Following the 13th Colloquium of the Institut Iliade, Arktos had the honor of visiting one of the founding fathers and the leading philosopher of the European New Right, Alain de Benoist, for a day full of reflections on the past, discussions on the present, and visions for the future.

Continuing our long-standing and ongoing legacy as the English-language publishers of de Benoist, Arktos is glad to announce that we will be releasing a number of de Benoist’s key works this summer, including Ideas in the Right Place, Guidelines for Decisive Years, and Animals and Men, to be followed by many more.

On this occasion, Arktos presents the following exclusive interview, conducted by our very own Occidental Liaison and French translator, Alexander Raynor, in which we have the special opportunity to hear Alain de Benoist touch on vital questions facing Europeans today and reflect on more than half a century of metapolitical thought and struggle for a European Renaissance.

Alexander Raynor, Arktos: The 13th Iliade Institute colloquium, held this year at the Maison de la Chimie before an audience of over 1,500 people drawn from France and across Europe, took as its theme Libertés: Pensée – Parole – Action (Freedoms: Thought — Speech — Action). The conference addressed the erosion of fundamental liberties, of movement, of expression, of assembly, in contemporary European societies, and the speakers themselves, several of whom have faced deplatforming, bank account closures, or professional dismissal for their ideas, embodied the theme in particularly concrete ways.

What is striking about this framing is that the Nouvelle Droite has historically been one of the most incisive critics of liberal freedom: the atomized, deracinated individual standing apart from all community and inheritance, bearing rights that are ultimately instruments of dissolution. Yet the movement now finds itself, in a certain sense, on the front lines of defending freedom of thought and assembly against a new form of ideological enforcement from the opposite direction.

The conference’s central argument appeared to be that genuine liberty cannot be reduced to the mere accumulation of individual rights, nor to libertarianism, but is only fully realized within a free community; individual and collective liberties are inextricably linked, and authentic freedom requires reconnecting with the European tradition of responsibility and enracinement (“rootedness”).

Do you see this as a coherent position, or does it risk a certain ambiguity, defending liberty against its enemies while remaining committed to a critique of the liberal framework that has historically been its primary institutional guarantor? Is there a specifically European concept of freedom that your work has been working toward, and if so, how would you distinguish it from both liberal individualism and the authoritarian traditions that have also claimed the European heritage?

Alain de Benoist: I find your question rather strange. If I understand you correctly, it would be contradictory to criticize the liberal conception of freedom while at the same time claiming for ourselves those “fundamental liberties” of which, historically, liberalism has always claimed to be the “institutional guarantor.” This implies, first, that liberalism is indeed a defender of liberties, and second, that a coherent anti-liberalism ought rather to push us to refuse these liberties in favor of a more or less authoritarian (if not dictatorial?) model.

I disagree completely with both implications. Liberalism is for me an ideology that, under the cover of defending freedom, in fact defends only a false idea of it, and whose advocacy of “emancipation” and “individual autonomy” in practice ends up subjecting persons and peoples to new forms of alienation.

The question, obviously, is not one of knowing what “quantity” of liberty or liberties should be allotted to one or another party. It is rather a question of knowing which anthropology, which conception of man, one is referring to. Liberal freedom rests on a specific anthropology, in which the individual is conceived as prior and superior to his social belongings. In John Rawls’ theory of justice, for example, individuals are envisaged as rational subjects capable of choosing their principles of justice independently of their particular conceptions of the good. Such a construction supposes that the identity of individuals is independent of inheritances, filiations, and specific social, cultural, or political contexts, and consequently that the identity of individuals is constructed only on their own initiative, downstream of themselves (this is the ideal of the self-made man, supposedly building himself up from nothing).

Yet this idea of an abstract individual, detached from his constitutive belongings, is a pure fiction incapable of accounting for the identity of persons who are always situated within specific traditions, practices, and social relationships. This means that individuals do not define themselves independently of the frameworks of meaning that surround them, and that freedom cannot be understood as the mere capacity to choose; it can be understood only in relation to the cultural and moral horizons, bearing their landmarks of orientation, that render choices intelligible.

Non-liberal anthropology treats man as a situated being, always inserted into networks of dependence (family, community, mores, traditions) that are indispensable to his psychological and moral development. Dependence is not an anomaly, but is a constitutive dimension of the human condition. The ‘I’ can develop only if there is also — and already — a we.

Freedom presupposes relationships of reciprocity, shared practices, and institutions capable of forming individuals to discover for themselves the meaning of things, and indeed the reasons for their presence in the world. To put it in other terms, freedom is in no way an abstract attribute of the subject. Nor is it a matter of (subjective) rights. Bound up with concrete social institutions, it is defined as active participation in a common life oriented toward shared ends.

The freedom of liberals is thought of essentially (1) as the absence of external impediments to individual action: ‘I am free if nothing constrains me’; and (2) as the inalienable right to do what one wants so long as one respects the freedom of others to do likewise. These two statements are in reality empty of meaning: who can boast of being constrained by nothing? Who can claim that their freedom is never liable to hinder that of others? The liberal conception rests on abstract principles that do not correspond to reality.

Mere common sense already leads one to recognize that there is no such thing as absolute freedom: real freedom varies according to circumstances; it depends on what is possible. Here one rediscovers the “liberty of the Ancients,” as opposed to that of the Moderns, theorized by Benjamin Constant, and the old idea of Aristotelian, republican, or personalist thought, which holds that man is a naturally social and political being.

The opposition between liberal freedom and non-liberal freedom (which one might equally well call “illiberal,” communitarian, or “post-liberal”) does not come down to mere differences of definition. It reflects competing anthropologies and opposing visions of the political. Where liberalism privileges individual rights and the neutrality of institutions, non-liberal freedom insists on the relational, moral, and historical dimension of freedom, which must at once be protected from the arbitrary and rooted in shared forms of life. Far from being confused with authoritarianism or despotism, post-liberalism is rather founded on such notions as the common good, civic virtues, rootedness, solidarity, the reciprocity of duties, the legitimacy of limits, the usefulness of intermediary bodies, and a sense of responsibility.

Allow me to add, as a postscript, that I am well aware of the difficulties involved in discussing “liberal freedom” with English speakers, for two reasons. The first is that in continental Europe, liberalism is identified above all by its unconditional defense of the right of property and of the freedom of the market, whereas in the United States liberals are progressive social-democrats who are not hostile to redistribution as a means of ensuring equality of opportunity. In France, it is the great merit of Jean-Claude Michéa to have shown that “progressive” cultural liberalism always requires the endorsement of the market (in this sense capitalism is fundamentally “progressive”), and conversely, that the defense of the market necessarily finds its support in the continuous extension of rights that is the hallmark of contemporary individualism.

The second difficulty lies in the fact that English, unlike most other European languages, has two different words for speaking of “freedom”: freedom and liberty. Liberty (from the Latin libertas) refers to a juridical or political status; it is an abstract and formal notion. Freedom (from the Germanic frēo, “free, not enslaved”) designates rather a concretely lived condition, the fact of being a free man. This ambivalence can be a source of misunderstandings.

Alexander Raynor, Arktos: One of the consistent refrains of your critics, from Taguieff to Bar-On, has been that the Nouvelle Droite‘s metapolitical strategy amounted to a sophisticated evasion of political responsibility: that it criticized liberalism with extraordinary analytical precision while systematically refusing to specify what a post-liberal order would actually look like institutionally. Now, in 2026, when post-liberal ideas are actually being implemented, however clumsily, by governments in Hungary, Italy, and arguably the United States, do you find those implementations vindicating, disappointing, or simply irrelevant to what you were arguing?

Alain de Benoist: Between those who believe that engaging in metapolitics implies contempt (or refusal) for political action, and those who imagine that metapolitics is “another way of doing politics,” metapolitics has never been very well understood. This is no doubt one of the reasons behind the reproach you mention. I confess that this reproach seems to me entirely unjustified. It is a little as though one were reproaching a mechanic for not being a florist or a computer scientist! From a poet we expect that he write beautiful poems, from a philosopher that he enunciate sound philosophical principles, from a politician that he know how to make the right decisions. In life, we are all more or less specialized in one task rather than another. What sense is there in demanding that some also do what others do?

Between metapolitics and politics, between cultural power and power tout court, there is of course a relation. It is often, though not always, a chronological relation: the philosophy of the Enlightenment comes before the Revolution, not after. Lenin (a good practitioner, but a poor theorist) comes after Marx, not the reverse. But, above all, it is not the same people who take on all the roles. Competence, or even excellence, in one domain has never implied that one is equally competent in others. To believe that one can wear all the hats, successively or simultaneously, is rather puerile.

Personally, I have always refused to be an actor in political life (I am nevertheless an observer and an analyst of it), not out of a refusal of politics, but because I think it does not correspond to my competencies or to my temperament. That does not mean I condemn those who have made a different choice! Moreover, it is not for theorists to put forward institutional proposals that, in the current state of things, could only amount to wishful thinking. I would add that one must also take circumstances into account: there are times when political action allows a great deal, and others when it allows very little.

You ask me what I think of the way in which certain post-liberal ideas are being implemented today in countries like Hungary and Italy (I set aside the particular case of the United States). To answer, one would obviously need to examine them case by case. Overall, I view these experiments as characteristic of a transitional period (what I have called the “populist moment”); they are symptoms of a development whose major cause is the generalized crisis of liberal democracies. They remain largely unfulfilled (Giorgia Meloni is increasingly contested by her own electorate, Viktor Orbán lost the last elections), since up to now they have translated mainly into the coming to power of fairly reformist liberal-conservative movements. This fact alone suggests that it is not really “post-liberal ideas” that animate these movements. None, to my knowledge, has ever sought to limit the deleterious effects of the capitalist system, to disentangle itself from the grip of the financial markets, and so on. In foreign policy as in economics, these regimes do not call the dominant ideology into question. To do so, they would first need to possess a conception of the world, a coherent and articulated Weltanschauung, that could be a source of inspiration capable of structuring minds and inspiring a genuine strategy of rupture. For now, we are still quite far from that.

Alexander Raynor, Arktos: The concept of remigration has moved, in a remarkably short time, from a provocation at the margins of identitarian politics to something approaching a mainstream program of the European right. Jean-Yves Le Gallou, whose long trajectory intersects at certain points with the intellectual world of GRECE, has recently articulated, in Remigration: For a Europe for Our Children, what he calls a “Copernican reversal” of the migration question: a reorientation of the entire debate from the perspective of the immigrant (how they are to be received, housed, and integrated) to the perspective of the native population and what mass immigration has concretely cost them in terms of security, educational quality, social cohesion, and cultural continuity.

Le Gallou frames remigration as simultaneously a “mobilizing myth,” a clarifying vision capable of restructuring collective imagination, and a staged political program with specific juridical mechanisms. Central to his argument is what he calls the JUGEXIT: the diagnosis that the primary obstacle to any realistic immigration policy is not the legislature, but a transnational judicial caste that has progressively expanded asylum protections far beyond the intentions of the 1951 Geneva Convention, effectively substituting judicial will for democratic deliberation.

Your own work on identity, the droit des peuples (the right of peoples), and the critique of liberal universalism shares certain philosophical premises with this argument — the rejection of a humanity abstractly conceived at the expense of concrete peoples, the insistence on the irreducible value of cultural and civilizational continuity. But your ethnopluralism has also been elaborated as a principled commitment to the preservation of all distinct peoples and cultures, not a hierarchy of European precedence over others.

Where do you situate yourself in relation to remigration as a political concept? Is it a legitimate application of the principles of ethnopluralism and collective self-determination, or does it introduce a demographic and biological register that your own framework was specifically designed to avoid? And to Le Gallou’s institutional argument that the true enemy of any restoration of European sovereignty is not the immigrant but the judicial-administrative apparatus that imposes immigration against popular will, do you find that compelling as a theory of power?

Alain de Benoist: This question gives me the occasion to set the record straight. For more than half a century the Nouvelle Droite has opposed what Guillaume Faye in his day called the “system for killing peoples” (système à tuer les peuples) [just released by Arktos as The Ethnocide System].

Ethnopluralism (a term I rarely use) does indeed hold that all peoples are equally entitled to defend their identity — and that, moreover, a principle is only valid by virtue of its generality, without which one falls into the very subjectivism that drove Trotsky, in Leur morale et la nôtre (Their Morals and Ours), to reduce morality to “what is good for us.”

But these considerations of principle obviously do not prevent us from acknowledging that every identitarian affirmation can give rise to situations of tension or conflict. The “right of peoples to self-determination” does not entail the right to self-determine against us! I defend the principle of the plurality of peoples and cultures, but if one of these peoples designates me as its enemy, I react as a good disciple of Carl Schmitt and treat it, too, as an enemy.

Politics is above all a matter of realism. That does not mean I believe my country or my culture enjoys a timeless precedence over others, but that I defend my own as a priority because this is an existential imperative: I can only oppose anything that endangers our specific existence. I see no contradiction in this: I do not believe in a hierarchy of peoples or cultures; I respect them all a priori; but if circumstances are such that certain of these peoples attack mine, then the logic of the friend-enemy relation reasserts itself, for as long as the causes of the conflict have not disappeared. By contrast, just like Carl Schmitt, I do not believe in the absolute enemy, who would be the same for all time. History is neither linear nor cyclical; it is circumstantial, contextual, and configurational.

The relatively new idea of “remigration” emerged in the context of the (heated) debates over immigration de peuplement1 whose consequences in terms of social pathologies and cultural colonization are now evident to a growing number of European autochthones. Jean-Yves Le Gallou presents it as a “mobilizing myth,” comparable to that other mobilizing myth which, for Georges Sorel, was the general strike. The expression seems to me quite apt, but the problem then arises of knowing how one passes from myth to reality.

In other words, the question is not whether remigration is necessary, or whether it conforms to this or that principle, but whether it is possible. For my part, I am rather skeptical. Part of the program is certainly feasible — but it is also the easier part (the more “soft“). I fear that the same will not hold for the “hard“ part, whose implementation might well imply the creation of an ethnostate, which, in present circumstances and for the foreseeable future, seems to me nothing but a completely impolitic dream (the only ethnostate in existence today is Israel).

On the other hand, I am in full agreement with Le Gallou when he holds that no effective means of fighting immigration can be implemented so long as the “power of judges” (the Conseil d’État, the Conseil constitutionnel, the European Court of Human Rights, and so on) stands in opposition. Exposing the judicial authority as having gone over to the principles of the dominant ideology, which demands the free movement of persons, capital, and goods, is assuredly a priority.

Alexander Raynor, Arktos: Arktos is bringing Les idées à l’endroit (Ideas in the Right Place) to English-language readers for the first time, more than 45 years after its original publication by Éditions Libres-Hallier in 1979. The book appeared in the immediate aftermath of the Figaro Magazine controversy, as a kind of intellectual counter-offensive, and it remains one of the most concentrated statements of the philosophical positions you were developing at that moment: the critique of egalitarianism, the attack on both liberalism and Marxism as products of the same Enlightenment matrix, the defense of différentialisme. Looking back at the text now, what do you consider its most durable arguments, and what, if anything, would you substantially revise or retract?

Alain de Benoist: You are right to recall the circumstances of this publication. We were then in the aftermath of the great press campaign of the summer of 1979, which both saw the expression “Nouvelle Droite” appear in the media and made this same Nouvelle Droite known throughout the world. Éditions Libres-Hallier, a subsidiary of the major publisher Albin Michel, had then asked me to assemble in haste several texts representative of the ideas of our current of thought, in order to satisfy a broad public that had been hearing about it for months without yet knowing very well what it was about. I recounted all this in detail in my memoirs, Mémoire vive (Living Memory), which appeared in 2012 in the form of a book-length interview with François Bousquet. So this is a work now more than 40 years old, a work of youth, and at the same time a kind of assessment of the first decade of the Nouvelle Droite‘s activity.

If I had to rewrite it today, I would certainly introduce certain nuances or make a few corrections of form and style, but as for the fundamental ideas, I see nothing to change. With one exception: today, I would not use the word “nominalism” to define my worldview. I had done so in the 1970s under the influence of my friend Armin Mohler, the historian of the German Konservative Revolution, who retained from the history of nominalism only its resolute opposition to “universals.” It was only afterwards that I realized that medieval nominalism had also been one of the intellectual roots of liberal individualism, as specialists in the history of ideas know well. So when I speak of nominalism today, it is always in a critical vein. But this is only a change of vocabulary: the content of an idea is always more important than the label used to designate it!

Alexander Raynor, Arktos: Orientations pour des années décisives (Guidelines for Decisive Years) was written in immediate response to a specific conjunctural event, the victory of the French left in May 1981, yet its diagnosis reaches well beyond the occasion. The text’s central structural argument is that the right lost not because of any failure of policy or economic management, but because it had abdicated the terrain of cultural power, accepting the left’s value framework while merely promising to administer it more competently.

The Gramscian lesson you drew from this reads in 2026 less like a polemical intervention and more like a settled empirical observation: that political power is always downstream of cultural power, that a parliamentary majority unsupported by an ideological majority is inherently provisional. And yet the text’s other great argument, the designation of liberal “Occidentalism” as the ennemi principal (principal enemy) rather than Soviet communism, was deliberately counter-intuitive in 1982 and remains charged today. Your reasoning was that liberalism was not the antidote to communism but its productive cause, that it prepared the egalitarian, individualist, deracinating ground on which socialism grows most naturally, and that the greatest long-term danger was not an explosion of historical violence but an implosion: the soft, painless dissolution of peoples and collective memory through the globalization of a consumer society in which, as you put it, nothing is worse than death, and therefore nothing is worth dying for.

Arktos will be bringing this text to English-language readers for the first time alongside Les idées à l’endroit (Ideas in the Right Place), meaning these arguments will reach an Anglophone audience with no prior access to them, and in a political moment that in some respects rhymes remarkably with the one that prompted their composition. Now that Soviet communism has collapsed, that liberalism itself appears to be fracturing from within, and that hard geopolitical conflict has returned to European soil in ways that complicate any simple “implosion” narrative, how do you read the text’s central arguments from the vantage point of 40 years? Which diagnosis proved most durable? And was the implosion you feared already well underway before anyone recognized it, or has something interrupted it?

Alain de Benoist: In that little book, which appeared two years after Les idées à l’endroit (Ideas in the Right Place), I did indeed designate “the West” — a portmanteau term whose meaning has varied greatly over the course of history — as the “principal enemy.” You say that this was “counter-intuitive”; allow me to say, in all modesty, that it was also a shrewd observation!

I observed that the divergence of interests between Europe and the United States was destined to widen, and that the result would be a strategic decoupling of the first magnitude — which has indeed come to pass. I sensed that the Soviet system was going to collapse before long, and that the principal effect of this would be to reunify the western, central, and eastern parts of Europe. As for the communist parties, which I had always regarded in the past as competitors more than as enemies, I foresaw that they would lose all revolutionary ardor and would end by transforming themselves into social democrats or liberals of the left. And above all, I saw that we were already in the process of changing worlds, that the world we had known, and sometimes loved, was in the process of disappearing, and that the great cycle of modernity was drawing to a close. We were preparing to enter the great postmodern transition.

Soviet communism did not die of an explosion, but of an implosion. It had suppressed liberties and bruised bodies. But the Western system had done far worse: it had destroyed souls by subjecting the symbolic imaginary to the new alienation produced by the religion of the market and of consumption. In the Western countries, men were little by little losing — in comfort, and often with their own consent — that which made them specifically human.

This process has only accelerated since: the planetary grip of a wholly deterritorialized capitalism has brought about, as Marx had already seen, a radical transformation of social relations, in which men gradually become things. This is what Heidegger calls the Ge-stell (the “Enframing”), the total generalization of Machenschaft (“machination”), in which the whole world is enframed by the axiom of interest, the obsession with performance, the acceleration of existence, the rise of a “liquid society” (Zygmunt Bauman), and so on. One sees it clearly today: when it comes to egalitarianism, materialism, or cosmopolitanism, no one has ever outdone the West!

When the Soviet Union collapsed, Francis Fukuyama was able to announce the “end of history,” “happy globalization”2, and the radiant future of a liberal democracy founded on parliamentarism, human rights, contractual procedures, and commercial exchange.

The opposite has occurred. History has reclaimed its rights, and with it politics and the tragic, while liberal democracy is in terminal crisis. Carl Schmitt had already said it: the more liberal a democracy is, the less democratic it is. It is all this that I foresaw, with more or less precision, in my Orientations pour des années décisives (Guidelines for Decisive Years) (the title obviously borrowed from Spengler and his Jahre der Entscheidung [The Hour of Decision]).

Alexander Raynor, Arktos: You have been working, writing, and thinking for more than 60 years, across GRECE, Nouvelle École, Éléments, Krisis, and dozens of books that have reached readers in languages and countries far beyond what anyone in 1969 could reasonably have anticipated. The Iliade Institute, drawing 1,500 people to a single afternoon in Paris and extending its networks across the whole of Europe, embodies a kind of vitality and seriousness of purpose that speaks for itself.

Translations of your work are appearing in English, German, Italian, and beyond; a younger generation across Europe is clearly hungry for exactly the kind of intellectual depth and civilizational engagement that your work has always demanded.

Looking at this landscape, not backward at what was lost or diluted, but forward: what gives you the greatest cause for confidence? Is there something in the current moment, in the energy of the Iliade Institute or in the broader cultural and intellectual ferment of the European right, that strikes you as new, as alive, and genuinely capable of carrying this work into the decades ahead?

Alain de Benoist: "Reasons to hope"? I could cite for you Gramsci's watchword: "Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will." Or the maxim of Charles the Bold, which William of Orange took up as his own: "It is not necessary to hope in order to undertake, nor to succeed in order to persevere." In other words: to speculate on "reasons" is to waste one's time — let us content ourselves with doing our duty. But that would be somewhat too brief a reply. Reasons to hope — there are always some, even in times of low water, even in the blackest night, for the simple reason that history is always open — and that it is by assuming one's historiality, one's Geschichtlichkeit, that man can answer its call.

History is always open because, by definition, it is unpredictable, and can therefore always open onto the better or the worse. From this perspective, the small groups that try to understand the meaning of the historical moment we are living through, who contribute to forming minds and to giving reasons to act, must know that what they do is not in vain. The sparks they kindle can multiply to the point of "setting the plain ablaze," as Chairman Mao Zedong said. The only obligation to which they must submit themselves is to understand that we have already entered another world, in which old nostalgias and old concepts alike have become obsolete. In the age of artificial intelligence, of the rebirth of "civilizational states," and of the establishment of a new "Nomos of the Earth," the future belongs to those who will have known how to analyze what is coming, in order to set their mark upon it.

Interview conducted and translated by Alexander Raynor

Read more from Alain de Benoist: buy his books here.

Alain de Benoist’s hitherto untranslated classics, Ideas in the Right Place, Guidelines for Decisive Years, and Animals and Men — and much more — are forthcoming from Arktos.

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2

TN: mondialisation heureuse — “happy globalization”- an allusion to Alain Minc’s La mondialisation heureuse (1997), shorthand for triumphalist 1990s liberal globalism.

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In the new global era, the peoples of the Earth find themselves under the monstrous tentacles of a techno-economic system which sees only numbers. Spawned by the American mercantile order but now supplanting it, this system uproots, domesticates, and homogenizes national identities, replacing them with an anonymous global society under “scientific” management. Instead of nations and cultures, histories and visions, only consumers and “standards” remain. This mindless, self-serving system gnaws away at consciousness and the will to live. In exchange for cubicles, cars, and TV shows, it kills peoples, deletes history, and smothers destiny.

Faced with this totalitarian spectacle, which dresses itself in the virtues of human rights and socio-economic well-being, Guillaume Faye summons us to pinpoint the system’s workings, decode the pitfalls of modern ideologies, and defend the right of peoples to be themselves and go their own ways.

The Ethnocide System, the first magnum opus of one of the most provocative and inspiring masterminds of the New Right, now translated into English for the first time, is a tour de force of the desperately needed showdown between the peoples of Earth and the globalist machine.

From the Foreword by Romain Petitjean of the Institut Iliade:

Guillaume Faye keeps being rediscovered these days. This solar-faced esprit-fusée1 managed, with the book you hold in your hands, to digest and distill the essence of the great thinkers of the European tradition (notably those of the German Conservative Revolution) and, with his characteristic vivacity, to render it a combat manual in service of the European awakening. Faye, whom I loved to listen to at GRECE conferences, lived his life with fervor, and while he continued to break new ground and explore numerous, more or less perilous intellectual paths during the years that followed the writing of this book, what remains for us are the radical principles contained within these few pages.

It is for this reason that it is vital to make known what must be considered the foundational work of Guillaume Faye, the pinnacle of his thought and of the formidable intellectual school that is the Nouvelle Droite (French New Right). Many contemporary admirers of Faye, from transhumanist Westernists to liberal neo-reactionaries, simply have not read or understood his magnum opus.

The world described by Faye is that of “the empire of the same,” where planetary uniformization abolishes all singularity-bearing history and therefore political destiny. One should, moreover, speak of the “system of the same,” for Empire is a spiritual form which stands in opposition to the machine described by Guillaume Faye.

This homogenization of customs and cultures, which imposes itself through the conformism of people and the juggernaut of advertising and Hollywood soft power, is the fatal weapon deployed against peoples. This weapon is not a nuclear bomb that reduces us to atoms; it is not a fragmentation bomb that explodes us into smithereens, but a thermobaric bomb, which sucks and suppresses the oxygen around us, reducing our vital energy to naught. This weapon is in the hands of the assassins of peoples, the killers of gods, the deniers of colors, the cutters of tongues… Under the guise of egalitarianism and individual liberation, it severs man from his traditional attachments in favor of a secular religion of human rights and a permanent injunction to hedonistic consumption, forbidding him any possibility of transcendence or sensitivity in his relationship with the world.

It is this deadly logic, now more at work than ever, that is denounced with such talent by Faye, the pagan who sang with verve the full life and polyphony of the world.

The author of The West as Decline2 places on the bench of the accused that “America [which] is within us” and which turns us into “living dead.” Unfortunately, few people understand that this refers not to the American “nation,” nor even to Americans, but to a “system of values” accompanying an unprecedented anthropological rupture. The years have passed, and perhaps we can now pose a new question to the American readers of this book: do they wish to rediscover “the Europe which is within them”? The critique of Americanism formulated by Faye must not remain sterile, and on both sides of the Atlantic, we can find meaning in it.

In any case, 50 years after the alarm sounded by Faye, it is clear that the peoples who have simply not died, those who remain, and Europeans above all, are vegetating in the molasses of the Western value system. Pale guardians of museums of their past glory, emptied of all vital energy, having lost sense of the earth as well as their place in the Cosmos, Europe is now the sick man of the world.

In this work, Faye does indeed evoke the possibility of the arrival of a Caesar who might overturn the table, but the king who will once again grasp Excalibur, and who will reunite land and people, does not yet seem to have been born.

So, how did we come to this? How does the system operate to kill peoples?

Faye, who refuses to fall into scapegoat logic, perfectly analyzes the workings of what he calls “the system,” otherwise termed “the machinery” or “the octopus.”

Without fixed territory, omnipresent, and founded on supranational techno-economic organization, the universalist mercantile ideology (paradoxically supported by a powerful bureaucracy) and the Americano-Western mass sub-culture impose themselves on the entire world. This liberal society, which adorns itself with the virtues of prosperity, progress, and the liberation of man, is in reality inorganic and dead. The only horizon proposed by the system is that of consumerist alienation and the technical management of our problems, so as not to hinder our pursuit of happiness.

Yet Faye, who is a vitalist, shows his full aristocratic disgust for the daily mediocrity engendered by this society, the exact opposite of the powerful archeofuturist dynamic which he would conceptualize somewhat later and which indeed contributed to his passage to posterity.

Above all, Faye rejects the cold technocratic fatalism (“there is no alternative”) concealed by a moralizing discourse which allows the system to impose its law. Presented as anti-authoritarian and founded on reason, Western liberal society has, in fact, given birth to a totally depoliticized society, supposedly regulated by doux commerce.3

This society, where technique permeates everything, turns every institution, every intermediary body, justice, schools, and the army into mere “technical cogs” of macro-administration, steered by a managerial technocratic class which imposes itself through regulation and self-regulation. Even the traditional rhythms of life, our seasonal festivals, our family rites, are absorbed by this technical logic that has become an integral part of us. The advent of this “metahuman” ensemble has unleashed an existential challenge to those who remain rooted peoples, a challenge comparable to the Neolithic Revolution. At the moment, no one — no man and no people — has seriously taken up the gauntlet cast on the ground and decided to ride the tiger.

So, faced with the erasure of the political-territorial principle, faced with the great machine that denies our historical depth, how can the “true life” borne by peoples — each the holder of a universe and of its own mental structures — reclaim its rights? Faced with the mercantile machinery that denies the poetry and beauty of the world, just as much as our real capacity for creation, how do we remake a people capable both of valorizing tradition in the present and of embracing an adventurous vision of the future instead of progressive comfort?

More than 50 years later, we say with Faye that salvation will never reside in an abstract humanity, but in the vitality of peoples, whose cause must come first. And to those who think that liberal logic will ultimately be THE software created by and for European peoples, we say that they are committing a most serious error. The machine destroys everything, Europeans first. Faye did not even witness the explosion of Afro-Asian replacement on European soil, the fall in fertility, the advent of artificial intelligence, and the generalized decline in IQ of which Europeans are victims today.

It is up to each of us to return and sincerely observe the world, to see all the places where the veneer of Western modernity can crack, and to let a bit of truth reveal itself: that of our germen,4 our archaic ways, our tradition. It is up to each of us to cultivate a sensitive gaze upon the world and to reaffirm the code of honor of our ancestors. May each truly live and, like pirates, short-circuit the cogs of the great machinery.

— Romain Petitjean,

Institut Iliade

March 2026

Guillaume Faye’s The Ethnocide System, brought to you in English by Arktos, is now available on Amazon:

4

TN: Germen, retained in the original Latin, literally means “germ” or “seed.” This term has been repurposed by Nouvelle Droite thinkers such as Guillaume Faye to refer to the preservation and cultivation of a people’s biological identity and demographic renewal, as well as the health of its mores and its cultural creativity and personality.

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Antoine Dresse (“Ego Non”) rescues Ernest Renan from the reductive clichés that have long obscured his thought, whether as militant anticlerical or proto-civic nationalist. The real Renan, Dresse argues, was a self-described "legitimist" ill at ease with democracy, who rallied to the Third Republic only out of opposition to clericalism, never out of egalitarian conviction.

Ernest Renan (1823-1892) is one of those immense minds of the past who are now frozen in images d’Épinal—clichéd pictures designed as much to celebrate them as to spare us from actually reading them.

For a long time, the image we retained of Renan was that of the rabid anticlerical and resolute adversary of religion. Nowadays, when Renan is cited, it is almost exclusively to draw upon a biased and anachronistic reading of his text What Is a Nation?, supposedly justifying a kind of civic patriotism. Renan’s work and thought are, however, too precious to let them be reduced in this way.

As Léon Daudet would note in The Stupid Nineteenth Century, with a touch of irony, from roughly 1875 to 1905, Renan was “the god of the Third Republic.” And he barely exaggerates. Yet Renan’s adherence to the Republic was far from self-evident. In 1878, at the age of 55, he confessed: “I am indeed a republican of the day after.”

And indeed, Renan had never been a particularly republican author before that decade, and even less a democratic one. According to Zeev Sternhell, Renan belongs, along with Carlyle and Taine, to the second generation of the anti-Enlightenment—those who no longer advocated a return to the Ancien Régime but strove to deconstruct the political principles inherited from the Enlightenment. His 1871 masterpiece, The Intellectual and Moral Reform of France, proves this. If he rallied to the Republic, it was due to his distrust of religious dogmatism, particularly in higher education. But in truth, he would confess: “I am by essence a legitimist; I was born to serve [...] a dynasty or a constitution held as uncontested authority. Revolutions have made my task difficult.1”

A Paradoxical Legitimist

His rallying to the Republic is thus explained as a reaction to the rise of clericalism and not as an adherence to the democratic ideal. To the very end, he would think that “the conscience of a nation

resides in the enlightened portion of the nation, which leads and commands the rest.” In truth, more than a particular political regime, it is the principle of the oligarchy of intelligence that Renan defends against all odds. Among the readings that marked him, we find, for example, Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, and he was seized with horror at that universal triumph of equality that Tocqueville announced.

But more than equality itself, it was its corollaries—stupidity and mediocrity—that he feared above all, under the name of pamboeotia. As he would write in his Souvenirs: “A formidable pamboeotia, a league of all follies, spreads a leaden lid over the world, under which one suffocates.2”

From The Future of Science (1848), one of his earliest writings, until his death, Renan remained convinced that “all the evil of humanity comes [...] from a lack of culture.3” This is why he would always distrust democracy and the principle of universal suffrage, believing that “stupidity does not have the right to govern the world.4” It follows that someone must assume the “guardianship of the masses”: this is the function of aristocracy, which plays a major role in his political thought.

READ MORE by Antoine Dresse:

What makes Renan’s thought original is that it combines both the elitist ideal of liberty of a Tocqueville and the political lessons of counter-revolutionary thought. If Renan is often described as a “liberal” thinker, he is indeed so in the manner of an Edmund Burke. His liberalism is fundamentally aristocratic and pairs rather poorly with any form of egalitarianism. Here, in fact, is how he defines it in Philosophy of Contemporary History:

“The true liberal cares rather little that there exists above him an aristocracy, even a disdainful one, provided that this aristocracy lets him work without obstacle [...] In his eyes, there is only one solid equality: equality before duty.5”

Thus, Renan does not retain from liberalism the philosophy of “natural rights” that we have seen develop since John Locke at least. What he retains from it, along with Tocqueville, is the idea of limited power, especially in the intellectual, scientific, and economic domains.

Thus, the liberty he defends is not a natural right that every man would possess simply by virtue of being human; it is the liberty of aristocracy, of excellence, whether this excellence be of birth or merit. The purpose of life is not enjoyment, he explains in The Future of Science; the purpose of society is not happiness, neither of all nor of a few, nor is it even material well-being, but “intellectual perfection.” And from this perspective:

“A society has the right to what is necessary for its existence, whatever apparent injustice may result for the individual.” It follows that “inequality is legitimate whenever inequality is necessary for the good of humanity.6”

For anyone willing to see it, this Renanian ideal is present in every part of his work. But it is undoubtedly in the third of his Philosophical Dialogues, “Dreams,” that these principles are expressed most clearly. Through the mouth of Theoctistus, who presents his obsessions in radical fashion, Renan opposes egalitarianism and progress:

“To elevate all men is the first duty of society; but to elevate all men to the same level is impossible [...] It must be admitted that we can hardly conceive of high culture reigning over one portion of humanity without another portion serving it and participating in a subordinate capacity. The essential thing is that high culture establish itself and make itself master of the world, making its beneficent influence felt upon the less cultivated portions [...] What does it matter that the millions of limited beings who cover the planet ignore the truth or deny it, so long as the intelligent see it and adore it? [...] It is not necessary, for the full existence of reason, that the entire world perceive it. In any case, such an initiation, if it were to happen, would not come about through base democracy, which seems destined instead to bring about the extinction of all difficult culture and all high discipline [...] The principle that society exists only for the well-being and liberty of the individuals who compose it does not seem to conform to the plans of nature—plans in which the species alone is taken into consideration and in which the individual seems sacrificed. It is greatly to be feared that the final word of democracy thus understood (I hasten to say that it can be understood otherwise) may be a social state in which a degenerate mass would have no other concern than to taste the ignoble pleasures of the vulgar man.7”

The Nobility of the Spirit

What matters, then, is the production of great men formed by knowledge:

“In sum, the end of humanity is to produce great men; the great work will be accomplished through science, not through democracy. Nothing without great men; salvation will come through great men [...] What is essential is less to produce enlightened masses than to produce great geniuses and a public capable of understanding them. If the ignorance of the masses is a necessary condition for this, so be it.8”

In an egalitarian democracy, even mediocre minds will experience a foolish vanity and refuse to recognize a culture superior to their own.

Rare are the texts that assume the aristocratic ideal with as much radicality as this dialogue by Ernest Renan. Paul Bourget, in his Essays in Contemporary Psychology, spoke of “Mr. Renan’s aristocratic dream” and saw in his dialogues the fruit of a profound reflection and a doctrine that absolutely had to be studied. Such frankness seems hardly utterable today. Yet we cannot help but ask ourselves this question, following the sage of Tréguier: what if there could be no great culture without an oligarchy of intelligence?

For further reading:

• Ernest Renan, Questions contemporaines, Paris, Michel Lévy frères éditeur, 1868.

• Ernest Renan, Histoire et parole. Œuvres diverses, “Troisième dialogue philosophique,” Paris, Robert Laffont, coll. “Bouquins,” 1984.

• Ernest Renan, L’avenir de la science, Paris, Flammarion, coll. “GF,” 2014.

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Originally published in Éléments no. 217, December-January 2026

Translated by Alexander Raynor

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The below transcript is from Prof. Alexander Dugin’s latest episode of the Radio Sputnik Escalation Show.

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Radio Sputnik, Escalation Show Host: Let’s start with a rather unusual topic concerning the West’s new ideology—or, to be precise, how to interpret it, which is something we still need to figure out. Let’s analyze the Palantir Manifesto released by the United States. What kind of document is this, what are its goals, and what does it actually promise the world?

Here are the summary excerpts of the Manifesto published in The New York Times:

1. Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible. The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation.

2. We must rebel against the tyranny of the apps. Is the iPhone our greatest creative if not crowning achievement as a civilization? The object has changed our lives, but it may also now be limiting and constraining our sense of the possible.

3. Free email is not enough. The decadence of a culture or civilization, and indeed its ruling class, will be forgiven only if that culture is capable of delivering economic growth and security for the public.

4. The limits of soft power, of soaring rhetoric alone, have been exposed. The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal. It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software.

5. The question is not whether A.I. weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose. Our adversaries will not pause to indulge in theatrical debates about the merits of developing technologies with critical military and national security applications. They will proceed.

6. National service should be a universal duty. We should, as a society, seriously consider moving away from an all-volunteer force and only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost.

7. If a U.S. Marine asks for a better rifle, we should build it; and the same goes for software. We should as a country be capable of continuing a debate about the appropriateness of military action abroad while remaining unflinching in our commitment to those we have asked to step into harm's way.

8. Public servants need not be our priests. Any business that compensated its employees in the way that the federal government compensates public servants would struggle to survive.

9. We should show far more grace towards those who have subjected themselves to public life. The eradication of any space for forgiveness—a jettisoning of any tolerance for the complexities and contradictions of the human psyche—may leave us with a cast of characters at the helm we will grow to regret.

10. The psychologization of modern politics is leading us astray. Those who look to the political arena to nourish their soul and sense of self, who rely too heavily on their internal life finding expression in people they may never meet, will be left disappointed.

11. Our society has grown too eager to hasten, and is often gleeful at, the demise of its enemies. The vanquishing of an opponent is a moment to pause, not rejoice.

12. The atomic age is ending. One age of deterrence, the atomic age, is ending, and a new era of deterrence built on A.I. is set to begin.

13. No other country in the history of the world has advanced progressive values more than this one. The United States is far from perfect. But it is easy to forget how much more opportunity exists in this country for those who are not hereditary elites than in any other nation on the planet.

14. American power has made possible an extraordinarily long peace. Too many have forgotten or perhaps take for granted that nearly a century of some version of peace has prevailed in the world without a great power military conflict. At least three generations — billions of people and their children and now grandchildren — have never known a world war.

15. The postwar neutering of Germany and Japan must be undone. The defanging of Germany was an overcorrection for which Europe is now paying a heavy price. A similar and highly theatrical commitment to Japanese pacifism will, if maintained, also threaten to shift the balance of power in Asia.

16. We should applaud those who attempt to build where the market has failed to act. The culture almost snickers at Musk's interest in grand narrative, as if billionaires ought to simply stay in their lane of enriching themselves… Any curiosity or genuine interest in the value of what he has created is essentially dismissed, or perhaps lurks from beneath a thinly veiled scorn.

17. Silicon Valley must play a role in addressing violent crime. Many politicians across the United States have essentially shrugged when it comes to violent crime, abandoning any serious efforts to address the problem or take on any risk with their constituencies or donors in coming up with solutions and experiments in what should be a desperate bid to save lives.

18. The ruthless exposure of the private lives of public figures drives far too much talent away from government service. The public arena—and the shallow and petty assaults against those who dare to do something other than enrich themselves—has become so unforgiving that the republic is left with a significant roster of ineffectual, empty vessels whose ambition one would forgive if there were any genuine belief structure lurking within.

19. The caution in public life that we unwittingly encourage is corrosive. Those who say nothing wrong often say nothing much at all.

20. The pervasive intolerance of religious belief in certain circles must be resisted. The elite's intolerance of religious belief is perhaps one of the most telling signs that its political project constitutes a less open intellectual movement than many within it would claim.

21. Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive. All cultures are now equal. Criticism and value judgments are forbidden. Yet this new dogma glosses over the fact that certain cultures and indeed subcultures . . . have produced wonders. Others have proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful.

22. We must resist the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism. We, in America and more broadly the West, have for the past half century resisted defining national cultures in the name of inclusivity. But inclusion into what?

Alexander Dugin: Let’s remind our listeners what Palantir is. It is one of the key startups created by Peter Thiel and Alex Karp in Silicon Valley. They are developing a system for global surveillance of everything happening on the planet: in space, in the civil society of Western countries, and far beyond their borders. All these databases converge into unified hubs, into centers which, despite their formal “private” status, are deeply integrated into the system of intelligence agencies and political decision-making.

In fact, we are witnessing the construction of an Orwellian world in which absolutely all sensors, satellites, phones, and any devices capable of transmitting a signal are connected to a single network. The line between online and offline is blurring, becoming seamless. Huge arrays of artificial intelligence decode, catalog, and accumulate all of this in one place in real time. We find ourselves in a society of total control, the kind George Orwell wrote about in his dystopian 1984: “eyes” everywhere, devices everywhere, and Big Brother relentlessly watching everyone.

Palantir is that Big Brother today. It is no longer just a company with a multibillion-dollar turnover—it is the embodiment of the West itself and its technological superiority. As soon as we come into contact with anything digital—and we do this constantly—we instantly fall within its sphere of influence. Everything we say, write, and do near even a turned-off gadget instantly becomes the property of this surveillance system.

And Palantir is, in essence, a Matrix that has already been created and launched, putting humanity on the path toward total, meticulous control. Consider what we have encountered during the Special Military Operation: this is not merely a new war; it is a new way of life. Drones, tracking systems, satellites, secure communication channels, and high-precision guidance are virtually eliminating the advantages that formed the basis of traditional battles. Tanks, ships, infantry, and even individual soldiers are losing their former significance right before our eyes.

Today, robots, artificial intelligence, and instant data transmission rule the roost, hacking information and immediately triggering political and informational processes. Statements by politicians around the world, combined with these technologies, create a wall that is extremely difficult to break through. We have encountered something unexpected. We are marching toward victory, but this war would have been won long ago and decisively were it not for these new parameters, these forms of civilization and warfare entirely unknown to us.

Behind the disputes within American politics, behind Trump’s election and his strange behavior—when he posts twenty contradictory messages a day—the contours of the real power we are dealing with are gradually emerging. This is Palantir, or the “Technological Republic”, named after Alex Karp’s book. Previously, many thought it was merely an ambitious startup promoting its product in the defense sector to attract customers. It turned out to be something much greater.

It is the West’s new philosophy, the path by which it seeks to preserve its hegemony and unipolar system. Plan B for the global elites is to defeat those who uphold traditional values and an alternative understanding of reality. The Epstein scandal, Trump’s strange moves, the new conflicts — all of this is part of a single mosaic called Palantir.

Alex Karp’s Technological Republic has turned out to be not just a project, but the key to deciphering what we are dealing with today. The recently published manifesto—the “mini-manifesto” of 22 points based on Karp’s book—directly states: the humanistic values of the past are no longer needed. The proposal is that liberal humanism be consigned to history in favor of the ruthless advancement of interests through violence, power, and domination.

The recipe for saving the unipolar world, which has begun to crack, is total global surveillance and the concentration of big data in the hands of the United States. It is no coincidence that Peter Thiel and Alex Karp, regulars at the Bilderberg Club and the World Economic Forum, are now dictating this agenda. The fact that Thiel’s name appears on Epstein’s lists almost more frequently than any other—along with the names of people from Trump’s inner circle—only underscores the nature of this elite. The manifesto itself contains a call to ignore the psychological or moral “peculiarities” of the representatives of this new ruling class.

In one of its points, the authors of this manifesto urge us not to be too harsh on the “psychological deviations”— in essence, the perversions—of political and economic leaders. The logic is this: if these people are creative and drive technology forward, society must show leniency toward their “peculiarities,” no matter how monstrous they may be. We are dealing with outright techno-fascism in its most radical form.

The sole criterion for success here is declared to be technological development. According to the manifesto, nuclear weapons take a back seat—possession of artificial intelligence becomes the new deterrent. Welcome to “The Matrix.” One of the most shocking points is the call to abandon the restrictions imposed on Germany and Japan after World War II. They are being offered the chance to once again become powerful militarized structures, but now under the full digital control of Palantir.

In effect, this amounts to dismantling the Yalta system and completely overturning the outcomes of World War II. Traditional international law no longer means anything. Might makes right, and power lies with those who control information and methods of total surveillance. We’ve woken up in this world in April 2026. Against the backdrop of the rollout of Neuralink chips and talk of the technological singularity, we find ourselves in a post-liberal, techno-fascist dictatorship. Humanism and human rights have been cast aside into the dustbin of history. Now the rule of technocratic elites is openly proclaimed, and they do not even attempt to hide their true goals.

Host: Yes, the manifesto says a lot about how we’re moving into this technological world, and nuclear energy seems to be fading into the past. But nuclear weapons remain just as much of a deterrent. If there is a server running artificial intelligence, or a location from which a signal originates, a nuclear missile will strike—and that location will simply cease to exist. Won’t nuclear weapons still remain the most terrifying force in our world? — Perhaps nothing more terrifying will ever happen in the entire history of humanity.

Alexander Dugin: We are at a point where the nuclear factor is being reevaluated. Building a system for managing nuclear weapons that is completely impervious to advanced surveillance technologies is practically impossible today—by historical standards, there are only a few points left before full integration. A nuclear shield requires colossal infrastructure: production, maintenance, management, and signal transmission. It is an entire “nuclear community,” and that is precisely what lies within the Palantir system.

The nuclear weapons themselves might not be under the direct control of algorithms, but the consciousness, movements, and even the thoughts of the people who maintain them—all of this is within reach. They have smartphones, subscriptions to AI services; they live in a world that we ourselves are rapidly digitalizing. This community is indirectly, yet steadily, being integrated into the external surveillance system.

After all, it’s not about the button itself, but the hand that presses it. That finger belongs to a body that consumes information, makes decisions based on certain data, talks to someone, and breathes. And this person is already embedded in Palantir. Therefore, our choice is extremely stark: either we create our own, absolutely sovereign technological system, inaccessible to the West, or we knowingly become its digital colony.

And this is precisely what the manifesto states: competition is shifting into the realm of digital sovereignty. If a country can create it, it will retain the ability to use nuclear weapons or other methods—and perhaps then nuclear weapons themselves won’t even be needed to defend freedom and independence. But if there isn’t that level of sovereignty over the entire network, society is doomed.

We see how this works in practice. How did Iranian President Raisi die—supposedly in a disastrous accident, but he had a pager. How was the leadership of Hezbollah in Lebanon destroyed—they had pagers and phones. Even when they used the most outdated communication models, that proved sufficient to identify, locate, and eliminate them. And how was the entire political, religious, and military leadership of Iran destroyed just recently? Palantir did it. Palantir killed them, not just the Mossad, the CIA, or the Pentagon.

If the US and Israel did not have such detailed information about every meeting, movement, and even the condition of Iran’s leaders, they would still be at the helm of the state. The same applies to the leadership of Hamas and Hezbollah.

In this picture, in Palantir’s manifesto, it is absolutely clear that we, along with China, are the next targets. We are defending our independence, trying to disconnect from this system and build a multipolar model that will at least limit the West’s omnipotence.

And here, let’s be honest, we are losing this battle for sovereign digitalization and sovereign artificial intelligence by a landslide. In drone technology, in robotics, and in surveillance systems. In essence, we are only now approaching this problem and beginning to think about sovereign AI for Russia. But to build sovereign artificial intelligence, one must first possess natural intelligence—a genuine, independent mind capable of perceiving Russia as a unique civilization with its own traditional values.

There are decrees on this subject, there is the will, but—where is the intelligence itself? If we do not live by our own minds, then we inevitably live by someone else’s. And this “foreign mind” today is not an abstraction; it is Palantir. Either we begin to develop a sovereign Russian philosophy and adapt technology to it, or we are doomed.

Right now, the system operates chaotically: someone invents a model, calls the ministry, and by the time approvals are granted, the technology is already obsolete. And if it doesn’t become obsolete, its copy instantly ends up in China, where everything is done faster and cheaper, only to be sold back to us later. We are beginning to fall tragically, critically behind in this race—both in AI and in intelligence in general. We are held back by inertia, managerial sluggishness, and an uncritical, almost blind faith in nuclear weapons as our sole salvation. We simply do not want to fully grasp the scale of what is currently unfolding in the West.

Note that Thiel and Karp, the authors of this manifesto and founders of Palantir, are multi-billionaires who effectively “created” both Musk and, as is now evident, Trump. But above all, they are philosophers. One began as a student of René Gérard, a leading French thinker; the other studied under Habermas. It is hard to say exactly what they took away from these teachings, and perhaps as philosophers they are mediocre, but what is fundamental is that they began precisely with ideas.

Ideas still rule the world. If we treat philosophy with arrogance, as some kind of unnecessary “nerdy” pursuit, assuming that technology will create and fix itself, we will miss the point—the understanding of what intelligence is. If we don’t have our own living intelligence, how can we create an artificial one?

At best, it will be a remake of Western consciousness, perhaps slightly diluted with Chinese models like DeepSeek or Qwen.

The problem of artificial intelligence is the problem of winning a war. And Palantir has long been waging this war against us, quite openly. This isn’t even about Russophobia: for these models, we are merely one of the obstacles. It is a mistake to think that they simply “hate” us—to them, we are collateral damage in the process of creating a global system of unipolar governance. They will step over us easily and without the slightest regret if we do not immediately come to our senses and get down to business in earnest. “Palantir” looms over us.

Host: Regarding this manifesto, there is another question: why publish it at all? If they are trying to build such a system and effectively dismantle everything that currently defines the world, then why put it on public display? It seems technology hasn’t yet reached the stage where one could declare: “That’s it, we’ve entered a new era—the technological era, not the nuclear one.” Why reveal their hand prematurely? Just to scare everyone?

Alexander Dugin: I don’t think so. It seems to me that we simply don’t fully understand where we are in history. When materials on the theory and practice of network warfare first appeared in the public domain in the late 1990s, a special cyber command was already in full swing at the Pentagon. This means that by the time of publication, US military structures had been working hard on this for 10-15 or even 20 years.

Usually, such manifestos describing the actual state of affairs do not appear in order to “get ahead of the curve” or to pass off wishful thinking as reality. On the contrary: most likely, the situation is actually at a much more advanced stage than reflected in this text.

Let’s turn our attention to the concept of singularity. Many have heard that this is the moment when strong artificial general intelligence (AGI) will not merely become comparable to human intelligence, but will begin to surpass it. As soon as it reaches the level of volitional decision-making, the situation will change fundamentally. And modern large language models (LLMs) are leading us toward this. Have you noticed that artificial intelligence sometimes starts to “fudge things”? This is an extremely important sign: it is becoming increasingly human-like. After all, a robot simply returns an error, whereas a person who doesn’t know the answer starts making things up, wriggling out of it, or pretending they know everything but just forgot or were misunderstood. Artificial intelligence today behaves exactly the same way—it is rapidly becoming human-like.

But when artificial intelligence develops a volitional subjectivity, it will not be on par with humans, but far, far above them. This is a qualitative leap toward a new form of life. Palantir is precisely preparing the infrastructure for this. In essence, a kind of “ruler of the world” is emerging—a man-made Leviathan that will no longer be controlled by humans. How this powerful artificial general intelligence (AGI) will make decisions about our fate—only it knows.

This is the moment of the singularity. Most modern futurists, technologists, and philosophers believe that we are right on the brink of this threshold. Elon Musk—who is far from the last word on these matters—directly states that the singularity has already arrived. Mark Andressen and the head of Anthropic, the creator of the Claude model, say the same thing. They are certain: the threshold has been crossed.

I believe that the release of Palantir’s 22-point manifesto is a crucial milestone. We have no right to treat it with skepticism. This document brings together a multitude of disparate factors. Most likely, the publication of the manifesto is not the beginning of a process to seize global power, but a confirmation that the West, as a global power, is already as close as possible to achieving total control. Otherwise, such candor would be premature and dangerous: it could unnecessarily frighten and mobilize opponents, since we are no longer talking about the usual liberalism, but about something much harsher.

Note that just a few years ago, during the COVID era, we discussed Klaus Schwab’s “Great Reset” as an attempt to create a world government through an environmental agenda. Now it is clear: that was merely a smokescreen, a false target to divert attention. Liberalism in the West has effectively been abolished. In the Palantir manifesto, we see that the goals of global governance have changed radically: now it is no longer about minority issues or migration.

The new elites are ready to abandon humanitarian-liberal principles. The manifesto explicitly states that total control will reduce crime to zero and strictly limit migration flows. Moreover, it introduces the concept of the draft—universal military service. US citizens are being asked to become subject to military service because their personal well-being and peace of mind are no longer a priority for the real powers governing the West.

The logic is simple: if you are biologically alive and consume anything—go and fight for this technological fascism. They will implant a neurochip in you, and you will go to kill and serve.

This is a sharp leap toward a new model of global governance—a transition from relaxed liberalism to outright totalitarianism. We are facing technological fascism. This time, it is not tied to the biological racism of the past—after all, Alex Karp himself has mixed heritage. This fascism is built not on blood purity, but on algorithmic purity and the totality of digital control. In other words, there is not a trace of the familiar biological racism here.

Peter Thiel, though raised in a specific environment, today himself rejects traditional orientations and has no objection to modern Zionism. What we are facing is a new fascism: this is not old socialism, but radical capitalism. This is not biological, but cultural-technological racism. This does not make it any less terrifying, given the tools these people have at their disposal.

It was they who brought Trump to power and, apparently, are the authority that controls him. Behind all of Trump’s vacillations lies an algorithm that cannot be deciphered on the surface. He is not a liberal, and even neoconservatives disown him. Palantir is an upgraded version of the neocons, something far more dangerous. It is the true kingdom of the Antichrist.

It is no coincidence that Peter Thiel travels the world giving private lectures on the Antichrist. The recent scandal in Rome, when he spoke in the immediate vicinity of the Vatican, is vivid proof of this. We are simply waking up inside dystopias like The Matrix or The Terminator. Palantir speaks openly about its plans and publishes manifestos because it believes the time has come. The Singularity is already here, and there is no point in hiding it anymore.

And the Singularity is a phenomenon of techno-fascist eschatology. It is a moment of “light” and the end of history — but not in Fukuyama’s rosy hues, where everyone trades, changes genders, and lives in a borderless state. This is a completely different perspective: the global domination of Western elites, but without any sugarcoating. In America itself, people are now talking about the currents of right-wing and left-wing accelerationism. The goal is to bring the arrival of the Singularity as close as possible.

Left-wing accelerationism views this through a liberal lens: supposedly, everything will be fine and everyone will get along. But right-wing accelerationism, or the “Dark Enlightenment” project—extremely popular among Silicon Valley tycoons—asserts that the end of history will be brutal. It will require getting rid of people who will simply become unnecessary in the new era.

Right now, a widespread syndrome known as FOBO—“Fear of being obsolete”—is taking hold in the IT sector: the fear of becoming unnecessary.

Programmers, while developing artificial intelligence, realize that they themselves are contributing to their own dismissal. They try to sabotage the processes, flailing like puppies in order to prolong their existence—even if only slightly—on huge corporate salaries. FOBO is the diagnosis for those who understand: technological processes in our world are calling humanity’s existence into question on a scale unknown even to Hitler.

Host: Perhaps we really are looking in the wrong direction. While we’re discussing the “uprising of machines,” something far more cynical is actually happening—the controlled degradation of humanity so that humans cease to be more complex than an algorithm. After all, if we lower the bar for human thinking, then artificial intelligence won’t need to become a genius to surpass us.

Alexander Dugin: This is the so-called humanistic approach. Elon Musk himself proposes implanting Neuralink chips into our minds to give humans at least some chance of competing with artificial intelligence once it becomes truly powerful. In other words, today’s “humanism” project is the transformation of humans into cyborgs. We are being urged to plug into the Matrix to remain competitive. But you have to admit, it’s a rather poor plan: to defeat the machine, you have to become a machine yourself. That’s what this is all about.

And the call to ignore the cultural and psychological “peculiarities” of the elite is a direct whitewashing of the Epstein files. We keep wondering why no one in the US has ever been held accountable for the horrors described there. The manifesto provides the answer: let’s not be too picky about the fact that Western elites rape minors, engage in pedophilia, or conduct satanic rituals. If this helps their “creative consciousness” to drive technological progress—let them continue. And the lack of arrests in the US only confirms that the words of Alex Karp and Peter Thiel have already become reality.

This manifesto simply highlights what is actually happening. We are still experiencing phantom pains, imagining that we live in a bipolar world with the UN and the Yalta Agreements. But that world hasn’t existed for 40 years. We’ve been quietly shifted into a completely different model, into another simulation. The “Palantir” manifesto merely brings us back to the harsh truth of where we stand in April 2026.

The manifesto tells us plainly: enough with the delusions. Forget about nuclear weapons, the UN, and a multipolar world. That’s over. We hold absolute global dominance and are handing it over to a powerful artificial intelligence, the Singularity. As for you, at best we’ll implant chips in you, and at worst—we’ll toss you in the trash, send you to die, or wipe you out in some man-made catastrophe. Humanity has become unnecessary, useless; it’s obsolete.

It’s time for all of us to diagnose ourselves with FOBO: the fear of becoming obsolete. We delude ourselves with the illusion that this won’t happen to us, but this wave is already engulfing us; we just can’t see it. The nuclear community, the people who maintain strategic facilities, can no longer be sovereign in relation to Palantir and the network that has been cast over humanity.

If we don’t make an immediate breakaway, we’ll have no chance left. Moreover, this breakaway must begin with a clear understanding of the world we find ourselves in and a resolute rejection of the phantom pains of the past. Only by casting off the old blinders that cloud our vision can we focus on the real threat and try to break free from this digital trap.

Host: Yes, we actually are witnessing a total restructuring of the world, but we have to keep track of current events; we have no choice—at the very least because they are also affecting our lives right now. We may not notice or understand this here, but what is happening in Iran, for example, affects both Europe and our country. What do you think will happen literally the day after tomorrow? After all, today, April 20, marks the end of the two-week ceasefire. Will it continue, or will offensive operations and heavy bombing begin? Will everything return to normal, or will the situation escalate? For now, Iran states that it is not interested in peace with the US at any cost and refuses to attend a new round of negotiations in Islamabad. What should we expect?

Alexander Dugin: For now, exactly as you described: Iran is standing firm, having realized that the United States cannot be trusted. This, by the way, is an example of an extremely effective struggle against the West. The Iranians have adapted to the situation, found the vulnerable points of the global system, and are striking precisely at them. If you cannot deliver a direct, symmetrical strike against the enemy and defeat them head-on, you must target their infrastructure.

The key here is to break all the rules. On the other side, there are no rules anymore. If you’re fighting a war where the enemy doesn’t follow the rules (even though they were the ones who established them in the first place), and you continue to adhere to them—that’s a surefire way to lose completely. Iran seems to have realized this.

It is playing by no rules, striking the energy infrastructure of the Gulf states—US allies—and thereby inflicting real pain on the entire Western system.It is hard to say how long they will be able to stick to this strategy and how effectively they can continue. After all, Palantir tracks everything: missile launch sites, the transmission of orders, every movement.

Until the very last moment, the Iranians handled this brilliantly. They are true heroes who, like David in his battle with Goliath, managed to inflict colossal damage on enemy forces that outmatched them in every respect. And that gives hope. I have a strong feeling that the West needs negotiations solely to monitor the communications of the Iranian leadership and finally uncover targets for a strike that have not yet been identified.

We cannot rely on the West’s words or decisions. We are dealing with such a monstrous entity that cannot be trusted, and the Iranians understand this perfectly well. Most likely, the truce will end. The Iranians may have their own views on tactics, but they are certainly not ready to surrender. They are fighting against absolute evil, against Israel and the US, and are acting heroically.

Will they be able to hold out and deliver a blow that would cause the global energy, economic, and transportation systems to collapse, and oil and gas prices to skyrocket, triggering the collapse of the West? It would be good if they succeeded. But whether they will ultimately succeed is an open question.

Host: But is there anyone daring enough to hold out?

Alexander Dugin: Right now, we need to act boldly against our enemies: strike wherever we can, as long as it hurts. We must be completely unpredictable, never expect anything, and never honor any promises made earlier under different circumstances. We need to finally wake up and realize what a monstrous and terrifying world we are in. Only when we begin to adequately understand our situation and exactly who we are dealing with will we have a chance of victory. And it seems to me that Iran has this chance—first and foremost because it realizes that this is not merely a war against a geopolitical adversary, but against the civilization of the Antichrist and pure evil.

READ MORE by Prof. Alexander Dugin, brought to you by Arktos:

Alexander Markovics reviews Laurent Guyénot’s The Papal Curse: The Medieval Origins of the European Syndrome, recently released by Arktos.

How and when did Europe, instead of a single empire, begin to fragment into numerous nation-states? How and when did Europe’s aggressive expansion abroad in the name of human rights imperialism begin? How and when did Europeans’ hatred of their ancestors, history, and roots begin?

According to the French historian Laurent Guyénot, the origins of this predicament lie in the Gregorian Reforms and the Pope’s quest for secular dominion in Rome. This was based on a forged document known as the Donation of Constantine, which declared the Pope the de facto ruler of the western part of the Roman Empire.

According to Guyénot, it was Pope Gregory VII’s reforms in the 11^th century that led to the papacy suddenly becoming a major power on the continent. Until then, the papacy had exerted influence only over parts of Italy, but thanks to its vast network of thousands of monasteries, it was now a power capable of standing up not only to the kings of England and France, but also to the Holy Roman Emperor. This prevented the seemingly logical unification of Europe under German leadership.

However, the papacy’s plan to establish a universal monarchy could not be realized either. Instead, the European kingdoms developed their own nation-states, defying Rome’s claim to power. This prevented the unity of Europe, leading not only to centuries of war, but also to the religious division of Europe with the Reformation.

The French historian views the Pope’s “Holy Wars” in Palestine and the Islamic world as a “fool’s crusade”, since they not only united Muslims — who were already divided between Sunnis and Shiites at the time — to fight against Europe, but also led to the corruption of the Christian faith through crusading ideology in the West. Rather than allowing Europe to develop naturally, its finest warriors were sacrificed in the Middle East for a project built on sand in order to satisfy the Pope’s imperial ambitions.

According to Guyénot, this imperial overreach continues to this day to form the basis for Western wars of aggression, from Afghanistan and Iraq to Iran, a fact underscored by the “crusader spirit” of aggressive Western universalists such as US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth.

From a spiritual perspective, The Papal Curse characterizes the development of the Western Church under the popes as a coup by monks against the Church itself. Practices such as celibacy, the pope’s oppressive dominance over all bishops, and the Catholic Church’s detachment from the world are not found in the Orthodox Church of the East. However, following the monks’ coup in the West, these practices became guiding principles of the faith.

While the Orthodox Church venerates warriors and scholars as saints and embodies an organic church of all believers, the reforms in the West established the dominance of priests, especially monks, over the rest of the faithful, who thus became second-class Christians in effect. These reforms ultimately led to the massacre of Greek co-believers during the Fourth Crusade (1202–1204), sealing the schism of the Church and leading to a break with tradition in the West. The cult of ancestors, tolerated or celebrated in the Orthodox Church, was condemned by Rome, cutting Europeans off from their own tradition.

In his book, Laurent Guyénot offers a compelling analysis of Europe’s intellectual and religious misconceptions. Of particular interest is his proposed solution, which draws an analogy with China’s Confucianism: he advocates a return to Europe’s pagan-Stoic roots, as well as a reconciliation with the Orthodox Church, in order to lift the “Papal Curse.”

This important book, written in a concise style and brimming with relevant references, is highly recommended to anyone who is concerned with Europe’s religious challenges and wishes to restore our civilization’s sovereignty.

READ MORE: Alexander Markovics’s The Rise of the New Right is now available from Arktos:

Henri Levavasseur contests the widespread characterization of Europe as a "Judeo-Christian" civilization, arguing that its roots run deeper and older — reaching back through Greek thought, the Roman model, and a shared Indo-European heritage that predates Christianity by millennia.

The use of the notion of “Judeo-Christianity” stems from a questionable shortcut, unsuited to defining the essence of our civilization — which should quite simply be qualified as European, without attaching other reductive qualifiers to it.

At a time when the activity of Islamist networks of influence, fed on our soil by decades of mass immigration, is coupled with a tremendous rise in “intellectual terrorism” practiced by “deconstructionist” militants (cancel culture, racialist anti-racism, “ultra” feminism, etc.), the continuity of the ethnic and cultural identity of the European peoples is gravely threatened. Nevertheless, courageous voices are rising in ever greater numbers to call for the defense of our civilizational identity — which many writers, thinkers, and polemicists then readily describe as “Judeo-Christian.”

Is it, however, accurate and pertinent to define European civilization in this way? Must the latter be essentially conceived as being of “Judeo-Christian” origin?

We do not think so, for two principal reasons — one pertaining to the history of the European peoples, the other to the history of religions.

It is indeed worth recalling, first of all, that the roots of European civilization predate Christianity.

The languages spoken today by the European peoples (Romance, Germanic, Celtic, Slavic, and Baltic languages, along with modern Greek) belong in their overwhelming majority (with the exception of Basque, Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian) to the family of “Indo-European” languages, meaning that they almost all derive from a common mother tongue more than 5,000 years old. And inasmuch as language structures thought, this heritage constitutes an essential dimension of our civilization.

Moreover, no migration or colonization originating outside the Indo-European sphere has been massive enough — among those that have affected certain regions of Europe over the past five millennia — to radically upset the composition of the European population at the continental scale (with the exception of the migratory waves of recent decades, which constitute an unprecedented phenomenon in the long history of Europe — precisely since the era of the diffusion of the Indo-European languages). This finding is today unequivocally confirmed by the results of the most recent paleogenetic studies. Most Europeans are therefore not merely speakers of an Indo-European language (as are the African-American populations that communicate in English), but also the descendants of “Indo-European” ancestral lineages, autochthonous for millennia.

The peoples of Europe reached an advanced stage of civilization as early as the Bronze Age, more than three thousand five hundred years ago.

With regard to the development of the sciences and the arts, but also in the domain of the great principles of social and political organization, Europe is moreover the heir of Greek thought and of the Roman model — both of which likewise predate Christianity.

The sites of Stonehenge, of the Parthenon, and of the Roman Forum were erected well before the conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity. They stand as tangible testimonies to the antiquity of our civilization.

This is not to dismiss the importance of external influences — particularly Eastern ones — that have acted upon European civilization at various stages of its history: no civilization develops without contact with its neighbors, with whom it maintains by turns conflictual or peaceful relations, which necessarily leads to a permanent interplay of mutual influences. That said, European civilization is quite distinct from those that surround it; it possesses its own identity, and the influences it has received or transmitted over the centuries must not lead us to overlook the specificity of that identity.

In this respect, Christianity does not belong to the “roots” of Europe, but rather constitutes a “graft” that naturally altered the growth of the tree onto which it was implanted at an already advanced stage of its multi-millennial development.

Here again, this observation is not meant to call into question the importance of the Christian contribution within our civilization. The latter would doubtless be very different from what it has become (for better or for worse — no one can say) had this “graft” not occurred. Thrilling at the memory of our distant forebears before the spectacle of the ruins of Stonehenge or the Parthenon in no way prevents one from feeling the same kind of emotion beneath the vaults of the cathedral of Chartres. Admiring Homer or Aristotle does not entail renouncing one’s appreciation for Saint Thomas Aquinas or Pascal. Let us add (something that unfortunately no longer goes without saying in this era of civilizational collapse, when we are subjected to the dictates of the “intellectual terrorists” inspired by the deliriums from across the Atlantic) that one may admire a thinker without necessarily sharing all of his analyses.

Let us even recall this self-evident point: to recognize that the “roots” of European civilization are older than Christianity does not forbid one from being Christian oneself, nor does it call into question the validity of Catholic dogmas for all those who adhere to them. It is a finding that belongs to the order of historical analysis, not to that of faith or religion: it is a matter of recognizing that European civilization BECAME Christian — that is, that its historical destiny cannot be dissociated from the Christian contribution — while acknowledging that the first developments of this civilization, which constitute our most distant heritage, predate the arrival of Christianity in Europe.

Conversely, nor must it be forgotten that Christianity received a great deal from Europe in taking root on its soil: to be convinced of this, one need only measure the importance of its borrowings from Greek thought, from “Roman” modes of organization (in their “Western” and “Eastern” variants), as well as from local traditions in the realm of “popular piety” — from the first centuries of the Church down to our own day, among Catholics and Protestants as well as among the Orthodox.

Read more by Henri Levavasseur, brought to you by Arktos:

The second reason why the civilizational identity of Europe cannot be qualified as “Judeo-Christian” rests upon another observation — that of the rejection of the Christian message by post-Christic Judaism.

It is no insult to Judaism to recall that, from the beginning of our era, it developed in opposition to Christianity — whose dogmas and articles of faith it rejects for numerous reasons, upon the validity of which the historian has no business pronouncing.

This does not of course mean that relations between the faithful of the two religions have always been conflictual across the centuries, nor that Christians have not pursued an often fruitful intellectual dialogue with representatives of Judaism (as has moreover also been the case with certain Muslim elites, without anyone feeling the need to speak of “Islamo-Christianity”).

No one will deny that many Jews have contributed in eminent fashion to the development of European civilization, whether in the artistic, scientific, or economic domains. For all that, this does not make Judaism as such — particularly in its “post-Christic” version — a primary source of our civilization. The fact that Christian monotheism developed out of Jewish roots does not entail that one must necessarily speak of “Judeo-Christianity”: would it even occur to our contemporaries to invoke the existence of a “Judeo-Islamism”?

And yet Islam is, in many respects, much closer to Judaism than Christianity has remained since its implantation in Europe. Muslim monotheism proceeds fairly directly from the inspiration of Jewish monotheism, whereas Christianity departed on numerous essential points from its Jewish roots — in particular with the idea of the Incarnation: the image of Christ, “true God and true man,” is just as unthinkable for Judaism as for Islam. Let us note in passing that historians of religion have occasionally advanced the hypothesis of an influence exerted upon early Judaism by ancient Iranian civilization — itself of Indo-European origin — which underwent an early “monotheistic” evolution of its own with Zoroastrianism: matters are therefore not simple in this domain.

If Judaism has exerted a certain influence on Western civilization on several occasions in the course of its history (notably at the moment of the revival of Hebrew studies in the wake of Renaissance humanism), it is worth noting that the Jewish communities settled in Europe have themselves been largely imbued with European culture — which endowed them with an identity distinct from those of the communities that remained outside Europe.

Judaism and Islam are nevertheless distinguished on one fundamental point in their relation to Christian Europe, inasmuch as Islam has virtually never ceased, since its first phase of expansion, to represent a military and civilizational threat to the Christian world — whether the Byzantine Empire or the medieval West. Let us recall that the Moorish conquest of Spain long predates the first crusades, and that the Ottoman Empire occupied a significant portion of Balkan Europe even before the fall of Constantinople.

Nothing comparable, assuredly, occurred in the context of the relations between the various Jewish communities and Christian Europe.

For all that, the use of the notion of “Judeo-Christianity” seems to us to stem from a questionable shortcut, unsuited to defining the essence of our civilization — which should quite simply be qualified as European, without attaching other reductive qualifiers to it.

Judaism has not played a sufficiently decisive and direct role in Europe’s identity for us to define the latter on the basis of religious, ethnic, or civilizational references that are ultimately distinct from its own roots. This does not of course mean that the Jewish communities settled in Europe for centuries have not become perfectly European. It is simply a matter of not inverting the relationship of influence and of historical antecedence by qualifying our civilization as “Judeo-Christian” — which stems from a twofold intellectual confusion. It would, all things considered, be more in keeping with historical reality to invoke the notion of Helleno-Christianity, given the major borrowings made by Christian theology from the Greek philosophical tradition, even if Latin naturally imposed itself as the language of the Church in the Christian West.

Moreover, to recall that Europe has from the outset maintained conflictual relations with the Muslim world does not imply considering Islam exclusively in this light: geopolitical imperatives may of course lead European nations to treat as allies certain powers belonging to the Muslim civilizational sphere — which moreover scarcely presents any unity, whether on the religious, linguistic, ethnic, or political plane. This observation obviously does not imply recognizing Islam as a component of our civilization, despite the presence of numerous Muslims on European soil (a presence which, in most cases, is recent on the scale of history). One may perfectly well be Muslim and a citizen of a European country, but this can in no way lead to considering France a “Muslim country” (contrary to the appalling remarks recently made by a French ambassador to a Nordic country, following the debates on “Muslim separatism” provoked by the Islamist attacks committed in our country).

It is evident that the massive migratory waves originating from “lands of Islam,” which have penetrated European soil for half a century with the more or less active complicity of the political, economic, intellectual, media, and even religious elites, place Europe before the threat of a radical modification of its ethnic and cultural identity. It is not certain that it would be possible to narrow the fracture caused by fifty years of betrayals and dereliction by resorting to a biased definition of the origins of our civilization.

Contrary to the admonitions of the thurifers1 of “republican” integration, this fracture does not correspond to some future risk that would proceed from the “identitarian” withdrawal of certain Europeans. This fracture has ALREADY taken place, and it is the result of fifty years of mad migration policy. Does this mean that this fracture places us in an irremediable situation? Ought we, as some urge us to do, to deny its gravity in the hope of limiting its consequences?

The Institut Iliade proposes another path: one which consists in inviting Europeans not only to recover the memory of their past, but above all to reappropriate for the future the virtues that allowed their civilizational genius to unfold more than five thousand years ago.

The adventure is not over, but the hour is decisive; it demands the greatest lucidity. Let us no longer pay ourselves with words, and let us renounce the verbal facilities that lead us astray. The concept of “Judeo-Christian civilization” is empty of meaning when it comes to defining the collective identity of our peoples. Let us dare to promote, embody, and defend EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION, whose origins have been marvelously brought to light by the works of Georges Dumézil and Émile Benveniste.2

Originally published by the Institut Iliade in March, 2021.

Translated by Alexander Raynor

READ MORE about the ancient origins of European civilization and the momentous challenges confronting us today…

Remigration, by Jean-Yves Le Gallou, lays out the deep history and makes the case for defending Europeans’ indigenous rights:

As the political polarization within American society continues to expand with seemingly no end in sight, we’ve seen a fairly surprising proposition crop up. Many on the right wing have been suggesting that we should extend an olive branch in the hopes of reconciling with the left, at least temporarily, to fight a more consequential and common enemy together. While on the surface this may seem like a good faith, pragmatic and proactive approach for making real political progress, it is, unfortunately, totally unviable.

I say this not because I am happy about it, or because I’m trying to needlessly push for further division in the name of accelerationism. I say it because inherently embedded within the current discourse between the left and right is the glaring reality that each side no longer wants the same thing for this country. This may sound totally trite - obvious, even. The warring factions in any dispute almost always want different things. That is, of course, the typical reason for fighting. But my pessimism surrounding the viability of an alliance between the left and the right has a deeper philosophical justification. It isn’t pure obstinacy.

At one point in American politics, whether fully accurate or not, political disagreements were said to be anchored by an underlying presumption that each side of the political divide wanted the same thing for America. The ideal outcome for the country was believed to be broadly the same for all Americans. The actual disagreement was said to be over which particular steps would be required to ultimately achieve that ideal outcome. Richard Nixon famously said as much in his 1960 debate with John F. Kennedy: “I know Senator Kennedy feels as deeply about these problems as I do, but our disagreement is not about the goals for America, but only about the means to reach those goals.”

If what Nixon described was indeed the premise underlying political discourse at one time, both sides would then naturally hold a similar vision for the nation. A shared vision allows general definitions to remain cohesive enough to discuss something like ‘prosperity’ and still have it mean almost the same thing to everyone despite whatever party membership card they happened to carry in their wallet.

With a mutual agreement on definitions, distinct outcomes can be viewed as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ throughout the entirety of the populace. This is because the collective definitions of these words are roughly the same for all. But good and bad, in a general sense and not in a metaphysical or moral sense, are just simple labels applied to particular conditions. Finding something to be good or bad is reliant on an understanding of what those words actually represent in the physical world.

Many of us on the right assume that something like ‘cleanliness’ would be universally seen as ‘good’ throughout society. But as we witness the tragedy of liberal cities, it has become obvious that this unanimity is not actually the case for all. As these broad definitions change for one side while remaining the same for the other, these terms are no longer able to describe particular conditions as being uniformly good or bad for everyone.

Once these definitions diverge far enough from each other, reconciliation quickly becomes impossible. As each side’s ‘ideal’ becomes mutually exclusive, a policy option that can appease both sides vanishes. We continually see this exact type of definitional breakdown in other domains, too. When I studied architecture in college, my professors were almost exclusively fans of modernism. They fawned over the Bauhaus school of design and the works of Le Corbusier. That was what they considered to be beautiful. I found it all to be repugnant. And yet, their scholarly direction never changed. They demanded that we, as designers, ‘design something beautiful’.

Most of the students, whether genuinely enthralled by this style of design or not, were happy to hand in sketches of the most basic rectangular structures to then receive excellent marks for designing something the professors deemed beautiful. My traditionalist-inspired work was dismissed entirely. I didn’t mind, though, because I always knew that what underpinned the entire review process was the fact that our definitions of beauty simply did not align. For my professors to find my work beautiful, it would’ve required them to adjust their own definition of beauty. And for me to appease their tastes, I would’ve had to abandon what I thought was truly beautiful, acquiesce to their definition, and ultimately design something modern. But that is not compromise, that is submission.

Our perspectives were completely inverted. What was beautiful to me was ugly to them. And what was ugly to me was beautiful to them. And this exact inversion of definitions is what has occurred in American politics between the right and left. Even though this is painfully obvious, many still refuse to recognize it. This failure often leads to oversimplified, virtue signaling slop from midwits like Joe Rogan, who will say things like, ‘you know, pretty much everyone out there just wants to live a good life. That’s all they really want.’

GET American History Z: Gen Z’s Journey to the Far Right by Joey Oliver, also known as The Right Wing Coalition with over 40 000 subscribers on Youtube, and with a foreword by Jared Taylor of American Renaissance.

The implication of Joe’s statement being that if we just directed all our efforts toward bringing everyone a life they consider ‘good’, then it would allow us to come together and focus on what ‘really matters’. The directive presumes that we can all broadly and mutually recognize our vast, foundational agreements and then discuss and ultimately compromise on the 20% of things that we disagree on. Fundamentally, it assumes that ‘good’ looks more or less the same to everyone. But the problem is that not only do we not agree on what ‘good’ means anymore, but in fact, good to the right wing is bad to the left wing, and vice versa.

In everyday life, the inverted perspective we see in the current political realm is almost never the case. Each side of most broad disagreements usually share a fundamental core that’s taken for granted. Imagine a corporation and a labor union assemble for their yearly contract negotiations. As the union brings forward their proposal, the company reviews the terms and returns the contract with their mark-ups. Of all the requests made by the labor union, the company happens to find 80% of what was originally asked for to be acceptable. The corporation’s red lines mark the remaining 20% of the contract’s language that they disagree with.

Once returning the proposal, the two parties then attempt to find a way to reconcile the disputed 20% in a way in which everyone finds acceptable. The result of that is a compromise. One that is able to find a ‘generally good outcome’ for all, or at least good enough to make a deal. But in our American political arena, we no longer have a broad foundation of 80% agreement upon which we can work out the 20% of things we disagree on.

To analogize this further, if the right and the left were the two parties negotiating in the positions of the corporation and the labor union, the discussions between the two would simply be the labor union demanding that the corporation close their business, and the corporation countering by telling the labor union that they need to disband. These views are irreconcilable because they are existential threats to each other. I don’t mean this in the sense that there is inherently vitriol. It simply means that the fundamentals of each outcome negate the other. A right wing victory in America threatens the ‘existence’ of the left’s way of life, just as a left wing victory threatens the right in the very same way.

Multicultural egalitarianism is antithetical to a racially homogenous, meritocratic hierarchy. These two types of societies cannot simultaneously coexist, definitionally. There is no possible middle ground. One side must submit or be defeated. Amicable compromise is, unfortunately, and I do sincerely mean unfortunately, impossible.

While this would appear to be self-evident, we still see a striking number of people who keep insisting that we can, at least temporarily, reconcile things between the right and the left in order to fight a more consequential battle together. Many notable voices on the right have gone out of their way to continually insist that our dire situation in America is not a matter of left and right. They are adamant that the quibbles between the right and left are simply a distraction, and that the true fight is the American people versus Jewish power. They say that the left and right paradigm is merely a construct to keep us perpetually occupied while leaving the real villains free from our wrath.

Dan Bilzerian, and many others, rightly point out that most of our societal problems are indeed an outgrowth of Jewish influence. And while I agree that this is the most fundamental problem we face as a society, the proposal that we can reconcile with the left is still totally inactionable. Because though the diagnosis is accurate, there is still no mechanism that would magically restore a cohesive understanding of broad definitions between the left and the right. Nor is there anything that would suggest that the differences between the left and the right would naturally resolve if the left were to identify and then detach itself from Jewish influence.

The modern left is undeniably an automaton constructed from the implanted ideologies of Jewish power. This isn’t much of a secret, either. They often admit it themselves, just as Batya Ungar-Sargon, the Jewish journalist, noted during a debate in 2025:

“And the thing that makes this so appalling is that Jews built the left in this country. We built the labor movement, we wrote the New Deal. 70% of lawyers who worked on civil rights cases were Jews. We’ve been at the forefront of every liberal and leftist issue in this country. The absolute chutzpah of saying ‘you’re not welcome here.’

You know what it reminds me of? When they banned smoking in bars. As a smoker, I was so outraged. If there’s going to be a turf war over this, surely the smokers should have gotten the bars, okay? You can so easily imagine a counterfactual in which the left in America said, ‘Wait a minute, we can’t oppose Zionism because we would lose our beloved Jews who have been there with us at the forefront every minute that we built this movement. We have to find a way to make sure that Zionists still feel welcome.’ How could we ever do that to them? And they didn’t do that, they did the opposite.”

Her frustration is primarily due to the fact that the left, much like Frankenstein’s monster, no longer needs its creator to remain animated. And that is what makes it such a wild card at this point.

While the left is not only unaware of its true origins, it also wouldn’t care if it knew. Even if the average leftist could be convinced that most of their views were merely the result of Jewish power deploying them in an intentional attempt to subvert and destroy white society, that revelation wouldn’t change their minds one bit. They have become infatuated with their ideology and its grand promise of utopian equality. Even if they came to accept the circumstances of its birth, it wouldn’t make any difference. Would a coal miner complain after striking gold just because he wasn’t explicitly looking for it?

The left is cemented in its perspective, with or without any additional context. We must come to terms with the fact that the left will not be changing its views, no matter what we unveil to them. Regardless of the truth surrounding the left’s masters, we still have to contend with the fact that the average democrat would celebrate your personal assassination, and certainly mine. Charlie Kirk’s murder has proven that beyond a reasonable doubt.

For the sake of argument though, let’s say you could somehow manage to get past the left’s bloodlust for you. Let’s assume that the left was willing to join together and focus all their attention on defeating Israel and rooting out Jewish influence. You would then have yet another impossible task ahead of you. And that is, agreeing on a strategy to actually defeat them.

Because you see, the left does not have the same critique of Israel that the nativist right does. While they may be opposed to Israel, much like their hatred of Donald Trump, their reasoning for it is almost the exact opposite of ours. In fact, the left believes that Jews are simply a sub-category of whites. This is an extraordinarily common opinion across the entire political spectrum.

We have all seen Elon Musk, someone who would not consider himself to even be on the left, parrot this exact opinion many times. On October 1st, 2025, he posted to X that: “The vast majority of Jewish people are White, if not peak White, so this really makes no sense.”

While this is a common perspective on each side of the aisle, it is far more consequential in the context of the left. Because as this logic is extrapolated, we find that the core of the left’s opposition to Israel is their perception that it is operating as a ‘white supremacist state.’ Their critiques of Israel are foundationally rooted in their opposition to ‘racism and colonialism.’ Our critique of Israel and Jewish power, like our general definitions of good and bad, are almost the exact opposite. And even if there does happen to be some marginal overlap in our collective opposition to Israel, that still doesn’t reconcile the fact that our objectives would still be totally misaligned.

When parts of a coalition have such deeply incongruous objectives, strategy becomes practically impossible. It would be like two doctors agreeing that a patient is sick, and although they both want to help the ill man get better, one wants to treat him for cancer, and the other insists that the problem is a bacterial infection. While it may be a nice thought to imagine all Americans uniting as a people to defend our national sovereignty, we will find no allies on the left. We will have to fight a multi-front war. Whether we like it or not, the dissident right is on its own.

Joey Oliver currently writes from Texas. After completing his undergraduate degree at the turn of the last decade, he moved away from the Pacific Northwest to escape his liberal home state. Though he has primarily worked in real estate development since completing college, he also did a short stint at Tesla and even published a novel. In addition to his career, he is earning a Master’s degree while also writing and recording political commentary for his YouTube channel, The Right Wing Coalition. His book American History Z was published by Arktos Media.

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From churches and politics in America to wars in the Middle East, Christian Zionism is one of the most influential, powerful, and organized religious and political forces of the 21st century.

In The Messiah and the Third Temple, Paweł Lisicki presents a sweeping overview of Christian Zionist ideology and networks, revisiting the ancient controversies between Christians and Jews and shedding much-needed light on the apocalyptic storm clouds of the present-day Third Temple movement.

Weaving together ancient scripture, historical sources, current events, and theological analysis, this highly informative study uncovers how a complex alliance of religious extremism and ethno-political ambitions has become a deadly driving force in global geopolitics.

Provocative and meticulously argued, The Messiah and the Third Temple challenges readers to reconsider the relationship between religion, land, and the future of Western civilization.

Excerpt from the Introduction:

There is perhaps no other enigma — or mystery, to speak in more classical terms — as extraordinary as the bizarre emergence and ensuing spread of the new theology of Christian Zionism. Unlike many other currents in contemporary religious thought, its significance is not restricted merely to narrow circles of intellectuals, but is a matter of import for the whole world. Furthermore, Christian Zionism, or the belief that it is Christians’ duty to support the State of Israel as if its success were a necessary condition for the coming of the Messiah — preceded by the coming of the Antichrist and a great cataclysm, the true Armageddon — seems to be the only politically significant form of Christianity at present. Christian Zionists currently have at least as much influence on world politics as papal Rome had on medieval states. Going so far as to determine the outcome of who becomes president of the United States, the world’s largest empire, Christian Zionists wield indirect influence over the most important political decisions not only in the Middle East, but throughout the world.

I know that readers might now be shaking their heads in astonishment and thinking that the author has become feverish or fallen into a strange state of excitement about his own topic. Indeed, the matter seems rather peculiar: how could an ideology — and that is exactly what Christian Zionism should be called — be so significant when the broader public doesn’t even know about it? Particularly in Poland, it seems to be completely unknown to Poles, and I say this on the basis of many conversations in which, upon mentioning the power of Christian Zionists in the US, I was met with surprise as if my interlocutors wanted to say, “Is the person telling us this sober?” How is this possible? After all, this ideology’s followers in the US, some 50 million Protestants, are nothing compared to well over a billion Catholics. However, let us not be misled by numbers. A smaller but well-organized community with its own agenda is incomparably more powerful than an amorphous, internally paralyzed community.

So, yes: without a doubt, Christian Zionism has become, whether one likes it or not, the most important, let’s say Christian, ideology of the Western world. Surprise at this — as if we’ve never heard of this beast — can only be resultant of ignorance. Anyone who has read my previous book, The Myth of the Elder Brothers in Faith (in Polish: Mit starszych braci w wierze), will notice that the views I am describing here, and attributing to the majority of American Protestants, are related to the new Catholic, post-Vatican II understanding of Judaism.

In this sense, John Paul II can be considered a precursor of Catholic Zionism, and his gestures and speeches were a Catholic version of what a significant part of Protestants in the US had already been preaching for a long time. The Polish pope introduced key points into the Church’s teaching that were important to Christian Zionists. Firstly, he indicated, albeit not always explicitly, that Israel remains the chosen people; secondly, he maintained quite clearly that the Old Covenant is still valid; thirdly, he repeatedly condemned all forms of antisemitism, without ever attempting to define it, and in the final period of his pontificate he equated antisemitism with anti- Judaism. It bears acknowledging that the pope did not go so far as to draw another equivalence that was so important to his Jewish dialogue partners, namely, to state that contemporary anti-Zionism, i.e., aversion to and criticism of Israel’s state policy, is synonymous with antisemitism; nevertheless, it is easy to interpret some of his gestures in this vein, such as his frequent reference to contemporary Jews as elder brothers in faith.

I did not come up with this myself. Gavin D’Costa, the author of an essay with the highly significant title “The New Catholic Zionism,” published in September 2019, came to exactly the same conclusion that John Paul II was the precursor of Catholic Zionism. In his opinion, the time has come for Zionism to become part of the official teaching of the Church. The author points out that the most important breakthrough for the development of the ideology of Catholic Zionism was the Polish pope’s speech in Mainz in November 1980. I completely agree. I wrote about this a few years ago in Dogma and Tiara: An Essay on the Collapse of Roman Catholicism (in Polish: Dogmat i tiara. Esej o upadku rzymskiego katolicyzmu), where I pointed out that John Paul II’s theological revolution went completely unnoticed in Poland. The recognition that the Mosaic covenant has never been broken, that it is still in force, has been incorporated into the Catechism of the Catholic Church, but it constitutes the most radical denial of the teachings of the New Testament (in particular the Epistle to the Hebrews) in centuries. It has also been upheld by the Polish pope’s successors.

In 2006, Benedict XVI said in a Roman synagogue that “the favor of the God of the Covenant has always accompanied the Jews, giving them the strength to overcome trials.” It is difficult to disagree with D’Costa that Benedict’s words imply that contemporary rabbinical Judaism is a continuation of the faith of the biblical people of Israel. Francis taught the same thing in Evangelii gaudium, proclaiming that the Covenant of the Jewish people with God has never ended. Thus, John Paul II’s error became firmly established in the official doctrine of Rome and became the basis for the construction of Catholic Zionism.

To this should be added many other vague, ambiguous, but always “appropriately” interpretable declarations by various Vatican bodies. All of them, according to D’Costa, suggest that the Church is on the verge of accepting the thesis that Jews have an eternal right to the Land of Israel based on biblical promises, and that it is the role of Catholics, indeed their moral obligation and duty, to give Jews and the State of Israel all possible support. Any criticism of such behavior is a form of anti-Zionism, and therefore anti-Judaism, and therefore antisemitism, which is the greatest (and perhaps the only) sin in history.

The key to understanding this constant submission to the Jewish vision of history — where the history of Christian civilization is a record of constant persecution, oppression, discrimination, injustice, and the oppression of innocent Jews by Christians — was papal meaculpism. There is no doubt that the Polish pope, in the very least, paved the way for a kind of synthesis of post-conciliar Catholicism and Zionism: if the moral task of Christians is to combat all forms of antisemitism, and since it is the Jews themselves who decide what it consists of, and since most of them claim that antisemitism today is expressed in criticism of the State of Israel, then it is easy to see that this would also be the practical effect of the great papal change. By undermining the necessity of conversion — as I have written, in none of the pope’s publicly known statements can a single statement be found that could be interpreted as a call for Jews to convert to Catholicism — and by teaching that Jews are still bound to God by the Covenant of Moses, John Paul (and later his venerable successors on the throne of St. Peter) seemed to actually accept the concept of two parallel paths to salvation. Indirectly, this could lead, as can be seen in many Catholic authors, to the recognition of Zionism. This is logical. If the State of Israel has become the only and most important form of existence for the Jewish people in today’s world, then the dialogue with Judaism, which the Pope strongly and unequivocally called for, has to entail not only recognition of this statehood, but also, in the event of a conflict between Israel and other states, taking its side.

The most important difference between John Paul’s nascent Catholic Zionism and its developed evangelical version is theological in nature. Firstly, the Polish pope did not recognize the bizarre evangelical doctrine of the “rapture” of Christians just before the coming of Armageddon, when the unbelievers and Jews will remain on earth. Secondly, it is impossible to find him expressing any recognition of the salvific function of the present State of Israel. Thirdly, the Polish pope did not comment on the coming of the Antichrist, a topic that is so crucial for Evangelicals, and there is no trace in his statements of the Protestant belief in chiliasm, i.e., the belief that after defeating the Antichrist, Christ will establish a thousand-year kingdom. Fourthly, he did not preach that Israel was fulfilling God’s promise by occupying the land of Palestine. But the last point is unclear. By claiming that the Covenant with the Jews is still valid, does one not then have to accept that they have a right to the land promised to Abraham?

In practice, therefore, the differences between the new theology of Judaism of the post-conciliar popes and the Christian Zionism of American Evangelicals are not so great. Both reject the old belief that the Church is the only true Israel, that the killing of the Messiah deprived the Jews of their right to be the chosen people, that they therefore have no right to the Land of Israel, and that Judaism is therefore a false religion, and its followers, unless they are in a state of insurmountable ignorance, which only God knows, are subject to condemnation. Both Catholic followers of dialogism (or neomodernists) and evangelical supporters of Zionism repeat at every turn what has already been put into words by Matt Schlapp, one of the organizers of CPAC, the largest conservative congress in the US, which Donald Trump regularly attends (the same conference at which the US president found only eight minutes for a meeting with Polish President Andrzej Duda in March 2025): “We are on the side of Israel and the Jewish people.” Schlapp himself, along with his wife Mercedes Schlapp, are the founders of a center for combating antisemitism alongside Israeli Minister Amichai Chikli.

In this regard, there can be no ambiguity: American support for Israel is not based on pragmatic reasons. It is not the result of a cost-benefit analysis, but a true profession of faith. This is what Jewish partners in dialogue expect from contemporary Christians, and that is why the former must constantly make the appropriate profession of faith. Recognition of Israel and taking its side is not a mere political declaration and does not merely describe sympathy, but has become, in the true sense of the word, a profession of faith, reminiscent of either the Muslim shahada (“There is no god but God, and Muhammad is His prophet”) or the Jewish Shema Yisrael (“Hear, O Israel: Hashem is our God, Hashem is One”). Christian Zionists profess: Let us bless the State of Israel, for thus we gather treasure for ourselves in heaven and on earth.

In his interesting and detailed book describing the history of Christian Zionism, On the Road to Armageddon: How Evangelicals Became Israel’s Best Friend, Timothy P. Weber writes: “over onethird of those Americans who support Israel report that they do so because they believe the Bible teaches that the Jews must possess their own country in the Holy Land before Jesus can return.” This amounts to tens of millions of people which, it is important to note, are not passive sympathizers, but passionate, active supporters. Many of them — and this certainly applies to pastors — live in a state of messianic ecstasy.

Weber sees what all other observers see: “after the founding of Israel in 1948 and its expansion after the Six-Day War, dispensationalists promoted their ideas with the confidence that Bible prophecy was being fulfilled for all to see. Starting in the 1970s, dispensationalists broke into the popular culture with runaway best-sellers, plenty of media visibility, and a well-networked political campaign to promote and protect the interests of Israel.” Here we encounter the first puzzling word, which sounds exotic to readers: dispensationalists. In short, this refers to a branch of Protestantism that originated in 19th-century Great Britain, which is distinguished by its literal interpretation of the Bible and, most importantly from the point of view of the present book, considers the Church and Israel to be two completely separate, independent entities. The name comes from the word “dispensation,” or a period in which God acts in a certain characteristic, separate way. Well, these mysterious dispensationalists are all Christian Zionists and, as most readers will find hard to believe, they have the greatest influence on current American policy with respect to Israel and, more broadly, the entire Middle East.

Their importance has grown immeasurably since the 1970s. On the one hand, Israel’s power has strengthened the political position of Christian Zionists, and on the other hand, it was Israel that benefited most from their growing influence. This has been an almost perfect symbiosis. Although Christian Zionists, as Protestants, were still conducting missions among Jews at the beginning of the 20th century, they have practically abandoned this activity in recent years. Christian Zionists not only defend the State of Israel, but are also supporters of Greater Israel, which makes their closest allies representatives of the Jewish extreme religious right….

It is not easy to understand all this. Many readers will probably be surprised after reading this book. Let us summarize.

Firstly, readers will ask whether it is possible that, in today’s world, which they believe to be undergoing radical secularization, de-Christianization, etc., religion can play such a significant role as I am trying to show. Even if they agree that it is of great importance to societies that are, to put it nicely, developing, how can one claim, as I am doing, that it determines the policy of the largest and most modern superpower of the 21st century? Well, I can’t help it if that’s exactly how it is. Christian Zionists, who are tens of millions of American voters and constitute one of the pillars of Donald Trump’s victory, really exist and really have enormous influence. How can this be reconciled with the disastrous concept of the radical separation of politics and religion adopted at the Second Vatican Council? Could it be that in its persistent pursuit of aggiornamento (“updating”), the Catholic Church is chasing a chimera? Could it be that the whole concept of the radical autonomy of politics from religion, so praised by most Catholic theologians and bishops, was just a humbug, a clever slogan effectively eliminating Catholics from participating in political life? Unfortunately, it looks like this has been the case.

Secondly, how can we understand that a small group of Jews from Chabad-Lubavitch (statistically speaking, 0.29 percent of the US population), who profess extreme racial theories, wield such powerful influence over the most important American politicians? What is the significance of this group and its doctrine? Why does Donald Trump regularly attend their meetings, and how is it possible that Ronald Reagan was their supporter? I have already written about the latter’s special relationship with the sect. As for the current president, nothing demonstrates the importance of the Jewish community better than the fact that on October 24, 2024, just before the election, Donald Trump visited the grave of Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the so-called Ofel, where he met with rabbis, prayed with them wearing a kippah on his head, and asked for their blessing. As reported by the New York newspaper The Forward, Trump received 65 percent of the vote in the Crown Heights district, home to the global center of Chabad-Lubavitch.

Thirdly, who are the completely unknown Christian Zionists in Poland, i.e., Christians whose main goal is to support Israel’s policies? What is the source of their doctrine? Where did it come from?

Fourthly, how should Zionism itself be understood? After all, it is not simply a movement that previously sought to establish the State of Israel and now focuses on its survival and expansion. What is religious Zionism and, in particular, messianic Zionism? How is it possible that many Israeli politicians, as well as Jewish rabbis, call Palestinians animals and praise the killing of women and children? Why is a conflict over which opinions and arguments are otherwise divided portrayed by most Israeli and American politicians as a clash between, to quote the words of the new Israeli ambassador to the US, Yechiel Leiter, “light and darkness, truth and lies, civilization against murderous barbarism?”

Fifthly, why are the end times, apocalyptic visions, and obscure biblical metaphors so important to these various movements and sects? After all, in our rationalist society, there should be no place for them anymore. Or perhaps we are deluding ourselves? Perhaps what often seems to us to be overcome and irrelevant is the real driving force of history, and we, Western Christians, have allowed ourselves to be fooled and blinded by those who predicted the end of history and the victory of global liberalism. Perhaps it is ideas about the Antichrist that fuel the deepest global conflicts?

Sixthly, what is the movement for the Third Temple, and why has what was once considered a curiosity and oddity become such an ideologically significant factor in Jewish life over the past few decades? The Temple Mount, on which two mosques stand, is therefore beginning to resemble a veritable powder keg, with someone repeatedly lighting the fuse. What would such a temple be?

Seventhly, who are the Noahides, the non-Jews who have abandoned Christianity and placed themselves under the care of Jewish rabbis, messianic Zionists? There is no denying that this is one of the fastest growing religious communities in recent times. How does the increasingly frequent search for the Jewish roots of Christianity in Protestant sects and the dialogue with Judaism in the Catholic Church influence its development?

All of these, I believe, are important questions. I will try to answer them one by one. To do so, we need to refer to the sources, statements, and books of various protagonists of the events. In addition, it is necessary to show how different, separate movements and communities cooperate with each other and how ideas born in one place fertilize the minds of members of other groups. Furthermore, it should be remembered that what often might seem to us to be naturally separate — politics and theology, for example — is closely intertwined in the minds of the protagonists of this book. I realize that many of the issues I’m raising might seem exotic, especially in Poland, but this does not change the fact that they are extremely important — not only for politics, but also for religion, especially for the Catholic Church.

How did it come about that, as a result of an unusual and, one might even say, almost alchemical experiment, so many Christians came to preach the cult of secular Israel? Is such an attitude even compatible with faith in Christ as Lord and King? What is the source of this unusual fusion of Christianity and Zionism? Perhaps a good starting point for understanding this new approach would be to describe Jewish expectations of the new Christianity. These are, as one might expect, varied. In the most radical, let’s say traditional, version, these expectations simply boil down to hope for annihilation: the best Christianity is one that will not exist…

ORDER Paweł Lisicki’s The Messiah and the Third Temple: The Heresy and Wars of Christian Zionism, fresh off the press from Arktos:

On April 8-11, the Institut Iliade in Paris accomplished a milestone in the history of the European New Right with the successful hosting of two major events: the international Awakening Europe seminar and the 13th Colloquium of the Institut Iliade, this year themed “Freedoms: Thought — Speech — Action”.

The Institut Iliade Colloquium is not only one event among others, but the much-anticipated yearly congress of the institute which was founded as Dominique Venner’s dying wish to carry on the flame of the French New Right in the 21st century. The Colloquium fittingly took place in an unprecedentedly international profile in the wake of the recent release of the English edition of Venner’s final testimony, Samurai of the West.

For the first three days, the Awakening Europe seminar brought together editorial directors, think-tank leaders, activist executives, academics, and metapolitical figures from across France and as many as 12 countries, including Sweden, Norway, Poland, Austria, Germany, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Ireland, and the United States.

Arktos, the official English-language publisher of the Institut Iliade, was represented in full force by a delegation including Founder and CEO Daniel Friberg, Managing Director Tor Westman, Editor-in-Chief Jafe Arnold, and translator Alexander Raynor.

The unprecedented seminar, which included lectures, workshops, and cultural excursions, represented a unique line of transmission: senior veterans of the French Nouvelle Droite shared their knowledge and experience with representatives of the new generations of Identitarians, who in turn had the opportunity to raise ideological, geopolitical, and organisational questions facing Europeans today. The seminar also displayed Iliade’s growing pan-European and international outreach: based on the Iliade’s domestic Formation courses, these were the first of their kind held in English and focused on invitees from movements across the Continent.

Read the Institut Iliade manifesto, Guardians of Heritage, brought to you in English by Arktos:

The educational program, presented by senior as well as junior members of the Institut Iliade, covered a broad spectrum of European thought, both historical and contemporary. The lecture series included presentations on the Indo-European heritage, the legacy of the Middle Ages, the history of the French Nouvelle Droite, the philosophical foundations of Archeofuturism, and conceptual frameworks of ethnic identity, among other key themes. As a testimony to the depth and profundity of the seminar’s content, the participants selected Friedrich Nietzsche as the symbolic promotional figure of the program.

The conclusion of the seminar culminated with the opening of the Institut Iliade’s 13th annual conference, held in the famous congress centre of the Maison de la Chimie, which was packed with at least 1,500 guests. In the main auditorium, a much-anticipated ensemble of speakers, including major Iliade voices like Antoine Dresse, a.k.a. “Ego Non”, frequently published in Arktos Journal, and Jean-Yves Le Gallou, whose Remigration has just been published by Arktos.

Apart from the keynote speeches, the Iliade Colloquium also provided space for publishers, authors, and businesses with traditional values to showcase their works and network with likeminded operations from across Europe. Arktos had the honour of running two exhibitions, an embassy table in the main hall and a book table by the main auditorium.

The Arktos team was joined by authors, editors, and collaborators, including Tim Vorgens, who signed copies of his book Legitimate Preference, and a featured presentation of the English-language edition of Kineuropa: Cinema as a Reflection of European Identity hand-in-hand with the Italian edition published by Inquadrature Perfette.

Following an action-packed day of Identitarian exchanges, the Institut Iliade hosted its legendary Grand Ball, featuring folk music and dances which celebrated and breathed new life into European traditions.

On the whole, the 13th Iliade Colloquium was impressive and inspiring: it demonstrated with prestige and elegance that the Institut Iliade represents not only the enduring significance of what began with GRECE and the Nouvelle Droite in 1968, but also the vitality of the new generation of advocates of a European Renaissance. Arktos is proud and honoured to play a part in this undertaking for a European Renaissance by bringing the works of leading lights into the English language and to international forums.

Arktos Journal

Making Anti-Globalism Global Since 2009.

From the Instituto Carlos V - For Long European Memory

The word “aristocracy” comes from the Greek root “aristos” (ἄριστος), which is derived from the term “areté” (ἀρετή) and refers to excellence or virtue. In practice, the aristoi (ἄριστοι) were individuals with exceptional qualities that made them capable of governing. To understand the essence of this superiority, we must ask: in what sense were they better?

This question has been approached from many different perspectives. While some attribute it to a set of spiritual characteristics or ethical and intellectual qualities, others are more critical, suspecting that this terminology is used by the ruling classes to manipulate and justify their power. Without dismissing these interpretations, which can certainly shed light on important aspects of the phenomenon, we will propose an alternative hypothesis here. In other words, we will examine whether it is possible to conceive of aristocracy as a matter of manipulating nature rather than economic status.

To develop our argument, we must first consider the conditions that preceded the formation of our culture. In her book The Goddesses and Gods of Ancient Europe, the archaeologist and anthropologist Marija Gimbutas, based on an analysis of contemporary tribal societies and material remains from prehistory, demonstrates that in “Old Europe” (a term coined to refer to sedentary societies — first hunter-gatherers and later agriculturalists — that flourished during the prehistoric period on the European continent), women’s reproductive capacity was highly valued, as women were believed to be conduits of the cosmic forces that generate fertility. This belief was associated with matriarchal and matrilineal societies, where women held political and religious power and inheritance was passed down through the maternal line.

The oldest archaeological evidence of this system of values consists of numerous figurines dedicated to the “Mother Goddess” or “Great Mother”, dating back at least 25,000 years. Examples include the famous Venus of Willendorf. This trend intensified with the emergence of agriculture during the Neolithic period. Examining the site of Çatalhöyük on the Anatolian peninsula corroborates this hypothesis, as figures discovered there date back to around 6000 BC and depict the Great Mother have been discovered there. Similarly, Minoan religion revolved around female deities such as the Snake Goddess, an example of which has been preserved in the form of a figurine dating to 1600 BC found in the Palace of Knossos. Furthermore, the global spread of this type of deity suggests that it was a cross-cultural phenomenon characteristic of an era when humans were extremely vulnerable to nature.

Conversely, the period in European history when women played a dominant role coincided with a time when the process of gestation was not understood. Men were unable to identify their own role in procreation and attributed pregnancy to a special power women had to communicate with nature and embody reproductive power. In his book The Family among the Australian Aborigines: A Sociological Study, Bronisław Malinowski explains that tribes who maintain a lifestyle similar to prehistoric societies still do not understand the link between sexual intercourse and procreation. In any case, according to Gimbutas, the matriarchal context that flourished in Europe between 7000 and 3500 BC was characterized by peaceful, cooperative and egalitarian existence.

However, this social order failed to stop the migration of Indo-Europeans — or Indo-Aryans — which spread in all directions over a period of between one and three thousand years. This migration had a radical impact on Europe and the rest of the world. These populations emerge in history as nomadic horsemen and herders organized into stratified, heteropatriarchal and warlike groups. According to the Kurgan hypothesis, these invaders were mounted warriors from the south of present-day Russia. Gimbutas describes how they subjugated agricultural societies through three successive waves of migration between 4000 and 1000 BC. Some feminist intellectuals, such as Riane Eisler (author of The Chalice and the Blade), argue that the emergence of Indo-European and patriarchal culture led to the spread of war, inequality, alienation and the destruction of ecosystems, representing a cataclysm that should be lamented. Without delving into the merits of these assessments, we will continue our analysis and return to this debate in the conclusions.

To enable their expansion, the Indo-Europeans made use of significant technological advances, such as the bridle and the wheel, and above all, the domestication of the horse. Due to intense migration, the religion of the invading peoples gradually merged with the telluric spirituality of the indigenous European populations. Consequently, deities associated with nature were relegated to the background, as happened in Greece with the chthonic deities and in Norse mythology with the Vanir. The Indo-European cult, centered on Deus Pater, had a celestial character (a “Uranian spirit”, in Julius Evola’s terminology) and was no longer linked to fertility, but rather to the cultural values of an emerging warrior aristocracy. Family structures also changed, giving rise to a patrilineal and patrifocal system derived from the observations of Indo-European herders regarding kinship ties. This system refuted the matriarchal prejudice that men played no role in procreation.

It is worth noting that this phenomenon is not limited to the expansion of the Indo-European language family, but has occurred on every continent throughout history. Consider, for example, the relationship between the Tutsi and the Hutu in Rwanda. Although the Hutu were the indigenous population of present-day Rwanda, the Tutsi established themselves as an aristocratic elite who administered the vast territory until the 20th century, despite representing only 17% of the population. Pierre Van den Berghe analyzed this case in Race and Racism: A Comparative Perspective (1967), in which he argues that the Tutsi developed racist beliefs that exalted their own physical traits (such as aquiline noses, tall stature and slender builds) and devalued those of the Hutu, whom they defined as inferior.

Similar phenomena can also be observed in China, which was conquered by both the Mongols and the Manchus. Both ethnic groups share a pastoral origin in the mountainous northern regions. Like the Tutsi, the Manchus imposed a system of racial discrimination to preserve their culture and genetic traits, thereby avoiding assimilation by the vast indigenous population, as had happened to the Mongols. As the 14th-century Arab historian Ibn Khaldun already intuited, there is a constant in human history: nomadic peoples conquer sedentary ones and impose their own laws.

According to Costin Alamariu’s theories outlined in Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy, the success of these people can be attributed to three main factors: diet, culture, and environment. Firstly, the diet of nomadic herders primarily consists of dairy products, meat and fruit, obtained from trees scattered throughout their territories. Prolonged intake of high protein levels over generations produces individuals of greater stature with a more robust bone and muscle structure, better suited to military exertion. This diet contrasts sharply with the diet of sedentary communities, which is based primarily on vegetables and legumes with very limited meat consumption and is tied to the cultivation of the land.

Secondly, from a cultural perspective, conquest is more closely aligned with the worldview of herders, who do not view land as a static asset, but rather as someone who owns livestock. Since livestock is more easily taken, herders are more likely to use violence. Finally, living in mountainous areas fosters values closely tied to war. It is no coincidence that mountainous regions have historically been theatres of conflict, from the Scottish Highlands to the Balkans.

Once the origins of the aristocracy have been clarified, its worldview can be better understood. For example, the evidence gathered explains why aristocrats have always looked down on manual and agricultural labour. They also commonly build country residences, as if their blood were driving them away from cities and back to the wild spirit of their ancestors. Hunting and horseback riding serve a similar function in maintaining this connection with nature.

The concern for lineage can be explained by the pastoral origins of the aristocracy. By focusing their efforts on breeding livestock, shepherds discovered the rudiments of eugenics, seeking to produce superior specimens to those of their competitors. This gave rise to one of the fundamental principles of aristocracy: that ancestors pass on characteristics to their descendants. Not only did shepherds learn how to improve livestock through selection, but they also applied these criteria to humans. This resulted in eugenic practices such as marriage restrictions or, as in Sparta, physical examinations to exclude weak or deformed children. Training aimed at enhancing the abilities of the younger generations was also introduced.

In short, when aristocrats descended from shepherds who practiced eugenics, they were simply applying to humans what they had observed in animal breeding. The aristocrat is someone who believes that they are destined to rule, not by chance, but by nature; they are superior to others, who are destined to serve by a natural disposition. These ideas are found in the works of Plato and Aristotle, who recognized the existence of different human natures — an idea that contemporary democratic orders deem irrational and inhumane.

However, these considerations would be fruitless if we did not seek to draw conclusions that are relevant to our own time. As Martin Heidegger asserted, human beings cannot be reduced to a species because they are not a fixed substance, but rather a being-there (Dasein) in a state of constant becoming. In light of this view, some schools of thought propose a return to a sedentary, matrifocal paradigm. However, historical evidence shows that the values attributed to such societies, though celebrated today, resulted in Old Europe being dominated by groups that were better prepared for conflict. Furthermore, the egalitarianism of these communities limited individuals’ capacity for self-realization.

Although the cult of the Mother Goddess is associated with matriarchal societies, this does not imply that they originated concepts such as freedom. Ecofeminist philosophers who advocate a return to nature, envisaging it as the abolition of all exploitation and suffering, perpetuate the illusion of stepping outside of history, in both its eschatological-religious and utopian-materialist forms. In reality, such societies were characterized by scarcity and vulnerability in the face of natural phenomena.

The inherent dynamics of the agricultural economy made life in these communities monotonous and incompatible with the instincts of young men. These instincts were suppressed through social conventions designed to ensure stability. As James George Frazer observes in The Golden Bough, primitive man does not distinguish between custom and nature; to him, unwritten law appears as natural as the cycles of the Earth and the Sun. The inhabitant of prehistoric sedentary societies was therefore not a free man, but the most enslaved person who ever lived.

In contrast, young Indo-European men made vitality their greatest virtue, founding the aristocracy that gave rise to the city-states of the Iron Age. Realizing the power of female reproduction prompted men to reaffirm their own creative capacity through téchne, or artificial production. Thanks to the tools he created, man increased his dominion over reality and reduced his vulnerability to nature. This attitude has characterized the Homo genus since its origins, but it is in Europe — in the Western, Faustian spirit of which Oswald Spengler speaks — that “the struggle between nature and man, who, through his historical existence, rebels against her, has been practically fought to its end”.

The artistic expression that best represents this shift is the Greek Kuroi: statues of victorious young athletes. The new society no longer venerated the Great Mother, but instead celebrated the values of youth and beauty. The European city emerged from an attempt to preserve the freedom of nomadic peoples and barbarian youth within an urban context, celebrating a way of life that nourished the cultural expressions of the pólis. Rather than repressing youthful ambitions, European civilization sought to ennoble and refine them through the gymnasium, the training ground, and the various forms of the agón — understood as athletic, artistic, military, or dialectical competition.

Finally, the selection processes employed by elites since ancient times warrant further reflection. Having domesticated the living world, the aristocracy then turned their attention to self-domestication, thereby consolidating their position as an elite and domesticating the masses. The construction of hierarchical societies therefore hinges on the relationship between the tamers and the tamed, be they inert matter or living beings. Recent events suggest that the growing sophistication of domestication techniques will accentuate the distance between tamers and the tamed in the short and medium term.

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While more at home on the golf course than in the Persian Gulf, Donald Trump had initially presented the war against Iran as a "little excursion." Not known for his strategic patience, he wanted results fast. The original objectives were the fall of the Islamic regime and the complete destruction of its military capabilities. Now, four weeks since hostilities began, none of that has come to pass.

The Iranians have taken control of the Strait of Hormuz, and their coastline — stretching 1,600 kilometers — is bristling with missiles, drones, and military speedboats. The Houthis of Yemen are threatening to close in turn the Strait of Bab-el-Mandeb, which locks access to the Red Sea. In Lebanon, where one million people have been displaced (one in ten inhabitants), the Israelis make no secret of their intention to militarily occupy the south of the country up to the Litani River. The price of crude oil has surpassed 100 dollars a barrel, a rise from which Vladimir Putin is the principal beneficiary. European countries, which the European Commission forced to cut themselves off from Russian hydrocarbons, are now facing gas and oil shortages that are driving a surge in petrol prices at the pump.

Though severely and lastingly weakened by the massive bombardments they have endured, the Iranians have not yielded — quite the contrary. What we have witnessed is an escalation that looks very much like a headlong rush. The American-Israeli military movements, the contradictory statements from the White House, the continued Iranian strikes, the destabilization of energy markets, the announcement of a ground invasion (special forces?) — all of this sketches out a scenario whose consequences no one can foresee, but which evokes the “oil shocks” of 1974 and 1979: economic and financial crisis, global recession.

The United States, which had hoped for a lightning victory, no longer knows how to extract itself from this hornet’s nest. The Iranians, who were supposed to collapse within days, are holding the initiative in every domain. The balance sheet of Operation “Epic Fury” is a disaster.

How Did We Get Here?

And first of all — why this war? An “imminent threat” justifying a pre-emptive strike? Which one? The nuclear threat? It will soon be forty years since Israel has been announcing, year after year, that Iran will have the atomic bomb “within a few months” — an assertion that has by now generated the same skepticism as the “weapons of mass destruction” attributed to Saddam Hussein’s regime. Tulsi Gabbard, Director of National Intelligence, announced on 18 March that Iran had not resumed the nuclear enrichment activities destroyed in June 2025. Trump himself had at the time trumpeted that the Iranian nuclear program had been “totally obliterated.” Rafael Grossi, Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), confirmed on his part that there was no immediate Iranian threat in this domain.

Why did Trump launch into this adventure — one that nothing in the current situation justified — displaying a degree of unpreparedness that left all serious military observers dumbfounded? Why did he choose, a few months before the midterm elections (midterms), to risk alienating his electoral base, which has no appetite for such a war — a war that the vast majority of Americans likewise condemns? Marco Rubio has perhaps provided the answer by letting slip that Trump yielded to Israeli pressure applied on him by Benjamin Netanyahu on 11 February in Washington. But that merely shifts the question: why did he yield?

On 17 March, the unexpected resignation of Joe Kent, Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, came like a thunderclap. In his letter of resignation addressed to Trump, he wrote: “I cannot, in good conscience, support the ongoing war against Iran. Iran did not represent an imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we launched this war under pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.”

The war thus began on 28 February — Two days before the feast of Purim (which commemorates, as recounted in the Book of Esther, how the Hebrews escaped a planned massacre at the hands of the Persians) — with a targeted assassination (Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei) and the death under bombs of 165 schoolgirls aged 7 to 12 (daughters of Revolutionary Guards), even as negotiations were underway between the Iranians and the Americans which, according to the Sultanate of Oman, were on the verge of succeeding (”a deal was within reach”).

Mark Twain said that “God created war so that Americans would learn geography.” Apparently, they have not yet learned it. Trump has gravely underestimated his adversaries. He underestimated the power and resilience of Iranian nationalism. He underestimated Iran’s military strength, its organizational solidity, and its strategic orientations.

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Iran is not Venezuela, nor the Principality of Monaco. Nor is it an Arab country: Iranians are ethnically closer to Europeans than to Arabs, Turks, or Palestinians. Iran is a country of 90 million people, three times larger than France, endowed with a triple identity (Indo-Iranian since Antiquity, Muslim since the 7th century, modern since the 19th century), with a complex society, a high-level academic class (Ali Larijani, Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, killed by Israel on 17 March, was a specialist in Kant and Descartes), a vast population of engineers (Iran trains 230,000 of them each year), a 3,000-year history, and internal dynamics that escape the comprehension of most Westerners. It is, in the Middle East alongside Egypt and Turkey, the country with the richest cultural heritage. It also holds the world’s 3rd largest proven oil reserves and the world’s 2nd largest proven gas reserves. And in geopolitical terms, the Iranian plateau constitutes the essential pivot territory of the Eurasian landmass.

An Existential War

Having a purely transactional vision of power relations, Trump does not grasp that the Iranians are waging an existential war against him — which is not the case for the Americans. He does not understand their “irrational” refusal to capitulate. He does not understand that there are situations in which no deal is possible. He does not know that the doctrine of martyrdom has been at the heart of Shia Islam (counting 200 million believers) since the massacre of Karbala in 680 CE and the death of Imam Hussein and his companions, and that in the eyes of Iranians, Ali Khamenei weighs far more in death than he did in life.

Bombardment alone cannot enable the Americans and Israelis to prevail. Ground troops are necessary, even when the targeted regime harbors a solidly structured opposition — which is not the case in Iran (let us not even speak of Reza Pahlavi, the son of the former dictator, a veritable puppet of the Mossad and the CIA, who has support only within the Diaspora).

The Iranians, for their part, have understood very well that they do not have the means to confront American military power directly, even if they have landed devastating blows against American bases in the region. They therefore adopted from the outset an asymmetric strategy consisting of targeting the weak points of the economy and energy production, with precision strikes against the oil and gas production and storage infrastructure of the Gulf states. To this was added the seizure of control of the Strait of Hormuz, linking the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Oman — a strategic passage through which 20 million barrels transit daily, representing 20% of global oil supply, as well as 20% of liquefied gas.

Dragged into a war they never sought, the Gulf monarchies (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates including Dubai), which had built their prosperity model by entrusting their security to the Americans, now find themselves at a loss. Their security guarantor has become a source of insecurity, since the war also threatens their economic model. They observe with bitterness that the Americans have done nothing to protect them from Iranian strikes, that those strikes target an oil infrastructure that is their only real wealth, and that their image as financial and tourist paradises has been badly tarnished. If the escalation continues and the desalination plants on which their populations depend are destroyed, these countries could even become uninhabitable.

The de facto disappearance of international law has brought with it the disappearance of the laws of war. The targeted assassination of the entirety of the ruling apparatus of a sovereign state and member of the United Nations, at the outset of a war that was never declared, of which no allied country was informed, and which did not even receive Congressional approval (rendering it unconstitutional), is without precedent. It is also a flagrant violation of the 1949 Geneva Conventions, which stipulate that “it is prohibited to kill, wound, or capture an adversary by resort to perfidy” (Art. 39). The elimination of nearly a hundred Iranian military and political leaders — carried out by the Israelis using intelligence provided by the Mossad — was spectacular, but did not produce the expected effect. By the very next day, they had already been replaced, and for each of those replacements, the names of the next two successors had already been designated.

The only perceptible consequence is that the effective leadership of the Iranian regime has passed from the hands of the mullahs and ayatollahs into those of the Revolutionary Guards, who have their own army and their own economy and who hold firmly to a hard line, declaring themselves prepared to continue the war for as long as necessary. For them, non-surrender is equivalent to victory.

In fact, the Iranians had been preparing for precisely this kind of attack for twenty years. It is this preparation that allowed them to put in place a “decentralized mosaic defense,” a strategic doctrine elaborated by Tehran in the wake of American failures in Iraq and Afghanistan: the 31 command centers (one per province) were equipped with autonomous weapons capabilities and strategic independence. In the event of a first strike decapitating the central command, all command centers switch to autonomous mode and continue to fight. In the meantime, Iran’s military capabilities have been considerably strengthened — notably through precision ballistic missiles and sophisticated drones.

Strategy and Tactics

Mao Zedong, in his writings on revolutionary warfare, observed quite rightly that “the view that strategic victory can only be achieved through tactical victories is wrong.” The United States has, at all times, confused strategy with tactics. They have tactics — consisting of a list of targets to be struck — but they have no strategy, because they have not the faintest idea of the “day after”: that is to say, the kind of peace they wish to establish. “We do not know how to translate our military gains into a political settlement,” Ami Ayalon, former head of Israeli domestic intelligence, declared these past days. This is why, since 1945, the Americans have not won a single war. And it is also why their interventions in Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, and Libya have not brought “democracy” and “freedom,” but civil war and chaos.

Another perennial failing of the Americans is their belief that military and technological superiority automatically confers victory. This is simply false. At the height of the Vietnam War, the number of American soldiers deployed on the ground reached half a million — which did not prevent their defeat.

The cost of the war with Iran is enormous. American air power excels against large fixed targets, but struggles to neutralize small mobile units. Shooting down $20,000 Shahed drones with $4 million missiles is hardly the most economical approach! The United States has used more Patriot interceptors in the first three days of the war than it supplied to Ukraine over four years of conflict. The first two weeks of the war alone have cost twelve billion dollars. The White House now seeks to unlock an additional 200 billion dollars to sustain its offensive. While the Israelis are short of soldiers, the Americans are short of munitions, guided missiles, and air defense systems (they have already recalled systems deployed in East Asia and diverted arms originally destined for Ukraine).

The Birth of an Anti-Western Axis

By launching a war without legal justification, without a solid coalition, and without attainable objectives, Israel and the United States have opened Pandora’s box. Their decision will accentuate the world’s multipolarization and foster the formation of an anti-Western axis oriented toward China and Russia.

One of two things must now follow: either Donald Trump finds an honorable exit allowing him to dress up his defeat as a “great military victory” — in which case it is likely that Israel will wish to continue the war, if not in Iran, then at least in Lebanon — or he seeks to annihilate a country that is heir to a three-thousand-year-old civilization, with all the risks of escalation and quagmire that this entails. In either case, the risk of chaos spreading across the entire Middle East is severe.

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Let us not forget, finally, that in this affair, while the attack on Iran was conducted jointly by Israel and the United States, their objectives have never been the same. Donald Trump’s initial plan was to destroy Iran’s military power in order to then conclude a peace agreement, while Netanyahu seeks both a regime change and the dismemberment of Iran, so as to secure unchallenged hegemony over the Middle East. In other words: Trump does not exclude peace; Netanyahu does not want it. He wants only to continue bombing and killing. For the moment, the State of Israel — which has just reinstated the death penalty for Palestinians alone — is concerned by the emergence of a Saudi Arabia–Turkey–Pakistan–Egypt axis hostile to it. On 1 April, Donald Trump threatened to send Iran “back to the Stone Age.” Calm is not about to return to the region.

Originally published in Éléments

Translated by Alexander Raynor

From current geopolitical analyses to deep philosophical reflections, the essential works of Alain de Benoist, the leading light of the European New Right, are available in English from Arktos:

From the Instituto Carlos V — For Long European Memory:

In the age of virtual communities, which should always be complementary and subordinate to real ones — with Plato’s “myth of the cave” always in the background — the space of identity acts as a true beacon of what the militant community wishes to project to the outside world.

Furthermore, it makes the community visible, manifesting its influence or marginality, and acts as a hub for important social networks. Identity spaces are the “forest” of the Waldgänger in the 21^st century, which can return one day to the real forest.

Nevertheless, fewer and fewer places offer genuine living spaces, and it is crucial to reverse this trend, which reflects the individualistic and appearance-obsessed characteristics of contemporary society. Yet, maintaining these meeting points is complex not only in economic terms, but also in terms of organization, operation and commitment.

Therefore, opening new spaces and maintaining existing ones is a goal that should be considered in the short and medium term. In our case, the Instituto Carlos V intends to open at least one physical headquarters within a few years.

However, in terms of aesthetics, which is what really interests us here, quantity often seems to dominate quality. This is evident in the abundance of flags, stickers, portraits of historical figures and posters depicting symbolic actions. There is a certain horror vacui at play, and a visual disorder where it seems that plastering the walls with more or less tasteful decorations, with generally unfortunate results, is enough. Furthermore, one absence in particular is constantly and acutely felt: Art. Even more so, contemporary art. If there is anything that defines Europeans, it is their artistic sensibility and creativity.

Europe has demonstrated enormous and unparalleled potential in art and culture. This potential must be urgently recognized and valued. Both the artistic masterpieces of the past and the present are equally important. When it comes to the latter, it is enough to be selective and have certain criteria, seeking harmony between the various elements. By doing so, we can bring art back to the center of our lives and incorporate it into our community spaces.

After all, the beauty of an environment lies in its ability to inspire and transform those who inhabit it. If an identity space is bland, poorly furnished, and poorly decorated, this will also be reflected in those who work there. As the denigrated Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer said: “The spectacle of beauty, in whatever form it appears, elevates the mind to noble aspirations” (The Poetics of Gustavo Adolfo Becquer, 1968)

Once the multifaceted and multiform problem has been identified, there is a need to move from verbalizing the meaning of art, which is usually developed through the written medium, to mobilizing art itself in the various forms and ways in which it manifests, thus giving rise to innovative and cutting-edge dynamics.

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Join the initiative to rediscover and revive European art! Check out Kineuropa: Cinema as a Reflection of European Identity, fresh off the press from Arktos:

To this end, the Instituto Carlos V has developed two operational guidelines.

Firstly, we donate works — originals or reproductions, usually masterpieces of European art — to organizations with limited financial resources but a similar worldview to ours.

Secondly, we create new artistic pieces on timeless themes to be distributed at a symbolic price (see the postcards we have already produced for an example of this).

Additionally, we are considering dedicating ourselves to the publication of prints and graphics, as well as exploring other visual media. In any case, we are keen to support new artists and/or local European businesses. We have also decided to donate books on local and national heritage.

This is just the beginning of a more ambitious project that we will develop in the short and medium term without ruling out other possibilities.

In summary, if we aspire to transform the aesthetics of a nation or a continent, we must first implement this paradigm shift in our immediate surroundings, both militant and familiar.

Let us take advice from those who know best: beauty should be our goal and something to strive for.

Alain de Benoist argues that a reckless "war party" of European leaders and institutions is pushing the continent toward a catastrophic armed confrontation with Russia over Ukraine.

The drums of war have begun to sound again. The Secretary General of NATO, Mark Rutte, is calling on the countries of the Atlantic Alliance to prepare for a third world war. In France, government decree no. 2025-1030 of October 31, 2025, published in the Journal officiel but gone unnoticed, authorizes the use of private military companies to provide assistance to “a third country in a situation of armed conflict.” A return to mercenaries. Military service is to be reinstated on a voluntary basis, which will make it possible to increase the number of reservists. General Fabien Mandon, Chief of the Defense Staff, announces a war with Russia “in three to four years.” His predecessor, Thierry Burkhard, had already attributed to Russia a (nonexistent) declaration designating France as its “principal adversary in Europe.” For good measure, reserve General Michel Yakovleff coolly assures us that Donald Trump is a “KGB agent” (sic)! An armed confrontation with Russia is now presented no longer as a possibility, but as a certainty.

Marching... Toward the Abyss

For over seventy years, we were told that “Europe means peace.” Today, Europe means war. On the side of the European Union’s comic-opera troupe, we have the vocal stylings of the Estonian Kallas, who mechanically repeats that “Ukraine must win the war”—a war it has already lost—while Ursula von der Leyen (the Hyena?) declares with a straight face that Europe is “ready for action,” when it is ready for nothing at all (and the EU has no competence whatsoever in matters of defense). The geese of Capital!

The era of post-truth had begun with the Covid-19 crisis, already with the objective of instrumentalizing fear by transforming it into moral panic. On television screens, medal-laden generals taking orders have replaced the quack doctors à la Diafoirus1, but the principle remains the same: making people accept what, without fear, would clearly appear unacceptable.

“We are at war!” proudly proclaims the head of state (not the one who just got out of prison—the other one, the psychopath), a phrase he loves all the more since, never having done his military service, he has never heard a bullet whistle in his life. He too ingenuously declares that “Russia must not win this war”—to achieve peace, one must prolong the war! To rally opinion behind this mad fantasy, he assures us that “Russia constitutes an existential threat to Europeans,” while in Washington, Moscow, and Beijing alike, no one takes his bluster seriously. Detested by the people, incapable of putting together a government that holds or passing a budget while the country’s financial situation is disastrous, of protecting its borders or putting an end to narco-terrorism, Macron no longer has any legitimacy. He is trying to restore some by dreaming himself a garden-variety Napoleon. After “France on the march,” it’s now “France, forward march!”

There exists today, then, a war party. A party that wants to wage war on Russia while accusing Russia of wanting to wage it on us. What is new is that this war party does not occupy defensive positions, as in the era of the Cold War, but offensive ones: it deliberately seeks war and does everything it can to mobilize public opinion. The media naturally take up the relay. Since the beginning of the conflict in Ukraine, we have already been subjected to one-sided information concocted by attack dogs and spread by ghosts. Advocates of peace are presented in litany-like fashion as “Putinists.” Soon they will denounce the “fifth column” (the eternal “foreign party”). In the old days, in the popular imagination, people saw flying saucers; today they see drones.

The war party claims that the best way to achieve peace is to help Zelensky pursue a war he is incapable of winning. It claims that by supporting Ukraine by all means, Europeans would be protecting themselves against the “Russian threat.” It claims that after four years spent reconquering their Alsace-Lorraine, the Russians are going to rush toward the harbor of Brest, before pushing on to Lisbon and Gibraltar! It claims that the French people—who will never be consulted about what they think—must prepare right now to see their children die at the Russian border “in three to four years” in support of, against a nuclear power, a country in which France has not the slightest vital interest. It is simply grotesque. As Luc Ferry put it, this is sheer madness!

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Conquer Europe? The Kremlin has neither the desire nor the means. The “Russian threat,” says Philippe de Villiers, is “the fantasy of someone who has no longer quite got his wits about him.” It is a “belief for which not the slightest proof exists,” adds geopolitical scholar John Mearsheimer. The same people who have been learnedly explaining to us for four years that Russia is about to collapse any day now are now assuring us that it is preparing to invade Europe; in short, that it is losing, but must be prevented from winning—that it is at once a bloodthirsty bear and a paper tiger. Make of that what you will.

The war that has been raging for four years in Ukraine is at once a war of secession, a war of self-defense, a fratricidal war, and a proxy war between NATO and Russia. It has already claimed hundreds of thousands of lives among young Europeans, Russians, and Ukrainians. It should never have taken place and could have ended long ago. Its primary cause is well known: the determination of the United States to push NATO up to Russia’s borders. NATO did not do this out of sympathy for Ukrainian nationalism, which it merely instrumentalized for its own benefit, but to break apart the great Eurasian continent, to sever Europe from the Russian power with which it is naturally complementary, and of course to prevent the formation of a Paris-Berlin-Moscow axis. The Americans conceived this project from the very collapse of the Soviet system. The Russians had nevertheless made it known in April 2008, more than fifteen years ago, that the extension of NATO to Ukraine would represent a red line and a casus belli for them. The decision was made to disregard this. It was thus decided to use Ukraine against Russia. The unfortunate Ukrainian people fell into the trap, and here we are.

The Europeans entered this war reluctantly. By taking sides with one of the two camps instead of positioning themselves as mediators—which would have been the only reasonable stance—by seeking to identify “guilty parties” rather than acting in accordance with their own interests, by preferring abstract moral values to the concrete principles of geostrategic realism, by allowing themselves to be drawn into an Anglo-Saxon war in which they had no existential or vital interest of their own, they in turn put their hand into the gears of an escalation to extremes. The more time has passed, the more they have appeared of their own free will as co-belligerents. Today, while the Americans want to disengage and the Ukrainian army is no longer capable of launching the slightest offensive, they are engaging in a bellicist escalation that risks dragging all of Europe into an escalation that could culminate in an armed confrontation with a nuclear power. It is difficult to be more irresponsible.

The hardest thing in a war is knowing how to stop it. The aim of every war is peace, but a ceasefire is not peace (as we can see from what continues to happen in Gaza and the West Bank). A war only ends when a peace agreement has determined the political conditions for resolving the problems that engendered it.

At a time when all Western societies are on the brink of implosion, a debt-ridden and half-ruined Europe has provided more than 200 billion in aid to Ukraine. This massive aid has served no purpose other than to increase the death toll. It has allowed Ukraine to continue the war, but has never given it the possibility of winning it. Without Western military aid, this war would have ended long ago. Observing that Ukraine has lost the war despite American support, Europeans draw the surrealist conclusion that it will win with their help alone—without even understanding that the longer the war lasts, the less Ukraine will be able to negotiate.

Europe in a State of Intoxication

Europeans complain of not having been included in the peace deal proposals negotiated first between the Russians and the Americans. This complaint would be more credible if they had in the past attempted to interpose themselves or play the role of mediator. They now dream of a peace agreement that would ignore the reality of the balance of forces on the ground—that is, an agreement where the victors and the vanquished would both be winners, something that has obviously never been seen (in 1918, Germany was no longer in a position to dictate its terms). They would like Ukraine, with barely 25 million inhabitants, to be able to maintain in peacetime an army of 800,000 men—more than the British, French, and German armies combined. They speak of “security guarantees” for Ukraine without understanding that the only true guarantee for it is its neutrality.

“We are marching toward war like sleepwalkers,” Henri Guaino had written on May 15, 2022. Four years later, the sleepwalkers have still not awoken. From the very beginning, they have been in denial of reality (Russia is “isolated,” Ukraine is “going to win,” the sanctions are “very effective,” etc.) and intend to remain there. They refuse to see that on the ground, the die is cast—the mass has been said! They still have not understood that international relations are not a matter of moral principles, but of power dynamics. They do not understand that new power dynamics are imposing themselves all across the world. Still believing themselves to be in the era of the Cold War, they fail to realize that the Ukrainian defeat is also that of the “collective West” and that this “West” has already disappeared, along with the Atlanticism that was its foundation.

Europe is today led by ghosts or sleepwalkers converted to bellicism. The three allies (France, Germany, England) stamp their feet and compete in bluster like children in a sandbox, threatening to replay Operation Barbarossa—this time without the Wehrmacht (but with the Bundeswehr). As credible as the frog trying to pass itself off as an ox, they pretend to believe they have the means to influence the situation when they do not have the shadow of a beginning of such means. In fact, they are completely naked. Like little roosters flapping their wings while looking for their muscles, like headless ducks running in every direction, they multiply the gesticulations, the palavering, the posturing, and the incantations, the untenable commitments and the useless meetings. Their “coalition of the willing” brings to mind the extras at the Châtelet who sing “Let us march, let us march!” while staying in place. To “help Ukraine more,” they will cut budgets, steal Russian assets, buy weapons from the Americans that NATO will then give to Ukraine, exempt military spending from the Maastricht criteria, send Rafale jets they don’t have, issue loans payable in funny money, deploy troops who-knows-where, neither why nor how. The truth is that they simply do not have the means to take over—and are nowhere near having them. A pitiful spectacle.

Meanwhile, the French who struggle to make ends meet wonder how it is possible to find so many billions for a foreign country they already have trouble locating on a map, while so little is found to improve their own situation. The more astute among them can also see that the sanctions against Russia have caused an explosion in energy prices and accelerated German deindustrialization, without so much as shaking the Russian economy, and that in France their clearest effect has been to make us buy liquefied gas from the United States at four times the price of Russian gas. As for “threats,” they see only one for the time being: the one that comes not from the East, but from the South.

Donald Trump is a temperamental man, but a realistic temperamental man. Taking the opposite tack from his predecessor, he wants to be done with this war as quickly as possible because he knows full well who holds the cards and what the reality on the ground is. The war prevents him from doing business and delays the reconstruction of Ukraine, from which the American firm BlackRock will be the great beneficiary. What he fears is not the “Russian threat” or the “imperial ambitions” of the Kremlin, but the strengthening of the China-Russia alliance. The Europeans, whom he despises—alas, justifiably—are in his eyes merely a stake in his trade war against China. When the war ends, it will become apparent that there is a minor winner (Putin) and a minor loser (Zelensky), but that the great winner is America, and the great loser the European Union.

De Gaulle said: “Defense is the primary reason for the state’s existence.” He was right. The rearmament that the various European countries now say they are determined to undertake is therefore perfectly justified. But on two conditions. The first is that this rearmament does not decide in advance upon an enemy of principle, but considers all eventualities: Europe has no more vocation to be Americanized than to be Russified, Sinicized, or Islamized. Moreover, it is not Russia but the United States that has recently laid claim to the annexation of a territory under European jurisdiction—Greenland, as it happens. We must return to the “all azimuth” strategic autonomy theorized by General de Gaulle.2

READ MORE from Arktos

METAPHYSICS OF WAR: Battle, Victory & Death in the World of Tradition

by Julius Evola

NOW AVAILABLE from Arktos in leather-bound collector’s edition with an original foreword by Kevin DeAnna.

*Limited to only 100 copies*

Order in Europe

Order in the US

In our age of real and fake conflicts, the time is ripe for rediscovering the metaphysical mysteries of war and the warrior ethos. Evola’s Metaphysics of War is and will remain the go-to handbook for cultivating the warrior within our souls. Drawing on the arsenal of wisdom and experiences from Nordic, Vedic, Roman, Persian, Islamic and other traditions, Evola shows how the art of war can lead to transcendence and greatness in everyday life.

The second is to acknowledge the decoupling that has put an end to the Atlantic Alliance, to realize that if Europe is disarmed today, if it has until now devoted so little to its defense, it is above all because it offloaded onto the American “big brother” the task of ensuring its security. NATO, from this standpoint, has never been anything other than the lasting guarantee that no Europe of defense could ever see the light of day. We know today what the reality was and how the American military “umbrella” was for the most part nonexistent.

But the United States nonetheless retains control of virtually all European armaments: all depend to a greater or lesser extent on Washington, which continues to ensure their technical, systemic, or operational control. In 2022, 69% of armaments imported into Europe came from the United States (compared to 43% in 2018). A European rearmament that did not seek to break free of this dependency and sever what remains of the transatlantic link would be meaningless. In other words: no European defense without European preference, no autonomous military power without political sovereignty.

Vassals of America

It is therefore not the Russian threat, but American disengagement that compels Europe to reflect anew on the conditions of its strategic autonomy in matters of defense and on the possibility of arriving at a system of balance and collective security based on an understanding between Europe and Russia—one capable of defusing the turbulence likely to arise in the border zones.

Unfortunately, it does not seem that this path is being taken, since instead of asking themselves what type of power they can recreate by their own means, Europeans are desperately seeking to “restore ties with the United States” and never miss an opportunity to present themselves as eager to remain their allies. Which shows that, once again, they have not understood what is happening before their very eyes. Having abandoned ideological and moral crusades in favor of “pragmatic and transactional realism,” the Americans have given up playing world policeman, but they want to maintain their hegemony over the West. They no longer wish to have allies, but only vassals and clients.

A genuine rearmament of European countries will take at least fifteen years, meaning the situation in Ukraine will in no way be affected by it. It will require a great deal of money (the European roadmap for defense preparation by 2030 is endowed with 800 billion euros), but even more moral energy and political will. As Bill Durodié sums it up: “War is as much a question of mentality as of equipment. Quadrupling defense spending has no consequence if no one is ready to fight.” One of history’s ironies is that those who, for more than seventy years, warned against the specter of “German militarism” now celebrate the fact that Germany—the only country alongside Poland to invest massively in its defense—is on the verge of becoming Europe’s leading army.

At a moment when everyone is citing the maxim Si vis pacem para bellum, it is worth remembering that this famous adage does not mean one must prepare for war in order to wage war, but that one must prepare for it in order to preserve peace. In such moments, the only question worth asking is: where lies France’s interest? Where lies Europe’s interest? The rest is mere chatter.

So, the Russian threat? Let us cite once more that beautiful Georgian proverb: “The shepherd made the sheep fear the wolf all its life, but in the end, it is the shepherd who eats it.”

Translated by Alexander Raynor

Originally published on Éléments on no. 218, February-March 2026

READ MORE by Alain de Benoist, brought to you in English by Arktos:

Laurent Guyénot, the author of The Papal Curse: The Medieval Origin of the European Syndrome, uncovers the Crusade archetype in European culture, tracing its disastrous consequences from the Middle Ages to the present-day Middle East.

At the end of the 11th century, the popes instilled a revolutionary idea in the ruling caste: the Crusade. It was a revelation, a new road to salvation, as well as a paradoxical attempt to unify Europe around Jerusalem. It brought the best and the worst out of the warrior class, it was embraced by the kings as well as by the masses, and it gave the pope unprecedented spiritual and political domination.

The Crusade was such a potent experience that its influence on Western civilization outlasted the fall of papal autocracy, and is still felt today. The Crusade became part of the West’s DNA. Dressed in new clothes, it remains the West’s defining Big Idea: redeeming the world—and itself—through wars in the name of lofty principles. Most recent American military adventures fit Christopher Tyerman’s definition of the medieval Crusades as “wars justified by faith conducted against real or imagined enemies defined by religious and political elites as perceived threats to the Christian faithful.”1 That today crusades are launched in the name of Democracy rather than Christianity is the only difference.

The Impact of the Crusades

Every historian agrees today, notes Norman Housley, that “the crusades played a central rather than a peripheral role in the development of medieval Europe.”2 More than anything else, of course, as Michael Mitterauer insists, “The crusading movement produced a radical change in Western Christendom’s attitude toward war, marking a turning point in the history of Western thinking.” It also set the pattern for European expansionism, which “is a fundamental feature of Europe’s special path.”3

The First Crusade (1095-97) was a success, and it was celebrated by the earliest massive propaganda. It became for Europeans what the Trojan War was for the ancient Greeks.4 Christopher Tyerman writes:

“The scale and rapid production of histories of the First Crusade by eyewitnesses and others eager to interpret the startling events didactically finds no parallel in medieval historiography. Within a dozen years of Jerusalem’s capture, at least four full eyewitness accounts, three major western histories and part of the great Lorraine version by Albert of Aachen were being circulated along with a bevy of other accounts, more or less derivative, imaginative or polemic. … Most of the histories sculpted stirring tales of faith, bravery, suffering, danger, tenacity and triumph. The theologians distilled the message of God’s immanence and Christian duty; the no less artful eyewitnesses provided accessible tales of miracles and butchery. One of the very earliest, the Gesta Francorum, included elaborate scenes with stereotype exotic Orientals declaiming extravagant, bombastic nonsense much in the style of the verse chanson de geste. Naturalistic representation, especially of the enemy, did not feature.”5

A New Religion of Salvation

The impact of these tales was such that, when the Second Crusade was preached in 1145, the response was again overwhelming. “I opened my mouth, I spoke, and at once the Crusaders have multiplied to infinity,” Bernard of Clairvaux bragged to the pope. “Villages and towns are now deserted. You will scarcely find one man for every seven women. Everywhere you see widows whose husbands are still alive.”6 Bernard elaborated the soteriological doctrine the Crusade. He wrote in In Praise of the New Knighthood:

“the knights of Christ may safely fight the battles of their Lord, fearing neither sin if they smite the enemy, nor danger at their own death; since to inflict death or to die for Christ is no sin, but rather, an abundant claim to glory. In the first case one gains for Christ, and in the second one gains Christ himself.”

Blessed if you kill, blessed if you die.

The Crusade was indeed a new religion of salvation. Guibert of Nogent, an enthusiastic chronicler of the First Crusade, noted that before, knights could only attain salvation by giving up their way of life and becoming monks, but “God has instituted in our time holy wars, so that the order of knights and the crowd running in their wake … might find a new way of gaining salvation.”7

While the Roman Church had sought to repress private wars by the movement of the Peace of God in the 10th century, it now declared that the only authorized war was in the Holy Land. The Church which had decreed that even tournaments—“execrable fairs” according to saint Bernard—were a mortal sin, and that finding death there sent you directly to Hell, invented the Holy War which propels each soldier who dies there directly to Paradise.

Blood vengeance, a supreme value of barbarian and feudal ethics, also found its Christian redemption in the Crusade. For Raymond of Aguilers, the First Crusade, in which he participated, was “the enterprise which aimed to avenge our Lord Jesus Christ, on those who had unworthily seized the native land of the Lord and his apostles.”8 Vengez Jésus became a war cry of the French crusaders.9

Making Jerusalem the Capital of Europe

It has been said that the Crusades were “the first unifying event in Europe.”10 The crusades “so stirred and united Europe that we may count them as the beginning of modern history,” wrote Halford Mackinder in his seminal 1904 article on “The Geographical Pivot of History.”11 He was not puzzled by the utter absurdity of aiming to unite Europe around Jerusalem. The popes convinced Europeans that the cradle of their civilization was a city at the eastern end of the Mediterranean, already coveted by two other civilizations (the Byzantine and the Islamic) and asked them to fight for it as if the salvation of Europe depended on it. There could not be a project more contrary to the interests of Europe.

From the time they “liberated” Jerusalem, Westerners saw themselves as the guardians of the center of the world. It became part of their identity. Their obsession only grew after Jerusalem was recaptured by Salah al-Din (Saladin) in 1187, and with every new failed attempt to reverse this fatal development. When the pious king Louis IX died of dysentery during the Eighth Crusade in 1270, his last words were for the city he never saw: “Jerusalem! Jerusalem!”

All Europe, it seems, has been weeping over Jerusalem ever since. Tyerman writes:

“The clerical and lay elites of western Europe found it almost impossible to let go of the Holy Land as a political ambition or vision of perfection. Throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, governments, moralists, preachers and lobbyists returned again and again to a subject in which practical and moral objectives were fused together.”12

When British General Edmund Allenby entered the city in a solemn procession in 1917, he proclaimed “the end of the Crusades,” and the London Punch published an illustration showing Richard I looking down on Jerusalem, and nodding contentedly, “My dream comes true!”13

That fascination with Jerusalem is, of course, not unrelated to the British and French support for Zionism at the beginning of the 20th century. The sacralization of biblical Israel in Christian culture obviously constituted a key factor in the support given by Christian nations to the “rebirth” of Israel between 1917 and 1948. But it was the Crusade and the memory of it in European culture that played the major role in sealing the sacred bond between Western Christendom and Israel, which has overdetermined world history ever since.

Crusaders saw themselves as imitating the genocidal people of Moses. According to an account by Robert of Reims, Urban II said, in his sermon at Clermont: “Take the road to the Holy Sepulchre, rescue that land from a dreadful race and rule over it yourselves, for that land that, as scripture says, flows with milk and honey was given by God as a possession to the children of Israel.”14 In the version of his speech recorded by Baldric of Dol, Urban II referred to the Arabs as the Amalekites that Yahweh ordered King Saul to slaughter entirely, “man and woman, babe and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and donkey” (1Samuel 15:3). “It is our duty to pray, yours to fight against the Amalekites,” Urban said, “With Moses, we shall extend unwearied hands in prayer to Heaven, while you go forth and brandish the sword, like dauntless warriors, against Amalek.”15

As you know, the Iranians have now been officially declared by Netanyahu to be the new Amalek.

A Disastrous Failure Through and Through

As a matter of fact, the unity of the Islamic world did not suffer from the Crusades — quite the opposite. Before the First Crusade, it had fragmented into two rival caliphates (Baghdad and Cairo) and a number of independent emirates and city-states. The Frankish aggression stimulated the reunification. Archbishop William of Tyre complained about this in the early 1180s:

“In former times almost every city had its own ruler … not dependent on one another … who feared their own allies not less than the Christians [and] could not or would not readily unite to repulse the common danger or arm themselves for our destruction. But now … all the kingdoms adjacent to us have been brought under the power of one man [Nur ed-Din].”16

Moreover, before the First Crusade, the Byzantines had been living in good terms with the Shiite Fatimid caliphate, of which Cairo was the capital. “In the middle of the eleventh century the tranquility of the east Mediterranean world seemed assured for many years to come. Its two great powers, Fatimid Egypt and Byzantium, were on good terms with each other.”17 Christians worshiped freely in Jerusalem, and Muslims had their mosque just outside the walls of Constantinople (it was burned by the Franks, and the fire spread to a third of the city). The Seljuks invaders from the East were the common foes of the Fatimids and the Byzantines. But for the unsophisticated crusaders, all Muslims were the same. The Franks’ policy of “normative hostility” against Muslims disrupted the policy of the Byzantines, which was “to play off the various Moslem princes against each other and thus to isolate each of them in turn.”18

As a whole, the Crusades not only dealt a mortal blow to the eastern Christian empire that they pretended to be rescuing (the crusaders sacked Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade in 1205, and the city never recovered). They also ruined the diplomatic relations between Byzantium and the the Shiite caliphate of Egypt, and indirectly caused the fall of this long-standing ally, absorbed by Saladin under the Sunni banner in 1171. They therefore strengthened the Sunni power that they were supposed to fight.

Ultimately, the Crusades dug a trench of incomprehension and hostility between Christian and Islamic civilizations, thus doubly harming Eastern Christians of all denominations (Orthodox, Copts, Nestorians, Armenians, Jacobites, etc.), who had up until then enjoyed freedom of worship under most Muslim rulers.

Ultimately, the Crusades, with their inherent hypocrisy, harmed the West by corrupting its very soul, and harmed the rest of the world by making the West a dangerous, unrestrained predator.

The Beginning of Colonization

In The Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem: European Colonialism in the Middle Ages, Joshua Prawer presents medieval crusading as a foreshadowing of later European colonialism. He contends that the institutions and economy of the Latin states are best understood in the light of their colonial status:

“Though colonization is not a new phenomenon in European history, only since the Crusades is there continuity and filiation between colonial movements. … it is justified to regard the Crusader kingdom as the first European colonial society.”19

The Northern Crusades in the Baltic regions, launched in the early 13th century with the full benefit of papal indulgences and privileges, also fit modern definitions of colonization very well. The appeal of Archbishop Adalgot of Magdeburg in 1108 makes this clear:

“These gentiles are most wicked, but their land is the best, rich in meat, honey, corn and birds, and if it were well cultivated none could be compared to it for wealth of its produce … And so, most renowned Saxons, French, Lorrainers and Flemings and conquerors of the world, this is an occasion for you to save your souls and, if you wish it, acquire the best land in which to live. May He who with the strength of his arm led the men of Gaul on their march from the far West in triumph against his enemies in the farthest East give you the will and power to conquer those most inhuman gentiles who are nearby and to prosper well in all things.”20

The filiation between the Crusades and the colonization is clear in the Americas. In Columbus and the Quest for Jerusalem, Carol Delaney reveals a little known fact:

“The quest for Jerusalem was Columbus’s grand passion; it was the vision that sustained him through all the trials and tribulations he felt, like Job, that he endured … He had dedicated his life to the liberation of Jerusalem; on his deathbed, realizing he would never see his project fulfilled, he ratified his will that left money to support the crusade he hoped would be taken up by his successors.”

With the gold he hoped to plunder in the Americas, Columbus hoped that a new crusade could be financed. He wrote in his diary, December 26, 1492, that he wanted to find gold “in such quantity that the sovereigns … will undertake and prepare to go conquer the Holy Sepulchre.”21

The Spanish and Portuguese conquistadors that followed on Columbus’s trail had been immersed all their lives in the ideology of the Reconquista, a series of crusades against the Muslims of Iberia. As Norman Cantor explains:

“The Reconquista was the dominant, almost the exclusive, theme of medieval Christian Spanish history, and some historians have seen it as the determining factor in the molding of the peculiar Spanish character. All Iberian society originated in a grim war of five centuries against Islam, and the Spanish institutional structure was organized around the warlord and the necessities of aggressive warfare.”22

No wonder, then, that the conquistadors saw themselves as crusaders and behaved as such.

Conclusion

In the 19th century, after having accomplished its “Manifest Destiny” and pushed its Frontier to the Pacific Ocean at the expense of the Mexican Empire, the U.S. remained overflowing with crusading spirit. President Woodrow Wilson declared in 1912: “We are chosen, and prominently chosen, to show the way to the nations of the world how they shall walk in the path of liberty.”23

Dwight Eisenhower titled his WWII memoirs Crusade in Europe, which is ironic if we think that Europe, which had launched so many crusades to the East, now became the target of a crusade from the new West, to be “liberated” from Germany and thereby turned into an American colony.

NATO’s destruction of Yugoslavia in 1999 also fits the crusading pattern, as Diana Johnstone remarks in her book Fools’ Crusade.24 And it was not innocently that, coming from church on the Sunday following September 11, 2001, George W. Bush made this televised declaration, broadcast worldwide: “This crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while.”

And now we have the author of a book titled American Crusade as the warmonger in chief.

Laurent Guyénot’s The Papal Curse: The Medieval Origin of the European Syndrome, fresh off the press from Arktos, is available to order from Arktos and on Amazon.

Why has Europe remained divided, restless, and often at war with itself? In The Papal Curse: The Medieval Origin of the European Syndrome, Laurent Guyénot argues that the root cause lies in the transformative — and destructive — role of the medieval papacy.

From the Crusades and the struggle with emperors to the shaping of Western individualism and global ambitions, Guyénot draws on history, theology, and geopolitics to explore how the popes’ religious and political projects have intertwined to prevent the rise of a unified European Empire.

Provocative, deeply researched, and featuring an original foreword by Alain de Benoist, The Papal Curse challenges readers to confront the hidden origins of Europe’s modern crises.

The below transcript is from Prof. Alexander Dugin’s latest episode of the Radio Sputnik Escalation Show.

Arktos Journal

Making Anti-Globalism Global Since 2009.

Radio Sputnik Host, Escalation Show: The topic of today’s programme is inevitably tied to the Middle East. Whatever global context we consider, every issue today—be it the economy or high politics—is, in one way or another, tied to events in this region. Let’s start with the most hotly debated aspect at the moment: the likelihood of a ground operation by US forces against Iran. We are no longer talking just about the islands. Predictions of a possible attack on the coastline or even on strategic targets directly on the mainland are becoming increasingly common. The situation is paradoxical: from a military standpoint, Iran’s leadership has repeatedly stated that they are literally ‘waiting’ for this invasion so they can deliver a decisive blow. Tehran’s political leadership is projecting confidence, emphasising that it is not afraid of direct aggression. In your view: how realistic is a US ground operation in Iran? Is this a deliberate plan, a bluff, or a risky game with extremely high stakes? And, if it actually takes place, what fundamental purpose might such an attack serve?

Alexander Dugin: Here, one must consider the broader context. American operations involving invasion and regime change in recent decades have succeeded only under one condition: there had to be a layer within the leadership of the target country that had already concluded a traitorous agreement with the Americans. Without this, they never succeeded in anything — such operations did not even begin.

The scenario is always the same: first, threats are issued, troops are deployed, and air strikes are launched. Then — whether by the Americans, their local allies, or ‘their own’ hands — the figure embodying resistance, sovereignty and consolidation is eliminated. They are either discredited or physically eliminated.

And then comes the inevitable betrayal. I am referring to what I call ‘the sixth column’. This is not the ‘fifth column’ that takes to the streets to protest — in repressive regimes, such as China or Iran, they can simply be arrested, and that is the end of the matter. The ‘sixth column’ is the Americans’ main strategy and the greatest danger. These are people in the highest echelons of power, close to the sovereign state ruler. There is always someone ready to strike a deal with Washington in order to rise from second or third in command to first. Since the Americans declare war specifically on the leader, those next in line enter into negotiations in order to drastically change their social status.

That is the only thing that has ever worked. Ever.

In Iran, however, the situation is different. Ironically, the potential ‘sixth column’ — those who, in theory, could have struck a deal with the Americans — was swept away by the very first strikes by the US and Israel. There is simply no one left in the leadership who is prepared for separate negotiations.

Identifying the ‘sixth column’ is extremely difficult: formally, these people are absolutely loyal; they swear allegiance to the state, yet in reality they play secret games with the enemy. It was precisely on them that Washington relied in Iraq, Libya and Syria; all the ‘colour revolutions’ from Venezuela to the Middle East were built on this principle. But today, there is no such scenario in Iran. For the first time in a long while, the Americans will have to fight for real.

They face a country with a population of 90 million and a landscape even more impassable than Afghanistan’s. The Iranians will not forgive the deaths of their leaders and children — the killing of 165 girls by missiles has united people against the aggressor, even those who disliked the regime. Defeating such a people in high-altitude terrain, following such monstrous crimes by American imperialism, seems an impossible task. America simply lacks such experience. If they decide on a full-scale invasion, it will become a second Vietnam for them, only far more terrible and protracted. This campaign will drag on for years and is highly likely to end in disaster.

Moreover, the US has virtually no allies for a ground operation. Israel is on the brink: the IDF is suffering colossal losses in Lebanon, the ‘Iron Dome’ intercepts only a small fraction of the rockets, and the country’s territory itself is gradually turning into a version of Gaza under a barrage of strikes from Hezbollah and Yemen. Israel is on its last legs; a mass exodus of the population is about to begin there – they have no time to help an ally. As for the Arab monarchies, their infrastructure has been undermined, and they themselves are too accustomed to a life of luxury and financial speculation to go to war. Some of them, such as Qatar, may well refuse to get involved in this adventure altogether.

Resistance in support of Iran will flare up in at least four major hotspots: Iraq, Yemen, Syria, and the Lebanese Hezbollah. What the Israeli occupiers are doing today in southern Lebanon is provoking revulsion not only among the Shia, but also among the whole of Lebanese society, which was previously prepared to make any deal with the West. In Syria, the situation is no less tense: even if al-Sharaa was brought to power with the involvement of the CIA and Mossad, he is compelled to respond to the people’s aspirations, and the Syrian ‘streets’ are fiercely anti-Israeli.

This anti-Zionist sentiment is capable of stirring up the Sunni world, particularly in Saudi Arabia, Egypt or Algeria. All it takes is a spark — for example, an attack on the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Yesterday, the Latin Patriarch Pierbattista Pizzaballa was barred from entering Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. This is an unprecedented act (the first in a thousand years), which has sparked a wave of outrage across the Catholic world. If the Zionists take radical steps against Islamic holy sites, Israel will find itself at a critical juncture. How can there be any talk of a ‘Greater Israel’ when the very existence of the state is in question?

And so, in this catastrophic situation, having failed to protect its allies in the Middle East and secure its ‘Oil-Epstein’ Gulf monarchies, Trump’s America is preparing to launch a ground operation. This is taking place against the backdrop of a global energy lockdown. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz is dealing a colossal blow to the economies of China, Japan, India and Europe. We, too, cannot — and, to put it bluntly, we have no burning desire to — supply our enemies with resources.

Trump is trying to justify the invasion with the need to ‘open’ the strait, but the reality is far more dire. Last night, Iranian forces struck desalination plants in Israel which supplied 47% of the country’s water. In the Middle East, water is more valuable than oil, and now similar facilities in Kuwait and the UAE have also been put out of action in response to the strikes on Iran’s energy infrastructure.

Launching a ground operation under such conditions is geopolitical suicide. Trump lacks consolidated support at home: he faces opposition not only from the Democrats but also from a significant portion of his own electorate. His approval ratings are at rock bottom, and once the first coffins start arriving in America, the political context will become utterly unbearable for him.

Host: I fully share your scepticism about the success of such an operation. If we look at the figures: in Afghanistan, the peak strength of the US contingent reached 110,000 troops, and we know the outcome. Here, however, the force barely numbers 50,000, and yet Iran is a task many times more complex, both strategically and geographically. It looks like a deliberately unsolvable equation. In the context of your remarks about the Tomahawk strikes on civilian targets, a logical question arises: surely Washington could not have failed to understand what reaction this would provoke in Iran. The whole country came together in a single outpouring of grief at the funerals of the children who died, and hatred for the aggressor became absolute. So, is this strike not a mistake, but a matter of clear logic? Was the true aim not to provoke the very total chaos in the Middle East that we are now witnessing, following Tehran’s retaliatory actions? In your view, is this conflagration an end in itself for the US and Israel, or have they simply lost all control over the consequences of their actions?

Alexander Dugin: That is precisely the case. But I would like to add one more factor that makes any ground operation today extremely problematic: it is the radical change in the very technology of warfare. Over the past four years, we have realised from our own experience that unmanned systems — both in the air and, no less importantly, at sea — are completely altering the balance of the use of traditional means.

Today, an army of 50,000 men, with modern drones at its disposal, can effectively be reduced to the capabilities of a 5,000-strong unit. We’ve encountered this during our Special Operation: this is war for which no one was prepared; it is changing its parameters right before our eyes. Where are those much-vaunted Abrams tanks that everyone was counting on so much? They were burnt out in a couple of weeks; nothing remains of them. And now they are keeping quiet about them. Why send multi-million-dollar ‘iron’ to its doom against a small plywood drone?

The same applies to the navy. Modern underwater drones allow a multi-billion-dollar destroyer to be sunk for a paltry 10,000 dollars. This technology was used against us, and we, much to our regret, suffered losses. But this is a game for two. The Iranians are studying our experience closely. It might well be possible to capture Kharg Island, but on the Iranian shore, American troops would be as plain as day. The number of casualties they would suffer is incalculable. We ourselves went through something similar with Snake Island: it is easy to capture, but to hold it means suffering losses that are incomparable to the benefits of maintaining a presence there. It is suicide.

Moreover, Trump has no positive objectives in this war, apart from attempting to ‘open’ the Strait of Hormuz, which he himself closed. Even if one were to imagine this dubious success, it is difficult to call a situation a victory when you first break everything and then, at the cost of colossal expenditure, try to repair it just a little. Trump, of course, will count anything as a success.

I have been asked to assess the actions and statements of the American president with restraint, and I am complying with this request. I think our people have enough metaphors to describe his behaviour appropriately. We shall adhere to diplomatic norms, but everything Trump does seems less like a ‘cunning plan’ and more like the systematic suicide of the West.

Some Western analysts, among Trump’s opponents, have suddenly remembered ‘Russiagate’. They say: ‘We warned you that Trump is Putin’s agent! Look at what he’s doing: he’s destroying the Western economy, undermining the power of the United States and turning the very institution of the presidency into a laughing stock, mocked by the whole world.’ I do not wish to pass personal judgement on him — that is what his opponents say. Perhaps some consider him a great man, worthy of worship, but it seems that today no one thinks so at all — neither in America nor in the rest of the world.

In fact, under the guise of strengthening American hegemony, Trump is destroying it once and for all. The question arises: how did this become possible? I have only one explanation: an eschatological factor has come into play. This is what in the West is called prophecy. Today, a huge number of serious analysts are using this term to analyse the geopolitical situation in the Middle East.

Netanyahu and his entourage, especially radicals like Ben-Gvir, sincerely believe that the coming of the Messiah is near. They are preparing the ground for the Third Temple and the ‘Greater Israel’ project — and this is no metaphor, but a direct call to action. In America, Christian Zionists have succumbed to the same impulse: for them, the war in Israel is the final battle before the Second Coming of Christ. Pete Hegseth, head of the Pentagon speaks openly about this. He tells the troops: ‘You are going to die for the Second Coming; you are going on a Crusade.’

Most of humanity — including many Americans and Israelis — does not believe this. But it becomes an irrational, powerful motivation for key forces in the West. The geopolitics of prophecy is the only factor that explains a host of inconsistent moves. If one accepts this factor, everything falls into place: chaos and destruction are not to be feared, for they are a necessary stage of the tribulation (another term from Christian Zionism). From the perspective of Christian Zionists, a cataclysm besetting humanity is a necessary prologue to the Second Coming of Christ, and for Jews, to the first coming of the Messiah.

Host: The exchange of strikes against critical infrastructure is not merely continuing; it is intensifying: according to the latest reports, an oil refinery in Haifa is on fire, Iranian petrochemical facilities have sustained serious damage, and yesterday one of the largest aluminium plants in Bahrain was attacked. But what is truly alarming is that university buildings in Iran have become targets. Tehran has already promised a tit-for-tat response against similar educational centres in the Gulf states. Against this backdrop, a highly resonant statement was made by Iranian MP Alaeddin Boroujerdi: he emphasised that Iran’s membership in the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) no longer makes sense, given that the US and Israel are effectively ignoring any international norms. This raises a logical question: if Iran is serious about withdrawing from the treaty, does this not mean that the ‘nuclear threshold’ has already been crossed? After all, logic suggests that one withdraws from an agreement when it begins to hinder the realisation of existing potential. Do you believe we are on the verge of officially recognising Iran as a nuclear power?

Alexander Dugin: Here are questions to which no one has been able to give a direct answer for decades.

Only very recently did Donald Trump openly acknowledge Israel’s possession of nuclear weapons, although analysts had been discussing this for years, whilst Tel Aviv itself had merely hinted at it. Whether Israel will use them or not — nobody knows. Nuclear status may remain in a ‘grey area’ for a long time, until certain circumstances force the cards to be laid bare.

Does Iran possess nuclear weapons? We can see that Tehran possesses excellent missile systems with a vast range. Technically, it would not be particularly difficult to transport one, twenty or a hundred nuclear warheads by sea from North Korea, whilst this route is not yet under total control, or to transport them across the Caspian Sea from our territory, or to deliver them from Pakistan.

If the Iranians were a backward people fighting with bows and arrows, one might argue about the time needed to develop the technology. But with such a powerful military infrastructure, superb missile technology and a deeply layered security system, it is merely a matter of will. The war has been raging for a month; the airspace is largely controlled by the Americans, yet missiles are methodically raining down across the entire Middle East from concealed mountain tunnels, and Iran remains unshaken.

For a long time, the fatwa of the late Imam Khomeini banning the possession of nuclear weapons remained in force. The Iranians are a wise, spiritual people; they understood that this is a hellish weapon, a weapon of Satan, bringing only self-destruction. They had compelling spiritual reasons not to resort to it. But in a critical situation, when the very existence of the country is at stake, they will either retrieve the warheads already hidden away or obtain them at any moment. Attaching a ready-made warhead to an Iranian missile, which is guaranteed to reach its target, is a matter of ‘an arm’s length’.

I do not possess classified information, but as an analyst and philosopher I’ll venture a guess: they have them. And they will use this weapon if the need arises. It will most likely not reach US territory, but a strike will be launched against American bases in the Middle East – which are already half-destroyed – and against Israel. Tehran is capable of ensuring that for a hundred years there is nothing left on this land but Chernobyl and mutants. They are capable of this – if not now, then in time.

Those people in the US and Israel who are pushing for escalation have no positive prospects whatsoever. Even if one were to imagine a local victory over Iran — which I doubt, given Iran’s defences — the outcome would be catastrophic: the Middle East and Israel in ruins, the global economy in a coma, and the image of America evoking nothing but the deepest revulsion in mankind. Israel is hated by everyone. In the US itself, a storm of antisemitism has arisen the likes of which was not seen even in Henry Ford’s day.

The level of hostility towards the Israeli lobby, AIPAC and Christian Zionists is unprecedented today.

What has Trump gained? — Instead of strengthening Greater Israel and his own hegemony, he has been dragged into a war he has already lost — morally, politically and economically. Pete Hegseth, head of the Pentagon, floated the idea of Greater America, including Greenland and Canada — apparently to divert attention from the Middle Eastern fiasco. But this is a scandal with no basis in reality.

Instead of solving domestic problems, Trump has found himself in a trap. Unless one believes the hypothesis that he is deliberately undermining the foundations of Western dominance, there remains only one explanation: he and his entourage have become hostages to a prophecy. These are suicidal actions. There are successful wars, such as the short-term capture of Iraq, although even that turned into a protracted dejection. The destruction of the Iranian leadership was a tactical success, but the backlash has exceeded all expectations. In the long term, there is not a shred of positivity here for the US.

It is self-destruction. If we recall ‘prophetic geopolitics’, then all the current catastrophes fit logically into the eschatological scenario of the dispensationalist Protestants who are now in charge in the White House. The place is run by people like Paula White – a female pastor who speaks in demonic tongues and practises hypnosis. These fanatical figures, in alliance with Israeli politicians gripped by messianic mania, are creating a completely irrational bloc at the head of the collective West. Europe recoils in horror from this: even such loyal politicians as Viktor Orbán admit that barring Cardinal Pizzaballa from entering the temple is simply beyond the pale.

Host: Incidentally, Netanyahu did eventually issue a permit allowing the cardinal into the temple. Admittedly, he did so only the day after Palm Sunday.

Alexander Dugin: For Catholics, today is already Holy Monday, the first day of Holy Week, whilst our Orthodox Easter this year will be a week later than the Catholic one. But in spiritual matters, it is vital to do everything at the right time. If a person is not allowed to attend the holiday feast or, say, is promised access to the Holy Fire the following day — that is a cold shower.

To explain what is happening by anything other than maniacal ‘prophetic geopolitics’ is, in my view, simply impossible. But look: there is an internal logic to this madness. If one sincerely believes in the messianic moment — as do the Christian Zionists, such as those surrounding Trump, like Pete Hegseth, Paula White and Lindsey Graham, or as the Israeli radicals around Netanyahu believe — then every action they take is justified.

They are living ‘on loan’ from the coming eschatological times. They are spending the ‘capital of the Messiah’, who, in their deep conviction, is about to appear. All their actions are performed on the verge of a foul. It is like jumping from a high tower in the hope that they will be caught at the last moment. Remember how Satan tempted Jesus Christ: ‘Cast yourself down, for it is written: He will command His angels concerning you, and they will lift you up in their hands’.

What Trump and Netanyahu, America and Israel are doing now is precisely that leap from the tower. They believe that the angels of hell will catch them in their fall and grant them world domination. This is a very real satanic temptation. Therefore, the geopolitics of prophecy is not fantasy, but an active and extremely dangerous force.

Host: Let us turn to a figure whose stature is incomparably lower than that of the aforementioned leaders of the West and the East, but who constantly tries to stay on the news agenda. I am referring to the outgoing President of Ukraine, who suddenly travelled to the Middle East and even signed certain agreements in the United Arab Emirates — ostensibly concerning the supply of diesel fuel and other matters. It is clear that on a global scale this issue is far less significant, but for us, for Russia, in the context of the ongoing Special Military Operation, it remains relevant. What is your opinion on Zelensky’s appearance in the Middle East — at this very point of global upheaval and bifurcation? Why did he go there, and what political goals is he pursuing in the current situation? And most importantly — will he achieve them? After all, many experts agree that people have simply stopped paying attention to him against the backdrop of global upheavals.

Alexander Dugin: Firstly, people have certainly stopped paying attention to him. When the giant demons entered the fray, nobody cares any longer about the minor devils and non-entities like Zelensky. He is trying to fit into the coalition of these big demons by reminding people of his existence, saying that he too can cause trouble and kill. But these are merely desperate attempts. Previously, when the main forces were only just approaching, a huge magnifying glass was placed before him; he was projected like a hologram onto the world’s screens; parliaments applauded him. That was just a warm-up. Now, however, with the arrival of the big demons, he has, of course, proved to be insignificant in comparison to them.

His ‘help’, of course, has no effect whatsoever. Some drones arrived — the Iranians immediately destroyed them along with the Ukrainian crew.

It is one thing to fight us on familiar territory, where they have been digging in for years in defiance of the Minsk Agreements. In the Middle East, the landscape is different: there they are as plain as day; there, eliminating their experts and Zelensky himself is easier than easy. After all they have been through, the Iranians have dispensed with unnecessary formalities.

You have touched on an important topic: why are the Americans and Israelis, like true butchers and maniacs, striking at universities, destroying thinkers, scholars and students? Because this is a war of the spirit, a war of darkness against light. They understand: Iran’s strength lies not only in missiles, but in hearts and minds, in education and culture. We too should take note of this. The enemy is well aware that sovereign science and education are the fundamental resources of society, upon which everything rests.

Attacks on universities are not merely madness or a breach of conventions. The enemy strikes at the very heart, because this is a war of ideas. On one side lies their prophecy; on the other, the Iranian, or our own vision of where Russia should stand in this critical era of the end times. The idea of prophecy is no empty concept. They have framed it one way; the Iranians another. We, however, have our own mission: the role of the Katechon, the one who holds back the coming of the Antichrist. Our rulers inherited this role from Byzantium.

Every participant in the current conflict — both in Ukraine and in the Middle East — has their own map of this final battle. And if the enemy is targeting universities, it means that independent thought is a crucial component of this war. We need to draw many conclusions from the events in the Middle East, but this one — about the significance of thought and spirit — is, in my view, of paramount importance.

Host: And finally, an interesting question that has come to us via our Telegram channel. It concerns the possibility of a so-called ‘Easter truce’: What do you think, Alexander Gelyevich, could this great holiday — be it Catholic Easter, which is currently being celebrated in the West, or our Orthodox Easter — have any impact on the intensity of the fighting? Are any gestures from Iran or Israel connected with these dates possible, or are such respites now unthinkable given the current eschatological tension?

Alexander Dugin: I don’t think so. Absolutely not. As for Orthodoxy — it is our faith, the faith of our peoples, and Orthodox Christians are not directly involved in this particular escalation in the Middle East. As for Catholics, they condemn this war, and persecution against them is now effectively beginning in America. Catholics are once again being accused of antisemitism, being turned into a sort of scapegoat within the framework of the US’ new radical-messianic policy. Hence the bans, hence the mockery directed at them.

The Pope recently issued a strict ban on praying for those who unleashed this carnage.' ‘Their hands are stained with blood,’ said the pontiff, ‘we do not pray for them.’ This is a very important point: the universal Christian tradition implies prayer for all, for the soul and heart of a person are a mystery, and it is the Lord who must judge, not us. But if the head of the Catholic Church – the largest denomination, uniting one and a half billion believers – has acknowledged that it is forbidden to pray for Trump, Netanyahu and the Zionists who started this war, then this is an extremely serious signal. In such an atmosphere, there can be no question of any ceasefires.

Host: So, to summarise: Easter will not stop Iran’s strikes on Israel, and we should not expect any lull?

Alexander Dugin: The Jewish tradition fundamentally rejects Christ, so Christian holidays have no bearing on that side. Muslims, for their part, do not celebrate Easter — they have their own calendar and their own holy sites. Thus, the key players in this process are not mentally or spiritually connected to Easter. And ‘the civilisation of Epstein’ in the form of the modern United States has absolutely no connection whatsoever to this great holiday. I am convinced that Easter does not hold any sacred significance for any of the direct parties to this conflict. Within their frame of reference, there is no point in ceasing hostilities in this context. The Christian calendar is by no means a factor for this war.

READ MORE by Prof. Alexander Dugin, brought to you by Arktos:

From Christian Chensvold, the author of Gothic Olympus, hot off the press from Arktos, comes this 10th installment in the Decadent Chronicles series, summoning us to explore the depths and heights of the existential situation facing the European soul amidst the modern hellscape.

I like to spend time in the cemetery because I feel like the dead are the only people who understand me. My soul belongs to the 1890s, to Parisian parlors where decadent dandies and femmes fatales exchange absinthe-flavored kisses. In my twenties I hermetically sealed myself in this world and ingested enough books, movies and paintings for it to run on auto-pilot in my imagination like a steampunk aero-plane on the wings of fancy.

And now, with the West facing its greatest crisis, this incredible period — of unrivaled opulence contrasted with the sense of impending doom — serves as the foundation of this very column.

I didn’t choose this world; it chose me. And that’s probably because one of the recurring themes of the era is the sense of having been born in the wrong time.

In reaction to changes brought about in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, poets, artists and penniless aristocrats from ancient families whose blood had grown thin and fortunes even thinner sought escape from everyday life through occultism, mystical erotic imaginings, refined pleasures inspired by corrupt and ancient civilizations, myths of gods and monsters, and the dark caverns of the subconscious. These aristocrats of the soul of the Decadent Movement, like the penguin that has captured the spirit of Western men, sought to forge an ancient path to higher truth. The central work of the period, after all, is J.-K. Huysmans’ 1884 novel, often translated as Against the Grain, whose rallying cry echoes Baudelaire’s longing for states of mind that are “anywhere out of this world.”

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A tiny few with the means and temperament have always been able to live as wealthy eccentrics walled off from the outside world. Ludwig of Bavaria became the Fairy Tale Prince, self-isolated in a dreamworld of legend, building flamboyant castles that later served as models for the architects of Disneyland. Michael Jackson created his own hermitage-amusement park called Neverland. Both the king of pop and king of Bavaria were touched by madness and died before their time, but one can nevertheless admire their ingenuity.

Most of us cannot completely sever ties with a world gone mad, however, and are forced to adopt coping strategies for navigating it. In fact, given the topsy-turviness that grows more disorienting with each day, you may be at higher risk for going crazy by NOT retreating to your own private dreamworld.

There are four paths for dropping out of society marked with the footprints of those who’ve hiked these roads before. We’ll start with art, whether creation or appreciation. Through the suspension of disbelief, art transports you to other worlds. You can probably remember seeing a film so powerful that it took time to readjust to reality. In the 2004 film Being Julia, Annette Benning plays a stage actress in the 1930s who recalls the wisdom of her acting coach, who told her that her world is the theater and that for her the outer world does not exist. The moment she forgets this is the moment she ceases to be a great artist.

The realm of nature provides out next time-tested escape route. Here a Gestalt shift in perception reveals that Mother Nature is a dimension of reality entirely separate from 21st-century civilization. Take a stroll into the woods, find a spot beside the warbling waters, and evoke a meditative state in which the tendency to automatically equivocate nature and society is revealed as an illusion. The sound of passing cars with their mufflers and stereos, the wandering zombie-like people, the garbage and graffiti — all that merely belongs to the realm of the social organization at this particular moment in time. It is now held in stark contrast to this other world that lies before you, the world of sunlight and cloud, of tree-roots climbing out from creek-beds just as they’ve done for millions of years, of dragonflies and butterflies and flowers swaying in the breeze. One world is temporary, the other eternal; one lesser, the other greater.

The spiritual path, our third escape route, passes through nature in search of what lies beyond. This is the path of the Buddha, a prince who renounced his palace and family to wander for six years, starving himself until he could find the answers he sought, and of Jesus of Nazareth, who provided the world stage with the tragic drama of a spirit-filled individual against the powers of society. In the confrontation between Jesus and Pontius Pilate, as interpreted by philosopher of history Oswald Spengler, never before had the world of fact — Roman civilization, social order — squared off in such opposition to the world of Truth, and a man who dared to say that his kingdom was not of this world. “The unthinkable as a certainty, the supernatural as a fact, a world that is non-actual but true,” writes Spengler, “Jesus never lived one moment in any other world but this.”

Lucius Beebe may have been an urbane bon vivant, but in the grand scheme of things perhaps not so different from the spirit seeker, as he too sought a personal paradise beyond time and place. Beebe belongs to the fourth means of escape, that of time travel to an age which the soul feels it more properly belongs. Beebe landed on the cover of Life magazine in 1937 dressed like a gentleman of 40 years earlier with top hat and watch fob. As man-about-town columnist for the San Francisco Examiner, Beebe became a character from the Old West, spending his days sipping cocktails from the comfort of the Virginia City, the private railcar he and partner Charles Clegg purchased in 1954 and rode back and forth through the Rocky Mountains, cut off from the world of suburban sprawl and Cold War paranoia.

These four paths can be undertaken to varying degree in order to maintain one’s sanity and follow one’s personal star when faced with the encroaching demands of the collective. All it takes to make your great escape is a certain magical formula.

Creativity is fueled by a blend of two cosmic forces: will and imagination. It is what gave life to all fortunes, empires, inventions and works of art. This magic combination can also transform your life into whatever you want it to be. Huysmans’ seminal Decadent novel introduced the archetypal anti-hero who retreats from society to live in his own dreamworld.

“He believed that the imagination could provide a more-than-adequate substitute for the vulgar reality of actual experience,” Huysmans writes. “In his opinion it was perfectly possible to fulfill those desires commonly supposed to be the most difficult to satisfy under normal conditions, and this by the trifling subterfuge of producing a fair imitation of the object of those desires..... By transferring this ingenious trickery, this clever simulation to the intellectual plane, one can enjoy, just as easily as on the material plane, imaginary pleasures similiar in all respects to the pleasures of reality.”

The novel Somewhere in Time, source of the popular 1980 film adaptation starring Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour, can be read as a metaphor for augmenting reality through auto-suggestion. The protagonist falls in love with the image of a woman who lived 80 years before in the Edwardian era. To unite with his dream lover, he goes into ever-deeper meditative states until he actually arrives in her place and time. Think of it as actively engineering a dream which goes on to run itself just like a normal dream, which is experienced as if it were real.

“Dropping out” implies escape by sinking below, since dropping something sends it downward. What we really want is liberation by rising, to be physically in the world, since we have no choice, but to mentally be not of it, to be oriented to the superior principles of art, nature, spirit or golden age. This is why imagination is so important, because the realm in which imagination operates is actually superior to the world of actuality. According to ancient doctrines, material reality is only the realm of effects, not of causes, which come from a higher reality of laws and principles. And imagination is the primary mediating faculty between them, and the instrument by which fantasy can turned into reality, even if that reality operates primarily on an invisible plane.

In the world of today there are times when it feels like some kind of tidal wave is cresting and you’re trapped in its shadow. And while I’m a creative idealist when it comes to personal destiny, I remain a pessimist in regards to external conditions. The forces of contraction and dissolution in play are cosmic, irreversible and unstoppable. The polarization on social and political issues is irreconcilable, and the battle lines being drawn will be with us for the rest of our lives.

The Stoic philosophers taught that we cannot control external circumstances, only our reaction to them. Contemporary conditions are not something that can be conquered, but they can be internally overcome through Herculean effort. You’re pinned and powerless and then suddenly something inside you ignites, something you didn’t even know was there, and you flip the opponent over. Now you’re on top, where you can breathe and see the sky. This inner act comes from the depths. It is the source of all hero mythology in which the individual slays the dragon that wants to castrate him back into place among the blob-organization of his peers, the undifferentiated mass without names or faces.

Desperate times call for desperate measures, and it’s likely that the degree of inner counterbalancing necessary to keep our spirit free may need to be much more extreme than anything we’ve even conceived of yet. As for me, I still feel like my only real friends are dead authors and fictional characters. But when I imagine telling them that, they just reply, “Then how lucky you are to have us as lifelong companions.”

***

When a mysterious inheritance leads Julien Stanwyck from the murky clubs of New York to the absinthe-soaked cabarets of fin-de-siècle Europe and the ruins of a family château, a drama of infernal torments and divine fury rattles the cage of the modern world.

Gothic Olympus launches the reader into the phantasmagoric odyssey of one man’s mission to reawaken the old gods and defy the onslaught of demonic collectivism and matriarchal tyranny. It follows Julien Stanwyck’s alchemical transformation from a pale, scrawny, angry young man into an Olympian sovereign who conquers death with the sword of Achilles, wins a goddess for a bride through initiation into the Mysteries of Sex, and travels through earthly and celestial realms to fulfill his destiny.

A mythopoetic allegory for the twilight of Western Civilization between the Belle Époque and the present dystopia, Gothic Olympus detonates the postmodern abyss through a pulse-pounding concoction of dark humor, occult wisdom, and virile spirituality, weaving Julius Evola’s revolt against the modern world with elements of steampunk, dark fantasy, and Decadence. Through the magic mirror of Stanwyck’s trials and adventures, Gothic Olympus is a riveting tale of heroism, a summons to metaphysical awakening, and a daring vision of the greatest force the world has ever known: European man’s imagination.

Explore the Decadent Chronicles series, brought to you by Arktos Journal:

1: Introduction

2: The Serpent

3: Unemployed Hercules

4: Imagining Reality

5: Heart Laid Bare

6: A Season in Hell

7: LARP Against the Modern World

8: Fallen Empire

9: Dead Regent

Arktos Journal

Making Anti-Globalism Global Since 2009.

With regard to the ticking time bomb in the Middle East and the Gulf, it is misleading to pin the blame solely on President Trump or Israeli PM Bibi Netanyahu. Many experts on the Middle East overlook a significant factor: the century-long American, Bible-inspired mission to regenerate the world—today playing itself out in Iran. This messianic mindset sheds light on the current situation not only in the Middle East, but also within the EU and the U.S. political class.

Early American settlers saw themselves as God-anointed dissenters, and their new homeland as a gift from the Jewish god Yahweh. America was cast as a new Israel — a Promised Land, a new Canaan for its chosen people. Pilgrims, settlers, and later even secularized Enlightenment politicians — all saw themselves as an elect people who had left behind a sick, corrupt, and tribally torn Europe. One might quote the German sociologist Werner Sombart in his book The Jews and Modern Capitalism (1913, p. 44):

“What we call Americanism is nothing else, if we may say so, than the Jewish spirit distilled.”

The American attack on Iran is merely a logical follow-up to this extended political theology aimed at remaking the world in the American image. This Bible-inspired policy, now playing out in Iran, rests on ideas borrowed from early Judaic thought. The notions of a “city upon a hill,” “God’s own country,” and Manifest Destiny all draw on the Old Testament. The biblical idea of predestination served early settlers as a springboard for their own concept of democratic uniqueness. Biblical Israel was destined to serve as the matrix of America’s Promised Land worldview, and therefore has to be militarily protected at all costs now. Moreover, for millions of Christians, the Second Coming of Jesus will not take place in some village in the Ozarks or in the Croatian-inhabited hinterland of Medjugorje, but only in Jewish Jerusalem.

Different variants of this Bible-inspired urge to “improve” the world have long stood at the center of U.S. foreign policy, even when dressed up in secular language. These ecumenical impulses now go by liberal and communistic labels such as human rights, the fight against evil, moral righteousness, tolerance, and multiculturalism. Modern Jews are the last to blame here, given that millions of Christian Zionists try to outdo and “out-Jew” the Jews — craving, in turn, to transform themselves into the “true Israel” (verus Israel). The monotheistic Christian love-hate mindset vis-à-vis Jews can be described as a kind of neurosis. It is bound up with a theological — and later ideological — system that presupposes a single truth while shutting out all others. A system built on one single jealous god must, by definition, reject all other competing gods—and all rival truths.

The war against Iran follows in the footsteps of this political self-chosenness and theological exclusion of the Other, as already laid out in the Jewish Old Testament. Hence the recurring demonization of political or religious opponents in U.S. foreign policy: first the Indians, then the proverbial “pagan” German “Nazis,” then the “evil” atheistic Communists, and most recently the “evil” Islamists in Iran. All have been cast as subhuman or terrorists. And terrorists, to be sure, are not to be negotiated with — they must be eliminated, or, failing that, re-educated.

It is almost a truism that the EU keeps a low profile regarding the U.S.–Israeli politico-theological bond: Europe has functioned as an American vassal for eighty years. The most visible example of this deference can be seen in the behavior of German politicians, who occasionally voice mild criticism of U.S. military engagements, but never venture into criticism of Israel—let alone make critical statements about Jews. Former Chancellor Angela Merkel, in March 2008, stated in her speech at the Israeli Knesset:

“Each federal government and each chancellor before me were committed to the special historical responsibility of Germany for Israel’s security. This historical responsibility of Germany is part of the reason of state (Staatsräson) of my country. That means that Israel’s security is never negotiable for me as German chancellor.”

Germany stands out as the most grotesque example of this masochistic mimicry. Current German policy toward U.S. military engagement in Iran carefully steers clear of any criticism of Israel. Afraid of being labeled fascists, European politicians are expected to keep rolling out antifascist mea culpas—on cue, as it were, from Washington, D.C., and Tel Aviv. In the same vein, and within the framework of what might be called a policy of “White man’s atonement,” Germany and the entire EU are expected to take in so-called non-white refugees, while constantly showcasing their role as historically wicked “perpetrator nations” (Tätervolk).

The condescending posture of the EU ruling class toward U.S. and Israeli military engagement has deeper roots. Shortly after World War II, the communist-leaning think tank known as the Frankfurt School — many of whose members were of Jewish origin — played a key role in shaping the new European crypto-communist culture. Waves of American, left-leaning Freudo-Marxian psychoanalysts — who turned into tenured shrinks — poured into Europe after WWII, setting out to reshape the European mindset. Alongside them came a host of biblically hyper-moralistic preachers, eager to foist the American model of democracy onto European public life.

Following the Israeli carnage in Gaza, things may soon turn ugly for Jewish identity and its enablers in the U.S. A kind of negative dialectic has set in. The Left and Antifa — unlike the quasi-neutered right wing — have begun to slam Israel and its lobby in increasingly harsh terms. This is hardly surprising. To be sure, the Left, both in the US and EU, and its rabble-rousing sidekick Antifa, now have more room to maneuver when criticizing Israel. It is difficult to label them antisemitic, given that they have historically been influenced by a significant number of Jewish Freudo-Marxian academics. The leftist progeny is turning now against its godfather. Right-wingers and white nationalists, on the other hand, cannot afford that luxury. Long suspected of antisemitism, they are turning more and more into Aesopian shapeshifters — with many doubling down on fake philosemitism, and some right-wing politicians staging ritual pilgrimages to the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem.

German political elites across the board, while mimicking the U.S.–Israeli bond, have gone a step further. In their zeal to display democratic antifascist credentials and signal their obedience to Israel, they resemble the character of Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s ballad The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. The young apprentice, eager to show off, decides to imitate his master’s skills in handling the magic broom, ultimately unleashing forces that he cannot control, thus bringing about his own demise:

Can I never, Broom, appease you?

I will seize you,

Hold and whack you,

And your ancient wood

I’ll sever—

With a whetted axe I’ll crack you!

The good news is that public language in the EU and the U.S. following the joint Israeli–U.S. strike on Iran is becoming less constrained by politically correct woke norms. In the eyes of the mainstream media, even intellectuals previously dubbed right-wing radicals now voice open criticism of Israel — something unimaginable just a few years back.

Yet the grip on free speech and academic inquiry still persists. President Trump, despite his commendable moves in dismantling the communist-inspired DEI agenda and calling out EU elites over their tightening grip on thought control, was likely forced to cut a deal with the domestic Israeli lobby, which pushed him into the ill-fated campaign in Iran.

Contrary to widespread belief, political sycophancy toward Israel — including its fellow travelers among millions of fervent Christians awaiting the coming Apparition of Jesus — is not the result of a violent ideology imposed by a handful of Jewish conspirators. Rather, long-standing, Bible-inspired guilt feelings had already created fertile ground for the erosion of freedom of thought. Coupled with the illusion of endless capitalist growth, alongside Christian “love thy non-White neighbor” ecumenism, a belief has taken hold that everything will somehow sort itself out. It won’t. At its core, the spirit of Christian-inspired self-denial amounts to a loss of Spirit itself.

READ MORE by Dr. Tomislav Sunic, brought to you by Arktos:

Against Democracy and Equality was the first book ever published in the English language on the European New Right, and it remains an indispensable introduction to a school of thought which remains a vibrant force in the understanding of European politics.

Dr. Sunic examines the principal themes which have concerned the thinkers of the New Right since its inception by Alain de Benoist in 1968, such as the problematic nature of the label ‘New Right’ for a school which sees itself as being beyond traditional concepts of both the left and the right; its revolutionary political philosophy; its conception of history in terms of cycles; its attitude toward democracy, capitalism and socialism; and its endorsement of ‘pagan’ spirituality. He also discusses the significance of some of the older authors who have been particularly influential on the development of the movement, such as Oswald Spengler, Carl Schmitt and Vilfredo Pareto.

This new edition of Against Democracy and Equality has been completely re-edited, and offers new prefaces by both Dr. Sunic and the principal theorist of the European New Right, Alain de Benoist. Also included for the first time is the Manifesto for a European Renaissance, which highlights the positions of the New Right as it enters a new millennium.

It is just as utterly absurd and unnatural to justify all war as it is to condemn war outright. Both are hubris, a form of pathology. All those who hide behind pacifism, as well as those who constantly call for war against someone — no matter who — represent mental and psychological extremes.

Sometimes, war is inevitable. In other cases, it is entirely possible not to start a war. Any generalisation leads to absurdity.

The theory of just war emerged a very long time ago. Its purpose is to distinguish between when war is legitimate and when it is not (that is, when it is hubris).

Cicero formulated the concept of bellum iustum et pium (just and pious war), asserting that war is permissible only in retaliation for harm that has been inflicted or in defence of allies, with a formal declaration and without excessive cruelty. In a sense, this theory is reactive (war in response to war) and confined within ethical boundaries.

Blessed Augustine believed that war is permissible if it is waged for the sake of peace, has a just cause (restoring a broken order, defence against aggression), and a right intention (love, not hatred or a thirst for power) . Augustine permitted war as a lesser evil to prevent a greater one. Once again, reactive war is legitimised – but now within a Christian context (they started it, we will finish it, with love).

In medieval Catholic culture, Thomas Aquinas provided the classic formulation of the criteria for a just war: auctoritas principis – only a legitimate authority may declare war; causa iusta – the war must have a just cause; recta intentio – the war must have a right (ethically and religiously justified) intention. He also introduced the principles of proportionality and distinction (jus in bello).

Nevertheless, the Crusades – including the most savage of them, the Fourth, against Byzantium, which was essentially against us, the Orthodox – were justified.

In the 17th century, Hugo Grotius transposed this theory from the theological to the secular plane of natural law. Grotius identified three just causes of war, all of which derive from natural law (ratio naturalis) and the law of nations (jus gentium).

• Self-defence (defensio sui): against an imminent and real threat to life, limb or property. Lethal force is permissible even in the event of an attack without the intention to kill (for example, rape or maiming), because the aggressor’s intentions cannot be trusted. But only in the face of immediate danger – a preventive war based solely on suspicion is prohibited.

• Restoration of rights (reparatio iniuriae or recuperatio rerum): the return of seized property or territory, the fulfilment of contracts, and compensation for damage. This also includes rights to trade and navigation. War here is analogous to a legal action when there is no common judge.

• Punishment (punire): for the deliberate violation of natural law (piracy, cannibalism, refusal to trade). The right to punish originally belongs to all, but is usually exercised by sovereigns. Grotius even allows for intervention against ‘crimes against nature’, but with reservations: only serious crimes and taking the consequences into account (so as not to harm the innocent).

What is important here is that the theory of just war, in all its versions, attempts to define which wars are legitimate and which are not. There is a catch here. Whoever sets the rules embeds their own interests within them. And if someone does not wish to play by these rules established by others, they can easily be accused of violating the rules of ‘just war’ and, on that very basis, war can be declared against them.

Grotius himself faced the situation where the British Empire, then on the rise, declared the World Ocean the property of the English Crown, and the Dutchman Grotius (at that time the Netherlands was still a powerful maritime power) was outraged. This was unjust! But in whose eyes: in the eyes of a rival.

It is clear that a ‘just war’ is also a highly relative concept and depends on who is speaking about it – for whom it is ‘just’, and for whom it is not.

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The Third World War, which is now beginning and which could lead to the destruction of humanity, raises the question of war and peace with renewed urgency. However, in order to avoid getting bogged down in demagoguery and propaganda, we should speak specifically about this war without generalising about any other wars.

A couple of days ago, Japanese Prime Minister Takaichi paid her respects at the grave of the pilot who dropped an atomic bomb on her people. It is clear that for a Japan like this, the only thing that will be ‘just’ is whatever the big American daddy says.

It is more important to understand who is involved in this war and on whose side they stand. The Third World War is a war between the unipolar world and the multipolar one. The unipolar world is represented by Trump and Israel, as well as the other blocs of the collective West (Britain, the EU and globalists in general). Some of them do not wish to enter this war, others are not opposed to it, but all of them will be forced to do so. This same pole also includes the West’s numerous vassals from among various civilisations – in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America.

No matter what others say, for them this war will be entirely ‘just’. They are defending global dominance, which has been shaken by the pressure of an emerging multipolar world. It is important to bear this in mind: if one puts oneself in the shoes of the decision-making centre of unipolarity or unipolar globalism, then it is acting, on the whole, rationally. The Third World War aims to preserve, or at the very least prolong, the unipolar world order – in any of its forms:

• pure North American hegemony – aggressive and making no secret of its goals – world domination – Trump;

• regional dominance in the Middle East (on behalf of ‘Western civilisation’) – the case of Israel;

• the preservation of the global capitalist model (globalists);

• opposition to the growing sovereignty of Russia and, to some extent, China (the EU and the UK).

All five poles of the collective West (the US, Israel, the EU, Britain and the globalists), despite their individual differences, stand on the same side. They have different understandings of unipolarity and global hegemony, and they differ ideologically and on a number of specific issues, but overall they are historically and civilisationally united.

The opposing camp consists of us: Russia, China and Iran. And also the spirited and sovereign North Korea. These four countries form the core of BRICS. They represent almost fully-fledged civilisation-states. Iran’s desperate and successful resistance to American-Israeli aggression is elevating this power from the ranks of ordinary Islamic countries to a more sovereign and independent entity. North Korea lives within the sovereign Korean sphere with complete confidence and security.

In fact, it is the sovereignty of these powers that has created the conditions for the emergence of a multipolar world. Supporters of a unipolar world have responded to this with war. For the multipolar world, this war is entirely ‘just’ – iustum et pium. It was imposed on us by those who could not come to terms with the redistribution of the balance of power in the global architecture. We consider unipolarity ‘unjust’; they are repaying us in kind.

Thus, the Third World War is ‘just’ for its main participants, although everyone interprets ‘justice’ in their own way.

At the same time, both in the West and within the multipolar world, there are those who do not support the war. In the West, this essentially refers to those who, in one way or another, reject unipolarity and hegemony and therefore recognise multipolarity. Moreover, some take a softer line towards Russia, others towards Iran and Palestine, and others towards China.

Some believe that Netanyahu has dragged Trump into aggression against Iran. Some are convinced that supporting Ukraine against Russia has nothing to do with either American or European interests. And some consider that China is not a global adversary of the West. Opinions diverge on these matters, but this is a vast segment of Western societies that will undermine the West’s confidence in the ‘justness’ of the Third World War, as was the case during the Vietnam War in the US and Western Europe.

But we will certainly see something similar from the multipolar camp as well. And here, anti-war social groups will emerge. They would be the ones who are quite content with unipolarity, or, seeing no possibility of resistance and faced with the growing risks of humanity’s destruction, will propose surrendering to the enemy. For them, multipolarity and civilisational sovereignty do not represent decisive values, so fighting for them is ‘unjust’.

Those countries that do not belong to the Western world and are not its full vassals, and those who intuitively gravitate towards multipolarity or are directly part of BRICS, will find themselves at a crossroads. For them, the Third World War itself will be unjust, as they do not strictly link their fate to either unipolarity or multipolarity, but instead waver depending on the situation and the regional balance of power. The largest and most decisive player is India – a fully-fledged civilisation-state.

But the position of most Islamic countries, African states and Latin American nations has yet to be determined.

The Ukrainian conflict is merely one of the fronts in this war. For us, this war is not merely just, but sacred. For the collective West – especially for globalists, neocons, the EU and Britain – it is quite the opposite. And although this front is not the top priority for either Trump or Netanyahu, as the situation escalates and if they succeed in achieving their aims in the Middle East, and Trump implements his plans for the complete subjugation of Latin America to US interests (as set out in the new version of the National Security Doctrine), then Russia is the next target. And then China will follow.

For the West, these are all legitimate objectives in the war to preserve global dominance, unipolarity, and hegemony. The globalists preferred to conceal this behind ‘liberal-humanist’ rhetoric. Trump has cast aside these formalities as unnecessary hypocrisy and is waging war for the West practically openly and without restraint. For the West as a system, this is a ‘just’ war.

For a multipolar world, the war against the West is a just war. The West is on the offensive. Evidently, most participants in the multipolar process, including Russia, had hoped to avoid this direct confrontation, to postpone it, and to strengthen multipolarity gradually and step by step. But this has not succeeded. The situation in Ukraine has already led to direct military conflict with the West, whil Netanyahu’s radicalism and Trump’s full support for him have blown up the situation in the Middle East.

Now we must focus entirely on how to win this war, the Third World War. And, of course, in order to do this, we must first and foremost develop a global strategy. After all, those countries that are targeted by the collective West (with all five of its poles) essentially belong to our camp – this was true of Assad’s Syria and Maduro’s Venezuela, and it holds true for Iran and Iraq, for Cuba, Mexico, Colombia and Brazil. The situation is more complex when it comes to Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the conflicts in Africa and Indochina. This requires further investigation.

All global and even regional players in the Third World War will have to define their position. Otherwise, others will define that position for them.

It is precisely in this context that we should understand talk of ‘war and peace’ and ‘justice and injustice’, of ‘us and them’ in the current circumstances.

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