I don't know that she downplayed the significance of the video, but rather wants to get more information. Whatever likely has an instinct and she is following it before coming to any conclusions, which is why she does amazing investigations. I don't know that Dugin has a desire for the west, but I do know that he doesn't like what he is seeing in the west.
I'm certainly not promoting Dugin and have said from the outset (even before seeing the video of him honouring Crowley) that I would be wary of him because he appeared to promote East/West divisions. Divisiveness based on ethnicity or location is anti-Christian.
I have never really considered the implications of it myself. At a first glance it strikes me as an inversion of the truth. The truth being 'I am [because I have been created by the One who is Existence itself, ipsum esse subsistens], therefore I exist'. And we know whose tactic inversion belongs to. But I don't understand why it necessarily led to the separation of the concepts of the body and the soul? That is probably ignorance on my part. It does seem to be a modernist rebellious act which tries to put man in the place of The Creator. The inception of relativism? My suspicion is that it was Descartes' empirical materialism which led to a complete emphasis on the body and the atrophy of the concept of the soul? Although it is probably not worth my going down a rabbit hole trying to figure it out.
If you get time to read the two articles linked in my response to Pax Prima you will see that Dugin is very anti-Western and extremely anti-American, which explained for me the reasons for the hit job on his reputation. If he were pro-Western, that Crowley video would have disappeared from the web. The first mention I ever heard of him was when an American pro-lifer whom I admire described Dugin as almost the devil incarnate. I believed him and I think that I actually posted about it on this forum. Now, seeing the genocide in Gaza, I look twice or three times at anything related to the current conflicts. A video of Dugin criticising woke culture popped up in my YouTube feed recently and I watched it and another video of a debate. That's all I knew about him. If that's what amounts to promoting the demonic, maybe we should hang on every word from CNN and the Telegraph.
Your post alludes to the fact that the video is old and that you couldn’t find any recent information on the subject. It also mentions that Western media has no issue promoting Crowley, as if this would have any influence on how a Catholic might form their own opinion about him.
attacks for being anti-Western is one thing; Criticizing Dugin because he is radically different from what is expected as a true opposition to the Western bloc and woke culture is something totally different.
Will you ever get a grip of yourself. This will be my final reply to your petty minded nonsense. I explained to Pax Prima that being a Crowley devotee wouldn't have been sufficient to make Dugin a villain in the opinion of intelligence agencies and pointed out that Crowley himself had been widely reported to have been an MI6 agent, therefore, there must have been some other reason for their apparent hatred of him. Then I posted links to an article from two associate professors at Western universities giving details of Dugin's antipathy towards the West, one of which provided examples for his plan for a revival of Russia's power by means of an alliance with non-Western countries. I think the countries mentioned were India Iran and China but I'm not going to read the article again just to mollify your childishness. If there were any more recent evidence of a link between Dugin and Crowley it would have been plastered all over the internet. I could find none which suggests to me that most likely it would take someone with a file (the kind of file an intelligence would keep) on Dugin to have found a 30 year old video. Nowhere did I suggest that someone with links to Crowley should be employed by any government agency and only someone with a petty, vindictive mind would even imagine such a thing from reading what I posted on this thread, but I'll surely bear in mind your concerns should the CIA or MI6 ever seek my advice on personnel policy. Now, Luan, this is not the first time you have had to admit that you misrepresented what I posted. I sincerely hope it will be the last time.
"But when the unstoppable intellectual force that is Alexander Dugin meets the immovable object of American power, or indeed indifference, the debate ends there. The third millennium looks set to be an American millennium, and for all the reasons Dugin so eloquently lays bare. Much to Dugin’s regret." I read the two articles you posted, thank you for posting them. I quoted the above because it summarizes how I feel about Dugin somewhat. While he has some influence I believe it is very limited. I am much more educated on the man and understand where some subtle cultural nuances are coming from now. While his theories are interesting and in-depth regarding history, ideologies and governance he also seems very confused. He seems to have created his own world view with it's own paradigm. I read one part of the second article where he supposedly felt that if the aristocracy had been dedicated to an ideology instead of western thought, Russia would have been better off or something like this. I find it comical, because we often say similar things in the church. Something like "If everyone was a saint the world would be better off.". Of course, this sort of thing is human nature but I don't know if he acknowledged it. What I do find incredible is that he does seem to take his vision to something of a limited supernatural degree, which seems uncommon today. Believing in a kind of Russian spiritual destiny. He takes a lot of shots at the west for weak culture and materialism, but doesn't seem to criticise the failures of Russia/Soviet Union too much. He also kind of creates a duality between east and west, instead of just saying the leadership of the west is currently evil. He seems so close to figuring out Christianity but just can't quite let himself go there. Over complicating everything on the way. This is just my interpretation.
Yes, Western media has its own reasons to dislike Dugin, but as a Catholic, I have serious reasons to consider the video on Aleister Crowley relevant enough to be critical of his anti-Western views and to worry about what he ultimately wants for the West as a result of his militaristic rhetoric. My reasons are not the same as those of the Western media. I had already said that I don’t believe he is the most suitable person to speak on Western degeneration, and I reaffirm that.
No matter how bad the situation in Western society may be, creating a division between East and West is certainly not the solution. This approach could lead to serious confusion between the evils present in Western society and the church that exists within it, which, despite scandals and communist and Masonic infiltration, remains the path to salvation for humanity.
Not for those who know the basics about Fatima and her promise of restoration—not through Russian nationalism or false Eastern religions, but through devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, which in Russia is seen as a Western innovation.
I don't think Dugin is as influential as he is given credit for. Personally I won't be losing any sleep over him. He seems to have crafted a kind of lore of Russia IMO. Russia still has a lot of the western decadence and all sorts of normal conveniences the west has.
I had a look at his Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Dugin He's an out and out nutcase. He did dabble in the occult although I saw no mention of Crowley in the piece about his Satanism. He has been in and out of all sorts of groups. It looks like he's an attention seeker - the kind of forever rebel that turns people off once they get to know him. According to Wiki, he has positioned himself somewhere between paganism and Orthodoxy. I wouldn't want to bump into him on a dark night. From the reports emerging now about how Putin tried to move Russia closer to the West, his influence on Putin seems to have been exaggerated. The impression I get of Putin is that he's far too canny and careful to have Dugin for a friend or mentor. That's not to say that Putin wouldn't have chosen the path of forging alliances with the East after being rebuffed by the West, especially Merkel's revelations about agreements made in bad faith, giving Dugin grounds to claim credit for Putin's strategy.
I don't know if it was intended by Descartes, but the interpretation of the soul, to which his statement led many, is of a deus ex machina, something almost entirely different from the body and almost unconnected with it. You put it very well when you describe it as leading to 'a complete emphasis on the body and the atrophy of the concept of the soul'. This is exactly what has happened, with science becoming completely objectivist and with the subjective dismissed as irrelevant or even non-existent. Death is no longer recognised as the separation of the soul from the body, the soul being that which gives the body life, yet our genius scientists cannot define a physical reason or moment to describe the moment of death, or why it should be so or why it is so completely irreversible. As far as I can see, science itself is now pointing to this fundamental error, but the scientific establishment, which I would describe as that aspect of the scientific community that decides the official narrative that is fed to the general public, does not accept this or at least does not want us to know it. Werner Heisenberg, one of the handful of intellectual giants of the first half of the last century and the man responsible for the 'Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle', said in his book 'Physics and Philosophy' that consciousness (a scientific term for the soul) is essential and integral to the coming into reality of subatomic matter/energy from its state of potential being into actual being. This is what is known popularly as 'wave-function collapse', that moment when, for example, an electron ceases to be a probability and becomes part of actual reality. No physicist has yet succeeded in formulating an equation for the moment of wave-function collapse of even the simplest particle, although they have provided a huge amount of equations for all manner of other sub-atomic events. It's a real mystery, this coming into being. In fact, it can justifiably be said (and some brave scientists have suggested it) that physics itself is not real! It only describes a world in potentia. That electron that goes from probability into the moment of collapse of its wave-function, essentially that moment when it is measured by a scientific instrument? No physicist can tell you what becomes of the electron after that moment. All we know is that it somehow is involved in the coming into being of the objective reality around us. To further the mystery, that measuring instrument that noted the point of collapse of the wave function cannot itself be the source of knowledge of this mysterious event. As part of the physical world (if 'physical' bears any real truth!), that instrument has itself been changed and affected by the collapse event and knowledge of this would need to be measured by another instrument and it by another, for the same reason; all leading to a series of infinite regress, which could never come to a final conclusion of the original event. That property which authoritatively concluded that the wave-function of the electron had collapsed is none other than the consciousness (soul) of the human observer of the experiment. The next logical step to take from this is that matter cannot have being without soul. But the scientific community adamantly refuses even the remote possibility of swallowing this gnat. It is easier for them to simply pass the camel of denial of the existence of the soul, but reality cannot exist without this soul (or consciousness) according to science's greatest recent exponents. A great read on all of this high-falutin' stuff is in the work of the late, great Wolfgang Smith. Wolfgang died on the 19th of July of this year, may God have mercy on his soul. I think The Lord will be good to him, because Wolfgang was a devout and completely orthodox Catholic as well as a great scientist, mathematician and philosopher. In his career, he was involved in developing re-entry physics for NASA (that would have been back in the '60's) and, in addition to his many scientific books (hardly 'popular science, because few know about them), he wrote one based on interviews he conducted with Fr Malachi Martin.
As regards Dugin, I don't think he is very important in himself, Crowley or not. I think we can all agree that something has gone terribly wrong with the world's political ideology. This latter is something that cannot be excluded from the East, which has been very damaged by Marxism, a product of the Enlightenment. The world needs to return to the thought of Christendom, East and West. With the help of God, we can return to that mode of thought which existed before the calamitous events of the eleventh century and both Rome and Constantinople/Moscow can be reconciled. Essentially, a return to the Fathers of the Church (arguably, the modern Church is driving us back to them).
I wonder if a return to the pentarchy could be a possible solution for reunification with the Orthodox, finally accepting our dogmas. However, in a world with seven billion people, it may seem like an overly exclusive "club of five."
Paraphrased from a neat little intro to philosophy book read awhile back Descartes: "I think, therefore I am" Story told later ~ He was sitting in a cafe enjoying a cup of coffee. The barista approached him, and asked him would he like another cup. "I think not" was the reply, after which he immediately disappeared.
