In what sense may George Soros and Alexander Dugin be defined as two sides of a single coin?
In 1945 the Austrian philosopher of science Karl Popper (1902-1994) published a ponderous work in two volumes entitled The Open Society and Its Enemies (Routledge, London, 1945). In this work, Popper maintained that the totalitarian ideologies like communism and Nazism have a common element: claiming to possess absolute truth. The Austrian philosopher contrasted totalitarian societies with a model of social democratic organization that he called an “open society” because it is opposed to any cultural or moral “frontier.” Popper wrote this work in New Zealand, where he had emigrated after the rise of Nazism due to his Jewish origins. Subsequently, the philosopher moved to England, where he taught at the prestigious London School of Economics and obtained British citizenship.
In 1947, George Soros, born in Budapest in 1930 to a secularized bourgeois family, left Hungary for London, where two years later he began studies at the London School of Economics. It was then that, as he himself has many times related, he was marked for life by the theses of the “open society” of his professor Karl Popper. In 1956 he moved to the United States where he married and obtained American citizenship. At the beginning of the 1970s he created the Soros Fund Management, and then the Quantum Fund, through which investors could bet on exchanges on currencies and interest rates from all over the world. Soros’ investment funds were incredibly successful, reaching one billion dollars in 1985. Thanks to the Quantum Fund, in 1992 Soros launched speculative attacks against the British pound and the Italian lire, destabilizing international markets. In 2015, Forbes Magazine listed him at the 19th richest person in the world, with a personal worth estimated at over 25 billion dollars.
Soros, who today is over ninety years old, was not only an unscrupulous international speculator, but he also invested a great part of his personal wealth towards realizing the “open society.” In order to implement this project, he created a network of organizations called the Open Society Foundation, by means of which he financed leftist parties all over the world, mass immigration, the legalization of drugs, abortion and euthanasia, radical ecological propaganda and gender theory. Pierre-Antoine Plaquevent defines Soros’ activity as a work of “social engineering” that aims to deeply transform contemporary society, a “globalist mystical body” that seeks to extend itself to the entire planet (Soros e la società aperta. Metapolitica del globalismo, Passaggio al Bosco, 2020, p. 138).
In the aftermath of the coronavirus pandemic, however, the utopia of George Soros’ “open society” has suffered a severe blow. Among the authors who have understood how the pandemic marked the crisis of globalism, the Russian political scientist Alexander Dugin stands out, who presents himself today as a “prophet of closed societies” as opposed to George Soros, the “prophet of an open society.”
In his analysis of the “post-global order,” Dugin affirms that, as a result of the pandemic, “Globalization collapses definitively, rapidly and irrevocably,” because “the epidemic has annihilated all of the major axioms: the openness of borders, the solidarity of societies, the effectiveness of existing economic institutions and the competence of ruling elites. Globalization has fallen ideologically (liberalism), economically (global networks) and politically (leadership of Western elites).” Dugin continues: “The open society will become a closed society. Sovereignty will become the highest and absolute value.”
Aleksandr Gelyevich Dugin was born in Moscow in 1962, the son of a Soviet secret service officer. In the 1980s, like other descendants of the communist nomenclature, he joined the Yuzhinsky circle which gathered around Yuri Mamleev (1931-2015) in an apartment located on Yuzhinsky Avenue in the center of Moscow. It was there that Dugin came under the influence of the occultist Evgenij Golovin (1938-2010), who introduced him to Western gnostic authors like René Guénon (1886-1951) and Julius Evola (1898-1974). Golovin and Dugin often became inebriated while singing the praises of Nazism (James D. Heiser, The American Empire Should Be Destroyed, Repristination Press, 2014, pp. 40-41), and “Dugin found himself in an environment where Satan, seances, ouija boards, drugs, sex, alcohol, role-playing games and fascism mixed together in an intoxicating cocktail” (Gary Lachman, La stella nera, Edizioni Tlon, 2019, p. 248).
After the fall of the USSR, Dugin collaborated with Gennadiy Zjuganov on the political program of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, and in 1993 he founded the National Bolshevik Party together with Edward Limonov (1943-2020), who joined his bisexuality to an equally bipolar admiration for communism and nazism. Dugin designed the movement’s flag: a black hammer and sickle inside a white circle on a red background. The Russian scientist underwent further influences in his intellectual evolution, from Lev Nikolaevič Gumilëv (1912-1992), from whom he drew the idea of “Eurasia,” to Alain de Benoist, the founder of the neo-pagan Nouvelle Droite. His principal point of reference, however, remains Evola, who is for Dugin what Popper was for Soros: the undisputed master. “Even more, he was the archetypal man who lived in his personal destiny the fate of Tradition in the midst of eschatological darkness. His legacy is more than precious. [...] He testified to the quality of the current reality, and heroically demonstrated the orientation that lesds to what lies beyond. His message is necessary for Europe” (https://www.centrostudilaruna.it/evoladugin.html).
Dugin’s theory of the “Radical Subject” faithfully follows Evola’s “Differentiated Man” – a man who, according to an ancient Chinese proverb, “rides the tiger” and by means of the experience of nihilism divinizes himself. For Dugin, as for Evola, it is only in anarchy that “the darkness gradually clears up and from the abyss of necessity that terrible flower of the absolute individual arises” (J. Evola, Teoria dell’individuo assoluto, Bocca, 1927, pp. 302-304).
Dugin’s principal work is The Fourth Political Theory (Arktos Media Ltd., 2012). In it he affirms that “we must strongly repudiate both anti-communism and anti-fascism” (p. 293). In contrast with Soros, who wants to transform the world into an “open society,” Dugin proposes a “post-modern” alliance of the “enemies of open society” – communists, fascists, and traditionalists. The American tycoon and the Russian political scientist both dream of an empire: that of Soros is rooted in the democracies of the West, while that of Dugin is rooted in the Mongol hordes of the steppes, under the patronage of Russia and China. For both, the road to carrying out these plans passes through planetary chaos.
Pierre-Antoine Plaquevent explains to us that Soros, after introducing the notion of imbalance into finance, wanted to apply this theory to society by means of a “sociology of chaos” which opposes not only “closed society” but also every form of social stability (op. cit., pp. 76-88). Dugin presents himself in turn as the anti-Soros, but he shares in common with him the radical denial of an absolute order of principles. Gary Lachman dwells at length on Dugin’s “politics of chaos” (pp. 271-305), recalling how the cover of his book The Foundations of Geopolitics (1997) shows the “star of Chaos,” an eight-point symbol used by Satanists and occultists. “We must learn to think with the chaos and within the chaos,” Dugin peremptorily affirms (La quarta teoria politica, p. 238), which negates what Soros affirms but within the same relativisitic and nihilistic horizon. Both present themselves as prophets of postmodern chaos and oppose the Catholic Church because it is the depository of the divine and natural law which they reject. For this reason, Soros and Dugin appear as two sides of the same coin, and thus we oppose the lies they propose with the one Truth of He who has given His Light to the darkness and His Order to chaos (Genesis 1:4-5).
