“Speak of the devil”… but also speaking of real Americans and real war…

Russell Bonner Bentley, better known in his higher self as “Texas” or “The Donbass Cowboy”, — indeed “The”, because there is no other — has gone to heaven. He did something fundamentally, truly transcendent and transformed his whole being: He, an American with no knowledge about the outside world, with only the slightest reference points and the furthest-fetched intuitions, escaped from prison (both literally and figuratively) and went to fight in and for what was right: Donbass, the frontline, the archetype of resistance, the primordial homeland.

I remember when Texas first surfaced in Donbass in a famous video (which I can’t track down now, because the journalists and algorithms saw to its deletion from the public domains). Soon thereafter we started talking and collaborating, as Donbass was my life from afar: humanitarian aid, translations, writing articles, etc. — while all of this was his direct life, his direct reality, his direct sacrifice, his new beginning and his wholeheartedly accepted end. When I heard the news of Texas’ disappearance, I revisited our last messages from 2020. His optimism and will exudes from them: he spoke of setbacks (which for men in situations like Texas mean real consequences) as “water under the bridge”, he joked about “cracking the whip as much as possible, but as gently as possible”, and said that his priority in life remains “defending Donbass and smashing fascism, of course.” He added: “so call or write anytime, I will be excited to hear from you! Good luck, Brother, and may 2020 be a year of change for the better!” Who else, in the first days of the lockdowns in 2020, could write such besides The Donbass Cowboy?

The occasion for our last exchange was his war diary, which he called a “page-turner” — too little said! I responded to him in words which now seem hopelessly weak: “I remember many long nights spent translating KIA lists and combat-op news, which was still nothing compared to your experience, no matter how important the info war might have been then during the climax. You were among the inspirations to me during this time, and I regret that I never mentioned you in my memorial piece on Motorola. Reading your diary, I felt it, as is said in Russian, ‘on my own skin.’ Thank you very much for sharing it with me - it means a lot. I really hope that your diary makes it far and wide as is needed.”

Unfortunately, due to the circumstances prevailing then, I had to tell him that PRAV, which was less than a few days old, couldn’t publish his diary, but that we could help get it published elsewhere or publish it ourselves in the future once we were off the ground and our people were in relatively safer places. The factors were real, but even more so is the regret. His only response was in the language he was learning: “Davay rabotayem brat!”. At any rate, apparently, a year later his diary was published as an Amazon Kindle edition: https://tinyurl.com/e7w3k3bz . If anyone knows the rights holders, please tell them that PRAV Publishing would be honored to publish a fully-fledged, proper edition of Texas’ magnum opus.

The reports about Texas’ death are discouraging, and they have naturally been used by our enemies. As far as we know, his death was either an unnecessary accident, a mistake — as he dropped everything to head to help a shelled neighborhood of Donetsk, ordinary soldiers mistook him for the enemy — or an unnecessary side-show in a showdown between different factions in the “Wild East under war”. In either case, however, no matter the circumstances, Texas met an end that was truly his own and truly ours: he died on the soil of Donbass, in the free world, in the midst of War which he freely joined as a warrior. Accidents happen, mistakes happen, injustices in a war zone happen, but events and figures like Texas don’t just “happen” — they are launchings, they are enactments, they are forgings, they are hard-earned and hard-won paradigms for those very few men who might, just might, decide, resolve, and move to be, to truly exist, to truly know and embrace the costs and yields of history in places where history is made by those who take the leap.

Therefore, no matter the scandal, outrage, and disheartening accompanying Texas’ apparently accidental death, the necessary farewell shines forth: Texas, Rest in Power, and let many more Texas’ rise to the occasion. Texas didn’t fear death, nor should we.

Texas became one of the only Americans in recent memory truly worthy of world-historical remembrance and emulation. When your life-deed surpasses your unfortunate death, you know you’ve truly lived.

Да здравствует товарищ Техас! Царство небесное ему!

So much death! So many dead friends….

Until you learn to live with this, upon this, you’re not ready for what comes next. Maybe you weren't even truly living right here and now.

For every one of ours, how many of theirs? How much of us?
At a certain point, things become incalculable.
They become meditative.
They become the future.
They become the question: How can we be and do differently?

The Cowboy, of course, is a deeply mythic figure, which one scholar called “America’s one contribution to world mythology.” One could also argue that the Cowboy is a distant analogue, or reembodiment, of the Proto-Indo-European riders of the steppe. Thus, when a Texan cowboy went to Donbass, "back to Yamnaya," history was rendered a loop, a good old myth.

COMING SOON from PRAV Publishing:

A Slow Death or, The Silence of the Old World

by Alexander J. Ford and Jack R. Parnell

***

It has been now two hundred thirty-one years since Edmund Burke wrote of the materialistic revolutionaries in France: “The age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded, and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever.” The passage of time has long since rendered the verdict that those were vatic words rather than reactionary contrivances, nearer to the spirit of Cassandra than to those of the last Pisistratids.

In A Slow Death or, The Silence of the Old World, Alexander Ford and Jack Parnell unveil a no-holds-barred assault on the citadels of Burke’s sophists, revealing that modernism and all of its progeny are essentially linguistic phenomena. What emerges from two centuries of academic haze is a lucid and elemental picture of the metaphysical disposition which defined the pre-industrial world. In this collection of swift essays and striking aphorisms, Nietzsche and Cioran talk to priests, Wittgenstein and Dugina face the eschaton, Krier and Evola critique consumerism, and Soviet and American Housing are haunted by the spirits of the home. A Slow Death is a dramatic confrontation too long in the making, an urgent questioning, and a radical answering.

***

https://pravpublishing.com/product/slow-death/

Peace & love!

Morning stroll

The beginning of Summer 2024 has turned out to be a turning point. One of the single most significant events of the 21st century, long in the making but never necessarily expected to happen, has taken place.

Tucker Carlson, who in a short span of time has arguably become the foremost representative of American dissidence and dissonance, introduced Prof. Alexander Dugin to millions of viewers, on the new alternative version of “prime time TV,” and he also paid respect to Daria. Dugin is now, to use American terms, the world’s most “aired”, “famous” and hence “viewed” philosopher — and the invocation of Daria is no less prominent.

There are many “philosophers” in the stale, academic, simulacral misuse of the term, but Dugin is the only Great Philosopher today in the primordial, spiritual sense. In fact, those few in the West who, like me, grew up with and live by Dugin’s thinking, know that Dugin is the only one in the 21st century who has restored the term, notion, and undertaking of “philosophy” to its original meaning, richness, role, fate, and horizons. In our days, it is only because of and thanks to Dugin that Philosophy has become a positive word again, a hopeful casting out into the horizon, a seeking worth seeking, a wisdom whose undertaking is wise, appropriate, and needed. Because and only because Dugin has re-transformed philosophy into the cosmic and spiritual horizons to which it was originally meant to aspire in ecstasy as well as sobriety. Dugin has reminded and originally shown us what it means to think the essence of reality and the essence of our “reality,” and therefore his thought has no interlocutors in this pseudo-philosophical wasteland. At most, accordingly, his thought has been caricatured by Western journalists and “criticized” by wanna-be dissidents whose pseudo-thinking has never risen above the memes and feed-data that served as their “being pilled.” In the meanwhile, the powers-that-be have resorted to trying to kill him. Can you even fathom the meaning of this beyond “democratic,” “human rights” clichés?

This ominous event cannot be underestimated. If the proper words, terminologies, and approaches to explaining its significance seem to be wanting, then this is only because we are dealing with a gargantuan, profound, incalculable shift which no one has been able to anticipate, much less keep up with. Dugin’s unassailable thinking has been externally battered in ways which no others know: Dugin has been sanctioned, his books banned, his daughter was killed, his collaborators have been persecuted, and, as I can attest on my own behalf as well as others who are understandably more cautious, those seeking to translate his thought have found themselves in the crosshairs of the powers-that-be. Do you even know what it means to be sanctioned, or to have to leave a country, or to be “de-platformed” (what a newspeak term!) because of thinking and translating? I will never forget when I discovered Dugin’s writings for the first time, nor will I ever forget when certain agents, who have never opened a book in their lives, were dispatched to enforce intimidation and threaten prosecution over the very prospect of translating and publishing books. Surely, there is nothing left.

Now we will soon be dealing with two contingent reactions: on the one hand, many profiles representing individuals and groups who don’t think and who shouldn’t even be breathing will spam their quoted comments about Dugin and demand wrath; on the other hand, many well-intending people who have read the little that is available of Dugin in English will now seek to go on the offensive without realizing that they have not even become acquainted with 10% of Dugin’s oeuvre, thinking, legacy, and existentiality, all of which are still in the making. The point is not about reading the other 90% (even though, of course, such would be healthily transformative as is so desperately needed) but about learning to think with Dugin. From one angle, learning to think with Dugin means no less than mastering hundreds, even thousands of tomes, and dozens, even a hundred languages, and millennia, even hundreds of millennia of history, and above all eternity — only so as to find oneself in the same situation in which Dugin was born as a thinker, in the darkest depths of a world in which you have nothing to grab onto besides the sheer, impossible, “post-sacral” will to become a Radical Self, to generate dozens of volumes of Noomakhia, to manifest the vision and vibration of geopolitics, and to theorize the extreme limits of all theories and prepare the ground for an “other beginning” which has no guaranteed continuers. Dugin is the name of the boundary of thinking, the first and final station of a journey which none of us can name…

With the rays emitted by the interview, something has happened that cannot be contained in any of the hitherto frameworks, and it is therefore the interpretations of this event that will establish the frameworks of the future. We find ourselves suspended in a world-historic transition, a metaphysical passage, an “interregnum” becoming a time of decision. Dugin is now poised to suddenly, unexpectedly become a virtual “household” name, his few published works in English will soon become liable clichés parodied and capitalized upon by lesser beings, and maybe even an academic field of “Duginology” will finally emerge… and none of them will grasp the point. “Duginism” is a despicably poor, quasi-journalistic trope whose pathetic originators are well known and now parasitically live off the scraps of doomed regimes’ grants, and “Duginology” might become a surrogate activity against thinking, a castrated historiography instead of and against the historic emerging and calling of the era that falls before its thoughtful momentum.

To be clear, we should welcome hundreds and thousands of articles and essays on Dugin’s thought. Let seeds be thrown and sown. And — should the few of us be brave enough and in a position to rise to the occasion — it is long since due that Dugin’s works be translated and published by those competent and attuned to the words and world at stake. The reason for the posing of a dilemma now is the dialectic of question and answer: Will Dugin become a headline and hashtag, or will Dugin rightfully be the name of the author who has been thinking the most and whose wake is ever waiting for thinkers in the last moment? None of this depends on Dugin, who has been thinking, writing, doing, and teaching for more than 40 years; it depends on you, on us.

Given that, as far as I can attest here, certain authorities are ready to prosecute for translating and publishing Dugin (and will do much beforehand anyway), and given that, as far as I’ve experienced along with others, writing about Dugin will get you censored and expelled from institutions, it is perhaps the greatest challenge and blessing that the real task now is learning and thinking with Dugin. I know two generations of Russians who know this even without the censorship, and I know two generations of Westerners who are learning this, however problematically, belatedly, shyly, and deprived of prospects, never rising up to compensate for what has been lost and granted but always aspiring to find a way to meaningfully think and live no matter what.

Now, as Dugin becomes widely known, all the work that we have failed to or simply couldn’t do, all the thoughts that have remained unsaid, all the vistas that remained unvisited, all the resonances that have fallen silent, and all the falsifications that have gone unexposed — now the time is dawning to see everything through. There is no method, only truth, only revealing. There is no expected reward, only the trials and tribulations of the soul hearkening into the gap. There is no solution, only resolutions (being resolute) to interpret, to bear forth, to behold what is staring back at us in ourselves through Dugin, through his Russia, through philosophizing with a hammer while in meditation and combat at the same koan-time, and in the “ahead” to which we might yet turn our minds in spite of all the talking heads. Dugin has given us everything that a teacher can, and we have everything to learn, assimilate, and follow through.

There is, moreover, far beyond the horizons of the seemingly immediate moment, a particularly acute question which deserves to be treated in many ways. It has in some ways been beckoned and yet remained unsaid in Dugin’s thought, and has been broached by some others who have learned from his thinking, but it is generally forgotten or never even realized among enthusiasts. It concerns the same fact rediscovered by Dugin’s teachers and which Dugin has rediscovered in particularly manifold ways for us. We are in the Kali-Yuga, the End Times. Things will not get better, only worse. The onset of multipolarity, the return of Eurasia, the “popularization” of Dugin, the dissemination of the Traditionalists and Heidegger, etc., are a possibility, an opportunity, that is preordained, favorable, but not necessarily “successful” — in the sense of “accomplished” as well as “fully succeed-able” or “fully expecting successors.” What does it mean — as Dugin once pondered upon his own incarnation in the Soviet underground — that Dugin’s thought shall burst into the open in impossible midsts? What does it mean, if the few of us were to take the offensive and risk much to translate and publish a few dozen more of his books, that Dugin could be more “readable” or “aired”? What did it mean, for instance, for Tantrik works to be translated into the European languages and appear in the West in the depths of modernity? And what does it mean that a great philosopher, great because he has both pondered and critically reflected on such phenomena, might finally “appear” and be “translated” in the lands of dying, persecution, and degeneration? Is a “new beginning” upon us, or is it the end that is ahead, whereupon this is our last breath that, although it can never be full, might yet still be drawn?

It is possible that Daria re-presented to us an essential dimension of Dugin’s legacy: it is eschatological optimism that remains first and foremost and ultimately.

It is possible that the fact of the most widely-viewed American journalist-turned-dissident interviewing Dugin is a momentous sign, an omen of proportions that can hardly be surmised.. but one for which Dugin has dared and given so much to show us the way to take all of this as our own stake, our own challenge, our own, as he called it, rupture of “eschatological gnosis” or “meta-metaphysics.” Dugin is still waiting for interlocutors all the while as we seem to be waiting for "Dugins"...

If a “new beginning” is upon us, then we need new beginners, “beginners anew.” If it is the end that we’ll live to foresee, then we need proper “enders,” truly conclusive discerners whose fingers point to what is behind the moon. For the past few decades, only Dugin has been thinking and forging the end and the beginning… alone, on a tragic, dramatic, beautiful, hard-earned, powerful, promising path. No one, save for a tiny few, has really followed this path, much less learned, internalized, or re-thought its imperatives, meaning, and consequences.

Dear Professor Dugin, esteemed Alexander Gelyevich, please forgive those of us who will not live up to what you have bequeathed, please know that we know that what you have done goes far beyond more than a few lifetimes of dedication, and please know that, when Tucker Carlson said that you were “aired,” many of us few in fact reflected and were dwelling upon the ether, where what is supposed to become “real” first hovers and calls for decisive thinking, speaking, and living. "The eternal not yet..."

This is how it’s supposed to be, how it really is.