The Eurasian Road to American Panarchy and the Agorist Path to Cold War Salvation

“Morally, it is wrong to suppose the source of evil is outside oneself, that one is a vessel of holiness running over with virtue. Such a disposition is the best soil for a hateful and cruel fanaticism.”

-Nikolai Berdyaev, The End of Our Time

It could have been a beautiful nightmare. The most terrifyingly colossal empire in human history done in not by another rival empire but by another rival century. After the long bloody American Century, a century defined by world wars, cold wars, forever wars, and the constant looming threat of nuclear war and after centuries of unipolar white Anglo-Saxon global supremacy, the Eurasian Century was going to be different. A multipolar order of the yellow people we raped in the South and their pale-faced cousins who we’ve long manipulated into submission in the West. An unlikely partnership of the formerly colonized and former colonizers that remained too diverse to form a singular empire but too vital for the current empire to suppress indefinitely, no matter how many stupid fucking color wars and humanitarian interventions they chucked at it.

The combination of East Asia’s booming vibrant young population and Germany’s access to the levers of institutionalized power was at once too obvious for America to prevent and too lethal for America to survive. NATO would have to collapse, the dollar would have to crash, and Atlantic primacy would suffer a fate worse than death. It would simply cease to be relevant on the world stage and the illusions of its omnipotence would shatter both at home and abroad. Riots would rage, Wall Street would burn, neocons would eat their pearl-handled pistols, and Americans would be forced to deal with the commercial emptiness that dominates our shallow existence and the newly castrated mandarins who made it all possible. Babylon would finally crumble into anarchy, and it would have been bloody fantastic. It could have been a beautiful nightmare, but Vladimir Putin had to go and fuck it all up.

That pig-headed czarist pretender gave the American Century everything it needed for a stay of execution by walking directly into an obvious NATO trap in Ukraine. By launching a great big American style invasion of a darling Western quisling with all the carpet bombing, massacres, and war crimes that come with it, Putin has essentially financed an enormous flaming infomercial for the continued necessity of Atlantic supremacy in the face of evil Eurasian barbarians like him, and NATO colonized Europe is fucking buying it. Doubling down on the crumbling imperial institutions that have kept them from fully realizing their true economic potential for decades of globalist austerity. Meanwhile, the Military Industrial Complex is flush with blood money, selling death to Ukraine faster than the bodies can drop and NATO troop levels have exploded ten-fold from 4,000 to 40,000 and growing in just months as Europe has once again become a three-ring-circus of apocalyptic cold war hysteria and the mind-numbing jingoism and casual racism that that brand of madness invites through the front door like a vampire.

Oh, it won’t last. In fact, it’s already showing signs of cracking. In many ways, this mess has brought Russia and China closer together than they’ve been since Stalin croaked and together, they are more than self-sufficient enough to weather the storm and give the West holy hell for bringing it. But divorced from the European end of the World Island, they are only strong enough to compete with the Atlantic Empire and not strong enough to eclipse it peacefully. This leaves us in a ditch with another goddamn cold war and this leaves those sharply dressed savages on Wall Street and Downing Street with just enough time to blow up the world with another sick game of thermo-nuclear chicken on Russia’s borders. And you better believe that those motherfuckers won’t hesitate to hit that big red button any more than Putin will.

That’s because the Western elites sense their power waning, and that narcotic level of power makes even the most intelligent people crazy enough to do unspeakably stupid things to hold on to it for just one more fix. All Russia had to do was wait it out and call their war junkie bluff. Ukraine was never going to become anything more than a glorified NATO arms depot and Germany’s impatience with the entire fiasco was becoming thick enough to cut with a halberd. Zelensky’s numbers were in the shitter and the entire Western-backed plutocracy in Kyiv was set to collapse like a deck of cards at any minute. But never underestimate the ability for a state to fuck up a sure thing.

Vladimir Putin is usually a pretty sharp monster. He saw the endless possibilities that a Eurasian Century had to offer and got on board early with revolutionary conglomerations like BRICS and the Eurasian Economic Union, but that cocky strongman and his entourage of Kremlin ghouls began counting their chickens before they hatched. They became greedy and convinced that Eurasia was a one-way ticket to a new Russian Empire. Thus, we end up with the ideological perversion known as Neo-Eurasianism. Developed by an enigmatic and influential neo-fascist gadfly named Alexander Dugin, Neo-Eurasianism swipes its name from Eurasianism, a political movement that came out of the post-Bolshevik Russian exile community which suggested that Russian civilization was neither European nor Asian, but rather something totally unique and thus destined to greatness should it embrace its natural place in the world.

But Dugin’s comprehension of this ideology ends here. The original Eurasian Movement was an early experiment in post-colonialism that rejected Western universalism in favor of a world united by diversity. They also boldly rejected the Czarist elite for its fetishization of Romano-Germanic culture which led to its reckless romance with imperialism. Much like Yukio Mishima and Oswald Spengler, the original Eurasianists were conservative revolutionaries who astutely saw imperialism as a perversion alien to their national culture that would only invite the ravages of what we now understand as globalism.

Contrary to their ideological namesake, Neo-Eurasianists like Alexander Dugin take the cliff notes on Eurasianism and use them to repackage Czarist imperialism as some kind of vaccine for Western primacy rather than a mirror image of it. Dugin’s ideas aren’t just immoral, they’re just plain goddamn stupid. Behind all his talk of multipolarity and anti-colonialist collaboration, Dugin is really just another run-of-the-mill Sinophobe who seems to foolishly believe that a Berlin-Moscow axis will somehow allow Russia to dominate their neighbors to the south. This hubris becomes downright hysterical when you look at the actual fucking numbers. While Eurasia’s combined GDP accounts for 55% of the world’s wealth, dwarfing America’s 25%, Russia only makes up just over 3% of this while China makes 16% and Asia alone makes a whopping 39%. Similarly, Eurasia now accounts for 60% of the global population but Russia makes up only 1.87%, about 3% less than the US.

Nothing but racism could make a sane man moronic enough to believe that Russia could ever dominate any Eurasian Century. The original Eurasianists grasped this and saw Russia’s role as a rich cultural land bridge between civilizations as its greatest hope to preserve its indigenous character. Ironically, Russia’s place in a new Eurasian order would likely have to be similar to what Putin rightfully advocates for its cousins in Ukraine but fails miserably to embrace himself, that of a neutral confederation akin to a giant Slavic Switzerland. The only road back to the Czarist debauchery that Dugin glorifies is paved in blood by the only thing that still makes Russia a world power, its colossal Soviet era war machine, but as we’ve seen in Ukraine, that machine is a rusted reck of its former glory and totally impotent in the face of a people united against being stepped on. The Cossacks of the Wild Steppes would remind the Czars of this every so often and put them back in their place with a lively peasant ass whooping. But this is another history lesson that Putin and Dugin decided to skip.

I’ve always found the relationship between these two giants of modern Russian nationalism to be quite curious. While Alexander Dugin sells himself across a veritable media empire as a champion of radical Orthodox traditionalism, Vladimir Putin has always been little more than another neoliberal gangster in ethnic nationalist clothing. I’ve always seen their tenuous bond as one of symbiotic convenience. Alexander Dugin gives Putin the right-wing street cred he desperately needs to shake the peasants off the trail of his humiliating past as the universally despised Boris Yeltsin’s dauphin. And Vladimir Putin provides Dugin with the decidedly modern media infrastructure necessary to pimp his pose as an anti-modern rock star to the masses.

But this doesn’t mean that Dugin’s influence is totally synthetic. Even if Putin isn’t a true believer, many of the generals in his inner circle are and I believe that it is this brand of imperial thinking masquerading as anti-Western resistance that has blinded Russia into believing that a dawning Eurasian Century bestows upon them the messianic superpowers necessary to crush NATO terrorists by behaving exactly like NATO terrorists. And it is this very delusional venality that puts the entire Eurasian project at risk of becoming just another cold war pissing match.

I know what you’re thinking, why the fuck should I care, right? What use could a Queer post-left anarchist like Nicky Reid have for an alliance between states that are no less corrupt than any other? Well, a strategic one of course, dearest motherfuckers. My ultimate goal may be a stateless society, but this begins with a decentralized planet and as I’ve pointed out above, a successful Eurasian Century would only be possible by decentralizing world order into multiple spheres of influence far smaller than that currently governed by the Anglo-American Century.

It would also create a massive blind spot in the suddenly irrelevant Western Hemisphere which would provide the perfect opportunity for my pet project of Panarchy, the creation of thousands of diverse stateless tribal societies governed by nothing but voluntary contracts between individuals and communities. In here is where my tribe of gender outlaws and sexual mavericks can thrive free from the chains of government tyranny and corporate assimilation and it’s my belief that this massive orgy of post-Western organized disorder could easily spread like VD across the seas to Eurasia as well. But none of this will ever happen if statist fanatics like Putin are allowed to clog the pipes of history long enough for creeps like Biden and Boris to blow it all up with a NATO cherry bomb.

The only solution to this statist Neo-Eurasian fuck up is naturally a stateless one. A tactical ideology is known as Agorism which embraces the counter-economics of the black market to create a truly voluntary economy. Anarchists of all stripes need to commit themselves to creating a new decentralized Silk Road to bridge the gap between East and West created by this satanic new cold war. We already have the weapons at our disposal on the Dark Web. As we speak, radically decentralized cryptocurrency exchanges are helping everyday Russians to evade both the collective punishment of international sanctions and the tyrannical governments that inspired them. Meanwhile, entire subcultures like the Shanzai movement have evolved out of China’s own black market, built on small contractors creating blatant rip-offs of Western brands that outcompete the originals. This is the new nightmare, dearest motherfuckers, to create a market too decentralized for any century to own it and the sheer size of East Asia’s exploding economy could make this market absolutely fucking lethal.

The Eurasian Century can still provide sick fucks like you and me with the playground necessary to make all our Panarchist nightmares a reality, but only if we can outsource lethal weapons like Agorism to help Eurasia weather the likes of Putin and NATO until they’re rendered irrelevant. The East could use a hand to help them destroy the West, including its malignant influence via pseudo-Eurasian hucksters like Alexander Dugin. I say we give it to them. What do you say, dearest motherfuckers? It could still be a beautiful nightmare.

Nicky Reid is an agoraphobic anarcho-genderqueer gonzo blogger from Central Pennsylvania and assistant editor for Attack the System. You can find her online at Exile in Happy Valley.