War in the Name of Peace: Civilizational Collapse and the Path to Renaissance

By Bostian Marco Turk

In Bostian Marco Turk’s new book War in the Name of Peace, he diagnoses Europe’s collapse as the fruit of the rupture of 1968: Marxism, Freudism, and consumerism eroding nation, family, faith, and authority. He argues that globalism, woke ideology, and consumerist voids have left the West weak, yet renewal is possible through sovereignty, community, and transcendence.

When I was writing War in the Name of Peace, I felt as though I was touching a wound that most people refuse to acknowledge – a deep, structural injury of Western civilization, slowly suffocated by contradictions and the loss of its roots. This pain is not abstract; it is a lived reality, manifesting itself in economic stagnation, cultural disorientation, and geopolitical vulnerability. The murder of the American conservative Charlie Kirk and the influence of George Soros, who through his foundations undermines national identities and the foundations of states, are only the latest examples of this cultural breakdown.

The war in Ukraine shocked Europe, but this war is not the cause, but rather the consequence – the consequence of internal weakness, the loss of meaning, and the erosion of civilizational memory. As I wrote: “War is not the trigger of the crisis, but its last chronological consequence,” arising from “the decadence of official Europe (Brussels) and its ideologies.” When Europe was strong, in the 1990s, the Russians retreated; half a million Russian soldiers withdrew unilaterally from Eastern Germany between 1992 and 1994. At that time, Europe was led by great political figures – Margaret Thatcher, Helmut Kohl, Alois Mock, Lech Wałęsa, Václav Havel, and the key figure who toppled communism, Pope John Paul II. His power and authority were of inestimable civilizational value; a reminder of the Pax Europaea rooted in Christianity and national sovereignty.

Later, however, there was no pope with comparable vision and influence; instead, we witnessed an erosion of transcendence, which Novalis in his essay The Christian World or Europe described as the essence of European identity. Today, Europe is weak, fractured from within and without, and this weakness makes it an easy target: the logic of the living world is clear – predators attack the weakest first. Putin exploited this, while Soros’s foundations and the ideologies of woke have left behind an inner void that deepens the civilizational rift. The West has been left without an anchor.

Roots of Collapse: The 1968 Revolution and the Amalgam of Ideologies: Marxism, Freudism, and Consumerism

It seems that everything begins in 1968. That year apparently symbolizes the rebellion of youth against conservative structures, but in truth it meant something else: a civilizational rupture, which is analyzed in detail in the context of the “fatal synthesis between Marxist ideology and libertarian practice.” Nation, faith, family, language – the foundations that for centuries gave people a sense of belonging and meaning – were branded as obsolete. In their place rose two new religions: Marxism and consumerism.

Marxism taught that the individual was nothing more than a product of social relations, his personality dissolved into the collective. As Jacques Attali wrote in his Karl Marx or the Spirit of the World: “Marx’s theory finds its meaning in today’s globalization, which he himself foresaw.” But this globalization is not neutral; it is mondialisation – a global amalgam in which Europe and the West are dissolved, undermining everything. And there’s also Freud, reaching even deeper: he shattered man’s interior, reducing him to drives that were supposed to take precedence over reason and will. If Marx dissolved man into the mass, Freud disintegrated him from within – this is the essence of Surrealism, which André Breton in his Surrealist Manifesto (1924) welcomed as liberation from the “cage guarded by common sense.” What a colossal mistake! And yet Breton is today one of modernity’s prophets.

But this rupture was not accidental; it was the “great anthropological revolution of modernity,” as Patrick Buisson described in The End of a World: “May ’68 was a process that for the first time in history articulated imperatives of a non-political nature… post-materialist social and cultural issues replaced those that until then had been at the forefront: tradition, family, politics, faith.” Film director Pier Paolo Pasolini called this revolution a “New economic order introduced by the emerging consumerist system, which does not merely produce goods, but comprehensively transforms their users into a new, hitherto unknown form of humanity.”

Graffiti of the Revolution and the Mechanisms of Consumerism: The Substitution of Goal and Means

Graffiti on the walls of the Sorbonne, such as “Be realistic, demand the impossible” – which Philippe Sollers called “the most beautiful slogan of May ’68” – proved highly influential. Later, they were adopted by advertising, where the idea of revolution was blended with consumption.

These slogans, the seeds of a new anthropology, fused Marx’s longing for change with Freud’s liberation of desire and the Surrealist fantasy. “I take my desires for reality, because I believe in the reality of my desires” or “Live without time limits, enjoy without constraints” were calls for the dissolution of boundaries, putting Cartesian reason and common sense into question. This Surrealist poetics did not remain on the walls; it penetrated the heart of capitalism, which was transforming into a hyper-globalized force. That is where we are today.

Examples abound: every advertisement that emphasizes the advantages of a product places it at the edge of perception, where reality merges with desire. From Omo detergent with its slogan “Add brightness to whiteness” to Persil’s ecstatic declaration “There is only Persil” – it is the same logic as Sollers’s slogan. Omo promises a miracle inside the washing machine: to make the brightest even brighter is to demand the impossible, to make desire reality.

Revolution and consumerism were reversed: both became ends in themselves, goals that justify existence. As I wrote, “people no longer go to shopping malls because they need something. They go because what they need is precisely the act of going to the shopping mall.” This is an anthropological mutation: the transformation of a means into an end, where pleasure is found not in fulfillment but in the perpetuation of the act – “Live without time limits, enjoy without constraints.” Only pure consumption produces superprofits.

This substitution of means and ends is part of the conceptual confusion of modernity. Hyper-globalized capitalism, which Friedrich A. Hayek in The Fatal Conceit described as the “extended order of human cooperation,” has mutated today into a “liberal-libertarian subtype,” in which everything is subordinated to profit and amalgamated with a Marxist substratum. Jacques Attali in A Brief History of the Future (2006) predicts the rise of the “nomad, detached from intangible cultural heritage,” in a “hyper-empire where everything can be bought – body parts, organs, thought; everything is interchangeable and replaceable.” This is not fantasy; it is the reality of 2025, in which “the parameters upon which Civilization was founded are transformed beyond recognition.”

Exposing Marxism’s Contradictions: Revolutionary Fallacies, Freud and the Legacy of ‘68.

War in the Name of Peace also incisively critiques Marxism, revealing its inherent contradictions through rigorous analysis. The text argues that Marxism deprives individuals of autonomy by prioritizing collective power, demanding the sacrifice of personal identity for classless communities. Combined with Freudian psychoanalysis, which negates free will through subconscious determinism, Marxism has misguided Western thought. The text exposes Marxism’s ambiguities, particularly its vague definitions of social class and revolution, as rhetorical flaws that undermine its scientific claims, rendering it closer to sophistry. It further argues that Marxism’s method contradicts its conclusions, especially its fixation on production and progress, which distorts revolutionary and intellectual integrity.

The text highlights four key contradictions in Marxism. First, the claim that social being determines individual consciousness is incoherent, as social being depends on individual consciousness, creating a logical paradox. Second, major discoveries like the printing press and penicillin, often accidental or driven by individual ingenuity, contradict Marxism’s assertion that societal structures dictate intellectual outcomes. Third, the Renaissance, driven by individual agency and intellectual awakening, demonstrates that personal consciousness shapes social transformations, not the reverse, as seen in its cultural and economic impacts. Fourth, the Marxist concept of revolution is impossible, as it fails to address the complexities of managing production post-revolution, leading to entropy or a return to hierarchical structures, as evidenced by the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991.

François Furet underscores this, noting the Soviet Empire’s failure to create a lasting civilization due to these contradictions. Strikingly, War in the Name of Peace reveals Marxism’s influence on modern anti-racist movements despite Marx and Engels’ racist and anti-Semitic views, highlighting the ideology’s incoherence while its legacy persists in Western thought, particularly in post-1968 movements.

The book furthermore exposes Freud’s contradictory claims, such as the death drive theory, appropriated from Sabina Spielrein without acknowledgment, which lacks scientific rigor and logical consistency. Freudian psychoanalysis is not a science but a literary construct, akin to Molière’s comedies that satirize medical quackery. Freud’s theories on the unconscious, slips of the tongue, and dreams are unproven, inconsistent, and based on subjective interpretations without empirical evidence. Both Freudianism and Marxism are equally contradictory, eroding human rationality and freedom, thus devaluing the dignity and consciousness essential to defining homo sapiens.

Freud and Marx: The Dismantling of Man and Institutions

Nevertheless, Marxism and Freudian theory live on in the ideologies shaping today’s world. Marx’s struggle of the proletariat has been replaced by the struggle for the rights of ever-new minorities, while Freud’s liberation of instinct has evolved into a culture of pleasure without responsibility. At first glance, these seem like noble aims, but without measure they turn into self-destructive processes. Wokeism, now dominant in the United States and increasingly influential in Europe, is a cluster of once-Christian values that have lost their anchor and gone mad, as Chesterton once observed. Globalism, whose spiritus agens is Soros’s agenda, has institutionalized this emptiness. His foundations finance projects that, in the name of open society and pluralism, dismantle national identities, culture, and tradition. Migration without integration, pluralism without respect for native culture, rights without responsibility – all this leads not to unity, but to disintegration.

Soros has become the symbol of globalism, which rests on the belief that man needs no roots, no transcendence, no sense of belonging. This dismantling is not only cultural; it is anthropological. “Revolution must take place within people before it takes place in reality,” declared one of the graffiti of May ’68.

Even worse: the media, once the “organic building block of social cohesion in postmodernity,” has become a “thunderous megaphone” that has abandoned its original mission. Today it promotes a univocal message regardless of external circumstances. Newspaper owners may be billionaires, but editorial boards lean decisively left.

The murder of Charlie Kirk revealed how deeply the fabric of Western society has been damaged. What shocked was not only his death, but the way society responded. Part of the left spectrum received his demise with indifference or even mockery. If hatred of dissent erases basic respect for life, we are no longer in democracy, but in civilizational collapse. Kirk became a symbol of this collapse – not because of his positions, but because of the response to him.

Today, Europe is disintegrating not only because of political or economic choices, but because of cultural and anthropological breakdown. The decline of authority, the disintegration of the family, the erosion of faith, the uncritical introduction of consumerist patterns into everyday life – all this is the fruit of a revolution lasting more than fifty years. The “liberated man” of ’68 was presented as a heroic figure, following only his desires and pleasures, not as a being belonging to a wider story, a society, a civilization. That created a void now filled by ideologies, populism, and political manipulation – as in the case of Brussels’s globalized politics, backed by Soros’s rhetoric.

From Regicide to Lobbyocracy: How Europe Lost the Common Good

The core argument of the book is that European civilization has lost the transcendent foundation of authority. Historically, the king, as a figure with “two bodies” – mortal and metaphysical – embodied the common good, grounded in divine order and cultural heritage. With the French Revolution and regicide, this dimension was lost, leading to a gradual erosion of social cohesion and legitimate authority.

Today, this crisis is particularly evident in European politics. Leaders like European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen are increasingly perceived as representatives of interests – in her case, those of large pharmaceutical corporations, notably Pfizer, during the pandemic. This confirms the diagnosis that European politics no longer operates in the service of the common good, rooted in transcendent authority and a vision of shared welfare, but is instead driven by lobbying networks and technocratic management.

Instead of visionary statesmen who once shaped European unity and civilizational strength (e.g., Kohl, Havel, John Paul II), today’s political figures often lack true legitimacy and deeper authority. Their language is frequently empty, filled with bureaucratic phrases about “dialogue,” “values,” and “progress,” yet devoid of real substance or connection to reality.

As a result, Europe exemplifies a continental crisis: without leaders who embody the common good and civilizational identity, the continent becomes a space dominated by particular interests, where politics is steered by lobbyists, financial elites, and technocrats. This is a logical consequence of losing the metaphysical dimension of authority that was once woven into the very core of European civilization.

The Path to a New Renaissance

The war in Ukraine is a symptom of the same inner void. Europe has grown weak, and therefore vulnerable. All the power of a civilization stems from its metaphysic. Putin merely exploited the emptiness we created ourselves. When a civilization loses its meaning, sooner or later someone else will attack it. The COVID-19 pandemic revealed a similar logic: for the first time in history, suicides increased during an external danger. Why? Because people had nowhere to turn – not to faith, not to community, not to family. The emptiness created by ideologies and the loss of foundations cannot be filled with psychotropic drugs or conspiracy theories.

Europe today is disintegrating not only because of political or economic decisions, but because of cultural and anthropological breakdown. The decline of authority, the disintegration of the family, the erosion of faith, the reckless introduction of consumerist patterns into daily life – all this is the fruit of a fifty-year revolution. The “liberated man” of ’68 was portrayed as a heroic figure who followed his own desires and pleasures, not as a being who is part of a wider story, society, and civilization. That void is now filled by ideologies, populism, and political manipulation – and Soros’s institutions.

As the author of War in the name of Peace, I believe there is still a way out of this collapse. Europe can rise again if it rediscovers its anchors: the nation as a space of belonging, the family and community as a refuge giving man basic security, and transcendence as the source of meaning – the awareness that there is something greater than us, beyond our desires and instincts. True peace is not the absence of war, but the presence of meaning.

If we do not do this, we will remain trapped in the void from which there is no escape. But if we do, there is still a chance for Europe to rise – not as an empty shell, but as a civilization that knows who it is, and why it exists.

Bostian Marco Turk
Doctor of Letters, University of Paris-Sorbonne
Professor of French literature at University of Ljubljana, Slovenia
Dean, Class I (Humanities), European Academy of Sciences and Arts, Salzburg

The book War in the Name of Peace, brought to you in English by Arktos, has already been published in Slovenian, Croatian, and Ukrainian, with the French edition scheduled for release in February in Paris. Editions in Polish, Czech, and Greek are also planned for release in 2026.