Dugin: What Is Wrong With Europe?

"Liberalism has turned totalitarian. 
There is no liberty to not be a liberal."
Morris reads the article by Alexander Dugin.

***

By Alexander Dugin: In order to correctly understand the nature of the present crisis, we need to briefly analyze the situation as a whole. I suggest three levels for this analysis:

· the ideological

· the economic

· the geopolitical

Liberal ideology is the source of the problem

Ideologically, the problem is liberalism which is imposed on Europe and the rest of humanity by the Anglo-Saxon world as the only unique and official ideology. Liberalism affirms only the individual identity and prohibits any kind of collective or organic identities. Thus, step by step, liberalism refuses religion, nation, gender, and belongingness in general in order to set the individual completely free from any kind of holism. A core political manifestation of this problem is gender, as liberals insist on the “optional nature” of gender and present it as an individual choice. Before, the liberal struggle was centered around the individual choice of religion or nationality, but now it has reached the point of gender. Yet another crucial problem is immigration. Refusing to acknowledge religious or cultural identities, or even gender-based identity, an immigrant is not considered to be a bearer of a different identity. Rather, he is just another atomic individual. Thus, liberalism destroys any sense of collective identity and, as logically follows, liberalism destroys European identity (with so-called tolerance and theories of human rights). Together with the intensive destruction of sexual identity, it accelerates the end of society as such. The very fact of accepting liberalism as the mainstream ideology guarantees the end of Europe itself.

The final step in the development of liberalism will be the negation of the human identity as a collective one at all. Thus, trans-humanism will be welcomed as part of the liberal agenda for tomorrow.

Liberalism is a nihilistic ideology. It insists on liberty from any kind of collective identity, but never suggests anything positive. When in competition with the totalitarian ideologies of the past, communism and fascism, liberalism appeared to be concrete and attractive because it negated such totalitarianism while positing itself as a real alternative. But when the totalitarian competition was overcome, the nihilistic nature of liberalism came to be fully revealed. It can only negate things, and cannot affirm anything constructive. It is not the ideology of positive freedom, but of negative liberty. Although yesterday this might not have been so explicit, today it is clear.

Liberalism has turned totalitarian. There is no liberty to not be a liberal. One must be a liberal. You can choose to be a left liberal, a right liberal, or a center liberal and, in the extreme case, you can be a far left or far right liberal, but you must always be a liberal. If you are judged to be illiberal by liberals, then you are finished, labelled as an extremist, terrorist, and so on. The liberals can only tolerate liberally tolerant people. If you are not tolerant in the liberal sense, you are intolerable.

With what can we oppose liberalism? In the 20th century, there were two options: communism (socialism) and fascism. Both failed historically, i.e., politically, philosophically, militarily, and economically. They now exist only as simulacra. They are either hyper-marginal or are manipulated by liberalism. Hence the utilization by liberals of post-modernist liberal-communism, anarchism, Trotskyism, and liberal-fascists in the service of promoting their cause in exactly the same way that Islamic fundamentalism is used as a weapon of the US. Thus, my idea is opposing liberalism (the first political theory) not with the second political theory (Marxism) or the third one (fascism), but with a fourth. I have developed this idea in my book The Fourth Political Theory which has been translated into many languages, including German. We need to combat liberalism, refuse it, and deconstruct it entirely. At the same time, we need to do so not in the name of just class (as in Marxism) or in the name of the nation or race (as in fascism), but in the name of the organic unity of the people, social justice, and real democracy. Liberals interpret democracy as the rule of minorities. We need to restore the original meaning of the term in which democracy is the rule of the majority, the organic majority, the majority sharing a common identity, that is, the rule of the historically and culturally united people.

 Financial capitalism is a catastrophe

 Economically, the problem is in financial capitalism pretending to have overcome the sector of productive industry in favor of stock market technology. Such capitalism is monopolistic and creates bubbles instead of developing economic infrastructure. Such an economy is based on financial speculation (of the G. Soros type) and clings to the illusion of infinite growth. This contradicts reality. The middle class is not growing any more and the growth of financial markets does not correspond to the growth of the actual productive sector. Giving all the attention to financial institutions and promoting the outsourcing of the productive sector to third world countries over the course of globalization is the way to the abyss. The first waves of the crisis have already passed, but new waves will be here soon. The economic collapse of the southern European countries like Greece and, in the near future Italy and Spain, is just the tip of the iceberg of an immense catastrophe. European unity is based on the full acceptance of this logic of financial capitalism. Yet now only Germany struggles to keep the economy in touch with industrial realities, refusing to embark on the train into nothingness. This is the reason for the anti-German hysterics in Europe and the US. The German economy may be the last productive economy, while the others are already virtual economies.

 Thus, we need to reconstruct Europe on an alternative economic basis.

Infinite growth is but a liberal illusion. The fall of the middle class is the harsh reality at hand. The way out of this is a complete revision of the myths of financial capitalism.

Atlanticism is wrong

Geopolitically, today’s Europe is an Atlanticist entity. Geopolitics, as envisioned by the Englishman Sir H. Mackinder, asserts that there are two types of civilization - the civilization of Sea (Seapower) and the civilization of Land (Landpower). They are constructed on opposite systems of values. While Seapower is purely mercantile, modernist, and materialist, Landpower is traditionalist, spiritual, and heroic. This dualism corresponds to Werner Sombart’s conceptual pair of Händlres and Helden. Modern European society is fully integrated into the civilization of Sea which manifests itself in the strategic hegemony of North America and NATO.

 This situation prevents Europe from becoming an independent geopolitical entity. On a more profound level, it perverts the real geopolitical nature of Europe as a continental entity – Landpower.

 Thus, this situation must be changed and the Landpower strategy based on real European sovereignty must be restored. Instead of Atlanticism, Europe needs to become a strategic continental power.

 Europe and Russia

In summarizing these points, we can logically deduce where we stand on European-Russian relations.

Contemporary Russia is

·      relatively hostile towards liberalism (more traditionalist and conservatively inclined)

·      trying to economically free itself from the dictatorship of the World Bank and IMF

·      geopolitically continental and anti-Atlanticist

This is the reason why Russia is under attack - in Ukraine, in Moscow, everywhere. The recent killing of the liberal Boris Nemtsov was a provocation that serves to further demonize Russia in the eyes of the West. The liberals, the global financial oligarchy,  and the Atlanticists (the US and the financial elite) are trying to provoke hostility between Russia and Europe just as they are trying to save their shaking rule by promoting ethnic conflicts. The war in Ukraine is the first step in a series of ethnic conflicts on European soil. The global liberal elite is planning ethnic wars not only in Ukraine and Russia but in Germany, France, Eastern Europe, and elsewhere as well. The liberal empire is trying to save its crumbling hegemony by dividing us.

We need to resist and construct a better Europe, a really European Europe. In such a situation, Russia is a friend and the US is the enemy. We have to work on a Russian-European alliance, not because Europeans love Russia or Russians love Europeans, but because we need to stand together in order to save each one of us in front of the danger that menaces us all.   Source