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How Aleksandr Dugin influences the West The rhetoric of Putin’s philosopher king reaches beyond Ukraine

'We ended up in hell' (KIRILL KUDRYAVTSEV/AFP via Getty Images)

'We ended up in hell' (KIRILL KUDRYAVTSEV/AFP via Getty Images)


June 12, 2023   10 mins

As Europe’s leaders anxiously await the results of Ukraine’s long-anticipated counteroffensive, it is significant that Aleksandr Dugin’s latest essay opens by citing Ernst Jünger’s influential 1932 essay The Worker, to call for Russia’s total mobilisation to win the war. Though dismissed by Jünger’s biographer Thomas Nevinin in 1996, back when History had ended, as “pseudoprophecy”, because “democracy has twice within this century triumphed, apparently, over its totalitarian foes,” few writers in 2023 would display such certainty.

If anything, Jünger’s writings, along with those of other thinkers of Germany’s interwar Conservative Revolution, seem to foreshadow the political ferment and geopolitical fault lines of today. As Dugin observes in his rambling and only partly comprehensible essay, published last Friday, “if we turn to Jünger’s idea of total mobilisation in a Heideggerian manner, then we get an existential theory of mobilisation”, as “when death is before us and we don’t run away from it and we don’t turn our backs on it, that’s when we exist authentically. In a sense, this can be described both as a total mobilisation on an existential level and as what I would call an awakening.”

Ernst Jünger in 1920

Just as, in The Worker, Junger foresaw the fusion of man and technology in the trenches of the First World War heralding the death of bourgeois liberal values and the birth of a new “age of Titans”, Dugin asserts that Russia’s “Special Military Operation” in Ukraine is “awakening” Russian society, shifting it from a period of “inauthenticity” to one of “authenticity”. In Dugin’s assessment, Russia’s overt enemy, the Ukrainian people, barely count, now being something less than human. Instead, in a wild perversion of Schmitt’s thought, the war has revealed “the very real, absolute Enemy of the human race, to which only theological categories are supposed to be applied” — because “we thought we were fighting enemies in Ukraine, but we ended up in hell”.

That enemy, that hell, is us: “the current postmodern globalist West”, a society “degenerating as humans” where “transgender parades already hardly allow us to understand what kind of species we are dealing with”. Ultimately, “posthumanist formations, i.e., cyborgs, are to follow” because “Western globalist circles are the last transitional state from human being to algae”.

While Dugin’s work is often carried by Russia’s state propaganda channel RT, his influence within Putin’s regime has been vastly overstated. If anything, the apocalyptic rhetoric he applies to the Ukraine war has greater currency in the West, particularly among the American populist Right. Back in 2014, as noted by the Ukrainian scholar of Radical Right intellectual thought Anton Shekhovtsov, now an influential Twitter personality in the war’s online front, Dugin created a narrative which consisted of four major ideas: “first, that Atlanticists brought Nazis to power in Ukraine thus declaring a war on Russia; secondly, that the interim government was a Nazi junta and had no legitimacy; thirdly, that Ukraine did not exist anymore; and finally, that Russia must act decisively to prevent the Atlanticists from establishing control over the entire territory of former Ukraine”.

These arguments are now as wearily familiar to anyone who follows the war on English-language social media as they are to Russians themselves. When Tucker Carlson can describe, as he did last week, Zelenskyy not as the democratically elected leader of a nation fighting invasion, but instead as “sweaty and rat-like, a comedian turned oligarch, a persecutor of Christians, a friend of BlackRock”, he has adopted, consciously or not, a Dugin-like framing of Russia’s aggression against some existential evil. If Dugin remains an outsider of sorts in Russia, then, he has nevertheless helped to shape both the contours of the war in Ukraine itself and international perceptions of it. For a marginal outsider, Dugin certainly seems influential.

In any case, as the editor of CodaStory Natalia Anteleva correctly observes, “the argument about whether or not Putin personally reads Dugin is somewhat irrelevant because Dugin is plenty relevant to the leaders of the Luhansk and Donetsk separatist movements, who consider him a teacher”. As Shekhovtsov notes, Dugin’s previously state-funded Eurasian Youth Union (or ESM) was prominently involved in the initial 2014 stages of the Ukraine war, and “strengthened the pro-Russian separatist movement in Eastern Ukraine, fuelled ethnic and social tensions, launched disinformation actions and declared alternative political centres”. Dugin’s ESM acolytes took up prominent positions in the new separatist republics: Aleksandr Proselkov, leader of the ESM’s cell in Russia’s Southern Federal District, became Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs for the Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR), before his mysterious death in 2014, while ESM activist Andriy Purhin became the DNR’s first Vice Prime Minister.

Igor Girkin, or "Strelkov"
Igor Girkin, or “Strelkov”(Getty Images)

Other fringe political figures on the edges of Dugin’s circle achieved prominence in both stages of the Ukraine war: the Russian adventurer Igor Girkin or “Strelkov” is a familiar name to Ukraine-watchers, first as the DNR’s Minister of Defence, and latterly as a military analyst and harsh critic of Putin’s shambolic prosecution of the current invasion. But for Dugin, Girkin is something else entirely, the mystical embodiment of “the Russian myth”, a “fearless Russian Orthodox Warrior heading to a Sacred War on his own accord” who by seizing Slovyansk “like D’Annunzio in Fiume” appeared on history’s stage as “the ghost of a true Russia” to guide Russia into its glorious Eurasian future.

With his opaque political philosophy merging both the esoteric Traditionalism of René Guénon (whose acolytes include both our own King Charles and, seemingly, Ukraine’s chief of intelligence Kyrylo Budanov) and an interpretation of Germany’s interwar Conservative Revolution which tips more sharply into fascism than the original, Dugin embodies the strange ferment of ideas which attended the fall of the Soviet Union. As the scholar of Traditionalism Mark Sedgwick observes of the philosophy, “in the West, it has generally appealed to intellectuals whose understanding of modernity has led them to disenchantment with it and alienation from it”. This makes them marginal figures in a broader political scene, but “for those with experience of Soviet modernity, however, Traditionalism could very easily seem to present an entirely accurate analysis”. After all, “nowhere was the loss of the sacred more dramatic than in the officially atheist Soviet Union, and nowhere else were the two substitute cults of science and progress more assiduously advanced, and nowhere else was the cult of progress more obviously illusory.”

Sedgwick’s insight is the key to understanding the influence of radical Right-wing, anti-modernist and Conservative Revolutionary thought on both sides in the Ukraine war, lost in the tiresome and intellectually sterile debate over which side contains the greater number of “fascists”. Kept isolated by Communism from the development of the post-war liberalism which still maintains a faltering hold on Western political discourse, as Communism discredited itself, radical intellectuals in the post-Soviet sphere turned their attention to the last great intellectual attempt to transcend liberal modernity, the Conservative Revolution, until recently discredited in the West by Germany’s subsequent, disastrous Nazi interlude.

In this story, Ukraine’s largely Russian-speaking second city of Kharkiv, birthplace of both Ukraine’s nationalist Azov movement and hometown of Dugin’s early patron, the Russian National Bolshevik provocateur Edvard Limonov, plays a significant role. Even now, Kharkiv functions as the organising base for the Azov-linked exiled Russian ultranationalists and neo-Nazis fighting Putin’s invasion through their incursions into Russia’s Belgorod. As the Kharkiv writer Anatoly Voronin observes, the city’s status as an ethnic and cultural borderland between Russia and Ukraine forged an unusual hybrid identity, and a form of nationalism quite distinct from that of western Ukraine, where both Russian and Ukrainian radical Right intellectuals interacted with each other in shaping their worldviews. As Voronin asks: “how do we explain the generally good relations between Dugin and various Ukrainian Right-wingers in the 2000s? No one in ‘Azov’ ever denied the profound influence Dugin had on young [Azov leader] Andriy Biletsky.”

Dugin’s influence, funded by Putin’s government, within the Ukrainian dissident political scene of the 2000s included cooperation with the poet and Right-wing activist Dmytro Korchynsky of the Orthodox fundamentalist Bratsvo party (whose militia is now fighting Russia in the east; as an aside, a young American volunteer with them I met in Kharkiv complained his fellow fighters dragged him to Orthodox mass early every morning). Dugin even found favour with the fascinating, complex Oleksey Arestovych, until recently Zelenskyy’s strategic advisor, but back then a Eurasianist opponent of Ukraine’s relationship with Nato and the West. Dugin’s original ambivalent stance on Ukrainian nationalism allowed for a degree of influence perhaps surprising now, broken only by his sudden, dramatic turn towards denial of Ukraine’s very existence. Nevertheless, though counterintuitive today, fringe Right-wing political ideas then possessed both unusual reach and strange, overlapping ambiguities.

The influence of both Dugin and of the German Conservative Revolution is perhaps best embodied in the fascinating political career of the Azov movement’s intellectual star, the Kharkiv native and “first lady of Ukrainian nationalism” Olena Semenyaka. Described by her professors at Kyiv-Mohyla University as “a brilliant student, reserved, and introverted but committed to her work”, Semenyaka’s PhD thesis — “The Transformation of the Conservative Revolutionary Subject in Ernst Jünger’s Work, from the Worker to Anarch in Ernst Jünger’s Creativity” — revolved around Jünger’s relevance to the new world she saw dawning in the 21st century. As the analyst Adrien Nonjon observes, “Semenyaka rose to popularity in the Duginian Traditionalist movement thanks to her article, ‘Conservative Revolution as Mythological Modernism’, published in volume 4 of Aleksandr Dugin’s anthology, In Search of the Dark Logos. She was invited to speak at the international conference Against the Post-Modern World, which was organised at Lomonosov Moscow State University (MSU) in 2011 by the Tradition Center chaired by Dugin”.

Aleksandr Dugin with Olena Semenyaka (credit @leonidragozin)

While Semenyaka now dismisses her relationship with Dugin as merely a one-off meeting, her early work, such as 2011’s Transformation of Ernst Junger’s alternative to the bourgeois individual”, approvingly cites Dugin’s definitions of Conservativism, just as her geopolitical worldview, like Dugin’s, derives from the British political theorist Halford Mackinder’s concept of the World Island, far more influential in Russian Eurasianist thought than it ever was in its homeland. Dugin’s shadow looms over Semenyaka’s writing and speeches, which can often be read as a conscious rejection of her former mentor following the two widely divergent paths each took as a result of Ukraine’s Maidan revolution. Just as Ukrainian and Russian commentators battle to convince international observers that the other side are the real fascists, Dugin and Semenyaka compete to convince the European and American radical Right that the other side are the real liberals. Yet each, despite their two respective nationalist projects being locked in an existential war against each other, share many of the same reference points in the Conservative Revolution, particularly their use of Jünger’s The Worker as a lodestone.

Often dismissed as a Nazi, Semenyaka more accurately occupies a far more interesting intellectual space as a Conservative Revolutionary whose concept of a pan-European political sphere distinct from an Asiatic Russia and a liberal American-led West derives directly from Jünger’s political thought. As Semenyaka writes, “the point of Ernst Jünger, who offered one of the earliest and most insightful descriptions of the coming totalitarian orders in his interwar classic treatise The Worker… is that the difference between the two regimes which rivalled for the planetary domination in the 20th century and the post-war neo-liberal order, in fact, is not so striking.” For Semenyaka, the value of Jünger in understanding the present is unparalleled: “it is his creativity that is considered the brightest example of the alternative of the Enlightenment project of modernisation and is widely known for its futuristic and even forecasting value”.

As she wrote in her intellectual autobiography published on the American White Nationalist website Countercurrents, the Azov movement offers a means to translate her academic interests into real-world politics: “I could say that what I studied in theory, I developed in practice. This is the Third Way, the Conservative Revolution, but revived for today. All of these theorists were also advocates of pan-Europeanism, and that is what our projects are all about.” As she remarks in an explicit rejection of Dugin’s work, “our goal is clear: it is the creation of the sovereign military and political Paneuropean bloc (confederation) which continues the classic tradition of the European third geopolitical way. That’s why Prof. Dugin is wrong by pretending by means of his Fourth Political Theory that the third geopolitical way is no longer possible and that all attempts to restore the European superpower, geopolitical subjectivity and the leading positions in the ‘unipolar’ world are ‘anti-Russian’ encroachments in the service of American imperialism.” For Semenyaka as for Dugin, as she observes in her essay on Black Metal, the goal of the Conservative Revolution is “to cancel not only the era of Enlightenment, but also that of Renaissance and Reformation. In other words, it aims at building the New Middle Ages”.

Mocking Girkin’s marginality, Semenyaka instead posits Azov’s National Corps as the engine of history, the “vanguard of the Ukrainian nationalism of the new generation which offers the alternative both to the West and Putin’s Russian Federation.” In Semenyaka’s assessment, “According to Jünger’s forecast, the titans will reign throughout the entire 21st century, but then the gods will return, casting the titans in the Tartarus again, but also completing the eventual decline of the anthropocentric history which began with WW1.” It is in this process that the Azov movement can play its historical role, she believes: “That’s why, on a global scale, as pompous and surreal as it may sound, we will feel a relief only when we hasten the coming of a new metahistorical aeon.”

When I interviewed Semenyaka back in 2019, she had just published her own translated selection of Jünger’s writing to be distributed among soldiers at the front. At the time, I thought her prediction of a coming great war against Russia, in which the West would be embroiled and in which Ukraine would forge a deeper cultural and defence relationship with Poland and the Baltic states as part of her Intermarium project, was a wild and unlikely fantasy. But the Azov movement, though still politically marginal, has been significantly boosted by Russia’s invasion, in numbers, military power and in its reputation as dogged defenders of the Ukrainian homeland, as during the siege of Mariupol’s Azovstal. Azov offshoots, such as Ukraine’s Third Assault Brigade and Kharkiv’s Kraken Regiment, play prominent roles in the war, and can reasonably hope to trade it for political capital — however the war ends.

Whatever the strange ambiguities of their earlier relationship, Dugin and Ukraine’s nationalist intellectuals like Semenyaka are now bitter opponents, locked in an existential conflict against each other, in a sort of esoteric Rightist shadow war distinct from but embedded within the far greater Ukraine tragedy. When the Russian state accused Azov of assassinating Dugin’s daughter Dariya Dugina — a still unproven claim — it only highlighted the strange intertwining of Russian and Ukrainian radical Right-wing politics. On the one hand, these are wildly obscure intellectual currents on the fringes of Right-wing thought; on the other, Western liberals cheering on the Russian Volunteer Corps’s raids on Belgorod, like American Republicans regurgitating Dugin’s portrayal of Zelenskyy as an incarnation of evil, have each found their own political personas influenced by them, demonstrating the strange ability of fringe politics to shape the wider world.

While Dugin’s apocalyptic worldview is now worryingly indistinguishable from that of the Russian state as a whole, Semenyaka’s, while fascinating, remains marginal in Ukraine. Yet each embodies the unexpected resurgence of esoteric Rightist ideas from the early 20th century in a hypermodern war that looks set to define the contours of modern Europe. Far from obscure 20th century marginalia, Germany’s interwar Conservative Revolution looks more relevant than ever: sometimes, history is written on the fringes.


Aris Roussinos is an UnHerd columnist and a former war reporter.

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Steve White
Steve White
1 year ago

As Gore Vidal called William F. Buckly a “crypto-Nazi”, Aris just essentially called any talk like Tucker Carlson did last week type of “crypto-Putin-supporter”. At least through the influence of what he calls Putin’s Philosopher King. Make no mistake, all his words, and more words, this is at the middle of his little thesis, or at least an important marker to maintain his own right connections on his own chosen side.
This is typical intellectual Western narrative control, that sounds profound, but merges right back in with establishment narratives. Is Aris is outing himself as a “crypto-American-hegemon” supporter?
I will say this again. If you want to understand what is going on in Ukraine, or with Taiwan (new-Ukraine) you must understand American military/economic hegemony. Covid/Digital-Health-Passports, the coming CBCDs, corporate slavery to ESG, the US military industrial complex where trillions make a swirling circle that fills the right pockets, and Blackrock who owns little pieces of just about everything now.
How many times do we have to find out after the fact, after the narrative control, things like Saddam didn’t have weapons of mass destruction… oops.. Russia didn’t blow up the pipeline… oops. Covid wasn’t natural cave bat evolution…oops… vaccines weren’t safe and effective… oops. Inflation wasn’t transitory, oops…
Aris is good at saying things that sounds like he is adding to the intellectual debate of thoughts and ideas that help everyone think, and come to better understanding of the truth, but when the results are always predictably going to back to reinforcing establishment narratives, this is just intellectualizing propaganda so people can arrive at the establishment position by their own intellectual pursuits. That way they get to feel both smart and be useful to the proper larger agenda. Yet this is all just something that does nothing to add to understanding the truth, but just reinforces the latest “oops”. 
Aris could still be a good guy, but his head is still down in a trench, and he doesn’t understand the global metanarrative that ties global leadership under the American hegemon together which is much larger than a single writer, even a “philosopher king” level writer. Because, we must remember that the objective truth is always the thing that dictates reality. Not the spinning of writers. The objective should always be understanding the truth, not spin. Spin is the real enemy. Get to the truth, say the truth. 

Last edited 1 year ago by Steve White
Peter Buchan
Peter Buchan
1 year ago
Reply to  Steve White

Trenchantly put, Mr White.
Roussinos has demonstrated a habit of doing precisely what you have drawn attention to here; the tendency to assert a great many things without offering reasonable evidence along with the requisite interconnections between fact; “Putin’s Philosopher King” (he is assuredly not that) – is yet more vapid, low-resolution thinking. Par for the course these days.
To paraphrase Sam Gerrans: a so-called intellectual class that has developed the habit of “consuming pint-sized ideas in tot glasses”.
Little wonder, then, that (what passes for) leadership in the West has been miscalculating so badly, and for so for so long. If your models of how things work are idealistic or just plain wrong; complicated and inductive rather than complex and rooted in realism, you will be outmaneuvered again and again.
At great cost to us all.

Albert McGloan
Albert McGloan
1 year ago
Reply to  Steve White

Very well said. Aris worked for Vice, a regime mouthpiece like RT.

Bruce V
Bruce V
1 year ago
Reply to  Steve White

minor errata: think it’s CBDC. Your “oops” paragraph is great.

Tony Testosteroni
Tony Testosteroni
1 year ago
Reply to  Steve White

>Aris could still be a good guy, but his head is still down in a trench, and he doesn’t understand the global metanarrative
>Spin is the real enemy. Get to the truth, say the truth.
Based on what you just wrote you don’t understand the meta narrative and are regurgitating spin

Last edited 1 year ago by Tony Testosteroni
Peter Buchan
Peter Buchan
1 year ago
Reply to  Steve White

Trenchantly put, Mr White.
Roussinos has demonstrated a habit of doing precisely what you have drawn attention to here; the tendency to assert a great many things without offering reasonable evidence along with the requisite interconnections between fact; “Putin’s Philosopher King” (he is assuredly not that) – is yet more vapid, low-resolution thinking. Par for the course these days.
To paraphrase Sam Gerrans: a so-called intellectual class that has developed the habit of “consuming pint-sized ideas in tot glasses”.
Little wonder, then, that (what passes for) leadership in the West has been miscalculating so badly, and for so for so long. If your models of how things work are idealistic or just plain wrong; complicated and inductive rather than complex and rooted in realism, you will be outmaneuvered again and again.
At great cost to us all.

Albert McGloan
Albert McGloan
1 year ago
Reply to  Steve White

Very well said. Aris worked for Vice, a regime mouthpiece like RT.

Bruce V
Bruce V
1 year ago
Reply to  Steve White

minor errata: think it’s CBDC. Your “oops” paragraph is great.

Tony Testosteroni
Tony Testosteroni
1 year ago
Reply to  Steve White

>Aris could still be a good guy, but his head is still down in a trench, and he doesn’t understand the global metanarrative
>Spin is the real enemy. Get to the truth, say the truth.
Based on what you just wrote you don’t understand the meta narrative and are regurgitating spin

Last edited 1 year ago by Tony Testosteroni
Steve White
Steve White
1 year ago

As Gore Vidal called William F. Buckly a “crypto-Nazi”, Aris just essentially called any talk like Tucker Carlson did last week type of “crypto-Putin-supporter”. At least through the influence of what he calls Putin’s Philosopher King. Make no mistake, all his words, and more words, this is at the middle of his little thesis, or at least an important marker to maintain his own right connections on his own chosen side.
This is typical intellectual Western narrative control, that sounds profound, but merges right back in with establishment narratives. Is Aris is outing himself as a “crypto-American-hegemon” supporter?
I will say this again. If you want to understand what is going on in Ukraine, or with Taiwan (new-Ukraine) you must understand American military/economic hegemony. Covid/Digital-Health-Passports, the coming CBCDs, corporate slavery to ESG, the US military industrial complex where trillions make a swirling circle that fills the right pockets, and Blackrock who owns little pieces of just about everything now.
How many times do we have to find out after the fact, after the narrative control, things like Saddam didn’t have weapons of mass destruction… oops.. Russia didn’t blow up the pipeline… oops. Covid wasn’t natural cave bat evolution…oops… vaccines weren’t safe and effective… oops. Inflation wasn’t transitory, oops…
Aris is good at saying things that sounds like he is adding to the intellectual debate of thoughts and ideas that help everyone think, and come to better understanding of the truth, but when the results are always predictably going to back to reinforcing establishment narratives, this is just intellectualizing propaganda so people can arrive at the establishment position by their own intellectual pursuits. That way they get to feel both smart and be useful to the proper larger agenda. Yet this is all just something that does nothing to add to understanding the truth, but just reinforces the latest “oops”. 
Aris could still be a good guy, but his head is still down in a trench, and he doesn’t understand the global metanarrative that ties global leadership under the American hegemon together which is much larger than a single writer, even a “philosopher king” level writer. Because, we must remember that the objective truth is always the thing that dictates reality. Not the spinning of writers. The objective should always be understanding the truth, not spin. Spin is the real enemy. Get to the truth, say the truth. 

Last edited 1 year ago by Steve White
Nick Faulks
Nick Faulks
1 year ago

Aris suggests that the “American populist Right”, which he presumably defines as anyone who has ever voted for Trump, is heavily influenced by Dugin. Utterly ridiculous.

Dominic A
Dominic A
1 year ago
Reply to  Nick Faulks

Seems more like your words than his, which are:

“If anything, the apocalyptic rhetoric he applies to the Ukraine war has greater currency in the West, particularly among the American populist Right.”

Dominic A
Dominic A
1 year ago
Reply to  Nick Faulks

Seems more like your words than his, which are:

“If anything, the apocalyptic rhetoric he applies to the Ukraine war has greater currency in the West, particularly among the American populist Right.”

Nick Faulks
Nick Faulks
1 year ago

Aris suggests that the “American populist Right”, which he presumably defines as anyone who has ever voted for Trump, is heavily influenced by Dugin. Utterly ridiculous.

Steve Murray
Steve Murray
1 year ago

Are we moved a single step further on in exploring our humanity by the pseudo-intellectual parasites that feed upon conflict and prey upon the minds of those directly engaged in it?

Mangling and manipulating concepts in the way that both Dugin and Semenyaka engage in may appeal to those who’re “hard of thinking” (and that includes plenty of politicians and academics) but what positive purpose do they serve? Fomenting division is quite simply anti-civilisational.

An example of such a concept would be Pan-Europeanism. What does that actually mean? Who does it mean? Who agrees to be lumped into this 1984-like over-simplified bloc? And by definition, which parts of the rest of humanity does it exclude?

All it acheives is to take us farther from the more important effort to truly understand ourselves, as fully as it’s possible to do so. Being influenced by these writers allows those afraid to do so to escape into their view of the world, simplified beyond recognition.

Last edited 1 year ago by Steve Murray
Martin Bollis
Martin Bollis
1 year ago
Reply to  Steve Murray

That was my reaction. These people live only on a page. They should spend more time in a trench to truly appreciate the real life effects of their dreams of glory.

N Satori
N Satori
1 year ago
Reply to  Martin Bollis

I hope you are not suggesting that Ernst Jünger only lived on a page.

Martin Bollis
Martin Bollis
1 year ago
Reply to  N Satori

Definitely not Ernst. Storm of Steel is a remarkable book, not only for the vividness of its descriptions but also for the stark contrast between his attitude to the war and those of most of the British war memoires.

N Satori
N Satori
1 year ago
Reply to  Martin Bollis

Remarkable indeed. I’m just reading that biography Aris Roussinos mentions (by the way, the author is Thomas Nevin not Nevinin). Jünger led an adventurous life even before his WWI experiences, even serving in the French Foreign Legion as a youth.

Charles Stanhope
Charles Stanhope
1 year ago
Reply to  Martin Bollis

Precisely, jubilant even, rather than morose.

Years ago I had the pleasure of exploring many of Jünger’s battlefields near Arras, so detailed were his accounts.

In later life wasn’t he quite an advocate of LSD or Acid to lapse into the vernacular?

N Satori
N Satori
1 year ago
Reply to  Martin Bollis

Remarkable indeed. I’m just reading that biography Aris Roussinos mentions (by the way, the author is Thomas Nevin not Nevinin). Jünger led an adventurous life even before his WWI experiences, even serving in the French Foreign Legion as a youth.

Charles Stanhope
Charles Stanhope
1 year ago
Reply to  Martin Bollis

Precisely, jubilant even, rather than morose.

Years ago I had the pleasure of exploring many of Jünger’s battlefields near Arras, so detailed were his accounts.

In later life wasn’t he quite an advocate of LSD or Acid to lapse into the vernacular?

Gayle Rosenthal
Gayle Rosenthal
1 year ago
Reply to  N Satori

They ARE suggesting that. The AZOV are very real and not only that, they have made alliance with a Jewish President. The idea that any of the players – Russians, communists, “Nazis”, PanEurAsians (or the EU), NATO, Jews, Christians and Muslims, “live on a page”…. is folly. Especially real and puzzling in an interesting way, is the fact that the AZOV are not clearly Nazis. Nor are the Israelis “Nazis” vis-a-vis the “Palestinians”. I put that one in quotes because “Palestinians” are probably the closest to a group that “lives on the page” but has deadly real impact on the world. We are way past buzzwords of the past to analyze our current political problems.
In short, there is a Conservative and rightward moving wave that hopes to save Liberal Western civilization by pruning some of its stupidity, like the proposal that “Migration is a Human Right.” Waves of fences and capsized boats will define the 21st Century. And witness the undoing of the Balkan Agreements.

N Satori
N Satori
1 year ago

The West, it seems, has nothing but moral obligations to fulfill while the migrating third world has nothing but moral rights and material demands. Bit of a symbiotic relationship isn’t it?

N Satori
N Satori
1 year ago

The West, it seems, has nothing but moral obligations to fulfill while the migrating third world has nothing but moral rights and material demands. Bit of a symbiotic relationship isn’t it?

Martin Bollis
Martin Bollis
1 year ago
Reply to  N Satori

Definitely not Ernst. Storm of Steel is a remarkable book, not only for the vividness of its descriptions but also for the stark contrast between his attitude to the war and those of most of the British war memoires.

Gayle Rosenthal
Gayle Rosenthal
1 year ago
Reply to  N Satori

They ARE suggesting that. The AZOV are very real and not only that, they have made alliance with a Jewish President. The idea that any of the players – Russians, communists, “Nazis”, PanEurAsians (or the EU), NATO, Jews, Christians and Muslims, “live on a page”…. is folly. Especially real and puzzling in an interesting way, is the fact that the AZOV are not clearly Nazis. Nor are the Israelis “Nazis” vis-a-vis the “Palestinians”. I put that one in quotes because “Palestinians” are probably the closest to a group that “lives on the page” but has deadly real impact on the world. We are way past buzzwords of the past to analyze our current political problems.
In short, there is a Conservative and rightward moving wave that hopes to save Liberal Western civilization by pruning some of its stupidity, like the proposal that “Migration is a Human Right.” Waves of fences and capsized boats will define the 21st Century. And witness the undoing of the Balkan Agreements.

Tony Testosteroni
Tony Testosteroni
1 year ago
Reply to  Martin Bollis

> They should spend more time in a trench
tell that to the azov guys lool you should spend more time in the trench

N Satori
N Satori
1 year ago
Reply to  Martin Bollis

I hope you are not suggesting that Ernst Jünger only lived on a page.

Tony Testosteroni
Tony Testosteroni
1 year ago
Reply to  Martin Bollis

> They should spend more time in a trench
tell that to the azov guys lool you should spend more time in the trench

B Timothy
B Timothy
1 year ago
Reply to  Steve Murray

You either believe we all share sacred bonds as societies which we should used to guide our lives as we did for millennia…

Or slicing off children’s genitalia is helping them “discover their true selves” as the individual “liberation” is celebrated above all else

That’s where we’re at right now

Last edited 1 year ago by B Timothy
Steve Murray
Steve Murray
1 year ago
Reply to  B Timothy

I’m afraid your either/or rhetoric is a much greater problem than you seem to realise, otherwise you wouldn’t be posting it in those terms.

B Timothy
B Timothy
1 year ago
Reply to  Steve Murray

I’m afraid that liberating humanity from our biological prison is what the liberals are indeed pushing, as Dugin predicted well over a decade ago now.

It is the next logical step of the “liberation” of the individual

I would like to be wrong. But I’m not. The liberals have already made the individuals base sexual satisfaction the highest God in the west.

Edit those bastions of freedom in Hungary and Poland excepted, of course. Not everyone in the West is infected by the liberal disease.

Last edited 1 year ago by B Timothy
Steve Murray
Steve Murray
1 year ago
Reply to  B Timothy

“The liberals…”
“…biological prison…”
“…the highest God…”
“…those bastions of freedom in Hungary and Poland…”
Student-level cut & paste, devoid of critical thinking.

Tony Testosteroni
Tony Testosteroni
1 year ago
Reply to  Steve Murray

Student-level cut & paste, devoid of critical thinking is what they do in contemporary worldwide university humanities departments and on the political scenes

Last edited 1 year ago by Tony Testosteroni
Tony Testosteroni
Tony Testosteroni
1 year ago
Reply to  Steve Murray

Student-level cut & paste, devoid of critical thinking is what they do in contemporary worldwide university humanities departments and on the political scenes

Last edited 1 year ago by Tony Testosteroni
Steve Murray
Steve Murray
1 year ago
Reply to  B Timothy

“The liberals…”
“…biological prison…”
“…the highest God…”
“…those bastions of freedom in Hungary and Poland…”
Student-level cut & paste, devoid of critical thinking.

B Timothy
B Timothy
1 year ago
Reply to  Steve Murray

I’m afraid that liberating humanity from our biological prison is what the liberals are indeed pushing, as Dugin predicted well over a decade ago now.

It is the next logical step of the “liberation” of the individual

I would like to be wrong. But I’m not. The liberals have already made the individuals base sexual satisfaction the highest God in the west.

Edit those bastions of freedom in Hungary and Poland excepted, of course. Not everyone in the West is infected by the liberal disease.

Last edited 1 year ago by B Timothy
Steve Murray
Steve Murray
1 year ago
Reply to  B Timothy

I’m afraid your either/or rhetoric is a much greater problem than you seem to realise, otherwise you wouldn’t be posting it in those terms.

Tony Testosteroni
Tony Testosteroni
1 year ago
Reply to  Steve Murray

Pan- Europeanism is anti civilizational ? Is your view of pro civilization one of egalitarianism and inclusion ? Why would it be 1984 like ? Is contemporary “progressive” west not 1984 like ?

Steve Murray
Steve Murray
1 year ago

Yes.

No.

Trying to force a disparate mass of people into one group.

If it is, that doesn’t contradict my argument.

Tony Testosteroni
Tony Testosteroni
1 year ago
Reply to  Steve Murray

>Yes.
How so ?
>Trying to force a disparate mass of people into one group
Isn’t that happening happening now under progressive slogans ? Why are you assuming that it would be forced, and are they that disparate ? Seems like you’re assuming that pan europeanism is about erasing ethnic/tribal distinctions and creating something like the “new soviet man” or american

Last edited 1 year ago by Tony Testosteroni
Tony Testosteroni
Tony Testosteroni
1 year ago
Reply to  Steve Murray

>Yes.
How so ?
>Trying to force a disparate mass of people into one group
Isn’t that happening happening now under progressive slogans ? Why are you assuming that it would be forced, and are they that disparate ? Seems like you’re assuming that pan europeanism is about erasing ethnic/tribal distinctions and creating something like the “new soviet man” or american

Last edited 1 year ago by Tony Testosteroni
Steve Murray
Steve Murray
1 year ago

Yes.

No.

Trying to force a disparate mass of people into one group.

If it is, that doesn’t contradict my argument.

Martin Bollis
Martin Bollis
1 year ago
Reply to  Steve Murray

That was my reaction. These people live only on a page. They should spend more time in a trench to truly appreciate the real life effects of their dreams of glory.

B Timothy
B Timothy
1 year ago
Reply to  Steve Murray

You either believe we all share sacred bonds as societies which we should used to guide our lives as we did for millennia…

Or slicing off children’s genitalia is helping them “discover their true selves” as the individual “liberation” is celebrated above all else

That’s where we’re at right now

Last edited 1 year ago by B Timothy
Tony Testosteroni
Tony Testosteroni
1 year ago
Reply to  Steve Murray

Pan- Europeanism is anti civilizational ? Is your view of pro civilization one of egalitarianism and inclusion ? Why would it be 1984 like ? Is contemporary “progressive” west not 1984 like ?

Steve Murray
Steve Murray
1 year ago

Are we moved a single step further on in exploring our humanity by the pseudo-intellectual parasites that feed upon conflict and prey upon the minds of those directly engaged in it?

Mangling and manipulating concepts in the way that both Dugin and Semenyaka engage in may appeal to those who’re “hard of thinking” (and that includes plenty of politicians and academics) but what positive purpose do they serve? Fomenting division is quite simply anti-civilisational.

An example of such a concept would be Pan-Europeanism. What does that actually mean? Who does it mean? Who agrees to be lumped into this 1984-like over-simplified bloc? And by definition, which parts of the rest of humanity does it exclude?

All it acheives is to take us farther from the more important effort to truly understand ourselves, as fully as it’s possible to do so. Being influenced by these writers allows those afraid to do so to escape into their view of the world, simplified beyond recognition.

Last edited 1 year ago by Steve Murray
Jonathan Nash
Jonathan Nash
1 year ago

Perhaps Mr Dugin should be mobilised to the front line so that he can get some first-hand experience of what he is recommending for everybody.

Last edited 1 year ago by Jonathan Nash
Jonathan Nash
Jonathan Nash
1 year ago

Perhaps Mr Dugin should be mobilised to the front line so that he can get some first-hand experience of what he is recommending for everybody.

Last edited 1 year ago by Jonathan Nash
Ian Johnston
Ian Johnston
1 year ago

Aris, your attempts to give avowed white nationalists like Semenyaka a patina of intellectual credibility is unworthy of your talents.

Billy Bob
Billy Bob
1 year ago
Reply to  Ian Johnston

How about Dugin?

Xaven Taner
Xaven Taner
1 year ago
Reply to  Ian Johnston

Just read her essay on Black Metal and Conservative Revolution. She makes many interesting points. I have always thought the genre at its purest was an expression of Counter Reformation rather than anti-Christianity. They rage against the disenchantment of the modern rationalist world and the loss of a direct connection to their historical community and nature. This is why they so often use images of “inverted” Catholicism.

Albert McGloan
Albert McGloan
1 year ago
Reply to  Xaven Taner

It’s surprising that so few black metal musicians have converted to a religious tradition. Perhaps satanism provides just enough to keep them trapped in the spiritual sub-basement. Has Dugin ever addressed his own journey away from satanism?

Albert McGloan
Albert McGloan
1 year ago
Reply to  Xaven Taner

It’s surprising that so few black metal musicians have converted to a religious tradition. Perhaps satanism provides just enough to keep them trapped in the spiritual sub-basement. Has Dugin ever addressed his own journey away from satanism?

Billy Bob
Billy Bob
1 year ago
Reply to  Ian Johnston

How about Dugin?

Xaven Taner
Xaven Taner
1 year ago
Reply to  Ian Johnston

Just read her essay on Black Metal and Conservative Revolution. She makes many interesting points. I have always thought the genre at its purest was an expression of Counter Reformation rather than anti-Christianity. They rage against the disenchantment of the modern rationalist world and the loss of a direct connection to their historical community and nature. This is why they so often use images of “inverted” Catholicism.

Ian Johnston
Ian Johnston
1 year ago

Aris, your attempts to give avowed white nationalists like Semenyaka a patina of intellectual credibility is unworthy of your talents.

polidori redux
polidori redux
1 year ago

Interesting piece. The below the line discussion is to avoid.

polidori redux
polidori redux
1 year ago

Interesting piece. The below the line discussion is to avoid.

Steven Targett
Steven Targett
1 year ago

I’m not a progressive nor Liberal in the American sense; Libertarian maybe. I utterly detest Tucker Carlson. An out and out racist and anti-semite the man is loathsome.

B Timothy
B Timothy
1 year ago
Reply to  Steven Targett

He’s also generally correct, but yes also loathsome

B Timothy
B Timothy
1 year ago
Reply to  Steven Targett

He’s also generally correct, but yes also loathsome

Steven Targett
Steven Targett
1 year ago

I’m not a progressive nor Liberal in the American sense; Libertarian maybe. I utterly detest Tucker Carlson. An out and out racist and anti-semite the man is loathsome.

Emre S
Emre S
1 year ago

What a fascinating read – and who better than Aris to guide through the Byzantine labyrinths of the (resurgent yet still marginal) Right-wing thought making rounds between Germany and its eastern border? I think this is a valuable piece not only because it’s very interesting intellectually, but also the “Anglo-Saxons” are being drawn into this deadly vortex as well and not for the first time.

Last edited 1 year ago by Emre S
Emre S
Emre S
1 year ago

What a fascinating read – and who better than Aris to guide through the Byzantine labyrinths of the (resurgent yet still marginal) Right-wing thought making rounds between Germany and its eastern border? I think this is a valuable piece not only because it’s very interesting intellectually, but also the “Anglo-Saxons” are being drawn into this deadly vortex as well and not for the first time.

Last edited 1 year ago by Emre S
Dominic A
Dominic A
1 year ago

Psychology is the appropriate field to understand Dugin, Putin et al; not politics. As Peter Pomerantsev and Gary Kasparov have set out.

Dominic A
Dominic A
1 year ago
Reply to  Dominic A

i.e. – like many radicals these are narcisistically damaged people, acting out, not brave enough, or able to interrogate their own minds.

Dominic A
Dominic A
1 year ago
Reply to  Dominic A

i.e. – like many radicals these are narcisistically damaged people, acting out, not brave enough, or able to interrogate their own minds.

Dominic A
Dominic A
1 year ago

Psychology is the appropriate field to understand Dugin, Putin et al; not politics. As Peter Pomerantsev and Gary Kasparov have set out.

Andrew F
Andrew F
1 year ago

I like authors writing in most cases.
But the parting of ways between Dugin and Semenyaka is not really surprising.
He only accepted her as a useful stooge of, Russia dominated, Euresian project.
After Russia invasion of Ukraine she realised that that was delusional.
Even now, her new conservatism platform is nonsense.
Without help of neocons, globalisers, Liberal West supremacists etc, Ukraine would be no more.
Silent majority in the West wants less globalisation, less immigration, less woke.
Yes, most traditional parties of the West don’t reflect this desires in their policies.
But ideas of conservative revolution as espoused by Semenyaka are not viable in modern world.

B Timothy
B Timothy
1 year ago
Reply to  Andrew F

The same paradox that exists for Ukrainian nationalist anti-liberals would equally have applied to the Afghan Mujahideen, who would not have been able to remove the Soviets without the aid of the westerners. But the liberals completely failed at being able to build a state there (or in Iraq) that was viable as anything other than a U.S. military outpost.

Just because the liberals are taking a side in this Slavic Blood Feud doesn’t mean their ideology would be successful there, either.

B Timothy
B Timothy
1 year ago
Reply to  Andrew F

The same paradox that exists for Ukrainian nationalist anti-liberals would equally have applied to the Afghan Mujahideen, who would not have been able to remove the Soviets without the aid of the westerners. But the liberals completely failed at being able to build a state there (or in Iraq) that was viable as anything other than a U.S. military outpost.

Just because the liberals are taking a side in this Slavic Blood Feud doesn’t mean their ideology would be successful there, either.

Andrew F
Andrew F
1 year ago

I like authors writing in most cases.
But the parting of ways between Dugin and Semenyaka is not really surprising.
He only accepted her as a useful stooge of, Russia dominated, Euresian project.
After Russia invasion of Ukraine she realised that that was delusional.
Even now, her new conservatism platform is nonsense.
Without help of neocons, globalisers, Liberal West supremacists etc, Ukraine would be no more.
Silent majority in the West wants less globalisation, less immigration, less woke.
Yes, most traditional parties of the West don’t reflect this desires in their policies.
But ideas of conservative revolution as espoused by Semenyaka are not viable in modern world.

Nanda Kishor das
Nanda Kishor das
1 year ago

If you’re looking for a fringe ideology becoming wildly influential, look no further than the woke apocalypse we seem to be in the midst of. As for Carlson and other figures in the Right being critical of Zelenski, is it imposible to think they have their own reasons for not hailing him as the oppressed hero the mainstream narrative is so intent on shoving down our throats? Not all Traditionalists are esoteric and nonsensical.

Nanda Kishor das
Nanda Kishor das
1 year ago

If you’re looking for a fringe ideology becoming wildly influential, look no further than the woke apocalypse we seem to be in the midst of. As for Carlson and other figures in the Right being critical of Zelenski, is it imposible to think they have their own reasons for not hailing him as the oppressed hero the mainstream narrative is so intent on shoving down our throats? Not all Traditionalists are esoteric and nonsensical.

Jürg Gassmann
Jürg Gassmann
1 year ago

It seems to me that Dugin is not denying the existence of Ukraine or of her right to exist, but making the argument that the current government of Ukraine is not representing the “true Ukraine” or her interests.

Jürg Gassmann
Jürg Gassmann
1 year ago

It seems to me that Dugin is not denying the existence of Ukraine or of her right to exist, but making the argument that the current government of Ukraine is not representing the “true Ukraine” or her interests.

Albert McGloan
Albert McGloan
1 year ago

Is there any proof for the following statement? “Dugin’s apocalyptic worldview is now worryingly indistinguishable from that of the Russian state as a whole”.
You can want Ukraine to win and also rightly describe Zelensky as “sweaty and rat-like, a comedian turned oligarch, a persecutor of Christians, a friend of BlackRock”.

Albert McGloan
Albert McGloan
1 year ago

Is there any proof for the following statement? “Dugin’s apocalyptic worldview is now worryingly indistinguishable from that of the Russian state as a whole”.
You can want Ukraine to win and also rightly describe Zelensky as “sweaty and rat-like, a comedian turned oligarch, a persecutor of Christians, a friend of BlackRock”.

Jürg Gassmann
Jürg Gassmann
1 year ago

Can the editors please read the article before they invent the title? Mr Roussinos clearly states that Mr. Dugin is NOT “Putin’s philosopher king”.

Martin Smith
Martin Smith
1 year ago

I do believe that an unaccountable global elite has infiltrated our national governments and instititions and is driving us consciously or not towards an atomised trans-human future. Family and real community, long in decay, are now in an escalating and rapid decline, replaced by ‘identities’ and faux ‘communities’ based on categories developed in and promulgated by elite instititions. The trans-gender horror, the barely disgused normalising of pedophilia, open displays in ‘entertainment’ of satanism, mass trafficking of slave labour, women, men and children traded for sexual purposes… and all under the banner of multi-culturalism and a ‘human right’ to emigrate in a borderless world… never before has so much evil mascaraded as so much good. And all driven by the technological, pharmaceutical and ‘charitable’ NGOs and ‘Foundations’ which operate unaccountably in the intergovernmental nexus that really rules what’s left of our hollowed out nations. So Dugin certainly sees the problem. History he says is cyclical not linear, ‘progress’ a delusion, and that the old tunes are not just coming back but never actually went away.

Martin Smith
Martin Smith
1 year ago

I do believe that an unaccountable global elite has infiltrated our national governments and instititions and is driving us consciously or not towards an atomised trans-human future. Family and real community, long in decay, are now in an escalating and rapid decline, replaced by ‘identities’ and faux ‘communities’ based on categories developed in and promulgated by elite instititions. The trans-gender horror, the barely disgused normalising of pedophilia, open displays in ‘entertainment’ of satanism, mass trafficking of slave labour, women, men and children traded for sexual purposes… and all under the banner of multi-culturalism and a ‘human right’ to emigrate in a borderless world… never before has so much evil mascaraded as so much good. And all driven by the technological, pharmaceutical and ‘charitable’ NGOs and ‘Foundations’ which operate unaccountably in the intergovernmental nexus that really rules what’s left of our hollowed out nations. So Dugin certainly sees the problem. History he says is cyclical not linear, ‘progress’ a delusion, and that the old tunes are not just coming back but never actually went away.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
5 months ago

In Russia, Europe and the West has always been seen as corrupt, decaying, immoral and inhuman – under the Tsars, the Soviets and now Putin. Dugin comes from a long tradition of Slavophile thought or as in its contemporary edition – Eurasian thought. Westernisers like Navalny have always really been on the defensive. Communism arose in Russia from European thought but in practice was quickly eclipsed by the Slavophile impulse.

B Timothy
B Timothy
1 year ago

Dugin is by far the most interesting political thinker of the 21st Century, and the Fourth Political Theory is perhaps the great political tract of the post-Cold War era.

Meanwhile the liberal scum seek to “liberate” children from their anatomy while oblivious western authors laugh at Dugin’s prediction that “liberating” humanity from the physical form would be next. How is this not the obvious next step of “liberation” to a philosophical tradition which values “liberation” of the individual (and, especially, the embracing of the individuals base sexual desires above the sacred bonds of society) as the highest good?

Kingsnorth is the only one who gets it. He just doesn’t know everything he writes has been covered by Dugin.

I wish we had more Duginists in the West. We need to utterly reject the path of individual “liberation” via atomization that started with destroying communal bonds and is now at work with “liberating” humanity from our own biology.

F That Serpent! In God We Trust!

Last edited 1 year ago by B Timothy
Tony Testosteroni
Tony Testosteroni
1 year ago
Reply to  B Timothy

He’s a 20th century thinker and a very mediocre one too

Tony Testosteroni
Tony Testosteroni
1 year ago
Reply to  B Timothy

He’s a 20th century thinker and a very mediocre one too

B Timothy
B Timothy
1 year ago

Dugin is by far the most interesting political thinker of the 21st Century, and the Fourth Political Theory is perhaps the great political tract of the post-Cold War era.

Meanwhile the liberal scum seek to “liberate” children from their anatomy while oblivious western authors laugh at Dugin’s prediction that “liberating” humanity from the physical form would be next. How is this not the obvious next step of “liberation” to a philosophical tradition which values “liberation” of the individual (and, especially, the embracing of the individuals base sexual desires above the sacred bonds of society) as the highest good?

Kingsnorth is the only one who gets it. He just doesn’t know everything he writes has been covered by Dugin.

I wish we had more Duginists in the West. We need to utterly reject the path of individual “liberation” via atomization that started with destroying communal bonds and is now at work with “liberating” humanity from our own biology.

F That Serpent! In God We Trust!

Last edited 1 year ago by B Timothy