There is a war between the ones who say there is a war and the ones who say there isn't —Leonard Cohen.
Published on Parallax here
According to Putin, there is no war or invasion of Ukraine—there are just 'special operations'. The bald lie of this is remarkable, to understate the case. Russia's 'special operations' are code for the mass rape and the death of scores of innocent people, and it should not be denied that Putin is a mass murderer by now. Let us be very blunt about that before we go forward with geopolitical complexities, make moral equivalence arguments, or blame 'the west' for all the world's sins.
There have always been mass murderers and tyrants east and west, and Putin can join the bad company of Attila the Hun, Pot Pol, Stalin, and so many others (I will not say the H-word). Of course, the United States and Nato have had their share of notorious special operations in the past and present undoubtedly. But on the scales of justice, some places are freer than others, and some killers are way worse. So let's not make the mistake of justifying Putin's mad butchering because of our own 'liberal guilt'.
However, instead of pointing out the obvious here, let's move on to more important questions. For instance, what is different about this war? Is there anything historically novel going on? And what is the nature of this conflict on a fundamental level? Is this a war of civilisations? Is it about killing a tyrant and saving the Ukrainians (and good Russians too)? Is this the story of David and Goliath?
In many ways, this war follows a predictable pattern. A scapegoat (Ukraine) is chosen to let off the murderous steam of a resentful and dying empire. The increase of fear, panic, and instability created by Covid sets the stage for war. That this war comes at the tail end of a pandemic is not novel; historically speaking, wars follow plagues and pandemics. And in many ways, this is the same eternal war as always, with the same eternal adversary: a filial war between brothers in arms. And yet I would argue that there are fundamental ways in which this war is different.
The war of attention
Firstly, the entire world's attention is on Ukraine for good or ill. Ukraine has already won the war of attention—even if worse situations exist in Uganda, Yemen, and Afghanistan. Also, the fact is that a Jewish comedian is the 'hero' of this war is also significant and surprising—especially in a country with a history of anti-semitism like Ukraine. President Volodymyr Zelensky has courageously remained in Kyiv and projected a spirit of heroism. Ukraine has already become a country of martyrs. In that sense, Putin has already lost the spiritual war, even if he manages to grind Ukraine into dust.
On the other side of the mirror, Alexander Dugin has been instrumental in creating the Kremlin's perverse and nihilistic spiritual vision. Contrary to Dugin's hodge-podge mystical metaphysics—this is not a war between civilisations or Atlantis and Eurasia or any of that bullshit. On a fundamental level, this is a war against a bigger war. When a nuclear holocaust is at stake, it's a choice between civilization and cockroaches.
Embracing and accelerating the 'chaos of the Kali Yuga' and destroying the 'evil liberalism' of the west has been Dugin's overt and perverse spiritual fantasy for years now. He has helped create a war that will not lead to the redemption of the holy Russian empire—quite the opposite. In reality, the Russian leadership has become the caricature anti-Christ that Dugin thinks he is fighting against in the west. It's 'Dugin against Dugin,' to quote Charles Upton's book title.
Furthermore, because of graphic horror transmitted into our devices 24/7—the fog of war has installed itself in our most intimate spaces. Will the shock of daily images and videos help us make this kind of war illegal and impossible in the future? Will Ukraine result in a massive peace movement bigger than Vietnam? Or is this the endgame of human civilisation? An almost universal condemnation and mobilisation against this war are already in progress. That is the good news.
Maybe the war in Ukraine is actually a sign of the 'the Apocalypse at the end of the Kali Yuga cycle'—if you like Hindu metaphors. Kali means 'time' while Yuga means 'world age'. In Indian mythology, after the Apocalypse of the Kali Yuga, history continues into a new time cycle. But does that mean? Importantly, Apocalypse is not the same as Armageddon; it is a painful awakening but not the end of the world. Apocalypse means 'to reveal or uncover' all our civilisation's hidden pathologies and clowns.
In this strange existential space, Dugin is the clown of chaos. Like the post-truth Joker in the Joker movie, he is the mirror image of the resentful modern nihilist he criticises. His mythopoetic Russian folk fantasies have done untold harm: they are merely social constructions without essence—and have more to do with postmodern chaos than whatever the Russian collective soul might be. Dugin knows that these are apocalyptic times—and he would like to exploit the current chaos in his favour.
An Apocalypse is also the harbinger of a new world. It happens when all of the current modes of civilisation are revealed to be insufficient. Incidentally, Hindu mythology is not Nietzsche's "eternal return of the same” or Dugin’s ‘reversal of history’ but a new historical cycle. According to mythology, there is no going back to a golden age, but there could be a new golden age after the silver, bronze, and iron ages are exhausted. And we do seem to inhabit the space between worlds, as Zak Stein put it, between one massive paradigm and the next.
If only Dugin had remained an eccentric scholar or poet and avoided geopolitics. Instead, he has become the postmodern nihilist par excellence, just as Putin is the pre-modern brute. Dugin is the Gollum of our age, and even his fascism is ironic. Of course, he is right about many things. He is perfectly correct to say that communism, fascism, humanism, capitalism, social democracy, social justice, identity politics, and even environmentalism are broken ideologies. He is also correct to say that the United Nations and Nato aren't working, and Europe and America are pretty lost. He knows that today's form of democracy is questionable, that most secular western institutions have become very corrupt—that we live in a meaning crisis and a simulacrum. Nothing is working. Everything is broken. This is a good definition of Kali Yuga.
But even if we are in the so-called Kali Yuga or the end of the iron age—our lives are still improving. Contrary to popular opinion, there is less starvation, madness, and war in the world today than there ever was. Compare Covid to the Black Plague, and compare the present string of proxy wars to 19th and 20th Century bloodbaths. Fewer people today are dying of hunger; there are more trees in Europe and Africa. And while there is fallout from new technology and existential risks like a global warning to deal with, I would argue that these are still the best of times to be alive.
This is evidenced by the fact that we live in a time when hot war is reviled and not romanticised—even the Chinese seem to be holding Russia at a distance for its brutality. Remember, this is also the internet age, not the age of industrial capitalism or Feudalism. Today's war is a war of information where nuclear weapons feel like anachronisms. Could Putin's war be a significant regression before a considerable step forward?
Hot war versus Cold war
Marshal McLuhan has pointed out that during the cold war and Vietnam, the public did not want a hot war. Vietnam failed, he claimed, because of 'cool media', specifically television. According to McLuhan, soap and car commercials, rock and roll, and sitcoms ended conscription and the power of the Klu Klux Klan in America. Indeed, new media and consumer capitalism have created new spiritual problems, and America continued its proxy wars underground. However, the point is that the intimacy of the Vietnam War was too much for people—napalm babies were too horrible for the cosy living room.
Again, in the internet age, war is no longer a romantic occupation for aristocrats and empires. The age of Napoleon is over. The 20th Century is over. With radio and newspapers, war was hot. It hypnotised populations into nationalism, communism, fascism, and mass genocide. But the technological intimacy of video and image makes war too intimate and real for any ‘empire’ to contain or manage through propaganda. Today, nobody can be indifferent to the present horrors coming out of Ukraine. No moral argument for Putin's actions can be sustained, except by freak conspiracy groups. Only the resentful and power lusting weirdos like Dugin could promote such a holy war with their comic book mythologies.
Hence, the hot or holy war is too obscene and anachronistic to be admitted to—therefore 'special operations'. And I doubt The Dugin/Putin double-speak will not wholly hypnotise Russia. News and images get filtered through, and many Russians are against the war. A lie can not sustain itself indefinitely.
I’m somewhat optimistic that ‘special operations’ collapses on itself for these reasons. But what will happen in the aftermath of the war? As Rabbi Manis Friedman says, peace is not good enough—it is just a pause between wars. We have to go deeper than peace. How about ending hot wars forever? The eternal adversary, the scapegoat, the demon of war, needs to be exorcised.
Today it is already fundamentally impossible to go to war with Russia—for one thing, because Russia has more nukes than America. Somehow, we will have to let Russia defeat itself, lose the moral argument, become intolerant of the lie it is telling itself. Russia could become the great spiritual holy land that Dugin dreams about, but only if it repents of its endless lies and is exhausted of its cruelty.
Dugin's fantasy is the worst kind of postmodern dream. It has nothing to do with eschatology or warnings in prophetic literature, with Hopi prophesies to the book of revelations. Dugin has read Martin Heidegger and Nietzsche but not Réné Girard. He doesn't understand that scapegoating makes the multipolar world impossible. But like a good postmodernist, he does not really believe in truth, only in power and his own fantasy life. Rather than a multipolar world, he is locked in a circle of eternal war of opposites. However, the good news is that the crack in everything is shining through.
Today we are in the bottleneck of a significant phase transition, where none of our institutions or ideologies will save us. However, the negativity of the present moment might help us glimpse an actual future. We are a long way from the golden age, but there are signs of a better world coming through the fog. Yes, we need to let Russia find its eternal Logos and China its Toa—and America be the land of the free, for that matter. Dugin is right about one thing. A multipolar is desirable. However, it cannot exist by creating more chaos and dirty wars. Kali, the great destroyer, will not be kind to Putin and his pseudo-Rasputin.
-Andrew Sweeny
My Blog: https://parallax-media.eu/andrew-sweeny/andrew-sweeny
References:
Upton, Charles. Dugin Against Dugin: A Traditionalist Critique of the Fourth Political Theory. Reviviscimus, 2018.
Stein, Zachary. Education in a Time Between Worlds: Essays on the Future of Schools, Technology & Society. Bright Alliance., 2019.