This is the second part of a two-part series by Vinicius. The first part can be found here.
IV Putin makes Dugin’s ideology official
After years of dropping hints, and encouraging the close alliance between Russian military and intelligence services with Dugin, Vladimir Putin has now embraced the ideology explicitly.
Putin’s Valdai Speech. 7/11/24.
Since 2004, The Valdai Club has functioned as a Russian version of the Davos summit. It is a gathering of Russian and international elites. These summits aim to project Russian influence internationally.
President Putin’s address at the most recent Valdai summit explicitly endorses the main contours of Dugin’s ideology. Putin’s core principle repeats the hatred of all dogma which is at the core of modern Russia’s quarrel with the Christian West: “It is untenable to adopt any conventional… code, and dictate it as an infallible truth to others in perpetuity”; “everyone is entitled to have their own vision, which is no better or worse than others – it is just different”.1 At a stroke, the Russian President rejects the Gospel’s Good News that it alone is true, and applies to all men, everywhere.
Introducing the Hegelianism with which Russian Messianist thought is impregnated, Putin claimed that differences in religion only “reflect … the dialectics of history”. He claimed that the “1917 Bolshevik revolution” and the “great French Revolution” were “milestones in the development path of humanity”:
“Our country, then called the Soviet Union, made a major contribution to consolidating [progress], [opposing “colonialism”] whether in Africa, Southeast Asia, the Middle East or Latin America. I would like to emphasise that in the mid-1980s, it was the Soviet Union that called for an end to ideological confrontation”. Putin was referring to the Soviet Union’s violent implantation of Communist regimes across the globe. This approval of past violent expansionism can easily indicate a sanction for future actions of the same kind.
The address asserts that the Soviet Union’s agenda was one of advancing a world of mutually respectful civilisations or “poles”; a multi-polar world opposed to the liberal West’s “unipolar” model.
Putin makes hay on the theme of modern Western decadence. But his message is equally insistent that even the traditional Christian West, or Christianity itself, must never be presented as superior to other religions or philosophies: “It [the West] is precisely “one of” alongside other rapidly advancing nations and groups”. Putin indicates that these “rapidly advancing groups”, to which the Christian West may never claim to be superior, are to be found in the BRICS membership: China, India, United Arab Emirates, Indonesia, Egypt. He indicates that North Korea is part of this rich multipolarity.
Confucianism is a secularist philosophy that professes no religious doctrine, and Putin takes this civilisation as the model for Russia, and even for Europe: “Eastern philosophy… takes a fundamentally different approach [to that of the West]. It seeks harmony of interests… All the ethnicities of Russia, throughout history, whenever possible, have similarly emphasised that the priority is not to impose one’s views” [Russia has four official religions including Islam, Judaism and Buddhism]; “I think our friends from China are certainly with us today. There is nothing about domination in the Chinese philosophy. They do not strive for domination”. Putin excused the turmoil caused by Chinese aggression towards the Philippines: “China has nothing to do with it.”
Putin endorsed the submerging of the Christian West into an Asian bloc: “we must try to create a Eurasian security system… [Asia is Vast] Europe obviously can, and I believe that it must, become an integral part of this system” through “the Belt and Road” (the Chinese expansionist strategy).
Putin’s religious relativism was evident when he criticised the Paris Olympic ceremony as wrong, merely because devout Christians might be offended: “similar situations arise for followers of Islam when the Quran is burned or when illustrations, including comics of the Prophet, are published”.
Victory, for Putin’s Russian Messianism, is not based on any universal truth, but only on the Hegelian dialectic of history: “the march of history cannot be halted”, he claims, referring to efforts to restrain Moscow’s actions.
His speech contrasted societies as “living” organisms with their own mind and “truth”, to universal principles. This scepticism is the source of intolerance. Any religion which does not accept being “just one more of”, can be depicted as an enemy of social harmony. This is the basis for persecution of the Catholic Church and has been from Antiquity, when it refused to be part of pagan Rome’s Pantheon of religions.
V. Some examples of Russian interference among Western nationalists and traditional Catholics
The Messianism expressed by Dugin and Putin takes Conservatism to its ultimate conclusions. It is therefore an ideology to which conservatives in the West have very few defences, because they already share its basic principles (human nature as debased outside society; society as an absolute that creates human nature and personhood; scepticism; secularism).
Moscow is content to work with practically any ideology or religion in the West in order to pursue its goals, which should be a sobering thought to those nationalists who believe that can get something for nothing by collaborating. Just before the recent German elections, Alexander Dugin called on the factions considered useful to the “multipolar” future to vote for the right-wing AfD: “Vote AfD if you are nihilist, socialist, nationalist, Christian, Muslim, pagan, Buddhist, agnostic, atheist. Vote AfD and you will see how wonderful reality can be”.2
Archbishop Vigano took part in an international conference organised by Alexander Dugin last year. Vigano has begun to use the same relativist concepts as Dugin, referring to an alliance of “traditional” civilisations to oppose liberal or socialist organisations.
For instance, he asserted that Orthodox Judaism was “traditional”, “like” traditional Catholicism, in contrast to “Zionism”. Michael Matt (The Remnant, 24/11/24) reiterates Vigano’s idea that Zionism is a heresy from “Orthodox Judaism”. He compared Orthodox Judaism to Orthodox Catholicism:
“ ‘Americanism and Zionism’ [are] Just words, maybe, but both are heresies condemned by the Catholic Church and orthodox Judaism, respectively”.
The well-known conservative, Tucker Carlson, was outraged that Amazon would not sell Dugin’s books.3 Steve Bannon, who is very close to Donald Trump, has long been an admirer of Dugin’s worldview, and shares his love of Guenon and other occultist authors. Yet he, like Carlson, has rights to the city when it comes to conservatism in the United States. I don’t know if Carlson is merely “smiling upon” Russian Messianism, but Bannon has always been devoted to Guenon’s worldview. The names mentioned above are very influential in religious and political circles. Many others could be added to this list.
VI: The Future
Christians are not the only ones to recognise that the liberal West won’t last for long. Ideologies, even religions, that have long despised the traditional West, are using the demise of liberalism as their chance to move in. The appeal of Russian Messianism to a West that is heartily sick of liberalism is undeniable. The appearance of a Moscow/Berlin (or northern German) axis is more than logical, given that modern German nationalism has its own anti-Christian Messianism based on Enlightenment philosophies. Likewise, Moscow’s quest for a grand alliance with Islam and the atheist culture of China makes sense in a quest for victory over the West.
But two things make the defeat of Moscow’s Messianism likely. Firstly, the West, even controlled by liberalism, continues to be the home of traditional Christianity. This West also includes Iberian America and the Philippines. That old West, and Rome its centre, will never succumb, as history has shown.
Secondly, Moscow, by allying itself with civilisations that are mutually antagonistic, will have bitten off more than it can chew. There are no common values in Moscow’s “multipolar” axis except hatred of the West (in both its traditional and liberal forms). At a critical point, Islam and China will reveal themselves to be no friends of Russia, which is in a precarious situation with regard to both. At such a time, desperation and common sense may effect that often-mentioned mysterious change of heart in Russia’s political leadership, which will abandon Messianism and bring the country to union with the traditional West, by accepting that the centre of the Church is not in Moscow.
By Vinicius. by Vinicius. Vinicius is a Melbourne-based historian-researcher focussing on early modernity as the Christian Western alternative to ideological, Enlightenment modernity.
ENDNOTES
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