A curious discussion was started on the Website of the Inter-American Institute between the Russian geopolitical theorist Aleksandr Dugin and the Brazilian philosopher Olavo de Carvalho. In this discussion Mr. Dugin argues against global capitalism and the “New World Order.” He foresees the ultimate victory of Eurasian land power over American sea power. It is difficult to say whether Dugin's rhetoric has real long-term importance or whether it will prove to be one of Moscow’s passing trial balloons. Whatever the case, Dugin's ideas appear to justify a future war against the United States; furthermore, his promotion within the Russian establishment indicates an observable strategic tendency.    

Dugin’s point of departure is simple: Western and Russian (or Eurasian) civilizations are incompatible. "The metaphysical basis of the West is individualism," wrote Dugin. Russian civilization, on the other hand, stresses "a collective entity." The collective entity in question is a Eurasian commonwealth, with its capital in Moscow. In Dugin's view America is the champion of a hyper-materialistic ethic, based on radical individualism. It is subversive of traditional human values. As an empire of "frenetic consumption," America threatens to remake the world in its own image. To prevent this, Dugin proposes an alliance between Russian/Chinese militarists and the Muslim Brotherhood. Appealing to the conservative sympathies of Professor de Carvalho and others, Dugin wrote: “every ... traditionalist should be on the Eurasian and Islamic side against materialist and capitalist decline....” He believes that all conservatives and traditionalists should join with Moscow and the Islamists in smashing the Bilderberg Club, the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission.

Here we encounter a central theme of Moscow’s old (and new) rhetoric: Western civilization is a den of iniquity ruled by a wicked money power. Within Western civilization the Left already represents a movement against capitalism. Now it is time to bring the political Right into the anti-capitalist camp. Dugin therefore extends a hand of friendship to all conservatives and traditionalists. We have the same enemy, he explains. And that enemy should be attacked. The globalist project, says Dugin, “is far more powerful ... [and] dangerous ... than the two other projects [i.e., Russian/Chinese militarism and Islamism].” The merchants of the West, and the financial oligarchy they build, can only be stopped by a combination of Russian-Chinese “national-militarism” and “Islamic religious fundamentalism.” The choice is clear, says Dugin, “and everyone is invited to make it by himself.”

Furthermore, as Dugin points out, the emerging neo-socialist trend in Latin America suggests that a new bloc of countries will soon join Russia, China and the Islamists. As a Brazilian, Professor de Carvalho should know that South America isn’t really part of Western civilization at all. The Latin Americans are, by nature, opposed to the West’s money changers. Though Dugin does not pose as a Luddite, he nonetheless suggests (however indirectly) that the fundamental technology of civilization (i.e., the technology of money) must be smashed; and those who handle money (i.e., bankers) are vile. He does not acknowledge that money (together with fire and the wheel) is one of those inventions responsible for getting man out of the Stone Age. Instead, he says that the world will never accept “the absoluteness of the free market, human rights, liberalism, individualism and parliamentarian democracy.” Such ideals only signify the hegemony of the Western financial elite. Surely, Western conservatives cannot align themselves with corrupt money interests. And they cannot remain neutral, either. For the reality is, they must choose one side over the other. It is either Rome or Carthage. And for Dugin, U.S. global power represents “the eternal Carthage, which became a worldwide phenomenon.”

This theory, by the way, implies that America is doomed. In the end, sea power cannot cope with land power. The great wealth that comes to sea power is ultimately corrupting and vulnerable. Athens, as a sea power, was defeated by Sparta. Carthage, as a sea power, was defeated by Rome. In the end, the land power can become a sea power. Inevitably, Eurasia defeats Oceania. Russia and China form the whole of Eurasia, together with its “temporary” Islamist allies. What can the United States do against this great combination? The Americans cannot possibly “impose” individual freedom and the market economy on such a vast territory. The entire American project is therefore doomed, and will be squeezed out of existence in the end. As for those Americans who do not serve the greedy financial oligarchy of the free market system, Dugin says, “There may be another America, but that does not change anything in general.” America apart from the CFR and the neo-cons (i.e., “World Carthage”) is a nullity.

Dugin is incredulous regarding de Carvalho’s idea that the globalist elite “is not an enemy of Russia, China or the Islamic countries” but a collaborator with them in efforts to “destroy the sovereignty ... and economy of the United States.” Because Dugin relies on a set formula for stigmatizing American policy-makers and their motives, he does not see the extent to which American leaders are themselves neo-socialists ready to hoist the banner of “holistic collectivism.”

In response, Professor de Carvalho noted the difference between Dugin’s mission and his own. “[Dugin’s] task is to recruit soldiers for the battle against the West and for the establishment of the universal Eurasian Empire. Mine is to attempt to understand the political situation of the world so that my readers and I are not reduced to the condition of blind men caught in the gunfire of the global combat....” To associate the globalist elite with America, argues de Carvalho, is an error. The globalist elite are following a course of their own, which does not coincide with American national interests. “I defend one-half of the West against the other half,” he says.

As a matter of course, de Carvalho’s claims that the Western financial elite has been working to establish its own worldwide socialist dictatorship, which is not to be confused with the dictatorship of Moscow or Beijing. The socialism put forward by the richest families in the West is a means for ensuring their ongoing influence – an effort to protect themselves against the ravages of free market competition. To prove his case, de Carvalho points to the work of Anthony Sutton. He also points to the “industrial blossoming of China ... and its transfiguration ... into the most powerful potential enemy of the USA....”

Here the question must be asked: What kind of brilliant scheme could entail the industrialization of China, and the arming of an implacable enemy? Setting aside Sutton’s misinterpretations of the data (where he completely fails to grasp the psychological realities of the capitalist milieu), the entire situation may be clarified by reference to a single fact: namely, the suicidal trajectory of the Western financial elite over the past half-century.  As James Burnham indicated long ago, liberalism is a philosophy leading to Western suicide. By industrializing and arming China, by rebuilding Russia’s position, by opening Europe to Islamic immigration, by adopting social policies which have collapsed Europe’s birth rate, we see the rush to suicide. What geniuses indeed! What leadership! Through intellectual superficiality, political shallowness, and arrogance, they cannot possibly hope to survive their own policies. If there is a plot to establish a universal socialist dictatorship the only people who stand a chance of establishing it are in Moscow and Beijing. I fail to see how Washington and London remain standing, let alone influential. 

The pre-war propaganda of Alexander Dugin merely provides a rationale for destroying something that has essentially weakened and undermined itself over a period of decades. The course of self-undermining is not conspiratorial, in my view. Wealth and power, combined with an overly rationalistic intellectual culture, tend to produce a mild form of insanity within elite groups.  Russian, Chinese and Islamic leaders are not free from their own special forms of insanity. It is the large, deracinated, non-traditional, highly bureaucratic structures of modernity that contribute to such insanity, along with the shift away from a culture based on books and serious reading to a culture based on images, television and slogans. The intellect in all classes, among the most advanced societies, has been declining for decades. Stupidity may be added to insanity, the one amplifying the other.  This is the real New World Order. We have left behind the greatness of the past, setting aside the classics. The vaunted elite are merely sheep. Or as Winston Churchill once described a representative specimen: “A sheep in sheep’s clothing.”

 

 

A sheep in sheep's clothing (above)

 

     LIBERALISM IS NOT EQUIPPED to meet and overcome the actual challenges confronting Western civilization in our time.
     In its historical practice as well as its ideological doctrine, liberalism has always operated most naturally as a tendency of opposition to the prevailing order, to the status quo, the ancien regime, the Establishment in general or in its several parts. Liberalism has always stressed change, reform, the break with encrusted habit whether in the form of old ideas, old customs or old institutions. Thus liberalism has been and continues to be primarily negative in its impact on society; and in point of fact it is through its negative and destructive achievements that liberalism makes its best claim to historical justification.
     In post-Renaissance Western society there were a number of deeply imbedded features that were bad on just about all counts; and were, moreover, capable of being eliminated. To get rid of such features, an attitude of skepticism toward custom and tradition, a fondness for change, and a confidence or even overconfidence in the possibilities of human nature were useful and probably necessary. Liberalism expressed that attitude and felt that confidence. Under its banner reform movements labored successfully to do away with many of the features of the old society or to transform them beyond recognition: many of the bad features, and also of course some of the good features, because liberalism's impulse to tinker with the established order is quite general, and does not stop with this particular feature that we might all agree needs replacement.
     Some of the older ways of handling lesser crimes and misdemeanors, for example, were surely barbarous. Torture to secre confessions; hanging for petty thefts; floggings; long prison sentences for minor derelictions, with the sentences almost equivalent to death because of the hideous nature of the jails; the futile and really absurd practice of imprisonment for debt; liberalism had a good deal to do with mitigating these barbarities, and for its humane negative accomplishments to that end liberalism deserves and gets nearly universal approval.
     Even in this matter of crime and punishment, though, we should notice that liberalism hs not done so well when it has tried to go on from the elimination of past abuses to the constructive job of devising new ways to meet the old conditions that do not disappear because of a change in the methods of dealing with them. Liberalism, applying its usual remedies of education and democratic reform seasoned with optimism concerning human nature, has signally failed to get rid of crime and criminals, or even to lessen the frequency of their occurence. Liberalism even fosters new sorts of crime through its permissive approach to education and discipline and its provocative egalitarianism; some at least of our fearfully multiplying juvenile delinquency is the logical outcome of liberal principles. In a way, a juvenile delinquent is a youth who takes literally the progressive-educational stress on self-expression and freedom. Nor is our high percentage of multiple offenders much of an endorsement of the liberal schemes for re-educating criminals and giving them plenty of  social service along with easy paroles. I have yet to read the account of one of those terrible crimes of sex perversion that take place daily, wherein the savage who rapes and strangles the child or grandmother or both did not have a long record of offenses which in pre-liberal days would have kept him behind solid bars. Pareto remarks that he doesn't much care what theory of punishment people prefer, so long as they are willing to try to keep murderers, thugs and rapists off the streets.
     We could make a similar double entry concerning liberalism's past performance in relation to the social position of women, poor laws, abuses in the factory system, electoral practices, business frauds and monopolies, and many other such matters of large and small import: that liberalism has been influential in curing a number of wrongs and grave abuses; and that liberalism has been less successful, has often very dismally failed, in its efforts to construct new procedurres and institutions to deal with the perennial problems. And in general, liberalism is better out of power than in power; better at changing than preserving; better at destroying than building.
     Am I repeating old cliches? "We need liberals to push through the necessary reforms, and conservatives to make the reforms work...." - that sort of thing? Yes, I readily admit so; and I have great respect, I will add, for many of the old cliches. The plain, platitudinous, common-sense opinion is very often the true opinion, stripped down to essentials. And in this case the platitude is manifestly true, whether we test it by history or by the analysis of ideas. The guilt that is always part of the liberal syndrome swells painfully when liberals gain power and find that the world's sorrows show no tendency to vanish at their sovereign touch. Liberals are unconfortable, uneasy, when they become 'the Establishment': we took note earlier of the desperate lengths to which academic lbierals go to prove to themselves that they are non-conformists, even on a faculty every member of which has been formed in the same ideological pod.
     Liberalism's inaptitude for power bears directly on the crucial fact: that the primary issue before Western civilization today, and before its member nations, is survival. No one threatened the survival of the West in A.D. 1100: the Crusades were an aggression, not defense, of the West. No one threatened Western survival in 1500 or 1700 or even so short a time ago in the scale of civilizations as the beginning of this century [i.e., the 20th century]. But now the threat is present - a clear, immediate and sufficient danger, both from within and from without. Before our time, it was a matter, for the West, of consolidation, growth, adaptation, change, reform, improvement; now it is, first of all a condition of all the rest, survival. Liberalism, and the ideas, sentiments and values to which liberalism gives priority, are not well designed for the stark issue of survival.

- James Burnham, Suicide of the West

 

A sheep (below)