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Unfinished Nazism. Chapter 10. The New Transition Period and Its Prospects

Aleksandr Shchipkov

A few years ago, the world has entered a new transition period primarily marked by the agony of neoliberal capitalism, often referred to as the «world crisis». Despite declarative humanistic rhetoric, this agony is characterized by military aggression and the establishment of geopolitical «outposts» of liberalism, which is several Nazi and proto-Nazi regimes in Eastern Europe.

These actions represent not a strategy but a gesture of desperation. Beyond the politics of naked force and global rule of police, the liberal-globalist regime has little to offer humanity. Its socio-cultural potential has been exhausted. Today, the peoples of the world are beginning to realize themselves as victims of a failed historical experiment. This experiment, undertaken within the framework of the Protestant secular modern project, involved spreading the norms of one culture to the rest of the world – in other words, promoting unipolarity (monocentricity). Implemented through military-political and economic violence under a regime of hegemony and strict global control, this project led humanity to a dead end characterized by a racist-Nazi, social-Darwinian worldview, masked by the liberal myth of freedom and party representative democracy. Meanwhile, even Western independent intellectuals have recognized the utopian nature of this myth. For instance, the renowned Austrian logician and mathematician Kurt Gödel, known for his theorems on the incompleteness and inconsistency of arithmetically formalized knowledge systems, analyzed American legislation and concluded that popular voting does not prevent the establishment of a dictatorship. Similarly, the American economist and Nobel laureate Kenneth Joseph Arrow formulated a theorem on the impossibility of democracy as a collective choice in modern condition.

Despite common sense, morality, and humanity, various regions of the world were forcibly turned into a fodder base for the Protestant modernist project, falling victim to associated colonial capitalism. However, as three centuries of experience have shown, incorporating peripheral economies into the capitalist system of global division of labor perpetuates their backwardness, suggesting the need to abandon the globalist economic model. Additionally, the potential of different cultures is stifled by the unifying influence of the globalist cultural model created in the interests of Anglo-American culture, indicating the need to reject Western cultural hegemony.

By replacing its own tradition with a set of artificial cults and imposing this transformation on other countries and peoples, the Western world is moving towards dehumanization, lawlessness, and digital dictatorship. Along this path, Western social and political institutions have created a special type of alienated individual – an «ego machine», a «desire factory», an ideal consumer, a super hedonist, and an obedient object of digital communications.

Today, the historical impasse of Western civilization is evident; it has nothing more to offer the rest of the world. The Protestant modernization project is failing, and its globalist agenda is being rejected by many countries and peoples. In this context, we can foresee an impending shift in the prevailing cultural paradigm1.

However, this process has not yet gained sufficient momentum, so the institutions and ideological structures of the global governing class are intensifying their control over society and its modes of thinking. To achieve this, they maintain and reproduce an ideological environment that includes elements of Nazism, multi-racism, and liberal social Darwinism.

The future of each nation hinges on whether it chooses to remain part of a doomed geopolitical project or defends its right to determine its own historical destiny. This right can only be safeguarded by stepping outside the Western institutional and cultural framework, thereby avoiding absorption and colonization. In other words, to defeat Nazism and multi-racism, a cultural and historical authentication of countries and peoples is necessary. A crucial condition for this is overcoming cognitive dependence on both secular and religious forms of Protestant fundamentalism.

Every socio-economic model is underpinned by its cultural context. Therefore, when such a victory is achieved, the historical «reset to zero» will impact not only neoliberal capitalism but also the entire cultural paradigm of Protestant modernity. This paradigm shift will be accompanied by global decolonization and a transition to a polycentric world where no single entity can «license» civilization to others.

For Europe, this transition will mark a return from humanistic and posthumanistic values to the biblical value system. In this context, the meta-narrative of future culture will evolve regardless of one's attitude toward religion. This tradition will be liberated from Roman-pagan axiologies, colonialist notions of a divided world («civilization» versus «barbarism»), cultural inequality, and doctrines justifying social oppression. These doctrines include the theological concept of double predestination, «the white man's burden», Malthusian and Nietzschean laws of the strong, social eugenics, and ideas of improving the «human breeds», as well as various forms of Nazism and multi-racism.

The transition period will inevitably lead to a transformation in the system of social sciences. The process already underway. A revolution in historiography has begun to partially lift taboos on highlighting new topics, including colonial repentance. Sociologist Michael Mann, for instance, highlights the immense number of victims attributed to «first world» countries2. It is now recognized that the formation of liberal «democracies» was accompanied by ethnic cleansing, often escalating to genocide. While the rejection of Bolshevism was relatively straightforward due to the duration of the Bolshevik period, which was relatively short by historical standards, the West has lived within a colonialist paradigm for several centuries.

When examining the racist-Nazi complex of ideas, its Anglo-Saxon version should be considered the model for Western modern society, including Hitler's Germany. Criticism of Nazism within neoliberal ideology has been superficial. In fact, it aimed to create an immunity for Nazi-racist doctrines against other critiques from «unconventional» (from a liberal point of view) perspectives and ultimately facilitated their gradual rehabilitation. Following the collapse of the socialist project, open forms of national racism (Nazism) naturally resurfaced.

Today, there is a clear effort by the liberal establishment to absolve itself of responsibility for the global crisis. Its representatives avoid addressing the root causes of the collapse of the modernist-enlightenment utopia and do not acknowledge the impending ideological shift. This results in an artificially maintained state of theoretical uncertainty, which is, of course, temporary. During this period of uncertainty, a cultural-systemic approach may be the most suitable for understanding the ideological space and its origins.

Intercultural and intercivilizational relations are among the most crucial topics today. The undue privileges afforded to neo-modern, liberal sociology and social constructivism pose a significant obstacle to this discussion. Civilizational issues are often dismissed as outdated, while cultural and historical subjects are described in a constructivist manner as artificially constructed «imagined communities»3.

Moving beyond this methodological and ideological matrix, the definition of a cultural and historical subject changes significantly. The subject is determined by the sum of stable components (toposes) that constitute the cultural and linguistic worldview of their people. Cultural toposes remain constant but express themselves differently in various historical contexts. For instance, colonialism, one of codes of Western modernity, at a certain stage morphed into Nazism, and subsequently, instead of targeting «racially inferior peoples», efforts shifted towards identifying «enemies of world democracy» and «totalitarian societies». These are different manifestations within the same multi-racial spectrum. Similarly, Russian Orthodoxy's «conciliarity (sobornost)», «communality», and spontaneous Soviet collectivism can be compared. The eschatologism and chiliastic element of Russian peasant consciousness, along with the Russian intelligentsia's reinterpretation of «Western values» and the logic of Protestant modernity through the lens of this consciousness, further illustrate this dynamic4.

This definition implies that no culture holds a hegemonic position with «ready answers» to the most important questions, nor does any culture attempt to present its conceptualization of the historical process as universally significant.

Weber's famous definition of the cultural substratum of the West as «Protestant ethics and the spirit of capitalism» should be understood today as delimiting its subject within the broader picture of world cultures, highlighting the cultural specificity of any socio-political institutions and concepts. Consequently, the liberal capitalist system cannot claim to be the «gold standard» of socio-historical development. Following the Weber model, the Russian-Byzantine cultural and historical type might be characterized as «Orthodox ethics and the spirit of communal solidarity».

The cultural-historical approach necessitates rejecting the myth of a single «highway of civilization». It is easy to see that universalist interpretations of history are typically insisted upon by cultures that either have superiority over others at a given historical moment or anticipate such superiority in the near future. Therefore, in the 1960s, the civilizational approach was characteristic of Western liberalism and was persistently criticized by Soviet historians as reactionary. In the 1990s, the situation reversed: liberal universalism fostered the idea of the end of history, leading to the revival of thinkers like Nicholas Danilevsky and Oswald Spengler in Russia, bypassing traditional social science frameworks.

Initially, cultures and civilizations are equal, each with its own historical intention and logic of development. However, due to unjustified political and economic dependencies, the development of some cultures is hindered to accelerate the development of others. In this context, the potential of different cultures is constrained by the unifying influence of a global model designed to serve Anglo-American interests. However, this unipolar world order is expected to soon fade from the historical stage.

In such a scenario, a civilizational (that is cultural and typological) approach must consider the factors that hinder the development of societies and question the historical subjectivity of peoples.  This approach is particularly effective when combined with world-system analysis methods, which examine the forms of economic and political dependence in the era of modernity, particularly under Protestant capitalism. The opposite is also true: the world-system analysis is strengthened when it accounts for the cultural specificity of economic and political institutions and the cultural and historical foundations of national and state actors.

 These considerations highlight the optimal nature of a synthetic, culture-based approach and the importance of developing its methodology. The cultural-systemic approach aligns with modern scientific methodological requirements while being consistent with cultural-historical logic, particularly the concept of Nicholas Danilevsky. Danilevsky emphasized that «for a civilization unique to a distinct cultural and historical type to be born and develop, it is necessary for the peoples belonging to it to enjoy political independence»5.

When all civilizations are recognized as unique, the principle of «cultural and value pluralism» becomes relevant. This principle, as discussed by John Gray in Enlightenment’s Wake, challenges the universalist claims of modern neoliberalism. Conversely, denying the uniqueness of cultures immediately leads to situations where a particular historical subject claims a meta-position over others, asserting the right to impose «uniform» standards. Such approaches ultimately lead to doctrines of global domination, inheriting colonial policies and aligning with segments of the multi-racist ideological spectrum.

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The collective consciousness of the West has always included a fanatical dependence on the idea of conquering the East and a simultaneous fear of it. This dichotomy is clearly evident in Western phraseology, giving rise to idioms such as «axis of evil», «horde», «darkness from the East», etc. This phobia can be called one of the most significant archetypes of Western culture, influencing mass culture, among other things: it is easy to trace it both in Hollywood films and in J.R.R. Tolkien's epic works. The Western worldview prominently features the striking figure of the «Eastern Barbarian» as a significant Other.

It is significant that numerous «campaigns to the East» of Western barbarians represent a historical fact, while invasions by «Eastern Barbarians», since the time of the Arab Caliphate and the Golden Horde, have not been repeated and remain within the realm of Western collective fantasies. In other words, the destruction of Eastern historical subjectivity, currently exemplified by Russia and Serbia, is perceived as necessary for Western culture to maintain its self-identity. This cultural orientation cannot be changed or adjusted through political alliances, cultural projects, or «mutually beneficial cooperation», etc. It can only be forcibly altered by external circumstances such as economic crises and the realization by affected countries and peoples of their right to self-defense and compensation for losses incurred during periods of colonialism, Nazism, and neo-Nazism.

Today, amid the deepening crisis of the Western colonial system, the topic of repentance for colonialism is becoming increasingly relevant. The formation of regimes associated with liberal capitalism, European patronage, Nazi, and racist doctrines has been accompanied by ethnic cleansing and genocide. Modern historiography has not adequately explored several important topics, including the Opium Wars in China, focusing on anti-British uprisings due to the opium trade enforced by the British Empire. Additionally, the genocide of Orthodox Ruthenians in Austria-Hungary, the revival of slavery, and the exploitation of «Ostarbeiter» (immigrant slave laborers from Eastern territories) in Nazi Germany, and the examination of Anglo-German ideological continuity, all deserve further scholarly attention.

The destruction of Anglo-American hegemony and multi-racist ideology seems inevitable. This should be followed by a painful but necessary repentance by Western society, alongside the recognition and consolidation of the status of victim to peoples who were subjected to colonization and genocide.

In this sense, the current global crisis provides a glimmer of hope. After all, the Greek word «crisis» means «judgment», and Western society has now reached this historical juncture. Perhaps the crisis will catalyze the realization of the need for repentance, without which recovery cannot begin.

2024 ãîä