Russia’s Secret Partners: The Reds and Geopolitics

“Extrapolating false fears, contemporary anti-Communism, to a larger degree, probably … gives birth to a chimera, specters, and simulacra. Communism is no longer present (as fascism has long ceased to be) – in its place there remains a plaster-cast imitation, a harmless Che Guevara, advertising mobile telephones or adorning the shirts of idle and comfortable petty-bourgeois youth. In the epoch of modernity, Che Guevara was the enemy of capitalism; in the epoch of post modernity, he advertises mobile connections on gigantic billboards. This is the style in which communism can return – in the form of a simulacra. The meaning of this commercial gesture consists in the postmodern laughing off of the pretensions of Communism to be an alternative logos, within the framework of modernity.”

Alexander Dugin[i]

Suggesting that communism is no longer a threat, Russian “philosopher” Alexander Dugin avoids any discussion of the communist structures of China, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, sub-Saharan Africa, etc. He also ignores the communist infiltration of the United States (which continues to the present day). Meanwhile, Red Chinese colonels once wrote about “unrestricted warfare,” telling Western readers that “professional armies are like gigantic dinosaurs which lack strength commensurate to their size in this new age.” Yet China has been building the biggest dinosaur of all.

The propaganda in recent years has been especially strong, from all sides, against U.S. nuclear rearmament. In her interview with Joe Rogan and others on nuclear war, Annie Jacobsen described our Cold War deterrent against Soviet nuclear attack as “a self-licking ice cream cone.” In other words: build the weapons, create the fear of their use, which generates the need for more weapons. The idea is that this kind of defense is irrational. But nothing could be further from the truth. This kind of defense is essential. Without it, we cannot survive against Russia and China. This characterization of America’s once great nuclear deterrent as “self-licking,” serves the Russian and Chinese interest. Is Jacobsen stupid? In terms of strategic thinking, I fear that many smart people share in this stupidity.

Russia and China are building nuclear weapons like crazy. How does it make sense to suggest (however indirectly) that the revitalization of our deterrent as a “self-licking ice cream cone”? Again, we must ask, who does this depiction serve? Such talk sounds plausible to many casual listeners. Yet the substance of this talk is grist for the national suicide mill. Peace-mongering is popular now, and people desperately want to believe in peace; but it’s never good to lose touch with reality. History is punctuated by wars and this is reality. Our beliefs ought to mirror reality, right? Always, in these narratives, we smell the enemy’s propaganda which is calculated to disarm us. Everything here is pleasant poison for maladapted dreamers. In Nietzsche’s prologue of the last man: “A little poison now and then; that makes for pleasant dreams. And much poison at the last for a pleasant death.”[ii]

We must remember, also, that nations are born and die in blood. In this matter, Nietzsche was a thinker who saw ahead. In the 1880s he foresaw the world wars. He foresaw massive dictatorships and ideological warfare. He foresaw that our civilization would collapse in the twenty-first century. I am worried that he saw correctly, through the insight of looming madness. He also wrote, “Of all that is written, I love only what a person has written with his blood. Write with blood, and you will find that blood is spirit.” Looking around at his nineteenth century milieu, Nietzsche turned his poison pen against “the reading idlers.” When you know what these modern readers are like, he said, a writer can do nothing. “Another century of readers,” he added, “and spirit itself will stink.” Everyone learning to read will ruin writing and thinking. Sadly, this has already happened to us.[iii]

To watch this painful process of intellectual degeneracy – the descent into madness by way of trivia, through the manifold byways of distraction, through the mental self-abuse of “woke culture” or conspiracy theory – is to feel the shock of a psychological disease which perpetuates itself through distractions of every stripe. Civilization has been losing touch with reality more and more. Can we reverse this process? Nietzsche thought we had to pass through this rising collective insanity to something on the other side of it. What might this “other side” look like? We watch the present political process for hopeful signs. Some think that President Trump’s political realism will break the spell of degeneracy. Yet others think Trump is another iteration of the degeneracy. Of course, a real correction will not come through politics. As many have said, politics is downstream from culture. The late Olavo de Carvalho, the Brazilian philosopher, said that real change will only come after the culture is regenerated.

Are we seeing more truth today, or is it “New Lies for Old?” Watch what flits by the screen and try to find the truth – that global warming is causing the earth to cool down; that Germany is under sabotage attack from Russia (but who cares?); that Russia and China are preparing for war against the West; that $100 billion of U.S. aid to Ukraine has gone missing (according to President Zelenskyy; that Putin has authorized nuclear attacks on NATO from Belarus; that Russia preparing to invade NATO territory at the Suwalki Gap; that the Japanese are huddling with American officials to counter China in the Pacific. All the useful idiots are chattering; Russia’s economy is on the ropes, China’s economy is teetering, Trump is pushing an agenda nobody fully understands – with zigs and zags.

Of course, the truth will win after each lie has had its day. Former Secretary of State John Kerry used to say, “Daniel Ortega is a misunderstood democrat, not a Marxist.” And now, thankfully, people are realizing that John Kerry is a misunderstood Marxist, not a democrat. We can only hope that American conservatives will see that Alexander Dugin is a servant of Putin and Xi’s “socialist camp,” and not a traditionalist.

What we see unfolding is a long-range plan, once described by defectors like KGB Major Anatoliy Golitsyn and Jan Sejna. After many stumbles, setbacks, and much kleptocratic bungling, the old socialist bloc plods forward, relentless and incompetent, while the West remains sleepy. Few pundits are willing to say that Russia and China are coming after us. Why? Because, quite simply, anyone who tries is punished, ostracized, blacklisted. The left has its people everywhere. Big business is partly in China’s pocket. The right listens to Tucker Carlson and Steven Bannon. Always vigilant to purge the perceptive anticommunist, this milieu is not open to reality. “One of the basic problems of the West,” wrote Jan Sejna in 1982, “is its frequent failure to recognize the existence of any Soviet ‘grand design’ at all.”[iv] Within the CIA, KGB defector Golitsyn’s testimony about a “grand design” was mocked as “a monster plot.”

Yet here we are, the monster plot having unfolded somewhat as Golitsyn foresaw. Much that was in Sejna’s book has also come to pass: The breakup of the Warsaw Pact as a gambit to destroy or weaken NATO, the infiltration of the West, the “the advent to power in Washington of a transitional liberal and progressive government….”[v] This government came to power under Clinton, then Obama, and then Biden. But the corrupt instrument of subversion was not as keen to follow through on its commitments; that is, to commit political suicide in the wake of Moscow’s liberalization. And the U.S. economy, despite being battered by every kind of bad policy, did not collapse as the communist plan envisioned. Such a collapse, in the communist lexicon, would have been the signal for a seizure of power and the dictatorship of the proletariat. But the occasion came and went, interrupted by the presidency of Donald Trump – twice over.

Yet the danger that these plans will be fulfilled by way of military outbreaks, economic sabotage, an all-out assault on the dollar, remains. It turns out, quite obviously, that Sun Tzu was not the genius he was reputed to have been. Carl von Clausewitz warned against the idea of winning without fighting. In Beijing and Moscow this has been a painful discovery. There can be no final victory without a major war, without a “war of continents.” Clearly, there has been a return to Lenin’s belief that Clausewitz was a true sage. For three years Moscow has been at war in Europe while Beijing prepares for a war in the Pacific. And the Chinese military buildup is accelerating.[vi]

To understand the grand strategic process underway, one must turn to the work of Alexander Dugin. In his book, Last War of the World Island, we find a “geopolitical” rationale for the Russian Federation to follow a Soviet-type policy of subversion and conquest against the West. Since overt Marxism-Leninism is no longer stylish, Dugin’s Eurasianism has served as a stand-in. Here we find a mishmash of National Bolshevism, traditionalism, perennialism, and more. What everyone seems to miss, in all this, is the Bolshevik shapeshifting that lies at the bottom of it. Everything in Dugin’s Eurasianism is operationally consistent with the old communist goals.

It is interesting that Dugin refers, on page two of his book, to “different historical stages” – an expression one might expect in a Marxist knock-off. Though Dugin offers the following helpful criticism:

“…the question of the attitude of Russian society toward political forms and types of government remains open. If in the Marxist period we were guided by the theory of progress and the shifts of political-economic blocs, and considered the experience of the Western European countries as ‘universal,’ then today this reductionist schema is no longer suitable.”[vii]

The Marxist-Leninist’s foresaw this themselves in the 1980s. Gorbachev was the personification of this insight. Overt Marxism had to be shelved, for strategic reasons. A broader approach to winning hearts and minds, globally, was needed if Moscow and Beijing were to become “masters of the earth.” One must therefore devise mutations of Orthodoxy, Catholicism, Protestantism, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism – mutations that could be grafted onto a chameleon-like national socialism. If Russia was to win over the religious and nationalist right, old-fashioned Marxism had to be placed in a back room. Even so, the failure of socialism was something Lenin himself had dealt with in the 1920s. The West, having its own kind of socialism, Moscow and Beijing merely had to neutralize the anti-socialist right, squeezing out the constitutionalist and capitalist middle ground. It was a maneuver. Change the packaging, remove the old label, merge the right into a disguised form of Marxism.

We should not be misled by Dugin’s anti-Marxist pose. Nowhere does he object to Marxism on moral grounds, or on the grounds that it damaged Russia or the Russian people. Cynically, he writes, “We must build a new model of Russian sociopolitical history, study the logic of that history, and propose structural generalities that reflect the peculiarities characteristic of our society’s relations at different historical stages, to other governmental and political systems.” Of course, talk of society’s “relations” and “different historical stages” is grist for the Marxist mill. Here we find Marx’s historicism pragmatically wedded to a plan of seduction aimed at conservatives. A device is therefore engendered – a political stopgap – needed for a future strategy of East/West convergence in Europe. “And in this case,” noted Dugin, “alas, we have but few relevant works, since Marxist theories yield notorious caricatures, based on exaggerations and violence against historical facts and especially against their significance.”[viii]

This is good self-criticism, in the Marxist sense. Victory over the West remains the goal. Anything in Marxism that hurts the cause must be amended. There is no Marxist dogma, according to Marx himself. Lenin knew this, and wrote about it. What has happened in the last thirty years is logical; that is, to build a better Leninism, without Lenin’s label. (But then, they kept Lenin’s statues up in Russia.) It was always a mistake to assault capitalism directly, especially when that entailed assaulting theologies and folkways. It is always better to take an enemy in the flank. That is Dugin’s mission, in terms of his assault on conservative values through a pretense of traditionalism.

Think of it this way: Once upon a time Marxism-Leninism attempted an assault the West’s values directly and suffered setbacks. Better, then, to adopt some of those values oneself – as one puts on a costume. Stalin did it many times over. Why not do more than Stalin did in this regard? It is in this context that Dugin writes of a “full-fledged Russian geopolitics.”[ix]

Why geopolitics? Because, hitherto, the Anglo-Saxons understood how to employ geopolitics to their advantage, dominating the seas and world trade. The theory of how the world works, and how it ought to work, was something the British and Americans had considered. Using the same template, the Russians might construct their own theory, taking as their point of departure the standpoint of the dominant land power on the World Island (i.e., Eurasia/Africa). This adjustment of perspective, Dugin admits, is subjective, but “we should understand ourselves not as a neutral observer, but as an observer embedded in a historical and spatial context.” This “procedure” he calls “geopolitical apperception.” He goes on to describe this “subjectivism” in rather grandiose terms – as “the ability to perceive the totality of geopolitical factors consciously….”

This formulation is strange, and it is suspect. Dugin is misleading his readers, misdirecting them in a subtle way, promising greater insights. By looking in the Index of Dugin’s book for references to China, which is a major nation also located on “the World Island,” we come to the heart of his deceptive formulation; for Marxism, like Dugin’s geopolitics, treat of phenomena “holistically.” Yet Dugin slides past China, as if China were part of the Russian Federation; that is, part of the same military bloc. As we read on it becomes clear that the heartland of the World Island was initially under Stalin during the postwar era. It exemplified “the Spartan” style of socialist society consistent with what Dugin calls “full-fledged tellurocracy.” China’s significance in this schema is deliberately omitted. Yet we have reason to believe an earlier version of his manuscript made mention of China, because the Index says China is mentioned there. Rather than drawing attention to facts that will give the game away, the ideological unity of China and Russia is only hinted at, where Dugin writes of Mackinder and Savitskii, “who considered from different points of view the geopolitical future of the Bolsheviks….”[x] This future is that of both Soviet Russia and Soviet China, manifesting in 1917 and 1949 respectively. Here the battle between the land-based communist Behemoth and the sea-based Leviathan alluded to by Carl Schmitt is passed over even as China itself was edited out of the text. “Functionally,” says Dugin, “Stalin was a ‘Russian Czar,’ comparable to Peter the Great or Ivan the Terrible.” Yet the Index says he should have begun a discussion of China on the previous page, before underscoring Stalin’s alleged “Czarism.” Here the unity of the Bolsheviks is eclipsed intentionally by characterizing the Behemoth of the World Island as “Czarist” under Stalin rather than communist. We do not know what the original passage in Dugin’s book said. We only know that the editors forgot to fix the Index as they erased any mention of China as part of the communist bloc.

More telling, Dugin eventually admits that the Third International “became a geopolitical instrument for the propagation of land-based, tellurocratic Russian influence worldwide. In terms of ideology,” Dugin continued, “this was a territorially unbound, international, planetary network. But in terms of strategy, the Third International fulfilled the function of a geopolitical instrument for the expansion of the Heartland’s geopolitical zone of influence.”[xi]

Here Dugin bolsters the idea that communism itself was a beard behind which Russian imperialism continued to function. This favored theme of the West’s anti-anticommunists has always been useful to Moscow and Beijing. It flatters one of the most deadly misunderstandings of Western analysts; namely, that communist ideas have no strategic meaning or significance. And Dugin underscores this flattery by explaining that the “orthodox messianism of the sixteenth century was reflected wonderfully in the Bolshevist Communist ‘messianism’ of global revolution with its core in Moscow, the capital of the Third International.”[xii]

After many pages China’s existence is finally acknowledged in this “geopolitical” book, though China is immediately dismissed as inconsequential: “China was in an exceedingly weak condition and was to a significant degree controlled by the English.”[xiii] Nowhere does Dugin admit that Stalin initially supported Nationalist China, with Soviet military advisors and more. Stalin clearly saw China’s importance early on. Why does Dugin downplay this? And after the Nationalists kicked the communists out of the Party, the British were not the ones who provided military advisors to China. It was, oddly, the German generals who assisted the Nationalist Chinese after the Soviets departed. Yet Dugin names the British. Then, in discussing the aftermath of World War II, he rambles on about the bipolar duel between Leviathan and Behemoth, forgetting to mention China’s membership in the “telluric empire of the Third International.”

Dugin is cunning in his historical omissions. For him, geopolitics is a struggle between commercial (or thalassocratic) sea powers like Athens, Carthage, Great Britain and the United States, versus tellurocratic land powers like Sparta, Rome, Germany and Russia. Again, we want to know where China fits into this analysis, yet Dugin passes over the question of China. Inevitably, Dugin swerves from a discussion of the Third International’s victory in the Vietnam War to the Sino-Soviet split: “In foreign policy, Khrushchev lost an important ally in Maoist China, whose leadership responded very unfavorably to the dethronement of the cult of Stalin and his political policy in general.”[xiv]

Dugin then admits that Stalin’s policy was continued under Khrushchev; and then, with the advent of Brezhnev (who was even closer to Stalin’s line) he fails to explain why the Sino-Soviet split would have continued. If the denunciation of Stalin by Khrushchev caused the split, then why didn’t Brezhnev’s neo-Stalinism heal the split? Dugin has no insights into this. That Dugin is the creature of Moscow’s strategy rather than an actual strategist, might explain his obfuscations and omissions. His writings are undoubtedly supervised by Russian Federation authorities. His pretense of independence and intellectual integrity, his critical stand toward Marxism, is for the sake of his alt-right and religious followers.

Returning to the book’s Index in search of further references to China, on page 75, he refers to China as more part of the United States’s unipolar structure: “The new [post Cold War] architecture of international relations,” he says, is “built on the sole dominance of the USA….”[xv] Echoing Vladimir Putin, Dugin says that the fall of the Soviet Union was “a catastrophic step backward.” But Russia is going to make a comeback, he explains. He then describes Russia’s struggle to overtake the United States. He writes, “Under various ideologies and political systems, Russia moved toward world dominance [under Putin].” Dugin then predicts a “great war of continents” which begins after Russia stops cooperating with NATO. This cooperation, he says, is “a pathology, a deviation from … [Russia’s] natural, undeniable historical trajectory.” The right trajectory, he says, is one of dominance of the Eurasian land mass and, by extension, the world.[xvi]

“The normalization of Russia’s natural historical vector only occurred with Putin’s coming to power,” notes Dugin, adding that Russia needs a “strong-willed and energetic personality at the head of the government” and “a new type of ruling elite and a new form of ideology.”[xvii] Having advised Russia’s leaders to adopt an aggressive policy, Dugin then attributes aggressive military intentions to NATO when he writes,

“…the forces of Atlanticism will not hesitate to strike a decisive blow against their primary adversary in the great war of continents. All discussions that claim that the West no longer views Russia as a rival and is only concerned with the ‘Islamic threat’ or with the growth of China’s potential are nothing but a diversionary tactic, and weapons in an information war.”[xviii]

Russia is the West’s most dangerous and primary enemy, according to Dugin. The great “war of continents” is inevitable, he explains. The geopolitical school, which sees Eurasia pitted against the maritime powers of the West, is embraced by the Russian generals. Why does Dugin seem to misplace China in this schema? Because, when he wrote this text in 2015, he was in the business of misleading his Western readers. After all, Russia is coming after the West.

According to Dugin, “[The] geopolitical school emerged in Russia, with lecturers from France and other countries pouring into Russia to speak. Dugin says, “In the early 1990s, instruction in geopolitics began at the Military Academy of the General Staff of the Russian Federation (under the instruction of the future Minister of Defense, I. Rodionov, in the Department of Strategy, then led by Lieutenant General H.P. Kolokotov), where its principle ideas were also formed and published somewhat later in the textbook, Foundations of Geopolitics.”[xix]

Geopolitical ideas were first “disseminated in patriotic circles which opposed the regime of Yeltsin and the ‘Young Reformers,’ which gave it a certain political orientation,” adds Dugin.[xx] In other words, geopolitics became a vehicle for the old communists. Here is the real explanation for Russia’s alliance with communist China. Here is the real explanation for North Korean communist troops fighting for Russia, and for Russia sending grain shipments to communist Cuba, positioning troops in communist Venezuela, for building base infrastructure in communist Nicaragua. There is an undeniable pattern here. But who bothers to notice?

Oh no, say the experts of the Ivy League. Communism is dead, It’s all just “geopolitics.” But I must disagree with these experts. They need to go back and read Nietzsche. Let us dispense with explaining the “war of continents” in non-ideological terms. Nietzsche predicted wars of this kind, and he knew they would be ideological. He knew that civilization would be coming unraveled. Nietzsche was right on all three counts, and he could see it clearly in the 1880s. Why should we be blind in this matter? It is happening in front of us. Yet Dugin hides the socialist nature of Russia’s alliance structure, and the socialist nature of Russia’s fifth column in the West. According to Ukrainian President Zelenskyy, the Biden administration in America was not supporting Ukraine as advertised. Zelenskyy says that over $100 billion in U.S. aid never reached Ukraine. Biden was supported by the left. He was a friend of the Soviet Union decades ago. Look at the Bukovsky files.

Everything here should be obvious when certain basic questions are asked. Who opened America’s border to invasion? Biden and his leftist Democratic Party. Who refused to build up North America’s defense against Russian missiles? Biden and his leftist Democratic Party. Who refused to modernize our degenerating ICBM deterrent? Biden and his leftist Democratic Party. Who canceled two nuclear weapons? Again, it was Biden. If this so-called “leader” cared about America’s survival, if he was genuinely hostile to Russia, why did he follow these suicidal policies that benefitted Russia? Of course his support for Ukraine was token!

As Dugin has shown, Russia’s leaders have a strategic vision and a fifth column in the West. The true nature of the attacking formation must be hidden, and the old communist bloc (a.k.a., socialist camp) still exists.

Does President Trump understand any of this? I don’t know. Can Trump take advantage of Russia’s present economic weakness? I hope so. Can Trump throw China off balance while successfully battling the enemy’s fifth column inside the American Establishment? Maybe. If war is inevitable, will America be ready for Dugin’s “war of continents”? If only our ice cream cone had been self-licking as Annie Jacobsen claims. In that case we might not be dealing with a war in Europe.

Global Cooling Expert Lee Wheelbarger

I got a call out of the blue from an expert on the grand solar minimum last Friday and we did a podcast on the fly.

This podcast with Nevin was done almost two weeks ago, and I apologize for posting it so late. You can see how my view of things differed back then. Technical troubles with the site kept me from posting.

Links and Notes

[i] Alexander Dugin, The Fourth Political Theory (Kindle Edition), p. 93. This is a very curious quotation which dismisses the way in which Marxist ideas have permeated everywhere in the West, including within the West’s commercial system. This is not serious, he suggests. Nothing to see here. Move along.

[ii] “Alas! There cometh the time when man will no longer give birth to any star. Alas! There cometh the time of the most despicable man, who can no longer despise himself!

“Lo! I show you the last man.

“What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?” – so asketh the last man and blinketh.

“The earth hath then become small, and on it there hoppeth the last men who maketh everything small. His species is ineradicable like that of the ground-flea; the last man liveth longest.

“We have discovered happiness” – say the last men, and blink thereby.

“They have left the regions where it is hard to live; for they need warmth. One still loveth one’s neighbor; for one needeth warmth.

“Turning ill and being distrustful, they consider sinful: they walk warily. He is a fool who still stumbleth over stones or men!

“A Little poison now and then: that maketh pleasant dreams. And much poison at the last for a pleasant death.”

Friedrich Nietzsche trans. Thomas Commons, Thus Spake Zarathustra, (New York: Modern Library), p. 12.

[iii] Ibid, p. 39. I have altered the translation to modern English.

[iv] Jan Sejna, We Will Bury You (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1982), p. 101.

[v] Ibid, pp. 153-54.

[vi] https://www.gisreportsonline.com/r/china-military-expansion/

[vii] Alexander Dugin, Last War of the World Island (United Kingdom: ARKTOS MEDIA LTD., 2015), p. 2.

[viii] Ibid.

[ix] Ibid, pp. 2-3.