Cas Corach examines why the great property debates of the twentieth century no longer answer the political and civilizational challenges of the multipolar age.

For much of the modern era, the question of property has been defined by a fundamental ideological struggle. On one side, Marxism has argued that private property represents the foundation of economic inequality, social domination and is the manifestation of the inherent contradiction of capital. On the other, liberal and Austrian thinkers, most notably Ludwig von Mises, have defended private property as the necessary foundation of economic calculation, individual freedom, and rational allocation. This opposition has shaped much of the political debate of the last century, yet the realities of the contemporary world increasingly suggest that neither framework fully captures the nature of property in modern society. The central question of the coming age is not simply whether property should exist or be abolished, but rather what form property should take, who it should serve, and what responsibilities should accompany ownership. As the liberal order gives way to a more multipolar world, societies will be forced to reconsider property not merely as an economic mechanism, but as a social institution embedded within family, community, culture, and the long-term interests of future generations.

We are entering a new time in which many of the assumptions that defined the late liberal order are beginning to weaken. Economic globalisation, financialization, demographic change, environmental pressure, and the gradual emergence of a multipolar world are forcing societies to reconsider fundamental political and economic questions. Among the most important of these is the question of property: what it is, who it serves, and under what conditions it should operate.

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Perrin Lovett reflects on the moral and spiritual meaning of Lindsey Graham’s death.

[W]hen the wicked perish there shall be praise.

— Proverbs 11:10

Praise! Lindsey Graham, U.S. Senator from South Carolina, died Saturday night in Washington after returning from Ukraine and a tour of a Vampire drone factory. At least, that is the reported, alleged news; Graham was always a man of allegations. He was allegedly a sodomite and was even rumored to be a pedophile. Whispers aside, by his own actions, admissions, and rally cries, he was an extraordinarily wicked man, even by the low, degenerate standards of the fallen Western political elite.

Graham was wanted terrorist No. 3967 in Russia, wanted for his genocidal war crimes against the Russian state and people. He was defined by war crimes, literally calling for bombing and murder in, well, just about every country he was aware existed. A servant of the Zionists occupying Palestine, he held a special animus for the Palestinians, particularly those in Gaza. “Level the place,” he once hissed about the besieged, impoverished Strip. His satanically evil crimes are so well-known and well-documented that they need not be recounted here.

Instead, let us focus on something unusual but necessary. I am mindful that Graham died on July 11th, when it was likely already July 12th in Russia. Thus, we may constructively say he died on the Feast Day of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, two Apostles known for not tolerating wickedness, but who also taught mercy and hope. In receiving news of Graham’s demise, Christians should try to summon some spirit of charmolypi, balancing the joy over the news with the knowledge that all deaths are unnatural, tainted, and something to be sorrowful about. So, as we celebrate the passing of a great darkness, let us also pray that, just before or even at the very end, Graham repented for his sins and accepted the saving grace of the Lord Jesus Christ. While his life and death were an extreme example, the example is still one of warning, hinged to hope, for all of us.

Deo vindice.

Constantin von Hoffmeister reveals the ten measures the AfD says it will implement immediately if it takes power in Saxony-Anhalt.

Two months before the state elections, the AfD Saxony-Anhalt presented its clear and ambitious 100-Day Program at the state party conference in Magdeburg. The party stood united and confident of success, showing the strength and determination that come from listening closely to the concerns of ordinary citizens.

This ten-point plan offers a practical roadmap for immediate action. Should the AfD assume government responsibility, it will put these measures into practice right away. The program reflects sound judgment rooted in German reality and common sense. It focuses on restoring order, protecting the homeland, and putting citizens first. Far from extreme ideas, it brings forward sensible reforms that many Germans have long desired, expressed with direct clarity.

What are the ten points? Read on to find out!

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Tim Kirby explores how his Ultra Heavy book series embeds traditional values into compelling science fiction, arguing that enduring moral principles resonate most powerfully when they emerge naturally through story rather than ideology.

When one sees the cover and artwork for the Ultra Heavy book series, one may not be aware that under the hood there are a lot of traditional values in place. The problem with media that is “Christian” or promotes “good values” tends to be dismal, because it places the objective of having Christian things into a media product where they do not fit. The life of Christ was not meant to translate into an open-world shooter for PS5. Supposedly, The Lord of the Rings gives off very Catholic vibes, but obviously the story came first and that is what is key to its success. If Tolkien had just dumped a boatload of Christian dogmatic text, his books would have never had such universal appeal. The story of any book should stand on its own even if the setting were to change. If Ultra Heavy #148 were an aging sheriff in the Wild West going into some no-man’s land because he had nothing more to live for, the story would still work. If he were a Samurai who lost everything due to age, taking a last hurrah to protect a newly colonized island near Hokkaido, then again the story would still work. These alternative versions of the story would then be free to put a lot of American and Japanese cultural elements, respectively, in the background to give the story more cultural value.

As the author of these books, I know they need to have a good story and be fun overall to succeed. Anything ideological needs to be put onto the second tier, but the publisher, Multipolar Press, who was gracious enough to take a risk and release these books, wanted me to go in and examine just how traditional values play out in them. And so let’s take a look at the moral side of these books that feature big dudes in big armor with big guns fighting for alien planets.

Spoiler alert! There is no way to talk about this kind of thing without plenty of spoilers!

In the first book, the primary female character is Klyookva, a woman who has grown up and lived her whole life in a future society that has extremely traditional values—thus they look at old-school gender roles and views as being both normal and genetically inherent and unalterable.

And most importantly, it has to be noted that both she and #148 have given up on life for reasons related to their gender. The old-timer has lost the ability to fight, and cannot fulfill the duty to society that he is supposed to. In a traditional society, men are supposed to be useful, to be the breadwinners, and #148 is approaching the moment when he can no longer fulfill that role. Klyookva, on the other hand, being raised in a reality very different from our own, feels like an utter failure for not having a family, despite the fact that this is a genetic dysfunction and not her fault. People in Holy Rus’ in 3900 AD are propagandized with the Eastern Orthodox view that sex (and everything) we do has to be taken in a proper context in order for it to have value. Thus, the men around Klyookva, much like those in medieval times, see her as sort of a spinster, or that there must be something “wrong with her” as she is childless in her mid-40s. They would believe that she is not fulfilling her function in society. To them, she is a “leftover woman,” as they say in Chinese. Modern feminists blast men and try to convince them that their genetically programmed preferences are evil social programming. Those preferences being the desire to have sex with women that have had few partners and are also young.

We all live in this insane post-feminist world where somehow we believe “society” makes men like women in their 20s and not genetic disposition. In the year 3900 in the Holyrussian Empire, there is no such propaganda. Men want women with a low “body count” and young. Thus, at some point, Klyookva “hit the wall,” as they say in modern parlance, and is no longer desirable. She is also one of the very few disabled people around and that does not work in her favor either. Essentially, Klyookva cannot fulfill her traditional role and thus chooses to go out with a bang on Titan.

The relationship between the Ultra Heavy and Klyookva evolves into marriage because they are both Orthodox Christians who, again, believe there should be a proper context to one’s actions and a point to them. Thus their sex leads to a marriage that bonds them together in the latter half of their lives to complete each other. Since #148 has had numerous children from multiple ex-wives (whom he vastly outlived) over the centuries, his “duty” has been fulfilled and thus their inherently progenyless marriage is not some sort of “child-free” propaganda but a proper function of marriage for those who are on in years. As is indicated in the book, the Church gives its approval.

Another aspect of the Klyookva character that gets ignored is that she is extremely powerful in a feminine way. Ultra Heavy #148 might be the ultimate killing machine, but Klyookva, growing up in a world of traditional values where people don’t reject gender stereotypes but embrace them, is an excellent manipulator. Throughout the story, in many ways she can get what she wants from our hero, ultimately ending up in a very powerful position. Klyookva understands fully the power of feminine softness and how well it can be used to get what she wants. Sirens, succubae, and other magical female characters have the superpower of being able to manipulate men. Klyookva does too but she uses this ability for the side of good. To the extent that the Ultra Heavies unabashedly use their male power (blunt force, intimidation, etc.), Klyookva uses her soft female powers throughout the book to ultimately come out a winner. Because the way for women to win in life is to play life as a woman’s game, not as a man’s game. When Klyooka turns their fallen ship into a real home, this demonstrates something that women have that men lack. She happily stands behind her “stone wall,” as they say in Russian, and wins over and over again because of it.

It should also be noted that these people live in a world where “obviously men want sex.” You will see that in many more traditional societies. Male lustfulness is acknowledged, often by gender separation and keeping them away from children. To some extent this is also the case in Holy Rus’, but everyone “in the empire” knows that men are lustful and want sex. They are just told that they need to do so in the proper context, which #148 does throughout the book. I utterly despise “virginal hero” characters. It is a horrible archetype to present to teenage boys, and the Ultra Heavies are the least virginal of any heroes.

Although both of our main characters of Book 1 have had hard lives, the book should show just how much more in harmony everything is in a world where there is no feminism. 3900AD is a time when men and women know who they are and how to play the game of life via the rules of their gender in order to win. Klyookva never wants to be a man; she never wants to compete with the old-timer, but she does want him to provide for her, and she knows what the primary thing is that any man would want from this lovely ministerial worker. They work in tandem and ultimately they both need each other. #148 can survive nearly anything, but would he want to survive without her to come home to?

Order the Ultra Heavy series here.

Constantin von Hoffmeister warns that the enemies of Europe speak of democracy while plotting its death, and nowhere is this betrayal clearer than in the CSU’s desperate campaign to ban the Thuringian AfD and silence its leader, Björn Höcke.

Germany features two main center-right parties alongside the rising nationalist Alternative for Germany (AfD). The CSU, or Christian Social Union, operates as a Bavarian party and sister to the CDU (Christian Democratic Union). Many nationalists view it as fake conservatives who talk of tradition and tougher borders but have long tolerated high levels of immigration, EU globalism, and establishment compromises. Markus Söder leads the CSU and serves as Bavaria’s Minister President. Björn Höcke heads the AfD in Thuringia, an East German state where the party enjoys strong support for its firm defense of German culture, borders, and sovereignty. Klaus Holetschek acts as a key CSU parliamentary leader and close ally of Söder. Recent statements from these CSU figures have sparked sharp debate.

Höcke has become one of Germany's most controversial politicians through statements that have sparked nationwide debate, including his call for a “180-degree turn” in Germany's culture of remembrance, his description of Berlin's Holocaust Memorial as a “monument of shame” in the context of criticizing German memory politics, and his repeated use of the phrase “Alles für Deutschland” (“Everything for Germany”). Although the expression predates National Socialism, it became the official slogan of the SA (stormtroopers) during the Third Reich and is therefore prohibited under Section 86a of the German Criminal Code. Höcke argued that he had used the words in their ordinary patriotic sense rather than as a reference to the SA, but German courts found that he had knowingly employed a banned Nazi slogan and convicted him on two occasions, imposing fines totaling €29,900.

Why has Germany's political establishment now concluded that Höcke must be removed from public life at any cost? Read on and find out!

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Alexander Dugin argues that Russia’s official recognition of a war with the collective West marks a decisive turning point that will reshape the country’s politics, society, and understanding of the conflict.

Conversation with Alexander Dugin on the Sputnik TV program Escalation.

Host: We’re going live on Sputnik radio. In the studio with us is Mikhail Alimov. Good afternoon, everyone. This is philosopher Alexander Dugin’s authorial program “Escalation.” Recently, Dmitry Peskov, the press secretary of the President of Russia, made a highly symbolic and important statement: he said that the Special Military Operation [SMO] has turned into a real war because “behind Kiev stands a number of European capitals and, unfortunately, Washington.” That’s a direct quote. Alexander Gelyevich [Dugin], please tell us: at what point did this transformation occur? After all, European capitals joined the process almost immediately.

Alexander Dugin: I think this transformation — the one we’re talking about and the one the President’s press secretary mentioned — has occurred primarily in our own minds. Previously, we understood the Special Military Operation as a technical action designed to cool down the West’s aggressive plans. It was supposed to be conducted in a local mode, within a limited regional format, with full control over escalation risks. The SMO needed to be carried out swiftly and successfully and concluded fairly quickly. After that, we were supposed to begin normalizing relations with the West, which could have taken a certain amount of time. At the beginning of the SMO, the goal was to secure our political sovereignty within the framework of the existing single global — that is, Western — world, whose legitimacy we largely recognized. We were only supposed to expand the scale of our independence and increase our importance within the overall world order, without directly challenging the West, without entering into war with it, and without provoking it into open conflict. The task was limited: to change the local configuration of our presence in the post-Soviet space by establishing control over what we firmly considered our zone of responsibility. It was believed that this could be achieved through technical means, without a complete break with the West.

That, in my view, was the original calculation. There’s no point in discussing today whether it was correct — it turned out to be wrong. It’s possible the plan itself was properly constructed, but its implementation went differently. What happened, happened. The main thing is that in May 2022 we failed to take Kiev. We were in Hostomel, right next to the city, but for a whole range of reasons we couldn’t capture it — and with that, the original plan was exhausted. From that moment, a new situation and a new reality emerged. The Special Military Operation ceased to be a special military operation — that is, something technical, local, regional, fast, and successful. The logic of any such operation is simple: you quickly do something difficult and unpleasant, and then for a long time, through diplomatic efforts, you smooth over its negative consequences. But everything went differently.

The Special Military Operation ended with our withdrawal from Kiev, and in the spring of 2022, a war essentially began. The West, which apparently believed we would rather quickly prevail in this operation, couldn’t believe its own eyes. It couldn’t believe that Ukraine had held out — and then it threw itself fully into the conflict. From that moment onward, we have been at war.

However, when the Special Military Operation as a blitzkrieg failed and the war began, it required very complex reflection on what was happening, and that took a lot of time. Remember: at first, criminal cases were even opened against people who spoke about a “war,” because officially a Special Military Operation was underway and that was the only way it could be referred to. Anyone who uttered the word “war” faced direct legal prosecution — administrative, and sometimes criminal. But at some point, punishment for using the word “war” in relation to the Special Military Operation in Ukraine was lifted, and from then on the situation began to change. Nevertheless, it took another four years for us to finally and officially acknowledge the reality. After all, the President’s press secretary doesn’t express a personal opinion — he conveys the opinion of the President, and that opinion is directive in nature. In other words, the SMO should now be called a war, and accordingly, what is happening in Ukraine should be understood as a war.

So, for four years our consciousness was coming into alignment with reality. Now we have essentially acknowledged that we are talking about a war. Everything is clear: this is war. And we must immediately add — as Peskov also did — the clarification: war with whom exactly? This is not a war with Ukraine — this is a war with the West. And this war, as Peskov rightly noted with the words “unfortunately,” is also being waged against America, against the United States, which is fighting on the opposite side, on the side of our enemies — despite all the statements and steps Trump took at the beginning of his second presidential term. That is where we stand today.

And the question arises: why was this statement made today with such clarity, unambiguity, and irreversibility — that we are in a state of war with the collective West?

Host: To answer a pressing question from society?

Alexander Dugin: I think there are two reasons — an internal one and an external one.

The first, internal reason is the intensification of the conflict, which now affects almost the entire population: drone strikes on our rear areas, terrorist attacks carried out by the Kiev criminal Nazi terrorist regime, problems with energy infrastructure, shelling of our territories, the increasing death of civilians, and the growing number of people drawn into the war. Of course, we suffer fewer losses at the front than the enemy — and that is right. We are advancing — and that is also right. We are on the offensive and we are winning. But we do suffer losses: that’s how war is.

People are increasingly asking themselves: is this really a Special Military Operation? The very concept of a Special Military Operation implies that only a very narrow segment of forces is involved — professional military personnel, those who belong to that sector. Special military operations are conducted precisely by them: the army, special services, internal troops. But here the people themselves have been drawn into the events. The people being pulled into a Special Military Operation is a contradiction in terms — by definition, that cannot be. Therefore, Peskov — and in essence the President — had to explain to the people what is happening: we are in a state of war. And that is an entirely different matter.

For four years the phrase “Special Military Operation” was used — and now it has been said outright: this is, after all, a war. Everyone already understands that a war is going on, but until the word is spoken from the top, it is not officially considered a war. Many of our agencies, ministries, governors, sectors, and many people had already realized that this is a war and that they needed to behave accordingly. Some, however, continued to live according to the logic of a Special Military Operation. Now what has been said applies to everyone: war is war.

That is the internal answer to the question of why this statement was made precisely now: it seems it was no longer possible to remain silent. Silence would only have been possible if we had achieved a swift victory and captured Kiev — not just liberated Donbass, but actually taken Kiev. Then we could have said: it was a Special Military Operation; it turned out to be far heavier, more terrible, and more difficult than we had anticipated, but congratulations to everyone, medals all around — Ukraine is ours, the Special Military Operation is complete. But since such an outcome is not yet in sight, despite our offensive, people need to be told how things really stand. And in reality, we are in a state of the most severe war — moreover, in its very first stage. A war with the collective West.

That is the first explanation. Now the second. Our military and political leadership, the agencies and services — everyone who truly understands what is happening — knows that the West is not preparing for a truce or de-escalation. The West — the European Union, all NATO countries, Rutte, the alliance itself — is preparing for a new wave of war against us: an attack on Kaliningrad, the use of missiles and other truly serious means against our territory. Even now, NATO drones are flying at us through the territory of the Baltic states. In fact, no one in the West is going to conclude a truce; no one intends to reduce the intensity of escalation.

We thought Trump would be the figure who would defuse the situation or at least postpone the showdown. He may have postponed it somewhat, but we were unable to take advantage of that pause. And that postponement was not serious — it was declarative, expressed only in limited actions. In essence, the main thing in this war is intelligence support from the United States. This is generally a war of space surveillance, an information war. Without Starlink support, without the transfer of reconnaissance data, we would have already taken Kiev — it wouldn’t have been a problem. But with such surveillance, with the involvement of precisely the American reconnaissance system and American secure communications, with the most careful monitoring of our territory, the main problems arise.

That is why Trump, mentioned by Peskov at the end with the words “unfortunately,” who is also participating in all of this, represents the most terrible and most crucial factor. Even the European Union, with all its considerable military power, without the American base of reconnaissance data and high technologies, would not have been able to wage a full-fledged war against us: we would have taken what was ours and then moved toward de-escalation. But the presence in this construction of “unfortunately, Trump,” as Peskov put it, changes everything. The entire infrastructure for transmitting reconnaissance data remains in place, while NATO and the European Union intend only to increase pressure on us.

The criminal Kiev regime is prepared for anything, up to and including the use of dirty bombs. I think it’s no coincidence that they are striking the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. They are clearly preparing for something, and they have the ability to deliver a serious blow — including provoking a nuclear catastrophe in our country with a dirty bomb. We are, of course, fighting back, but with the unambiguous and total support of the Kiev regime by the entire West, such a scenario is entirely possible.

So today we are at war. People need to be told where we stand so that they understand and are aware of what is happening responsibly, rationally, and objectively. And society must undoubtedly be restructured onto a war footing — essentially in preparation for a major world war, which has, in essence, already begun.

We might like to end the conflict, agree to a truce, and even make certain concessions — the President has said that in Anchorage we agreed to a number of concessions. But most likely, no one will offer them to us anymore. The West has smelled blood; it has realized that it has truly clashed with us, and any truce options it offers us will proceed from exactly that. We have demonstrated, unfortunately, a number of weak sides — although we have also courageously held out — as well as many strong ones. Let us be objective: some things did not work out for us. The fact that the SMO failed as a blitzkrieg is in reality the main thing. Seeing this, they decided that we could be finished off, and they have essentially moved in that direction. We cannot convince them otherwise with words or even with individual small tactical successes.

We now face a real examination — in the face of a major and inevitable war that we do not want, but which we cannot stop, prevent, or avoid. Any concessions we might make now would be incompatible with Russia’s continued existence.

That is why, it seems to me, this situation is not new: it did not arise today but formed gradually. If we measure the path we have already traveled — the path of war — it is already more than four years. And how much more lies ahead? Moreover, we will have to go forward not under conditions of reduced tension and an improved situation, but under conditions of further escalation, which moreover does not depend on us. They escalate; we can try to de-escalate, but they do not listen. Our red lines are erased and not restored: they are erased — and they no longer exist. Seeing that we only react, only take limited retaliatory steps, they understand that they can engage in escalation under their own control, unilaterally, and to whatever extent they see fit.

Right now we need to restructure the entire society. I think that in order to win this war, we also need to restructure the political system — temporarily, of course, onto a war footing.

From this follow several fundamental conclusions. From the words of the President’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov it follows that we must restructure society, the economy, and the administrative system onto a war footing. Moreover, onto a war footing in which real, not paper, achievements will be rewarded, while failures in certain directions and missions — in the military sphere, the economy, and the administrative system — will be met with corresponding punishment. It is no coincidence that with the announcement of war, many rules are being tightened. What is permissible in peacetime — even if it may be harmful there too — becomes impermissible in wartime: when people are rewarded for failures; when window-dressing is encouraged rather than punished; when superiors are told what they want to hear rather than what is actually the case. Our Minister of Defense, Andrei Removich Belousov, by the way, speaks about this: mistakes are possible — lying is not. There is a sense that this peacetime flaw — the habit of embellishing things to please the boss — is being carried over into the military sphere as well. That is unacceptable.

And of course, a rotation of elites is necessary. We need the best, truly effective people. In the new extreme conditions, the political system, the government, and the military department require, first of all, people who deserve the positions they hold — what is called meritocracy. Secondly, we need maximally effective people — emergency managers, crisis managers. Not just administrators, but precisely crisis administrators — those who perform well and effectively in extreme, emergency circumstances, not in ordinary ones. These are different types of people.

Thus, we need a rotation of elites and the strengthening of the positions of crisis managers — more vigilant, sharper, bolder, more decisive, and even somewhat unbound people who follow instructions when possible, and when it is not — act at their own risk for the sake of victory. This is a different type of person. And now that the President’s press secretary has announced that we are at war, the peacetime elites must be replaced: peacetime managers must be replaced by crisis managers — that is, wartime administrators — with the creation of appropriate structures of reward and punishment suited to emergency circumstances.

Thus, we need to take two steps.

The first is truth — complete, responsible, honest, and, if necessary, bitter. It is absolutely essential. Otherwise, the fog of war will persist — but this fog is not being directed at our enemies. Our enemies understand everything perfectly; they see what is really happening with us. This fog of war is directed inward, at our own society. Inside the country, there must be complete transparency. We should be deceiving the enemy, not ourselves. However, it often seems we are doing the exact opposite — not always, of course, but far too often.

The second step is the rotation of elites and the arrival of wartime people. And not only in sensitive military areas, but also in the economy, management, government, and the administrative system — and, if you will, in the humanitarian, cultural, and information spheres as well. Right now, all of these areas are still being run by peacetime managers.

Paradoxically, even the army — which we do not criticize, but on the contrary, glorify — is only slowly and with great difficulty emerging from its peacetime state. Yes, our army will win; our army is the best; it has excellent leadership; we have the strongest army in the world. But it feels as though we are waking up to our own military reality as if coming out of a deep sleep. As if we had been peacefully dozing, convinced that we were the strongest, and had grown complacent. And now we are being told: prove that you are the strongest, demonstrate it, achieve results. And we reply, as if still half-asleep: come on, we’ll deal with all of you anyway.

However, today it is not enough to simply maintain confidence in what we truly are. I have no doubt that we are the best, the strongest, the bravest, and the most victorious — just as our ancestors were, and as we actually are. But we have forgotten who we are. The army must remember what victory is, how it is achieved, and what actions are required to attain it. We need a society of victory and reforms of victory.

Host: You spoke earlier about certain changes specifically in the administrative sector. How can this be done? We have State Duma elections in September, for example. Through this mechanism, or do we need something radically new?

Alexander Dugin: Of course not. The elections, thank God, will go as they should: everyone will be elected correctly. But what do elections have to do with it? They serve a function similar to a sociological poll. All reforms in our country can be carried out only and exclusively from the top. The people are thirsting for these reforms and are asking for them — asking to bring society, governance, the social model, and the political system into line with popular expectations. Our society is addressing this request to the head of state, to the President. This is not an ultimatum or a demand — it is a humble, respectful request. People are simply saying: we bow before you — please carry out the reform. And this request is directed to the President. No one intends to resolve this issue through voting.

Host: The press office of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) has released new information regarding the strike on the Museum of the Defense of Sevastopol. It turns out this was a carefully planned provocation by London and British special services, and the Ukrainian Armed Forces were probably not even aware of the true target of the attack. In your view, why would London target objectives that have so little military significance?

Alexander Dugin: Before addressing this very important question, I would like to ask another: why is the SVR releasing this information right now? The fact is that our intelligence officers and analysts — sober and attentive people — have understood perfectly since the very beginning, since the spring of 2022, that we are not fighting Ukraine. Through Ukraine, we are fighting the West. On the other side stand the British, representatives of the European Union, and the Americans. It is they who are directing this war: they guide Ukrainian drones, calculate and plot routes, and oversee operations via satellite. Yes, Starlink does not work over our territory, but there are other reconnaissance satellites that we cannot yet neutralize — at least until we destroy the entire space-based system. Such methods also exist, and we are probably thinking about them now.

In any case, the drones that kill our people, destroy energy infrastructure, and strike even more sensitive targets (which we are not talking about yet, but probably will) are operated by British specialists using British and American intelligence data. Ukraine is merely a mask. In essence, Ukraine does not really exist as an independent actor — it is a conditional entity, a simulacrum, a kind of golem or robot through which the West is fighting us.

I believe the Foreign Intelligence Service has released this information about the strike on the Sevastopol Defense Museum now precisely because Peskov has already said: we are at war with the West. This timing is not coincidental — that is the first answer.

The second point: for some people this is a revelation, whereas for most attentive analysts and participants in the war we are waging against the West, it is self-evident. So some will be surprised, while others will say: well, obviously. Moreover, the British have struck not only this museum. I think our special services are well aware of this, and so is the President. But now we, the public, also know about it — that is the difference. It means we are being brought into this war by raising our understanding of what is happening to a more adequate level. Indeed, what kind of Special Military Operation is this if our sacred symbolic sites are being attacked by the British? This cannot be a Special Military Operation. We are not conducting a special military operation to land troops on English territory. No — this is not a special operation. For them it is a special operation; for us it is war. They are fighting us by proxy, with someone else’s hands. And now we will probably begin to fight them directly — and then we will see who prevails. But we must accept this reality.

Why do they carry out such strikes? Because they are attacking symbolic targets and because the West is conducting escalation that it itself controls. The process of escalation is also a form of military art. And the West — primarily the British — believes that this escalation dial, which can be turned up a little or a lot, switched from 1.0 to 1.2 or 2.3 — all these fine gradations (2.3, 2.4, 1.8) — must be completely under their control.

We are assigned the role of the responding side. Look: they strike the energy system, civilian objects, symbolic targets like this museum. We respond. How exactly do we respond? Do we inform society or not? They measure that. Do we strike back at certain targets or others? They measure that too. Knowing that the missile was effectively launched by the British, do we at least verbally respond to the British? They measure that as well.

In this way, they manage escalation alone. If they need to dial it down a bit, they do so when it suits them. If they want to increase it, they do. Until the recent fundamental statement by Peskov that we are at war with the West — and with America too — we were not part of this full escalation process. We responded, tried not to notice this escalation, and tried to extinguish it unilaterally by simply refusing to join it. It was as if someone was waging war on you, and you pretended everything was fine. That is roughly how things stood.

Inside the country, the message was: no, the West is merely supporting Ukraine. Ukraine is bad, but we are not at war with the West itself. At the same time, we sent signals to them: although you are raising the level of escalation, we are not being drawn into it and will not fall for provocations. You raise the temperature — we do not. But then they raise it even higher: the next strike hits another target — symbolic, military, strategic, or energy-related.

What would our inclusion in the escalation process mean? For example, a sudden strike on the Baltic states, Poland, or Romania; sabotage of key strategic military facilities in Germany or France that are being used against us; the elimination of certain prominent figures in British intelligence most involved in this war. Or sending some kind of signal to the Americans — roughly in the Iranian style: if we cannot reach them directly, we must make them feel real pain. And not secretly, but openly: sending divers to cut underwater cables in the Baltic Sea leading to the Baltics, followed by an incursion onto their territory.

Are they afraid to direct missiles at the Museum of the Defense of Sevastopol? No, they are not. Why? Because they feel they are playing alone. Only they are playing this game of escalation. We are only taking limited, predictably weaker retaliatory steps to convince everyone — ourselves and them — that we are not seriously playing. We are not turning on full escalation. Meanwhile, everyone understands — and most importantly, the President understands — that the British stood behind the strike on the Sevastopol panorama museum. They directed the missile, American reconnaissance satellites plotted the route, and they pushed the button. Ukraine had nothing to do with it.

Our President sees this. And when he sees it and does not respond, they draw the conclusion: fine, everything is clear — the Russians will continue playing at de-escalation, while we will continue playing at escalation, because it costs us nothing. We erase their red lines; they draw new ones — we erase those too. And nothing happens to us.

This is already beginning to resemble Gorbachev’s time. We said: we will no longer fight the West or the Western system; we are reaching out to you with an open hand. And into that outstretched hand they placed a grenade with the pin pulled: they destroyed our power in Eastern Europe and the Warsaw Pact, then broke up the Soviet Union and began dismembering the Russian Federation — from which only Putin saved us. We were on the verge of the next cascade of consequences after unilaterally ending the Cold War. And to “end” the Cold War in their language means only one thing: to lose it.

The same thing is repeating now at the level of escalation. They say: we are escalating with you. And we reply: we are not escalating with you.

It seems to me that the limits of this position have been exhausted. We have demonstrated our peacefulness, goodwill, readiness for mutual understanding, for certain concessions, and for normalizing relations more than enough. Our President went to Anchorage; we talked with the Americans and explained everything; we are ready to engage with the European Union. But they are not ready and will not be ready — that is the problem.

They will not be ready until something truly convincing happens. For example — I am only speculating — one day we wake up and the military and political leadership of Kiev is gone. Some other people appear, running around in panic. And the second tier of leadership is gone too. At that point they will truly say: perhaps we should negotiate, otherwise the Russians will keep going. Then they will be ready to talk. And if we feel confident, we may choose not to negotiate and continue — or we may agree. Other scenarios are also possible.

I am not a military specialist. Everyone loves to give advice these days: people from the sidelines tell the army and the President what to do. I do not count myself among them — I am simply speculating. I am only applying the lessons of the past, or for example the experience of Iran in its confrontation, to our situation. Iran cannot defeat the United States and Israel, but it can inflict unacceptable damage on them — economic damage, for instance. That is what Iran does. And we too can inflict unacceptable damage on the enemy in many different ways.

We say: escalation is inevitable — and we are joining it. You raise the dial — and we, for example, raise it even higher. But it is not enough to just say this. It is obvious that they no longer react to our statements: all our protests and all our new red lines are perceived by them as white noise. It is also obvious that they treat words not followed by actions so serious they cannot be ignored with extreme frivolity.

We now face a very serious question. Some, like Karaganov, say we need to deliver a preventive strategic nuclear strike — for example, against the United States or the European Union. Others suggest using tactical nuclear weapons. As I understand it, this might once have been feasible, but today it is no longer the most relevant option. What is needed now is a set of complex, multidimensional, carefully planned actions carried out simultaneously across many domains. Perhaps something in space — for example, the destruction of the entire satellite reconnaissance system, since it constitutes one of our main problems. Perhaps other actions that no one expects from us. And all at once: one, two, three. If and when we manage to create six or seven such unpredictable, untrackable centers of real confrontation, that could stop them.

If we simply keep repeating “Enough, enough, enough — stop shelling our museums, leave our children alone, stop killing our schoolchildren, stop blowing up our trains, leave our oil refineries and even more important facilities alone,” no one will listen.

Host: Alexander Gelyevich [Dugin], perhaps alongside these escalatory mechanisms, some preparation is already underway to ready our society and our future adult citizens for this changing world. I’m thinking, for example, of the recent changes to the history textbooks. There are so many topics to discuss, but I’d like to touch on this one too. Regarding the new edition of the unified history textbook series — in your view, is the goal of these changes what I just mentioned, or is a more comprehensive task being set?

Alexander Dugin: You see, we have grown too accustomed to peacetime rhetoric: “I agree with you, but not entirely,” “let’s discuss the details,” “let’s not discuss the details.”

The new textbooks — especially the history ones — are necessary to raise genuine, fully formed Russian patriots and to place patriotism at the center of our historical self-awareness. Yes, we need new citizens who will be proud of their Motherland, who will sincerely love Russia, know its history, understand its identity, know its heroes — and know its enemies. This is the primary task that the new series of textbooks is designed to accomplish: to instill in our children civic consciousness, a sense of dignity, patriotism, love for the Motherland, and an understanding of historical patterns.

I am, of course, deeply moved and immensely grateful to the authors for including in one of these textbooks the tragic fate of my daughter, Darya Dugina. People should know those who suffered for the Fatherland, those who gave their lives for the Motherland. It is on such images and examples — including Vladlen Tatarsky and the new heroes of the Special Military Operation and our war with the West — that we must raise the next generation.

Naturally, all generations matter — our grandfathers and great-grandfathers who built and defended our country. But the heroes who live among us are also important — people just like us: young men and women who today exemplify heroism, self-sacrifice, courage, intelligence, service to the Fatherland, love for the Motherland, loyalty to the Christian Church, our civilization, and our identity. They too belong in this textbook — and they have been included.

Here is what I want to say: some good deeds require no “buts,” no reservations like “it could have been done better.” It can always be done better — we will continue working on that. But the main thing is to do what is necessary: to restore dignity, pride, and love for the Fatherland in our schools, at the very foundation of our education.

We are doing the same thing, by the way, at the level of higher education — in universities and institutes. At the Ivan Ilyin Higher Political School, we teach courses in “Western studies” (Westernology), treating the West as a different civilization. We offer courses affirming that Russia is a state-civilization, courses on multipolarity, and courses on identity. We have set ourselves an ambitious goal: to rebuild the entire humanities education and the entire field of humanitarian scholarship on this patriotic foundation.

Unfortunately, the overall situation is still different. But the struggle for our children is the most important thing, and in schools this task has already been addressed. Work continues in other areas. A great deal has already been done through the course “Foundations of Russian Statehood,” which provides a certain inoculation of patriotism in universities. We must continue, develop, and expand this direction — broaden the field of Western studies, change the paradigms in the humanities based on the thesis repeatedly articulated by our President: Russia is a state-civilization. We live in a multipolar world where, alongside the West, there are other centers of power and other civilizations, including our own.

This restructuring of the entire humanitarian approach, of education and upbringing as a whole, is now underway at full speed — but “full speed” only by peacetime standards, or by the standards of a Special Military Operation. By the standards of a war with the West, this pace is still insufficient. While the situation with school history is good, in higher education things are moving in the right direction — the correct instructions have been given — but far too slowly, because there is enormous resistance. Some resist out of inertia, others for ideological reasons. This is the sixth column — opponents of the idea that Russia is a distinct civilization.

After all, Russophobia did not appear by accident, and not just in recent years. That said, we cannot reduce everything to spy networks, even though serious work has been done in that area. For the last 30–40 years, our enemies have simply been operating in the humanitarian sphere — centers that distorted the consciousness of our scholars, altered the educational process, promoted toxic trends in the humanities, and supported them. All of this exists. But the issue cannot be reduced to espionage alone. Even if we identify the entire network of Western agents of influence in the humanities, it will not be enough, because an entire generation of teachers and scholars has already been trained to view the West as universal. This is what we must fight against.

Therefore, the war that we are discussing today — and that Peskov spoke about — naturally affects all spheres of our society, including school education and, I believe, even preschool education. “Lessons about the most important things” should be conducted even for the youngest children. Let them sit on their potties and listen to stories about great heroes — then they will come to school already with the first seeds of civic consciousness.

We must shift our society into a different, awakened state — a state of affirming the distinctiveness, independence, and uniqueness of our civilization, which we are called upon to defend. It is precisely they — today’s youth, schoolchildren, and even kindergarten children — who will be called upon to protect and uphold our civilizational sovereignty, our dignity, our freedom, and our independence in the face of very serious challenges, including technological ones.

And if we are making this turn — and we can no longer avoid making it, because all the deadlines for dodging a serious civilizational conflict with the West have passed — then we must act quickly. Changing course, shifting the direction of this great ship from mere political sovereignty to full civilizational sovereignty is, of course, extremely difficult. Nevertheless, the helm must be turned — with a loud creak, because we need to change the course of an entire continent, and its inertia is enormous. This inertia comes not only from the last 30–40 years, but from the Petrine era: the West has long attracted and pulled us toward itself. Now a rather sharp break is required. We have been capable of such turns before — in the 19th and 20th centuries. But now we need another patriotic turn. It will be incredibly difficult to carry out, yet it must be done quickly.

Host: Literally within how many years? After all, when we talk about civilization, we usually think in terms of centuries. But if it has to be fast, how long is that?

Alexander Dugin: I cannot give an exact number. One thing is clear: the longer we delay, the worse our starting conditions become. The earlier we had declared that we are in a state of war with the West, the better the results we would already have. But better late than never. I won’t venture to say exactly how many years. We don’t have much time. I think we are talking about years, not decades — even though civilizations operate on much longer cycles. In that sense you are right. However, right now a paradigm shift is taking place, including in education.

(Translated from the Russian)

Constantin von Hoffmeister explains why Brussels released billions to Hungary only after Viktor Orbán left office, and what this reveals about the EU's enforcement of political conformity.

Brussels once again wields its billions like a club, punishing any nation bold enough to defend its sovereignty. After the government change, Hungary is ready to receive nearly ten billion euros from the EU Recovery Fund created during the coronavirus pandemic. Germany and the country’s other EU partners approved the corresponding reform and investment program in Brussels on Friday. This marks a clear victory for the EU’s long campaign of financial pressure against a member state that once dared to put its own people first.

Former Prime Minister Viktor Orbán courageously defended Hungarian sovereignty against endless interference from Brussels. For years, the European Union withheld double-digit billions in allocated funds, citing supposed “violations of rule-of-law principles and EU core values” (anti-values for all decent human beings).

What was Orbán’s crime?

Read more

Karl Richter writes that Trump’s savage attack on Iran and the collapse of the ceasefire have ignited a high-stakes showdown that could mark the beginning of the end for U.S. supremacy.

Russian geopolitician and publicist Alexander Dugin put it succinctly: one does not negotiate with the “Dajjal”—the liar and deceiver in Islamic theology who leads people astray in the end times. One fights and destroys him. On this, Muslims and Christians agree. The Iranians should have been warned and surely were. On Wednesday, US President Donald Trump declared the ceasefire agreement of April 17 null and void and immediately resumed the bombing of Iranian targets. Tehran responded with attacks on US military installations in Bahrain and Kuwait. Any calming of the situation in the Gulf is now off the table for the time being.

It is worth examining Trump’s choice of words carefully so as not to harbor any illusions about who the world is dealing with. Delirious about the Iranian leadership, he said: “I don’t want to deal with them anymore, they’re scum. You know what scum is? They’re scum. They’re sick people. They’re led by sick people. And they’re vicious, violent people. And if they had a nuclear weapon, they’d use it.” Regarding further talks with Tehran, he hallucinated in a brazen inversion of the facts: “As far as I’m concerned, it’s over. They are liars.”

The truth is different, and one must keep it in mind to properly assess the events. From the first round of exchanges between late February and mid-April, Iran emerged as the winner on points. The nuclear superpower USA, supposedly the protector of the region, had to absorb painful losses. According to consistent reports in American media (which both Trump and his Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth bitterly complained about), at least 17 of the 19 US sites were hit in the Iranian counterattacks, some of them devastatingly—a hit rate of 89 percent. At least some of the struck bases had to be evacuated. No wonder Washington’s Arab allies are keeping their distance: no one needs a protective power that protects no one.

But that is only part of the humiliation. While Trump has to endure the accusation that he achieved practically nothing after six weeks of war, Iran has suddenly returned to the world stage, undefeated and stronger than ever. As a result of the war, Tehran is now officially claiming control over shipping traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. Since May 5, shipowners have been formally required to apply for transit permits from a specially created Iranian authority, the “Persian Gulf Strait Authority” (PGSA), and to pay substantial fees, while the US superpower stands by and is forced to watch. For the self-image of the United States, which just days ago celebrated the 250th anniversary of its questionable existence with great pomp, this is completely unacceptable. The ceasefire **could not** hold under these conditions. America still does not accept that it is no longer the world hegemon. Israel and the Epstein files certainly did their part.

Thus the world is back where it was in April. It should remember that the war was not started by Tehran, but, in violation of all international law, by the USA and Israel, which began bombing Iran on February 28 in the middle of ongoing negotiations.

To the Iranian people, who have so far stood up to the Great Satan in an admirable way, anyone with their wits about them can only continue to wish every possible success: they are currently fighting at the forefront of all those who want a world without US-Israeli tyranny. Such a world is not only possible but must be supported with all determination. According to a 2025 University of Denver study, the number of victims of American sanctions since the 1970s alone stands at an inconceivable 38 million dead, not counting the actual war victims. A world order that accepts something like this as normal is a criminal order that must be eliminated. With a bit of luck, Iran will be its coffin nail.

(Translated from the German)

Constantin von Hoffmeister explains how a surprising left-right rapprochement and a possible cross-spectrum alliance against Germany’s corrupt liberal system is deepening the BSW’s internal split over closer engagement with the AfD.

The BSW, short for Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht: Vernunft und Gerechtigkeit (Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance for Reason and Justice), is a new German political party founded on January8, 2024. It was created by Sahra Wagenknecht, a prominent left-wing politician (half-Iranian, half-German) born in 1969 in the former German Democratic Republic. Wagenknecht had long been a leading figure in Die Linke (The Left), a socialist party with roots in East German communism. She served as one of its co-leaders from 2015 to 2019 and spent many years in the national parliament.

Wagenknecht broke away because she believed the left had lost touch with ordinary working people. The modern left, she argued, focused too much on identity politics, open borders, gender debates, and climate symbolism while neglecting core economic issues such as wages, pensions, housing, and protection for small businesses. Many former left voters felt abandoned and turned instead to the AfD, the country’s main right-wing populist party. The BSW was meant to offer a different path: strong left-wing economic policies combined with more conservative and pragmatic stances on culture, immigration, and foreign affairs.

The party calls for higher minimum wages, stronger pensions, wealth taxes on the rich, and support for ordinary workers and small businesses. At the same time, it demands strict limits on immigration, criticizes rapid changes in language and gender policies, opposes green measures that sharply raise energy costs for families, and pushes for diplomacy and negotiations to end the war in Ukraine rather than indefinite military aid. It quickly gained traction in East Germany, where economic disappointment and cultural unease are widespread. In some 2024 state elections, the BSW achieved double-digit results. Nationally, however, it received only 4.9 percent in the February 2025 federal election, narrowly missing the 5 percent threshold for seats in parliament.

The Current Fight Inside the Party

Now the young party is tearing itself apart over a fundamental question. Read on to find out what it’s all about!

In the eastern state of Thuringia, about one hundred BSW members have published an open letter defending their national leaders’ willingness to hold public talks and possible cooperation with the AfD. Local Thuringian BSW officials have hit back hard, denouncing the signatories as “crackpots, fantasists and extremists.” The dispute centres on whether the BSW should continue working closely with the established “center-right” CDU (Christian Democratic Union, Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s party) or break old taboos and engage more openly with the AfD on shared concerns such as immigration control and the search for peace.

To grasp the conflict, one needs to understand Germany’s broader political system. After the Second World War, the country built what it called “safeguards against political extremes” (in reality censorship and state repression against uncomfortable political parties). The main parties—the fake “conservative” CDU, the centre-left (in reality, radically left) SPD (Social Democratic Party), the FDP (the Free Democratic Party, fake libertarians), and later the Greens—formed coalitions and kept “radicals” (sane parties) isolated. Die Linke represented the far left. For decades this center held.

The 2015 migrant crisis changed the picture. Large numbers of people arrived from the Middle East, Africa, and elsewhere. Many Germans worried about a strain on housing, schools, welfare, wages, and ethnocultural cohesion, as well as a massive rise in violent crime. The AfD, originally founded in 2013 as a Eurosceptic party critical of the euro and EU bailouts, shifted sharply rightward. It now calls for strict border controls, opposes what it sees as Islamization, favors welfare policies that prioritize German citizens, questions aggressive climate targets, and takes a more skeptical view of NATO and prolonged involvement in Ukraine. The party has become especially strong in East Germany, where many residents feel economically disadvantaged and culturally sidelined by politics dominated from the west.

Mainstream parties responded with a “firewall” (Brandmauer): an informal but powerful agreement never to form coalitions with the AfD or give it governing responsibility. They often avoid normal political dialogue as well. Defenders say the firewall protects democracy. Critics argue that excluding a party that regularly wins large vote shares in some regions only deepens alienation and blocks practical solutions. It is also deeply anti-democratic and some argue even tyrannical.

Where the BSW and AfD Overlap

Although the two parties come from opposite sides of the traditional spectrum, they share several concrete positions that matter to many voters. Both advocate much tighter immigration controls and open discussion of its effects on housing, wages, crime, and social trust. Both criticize endless arms deliveries to Ukraine without serious peace negotiations that takes the Russian side seriously. Both oppose green policies that drive up everyday living costs. Both present themselves as anti-establishment voices speaking for people ignored by the Berlin elite. These overlaps make some form of dialogue tempting, especially in eastern states where both draw protest votes. Traditional leftists see any contact as dangerous “legitimization.” Others say refusing to talk to a major party is itself undemocratic, which is obviously true for anybody with half a brain.

The Meaning of Querfront

The German term Querfront (cross-front or transverse front) refers to political cooperation or open debate that crosses the usual left–right divide. Historically, it recalls attempts in the Weimar Republic era to unite certain radical nationalists and socialists against the liberal center that betrayed the nation after World War One (just as it is betraying Germany today). Today, the word is most often used as an accusation. Critics claim the BSW is pursuing a risky Querfront strategy by softening its stance towards the AfD. Supporters answer that rigid firewalls prevent honest solutions to real problems and treat millions of citizens as political untouchables.

The Thuringia Conflict in Detail

In Thuringia, the BSW entered a governing coalition with the CDU. Katja Wolf, the BSW state leader, became Finance Minister under CDU Minister-President Mario Voigt (sometimes nicknamed after a local food, Mettbrötchen1). This gave the party real influence but damaged its image among voters who wanted confrontation with the old system rather than accommodation.

With state elections scheduled for September 2026, the national BSW leadership—including Amira Mohamed Ali, Fabio De Masi, and Sahra Wagenknecht—tried to correct course. They declared the party would no longer support the “firewall” parties that isolate the AfD. In states such as Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, they would back independent, non-party candidates for Minister-President who could form broad governments potentially including AfD ministers where this delivered stability and addressed voters’ concerns. They offered to debate these ideas publicly, including in direct formats such as Wagenknecht versus AfD co-leader Alice Weidel.

The Thuringian leadership reacted with fury. It preferred to remain in the CDU coalition. Stefan Wogawa, parliamentary manager of the Thuringian BSW group and a close ally of Wolf, accused the federal leaders of “cozying up to the AfD” and demanded their resignation.

The Open Letter

Roughly one hundred Thuringian BSW members answered with a public open letter. The signatories included two sitting state parliament members (Anke Wirsing and Sven Küntzel) and Anastasia Wirsing, federal chairwoman of the party’s youth organization. This gave the document real internal authority. The letter explained the disagreement in measured but firm language:

The public debate of recent days has shown that different views exist inside the BSW. This is natural and legitimate in a democratic party.

We are turning to the public because criticism by some members of the Thuringian parliamentary group has created the false impression that it reflects the position of the entire state association. We want to correct this.

We are among the members and supporters who back Sahra Wagenknecht’s proposal to consider an independent or cross-party viable candidate for the election for minister-president in Saxony-Anhalt if this can bring stability and a genuine new beginning to the state.

We likewise consider the federal executive’s invitation to Alice Weidel [leader of the AfD] for a public duel a legitimate democratic step. Whoever criticizes political positions should be ready to defend them in open debate. Democracy lives from public confrontation and the comparison of arguments.

By contrast, we see with concern that representatives of our Thuringian parliamentary group repeatedly turn such questions into public conflict with the federal executive. In our view, a state parliamentary group during an election campaign should do everything possible to support the common political success of the party.

Public conflicts with the federal leadership weaken the BSW’s credibility and distract attention from the political goals for which our party was founded. Different opinions should be discussed openly, respectfully, and above all in the proper party bodies. A variety of positions is an expression of internal party democracy. But internal democracy also requires clarity: public criticism by individual office-holders does not automatically speak for the entire state association.

With this open letter, we therefore wish to state clearly that numerous members and supporters of BSW Thuringia support the federal executive’s political course on the questions mentioned. We want a factual debate, mutual respect, and a common focus on what the citizens expect from us: sensible politics and unity on the decisive issues.

Oskar Lafontaine, Wagenknecht’s husband and a veteran socialist, further inflamed the debate by praising parts of the AfD’s foreign policy as “left-wing.”

Why the Struggle Is Important

The proposal from the national leadership of the BSW still contains gaps and half-measures. It does not call for full coalitions with the AfD everywhere. Yet it clearly signals a willingness to treat the AfD as a party one can argue with publicly rather than a permanent pariah. The open letter shows a real split inside the BSW. One wing seeks respectability by staying inside the old CDU-led system. The other believes genuine change requires breaking taboos, holding open debates, and addressing voters’ deepest practical concerns without fear of labels.

East Germany, with its particular history under communism, economic challenges, and greater distrust of distant elites, has become the main testing ground. The results of the September 2026 state elections there could decide whether the BSW becomes a lasting force capable of bridging some divides or fades away like earlier protest movements. The fight also tests a larger question for Germany: can a party successfully combine left-wing economics with pragmatic positions on immigration, culture, and peace, or will the old firewall and old coalitions continue to dominate? The open letter suggests that many inside the BSW still believe honest public argument and practical solutions matter more than rigid exclusion. The coming months will reveal which side prevails.

If you enjoy Constantin von Hoffmeister’s writing, order his new book, The Fate of White America, here.

Speculum Orientis examines the formal death of the Memorandum of Understanding as the collapse of a decade-long liberal experiment in appeasement, arguing that the Islamic Republic now stands at a civilizational crossroads. Beneath the broken diplomacy stirs the dust of a far older stand, and the funeral of the Supreme Leader has delivered the verdict of the streets: the age of paper is over, and the restoration of deterrence is the only path to sovereignty.

I. The Victory That Was Stolen

Iran won the war. That is the foundational fact, written not in the fantasies of the liberal press but in the hard geometry of missile ranges and strategic geography. The American empire, for all its carrier groups and base counts, was defeated by a new paradigm of military technology it neither anticipated nor could counter. Iran’s conventional missile architecture, precision-guided ballistic salvos, drone swarms, and layered coastal defence systems, had transformed the region into a kill zone where every Gulf desalination plant, every port, every energy facility, and every American barracks sat within the crosshairs of a middle power that required no nuclear umbrella to impose unacceptable costs. The Axis of Resistance, from Lebanon to Yemen, from Iraq to Syria, was not a collection of proxies but a distributed deterrent lattice: any strike on the Iranian heartland would trigger simultaneous retaliation across multiple theatres, making the cost of direct military intervention not merely prohibitive but politically suicidal.

Washington entered the negotiations with none of its strategic objectives achieved. Regime change had collapsed. Containment had been perforated. The maximum pressure campaign had only hardened the Republic’s self-sufficiency. And critically, the Trump administration faced an immovable domestic deadline: the looming midterm elections demanded economic stability, and a full-spectrum war in the Persian Gulf would have shattered the American consumer economy, spiked energy prices, and handed Congress to the opposition. The empire was forced to sue for peace not from magnanimity, but from the arithmetic of defeat, the recognition that the new technological and geopolitical reality had stripped it of the capacity to impose its will. The Memorandum of Understanding was not a diplomatic breakthrough; it was the formal admission of forty years of failure, signed by a superpower that had been outmanoeuvred, outranged, and outlasted.

At the peak of this strategic momentum, with escalation dominance firmly in Iranian hands, a faction inside Tehran stopped the advance. The men who brought the catastrophic JCPOA, the Zarif school, a tendency that under pressure created the diplomatic offramp necessary for Trump to save face and disguise his strategic defeat before the electorate, are now incarnate in Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi. They froze all of Iran’s advantages in a piece of paper. This is the same liberal tendency that has held the presidency for more than three decades, and whose record is a continuous chain of national trauma. Every major protest and riot of the post-revolutionary era has ignited either during a liberal presidency or as the direct consequence of liberal policy. In 2009, the Green Revolution erupted after Mir-Hossein Mousavi, one of the founding fathers of this faction, refused to accept the election result, invoking a Western conception of popular sovereignty that threatened to replicate the Syrian disintegration inside Iran. In 2017, the Rouhani government tripled gas prices overnight, immolating the working class to satisfy IMF prescriptions. The JCPOA itself was the crown jewel of this destructive legacy: a document that mortgaged the nation’s nuclear achievements for the illusion of normalization, only to be torn up by Trump with a signature and a smile. Rouhani then kept Iran in full compliance for years after Trump’s unilateral exit, on the basis of European guarantees that they would bring Washington back to the table, guarantees that were never honoured.

President Masoud Pezeshkian, a physician by training with no strategic experience, was elevated after the assassination of Ebrahim Raisi, the most consequential president of the post-revolutionary era. Raisi had entered Iran into the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and BRICS; he had also spent years negotiating a mutual security treaty with Russia, a binding defence pact that would have anchored Iran’s deterrence in a formal great-power alliance. Pezeshkian, upon taking office, shelved that treaty and signed instead a toothless comprehensive strategic partnership, a document of sentiment that signals to every adversary that Tehran’s eastern pivot is purely cosmetic. On the very day that the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation was signed by Raisi, the “Woman, Life, Freedom” colour revolution erupted. The CIA and Mossad, using Gulf Arab intermediaries, funneled money to agent provocateurs, attempting to ignite a Kurdish insurrection that failed. Then Raisi died in a helicopter crash near the border of Azerbaijan, a state openly collaborating with Israeli intelligence. The path was cleared for a government of appeasement.

Now the MOU lies in ruins; Trump has formally declared it over. Israeli strikes pound Lebanon daily. American missiles struck Sirik and Bandar Abbas, and now they target Iranian islands and coastal cities in a transparent campaign to erode Tehran’s control over the Strait of Hormuz. Iran’s response was immediate: missiles and drones struck military and energy targets in Bahrain and Kuwait, the Gulf clients that host the command-and-control infrastructure of the coalition’s air war. Trump’s daily announcements had already violated the terms before he formally tore the document up; the mockery was complete. Simultaneously, the coalition is arming insurgencies in Iraq, Kurdistan, and along the Baluchistan border with Pakistan, opening new fronts while the ink of the deal dries. The agreement that promised security has delivered only more death and more proof that the West’s word is worthless. But this time, the betrayal will not stand. The Supreme Leader has been assassinated and martyred, and his funeral has revealed the true balance of forces.

II. The Economic Treason and the Yeltsin Model

The liberal faction’s betrayal extends to the economic foundations of the Republic, and here the record is not ambiguous; it is a continuous, decades-long assault on the nation’s self-sufficiency. For more than thirty years, the reformist tendency has advocated the same neoliberal poison: mass privatization of state assets, the dismantling of subsidy networks that kept the working classes loyal, and the systematic transfer of national wealth into the hands of a comprador oligarchy. Khatami began the fire-sale. Rouhani accelerated it, stripping the social contract bare while his ministers stored their fortunes in Dubai, European countries, Canada, and the United States. And now Pezeshkian has delivered the terminal blow.

The so-called “economic surgery” is the language of shock therapy, and its specific mechanism is the abolition of the governmental exchange rate, the subsidized dollar price that allowed essential goods to enter the country without passing the full cost of sanctions onto the population. By moving this to the free market, the Pezeshkian government did not merely adjust a currency peg; it detonated the purchasing power of the nation overnight. Bread, medicine, fuel, and raw materials for domestic industry were instantly repriced at the black-market dollar rate. This is not economics; it is the Yeltsin model in Persian execution: the deliberate immiseration of the population under the guise of “modernization,” the reduction of a sovereign economy to a vassal market where only the dollar-denominated elite survives.

The consequences were immediate and catastrophic. Inflation exploded. The rial collapsed because the state voluntarily removed the floor beneath its own currency; sanctions were a secondary blow. The working class, the agricultural base, the industrial worker, those who had borne the weight of the resistance economy, were suddenly priced out of existence. This was the material tinder for the conflagration that followed.

And that conflagration was not spontaneous. It was engineered. The CIA and Mossad, operating through a network of satellite channels of which Iran International is merely the most visible example, had spent years preparing the narrative architecture. These channels do not broadcast news; they operate as psychological warfare battalions, pushing the “return of the Shah” fantasy, instructing urban populations in riot tactics, identifying targets for sabotage, and recruiting operatives for Mossad-connected rings inside the country. Billions of dollars were poured into this machinery: Starlink terminals were smuggled to coordinate armed insurrection, social media algorithms were weaponized to amplify despair, and the very inflation that the liberal government had created was blamed not on the neoliberal shock therapists in Tehran, but on the so called hardliners who refused to surrender.

The sequence is unmistakable. First, the liberal oligarch class implements the economic shock that destroys purchasing power. Second, the foreign-funded media apparatus channels the resulting rage into the streets. Third, armed elements, trained, equipped, and communicated via Starlink, escalate the riots into an attempted regime change. This is not policy failure; it is coordination. The liberal faction creates the economic conditions for destabilization, and its foreign partners exploit them. The reformist who cries for sanctions relief while his policies immiserate the population is the domestic facilitator of a transnational coup.

The oligarchs in Tehran ministries who park their wealth in Emirati and Saudi banks, the same banks financing the propaganda networks used to destabilize their own country, understand this perfectly. They are not victims of circumstance. They are beneficiaries of the chaos. The destruction of the subsidized exchange rate does not hurt them; their fortunes are indexed to the dollar. Their children study in London and Toronto. It is no coincidence that Azerbaijan, whose territory openly hosts Israeli intelligence operations, was spared completely, with no reprisal, no warning. Qatar and the UAE, despite their documented role in financing destabilization, were likewise spared even after the ceasefire violations rendered the MOU a dead letter. These omissions are not a strategy. They are class solidarity, the mutual protection of a transnational elite that has already chosen its side.

III. The Russian Lesson and the Impossibility of Paper

The liberal faction refuses to learn from Moscow’s experience, but the people have absorbed its lessons. For decades, the West promised that NATO would not expand one inch eastward. That promise was dust before the ink was dry. In 2014 and 2015, Russia entered the Minsk negotiations believing that diplomacy could anchor a ceasefire and a political settlement in eastern Ukraine. The West used both agreements, Minsk I and Minsk II, as cover to arm and train the Ukrainian military, to integrate its command structures with NATO, and to prepare the ground for the very escalation the accords were supposed to prevent. Years later, Angela Merkel and François Hollande admitted publicly that the Minsk process was never intended to succeed; it was a ruse to buy time for Ukraine to rebuild its armed forces. The same pattern repeated at Istanbul in 2022, where talks were once again used as a diplomatic screen while the weapons pipeline widened. Now Finland and Lithuania have amended their constitutions to remove the ban on nuclear weapons, erasing the last legal barriers to a forward-deployed nuclear arc along Russia’s border. Negotiated ‘pauses’ are reloading cycles. The paper is not a shield; it is a sedative administered to the victim while the blade is sharpened.

Iran’s MOU is its Istanbul, a document giving Washington a free hand while Tehran’s deterrent is institutionally frozen. Daily Israeli violations, the strike on Sirik: these are not exceptions. They are the deal, as the West understands it. The West has demonstrated, from the broken NATO promise to the Minsk deception to the Baltic nuclear amendments, that its legal architecture is a weapon, not a constraint.

And even the enemy cannot accept the constraints its own diplomats sign. Israeli society and Netanyahu’s coalition are structurally incapable of backing down from the Greater Israel project. The MOU, even before its formal termination, would have required some measure of restraint, some pause in settlement expansion and territorial consolidation. This is impossible for an entity whose entire political theology demands continuous advance. The MOU was void the moment it was signed, not only because the West would violate it, but because one of the principal actors could not abide even its paper constraints. Another round of conflict is unavoidable.

IV. The Coup in Plain Sight

The government’s behaviour reveals its panic. Since the war began, the Majles (parliament) has not been allowed to convene. Hardline voices have been deleted from national television; the head of the security commission was cut off mid-criticism. The information space is sanitized, flooded with pro-deal propaganda while Israeli bombs fall and Iranian commanders die. This is not governance; it is a faction that cannot survive open scrutiny.

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The late Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, announced explicitly that he held a different opinion from the government on the MOU. In the Islamic Republic, such a public correction signals a red line crossed, a threat to the survival of the system itself. It was a warning from the highest authority that the liberal tendency had exhausted its credit. The Assembly of Experts, the eighty-eight-member clerical body constitutionally empowered to appoint the Supreme Leader and, if necessary, to dismiss him, spoke with unprecedented force: sixty-two members declared that upholding the Leader’s redlines is a binding religious obligation, not a political option. The implicit warning was unmistakable: a leadership that abandons the redlines forfeits its mandate.

V. The Funeral: A Nation’s Verdict

After the death of Raisi, the majority of the people voted for Pezeshkian. They gave the reformist a chance, and he repaid them with appeasement while the enemy repaid them with bombs. The coalition of the United States, Israel, and their Gulf vassals, a cabal of pederasts and client kings, launched two waves of attacks on Iran. They killed thousands of civilians. They struck homes, hospitals, sports complexes, and infrastructure. On the first day, they targeted the Minab school. These were not strategic objectives; there is no military logic to bombing a school. These were satanic sacrifices, rituals of demoralization intended to crush the will of a people, to prove that no place was safe, that even children at their desks were legitimate prey. They armed ethnic minorities to attack infrastructure from within, trying to fracture the nation along fault lines they had spent decades mapping. They violated every conceivable international law with the impunity of those who know the institutions are their own.

And it failed. It failed because they struck a civilization that has cultivated thousands of years of history and identity, and a culture of martyrdom fourteen hundred years in the making. Every bomb that fell on a home awakened the collective memory of Karbala, where seventy-two warriors stood against an army of thousands for the sake of principle. Every child pulled from the rubble of Minab was Hussein’s infant Ali Asghar, slaughtered by the arrow of the usurper. The liberal class in Tehran could not understand this. They believed that suffering would produce despair, that despair would produce surrender. They forgot that in Shia Islam, suffering sanctifies, and sanctified suffering produces a rage that no propaganda can extinguish, no algorithm can pacify, because you cannot engineer away the eschatological.

Behind the political mobilization lies a metaphysical confrontation that the liberal mind cannot register. Zionism is not merely a colonial project; it is an eschatological engine operating on a theological deadline. Its architecture assumes the necessity of territorial consolidation before the arrival of a messianic kingdom. Shia eschatology, by contrast, anticipates the return of the Hidden Imam as the culmination of justice through the dismantling of every tyrannical order. These two eschatologies are diametrically opposed: one seeks to build a profane kingdom to hasten a sacred end, the other knows that every profane kingdom must be razed before the sacred can dawn. The liberal in Tehran looks at Washington and sees a negotiation partner; the people in the streets look at Washington and see the fortress of the usurper.

And then the Supreme Leader passed. The moment the liberal faction had perhaps calculated would fracture the nation instead became the most overwhelming demonstration of popular will in the Islamic Republic’s history. Millions upon millions of mourners flooded the streets, not merely to grieve, but to demand revenge. They came not as a disorganized crowd but as a nation in arms of the spirit. They carried black flags, but these were not the black flags of mourning alone. They were the black flags of Karbala, the banners of a civilization that has chosen, for fourteen centuries, the camp of Hussein over the palace of Yazid. And among them, the red flags of vengeance were raised, the ancient signal that the blood of the martyrs will not go unanswered. The reformist offers the palace: air-conditioned negotiations, gradual normalization, survival at the price of honour. The millions in the street chose the desert of Karbala, where the small band stood against the army of the usurper knowing that death was certain and that victory belongs to the principle, not the battalion.

These millions are the true kshatriya of this age, the warrior caste loyal not to a profane government but to the Leader and the principle. The funeral was not just a mere funeral; it was a referendum. The people declared, with their presence and their voices, that they are not the pacified consumers the liberal faction imagined. They are the heirs of Hussein, and they will accept annihilation before they accept the MOU that sells their martyrs’ blood for a currency peg.

The scale cannot be overstated. Every attempt at social media engineering, every dollar spent on Iran International, every think-tank white paper from the Trita Parsi network, all of it evaporated before the reality of those millions. The liberal faction, which had convinced itself that the population was pacified, managed, ready to accept any compromise for a trickle of economic relief, was exposed in its delusion. The people are awake. The betrayal has completed their awakening. And they have chosen, with their presence and their demand for vengeance.

The MOU is the last straw. The liberal tendency that began with Khatami, produced the JCPOA disaster, assassinated no one but enabled every assassination through diplomacy of submission, has reached its terminal point. The millions who attended the funeral did not come to mourn in passivity; they came to bury the illusion that Iran can be governed by men who believe in paper over steel, in negotiation over resistance.

VI. The Restoration of Deterrence

The MOU has been torn up by its own signatory; Iran must now bury it without ambiguity or the pretence of compromise. The restoration of deterrence is the unavoidable consequence of a betrayal documented day by day in the blood of schoolchildren and the rubble of hospitals. The Strait of Hormuz must be closed, fully and unambiguously, a sovereign assertion of control over the chokepoint the global economy cannot afford to lose. This is the only language the coalition understands: cost-imposition so severe that incremental aggression becomes a liability. The Western conventional military complex cannot fight a multi-front war; it knows this, which is why it relied on the shadow war and the deliberate targeting of civilians. The closure of the Strait removes the shadow and forces the choice into the open.

Deterrence in this theatre, however, cannot stop at one chokepoint. Iran must coordinate with the Ansarallah government in Sana’a to declare the Bab el‑Mandeb a closed waterway to all traffic bound for the aggressor states, severing the Red Sea’s jugular and doubling the economic cost of the war in a single stroke. The empire can absorb one strait; it cannot absorb both without triggering a global energy cascade that its domestic politics cannot survive.

And Iran must exit the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. As long as Iran remains inside, its threshold capability is a bargaining chip for the next Araghchi, the next Zarif, the next liberal who imagines the West can be trusted. Outside, it becomes a civilizational deterrent, the unassailable foundation of a genuine pole in the multipolar order. The JCPOA was approved by the Security Council, and yet when the United States violated its commitments, no institution lifted a finger. The legal architecture of the liberal international order is revealed, by its own record, as a selective weapon wielded by the strong against the weak. No Iranian government should ever again negotiate on the basis of commitments that no one abides by. These Western institutions are instruments of the unipolar graveyard, and Iran’s sovereignty requires their irrelevance to be made manifest.

But the treaty cage is not enough. The nuclear doctrine itself must be revised. The fatwa against weapons of mass destruction was a civilizational marker, not a suicide pact. A new doctrine should declare that Iran reserves the right to weaponise its threshold capability if the territorial integrity of the homeland is breached by a nuclear‑armed adversary or if a foreign‑sponsored insurgency, assisted by nuclear‑backed powers, threatens the survival of the state. The doctrine must be codified not as a quest for a bomb, but as a sovereign deterrent contingent on the behaviour of those who have already removed all legal and moral restraints. The liberal order has amended constitutions to accommodate nuclear weapons on Russia’s border; Iran will amend its doctrine to ensure that the schools of Minab are never again treated as test‑beds for satanic sacrifice.

Nuclear capability, the demonstrable capacity to deliver a nuclear payload, is the only guarantee of sovereignty in an age where the coalition that bombs schools to test a nation’s will operates with complete impunity. It is not a preference; it is an existential necessity. The Reformist offered the NPT as a badge of respectability. The people have seen where respectability leads: to Minab, to hospitals and sports complexes reduced to rubble, to refineries and power plants laid waste. They will not accept a cage when the predator is already within. This is the same calibrated treachery that Russia has endured, the same pattern of negotiation as sedative and paper as the prelude to encirclement. Against this design, neither Iran nor Russia can prevail by playing the Western game at the Western table, by accepting the procedural traps of an institutional architecture built to neutralize the independent. The only answer is to refuse the table itself.

The Supreme Leader is gone, but his warning remains, and his funeral has proved that the people are its executors. The guardians have spoken. The streets have voted with their millions. The restoration of deterrence is no longer a strategic option; it is the will of a civilization that has chosen the sword over the ledger, and the immutable over the negotiable. The funeral has buried the liberal illusion. The missiles over Bahrain and Kuwait have buried the truce.

A New Iran and a New Russia must emerge, drawing on the deepest roots of their civilizational identity, not as supplicants seeking recognition from a dying order, but as sovereign poles that reestablish true deterrence through the cold grammar of realist logic: capability, geography, and the demonstrated will to impose costs. The closure of the dual straits, the exit from the treaty cage, and the redefinition of the nuclear redline are not policy options; they are the minimal architecture of a state that has chosen the immutable over the negotiable. The age of paper is over. What begins now is the age of steel.

Alexander Dugin reveals why escalation must be mutual or negotiations with the West become a trap.

As expected, no peace between Iran and the United States ever materialized. The US resumed bombing Iranian territory. Tehran struck American military bases in Bahrain and once again closed the Strait of Hormuz. It didn’t work, and it could never have worked. You don’t make deals with Dajjal.1 That is a basic tenet of Shia metaphysics.

Delaying the war and maintaining the mere appearance of negotiations always and in every circumstance plays into the hands of the West.

In Iran, just as in our own war with the West, there is an ironclad rule: escalation must be mutual. The enemy escalates, we escalate. Only then can we influence the process. Otherwise, the enemy escalates unilaterally, entirely in its own interests, while we are left merely reacting in a passive, follow-the-leader mode. In essence, this kind of one-sided escalation during wartime creates a system of external control.

By the way, why aren’t statues of Baal being burned in Russia? Why aren’t we raising a storm over the criminal networks connected to Epstein? Why do we fail to respond in any meaningful way to the direct participation of Western countries—the Baltic states, Britain, and Germany—in the war against us, even though we ourselves report on it?

Iran goes to the negotiating table and ends up with nothing. For outsiders, this is obvious. Sometimes you see things more clearly from the outside.

Incidentally, right after the first US and Israeli strikes on Iranian leadership, the IRGC eliminated a significant part of the sixth column. Apparently, some still remain.

Negotiations can be held, but only in your own interests and never publicly. As soon as they become open and public, they instantly turn into an information weapon that only the West uses, and exclusively for its own purposes.

That’s why any mention of Witkoff, Kushner, or even Kirill Dmitriev, at a certain point, becomes a blow to the morale of the soldiers at the front and to the patriotic mood of the country. Just one mention is enough. It’s the same with the seemingly harmless broadcast of an old Vladimir Pozner program on Channel One.2

The same thing is happening with the Iranians. At the funeral of Imam Khamenei and his family, furious curses were hurled at the negotiators with Dajjal: Pezeshkian and Araghchi. I don’t think they are personally to blame. This is simply how the laws of information warfare work. The West sets these rules, and it is the only one that uses them unilaterally.

(Translated from the Russian)

Constantin von Hoffmeister examines the mounting tensions in the Middle East through the lens of Carl Schmitt’s political realism, arguing that the latest clashes reveal a far deeper struggle over regional order and sovereignty. Beneath the headlines lies a contest over alliances, spheres of influence, and the enduring logic of friend and enemy that continues to shape international politics.

The Middle East stands once again on the edge of renewed war. Recent attacks on commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz have drawn immediate attention, yet these incidents represent only the visible surface of a much larger struggle. The real contest extends far beyond the narrow waters of the Gulf. It reaches into the political order of the entire region, where alliances shift, governments change direction, and competing powers seek lasting advantage. Every missile, every naval incident, and every diplomatic statement belongs to a broader contest over who will shape the future of the Middle East.

The attacks on shipping provide the formal trigger for rising tensions. The deeper causes lie elsewhere. Military operations rarely emerge from isolated events. They develop through long sequences of political decisions, strategic calculations, and changing balances of power. The Strait of Hormuz serves as one theatre within a conflict that stretches across Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, and the Persian Gulf. Every development influences the next, producing a chain of events that steadily raises the stakes for all participants.

From this perspective, agreements with great powers possess value only so long as they coincide with existing strategic interests. States pursue their own security, influence, and survival before every other consideration. Diplomatic understandings therefore remain temporary instruments rather than permanent settlements. Once circumstances change, negotiations acquire new meanings, and previous commitments often give way to fresh calculations. The current relationship between Washington and Tehran reflects precisely this dynamic, where every pause becomes an opportunity to strengthen one’s own position before the next phase begins.

But what happens when diplomacy itself becomes another weapon of war, and every ceasefire serves as preparation for the next confrontation?

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Matteo Romano explores Armin Mohler’s provocative argument that fascism is defined not by ideology but by a distinctive style of being.

“One is more faithful to a style than to ideas,” wrote Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, and without the slightest doubt we can say that this is the guiding thread running through the brief yet dense essay The Fascist Style (1973) by Armin Mohler, a philosopher and leading figure of the European New Right. Mohler, a scholar of the German Conservative Revolution, Ernst Jünger’s secretary during the postwar years, and a correspondent of Julius Evola, is, as mentioned, known above all for the role he played within the European New Right and for his sharp critique of liberalism.

Here, through a physiognomic description of what he considers to be the attitudinal “style” of the “fascist,” Mohler seeks to identify the essential core of that historical, political, and social experience. The context in which this short essay took shape can be found in a debate among various intellectuals of the European New Right during those years, one whose speculative foundation lay in the ancient medieval dispute between nominalism and universalism. The discussion was carried forward primarily through articles and publications in the journal Nouvelle École [New School], often written by Mohler himself or by Alain de Benoist. This same question was later taken up by Alexander Dugin, who saw in the nominalist worldview the very root of modern liberal individualism.

For Mohler, however, a vision that restores individuality and its existential value to the center (and which we might therefore call nominalist) is precisely what makes it possible to reclaim the most authentic, and equally the harshest, meaning of life. It alone permits a cathartic renewal beyond every empty, abstract, universal, and therefore leveling conception of man, upon which modern liberalism and its various forms of internationalism are founded. It follows, therefore, returning to our subject, that the approach Mohler adopts to define “what is fascist” is (quite rightly, we might add) essentially pre-political and pre-doctrinal. In this, he follows the path traced by other scholars of the phenomenon, such as Giorgio Locchi in The Essence of Fascism.

Mohler writes: “To summarize, let us say that fascists have absolutely no difficulty adapting themselves to the inconsistencies of theory, because they understand one another through a more direct path: that of style.” Elsewhere, referring to the speech delivered by Gottfried Benn on the occasion of Marinetti’s visit to Hitler’s Germany in 1934, Mohler writes: “Style takes precedence over faith; form comes before the idea.”

For Mohler, then, the fascist is not such because he adheres to an ideological, doctrinal, or political framework. He is such because he has experienced within himself, in the deepest intimacy of his being, the mortal weakness of every Enlightenment, rationalist, and democratic myth or value. All of these collapse in the face of wars, revolutions, and economic and social crises. Yet the fascist responds by gathering what is positive within every crisis, becoming the bearer of a creative will that reaffirms the values of spirit, heroism, and the will over life.

Quoting Jünger, Mohler writes: “Our hope rests upon the young who burn with fever because the green putrefaction of disgust consumes them.” For Mohler, this expresses “the longing for another form of life, denser and more real.” It is a denser life because it is more complete, having passed through a naked and renewing experiential tragedy. Mohler speaks of a fusion of “anarchy” and “style,” of destruction and renewal. It is precisely this heroic mortification that leads to a reconnection with the original and unified root of reality and of the individual’s life, in which the opposition between life and death is overcome in an inner indifference. This renewal is something the fascist feels within himself, but only on the condition that he has accepted as his task “the necessity of having to die constantly, day and night, in solitude.” Only then, having reached the zero point of every value (not coincidentally, one section is entitled “The Magical Zero Point”), drawing upon deeper forces and having been virtuously forged through a style “that is not theatrical, but one of imposing coldness towards which Europe should orient itself,” can he bear witness to the birth of a new hierarchy. It is an objective, cold, and impersonal style.

Mohler finds this attitude specifically in the “fascist” man and in the “fascist” style because, according to the author, they place the greatest emphasis on individuality and personal experience. While the National Socialist is characterized above all by his emphasis on the people, the Volksgemeinschaft [people’s community], and social rebellion, Mohler argues that the statist is distinguished by his admiration for what functions, for what is not arbitrary, and for what is well integrated into the framework of the state. That framework, at times suffocating, prevents him from fully experiencing the sense of the tragic that, according to Mohler, is proper to the fascist. Although these three “types” have historically overlapped, Mohler’s aim here, at the theoretical level, is to emphasize the specific character of what he defines as “the fascist man.”

It is precisely the primary necessity of existential conviction that, for Mohler, explains why fascism “lacks a system prepared a priori; it lacks the scientific pretension of explaining everything in a dogmatic and bookish manner.” In this lies the immanent, intimate, and individual character of the revolution that the fascist first carries out within himself, and which animates him, leading him to manifest an inner form, an attitude, and a particular dignity and nobility that can only be attained through an intimate catharsis.

In conclusion, we may say that although Mohler’s interpretation may at certain points appear somewhat forced, it has the merit of refusing to reduce the experience and the phenomenon under discussion to something accidental, contingent, or confined to party membership, political doctrine, or economic theory. Instead, it places it on a deeper and more fundamental level, locating it in that within the individual which stands in communication with the sphere of Being.

Translated from the original Italian version on Identitario.

Oswald Spengler is remembered above all for The Decline of the West (1918-1922), yet his historical vision extended far beyond Europe. In late 1924, following a lecture to the German Oriental Society, he drafted this text as the programmatic introduction to a major planned series of books on the early history of Asia. Although he never completed the project, the outline was published posthumously in 1937.

Far from presenting a finished historical narrative or a summary of established facts, Spengler offers something more provocative: a wide-ranging research program. He deliberately sets aside the familiar European division of history into antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the modern age, arguing that these categories dissolve entirely when viewed from the broader perspective of Asia. Instead, he sketches three vast prehistoric cultural spheres that stretch across Eurasia and into the Pacific, explores the role of ancient trade routes and migrations as drivers of historical change, and insists that archaeology and material culture must take precedence over literary sources in reconstructing mankind’s distant past.

The text reveals a side of Spengler that is often overlooked. He presents the great upheavals of the second millennium BC—the Indo-Aryan migrations into India, the rise of the Zhou dynasty in northern China, the collapse of the Minoan and Hittite worlds, and the turmoil in the Near East—not as isolated events but as interconnected expressions of a single, continent-wide transformation radiating from the northern interior. Throughout the outline, he emphasizes long-distance cultural exchange, the enduring influence of prehistoric “culture circles,” and the deep continuity between primitive and high cultures.

Many of Spengler’s interpretations remain highly controversial, and subsequent archaeological discoveries have revised or refuted some of his bolder claims. Yet the text is remarkable, not because every hypothesis has endured but because of the sheer scale of its ambition. It attempts to move beyond the conventional isolation of individual cultures and peoples—the fragmented histories of China, India, Egypt, Babylonia, and the steppe nomads—and replace them with a genuinely Eurasian perspective on civilization, one that traces the movement of peoples, technologies, religions, and artistic forms across thousands of miles and many centuries.

What follows is not a completed history of ancient Asia, but the blueprint for one of the twentieth century’s most ambitious, and ultimately unfinished, intellectual undertakings: an effort to understand the continent as a single historical whole.

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Alexander Dugin warns that Russia’s status quo has exhausted itself and must be transcended if it is to win the civilizational war.

It is worth giving serious thought to the structure of the Russian status quo, taking into account the recent processes unfolding in the West and beyond, and doing so with historical depth, both in Russia’s domestic past and in that of the West.

In the course of the Special Military Operation (SMO)—that is, in the confrontation with Western civilization—we have approached a critical line. As long as it was the Russian status quo fighting the West, this was a matter of securing partial sovereignty by technical means. Slightly more sovereignty than is granted to others, but still quite limited—limited by acceptance of the liberal globalist rules-based order. We violated its rules, reasonably noting that the West itself constantly violates them. But quod licet Jovi non licet bovi. From that moment, we have seriously set out on the path of building an alternative architecture of international relations. But this also meant that we intended to change our own status quo. That is what we declared, albeit rather cautiously: a state-civilization, multipolarity, traditional values, the Russian World. This is not what Russia (in its current status quo) actually is, but a declaration of what it wants to become.

So far, everything is logical. We started with a technical conflict that grew into a civilizational one, and then openly said so. However… it may be that we ourselves never fully believed what we declared.

What we have now:

• Growing escalation with the West, where the West is free to conduct it however it wishes (it erases any red lines whenever and however it wants);

• The declared horizon of a Russian ideology (the state-civilization);

• Russia as it exists in the status quo, with all its current wants and refusals, capabilities and limitations.

Importantly, what a country “wants” and what it “can” achieve is not just a balance between subjective will and objective possibilities. It is a single whole in which reality is born from the interplay of will and the resistance of matter. This is the phenomenology of power: power often produces what it lacks and politically creates being. This is always and everywhere the case. The discourse of power is not just a reflection of reality, but a tool for shaping it.

The status quo is a specific formula of political ontology. What we can and want depends on its construction and structure. Inside the status quo, the balance of desire and resources is one thing. But beyond the status quo, this balance can change significantly, theoretically in any direction. In other words, it is possible to want and to be capable of something different from what we have now.

To move into the future, we must go beyond the status quo. But the status quo itself does not want to change. Hence its two main desires: to win the war as quickly as possible and/or to stop the war as quickly as possible. Both solutions are purely technical, and both encounter fierce Western resistance. The West wants neither. It does not want the Russian status quo at all.

In other words, the status quo has reached a critical line. Postponing deep, qualitative reforms is no longer possible. Time is now measured in months.

The status quo has exhausted its potential. Now it stands like a wall, blocking the path to Russia’s future.

The President has indicated the direction to that future. The question now boils down to one rather difficult point: how to carry out a rotation of the elites? We have the elites of the status quo. We need the elites of Victory, the elites of the state-civilization. It is obvious that the current elites do not want to be rotated. They are resisting. They are clinging to the status quo with all their might. But time is running out.

The SMO has turned into a full-scale war. And yes, precisely because it has spilled over from a regional confrontation into a clash of civilizations. This is what gives the events their historical significance: between Russia as a state-civilization and Western civilization there exists a deep ontological and metaphysical antagonism. This is not a glitch or an accident. It is the expression of a profound geopolitical and historical pattern. Fate, destiny, Providence, mission. That is what this war is. It is more serious than the Great Patriotic War. And no less serious than the Civil War. It may well be the most important war of all.

Its nature above all demands deep understanding. If we do not break our disgusting habit of treating thought with contempt and reducing it to mere technology, we have no chance of winning this war. First and foremost, we must understand who we are and who our adversary is. We must understand this clearly and firmly. If we fail to grasp these fundamental things, it will be fatal. Correct knowledge determines correct action.

(Translated from the Russian)

Constantin von Hoffmeister argues that the Special Military Operation’s transformation into war confirms Russia’s self-declared role as the Katechon defending tradition against the dying liberal West.

On July 5, 2026, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov made a statement that marked an important turning point in Russia’s public description of the conflict. He said that the Special Military Operation had become a war. For years, Russian officials had consistently used the original term, even as the fighting expanded and foreign involvement grew. Peskov explained that the conflict had changed because Western governments had become deeply involved through the steady supply of advanced weapons, intelligence, satellite support, military planning, and financial assistance. His words reflected what many had already concluded from events on the battlefield. The conflict had moved beyond the confines of a limited operation and become a wider struggle shaped by outside powers. Russian forces continue to advance, establish defensive positions, and strengthen the security perimeter along the front, while the scale of foreign participation increasingly influences the course of military operations. Peskov’s statement acknowledged this new reality and connected political decisions made in distant Western capitals to the conditions now faced by soldiers on the battlefield.

Alexander Dugin argues that the Special Military Operation has turned into a full-scale war not by mistake or chance but as the natural outcome of a deep civilizational confrontation between Russia as a sovereign state-civilization and the West. According to him, this conflict reveals a fundamental ontological and metaphysical antagonism, a historic inevitability guided by fate, Providence, and Russia’s sacred mission.

What is the significance?

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The following is an excerpt from my book Dimensional Prophecy of Zohar, now available on Amazon. This has been my longest creative project, a journey that began around 2004.

The project was inspired by works such as Xenogears, Xenosaga, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Megazone 23, Serial Experiments Lain, the original Ghost in the Shell film, and many others. These works also served as my introduction to philosophy. Neon Genesis Evangelion introduced me to thinkers such as Søren Kierkegaard and Jean-Paul Sartre while exploring psychoanalysis and occultism. Serial Experiments Lain casually poses difficult questions about reality, identity, and causality. The Xenosaga games are named after Nietzsche’s books, while Xenogears draws on Nietzsche, Freud, the Kabbalah, Lacan, geopolitics, Oswald Spengler, the Orthodox Church, and many other philosophical and religious traditions. I was deeply impressed by these works and wanted to create a story with a similar level of philosophical depth. As preparation, I immersed myself in science fiction by authors such as Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick, Stanisław Lem, Robert A. Heinlein, and H. P. Lovecraft, while also reading philosophy extensively.

I conceived the basic idea for Dimensional Prophecy of Zohar around 2004. Preparing for the project led me to read countless philosophers, psychologists, and especially existentialists. Ironically, this project is the reason I first picked up Heidegger. That eventually led to a funny moment when I replayed Final Fantasy VII and encountered the line, “Terrorists plan to attack the reactor in Midgar. Please urgently report this to Heidegger.” Before studying philosophy, I had never thought the character’s name meant anything. Suddenly, I realized it was almost certainly a reference to Martin Heidegger, and the scene became unintentionally amusing.

In many ways, this became my first major philosophical project. Tonally, I was also heavily influenced by the Japanese science-fiction series Gasaraki. Rather than presenting spectacular battles, Gasaraki portrayed a fictional Middle Eastern conflict with an almost documentary-like realism, complete with news reports and grounded political storytelling. The remarkable part is that the series aired roughly a year before the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The dictator whom the United States seeks to overthrow even resembles Saddam Hussein and is accused of developing weapons of mass destruction, making the series feel strangely prophetic in retrospect.

Over the past two decades, I have revised the story countless times and experimented with many different forms of media. I attempted a hand-drawn manga, although all of those pages have since been lost. I taught myself Autodesk Maya—the software used in productions such as Jurassic Park, Terminator, Star Wars, and the Final Fantasy films—and created several 3D CGI comics. I experimented with an animated YouTube series, developed a video game adaptation covering roughly the first third of the story that is still available on Xbox Live, and wrote numerous drafts of the novel itself. At one point, Microsoft operated a program that allowed independent developers to publish games more easily, and my project became part of that initiative before it was discontinued. The earliest draft of the novel was only eight pages long. Over the years, the project has existed as a manga, prose, 3D animation, a video game, and, more recently, AI-assisted visualizations.

When I began studying computer science, the story evolved again. It gradually incorporated ideas from computability theory, computational complexity, Turing machines, and other areas of theoretical computer science, making technology an even more central philosophical theme.

This is the project I have worked on longer than anything else in my life.

Looking back, I realize that my philosophical worldview was shaped through the process of creating this story. It remains my most Heideggerian work of fiction. Existential anxiety and the question of technology—particularly Heidegger’s concept of Gestell (enframing)—form two of its central themes. There are also two scenes that consciously draw on Heidegger’s philosophy.

In one scene, the protagonist Karala is attacked by a monster and briefly considers fleeing. This becomes a reflection on anxiety and personal responsibility. Her fear isolates her from everyone else and confronts her with the fact that she alone is responsible for her own life and death. In later revisions, I even incorporated Heidegger’s concept of Geworfenheit (”thrownness”) to strengthen this connection.

Another scene centers on Madoka’s relationship to crowds and mass society. It explores Heidegger’s concept of das Man (”the They”), examining how individuals lose themselves in collective expectations and anonymous social conformity.

With that background in mind, here is the train station scene from the book:

A monorail train glided silently through the Shin-Tama industrial zone on its elevated track, heading toward Kyoto Central Station. The train was painted white with broad blue stripes along its sides that glowed like artificial veins under the pale night lighting.

It reached the main station quickly. From a distance, the building looked futuristic and audacious—a massive, almost floating platform held on one side by a sheer wall and otherwise supported only by a few slender metal pillars.

Behind the station rose three colossal skyscrapers into the black sky. In front stood smaller structures, while even beneath the monorail tracks, warehouses and shacks had taken root.

Outwardly, the station radiated bold modernity. Inside, however, it was quietly decaying, like so many hubs in this world. In its corners and shadowed passages loitered society’s outcasts: hollow-eyed junkies, prostitutes bathed in cheap neon, creatures of the night that had never truly disappeared. Even the founding of the World Government and its grand social reforms had changed nothing here. Crime had not been eradicated—it had simply retreated into the cracks and forgotten corners, where the police preferred to leave it undisturbed.

It was a filthy, wretched district. Not even the glaring neon signs could fully conceal the rot. Most objects cast long, sharp shadows in the darkness.

Beneath the station, a small but thriving black market had existed for years. Everything was available: illegal software, second-hand cyberware, questionable implants, and even simple household goods. Increasingly, ordinary citizens preferred coming here rather than dealing with official vendors. No one asked awkward questions about radiation levels, demanded masks, or required biometric registration.

At the roadside in front of the station, a strange girl with snow-white hair and a bright yellow jacket was picking wildflowers growing from the cracks in the concrete. She paused and looked up as several monorail trains arrived almost simultaneously. The sight intrigued her. For a brief moment, her thoughts drifted toward machines, automata, and the cold beauty of technology.

But she had to hurry. An unwanted doctor’s appointment awaited. She needed her medication. With a quiet sigh, she glanced at her phone. The screen displayed her name:

Madoka Michael.

Shortly afterward, the train came to a gentle stop. Masses of anonymous commuters and tourists poured out hastily, gray silhouettes in the night. Among them was another young girl. She wore a simple black dress and heavy black boots. Her hair was as dark as her mood.

Her name was Karala Yagiyu.

Karala paused for a moment and let her gaze drift through the dark, neon-lit area. Quiet, weary thoughts took shape in her mind:

I came to Kyoto today. To the place that is supposedly my destiny.

The orderly streams of workers that dominate the streets during the day have vanished. The city has once again sunk back into that chaos which is as fundamental to human nature as hunger or the pursuit of happiness. In these hours, absolute freedom reveals itself—and with it, absolute abandonment. This chaos is terrifying. And yet… in a twisted way, alluring. All this disorder is watched over by our scientifically controlled technology—the proud symbol of humanity’s collective reason. And still, every order crumbles. Anicca, as the ancients said. Nothing lasts.

I am supposed to help this institute. But why? To save humanity? Humanity is indifferent to me. No matter what one does, suffering and pain will always remain—even in a perfect utopia. People don’t matter to me. So why should I care about saving them? If what I do ends up saving them… fine. It doesn’t touch me. I just want my own fun.

At least I think that’s what I want.

In truth, I don’t even know what I really want…

Order Dimensional Prophecy of Zohar here.

Michael Kumpmann delivers a sharp, on-the-ground account of how the AfD outmaneuvered Antifa’s much-hyped blockade attempts at their party conference and what actually unfolded inside the event.

Read part one here.

The first reports about the AfD party conference and how it went are as follows: The Antifa’s attempt to blockade the Autobahn (highway) failed completely and they were unable to stop the delegates from reaching the party conference. How did the AfD manage that? They simply got up earlier and left an hour ahead of schedule. As a result, because Antifa had registered their action as a demonstration, they were only allowed to set up their roadblock after the AfD had already left the highway.

Some AfD politicians also drove through the night in their private cars, arriving very early, and then caught up on sleep in their vehicles before the conference started.

Lesson learned: The ultimate poison for Antifa is having to get up early. Antifa had even distributed instructions on how to use explosives, pyrotechnics, etc. Apparently they should also have taught their people how to use an alarm clock.

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Michael Kumpmann offers a sharp inside look at the tensions surrounding the upcoming AfD party congress.

The AfD party congress in Erfurt, Thuringia, tomorrow (July 4) is expected to be highly charged. The situation beforehand is extremely tense. At this congress, things could really explode. Unfortunately, this is not meant only politically or metaphorically—thanks to a portion of the violent counter-protesters, it could become very real.

Prominent left-wing politicians such as Bodo Ramelow (representing the The Left party in the German parliament), Green Party figures, and left-wing groups like Antifa and Bündnis Widersetzen (Alliance pf Resistance) have called for protests and civil disobedience against the police and security forces. Prominent left-wing personalities such as Luisa Neubauer (the “German Greta Thunberg”) have also announced they will take part. There are 30 registered demonstrations against the AfD, and the police union anticipates as many as 50,000 counter-protesters. The police believe that at least 2,500 of those arriving intend to commit violence, while 14,000 plan to erect barricades. Large parts of the police, and even the Bundeswehr (German army), are expecting violent riots. Even though the party congress hasn’t started yet, more than 70 violent crimes have already occurred in Erfurt that are clearly linked to the event. To guarantee security, the police have already imposed assembly bans in many zones around the congress venue. At the same time, officers from all over Germany have been brought in to prevent escalation.

Antifa groups are spreading propaganda in advance, claiming this is the “last chance to prevent the AfD’s seizure of power.” In some Antifa circles, informational material on the use of explosives and incendiary devices has even been found. Meanwhile, the AfD is hitting new record highs in the polls ahead of the congress. BSW founder Sarah Wagenknecht announced in an open letter four days ago that she is once again open to limited cooperation with the AfD in Thuringia and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania.

AfD party congresses have always been accompanied by conflicts, disruptions, and riots, no matter where they were held. When the party tried to hold one in a hotel in Cologne, pressure was put on the hotel. Last year’s congress was delayed by blockades and sabotage so badly that it only started two hours late. (The entire Antifa scene, which had previously been more of a niche issue, only really exploded in size in Germany because of the fear of the AfD.)

This time, however, there are specific reasons why tensions are boiling over so fiercely.

The congress is taking place in Erfurt, the capital of Thuringia. This is especially significant because the Thuringian state branch and its chairman Björn Höcke are by far the most controversial part of the AfD. To understand why, it’s important to know that the AfD is informally divided into two camps.

There is a wing that is particularly visible in the West. It is liberal-conservative. One should not make the mistake of simply equating it with Trump. Although many of its supporters admire Trump, they often resemble more the faction of the Republicans that Trump himself fought against. This lib-con wing consists heavily of former CDU (Christian Democratic Union) and FDP (Free Democratic Party) members (often people who had to leave those parties due to internal conflicts). They are very close to traditional CDU positions—with a strong focus on the welfare state, the glorification of high achievers and work ethic, a love of the economy, and firm Western alignment. Lucassen is a prominent example of this stance. They are usually not libertarians or hardcore capitalists with a passion for small businesses and risk-taking; instead, they prefer to strengthen large corporations like VW, Siemens, and others. (Libertarians form a smaller group that often overlaps with them but also appears more frequently in the so-called Flügel [Wing], the hard-right, nationalist faction of the AfD). These people love the term Bürgertum (bourgeois middle class), and their core values are work and achievement. For them, work is a social duty, not self-fulfillment or “another form of entrepreneurship.” They are often superficially Christian, but mainly because it is considered proper. Being bourgeois is often more important to them than being Christian. A certain voluntary conformism and “not standing out too much” is also seen as morally desirable. Many still cling to the old ideal of joining a company young, climbing the career ladder, and staying loyal until retirement—something that is often no longer possible in today’s system.

One thing I personally am glad about is that I have thankfully heard no calls from the AfD for banning violent video games, expanding internet surveillance, or implementing lobbyist-driven tightening of copyright law, etc. That kind of old CDU policy is thankfully being left behind.

This part of the AfD also tries hard to appear “serious” and “not too radical.” As a result, they often rein in their own members and especially try to prevent younger people from adopting radical libertarian ideas. Many dream of becoming the junior partner in a coalition with the CDU. This is also the part of the AfD that criticizes Islam under the motto “Muslims are a danger to Western values such as liberalism and democracy. We must support Israel,” and so on.

This “Western AfD” is the part that can still be partially tolerated by the mainstream. (Certain media outlets close to them, such as Nius, founded by former Bild editor Reichelt, are trying to increase this tolerance.)

The other part is the so-called Flügel (the Wing), which was officially dissolved under pressure from within the party and from the Verfassungsschutz (Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency), but which continues to exist de facto informally and dominates especially in the East. It grew significantly after the refugee crisis and especially the Cologne New Year’s Eve attacks at the end of 2015. It is closely linked to Götz Kubitschek and the German New Right. Kubitschek is the key figure who, together with Armin Mohler (who in turn worked with Ernst Jünger), built the German New Right. It has connections to the French New Right, although there are some differences.

The most important difference is that the German New Right has no utopian visions for completely reshaping society, as advocated by Alain de Benoist, Alexander Dugin, or Guillaume Faye. They remain very vague on overarching societal goals. There is often lip service paid to tradition, but no deep engagement with figures like Evola. (I was at the libertarian magazine Eigentümlich Frei [Distinctively Free] from 2016 to 2019 and wrote extensive commentary series on Evola’s Revolt Against the Modern World. I engaged with Evola more thoroughly than most prominent members of Kubitschek’s circle. No joke.) Kubitschek and others prefer to focus on strategy, metapolitics, and (re-)migration. Compared to France, criticism of capitalism has also been greatly reduced in the German New Right, largely because they recruit heavily from young internet users, where libertarians are extremely strong and dominant in German online discourse. Many around Kubitschek are neither explicitly Eurasianist nor transatlanticist, but rather follow a “We are in Germany and should primarily focus on Germany” approach—although many have certain sympathies for Russia. Martin Sellner and the Identitarian Movement also emerged from Kubitschek’s milieu.

A certain Erik Ahrens claimed that Kubitschek cooperates with an Orthodox monastery and dreams of turning Germany into a traditionalist, neo-feudal agrarian state. That sounded pretty cool (even though Ahrens meant it negatively). Apart from Ahrens himself, however, I haven’t found any sources confirming it. Still, the rumor is too interesting to omit, and if true, it would actually speak in Kubitschek’s favor.

Höcke has been the figurehead of the Flügel and its successors and has therefore been demonized both inside the party and by propagandists like Jan Böhmermann and Oliver Welke. He has since become something of a bogeyman. In today’s political system, Höcke is roughly what Emmanuel Goldstein was in Nineteen Eighty-Four. For example, after he called the Holocaust memorial in Berlin a “monument of shame,” a group indirectly funded by the state stalked and harassed him right outside his home. (Incidentally, a successor company of IG Farben worked on that memorial. No joke.) When YouTuber Ben Ungescripted conducted an uncensored interview with Höcke, government parties and authorities such as a state media regulator threatened him with legal consequences.

There is also the strange recurring rumor that Höcke was once an extreme neo-Nazi under the pseudonym “Landolf Ladig.” I cannot judge whether it’s true. (The name “Ladig” is reminiscent of the occult neo-Nazi “Landig Group” from the 1950s, which claimed some members had contact with a secret Nazi base at the South Pole.)

(Most foreign observers, upon seeing Höcke, would probably consider him a rather boring and harmless petty-bourgeois type. At public appearances, Höcke also has a less commanding presence than figures like Le Pen, Orbán, or Trump. He comes across more like a minor intellectual without strong social dominance.)

This is precisely why this party congress is so politically explosive. The AfD are the pariahs of German politics, but the Thuringian branch is essentially the “AfD within the AfD.”

In addition to Höcke himself, several of his proposals that are to be discussed at the congress are highly controversial. Among other things, he is calling for a reduction of the “incompatibility list” and the introduction of a “statute of limitations.” The incompatibility list registers right-wing extra-parliamentary organizations; anyone who has ever been a member of one of them is barred from joining the AfD. It was introduced to protect the party from accusations of being a neo-Nazi party. However, there is pressure on the party to distance itself from its own broader milieu (even when the groups are not questionable). Members of the Western AfD in particular were happy to comply with this pressure and used the list to keep the AfD “clean” and “coalition-compatible” with the CDU. Höcke therefore wants to reduce and reform this list. Although this is a reasonable position, it is a gift to AfD opponents.

At the same time, critics complain that the congress was scheduled to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the NSDAP’s “re-founding congress” in Weimar (also in Thuringia). This is classic “grasping at straws” by the left. They seize on literally any absurd detail to construct a connection to the Nazis. A prime example was when Höcke was attacked for using the phrase “… for Germany” (I won’t repeat it here, as journalists who did so were also sued) because it was allegedly a slogan of Hitler’s SA. This slogan is not taught in history lessons and is extremely obscure. It is highly unlikely that it was meant as an allusion or that many people would have understood it that way. Most interpreted it as a reference to the letters AfD. But this is exactly how the woke crowd operates here.

The congress will also include a new election of the party leadership. It is therefore highly decisive for the party’s future direction.

Read part 2 here.

(Translated from the German)

If you enjoy Michael Kumpmann’s writing, order his first book, Dimensional Prophecy of Zohar Redux, here.

Constantin von Hoffmeister on the forgotten meaning of independence in an age of multipolarity.

Every Fourth of July, Americans celebrate the birth of a republic that declared its independence from an empire. Fireworks, flags, and speeches commemorate a people who rejected distant rule, foreign entanglements, and the concentration of power beyond the consent of their own communities. Yet the deepest irony of the holiday is that the United States gradually became the very thing it was created to resist. The republic of farmers, merchants, craftsmen, and self-governing states transformed into a global empire with military bases scattered across continents, fleets patrolling every ocean, and political ambitions extending far beyond its own shores. The anniversary of American independence therefore raises a more urgent question than patriotic ceremony usually allows: whether the United States can once again become a republic, or whether it will continue to exhaust itself attempting to preserve a global order that no longer exists.

The rise of a multipolar world has exposed the limits of the imperial project with increasing clarity. For decades, Washington enjoyed a position that allowed it to shape international finance, military alliances, and diplomatic institutions with relatively little resistance. That period has come to an end. New centers of power have emerged across Eurasia and the wider Global South, not because they were granted permission to do so, but because economic development, technological progress, and demographic change have altered the balance of power. No amount of military spending or diplomatic pressure can permanently reverse these structural changes. The effort to preserve unipolar dominance has instead produced endless wars, mounting public debt, domestic division, and growing distrust among allies who increasingly recognize that the world is changing regardless of American wishes. The end of empire is therefore not the result of a single defeat but of a historical transformation that no state can simply legislate away.

This transformation also reveals a conflict within America itself. The United States has always contained two competing impulses. One looks towards the sea, seeking commercial expansion, financial influence, military projection, and a universal mission extending across the globe. The other looks towards the land, emphasizing productive industry, local communities, secure borders, national cohesion, and the cultivation of the republic at home. These traditions have existed side by side since the country’s earliest history, yet the maritime vision gradually overwhelmed the continental one. Industrial strength increasingly served financial interests, foreign commitments multiplied, and domestic renewal became secondary to global management. As imperial obligations expanded, the foundations of the republic weakened. Infrastructure aged, manufacturing declined in many regions, communities fractured, and political life became consumed by struggles over distant crises while problems at home accumulated year after year.

The promise of America First briefly appeared to recognize this reality. Millions of voters understood that endless interventions abroad had brought little benefit to ordinary Americans while imposing immense financial and human costs. They hoped for a return to a foreign policy guided by restraint, national interest, and constitutional limits rather than ideological missions overseas. Yet hopes alone cannot overcome entrenched institutions. Campaign promises collided with a political, bureaucratic, military, and financial establishment deeply invested in maintaining the existing order. Whether through compromise, pressure, calculation, or conviction, the movement that promised national renewal increasingly found itself participating in many of the same patterns it had once condemned. For many supporters, this represented not merely a political disappointment but a reminder that changing personalities is easier than changing the structures of an empire that has grown over generations.

If the United States wishes to recover its strength, it must abandon the illusion that global predominance can be restored through greater exertion. A republic becomes durable not by governing the world but by governing itself well. Economic production, technological innovation, border security, infrastructure, education, and the stability of local communities contribute more to national greatness than another military commitment on the far side of the globe. A genuine America First policy would therefore accept the emergence of multipolarity rather than treating it as a catastrophe. It would recognize other great civilizations as permanent features of international life while concentrating American resources on rebuilding the country itself. Such a course would not represent surrender but strategic maturity, replacing imperial overstretch with national consolidation.

The Fourth of July should therefore become more than a celebration of the past. It should serve as an opportunity to remember the original purpose of American independence and to measure how far the nation has drifted from it. The empire that emerged during the twentieth century is entering its final chapter because the conditions that sustained it have disappeared. Clinging to its remnants will only deepen decline. Recovering the republic, by contrast, remains possible if Americans rediscover the wisdom that animated their founding: that a free people should govern themselves rather than seek to govern the world. The age of empire is ending. Whether this marks the decline of America or the beginning of its renewal depends upon whether the nation chooses to remain an empire or once again become a republic.

If you enjoy Constantin von Hoffmeister’s writing, order his new book, The Fate of White America, here.