I randomly came across a fascinating document called The USA And The New World Order: A Debate Between Olavo de Carvalho And Aleksandr Dugin (PDF download). It has done more for me to clarify modern geopolitics than any other work I’ve read.

Before we review its contents, let’s first introduce the two debaters. Olavo de Carvalho is a conservative Brazilian philosopher and writer who created the Inter American Institute, which focuses on philosophical and social issues. Aleksandr Dugin is a Russian thinker and strategist who is an independent adviser to Vladimir Putin. His grand vision is to create a Eurasian sphere that eliminates the unipolarity of the United States.

I’m first struck by what a clear understanding Carvalho, who I hadn’t heard of before reading the debate, has of the globalist establishment. Here he is defining globalism and its aims:

…liberal globalism is the project in progress that aims to establish throughout the world the Popperian model of the “open society,” necessarily destroying on its way national sovereignties and every metaphysical or moral principle that aspires to be superior to individual rationality. It is the end of nations and of all traditional spirituality, the former being replaced by a global scientific-technocratic administration, and the latter by a mix of scientism, materialism and relativistic subjectivism that inspires the globalist elites of the West.

He then makes the claim that globalists are in control of the United States and are enacting policies to bring it to heel:

The United States are not the command center of the globalist project, but on the contrary, its prime victim, marked for death. The globalist elite is not an enemy of Russia, China or the Islamic countries potentially associated with the Eurasian project, but, rather it is their collaborator and accomplice in the effort to destroy the sovereignty, the politico-military power and the economy of the United States.

Why is the USA marked for death? Because its patriotic and Christian people are the last obstacle to ushering in a truly global world order controlled by a state-less group of elites who rule over three 1984-style domains: Western empire (the merchant), Russian-Chinese empire (the warrior), and Islamic empire (the priest).

Dugin bristles at the suggestion that Russia is already a pawn of the world order that is being used as a device to bring down the USA. In fact, he says there is no world order at all besides American hegemony.

There is no definitive World Order of any kind at present. There is a Transition from the World Order we knew in XX century to the some other paradigm whose full features rest to define. Will the future be really global? Or the regionalist tendencies will win? Will there be a unique Order? Or there will be different local or regional Orders? Or may be we are going to deal with World Chaos? It is not clear yet, the Transition is not accomplished. We are living in the middle of it.

Dugin states that the transition can proceed in one of three ways:

1. A stable “Imperial Core” that generates policies that cause chaos and mayhem in the world for the purpose of controlling other nations.

2. Cooperating with friendly powers while putting pressure on rogue countries.

3. Achieving true globalization by trading sovereignty for world government, ruled by the likes of George Soros and organizations such as the Council On Foreign Relations.

It seems that USA tries to go by these three ways simultaneously promoting all three strategies at the same time. This three directions strategy of USA creates the global context in International Relations, USA being the key actor on the global scale.

Globalist-sponsored commentator Francis Fukuyama wrote in his book The End Of History And The Last Man that liberal democracy (the platform that globalists herald) is the best political system ever created, and it will bring about the end of historical movements and revolutions, but only if it is allowed to envelop the world by “exporting democracy,” a euphemism for subversion through propaganda, covert CIA operations, or overt military action. As Dugin points out, it’s the USA way or death.

The history is considered to be univocal (monotone) process of technological and social progress, the way of growing liberation of individuals from all kind of collective identities. The tradition and conservatism are regarded as the obstacles for the freedom and should be rejected. The USA is in vanguard of this historical progress and has the right and obligation (mission!) to move the history further and further. The historical existence of USA coincides with the course of the human history. So “American” means “universal.” The other cultures have only an American future or no future at all.

God must be killed and replaced with “rational” thinking, where the rationale of the day is guided into your brain through scientific, political, and academic experts who are controlled by the elites. Technology is but another means to speed this along, as everything becomes centered around the individual and its needs instead of the tribe and family. The end goal is transhumanism, creating something “better” than human nature on the neverending march towards perfection, stability, and order for the top 0.01%.

…the fragmentation and atomization of society included in the technology (internet, mobile phones and so on) where the principle actor is strictly individual and excerpt from the natural and social context. […] After the accomplishing the full fragmentation of the societies to the individual atoms there will begin the second phase: the division of the individuals themselves on the parts and new (genetic, for example) combinations of the elements in the way of post-human creativity.

What “liberal democracy” really means is a fractured society of atomized individuals who are either culturally and biologically sterile (white nations) or constantly chaotic (non-white nations). Your society will be inverted to make it easy to be controlled and dominated by a USA-led hegemon, which Dugin insists is the height of world power. If you do not allow liberal democracy to penetrate your nation “peacefully,” you will be targeted for chaos. If you are a Syrian, Iraqi, Russian, Indian, or African, and hear warm buzzwords from the American president that you deserve “liberal democracy,” get ready for subversion at best, war at worst.

Dugin is triggered at Carvalho’s assertion that Russia is part of the new world order instead of being its target:

The globalization of the world and the installation everywhere of the American control, including the direct intrusion in the nominally sovereign countries, the promotion of American way of life and the uniformization of the different human societies, accomplished by USA, is considered by the professor as “nothing”, being ignored and forgotten. The contamination of Russian society by decadent consumerist individualist patterns, the support for the anti-Russian regimes in the post-soviet space is nothing. The USA is an absolute plague for the mankind. And the globalist elite is the quintessence of USA, it rules USA and through it in the rest of the world. The globalist elite of the USA is the absolute enemy of the Russia, China and Islamic countries, it corrupts our political elite, the society, the country. For us it is obvious. “The sovereignty, the political-military power and the economy of the United States” are no more than the instruments in the hand of this elite, its accomplices, voluntary or not.

From this point, the debate becomes about whether Russia is part of the globalist system or not. Carvalho insists that the “contamination” of Russia society was done by its own hand starting with the Bolshevik revolution, which implemented anti-traditional policies such as feminism, easy divorce, and godlessness before Stalin scaled them back. Dugin insists that a level of elites above that of nation states is a “conspiracy theory” (he uses that exact phrase), and the tit-for-tat games you see in the mainstream news is real, that there are no transnational elites who meet in Davos, Brussels, and so on.

This distinction is important because if Russia and the United States are dialectical forces under the same controlling power, the Russia vs USA tension is theater and being used to create the justification for a war that benefits a pre-determined victor. If on the other hand they are truly independent entities, USA is bumbling its war to World War 3 by provoking Russia (at least up until Trump’s victory), which is all too ready to take advantage of those blunders by re-asserting its power in Eastern Europe and Asia.

Dugin’s position that there are no transnational elites, with the insinuation that world leaders are at the top of the pyramid, was wholly unconvincing. Carvalho found an opening and laid down heavy fire.

The globalist elite is not only a vague social class of capitalists and bankers. It is an organized entity, with continuous existence for over a century, which meets periodically to ensure the unity of its plans and the continuity of their implementation, with the minuteness and scientific precision with which an engineer controls the transmutation of his blueprint into a building. […] The Syndicate is an organization of big capitalists and international bankers committed to establishing a worldwide socialist dictatorship. There are so many documents and studies that meticulously depict its origin, history, membership, and modus operandi that no excuse can be accepted for ignorance in this matter, most of all from people who intend to opine about it. No, this is not an insinuation against Professor Dugin. He is perfectly informed about it, and if he commits errors in the conclusions he presents, it is not due to ignorance. It is because the essentially bellicose nature of his approach impels him to divide the panorama into two symmetrically opposed halves, falsifying the whole picture and sending to the limbo of non-existence all the facts that refute this Manichean simplification.

As I’ve written before, socialism is but a tool of the elites to centralize their power by increasing the size and reach of government while weakening social bonds through Marxist poison. Here it is explained more elegantly by Carvalho:

If the Medieval system lasted ten centuries, Absolutism did not last more than three. Even shorter will be the reign of liberal bourgeoisie. One century of economic and political freedom was enough to make some capitalists so formidably rich that they no longer wish to submit to the whims of the markets that made them rich. They want to control them, and there are three instruments for this: dominion of the State, in order to enact the statist policies necessary to make the oligopoly eternal; stimulus to socialist and communist movements that invariably favor the growth of state power; and the drafting of an army of intellectuals who prepare public opinion to bid farewell to bourgeois freedoms and happily step into a world of omnipresent and obsessive repression (extending itself to the last details of private life and everyday speech), presented as a paradise adorned both with the abundance of capitalism and the “social justice” of communism.

Carvalho then discusses historical philosophy and how only an entity that spans generations can be an agent that affect the change that we come to see as “history.” We like to think of nation states as drivers of history, but it’s really the groups that hold power within those states who are the true drivers. This is often described as the “conspiratorial view of history.”

Who can be an agent of a historical action? States? Nations? Empires? Of course not. These entities result from the combination of heterogeneous forces which struggle to dominate them from within. They do not have their own will, but they reflect, at each moment, the will of a dominant group, which may be replaced by another in the next moment. A state, nation or empire is an apparent agent, manipulated by other, more durable, more stable agents, capable of dominating it and using it for their objectives, which frequently transcend even the duration of the national, state and imperial formations which they utilized. To be a historical agent, the group or entity must: (a) Nurture permanent or long-term objectives. (b) Be capable of continuing the pursuit of these objectives beyond the lifespan of its individual agents, beyond the duration of the present state of affairs, and beyond the duration of even the states, nations and empires involved. (c) Be capable, therefore, of reproducing individual agents able to continue the action through the centuries and to adapt the original plans to the different situations that may emerge without losing view of the initial goals. Only the following entities fulfill these conditions: (1) The great universal religions.

(2) Initiatory and esoteric organizations.

(3) Royal and noble dynasties and similar entities.

(4) Ideologically revolutionary movements and parties.

(5) Spiritual agents: God, angels, and demons. Everything, absolutely everything that happens in the historical scene either comes from one of these forces, or is the result of an uncontrolled combination of forces.

Ideas by themselves do not act on history unless they are used by groups that meet the above conditions that Carvalho lays out. Otherwise it’s just a frustrated exertion or power grab that fails and relinquishes power back to the true agents in charge.

For example, now that Donald Trump has won the Presidency, it will be up to him and those around him to create a lasting nationalist movement that outlives him. Otherwise, it may blowback spectacularly and crush nationalism for generations. One only need to look at Adolph Hitler to see how a failed nationalist uprising becomes manna from heaven to globalist interests because of how quickly a foolhardy war can accelerate a world order that was planned all along.

And yet in a single stroke, Dugin brushes away Carvalho’s assertions by stating that this is all merely a simple matter of good versus evil, as if we were in a Hollywood movie whose plot was inspired by Joseph Campbell, and that the world must join Russia in its honorable crusade against the West.

Therefore, I invite all the rest to join the camp and fight Globalism, Modernity/Hypermodernity, Imperialism Yankee, liberalism, free market religion and unipolar world. These phenomena are the ultimate point of the Western path to the abyss, the final station of the evil and the almost transparent image of the antichrist/ad-dadjal/erev rav. So the West is the center of kali-yuga, its motor, its heart.

While I don’t agree with Dugin on the denial of a global syndicate, and am deeply suspicious of his reasoning for doing so, he does understand the decline of the West.

Once the West had its own tradition. Partly it has lost it. Partly this tradition has given the poisonous germs. The West should search in its deep ancient roots. But these roots lead to the common indo-european Eurasian past, the glorious past of the Scyths, Celts, Sarmats, Germans, Slavs, Hindus, Persians, Greeks, Romans and their holistic societies, warrior style hierarchical culture and spiritual mystic values that had nothing in common with present day Western mercantile capitalist degenerated civilization. To return to the Tradition we need to accomplish the revolt against modern world and against modern West—absolute revolt—spiritual (traditionalist) and social (socialist). The West is in agony. We need to save the world from this agony and may be to save the West from itself. The Modern (and Post-Modern) West must die. And if there were the real traditional values in its foundations (and they certainly were) we will save them only in the process of the global destruction of the Modernity/Hypermodernity.

Carvalho snaps back and methodically breaks down Dugin’s arguments (or lack thereof), especially his “conspiracy theory” reply about elite groups possessing long-term plans.

Without continuity over generations, there is no historical action, and only a few types of human groups have the means to fulfill this requirement. If among those means the control over the flow of information is included, this is only due to a trite observation, actually a commonplace in historical methodology, according to which the dissemination of facts produces new facts; therefore, the control over the flow of information is absolutely essential to any group or entity that plans long-term historical actions. The Council on Foreign Relations, for example, managed to remain totally secret and unknown for fifty years, even though its membership included practically all the owners of the major media outlets of the West. Once the period of obligatory discretion was over, David Rockefeller publicly thanked journalists for their five-decade old silence. Should we hide this fact only out of a yokelish fear of being called “conspiracy theorists”?

He makes the important claim that a Eurasian empire is merely a competitor to Western globalism, concealed by a seemingly traditional and moral facade.

Karl Marx himself defined [ideology as] just a “dress of ideas” concealing a scheme of political power. The scheme of political power in Russia has changed its dress, but continues to be the same—maintaining the same people in the same positions, performing the same functions, with the same totalitarian ambitions as ever. […] But as Nietzsche used to say, one cannot completely destroy a thing except when one substitutes it. It is not enough to cut the West off from its roots and then accuse it of not having roots: it is necessary to insert a Eurasian graft into it and persuade the West that Eurasianism is its true roots.

If Russia wins, Putin would merely replace Western globalism with his own vision that is also globalist. Carvalho doesn’t trust Russia because of the untold dead and mass repression that occurred during the Soviet Empire, and implies that he rather live under Western hegemony.

The question we have to ask ourselves is this: if we were allowed to pick our globalist master, the USA or Russia, which would be better for us and our interests? Based on how the West methodically attacks men and the traditional family while Russia does not, I presume that it would be Russia, but we are not Russian and cannot assume that Putin would treat his American vassal citizen the same as a Russian one. There is no way to be certain that our living conditions would improve under Russian hegemony, and lessons from history lean towards a more turbulent conclusion.

Losing his patience against a tenacious Carvalho, Dugin removes intellectual pretense and proclaims what his heart desires most.

…we have a kind of the global dictatorship. We should fight against it. If someone deprives us from our freedom we have to react. And we will. The American Empire should be destroyed. And at one point it will be.

Destroyed from within or destroyed by Russian nuclear bombs when they sense the time is right to establish the Eurasian empire? Dugin leaves that for our imagination, but gives hints as to what the future Eurasian empire would be like.

…the communism doctrine is Modern, atheist, materialist and cosmopolite. That should be thrown out. On the contrary, the social solidarity, social justice, the socialism and general holistic attitude to the society are good in themselves. So we need to separate the materialist and Modernist aspect and reject them. On the other hand in the theories of Third way (dear up to certain point to some traditionalists as Julius Evola) there were some unacceptable elements—first of all racism, xenophobia and chauvinism.

Don’t we already have social solidarity, social justice, and anti-racism in the West? Dugin calls us to join arms with Russia to replace a progressive West with a progressive Russian empire. We can only hope that Dugin is confusing his definitions on what social justice and racism are, since those features include the very atheist and cosmopolitan features that he rejects, but it’s easy to look at Russia, with a 6.5% Muslim population and a host of other ethic groups to understand that the Eurasian empire will at the minimum be a multicultural empire. Sorry, white nationalists, but Russia will never cater to your demands of a purely white state.

He explains that the future Eurasian empire will be ruled by the Fourth Political Theory, which seems awfully similar to what the United States uses today, but with a traditional veneer that is nowhere close to true traditionalism. Nationalism is, unsurprisingly, excluded from the program.

We call it Fourth Political Theory (first being the liberalism, that we essentially challenge, the second the classical form of communism, the third the national-socialism and the fascism). Its elaboration starts from the point of intersection between different anti-liberal political theories of the past (the communism and the Third way theories). So we arrive to the nationalbolshevism that represents the socialism without materialism, atheism, progressism and Modernism and the Third way theories without racism and nationalism.

The Fourth Political Theory wants to unite all the people of the world in a world struggle against an evil empire. One-hundred years ago the evil enemy was the bourgeoisie and their class oppression. Today the evil enemy is the United States and their world oppression. The enemy has been identified and it will be used as part of the “dress of ideas” to restore Russian power once again.

So we need to unite the right, the left and the religions in the common struggle against common enemy. The social justice, the national sovereignty and the Traditional values are three principles of such ideology. It is not easy to put all this together. But we should try if we want to overcome the foe.

Dugin wants us to trade one master for another. For that reason, I have to reject Dugin’s call for me to join him in replacing our current cabal of globalist oppressors with another cabal who will in all likelihood end up as globalist oppressors. Neither entity offers me anything to fight for.

While not an easy read, this debate (PDF) clarified a lot of conflicts in my mind about how to deal with our current situation. The most important thing I learned is that to replace a globalist hegemon, you will need to counter with a strategy that is also globalist is nature. Otherwise, patient historical agents will marshal their resources across several nation-states to effortlessly crush any non-globalist force.

It’s for this reason that nationalism will ultimately fail after its current resurgence after the present cycle plays itself out. How can individual nations and their leaders stand up in the long term (beyond a generation) against a host of individuals, corporations, NGOs, and other organizations that operate globally and across generations? To defeat globalists who operate around the world, you’ll have to be global yourself, which nationalism is not. For that reason, I have accepted that globalism is here to stay.

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