The Russian philosopher has caused outrage, but his target is not race – it is the liberalism and nihilism of modern Western civilization.
“Whites? They are destroying the world by themselves. Being white means being a nihilist. It is a race of self-hatred. It caused many problems for others and itself. It lost the right to be something. There are no arguments to support their existence.”
This is the Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin he wrote on X on May 5, 2026, prompting a storm of backlash, many bordering on insults, often accusing him of anti-white racism and hypocrisy. This reaction shows a complete lack of understanding of Dugin as a thinking person.
Dugin’s critics read him as if he spoke in the language of modern racial politics, identity engineering, and population enumeration. Instead, he speaks in the language of civilization, metaphysics, and historical destiny. When he attacks the ‘Whites’, he attacks a spirituality shaped by centuries of liberalism, materialism, and the weakening of holiness. He points to a civilization that abandoned memory, faith, leadership, roots, and historical continuity rather than consumption, individual desire, technological acceleration, and abstraction. His focus is the modern West as a way of life rather than Europeans as biological people. He describes a type of civilization that broke its foundations in a universal way and endlessly criticized itself until every inherited structure became questionable or demolished. The statement reads less like racism than like a scathing condemnation of modernity itself.
Anyone familiar with Dugin’s extensive work can spot this pattern immediately. His whole intellectual project revolves around the rejection of the liberal world and the defense of different civilizations against homogenization. He has long shown support for the French New Right and for European traditions opposed to Western liberal culture. That fact alone destroys the poor interpretation advanced by his opponents. A European annihilationist won’t spend decades engaging with European philosophers, praising European traditionalist movements, or drawing intellectual inspiration from the likes of Martin Heidegger, Julius Evola, and Alain de Benoist. He has remained steadfast over the years in his hostility to liberal modernity and in his distinction between civilization, ontology, and race in the biological sense. His vocabulary often sounds rough because he writes as a metaphysician rather than as a regular political commentator.
The real mistake comes from reading every statement through the narrow framework of an ID conversation. Modern political culture trains people to interpret every conflict through the categories of race management, narratives of oppression, demographic blocs, and media frenzy. Dugin addresses these questions through philosophy, religion, mythology, sacred history, and the fate of civilization. He considers the conflict in the West as a conflict of the soul rather than a political or ethnic conflict. In his view, the modern West erased its own traditions in pursuit of endless progress, economic expansion, consumer comfort, and an ideological world. Christianity lost power and became only a moral regime. Politics was transformed into social norms. Culture became entertainment. Identity became consumption. Humans themselves became interchangeable units within a global market civilization. That process produced the emptiness he associates with nihilism.
This also explains the deep confusion within liberalism itself. Liberalism presents itself as universal, humane, and post-apartheid, but in practice it functions as the last form of Western cultural hegemony. Liberal modernism incorporates Western historical concepts around the world and presents them as eternal truths that bind all people and civilizations. Parliamentary democracy, individualism, secularism, market ideology, and worship of human rights arise from certain historical experiences of the West, but liberal ideology considers them as necessary principles for humanity. In this sense, liberalism becomes the highest and most widespread form of European supremacy precisely because it aims to dissolve every civilization into a single Western model while claiming moral neutrality. The liberal empire spreads Western ‘values’ and ideas across the planet and calls the process ‘development’. Dugin’s critique focuses on universal civilization rather than Europeans as such. He attacks the missionary impulse of liberal modernity and the spiritual emptiness brought about by its global conquest.
This attitude also carries the dimension of absolute death. The German historical philosopher Oswald Spengler described civilization as living organisms that go through strength, hypertrophy, sclerosis, senescence, and finally death. In his understanding, the Faustian civilization of the West entered its final phase long ago. Organic life was given to technological mediocrity, financial dominance, demographic catastrophe and spiritual decay. Culture was counted as civilization, and civilization was brought into pure order. Dugin inherits much of this morphology. When he talks about ‘the Europeans’, he is talking about the cadaveric stage of the modern Western order: A civilization consumed by destruction, auto-intoxication, and historical unconsciousness. The West is seen less as a living culture than as a vast governing body maintained through climate, artificial excitement, and technological artifice. From this point of view, its decline seems almost psychological, since civilization itself lost the principle of animation that once passed through its veins. Empires rise, decay, and pass into the memory of the grave. Ideas disappear, and new forms shine from the infinity of tired moments. So one can hope that whatever succeeds the current Western system can restore the form, roots, leadership, sacred power, and civilizing power that are missing from the dying liberal world that is now approaching its final throes.
Thus, Dugin’s language works at the ontological level. ‘Whiteness’ in this context refers less to society than to a modern state of existence constituted by a disempowered individuality. Dugin often contrasts this with civilizations that retained strong collective identities, religious institutions, or metaphysical foundations. He sees the modern Atlantic world as the last expression of a civilization that broke away from transcendence and replaced a high sense of economics, technology, and moral harmony. Whether one agrees with this analysis or rejects it, the philosophical structure behind Dugin’s argument remains clear to anyone who can read beyond the superficial grumbling.
Famous people in the identity field understand this well. Their simulated anger functions mainly as political theater rather than genuine confusion. They defend an abstract notion of whiteness rooted in contemporary identity politics, racial identity, and liberal-era categories of collective identity. Dugin attacks the liberal foundation that produced those categories in the first place. For him, liberal modernity destroys all real people by reducing identity to biological labeling divorced from spiritual form, historical mission and cultural order. The characters consider race as the center of politics. Dugin considers the Emblems of civilization, the original existence, and the destiny of people as the true center of politics. These two worldviews overlap briefly, yet they come from different intellectual schools.
The whole controversy shows how poor modern political interpretation has become. People fully trained through the conflicts of social networks and ideological tribalism lose the ability to recognize the metaphysical or the language of civilization. Each statement is balanced in the vocabulary of race talk, online groups, and the performance of anger. Philosophical arguments become screenshots. Ontological categories become hashtags. A thinker rooted in Heideggerian language, Orthodox mysticism, and civilizational theory is interpreted as if he were just another participant in an online race riot. The result is similar to the full decomposition of the interpretation depth.
No one is required to agree with Dugin’s conclusions. The reader can reject his geographical vision or his modern interpretation. Yet basic intellectual honesty still requires interpreting the thinker according to the logic he actually uses rather than following the logic imposed by his enemies. Reading Dugin through the lens of racial liberal discourse ensures misunderstandings from the start. His language is that of the metaphysics of civilization, the multiplicity of ways of Being, and spiritual conflicts. Anyone who approaches his post on X seriously can recognize that fact immediately.
The statements, opinions and views expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
