world-view and where the races – due to their proper perception of the laws of nature – lived in a world organized according to the logic of ethnopluralism.


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Re: Return of the Sith Lord: Evola & Traditionalism

Postby American Dream » Mon Dec 25, 2017 9:28 am

Dugin’s Occult Fascism and the Hijacking of Left Anti-Imperialism and Muslim Anti-Salafism

by WAHID AZAL

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Eurasian Thunderbolt flag.


Chaos Magic as the True Duginist weltanschauung

The misanthropic ideas of British occultist and satanist Aleister Crowley (d. 1947) do however inform both the Duginist world view and its contemporary praxis. Indeed it is within the worldview of Chaos magic specifically (which is a spawn of Crowley’s Thelemic philosophy) where much of the paradoxes and seeming contradictions of the Duginist weltanschauung – and especially in its Fourth Positionist catchall of ‘beyond right or left’ – must be sought, since this is (whether explicitly articulated or not) the actual animating locus of the Duginist far-right praxis, beginning with its choice of symbology, i.e. his Eurasian flag of eight white or yellow thunderbolts (or arrows) shaped in a radial pattern and set behind a black background. This symbol by itself is alternatively referred to in Chaos magic as the ‘wheel of chaos’, ‘the symbol of chaos’, ‘arms of chaos’, ‘the arrows of chaos’, ‘the chaos star’, ‘the chaos cross’, ‘the chaosphere’ or ‘the symbol of eight’. Somewhat reminiscent of the Thule Society and then Hitler’s own appropriation of the swastika from the writings of Theosophical Society founder H.P. Blavatsky (d. 1891), Dugin derives his design from the popularizations of it made by western Chaos magicians during the 1970s-1980s who themselves appropriated it from the work of British science fiction and fantasy novelist Michael Moorcock.

It should be noted here that both the number eight as well as the color black play a pivotal role in all neo-Nazi/far-right symbology, not to mention that the ‘wheel of chaos’ itself maintains striking similarities to the well known ‘sun wheel’ symbol used by the SS and many contemporary neo-Nazis (likewise the symbol of the old Spanish Falangists). In his own defence, Dugin would probably assert that the number eight also holds important correspondences within esoteric Christianity as well where it refers to Christ. However, his obvious (or dubious, rather) choice of the ‘wheel of chaos’ over the cross would tend to refute that claim. In addition, as a self-proclaimed Russian nationalist, it is not clear exactly why Alexander Dugin would choose his chief symbol from sources located within the tradition of British occultism rather than from those of his native Russia or, for that matter, from the Eastern Orthodox Christianity that he claims to adhere to. This point alone, we believe, further reinforces the allegations regarding Dugin’s anti-traditionalism, while simultaneously locating him in a very different universe altogether than the one he claims to be speaking for.

Be that as it may, such behaviour in itself would be quite consistent with Chaos magic’s basic dictum regarding the malleability of all beliefs and their pliability as tools in the hands of the Chaos magician. Here it is the Nietzschean ‘will to power’ in-itself that becomes the prime motivation of the black magus turned political activist. Emerging from this, the next significant formula of Chaos magic is that of a continual paradigm shift or the constant arbitrary changing of beliefs, where holding contradictory positions simultaneously becomes the vehicle for self-realization and understanding of the coincidentia oppositorum underlying all phenomena. As a spiritual practice there are numerous correlations and comparisons that can be made with this specific idea among many traditions around the globe (i.e. Taoist, Sufi, Tantric, Zen, Hermeticism, etc.), and in and of itself it is neutral. Except that with Dugin and his acolytes the issue is not linked specifically to any spiritual practice and its realization per se but rather it is purely about political praxis and the will to power in its crudest form. In other words, for Dugin the alchemical laboratory and its ars operativa resides not in the self but rather in the greater world and the theatre of politics where the black magus acts to immanentize the eschaton and where this eschaton represents the inversion of all values.

The Philosopher’s Stone for Dugin is thus power over the world for its own sake and not over the self. This, including other features of his thinking, is what informs the paradigmatic ‘beyond left and right’ catchall latched on to by the Duginists. It is also what makes Duginism particularly dangerous as an ideology and a movement. In other words, in this worldview where Chaos magic acts as the ideological primum mobile, occultist principles are made to serve a fundamentally fascist political program. Some would also call this a form of Satanism and yet another manifestation of the very modernity and ‘materialist West’ that Alexander Dugin has otherwise railed against. Arguably, and whatever else Dugin says to criticize and distance himself from it, Hitlerian National Socialism attempted precisely the very same thing – animated also, as it was, by almost identical underlying ideological concerns and motivations.

That said, René Guénon alleged about Blavatsky and her Theosophical Society that during the nineteenth and early twentieth century they were essentially acting in the capacity of a colonialist trojan horse put up by the imperial British secret services in order to infiltrate and disrupt the traditional religious sub-cultures of the sub-continent (see his, Theosophy: The History of a Pseudo-Religion, 2004). Given Dugin’s networks in Iran, Lebanon, Syria and elsewhere in the Islamic world, not to mention Eastern Europe, it is not entirely out of the realm of possibility that similar patterns and inducements may be motivating and underlying the Duginists’ recruitment agenda whereby Dugin himself can be seen as the new Blavatsky with his networks the successor to the Theosophical Society-cum-British imperial trojan horse. Certainly their attempt to further break down the already fractured left/right spectrum in Europe in order to recruit for the far-right appears to speak to it directly given that their unambiguous racist and reactionary rhetoric on the immigration/refugee crisis, on the face of things, otherwise defies the alliances they have made inside the Islamic world among Iranians, Iraqis, Lebanese, Syrians and other sectors of the Resistance Axis.

Russia, the European refugee crisis and far-right Duginist geopolitics in action

Now, the instrumental role of NATO in the collapse of the Libyan state in 2011; the Syrian war that is now going into its fifth year; ISIS; Ukraine, and, above all, the European refugee crisis appears to have provided the Duginists a rare opportunity to exploit existing splits arising among cross-sections of the western antiwar Left as well as among activists in the Muslim community itself in order to recruit among these groups. This is especially in evidence in the recent talking points adopted by a number of otherwise progressive and left-leaning pundits who regularly appear on RT (Russia Today) and elsewhere in the alternative media where their usually consistent antiwar stance with regard to Syria specifically (and western imperialism generally) has, in paradoxical fashion, given way instead to a melange of reactionary narratives over the European refugee crisis. In short, we have a situation where certain progressives (and even some Muslims) have adopted the contemporary white supremacist kulturkampf rhetoric of fascists and fellow travellers that largely victimizes Mid East/North African immigrants and asylum seekers in Europe, and where rightwing hysteria over a perceived threat to ‘European culture’ and ‘its way of life’ is uncritically repeated, to varying degrees, parrot fashion.

Whereas some blame Russian state policy directly for such recent developments, the point of view of the present author is that such a turn of events ultimately benefits the agendas of Empire itself rather than Russia specifically such that these Duginists may in fact be sheepdogging for long-term Anglo-American Atlanticist policy initiatives rather than specifically Russian ones. Be that as it may, rumours abound that the Russian state has been a generous donor (and in a few cases has even outright financed for protracted periods) fascist/far-right groups such as Jobbik in Hungary and the Golden Dawn in Greece. Since 2014 in Germany, for instance, the AfD (Alternative für Deutschland), the NPD (Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands) and PEGIDA are alleged to have received substantial financial support from Moscow as a means of destabilizing Merkel and the German center who were key actors in the sanctions imposed on Russia following its annexation of Crimea in March 2014. Similarly is held regarding Le Pen’s Front National in France. Certainly much of the anti-immigration/anti-refugee jingoism published regularly on the pages of RT (Russia Today) as of that time would on the face of things tend to support the allegations.


More at: http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/02/10/ ... -salafism/
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Re: Return of the Sith Lord: Evola & Traditionalism

Postby Jerky » Mon Dec 25, 2017 11:07 am

Great synergy of materials here AD. Thanks for bringing us this stuff!

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Re: Return of the Sith Lord: Evola & Traditionalism

Postby American Dream » Mon Dec 25, 2017 3:26 pm

It is truly my pleasure. I gain so much personally from gathering this sort of material.
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Re: Return of the Sith Lord: Evola & Traditionalism

Postby American Dream » Sat Feb 10, 2018 2:58 pm

Kung Pao with the Brownshirts: My Evening with the German Far Right

By Timothy Wright

That a drab Chinese restaurant might be the setting for a small piece of this dramatic postwar German history seemed incredible. As was explained to me later, Zhang’s was the only restaurant in town that would host the party’s gatherings. In the meantime, I had found my way to a back room of the restaurant where the meeting was to be held, with extra tables and a podium packed into the front. As I sat nervously finishing my sweet-and-sour chicken dish, the other guests began to arrive. A few men busily walked around the room putting up the AfD’s signature blue campaign posters with various populist slogans on them such as “Strengthen the Police,” “Secure the Borders,” and “All Power Comes from the People.”

I began to wonder at the AfD’s unashamed use of tropes that all Germans would instinctively associate with Nazism. For many Germans still today, celebrating even Mother’s Day is taboo for its association with Hitler’s valorization and promotion of motherhood as a means of increasing the birthrate. But these AfD sympathizers were throwing around terms like “Das Volk,” and speaking of empowering the police to sniff out “undesirables,” either ignorant of their past use or, worse, fully cognizant of their connotations.

A newcomer next to me, a man in his 40s, shared the simple lesson that the AfD had learned from Trump: “break taboos.” “We need to say those things no one else is willing to say,” he continued. A smile came over his face as he told me, just as the meeting was getting under way, “We’re going to stick our fingers into the wound, and twist.”

A rotund man in a suit, about 45 to 50 years old, stood up at the front of the room to welcome everyone and immediately launched into a screed against the family policies of all the other German parties that are destroying the “traditional family” of “man and woman.” The far left-wing party (Die Linke) doesn’t deserve much attention, he claimed, because they still bear the imprint of communist ideology and their platform doesn’t even mention “family” in any traditional sense. The truly dangerous party to him was the Greens. They are the most active in trying to get “women in power” and their obsession with a total expunging of gender roles goes “far beyond equality.” Equality is not pressuring women to enter the workforce, but rather letting them choose whether they wish to be mothers or work, he explained.

At this point, the speaker introduced a key term of derision used by the AfD when it comes to social policies, gender, and feminism, that of “gender-mainstreaming.” Not immediately familiar with the term, I eventually gathered that it referred to the attempt to engineer gender equality through coercion, top-down government action, and educational policy. The local AfD chapter leader was particularly concerned with Chancellor Angela Merkel’s novel use of feminine nouns in place of male-only words (one should now say Studenten und Studentinnen as opposed to just the male form Studenten for all students). Gender politics comes to the fatherland.

The restaurant filled with uproarious laughter when he mentioned a viral video in which an AfD politician in the Brandenburg state assembly, Steffen Königer, had recently mocked “politically correct gender greetings” (“Gendergerechte Begrüßung”) by opening his speech in the state assembly with 60 different gendered greetings. His “speech” began, “Dear Mr. President, dear ladies and gentlemen, dear gays, dear lesbians, dear androgynous, dear bigender, dear woman-to-man and dear man-to-woman, dear gender-variable, dear genderqueer, dear intersexual,” and so on. It was apparent that everyone in the room had seen this video and that Königer had become something of a local hero for his stunt.

I had been ready to hear anything, but the extreme derision directed at progressive feminist and sexual politics still surprised me. I had expected the AfD to be virulently anti-Muslim and anti-immigration, and I knew, of course, that they were nervous about the falling birthrates of ethnic Germans, but my stereotypes about Western Europe being more socially progressive than the United States had led me to assume that even AfD members were still far ahead of an American rural Republican when it came to questions like gender parity and gay rights. But while the social welfare state has provided certain key structural assurances to women such as maternity leave and cheaper daycare, this often masks the persistent misogyny and traditionalism permeating large swaths of Western Europe. AfD, like several other European populist parties, is now belatedly giving voice to a deeply masculine traditionalism that characterizes the European right.


https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/kun ... far-right/
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Re: Return of the Sith Lord: Evola & Traditionalism

Postby American Dream » Fri Mar 23, 2018 7:45 pm

This article is long but worth reading in its entirety:

Ivan Ilyin, Putin’s Philosopher of Russian Fascism

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Ivan Ilyin, circa 1920


The fact of the matter is that fascism is a redemptive excess of patriotic arbitrariness.

—Ivan Ilyin, 1927

My prayer is like a sword. And my sword is like a prayer.

—Ivan Ilyin, 1927

Politics is the art of identifying and neutralizing the enemy.

—Ivan Ilyin, 1948


...Russia today is a media-heavy authoritarian kleptocracy, not the religious totalitarian entity that Ilyin imagined. And yet, his concepts do help lift the obscurity from some of the more interesting aspects of Russian politics. Vladimir Putin, to take a very important example, is a post-Soviet politician who emerged from the realm of fiction. Since it is he who brought Ilyin’s ideas into high politics, his rise to power is part of Ilyin’s story as well.

Putin was an unknown when he was selected by post-Soviet Russia’s first president, Boris Yeltsin, to be prime minister in 1999. Putin was chosen by political casting call. Yeltsin’s intimates, carrying out what they called “Operation Successor,” asked themselves who the most popular character in Russian television was. Polling showed that this was the hero of a 1970s program, a Soviet spy who spoke German. This fit Putin, a former KGB officer who had served in East Germany. Right after he was appointed prime minister by Yeltsin in September 1999, Putin gained his reputation through a bloodier fiction. When apartment buildings in Russian cities began to explode, Putin blamed Muslims and began a war in Chechnya. Contemporary evidence suggests that the bombs might have been planted by Russia’s own security organization, the FSB. Putin was elected president in 2000, and served until 2008.

In the early 2000s, Putin maintained that Russia could become some kind of rule-of-law state. Instead, he succeeded in bringing economic crime within the Russian state, transforming general corruption into official kleptocracy. Once the state became the center of crime, the rule of law became incoherent, inequality entrenched, and reform unthinkable. Another political story was needed. Because Putin’s victory over Russia’s oligarchs also meant control over their television stations, new media instruments were at hand. The Western trend towards infotainment was brought to its logical conclusion in Russia, generating an alternative reality meant to generate faith in Russian virtue but cynicism about facts. This transformation was engineered by Vladislav Surkov, the genius of Russian propaganda. He oversaw a striking move toward the world as Ilyin imagined it, a dark and confusing realm given shape only by Russian innocence. With the financial and media resources under control, Putin needed only, in the nice Russian term, to add the “spiritual resource.” And so, beginning in 2005, Putin began to rehabilitate Ilyin as a Kremlin court philosopher.

That year, Putin began to cite Ilyin in his addresses to the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation, and arranged for the reinterment of Ilyin’s remains in Russia. Then Surkov began to cite Ilyin. The propagandist accepted Ilyin’s idea that “Russian culture is the contemplation of the whole,” and summarizes his own work as the creation of a narrative of an innocent Russia surrounded by permanent hostility. Surkov’s enmity toward factuality is as deep as Ilyin’s, and like Ilyin, he tends to find theological grounds for it. Dmitry Medvedev, the leader of Putin’s political party, recommended Ilyin’s books to Russia’s youth. Ilyin began to figure in the speeches of the leaders of Russia’s tame opposition parties, the communists and the (confusingly-named, extreme-right) Liberal Democrats. These last few years, Ilyin has been cited by the head of the constitutional court, by the foreign minister, and by patriarchs of the Russian Orthodox Church.

After a four-year intermission between 2008 and 2012, during which Putin served as prime minister and allowed Medvedev to be president, Putin returned to the highest office. If Putin came to power in 2000 as hero from the realm of fiction, he returned in 2012 as the destroyer of the rule of law. In a minor key, the Russia of Putin’s time had repeated the drama of the Russia of Ilyin’s time. The hopes of Russian liberals for a rule-of-law state were again disappointed. Ilyin, who had transformed that failure into fascism the first time around, now had his moment. His arguments helped Putin transform the failure of his first period in office, the inability to introduce of the rule of law, into the promise for a second period in office, the confirmation of Russian virtue. If Russia could not become a rule-of-law state, it would seek to destroy neighbors that had succeeded in doing so or that aspired to do so. Echoing one of the most notorious proclamations of the Nazi legal thinker Carl Schmitt, Ilyin wrote that politics “is the art of identifying and neutralizing the enemy.” In the second decade of the twenty-first century, Putin’s promises were not about law in Russia, but about the defeat of a hyper-legal neighboring entity.

The European Union, the largest economy in the world and Russia’s most important economic partner, is grounded on the assumption that international legal agreements provide the basis for fruitful cooperation among rule-of-law states. In late 2011 and early 2012, Putin made public a new ideology, based in Ilyin, defining Russia in opposition to this model of Europe. In an article in Izvestiia on October 3, 2011, Putin announced a rival Eurasian Union that would unite states that had failed to establish the rule of law. In Nezavisimaia Gazeta on January 23, 2012, Putin, citing Ilyin, presented integration among states as a matter of virtue rather than achievement. The rule of law was not a universal aspiration, but part of an alien Western civilization; Russian culture, meanwhile, united Russia with post-Soviet states such as Ukraine. In a third article, in Moskovskie Novosti on February 27, 2012, Putin drew the political conclusions. Ilyin had imagined that “Russia as a spiritual organism served not only all the Orthodox nations and not only all of the nations of the Eurasian landmass, but all the nations of the world.” Putin predicted that Eurasia would overcome the European Union and bring its members into a larger entity that would extend “from Lisbon to Vladivostok.”

Putin’s offensive against the rule of law began with the manner of his reaccession to the office of president of the Russian Federation. The foundation of any rule-of-law state is a principle of succession, the set of rules that allow one person to succeed another in office in a manner that confirms rather than destroys the system. The way that Putin returned to power in 2012 destroyed any possibility that such a principle could function in Russia in any foreseeable future. He assumed the office of president, with a parliamentary majority, thanks to presidential and parliamentary elections that were ostentatiously faked, during protests whose participants he condemned as foreign agents.

In depriving Russia of any accepted means by which he might be succeeded by someone else and the Russian parliament controlled by another party but his, Putin was following Ilyin’s recommendation. Elections had become a ritual, and those who thought otherwise were portrayed by a formidable state media as traitors. Sitting in a radio station with the fascist writer Alexander Prokhanov as Russians protested electoral fraud, Putin mused about what Ivan Ilyin would have to say about the state of Russia. “Can we say,” asked Putin rhetorically, “that our country has fully recovered and healed after the dramatic events that have occurred to us after the Soviet Union collapsed, and that we now have a strong, healthy state? No, of course she is still quite ill; but here we must recall Ivan Ilyin: ‘Yes, our country is still sick, but we did not flee from the bed of our sick mother.’”

The fact that Putin cited Ilyin in this setting is very suggestive, and that he knew this phrase suggests extensive reading. Be that as it may, the way that he cited it seems strange. Ilyin was expelled from the Soviet Union by the Cheka—the institution that was the predecessor of Putin’s employer, the KGB. For Ilyin, it was the foundation of the USSR, not its dissolution, that was the Russian sickness. As Ilyin told his Cheka interrogator at the time: “I consider Soviet power to be an inevitable historical outcome of the great social and spiritual disease which has been growing in Russia for several centuries.” Ilyin thought that KGB officers (of whom Putin was one) should be forbidden from entering politics after the end of the Soviet Union. Ilyin dreamed his whole life of a Soviet collapse.

Putin’s reinterment of Ilyin’s remains was a mystical release from this contradiction. Ilyin had been expelled from Russia by the Soviet security service; his corpse was reburied alongside the remains of its victims. Putin had Ilyin’s corpse interred at a monastery where the NKVD, the heir to the Cheka and the predecessor of the KGB, had interred the ashes of thousands of Soviet citizens executed in the Great Terror. When Putin later visited the site to lay flowers on Ilyin’s grave, he was in the company of an Orthodox monk who saw the NKVD executioners as Russian patriots and therefore good men. At the time of the reburial, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church was a man who had previously served the KGB as an agent. After all, Ilyin’s justification for mass murder was the same as that of the Bolsheviks: the defense of an absolute good. As critics of his second book in the 1920s put it, Ilyin was a “Chekist for God.” He was reburied as such, with all possible honors conferred by the Chekists and by the men of God—and by the men of God who were Chekists, and by the Chekists who were men of God.

Ilyin was returned, body and soul, to the Russia he had been forced to leave. And that very return, in its inattention to contradiction, in its disregard of fact, was the purest expression of respect for his legacy. To be sure, Ilyin opposed the Soviet system. Yet, once the USSR ceased to exist in 1991, it was history—and the past, for Ilyin, was nothing but cognitive raw material for a literature of eternal virtue. Modifying Ilyin’s views about Russian innocence ever so slightly, Russian leaders could see the Soviet Union not as a foreign imposition upon Russia, as Ilyin had, but rather as Russia itself, and so virtuous despite appearances. Any faults of the Soviet system became necessary Russian reactions to the prior hostility of the West.

*

Questions about the influence of ideas in politics are very difficult to answer, and it would be needlessly bold to make of Ilyin’s writings the pillar of the Russian system. For one thing, Ilyin’s vast body of work admits multiple interpretations. As with Martin Heidegger, another student of Husserl who supported Hitler, it is reasonable to ask how closely a man’s political support of fascism relates to a philosopher’s work. Within Russia itself, Ilyin is not the only native source of fascist ideas to be cited with approval by Vladimir Putin; Lev Gumilev is another. Contemporary Russian fascists who now rove through the public space, such as Aleksander Prokhanov and Aleksander Dugin, represent distinct traditions. It is Dugin, for example, who made the idea of “Eurasia” popular in Russia, and his references are German Nazis and postwar West European fascists. And yet, most often in the Russia of the second decade of the twenty-first century, it is Ilyin’s ideas that to seem to satisfy political needs and to fill rhetorical gaps, to provide the “spiritual resource” for the kleptocratic state machine. In 2017, when the Russian state had so much difficulty commemorating the centenary of the Bolshevik Revolution, Ilyin was advanced as its heroic opponent. In a television drama about the revolution, he decried the evil of promising social advancement to Russians.

Russian policies certainly recall Ilyin’s recommendations. Russia’s 2012 law on “foreign agents,” passed right after Putin’s return to the office of the presidency, well represents Ilyin’s attitude to civil society. Ilyin believed that Russia’s “White Spirit” should animate the fascists of Europe; since 2013, the Kremlin has provided financial and propaganda support to European parties of the populist and extreme right. The Russian campaign against the “decadence” of the European Union, initiated in 2013, is in accord with Ilyin’s worldview. Ilyin’s scholarly effort followed his personal projection of sexual anxiety to others. First, Ilyin called Russia homosexual, then underwent therapy with his girlfriend, then blamed God. Putin first submitted to years of shirtless fur-and-feather photoshoots, then divorced his wife, then blamed the European Union for Russian homosexuality. Ilyin sexualized what he experienced as foreign threats. Jazz, for example, was a plot to induce premature ejaculation. When Ukrainians began in late 2013 to assemble in favor of a European future for their country, the Russian media raised the specter of a “homodictatorship.”

The case for Ilyin’s influence is perhaps easiest to make with respect to Russia’s new orientation toward Ukraine. Ukraine, like the Russian Federation, is a new country, formed from the territory of a Soviet republic in 1991. After Russia, it was the second-most populous republic of the Soviet Union, and it has a long border with Russia to the east and north as well as with European Union members to the west. For the first two decades after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russian-Ukrainian relations were defined by both sides according to international law, with Russian lawyers always insistent on very traditional concepts such as sovereignty and territorial integrity. When Putin returned to power in 2012, legalism gave way to colonialism. Since 2012, Russian policy toward Ukraine has been made on the basis of first principles, and those principles have been Ilyin’s. Putin’s Eurasian Union, a plan he announced with the help of Ilyin’s ideas, presupposed that Ukraine would join. Putin justified Russia’s attempt to draw Ukraine towards Eurasia by Ilyin’s “organic model” that made of Russia and Ukraine “one people.”

Ilyin’s idea of a Russian organism including Ukraine clashed with the more prosaic Ukrainian notion of reforming the Ukrainian state. In Ukraine in 2013, the European Union was a subject of domestic political debate, and was generally popular. An association agreement between Ukraine and the European Union was seen as a way to address the major local problem, the weakness of the rule of law. Through threats and promises, Putin was able in November 2013 to induce the Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych, not to sign the association agreement, which had already been negotiated. This brought young Ukrainians to the street to demonstrate in favor the agreement. When the Ukrainian government (urged on and assisted by Russia) used violence, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian citizens assembled in Kyiv’s Independence Square. Their main postulate, as surveys showed at the time, was the rule of law. After a sniper massacre that left more than one hundred Ukrainians dead, Yanukovych fled to Russia. His main adviser, Paul Manafort, was next seen working as Donald Trump’s campaign manager.

By the time Yanukovych fled to Russia, Russian troops had already been mobilized for the invasion of Ukraine. As Russian troops entered Ukraine in February 2014, Russian civilizational rhetoric (of which Ilyin was a major source) captured the imagination of many Western observers. In the first half of 2014, the issues debated were whether or not Ukraine was or was not part of Russian culture, or whether Russian myths about the past were somehow a reason to invade a neighboring sovereign state. In accepting the way that Ilyin put the question, as a matter of civilization rather than law, Western observers missed the stakes of the conflict for Europe and the United States. Considering the Russian invasion of Ukraine as a clash of cultures was to render it distant and colorful and obscure; seeing it as an element of a larger assault on the rule of law would have been to realize that Western institutions were in peril. To accept the civilizational framing was also to overlook the basic issue of inequality. What pro-European Ukrainians wanted was to avoid Russian-style kleptocracy. What Putin needed was to demonstrate that such efforts were fruitless.

Ilyin’s arguments were everywhere as Russian troops entered Ukraine multiple times in 2014. As soldiers received their mobilization orders for the invasion of the Ukraine’s Crimean province in January 2014, all of Russia’s high-ranking bureaucrats and regional governors were sent a copy of Ilyin’s Our Tasks. After Russian troops occupied Crimea and the Russian parliament voted for annexation, Putin cited Ilyin again as justification. The Russian commander sent to oversee the second major movement of Russian troops into Ukraine, to the southeastern provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk in summer 2014, described the war’s final goal in terms that Ilyin would have understood: “If the world were saved from demonic constructions such as the United States, it would be easier for everyone to live. And one of these days it will happen.”

Anyone following Russian politics could see in early 2016 that the Russian elite preferred Donald Trump to become the Republican nominee for president and then to defeat Hillary Clinton in the general election. In the spring of that year, Russian military intelligence was boasting of an effort to help Trump win. In the Russian assault on American democracy that followed, the main weapon was falsehood. Donald Trump is another masculinity-challenged kleptocrat from the realm of fiction, in his case that of reality television. His campaign was helped by the elaborate untruths that Russia distributed about his opponent. In office, Trump imitates Putin in his pursuit of political post-truth: first filling the public sphere with lies, then blaming the institutions whose purpose is to seek facts, and finally rejoicing in the resulting confusion. Russian assistance to Trump weakened American trust in the institutions that Russia has been unable to build. Such trust was already in decline, thanks to America’s own media culture and growing inequality.

Ilyin meant to be the prophet of our age, the post-Soviet age, and perhaps he is. His disbelief in this world allows politics to take place in a fictional one. He made of lawlessness a virtue so pure as to be invisible, and so absolute as to demand the destruction of the West. He shows us how fragile masculinity generates enemies, how perverted Christianity rejects Jesus, how economic inequality imitates innocence, and how fascist ideas flow into the postmodern. This is no longer just Russian philosophy. It is now American life.


Read more: http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/03/16 ... n-fascism/
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Re: Return of the Sith Lord: Evola & Traditionalism

Postby American Dream » Sat Mar 24, 2018 1:44 pm

http://wahidazal.blogspot.com/2018/03/c ... ikkka.html

Image

CLOWNS OF AMERIKKKA INTERNATIONALE


Look at this pattern. Raised liberal Catholic. Rejects it. Meddles with Protestanism and then goes atheist. Becomes Theravada Buddhist, the most exoteric, literalist brand of Buddhism. Somehow rediscovers God. Meddles with Salafi Islam, becomes a protestant Shi’ite. Become a Waqifi…Then a Mutazilite. And of course has experimented with countless theologies in between these phases. I have a list of archetypes of people I meet. And this archetype is always AmeriKKKans…They are damned in never being able to be stable in anything. Always changing or evolving theologies. That Nathan Abookire is like this too. Years ago he was changing theologies like literally on a weekly basis. And admits despite it all he remains a passionate agnostic. Now this guy Nick Orzech is exactly the same. A hyper perennialist Sufi. Constantly demanding Muslims accept that no religion can be absolutely true and we must accept religion on perennialist terms. Thomas and I have talked about this, and how he has seen people like this all his life. About how we all see these people illustrate a deep seated need to tear down people’s cherished beliefs. Like a colonial impulse to educate us about what our religion truly is. And it is always a white European male who fits this archetype. Always changing or questioning standard theology and tradition. Always trying to eat it all, trying to have it all. Both the New Age and Perennialism [i.e. Traditionalism] are not more than leftwing and rightwing versions of the same thing. And guess which demographic consumes both? White women will be more new agey while white males will be more into perennialism [i.e. Traditionalism], possibly due to masculinity issues. But it is a civilization problem. Hence the stat that the average amerikkkan changes churches over 10 times in a lifetime. And this only reinforces Imam Sadiq’s (ع) demand that we should properly screen people before letting them in.



~ Noman Nazir
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Re: Return of the Sith Lord: Evola & Traditionalism

Postby American Dream » Sun Mar 25, 2018 2:14 pm

Anton Shekhovtsov. The Palingenetic Thrust of Russian Neo-Eurasianism: Ideas of Rebirth in Aleksandr Dugin's Worldview1

(Anton Shekhovtsov, 'The Palingenetic Thrust of Russian Neo-Eurasianism: Ideas of Rebirth in Aleksandr Dugin's Worldview', Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 9/4 (2008), pp. 491-506.)

'You are famed,' he said, 'for being able to burn a rose to ashes and make it emerge again, by the magic of your art. Let me witness that prodigy. I ask that of you, and in return I will offer up my entire life.'2

The phrase cited in the epigraph to this article belongs to Johannes Grisebach, a doubting would-be disciple of Paracelsus, who asked for a miracle in order to believe in the great magical powers of alchemy. This fictional story, narrated by the brilliant Jorge Luis Borges, ended in disappointment for the unaccomplished pupil, as Paracelsus refused both to accept Grisebach's lifelong service and to show him magic tricks. The miracle that Grisebach was begging to be revealed is arguably one of the most famous alchemic acts, which is known as the palingenesis of a rose. This magische Operation, to use Paracelsus' mother tongue, was beautifully portrayed by the British scholar Isaac Disraeli in his grand work on philosophy, politics and literature:

These philosophers having burnt a flower, by calcination disengaged the salts from its ashes, and deposited them in a glass phial; a chemical mixture acted on it, till in the fermentation they assumed a bluish and spectral hue. This dust, thus excited by heat, shoots upwards into its primitive forms; by sympathy the parts unite, and while each is returning to its destined place, we see distinctly the stalk, the leaves, and the flower, arise: it is the pale spectre of a flower coming slowly forth from its ashes.3

This article deals with a less romantic palingenesis, namely the socio-political palingenesis of the 'cultural-ethnic community' at the core of Aleksandr Dugin's doctrine. Though tangibly removed from the magische Operation in both form(ula) and content, both ideas of rebirth are closely linked in a certain symbolic way, which will be exposed below.

In the course of several years, the political activities of the International Eurasian Movement's leader, Aleksandr Dugin, became the topic of dozens of academic works.4 Dugin's writings have become objects of thorough analysis and attentive dissection, if not deconstruction. Numerous studies reveal Dugin - with different degrees of academic cogency - as a champion of fascist and ultranationalist ideas, a geopolitician, an 'integral Traditionalist', or a specialist in the history of religions. This scholarly attention seems justified due to the role that Dugin currently plays in the socio-political life of the Russian Federation. He came into mainstream political prominence in early 1999, when he was appointed a special advisor to the contemporary Duma speaker, Gennady Seleznev. In 2003, Dugin established his non-governmental organisation, The International Eurasian Movement, the supreme council of which included a number of high-ranking officials such as, for example, Aleksandr Torshev, a vice-speaker of the Federation Council of Russia, Aslambek Aslakhanov, assistant to the President of Russia, Mikhail Margelov, a chairman of the International Commitee of the Federation Council of Russia, and some others. Currently, Dugin is a popular political commentator who seems to have a significant influence upon public opinion in Russia as he frequently appears on prime-time political talk shows and publishes in authoritative newspapers. This paper is not aimed at offering an entirely new conception of Dugin and his political views, though it will, hopefully, contribute to a scholarly vision of this political figure as a carrying agent of fascist Weltanschauung.

Many commentators have noted the eclecticism of Dugin's ideology, which is seen as a combination of contradictory ideas and conflicting attitudes. Alan Ingram argues that Dugin's writings are characterised by 'contradictions and obfuscation that make his work somewhat resistant to conventional interpretation or coherent summarisation'.5 In a recent article focused on Eurasianism and Russia's politics, Paradorn Rangsimaporn characterised Dugin as a 'political chameleon whose views adapt to the current circumstances'.6 In this article we resort to a contrary assumption - to be further corroborated - that Dugin's socio-political doctrine is, in its own way, consecutive and consistent.

This assumption is theoretically grounded on the idea that if, in the context of fascism, various - even seemingly conflicting - ideas are purposefully interpreted within the context of one or more components of the fascist ideological core, then neither their separate, individual meanings nor their apparent joint discrepancy matter more than the consistency of the component(s) they enforce. The well-known Jesuit slogan 'The end justifies the means' can be employed here to figuratively demonstrate that the weakness (irrationality, inconsistency, or plain silliness) of arguments may not be taken into consideration if the resulting postulate they endorse benefits from them as convincing instruments, even if only in the minds of adherents of the 'political religion' that fascism is.7 This article pursues a different aim than that of labelling selected elements as 'unimportant'. On the contrary, we shall analyse aspects, themes and trends within Dugin's doctrine thoroughly, treating them as parts of a larger integral component, viz. palingenesis, which is part and parcel of any permutation of fascist ideology.

Conceptual Framework

The conceptual framework for the current study is based on the writings of Roger Griffin, who - although not the first to introduce the idea of palingenesis to the realm of social sciences in general and fascism studies in particular - was the first to make the palingenetic myth an essential element of an ideal type of fascism. He defines the latter as 'a genus of political ideology whose mythic core in its various permutations is a palingenetic form of populist ultra-nationalism'.8 It might be worth noting that there is nothing inherently fascist in the palingenetic myth as such. Elsewhere, Griffin explains that '[t]he vision of rebirth, of palingenesis, of a new cycle of regeneration and renewal growing out of what appeared to be an irreversible linear process of decay, dissolution, or death, appears to be an archetype of human mythopoeia'.9 Examples of the palingenetic myths are well-known, e.g. the Phoenix, the Second Coming of Christ or the alchemical resurrection of a rose mentioned above.10 As an archetype, palingenesis is treated by Griffin in its sociological sense: according to fascist ideologues, the members of the nation (race or any other imagined or actual community) must undergo a process of radical transformation into 'new men'. Thus, the palingenetic transformation of a community implies 'social engineering' carried out by a totalitarian regime.11

Griffin interprets the concept of palingenesis in a way reminiscent of Immanuel Kant. A stark critic of revolutions, the German philosopher argued in his 1797 Metaphysics of Morals that palingenesis is 'the transition to a better constitution […], which requires a new social contract on which the previous one (now annulled) has no effect'.12 For Kant, one of the negative aspects of palingenesis was that the palingenetic transformation of a society 'would have to take place by the people acting as a mob, not by legislation'.13

The word 'palingenesis' implies, however, one more important message besides that of 'a new beginning'. As Griffin put it, the term is used in the sense of '“a new birth” occurring after a period of perceived decadence'.14 Williams, too, set forth the idea of a phase of decay that precedes the renewal: '[T]he birth of a new structure can only take place with the completed death of the old. In creating this new form none of the existing structure can be used'.15 Thus, the archetype of palingenesis suggests not only a radical new beginning or rebirth, but also a preceding 'liminoid' ('borderline', see below) stage of decadence, decay, chaos or even death of the structure to be reborn and renewed.

This interpretation of the concept of palingenesis is the basis of the current analysis, intended to highlight certain palingenetic moments within Dugin's doctrine to be added to the larger palingenetic myth or thrust inherent in Dugin's fascism. In order to explain the nature of this aggregation, and thus show the logic behind the combination and re-combination of seemingly contradictory ideas, we shall require three auxiliary theoretical concepts, which are thoroughly explained in Griffin's latest major book, Modernism and Fascism.16 Two concepts, liminality and liminoidality, originate from the anthropological theories of Arnold van Gennep as refined by Victor Turner and Maurice Bloch. According to those authors, every change in the social status of a person is accompanied by a rite of passage that consists of three distinct phases: (1) separation, i.e. withdrawal of a person from her/his group; (2) liminality, or the liminal phase, when the person's status is undetermined, unstable, neither the old nor the new one; (3) incorporation of the person into her/his new group. This rite of passage is required not for the sake of the individual, but for the collective society to regenerate itself in a ritualised cyclic process of births, weddings and deaths.17 The liminal phase can be seen as the most important in the ritual, as it is exactly the state when persons 'nourish themselves with metaphysical energy unavailable in “normal” phases of reality, and thus refuel society with transcendence on their symbolic return to it'.18 Turner and Bloch distinguished two types of transitional phases: the liminal state and the liminoid one. If the liminal state refers to an individual who performs a rite of passage in a process of restoring the society, the liminoid transition refers to the revolutionary transformation of the society itself, which 'undergoes a crisis sufficiently profound to prevent it from perpetuating and regenerating itself through its own symbolic and ritual resources'.19 Thus the liminal phase is followed by individuals' acquisition of new statuses in the same old society to restore its status quo, while the liminoid phase supports the annulment of the old 'social contract' and demolition of the status quo to give way to a new society.

The conclusion of a new 'social contract' can be considered an adaptation of society to the liminoid conditions of a profound crisis. Once the liminoidality of these conditions is perceived by a given community, its collective Weltanschauung - or, in Anthony Wallace's terms,20 'mazeway' - undergoes a radical change. The community begets a 'prophet', i.e. an individual who devises the form and content of the new society to be realised beyond the liminoid conditions. As the 'prophet' cannot create a new order from zero, he or she syncretises different ideological components - drawn both from traditional and 'neogenic' symbolical apparatuses, and perceived both from liminal and liminoid situations - into a new mazeway to impose it on the community. This reaggregation of 'healthy elements' of the past and 'novel inventions' of the present is called a 'mazeway resynthesis',21 which is our third auxiliary concept. It means a process of recombining different and even incompatible elements into a new Weltanschauung as a way of an innovative adaptation to the liminoid conditions on the community's revolutionary path to the socio-economical and cultural palingenesis supposed to result in the establishment of a new order.

Exploring Aleksandr Dugin's mazeway is not an easy task due to the nature of the intertwined palingenetic ideas permeating through Neo-Eurasian doctrine, and includes a wide scale of 'resynthesised' renewal ideas ranging from purely the socio-political and ideological to the esoteric and 'integral Traditionalist'. This Babylonian confusion seems to be a result of Dugin's lack of differentiation between the sphere of human knowledge and obscurantism: 'Many people keep telling me […], why politics and metaphysics are required to be mixed. I believe that the subjects we deal with are not just metaphysical, individual, mystical, or political'.22 The consistency of this 'labyrinth map' is as complex as it is misleading, to the extent that such a sophisticated scholar as A. James Gregor, who fails to recognise the fascist nature of the doctrine in question, asserts that 'Dugin's ideas run the gamut from the occult to absurd', and suggests accepting Dugin's fascism only if he is equally termed as 'a mystic, an occultist, a Sufi wiseman, a Samurai, and a “neo-Eurasian”, a “new socialist”, and a “conservative revolutionary”'.23 The weakness of Gregor's approach consists in his isolation of the individual themes exploited by Dugin who, however, does not see them as isolated but as reinforcing each other in the process of creating a new ideological synthesis. Obviously, no 'Samurai' themes would have been present in his works if it had not been for Yukio Mishima, a Japanese right-wing militarist and the 'Last Samurai' who unsuccessfully attempted a fascist coup d'état in Japan in 1970. That is also the case of the other terms that Gregor sarcastically applies to Dugin. For example, it seems obvious that Dugin's (perfunctory and largely pretentious) interest in Sufism can be traced back less to the original 'integral Traditionalist' teaching of the French Sufi René Guénon than to its re-interpretation (some would say, distortion) by Julius Evola and the Nouvelle Droite who, like Dugin, used it for formulating ideologies that, in one way or another, have been classified as fascist.24 Equally, Dugin's grasp of conservative revolutionary themes needs to be seen against the background of Ernst Jünger's soldierly völkisch nationalism or the legacy of Armin Mohler's 'conceptual framework [which] acknowledge[d] that Nazism was an integral part of the C[onservative] R[evolution]'25 - something admitted by Dugin himself.26 One could add to Gregor's labels that Dugin may be a 'psychologist' or 'historian of religions' and refer to Dugin's eulogies for Carl Jung, once president of the Nazi-dominated International General Medical Society for Psychotherapy, and Mircea Eliade, whose biography's well-known 'dark side' includes him being a minor ideologue of the interwar Romanian fascist Legion of Archangel Michael. Gregor's eloquent irony and Dugin's persistent amalgamation of the seemingly discordant spheres of politics and metaphysics prompt me here, first, to analyse individual palingenetic ideas that form a larger secular palingenetic myth. I shall distinguish - for heuristic purposes only - between the political and metaphysical palingenetic ideas of Dugin, highlighting different sub-currents in each. This approach is not meant to isolate different palingenetic ideas, but to identify their common underlying message.

The Socio-political Rebirth of Russia

According to Eduard Limonov, in a 1997 lecture called 'The Philosophic Russian' and delivered before the members of National Bolshevik Party, Dugin argued that by means of laborious self-perfection a new type of man must be created: a 'philosophic Russian', who would then be able to commence a revolution.27 Dugin's 'new type of man' thesis had a special connotation, far removed from piety and devotion - nouns that might come to mind upon hearing the phrase 'self-perfection'. The nature of the 'new mankind' is thoroughly revealed in Dugin's most important book to date, Osnovy geopolitiki [Foundations of Geopolitics],28 which ran into four editions from 1997 until 2000. In fact, it became so influential that its second edition included an afterword by General Lieutenant Nikolai Klokotov, former head of the General Staff Academy of the Russian armed forces. Grounded upon the legacy of such imperialist geopolitical theorists as Alfred Mahan, Friedrich Ratzel, Halford Mackinder, Karl Haushofer and Nicholas Spykman,29 the book both explores and exploits the issue of geopolitics. If Limonov highlighted the 'self-perfection' way of transition to the 'new type of mankind', Osnovy geopolitiki outlined a more pragmatic political and ideological strategy that would affect the whole world. We will not dwell here on the book's ultranationalist theme, although the focus on political palingenetic ideas will inevitably touch upon the ultranationalist issues, as it is the 'cultural-ethnic community' that is to be revived or renewed.

In Osnovy geopolitiki, Dugin linked geopolitical thought with the political level, as was once done by Adolf Hitler's main geopolitical thinker, Haushofer. Obviously, Dugin's work did not deal with the Nazi geopolitical paradigm but a Russia-oriented one. The main geopolitical enemy is also different: the US and the whole Atlanticist 'World Island' are now 'the Fiend', in classic Manichean tradition. Thus, the planet is roughly divided into three large spaces: the World Island (principally the United States and the UK), Eurasia (predominantly Central Europe, Russia, and Asia), and the Rimland (the states between the World Island and Eurasia). These ideas are not Dugin's but can be traced to imperialist geopolitical theoreticians. He seems to be a follower of a narrow trend in geopolitics, namely the fascist geopolitics of Haushofer30 and the Nouvelle Droite. Dugin juxtaposes two 'Orders': the U.S.-dominated, 'homogenizing' 'New World Order' against the Russia-oriented 'New Eurasian Order'. Based upon the Nouvelle Droite's peculiar new racism,31 Eurasia - according to Dugin - is to undergo an 'organic cultural-ethnic process' so that 'Russians shall live in their own national reality, and there shall also be national realities for Tatars, Chechens, Armenians, and the rest'.32 The Russian nation - perceived in a wide sense identifying Russians with Eurasians - is portrayed as immersed in a decadent historical phase, and Dugin offers a way of treating the 'problem':

For the Russian people to survive in these hard circumstances, for the Russian nation's demographics to rise, for the improvement of its severe condition in the ethnic, biological and spiritual sense, it is necessary to appeal to the most radical forms of Russian nationalism [italics in original]. Without it, no technical or economical measures will yield any results.33

The quote clearly shows that Dugin perceives Russia not in a liminal situation that - through modernising reforms - could have been followed by socio-political recovery, but rather in a liminoid one conditioned by the crisis, which is so profound that the traditional 'rite of passage' (reforms) is considered invalid. While rejecting the idea of the nation state with regard to Eurasian 'organic cultural-ethnic' communities, including the Russian one, Dugin states that the only way to escape the liminoid phase is '[n]ot a path of socio-political evolution, but a path of a geopolitical Revolution'.34

The idea of 'a geopolitical Revolution', or palingenesis, aimed at helping the Russian nation out of its 'severe ethnic, biological and spiritual state', is undoubtedly a novel concept within geopolitical theory - or rather, it does not belong to the geopolitical sphere at all. This idea can be seen as a cluster of Dugin's restructured mazeway and the core element of his political ideology outlined in Osnovy geopolitiki. Russia, in his view, is to be reborn in the form of an empire, which will establish a 'New Eurasian Order' in order to oppose 'the Far Western reign of the dead'.35

Political or 'geopolitical revolutionary' transformation should be, according to Dugin, paralleled by economic transformation. Already the 2001 programme of the Eurasia movement mentioned the political and economic sides of the projected empire. The programme promoted the idea of 'Eurasian centrism', a rather confusing notion that mixes 'social justice and social economy' and the 'value conservatism and cultural traditionalism' of the 'conservative revolution'.36 That notion can be termed as a combination of left-wing economic ideas with right-wing policy foundations. If the latter is supposed to be implemented in a revolutionary way, so is the left-wing economy, as Dugin sees socialism as an ultimately revolutionary ideology interpreted within the context of 'the Third Way'. In this interpretation, socialism is seen as containing palingenetic features in order to add finishing strokes to the economic and political renovation envisaged in Dugin's doctrine:

For genuine revolutionary socialism, progress consists of a Leap, a traumatic rupture in the even course of social history. Society (Gesellschaft), 'the old world', 'the world of violence' is, according to genuine socialist doctrine, not capable of 'improvement', but of 'abolition', 'destruction', 'demolition'. Instead, 'a new world' is to appear, 'our world', 'the world of Community (Gemeinschaft)', not the community destroyed by the capitalist society (Gesellschaft) […] but 'a New Community', 'an Absolute Heavenly Community', to which no elements of ontological and social entropy will have access.37

Concluding the discussion of political palingenetic themes in Dugin's ideology, we should mention the important trend - inherent in the overwhelming majority of new radical right-wing parties and movements - to add the discursive tools of other ideologies to the radical Right armoury. Griffin outlined this trend when speculating on the metamorphosis of the modern right-wing extremism that is trying to adapt to new socio-political circumstances created by a 'hostile' liberal democratic environment. Among other types of threats to democracy that right-wing extremism poses, Griffin argued that it 'can corrupt the cogency of Left-wing critiques of the status quo by hijacking them and editing them so as to corroborate an extreme-right analysis and agenda couched in metapolitical anti-Western terms'.38 Perhaps the best example of this strategy in respect to Dugin is his exploitation of 'neo-Luddite' issues in the process of rampant ideological synthesising and recombining. Dugin's attitude to machinery is outlined in his second doctoral dissertation Evolyutsiya paradigmalnykh osnovaniy nauki [Evolution of Paradigm Foundations of Science], where he writes of alienation from nature brought to humankind by the invention of tools, and praises 'some radical popular movements of a mystical and anti-bourgeois character, like the Luddites', who wrecked machines.39 His positive attitude toward 'neo-Luddites' also determines Dugin's respect towards John Zerzan,40 an American anarchist and primitivist philosopher,41 who became known to a wider public after the trial of Theodore Kaczynski (also known as 'the Unabomber'), which put an end to terrorist acts against universities and airlines under the slogan of a struggle against technological progress.42

In spite of the obvious antagonism and innate conflict between radical left-wing anarchism and fascism, Dugin does not hesitate to refer to Zerzan because of the strong palingenetic sentiment expressed in the works of the latter. The idea behind Zerzan's anarcho-primitivism is that of the recovery of a 'Golden Age' of natural harmony and simple way of life by 'dismantling' the present technology-based modernity and 'unmaking of civilization' itself. Primitivist thought aims at abolishing such crucial civilisational features as the concepts of time, language, number and culture, responsible for the present state of 'dis-ease'. Politically, however, Zerzan - as other anarcho-primitivists - rejects the establishment of any form of governmental rule, be it authoritarian, social-democratic, fascist or communist, as well as any hierarchical society structure in general. Dugin disregards this anarcho-primitivist antithesis to his own doctrine just as he ignores the entire essence of anarcho-primitivism, implying that its only 'healthy element' is the idea of an abolition of the liminoid conditions of modernity, diagnosed as abnormal and malignant, to be followed by the immediate coming of a new 'Golden Age', regardless of the political or cultural content of this 'new world'. Dugin is not the only extreme right ideologist interested in Zerzan's legacy. For instance, there was a short discussion entitled 'Evola and Zerzan on modern “civilisation”' in the Internet forum 'Stormfront White Nationalist Community'.43 Moreover, the first issue of the 'radical Traditionalist' magazine Tyr: Myth - Culture - Tradition featured a review of Zerzan's Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilization written by American journalist Michael Moynihan,44 who also happens to be the leader of the countercultural music band Blood Axis.

Exploiting Metaphysics

The first distinctly socio-political organisation Aleksandr Dugin joined before he engaged in politics was the historical-patriotic association 'Pamyat', known for its Black-Hundred-like anti-Semitism.45 Before this affiliation to Pamyat, his worldview had been shaped by esoteric and metaphysical teachings he was introduced to while a 'member' of the 'Yuzhinskiy circle' - or, in the words of one of its former members, the 'intellectual schizoid underground'.46 This circle was formed in the 1960s around the Russian writer and poet Yuri Mamleyev, who resided in two rooms of a shared apartment on Yuzhinskiy Lane in central Moscow. Mamleyev turned his quarters into an illegal literary salon where a volatile number of Soviet non-conformist artists, samizdat writers, poets and anti-system intellectuals met for discussions that could have been corpus delicti against those involved. The Yuzhinskiy circle was evidently anti-Soviet, but it stayed largely apolitical prior to Mamleyev's emigration to the United States in 1974.47

A few years after his departure, a large 'faction' of the circle fell under the influence of the mystical writer, poet and translator Yevgeniy Golovin. When Dugin joined the circle in 1980, he became associated with this very 'faction'. In the circle, Golovin was progressively propagating occultism, esotericism, the 'integral Traditionalist' works of René Guénon and other authors and, later, Conservative Revolutionary and fascist classics.48 Golovin's 'faction' was characterised by 'a philosophy of denial of the surrounding reality as something evil, hostile, erroneous and artificial'.49 As soon as the modern world was diagnosed as chaotic and decadent, his followers started asking themselves 'when exactly the humanity had “strayed from God”, and what needed to be done to return to “the Golden age”'.50 The combination of the radical rejection of the modern world and the eschatological expectations that were typical of the 'Yuzhinskiy circle' under the influence of Golovin led his followers to long for changing reality in a true palingenetic sense. As one commentator put it, '[Golovin's] disciples […] thought seriously about the transformation of this sinful world. “If not us, then who is destined to oppose the global chaos?” - they asked'.51 Due to the fact that Dugin's affiliation with the 'Yuzhinskiy circle' was the first time he participated in a 'movement' that perceived the liminoidality of the present, we can assume that it was within this 'movement' that Dugin was encouraged in his own mazeway resynthesis, which he would impose on his followers and fellow-travellers in subsequent years.

The projected renewal of the modern world required political activism and, following Golovin's advice, Dugin joined 'Pamyat' and tried to change its course to that of 'Traditionalism' as he saw it. Yet Dugin was soon denounced by 'Pamyat's' leader as a Zionist and expelled.52 Although Dugin failed to change the ideological course of this organisation - let alone to transform the modern world - he never gave up exploiting 'Traditionalist' and occult thesauri for his political cause. Here we shall discuss two currents of metaphysical teachings, namely 'integral Traditionalism' (or 'Perennialism') and the occult doctrines of Aleister Crowley and his successors, which are recombined in Dugin's mazeway and constitute a considerable discursive element in his ideology.

The American-Egyptian scholar Mark Sedgwick is perhaps the most important advocate of interpreting the Dugin phenomenon in the light of the 'integral Traditionalism' of the works of René Guénon, Ananda Coomaraswamy, Frithjof Schuon, and other philosophers. In his Against the Modern World, subtitled in a conspiratorial-theoretical manner as Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century, Sedgwick argued that Dugin's Neo-Eurasianism is a form of 'Traditionalism', although he failed to sufficiently substantiate his identification of Neo-Eurasianism with 'Traditionalism'. Sedgwick's point of view is indicative of Dugin's extensive use of the 'Perennialist' thesaurus and imagery. Dugin, however, interprets 'integral Traditionalism' not in its original, contemplation-oriented sense. Instead, he uses Julius Evola's activist approach to exploit the doctrine for political aims. Again, the concept of palingenesis, doubtlessly central to 'Perennialism', seems to be a major factor behind Dugin's attraction to 'Traditionalism', which he considered worthy of being an element in a newly invented worldview.

'Perennialist' authors believe that there was once a golden era, called Satya Yuga in Hindu religious tradition, which is now long gone as already three further eras (or Yugas) have succeeded it. If the world of Satya Yuga is ideal, its perfection declines when it is superseded by other eras, Treta Yuga and then Dvapara Yuga. The perfection of life and the world is almost completely absent during the last era, Kali Yuga (literally, age of vice). 'Perennialists' argue that we live in this era of decadence and decay. Nevertheless, there is nothing lost for the world as, given the cyclic nature of the succession of eras, a new Satya Yuga, a golden age, will definitely come. As the Yugas are seen as succeeding each other in a normal cosmological process, the phase of Kali Yuga can be considered as liminal.

The 'integral Traditionalist' doctrine, however, differs from the Hindu religious tradition, as the 'Perennialists' also believe that the golden age was marked by a 'transcendental unity of religions' reflected in the idea of 'a Primordial Tradition' of divine origin. As the perfection of the eras declined, 'the unity of religions' was also affected, and their transcendental essence can now only be found in their mystic sub-currents such as, for example, in Islamic Sufism. The mission of 'integral Traditionalists' is to reveal the elements of the 'Primordial Tradition' in modern - and mostly monotheistic - religions.53

Dugin uses the 'Perennialist' apparatus for different purposes, and, by doing so, distorts 'integral Traditionalism'. For instance, he tends to identify central 'Perennialist' concepts with specific socio-political and economical phenomena. Therefore, Kali Yuga is equated with 'materialism, democracy, equality, market economy, humanism, and progress',54 while the 'New Eurasian Order' established by 'new men' - i.e. 'the church of the last times'55 - is identified with the golden age:

Already in the twentieth century, some supposedly modern ideologies implicitly appealed to the idea of cyclic time, which implies degradation to be succeeded by a new golden age. The most striking ideologies of this kind were National Socialism and Bolshevism. The capitalist bourgeois regime was perceived as the pinnacle of degradation, and the red and brown romantics set off brilliant prospects of a New World and the renewal of the golden age. The active pessimism of the radicals directed the masses to achieve two objectives: The destruction of the degenerated (old) mankind and the creation of an ultimately new heavenly civilization. Behind the Bolshevik and Nazi purges and bloodshed, there were hidden mystical motives. This was not an excess of sadism, brutality or inhumanity. The elites were just confident: 'Man is indeed degraded!' The evening hours are inexorably approaching the twilight, but in the womb of darkness, there is a New Dawn ripening: The new world.56

For Dugin, Kali Yuga is not a liminal but rather a liminoid situation that one just cannot accept and contemplatively resign to, but should be terminated here and now at whatever human cost. Taking into account the perversion of the teachings of the 'integral Traditionalist' school - which are a mazeway resynthesis themselves - it is only logical that 'Perennialists' doubted that 'Guénon would recognise himself at all in Dugin's violent exhortations'.57 Dugin - in a way analogous to Evola - utilises the 'Perennialist' doctrine, or rather its palingenetic themes, in order to corroborate his own fascist ideology. Traditionalist themes become integrated into a reaggregated secular palingenetic myth, made up of different and even discordant ideas of rebirth and renewal.

If the 'integral Traditionalist' philosophy is distorted and manipulated by Dugin, the teachings of Crowley are used in a more curious manner. While claiming to be an Orthodox Christian (an Old Believer), Dugin approvingly refers to the legacy of the British occultist, who once proclaimed himself 'To Mega Therion' (Greek, the Great Beast) and is considered one of the most important authors of modern Satanism. This oddity, however, does not mean indiscriminateness on the part of Dubin. On the contrary, the consistency of his agenda clicks into place if the reason behind his references to Crowley's doctrine is revealed. Dugin wrote two essays on Crowley58 and tried to explain why 'the Great Beast's' ideas are significant to the builders of the 'New Eurasian Order'. In these essays, Crowley was presented as a 'conservative revolutionary' who promoted ideas of renewal of the modern world:

[Between the aeons of Osiris and Horus], there is a special period, 'the tempest of equinoxes'. This is the epoch of the triumph of chaos, anarchy, revolutions, wars, and catastrophes. These waves of horror are necessary to wash away the remnants of the old order and clear the space for the new one. According to Crowley's doctrine, 'the tempest of equinoxes' is a positive moment, which should be celebrated, expedited, and used by all the votaries of 'the aeon of Horus'. This is why Crowley himself supported all the 'subversive' trends in politics - Communism, Nazism, anarchism and extreme liberation nationalism (especially the Irish one).59

In fact, Crowley's political positions are little known.60 We can only conjecture whether Dugin is aware of the fact that Crowley's Irish separatist disguise served him well during World War I to win the favour of German secret service agents, as 'the Great Beast' was a MI-6 agent for the greater part of his life.61 However, it is evident that Dugin deliberately associated the palingenetic themes in the occult doctrine - themes that were obviously not central to it - with Crowley's virtual support of 'subversive' trends in politics. What can be highlighted in the quote above is a thesis that the liminoid conditions should be 'celebrated' by those who strive for the birth of a new order, and the votaries of palingenesis should become agents aggravating the perceived crisis to put an end to the old order.

Occult symbolism plays another important role in Dugin's ideological imagery. The eight-arrow star that became an official symbol of Dugin's organisation had first appeared on the cover of Osnovy geopolitiki, posited in the centre of the outline map of Eurasia. Misleadingly identified by Ingram as a swastika,62 this symbol is a modified 'Star of Chaos'63 and can be presumed to refer to 'Chaos Magick', an occult doctrine based on the writings of Crowley, Austin Osman Spare and Peter Carroll.64 It seems appropriate to consider 'Chaos Magick' itself a product of mazeway resynthesis, as the 'practitioners of chaos magic' openly admit that 'for them, worldviews, theories, beliefs, opinions, habits and even personalities are tools that may be chosen arbitrarily in order to understand or manipulate the world they see and create around themselves'.65 The 'Star of Chaos' is one of the symbolic 'tools' adopted from Michael Moorcock's fantasy books and popularised through role-playing games, especially the Warhammer 40K series.66

Though there is a slight difference between the common 'Star of Chaos' and the Neo-Eurasian symbol (the former being usually depicted in a round form while the latter is squared), this difference does not prejudice the direct cognation of the two symbols, as - to cite Crowley's most famous work, The Book of the Law, undoubtedly familiar to Dugin - the 'circle squared in its failure is a key also'.67 The symbolism concerned with the occult teachings of Crowley and the 'Chaos Magick' movement constitutes an important element in the style and imagery of Dugin's doctrine.68 Thus, Crowley terms the 'key', which is a 'squared circle', as 'Abrahadabra' and assigns the number 418 as the numerical value of the word. In an essay on the late Russian musical genius Sergey Kuryokhin, Dugin wrote:

The new aeon will be cruel and paradoxical. The age of a crowned child, an acquisition of runes, and a cosmic rampage of the Superhuman. 'Slaves shall serve and suffer'.
The renewal of archaic sacredness, the newest and, at the same time, the oldest synthetic super-art is an important moment of the eschatological drama, of 'the tempest of equinoxes'.
In his Book of the Law, Crowley argued that only those who know the value of number 418 can proceed into the new aeon […].
69

It is hardly a coincidence that an account on Kuryokhin's rock concert - organised in support of Dugin's 1995 election campaign - was titled 'Koldovstvo 418 proshlo udachno' [The Sorcery of 418 has been a success],70 as Dugin and his followers interpret the number 418 in its implicitly palingenetic sense. Dugin's 'Chaos Magick' can be interpreted in the same sense and referred to the perceived liminoid conditions of modernity, as for him, '“chaos magic” is a ritual practice associated with the change of the aeons'.71 These occult symbolic nodes, i.e. the number 418 and the word 'Abrahadabra'72 as well as the focus on 'Chaos Magick', point to the relevance of interpreting the official symbol (i.e. the 'Star of Chaos'73) of Dugin's Neo-Eurasian organisations as a graphic representation of the palingenetic idea that the liminoidality of the present phase of history should be maximised and brought to the boiling point by those who believe that this phase will be immediately followed by the establishment of a new order. Seen from this perspective, Dugin's Neo-Eurasian organisations must be - or rather are intended to be - the agents of both the deterioration of the liminoid conditions and the socio-political-cultural palingenesis in order to establish the 'New Eurasian Order'.

Conclusion

The palingenetic ideas of different nature - be they the socio-political and economical rebirth of Russia as a Eurasian empire, modernity's transformation into the 'New Heavenly Community', or the eschatological embrace of 'the tempest of equinoxes' as a premise of the new 'aeon of Horus' - which Dugin resorts to in numerous books, articles, proclamations and speeches, serve him in two distinct ways. First, they are used to engage new followers. Being psychological archetypes, the rite of passage and the myth of rebirth are powerful instruments of mobilisation of those who perceive the liminoidality of a situational or existential disenchantment with the quotidien. The diversity of palingenetic themes referred to by Dugin allows him to have high-ranking politicians, a variety of philosophers, scores of university students, as well as numerous avant-garde artists and musicians at the Neo-Eurasian 'amen corner'. Each group can enjoy a (mostly illusory) possibility of incarnating its own and special myth of rebirth by contributing to Dugin's political cause. In contrast to Borges's Paracelsus, Dugin does promise them that.

Second, all the palingenetic themes employed by Dugin are recombined and reaggregated in his worldview in the process of mazeway resynthesis, conditioned by the perception that the socio-political crisis, which Dugin's motherland (be it Russia or the whole Eurasia) supposedly faces, is not a liminal situation that can be overcome by traditional means of reforms but rather a liminoid state that the society can only escape in a revolutionary way. The synthesis of different ideas of renewal reinforce - directly or indirectly - a larger secular palingenetic myth of Neo-Eurasianism. Lying at the core of Dugin's worldview this myth functions as a discursive basis, on which the 'organic cultural-ethnic community' is sacralised and comes to be seen as a mythologised historical subject. Thus Dugin breaks off with the secular interpretation of the objective reality, and turns his socio-political worldview into a political religion. In its terms, Eurasia is the ultimate 'spiritual' value that - once endangered by a perceived decadent state - must be saved at whatever cost through a 'geopolitical revolution' which would establish the 'New Eurasian Order'. To realise this aim, Dugin's doctrine requires an embodiment in a political regime that would totally subordinate the society to the value(s) of the political religion. This implies that the realisation of the Neo-Eurasian project is only possible under a totalitarian regime.

Our focus on various ideas of renewal and rebirth aimed at conveying the integral consistency of Dugin's doctrine seen as a variety of fascism. In conclusion, it might be worth adding that Dugin's Neo-Eurasianism can be interpreted as fascist not only within the analytical framework of Roger Griffin or the academics who subscribe to the 'new consensus' in fascist studies,74 but also according to the model of fascism, constructed by Dugin himself:

Fascism - this is nationalism yet not any nationalism, but a revolutionary, rebellious, romantic, idealistic [form of nationalism] appealing to a great myth and transcendental idea, trying to put into practice the Impossible Dream, to give birth to a society of the hero and Superhuman, to change and transform the world.
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Re: Return of the Sith Lord: Evola & Traditionalism

Postby American Dream » Sat Jun 16, 2018 3:02 pm

Dreamer of the Day: Francis Parker Yockey and The Postwar Fascist International
by Kevin Coogan; Autonomedia [SC]; ISBN I-57027-039-2

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pp. 319-320.

. . . . . Evola’s SD work at the end of the war is shrouded in mystery. Historian Richard Drake says that while he was in Vienna, ‘Evola performed vital liaisons for the SS as Nazi Germany sought to recruit a European army for the defense of the Continent against the Soviet Union and the United States.’ According to his own account, Evola spent his time living incognito while doing ‘intellectual’ research. But what kind of research? . . .

. . . . While Evola was in Vienna, the SD supplied him with a series of arcane texts plundered from private libraries and rare book collections. The SD bureau that provided him with these documents was Amt VII, an obscure branch that served as an RSHA research library. With this precious archive, Evola closely studied Masonic rituals and translated certain ‘esoteric texts’ for a book called Historie Secrete des Societes Secretes. It never appeared because Evola claimed that all his documents were lost during the Russian bombardment. . . .

. . . . But why would the SD actively involve itself in Evola’s arcane research at a time when hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers were sweeping into the Reich? And why would Evola choose to live in Vienna under a false name and devote his time to such a strange project? Could the answer to this question be found in the cryptic reference to Evola’s ‘efforts to establish a secret international order’ in the 1938 SS report?

I believe that Evola’s Vienna project was intimately linked to the development of what I will call ‘the Order,’ a new kind of Knights Templar designed to successfully function sub-rosa. Well before the end of World War II, the intelligence and financial networks of the Third Reich were hard at work preparing underground networks to survive the coming Allied occupation. Escape lines to South America and the Middle East were organized. Bank accounts were created in Switzerland and other neutral nations to finance the underground with plunder the Nazis had looted from occupied Europe. But how was this secret empire to be managed, except by a virtually invisible ‘government in exile’?


4. Like SS chief Himmler, Evola saw the SS as the successors to the Kshatriya class (the Hindu warrior caste.) Seeing Germany and Europe as succumbing to “barbarian invasion,” Evola saw a pagan, anti-Christian mysticism as necessarily antithetical to the Judeo-Christian culture which, he felt, had led the West to decline before the “Bolshevik hordes” of the Soviet Union and the “chewing gum imperialism” of the United States.

Kevin felt that this organization (reflecting the ideological stance of an element of the Waffen SS) would be pan-European in scope and orientation, and not necessarily entirely chauvinistic from a Nordic or Germanic racial and national standpoint. Nourished by bank accounts secreted abroad, this hypothetical organization functions in an underground fashion. (The funds that nourished this institution would necessarily have derived from the Bormann Organization.) The Order appears to have established ostensibly friendly relations with the West.

Ibid., pp. 320-1.

. . . . For years, Evola had been fascinated by knightly orders as expressions of the Kshatriya caste of warrior aristocrats. In the formal structure of the SS, he saw the precursor to a new Ordenstaat, a State ruled by an Order. He also understood the great advantages provided by medieval orders of chivalry due to their transnational composition. Crusading orders, like the Knights Templar and the Knights of Saint John of Jerusalem, were pan-European, with separate ‘national’ sections (‘langues,’ or tongues) unified through a Council presided over by a Grand Master. After the collapse of fascist state power, a new Order, an ‘invisible college’ of sorts, was needed not only to manipulate bank accounts and travel schedules but to have policy-making functions. Nor could it simply be run under the auspices of the Vatican, since Evola believed that Rome’s downfall had been caused by the acceptance of Christianity by the dominant faction of the Roman elite. The Emperor Constantine’s official embrace of the ‘gentle Nazarene’ in 313 A.D. had culminated, a hundred years later, in Alaric’s sack of Rome. With the American chewing-gum imperialists threatening in the West, and the new Huns sweeping in from the East, was the situation in1945 really so different? The Order was a vessel for those ‘Hermetic’ elements of the conservative Revolution, old ruling class, and new Nazi elite not entirely beholden to the political, cultural, and religious ‘Guelf’ wing of the European aristocracy which remained ideologically committed to the continued propagation of the ruling Christian mythology.

This account of the origins of the Order is obviously speculative, and I advance it as hypothesis, not fact. Yet if I am correct the SD really did have a need for Evola’s unique talents. With his extensive knowledge of matters esoteric and occult; his fascination with secret societies and knightly Orders; his Waffen SS transnationalism; his ties to some of the highest figures in fascism, Nazism, and movements like the Iron guard; and his loyal service to the SD, Baron Evola was a perfect candidate to help theorize a new underground Order. As the SD’s equivalent of Albert Pike, the former Confederate Army general who designed the rituals for the Scottish Rite Masons in the late 1800’s, Evola’s task was to help create the inner organizational and ritual structure for the Grand Masters of a secret Shamballah whose financial nerve center was carefully hidden away in Swiss bank accounts.

With the war rapidly coming to an end, however, the Order lacked the time to implement its plans. With support from the top RSHA leadership, a deception game was begun with both Allied intelligence and the Catholic Church. Utilizing Wall Street and Vatican fears of communism, some of Himmler’s top cronies, like SS General Karl Wolff, became Damascus-road converts to a ‘kinder, gentler’ SS eager to establish friendly relations with both the Americans and the Holy See.


5. This organization may very well have begun working with the U.S. intelligence apparat after the war, as evidenced by, among other things, the collaboration between post-war SS elements and the CIA. Coogan hypothesizes that CIA director Allen Dulles may have played a primary role in such an accord.

Another influence on a Dulles/Order collaborative relationship may have been psychologist Carl Jung, who was connected to Dulles and to the Third Reich.

Ibid., p. 334.

. . . . Behind the strategy of tension there lurked what appears to have been a devil’s pact between the Order and Allen Dulles. Until Dulles was named CIA director by President Eisenhower (and his brother, John Foster Dulles, became director by President Eisenhower (and his brother, John Foster Dulles, became secretary of state), operational links to the Nazi underground came primarily from the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), headed by Dulles protégé Frank Wisner, the former chief of OSS operations in Bucharest, Romania. After the war, Dulles, Wisner, Angleton, and OPC’s Carmel Offie virtually ran covert operations in Italy as their own private affair. . . .

. . . . The OPC’s budget was $4.7 million in 1949. Three years later, when Dulles was still only CIA deputy director, it had reached $82 million. OPC personnel had humped from 302 to 6,954. OPC was officially incorporated into the CIA in 1952 as the Agency’s directorate of Plans. In1956, after President Eisenhower established the Killian Commission to investigate the Agency, it was discovered that more than half of the CIA’s personnel and 80 percent of its budget had been devoted not to intelligence-gathering but to psychological and political warfare programs. Throughout this entire time, the Dulles network was intimately involved in complex deals with factions inside the postwar SS. . . .

. . . Did Dulles offer to protect elements of the SS in return for its support for CIA-backed anti-Soviet operations in Europe and the Third World? Did he think that granting the Order a certain amount of autonomy was a small price to pay for bringing it into the American camp? Might he even have been personally compromised in some way, or manipulated by the Dulles family psychiatrist, Carl Jung? Men Among the Ruins, then, may have been less a concession by Evola to American power than a signal that some sort of understanding reached by Dulles and Wolff at the end of the war was now fully operational. . . .


6. More about Jung, Dulles and Mary Bancroft, an OSS operative and Dulles’s mistress.

Ibid.; p. 340.

. . . . Jung also treated Dulles’s wife, Clover, for years. One of Jung’s assistants, Mary Bancroft, was an OSS operative in Switzerland as well as Allen Dulles’s mistress. Like Evola, Jung was an expert in myth, symbol, and psyche with a complex and ambiguous relationship to the Third Reich. . . .


7. Significantly, the Order appears to have overlapped, and also worked with, elements of the East Bloc, including former Soviet and East German national security officials. The organization also maintained contacts with “anti-imperialist,” Third World liberation movements.

Steve Bannon’s discussion of Alexander Dugin gains significance in this context.

Ibid., p. 369.

. . . . [Jan] Paulus then reported that the British had uncovered the fact that two Russian generals, Bulganin and Kubalov, were working closely with the Nazis; they also found that the Russians had set up a counterpart to General Matthew Ridgeway’s SHAPE, headed by a Generl Shugaev, in East Germany. The British had ‘conclusive evidence.’ That the [Werner] Naumann circle maintained close ties to General Vincenz Muller, the brains behind the East German police. Paulus thought that Churchill wanted to use this information both to warn Washington that Germany was unreliable and to gain leverage over Adenauer, even to the point of being able to topple his government if necessary.

He said that ‘Britain has an extremely extensive dossier about the Nazi activities which she will reveal later in case Eisenhower decides to push his broad German policy too far. For instance, the British have conclusive evidence that the Nazi activities have been financed by the Ruhr industrialists . . . Additional evidence that the Ruhr industrialists have been collaborating very extensively with the Nazis is the fact that when [former Nazi finance minister] Dr. Schacht opened his bank in Dusseldorf, the minister of interior and the minister of economics were present.’ . . .

. . . The British particularly feared the Naumann circle’s astonishing influence in the Middle East. According to a March 1953 report by the Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League (NSANL), Dr. Gustav Scheel, a Bruderschaft leader arrested with Naumann, maintained excellent ties to the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. German corporations wishing to do business in the Middle East and Africa first had to approach Naumann, Scheel, Skorzeny, and the Grand Mufti. Scheel was especially close to Iran’s nationalist leader, Dr. Mohammad Mossadegh, and supported Iranian efforts to nationalize Western oil companies. . . .


8. In addition, the Order appears to have exploited its contacts within both East and West blocs to further its own fascistic and elitist agenda, playing both sides against the middle during the Cold War.

Ibid. p. 360.

. . . . Any purely secular interpretation of the divisions in the far right between the ‘pro-Russian’ and the ‘pro-American’ factions of the Black International that avoids the ‘occult’ would conclude that political differences divided the two tendencies. An Order, however, is not structured along conventional political lines. Such an organization can dictate sharp turns and reversals in seemingly fixed political logics because the ‘political,’ crudely understood, is not the motivating force. . . .

. . . . Whether Yockey or anyone else tilted East or West, and at what time, and to what degree, and for how long, and under what conditions, was essentially a tactical question. The Order, like any intelligence agency, was a kind of octopus with many tentacles, not jus a ‘left’ and ‘right’ one. While I believe that there were legitimate policy arguments inside the postwar underground, as might be expected, I am not at all sure that it is meaningful to conceptualize a split inside the Order along rigid ‘East’/ ‘West’ lines. An organization like the Order was necessary precisely to prevent the total domination of postwar Europe by either the Americans or the Russians. By playing off the U.S. and USSR against one another, the Order equally ensured its own ability to survive and prosper. In music, the basic theme can sometimes be quite simple. The real test is how well you play the complex variations. . . .


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Re: Return of the Sith Lord: Evola & Traditionalism

Postby American Dream » Thu Jun 28, 2018 7:22 am

Roger Griffin on the fascist ultra-nation (extract)

Posted on June 28, 2018 by @ndy

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The ability of the ultra-nation to have connotations both of a regenerated nation-state and of a reborn civilization or race, sometimes simultaneously, gives this component of the central fascist myth, or ‘fascist minimum’ — what the theorist Michael Freeden would call its ‘ineliminable core’ — particular flexibility and affective appeal in the context of palingenetic longings at the time of crisis. As an emotive force, and as a source of identity and purpose, the strength of fascist ideology often lies in the nebulousness and utopian quality of its vision, not in its practicality or realizability. Thus the fact that fanatically patriotic neo-fascists from different countries may attend international rallies […] or conferences […] is a paradox, but certainly no contradiction.

The fascist ultra-nation can be envisaged as a supra-individual product of the fascist imagination which can partake of aspects of both the historical ‘motherland’ and ‘fatherland’, but also of mythicized historical and racial pasts and future destinies. It provides the mythic focal point for the fascist to feel part of a supra-personal community of belonging, identity and shared culture (whether based on history, language, territory, religion or blood, or a mixture of several such components). It is into this mystic entity that the individual is encouraged to submerge his or her tormented, angry, disoriented self entirely, thus dissolving it into an ‘identificatory community’ rather than forming part of an ‘integrative community’, one which respects the difference, individualism and humanity of ‘the Other’. In some respects, the ‘ultra-nation’ also takes on aspects of the Judeo-Christian God: it lives both in and through the unfolding of historical time and, contemporaneously, in the supra-historical eternity of the people or race. Moreover, in extreme situations — when the ‘motherland’ is threatened or the ‘fatherland’ commands it — it may demand love, commitment and suffering from the faithful literally to the point of the ultimate sacrifice, thus making their life holy through death while further sanctifying the ultra-nation.

On a psychological level, identification with the ‘ultra-nation’ can thus serve as a portal to transcendence for individuals whose personal lives have been shattered by socio-political and economic upheavals that threaten their core identity as individuals, or whose inner lives might otherwise be experienced as devoid of purpose, meaning and hope because of the personal crises they are experiencing. Heroic service to this supra-personal entity enables them to enter its highly mythicized story, its history, and perhaps fleetingly know directly the sensation of redemption and immortality evoked in the sacred texts and rituals of military burial and commemoration ceremonies dedicated to fallen soldiers all over the world. It should be noted, however, that the two world wars proved that, at times of national danger, even liberal democratic nation-states can develop intense, elaborate and at least partially spontaneous political religions centred on the moral imperative of individual ‘blood’ sacrifice to the national community. The difference is that liberal societies do not abandon civil nationalism and political liberalism as the basis of the ideal social order to which life should return after the crisis. In contrast, fascism sees the sacralized nation that may emerge under democracy in extremis at a time of national emergency and war not as an exceptional state, but as the inauguration of a new societal norm. Where liberal constraints were removed in the 1930s and 1940s, fascism attempted to engineer a sustained climate of extreme patriotism, reinforced in some cases by terror, which demanded the selflessness and sacrifice of a whole generation as the precondition for the replacement of ‘sick’ liberal democracy by a ‘healthy’ totalitarian new order inhabited, once the wars were over, by a socially engineered population of believers purged of theological, humanist or individual conscience.

It is implicit in this account that, following an early modern tradition of conceiving the subjects of a regime as constituting a ‘body politic’, whether autonomously self-regulating (as posited by [url]Francisco Suárez[/url]) or created from above (as proposed by Thomas Hobbes), the fascist imagination turns ‘the people’ into an intrinsically anti-democratic and anti-egalitarian, organic entity signified by such words as https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/suarez‘Volk’ (German), ‘volk’ (Dutch), ‘narod’ (Croatian) or ‘poporul’ (Romanian). However, it is important not to infer from this that fascism is inherently biologically or genetically racist. Certainly, any organic concept of the nation is intrinsically racist in the way that it tends to treat ethnicities or nationalities as idealized singular entities which are threatened by miscegenation (ethnic mixing), mass migration, cosmopolitanism, materialism, individualism or absorption into international bodies. Yet, as will become apparent […] the ultra-nation of the fascist political imagination is not necessarily racist in biological, pseudo-scientific, or eugenic terms. Nor is it necessarily obsessed with ‘blood-lines’, racial purity or heredity. Nor is it necessarily ‘eliminationist’, or genocidal in the manner of Nazism, the Iron Guard, or the Ustasha, in its treatment of other nationalities, ethnicities and out-groups.

From what has been said earlier about the way the fascist ‘ultra-nation’ is not necessarily equated with the nation-state, it is also clear that fascist ultranationalism does not preclude tactical alliances being forged with other ultranationalisms in a common supranational cause to fight same international forces of ideological hostility or decadence held to be destroying the organic nation. Ultranationalism, despite its primary stress on the need for national or racial palingenesis, can thus acquire an important international or transnational dimension beyond narrow cultural, linguistic and ethnic divides, a fact being increasingly recognized by fascist studies.

~ Roger Griffin, Fascism, Polity, 2018, pp.43–45


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Re: Return of the Sith Lord: Evola & Traditionalism

Postby American Dream » Mon Jul 09, 2018 11:57 am

DARK STAR RISING: FASCISM AND THE OCCULT MEET IN RUSSIAN PHILOSOPHER ALEXANDER DUGIN

GARY LACHMAN

Probably his most violent remarks concerned the war in Ukraine. When asked his view on events he said “Kill them, kill them, kill them” – the Ukrainians, that is. The outburst cost him his job in the Department of Sociology at Moscow State University.[9] Dugin is also believed to be responsible for the fake news story that Ukrainian soldiers “crucified” a young boy in Slovyansk, in eastern Ukraine.[10] As an expert on “conspirology”, the study and propagation of conspiracies, Dugin no doubt recognizes that the truth of some statement is no longer important, only its effectiveness, an insight he shares with Trump.

By the time of his arrest Dugin had already been expelled from the Moscow Aviation Institute because of his interest in various neo-Nazi ideas. His fascination with the Third Reich started early and was nurtured in the bohemian occult-science fiction scene he entered in his late teens. One book popular with this set was The Morning of the Magicians, which spoke of Hitler as “ ‘Guénonism’ plus tanks.”[11] While this is not quite accurate, it did set the mould for the blend of occultism and far-right radical politics that attracts Evola’s readers and colored Dugin’s career.

He was taken under the wing of Yevgeny Golovin, an alcoholic alchemist also obsessed with Hitler. Another older bohemian who guided the young Dugin was Geydar Dzhemal, a Russian Islamist who, like Evola, promoted a kind of religious radicalism. It was a milieu in which Satanism, séances, Ouija boards, occultism, drugs, sex, alcohol, role playing, and fascism came together into a heady brew.

Golovin was something of a Svengali, “zombifying” his followers and leading them through a variety of “performances,” directing them in fantasies as sailors, poets, Knights of the Round Table, and, invariably, Nazis, an early outing in the role-playing that characterizes Dugin’s career. Dugin soon became another dominant figure on this scene, zombifying others himself, as gurus and demagogues do. With his pudding-bowl haircut, hippie guitar, cavalry breeches, and aristocratic manner, he presented a striking persona, one with “a dash of fascist imagery and a repertoire of occult songs.” “Dash” however does not quite cover Dugin’s Nazi obsession. He called himself “Hans Sievers,” after the director of Himmler’s Ahnenerbe, which researched “Aryan history,” and once smashed a bottle of port at a train station while shouting “Sieg Heil!” In 1947 the real Hans Sievers was hanged at Nuremberg.[12]

Dugin later claimed that his Hitlerism was only an expression of his anti-Soviet feelings, a manifestation of the “transgressive” stance that included his interest in the dark poetry of the Comte de Lautrémont’s Songs of Maldoror, whose beautiful sadism inspired the Surrealists. He was, we might say, a kind of “fascist dandy.” Years later, when questioned about his Nazi behaviour, he would claim, in standard postmodern fashion, that it was a joke, a bit of irony, implying that those who took him seriously had the problem, something that alt-righters and 4Channers rely on today. This “plausible deniability” is difficult to match with the neo-Nazi atmosphere in which he came of age and the politics he pursued.

It was in this milieu that Dugin came upon Evola, whose books, oddly enough, were available off the shelf in the Lenin Library, not far from where he and Golovin’s other zombies would meet. Dugin, who taught himself French and other languages, grabbed a copy of Evola’s Pagan Imperialism, the German edition, and quickly produced a samizdat edition of the work.[13] This was the beginning of a career that would unite occultism with far-right politics in an often dizzying mix. He would later write books about Evola and Guénon, linking them to the Russian Orthodox Church, of which he is a firm believer. In fact, he is an Old Believer, joining the branch of the faith that maintain the rituals and practices prior to the reforms of the seventeenth century. As Guénon advised, he stuck close to the roots of tradition, even to wearing the beard and peasant dress associated with the sect.

In 1986 Dugin joined Pamyat, an organization dedicated to restoring old monuments. This innocuous aim was soon overshadowed by the anti-Semitism of its leader, Dmitry Vasilyev, a paranoid actor who believed the Jews were destroying Russia’s patrimony and had sent Zionists to kill him.[14] Pamyat attracted more hooligans, crypto-fascists, and nationalists than art restorers but it stirred a patriotic sense in Dugin; he began to wear a black shirt, leather belt, and shoulder strap, the garb of the Black Hundred, a patriotic tsarist movement of the early twentieth century. The historian Walter Laqueur, who wrote a book about the Black Hundred, noted Dugin’s activities as early as 1993; with Dugin, he wrote, “we move from the realm of a quasi-rational approach to the depths of irrationality.”[15] Readers of Dugin out of sympathy with his ideas may agree.


From DARK STAR RISING: Magick and Power in the Age of Trump by Gary Lachman


https://www.dailygrail.com/2018/06/dark ... der-dugin/
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