Considered a guru of Russian expansionism and one of the most prominent names in favor of the invasion of Ukraine, the controversial Russian philosopher Aleksandr Dugin published an article in Brazil, invited by the military, to defend the conflict in Eastern Europe as a vector for a change in the world order.
He also called on Brazil, through the BRICS (a group formed by Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), to participate in the process of transforming the world — a movement that, according to the ultranationalist thinker, would break what he calls globalism and Western economic and cultural dominance.
The text was published in the latest edition of the Caderno de Estudos Estratégicos, by the ESG (Escola Superior de Guerra), an institution linked to the Ministry of Defense.
Called a fascist due to his ultranationalist ideas, Dugin gained Brazilian supporters who say they are against globalism. He himself has participated in debates with Olavo de Carvalho, guru of Bolsonarism, who died in 2022.
Some of Dugin’s admirers are military personnel, most of them retired, who started to share videos of the philosopher on YouTube channels. It was in this context that, according to people linked to the Ministry of Defense, Sheetthe Russian was asked by ESG to write the article for the Brazilian magazine.
The initiative also took place months after a lecture by Dugin in Rio de Janeiro, at the invitation of the same institution, was cancelled. Officially, there was talk of scheduling problems to justify the embarrassment.
The publication of the article generated internal criticism at the Ministry of Defense and at the Escola Superior de Guerra. The assessment, according to reports made to the Sheetis that Dugin is considered a fascist and cannot simply be presented as an antithesis to critics of the Ukrainian War.
In a note, the Ministry of Defense said that the publication of the article by the ultranationalist philosopher, in defense of the war against Ukraine, had the objective of “knowing the national and international realities”.
“The choice for publishing an article by Dugin, in the 2023 edition, was due to the fact that this edition sought to offer readers various perceptions of the Russian-Ukrainian crisis, with authors of different nationalities and different views on the conflict”, said the folder.
Dugin is one of the five authors of the articles published in the Caderno de Estudos Estratégicos edition. He shares space with other writers, such as Luis Bitencourt, professor of International Security at the William J. Perry Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies, in the United States.
In the text, Dugin defends the thesis that the countries considered of the second world must rebel against the economic and cultural domain of the western powers to create what he calls “State-Civilization”. The Russian ultranationalist even relativizes concepts such as democracy and dictatorship to assert that countries must exercise sovereignty in their own way.
“There are forces and patterns at work in the Civilization-State that modern Western political science does not understand. They are not reducible to nation-state structures and are not captured by macro and microeconomic analysis. The terms ‘dictatorship’, ‘democracy’, ‘ authoritarianism’, ‘totalitarianism’, ‘social progress’, ‘human rights’ etc. have no meaning here or require fundamental translation”, he writes.
He also says that each country must be sovereign and possess self-awareness to defend “their integration theories and ambitious projects”.
“Contemporary Russia has come close to this status, and the special military operation in Ukraine [eufemismo russo para a guerra]accompanied by his withdrawal from global networks, is one of the proofs of this deep and powerful will”, writes Dugin.
For him, the inaction of second world countries against the dominance of the West would have, as the “next logical step”, the “declaration of a World Government”.
“Often (but not always) changing the world order takes place through wars—including world wars. The construction of a multipolar world will, unfortunately, also go through wars. If wars as such cannot be avoided, it is possible to limit scope, determine its rules and establish its laws”, he concludes.
The Ukrainian War, for Dugin, is the result of Moscow’s efforts to prevent the Western identity from being imposed on the entire population of Ukraine — especially in regions like Crimea, whose population is mostly Russian.
“The truth is that the east and south of Ukraine have a population with a completely different history and cultural identity. Ukraine is the typical post-Soviet failed state, artificial and that never existed before 1991. The south and east are pro -Russia, anti-fascists and strongly pro-Soviet. Its population belongs to the Russian world and the Eurasian civilization”, Dugin told Folha in an interview in 2014.
