The West without the USSR: the world goes to an ideological explosion
Question: Alexander Gelevich, for more than 20 years in the world there is no such powerful pole as the USSR was. A lot of reasoning is about the reasons for the collapse of the Soviet Union, about what awaits us further. What do you think the West has become without the USSR? How did the absence of a second pole affect the West?
Alexander Dugin: USSR and the absence of the USSR can be considered at several levels. Now let's look from the point of view of ideology. During the existence of the USSR, after the Second World War, when the liberals and communists won a joint victory over the axis countries, that is, over National Socialism and fascism, a bipolar system developed in the world. In an ideological sense, this meant that now there are two world ideologies: liberalism - it is bourgeois capitalism, and, accordingly, on the other hand, communism and socialism. Two ideological models that challenged each other's right to express the very spirit of modernity. Liberal capitalists believed that they represented the last word of progress, development and enlightenment. And the disappearance of the USSR on an ideological level meant a fundamental and, possibly, decisive, irreversible victory of liberalism and bourgeois capitalism in the struggle for the legacy of modernity, the spirit of modernity. It turned out that socialism was not the phase that follows liberalism and which is a more advanced and modern phase, the current within modernity, but is a step to the side. The end of the USSR was also fundamental historical an argument for the defeat of communist ideology in the battle with the liberals for the right to represent a new time.
A world without the USSR is a world of victorious liberalism, which has become the dominant paradigm of all mankind, and only one of the two ideologies remains - the global ideology of liberalism, liberal democracy, capitalism, individualism, bourgeois society in its current state. A world without the USSR is a world of socialism who has lost, which went down in history after fascism and communism, losing a historical duel. It fundamentally changed everything, in particular, it abolished the choice of ideology. If we want the whole global world to be accepted into the mainstream, into the establishment, if we want to be seen as people who meet the standards, not marginalized, not radical, we must recognize the dogmatic foundations of liberalism: individualism, private property rights, human rights , the selectivity of all bodies, and, accordingly, the material inequality that is realized in the course of economic activity with recognized nominal starting conditions. That is, these dogmas of liberalism are now the norm, the one who denies liberalism, already does not look like a representative of another, alternative ideology, but as a marginal. That is what the world received without the USSR.
A world without the USSR is a completely different world in every sense.
Now the second question is from a geopolitical point of view. The USSR and its opposition to the West represented a balance of power model, where two hegemonies, two superpowers reorganized the rest of the space in their opposition. And the space occupied by the countries that joined them, it was also due to the positional power of the two main players. The balance of power of the USSR and the USA determined the political structure of the rest of the world, and if we digress from ideology, we will see a world consisting of two hegemonies, two poles - antagonistic, competing with each other, but which created certain conditions of world order among themselves.
The collapse of the USSR, the collapse of the socialist camp, the collapse of the entire Soviet model meant a transition from bipolarity to unipolarity. When there were two hegemonies in the world, those countries that were at the level of "non-alignment" and refused to make a clear choice in one direction or another (the United States or the USSR) received space for political maneuver, in some cases a rather large maneuver - this is evident from experience India She was at the head of the non-aligned movement. One can argue about how wide the possibilities of those who refused to stand on one side or the other were, but, nevertheless, the basic strategic architecture of the world was based on the principle of countering the two superpowers. When one of these superpowers was gone, instead of a bipolar model, we came to a unipolar one. This is fundamental, since the two poles of the bipolar model represent a system organized on the plus and minus principle and it doesn’t matter who considered the evil empire — we counted them, they counted us — this is a common story in international relations. The friend-enemy pair defines the identity of each of the participants, but when this bipolar system was broken, a completely new center-periphery system appeared, where there is only one absolute pole. This is an American superpower, a developed "civilized" west, and, as it moves away from this core, from this center, from this pole there are peripheral countries, less developed, less civilized. That is, the world without the USSR is a world built on a completely different geometry. If we talk about theories, for example, within the framework of American neorealism, then one of the founders of American neorealism Kenneth Walsh was a supporter of bipolar hegemony, and Geelston was a supporter of unipolar hegemony, it is a theory of hegemonic stability. Thus, a world without the USSR is a world created on a completely different matrix, a different world order.
Well, and the third thing that can be said: after the collapse of the USSR in 90-s, both of these points, which I mentioned, were very clearly and extremely meaningful - at the ideological level Francis Fukuyama, who declared the end of the story to be a total victory for liberalism on a global scale; and another point of view is about the beginning of a unipolar world. That is, the fact of the collapse of the USSR was comprehended in the West in the ideological and geopolitical, strategic vein. And of course, we are very poorly understood, because we have been, and to a large extent we are still in a contusion - we did not comprehend the end of the USSR, we do not have a clear idea of what happened, as clear as the Americans or representatives another world. We cannot even take a rational approach to this, since this event was a shock for us, from which we, of course, have not yet recovered. And in the 90s, when the defeat of the USSR in the Cold War became apparent to the West, that is, the transition from two competing ideologies to one - now universally binding, the dominant, liberal ideology, a certain dispute arose, whether in the West, whether this is final and irrevocable , as Fukuyama believed, or this unipolar world will only be a kind of temporary world order and then be replaced by another.
We can sum up the first results of twenty years without the USSR, saying that the unipolar moment is gradually inferior to the growing multipolar moment. Thus, unipolarity is still preserved, but we already see some vague outlines of the upcoming multipolarity. And this is very important: peace with the USSR, which was understandable for the West in the 90s, is becoming more and more problematic in the new configuration of forces as America fails to cope with the task of organizing effective management of global hegemony. And at the level of ideology, very interesting processes are also going on - capitalism celebrated its triumph in the 90s and, in principle, was ready to abolish liberalism as an ideology, as it became not just an ideology, but something taken for granted.
Now the West is undergoing a fundamental internal implosion, an internal ideological explosion, since it was left without an adversary who could keep it within certain ideological frameworks, because liberalism was very convincing only when it resisted totalitarianism.
People were offered: “either freedom - or lack of freedom”, liberalism was chosen according to the principle of the opposite, the opposite - if we don’t want totalitarianism, then we want liberalism. Well, today there are almost no totalitarian regimes left, liberalism in the polemic sense has nothing more to do. In varying degrees, democratic values have become established everywhere, and now people are no longer confronted with opposing liberalism to non-liberalism. He has already won - so what? Is this the best of all worlds? Did he remove the main problems? Basic fears? Has he made the world more just? Has he made our life happier? And the negative answer to this question today results not in the fact that people are moving from liberalism to communist ideology, for example, as the basic and main critical and opposing theory. Today, this dissatisfaction with liberalism is eroding it from the inside, for many, liberalism is insufficient, unconvincing, not the last word, but since there is no alternative, liberalism begins to decompose and be undermined from within.
The crisis of unipolarity and the crisis of liberalism are what is at the center of attention of Western intellectuals. But without the USSR, this is a completely different matter than in the era of bipolarity, since the crisis of both cannot be appropriated by anyone. If earlier the crisis of capitalism, in general, was replenished, appropriated to an alternative socialist system, then the crisis of unipolarity now leaves an expanding vacuum both ideological and geopolitical, which is gradually being filled in something with Islamic fundamentalism, in something multi-polar, in something critical that have not yet acquired a definitive, intelligible expression. But in fact, the victory of capitalism became a pyrrhic victory for liberalism.
Today we see that this triumph, which seemed irreversible to many in the 90s, turned out to be something completely different than what it was accepted for in the 90s. Once again, we repeat, we are still in a concussion, we must be treated as patients, we have a mentally defective society for some historical period, we will recover, but we will need time and effort. So if in the West it was an understandable phenomenon, today it is called into question.
Even having defeated its main opponent, the world Western system, in fact, has brought its end closer. And the fate of the American empire, American hegemony, and modern unipolarity, and the victorious liberalism can largely repeat the fate of the USSR. When, with all the stability, with all the appearance of control, effective management, in fact, the internal decomposition systems reached a critical point, it seemed to all of us who lived during that period that this could not happen. Despite some critical moments, the USSR to the last made an impression of a very stable, very powerful control system with a huge army, with the KGB, political social institutions, and overnight this did not become. The USSR did not just fall in the war, like Germany, which lost the terrible war and then disappeared. In order to defeat Nazism, it took the real efforts of all mankind, the planet was bleeding to death, and the allies and their enemies fought to the last. The fate of the USSR was completely different - it just disappeared, as if it wasn’t there, a bunch of party cards quietly smoldered, and the heroism of Pavka Korchagin, great construction projects, even the Great War was simply forgotten and crossed out in exchange for a rather small piece of sausage.
That is, the USSR fell because of such microscopic reasons, which actually look ridiculous now, and the people who destroyed it look pathetic and insignificant. Today, liberalism can collapse overnight just the same, and it will not be necessary to finish it, the fate of the USSR clearly repeats itself today at the level of the global system - just as the mighty Soviet Union fell, leaving us in another world, in another reality. And, despite the fact that the appearance of the victory of liberalism is preserved, as an absolute triumph, the global American empire may disappear at some point due to a seemingly insignificant reason.
Question: You have raised an interesting topic - ideological competition. Since the West simply could not defeat the Soviet Union by brute force, as it happened with Germany, since we had a nuclear weapon, and open conflict was dangerous for everyone, America had to develop its "soft power." And during the confrontation with the USSR in the West there was such a creative search for ideological approaches, the formation of the ideology necessary for opposing. Therefore, some processes inherent in him organically were banished from Western society - they were declared communist or fascist. Has the West itself been harmed by such selectiveness in development? What else destructive, paradoxically, did the West bring victory over the communist idea?
Alexander Dugin: I do not think that the Cold War somehow had a negative impact on the distortion of the liberal model. how Nietzsche said: "Sins and virtues grow in a person from the same root." A man, for example, is a brave man — and in war he is a virtue, but when he returns from war, he begins to run amok, he loves radicalism, his fearlessness, courage can lead to instability, aggressiveness, etc., in a peaceful life. Similarly, the collapse of liberalism and the internal implosion of the West are not the costs of the Cold War, they are the costs of victory in the Cold War. Because when the war was going on, liberalism had the most important argument that always saved it, when Western society was in a critical situation. They pointed at the Soviet Union and said: "But they have worse, their gulags, they do not have freedom." And thus, through an appeal to a different kind of liberalism in the era of the Cold War, it solved many internal problems and contradictions. The presence of such an enemy as the USSR was vital for the West. Therefore, I think that the Cold War spurred the West, including the development of "soft power", other technologies, social changes took place in order to compete with the social system of socialist countries. All opposition to the Soviet Union was simply salutary for Western capitalism in every sense, the existence of such a system was the basis of the guarantors of its existence. And having lost such an enemy, beginning to frantically search for another, for example, in the face of Islamic fundamentalism, the West lost the most important thing (Islamic fundamentalism is not as serious an ideology as communism, compared to the communist system of the USSR, is simply ridiculous, this phenomenon is quite serious, but not compared to the USSR).
I'm still convinced that the cause of the fundamental crisis of modern Western society is the result of the victory of the liberal ideology, the victory of the West over the East and the disappearance of the USSR. And the United States will never have such an adversary, will not have the geopolitical situation that existed in this ideological, geopolitical bipolarity - there will never be such a gift anymore. Liberalism was left alone, alone with itself, and it was here that the absence of any positive program in liberalism, as in ideology, emerged. Because freedom, as liberals understand it, is freedom “from”, freedom directed against the state, totalitarian ties, against public religious identities. When the program of liberalism is completed, it can only do one thing — dismantle itself, get rid of itself. This is happening now. Therefore, I think that the West received a blow not from the fact that it was forced to compete with us, but on the contrary - from the fact that it was freed from this.
Question: Was the absolute triumph of victory in the Cold War? Russia has historically become famous as the "graveyard of empires." And the Swedish king Carl, and Napoleon, and Hitler ended their conquests here. All the regimes mentioned are part of the warlike Western civilization. And even our defeat in the Cold War - thoroughly knocked down the enemy, the Pyrrhic victory was enough for them, apparently, not for long?
Alexander Dugin: You say this correctly, I think so too. Although it is very disappointing, but after all, as was the situation of Rostopchin, the governor of Moscow, it was a surrender to the city during the Napoleonic wars. How was the Russian people to retreat in the early years of World War II. In fact, the question is whether we really lost the Cold War or whether we lost a very serious battle, letting the enemy in the form of liberals, Echo of Moscow and other bastards go straight to the center of our Russian life. Of course, the presence of the occupiers is obvious, the occupiers, the Gauleiters, the representatives of Western society — they largely determine our culture, the information policy, the education — yes, we have surrendered Moscow. We really passed Moscow. People who represent Western hegemony - they are already here, they are at the center of our society, in the 90s they simply seized power. Today, of course, we are considering the following question: is there a chance, using the Scythian strategy, the Russian strategy, and, perhaps, the Soviet strategy, luring the enemy deep into his own territory, to provide overvoltage of forces, and then wait for the moment when he simply escapes from here ? When "Echo of Moscow" will begin to collect their stinky suitcases, to get out of here with all the listeners. Now, will we wait until the Germans run from Moscow in the end, or the army NapoleonWhether we will wait for this from the Americans and global American hegemony is an open question. I do not know whether we lost the decisive battles or the whole war. This will be decided as soon as possible, the fact that Putinas a phenomenon, as a political phenomenon - this, in general, gives hope that we have lost only the battle. But maybe, in fact, you need to go to the counterattack, take revenge. And at the same time tightening liberalism, which believed in its global domination, in its victory at the total level, perhaps, we have brought its end closer. I want to believe that this is so, but the question is still open, a lot depends on us. If today we make a choice in the direction that we are slaves of liberal hegemony - everything, then we can make this victory in the Cold War of our opponents truly accomplished.
Much depends on us and on Islamic countries, on India, on China a lot depends. Nevertheless, today it seems that, despite the bravura messages of the West regarding its successful, irreversible, absolute, and final final victory, which we heard about, it is possible that this is not the case. Already from the battlefields sound much more cautious reports, more pessimistic. They say, maybe we should gain a foothold in the positions that we have now? Leave alone the objects we have won? Perhaps, to withdraw its troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, perhaps, to leave Russia alone, at least in its territory? These voices are still heard and audible, but in fact, I believe that everything will be decided. Even those events that we are talking about - the end of the USSR - we still do not understand the meaning of this. Not because we think badly, but because this end has not really come yet. Because, if a multipolar world emerges in the place of the bipolar world, it may be even good. But if the collapse of the global liberal hegemony, the Western empire, the capitalist empire, due to the fall of the USSR, this will also be our victory. That is, in fact, it is early to put the last point in the history of the liquidation of the USSR. This is an open topic and it depends on how we ourselves, living today, will, firstly, understand what happened, secondly, analyze the present and, finally, behave in the future.
Question: And if you take not the ideological component, but military superiority? Is there a degradation of the military potential of the Western countries? Once competition with the USSR pushed for new, more technically advanced improvements in the army. Now the power of the American military is not enough even to defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Alexander Dugin: I do not think that this is so, firstly, it is impossible to win the Taliban - because guerrilla war is ineradicable. When a person fights on his own territory - this is a war of nature against man, and always nature will win sooner or later. Therefore, the Taliban or any other partisan well-rooted tendencies cannot be defeated. And speaking objectively, the West does it better than the Soviet Union. I do not think that the West is fundamentally in such a helpless position today. Yes, he went on decolonization, but because economic control is cultural, informational, it is more effective than direct military suppression. This is simply a more successful form of domination, which is carried out with the help of mass media, networks, the same "Soft Power" (after all, it is not resorted to because it is more humane, but because it is more effective). Since the domination, suppression and assertion of control over others is carried out with the help of "Soft Power" with a greater degree of success, it is not a more humane weapon, but a more advanced weapon. Or, for example, control over former colonies — not by direct administration, but by keeping their influence in orbit. Dominance is increasing. The creation of the British Commonwealth, which includes former colonies, but called otherwise, British Commonwealth of Nations is a more effective way to exploit the former colonies in our new economic conditions - this is a new form of colonization. "Soft Power" is an improved "Hard Power", although the Americans don’t refuse the last. That is, I still would not say a tomb speech over the Western system ahead of time.
In order for the West to collapse, it still needs to be destroyed, and today there are such prerequisites. Today we see the weakness of this system, perhaps the West will find some technological moves to cope with these weaknesses, and so far it has not found someone who plays on the side opposite to the hegemony, for example, Putin personally, although I even I do not know if this is Russia, but Putin clearly does not fully recognize hegemony, although so far neither he is ready, nor our society is ready to throw down a direct challenge to hegemony, but Putin is playing against it. China is playing against it, but also according to the rules, also in semitones; a number of Islamic countries, especially the Iranians, are playing against it, but even more players, in particular, the countries of Latin America, Turkey, India, Pakistan, can play against the hegemony. In general, if we try to carefully construct a register of counter-hegemonic potentials, we can see a rather impressive arsenal of power directed against the West. But these powers, unlike Western powers, are not united. The West is coordinating its efforts: the people who run Hollywood are the same people who run the Pentagon. Google and the CIA are not fundamentally different phenomena, they are different departments of the overall strategic process. And the opponents of American hegemony are scattered, the coordination of counter-hegemonic potentials is what we need. Today there is no Soviet Union, it cannot exist, we need to create an alternative of a completely different kind, multipolar, networked, planetary. This is closely related to the comprehension of the collapse of the USSR, because if we want an alternative to what exists, we cannot simply return to the revival of the USSR, we need to think in completely new terms. The theme of the USSR is not the theme of the past, it is the theme of the present and the future, but comprehension must be raised to a qualitatively new level.
Question: That is, the restoration of the Soviet system, the emergence of a new union state on the territory of the former USSR, you consider impossible?
Alexander Dugin: On the basis of the Soviet ideology, it is impossible and simply unrealistic to recreate the USSR. There are no serious forces representing socialism in any of these countries where unification is said or planned. The Soviet experience in the past and any form of association and integration require completely new ideological, ideological, economic, geopolitical, conceptual, theoretical approaches. Therefore, the Eurasian Union cannot be a reproduction of either the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union, this is a completely new concept, and understanding it ahead. Not that Putin knows what he will do, I think that in many ways he acts intuitively, he correctly draws the vector of integration, but no one thought about the structure of this integration, the content of the Eurasian Union either in our society or in the post-Soviet space. Since the ideological changes in our world over the past 20 years are so rapid that we simply have no time, no opportunity to comprehend them. But, nevertheless, they are irreversible, they occur; therefore, it is absolutely equally unacceptable to apply the measures of the European Union or the Soviet Union to the Eurasian Union. There is a new understanding of multipolarity, American hegemony - what the Americans actually can, and what is beyond their control, for example, Russian liberalism, because this is a group of corrupt, weak-minded, hating their country Russophobes, and not liberals.
They act destructively and oppose communism, the Russian idea, but if you ask whether they are responsible for their liberal views, are they liberals complete, convinced, conscious, are they able to act in the liberal paradigm in those cases when this liberal paradigm is bring with you not only benefits, grants, trips and benevolent pats on the cheek of American supervisors, when you have to really pay for your beliefs, I think we will have the same handful of dissidents who Some people make an impression of urban madmen. As in Soviet times, there will be Novodvorskaya, Alekseeva, Ponomarev - here they are liberals, really liberals, and when liberalism is fashionable, and when liberalism is not fashionable, and when it is beaten for it, and when awards are given for it. But there are not many of them - a handful of really similar people from a psychiatric clinic. These are real liberals, and those who in Russia try to be similar to these patients are a post-Soviet conformist, unintelligible phenomenon that is united by a hatred of Russia, of our history. These people think of themselves as planters in cork helmets, drove to some Aboriginal people, but in reality they are not Barons de Coustenes, who travel around dirty unwashed Russia, but these are courtesy, lackeys, who, in the absence of a master, imagined themselves to be barinas. This is the Russian liberals, because the Americans, who rely on them, they can miscalculate, because they are not liberals, but simply a corrupt scum. The Americans will wash their tears out of their agents in Russia with bitter tears, this agency works while it is paid.
- Alexander Dugin
- http://www.geopolitica.ru/article/zapad-bez-sssr-mir-idet-k-ideologicheskomu-vzryvu#.US7HgsJrJ_R
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