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Robert Steuckers: Interview for Breizh-Info about Daria and Alexander Dugin
17.11.2023
Robert Steuckers is a Belgian translator, theorist and writer, who was once close to the New Right more than 30 years ago, and who knows Alexander Dugin, the thinker of neo-eurasism presented by the international press as the most influential ideologist in the circles of power in Russia and whose daughter Daria died in an attack in Moscow. Lionel Baland interviewed him for Breizh-info.
Daria Dugin was the victim of a bomb that was probably aimed at her father. What is the point of foreign secret services trying to liquidate a thinker? How can Aleksandr Dugin's theories be a problem for the powers that be in Kiev and the United States, as well as for the globalist elites? What are the main lines of Aleksandr Dugin's ideas?
I think the attack was on the father and daughter, who were supposedly travelling in the same car. However, the investigation so far tends to conclude that Daria herself was the main target since the person suspected of setting off the explosive device had rented a flat in the same building where Alexander's daughter lived. I would not presume to speculate on the motives and interests of any service, Ukrainian or Western, that would motivate such an abominable act, although wartime erases the limits of normal behaviour. Daria Dugina was very active: she ran a digital news agency, called "Telegramm", which provided non-stop information on world events. This information appeared on geopolitika.ru, in Russian, and on her own Telegram account. Then, with a good command of French, she seemed to have been given a new mission to speak to French-speaking Africans who could no longer stand French arrogance in their countries and wanted to replace the tutelage of Paris with cooperation with Russia, as the emblematic example of Mali shows. Dugin himself had written a sketch of African history for the use of his compatriots, who are obviously not very familiar with African issues. I translated this succinct study, which was intended to remind Africa of the most brilliant and interesting pages of its history, from a traditionalist ethnological perspective. You can read the translation here: http://euro-synergies.hautetfort.com/archive/2021/09/08/ethnologie-et-ontologie-des-peuples-de-l-afrique-de-l-ouest-6336366.html .
Finally, Turkish correspondents of the "Eurasist movement", created by Dugin, believe that Daria was murdered because some foreign services (unspecified) perceived her as the most emblematic spokesperson of the Russian-Turkish rapprochement. Italian journalist Francesca Totolo, for the newspaper Il Primato Nazionale, believes that the motive for her murder was an investigation she was conducting into the British intelligence service Bellingcat (which Claude Chollet's OJIM reported on in France). As for the Polish journalist, Konrad Rekas, who lives in Scotland, he recalls, in his tribute to Daria Dugina, that the British services who interviewed him were more interested in the daughter than in the father.
As far as Kiev is concerned, Dugin's discourse is certainly not very different from that of other Russians who talk about the ongoing conflict in the Russian Federation media. Dugin obviously wants the return of the so-called "Novorossiya" territories to Russia. This "Novorossiya", including Crimea, represents the lands conquered in the 18th century by Empress Catherine II. As for the western part of Ukraine, Dugin expressly recognises "that the ethno-sociological, historical and psychological profile of Western Ukraine is such that it does not lend itself to integration into Eurasia". And in his article he asks the question: "Shouldn't we leave them to their own devices?" (see http://euro-synergies.hautetfort.com/archive/2022/02/17/le-destin-de-l-etat-ukrainien-6366620.html ). Dugin thus recognises an otherness in the Ukrainians but, obviously, as a Russian, he does not accept that the self-determination, or even the right to secession, of the Russian-speaking areas should be denied. The Ukrainian imbroglio is a complex reality that is difficult to map in the West, where, for the past seven or eight decades, a flood of distracting variety, fake news, and uninteresting gossip has literally obliterated our ability to understand historical and geopolitical facts, even among intellectuals.
In the global context, Dugin sees an ongoing struggle, which is of almost apocalyptic dimensions: a kind of struggle between good and evil, where the good is the imperial and telluric power (be it Russian, Chinese or Iranian) and the evil is the liberal thalassocracy, the globalist liberalism as defined by the Anglo-Saxons. Liberalism, in the Anglosphere, is not the simple market economy of European-style bourgeois democracies, but the militant permissiveness that culminates today in the "woke" ideology. So on the one hand we have traditional decency, on the other hand destructive and demonic hysteria, especially when it is orchestrated by the idea of the "open society" dear to George Soros. Dugin's discourse is not fundamentally different from that of the numerous Anglo-Saxon protesters who castigate the warmongering of the neo-conservatives and their many predecessors. Dugin sees Russia as the 19th century European conservatives saw it: the shield of counter-revolution, in this case, today, the shield of illiberalism, the pole of resistance to the planetary globalism promoted by Davos, Soros, Schwab, Bill Gates and Zuckerberg. The philosophy of this planetary globalism is expressed by the American Francis Fukuyama, whom Douguine met in the United States and to whom he regularly addresses criticisms, cf.: http://euro-synergies.hautetfort.com/archive/2022/03/19/la-fin-inachevee-de-l-histoire-et-la-guerre-de-la-russie-con-6372268.html . To the idea of a "great reinitialisation", hammered relentlessly by Schwab in the framework of the Davos conciliables, Douguine opposes the project of a "great awakening".
The main lines of Dugin's thought are drawn from traditionalism, which stems from the thought of Guénon and the works of the Italian Julius Evola, which are more focused on the military caste (the Kshatriyas). He likes to couple this traditional foundation with the rather Shiite Islam (of his Azerbaijani mentor Djemal Haidar - 1947-2016). Dugin follows in the footsteps of the 19th century Russian thinker Konstantin Leontiev, who advocated a union of Orthodox Russians and Muslim Ottomans against Western liberalism, a position taken, of course, after the Crimean War (1853-1856), an event that triggered a wave of anti-Westernism in Russia that is far from having dried up today. Despite the influence of these authors, Islamic with Guénon and Haidar, non-folkloric pagan with Evola, Dugin believes that the only tradition he can immerse himself in is the Russian Orthodox tradition. Under the pseudonym of Denis Carpentier for 'Terre & Peuple', I wrote the following, which summarises Dugin's positions at the beginning of the decade 2000: http://euro-synergies.hautetfort.com/archive/2008/09/16/les-positions-philosophiques-d-alexandre-douguine.html .)
To this traditionalism is added a strong influence of continentalist geopolitical theories, Russia being the continental power, tellurocratic, par excellence. Soviet universities did not speak of pure geopolitics, as in the West before Reagan, but included this discipline in various others, such as 'international relations', geo-economics, etc. Dugin succeeded in getting his didactic book on the foundations of geopolitics accepted at the Russian military academy. The theses presented in this reference work can also be found in several of the author's other books: let us note that he takes up Carl Schmitt's idea of the great space (European in the case of this German from Sauerland, Russian-Siberian encompassing the near abroad in the case of our Russian theorist). Schmitt's great space (Grossraum) thus becomes, in Dugin, the "great Soviet space" as "Russian Reich", which is of course a great Eurasian space. This great Soviet space, 'imperial without an emperor', has been defeated by the subversive actions of the West, including the Orange Revolutions, which only bring turbulence and misery. To the American Leviathan, Douguine contrasts the Russian Behemoth, another biblical parable that he takes from Schmitt (and Hobbes).
Faced with Putin's Russia, which Dugin supports in all his current initiatives, our Russian author is divided: On the one hand, he recognises Putin's work, that of having pulled Russia out of the mire into which the liberal mismanagement instituted by Yeltsin had plunged it; on the other hand, he believes that behind the glorious and illiberal facade of Putinism lies a doctrinal inadequacy, due to a hesitancy to assert itself as truly imperial, to declare open war on all the deleterious cross-breeds of Western liberalism that continue to insinuate themselves into the daily lives of Russians. Djemal Haidar, his mentor, had openly opposed Putin in 2010, thus well before the decisive events in Ukraine, which occurred during the Maïdan of 2014 and which are at the source, obviously, of the conflict in Donbass first, and then of the current war. For a full understanding of Dugin's positions on the political work of the Russian president, read: http://euro-synergies.hautetfort.com/archive/2021/09/11/la-tianxia-mondialiste-la-double-contrainte-et-le-dilemme-in-6337002.html ).
Secondly, Dugin's great work, which has been in progress for many years and is still unfinished, consists of the numerous volumes of his "Noomachy". Every civilisation, every great historical people, even every cultural-historical strand has its 'logos', writes Dugin. Noomachy is therefore the struggle and/or convergence between the logos of peoples: our author argues, of course, for the convergence of traditional logos which are all "forms", in the ancient Greek sense of the term (and here Daria Dugina's philosophical work, begun but unfortunately unfinished, could have given a very solid foundation to this idea of form or "logos"). Similarly, with a certain Iranian tropism, both Zoroastrian and Shiite, that we can see in Dugin, we can bring this idea of a convergence of "traditional logos" closer to the idea conveyed by contemporary Iran: that of the dialogue of civilisations (different from Samuel Huntington's idea of the "clash of civilisations", which Dugin does not reject). Dugin thus aims at preserving the resilient and inalienable differences in the psyche of peoples and elevating them to the rank of traditions, all of which have a pre-existing common core, as Guénon sought to demonstrate in his entire work. I have translated five texts that explain what this noomachy is and what the 'logos' of Germany and China are:
Douguine's work is therefore not limited to the few schemas that the Parisian press conveys about him, nor to the schemas that a few very pretentious false scholars peddle, posing, pontificating and ridiculous, as "experts" in populisms while putting on great airs. It is a work that should be followed, its effervescent aspects showing that it seeks to mould itself to a reality in perpetual motion, and that it should be studied more seriously, while knowing that its aim is above all to open up avenues that later generations will explore further.
Did you know Daria Dugin? You met Aleksandr Dugin in France, Belgium and Russia. In what context did this happen? What contributions did Aleksandr Dugin make to your journals Vouloir and European Synergies News?
No, unfortunately I never had the opportunity to meet Daria Dugina. I only heard praise for her from participants in the Chisinau colloquium in Moldova, orchestrated by Iure Rosca (with whom I had a dialogue in Lille) and from some of those who went, at the same time as her, to Syria for a study trip to that ravaged country. She fascinated her fellow travellers with the joy she radiated and the aplomb of her speech. On the other hand, yes, I met her father many times, although too rarely! I saw him for the first time in Paris, in a bookshop where I was going to drop off copies of my magazines. We immediately hit it off and indeed, he gave me a first interview in French (of which I can give a copy to those who wish). I then saw him again in Paris at a GRECE colloquium, where he spoke, and at a more discreet talk, organised in 1994 by Christian Bouchet, in a room near the Porte de la Chapelle, where we were the two guest speakers. Bouchet, worried, had given us a shotgun and a pellet gun, in case the event had been attacked. So we spoke to the participants with this hardware in our laps! Then, when Russians from his entourage came to Brussels, he would not fail to entrust them with a parcel of magazines for me: this is how I got to know Larissa Gogoleva, who would be seriously injured during the events of October 1993 in Moscow, and a charming Armenian family.
Also in 1994, Dugin took part in a colloquium in Italy devoted to the thought of Julius Evola: there he explained, in a very didactic and succinct manner, the axes of Evolian thought that had particularly appealed to him, including the notions of the tantric vira and the 'way of the left hand'. The tantric vîra (or "hero") does not take into account the traditional links expressed in Vedic thought, he transgresses in order to better access the essential; such is the heterodox path known as the "left hand", which our era must take into account because the true traditionalist must transgress the conventions of "institutionalised revolutionarism". This 'left-hand' perspective is probably what led him to join the provocative actions of Eduard Limonov in the days of the Russian 'National-Bolshevik Party'.
We were, of course, on the same wavelength in opposing NATO's attack on Yugoslavia in 1999, articulating the struggle above all around the "No to War" initiative, orchestrated in France by Laurent Ozon, and around that of the Lega Lombarda at the time and its daily newspaper La Padania. Archimede Bontempi, tireless animator of these circles and resolutely anti-Atlanticist, coordinated all this in Milan, with the blessing of the mayor of the city at the time, who had invited me to an anti-Bellicist tribune together with Dugin's friend, the Serbian traditionalist writer and artist Dragos Kalajic (picture), then Yugoslav ambassador to the Holy See. Unfortunately, Dragos left us in 2005. A huge loss in our ranks. Especially since the same year Carlo Terracciano (picture), author of excellent articles on geopolitics, died prematurely and deeply inspired Dugin, who paid him a vibrant tribute. Terracciano's didactic way of presenting the major theses of geopolitics was very useful for a Russian public, initially unfamiliar with this discipline, which is now omnipresent in the media, with the difference that in the West, only Anglo-Saxon geopolitics is promoted.
Similarly, in the autumn of 2002, when Chechen terrorists attacked the Doubrovna theatre in Moscow, arbitrarily massacred spectators and took all those present, including many children, hostage, Putin sent in his special troops and restored the situation, despite the heavy loss of life among the spectators as a result of this coup de force. I published, in Au fil de l'épée (November 2002), the texts of Dugin and the Russian Eurasists to explain the situation: rereading these texts, I note, twenty years later, that our friend has perfectly explained the situation and shown the links between the Chechen terrorist faction and the Western and Wahhabi services (allied against Russia). The horror of the hostage-taking in the Moscow Durbrovna theatre and, later, the Chechen attack on the Beslan school in Ossetia are nameless tragedies that the sanctimonious press in the West has minimised, blurred and made disappear from the screens: these escamotages speak volumes about the objectivity of our press.
Dugin then came to Brussels and Antwerp in 2005 to speak at a colloquium on identity held at Château Coloma in Sint-Pieters-Leeuw (picture above) and to address the participants of a colloquium organised by the magazine TeKos, GRECE's correspondent in Flanders. After that, we did not meet again, as my new professional and family obligations left me little time, and we did not correspond any more, except that I systematically translated texts and interviews of Dugin published in the friendly press, especially in German (Zuerst, zur Zeit). We have only reconnected since my retirement, when I have more time to devote to translations, which he makes extensive use of in his activities.
Dugin's contributions to the small press organs that I have sponsored and especially to the "euro-synergies" blog (created in 2007) are innumerable and constitute without doubt the best supplied library in this field in the French language, apart of course from the excellent volumes published by Christian Bouchet (Ed. Ars Magna) or Gilbert Dawed (Avatar Editions). Here is the 'Dugin' entry in the 'euro-synergies' block: http://euro-synergies.hautetfort.com/tag/alexandre+douguin
It remains to speak of the famous trip to Moscow in 1992, where I was invited, together with Alain de Benoist and Jean Laloux (former director of Krisis) to participate in various activities during four days, including a press conference where Dugin, Prokhanov, de Benoist and myself faced the Moscow press. We then had two dinners together, one at the home of Prokhanov, former director of the journal Lettres Soviétiques, which appeared in several languages and which had the merit of bringing out a very first issue on Dostoyevsky that I had bought in Brussels in the 1970s. The other dinner was at Dugin's house, where his wife had prepared an excellent meal. Then there was a debate in the offices of the newspaper Dyein with Gennady Zyuganov, leader of the Russian Communist Party, who was looking for a national way out of the mismanagement unleashed by Yeltsin's imperialism; indeed, on that trip I saw the disaster: one day before my arrival, on 31 March, the rouble was exchanged for one US dollar. On 1 April, and alas, this was no joke, the exchange rate had gone from 100 roubles to one dollar! A university professor sold me his American slang dictionaries for twenty dollars, a poor old man tried to sell me his stamp collection, children sold their toys on the stairs of the "Children's House", a teenager sold me his father's policeman's chapka while being copiously yelled at by Dugin who called him a "spekulator". It was horrible, it was heartbreaking. The day after our debate with Zyuganov, Dyein came out of the press with two full pages of the paper devoted to our debate, pages that people read on a trolleybus we had taken to get back to our hotel. That had never happened to me in my life, and it never happened again!
The ideas of the Belgian theorist Jean Thiriart (1922-1992), whom you also knew, were an important source of inspiration for Alexander Dugin. What were Thiriart's ideas and how do they influence his own? But are there any differences between these two thinkers?
Jean Thiriart was a neighbour I could meet on a daily basis. Following the implicit alliance between China and the United States, sealed by the Kissinger-Chou en Lai agreements in 1972, the hope of the activists of "Young Europe" to use China as a back-up ally, to force the Soviet Union to give up ballast in Eastern Europe and to compel the United States to pull out all the stops in Indochina, had become vain. From then on, the idea of a Euro-soviet alliance against China and the United States began to agitate minds that could be described, mutatis mutandis, as "national-revolutionaries". In Italy, Guido Giannettini published a well-constructed book on the subject, which we devoured and commented on in Brussels; Jean Parvulesco speculated along the same lines. And Thiriart began to conceive of a hypothetical "Euro-soviet" empire, slightly Nietzscheanised on the edges because he had read the first Soviet exegeses of Nietzsche's work at the time, by a certain Odouev. Thiriart, a former left-wing teenager before the war in the ranks of the "Young Socialist Guards", had certainly been tempted, a few years later, by collaboration under the sign of a Europe united by Germany, but he had no habitus proper to the right, to Walloon rexism or to the fascisms of the 1930s and 1940s. Moreover, he had no religious background and declared himself openly 'materialist', like the good anti-clerical bourgeoisie of French-speaking Belgium. The Soviet Union was not for him, as it was for the believers, a political abomination but a simple way of practising politics which, of course, was insufficient because it claimed to be based on a materialism which had nothing scientific about it and applied a defective economic system. For Thiriart, it was therefore necessary to keep the Soviet apparatus intact, to extend it to Europe (in order to get rid of the "hippy and permissive", "trivial" and "a-historical" ideology), but by infusing it with a physical and biological materialism in tune with the new scientific discoveries and by giving it an economic system, It would be necessary to return to the influence of the "old" and "new" economic systems, which were not only the result of the new scientific discoveries, but also of the "new" and "updated" economic systems. The influence of a now forgotten author, Anton Zischka, on Thiriart and his entire generation in Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany, should be revisited: for Zischka, the theorist of the labour standard, science and engineering belong to the genius of the Volk, and must not be restricted by ideological or speculative authorities. In his widely circulated book Science Breaks Monopolies, Zischka in fact theorises the idea of the innate popular genius, which is expressed in particular by the inventiveness of its scientists, physicists and engineers and which is opposed to lawyerly jargon, stock market speculation, moralising mumbo jumbo and all other incapacitating nuisances. The peoples of the USSR had to bet on the jewels of Soviet science and technology (aeronautics, space) to get out of the rut of the "technological gap" on which the Anglo-Saxon Russophobic strategists (including the great Arnold Toynbee) were speculating: this exit could only take place through an alliance with Carolingian (Franco-German) Europe, which was capable of bridging the « technological gap ».
What struck Dugin about Thiriart's approach was that a man who was mistakenly seen as a primary anti-communist showed no animosity for the USSR and, by extension, for the Russian people. Secondly, if Thiriart spoke of Euro-sovietism and not Eurasism, the territory he called for to be reorganised according to rationalist, Hobbesian (Leviathan) and centralising criteria, corresponded to the traditional and mythical Eurasia, Russian-Turanian, which was beginning to germinate in Dugin's mind.
The links between Thiriart and Dugin were only short-lived because, although they had been corresponding for a year or more, Thiriart only went to Moscow at the end of the summer of 1992 to take part in a whole series of political debates, with, in his wake, Michel Schneider, the publisher of the journal Nationalisme et République, Marco Battarra, a bookseller and publisher in Milan, and the genial geopolitologist Carlo Terracciano. A little over two months after his return to Brussels, Thiriart died in his holiday cottage in the Ardennes.
The systems of thought of the two men were obviously very different: Thiriart, as I have just said, came from Belgian secular circles that resolutely rejected religious traditions, considered, like Voltaire, as "childishnesses", destined to disappear along with their clergy. Dugin, in fact like Catherine II, immersed himself in Orthodox spirituality, where unlike in Western (Catholic) papism, the rupture between Church and State (Empire) was never clear-cut as in Western Europe after the Investiture Quarrel which had initiated, in the 11th century, the irremediable break between the Papacy and the Empire, only a few years after the definitive rupture between Rome and Byzantium (in 1054).
After Boris Yeltsin's coup d'état in 1993 and the opposition of the deputies to it, Alexander Dugin and the writer Edouard Limonov, who had supported the latter who were crushed by force, founded the National-Bolshevik Party. A curious experience from an ideological point of view?
I didn't really follow the avatars of the "National-Bolshevik Party". But I did read Limonov's book The Great Western Hospice, in which he takes up an old Russian and Panslavist idea, present in the work of a more or less Darwinian author of the 19th century, Nikolai Danilevsky. For Danilevski, Western Europe was a collection of old people, without much resilience, while the Russians, who had just completed the conquest of Central Asia and were approaching the frontiers of British India, were a young, vigorous people with a great future: the one that would decide the outcome of what the English, including Kipling, called the "Great Game", i.e. the mastery of Central Asia and India. Limonov, who had lived in the United States and France, often in underworld circles, came, mutatis mutandis, to the same conclusions as his illustrious predecessor. Danilevsky's idea was also taken up in Germany by Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, translator of Dostoyevsky and leader of the first circles of the "conservative revolution" (all of them Russophiles and supporters of an alliance between the Weimar Republic and the young USSR, while at the same time being anti-communists, the German communists being judged as incompetent and unconstructive). Moeller van den Bruck also spoke of 'young peoples' in revolt against the 'old peoples' (of the West). The birth in Russia in 1993-94 of the "National-Bolshevik Party" allowed the journalists of the Parisian press to fabricate, at the start of their delusions, the papier-mâché bogeyman that was the "Red-Brown" plot: The facts they put forward to justify the existence of this imaginary conspiracy were 1) the participation in the writing of Jean-Edern Hallier's Idiot International of signatures from heterogeneous backgrounds classified just as arbitrarily on the left or the right according to moods or fantasies (on this affair, read the very recent article by Bernard Lindekens: http://euro-synergies. hautetfort.com/archive/2022/08/29/l-idiot-international-sur-l-utilite-du-non-conformisme.html ); and 2) the trip we took to Moscow for four or five days from 30 March to 3 April 1992. Dipping my pen in vitriol and liquefied laughing gas, I had fun writing a response to all the trolls of Parisian journalism ("L'affaire du national-communisme ou quand les galopins du journalisme parisien ratent l'occasion de se taire - Réponse narquoise aux carnavalesques inquisiteurs de l'été 1993") in an issue of Vouloir, the contents and some articles of which can be found here: http://www.archiveseroe.eu/vouloir-105-108-a117208412 ). The affair, even if it ended in disaster, nevertheless left after-effects, which seem to have been reactivated since the assassination of Daria Douguina.
Then, at the end of the 1990s, Aleksandr Dugin launched himself into the conception and dissemination of neo-Eurasian ideas? What do they consist of? What is the fate of Western Europe and Germany within them? Why were they so successful in Russia, especially in power circles, and elsewhere?
Eurasian ideas were present in Dugin from the start. After his many attempts to insert himself into the Moscow press, after the parenthesis of the "National-Bolshevik Party" with Limonov, Dugin launched his Eurasist movement to update several strands of Russian thought, disseminated as much among White Russians emigrated to Prague, Berlin, Brussels and Paris, as among the Reds or even the "Bolshevik monarchists" who admired Stalin. The Eurasian idea consists essentially in maintaining intact the territorial mass gathered by the tsars (Peter the Great, Catherine II, Alexander II) and the Red Army (in 1945) or, at least, in maintaining the strongest possible links between the three East Slavic peoples (an idea shared by Solzhenitsyn and Putin, This idea is shared by Solzhenitsyn and Putin, but less so by Dugin, who reproaches the author of The Gulag Archipelago for having served as a foil for Western propaganda, including that served up to us by André Glucksmann and Bernard-Henri Lévy.) In practice, it serves to maintain solid links with the states that were part of the USSR, to ease any conflicts that might arise between them, to ensure good communications between these new countries, born 31 years ago, and to establish good relations with India, China and Iran. The Eurasian idea is now taking shape in initiatives such as the BRICS or the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, in which China seems to play a leading role. China's Belt & Road Initiative (BRI) aims to shape the great Eurasian landmass and, in the process, remove control of major communications from the maritime powers of the Anglosphere. Dugin consistently supports these policies, adding a spiritual dimension that would otherwise be absent from this new "Great Game".
As for Germany in this "Great Game", it is automatically part of it, despite its current Atlanticist subservience. The 18th and 19th centuries were centuries of German-Russian symbiosis. As early as Peter the Great and even more so as early as Catherine II (who was herself German), hundreds of thousands of Germans participated in the construction and consolidation of the Russian Empire, as teachers, simple peasants, engineers, industrialists, etc. The First World War interrupted this symbiosis. The First World War interrupted this symbiosis, but it resumed under the Weimar Republic, following the signing of the Treaty of Rapallo in 1922. Even under National Socialism, the privileged links between the two "empires" (which no longer used this term to designate their politics) only faded very superficially, only to resume in earnest during the 22 months of the German-Soviet treaty or Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact: it was the USSR that supplied oil, useful metals and wheat to the Third Reich, which otherwise would not have been able to defeat France. Hitler's poker move, which may have been ahead of either a poker move by Stalin in the West or a British attack on the Soviets in the Caucasus, was aimed at making himself the sole master of oil, wheat and metals without having to pass under any "Caudine forks". This gamble, this "Vabanquespiel" as Ernst Jünger called it, ended in an apocalyptic failure. However, the new Federal Republic, established under the patronage of the Western allies in 1949, could not do without the USSR: Brandt's Ostpolitik re-established the situation, in a complex game in which the Social Democrats forged privileged links with the Soviets of COMECON, while the Christian Democrats hastened to implement a "Fernostpolitik" with China. What was the objective? To reconstitute the "Triad" imagined by the Reichswehr organisers under Weimar (especially General Hans von Seeckt) and the national-revolutionary or national-Bolshevik circles (to which figures such as Hielscher, Jünger, Niekisch, von Salomon, Fischer, etc. belonged, with Richard Scheringer dealing with China in particular, together with von Seeckt). What is the "Triad"? The Triad is the anti-Western alliance (hostile to France, Great Britain and the United States) which was to bring together Germany (with a regime yet to be defined and installed), the USSR (around the CPSU) and China (not around Mao's Chinese communists but around Chiang Kai Tchek's Kuo Min Tang), to which was to be added a soon-to-be-independent India, led by cadres trained above all in Germany and, to a lesser extent, in the Soviet Union. The Reichswehr and the Luftwaffe trained in the USSR, especially in Kazan, German engineers built the new cities of the USSR, Reichwehr officers supervised Chiang Kai Chek's army. The reason for the unrest that concerns us today, in this year 2022, one hundred years after the signing of the Treaty of Rapallo, is that this triad had been tacitly reconstituted: China had become Germany's main trading partner, which received, as it did during the 22 months of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, its energy via Baltic gas pipelines (Nord Stream 1 and 2), etc. The American West cannot tolerate the tacit reconstitution of this Triad and the secret services have created the conditions necessary for its torpedoing by bringing the ecologists in their pay to power in Berlin and by harassing Russia in Crimea, in the Donbass, on the coast of the Sea of Azov, at the mouth of the Don, sensitive regions whose control by NATO would allow a total blockade of Russia. Indeed, the objective of the Anglosphere is to totally control the Black Sea and to block the Don River, which gives access to the Russian hinterland, and the Don River is linked to the Volga by a canal which, ipso facto, connects the Black Sea to the Caspian Sea and to Iran. Secondly, the Indo-Iranian-Russian project to create an "International North-South Transport Corridor" (INSTC) aims to link India and Iran to the Arctic and the Baltic (i.e. Hamburg, Rotterdam and Antwerp) by a system of maritime, rail and river communications, thus reducing the importance of the Suez bottleneck. It is for this set of reasons that the Eurasian idea, a necessary spiritual complement to the major land communications projects, has the support of many Russian politicians.
Christian Bouchet stated in an article in Breizh-info that Alexander Dugin is not a Russian nationalist, which you confirm in the reader's comments at the bottom of this publication. Can you clarify this for us?
Dugin is in fact a Eurasist, a traditionalist and an imperialist as we were ourselves in the Spanish empire from Charles V to Philip V or in the Austrian empire in the 18th century. Belgium, together with the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, is the last non-German speaking part of imperial Lotharingia that has not been absorbed and distorted by France. A gentleman serves his king or emperor, as did Jean-Baptiste Steuckers in the 17th century, representative of the Catholic district of Gelderland at the States-General of the Royal Netherlands in Brussels, and his son Jean-François Steuckers, Lieutenant-Drossard of Brabant until his death in 1709. Both are buried in the Church of Finisterre in Brussels, rue Neuve. They served both the King of Spain and the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, together with their colleagues from Franche-Comté, Lorraine, Germany, Spain, Aragon, Milan, Sicily, etc., and counted on Spanish, German, Irish, English (Catholic), Croatian and Alsatian tercios who defended, together with our own, our country against the hordes of Louis XIV, in memorable battles such as the siege of Louvain or the head-on clash at Rocroi.
Alexander Dugin, Christian Bouchet and Alain Soral during a meeting in France.
If Dugin does not proclaim himself a "Russian nationalist", this does not mean that he does not feel "Russian" in every fibre of his body, but a narrow, exclusive nationalism would not allow him to reach out to the other peoples of the Russian Federation, be they Caucasians, Ossetians, Finno-Ugrians, Tatars, Turkic speakers, etc. All these peoples have been linked to the Russian Federation for centuries. All these peoples have been linked to Russia throughout history. In the 1960s and 1970s, the USSR did everything it could to save the disappearing languages and traditions of these peoples, such as the Maris, Chuvash, Nanais, Komi, Nenets, Udmurts, etc. These initiatives created, long before Dugin, an imperial spirit: I am a citizen of such and such an ethnic group but I am part of the Empire that protects me. The Republic, in France, did nothing of the kind, on the contrary: only private initiatives made it possible to save local linguistic or folkloric traditions. There has never been a state initiative. In Great Britain, without a series of private initiatives, the Cornish language would have disappeared (and its future is not yet assured) just as Manx has almost disappeared.
It is in the sense of an imperial political mentality that we must understand Dugin's refusal to call himself a "nationalist": he does not intend to Russify the Chuvash or the Nenets. I have translated the general article on his site which specifies precisely what is meant by "people" (a term he favours), "ethnicity" and "nation". It is up to you to read it: http://euro-synergies.hautetfort.com/archive/2022/08/18/ethnos-peuple-nation-comme-categories-ethno-sociologiques.html .)
Bouchet, editor of important works by Dugin, knows what he is talking about. I myself have collaborators and correspondents from Russia, Poland, Romania, Finland, Sweden, the United Kingdom, France, Switzerland, Italy, Castile, the Basque Country, Navarre, Catalonia, Flanders, the Netherlands, Ibero-America, Germany, etc., in the framework of the editorial activities of 'European Synergies'. This does not prevent me from feeling fully a citizen of the region that has always been that of my Steuckers ancestors: the Euroregio around Aachen, at the crossroads of the three languages, around the 'Drei-Länder-Ecke'. My father, a Limburger, worked in Liège, Brussels and Franche-Comté, but this never prevented him from feeling that he was a child of the land of Sint-Truiden, of the land of orchards that bloom with millions of flowers in spring. I assume a transnational task without hostility to ethnic and national facts, a preparatory task for a political system of an imperial nature to come, which Jean Parvulesco named, with the very particular vocabulary that we know, "the Eurasian Empire of the End".
