Danger Ahead—Part II

Though unified around the project of Universal Caliphate, Islam does not pose any great strategic danger to the West in the short term. However, nothing that happens in the Islamic world is isolated from the grand “Eurasian” strategy that today guides the governments of both Russia and China. The idea for this strategy originated in the doctrine of “National Bolshevism,” an ideological syncretism created by writer Edward Limonov and philosopher Alexander Dugin in the 1980’s. Starting from a brutally stereotyped schematic view of Western civilization, derived from Sir Karl Popper’s book, “The Open Society and Its Enemies,” Limonov dreamed of a global alliance among all the potential enemies of the Western scientific-relativistic mentality, i.e. among all the lovers of “absolute truths.” And since this alliance simply aimed to destroy relativism—and by extension, the civilization founded upon it—little did it matter to Limonov that the various absolutes he summoned to the fight contradicted one another: the negative brotherhood could include in itself, with no greater scruples of consistency, communists and Catholic traditionalists, Nazis, fascists, Islamites, Hindus, admirers of René Guénon and Julius Evola, etc. As if this notion was not elastic enough, the holy unity would even receive with open arms all manner of haters of America, even those absolutely devoid of any identifiable absolute: punks, “rebels without a cause,” Black Power militants, and so on. In the wave of anti-Americanism that has spread around the world after the dissolution of the USSR, the offer to appease old antagonisms on the basis of hatred of a common enemy seemed a relief to many people, especially to Guénonians and Evolians, who, being hostile to the “modern world” in general, saw in it the remedy of their harrowing sense of isolation.

“National Bolshevism” was just an ideology, but Alexander Dugin (whose brain is far more consistent than Limonov’s), has eventually overcome it and absorbed it into a formidable strategic synthesis, “Eurasianism,” which now guides Vladimir Putin’s international policy, and whose first substantial victory was the establishment of the Shanghai Pact (see http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/semana/060130dc.htm ), designed to expand until it can include, if possible, all the anti-American forces of the universe (especially the Muslim Brotherhood), not only around a vague ideological proposal, but very well-defined political-military plans.

Both Limonov and Dugin are sons of KGB officers, and the latter is now the maître à penser of the man who most clearly embodies the KGB in power.

Seduced by the promise of destroying the “modern world,” many traditionalists—Catholic, Orthodox, or Muslim—will probably end up becoming the best useful idiots that the KGB has ever had at its disposal. It has never occurred to any of these brilliant minds to notice that the liberalism of Karl Popper is one thing and the American nation is quite another, that the destruction or marginalization of the latter will not bring about the extinction of the execrable “modernity” and the coming of the Kingdom of God on earth, but rather the triumph of Western globalists (Bilderbergers and tutti quanti), to whom the neutralization of U.S. national power is the urgency of urgencies, and whose relations with the Russian-Chinese scheme are much friendlier than any “Eurasian” rhetoric may intimate  (the very support of the Obama administration to the Egyptian rebellion is further evidence of this).

The crisis in Egypt is not only a victory of radical Islam, but of the Eurasian project that stands behind it.

Olavo de Carvalho is the President of The Inter-American Institute and Distinguished Senior Fellow in Philosophy, Political Science, and the Humanities.

The opinions published here are those of the writer and are not necessarily endorsed by the Institute. This article was originally published in the newspaper Jornal do Brasil on May 8, 2008, and translated from the Portuguese by Alessandro Cota and Bruno Mori.

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