National Bolshevism, Neoreaction, and Nuclear War (Jeffrey Nyquist - April 19, 2025)

National Bolshevism, Neoreaction, and Nuclear War
“In short, then, what Dugin proposes is that National Bolshevism takes from the ‘metaphysics’ of Marxism a secret, initiatory Gnosticism and mysticism which seeks to accomplish a spiritual alchemy to transform society – National Bolshevism thus becomes a secret society bent on a theurgic, magic transformation of reality.”
James D. Heiser
In the first instance, to establish Europe from Lisbon to Vladivostok under Moscow, either America must be destroyed or it must abandon Europe. To accomplish this you would need an economic strategy; second, an information warfare strategy; and third, you would want a war strategy.
The economic strategy is simple. You destroy the dollar as the world’s trading currency. Information warfare is the most difficult and complicated part of your strategy. But information warfare will not work if you do not have a military strategy. And the key military strategy you need is a nuclear one. What nearly all observers miss is the importance of nuclear warfare in any attempt to displace the United States as the world’s leading power. Nuclear weapons are also important if you want to convince the United States to step aside and allow Russia to dominate Europe. Most people in the West are indoctrinated to believe nuclear weapons signify the “end of all life.” This is a myth. As former CIA analyst Peter Pry noted in 1990, “a case can be made that large-scale counterforce nuclear attacks can be executed while limiting fatalities to the low millions, or even hundreds of thousands.”
According to Joseph D. Douglass. Jr., theater nuclear war is integral to Moscow’s war preparations. That is why Russian troop quality is unimportant to Kremlin strategists. It makes no sense to invest too much in training and equipping troops subjected to nuclear strikes. Douglass wrote as follows:
“Warfighting is accorded first priority in the Soviet approach to theater nuclear weapons. The … [Russians] view nuclear weapons as powerful and effective means of tactical combat. The Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union has adopted and promulgated a strong, offensive, nuclear-oriented, warfighting doctrine. The Soviet military strategy is clearly offensive, with nuclear weapons playing the lead role. And, the forces are directed to design, equip, and plan to fight a nuclear war.”
The American side, noted Douglass, sees nuclear deployments as “theoretical.” Nuclear missiles are not seriously intended for use. Nukes are all about deterrence. Of course, the Russians have never agreed with this idea. Moscow places great emphasis on surprise attack. Throughout Russian military literature “the importance of surprise and the need for secrecy are major continuing themes. In fact, surprise that catches the enemy unaware, including the use of nuclear weapons, is as important as the total attack strength.”
Moscow’s concept of warfighting can be described as “an in-depth, massive, surprise nuclear strike, in conjunction with an immediate, high-speed air and ground exploitation….” According to Douglass,
“[Moscow intends] to strike first with a massive, in-depth, nuclear strike. This strike is designed to (1) destroy NATO means of nuclear attack, (2) destroy the main groupings of combat forces and their command/control, (3) isolate the battlefield, and (4) breach the main defense and define the main attack corridors.”
If this is how the next war is to be fought, what kind of information warfare would you engage in? Would you try to convince the Americans that nuclear weapons are useless? Would you try to convince everyone that nuclear weapons are environmentally too destructive for use? Obviously you would, and that is exactly what America’s enemies have done.
Yet, the most important thing in war is to know who your enemy is. The most important thing in an information war might be to sow confusion regarding friends and enemies. Through the creation of many confusing narratives, the traditional defenders of America could be divided. For example, the American right has typically been more committed to national defense than the left. It follows, therefore, that information warfare in advance of a world war would tend to target the right.
Today the American right no longer sees a clear connection between overseas threats and internal threats. While the left was once the primary conduit for enemy infiltration and subversion, today we have reason to worry about the right. Whereas, the left tended to sympathize with our communist enemies in Vietnam during the 1960s, the right tends to sympathize with Russia today. We see this in the broadcasts of Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones.
Russia’s Information Strategy: On the Varieties of Right Wing Bolshevism
Moscow’s contamination of the right, through infiltration and psychological warfare, did not begin yesterday. If we examine various ideological anomalies in rightwing movements of the past, we find persistent attempts by supposed rightwing movements to align with the left (consciously or unconsciously). National Socialism (i.e., the Nazi movement) is usually considered rightwing, yet this movement was “socialist” and had a leftwing side to it. We see the support Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones now give to Russia, and the ever-increasing support given to Russia by Trump’s MAGA following. Dare we make an obnoxious comparison that the theorists of the Dark Enlightenment have themselves anticipated by saying that National Socialism came to power in Germany, in January 1933, because Stalin ordered the KPD (Communist Party Germany), to allow it. Did Trump come to power because the American equivalent of the KPD, on Putin’s orders, allowed it? Many were surprised, in 1939, when Hitler made a pact with Stalin – when Bolshevism and National Socialism joined forces to smash Poland. Is anyone surprised, now, as Putin and Trump form a kind of non-aggression pact? Joseph Stalin’s nickname for Hitler was “the icebreaker” of the Revolution. Russian historian, Yuri Felshtinsky, has suggested that Donald Trump is Vladimir Putin’s “icebreaker.” In terms of Stalin-Hitler and Putin-Trump, Felshtinsky made an apt strategy analogy. It is considered out-of-bounds, however, by the neo-reactionaries who will say Felshtinsky has committed a reductio ad Hitlerum.
It was Nick Land, analyzing the texts of Curtis Yarvin, who suggested that Hitler was a universal negative symbol against which the liberal faithful must always rally, since hatred of Hitler is mandatory for “all men of sound faith as the exact complement of the incarnate God (the revealed anti-Messiah, or Adversary), and this identification has the force of ‘self-evident truth.’” What fool, however, can miss the obvious parallel between Stalin-Hitler and Trump-Putin? James B. Edwards, who wrote a book titled Hitler: Stalin’s Stooge, explained, “Once the intellectuals had made up their minds about the essential corruption of the Western system and the essential goodness of the Soviet system, details were no longer important.” We might well rewrite Edwards’s sentence, “Once the MAGA pundits had made up their minds about the essential corruption of the Western system and the essential goodness of the Russian system under Putin, details were no longer important.” The parallel between then and now is almost exact. One might pen a book titled Trump: Putin’s Stooge. Just as Hitler imagined an alliance with Moscow against Poland, Trump may be imagining an alliance with Moscow against China – or even against Europe! An incredibly stupid idea, deserving scorn. Yet again, this is the pattern of Hitler’s principal blunder outlined by Ernst Topitsch in a remarkable little book titled Stalin’s War: “When things reached a critical juncture Hitler brought ruin on himself by not steering clear; instead he made himself dependent on Moscow, with dire consequences.”
We are not writing about the Holocaust here. We are not comparing Hitler, the mass murderer, to Trump the reality TV personality. We are comparing Hitler the strategist who trusted Moscow to Trump the strategist who trusts Moscow today. There are patterns of behavior in nations, in foreign policy, and we should be allowed to notice them. Putin is not ashamed to admire Stalin, or to imitate Stalin. I submit that Trump is too ignorant to know he is imitating Hitler in his choice of friends. That Russia’s disinformation agents have themselves noticed a resemblance between Trump and Hitler as strategists in mockingly reflected in a little volume titled Esoteric Trumpism which, in essence, mimics the dark blasphemies of Miguel Serrano’s Esoteric Hitlerism. The admission of a relationship between the two volumes is frankly made on this pro-Russian Duginist website, where Trump is described as “a mythic, archeofuturist figure navigating the West’s existential battle for revival, bridging esoteric symbolism and modern populism in an apocalyptic quest for renewal.”
Archeofuturist? To understand this and other pro-Russian terms, one needs to have read the pro-Russian writers of the post-Cold War era. Believe in or not, a French rightwing author named Guillaume Faye wrote a book titled Archeofuturism: European Visions of the Post Catastrophic Age, published in Europe during the 1990s and translated into English. The book proposed the creation of a new Eurasian empire in which the countries of Europe are demoted to mere provinces, and the new nationality will be that of white Europeans. As Faye told a gathering of Russians from the People’s National Party in 2005, “I believe that Russia must be the center of a great white confederation. It’s the same goal as your organization.”
Like Nick Land and Curtis Yarvin’s work, Faye’s book opposes the “ethnic masochism” of the ruling liberal ideology, which he says is exacerbated by hedonistic individualism. Faye blames individualism for “triggering a boom in anti-natural practices: divorces made automatic … rejection of the housewife model … the glorification of homosexuality [and a] … demographic fall caused by anti-natalism….” Faye predicts calamity, though he doesn’t say exactly what the calamity will be. Of course, it is true: left liberalism has become a mass suicide cult. But Faye does not distinguish between forms of liberalism, neither does he remark on the way in which conservatism and liberalism grew out of the same English political party. Faye akes questionable and dogmatic pronouncements on the subject. We are headed for suicide, says Faye, because liberal modernity is “based on a dream-like view of human nature and fallacious anthropology.” Yet Faye has his own fallacious progressive anthropology. An apparent believer in global warming and various environmental scares, Faye frets about the incompatibility between Afro-Asian Muslims and Europeans in a National Socialist sense (though Faye”s declared nation is Eurosiberia, with its capital in Moscow). He believes that a social explosion is coming, along with hard economic times. Liberalism is dead, says Faye, and the rationalism of the Enlightenment has no future whatsoever. “[T]he post-catastrophic world will have to reorganize social fabrics according to archaic principles — which is to say, human ones.”
Specifically, what will this reorganization entail? There will be a return of authority, of course, and a return of family power along with “the subordination of rights to duties.” He vaguely mentions the possibility of communitarian structures, “the power of hierarchy” and “the principle of punishment over prevention” along with “the rehabilitation of the aristocratic principle.” The European soul, he says, longs for the future, and also longs for a Plan. This Plan entails the overthrow of the liberal order. Why? “Because the egalitarian and humanitarian mindset of modern man … does not allow him to manage the explosive possibilities behind genetic engineering” which Faye would embrace. We are approaching the day when science will be able to make super-humans and sub-humans; and we must embrace these new creatures, Faye suggests, eradicating the “pseudo-ethical obstacles raised in opposition to genetic engineering, the creation of ‘modified’ human beings, and positive eugenics.”
Faye is a drooling moral idiot. Genetic engineering of this kind would signal the end of humanity. The idea is born of hubris, of course, and reminds us of Greek tragedy; except that Faye is a joker whose silhouette fits better with low comedy. He thinks he can, willy-nilly, create meaning on his own – breaking free from the liberal cage. He throws all babies out with their bath water; and he uses leftover diaper pins against the blinking eyeballs of his readership after the fashion of King Lear’s villain, Lord Cornwall, who gouged out Lord Gloucester’s eyes shouting, “Out vile jelly!” To be a moral idiot, and to transmit moral idiocy, suggests a blindness that wishes to inflict blindness on everyone. There are none so blind as those want to poke everyone’s eyes out.
“The great weakness of the system is that it believes people are stupid,” writes Faye, “and it seeks to narcotize them or get around them by clumsy means – something which ends up tiring people and proving ineffective. The strategy chosen to contain ‘dangerous ideas’ has been to defuse all ideas, whatever they may be….” It’s so funny, really, that Faye should fault “the system” for believing people are stupid while he advocates the mass breeding of subhumans! Faye wants a race of stupid creatures as slaves!
Faye plays with ideas as a child might play with matches. He is an incendiary, setting fire to God’s creation to make way for the abominations of man. Having no real sense of history, he nonetheless recognizes that modernity is an unsustainable chaos, and a retreat into old forms (with new technology) is inevitable. Having no sense of right or wrong, a society governed by men like Faye must become totalitarian. It must become a society led by moral idiots like himself. Nevertheless, he recognizes that old forms of moral authority must be re-established. “Archeofuturism,” he writes, “is a concept of order, a concept that upsets modern minds, which are shaped by the fallacious individualist ethics of emancipation and the rejection of discipline that has led to the swindle of ‘contemporary art,’ and wreaked havoc in the educational and socio-economic systems.” Faye is a revolutionary. He would favor Marx insofar as Marx was anti-bourgeois, but he realizes that Marxism is presently unworkable. Some other brand of anti-bourgeois ideology must therefore be cobbled together. And so, a new form of critical theory emerges. Faye opposes –
“the weak spirit of humanitarianism, a sham ethic which raises ‘human dignity’ to the rank of ridiculous dogma. This, not to mention the hypocrisy of the many well-meaning souls who yesterday forgot to denounce Communist crimes and today have nothing to say about the embargo on Iraq [1998] and Cuba by the American superpower … [and] the oppression of the Palestinians.”
What can we say about this moralist with a broken moral compass? About religion, he says that modernity has overseen a process of de-spiritualization and the destruction of transcendental values. True enough. But is he a master of transcendental values in his own right? Faye wrote, “The failed attempt at establishing secular religions, the empty disenchantment created by a civilization that bases its ultimate legitimacy on the value of exchange and the cult of money, and the self-destruction of Christianity have engendered a situation that cannot endure.” If we are not careful, he warns, Islam may become the religion of the future. This is dangerous because a triumphant Islam would destroy “the creativity and inventiveness of the European soul….”
Does Faye wear a cross? Does he advocate a return to the Catholic Church in France? It is trendy to attack the market, to side with the socialists against the bourgeoisie, but people need to buy and sell. Why is prosperity a bad thing? On the one hand he favors creativity, which the market supports; on the other hand he attacks the market and the economic freedom that, historically, made Europe so creative and inventive. And then, with a bow toward Moscow, Faye laments the Machiavellian plans of certain American strategists which he blames for Europe’s Muslim problem.
How curious, indeed, that America is blamed for an essentially Marxist project; namely, the project of undermining Western society by downgrading motherhood. This ill treatment of motherhood, more than anything, brought Islam into Europe. Is there any doubt that feminism caused the birthrate to fall in Europe? Is there any doubt that feminism was hijacked and used by Marxism? As the birthrate fell Europe had to import Muslim laborers. Today half the school children in certain European cities have the name Mohammed. London became Londonistan, and Europe became Eurabia. And this is the fault of America? What about the communists? But then, Curtis Yarvin would tell us that America is THE ORIGINAL COMMUNIST COUNTRY. Right? Never mind that man behind the Iron Curtain!
And what does Faye, as Kremlin stooge, propose as a religious alternative to Islam? “The archeofuturist answer might be as follows,” Faye explains: “a neo-medieval, quasi-polytheistic, superstitious and ritualized Christianity for the masses and a pagan agnosticism – a ‘religion of philosophers’ – for the elite.” As for the secular religion of “political correctness,” he finds it to be ethnically insincere, based on “intellectual snobbishness and social cowardice.” He calls it chic, soft, and a bourgeois form of Stalinism. To talk of a threat to Europe from Islam is to be barred from trendy restaurants and loses its appeal in the eyes of beautiful girls. “Being politically correct is a matter not of ideology,” says Faye, “but of social acceptance.”
Faye believes today’s opposition to political correctness is also politically correct. Rebellion is neutralized, he says, “through sham rebellion.” Here the politically correct merely hide behind the mask of political incorrectness. So much for conservatives. As for freedom of speech, instead of outright censorship what we have is a media that relies on diversion, focusing on side issues and entertainment. The media careerist craves safety and knows how to win an audience through trivia. “What we are dealing with here,” wrote Faye, “is not simply the usual brutalization of the population via the increasingly sophisticated mass-media apparatus of … the spectacle — a veritable ‘audiovisual prozac’ — but rather a concealment of essential political problems….”
Faye refers to consultation and negotiation as the “scourges of modern democracy.” He says that “Constantinople is under siege and we’re debating the gender of angels.” Though his meaning is given indirectly, he appears to suggest that the racism and bigotry of old was not entirely bad; that the class system was not entirely oppressive; that male dominance is a biological imperative. The old ways and institutions are coming back, he says, whether we want them or not. He is undoubtedly right in seeing patriarchy on the rebound. Naturally, hard men will be back in style. It is inevitable. But more than this, Faye believes that a racial civil war is coming to Europe. Like Nick Land and Curtis Yarvin, Faye has nudged various white supremacist and separatists toward this future vision. While he was not overtly anti-Semitic in his book, Faye favored Russian authoritarianism – or should we call it totalitarianism? Faye appeals to the native European stock, warning that one day they will violently react against liberalism and egalitarianism and Islam. These, after all, are the forces destroying European civilization. And who benefits? Moscow, of course. And who is ultimately to blame? Faye said the blame must be put upon liberal economics and hedonistic individualism and America. It is the permissiveness engendered by market systems, he explained, which have undermined the authoritative structures of civilization. Did Marxism have anything to do with this? Faye will not say so.
As for “conservative” politicians and right-wing governments, Faye says they “have always been soft. They fear confrontation and do not dare to implement the ideas and programs by which they came to power…. A Right-wing government would rather avoid displeasing those who voted against it rather than please its own electorate. Winning the favor of the Left is the delight of the Right.” True enough! But there is more poison here than meets the eye. Democracy, he says, is therefore headed for failure, and the emergence of a new aristocracy is necessary (i.e., an aristocracy coming out of Moscow). Everything is thoroughly rotten and Russia has the cure. Multiculturalism, he says, merely signifies multi-racism. Only now everyone is going to truly hate everyone else. Only the Americans still have imagination and epic vision. “Culturally, as well as politically and geopolitically, Americans are strong because we [Europeans] are weak, absent, stiff, and we lack dynamism and will. Let us stop moaning: America is only quite naturally occupying the space we have abandoned.”
This takes us to Faye’s conclusion, which makes the Kremlin so happy. He points westward to what he calls “the Imperial American Republic.” He says that America’s decline “has already been ‘virally’ programmed for the first quarter of the twenty-first century….” Then he points to the east, to the emergence of what he calls “Eurosiberia.” According to Faye, France should no longer be called France. This is not its true name, after all. France should resume the name it had under the Roman Empire and henceforth become the Eurosiberian province of Gaul. To build an empire of our own, says Faye, will require the emergence of predators who are “on guard for a historical disaster to happen and make their prey emerge from the undergrowth in panic.” The predator, in this case, is Russia. The prey would be the petty bourgeois states of Europe.
“In human history,” says Faye, “the establishment of a Eurosiberian complex would represent a revolution greater than that of the short-lived Soviet Union or even the United States of America.” The reasons given to justify this empire, he admits, are of little importance. In his view a Greater Europe absolutely must emerge. He calls the nations of Europe a “disorderly grouping,” which is somewhat shocking insofar as nationalism is the authentic European heritage while the Roman Empire died from its decline into oriental despotism. Faye’s solution, then, is that same rotten oriental despotism now centered in Moscow. The example of imperial Rome’s progressive ossification, the strangulation of the economy by state decree, is clearly in evidence from Diocletian to its ultimate culmination in Theodosius; but this is utterly forgotten by Faye (if he ever knew it). And yet, Faye would celebrate his new imperial project, with Russia at its core, as “Leviathan and Behemoth rolled into one.” According to Faye, “From the harbor of Brest to Port Arthur, from our frozen islands in the Arctic to the victorious sun of Crete, from the fields of the steppe and from the fjords to the maquis, a hundred nations free and united, regrouped to form an empire….” And he credits Soviet dictator Mikhail Gorbachev with this idea!
Faye’s book was published in 2010 by Arktos Media Ltd., where Arktos is the Greek word for bear; that is, the same bear that symbolizes the ruling party in Russia, and is connected with the name of a Russian publishing house named ARKTOGEYA, and the Website arcto.ru, where Bolshevik and nationalist terminology are knitted together by the Russian geopolitical “philosopher” Alexander Dugin, who is almost certainly linked to Faye’s project (insofar as Dugin is also preaching the establishment of a Eurasian empire). The discerning investigator cannot help but see a connection between the various projects of Arktos Media and ARKTOGEYA, between Faye’s publisher and Dugin’s, between Nick Land and Curtis Yarvin – between Esoteric Trumpism and Esoteric Hitlerism. Why should we not discover, in due time, a common source of funding for these curiosities (as well as a common strategic direction)?
There is a peculiar tendency of alliance between the Red and the Brown, between the communist and the National Socialist – between Russia and MAGA. Should we be worried? Or should we dismiss such concerns as stemming from a reductio ad Hitlerum, as Nick Land has suggested? Let us remember that policies of suicide do not only come from the left. Such policies can also come from the right. Societal suicide is in the air when the right and the left begin to cooperate toward a common authoritarian end. My argument would be that Nazi Germany’s policy was a policy of national suicide. Hitler committed suicide by aligning himself with Moscow in 1939, triggering a world war. The pro-Russian rhetoric of Faye and Dugin, Land and Yarvin, rings the same bell. It is the bell of national suicide.
In May 2005 Faye said the following to members of the People’s National Party in Russia:
“I am often asked if I’m racist. If I am a Nazi. No. My concept is, I am against war. I don’t want to conquer Algeria. But if they attack us, they have to be destroyed…. So I completely agree with the teachings of Russia-ism. I believe that Russia must be the center of a great white confederation. It’s the same goal as your organization [the People’s National Party]. ” Commenting on this rhetoric, a Ukrainian researcher told me, “This is theater. They want to create a Nazi atmosphere without the Nazi stigma. They are exploiting the emotional idea that Hitler came close to liberating Russia from Bolshevism. This is why a lot of anti-Soviets have this unconscious sympathy toward Hitler. The stupid will be led by such emotions.”
The quote within the quote contains as rather surprising admission. It is an admission that should be lost on no one. It must be understood that methods now exist, in terms of psychological warfare, for leading the Right and the Left toward the same end. What we find today is two varieties of rhetoric, each tending to the same outcome, each connected to the same secretive system. Readers should check out the images and symbolism of the People’s National Party at nnpr.su. According to Wikipedia, the People’s National Party was allegedly founded by Aleksandr Ivanov-Sukharevksy with help from two veterans of the Black Hundreds. Ivanov-Sukharevsky allied himself with Semyon Tokmakov, the leader of a skinhead group. Oddly, the two great heroes of the People’s National Party are Tsar Nicholas II and Adolf Hitler.
It might be said that a bizarre mixing-up of diverse personalities and causes is an outgrowth of an experimental approach to political adaptation, perhaps overseen by a particular country’s special services (GRU, SVR). However intriguing or brilliant the ideological formulations presented by writers like Faye, the character behind these formulations nonetheless cannot help revealing an unabashed lack of moral sensibility. This lack of moral sensibility is also found in American ideologists like Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones.
Was it so outrageous, then, that some years ago Yuri Felshtinsky wrote, “We might thus find out that the Donald Trump of 2017-2021 was a ‘young’ version of Hitler, and the ‘older’ version is yet to come.” Certainly this statement rubbed me the wrong way at the time. Many of us were hoping against hope that Trump would oppose the socialist agenda, saving our nation from leftist insanity. How could we have known that Trump represents a different kind of insanity? The form which Trump’s approach has taken is fundamental, having to do with immigration, and was labeled “racist” by the left. Most of us ignored the left’s warnings about Trump because we were sick of being called racists. But Trump’s ideological direction of march now appears destined to break with the Constitution, in the sense of the imagined rightwing dictator described in Origins of the Fourth World War. This dictator, depicted as morally questionable, was imagined as appearing after World War III. I had not imagined him emerging before. This dictator was imagined as a military figure. I had not imagined him as a businessman. He was, indeed, a hater of the Chinese even as he was ambivalent to Russia (as he appears in the text of Origins). The “Archgeneral” would be “dictator from Pole to Pole,” in a world divided between the warring states of Russia, China, and America. He would be an amoralistic Caesar, killer, a Machiavellian summoned by the “hurricane politics” of mass destruction warfare. It never occurred to me that this amoral type could emerge prior to a war of mass destruction; that the internal disorientation of America would be sufficient to allow for such a character to emerge.
The strategist-philosophers of the Kremlin’s global brain trust deserve some credit. The destruction unleashed in the next world war owes a great deal to their ingenuity. How can we understand these people? They are not even ideologues. They have recognized what I first put to paper in 1987: “The right is a fiction. Everyone is on the left.”
Here is the dirty secret that fuels the neo-reactionary game. Moscow’s agents of influence know that the right was never serious and lacked confidence. More than that, the right is oblivious. How could the right have understood communism when they did not understand themselves? The great Russian dissident, Vladimir Bukovsky, tried to tell his conservative friends that “Communism is complicated.” But our neocons and libertarians and paleocons wanted a fast-food answer, along with their cheeseburger and fries. When you try to explain communism to them, Bukovsky told me, their eyes glaze over. After all, communism is full of traps and misunderstandings, especially for shallow people. These shallow people, these American conservatives, could not have won the Cold War. It is ridiculous to think they won it. They were too superficial to understand what they were up against. They did not dwell long enough, or think carefully enough, about the Hitler-Stalin pact and its meaning.
What, then, is communism? A philosophy, a political party, a police state, an economic system, a revolution, the withering away of the state? All the above? None of the above? It has been, from the start, a mass of contradictions that fed on contradiction. And then there is the criminal psychology of it, and the organized crime that manifests through it. Communist parties rely on capitalism, socialism, even democracy when it suits them. But the ever-present element is the lying, the stealing, and the murdering. We have seen it play out with Stalin, Mao, Putin, and Xi. The lying is more spectacular than ever, which suggests the final death toll will be even more spectacular. The complexity of communism (a.k.a., socialism), in all its aspects, leaves us in a situation where nobody quite explained how the thing works. Hannah Arendt used the term “totalitarianism” into which she mixed National Socialism. Eric Voegelin wrote of “Gnosticism.” Igor Shafarevich and Gustave Le Bon preferred the term “socialism,” while Carl Jung wrote of an Antichrist movement in history. They all saw that the thing was evil. Each used different terminology. All of them were describing the same phenomenon.
Marx told his closest friends that he was not a Marxist, that there was no Marxist dogma – a notion underscored by Lenin. Here was a notion that Stalin ran with. Today, Putin freely flies across the heavens, like a nuclear rocket, with this same understanding. Every statue of Lenin, in every Russian town, remains in place. Famously Mao Zedong said Marxism-Leninism is more powerful “than a machine gun.” It was, he also said, “more powerful than the atomic bomb.” You see, Marxism was not an ideology. Marxism was a weapon. Leninism was a weapon. Ideology itself is a weapon. Narratives, as we now can see, are weapons! And so, Lenin remains in his mausoleum. Stalin’s statues are going up all over Russia. The old idols return and are honored. Why? Because they were wickedly imaginative and strategically successful. What is always called for, again and again, is imagination. We always hope that good men have more imagination than bad men. But here the bad outplayed the good. And now that nearly everyone is an idiot, we are careening toward the final act.
More than a hundred years ago Lenin wrote that communism could only succeed if the communist becomes “a practical leader of the masses in the revolution.” He explained that the revolutionary leader must link devotion to communism with
“the ability to effect all the necessary practical compromises, tacks, conciliatory manoeuvres, zigzags, retreats and so on, in order to speed up the achievement and then loss of political power by [the pro-capitalist politicians] … to accelerate their inevitable bankruptcy in practice … to accelerate the inevitable frictions, quarrels, conflicts and complete disintegration among [the pro-capitalist politicians] … to select the proper moment when the discord among these ‘pillars of sacrosanct private property’ is at its height, so that, through a decisive offensive, the proletariat will defeat them all and capture political power.” [Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder]
Lenin said that doctrinairism should be refuted in such matters because there is “a wonderful variety of changing forms … that there is every reason to hope for a rapid and complete recovery of the international communist movement from the infantile disorder of ‘Left-wing’ communism.”
What we have on the right today is a problem that Lenin faced in Russia. Communists were not mentally equipped to govern a real country in 1917. Their thinking was too narrow. They treated political theory like a religion in which belief was what mattered most. Today the same problem afflicts the American right. Nearly everyone adheres to bad theory, to ideological thinking. Too many hold to rigid dogmas without knowing their ABCs. The right (in the American conservative context) is by definition the defender of existing structures. It is not supposed to be revolutionary or neoreactionary. It is supposed to be careful, steady, and gradualist. Everyone has forgotten Edmund Burke. The theories being propounded are now dangerous. The policies that stem from today’s prevailing theories are also dangerous. Moscow’s strategists are rubbing their hands with delight.