Dugin to Mardan: 'Liberalism has taken the place of religion'

Sergey Mardan: Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair - the same one, obviously aged, but still recognisable - said that the era of Western domination over the world is coming to an end. You have been saying that for a long time and very often. Incredibly, are they starting to realise it too?

Dugin: This is not an easy question. If we look at the statements of the most important thinkers and philosophers of the West, as well as public and political figures, it turns out that in the last hundred years, the more responsible the thinker, the deeper and more substantial he is, the more catastrophic the future and present he sees for the West. Here one can think of Spengler, Heidegger, philosophers in the German tradition, but also of many American, French and British thinkers. A. Toynbee, for example, who studied different civilisations, being an English patriot and advocating the West, argued that Western countries are coming to a very disastrous state. The more responsible these thinkers are, the more they give a critical and pessimistic assessment of Western civilisation and the more catastrophic their prognosis. And this is also the tradition of the West to be pessimistic, to understand the threats, to see that Western domination of the world is coming to an end, that there is a need to realise how many mistakes and crimes the West has committed in history, and in parallel to promote (this is also a surprising point) an optimistic globalism, ignoring all the tragic overtones, all the catastrophic line, all the symphonic works of the critics of Western civilisation by Western civilisation itself, and the politicians and thinkers of the West, though by no means enemies of the West, say: we are falling, we are in a mess, we have lost both world domination and leadership, and we have built an anti-civilisation ourselves. Some of them say that, while others - as if they don't hear about it - completely exclude criticism of their own geniuses, their own brightest people (Tony Blair, for example, is a rather brilliant politician). And they say: we will continue to govern, we will show you the New American Century, a new western domination, we will correct and we have already corrected the mistakes and we are ready to embark again on a new cycle of globalisation, we will further tighten the rules of our behaviour, we will only deal with those who fully share our beautiful new value system.

This is a kind of dissonance, it is as if one half of the Western brain is critical and realistic about the situation and trying to find a way out, while the other half lives with a different agenda and feels nothing. Sometimes they can co-exist in the same mind. Let us look at George Soros. In half of his works he talks about how terrible totalitarian regimes are, how important it is to promote democracy, an open society, how the democratisation process must be carried out on a global scale, to finance colour revolutions, to overthrow undesirable governments - in other words he does a lot of work to strengthen the position of the West. And at the same time the other half of his mind says: the West has collapsed, America has turned into totalitarianism and is no longer able to rule the world, the liberal economic system has collapsed, it has exploded. And it is all claimed by the same person.

If you realise that things are bad, you have to find a way out, open up to other critics, dialogue, but here it is the opposite. Perhaps it is a diagnosis. I don't exclude that it is a kind of schizophrenia of civilisation. We are dealing with two voices, so to speak. In the West there are two completely parallel voices that are not being heard. One voice says: all is lost. The other says: now we will show you!

Sergey Mardan: To confirm this thesis, I would like to draw your attention to Borrell's statement yesterday. On the same day there is an interview with Blair who says that the decline of the West is happening, and not in the context of "all is lost!", but he formulates it as a global problem that Western society must start fighting or learn to live in this new world. And then along comes Borrell, one of Europe's top officials, who, wide-eyed, simply declares: 'We will keep the sanctions until the end, they will surely work, we must be patient'. The impression is that this man is in a completely different context.

Dugin: This duality, this dualism or schizophrenia of civilisation, manifested itself in the early 1990s. Then two projects appeared: Fukuyama's The End of History and Huntington's The Clash of Civilisations. Huntington said: the world domination of the West will no longer expand after the fall of the Soviet Union, the West will not conquer and subjugate the entire world, but will remain a civilisation among other civilisations. An absolutely sober and correct analysis that prepares all actors - Western and non-Western - to enter a multipolar world. Thirty years of reality checks prove that Huntington was right.
And then Fukuyama comes along and says: 'No, nothing like that, we have defeated the last formal adversary in the form of the world communist system and the world will be left with one dominant ideology, liberalism. All nations will submit to it because no one proposes an alternative. In reality, it will be the end of history, our opponents have no arguments, there comes an era of a single western liberal world order, called globalisation.

Two projects. It would seem, take your pick, listen to the arguments, do a reality check. Is what Fukuyama talked about confirmed? Nothing has been confirmed since the 1990s. And in the 2000s everything started to explode like munitions depots. All of Fukuyama's theses from the 1990s (although he later tried to correct them) are collapsing today. His latest idea is that Putin has challenged the liberal world order, a world order of rules and regulations that are now in danger and must be defended. Whatever the thesis of Fukuyama and those who have been on his wavelength for the past thirty years, this misses the mark. It is all wrong. Whatever he argues, it is all refuted by life.
Nevertheless, a paranoid part of the Western identity, including maniacs like Borrell, continues to call for more sanctions against Russia, insisting on human rights, on LGBT. Even the Saudis, their closest partners, make it clear to them that if the West only deals with those who think like them on all issues, the West will find itself exclusively within the confines of NATO and will lose the whole world, including its allies in the Islamic world. But nevertheless, Western paranoia continues... It is like an obsession: to continue no matter what.

At the same time, if we take S. Huntington with his 'Clash of Civilisations', on the contrary, everything this thinker said thirty years ago is being implemented. Thirty years of confirming one half of the thesis of this Western dualism. Incidentally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair was once developing the idea of a 'third way', believing that classical capitalism had degenerated. And Blair is by no means a limited man and is quite an interesting thinker. I am not a great admirer of his and his 'third way' does not seem at all tenable to me, but at least he was trying to think critically and alternatively.

And now it turns out that the Huntingtonian line is completely confirmed, while Fukuyama's has failed. So? So what? The advocates of the end of history, of the Great Reset, all the Schwabs, the Davos forums, Soros, keep saying the same thing: "more sanctions, put sanctions on China, demonise Russia, severely admonish the Islamic world, put Erdogan in his place, isolate Iran, bomb North Korea with military installations". And it is repeated in the usual way, as if nothing ever happened. And as if Huntington never existed. And above all, it's as if no one is doing a reality check, no one is comparing the direction in which we are going. But it is obvious to all right-thinking people in the West that the world is following Huntington's line.

Sergey Mardan: A thought occurred to me. What if this obstinacy of theirs, their irreversibility from their chosen path, is a peculiar quasi-religiosity? It seems completely gone, it seems absent, but on the other hand Europe remains the same, as it was at the time of the Thirty Years' War, the Hundred Years' War, the Crusades. Fierce, intransigent... Continent of crusaders, ready to slaughter countrymen and foreigners for an idea.

Dugin: Maybe so. If we look carefully, we will actually discover fanaticism, mania and religious faith in liberalism and progress. While these models don't work, Nobel Prizes are being handed out left and right to the authors of the exponential growth, geometric progression concepts of the global liberal economy. A few years after these Nobel Prizes, it turns out the opposite, all indicators are falling. Yet, the Nobel Prizes pass and the religion remains. A liberal and, in a way, satanic religion....

Sergey Mardan: The West is obsessed, the West is religiously fanatical. With all this they have thrown religion into the dustbin of history.

Dugin: In fact, liberalism has taken the place of religion. The dogmas of the liberal conception: progress, the individual, the individual are, in fact, a kind of theology. It has no divine dimension, but it insists on these dogmas, rules and norms, just like medieval theology.

At the same time, it is interesting that the West is openly fighting its own racism. It proclaims: we are racists and we must get rid of them. But the West will overcome its racism as racist. It declares: we fight and you fight. We apologise for our mistakes - and you should apologise; then everyone should accept this apologia as absolute dogma, and all nations, especially non-Western nations, especially backward nations, second-class nations, in their view, should accept it as a common platform. Western anti-racism also becomes outright racist and anti-fascism becomes fascist. Liberalism becomes totalitarian. Its core remains unchanged. It is, in fact, a kind of ethnocentrism, where at the centre is the West, its history. Around the periphery, on which it throws its power, now economic, informational, technological. Everyone must strictly obey him. Even if it requires everyone to repent of their colonial experience. It is a paradox, it is Orwellian.

I think everyone was afraid of Orwell coming, I am referring to '1984', from Eastern Europe, from socialist countries. This phenomenon of '1984' did not come from where it was expected. We live in a totally totalitarian liberal world, with a totally fanatical racist and Nazi ideology, which, just like Orwell's, proclaims: love is hate, war is peace, poverty is wealth, wealth is poverty. And it imposes these ideological paradoxes on everyone in a terrible way. If you don't think so, we will 'abolish you'. Hence the 'culture of annihilation' and today it has become simply ubiquitous.

And Westerners who still retain their senses are horrified by what their culture, their civilisation, has become. They are completely disconnected from any reality and have fallen into a special fanatical and manic state. Seeing that everything is falling apart for them, they say, "No, it is not falling apart, it is getting stronger". When they see that they are losing, they say: 'we are winning'. And we see this in Ukraine. The West has taught Ukraine not to win, not to fight, not to defend its interests, but to delude, exactly to delude. And it is a very effective network delusion. When you lose territories, you say, like the Ukrainians: 'Never mind, our troops are standing by Rostov, soon Belgorod and Moscow will be taken'. Minsk, in fact, is already ours.

The less successes, the more failures, the more losses, the more these expectations grow. It is a form of collective mental disorder, but it is not simply Ukrainian. We think it is like that in Ukraine, yet it is like that all over Europe. Draghi says he is leaving, Mattarella replies that he cannot leave, having been kicked out. Macron has no real support from the population, the yellow waistcoats have been fighting him for years and he says 'they are the most successful leader'. The same goes for Scholz. These rulers are suggesting incredible measures to their people. They have simply failed. Russia should have been talked about seriously from the start. But nobody saw it that way. And so illusion replaces reality.

Sergey Mardan: I will propose this variant to explain why they behave this way. Perhaps it is not fanaticism, but a kind of rationalism? They have existed for four hundred years in a conception where the 'golden billion' dominates the world (now a billion, before it was much less). A Eurocentric world. Europe is surrounded by peripheries, colonies, it sucks them in. And all this has taken shape, changed somewhat. But nothing has changed substantially. The centre has moved from Britain to New York, to Washington. Now everything is breaking down. The dollar system is breaking down, the global economy is breaking down as a phenomenon that was designed to feed them, to feed this 'golden billion', and everything is breaking down. And they are not ready to accept that, because in the new world, in a non-Eurocentric world, it will be very sad. They just refuse to recognise reality, that's all.

Dugin: You are absolutely right. Moreover, their vision is crumbling. The racist view used to be that 'whites' were perceived as 'first class', 'yellows' as 'second class' and 'blacks' as 'third class'. Pure racism. It dates back to the 19th century. By the way, it was mainly practised by liberals. English and British liberalism was completely racist. It is sometimes said that racism came to Europe with Hitler, but racism came to Germany from England, from liberal British England, through the writings of Chamberlain. The Germans were not racist until they came under the malign and monstrous influence of British liberals. Liberalism is a racist phenomenon at its root.

Then the idea was born: whites, then yellows, then blacks. Of course, in the 20th century this system was abandoned, but what do we have today? Centre, semi-periphery, periphery. Rich North, intermediate area, poor South. Civilisation, barbarism, savagery. All these taxonomies, all these hierarchies have remained unchanged. In the centre is the West, around it are those who follow the West, the League of Democracies, and on the periphery are all the rogue, rogue states. The same model. And now it's crumbling. And in fact it no longer works. Because it satisfies no one. Neither colonies, nor opponents of the West, nor friends of the West. It no longer corresponds to reality.

And that's where that strange feeling arises, when the world is already very different and all these racist models are being foisted on it. It's desperation. It is clear that the West will have a slightly worse life, but this is the West of adaptation, made to find ways out, to build a new model. They think they are very flexible, resourceful, and they are stealing brains from the world. So, make these brains justify how the West can survive in the multipolar world. Perhaps a way can be found without colonisation, without this totally totalitarian liberalism.

By the way, regarding Trump. When Trump came along, America itself went in that direction. The problem was how to remain a strong power when there are other poles. That is what we have to think about. It is realistic. It is something to think about waking up, coming to our senses. A healthy approach is how to find a place for the West, for Western civilisation in the context of other civilisations, Russian, Chinese, Indian, Islamic, which have frankly arisen. How should the West position itself in relation to these civilisations, how should it position itself, how should it develop its economy, how should it build relations? It is not an easy task, but I believe it can be done.

But to solve it, we have to set it up. So we see Borrell, we see Biden, we see Soros, we see Schwab. We see maniacs in front of us. They are not even old in age, but in their conscience. They want to maintain Western dominance at any cost. Even though it no longer exists, they still talk about it. This is senile nonsense. People have been retired for a long time, but they still dress up and go to the stairwell every morning to entrust tasks to someone. A similar thing happened to me in the 1980s: we had such a neighbour. At first he was a senior manager, then he retired and gradually went mad. And every day he would go to work and scream. He would stand in the stairwell and shout at his subordinates. It wasn't funny, it was sinister.

Biden reminds me of the kind of late Soviet manager, out of his mind, yelling at nothing. Nobody hears him, only his wife occasionally takes him back to his room when she feels sorry for him.

Sergey Mardan: He gives him a pill.

Dugin: The West is in exactly this condition. It is a world that does not exist. The West is sick with violence. At the same time it has nuclear weapons, it can also impose sanctions, it supplies long-range weapons to Ukrainian maniacs, it gives life to maniacs who believe in it. Young, healthy, normal people before their eyes, under the influence of this senile obscurantism, turn into monsters. It is all liberalism. Liberalism is a contagion. It actually paralyses people. People are told: everything is allowed, you are an individual, you have no collective identity. And a man believes it, he falls for it. And he loses all humanity, he becomes like a maniac, like that Western part of humanity.

I believe that the liberation of the West will happen within it.

Published on Radio KP
Translation by Lorenzo Maria Pacini