Speculum Orientis examines how the black machinery of Ahriman may turn against the American empire that now serves as its greatest vessel.

Begin with Zurvan—Time uncreated, boundless, prior to all names. The old Iranian imagination placed this single reality at the origin of all things. “Except Time, all other things are created.” Zurvan existed before heaven and earth were named. For a thousand years, Zurvan performed sacrifice, desiring a son who would fashion an ordered creation. At the end of the thousand years, at the very threshold of fulfilment, doubt fissured the god. A shadow stirred within him. Had the sacrifices been in vain? Would the son come? In that instant of division between faith and negation, twins were conceived in the womb Zurvan himself contained.

Ohrmazd, the Wise Lord, was born of the sacrifice: luminous, sweet-scented, turned toward truth and the making of the good world. Ahriman, the Destructive Spirit, was born of the doubt: dark, stinking, turned toward negation and the undoing of form. They came from the same source, but they were not equal. One sought to build; the other sought to break.

Zurvan had sworn that the kingdom would belong to whichever twin came first into his presence. Ohrmazd perceived his father’s thought in the light of wisdom and told his brother what he had seen. Ahriman, seized by Az—the raging spirit of greed, excess, and insatiable haste—would not wait. He ripped through the womb before his hour, forcing his way into the world, and presented himself to Zurvan. The god wept. When Ohrmazd was born moments later, bright and true, Zurvan recognised him at once, but the vow could not be broken. The kingdom of the world was granted to Ahriman, yet only for a measured term: nine thousand years. After that, Ohrmazd would rule as lord over all, and the broken creation would be purified.

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This was the first treaty, the pact that set a limit upon destruction. Ahriman could enter the world, wound it, corrupt it, fill it with death, but he could not make his dominion eternal. The destroyer’s power, for all its violence, was placed within a boundary of Time. The most terrible force remains subject to a term it did not set.

Zurvan did not leave the compact to the honour of the destroyer. He placed in Ahriman’s hand a black and ashen implement, steeped in the substance of Az, and warned that if the spirit of darkness failed to make good his threat within the allotted years, this very weapon would turn inward and consume his own legions. That ashen tool remained sterile and inflexible, a cold apparatus of mechanical fate—the mythic image of a machine that devours what it was meant to serve. The pact was given into the custody of Mithra, lord of the treaty, guardian of boundaries, who waits in silence until the appointed hour and then renders the oath-breaker powerless.

Such is the foundational myth, serving as a diagnostic for the pathology of power when it mistakes the illusion of acceleration for true sovereignty, and the application of force for the mastery of Time.

The strait that today bears the name Hormuz—a contraction of Ahura Mazda, the Wise Lord himself—is the narrow sea passage through which the world’s energy flows. In this strait, the ancient drama reenacts itself. Within this frame, the shadow does not fall on some distant enemy; it falls across the power that now dominates the global order. The evil at issue is not the crude evil of a moral caricature; it is a structural and spiritual evil—the evil of a power whose form bears the unmistakable marks of the destructive spirit: it enters an ordered space it did not create, disrupts ancient political ecologies with immense speed, deploys a technological apparatus of unprecedented scale, and is driven by a compulsion the old texts called Az.

Ahriman is machinery. He is not a demon hiding in the shadows; he is the logic of the system itself. He is the cold light of the terminal that optimises away human presence; the invisible calculus of the drone strike that vaporises witnesses; the bureaucratic flowchart that renders the sanctity of human life into a data point on a ledger. He is the structural logic of a civilisation that has elevated technique over contemplation, and the spreadsheet over the soul.

The American imperium is not the source of this evil. It is the most complete vessel for it—the purest expression of the Ahrimanic structure that history has yet produced. American finance has become one of its purest organs: it cannot pause, cannot reflect, cannot contract without collapsing. American military doctrine has taken the same shape: it requires the instantaneous conversion of intelligence into kinetic effect, leaving no room for the organic rhythms of diplomacy or generational strategy. American technology completes the pattern: it replaces the living word with the algorithm, the family with the network, the soul with the interface.

This transcends mere moral judgment; it is a structural inevitability. A society that raises the machine to the status of a god becomes ridden by a hunger no conquest can satisfy. The black implement, the myth’s cold machine of dead causality, sets the tempo of the epoch. It dictates policy. It overrules statesmen. It accelerates towards its own terminal velocity, unable to stop because stopping would require a will, and the Ahrimanic structure has no will. It only has momentum.

Iran, by contrast, has preserved the Ohrmazdic residue. Not as a utopia, but as a civilisation that still remembers that time is organic, not linear. The Magian sees history as a field of cultivation, not an assembly line. This is why the memory of Karbala resonates so deeply here; it is the living reenactment of the first sacrifice. It teaches that a deed of truth, once planted in the soil of history, is a seed whose harvest belongs to the future—an act that the accelerationist machine, in its haste, can never comprehend.

While the American colossus must act now—its structural Ahriman demands immediate results, electoral validation, measurable outputs—Iran can wait. It absorbs. It evades. It rebuilds. It disperses its forces across allied networks that share its temporal horizon. Every American victory, measured in tonnage of explosives or number of sanctions, becomes a strategic defeat measured in years of entrenchment. This is not guerrilla warfare in the conventional sense. It is the patience of Mithra, who knows that the Ahrimanic structure, for all its terrifying efficiency, is finite. Its gears wear down. Its algorithms encounter variables they cannot process. Its speed meets the resistance of matter.

The seers of our age have long whispered of this decline: the Faustian will turning against itself, the reign of quantity over quality, the mechanical subversion of the organic. These are not merely separate grievances; they are the symptoms of a single structural trap. The Ahrimanic edifice is not the conqueror of Time; it is the slave of Time, unable to reproduce itself except through the perpetual, vampiric extraction of the living.

The black implement was never Ahriman’s own possession. It was lent under a condition. When the destroyer’s term expires—and it is expiring in this era—the ashen implement, that cold instrument of dead causality from the myth, turns inward. The machinery devours its own operators. The surveillance state turns on its architects. The financial leviathan implodes under the weight of its own compounded abstractions. Drones, grids, algorithms—the sterile, entropic machinery of Az—will one day prove more lethal to Washington than to Tehran.

Iran’s strategic orientation represents more than a preservation of form; it is a fundamental restoration—a reclamation of the primordial law of Time which the technological adversary has cast into oblivion. The competitor has constructed its vast, sterile architecture upon the delusion of its own eternity. Nevertheless, the organic alone persists; only the soul is spared from entropy. Steel surrenders to rust. The algorithm decays. The mechanical apparatus eventually finds its terminal stillness.

At Hormuz, the narrow waters present a geographical truth that the Ahrimanic structure cannot compute. The strait is a limit, an a priori boundary. Ahrimanic expansion, however total it may appear, eventually meets matter itself: The sea remains indifferent to the speed of the missile, and the current does not bow to the carrier group; against this, the Ahrimanic machine falters, for it confronts not merely the tide, but a civilization whose roots run as deep into the strait as the geography itself. Every force meets a physical boundary it cannot overwhelm, just as every empire meets a temporal boundary it cannot outrun.

Frashokereti, the Zoroastrian horizon of final renovation, is not the world’s annihilation. It is its sanctification: the purging of the structural parasite that mistook a temporary lease for an eternal dominion. Ahriman burst into creation believing his machinery could overturn the order of Time. He was wrong. He entered a realm governed by a law older than his gears.

Arsenals evolve; the banners of empire rise and dissolve into history; yet the sea remains the immutable witness. The struggle over this strait is the echo of the first sacrifice: the question of the destroyer’s measure. Time holds the reckoning, and Time answers to a higher, unyielding law. When the appointed hour strikes, Mithra shall rise, and the cold, ashen artifice—the very mask of Ahriman—will dissolve into the dust from which it was forged. The frantic motion of the machine will cease; the organic will endure.

Michael Kumpmann explores Eduard Limonov’s explosive fusion of revolutionary politics, youth culture, and radical freedom—and its lasting influence on the Identitarian Movement.

The majority of the New Right is at least rudimentarily familiar with the philosophy of Alexander Dugin. However, Eduard Limonov, who worked with Dugin for decades, is almost absent from the discussion. Nevertheless, he too developed an interesting philosophy that is certainly worth a look.

The first fundamental thing that can be said about Eduard Limonov is that fashion, youth culture, politics, and philosophy are inseparable in his work. His National Bolshevik Party was thus not meant to be a party like the AfD (Alternative for Germany) but rather a mix of political party, punk group, and avant-garde. This influence also partially spilled over into the early texts of Alexander Dugin and is, for instance, a reason why Dugin’s “Arctogea Manifesto” finishes the “list of most significant philosophers” with John Lydon from the Sex Pistols.

Direct Predecessor of the Identitarian Movement

This is precisely why Limonov must be seen as a direct predecessor of the Identitarian Movement, trends like Vaporwave, and individuals like Chris Ares. Surprisingly, however, Limonov nowhere mentions Stanley Kubrick’s film A Clockwork Orange. And this is despite the fact that his movement often really acts like a transfer of the youth gangs there into reality.

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Alexander Dugin argues that his daughter Daria’s “eschatological optimism”—faith in victory even in darkness—is the only stance that fits a war he calls not geopolitical but metaphysical.

Conversation with Alexander Dugin on the Sputnik TV program Escalation.

Host: Another monstrous crime has taken place in Ukraine. The perpetrators have not been officially named, but it is known that an armed attack was carried out on the Holy Dormition Svyatogorsk Lavra of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, resulting in the death of a monk. Orthodox media are actively publishing the details. Alexander Gelyevich [Dugin], do you think they will actually look for those responsible, or do they already know perfectly well who they are and will simply cover for them, given the dire and powerless position in which the Church finds itself today on Ukrainian territory?

Alexander Dugin: You know, the war now being waged in Ukraine is, among other things, a war for Orthodoxy and against Orthodoxy. It is not even really a question of whose jurisdiction this or that Orthodox community falls under—although, of course, there is one Church, the Russian Orthodox Church, the traditional one, and the overwhelming majority of Ukrainians still belong to the Russian Orthodox Church. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church is its part, its inseparable branch. But generally speaking, the course the Ukrainian authorities have taken is a course toward the West, toward globalism, toward postmodernity. And that, of course, runs completely contrary to Orthodoxy.

A genuine open war is being waged against the Russian Orthodox Church—that is, against its canonical part, the UOC—so no one will be looking for anyone. You could call it an excess committed by those who carried it out, but in Ukraine Orthodoxy as such has, in essence, been declared outlawed. It has been declared the enemy; Orthodox people are regarded as conduits of the “Russian world.” In principle they are partly right, because these people are not working for us—they are working for the Lord. Ukrainian believers work for Jesus Christ, to whom our people swore allegiance in the baptismal waters of the Dnieper under Grand Prince Vladimir. We and the Ukrainians are one inseparable community—historical, religious, cultural—that then pledged itself to Christ.

The Ukrainian nationalists, globalists, Westernizers, and neo-Nazis who came to power in Ukraine tore up that covenant; they ripped it apart. They accused Russian Orthodoxy and Rus itself—of which they themselves are a part—of every sin. And of course the murder of monks, the Svyatogorsk Lavra—this is simply part of that diabolical force that has swept over Ukraine. That territory is now under the power of Satan, in the literal sense.

By the way, Satanism is banned in the Russian Federation; it is considered a prohibited current. But Satanism can still be banned—Satan himself cannot, because if he did not exist, what exactly would we be banning? And that is precisely the historical sharpness of the situation: a battle between God and the devil is underway. And that battle is being fought through us, through Russians, through Ukrainians, through Western and Eastern countries. We are now at the center of this battle, and when monks die, that simply confirms how serious the situation is. They are most certainly parties to this war; they are not spies—they pray to God, and that is all. I even think that for them questions of inter-church relations are secondary compared with fulfilling their higher mission of serving God and saving the soul. And if you yourself are saved, then, as Saint Seraphim said, “Save yourself, and thousands around you will be saved.” They bring salvation, and that is why they are enemies. And the enemy chooses a sacred target, a symbolic target. I am absolutely convinced that this crime will remain unsolved, because behind this crime stands the whole of contemporary Ukraine.

Host: In parallel with this process, a little earlier in Russia the relics of Dmitry Donskoy were discovered. Representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church, among others, have drawn attention to the symbolism of this happening at such a difficult time for the country. Vakhtang Kipshidze, in particular, noted that during the special military operation we are defending sovereignty, drawing historical parallels precisely with the times of Dmitry Donskoy. From your point of view, what is the symbolism of this happening right now?

Alexander Dugin: This is simply a real miracle. We often do not believe in miracles and try to explain everything by rational processes, but that does not work. Sometimes a miracle is simply a miracle. An astonishing thing: I myself was there; I venerated the relics during that very brief period when they were open, before they were closed again. Makarov and Batalov, who supervise the Kremlin archaeological excavations, told a small group of us how it all happened. A crack appeared in the sarcophagus of Dmitry Donskoy’s father, Grand Prince Ivan the Red. In the nineteenth century they installed heating in the cathedral and treated the tombs of our Russian saints and grand princes rather carelessly. It was believed that two sarcophagi lay one beneath the other: the father’s and Dmitry Donskoy’s own.

When the crack formed this August they began checking the structure and discovered that there was no other sarcophagus under the father’s—it was next to it. When they opened it in order to save the entire structure from collapse caused by those very barbaric nineteenth-century heating works in the Archangel Cathedral, the authentic relics of Grand Prince Dmitry Donskoy were found, whose identity has been fully confirmed by genetic research. And the main thing is that they have been preserved. I myself saw that body: in more than 600 years everything could have turned to dust, yet the relics are incorrupt, and on the skull one can see the mark of a blow from a Tatar warrior—after all, it is known that he fought in the front ranks on Kulikovo Field.

His Holiness Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Rus came to venerate these relics. The President also came and venerated them on August 20—precisely on that symbolic date when my daughter was killed by Ukrainian terrorists. And I arrived on the 21st together with my good friend Konstantin Malofeev and Nikita Mikhalkov. We found ourselves there in the Kremlin literally an hour before the sarcophagus was closed for good, because all the restoration work had been completed.

But what is astonishing is the day after the President venerated the relics. After all, it was exactly on August 21, 1380, that Dmitry Donskoy set out from Moscow for the Battle of Kulikovo, which we won with enormous difficulty and which became the turning point in the liberation from the Golden Horde and the rise of Moscow as a world power in anticipation of the “Moscow—the Third Rome” theory that arose a hundred years later, when this transfer of our historical mission took place.

This is an incredible coincidence. Because of restoration work and the appearance of a crack they accidentally opened the relics of Grand Prince Dmitry Donskoy—canonized in 1989, so this can be considered a second finding of the relics. The veneration by the President and the Patriarch reproduces a genuine symphony of powers, and all of this occurs at a historical moment coinciding with the date of the departure from Moscow for Kulikovo Field—August 21. Such a thing simply cannot be accidental.

Nikita Sergeyevich Mikhalkov, praying at the sarcophagus opened at the last minute—after all, it will be closed for another century—addressing the saint practically in an empty church, in the presence of only a few people, said: “Help us, saint; we need your help, your prayers and your participation.” Russia stands in an extremely difficult situation; the question of “to be or not to be” is being decided—perhaps as then, or perhaps in an even sharper form than on Kulikovo Field. We are marching to our own Kulikovo Field.

And the President, according to eyewitnesses, coming out of the Archangel Cathedral on August 20 after venerating the relics, was completely radiant. Thanks to this miracle he became convinced with new force of the inevitable victory of Russia, of our spirit, people, and state. This is truly a miracle and a profound turning point, although the forces of darkness have also stirred. Very many of the most important symbolic events of our history—both the most tragic and the turning-point ones—occur precisely in these August days, from the 19th to the 21st.

The way everyone has risen up against the discovery of the relics of the holy right-believing Grand Prince Dmitry Donskoy—the West, the Ukrainians, and our liberals together with skeptics, atheists, materialists, left and right—proves that this event is extraordinary. It is a genuine heavenly sign. Saints come out of concealment only in critical times.

And in parallel with this, the relics of Saint Spyridon of Trimythous were miraculously brought to Russia—a great saint deeply venerated in Rus, whose relics have arrived in our country for the first time. Compatriots go to them; hundreds of thousands of believers venerate him in the cities to which they are brought. Saint Spyridon plays a colossal role in our spiritual tradition.

As Akim Apachev recently wrote very accurately, we now feel like two bogatyrs in the final clash: we are tired, the West is tired, the Ukrainians are exhausted, and we too are in many ways depleted. We sense the approach of the finale of this battle, the portent of our Victory. Of course it will not be given to us as a gift—we have already paid an enormous price for it, losing and continuing to lose people close to us. And the help of the heavenly intercessor of Holy Rus, Grand Prince Dmitry Donskoy, victor in the fateful Battle of Kulikovo, is simply necessary to us now. We must receive this sign that has descended from heaven upon Holy Rus with deep gratitude.

Host: We have a question from listeners on the topic; I will quote it now: “Do you think we will live to see the moment when the demons—meaning the Ukrainian authorities—decide to declare holy the relics of the so-called heroes from the new pantheon of Nazi collaborators?”

Alexander Dugin: That is almost exactly what is happening. They honor Bandera, they rebury executioners, murderers, sadists, and rapists—people whom they exalt and to whom they in fact bow down. When we say that Ukraine has turned into a satanic society, this is no longer a metaphor, not an exaggeration, and not a propaganda cliché. On our Russian land, on its Ukrainian part, something terrible is taking place that makes one recall both Gogol’s dark prophecies and the most horrific infernal scenes.

I think it may well come to official canonization. People today are being forced to venerate the remains of these criminals—and this is a genuine perversion of the entire church tradition, genuine satanic “relics.” The filthy, dark flesh of murderers and maniacs, decomposed to the end, is used to open the gates of hell and draw nourishment from there. The murder of the Svyatogorsk monks, everything they do… The death of little children in a kindergarten in Krasnodar—all these are links in one chain, elements of an endless satanic mass, the so-called “Bloody Easter,” which is celebrated without end in Ukraine.

And here we must all treat what is happening with the utmost seriousness. Right now the consciousness of the secular person, the atheist or skeptic, is undergoing a colossal trial. For centuries of the Enlightenment, culture was held under the hard press of the doctrine that there is nothing higher, that atheism is the only scientific truth, that God is a myth, and that all church mysteries, miracles, and relics are deception and “opium for the people.” But when we encounter a whole array of miracles—both genuine heavenly miracles and the black miracles of Satan, when they collide head-on—it becomes incredibly difficult for the secular person. He falls back on skepticism, repeating: “This is all fake, this cannot be.” As a result his understanding of reality shrinks and becomes completely inadequate.

If one discards sacred history, the logic of Russian thought and philosophy, if one ignores the depth of the teaching of our Russian Orthodox Church on the meaning of history and the mission of the Russian people, if one does not believe in the Apocalypse and considers all this nonsense—then what is happening today in Ukraine, in our politics, in technology, in the Middle East, and in our own war becomes completely inexplicable. From a materialist point of view all these events look irrational—after all, it would be rational simply to get on with ordinary life, move toward technological progress, and pay no attention to anything.

But the religious underpinning of what is happening, the eschatological tonality of our historical moment, cannot be wished away. The unfortunate person deprived of religious culture today turns out to be the easiest prey for these dark forces. That is precisely why the gestures of our President, the Patriarch, opinion leaders, spiritual and cultural figures who openly turn to God are so important. This is no longer a slogan or a metaphor—it is a direct call to go to church, to turn to Scripture and tradition, to think about the salvation of the soul, because what is at stake today is not something or other, but the soul of each of us and the very fate of Holy Rus.

Host: In the first half of today we spoke a great deal about Satanism. You mentioned that it is a prohibited current, and here it is important to add that it is also on the list of extremist ones—we observe the law. Concluding this large theme connected with the Church and with relics: how ready are Western countries in general to accept and understand how we see our future on the basis of this worldview? Will the conflict between our ideology and their position widen or diminish, or will we still arrive at some kind of consensus?

Alexander Dugin: Unfortunately, it will only intensify, because recently an interesting article appeared in The Spectator by a German author, Döpfner, who clearly showed: the West is an idea. An idea absolutely incompatible with the existence of either an independent Russia, or an independent China, or an independent Iran. The West is not simply a territory but a rigidly anti-Christian, anti-traditional, and hegemonic ideology that does not permit any other sovereign centers of power beyond its borders. And here everything is said with extreme honesty: either we or they—and the entire rest of the world, which they count among their enemies (the Orthodox, the Chinese, Muslims, and everyone who has a different view of life). Between our civilization and the Western one a war of survival is underway.

I want to stress one important thing: this is not a matter of ordinary tactical, strategic, or economic contradictions of the kind any states have. Today we stand in a radical, absolute, metaphysical, and messianic opposition to the West, because the West is a false, harmful, dangerous, and insistent idea. If we want to preserve our sovereignty and win, we have to draw that line with complete clarity. We are prepared to talk to the West only on our terms—on the terms of recognition of our spiritual, intellectual, political, and economic sovereignty. And that is precisely what the collective West denies us today.

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So we need to gather our strength and understand that what lies ahead may be the greatest victory in our Russian history, and there will certainly be no easy paths. For too long—not only in recent decades, but for centuries—we have been infatuated with the West. Today the West has become the final reality of that very absolute evil, and Ukraine is only one of its tentacles.

Host: In the first half of our conversation we remembered Dasha Dugina and the fact that four years have already passed since she was taken from us. How is she remembered today? In Italy, for example, a memorial plaque was unveiled. People who care, people who keep her memory… What do they write to you? How is she remembered—both here in our country and abroad?

Alexander Dugin: It really is a miracle of a particular kind. Dasha was a remarkable person, with an enormous, bright future ahead of her. She was incredibly active, very intelligent, a sincerely and fervently believing Orthodox Christian and a patriot. And just as the world began to turn in that direction, she was killed.

But her potential, perhaps not fully realized in life, is being realized now in another way. Her books are being published both here and around the world; they have been translated into English, Spanish, and Italian—all five of her books have come out, and new fragments are being gathered. People search out her interviews, print them, and publish them. Memory of her does not fade or wear away from year to year; it grows and takes on new tones.

A year ago, on August 20, 2025, in Zakharovo, at the Pushkin Museum—the site of the Tradition festival after which she was brutally murdered by Ukrainian terrorists—a magnificent monument to her was unveiled. In every season it changes, fitting in an extraordinary way into the Russian landscape, playing with light and shadow. People bring flowers there: first-graders come at the start of the school year, and students after graduating from university. For many, the monument has become a living gathering place.

And this year in Italy—and I am very grateful to the leadership of one of the districts of Tuscany—a memorial plaque in Dasha’s honor was unveiled. In the Italian city of Varese there was an extraordinary, profound festival called “Daria Aletheia” (from the Greek for “truth”). They read her poems, performed an operatic cantata written by the Italian composer Angelo Inglese. One actress read Dasha’s work translated into Italian—the diary The Depths and Heights of My Heart, including her notes on her journey through Italy.

People were stunned by how finely she described Italian culture, the landscape, the boat trip from Rome to Sicily. How many of our fine, observant, cultivated young women travel the world—but Dasha’s journey became a true symbol. She wrote about the most important authors of Italian culture, visited palaces—in particular she knew the remarkable Princess Vittoria Alliata di Villafranca, owner of the magical Villa Valguarnera. Dasha traveled through that sacred Italy and left astonishing texts about it.

She has a book, A Theory of Europe, very popular now and translated into almost every European language. In it she says: I would like to see another Europe—a Europe of tradition, sacred, Christian, cultural, and philosophical. I love it, I dream of it, and I discern it through the horror that reigns in contemporary Europe. “This Europe is disappearing; save my Europe,” Dasha said.

When the Italians heard the actress—and she really did read excerpts from The Depths and Heights of My Heart with great professionalism—people simply wept. Those present were shaken by this piercing address to Europeans: “Wake up! Return to yourselves! We Russians are making this difficult journey; we are returning to our sacred roots—do the same.” Those words struck them with their extraordinary, prophetic depth.

Dasha is now revealing herself from a side that neither we, her parents, nor even her friends fully knew before. When you live next to someone, everyday details often hide what matters most. Now that essential thing is beginning to come through. Many call her Daria the Thinker. Her monument in Zakharovo holds a book, and people who come there wonder: what book is it? Plato? Or a future work of her own? After all, we published most of her books only after her tragic, martyred death. The book in her hands is a symbol of a work not yet written, one that still remains to be created.

Dasha has become a symbol of the future, a symbol of spiritual sovereignty, a sign of our true Russian intellectual, spiritual, Orthodox, and patriotic youth. She has become their guiding figure. Yes, we have a constellation of warriors, we have saints, we have a ruler and we have geniuses, but Dasha has taken her own place in that line, embodying what Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky already spoke of in the nineteenth century. He wrote about Russian young people—people endowed with the sharpest, most piercing moral sense. They may not be as deft, skilled, advanced, or successful as the youth of other countries; they may at times be shy and shrink before loud, self-enamored discourses; but they possess the main thing—the depth and purity of the Russian heart, that piercing morality.

Dasha has become for new generations the embodiment of just that Russian youth. Not always as it appears on the surface—with all its passing weaknesses, laziness, slackness, ambitions, or flaws that sometimes create a distorted image. But deep inside every Russian person, every Russian girl and every young man, a pure Russian spark is beating. And at a certain moment it opens. Dasha became an invitation into those worlds, a guide into a space of purity, fidelity, and spirit.

And that is felt here in Russia as well—her memory is honored in a completely unofficial way. This is not official propaganda and not a banal common denominator; she speaks to the deepest layers of the human soul. Dasha seems to awaken faith in victory, in fidelity, and she calls: fight, stand your ground, love, start families, be faithful to Russia, to the Church, to our mission, and we will surely win.

In her lived that very optimism which we call—continuing her own thoughts and texts—eschatological optimism. It is confidence in our victory even when everything around is dark, even at the price of unimaginable suffering and sacrifice. That is Daria Dugina’s testament: believe in the future, never give up, even when it is hard and unbearable, keep fighting.

The people who surrounded her at the beginning of the special military operation also became martyrs: Vladlen Tatarsky, with whom she was on excellent terms; Pavel Kanishchev—leader of the Eurasian Youth Union, who died in the liberation of the village of Konstantinopolskoye, which is also symbolic. For that world of spiritual Russian youth that took the final battle of sacred history as a personal matter, Dasha became an absolute symbol, a source of light. The remarkable artist Dmitry Sever created a beautiful mural dedicated to her, in which the figures are woven from letters, and wrote the phrase: “We need a revolution of the spirit.” Dasha embodies that spiritual revolution and awakening. In her lifetime she herself probably did not fully grasp the scale of her future mission, but now everyone sees it, and it is happening in a completely natural way.

I am boundlessly grateful to the millions of people around the world who remember Dasha and keep her memory. The number of messages and words of support that come to me is enormous—these condolences do not stop. For me every day of these four years is still the twentieth of August. And it will be that way in the future; it cannot be overcome. But people feel it; they send thousands of responses from all over the world, and Dasha is truly alive.

In her lifetime she was known and treated with enormous respect and affection. People often said to her: “You are just like your father, only better.” I liked that immensely, and so did Dasha—she felt that she was continuing and developing what we had not had time to finish. And now she is performing that function on an entirely different level. She has become many times higher and purer than all of us, but she continues, illuminates, and transforms what we gave our own lives to—the lives of her parents and those close to her. She has not gone anywhere; she has not left our ranks; in a spiritual sense, she now stands at the head of them.

Host: Speaking precisely of the eschatological optimism Daria talked about… Today’s broadcast is built in many ways on contrasts: on one side, the reports of our Ministry of Defense, strikes on military targets and warehouses on the territory of the Odessa port; on the other, the attack on a children’s center in Krasnodar, where, our ombudsman reported, three teenagers were killed. Is there any understanding at all—we have it, but do those in Ukraine who give these orders, and those who finance all of this, have it—that this is, to put it mildly, wrong? Or not even “somewhat wrong,” but simply monstrous?

Alexander Dugin: The apple does not fall far from the tree: we see perfectly well who stands behind the Ukrainian regime and supports it. We remember the strikes on schools with children that the Americans and Israelis carried out at the beginning of the war with Iran, and the thousands of children who died in Gaza under the cruelest, most unfeeling and inhuman bombardments. And do we really expect any conscience from them?

After that whole flood of lies, after the mass killings of children carried out by the West and its proxy affiliates in different parts of the world, there is nothing to be surprised at. We will not be able to call them to account until we defeat them. They will always answer us with double standards and cynicism, declaring: “You Russians are to blame for everything; you started it all yourselves.” To wait for repentance, apologies, or a change of position from them is completely pointless. They want to destroy us entirely—every last one of us, together with our children.

That is why it is time to understand: this war is being fought not for life, but to the death. It is not about a partial improvement of geopolitical positions, not about borders, and not about control over zones. What is at stake is the very being or non-being of Russia. And we are paying the highest and most terrible price for it, because the death of children is the absolute limit of pain, which proves the extreme seriousness of what is happening.

In this world, only the victors are heard. There is a hard formula: the victors are not judged, but the defeated are always judged, because they are supposedly “always in the wrong.” If we do not win, we will be billed for our own sacrifices and sufferings. So talk of repentance or apologies should be put off until victory.

We need to concentrate completely on the main thing: striking the enemy’s critically important infrastructure and liberating the entire territory of Ukraine. This tumor cannot be left in the body—otherwise it will keep spreading. We must rid our Russian body of this deeply toxic phenomenon, Ukrainian Nazism, and of the West that supports it. We may not reach the West itself directly—although this war could grow into a world war, and more than once we have finished world wars in the capitals of defeated European powers (though it would of course be better not to let it come to that). But we are obliged to liberate all of Ukraine. This is a question of “to be or not to be” for Russia itself. And after victory, everyone will answer for their deeds according to justice.

Host: How can people who themselves have faced—God forbid—the death or wounding of relatives, the loss of property or a business… How, in that situation, can they keep the very optimism Daria spoke of?

Alexander Dugin: You see what the price of optimism can be—the price of a firm spiritual, moral, and patriotic stand. The price of our views, ideas, and convictions, to our great sorrow, is death. Death comes to everyone: to the one who took risks, and to the one who tried to hide, to the one who lost a great deal, and to the one who, on the contrary, only acquired. In that, perhaps, lies the greatest justice.

What so frightens us, what we dread and hate, may be the most important and deepest event in our life. If that death is worthy, if we pay with our life for what we believed in, for what we loved and defended… as the saying goes, among one’s own people even death is beautiful; it becomes a beautiful death. It turns into a martyr’s elevation, into a genuine triumph. But if a person spent the whole time hiding, slipping away, occupying himself only with petty everyday affairs—death will still overtake him sooner or later, look at him, and ask: “What did you do with your whole life? You ran from one thing to another, looking for whatever was more convenient and more comfortable? What a worthless creature you were.” And now you will collapse, and nothing of you will remain.

Since death will come to everyone, the highest virtue is to remember it, to keep the remembrance of death. I think people need to remember that and live out the existence allotted to them on earth worthily, truly, as befits a Russian Orthodox person.

(Translated from the Russian)

Simon Rorschach examines how the conflicts in Iran and Ukraine have become two fronts in a global war between Western unipolarity and an emerging multipolar order.

The wars in Iran and Ukraine appear to belong to different regions, histories, and political disputes. One is being fought across the Persian Gulf and the wider Middle East; the other stretches from the Black Sea to the Donbas. Yet both conflicts arise from the same dispute over who has the right to shape the world. The United States and its allies defend an order in which one center defines lawful conduct, assigns political virtue, controls the main financial channels, guards the sea routes, and decides which states may possess advanced weapons. Russia and Iran reject that claim. They insist that great civilizations must be free to organize their own regions, protect their own borders, and choose their own paths. Ukraine and Israel serve different national purposes, but both have become forward positions of the Western system. Russia and Iran, in turn, have become armed obstacles to that system. The result is a global war without a common battlefield or a formal declaration. It is fought with missiles in Kiev, drones over the Gulf, sanctions on banks, attacks on refineries, control of shipping lanes, and pressure on countries that refuse to choose the Western side. Washington still possesses unmatched power, but it can no longer impose its will without meeting organized resistance. That is the central fact linking the two wars.

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Michael Kumpmann recounts how the philosophical anime of the 1980s and 1990s led him to Heidegger and shaped the world of fear, terror, and alienation in his science-fiction novel Dimensional Prophecy of Zohar.

Kyoto Novalis, at an unspecified point in the future. Several years have passed since the Caine aliens carried out a terrorist attack on the Martian colony of Grover’s Mill. The aliens appeared without warning and attacked the colony’s government building. Strangely, subsequent investigations indicated that these aliens were apparently also a form of humanity. The attack developed into a decades-long terror crisis. The aliens would suddenly appear in human cities, launch an attack, kill large numbers of people, and immediately disappear again. Nowhere was safe from them. They could strike and spread terror anywhere. Even increased surveillance and extreme measures failed to stop them.

One day, the mathematician Riemann and his assistants, Szabi and Rosenberg, discovered a mathematical algorithm that could predict precisely when the Caine would appear. Humanity finally had a chance to fight back against the terrorists. An institute was established in Kyoto Novalis to apply and improve the algorithm. Humanity could now prevent attacks and save lives. At last, the situation seemed to be improving.

Then the algorithm suddenly began producing large numbers of false predictions. It turned out that it had problems with machine precision and relative error and therefore had to be revised. The Carl Friedrich Gauss Institute was also given the task of improving the algorithm’s efficiency and accuracy.

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Karala Yagiyu, the young daughter of two scientists at the institute, is to be recruited as a specialist. She arrives in Kyoto Novalis by train. At the same time, however, the bodies of people who have evidently been murdered by the Caine aliens begin to appear. More and more incidents occur, and the Caine even drive some people insane. The situation becomes an absolute crisis because the government sees only one way to stop them:

If necessary, completely destroy the city with hydrogen bombs and bury it beneath a layer of concrete.

Can the catastrophe still be prevented, or is everything lost?

This is the plot of my science-fiction novel Dimensional Prophecy of Zohar, which has been available on Amazon for several months and has already been featured several times here at Multipolar Press.

It is easy to see that fear is the story’s central theme, and, as the latest trailers have shown, the novel is also heavily inspired by Heidegger’s work. But how did this come about, and how does that influence express itself? It may sound paradoxical to many people, but its origins lie not in philosophy but in popular culture—more precisely, in anime from the 1980s and 1990s.

Many anime from that period contained philosophical undertones. One well-known example is Mamoru Oshii’s film Ghost in the Shell, which later became one of the main inspirations for the Matrix films. After all, The Matrix is the “most famous film adaptation of Plato’s work.” Megazone 23 is another famous Gnostic and Platonic anime from the 1980s. In it, machines imprison humanity within a simulated reality in which the 1980s have been repeating in an endless loop for centuries. A Wind Named Amnesia is also a highly Platonic work, based on a Japanese science-fiction novel, in which aliens take control of the world and periodically erase humanity’s memory. The protagonist is a wanderer who loves an alien woman named Sophia and searches for people willing to risk pursuing an education and recovering their memories. Notice the name: the protagonist loves Sophia. To love “Sophia,” or wisdom, is the true meaning of the word philosophy.

Gunbuster uses time and its passage as a central element of its plot. It examines what happens when time dilation causes you to age so slowly that the world continues to develop without you while you yourself appear to stand still.

The best-known “philosophical anime,” however, is probably Hideaki Anno’s Neon Genesis Evangelion, with its references to Freud, Lacan, Wilhelm Reich, the Kabbalah, and direct quotations from Schopenhauer and Søren Kierkegaard. Kunihiko Ikuhara’s series Revolutionary Girl Utena originated as a rejected proposal for a Sailor Moon film about Haruka and Michiru, which the studio then transformed into a complex Masonic and Rosicrucian allegory. The most extreme philosophical anime series is probably Serial Experiments Lain, almost 99 percent of which consists of intricate philosophical discussions about causality, the effects of media, existence, the internet, computer technology, time, and other subjects. Mamoru Oshii’s Angel’s Egg is also a famous short film dealing with Nietzsche’s concept of the “death of God.”

These themes were so richly represented in anime because Japan’s economy was booming during the 1980s, while the invention of the VHS cassette triggered an explosion in independent filmmaking. It was the only period in which a group of science-fiction nerds could approach investors and receive a million-dollar budget to produce a science-fiction anime. This led to the creation of numerous works conceived along the lines of: “Let’s combine philosophy, Philip K. Dick, Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and the aesthetics of Métal Hurlant (Heavy Metal), Alien, and Blade Runner in a new anime.”

A video explaining what makes anime from this period and its aesthetic so distinctive:

A montage of scenes from anime of this period:

Megazone 23, whose visual kinship with the French Métal Hurlant comics is particularly apparent:

Wicked City, a horror anime with an especially stylish neo-noir look:

Films were not the only medium affected by these trends. They continued in video games as well. It is no coincidence that one of Shinra’s executives in Final Fantasy VII is named Heidegger, while the game’s famous Professor Gast is almost a direct copy of Hermann Wirth. Xenogears, which was obviously influenced by Evangelion, contains references to Nietzsche, Gnosticism, psychoanalysis, and more. Then there is the famous Metal Gear series, which many players know precisely for its engagement with such subjects.

This period of anime and the works it produced were clearly among the main influences on Dimensional Prophecy of Zohar. The word Dimensional in the title also comes from this tradition. I based it on the naming conventions of Super Dimension Fortress Macross, Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross, and Super Dimension Century Orguss.

These anime were also what first led me to philosophy. Of course, back in the late 1990s, when I was an autistic super-nerd, most of the references went straight over my head. I mainly watched them for the action. But when I began taking philosophy classes in high school and watched Neon Genesis Evangelion again, something finally clicked.

It actually happened through a somewhat indirect route. After watching Neon Genesis Evangelion, I read about the game Xenogears in an old issue of AnimaniA—I still have those glossy magazines from the 1990s—and the article said that it was similar to Evangelion. I desperately wanted to play it. After an EXTREMELY LONG campaign of persuasion, I convinced my father to order me a modchip for the PlayStation and an imported copy of Xenogears. I also heard that unofficial successors to Xenogears were being produced: Xenosaga Episode I: Der Wille zur Macht (The Will to Power), Xenosaga Episode II: Jenseits von Gut und Böse (Beyond Good and Evil), and Xenosaga Episode III: Also sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spoke Zarathustra). I wanted those too.

Those titles puzzled me. They sounded extremely strange, and I wanted to know what these peculiar names meant. So I looked them up online, and that single step genuinely improved my life. In my spare time, I began constantly reading Nietzsche, Kant, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, and many others. My philosophy grades went from a 4 to the highest mark in the class on every exam. My philosophy teacher even begged me to study philosophy instead of computer science. Ironically, he eventually got his wish despite everything, because I did later become a philosopher.

I was completely blown away by these old anime and wanted to create something similar. Thanks to vaporwave and, above all, artificial intelligence, many people are now trying to revive the “1980s and 1990s anime aesthetic,” but I began doing it around 2004. Lol. I eagerly studied not only the works of philosophers but also the science-fiction influences behind the style, including Blade Runner, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Starship Troopers, Alien, H. R. Giger, Stanisław Lem, and others.

My Dimensional Prophecy of Zohar project began during the summer vacation when I was around seventeen. The idea came from an AnimaniA interview with an anime director who said that he wanted to make a film about Being. I have forgotten who it was. By coincidence, I had bought the same philosophy textbook our teacher used, and it contained an enormous chapter on precisely that subject. I thought, “Okay, I’ll write a story about that too.” I worked through the chapter, along with excerpts from Nietzsche, Sartre, Heidegger, Hegel, Freud, and Marx, and slowly began planning the story. Yes, I am serious. Other seventeen-year-olds used to read Playboy secretly under the covers at midnight. I secretly read Heidegger instead.

My basic premise was that I should place this theme in the foreground and portray a future humanity under attack by bizarre Lovecraftian aliens who, for some reason, also happened to be human. One of the protagonists’ central questions would be why these creatures should also be considered human. In the first draft, they resembled the bugs from Starship Troopers because I had not yet learned how to capture the Lovecraftian style properly. But as my understanding of Lovecraft grew, and as I encountered other books such as Solaris, the aliens increasingly developed into “eldritch abominations” incomprehensible to the human mind.

The very first rough draft, which I posted on German fan-fiction websites, was still extremely raw and had problems with plot cohesion.

Years later, while studying computer science, I began my first major revision of the story. The inspiration came from a simple personal fear: I was terrified of failing an upcoming exam. I wanted some way to talk about my fears. I therefore rewrote the story so that humanity had invented an algorithm—a computer program—to defend itself against the aliens. By “coincidence,” however, the program suffered from precisely the problems covered in that exam and therefore had to be corrected. The plot also moved away from the military and combat and toward research and analysis, with a generous dose of The X-Files-style investigation and conspiracy.

I then discovered another anime called Gasaraki, which also influenced my work. The creators of Gasaraki believed that Hideaki Anno had gone too far with the esotericism and mysticism in Neon Genesis Evangelion. They wanted to present a “credible vision of a possible future” instead. Dear reader, you will immediately see just how frighteningly credible the series’ premise was. Produced in 2000, it tells the following story: in the near future, the United States accuses the dictator of a Middle Eastern country—who looks remarkably like Saddam Hussein—of possessing weapons of mass destruction and launches an unpopular regime-change war. As the war runs into difficulties, unmanned combat drones are used with increasing frequency.

So much for a “credible vision of a possible future.” Almost exactly that happened one year later. The series gave me another idea: the government would regard the attacking aliens as terrorists and restrict civil liberties, expand surveillance, and introduce similar measures in an effort to stop them.

The next decisive event was the Fukushima disaster. Here in Germany, people practically descended into a mass psychosis. Among other things, this led some Germans to accidentally poison themselves with anti-radiation medication and prompted Germany to carry out its idiotic nuclear phaseout, the gradual closure of all the country’s nuclear power plants, which is one reason for its present energy crisis. Germany later also abandoned cheap Russian gas and replaced it with liquefied natural gas. Germany obtains this LNG from Qatar, and transporting it to the country depends on the Strait of Hormuz remaining open. If I were not German, I could almost laugh.

This made one thing clear to me: I had to change my story and its philosophy FUNDAMENTALLY. Until then, Heidegger had appeared only in a minor subplot involving the character Madoka Michael and her psyche. But Heidegger’s theme of existential anxiety needed to become THE central theme of the story, partly because this would reflect reality. The Fukushima crisis had clearly shown that human beings were not, as many within Germany’s market-liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP) and elsewhere claimed, “rational, logical creatures.” No. The central human emotion is fear. Fear comes first; only afterward do we ask what we are afraid of. The fundamental feeling that accompanies us from birth to death, controlling all our actions and our entire way of life, is fear.

I also realized that this theme applied not only to Madoka but to all the characters and to the background of the story itself. Karala initially runs away after encountering the alien monsters but later regrets it. Once again, fear is clearly the theme. The basic premise of devoting all the state’s money to completing a computer program capable of predicting alien attacks is likewise an example of fear and of how people attempt to deal with it. It is also an example of what Heidegger called Gestell, or enframing, as I later realized.

This led to my final major revision of the story, in which I moved the themes of fear and Heidegger’s philosophy into the foreground. That gave the story its final touch. As a result, the aliens also became literally radioactive and emitted radiation. Later, I included allusions to “other fears” as well. The aliens, for example, lead to curfews and mask mandates. They were intended to become the sum of all contemporary fears.

Alongside its political and philosophical themes, the work also became a means of self-analysis, following the example Hideaki Anno had set with Evangelion. My social anxieties, the difficulties I experienced connecting with others because of my autism, and many other personal experiences flowed into the work.

Incidentally, my growing interest in Heidegger later had another consequence. In 2015, a libertarian Facebook friend named Manuel Peters told me about a Russian philosopher called Alexander Dugin, who was apparently one of the greatest living Heideggerians. That discovery quite literally placed me on the path I am following today.

(Translated from the German)

Order Dimensional Prophecy of Zohar here.

Karl Richter argues that geography will eventually restore the German-Russian partnership destroyed by war and transatlantic power.

History occasionally presents moments when the possibility of an alternative course becomes visible. What would have happened if the Hitler–Stalin Pact of August 23, 1939, had endured and both sides had abided by it?

It is, regrettably, a futile question, because none of the necessary conditions existed. Stalin, who drove forward the electrification and industrialization of the Soviet Union during the 1930s at the cost of a staggering number of human lives, had by no means abandoned the goal of exporting world revolution, as his intervention on the side of the left-wing Republicans in the Spanish Civil War demonstrated. Western Europe was under threat. Hitler, meanwhile, had contemplated war against the Soviet Union since the 1920s. Thus, although the pact of August 1939 came as an enormous sensation to the world, it was ultimately little more than a ruse by which each side intended to outwit the other. The fiction of German-Soviet cooperation lasted less than two years. The chief beneficiary was American capital, which, thanks to the war and the subsequent confrontation between the two blocs, found a way out of the depths of the 1930s and turned the United States into the world’s leading power.

Nevertheless, the fear remained that Germany and Russia might yet find their way towards each other. In 1952, Stalin tried to build a golden bridge for the Germans by offering them sovereignty, reunification, and even armed forces of their own. As is well known, Adenauer, the “Chancellor of the Allies,” did not even examine the proposal. Nine chancellors later, German-Russian relations lie in ruins, while the danger of war, thanks to Chancellor Merz’s harakiri policies, is greater than it was during the Cold War. The transatlantic agenda setters have done their work well.

This need not and will not remain the case forever. Geography is destiny, as the saying goes. A single glance at the map shows that the possibility of German-Russian cooperation benefiting both sides still exists. For Germany and Europe, it is more urgently needed than ever; the sanctions madness of recent years has been a spectacular own goal. Most Germans will feel its painful consequences themselves sooner rather than later. The German economy is in free fall, whereas the Russian economy, thanks to its Asian hinterland, is not. The sooner we restore our energy partnership with Russia and free ourselves from LNG blackmail by the United States and others, the better. Alongside resolving the immigration question, this will be the central domestic and foreign-policy challenge of the years ahead. The transatlantic yapping dogs that still dominate the debate will soon enough be consigned to history.

I write these lines with great composure because the window of opportunity is closing for the ship of fools that is the Federal Republic. Something new must and will come; everyone can feel it. For those who live to see it, the German-Russian option will then naturally be back on the table.

(Translated from the German)

Santander Wallaby explains how the Global South’s turn toward local currencies, resource control, and strategic autonomy is bringing Alexander Dugin’s vision of multipolarity into view.

Alexander Dugin sees world politics as a lasting contest among world powers. Civilizations, in his account, are more than areas on a map. Each carries its own view of man, God, history, authority, and the good life. After 1945, and with far greater reach after 1991 and the collapse of its chief rival, the Soviet Union, the United States built a global order centered on Washington. Open markets, the dollar, NATO, sanctions, media power, and Western legal norms gave that order its shape. Its leaders often presented their own model as the final stage of history.

Dugin’s multipolarity begins with a plain claim: several great centers of power now exist, and each seeks the right to set its own course. China, India, Russia, the Islamic world, Africa, and Latin America bring separate histories and aims to world affairs. The Global South has become more relevant through BRICS, which widened again when Indonesia entered as a full member in January 2025. India holds the chair in 2026, while a circle of partner states gives the group reach across Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and the Americas. These countries share few doctrines, yet they share a wish for greater room to act.

Is the Global South seeking a larger place in the old order or creating a new one?

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Alexander Dugin argues that the Special Military Operation is Russia’s long-overdue surgery on its own civilizational malformation, Westernism, whose purest expression is the current Ukrainian regime.

Conversation with Alexander Dugin on the Sputnik TV program Escalation.

Host: Let’s start with a new development—or at least a relatively new one: the collapse of infrastructure in southern Ukraine, of logistics (including maritime logistics and more), which is taking place with the active involvement of Russia’s Aerospace Forces. The view is being expressed—not only by our specialists but by Western ones as well—that this could cost Ukraine the loss of Odessa Oblast. Let’s try to work out exactly how that could happen, given that land logistics between the northern regions and Odessa Oblast formally still exist. Still, I’m very interested to hear your view.

Alexander Dugin: First of all, I wouldn’t rush to claim that Ukraine is losing Odessa Oblast right this minute. But what is happening—objectively and regardless of whose analysis it is: ours, Western, or even Ukrainian—is Ukraine’s undoubted loss of access to the sea. That is of fundamental importance, because despite all the technological and digital changes, maritime logistics, the development of drones, and sea communications remain key factors. Essentially, depriving Ukraine of access to the sea—shutting down the Port of Odessa and stopping the circulation of any goods, services, weapons, and materials through it—is a colossal step. Ukraine ceases to have an outlet to the open ocean, from which it has constantly been receiving infrastructural support.

Of course it is obvious that this should have been done long ago, from the very beginning. But let’s forbid ourselves from using that argument, because Russia is always late in everything. Absolutely everything, and always. And yet in the end things somehow turn out the way we need them to, because truth is on our side. Yes, we make mistakes—it has already become a well-worn observation that we should never have entered any grain deal, should never have negotiated in Istanbul, should never have indulged the “spirit of Anchorage”… But we make yet another mistake, and then we correct it…

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Host: Sorry to interrupt. So Vladimir Vladimirovich [Putin] shouldn’t have spoken to Trump at all?

Alexander Dugin: No, he should have—talking to Trump was necessary. What was not necessary was whipping up exaggerated expectations of an imminent ceasefire around it. Going to talk with Trump in Anchorage or anywhere else was absolutely the right thing to do. The president does everything correctly, but his correct steps are immediately placed in the wrong context, and that is fatal. Whatever he does, his words and actions are instantly given a distorted interpretation among the elites. Hence we end up with the correct Anchorage—and the incorrect “spirit of Anchorage.” The very attempt to resolve a direct nuclear conflict between two superpowers through dialogue with Trump is absolutely right. What was built on top of that is absolutely wrong.

The same applies to many other issues. The argument that “we told you so, once again everything was done late, it should have been started four years ago, in 2014, in 1991” needs, in my view, to be crossed out once and for all. Everything is completely correct: the Soviet Union should not have been destroyed in 1991, Ukraine should have been properly dealt with throughout those 26 years, and the special military operation should have been started in 2014, or even earlier. All of that needed to be done, but we didn’t do it. The Port of Odessa should have been destroyed from the very start of the SMO, when we still controlled Snake Island—a strategic point in the western Black Sea.

Nevertheless, let’s accept once and for all as a given that Russia is always late in everything. We simply don’t know how to do it any other way. That means we will do everything with a lag, and this is probably already beyond fixing. Since we cannot change this habit of acting late, let’s simply accept it as a fact. We will persistently and consistently be late in everything—well, perhaps by the finale we will still arrive on time. That has happened in our history.

All these reproaches are fair, but they change nothing. We like to say that the Ukrainians keep stepping on the same rake—yes, they do so constantly; that is their fate and their curse. But perhaps we have something analogous. So let’s stop using this argument and put a full stop to it.

What do we mean right now? We are doing something of the utmost importance: turning Ukraine into a purely landlocked country, cutting off any contact it has with the sea. That is fundamental. In fact, Ukraine’s entire maritime activity needs to be paralyzed and suppressed completely. How the next stage of the operation will unfold—time will tell. Will there be a landing? Will we enter from the sea or from land? Will we wipe Odessa off the face of the earth with air strikes and missiles, starting with military and infrastructure targets? I think we have not yet moved to that phase, but right now we have rather consistently taken on the task of cutting Odessa and all of Ukraine off from the sea.

This is a fundamental geopolitical step that will make Ukraine dependent exclusively on land contacts with Europe. And from a geopolitical point of view, before speaking of liberating Odessa Oblast itself, it is vitally important to destroy all the port infrastructure with the means we have. At the next stage—having separated Ukraine from the sea—it will be necessary to separate it from the land as well, because there too there are only a few arteries; they are not infinite in number.

If we picture the geographical landscape of Ukraine’s western borders, it becomes obvious that the number of transport corridors through which real systemic military and energy assistance can be provided is limited. And by and large we have all the resources to destroy them. Here one can act both consistently and correctly.

This morning I read a very interesting article on a new approach to programming artificial intelligence—so-called graph management. A very subtle thing. The main idea is that one can substantially and many times over—by factors, or even by orders of magnitude—increase the efficiency of working with AI by delegating different functions to agents (or, applying this to the state, to various agencies and structures) in parallel: without waiting for one agent to finish its task before passing the baton to the next.

Of course, in a number of cases a strict sequence is logically necessary—these are the so-called edges (directed arrows), when the next resource is engaged only after the previous stage is completed. But in many cases there is no such temporal dependence, although by inertia we still act linearly: first one thing, then another, then a third.

Graph management clearly shows where this sequence is truly needed and where it can be avoided. Applying this principle to military strategy, perhaps we should not wait until we have completely cut Ukraine off from the sea; in parallel with that we can focus on cutting Ukraine off from the land. We need to act according to the principle of the sack: put Ukraine in a tight sack, closing all borders—both maritime and land—without waiting for the completion of each separate step.

In graph programming for AI there is the concept of the “diamond” or “rhombus”: first we disperse, distribute functions in parallel, and then bring the results obtained together, instead of pulling everything along manually. If we transfer this “diamond” principle to military strategy, we will get an extraordinary result.

Right now everyone is beginning to acknowledge that the initiative is gradually passing to us. Just two or three months ago, when hopes were pinned on those forty-day attacks by Zelensky on Russia’s internal territories, people thought they would turn the situation in Kiev’s favour. That did not produce a strategic effect—yes, it brought us pain and serious losses, but it did not change the situation. On the contrary, it is we who are now making this turning point.

How do we consolidate this turning point that is not yet fully decisive? Precisely by means of the principle of distributing functions. Doing one thing in one direction, in parallel with other forces—in another, a third, a fourth. We need absolute synchronicity, victory through a multitude of efforts synergistically directed toward a common goal, where nothing is unimportant—including in the information sphere.

Look at domestic politics: removing the traitorous, relocant, foreign-agent “Yabloko” from elections, restricting the screening of repulsive Western films, suppressing hostile network structures inside Russia, all in combination with the most powerful strikes on Ukrainian infrastructure. Previously we did not act so intensively; we spared objects in the hope that we ourselves would later have to restore all of this. Now we are freeing ourselves from these internal blinkers, from the hypnosis of strategies that do not work.

Our Russian stubbornness is a double-edged thing. If you look at the Ukrainians, their stubbornness is destructive in character, yet it gives them a certain resilience. We have it too: if something does not work, we try to break through the wall to the end—as was the case with that same “spirit of Anchorage,” which people believed in until it finally evaporated. But one must understand: the West, whether Trump or anyone else, will reckon only with the strong, only with the victors.

It will not be possible to preserve the infrastructure of Ukrainian society in this monstrous war. Everything will have to be rebuilt from scratch, and it will have to be done exclusively by us—there is no one left to hope for. Accordingly, we need to win by any means, acting very actively and simultaneously in all directions according to the principle of managing artificial intelligence through graphs: we distribute efforts, deliver a crushing blow from all sides, look at the result—and then we will rebuild.

Host: But you know, it’s like in cinema: scenes are not necessarily shot chronologically—they can shoot the finale first, then the beginning, then the middle, as is convenient for the director, as he sees it. But that’s not even the point. What do you make of this suggestion: that in reality all these talks about the “spirit of Anchorage” are a special cunning ploy by our authorities so that we would not be forced to sign any disadvantageous documents? That is, thanks to this very “spirit of Anchorage” we simply continue to do what we must—advance along the front line and solve the tasks, in particular those you have just spoken about. Isn’t that so? Ukraine fulfils nothing and wants nothing, while we calmly continue our business, discussing Anchorage along the way. Or no—did we really believe in all of this?

Alexander Dugin: The essence is that the president, as is completely obvious, always understands everything and keeps the situation under control. But the problem is that around this “spirit of Anchorage” we created unhealthy, false expectations in a certain part of our society. People sincerely believed that any moment now the leadership would reach an agreement, the war would end, and everything would return to the pre-war positions. But that will never happen. The war is far from its final stage; ahead still lie extraordinary efforts that must be made, and such illusions simply demoralize people and create an absolutely incorrect message in society and at the front. The harm from this topic was far greater than the benefit.

Of course, sending such signals through closed diplomatic channels via sherpas is perfectly fine. But our society should not have known about it. Military cunning is cunning precisely because it is directed at the enemy. With us it turned out the other way round: the enemy does not believe in it and figured everything out long ago, while we continue to “jam” our own citizens with this empty and failed topic.

This, of course, does credit to our consistency—if we have started something, we try to see it through to the end. But at some point a reality check, an understanding of whether we are even going in the right direction and doing the right thing, must still take place in society. It is clear that the people often resemble a cat watching television, wagging its tail, yet not fully grasping what is going on.

One would like our informational moves actually to mislead those whom we plan to deceive, and not our own people, and still less ourselves. That is the main question.

Host: And a very important point that from the very beginning of the SMO pleasantly surprised me—our society demonstrated, if not one-hundred-percent, then to a significant degree, unity. That is, I thought there might be some wavering and various not very good phenomena here. And now, from your point of view, after these years, is our society united? And what processes, perhaps, inside it hinder or help this?

Alexander Dugin: It is interesting that from the very beginning of the special military operation it was most radically rejected not by representatives of the people, but by representatives of the elite. Among the relocants and foreign agents, ordinary people can be counted on the fingers of one hand; maybe someone simply ran along with the crowd on the principle of “everyone’s running, so I’ll run too.” But mainly it was the elite.

In reality the main betrayal occurred not among the people, but at the top. Those people who in their time destroyed the Soviet Union, applauded the criminal reforms of the 1990s and formed a significant part of our former elite—it was precisely these people who rejected the turn toward the full-fledged sovereignty of our country set by the president. So we are not talking about society. It was they who created the illusion of protest movements and some kind of liberal-democratic dissatisfaction with the course of our president.

Host: Elites are also part of society, right? Or not?

Alexander Dugin: It is a special part of society. It is a minority. In good cases the elite represents the best of the people, but that is not always so—sometimes an enormous amount of slag penetrates into it. Unfortunately, that is exactly what happened at the end of the Soviet period and in the 1990s. Our elite is a problem. It is not a mirror of the people, but a distorted one. It was precisely there that opposition sentiments were concentrated, not in society.

And when these relocants left Russia, what remained—both society and the remaining part of the elite—turned out to be much healthier. You ask how people today react to the special military operation. I think they are tired not of the SMO itself, but of the uncertainty, of the delays and the indecisiveness.

In society one can distinguish two main positions. The first consists of people who fully grasp the moment and say: let’s win, let’s wage war properly. This is a large part of our society, and they are dissatisfied with how slowly everything is unfolding; they want more decisive action. The second part consists of more naïve people who understand less deeply the acuteness of the historical moment; they simply want everything to end as soon as possible, though they have no clear answer to the question of what sacrifices and efforts are required for that.

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Yet at the same time there is an absolute consensus in society today. First, everyone understands the justification for the special military operation and supports the president. Everyone recognizes the seriousness of the civilizational challenge we have issued to the collective West. This is a common, universal understanding. Nevertheless, questions toward the state are gradually accumulating among people. These questions could be removed if we accelerated a little and came into line with the real expectations of the people.

Host: Finishing the topic we have already touched on, you said that the elites who did not accept the SMO are very few in number, and moreover many of them have left the country altogether. This, by the way, is also a positive outcome of the SMO—the cleansing of Russian society, as it seems to me. But at the same time you write that a certain disconnect can arise between different parts of our society, that they can develop and function separately from one another, which in the end can lead to disintegration, and you even use the corresponding term. How great is this danger at present, and how would you assess it?

Alexander Dugin: Here, I believe, we are dealing with what in medicine is called a malformation. A malformation is the faulty development of the organs in the human embryo, leading to various forms of deformity when the organs are not in their proper places. That is, when the original design, the image of the human being, and its passage through all the stages of development from conception to birth goes awry. The goal of the birth and upbringing of a child is the creation of an integral personality in which everything is in its place: in the organism, in the soul, and in the consciousness. That is the norm.

But sometimes the process of maturation of the human embryo does not go according to plan. A failure occurs in that colossal work in the course of which all the organs must arrange themselves in the correct order. Integrity is lost, and certain parts begin to develop according to a completely autonomous logic. In medicine this pathology is called a malformation.

If we apply this to our historical experience, to Russia, then something similar was noted by Spengler, by many external observers, and by our Slavophiles in the nineteenth century. They said: a process is taking place in Russia that can be called a pseudomorphosis or, as I prefer, archeomodern. What does this mean? Into the maturation of our society, into the most complex balance between the people and the authorities—which has never been simple, has constantly been constructed, reconstructed and distorted—Westernism intervened. The experience of an entirely different organism, a different civilization, led to a profound distortion of the internal processes.

In the nineteenth century our Slavophiles, and especially vividly Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, saw in this a disease. The Westernism of Russian society is a pathology, a malformation. It is when, in the place where a healthy organism should have a head, some other organ appears, and instead of an arm—a leg. The product of this pathological social being is reflected by Dostoevsky in Demons, in The Brothers Karamazov, and in other novels. Society is sick with Westernism, and Dostoevsky gives it an exact diagnosis.

In the person of Smerdyakov from The Brothers Karamazov, he created the pure image of the Westernizer. Smerdyakov, while formally a Russian man, is completely devoted to the West; he openly wishes Russia to lose and the “educated French nation” to defeat the “uneducated and backward Russian” one. The old servant Grigory, a kind and loyal man, speaks of him as a dragon, as some kind of “bathhouse slime” in which a mixing of natures has occurred, and even asks that Smerdyakov not be baptized. He understands that we are recognizing the status of a normal human being in a degenerate, a pathological creature who will yet remind us of everything. And indeed Smerdyakov becomes a murderer, although in the end it is Mitya who is put on trial. Smerdyakov is the illegitimate bastard of the same Karamazov.

And so our liberal elite, Russian Westernism, which is the carrier of this malformation (including its political structures such as the recently barred-from-elections “Yabloko”)—this is the internal deformity and dysfunction of our society. They hinder the healthy, even if difficult and dramatic, becoming of Russian history. This is a rupture, a destruction of integrity. And it is with this liberal, essentially Russophobic elite—where this malformation has finally triumphed—that we are fighting today in Ukraine.

Ukraine is our own reflection, our repulsive, distorted, inverted, yet extremely sharp and concentrated image of ourselves in this perverted, “Smerdyakovite” aspect. That is precisely why this is such a serious matter.

The malformation, archeomodern or pseudomorphosis of our society—it sounds complex, these are scholarly terms, but it is precisely this task that we are called upon to solve in the course of the special military operation. We must emerge into the open space of our historical being under incredibly difficult conditions and under the colossal, continuing pressure of the West. For the West penetrates us not only physically, trying to conquer and seize us by force—as it did under Napoleon, Hitler, or under the current policy of Biden. It penetrates from within: through its technologies, operations, images, cultural patterns and soft power. The West deliberately imposes on us the model of movement through history that is advantageous to it, so that we weaken and disintegrate. Exactly as during the Opium Wars in China, when the West under threat of force forcibly opened markets in order to corrupt and destroy Chinese society.

It is with this internal Western influence that we have collided. That is precisely why we lost our bearings in the 1990s, surrendered our state, reached out toward our chief enemy and committed an enormous number of mistakes and crimes—concentrated crimes characteristic of malformation.

But now, in my view, we have reached the moment of great healing. Our society must come into agreement with its traditional values—that is why presidential decrees on traditional values and historical enlightenment are being signed. We must clearly understand who we are, where we come from, what our nature and civilizational identity are, what it means to be Russian. This war forces us to give the deepest answers to questions that in comfortable peacetime we were simply incapable of posing. In peacetime we fall apart over trifles, sink into everyday life and individualism, not noticing how destructive poisons penetrate the consciousness of our society and render us defenceless.

Today we have come face to face with the externalized image of our own illness, for the present Ukrainian regime is precisely our disease. Recall: it was we ourselves who rushed toward the West, toward Europe, toward NATO, who dreamed of visa-free travel and Schengen. It was our elite in the 1990s that despised and hated the Russian people, labelling supporters of social justice and the patriotic idea “red-browns.” Russophobia reigned here, in Russia itself, and it was on this that those elites grew who, after the start of the special military operation, broke away and fled. You are absolutely right: what is at stake is the healing of our society and our elite. We are paying a colossal price for this, but the process of healing is under way.

It is very important to grasp the scale of the problem. This is not some technical malfunction. The special military operation and what it will lead to—and in the near future it will only scale up—is the greatest trial for our people. But it is at the same time the greatest chance, a unique opportunity for our spiritual awakening and for our affirmation on our genuine historical and spiritual paths.

Host: But it is a blessing that the war is being waged in every sphere. I am not even speaking of air, land and sea—it is being waged in minds and souls, in the economy and, of course, on the battlefield. And here, thank God, the United States of America is forced to disperse its forces, because points of resistance have appeared: China in a certain sense, Iran of course, and so on. That is, we are not alone, and Iran by its resistance is helping us. Nevertheless, Donald Trump has already announced the crushing defeat [of the Iranian side] and declared that the Strait of Hormuz will become part of the USA, passing under the jurisdiction of the United States. How do things stand on this front from your point of view?

Alexander Dugin: Here, as everywhere, it seems to me one should avoid overly light statements. It is completely obvious that Trump is simply presenting wishful thinking as reality. There is no victory and no control over the Strait of Hormuz on the part of the USA, not even close. At present this strait is controlled simultaneously by Iran and by the Americans: those whom the Iranians let through are stopped by the Americans, while those who have not reached an agreement with Iran are stopped, turned back or sunk by the Iranians themselves. In essence a double blockade is in place, through which almost no one gets through. And in order to obtain full control over the Strait of Hormuz the USA would need to crush Iran completely, which in the remote perspective is still very far off.

This does not mean that such a development of events is excluded—America and NATO possess enormous strength. But Iran is opposing them with exceptional success and is fighting magnificently. Having received the first blow, they have reassembled and are ready for a long war with the entire West. They have found the most painful points—I think they will sooner or later begin one by one to cut the undersea cables carrying information sensitive for the world economy that run along the bottom of the Strait of Hormuz. Iran has a whole arsenal of possibilities for making the West and America hurt so badly that they will howl in pain.

Of course it is still too early to speak of a complete victory for Iran, although morally it has already stood firm and won. But strategic victory is still far off for it, while for the West it is even farther, and it is by no means certain that it is in store for them at all. A quick operation by Israel and the USA in Iran did not work out—unlike, for example, in Venezuela. Everything has stalled, and the further development of the situation is completely unpredictable. Iran is fighting heroically for its sovereignty, delivering a grand slap in the face to all the other Islamic countries that fawn before Israel and the USA. Iran’s authority in the Islamic world and in all humanity is today higher than ever.

You are absolutely right: strategically this helps us a great deal, because the West is forced to fight on two fronts, and with the opening of the Taiwan direction—already on three. And that is where everything is heading. This is a struggle for a multipolar world in which we, China, Iran and North Korea embody radical multipolarity. Other large civilization-states—India, the rest of the Islamic world, Africa, Latin America—are for the time being acting as neutral players capable of leaning either toward multipolarity or toward unipolarity. If they were given the chance they would of course choose multipolarity, but they are not yet ready to fight as fiercely as we or the Iranians.

The main point is that this world war is already under way right now. On its outcome depends what the world order will be—multipolar or unipolar. Can we say that we have won? Honestly speaking, no: neither we, nor the Iranians, nor the Chinese have yet achieved victory. But can the West say that it has won? Most certainly not! On the contrary, it is beginning to demonstrate its weakest sides. Yet if we do not come to our senses, if we do not realize that everything most important—both for us, and for the Iranians, and for the West—still lies ahead… For if we do indeed defeat the West, it will collapse like the Tower of Babel with such a roar across the whole earth that it is still unknown whether they will try to drag all of humanity down with them. And even the Chinese miracle, thanks to which China has become a gigantic world power, will under these conditions also be subjected to the greatest trial.

We now see China as the undisputed leader, and that is true: it has broken out from secondary positions into first place in history, in artificial intelligence, in the economy and finance, showing magnificent results. But by and large all of this took place thanks to a very subtle game. As soon as the West decides to stop playing by these rules on its side, China too will have to sit an examination in historical maturity, and Taiwan will become the very touchstone with which they have yet to collide.

Right now it is very important to realize the full seriousness of what is happening for us, for Iran, to understand that the Iranians are our people, that North Korea is ours, and China is also ours. In this war of the multipolar world against unipolar hegemony one must look at everything globally: try to make other civilization-states ours and at the same time seek allies on the West itself. For the liberal, globalist or already openly neo-Nazi Trumpian West is by no means a matter of consensus in Western societies. There a colossal resistance is growing both on the right and on the left—both in relation to the European Union and in relation to the American bipartisan neoconservative system.

A real powder keg today is Israel, which has declared war on the entire Islamic world and is taking extremely dangerous, aggressive steps while continuing the genocide in Gaza. This is pure playing with fire, all the more so because they practically no longer reckon with anyone or anything, even trying to break over the knee those politicians in American society who disagree with the leadership’s line. Right now everything is at stake. We are at a unique point in the global distribution of forces: the scales have frozen in a fifty-fifty position, and literally a speck of dust or a feather can tip the situation. The West is undoubtedly losing its hegemony, but it is desperately fighting to prolong it, and for that it will go very far.

On the other hand, victory for neither side can be taken for granted. This is a unique state of military-conflict equilibrium: one more step—whether our effective strikes, decisive actions by the Iranians or a new conflict in the Pacific region—can change everything instantaneously. The main thing here is to stand firm to the end. In the Gospel and in our tradition there are great words: “He that shall endure unto the end, the same shall be saved.” He who stands firm to the end shall be saved. And that is precisely why a hard, resolute mindset is so important.

That is why all talk of an imminent ceasefire, of the need to end the war more quickly and to reach some agreement with someone—about which we began—is so dangerous and demoralizing. At the moment when it is necessary to make the decisive effort, to gather one’s spirit, thought, will and organizational capacities in order to deliver the ultimate, fatal blow in this heaviest and most tragic battle of humanity, we begin to be told that everything is about to end of its own accord. But until we win, nothing will end.

Iran is in exactly the same position. And the USA, by the way, is too. You are right: once you’ve swung, you have to follow through. Trump has swung, and now he is responding exclusively with his posts on social media, and they are becoming less and less coherent. Even his convinced adherents are already openly speaking of signs of cognitive disorder, and his behaviour is increasingly reminiscent of a medical diagnosis. Well, those are their internal affairs; we will not interfere, but in principle this does not cancel their hegemony. In the final analysis they can pursue their line even with such a representative. Trump, after all, went to the elections under splendid slogans, promising to change everything, but all of that has collapsed—no one remembers any more either about the Epstein files or about the peace initiatives. There is simply no longer any difference between Democrats and Republicans within the framework of this neoconservative course.

One must clearly understand: the West is absolutely independent of the outcome of presidential elections either in America or in Europe. This question has already been settled once and for all. This is a force with which we are in a state of direct war—a war with the West and with Westernism. And in this war we have only one path—to win.

(Translated from the Russian)

Igor Ronhaus examines why CIA Director John Ratcliffe’s secret trip to Moscow may signal either a dangerous escalation or Washington’s reluctant shift from denial to bargaining.

CIA Director John Ratcliffe made an unannounced visit to Moscow on Tuesday for talks with Russian officials. The trip became public only after observers spotted a US Air Force Boeing C-17A Globemaster III at a Moscow airport and a US diplomatic motorcade nearby. Flight data showed that the aircraft had left Joint Base Andrews in Maryland, stopped in Riga and then continued to Moscow. Neither Washington nor Moscow disclosed whom Ratcliffe met or what was discussed. The CIA declined to comment, while Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that Vladimir Putin had no meeting with Ratcliffe on his schedule. This was Ratcliffe’s first known visit to Russia since becoming CIA director, although he has kept open direct contacts with Russian intelligence chiefs.

Ratcliffe’s arrival is far more important—and, from a Russian point of view, far more encouraging—than another visit by Steve Witkoff. Why is that?

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Stanislav Krapivnik and Tim Kirby discuss the latter's traditionalist and violent sci-fi book series Ultra Heavy.

You can order the Ultra Heavy books here.

Bob Hickok examines how Marine Le Pen’s return to the 2027 presidential race, her partnership with Jordan Bardella, and the National Rally’s commanding poll lead have brought France’s patriotic movement closer to power than ever.

France has entered the final stretch before the 2027 presidential vote with Marine Le Pen far ahead of every rival. A Toluna Harris Interactive survey published on August 24, based on fieldwork among 1,764 registered voters, places her between 35 and 38 percent across five first-round fields. Her closest rivals reach only 16 or 17 percent. The same poll gives her 68 percent against Jean-Luc Mélenchon, 57 percent against Gabriel Attal, and 55 percent against Édouard Philippe in possible runoffs. A poll remains a snapshot, yet a lead of almost twenty points carries a plain message. The National Rally has become the main vessel for French anger, hope, and desire for renewal. Years of Macron rule have left record debt, weak growth, strained public services, falling authority, and a widespread sense that Paris serves systems before citizens. The old center still asks voters to fear political change. A growing share of France now fears five more years of the same course. The patriotic current has moved from protest toward power, and Le Pen stands at its head.

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In his latest video essay, Nicholas Reed illustrates the surprising political history of milk, exploring how one of humanity’s oldest symbols of nourishment became intertwined with ideas of purity, racial ideology, authoritarianism, and power across history, popular culture, and the modern internet.

Milk is one of humanity’s oldest and most universal symbols. It represents nourishment, motherhood, innocence, purity, health, and life itself. As the first food most people ever consume, it evokes comfort, dependence, and trust. Yet throughout modern history, this seemingly ordinary drink has repeatedly appeared in unexpected places: fascist propaganda, colonial racial theory, white supremacist internet culture, and countless films depicting authoritarian power.

This is not because milk is inherently political. Rather, authoritarian movements have consistently appropriated symbols associated with purity, health, discipline, and protection to present themselves as guardians of society. Milk has become one of the most enduring examples of that phenomenon.

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The association stretches back long before the twentieth century. Across Europe and the Middle East, milk baths symbolized aristocratic refinement, beauty, and elite status. Legends surrounding figures such as Cleopatra helped establish milk as a metaphor for bodily perfection and cultivated purity. Pale skin itself often represented wealth and privilege because it implied freedom from manual labor. While these associations were largely social rather than racial, they created a symbolic language that later political ideologies would eagerly adopt.

During the nineteenth century, colonial thinkers increasingly transformed milk from a simple food into evidence of supposed civilizational superiority. Because many Northern European populations had developed high levels of adult lactose tolerance through centuries of dairy farming, racial theorists began contrasting “milk-drinking races” with societies whose diets relied primarily on rice, millet, corn, or legumes. Dietary differences soon became distorted into claims about intelligence, strength, masculinity, and national character.

Writers and physicians argued that dairy consumption produced stronger, more vigorous populations, while non-dairy cultures were portrayed as weaker or less advanced. Figures such as J. Leonard Corning and Woods Hutchinson promoted these ideas openly, helping turn nutrition into racial ideology. By the early twentieth century, even prominent political leaders echoed similar rhetoric. Future U.S. President Herbert Hoover famously connected dairy consumption to the “virility of the white races,” illustrating how deeply these assumptions had entered mainstream public discourse.

These ideas proved fertile ground for authoritarian movements.

Fascist regimes rarely presented themselves merely as systems of force. Instead, they portrayed themselves as protectors of the national body, promising order, discipline, health, and moral renewal. Physical fitness, bodily restraint, and notions of purity became central political values. Milk fit naturally within this symbolic framework because it represented wholesome nourishment rather than indulgence.

Nazi Germany cultivated the image of Adolf Hitler as an ascetic leader who rejected alcohol, smoking, and excess while embodying discipline and self-sacrifice. Whether every detail of this image reflected reality mattered less than its political usefulness. Hitler’s carefully constructed public persona became a metaphor for the purified German nation itself. Likewise, Fascist Italy under Benito Mussolini celebrated milk as part of its vision of national regeneration, even producing Lanital, a synthetic textile manufactured from milk protein, as a symbol of industrial innovation and economic self-sufficiency.

The symbolism extended far beyond food. It became part of a broader authoritarian aesthetic in which the healthy body represented the healthy nation.

These historical associations help explain why milk appears so frequently in modern cinema whenever filmmakers wish to signal unsettling authority. Films such as Inglorious Bastards, Get Out, and V for Vendetta deliberately place milk alongside characters who exercise immense power while presenting themselves as calm, civilized, or paternal. The contrast creates unease precisely because milk normally evokes innocence rather than menace.

Perhaps nowhere is this symbolism clearer than in V for Vendetta. The authoritarian government repeatedly frames itself as a protective force preserving order against chaos. Milk reinforces that illusion of benevolence. It suggests nourishment and safety even as violence operates beneath the surface. The drink becomes shorthand for a government claiming parental authority over society.

In the twenty-first century, these symbolic traditions resurfaced in an entirely different environment: internet culture. During the rise of the alt-right in the mid-2010s, white supremacist communities embraced milk as an online meme, posting images of themselves chugging milk and celebrating lactose tolerance as evidence of supposed European racial superiority. What appeared absurd to many observers was actually rooted in much older colonial myths linking dairy consumption with whiteness and biological superiority.

The internet did not invent these ideas. It merely repackaged them into digital culture.

That does not mean drinking milk, or promoting healthier diets, is inherently political. Modern debates over raw milk, organic food, processed ingredients, or nutrition span a wide range of viewpoints and motivations. Most people who advocate dietary reform have no connection whatsoever to extremist politics.

The important lesson lies elsewhere. Throughout history, movements built on nationalism and authoritarianism have repeatedly drawn on symbols of purity, bodily discipline, and national restoration because they possess enormous emotional power. They promise a return to health, strength, innocence, and order. Milk, perhaps more than any other everyday food, naturally embodies those ideals. Ultimately, milk is neither racist nor fascist. It remains a source of nutrition, a livelihood for millions of farmers, and a symbol of care across countless cultures and religions. Yet its repeated appearance alongside authoritarian movements reveals something important about political symbolism itself. Extremist ideologies rarely invent entirely new symbols. Instead, they appropriate familiar ones that already carry positive emotional associations.

Milk did not create authoritarianism. But generation after generation, authoritarian movements have chosen milk as one of the most effective symbols through which to portray themselves as pure, protective, disciplined, and morally righteous. History reminds us that even the most ordinary objects can acquire extraordinary political meaning, not because of what they are, but because of the stories societies choose to tell about them.

Bob Hickok examines how the AfD’s surge in Saxony-Anhalt could carry the party from opposition into government and alter the course of German politics.

AfD leader Alice Weidel’s latest declaration was direct: “We will form the government in Saxony-Anhalt.” The state votes on September 6, and the AfD enters the final weeks of the campaign with a commanding lead. An Infratest dimap poll places the party at 41 percent, against 24 percent for the CDU (Christian Democratic Union, Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s party). Since several smaller parties are polling close to the five-percent threshold required to enter the state parliament, such a result could give the AfD an absolute majority of seats without an absolute majority of votes. Its lead candidate, Ulrich Siegmund, is therefore campaigning for an AfD government rather than another term in opposition. This would be the first state government led by the party and a grave defeat for every institution that has spent years telling Germans that the AfD must never be allowed to exercise power. The campaign slogan, “Everything is possible,” has become a statement of fact. A party treated as an untouchable outsider now stands within reach of the State Chancellery in Magdeburg, the capital of Saxony-Anhalt.

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Cas Corach draws on Jean Baudrillard to trace a path from a false rumor that divided an Irish town to the empty spectacle of MAGA, revealing how the liberal order replaces material reality with rival simulations and why multipolarity must recover the real.

In May 2023, the normally quiet town of Corofin in Ireland’s County Clare was rocked by protest. This protest was small, parochial and uninteresting to any outsider, attracting only angry locals who were divided on a central question: should a property in the town be used to house asylum seekers? The debate was not held in a town hall or in the offices of political representatives, but rather on the streets and roads of that otherwise peaceful area. This culminated in the construction of a makeshift blockade of wooden pallets and large plastic bins across the entrance to the property. People shouted on either side of this physical divide, which was the real manifestation of a cultural divide in the town. One old man was even assaulted, leading to an arrest.

This story, on the face of it, is not unusual in modern Europe, as the housing of asylum seekers is a burning issue across the continent. Yet there was something unusual about the Corofin incident: there never were any plans to house asylum seekers or any immigrant group in that town. The blockade was, in truth, for nothing. The premise of the debate was false, and the assault and screaming matches were needless and tragic. Yet the anger itself was real. What had happened?

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The rumour of housing foreigners had spread over social media when someone had illegally entered a newly constructed building, claiming it was being built to bring nameless ‘invaders’ to the town. That was enough to ignite the explosion in Corofin on that fateful day. The social media video was a simulacrum: it had no corresponding reality, yet it acquired a political meaning of its own and motivated people to act. A digital representation of an event that had never happened had produced very real consequences.

The incident at Corofin may, in the grand scheme of things, be unimportant and soon forgotten. Yet it represents a microcosm of a growing problem in the West: the use of spectacle to engender conflict, and the emergence of a political reality increasingly detached from the reality it claims to represent.

One influential theorist immediately comes to mind in relation to this question: Jean Baudrillard and his theory of the simulacrum. His writing is dense and complicated, but to explain it succinctly, Baudrillard argues that the words, symbols and signs we use to describe reality and communicate with one another are becoming increasingly detached from reality itself. What we say and believe no longer necessarily corresponds to anything concrete, but instead endlessly refers back to other signs:

….the era of simulation is inaugurated by a liquidation of all referentials—worse: with their artificial resurrection in the systems of signs, a material more malleable than meaning, in that it lends itself to all systems of equivalences, to all binary oppositions, to all combinatory algebra. It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real, that is to say of an operation of deterring every real process via its operational double, a programmatic, metastable, perfectly descriptive machine that offers all the signs of the real and short-circuits all its vicissitudes. Never again will the real have the chance to produce itself. (Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation)

For Baudrillard, this represents the transition into an era of simulation in which the distinction between the real and its representation becomes increasingly difficult to maintain. His argument extends beyond politics, affecting everything from family life and social relations to history itself. Yet for the purposes of this essay, our focus will be narrower: the political sphere, and the extent to which contemporary political discourse is becoming detached from the material reality it supposedly represents. Corofin provides a particularly simple example of this process. The building was real, the video was real, and the people involved were real; what did not exist was the political reality constructed around them. A representation of an imagined event became sufficiently powerful to produce a real political confrontation. The sign had effectively preceded the reality.

Following this, it is our contention that much of the current unipolar and liberal world order is a mere simulation of reality. Perhaps the clearest example is the death of George Floyd in 2020 and the extraordinary circulation of the footage surrounding his arrest. Whatever one’s interpretation of the precise circumstances of Floyd’s death, the footage rapidly ceased to function merely as a tragic individual police encounter and became a political symbol representing much broader arguments about American society; in short, the image became more important than the event it claimed to represent.

The name ‘George Floyd’ was associated with a whole collection of political symbols: racial injustice, police brutality, white supremacy and the condition of black people in America. The video was reproduced endlessly across television, social media and political demonstrations, while the individual circumstances of Floyd’s death became increasingly distinct from the larger political narrative constructed around the image. A real event had become a simulacrum, and one that had acquired a political life of its own.

This is important because it demonstrates that simulation does not necessarily mean that an event is entirely imaginary. The underlying situation may be completely real; rather, what changes is the relationship between the event and its representation. The representation becomes dislodged from the complexity of the real and becomes a symbol through which other political questions are understood. The image no longer simply tells us what happened; in fact, people from different political perspectives cannot even agree on what truly happened to George Floyd. The image simply references other symbols: Black Lives Matter, ‘support the blue’, rioting in the streets, ‘take our country back’, and so on. At no point was anything resolved or truly learned from the event. At no point was the real ever even under consideration.

Yet the backlash against this process has not liberated politics from simulation; it has merely produced a competing set of signs which are more ridiculous, if anything. The Right has correctly identified the artificiality of many of the political signs produced by the left wing of the liberal order, but it has failed to escape the system which produces them. MAGA, in particular, may represent the ultimate political simulacrum: a sign which appears to stand for a coherent political programme while increasingly becoming a vessel into which almost any political meaning can be poured; in short, a non-entity or void in the core of the US liberal empire.

MAGA has the uncanny ability to represent everything and nothing. It is for the working class yet funded and increasingly represented by billionaire elites; it is anti-war yet bombs schoolchildren in Iran; it promises economic rejuvenation while embracing policies that contribute to inflationary pressures. Most strikingly, it claims to be populist while becoming increasingly unpopular with the very population in whose name it claims to speak. These contradictions would seem fatal to any coherent political programme, yet they barely damage the sign itself. MAGA simply absorbs them.

This is what makes MAGA a simulacrum of a political movement. It does not need to correspond to one stable political reality because it can continually refer to other signs: America, greatness, the silent majority, the deep state, globalism, the wall, the establishment, the golden age. Each sign points towards another, and together they create the impression of a coherence which need not actually exist. The movement means everything and nothing precisely because the sign has become detached from any stable referent.

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The speed with which these contradictions disappear is itself revealing. Who remembers Trump effectively threatening to end Iranian civilisation? The threat appears, dominates the political spectacle for a moment, is interpreted through the existing signs of strength and American power (or conversely American wickedness), and then disappears beneath the next controversy. The event does not have to produce a lasting material consequence because its primary function is symbolic. Even the supposed leader of the free world increasingly operates within this same hyperreality: the office, the rhetoric, the threats and the spectacle all possess the appearance of power, while the powerlessness of the US becomes more apparent against the rising tide of global opposition.

These issues are not limited to the US but stretch across the broader West. We have already mentioned Ireland and again we look to the dissident Right who crop up in response to liberal hegemony on the island. Phrases such as ‘remigration’ have become mere slogans of activists without any real power to achieve their goals, all the while the demographic situation worsens. The real is unknown, avoided and lost in the simulation. For much of the population, ‘remigration’ is an obscurity, and even among those who use it, its precise meaning and material implications are often unclear. The word therefore acquires a power independent of any clearly defined referent: it signifies a solution without ever having to confront the practical question of what that solution would actually entail.

Dissident organisations increasingly engage in a fantasy of political action which exists more fully online than it does in the material world. A video, a protest, a viral post or an impressive-looking march can create the appearance of political momentum without producing any corresponding increase in political power. Restore in Britain appears to suffer from a similar problem: considerable simulated support online, but little transfer of that support into the material institutions where political power is actually exercised. These movements can generate signs of political importance without necessarily acquiring the institutional power required to alter the political order.

The question remains: why all this? Where did this simulation come from? Baudrillard makes the point clear:

…..in the end, throughout its history it was capital that first fed on the destructuration of every referential, of every human objective, that shattered every ideal distinction between true and false, good and evil, in order to establish a radical law of equivalence and exchange, the iron law of its power. Capital was the first to play at deterrence, abstraction, disconnection, deterritorialization, etc., and if it is the one that fostered reality, the reality principle, it was also the first to liquidate it by exterminating all use value, all real equivalence of production and wealth, in the very sense we have of the unreality of the stakes and the omnipotence of manipulation. (Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation)

Baudrillard’s argument here is particularly important; capital itself has historically been one of the great forces of abstraction. It takes things which once possessed a particular use, meaning or place and reduces them to their exchange value. The local becomes the market; the worker becomes labour; the object becomes a commodity; and eventually even political ideas can become signs to be bought, sold and exchanged.

In this sense, the contemporary political spectacle is not simply an invention of the liberal left or its dissident enemies. It emerges from a much deeper process in which liberal capitalism has progressively dissolved the distinctions between the real and its representation. The irony is therefore that much of the contemporary dissident Right seeks to oppose the liberal order while leaving largely untouched the economic system which Baudrillard identifies as one of the original forces behind this destruction of the referential.

So what is the solution? We have written quite pessimistically but all is far from lost. From our own experience in Ireland, we can say that there are political movements that engage with real people and solve real problems. A new popular movement like Independent Ireland comes to mind, precisely because its appeal is rooted less in an online ideological identity than in practical questions of representation, local development and the material concerns of its constituents.

While of course nothing is immune from the simulation in its entirety, we now see more individuals who recognize the system for what it is and make genuine efforts to step over the signs and symbols and engage with real people. It is not glamorous or sexy, but a local representative fixing roads, funding schools or halting the development of an asylum centre in the town hall rather than in violent protest is a sign of real change in ways of thinking, small as it may be.

More of us are seeing the benefit of turning off our screens, rejecting ideology in favour of human interaction, and avoiding the language of simulation wherever possible. It is about building real community, not movements. Genuine interactions, not market relations. It means judging politics by what it actually produces rather than by the strength of its online presence, its slogans or the number of people who can be mobilised around a symbol. The answer to a politics increasingly detached from reality is therefore not to construct a more convincing simulation, but to recover the habit of dealing with things as they actually are: people, places, communities, institutions and material conditions.

This represents a step away from liberalism and towards multipolarity. Not the multipolarity of online edits or ideology, but rather the true recognition of people and place in the real. A politics of multipolarity, properly understood, is not simply about replacing one ideological centre with several competing ideological centres. It is about recovering the importance of locality, particularity and actual material circumstance against a political order which increasingly reduces everything to abstract signs. The future of politics may therefore depend less on who wins the next rhetorical battle and more on whether we can once again build things that truly last.

The lesson of Corofin, then, is perhaps a straightforward one: the blockade was real, the anger was real, and the people were real, but the political reality which brought them together was not. The task before us is to reverse that relationship: to build a politics in which the signs once again follow the real, rather than the real being forced to follow the signs.

Georg Immanuel Nagel rejects the claim of Israeli nationalist Yoram Hazony that European culture is based on Judaism.

Yoram Hazony is an Israeli citizen, a modern Orthodox Jew, President of the Herzl Institute in Jerusalem, and is considered a fanatical Zionist. His book The Virtue of Nationalism was controversially discussed by the mainstream. Particularly in the United States, his often very peculiar theses seem to find an audience. Hazony’s excessive Jewish nationalism has led him to make some statements that are as absurd as they are revealing.

Europe Is Said to Descend from “Israel and the Bible”

“There was always a problem with the academic study of ‘classical antiquity,’ which was built around the assumption that the West was descended from Greece and Rome—but not from Israel and the Bible,” Hazony wrote on Twitter. He considers this thesis to be “anti-Semitic.” Wow! Hazony is pulling out the heavy artillery of contemporary moralism.

I find Hazony’s claim that European civilization should be based on the Jews and their Bible to be incredibly presumptuous, chauvinistic, and a delusion that can only happen to someone who has escalated so extremely in his nationalism that he has lost all touch with reality.

The only connection ancient Israel has with Western civilization, i.e., with Rome and Hellenism, is that the province of Judea was part of the oriental empire of Rome. This did not magically make the Jews Europeans. In antiquity, the Jews were by no means a significant people. The Romans did not see them as much more than the numerous other small tribes that were part of their vast empire. The fact that Jews later migrated to Europe does not change these facts.

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Christian Bouchet is one of the more unconventional figures in contemporary French political and intellectual life: a publisher, writer, and scholar of religious and esoteric currents, whose journey through nationalist-revolutionary and Eurasianist circles has made him a unique voice in Europe’s post-liberal debate. Trained in ethnology, Bouchet has combined academic inquiry with decades of metapolitical activism, founding journals, networks, and the publishing house Ars Magna, through which he has introduced to French audiences authors ranging from Julius Evola to Alexander Dugin and Jean Thiriart and Francis Parker Yockey.

For Bouchet, the central political question of the 21st century is civilizational sovereignty. He argues that the West’s project of universalisation—economic, moral, and cultural—has produced a global homogenization that dissolves authentic identities. In response, he advocates “ethno-differentialism,” a doctrine asserting the right of peoples and cultures to remain themselves rather than being absorbed into a single, liberal-capitalist model of humanity. This perspective places him inside the broader multipolar paradigm, which sees the future belonging to distinct civilizational blocs rather than one hegemonic power.

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His interest in geopolitical conflict has taken him beyond theory and into contact with emerging zones of alternative statehood, including a visit to the Donbas, where he sought to understand on the ground how identity, war, and resistance shape new political realities outside Western influence.

In the following conversation, we explore the intellectual foundations of his work, the future of Europe in a multipolar world, and the role of culture, spirituality, and publishing in the struggle for civilizational self-determination.

This interview was conducted by Constantin von Hoffmeister.

You have explored nationalist-revolutionary and metapolitical domains. How would you describe the internal continuity of your intellectual journey from the 1970s to the present day?

I’ve kept a diary since I was 11. Its intellectual consistency has always surprised me. My ideas have remained the same for 60 years. Of course, they’ve become more refined, but they haven’t changed. So, they come from my soul, not from the outside world. I sometimes express myself by referring to someone else’s thoughts, but when I do this, I keep in mind this quote from Sylvain Tesson: “Quotations are not screens behind which to take refuge. They are the formulation of a thought that one once cherished and recognizes, happily expressed, in the writings of another. Quotations reveal the soul of the one who uses them.”

How has your training in ethnology influenced your political worldview, in particular your perception of civilizational differences?

I think the opposite happened. It was because I was aware of these civilizational differences that I became interested in ethnology. Reading Herder greatly influenced me in this regard.

You have been an activist, an academic, and a publisher. Which of these roles has most defined your sense of mission?

Without a doubt, publishing. That’s where I was most useful.

My past as a student and teacher didn’t contribute much to our cause. Activism was something others could do, even though I never aspired to be an activist.

To be a publisher, you need a desire to transmit knowledge that very few have, and that I had.

I don’t mean to sound arrogant, but if I hadn’t directed Ars magna, who would have had Francis Parker Yockey, Ferenc Szalasi, Alexander Dugin, Karl Otto Paetel, Ivan Ilyin, and others translated and published in French? Who would have undertaken the republication of the complete works of Georges Valois? Who would have taken on the task of translating and publishing Scarabelli’s biography of Evola and the most recent Evola miscellany? Who would be planning to publish Rohan, Ustrialov, and Ikki Kita soon?

There are very few “radical right-wing” publishers in France and none of them have, like me, a clear and precise publishing policy, without worrying about making big sales or making their investment profitable.

Through your publishing house, Éditions Ars Magna, you have published texts by authors as diverse as Alexander Dugin, Julius Evola, Guillaume Faye, and Jean Thiriart. In your opinion, what unites these very different authors?

An imperial ambition, the dream of an imperial state stretching from Galway to Vladivostok. That said, there are many differences between them regarding how to achieve it and what it should be.

The Italian communist thinker Antonio Gramsci believed that political power is won long before elections, by shaping culture, language, and how people perceive the world. According to this view, books, ideas, and the media can be more decisive than laws or political parties.

Do you consider publishing a form of political warfare, a metapolitical front in the Gramscian sense?

Absolutely. But I’m talking about mainstream publishing, which is aimed at everyone and has large print runs. I, on the other hand, only work in niche publishing, where the books don’t reach the masses. That doesn’t mean they have no influence, however, but it’s more indirect: they influence activists and political leaders who, in turn, influence the masses.

While multipolarity describes a world shaped by several major centers of power, Eurasianism puts forward a more specific civilizational idea: that Russia, Central Asia, parts of Europe, and sometimes Iran and other neighboring cultures, form a distinct geopolitical and cultural space that is neither Western-Atlantic nor purely Asian. This view considers the heart of the world not to be in Washington or Brussels, but in a vast continental landmass stretching from the Carpathians to the Altai Mountains and from the Arctic to the Persian and Turkic cultural zones. What has been your experience translating and presenting Eurasian thought to French audiences? Has French political culture been receptive or resistant?

For the general public, as well as for intellectuals of the traditional right, the idea is utterly ludicrous. However, it resonated strongly within the Greater European nationalist movement, as it shares many similarities with the theories of Niekisch, Yockey, Faye, and Thiriart—the last one having, for a time, even suggested that Istanbul should become the capital of “Greater Europe”...

What is the main mission of your publishing house Ars Magna today: to archive, to awaken, or to convert?

All three, simultaneously!

In your recent writings, you seem to be asserting a Catholic cultural horizon for Europe. Do you consider Catholicism to be the authentic European tradition or simply one expression among others?

In its form following the ordo antiquor, it is undoubtedly the authentic tradition of Western Europe, at least of a part of it. I discern traces of tradition in certain Anglican currents resistant to the modern world and the evolution of their Church. As for Protestantism, I don’t know. My maternal grandfather was Lutheran, but I know very little about contemporary Protestantism and I don’t know if any fragments of tradition can exist in its forms not contaminated by the modern world.

I believe that each geographical area and each people has its own particular tradition. I am Catholic by tradition because I live in France; if I lived in Russia, I would probably be Old Believer Orthodox, Shiite if I were Iranian, Sufi if I were North African, Shaivite if I were Indian… All of this makes me very hostile to any conversion and any proselytism.

Traditionalist thinkers René Guénon and Julius Evola argued that modernity represents the final stage of a long civilizational degeneration: an eclipse of initiation, sacred kingship, metaphysical knowledge, and the vertical relationship between humanity and the divine. According to them, the West has traded a comprehensive spiritual order for technological power, mass culture, and purely materialistic conceptions of life. From your perspective, what remains of the sacred in the contemporary West?

In the West, only traces of it remain, in popular rites, in monasteries.

How do you interpret the current fascination of young nationalists with pagan revival and magical thinking? Is it a symptom or a solution?

I don’t see any “fascination among young nationalists in France with pagan revival and magical thinking.” There was a brief surge in neo-paganism a few decades ago, but it didn’t reach many people and it didn’t last. It wasn’t truly a religious phenomenon; at best, it was reconstructionism, reenactment as the Anglo-Saxons say, at worst, parody.

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If there is a dominant trend among French “right-wing” youth, it is the return to a practice of Catholicism in an identity-based version.

You have promoted the idea that European nationalists and traditional Islamic forces might have deeper enemies in global liberal modernity than they have among themselves. Concretely, what would a Euro-Islamic axis look like, and how could Europe and the Islamic world establish cooperation while fully preserving their distinct spiritual and civilizational identities?

Europe faces a major problem: the influx of migrants. For political and geopolitical reasons, some want us to look the other way and claim that the only problem is a religious one, and that it has a name: Islam. This conveniently implies that non-Muslim immigration is therefore acceptable and that we share the same enemies as a small entity in the Middle East.

Hence, my consistent position is to denounce immigration and not the religion of immigrants.

After that, is a militant approach conceivable? If we are talking about the political field, there has always been an affinity and relations between European nationalist currents and certain major Arab nationalist organizations such as the Ba’ath, or local nationalists such as the Libyan Jamahiriya, the PFLP-GC in Palestine, or the Syrian Social Nationalist Party.

There were shared political visions and a common enemy as well. But the institutional weakness of European nationalist groups prevented this from going very far, and subsequently the Arab nationalist groups collapsed.

If we’re talking about the traditional sphere, it’s logical that a traditionalist would identify with the traditionalist currents of other peoples, such as Sufism or certain forms of Shi’ism within Islam. It’s equally logical that they would consider the enemy to be the modern world, not another tradition. There have been contacts there as well, but again, these have not gone very far.

In conclusion, I don’t believe at all that a Euro-Islamic axis is possible. At best, one could hope that Europe would have an independent Arab and Muslim policy and not be entirely subservient to the interests of the Zionist entity.

Islam and Muslims themselves are not our enemies. Returning to the issue of immigration, immigrants must be sent back, not because they are Muslim, but because they are not “one of us,” regardless of their religion.

How do you define the Eurasian civilizational space in geographical, spiritual, and political terms?

Like the Earth Empire stretching from Galway to Vladivostok, with Moscow, as the Third Rome, as its capital. Like a state structured according to the functional tripartite division of the Indo-Europeans. Like a vast archeofuturistic space.

In your view, what is the most dangerous illusion that underpins Western unipolar domination today?

That Western Europe needs the American “big brother” to ensure its defense and that the Zionist entity has the same enemies as us.

Can you elaborate on your concept of “ethno-differentialism” and explain how it contrasts with both racism and liberal universalism?

There are actually two forms of racism. The one we usually call by that name is a racism of exclusion, domination, and even extermination. The other is universalist racism, whether liberal or not. This is a racism of negation: it denies what makes others different and dreams of a uniform world where cultures and affiliations are no longer transmitted but are simply sets of attributes that one chooses and can change according to the spirit of the times. Everyone is the same, and differences are merely marginal and fleeting. Ethno-differentialism, inspired by Herder, considers all cultures to be inherently respectable and must be preserved. It believes that identity is paramount. It is a rejection of a monochrome world.

Is multipolarity simply a geopolitical reality or does it have a metaphysical significance, that of a restoration of plurality against the Tower of Babel of globalism?

Both, of course. In this regard, we should also reread Herder.

You joined the National Front (now the National Rally) later in your career. How do you assess Marine Le Pen’s attempt to mainstream nationalist politics in France?

Henry IV said, “Paris is well worth a Mass.” Marine Le Pen could say, “Paris is well worth a teshuvah.” The end justifies the means. Marine Le Pen and her followers are involved in “high politics,” which has nothing to do with what we are dealing with.

I am not criticizing her today and I will not criticize her tomorrow, any more than I criticize Trump or Meloni, because we are not playing in the same league.

Has French nationalism lost its revolutionary character since the 1980s?

No, because I think it never had it except on extremely narrow margins. The massive revolutionary character of French nationalism disappeared as early as the First World War. Afterwards, it was only marginal.

Do you think a truly sovereign France could exist again within the current structure of the European Union?

No. But an independent France would be preferable to the France we know within Europe. Europe as a structure needs to be recreated, and I await its Cavour.1

What role do you see for intellectuals in preparing a post-liberal Europe?

That of watchmen and that of awakeners.

What advice would you give to young thinkers seeking to find a balance between tradition, revolution, and realism in a chaotic world?

To pray a lot, to join a traditional structure if they can find one—perhaps a third order or a fraternity—within their reach, to frequently retreat to the desert.

Do you primarily see yourself as a bridge between the political and the spiritual?

I don’t have that ambition. I long dreamed of founding an order or, failing that, a new Group of Ur. I haven’t had the chance to see that dream come true.

Does what you read or study today challenge your own worldview?

No, absolutely not!

After decades of activism, scholarship, and controversy, what do you think is the essential idea worth defending?

Undoubtedly, loyalty to one’s own, to those who came before us, and to those who placed their trust in us. In this regard, there is a quote from Robert Brasillach that I have adopted as my own: “What would the young people who listened to me and followed me think of me if I were to betray my principles?”

You traveled to the Donetsk People’s Republic. What motivated you to make this trip, and what did you observe on the ground in terms of cultural, civilizational, and geopolitical dynamics? How does this experience fit into your broader vision of a multipolar world where different civilizational entities resist Western influence?

I went to the Donetsk People’s Republic because I was invited and recognized as an influential figure who supported it. I saw a people standing tall and upright. I observed an ethnic and cultural homogeneity that the West no longer possesses.

The reorganization of Ukraine, with borders that correspond to something real, should benefit everyone in this region of the world. Novorossiya, of course, but also Romania, Poland, and Hungary.

In his book Archeofuturism, the French New Right philosopher Guillaume Faye argues that the future belongs to societies capable of reconciling mythical identity with advanced technoscience, and that Europe will have to face a catastrophic upheaval before such a synthesis can emerge. As we sink deeper into a systemic crisis—economic, demographic, geopolitical—do you envision an archeofuturistic future for Europe, and what forces or institutions could bring it about?

If Western Europe continues on its current path, its future risks being not at all archaeofuturistic but resolutely third-worldist.

If such a synthesis—tradition and technology, myth and power—does not occur in Europe, who will shape the future in its place?

China, Russia, and probably India.

Jürgen Schwab explains why national revolution is inseparable from the sovereign nation-state, the only political force capable of resisting global Americanization and defending a people’s freedom.

A dazzling term that is rarely questioned in nationalist journalism is “national revolution.” Revolutionary nationalists, National Socialists, National Bolsheviks, National Communists—these groups and more can be (mis)interpreted as “national revolutionary.”

Armin Mohler1 defined the “national revolutionaries”—alongside the “young conservatives,” the Völkische [ethno-nationalists], the Bündische,2 and the Landvolk movement3—as one of the five main groups of the “Conservative Revolution,” which, however, did not exist under this collective term during the author’s period of study, namely the 1920s and 1930s. At that time, the term “New Nationalism” was commonly used, but it was no longer considered appropriate after the war, leading Mohler to replace it in his dissertation with “Conservative Revolution.” The national revolutionaries of the interwar period would likely have strongly opposed being redefined as “conservative revolutionaries.”

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Alexander Dugin reflects on his daughter and the truth that endures beyond death.

The origins of theater lie in the cult of the hero. The ancient Greeks would gather at a certain time at the tomb of a hero in order to honor his memory. They would form a circle, sing sacred hymns, put on masks, and offer sacrifices. It was believed that, for a brief time, the immortal spirit of the hero breathed through their lungs, heard through their ears, and spoke through their voices. Dasha is, without any doubt, a true hero. And the remembrance of her is gradually becoming a ritual.

Plato himself founded his school in a grove dedicated to the sacred hero Academus. There, the people of the polis would gather to honor Academus’s memory, to give him the chance to look once more upon this world and breathe its air. In the name of the hero Academus, pious Athenian men held their philosophical discussions. This later became the beginning of all the academies of the world. The hero’s name has not been forgotten: a-letheia—non-forgetting, truth.

So much is connected with Dasha, and so much continues to gather around her memory. She was a philosopher; she staged beautiful theatrical performances, wrote music, and composed poetry. She was a very kind and sincere person. At the same time, she was a person who suffered deeply. Perhaps the reason was her memory of the higher world and her refusal to compromise with the harsh determinisms of the lower world.

The memory of Dasha is not fading at all. Our war has produced many heroes. Yet Dasha remains something special even among them. Her feat, her sacrifice, is sanctified by the intimate presence of truth itself. Thinking of Dasha, reading her books, listening to her voice and her music, looking at photographs of her, you begin to understand that truth is somewhere very close, within arm’s reach… There, beyond the thin veil of death…

“I surrender, I raise my hands.” To the heavens. Cedo, in manus tollo. Ad caelum tollo.

(Translated from the Russian)

Simon Rorschach traces how America’s mountain of debt has created an adversary Trump cannot threaten, bomb, or tariff into submission.

The American state has reached a point Karl Marx would have understood at once: the government commands armies, levies taxes, prints the world’s chief reserve currency, and still depends upon men who decide whether to lend it money. Federal debt has now passed $40 trillion for the first time, equal to roughly 126 percent of annual economic output and close to the ratio reached during the Second World War. Washington runs an annual deficit of about 7.5 percent of the GDP. Interest charges alone exceed $1 trillion a year, a sum larger than the military budget. Debt service has become the second-largest claim on a federal budget of roughly $7 trillion, behind only Social Security and Medicare. Marx wrote that public debt turns future state revenue into a present financial asset. America has carried that process further than any previous great power.

What happens when America’s creditors begin demanding a higher price for financing its power?

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For those who have been enjoying the books, our buddy AI animator Sergey Kolesnik (his website is www.gzone.ru) has come through with a great theme song for the Ultra Heavy Series. So friends, take a listen to this short music video. Hopefully, if you’ve read the book series and like it so far, then you will enjoy this very appropriate theme song.

You can buy Ultra Heavy Book 1 here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1970784105/
And you can buy Ultra Heavy Book 2 here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1970784229/

If you were wondering, Book 3 is only about 5% complete but the fall season means less work and more science fiction writing!

And if you were curious about the lyrics to the song, they are as follows:

“Hyper Masculine

Turbo Violent

Their fate is

Ultra Heavy

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Mace to Face

Machine Gun Charged

The Solar System Shall Be Ours

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Our Tsar stands Proud

We scream our Faith Allowed

Holy Rus’ will never bow.

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Our legacy eternal

Our enemies infernal

All hail the Ultra Heavies”