Continued elsewhere

I've decided to abandon this blog in favor of a newer, more experimental hypertext form of writing. Come over and see the new place.

Thursday, August 20, 2015

In post-Soviet Russia, eschaton immanentizes you!

Nick Land (a philosopher who is now a major neoreactionary) links to this video of the genuinely scary Russian reactionary philosopher Alexander Dugin calling modernity “pure satanism”. On the other hand, the National Review (!) calls Dugin՚s philosophy not only satanic but fascist and an effort to immanentize the eschaton:
Repeating the ideas of Nazi theorists Karl Haushofer, Rudolf Hess, Carl Schmitt, and Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Dugin says that this liberal threat is not new, but is the ideology of the maritime-cosmopolitan power “Atlantis,” which has conspired to subvert more conservative land-based societies since ancient times. Accordingly he has written books in which he has reconstructed the entire history of the world as a continuous battle between these two factions, from Rome vs. Carthage to Russia vs. the Anglo-Saxon “Atlantic Order” today.
Meanwhile Hamas claims to have captured an Israeli spy that happens to be a dolphin. Robert Anton Wilsion may have passed into the universe next door, but this one is increasingly beginning to resemble one of his novels.

More seriously, to any nrx-fellow-travellers who might be reading: how far are you going to let your anti-liberalism take you, and to where? A lot of you seem to want to get to Singapore (that is, a modern state run like a tight-knit corporation, authoritarian but highly rational and technical). But mostly what you actually get without liberalism is this sort of violent ethnic Blut und Boden nationalism, which is anything but nerd-friendly. That՚s a hell of a thing to aim for just because some SJWs were mean to you or whatever the motivation is.

2 comments:

Dain said...

"...just because some SJWs were mean to you or whatever the motivation is."

Amen. (So to speak, kinda.)

Crawfurdmuir said...

The thesis of maritime versus land-based powers is not the creation of "Nazi theorists." Its origin may be found in Rear Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan's "The Influence of Sea Power upon History." This work had great influence in Germany, Wilhelm II ordered his officers to read it.

Karl Haushofer's development of geopolitics is based in significant part on Mahan's thought. Most of Haushofer's work was published before the Nazis came to power, and Haushofer was never a member of the Nazi party. His wife, who was half Jewish, was protected only by the intervention of Rudolf Hess, who had been a student of Haushofer's. Haushofer was in fact imprisoned for eight months in the Dachau concentration camp by the Nazis, and his son Albrecht was executed in the aftermath of the Stauffenberg plot, with which he was tenuously linked.

Geopolitics is a serious discipline, and to dismiss Haushofer, one of its early exponents, as a "Nazi theorist" is both inaccurate and prejudicial.