On Philosophy and Self-Assessment

Olshansky vs. Dugin - two types of Russian thinkers and how they view Ukrainian conflict

As many of you have heard Alexander Dugin, a famous Russian philosopher, suffered a family loss past August when his daughter, Daria Dugina, was killed in her car by explosion in what appeared to be a terrorist attack organized by Ukrainian special forces and executed by a woman, Natalia Vovk, that escaped Russia via Estonia immediately after allegedly commiting this crime. Russian FSB declared the case of terror attack solved just couple of days after the incident and everything since went into a silent mode. Natalia Vovk and those who helped her to organize the attack are now alive and well back in Ukraine.

Alexander Dugin was silent for a while for understandable reasons, but with events developing and four new subjects being added to the Russian Federation (the process was officially completed today) he came up with an article that explained the significance of the events and the overall stance of Russia in the world as the force countering evil and so forth. This article met both with approval and criticism by the patriotic community in Russia. Here I want to present mentioned article by Dugin and a response to it by a Russian publicist, Dmitry Olshansky, who is well known for his wits and sharp observations. Articles were bulk translated using Yandex translate service that in my view has best translation algorithms for the Russian language, but I have also edited the translated texts manually as usually about 5%-10% of it needs to be modified to correct semantic errors and make sure that text is readable in English. Please let me know in your comments who's position do you agree with more, Dugin or Olshansky.

I understand, publishing translated versions of these articles is a lot of reading for someone only superficially interested in what is really going on in Russia, but for somebody who wants to look behind the curtain, to see what kind of discourse is happening there, this might be an interesting read. By leaving a like and best of all a comment you'll let me know if this kind of insight is appreciated, no likes no comments would mean that I should stop polluting “radio waves” with lengthy posts of no interest to readers.

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Alexander Dugin

Article by Alexander Dugin taken from НЕЗЫГАРЬ (@russica2) Telegram channel

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September 30, 2022 was a turning historical date. On this day, all the recent events, already endowed with colossal meaning, reached a climax. On September 30th, everything mattered – not only what was said, done, signed, but also how it was all framed, with what facial expression and what voice it was pronounced.

In general, it was a turning point. Not something routine, not a continuation of the trend, but a new beginning. In Platonism, there is an important term "epistrophe" – which in Greek means "a sharp change in the direction of movement", "line transition", "change of course", and in the most sublime sense - "a great return to the source". On September 30, 2022, an epistrophe moment took place – in Russian politics, in the Ukrainian conflict, in world history.

The act of admission into Russia after the people's referendums of 4 new subjects - the DPR, the LPR, the Kherson and Zaporozhye regions – has become something much more than the reunification of Russia with Crimea. Now it is obvious to everyone that Moscow has essentially come to question the Belovezhskie Agreements (agreement signed in December 1991 by Yeltsin, Kravchuk and Shushkevich that dissolved USSR), which Putin hinted at in his epochal speech, which means that we are going to revise the entire post-Soviet history of Russia and, accordingly, the world. 

The President's speech directly expressed the key concepts – "Greater Russia", "country-civilization", the "Russian Spring", radical rejection of Western hegemony and claims to a unipolar world order. Putin has attacked the entire West–centric world order, which he equated to a neo-colonial racist system - to agonizing imperialism and apartheid.

Masks are thrown off. At the next turn of its historical existence, Russia has entered into a tough confrontation with the collective West.

This time, this confrontation includes almost all dimensions:

• geopolitical (Land Power in the battle for Rimland counterattacks Sea Power, after the era of retreats and defeats);

• civilizational (Russia as a special separate country-civilization rises up against the civilization of the postmodern collective West, denies it the right to uniqueness, universality, and recognizes the right of other civilizations to their own identity and independence);

• economic (economic relations between Russia and the West are rapidly collapsing, and the undermining of the pipelines of the Nord Stream by the Anglo–Saxons is the last touch in this economic divorce);

• cultural (Russia swears by traditional values, natural human his/her right to be, faith, a normal family, freedom and justice, and renounces individualism, posthumanism, cancel culture, LGBT, feminism, legalization of perversions and direct Satanism of the West);

• military (in Ukraine and now on the western borders of Russia itself, there is a fierce military confrontation in which the enemy is de facto, although not de jure, namely NATO, arming and supervising the Ukrainian Nazis).

All this is clearly and literally contained in the President's speech at the act of signing the agreement on the entry of 4 new subjects into Russia. This speech is a framework of a full–fledged ideology, culminating in the words of the philosopher Ivan Ilyin - an oath of allegiance to Russia, the Russian Idea.

Yes, this is far from a Victory, but it is an extremely clear and consistent consolidation of the main factors that will make this Victory a reality. You can win a battle only by joining it and fully realizing what is happening – risks, bets, resources, options for the development of events. This is exactly what was done on September 30. A difficult period of half-sleep, compromises, euphemisms, streamlined formulas and residual illusions about the true nature of the today's West has ended in Russia.

Putin's epochal speech was preceded by a number of fundamentally important measures. Each of them was a necessary condition for creating the entire context of the events of September 30.

Following our recent retreat in the Kharkov region and the breakthrough of the AFU, the country's leadership took clear and unambiguous steps:

• holding referendums in 4 subjects on joining Russia (which was necessary for the complete and irreversible consolidation of these areas in the political and legal field of Russia);

• the announcement of partial mobilization in Russia itself (as conditions for the quantitative and qualitative strengthening of the belligerent Russian army, faced with difficulties);

• introducing provisions on desertion into the legislation (which removed the problem of 500's e.g. contract refuseniks), tightening responsibility for the failure of the Military Order, clarifying the concepts of "martial law" and "wartime".

In parallel, the Anglo-Saxon forces blew up the pipelines of the Nord Stream, trying to finally cut off continental Europe (primarily Germany) from Russia. In Italy, meanwhile, the election was won by the right—wing anti-globalist coalition - not too friendly, but tactically useful to Russia.

The act of unification of the lands and Putin's speech delivered at the ceremony added an important dimension to these absolutely necessary technical steps and the international context. In fact, the President proclaimed an ideology — the Russian ideology, which organically included the principles of Orthodoxy and traditional confessions of the peoples of Russia, the ideas of Slavophiles, Eurasians, loyalty to the heroic feat of the Soviet people. Now it has become crystal clear who is fighting and why.

It is important that Ukraine was mentioned briefly in the speech and just along the way. Basically, Putin attacked the collective West, the world's liberal elites, globalism and civilizational racism, world hegemony and the desperate desire of the unjust vicious Western system to preserve the unipolar world. Ukraine is not a subject here, but only a cynically constructed tool saturated with Nazi Russophobic ideology in order to fight Russia. Ukraine is not a country – it is the territory of the battle of civilizations. And the choice of its four former regions clearly shows which side the people of Ukraine are on. He is on the side of our common Russian East Slavic civilization. And there is no ambiguity here. Any advance we make westward through this territory will mean the liberation of the new additions of our native population – liberation from Western hegemony and its perverse bloody henchmen. The fight against the Kiev regime is similar to a counter-terrorism operation. But it is pointless to talk about something with the terrorists themselves - it is necessary to resolve issues with their real owners. Putin spoke about them in his speech.

Russia entered a new era in October 2022 – the era of the Idea. Everything that we only guessed, assumed and hoped for is now called by its own names. Russia is a civilization whose main code is Tradition. It is opposed by another civilization, and its code is Anti-Tradition, dehumanization of man, lies, aggression, exploitation of countries and peoples, neocolonialism, terror and evil. At the same time, the collective West also claims the universality of its model, leaving no other choice to anyone. You can make just one choice, and anyone who disagrees is immediately branded with terrible labels – "fascist", "Putin's agent" and simply "Russian".

Russophobia today is also an ideology, a Western globalist ideology, bursting with hatred for its opposite – for the good. To be Russian, to be with Russia, means to be on the side of Truth. 

This ideological dimension forces us to take a new attitude to the liberal opposition inside Russia, and to the terrorist acts that pro-Western and most often technically led networks and groups from Kiev are trying to carry out in Russia, and to the shameful attempt of those who are subject to conscription and are fleeing the country in fear at a critical, turning point. This is not just a fear for your own life or a free choice of your own path, it is a transition to the side of world's evil. This is an act of Judas, a moral crime – before yourself first of all, before your soul, as well as before the people, the state, ancestors, descendants, history.

What matters is not how a particular person relates to the political regime that exists in Russia today (criticism and distrust may well take place here), but how he views himself, his homeland, his civilization and culture. 

To run or not to run, to betray or not to betray – the choice is existential. The fate of Judas is sad – he could not cope with his crime and strangled himself. Crowds of young men fleeing from Russia, alas, embarked on his terrible path, causing only contempt and disgust.

And vice versa: those who not only accepted mobilization, but volunteered themselves, in the new light of historical cataclysms, perform a real moral, spiritual, religious feat. This is the path of loyalty and honor - the path leading to light and holiness. This is also an "epistrophe", an appeal of oneself to one's essence, to one's inner spiritual nature. 

Against this background, the technical issues of the military company recede into the background. Now the territories of the DPR and Zaporozhye are Russia. And to liberate the areas still occupied by the enemy is a national matter. In practice, however, it is impossible to achieve this without liberating the rest of the lands of Novorossiya – from Kharkov to Odessa. And there the same question will arise with regard to Central Ukraine and even Western Ukraine. But this is still over the horizon. Now it is essential to stop the attempts of the Kiev Nazis to conduct a counteroffensive. 

Of course, it is necessary to draw conclusions after the previous breakthrough of the Ukrainian Armed Forces on the Kharkov front, and they will certainly be made. But now, in the military campaign, the factor of ideology will fully make itself felt. The war with the West takes on a completely different dimension. This is a spiritual battle between Good and Evil, and when a warrior realizes this to the depths of his soul, he fights differently. And society turns into the rear, works for Victory, giving all its strength, and lives in the same breath with the heroes defending its freedom. This is the laws of holy war. This war has definitely become sacred.

There is no reason for euphoria. It is necessary to understand the full depth of the historical – metaphysical – responsibility that now lies on each of us. Not only on the state, but on the people, on each individual.

But the main thing happened: everything finally made sense. This means that all the unthinkable heartbreaking sacrifices, both past and, alas, future, are not in vain.

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Dmitry Olshansky

Article by Dmitry Olshansky taken from his own Telegram channel Комиссар Исчезает (@komissarischezaet)

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I must admit that I have been terribly infuriated for many years now by the Duginist rhetoric that has become our official (and now even more so) about the holy war of Russia as the center of world good, tradition and something else there - with the bad West and Euro-Atlantic civilization.

There are two problems with these ideas.

First of all, it's all a lie.

There is no "tradition" in Russia - not as a historical tradition and canon, but as something that we experience "live", here and now. Russia is a country of total divorces, low birth rate, old age abandonment, lack of men acting according to their age (and, therefore, zero patriarchy), universal cynicism, individualism, cult of consumption, extremely weak religiosity (except for "cottage" paganism and esoteric beliefs), mass (and not only elite) imitation of any foreign fashions, brocken historical and family memory, indifference to everything national, multi-storey concrete buildings without a sense of land and self-perception of the owners, and, most importantly, the strongest distrust of any public and collective institutions.

The USA is an infinitely more "traditional" country than Russia. Almost every second person there has read the Bible - and he will quote it to you.

But that's okay.

Something else is worse.

The rhetoric of the struggle against the West raises the bar of the current confrontation to an obviously unattainable height, since the "West" cannot be defeated. In any case, there were no precedents in world history, and even the Bolsheviks could not cope with this.

And by posing the question so radically that the answer in any case will be unsatisfactory, Russia is also diligently driving itself into the role of world evil - already from the point of view of the other side (not the bosses there, but the Western world in principle), making abstract threatening claims that do not imply a rational way out - and at the same time not having resources for such a confrontation.

That is, the Duginist pathos of the "struggle of civilizations" - not confirmed by anything in practice and inflating the real problem to an unsolvable cosmic level - is ideal in order to lose.

But people like it.

Because it is solemn, theatrical, with a swing.

We, they say, are not just here, but we are for the redistribution of the whole world, for good against evil and nothing less than that.

Very sad.

And it should have been a long time ago - and as firmly and loudly as possible - to assert the following:

Russia has territorial claims against Ukraine in relation to its regions along the eastern border, as well as along the shores of the Azov and Black Seas. These are Russian lands inhabited by Russian people, the Ukrainization of which - and the transformation of these territories into a military springboard against Russia - we intend to prevent.

This is a local problem of two hostile political nations contesting historically, strategically, ethnically, economically and culturally valuable borderlands.

That's it, period.

And then it would be clear to the whole world what happened and what we really need.

And at the same time, they would have brought a simple and sober order to Russian heads - instead of intellectual ruin.

And decisions in the spirit of Elon Musk - this is there, this is here, this is yours, this is mine, here is such a referendum, here is another referendum, these are separated, here is autonomy, etc., - would immediately become a rational solution, since dozens of such conflicts are known to the whole world, from the Anglo-Irish and Greek-Turkish to Indo-Pakistani.

The case is difficult, often tragic, but in a sense ordinary. It can be solved.

But it was not there.

It's too small for us. We need to fight the world's evil.

Well, well.

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