Restoring Sovereignty: A Conversation with Alexander Dugin about Japan

The West is spiraling into chaos. Russia is recovering its civilizational greatness. The difference lies in the life of the mind—or, rather, in the difference between thinking and mindlessness. Russia has learned from bitter experience that philosophy, true thought, is indispensable for human flourishing. The West, by stark contrast, remains mired in destructive anti-thinking (LGBTQ hedonism, Nominalism, wokeism, gender theory, and more), and so is dying. The West needs philosophy, but is it too proud to learn it from Russia, a civilization that the West’s overlords claim (mindlessly) to be an enemy?

In this interview, I spoke with Alexander Dugin, one of the greatest living philosophers. Professor Dugin does not traffic in cheap rhetoric, and he does not parrot platitudes. He is erudite, articulate, and deeply interested in, above all things, ideas, and in how those ideas move states and statesmen in a rapidly changing world. Professor Dugin’s vocation is the life of the mind, and not the mindlessness that typifies public discourse in much of the ideology-addled West. If there is a philosopher from whom to learn how to recover one’s God-given ability to think, it is this man. To frame the problem on a bigger scale, because Russia has a Dugin—because she has someone who has given his life to the search for understanding intellectual and spiritual truth—she also has a future. Would that there were anyone of Professor Dugin’s caliber in the United States. Alas, there isn’t. And so, it seems, the divide between Western bedlam and Russian, or, more properly, Eurasian reawakening will continue to widen. Russia remains the West’s “enemy” precisely because Russia thinks, and the West has come to hate thinking. This is one aspect of the current world problem accurately stated.

There is more to the West than Europe and North America. Unfortunately, parts of East Asia and elsewhere are also in the thrall of globalist anti-philosophers. The interview here treats almost entirely of Japan, which for the past eight decades has been Washington’s handmaid. But there is so much more to Japan than that. Japan is not Professor Dugin’s specialty, but even so he spoke with much learning and curiosity of Japanese history, culture, and philosophy. I learned that Professor Dugin and I share a fondness for the Kyoto School of philosophy. I learned also that we agree that Japan has not a shred of sovereignty in the Washington-dominated postwar. Again the gap is revealed. Japan, slave to a cabal of anti-civilizational globalists, has forsaken its proud cultural heritage. It descends, hand in hand with the West, into nihilism and madness, while its neighbor, Russia, rises.

Japan can be Japan again, as Russia is learning how to be Russia again, and as much of the rest of the world is learning to throw off the mindlessness of the dying West. I hope that many will watch this interview, hear Professor Dugin’s words, take them to heart, and learn from him how to think, and thereby how to save civilization from mindless suicide.