Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
[REGNUM] The civilizational approach that Russia proclaims is progressive-conservative anti-globalism. Conservative, because we strive to follow our tradition. Progressive, because, relying on our tradition, we want to develop and not stagnate. Anti-globalism, because we recognize the same right for other civilizations.
Russia is a "state of civilization." This is what the concept of Russia's foreign policy approved this spring says, which caused some joy, others bewilderment: what, they say, is a novelty, some kind of "civilization?" Will we pull to be a civilization?
"More than a thousand years of experience of independent statehood," the concept says, "The cultural heritage of the previous era, deep historical ties with traditional European culture and other cultures of Eurasia, developed over many centuries, the ability to ensure the harmonious coexistence of various peoples, ethnic, religious and linguistic groups determine the special position of Russia as an original state-civilization, a vast Eurasian and Euro-Pacific power that has rallied the Russian people and other peoples that make up the cultural and civilizational community of the Russian world."
If one of the Russian activists had been shown this text 10 years ago and told that it would be approved by the president and laid the foundation for all the actions of our state in the international arena, his eyes would have gone out of his head. Although no, he would just laugh at the ridiculous prank. And yet, this “prank” has become a reality. We are a thousand-year-old Russian state, which is building the Russian world as a cultural and civilizational community.
The sweeping under the carpet of Russians - both as a people and as a cultural and civilizational identity - is over. Moreover, changing the concept of foreign policy, as one can judge, is only the beginning.
There were also demands to start prosecuting aggressive Russophobia propaganda. Judging by the proposal of the Minister of Justice, to abandon the ridiculous ban on ideology, spelled out by the liberals in the 1993 constitution, is on the agenda - the resumption of the constitutional process, which should affirm the fundamental Russian traditional values even more clearly than was done in 2020.
What kind of ideology, officially or semi-officially, now dominates in Russia?
This is the ideology of civilizational sovereignty, the ideology of the state-civilization. It contains the basic principles on which, apparently, Russia's foreign policy and ideology will be built in the coming decades.
The world is a community of many unique idiosyncratic civilizations. Each civilization has its own special values and a special model of development. This multi-linear development moves humanity forward.
One of the most important civilizations on the planet is the Russian civilization, based on its thousand-year-old religious and cultural values, gathering a large historical space.
The global dominance of one, Western civilization is an absolute evil, since it leads to a reduction in development options and a malicious inhibition of this development by a hegemon who is afraid of competition. Therefore, such civilizational hegemonism must be eliminated, and normal multi-linearism restored. And Russia must play an important role in this elimination, the role of the instigator of a kind of "uprising of civilizations," to which, as there is every reason to believe, others will join.
This means that we affirm the plurality of civilizations in the face of an aggressive globalist world order, which is imposed by the United States and the countries of Europe trailing behind them, having renounced their own civilizational sovereignty.
Of course, both in Europe and in America there are resistance forces that advocate the restoration of traditional European and American civilization and a break with globalism, we wish them victory in this. But for today we must promote the formation of a bloc of world civilizations against the West with its globalism.
To summarize briefly our view of the world, it is as follows.
The world is a community of civilizations, that is, development centers characterized by a special culture, values, and traditions. Each civilization has its own trajectory of development, unlike the trajectories of other civilizations. Civilizations are in constant interaction - fighting and reconciling, exchanging cultural values and, on the contrary, rejecting someone else's experience and asserting their identity through such rejection. The fruit of the coexistence of civilizations are world religions, and world empires, and world trade networks (such as the Great Silk Road).
Each civilization is a large enough space for the entire set of forms of culture, religion, politics, and economics worthy of a developed person to be realized in it. And the dissimilarity of civilizations, a certain degree of their mutual repulsion is a guarantee that they will not deviate into general degradation, since not a single person, not a single human community can “do everything”, everyone has their own strengths and weaknesses.
“Progress does not consist in going in one direction for everyone, but in moving the whole field, which is the field of historical activity of mankind in all directions,” said the creator of the theory of the plurality of civilizations, the great Russian thinker Nikolai Danilevsky.
In general, the theory of the plurality of civilizations, the principle of civilizational pluralism, is the most important contribution of Russian social thought to the world treasury of ideas. After Danilevsky, his thoughts were picked up in the West by Oswald Spengler , Arnold Toynbee , and many others, but all of them still only followed in his footsteps. And to date, the principle of the plurality of civilizations is among the obvious.
However, in recent centuries, the normal development of world civilizations has been disrupted due to the aggressive expansion of the West. One of the civilizations, initially peripheral in relation to the Roman-Byzantine imperial world, but then imagined itself as a universal and unique civilization.
Why did this happen to the West?
The thing is that the defining idea for the West was Roman Catholicism. On the one hand, it is Christianity with all its universal claims to the absoluteness of truth, which, of course, are justified. But, on the other hand, this is Christianity, damaged by the heresy of papism, which consisted in the fact that one earthly person, the Pope of Rome, was credited with all the fullness of both spiritual and secular power over the world, moreover, infallibility, infallibility of judgments, at least in office. This power must be extended by aggression and the sword, cunning and intrigue, bribery and propaganda.
These properties were not at all inherent in genuine, Orthodox Christianity, since it asserted the idea of an empire, that is, a political force that protects the Orthodox Church, Orthodox people, including in the freedom of their spirit, which creates an infrastructure that contributes to the salvation of a person’s soul, and protects it from barbarian attacks.
But the Roman-Byzantine civilization did not know and did not want to know the militant missionary, guided by the principle “The end justifies the means”.
And with Western civilization there was a characteristic degradation.
Aggressive worldly means of imposing spiritual values have led to the predominance of means over values. The process that Alexander Solzhenitsyn called the “orbital path” began: the Renaissance, the Reformation, the so-called Enlightenment, and in fact the aggressive propaganda of atheism, then the development of two “wings” of the Enlightenment ideology, two twin brothers attacking tradition - liberalism and socialism. All this led us you know where - to the transgender toilet.
And throughout this movement away from spiritual values and meanings, the West retained the attitude inherited from papism for unrestrained expansion, but only now it was expansion not for the sake of faith, but for the sake of power, for the sake of money, for the sake of vile and perverted ideas, which, of course, , also faith, just the other way around.
The collapse of Western global hegemony, which took place with particular force in the second half of the 20th century, turned out to be especially toxic.
If the colonial empires expended some efforts on the development of the countries under their jurisdiction, at least along the Western path, then the weakening modern West focused primarily on slowing down the development of others. He no longer sees prospects for being the strongest in technological, intellectual, and military competition. He seeks to keep others from rising.
At the same time, as an ideology, he imposes not the deification of man, as was done in the previous half millennia, but the dehumanization of man. The God-man was replaced not just by a man, but by a mangled demon-man, a monster that grimaces and calls itself “they” or “it.”
The classical man, even godless, was still too divine, since the image of God is still present in his mind, his spirit, his disposition, even in his body, since the Son of God Jesus Christ assumed the fullness of the human body, except for sin.
This means that in order to finally get away from God, it is necessary to dehumanize a person. Hence all this fierce attack on family values.
The modern West has created a whole system of restrictions and brakes on development.
Here is the already mentioned "Washington Consensus", that is, a ban on supporting their own economy and industrialization, coercion to world trade, going in the interests of Western countries and corporations. Here is the environmental agenda, the fight against imaginary global warming, leading to the limitation of industry and technology in developing countries.
Here is the so-called human rights agenda, when Western “human rights activists” oppose individual members of non-Western societies to the whole, they begin to especially care about their rights, thereby encouraging the social atomization of non-Western societies, undermining their solidarity, leading to final destruction.
In addition, propaganda of the social priority of minorities and supporters of perversions also leads, since representatives of minorities, especially those declared oppressed, are, as it were, freed from solidarity with their large community, form, so to speak, an international that is hostile to their people, their culture, their land. Well, they undermine the demographic potential, among other things.
True, by all these means the West is destroying itself rather than its neighbors, but this does not save us from cadaveric infection. A decaying, overgrown civilization, a cuckoo civilization, seeking to throw everyone else out of the nest, has blocked the normal development of the world as a whole.
The globalist West has become a brake on development for all other civilizations. It does not allow other civilizations to develop in their own logic, demanding instead an infusion into the Western globalist system and pumping out resources.
The task of mankind as a set of original original civilizations with their special talents, with their special forms of the structure of life, is to remove this blockage. It is necessary to resume the normal multilinear development of civilizations, their free cooperation and free competition. Not necessarily peaceful, but necessarily honest in the sense of respect for someone else's space and the right of a neighbor to be different and live in his own way.
By and large, Russia is fighting for this today.
The world is gradually realizing that our NWO is not only for itself, not only for its national and geopolitical interests. We gave the signal for an armed uprising for the civilizational sovereignty of all subjects of world development.
That is why we have every right to the sympathy of China, and India, and Iran, and Turkey, and the Arab countries, and Latin America, and those forces in Europe and America that would like to stop decay, divide their traditional civilization and the globalist zombie that is killing it -monster. And it is precisely for these ideological reasons that many people already support us, and they will support even more, especially if we proclaim the ideology of civilizational sovereignty and multi-linear development openly, without bluntness. If we break with curtsies in favor of Western globalism.
We defend both for ourselves and for others the right to sovereign development, the right to our own future, not imposed from outside. Development is not limited to the model formed in the West, when “LGBT rights” inevitably follow from supersonic aircraft.
But we must openly recognize and proclaim, among other things, the “right to obscurantism”, or rather, to what the Western liberals call “obscurantism”. “The right to obscurantism”, that is, to refuse to follow the Renaissance-Enlightenment-liberal-leftist paradigm in culture and social relations, is the sacred right of peoples and civilizations. Not always, but often enough, it is, in fact, "angel light."
Peoples have the right to ban transgenderism, persecute blasphemy, believe in miracles, and not be fooled by propaganda under the guise of "creative self-expression." They have the right to believe that high-speed trains and antibiotics are not the result of homosexuality and atheism and are not obliged to accompany them.
Peoples have the right to be "out of date" in one way or another. Moreover, they have the right to consider "modernity" outdated and irrelevant. Moreover, they have the right not to recognize the authority of those forces that act as “heralds of modernity” and pass off their private interests, the interests of the Anglo-Saxon world mafia, as the demands of the century.
The right "not to be one's own contemporary," as Marina Tsvetaeva once put it, is not only for poets.
Marina Tsvetaeva was a Russian poet.
The civilizational approach that, in fact, Russia proclaims is progressive-conservative anti-globalism. Conservative, because we strive to follow our tradition, our own, precisely our thousand-year experience. Progressive, because, relying on our tradition, we want to develop, and not stagnate and trail behind, which Western pseudo-progressives are forcing us to do. Anti-globalism, because we recognize the same right to develop in our own direction and for other civilizations.
Moreover, this ideology stands outside the dichotomy created just in the West, right-left, bourgeois-socialists.
The whole nightmare that we experienced in the 20th century after the Bolshevik revolution was connected precisely with the fanatical Westernism of the Bolsheviks, with a fierce faith in a world revolution that would put an end to all the traditional heritage on the planet.
But today China is building its socialism, now relying on Confucius and the latest capitalist and industrial business models. Fundamentalist Islamic Iran cherishes the legacy of its ancient Zoroastrian civilization. India, on the basis of its antiquity, creates a dynamic capitalist system.
Outside the Western globalist ideology, the so-called leftism is freed from its main vice - hatred of its own historical tradition and the desire to destroy it in the name of "progress" - and in this sense it may well merge with rightism if it does not drag the decaying corpse of Leninism and others on its shoulders. forms of Russophobia.
Well, and most importantly, within the framework of a civilizational approach, we may well respect both the Chinese communists and Iranian Islamists, without becoming communists or Islamists ourselves. This is what is impossible with the West, which requires only unconditional acceptance and zombification.
The historical mission of Russia is not to impose its civilization, its worldview on everyone else, but to prevent the world from sliding into unilinearism and degradation, to prevent the aggressor from forcibly stopping the development of independent civilizations and cultures, including our own.
This idea of a universal evil that “holds back” from spreading in the world is of central importance for Russian religious and social thought.
May 13, 2023
Egor Kholmogorov
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