The End of History and the Beginning of Transhumanism: How Anonymous Helped Russia Trick Neo-Conservative and Neo-Liberal Americans Into Destroying Their Own Empire.
By Robert Strong, Ph.D.
Aleksander Dugin is the most original, incomprehensible, and sometimes disturbing philosopher since Zizek. He has been called “the Most Dangerous Philosopher in the World”, and he is the new Rasputin to the new Russian monarch, Putin. Dugin theorizes about a “Fourth Way”, past previous political frameworks that have run their course: capitalism, communism, and fascism. The “Fourth Way” has an interesting analogue in some ways to the “Fourth Turning” that Trump’s Rasputin, Steve Bannon borrows from William Strauss and Neil Howe’s seminal work, “The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy.” And in the same way that Bannon seems to embrace his inevitable villain role as some sort of inevitability, to move into the next inevitable historical cycle, Dugin’s Fourth Way is informed by the notion of “The End of History”, a point where the usual cycles and seasons of political dialectic, the volley between liberal and conservative, come to a qualitative crunch, where something wholly other must emerge. Another interesting comparison between Trump’s Rasputin and Putin’s is that Bannon, is an American Conservative ideologue who self-describes as a “cultural Stalinist”, while his Russian counterpart, an avowed Marxist who fronted the New Bolshevik Party in the Soviet Union proudly embraces the term “conservative.”
Like Bannon, Dugin has become a sort of traditionalist ideological rock star for American Conservatives, partially because of the intellectual vacuum within the American Conservative movement, led by religious regressive anti-intellectuals. Dugin’s sense of Russian National Identity is rooted in one of the oldest sects of Christianity in history, the Russian Orthodox Church, which got their version pretty much straight from the Syrian orthodox, i.e., they still use some Aramaic, the spoken language of Christ, in their liturgy. American conservatives have seen Dugin’s Russian Christian Identity movement as a potential template for their own.
But what American Conservatives don’t realize, is that while Dugin seems to be speaking their language in English, behind closed doors, he expresses equal animus towards American Conservatives and American Liberals alike. Dugin and Putin are not pro-Trump. They are anti-America. Dugin’s brand of Russian Nationalism is very different than the White Supremacist Nationalism of the American Right. Dugin’s Nationalism is about a strong Russia that is not at odds with a strong China, India, and Africa. Dugin takes the high ground morally from American neo-conservatives and neo-liberals alike. The Russian Nationalists view American Nationalism as a global imperialist force that has actively destabilized governments throughout the Southern Hemisphere for the past century so they can continue to enslave populations to outsourced slave labor and continue to rape natural resources.
What American Conservative pundits don’t seem to get, is that when Dugin blasts the American liberal class, it is through a Marxist critique lens not a capitalist lens. He sees American liberalism as the “nice face” of capitalism, the good cop to the bad cop of American corporations and lobbying groups that perpetuate the global slave market, a slave market outsourced to the third world where we don’t have to experience the discomfort in seeing the consequences of collective action. Like factory farmed meat, like all our proxy wars. Conservatives in America need to realize that Dugin and Putin’s “Conservative Traditionalism” is Marxist at its core. While they worked to put Trump in office, Trump, to them, is performance art, the bloated, belching, derelict clown of late stage capitalism.
Let me go ahead and get to the punchline—Anonymous, the hacker group that started Occupy—the radical Leftist movement in America—a good percentage of those folks worked with the Russians on the leaks and disinformation campaigns that put Trump in office. As an Occupy organizer, I reached out to several of the ones I knew from my Occupy days, wondering why they’d been MIA in the biggest political crisis of modern American history. To my dismay, the general response was that approximately 1/3 of Anons actually worked for the Russians to put Trump in office, because they saw him as the wrecking ball that could conceivably bring down the American empire. About 1/3 of them were coerced into working for the Russians by the same KGB blackmail techniques by which Russia keeps so many GOP politicians on the leash. And about 1/3 don’t even go into the dark web anymore for fear of being black-mailed. I know that more than one of the original crew have serious jobs and relationships pending and wish to simply “live a normal life” at this point, profiting handsomely from their tech savvy.
You can find translated speeches of Dugin from 20 years ago predicting this propaganda campaign that has transformed our national stage into an episode of Rick & Morty. This is a deliberate tactic of the Russian propaganda machine, to wear the conservative mask and stoke the flames of fear in the conservative heartland of America—“Look at what those liberal perverts are doing to your kids! Look at those big city Hollywood elites!” It is an interesting shift of tactics, that the atheistic brand of Russian Marxism has shifted to the use of religious propaganda to speak out against the excesses of modern capitalism, manipulating the religious conservative voting block of Red State America into imploding their own country. The big question is whether Putin is using Dugin or Dugin is using Putin.
As a theologian and a Christian Socialist, I personally find resonance with Dugin’s approach. An aspect of Dugin’s Russian Orthodox Conservative Identity movement is a strain of Eastern Christianity that goes back through the Syrian Orthodox church to the Gnostic Christians and their pagan counterparts in Eastern Europe. In many of his talks, Dugin specifically references Gnostic ideas, such as the idea of “getting free from the Matrix and the demiurge of Mammon,” in many ways mirroring the teaching of the earliest Christians more accurately than the Evangelical block, that is so often beholden to the glamour of get-rich-quick televangelists.
It was initially perplexing to me that the Dugin-Putin propaganda machine has actively courted and seems to side with religious conservatives in America, turning them against the Left, which otherwise seem to have more progressive tendencies. But it really is a stroke of genius. The Russian Marxists know that the comfortable American Left is relatively inert, and they know that a large segment of Hollywood really is a Mammon machine, built on “the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life” (“…from such turn away”?). And the Marxists in Russia want the American working class to see this and be pissed off about it. The Russian-Anonymous propaganda machine has turned their guns on liberals, because they see mainstream liberalism as the shiny face of exploitative capitalism—the enabler that benefits from financial exploitation for art’s sake. And the Russian neo-Marxists want to rip the band-aid off. Unfortuntately for us, they are actively attempting to reverse engineer the American Civil War to finish things off.
Like Marx and Engels, Dugin closely studied the history of the American Civil War. He has spoken in earlier interviews about wanting to reverse engineer the American Civil War, so that America’s grip on the world economy will finally be broken. Dugin knows that such a Civil War is easier to instigate from the right than from the left. Historically Southern conservatives were tricked by prospectors to fight in the Civil War for the cultural illusion of “Ol’ Dixie”, this idea that if they fought for the wealthy plantation owners, they would be rewarded with riches themselves. And conservative Southerns have been shooting themselves in the dick ever since, falling for snake oil salesmen, Northern “carpet baggers”, and televangelists, all with the same delusion of wealth by association.
And now we are faced with the specter of actual street war. It has already begun. In major cities around the country, Proud Boys and so-called “Patriot Prayer” warriors have begun armed campaigns, clashing with Anti-fascist protestors in the streets of even the most liberal cities in America. Soon, we will be too busy fighting each other to realize how this whole ball got rolling, and that is why we all really need to step back and look at the big picture for a minute. We can all participate in dismantling the old empire, or we can be crushed in the rubble of its inevitable demise. It’s sort of our choice. I say sort of, because there are so many ignorant religious warriors on the Right that will refuse to engage the Left in any sort of intelligent or civil manner. And it is perfectly within the Constitutional right of those on the Left to arm up and protect their cities from this onslaught of Far right Fascism.
What does Dugin have in mind after the fall of the American empire? Dugin sees his “Fourth Way” as a way forward that is not limited to the previous failed paradigms of capitalism, communism, and fascism (though his views are sometimes lumped in with the latter). He seems to almost see fascism as honest capitalism and a necessary late stage, but he is equally warry of statist Communism. Whereas the Western Countries committed a sort of outsourced genocide based on race and slavery, the communist countries committed a class genocide. Interesting that those stuck in the current American conflict hurl the two polar epitaphs of “Nazi” and “Commie.”
Wanna go deeper? Okay, here is where it gets really weird. Another aspect of Dugin’s ethnic identity narrative is the mythology of an ancient Manichean battle between the forces of what he calls the Atlanteans (the ship building sea dwellers of Western Europe, who colonized and enslaved most of the Southern Hemisphere), and the Hyperboreans, the continental land dwellers of Central Europe, whom he views as having moral superiority. This is the motivation for Putin to use a broad propaganda strategy towards the break-up of the UK and ultimately the EU into balkanized nation states. He’s using Trump to dramatically reduce the power of NATO and Western hegemony within the UN.
The Nationalism that Russians are projecting in their propaganda war is nothing like the racist white nationalism that is growing throughout the West. It is, in fact, a disdain for our racist imperialism. Their closed doors to migrants from the Southern hemisphere has less to do with racism than a complete disdain for the long history of imperialistic racism inflicted upon the Southern Hemisphere by the Atlantean powers. The Russians shut their borders, not because they see dark people as inferior, but because they resent the pressure to fix problems created by their enemies. They see the current global migration crisis as something the West created and that the West must be responsible for. These are the consequences of our own history.
In this Eurasianist mythos, the Atlantean culture seeks to homogenize all other cultures and convert all these diverse tribal and group identities into nothing more than consumer culture, which can be seen in the global monoculture which has quickly become a reality through the internet. Dugin sees this erasing of boundaries as being fundamentally an evil part of the capitalist machine, of the forces of Mammon, whose ultimate goal is to erase our humanity in the Singularity.
Ready to go even further down the rabbit-hole? Dugin has embraced a view of historical teleology that no longer moves from a deterministic prime mover forward. He bases much of his framework on history read backwards from the Singularity, or what theologian Teillhard du Chardin refers to as “the Omega Point.” The technofuturistic understanding of the great Singularity, is when humans so augment their intelligence through neurocyber integration and AI, that there is a punctuated leap of evolution forward, causing the unenhanced to seem as other as the Neanderthals were perceived by the homo sapiens. This is arguably the new arms race of the 21st century.
Dugin is not necessarily optimistic about this race towards the Singularity. He sees the inevitable human evolution post singularity as being far more deterministic than our current homo sapien state, fearing for a future where beings will be as shaped by algorithms as we currently are by genetics and culture. Dugin sees Nativist fidelity to our genetics as the safeguard from becoming amoral mutants. His concerns have been somewhat validated by Western technofuturists like Elon Musk and Steven Hawking. Even the Western theorists of AI warn that the discrepancy in class could become even greater with the advent of AI and somewhat permanent.
For the Red State Evangelicals who lionize Putin as some sort of Christian strongman, these transhumanist notions bring to mind “the end times prophecies” of the Book of Revelations and “the Mark of the Beast.” And indeed one can imagine how the rush towards the Singularity, without a just social structure in place, could create a sort of permanent global slave class. This accounts for Dugin’s militant sense of urgency. He sees this rush towards the Singularity increasing in speed as we circle closer to the center of the spiral, and Moore’s Law qua MIT’s Ray Kurzweil does seem to back this up.
This is why a theological ideologue like Dugin has sought to partner with an autocrat like Putin. To Dugin, and to the apocalypse clock described by the majority of scientists, this change needs to happen faster than the rate of climate change. And that means crushing the global stranglehold of Western hegemony, the “good part” with it. The Russians, whom we must remember are still Marxist, despite how they’ve portrayed themselves in this propaganda campaign, see American Liberalism as the coopted revolution, like the Coca-cola commercial of hippies singing “I’d like to teach the world to sing,” quasi-bohemians selling poison to the world. So liberals and conservatives have both been punked. And the genius of the Russian approach, is they’ve done it in a relatively bloodless fashion, at least compared to prior revolutions. So far.
My Anonymous comrades, the ones I was surprised to find were working for Russia, seemed to all jump ship as soon as they saw mainstream democrats sabotage a true socialist candidate, Bernie Sanders. They began to lean hard into Plan B, i.e., “okay, America, you asked for it. You didn’t accept the easy way during Occupy Wall Street, and now you must take the harder path.” We are lucky that the new world war is just an Epistemological War at this point. But if we don’t dismantle the machine of Mammon that is putting a stranglehold on the world economy as well as the ecosystem, the new Eurasia will dismantle it for us.
A lot of people are referring to this period as “the end of history.” The Metanarrative of Western Civilization begins and ends with catastrophe. It begins with the story of an ecological disaster, the Great Flood (Ice Age?). Act 2 is the story of enslaved humans finding a path of liberation. Act 3 is the apocalypse. In the Bible, human civilization ends with a Rapture, a Singularity. Perhaps this is the point where post-human emerges, hopefully subsuming the best parts of human nature with it, and the weeping and gnashing of teeth, of those left behind.