Reviewed: The Great Awakening Vs The Great Reset by Alexander Dugin

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Given that Vladimir Putin’s pet bear’s psychic consults Alexander Dugin (via remote vision using Rasputin’s shin bone), and that Regime propagandists enjoy painting him as Putin’s cackling demonic seer, the propaganda so effective that the poor man’s daughter was assassinated, I thought I’d review one of his books. Being lazy, I chose his shortest, which is also one of his newest.

Amazon, being an arm of the Regime, is too frightened to stock any of Dugin’s books, so I bought The Great Awakening Vs The Great Reset directly from the publisher Arktos.

It’s more of a pamphlet than a book, only forty four pages of main text, along with some appendixes consisting of an interview Dugin gave a media outlet, a hot essay written immediately after Jan 6, and some bullet points of his Fourth Political Theory.

None of Dugin’s ideas or arguments are given full life here, and can’t be, not in forty-four pages, so it would be churlish to point out he hasn’t really proved anything. Indeed, this book is best classed as a polemic.

“The main idea of the Great Reset,” he writes, “is a continuation of the globalisation and the strengthen of globalism after a series of failures”. Among globalism’s failures are Trump, Russia & China and various Mideast countries, not to say Afghanistan.

Yet this can’t be true globalization with half the world determined to stay on the other side of the ledger. The Great Reset is therefore better seen as the actions and failures of Big GAE (pronounced like it’s spelled), i.e. the Global American Empire. Which Dugin inexplicably—though we recall he wrote this in early 2020—believes Biden is in firm control of.

A better measure of globalization is the creation of Expertocracies with local flavors, as in China. These are naturally brought about because of the globalization of higher education, especially science. Expertocracy: The system of rule whereby government Experts order all things, expertly, using The Science and monitoring technology. Think China’s nascent social credit system, for instance.

What I like best is Dugin’s “Brief History of Liberal Ideology”. I quote the first part extensively, because I believe it to be correct, important, and too often forgotten:

Biden and the forces behind embody the culmination of a historical process that began in the Middle Ages, reached its maturity in modernity with he emergence of capitalist society, and which today is reaching its final stage…

The roots of the liberal (=capitalist) system go back to the scholastic dispute about universals. This dispute split Catholic theologians into two camps: some recognized the existence of the common (species, genus, universalia), while others believed in only certain concrete—individual things, and interpreted their generalizing names as purely external conventional systems of classification, representing “empty sound”. Those who were convinced of the existence of the general, the species, drew on the classical tradition of Plato and Aristotle. They came to called “realists,” that is, those who recognized the “reality of unversalia.” The most prominent representative of the “realists” was Thomas Aquinas and, in general, it was the tradition of the Dominican monks.

The proponents of the idea that only individual things and beings are real came to be called “nominalists.” from the Latin nomen.

He reminds us that William Occam of razor fame was a nominalist.

It is impossible to be a consistent nominalist. But error can be made in its name with ease. It is a fallacy of nominalism to “identify” a horse as a cat, for instance, because both are “really just” animals, and you pretend there is no other essential difference between the two. But if that is so, then animal is a universal, which nominalists deny exist. Nominalism is at the root of every “I Identify As” fallacy, a class of mental malady which now suffocates us.

Dugin sees clearly that once this error slithers in, religious belief must suffer. For if there are universals, there must be a cause of them.

The rest of the story is more or less familiar. He compresses several centuries of history into a few pages, here compressed into a paragraph.

Protesting Christianity followed directly from nominalism, Dugin says, rejecting Tradition and trading it for Reason. Which can work, for those with the ability to think. Alas, thinking is rare, so that the fading of Tradition is to be lamented. In any case, from Protesting Christianity the bourgeois developed, along with Capitalism. The weakening of the Church led to nation states. Then came Locke, Hume, and Kant. The Twentieth Century we know. And so forth.

Dugin sees that the globalist/Big GAE impulse is the destruction of all identity outside the Regime (he doesn’t use that term), even as it wields certain collective identities as weapons. The impetus behind it all he nails:

[The Great Reset] is nothing less than the beginning of the “last battle”. The globalists, in their struggle for nominalism, liberalism, individual liberation and civil society, appear to themselves as “warriors of light”, bringing progress, liberation from thousands of years of prejudice, new possibilities—and perhaps even physical immortality and the wonders of genetic engineering, to the masses.

Trump upset the globalists’ plans, and their hersterical conniption fit over him is so well known we needn’t say much about. Dugin covers the matter succinctly, coming to the view that the election was, indeed, fortified (he doesn’t use that term either).

It’s amusing Reseters label their enemies “populists” at the same time they boast of “our democracy”. Populism is the definition of democracy. But, of course, their definitions on these matters, or indeed most, do not accord with Reality. Anyway, deplorables vote the wrong way and need to be stopped.

Dugin reminds us that it’s important Trump wanted a return to the nation-state kind of politics with which he was familiar and comfortable. This the Reseters could not abide, individual nations being an affront to Equality.

Like many gloablists, Dugin indicates he thinks the dreaded Singularity is possible. I do not, and I find it difficult for anybody who has ever coded a computer to believe so.

All this is contrasted with the Great Awakening—of the sort defined by Alex Jones (yes). This is the counter-reaction to the usurpation of Reality by the Reseters. Well, there have been other Great Awakenings, all religious, so such a thing is always possible. Dugin says “that a kernel of resistance is maturing in the masses, that they are beginning to mobilise.” And he’s right that the self-consistent insularity of those on the Right—people who want their nations’s business to be their business—precludes them from “seeing that the people of other civilizations are in the same desperate situation.” He does not develop the idea that anti-globalists might be forced to globalize to fight globalism. He does something else instead, which we’ll shortly see.

He makes the same prediction many on our side have made: “It is likely the Democrats will try to kill the two-party system itself by introducing an essentially one-party regime, quite in the spirit of the current state of their ideology. This is liberal Bolshevism.” It is.

It will come as no surprise that he believes the Great Bulwark against the Great Reset will be Russia herself. “Nominalism,” he says, “is deeply alien to the Russian people in its very foundations.”

Russian identity has always prioritised the common—the clan, folk, church, tradition, nation, and power, and even communism represented—albeit artificial, in class terms—a collective identity opposed to bourgeois individualism. Russians stubbornly rejected and continue to reject nominalism in all its forms. And this a common platform for both the monarchist and Soviet periods.

I recall Ianto Watt getting grief for his similar summary of the Russian spirit.

In any case, Dugin says—and recall he wrote this before the Russia-Ukraine war—“Russia is the most important—if not the main!—pole of the Great Awakening.” He acknowledges the old, and continuing, distrust of and even determined rejection of the West. Opinions which are unfathomable to globalists, who truly believe everybody, once they are purged of error, secretly wants to be like them.

Whether it’s a Russian chip on his shoulder, or a prescient observation, he says:

[Russia] is diametrically opposed to the globalist project of the Great Reset. And it would be natural to expect that in their decisive rush the globalists will do everything in their power to prevent an imperial renaissance in Russia. Accordingly, we need exactly that: an imperial renaissance. Not to impose our Russian and Orthodox truth on the other peoples, culture and civilisations, but to revive, fortify [!] and defend our identify and to help others in their own resistance…

The sequel we know. We naturally agree that Big GAE must be stopped.

He leaves us with a word of optimism. Don’t forget that the “Great Reset was proclaimed by a handful of degenerates and panting old globalist men on the verge of dementia…and a marginal, perverted rabble selected to illustrate the lightning-quick careers opportunities for all nonentities.”

Apt, that. The gerontocracy is wearing out their Depends. We may need nothing more than await the inevitable biological solution.

The rest of the book, as I said, are appendices. One an interview with some media outlet. A blistering, rage-filled article written shortly after Jan 6. And some bullet points about his Fourth Political Theory. I think the publishers included these lest the main book appear too thin.

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