Fight Club, or why Eurasianism for the world

The Islamic State (Caliphate), Ebola in Africa, a new civil war in Ukraine that occurred as a result of intervention and a post-modern neo-Nazi coup, the daily murder of people in Afghanistan and Pakistan by drones, and the already-forgotten, unfinished wars in the Congo, South Sudan, and Somalia. What is happening? What will be next? If a picture of the world we live in now is compared with one from the time of the Cold War, even with the horrors of Korea, Vietnam, or the Iran-Iraq war, the latter looks like a romantic time of polite knights. It seems that today there is an exponential growth in the chaotic escalation of conflicts around the world. They haven’t yet reached the scale of the world wars of the 20th century, but the trend of growth is quite fast. How can we understand this and how is it possible to find meaning and pattern in these events? Everything has begun to look like humanity is moving towards the post-apocalyptic world of the Mad Max movies, Brasil or Blade Runner, or the books of Zamyatin and Huxley. Maybe the answer to the question of the sources of such horror, or “telenarcos” as the famous comic book author Moebius (Jean Henri Gaston Giraud Moebius) said, in which the  modern person lives is contained in literature or fiction.

 

I remember how 10 years ago, in a typical American college dorm room at the University of Wisconsin - Eau Claire, where I studied as an exchange student, I watched the film “Fight Club” with a group of friends. I remember that after watching it, I was left in terrible delight. I realized that the film was packed with motifs and terms associated with the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York on September 11, 2001, although the film of David Fincher was filmed in 1999, and the book by Chuck Palahniuk appeared in 1996. Terms such as “ground zero,” “base,” “Al-Qaeda,” which in the film becomes a fighting club, an organization with cells increasingly independent from the central leadership. Then there was “controlled demolition”, “theater of mass destruction,” similar with the term “weapons of mass destruction” repeated after 2011, “war against crime,” which grates against the ears with similarity to Bush’s words “the war on terror,” etc. There are plenty of interesting allusions literally every second.[1]

 

Besides words, the film is full of symbols reminiscent of the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. For example, one scene of the film shows a sculpture flying in the air - a sort of ball, like a sculpture, at one point standing between the Twin Towers, and the apotheosis of the simultaneous collapse of two identical bank towers. The meaning of the destruction of a financial center, for the main character, is explained by the collapse of the global financial system: “If there are no signs of debts, everything starts over again.” Thus, total chaos is created. The collapse of financial history [2]. A brief Google search establishes that I am far from the only one in the world who noticed these similarities. But what disturbs me the most is that there are moments and predictions in the film that have not yet happen. 

 

But, in my opinion, the most in interesting thing in the movie is that everything doesn’t end with the symbolic terrorist attacks in New York. This all wouldn’t be so impressive if the film wasn’t filmed in 1999, specifically during the time of the bombing of Yugoslavia, which marked the end of the Potsdam world order. The main hero in the movie is Tyler Durden, who says that all the terrorist attacks and chaos, produced by terrorist organizations, are only the beginning of a broad Project Mayhem and a revolution that is to come whose end is unforeseen. We’ve already witnessed something from all of this, and something, perhaps, is still ahead. Maybe chaos is only created for the sake of chaos, and there is no meaning, but maybe there is, and it’s difficult to find out. However, Fight Club looks like a manifesto and program of an undeclared war, a postmodern war without meaning and without end. Maybe it’s launched and there will be some-kind of lines like those written by Lev Tolstoy in the last 50 pages of “War and Peace,” where he refuses to blame all concrete political figures, even Napoleon himself, for the fact that many people of the West attacked the peoples of the East, and in response the peoples of the East fought against the peoples of the West. The wars ended, Tolstoy writes, but not because of someone’s specific will as they were begun. 

 

Perhaps, there is no conspiracy, but the matter at hand is that artists, as strangers of their own species (the author of a book or the director of a film), feel the spirit of coming times more than ordinary people. And maybe it was the coincidence that the famous Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung called synchronicity. But if it wasn’t such, it doesn’t matter, in my opinion, deliberately or accidentally, if the book and movie Fight Club have become particular manifestos of a new politics of chaos in the 21st century. The manifesto of postmodern politics in the world is wielded permanently and unexpectedly, to a greater or lesser extent, in the risk society of Ulrich Beck and chaos (controlled or not). Chaos is in "Times of the Unbearable", as the legendary Serbian historian Andrey Mitrovich said, no matter if we have in mind the hate of militiamen towards Nazis in Ukraine or Wahhabis and Shiites in the Middle East. 

 

Now it’s necessary to ask the main question which confronts such a world. Is there an ideology or system of values, which could potentially stabilize the world at least to the extent of the “Golden times” of the Cold War, when there was a balance. Has an ideology been born which can resist the permanent rebellion and revolution which came about after the “end of history?”[3]

 

As before, the problem comes from the colonial imposition of “universal” values which Nikolay Trubetskoy and Edward Said wrote about. Here it’s necessary to recall the wonderful note of Henry Kissinger from his diplomacy, when he spoke about the new policy of President Woodrow Wilson, according to which Americans love values, but Europeans love real politics.[4] 

 

The fact remains: Eurasia and the so-called “fourth political theory,” embodied in the new independent policy of Russia, become more and more of an attractive idea in many parts of the world. It is difficult to explain in a different way the phenomenon that Vladimir Putin has suddenly became a hero and the hope of millions if not billions of people far from Russia and the space and culture of the CIS. These phenomena and the necessity in a new form come from one simple reason. Everyone wants to escape from chaos, from “project Mayhem,” from Fight Club. Either just from chaos or from, as it seems, the unceasing military violence, no matter what name it bears, but more importantly from the violent, external imposition of value systems. Eurasianism has become a new form of rebellion. Presenting the same as that in 1857 when Indians rose up against the colonial system of Great Britain, which besides simple exploitation also attempted in the 19th century to engage in value politics, which causes the so-called “Indian mutiny.” Is that what “Eurasianism” looks like in the eyes of the world? Russia, promoting the not-yet developed idea, sends such a signal to the world: “Let societies live as they want, and not fear threats of intervention in the name of values.” 

 

It seems so simple, but this message is very direct and very defiant. Eurasianism is not yet fully ready, although one aspect of it is already clear as day. The new “fourth political theory” speaks in the words of the African-American thinker Frederick Douglass in his famous speech in 1865.[5] Speaking about what was necessary to do with the African-American after emancipation, Douglass said simply: “Do nothing; your actions brought us to this unhappy position” and “Leave him alone.” It is this that feels so passively aggressive in the resistance of the weak to the aggressive, Messianic “world community” (as some decided to call themselves) about the welfare of the whole world. Leave us be, no more and no less; let us breathe freely - it would appear that this is the thought of billions, but thoughts require political articulation. In the potential strength of Eurasianism as a global response to the ideology of the end of history can this need be met. In other words, Eurasianism or the Fourth Political Theory do not force anyone to love jeans because they should be fashionable, believe a carpet in a living room to be beautiful, or the jokes of Winnie the Pooh to be funny, but, on the contrary, it asserts the right to live in one’s own away, according to one’s own culture without outside interference. This is the “soft power” of contemporary Eurasianism and its attractiveness. 

 

But for the global expansion of Eurasiniasm ("Neoconservatism"[The author uses this term in a different context than it might be understood in the West, particularly in the US - J. Arnoldski]/Fourth Political Theory) outside the CIS, it is necessary to first consolidate the Russian world - the core of a new, alternative world. This is primarily Russia, Belarus, and Novorossiya (yes,with Kiev), and then the whole space of the USSR. This is the minimum without which illusions about a global scale of a new ideology shouldn’t be fed. Of course, in this space now, new ideas, techniques of integration, and, this is very important, other aesthetics, should appear. It’s necessary to forget old models and styles of “agitprop” with naive paintings of “friendship of peoples” and “progress of time,” when the words “only the sky, only the wind, and only happiness are ahead” from the Soviet children's song sounded believable. Now they can only cause tears of nostalgia for a past era, but do not meet the era and aesthetics of the brutal Fight Club in which we live. New times are much less romantic than even the aesthetics of the Second World War and the many films about it. Therefore, the response should be appropriately strong. 

 

Concerning this consolidation, we must keep in mind, that for 20 years there has been a lot of resentment in the space of the USSR. Let the grievances of peoples and specific individuals between each other remain; no one will force resentful Uzbeks and Tajiks, Armenians and Azerbaijanis, Ossetians and Ingush, etc. (almost all the stereotypical ill-feelings on the expanse of the USSR can be included in this list) to love each other if they have lost loved ones in recent wars (in real ones or in so-called “capillary” municipalities). But security links together better than glue, especially in view of threats from the outside, and, moreover, moral threats. In other words, the resolution of all issues in the Caucasus and Central Asia lies in union with Russia. Defense from external threats is a priority for the Eurasian Union. A population of 300 million people is not too much in an enormous territory, keeping in mind the population of neighboring regions.

 

Here it is appropriate to note the key role of Dr. Dugin in the process of creating an alternative. His greatness lies in that, in his time, when such thinking was considered to be marginal, he raised from the depths of the ’20’s-’30’s of the 20th century the ideology of forgotten, and in some cases, little-known and strange Russian emigre intellectuals. He picked it up, insisted on it, and created an alternative, a real, potential global alternative to the new world order. Tenacity ensured that these ideas became “mainstream” and now entire institutions, banks and other entities with the prefix “Eurasian” are being created, and in many countries, a serious debate on this ideological alternative to the end of history have begun. But Dugin himself, like the majority of Eurasian geopoliticians, unlike their Western counterparts, cannot live by the principle of dolce vita, and he even wrote about this in Foundations of Geopolitics. His expulsion from Moscow State University fits this framework.[6] But we should not forget that Stalin, in the crucial moment, called Rokossovsky, who up until then had sat in prison, after which the anecdote was born: “He found time to sit out.” This is the unforeseen and harsh political culture of Russia, but it has to be reckoned with and then it’s necessary move on. 

 

There is a potential alternative, and its main task is not to burst, but to give a global response to the impasse of the end of history and its products, well described in Fight Club. The US can also give their counter-alternative to this Eurasianism in the future, but only if they consolidate over the course of several decades and Eurasianism exhausts its opportunities. But this is a distant perspective, and the task of Eurasianism is to go as far as possible. And this is possible only after the internal catharsis in the Western hemisphere, such as that which the CIS survived after the USSR. And Kissinger himself wrote that the failure in Vietnam brought an internal test to America itself, and it was able to rise only after serious internal dilemmas. Now only the collapse of hegemony will bring a new global renaissance, if the US is to maintain integrity.

 

Today, the place of global leader should fall to something new and not tainted, which can stop global chaos and relax the peoples of the world from the constant feeling of threat. While it is still young and incomplete, the Fourth Political Theory and Eurasia(nism) have the serious chance to take this place. It would be even better for it and Russia, as the state bearing this ideology, not to miss out, because “Mayhem” doesn’t forgive. 

 

[1] For example, the symbol of the Savior on the t-shirt of Bob, when the main character, played by Edward Norton, cries on his chest in support of a group of cancer patients. The entire time, they talk about the the harmfulness of consumption which brings boredom that breaks up the fight (a fight that brings adrenaline), i.e., boredom destroys fight club. Tyler, like Nietzsche, said that God does not need man, and that Fight Club is a gift to the world, etc.

 

[2] "If you erase the debt record then we all go back to zero. You’ll create a total chaos. Collapse of financial history."

 

[3] The concept of Francis Fukuyama

 

[4] In this interval of time, Western European countries have begun to prefer value to real politics, today being the hostages of these values on many issues. 

 

[5] http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/what-the-black-man-w... (accessed: 1st october 2014)

 

[6] Good examples of contemporary, high-ranking officials on the Atlanticist side: Zbigniew Brzezinski, Henry Kissinger, George Friedman, etc. And on the other hand, the sad fate of Karl Haushofer and the Eurasians. 

 

Translated for Fort Russ by J. Arnoldski