Seyyed Hossein Nasr and friends

At the age of 94, Seyyed Hossein Nasr has formally retired, and this was marked by a meeting at Geroge Washington University with many speakers, including Nasr himself. The entire meeting was filmed, as is available on YouTube, here. It lasted six hours and forty-three minutes, so it will be some time before I can go through it all, but it provides a rich source for those interested in Nasr, as well as a fitting tribute to a great thinker.

My thanks to Ali Mohammad Eskandari Joo for drawing this to my attention.

Anarchist Podcasts on Traditionalism and Against the Modern World

“The Empire Never Ended Podcast” has been getting into Traditionalism. Episodes are listed below. The Empire Never Ended describes itself as “a weekly podcast about fascist freaks and Balkan (anti)nationalist history” and is hosted by Boris Mamlëz and Rey Katula. Nothing is known of Mamlëz, which may be a pseudonym, but Katula is an editor of Antipolitika, an anarchist magazine (see here) published in English and “Shtokavian,” a supradialect that functions as a substitute for what used to be called Serbo-Croatian. The podcast is serious but humorous, and membership levels proceed from “Regular OK person” ($5) through “Salaried Antifascist” ($10) and “Western Liberal” (§25) to “German” ($50). But some episodes are free.

The first podcasts were part of the “Kali Yuga Reading Room” series in 2023, starting with René Guénon's The Crisis of the Modern World (#217, here) and proceeding to Julius Evola's Revolt Against the Modern World (#221 and #224, here and here), then Men Among the Ruins (#231, here) and Ride the Tiger (#234, here).

In 2025 came three new podcasts, based on Mark Sedgwick, Against the Modern World: #217 on Guénon (here), #340 on Schuon (here), and #341 (here), returning to Evola.

Enjoy. 

(and thanks to  DV for drawing my attention to these podcasts)

Alexander Dugin interviewed by Tucker Carlson

Tucker Carlson, the American political talk-show host who in February 2024 interviewed President Putin for his own show on X, the Tucker Carlson Encounter, has now interviewed Alexander Dugin. 

In the 20-minute interview, available here, Dugin develops two arguments. The first is that the central problem today is individualism, which starts with the Protestant reformation, passes through a transition from a classic liberalism that is about the rule of the majority to a new liberalism that is about the rule of minorities and is in fact prescriptive and totalitarian. This new liberalism seeks liberation from all collective identities—most recently gender, which has now become a matter of choice, and finally from humanity itself, moving towards the post-humanism of The Matrix. The second argument is that the reason that Western progressives hate Putin is that he is a defender of “traditional values,” a phrase that Dugin uses several times. He understands these values as being the traditional sovereign state, the traditional family, and traditional belief. This, he says, is metaphysical. But he has not become purely statist; he also mentions Russian civilization as a “world region,” without going in to what he means by this. He is referring to his early understanding of sacred geography, in which the Russian world region becomes the traditional East in contrast to the modern West. This was, of course, one of René Guénon’s fundamental ideas, though Guénon’s East was a different East. For Guénon, individualism was an important aspect of modernity, and the classic pair of modern and traditional can be seen behind the interview’s pair of individualist progressivism and tradition. 

Dugin’s views in the interview are not a great surprise. If anything, the surprise is that Tucker Carlson likes them so much, which he evidently does. The Daily Beast has described the interview as “deranged” (here), and one comment on Twitter suggested that Carlson had been brainwashed. So far the interview has clocked 5.3 million views.

Understanding and Misunderstanding Dugin

Hal Brands, of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, has published a useful article in Foreign Policy, “The Promise and Peril of Geopolitics” (here), placing Alexander’s Dugin’s Geopolitics in its wider context, going back to the British geographer Halford Mackinder (1861-1947) and forward to Chinese and American geopolitical perspectives today. Brands starts by describing Dugin as “a bit of a madman,” but still helps our understanding of one aspect of his thought.

The same cannot be said of the Ayn Rand Institute (129,000 subscribers), which has listed among its eight best podcasts of 2023 “From Russia with Evil: The Philosophy of Alexander Dugin” (here)  a discussion by two Ayn Rand Institute fellows, Nikos Sotirakopoulos and Ziemowit Gowin. The podcast is interesting because, despite often seeming to know Dugin’s work well, Sotirakopoulos and Gowin still get it back to front. They start by describing Dugin as a “Russian ultra-nationalist,” which ignores his views on nationalism, and then identify the two key elements in his thought as condemnation of individualism and celebration of the ethnos. They then confuse cause and effect when they assert that Dugin condemns modernity because modernity “destroys tradition and tradition is one of the most important aspects of ethnos.” Thus “for Dugin tradition is good no matter what is your tradition—to do… I don’t know… human sacrifices? Good, it’s your tradition.” Dugin, as a postmodernist, does not believe that there is any one single truth. Ultimately, “Dugin welcomes any form of irrationality which for him can be used as a shield against reason.” This interpretation allows Sotirakopoulos and Gowin to condemn Dugin and his thought. 

It is, however, hardly accurate. It is not the case that Dugin, as a postmodernist, believes that all traditions and irrationalities are equal, but that, as a Traditionalist, he condemns modernity as the negation of a very specific tradition—which Sotirakopoulos and Gowin in fact come close to recognizing when they refer to Dugin’s belief in “a crazy eclecticism of mysticism, of religion or even religions.” Traditionalism is indeed in a sense eclectic, but not exactly crazy, and for Dugin long precedes any postmodernism. 

The Ayn Rand Institute is quite entitled to condemn Dugin, but would do well to get his thought right before they do so.