Hi,
Hey Chris, read any Telos since its love affair with de Benoist? Some of us would read the praise from Dugin of the Evola/Spengler crowds, and read his other stuff, and say it is a recognizable version of the neofascist intellectual currents behind the European New Right--with just a dash of Eurasianist spice. Sure it is anti-Hitler and Anti-Mussolini, but most of the intellectual neofascists run that line.
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Me:
I have actually never read Telos (though one of my old profs, Daniel Dahlstrom, used to write for them in the '70s). I know nothing about Evola, but wouldn't consider Spengler a fascist (Junger, though, I would lump in the tradition of avant-garde futurist fascism), In any case, I don't think praising them, or even explicitly drawing on them, as Dugin does, makes him necessarily a fascist. I think teh Eurasia Movement, in its most extreme manifestations, ideologically draws more on the Narodnaya Volya (People's Will) Russian revolutionary movement and the intellectualized, aestheticized Bolshevism of people like Mayakovsky, and also on the irrationalism of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy.
Moreover, I don't think a party which is non-exclusivist (they want to unite all the peoples of the CIS on a basis of mutual respect), ascribes to the preservation of traditional cultures -- in their plurality -- as a main goal, has never incited violence (beyong pelting people with eggs), and has the Grand Mufti of the CIS on its board, as well as several rabbis, can effectively be described as fascist.
This does not strike me as the manifesto of a fascist party:
Basic principles of the eurasist doctrinal platform
The eurasist vision
«According to 71% of the surveyed Russian citizens, Russia belongs to a peculiar - «eurasian» or Orthodox - civilization, therefore she does not follow the western way of development. Only 13% considers Russia as a western civilization». (Survey by the VCIOM, PanRussian Centre for the Study of the Public Opinion, 2-5 November 2001)
The breath of the epoch
Every historical epoch has its own peculiar «system of coordinates» - political, ideological, economic and cultural. For example, the XIX century in Russia passed under the sign of the dispute between «Slavophiles» and «Pro-westerners» [zapadniki]. In the XX century the watershed passed between «Reds» and «Whites». The XXI century will become the century of the opposition between «atlantists» * (the supporters of «unipolar globalism» **) and «eurasists» **.
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* Atlantism - geopolitical term denoting: - from the historical and geographical point of view, the Western sector of the world civilization: - from the military-strategic point of view, the member countries of the NATO (in the first place, the US); - from the cultural point of view, the unified information network created by the Western media-empires; - from the social point of view, the «market system», claimed to be absolute and denying all the different forms of organisation of the economic life. Atlantists - the strategists of the Western civilization and their conscious supporters in other parts of the planet, aiming at putting the whole world under control and imposing the social, economic and cultural stereotypes typical of the Western civilization to all the rest of mankind. The atlantists are the builders of the «new world order» - the unprecedented world system benefiting an absolute minority of the planet’s population, the so-called «golden billion». ** Globalism - the process of building the «new world order», at the centre of which stand the political-financial oligarchic groups of the West, is called as globalisation. The victims of this process are the sovereign states, the national cultures, the religious doctrines, the economic traditions, the manifestations of social justice, the surrounding environment - every spiritual, intellectual and material variety on the planet. The term «globalism» in the customary political lexicon means just «unipolar globalism», i.e. not the fusion of the different cultures, social-political and economic systems into something new (as this would be «multi-polar globalism», «eurasist globalism»), as the imposition of Western stereotypes upon mankind.
*** Eurasism (in its widest meaning) - basic geopolitical term indicating: - from the historical and geographical point of view, the whole world, excluding the Western sector of the world civilization: - from the military-strategic point of view, all the countries who do not approve the expansionist policies of the US and of their NATO partners; - from the cultural point of view, the preservation and development of organic national, ethnical and religious cultural traditions; - from the social point of view, the different forms of economic life and the «socially just society». Eurasism (in its strict historical meaning) is a philosophical current arisen in the 1920s among the Russian emigrates. Its fundamental authors are N.S. Trubetskoy, P.N. Savitsky, N.N. Alekseev, V.G. Vernadsky, V.I.Ilyn, P.P. Suvchinski, E. Khara-Davan, Ya. Bromberg, and others. From the 1950s and the 1980s this current received further development and deepening by L.N.Gumilyov. Neo-eurasism - it arose at the end of the 1980s (the founder being the philosopher A.G. Dugin) and broadened the scope of the traditional concept of eurasism, combining it to new blocs of ideas and methodologies - traditionalism, geopolitics, metaphysics, «New Right», «New Left», «third way» in economics, theory of the «peoples’ rights», ecology, ontological philosophy, eschatological vector, new understanding of the universal mission of the Russian history, paradigmatic perspective of the history of science, etc.
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Against the establishing of the atlantist world order and globalisation stand the supporters of the multi-polar world - the eurasists. The eurasists defend on principle the necessity to preserve the existence of every people on earth, the blossoming variety of cultures and religious traditions, the unquestionable right of the peoples to independently choose their path of historical development. The eurasists greet the generality of cultures and systems of values, the open dialogue among peoples and civilizations, the organic combination between the devotion to traditions and the creative impulse. Eurasists are not only the representatives of the peoples living in the Eurasian continent. Being eurasist is a conscious choice, which means combining the aspiration to preserve the traditional forms of life with the aspiration to free creative (social and personal) development. In this way, eurasists are all free creative personalities who acknowledge the values of tradition; among them are also the representatives of those region which objectively form the bases of atlantism. Eurasists and atlantists are opposed to each other in everything. They defend two different, alternative, mutually excluding images of the world and its future. It is the opposition between eurasists and atlantists which defines the historical outline of the XXI century.
The eurasist vision of the future world
The eurasists consequently defend the principle of multi-polarity, standing against the unipolar globalism imposed by the atlantists. As the poles of this new world there shall not be the traditional states, as some new integrated civilizational formations («great spaces»), united into «geo-economic belts» («geo-economic zones»). According to the principle of multi-polarity, the future of the world is imagined as the equal, benevolent partnership relations among all countries and peoples, organised - according to a principle of proximity in terms of geography, culture, values and civilization - in four geo-economic belts (each one consisting in its turn of some «great spaces»).
Euro-African belt, including 3 «great spaces»: the European Union, Islamic-Arab Africa, sub-tropical (black) Africa; Asian-Pacific belt, including Japan, the countries of South-eastern Asia and Indochina, Australia and New Zealand; Eurasian continental belt, including 4 «great spaces»: Russia and the countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), the countries of continental Islam, India, China; American belt, including three «great spaces»: Northern America, Central America and Southern America. Thanks to such organisation of the world space, global conflicts, bloody wars and extreme forms of confrontation, threatening the same existence of mankind, become scarcely probable.
Russia and its partners in the Eurasian continental belt will establish harmonic relations not only with the neighbouring belts (Euro-African and Asia-Pacific), but also with the belt at its antipode - the American belt, which will be also called to play a constructive role in the Western hemisphere in the context of the multi-polar structure.
Such vision of future mankind is the opposite of the globalist plans of the atlantists aimed at creating a unipolar, stereo-typed world under the control of the oligarchic structures of the West, in the perspective of creating the «world government».
The eurasist vision of the evolution of the state The eurasists consider the nation-state, in their present features, as an obsolete form of organisation of spaces and peoples, typical of the historical period going from the XV to the XX centuries. In the place of the nation-states new political formations must rise, combining into themselves the strategical unification of the great continental spaces with the complex multi-dimensional system of national, cultural and economic autonomies inside. Some features of such organisation of spaces and peoples may be observed both in the ancient empires of the past (e.g., the empire of Alexander of Macedon, the Roman empire, etc.) and in the newest political structures (European Union, CIS).
The contemporary states face today the following outlooks
self-liquidation and integration in the single planetary space under US domination (atlantism, globalisation); opposing to globalisation, attempting to preserve their own administrative structures (formal sovereignty) notwithstanding globalisation; entering supra-state formations of regional kind («great spaces») on the basis of historical, civilizational and strategic community. The third variant is the eurasist one. From the point of view of the eurasist analysis, this is the only way of development capable to preserve everything most valuable and original which the contemporary states are called to safeguard in the face of globalisation. The mere conservative aspiration to preserve the state at any cost is doomed to failure. The conscious orientation of the political leaderships of the states to dissolving into the globalist project is estimated by the eurasists as the renounce to those correlative values whose preservation has been the duty of the historical states toward their subjects. The XXI century shall be the arena of the fatal decision of the contemporary political elites concerning the issue of the three possible outlooks. The struggle for the third variant of development lies at the foundations of a new wide international coalition of political forces, in tune with the eurasist world-view.
The eurasists consider the Russian Federation and the CIS as the nucleus of a forthcoming autonomous political formation - the «Eurasian Union» («core Eurasia»), and further of one of the basic four world geo-economic belts («Eurasian continental bloc»).
At the same time, the eurasists are the convinced supporters of the development of a multi-dimensional system of autonomies *.
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* Autonomy (ancient Greek: self-government) - the form of natural organisation of a collective of people, united by any kind of organic sign (national, religious, professional, familiar, etc.). A distinctive feature of the autonomy is the largest freedom in those spheres not concerning the strategic interest of the political formations of continental dimension. Autonomy is opposed to sovereignty - a feature of the organisations of peoples and spaces typical of the nation-states in their present form. In the case of sovereignty, we deal with the prioritary right to the free and independent ordering of the territory; autonomy supposes independence in the issues of the organisation of the collective life of peoples and regions, not linked to the ordering of the territory.
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And then a lot more stuff.
Chris Doss The Russia Journal