#even in other decadent imperial societies

[deepspaceboytoy]

I hate that fuckin post that’s like “actually it’s not useful to say westerners enjoy a level of luxury never before imagined in human history because um. Kings didn’t have to worry about the rent” and like. Well actually I don’t know if you know this but historical rulers sort of did have a rent to worry about called the national treasury and oftentimes they’d just be straight up killed if that shit was empty but also like. I dunno like you live in a world where at literally any moment you can choose to be entertained by nearly any piece of media or culture we know of, you can eat literally any kind of food you’ve ever wanted year round with no interruptions, and also for the first time in human history getting a boo-boo isn’t just a guaranteed death sentence. Like yeah you may have to pay for these things but these are still luxuries. They are still offered to you. You think fuckin Richard the Lionheart could hop in a car, drive 15 minutes, and eat some Chinese food? You live in the most luxury-filled, convenience focused society in human history you need to start being cognizant of that.

[theoppositeofprofound]

Where I’m at, personally, is that I think voting when you have the franchise is a civic responsibility.

If you’re from the USA and currently possess a vote, you do in fact have a duty to use it in the way that will do the most good to the most people. The weight of imperialism does not lift that burden, it multiplies it. You are determining how much funding UN famine relief may get and whether distant countries will be invaded and you cannot shrink from that. No amount of whinging about your red state (states flip all the time—Virginia was ruby red a few decades ago!) or your misplaced guilt can change that. Everyone from the dawn of time has lived with hands soaked in blood, being part of a society means being complicit in horror, you can become paralyzed by that or you can start to work to save people.

(If a single person is protected by a Harris presidency who’d die under Trump then you actually do have a moral obligation to help them. Failing in that task is, in my opinion, selfishness. Sometimes sympathetic selfishness: people who have lost family due to the incompetence of the best option have the right to shrink back from necessary choices. Humans grieve. That just means everyone further out in the circles of tragedy needs to develop some risk assessment skills and vote on their behalf.)

If you’re in Britain or Brasil or the EU or Georgia or Aotearoa the same holds true. The global community remains a community in which every country impacts the other, no nation lacks some dispossessed minority which needs to be protected. Voting is always important and you never get to slack off. Even if your vote is diluted or subverted you have to try. There is no winning the task of creating a better world, you’re going to keep doing it for the rest of your life.

I believe all this is true and I also believe that Tumblr is the worst possible environment to convince anyone of their truth. It’s probably not possible to harangue anyone into taking moral action. The disappointment of a stranger rarely motivates anyone! But one does have to speak up periodically, so here’s my general plea: Vote. It’s quite literally the bare minimum.

[syn0vial]

Mand'alor the Pretender, Mand'alor the Resurgent: Boba Fett as the Leader of the Mandalorians in the Expanded Universe

Hello everyone! It's Syn with yet another Expanded Universe deep-dive, this time into the reign of Boba Fett as Mand'alor as portrayed in Boba Fett: A Practical Man and throughout the Legacy of the Force series of novels. Fett was indeed made Mand'alor some decades after the events of the Original Trilogy and this post will examine how he became ruler, his actions as leader, and how his reign connects with Mandalorian mythology regarding the relationship between Mandalore the planet and Mand'alor the ruler. I hope you enjoy!

Heir of the True Mandalorians

To understand how Boba Fett became Mand'alor, it's important to first understand his family background. Indeed, Boba was not the first Fett to be named Mand'alor; his father, Jango, also held the title during the tumultuous Mandalorian Civil War. Specifically, Jango served as the Mand'alor of the True Mandalorians, or Haat Mando'ade, a Mandalorian faction established by reformer Jaster Mereel that emphasized honorable conduct and strong community bonds. They were opposed in the civil war by the Death Watch, or Kyr'tsad, a Mandalorian splinter group that espoused ideals of Mandalorian supremacy and rule by brutality. The True Mandalorians would later be massacred by the Jedi in the Battle of Galidraan, and Jango, the sole survivor, would largely withdraw from Mandalorian society and quietly abdicate his claim as Mand'alor.

Despite their relatively short span of existence in Mandalorian history, the True Mandalorians had an outsized effect on Mandalorian cultural identity, with many Mandalorians adopting their tenets and valorizing their struggle against both Death Watch and the Jedi. Furthermore, as Mandalorian society became more suppressed and scattered following the Imperial occupation of Mandalore during the Galactic Civil War, some looked to the history of the True Mandalorians as a source of national pride and a symbol of renewed Mandalorian unity and prestige.

One such believer in the True Mandalorian cause was Fenn Shysa, who served as Mand'alor during and after the Imperial occupation of Mandalore. Widely adored for his charm and affability, Shysa nonetheless was determined to see the true heir of the Haat Mando'ade take the throne: none other than Boba Fett. Despite Boba's status as a Mandalorian being contested by many clans due to what was perceived as his dishonorable behavior, failure to uphold the Resol'nare, and the fact that he'd never completed his verd'goten due to his father's premature death, Shysa believed that Boba could serve as a powerful symbol for both the scattered Mandalorian people and the rest of the galaxy as both the heir to the True Mandalorian cause and a notorious warrior the galaxy-over.

Unfortunately for Shysa, Boba had no interest in taking up the mantle of Mand'alor. In light of Boba's unwillingness, Shysa pursued other leads for potential heirs of the True Mandalorian title, including Jango's sister Arla (who unfortunately had been rendered mentally unfit after her prolonged and torturous captivity under the Death Watch) and even one of Jango's clones, Spar, whom Shysa may or may not have presented to the galaxy as Boba Fett himself.

Yet, Shysa would eventually get his wish, though at a very high price. With a bounty placed on his head by Boba's former tutor, the Kaminoan Taun We, Shysa would come face-to-face with Boba himself on the planet Shogun. Despite being hired to kill Shysa, Boba would, due to events that are never fully explained, end up on the same side as him against an attack of Sevvet mercenaries. With the two of them overpowered, Shysa sacrificed his life to protect Boba and ordered Boba to kill him and take his place as Mand'alor. Indebted to Shysa for saving his life and unwilling to let him fall into the hands of the notoriously sadistic Sevvets, Boba would honor both of Shysa's requests.

Though it cost him his life, Shysa would see his ambition through in the end: the heir of Jango Fett now held the title of Mand'alor.

The Pretender Years: Mandalorian Deception During of the Yuuzhan Vong War

Boba's first test as Mand'alor would come fairly soon after he had taken power: an invasion by an extragalactic army known as the Yuuzhan Vong. These invaders intended to conquer the galaxy and either destroy, convert, or enslave all sentient life within it—but to do this effectively, they needed help. Namely, they needed denizens of their target galaxy to help them gather intelligence and do sensitive infiltration work that they themselves would be unable to carry out. For this, they approached a peoples whom they had found to be notorious for their mercenary natures, led by a man equally notorious for working with the worst of the worst: the Mandalorians and their Mand'alor Boba Fett.

While meeting with Boba and his second-in-command, Goran Beviin, aboard one of their ships, the Yuuzhan Vong commander Nom Anor presented their terms: work for the Yuuzhan Vong or be exterminated. Anor also made sure to present Boba and Beviin with two prisoners they had already taken, a Human and a Twi'lek male, outfitted with gruesome, surgically-implanted torture devices to demonstrate what would be in store for their people should they resist.

Deciding then and there that he despised the Yuuzhan Vong and that he'd do whatever was necessary to destroy them, Boba feigned indifference and, much to Anor's surprise, demanded a higher price: amnesty to the entire Mandalore sector, both during and after the invasion. Finding himself unable to sway Boba despite his repeated threats, Anor eventually agreed to the deal, buying Boba and Beviin much-needed time to prepare the Mandalorian people for their great deception.

The Mandalorian people would pretend to be traitors to their galaxy, serving the Yuuzhan Vong as spies and mercenaries—and all the while, they would sabotage the Yuuzhan Vong and funnel intelligence regarding their movements and tactics to New Republic command.

Under Boba, the Mandalorians would keep up this facade for much of the war, their intelligence proving instrumental in combating the invaders even while much of the galaxy believed them to be conspirators with the Yuuzhan Vong. Only towards the end of the war did their deception become known to the Vong, who responded with vicious, razed-earth attacks on the planet of Mandalore, not only killing its people but also carpet-bombing much of the planet's surface and poisoning the soil in an effort to render the planet uninhabitable.

Despite the heavy toll taken by the Mandalorians during the war, with their help, the galaxy was able to turn back the Yuuzhan Vong invasion and emerge victorious—though the challenges facing Mandalore and its people were still far from over.

Mandalore Resurgent: Post-War Aftermath and Policies

Following the war against the Yuuzhan Vong, Mandalore would find itself in a precarious position. With a third of its population destroyed, its industrial infrastructure in shambles, and much of its arable land poisoned, it was unclear whether the planet could even support its surviving clans. In addition, the Mandalorian deception that had proved so instrumental in turning the tide against the Yuuzhan Vong had worked a little too well; most of the galaxy still viewed the Mandalorians as traitors who had only turned against their Yuuzhan Vong handlers at the last minute. As a result, Mandalore was offered no aid whatsoever from the Galactic Alliance (formerly the New Republic) following the war in spite of the planet's dire straits.

Faced with these circumstances, Mand'alor Boba Fett pursued policies focusing on the internal restoration of Mandalore, including:

An immediate order for two million Mandalorians living in diaspora to return to Mandalore to help rebuild the planet. All returning Mandalorians were eligible receive an allotment of land, provided they agreed to restore it. Boba knew this was possible because he had seen Beviin, a farmer by trade, restore the land on his own farm.

Mandalore's official neutrality in the ongoing civil war between the Galactic Alliance and the Corellian Confederation. Individual Mandalorians were free to offer their mercenary services to whichever side they wished, but it was to be understood that Mandalore itself had no official involvement in the dispute.

The increased importation of food to Mandalore to feed the population until such a time that the planet's farming and infrastructure could sustain itself once more. Both Fett himself and the chief of MandalMotors would donate heavily to pay for these imports.

In addition to these policies, Mandalore would also benefit from a lucky break discovered more than a decade after the end of the Yuuzhan Vong war: a massive motherlode of beskar unearthed by the Yuuzhan Vong's extensive bombing of the planet. This discovery was extremely significant following the Imperial occupation of Mandalore, as it was believed that the Empire had completely strip-mined the planet bare of its beskar deposits. With both sides of the galaxy's newest civil war scrambling for weapons and armor, this newly discovered beskar would prove a massive economic windfall for the struggling Mandalorians, and also serve as the catalyst for MandalMotors creating the first-ever beskar-plated starfighter, the Bes'uliik.

Mirrored Destinies: Connection to Mandalorian Mythology

As an ending note to this lore post, I'd like to share a piece of Mandalorian mythology and how we see it exemplified in Boba's rule as Mand'alor. According to this belief, the fate of Mand'alor the leader and Mandalore the planet are inextricably tied; the two are synonymous to the point where, if something happens to one, whether for good or ill, one expects to see it reflected in the other. And this is absolutely the case in Boba's story.

Consider: when Boba first becomes Mand'alor, he finds himself leading a planet still recovering from Imperial rule. It is largely believed to have been robbed of its defining resource, its beskar, and thus, its soul has been stolen. Similarly, Fett himself is perceived to have "sold his soul" to the Imperials. He is the heir of the Haat Mando'ade, someone who is meant to embody the Mandalorian ideal as expressed by his grandfather Jaster Mereel, but that hope for him appears to have been in vain. He is isolated from the Mandalorians and has spent much of the past few decades at the beck and call of their enemies. He, like Mandalore, has enriched the Empire at the expense of his people.

Then, the Yuuzhan Vong War happens. Mandalore the planet is poisoned and no longer self-sustaining. Coincidentally, soon after the end of the war, Fett finds out that he is dying of a terminal genetic illness due to his cloned DNA. Both he and Mandalore are dying together.

But he doesn't go down without a fight. He learns to rely on others, such as Beviin, Mirta, and the other Mandalorians. With them, he is able to find a cure and begin the process of recovery. And, just like its Mand'alor, Mandalore is able to come back from the brink by the same means. It needs others to care for it, to restore it. Only then can it become a viable homeland once more.

Finally, after all that misfortune and suffering—because of the misfortune and suffering—both the planet and the man are revealed to not be so bereft and without soul as originally thought. In the crater of Yuuzhan Vong desolation, a new motherlode of beskar is found. In the midst of illness, war, and grief, something like a true Mandalorian is found—someone who cares for his people, his clan, and his planet. Both Mand'alor and Mandalore thus go through an arc of loss, desolation, interdependence with others, and finally, resurgence and rebirth. In this way, Boba Fett embodies the myth of the inextricable connection between Mandalore the planet and Mand'alor the man.

[dangermousie]

Confession time - I find Miles Wei’s character more interesting that Li Xian’s.

It’s honestly The Double again for me - a female centric narrative about a driven woman with a terrible weak ex and a powerful new dude - and I find myself much more interested in the bad dude than the good one.

OK, before people come for my head, this doesn’t mean I find Peony husband a better person than the Envoy or that I ship him with FL (no thank you!), I just find him more interesting as a character for the same reason that I found Shen Yurong more interesting in The Double (tho in The Double, it was exacerbated by the fact that SYR and Princess Wanning actors gave the best performances in the drama - the mains were great but those two were another level. Here I don’t think Husband is giving a better performance than Envoy.)

You never truly know how Husband would act and which way he’d jump. He’s not the noble main character bound by the narrative restrictions (and censorship restrictions) within a certain path. And that is what makes him interesting to me - the complexity but also the uncertainty. I mean both actual MLs of The Double and Peony have a bit of an edge - Duke Su is dramatic and ruthless and starts out using FL and Envoy is dramatic, standoffish from FL and seemingly corrupt. But it’s a cdrama in this era, not a decade plus ago, we all know every minute they are actually good guys - no, Envoy is not actually corrupt and Duke Su is not actually murder happy - the former is saving the bribes for the people of treasury or w/e, Duke Su only kills death penalty people and both are super super duper loyal to the crown and of course would save the FL if she really needed it.

That makes them great husband material but it removes a lot of the tension I find interesting. No, a character does not need to be dark and/or unhinged for me to find them interesting - I loved 17 in LYF and am loving XXC in The Blossoming Love and those two are utter Boy Scouts - but it is hard to do in such a way they grab me.

Meanwhile secondaries are out there running free of confines of the moral messages which gives them an edge.

In the olden days, you could have MLs which were like this (I am thinking of Glamorous Imperial Concubine - the deliciousness of it was that Kevin Yan started ready willing and able to harm FL for his goals, not to mention all the “proper” historicals - think of Three Kingdoms or Advisors’ Alliance - those were not romantic heroes in traditional sense or a more recent example of Goodbye My Princess or Siege in Fog - except their inability to let FL go it was anything goes for those MLs) but for obvious reasons, this doesn’t happen much any more - the closest we’ve come recently is Kunning and Blossom and I adored both - there a lot of tension was that even after we realized MLs would die for FL, you often had no idea how they’d jump for other reasons and it gave us tension.

(Interesting side note is something like Eternal Brotherhood where even until the last episode, in terms of romance, I could not tell how Xiu would react to Ning - he was a very good person but the tension in the narrative came from his immense damage - every scene between them crackled with whether his feelings would win or his issues - it was constantly his issues but in every scene I kept going…but what if? That’s good acting and writing! But then there was the other tension because what Xiu was dedicated to was brotherhood and his platonic ideal of what a just society should be - which put him on a collision course with the wishes of his heart, and his friends and even the ruler - it gave uncertainty also. That’s a hard balancing act.)

Anyway this is a ramble so I will finish this failed attempt at an essay by saying - if cdrama rules allowed mains more edge and uncertainty, I’d probably be (even) more interested but as is, much as I love the mains, I often end up more drawn to secondaries in terms of interest.

[strawberrykaon]

I think autistic primarchs would present very differently than in a baseline human. Its so much easier to cover up or explain away.

Like if Mortarion goes semi- verbal, he still sounds normal. But very stilted for a primarch. Its different from when I can only maybe say three words at a time. Usually I can only go "I don't know" or "no", or "go away". For him it's still full length sentences, like "I think I just need to be alone now". That can easily be explained to be exhaustion. But in reality he can't vocalize anything more complex right now.

Guilliman has be scripting since a child but no one notices. He just has over 100 scripts memorized for any occasion. Any question or change in the conversation. He already has a script lined up. He's capable of memorizing it. Conversations happen so naturally, you can't even tell the difference.

Even the way they stim can be so different to a baseline. Probably in ways a baseline can't comprehend. Traits like increased pattern recognition are standard in a primarch. All primarchs are far more "higher functioning" than any baseline.

Being behind their brothers developmentally by a few weeks is nothing compared to a baseline. What's walking at two months when most humans are closer to a year old when they start. Sure the other primarchs were walking much sooner. Some right out of the pod. But they often reached adulthood far sooner than any human. What constitutes a development delay to a primarch. If an apothecary can't tell what's a high blood pressure level in Guilliman. How can you tell?

Exhaustion that so many autistic face is so off from a baseline. They need less sleep. They can go through periods without rest for far longer. I think in cases like Mortarion, he can just push through an autistic burnout. Sure he's a bit more irritable, among other things. But hey, the point of a shutdown won't hit him till a few decades later. So therefore he must have high energy levels then even his brothers. Despite the toll on his mental health. Plus their recovery times are far shorter. Guilliman needs just a few days to feel normal after a year long campaign after all. Doesn't matter how he was acting prior. Any strange behavior can be hand waved away.

Mental conditioning can be used to suppress sensory overload. No point in having your super solider curl up screaming because he has super hearing. And you threw him into an active warzone. Lets make sure you can't process that information in way that would harm you. (Plus I think as a rule primarchs have a tendency to be more sensory seeking than sensory avoidant.)

Hell even their positions in the imperial society could make it easier to mask. If Perturabo wants something done in a certain way, you are going to do it that way. You're just some 25 year old iron warrior or serf that needs to follow command. Plus you don't know best compared to a primarch.

Of course they mask in typical ways. Mortarion hasn't rocked when upset since he was young. Because Nacrae told him that he should avoid such weakling behavior. Or still show more obvious traits like Dorn's flatter speaking style. (IDK how true this is but everyone says this and I'm not too familiar with Dorn to say otherwise.)

Also I like to imagine that the Emperor intentionally placed Autism into some of his designer babies. Thinking he could "avoid all the negatives but only gain those traits that would benefit them greatly." Only for his patience to slowly be drained. Like Perturabo having a meltdown while Dorn is trying to get the two of them to work together. But he's lost the ability to mask what little he does. And is just going, "We are to conclude this activity in an hour. I have to calibrate the ships sensors in an hour and half. You have already wasted 10 minutes. We must refocus so we can conclude in an hour..."

The problem start when understanding what's going on under the surface. Or when you start comparing them to their brothers. But hey you're below understanding what a primarch is thinking. And all the primarchs are little off. They're demigods. What makes these one's so different. Doesn't help they themselves won't consider it themselves. Or even be insulted by the implication. I'm not an invalid. Don't be ridiculous.

(I used Perturabo, Dorn, and Guilliman here because they're the common ones head cannoned as autistic. I went with Mortarion as well because I decided to just go with it. I know him the best. Plus this is all just headcannon. Just to be clear. Reasoning being his kids tend to present with a flat personality anyways. Also heard Mortarion was always behind his brothers, so developmental delays?? Idk yet where they got that in lore yet. Trying to get through all the books is a lot. Plus his other strange behaviors. But it could just be poor socialization as a child mixed with mental illness. Could also just be all three too. But more than these four could be autistic is my point. Sorry if this post was rambling or unclear. Or if anyone has done this before. I just wanted to get my thoughts out on the subject.)

[sallymander40k]

Why The Tau Were Never 'Too Good' For 40k

The Tau were added midway through Warhammer 40,000's 3rd edition, though according to some records the idea had been floating around since Laserburn. In the twenty years since their introduction to the 41st millennium, the Tau have remained one of the most consistently reviled and hated aspect of 40k lore, with all complaints around them boiling down to one core issue: they're too good for 40k. By that, people mean that they are too morally good to fit within the grimdark narrative of the 41st millennium. This has always been the primary complaint levied at them, since they were first introduced in 2001. And GW has seemingly agreed with them, and spent the last 20 years trying to inject grimdarkness into the Tau Empire.

The first attempt to grimdarkify the Tau came very early on, with the Tau campaign in Dawn of War: Dark Crusade

It's explained how in the decade following Tau victory on Kronus the remaining human population was subjugated, oppressed, forced to give up their culture, and eventually simply sterilized and allowed to die off naturally to create a Tau and Kroot ethnostate on Kronus. It explains this over images of prisoners of war being fed to Krootox in prison camps and humans huddling together in slums.

This is obviously a departure from the image of the Tau as it was established in Codex: Tau (3rd Edition), as that codex makes explicit mention of the Tau trading and making alliances with frontier human colonies. This is also a departure from... common sense. Why exactly would the Tau accept Kroot, Vespid, Nicassar, Demiurg, Tarellians and many others into their ranks but then arbitrarily draw the line at humans?

This would become a pattern that I like to call "The Grimderp Tau Cycle." It's not exactly a stretch to say that the Tau are easily the most morally good society in the 41st millennium. Their tolerance toward other species alone makes them head and shoulders above almost any other species in the galaxy. So to remind people that there are no good guys in the 41st millennium and that this is a very serious and grimdark setting that you need to take seriously because there are no good guys or whatever, GW will occasionally have the Tau commit a completely out of character, random, and nonsensical atrocity. This was also seen at the end of In Harmony Restored, the short story that came out alongside 8th edition's Psychic Awakening: The Greater Good.

For context, In Harmony Restored is a short story about a group of Gue'vesa soldiers (human auxiliary troops fighting in the Tau military) performing a desperate defensive rearguard action to halt an Imperial advance long enough for Tau reinforcements to come and smash the delayed invasion force. The Gue'vesa are able to do this, though at great sacrifice to themselves, and then when the reinforcing army does arrive and makes quick work of the Imperial army they then continue on to butcher the Gue'vesa soldiers who performed this valiant holding action for... Seemingly no reason? Assuming the Tau forces thought they were more Astra Militarum soldiers, the Gue'vesa step out of cover pleading for mercy, only to be gunned down. With one of the Gue'vesa at the end noting that the language one of the Battlesuit pilots is using is very reminiscent of the way the Imperium talks about those they've labeled undesirables.

The message here is clear: these humans betrayed the Imperium in order to escape from the Imperium's genocidal regime... Only to end up in the equally merciless clutches of an equally ruthless oppressor. But, from a lore standpoint, that defeats the entire purpose of the Tau. It makes them wholly indistinct and, frankly, boring. But that doesn't even scratch the surface of how stupid this is, because it has clearly been stated in the past that the Tau do not hold bigotries toward client species on the basis of their faiths. And that makes sense.

Not only does this contradict previous lore, not only does it render the Tau a boring palette swapped version of the Imperium, it also just defies practical sense. If you're a race like the Tau, who expand primarily through ingratiating yourself with other races and convincing them to join your collective, you'd naturally want as few barriers between potential client races and joining as possible. No human colony is going to voluntarily join the Greater Good if the Tau's version of the Greater Good happens to require that the human population of that planet lose all sense of their heritage and culture through forced reeducation and the abandonment of their faith, and in the long term for that human population to slowly go extinct through gradual forced sterilization and confinement to ghettos and slums.

It's deeply stupid, lazy writing on the part of GW to repair the image of the Tau in the eyes of a fandom who accused the faction of being "too good." Except, uhm, here's the thing: the Tau were never too good to begin with. Lets rewind back to 3rd Edition's Tau Codex, our first introduction to the Tau in the 40k universe. From the very beginning it was very clear that the Utopian idealism of the Tau Empire held beneath the surface a significantly more sinister and malevolent nature, and it all roots from the mysterious and enigmatic fifth caste of Tau Society: the Ethereals.

In 3rd Edition, the Ethereals are spoken of more like mythological beings than the slightly mundane way they exist in modern 40k. All we know about them out of this book is that they are the autocratic leaders of the Tau Empire who inspire radical devotion among the Tau, though are rarely seen or heard from. They reorganized Tau society with pursuit of the Greater Good in mind first. But the specifics of what that means matters a lot. Tau are born into a caste that roughly determines, from birth, what role in society that person will fulfill. Those born into a caste are not allowed to have children with members of other castes, are not allowed to take up any job or position that contradicts the societal purpose of their caste, and generally lack self-determination in regards to things like career choice.

so, bam, the setup for Tau as a flawed and morally ambiguous faction are already present. They're a faction who fight for a better future, for a galaxy where all can exist in harmony with one another, so long as that harmony is kosher by the standards of the Ethereal caste. In that sense they're somewhat similar to the Dominion from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. A multispecies interstellar collective who seek to create a galaxy harmoniously unified... in service to the Founders. Just taken from this vision of the Tau Empire, they're already an autocratic dictatorship who fight in the name of an ideology that declares itself to be for the greater good of all who ascribe to it while also relying on the assumption that the tyrannical power of the Ethereals must inherently be for the Greater Good. I reject the idea that the Tau were ever "too good" for 40k. Rather that they were written with a realistic level of nuance, with an understanding that dictatorships are built upon cognitive dissonance, not on perfectly consistent virtues.

TL;DR THEY'RE NOT FUCKING COMMUNISTS, THEY LITERALLY HAVE A CASTE SYSTEM, WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?!

[inkwingart]

[image ID] Iris, a brown-skinned young man, perches on a windowsill, flying a kite with a long green tail with stylized pennants resembling the Palestinian olive-leaf motif. A black and white kufiya is wrapped loosely around his shoulders, and his black tunic is adorned with tatreez. Crow, a darker-skinned brown man in a dark teal sleeveless shirt, stands behind Iris with his hand resting gently on Iris’s arm. [end ID]

Ceasefire now. End the occupation. Free Palestine.

Context under the cut:

These are my characters Iris (with the kite) and Crow (behind him). I started writing about them a few years ago, and their story takes place in the same world as Fox and Hemlock’s. Stars in the Dark is about being diaspora in a multicultural society, how a gilded cage is still a cage and slavery remains slavery even if it is not named such, and about the weight of a ruler’s legacy.

Iris and Crow’s story takes place a few decades prior, while Mahjuren is not a kingdom but an empire.

This time, the focus is on Iris, one of the last surviving members of an indigenous nomadic minority within Mahjuren. His clan was massacred when he was a child, and his identity as a member of that clan was erased by assigning him a new surname that roughly translates to “of nothing and nowhere.” Other clans are under constant threat from imperial raids that gleefully commit similar massacres with total impunity.

As Iris grows up, every aspect of his life is rigidly dictated by his “savior” who took him in after the massacre. Who he meets, what he learns, where he goes, his meals, his hobbies, and even his relationships are subjected to scrutiny and control.

One of the major events in the story is when Iris is assigned to travel to a certain city for the first time, a trip that is typically given as a reward to novices for becoming journeymen and one that Iris was originally denied. The day he and Crow arrive happens to be the Festival of Kites, and the scene in which Iris plays with a stolen kite is the first moment when Iris is permitted unfettered, childlike joy.

~~

If you read all that, you’ll notice some striking similarities to Palestinian history. None of this was intentional—my original inspiration was North Asian and North American indigenous peoples. Before the genocide in Gaza, I thought maybe my writing of Iris’s childhood was a bit unbelievable, acceptable for a fantasy protagonist but not entirely realistic. I don’t think that anymore. In the past hundred days, we’ve witnessed families wiped out, children kidnapped by colonizers, zionist soldiers laughing as they attempt to destroy an entire society.

[danvolodar]

Why the new fluff in 40k undermines the setting: part 2, what is, and why it is bad

Continuing from the previous post, where we've established the basic themes of the setting and explored how the Imperium exemplifies them, this one deals with the setting's developments over the last two decades consistently undermining said themes.

One great issue are of course the Tau, who use the AI (and it's never corrupted by the taint of Chaos), develop and easily produce new tech, and enjoy effortless interstellar logistics (handwaved away as being "slower" than the Imperium's warp jumps, but that supposed slowness is not causing them any trouble whatsoever).

An example of the Tau, human collaborationists, and AI interacting in the works of superfeyn

That's bad enough on its own, so 40k fluff over the years has made numerous attempts to somehow balance the obvious superiority of their society. Xenology made the furthest strides, in establishing that the Ethereals exert mind control over the rest of the castes using the hormones they secrete, turning the utopia into a dystopia effortlessly. The Tau DoW ending claimed that the Tau sterilised the human populations they conquered. Both sources, of course, aren't canon. Black Library is arguably isn't canon, either, but I've tales retold from it of the Tau not just using human collaborationist units, but, say, recultivating the Imperial hive worlds. And that majorly undermines the core themes of the setting: if human populations can't exist in the Imperium without the constant threat of errant psykers opening a doorway to the Warp for a daemonic incursion to pour through, why can they under the Tau, who are warp-insensitive and thus have no way either to discover the threat or counter it? The same goes for the hives: the Imperium has to milk its worlds for all they're worth to counter the multitude threats from all directions, why don't the Tau? Why are the rules of the setting different for the Tau and the Imperium?

The two other major releases haven't brought quite the same big problems to the setting as the Tau. The Newcrons have simply moved them to become one more civilisation competing with the Imperium on peer terms, except with superiour technology. Similarly, the release of the Adeptus Mechanicus as a separate army hasn't changed much, except for undermining the setting a bit by turning its themes to eleven, a certain distance past verisimilitude. The Skitarii have their legs below the knee cut off and replaced by cybernetic implants, to symbolically reference the cohorts of Mars wearing their legs raw (recall that humans the Imperium has in abundance, yet technology is rare and hard to replicate), and have their eyelids cut off for teh evilz lul. Oh, and of course, the Mechanicus have a perpetual motion machine.

But these all pale compared to the recent (well, two years ago now) release of the Leagues of Votann, formerly known simply as the Squats. You see, the Squats are an offshoot of Humanity, except they still have fully functional STCs (the Holy Grail of the Adeptus Mechanicus that will supposedly reverse the Humanity's technological degradation), they have fully functional superhuman AIs undisturbed by the Iron Men rebellion (and, same as the Tau, somehow not susceptible to daemonic possession), they innovate and easily produce their products, they have 100% reliable means of interstellar FTL travel and communication, and unlike the Tau, they can even harness the powers of the Warp for their combat Psykers, except it's all perfectly safe and doesn't run the risk of daemonic incursion. Plus they can mass-produce genetically optimised clones, except they're not locked into what they're optimised for and instead are free to choose their job (again, unlike the caste system of the Tau).

And by this moment, one has to wonder: how the hell can the Imperium even exist with peer competitors like that? The Leagues of Votann are better off strategically than the mainstay of Humanity in each and every way, literally in everything that matters in war - how are they not the dominant human civilisation in the Galaxy? Why does the Imperium even trudge on, when it could've been easily replaced by the superior Squats wearing fur coats over spacesuits?

One could argue the Emperor and his gang of hyperviolent psychos presented a threat to the Squats during the Great Crusade era, but they apparently never got to meet them, and it's been ten thousand years since the Emperor ascended to the Golden Throne, removing himself from the picture. Why have the Leagues of Votann not been expanding exponentially into the Imperial space, if all the limiters and checks that cripple the mainstay humanity simply do not apply to them?

Frankly speaking, I feel that these two taken together - the Tau, and particularly the Squats, - kill the setting by utterly demolishing its basic themes. What's the point of sacrificing for the Imperium, and tolerating its oppressive policies designed to sustain at least something during the millennia of total war, when there are alternatives - even alternative human civilisations, - that suffer from none of its problems?

[literary-illuminati]

2024 Book Review #50 – The Gold Eaters by Ronald Wright

This was the rare book I had literally never heard of before opening it - a birthday gift from a friend, and the rare one not resulting from some sort of conversation about what books we’ve been meaning to read. It’s the first historical fiction I’ve read in year and years, so I can’t really say how it stands in terms of the rest of the genre. Reading it for myself, I had a great time – though the book did seem confused about which part of ‘historical fiction’ it actually cared about.

The book (primarily) follows Waman, an adolescent boy just coming of age in a nowhere coastal village on the edge of the ascendant and seemingly world-spanning Inca Empire, the demands and products of which are the only outside intrusions upon his life. Feeling stifled at home after his father returns from a period of conscription building roads and bridges in the highlands, he runs away to have some adventures and become a man on a trading ship. And in a stroke of truly cosmic misfortune, on his first voyage they run into a scouting expedition run by one Francisco Pizarro, investigating rumours of a strange land called Peru and its cities of gold.

Waman is abducted and conscripted into service as the Spaniards guide and interpreter. He spends the next decades of his life with an unwilling front-row seat to History unfolding, making and losing friends and endlessly searching for his family and childhood love as the whole world is overthrown again and again around him.

The great strength of the book, I think, is how it manages to portray the civilizations of the past as both familiar and awe-inspiring. The Spanish and Inca Empires are both portrayed almost like fictional kingdoms in a fantasy novel, simultaneously defamilirized and made new and strange, and presented from the point of view of someone whose ideas of normal are at least as strange to us as any of the peoples he meets. More than that, it never stops feeling like a world where people actually lived and worked, one that made sense on a human scale where all its inhabitants could find a place for themselves (or else be forced into one). It was never exactly confusing either -even if it does feel a bit like cheating to jump between points of view to ensure there’s a wide-eyed foreigner needing things explained to them wherever it’s required.

Wright is apparently a historian by trade, and has mostly previously written nonfiction. Given the sheer cornucopia of details about both daily life and the exact sequences of events that led to Spanish dominion, I entirely believe it.

As history, the two things that I most took away from the reading experience were the portrayal of the Inca at their peak as a really vital, world-shaping imperial society on the one hand, and just how drawn out and contingent the process of conquest was, on the other. The book does a great job getting across just how incredible the road- and bridge-building projects and the great imperial cities were, and how rich and organized a society it was (without ever entirely falling into portraying the Inca as some prelapsarian utopia, either, which is how a great many works in the general space seem to screw this up). It then also does an excellent job getting across just how apocalyptic the smallpox epidemic that swept through the empire was, and how ruinous the wars of succession that followed. Pizarro triumphed because he was facing an empire that was a death-choked ruin at war with itself, manipulating and extorting an emperor with many enemies and not much way in the way of skills or legitimacy except that everyone ahead of him was dead.

The other thing that did strike me is that – the historical narrative as I have always received it is that the Spanish conquered their American empire in one single, cataclysmic moment of contact, disease and violence and simple shock leaving them ruling the better part of a continent before anyone even realized what was happening. Which I’d intellectually known was false, but the book really does an amazing job dramatizing the fact that the building of the Spanish empire was a multi-decade – multi-generational, really – affair, and far more a matter of politics and logistics than initial shock an awe.

My main complaint with the book is the matter of genre – it spent the entire back half continuously changing its mind about what it wanted to be. Is this Waman’s story, a man coming of age and scrambling to form a life for himself as the tides of history destroy and remake his world around him and buffet him hither and yon? Or is he just a convenient POV to what’s essentially a rationalized history of (the initial chapters of) the fall of the Inca, improbably standing at the side of and sharing drinks with one famous personage after another to hear their thoughts and see their pivotal deeds? The book never quite settles on an answer, and so Waman’s own arc and personal concerns shift from feeling like thin connective tissue to the emotional core of the story and back several times. The issue gets worse in the latter parts of the book, where it just outright shifts into omniscient exposition of historical events at times.

Also on goodreads this is tagged as a romance and – okay so there is a romance in this book. But it’s the third or fourth most important relationship at most. For the vast majority of the page count it’s just a childhood crush Waman nurses as motivation to get home. If you come in expecting this is mostly be a love story you are going to have a bad time.

But yeah! I should read more historical fiction.

[readingsquotes]

"I’ll never be able to forget my own experience pushing my college to divest......I’ll never forget the look I got from one administrator as I entered their building. We had been camped outside for two weeks at that point, and even though the woman who saw me had no idea who I was, she knew exactly who I was. She knew my presence, our presence, meant disruption. And few things are more sacred to the neoliberal institution than avoiding disruption, even when the status quo is harmful investment in fossil fuel corporations, or genocide. And so my presence scared this administrator, and the cops were there within minutes. The feeling of being a student and having the university resort to violence rather than speak with you is immensely hard to forget.

But so too are the broader lessons I learned in student organizing. The feelings are indelible, and yet the bigger picture, the structural knowledge you receive when you go up against a large and powerful institution, stuck with me too. .... I had learned that universities didn’t quite work the way I had imagined. Growing up they had seemed to me, from a distance, to be centers of knowledge and places where life looks a little more like it’s supposed to; people pursue learning and community and aren’t as constrained by work and stress. And there’s a significant kernel of truth to that, but behind the facade is a power structure that cares infinitely more about investments and real estate than the student body. That truth has become more and more real over time, and has been violently laid bare by the boards and administrations themselves in recent weeks. ...

The impact of protest right now matters immensely. It’s impossible to quantify how important it would be if the movement for a Free Palestine in the West built enough power to force our countries to stop funding ethnic cleansing, to stop arming genocide, to stop supporting apartheid. The lives that have been lost are irreplaceable, and the lives that could be saved are invaluable. And, at the same time, we’re seeing millions of people, young and old and everything in between, change in profound ways. In that fact lies the reality that Gaza and Palestinians and this movement we’re seeing all around us are altering the future just as they work to alter the present.

One of the many driving forces changing how people across the globe think, not only about Zionism but about imperialism and society at large, is the simple fact that we cannot unsee what we have seen. ...Decades of propaganda began to fracture in recent years, and shattered in recent months. But it’s more than that – for millions of people across the world there’s also no unseeing U.S. complicity. There’s no unseeing how Israel and the U.S. are virtually alone at the UN, on the world stage, working to protect a genocidal state and enable a genocide again and again. Even as Israel kills yet another UN worker, bringing the total to 190 slain employees of the United Nations, the enabling and participation in Israel’s genocide continues. 

People cannot simply forget these actions, these choices that the U.S. and Israel make day after day. I say that as a hope more than as a fact. ...And while students are not facing repression that can be compared to what the Black Panthers and others have faced, they are repeatedly facing mass violence from the state as well as vigilantes. They have also seen how little their schools care about them, how little their government cares about them, and how deeply invested our entire system is in war and imperialism.

..Students who have been attacked, and people everywhere who have seen horrors in Gaza beyond our comprehension, cannot simply forget. We’ve seen how violence abroad is connected to fascism at home. We’ve seen how Israel’s genocide in Gaza is connected to the war machine here in the United States. We’ve seen how it all comes together in a society structured to deprive the many so the few can hoard wealth and resources. Whatever comes next, there’s no turning back. We will struggle towards a better system, both because we want to see it come into existence and because we don’t have the option to return to a healthy status quo. We can’t turn back to the society we might be nostalgic for. That world doesn’t exist anymore; a new one must be built."

[notwiselybuttoowell]

Countries that weaken or stop their net zero and climate actions may be consigning their populations to decades of preventable illness.

Gains from net zero are often presented as global benefits and mainly for future generations. But less fossil fuel use also means less air pollution which results in local health gains right away.

For example, rapid health gains are predicted from policies for US net zero by 2050. By 2035, between 4,000 to 15,000 fewer US residents would die annually from air pollution, saving the US economy $65bn to $128bn, with even greater benefits thereafter.

A study, led by Imperial College London, has found that there are large health gains from UK net zero actions.

Dr Mike Holland, who was part of the study team, said: “Fundamental changes required for net zero will bring long lasting benefits to UK health. Or turn that around. If we don’t take the net zero path, we will be sicker. This would be a double own goal on both climate and health.”

The researchers looked at the net zero pathways for transport and buildings in the UK’s sixth carbon budget. Health improvements came about from less air pollution and also increased exercise from more walking, cycling and e-biking.

Some gains would be expected straight away, as air pollution decreased. These include fewer new cases of asthma in children and adults, as well as reduced hospital admissions for breathing and heart problems. This is consistent with recent health improvements that followed Bradford’s clean air zone and others around Europe.

Fewer strokes and heart attacks would emerge more slowly over five years as air pollution started to reduce. For lung cancer, the reduction in cases would be expected to lag air pollution improvements by six to 20 years.

But the gains would not stop in 2060. Children born in the 2050s would suffer from fewer air pollution illnesses as they grew up and aged as adults. Although less certain than the other illnesses studied, the greatest long-term gains could be in cases of dementia.

Prof Christian Brand, part of the study team, said: “If transport decarbonisation focuses mainly on commuting, how much health improvement and emissions reduction are we leaving on the table? Without policies that support all forms of mobility – especially the short, everyday trips that reduce car dependency – are we missing a crucial opportunity to maximize the full benefits of net zero?”

Participation is key to maximising these gains across society, especially amongwomen and older people. The study found that people walking or cycling for transport could expect to an average of five and half months longer life expectancy, and a healthier life.

[txttletale]

So I'm a leftist because I can plainly see that capitalism sucks, but I have a really hard time pinning down what I think we should replace it with because I have "agrees with the last theory I read" disease. (Or, more embarrassingly, "agrees with the last Post I read.")

Something I've been wondering about recently is what's the point of planning and arguing over what happens after the revolution anyway? The chances of a successful worker's revolution in my lifetime, let alone the next few decades, feels vanishingly small. The preconditions just feel so far away.

Is there really value in committing to a specific ideology right now, or is it sufficient to say the anarchist future and the ML future (and even, like, the DemSoc future) sound better than what we have now, and require many of the same preconditions, so let's work towards those shared goals now and figure out what comes after in a few decades when the groundwork is actually laid?

i agree with you that i don't think a genuine revolutionary situation will arise (at least, not in the imperial core) within our lifetimes. i also agree that there is a meaningful degree to which the theoretical differences between marxist-leninists & anarchists are far enough from being present and pressing concerns that they should in almost all cases be working together and employing similar tactics and action.

however, i do think there is a value to having an ideological framework: it keeps you consistent. if your ideology is vague and empty, you're liable to (intentional or unintentional) opportunism--you will fill in the gaps or approach new ideas with the default positions, the ones that require the least divergence from hegemonic cultural norms and values.

that sounds a bit ideological-jargony so i'll phrase it another way: if you grow up in a [joker voice] society, you're going to grow up with a lot of assumptions! like, 'cops reduce crime', for example. and if you don't have an underlying theory of capitalist society and how it functions, then it's entirely possible to realize (through experience or analysis) that capitalism is bad and that our society is inherently unjust, but continue thinking 'cops reduce crime' because that's just the default cultural position you grew up with. these two things are pretty impossible to reconcile, right--because of course the actual purpose of cops is to enforce private property rights and maintain the capitalist system of economic relations--but if you don't have a full theoretical framework of capitalism & society that you can use to analyse things, that incoherence is very easy to let slip by!

i also want to say that while i think that anarchists & marxist-leninists (and all other revolutionary) communists share common goals and functionally very similar political projects for our forseeable lifetime, there is a meaningful difference between these two and the 'demsocs' you mentioned. not an uncrossable gulf by any means in terms of working together and forging political alliances--but the steps one takes to agitate and organize the working class in anticipation of a future revolutionary situation, however distant, are imo very functionally different to the steps one takes to advocate for social reform within liberal legislatures. rosa luxemburg put it well when she said there is nothing reformist about supporting trade unions, welfare legislation, as a vehicle for revolutionary class struggle--but when you take these things as ends themselves, i.e., as viable methods for resolving the contradictions of capitalism, you become unable to use them as such a vehicle.

but, yeah. tldr; i think it is far from the most important thing (the most important thing is to be a principled anti-capitalist & anti-imperialist--these are the two litmus tests for whom i can consider a political ally), but it is useful to have an underlying political framework rather than a collection of individual positions, because the latter can lead to contradictory and self-defeating worldviews and political programs

[mariacallous]

In August, 2022, six months after Russian troops invaded Ukraine, a cultural festival named Traditions was held outside Moscow, at the onetime summer retreat of Alexander Pushkin. The star speaker was Alexander Dugin, a scholar and a prominent proponent of the war who has been called the prophet of the new Russian Empire. In his book “Being and Empire” (2023), which runs to a Heideggerian length of seven hundred and eighty-four pages, Dugin characterizes Russia as nothing less than “the last place of the true subject of history in time and space.” His lecture at the festival, “Tradition and History,” was as sprawling as its title suggested. Sitting under a canopy, he extemporized on the seasonal labors of the Russian peasantry, finding in the pre-modern past the “secret center” of the nation’s spiritual life.

For Dugin, the greatest enemy of Russia is liberalism, which he has defined as the “false premise that a human is a separate, autonomous individual—a selfish animal seeking its own benefit. And nothing more.” He has written that “such a liberal person—completely detached from God, history, and society; from the people and culture; from the family and loved ones; from collective morality and ethnic identity—does not exist; and if they do exist, they ought not to.”

After the talk, some members of the audience gathered around Dugin. A young man asked, “This liberalism thing—is it possible that concealed within it is some link to the Lord that will take it and bring it down?”

“Perhaps,” Dugin told him. “That’s why there are people who fight against the liberal world, even within the liberal world.”

“Maybe there is simply a certain substance that has flooded everything, all the brains,” the young man went on. “Then a flame is lit inside it by its offspring, which instantly turns the game upside down?”

The crowd looked befuddled, but Dugin cottoned at once. “Ah,” he said. “That would be Donald Trump!”

Everyone laughed, including Dugin’s daughter, Daria Dugina, who’d accompanied him to the event. A writer and broadcaster, Dugina also worked as a publicist and scheduler for her father. That evening, as they drove in different cars, an explosive attached to the underside of Dugina’s S.U.V. detonated. Her father got out of his vehicle as other drivers stopped. Someone taped the scene; Dugin can be seen stepping among the flaming wreckage, holding his hands to his head. The next day, Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin, sent Dugin a telegram calling Dugina’s death “a vile, cruel crime.”

An obscure Russian paramilitary group claimed responsibility for the bombing, but Moscow insisted that the order had come from Ukraine’s intelligence services. Ukraine denied the charge, but Biden Administration officials reportedly agreed with Russia. The intended victim was presumably Dugin. In some ways, he was a curious target: Dugin is not a politician or a military commander, nor does he seem to be a secret agent, despite predictable rumors to the contrary. Yet his voluminous writings, from books to online essays, have indelibly shaped Russian politics and policy. His conviction that the Russian Federation’s destiny is to become a holy empire along tsarist lines, a notion that he has been promoting for more than three decades, has been adopted by much of the Russian political élite—including by Putin himself. So has Dugin’s long-held belief that Ukraine is a proxy battlefield for a larger mortal conflict with the West. Whereas the Biden Administration opposed Russia’s imperial aggression, the Trump Administration appears willing to ratify it, if not to mimic it.

Since invading Ukraine, Putin has regularly invoked old arguments about Russia’s imperial role in the world, yet his references amount to a mercenary patchwork. In contrast, Dugin’s fluency with these arguments is as formidable as his loathing for liberalism is sincere. A close reading of his work offers an answer to the central question of the war, a question that, after three years, has still not been adequately addressed: Just why did Putin want to conquer Ukraine?

Only some of Dugin’s writing is about matters of state. Other pet subjects are literature, art, theology, music, and philosophy. He composes poetry (the not bad “In a Soviet Basement” contains the lines “He spins in a waltz, black as a cat / In his hands a Walter, in his hands a Walter / In his hands, Walter Scott”), records experimental music, and translates an array of right-wing European writers into Russian, releasing the books through his publishing house. Until 2014, he taught sociology at Moscow State University. He is not a Kremlin insider but, rather, a member of Moscow’s intelligentsia—or what now passes for it. He has written, co-written, or edited nearly a hundred books, and in his graphomania, if not in the quality of his work, he is a throwback to the Golden Age of Russian literature, in the nineteenth century. And, like the conservative Slavophile authors of that era who first formulated the nativist views that have resurged under Putin—such as the historian Mikhail Pogodin—Dugin assails the West and its values. He inveighs against democracy, secularism, individualism, civil society, multiculturalism, human rights, sexual openness, technology, scientific rationalism, and reason in general, which he rejects in favor of the mystical revelations of the Russian Orthodox Church. Although he is an avid tweeter and frequently posts on Telegram and Facebook, he claims to have no use for modernity. He once wrote that “the best course would be to eradicate the state and replace it with the Holy Empire.”

“Dugin can write a book in one night,” Marat Guelman, a former political consultant to the administration of Boris Yeltsin and a former acquaintance of Dugin’s, told me. “He is full of words.” Some of those words are sound enough. In “Templars of the Proletariat,” from 1997, Dugin observes that “the Russian national idea” is “paradoxical,” and “a colossal labor of the soul is required in order to make sense of it.” But, just when you think he is onto something serious, he says something risibly unserious. In his 2012 book, “Putin vs. Putin,” he presents pages of admissible arguments about Putin’s lack of vision for Russia’s future, only to announce, with a note of portentous climax, that Putin took office on a date predicted by Nostradamus. A critique of the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, which lucidly dissects the contradictions of perestroika, is undercut by musings on the occult implications of the “characteristic mark” on the former premier’s forehead. Dugin’s Russian critics like to say that he has kasha v golove—porridge in the head. Alexander Verkhovsky, a scholar of Russian extremism, dryly told me, “His books are very impressive, especially if, when you read them, you’re not thinking much.”

Nevertheless, you can find Dugin’s latest works in Russian bookstores, and he has found some avid readers abroad. The more extreme elements of the European New Right love his disdain for democracy. His books have been translated into French, Spanish, German, Italian, and English; in the United States, at least one of them—a 2014 treatise on Martin Heidegger—was published by a company run by the white nationalist Richard Spencer. Dugin makes President Trump’s accounts of American decline seem modest by comparison. In “Being and Empire,” Dugin calls the U.S. an immoral wasteland—“the direct opposite of the Holy Empire.” (His writing is full of italics.)

Last April, Dugin was interviewed by Tucker Carlson during the pundit’s tour of Russia. The expression of amiable skepticism that Carlson had worn through an earlier interview with Putin descended into a baffled frown when Dugin told him that the triumph of Western liberalism, which promotes “individualism” and rejects all kinds of “collective identities,” had led mankind to “the historical terminal station” where all ties to the past—religion, family, nation-state—were cut and “human identity” was “abandoned.” His anti-Western militancy is so intense that the U.S. and the European Union have both placed sanctions on him.

More dramatically, Ukrainian prosecutors have charged Dugin with genocide, though he appears to have played no material role in the war. His crime is rhetorical: he argues that the destruction of Ukraine is essential to Russia’s continued existence. In his 1997 book “Foundations of Geopolitics: The Geopolitical Future of Russia,” which brought him to fame in his home country, he writes, “The existence of Ukraine within its current borders, and with its current status as a ‘sovereign state,’ is tantamount to delivering a monstrous blow to Russia’s geopolitical security.” Although other Russian intellectuals have called for Ukraine’s incorporation into the Russian Federation, none have done so for quite so long, or with such a murderous tone, as Dugin. “Russia can be either great or not at all,” he writes in his 2014 book “Ukraine: My War,” adding, “Of course, for greatness, people always, in all centuries, pay a very heavy price, sometimes shedding entire seas of blood.”

Putin was once known for his distaste for ideology. Just before becoming his country’s acting President, in 2000, he wrote, “I am against the restoration of an official state ideology in Russia in any form.” In the decade after he took office, whenever he did resort to violence abroad—continuing the war in Chechnya; invading Georgia, in 2008—no grand ideology lay behind it. These were acts of opportunism by a cold-eyed pragmatist. The same could be said of Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, which was brazen and unlawful but also virtually bloodless, so much so that it moved Henry Kissinger to call Putin “a serious strategist.” (The mandarin of Realpolitik knew no higher praise.)

Putin’s decision, in 2022, to try to conquer all of Ukraine can’t be arrived at by extrapolating from those prior invasions. This was less the gambit of a master of Realpolitik than the reckless gamble of an ideologue, and the impulse to invade belongs to an antique tradition of Russian political thought—a messianic imperialism that originates not in the Soviet Union (which the former K.G.B. agent Putin has been accused, imprecisely, of wanting to revive) but in tsarist Russia.

Today, Putin talks like a Romanov-era zealot. This once terse apparatchik seems to have succumbed to the notion, as Dostoyevsky put it in “The Brothers Karamazov,” that “all true Russians are philosophers.” Putin has even taken to quoting Dostoyevsky; not too long ago, the idea that he’d ever read Dostoyevsky would have been laughable. Putin waxes on about the “civilizational identity” that underlies Russia’s claims to cultural dominance, and about the “historical and spiritual space” of Greater Russia, which, naturally, includes all of Ukraine. “The world has entered a period of fundamental, revolutionary transformation,” he declared in a speech several months after attempting to topple Kyiv. Russia, he said, was defending not only its national interests but also the oppressed of the world against the “Western élites” who exploited them. His country had made “a glorious spiritual choice.”

The speech could have been written by Dugin. In “Foundations of Geopolitics,” he writes, “The Russian people certainly belong to the messianic peoples, and, like any messianic people, it has a universal, pan-human significance.” Putin has come to sound like Dugin to such an extent that Dugin has been called Putin’s Rasputin and Putin’s philosopher. “Putin’s Brain” was the headline of a Foreign Affairs profile of Dugin; “Inside ‘Putin’s Brain’ ” is the title of a recent book. All oversell the point. Putin’s telegram of condolence to Dugin notwithstanding, there is little to suggest that the two men have a personal relationship. But wars don’t arise from personal relationships. They arise from ideas—from the accretion, and corruption, of ideas over time. Putin’s assimilation of Dugin’s thinking is likely indirect, maybe even unconscious. It might be more apt to call Dugin the Russian President’s imperial id. When I asked the historian Andrei Tsygankov, the author of “Russia and the West from Alexander to Putin,” about the pair’s connection, he said, “Putin uses Dugin in the way that the tsars used the Slavophiles”—for “mobilizing the population to their cause.”

When Putin announced the start of his “special military operation” in Ukraine, on February 24, 2022, he didn’t mention that country by name until the latter half of a nearly four-thousand-word speech. The first half was taken up with excoriating the West, and especially the U.S., that “empire of lies,” for forcing the war on Russia by seeking to “destroy our traditional values and force on us their false values . . . that are directly leading to degradation and degeneration, because they are contrary to human nature.” That speech, too, could have been written by Dugin, who has written that “the entirety of Russian history is a dialectical argument with the West and against Western culture.”

Putin and Dugin came to prominence simultaneously, in the nineteen-nineties. After leaving the K.G.B., Putin became the deputy mayor of St. Petersburg, then joined the staff of President Yeltsin, who made him chief of the Federal Security Service (the K.G.B.’s successor), then Prime Minister, and eventually tapped him for the Presidency. This was one way up in post-Soviet Russia. Another was through the reactionary underground. This was Dugin’s path. February 24, 2022, can be seen as the day those two trajectories, the official and the unofficial, collided.

Putin describes himself as a “pure and utterly successful product of Soviet patriotic education” in “First Person,” a collection of interviews with him published in 2000 and the closest thing we have to an autobiography. Dugin is a more exotic specimen in Russia: a child of the sixties, almost in the same sense that Westerners would use that term. He was born in Moscow to a minor official in 1962, nine years after the death of Joseph Stalin, from whose murderous purges the Russian intelligentsia was slowly recovering. Writers and other educated élites were then “under such monstrous ideological pressure that one wonders why art and the humanities have not altogether vanished in our country,” the dissident Andrei Sakharov wrote.

Stalin suppressed Ukrainian culture and caused the death of untold numbers of Ukrainians. While Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, continued expanding the Soviet imperium, he reversed Stalin’s policy on Ukraine. Khrushchev, who grew up in Ukraine, elevated it to the status of the second most powerful Soviet republic after Russia and, in 1954, transferred Crimea to its control—an act for which Putin assails him today. He also instituted the thaw, as it was known, relaxing cultural restrictions. The year Dugin was born, Khrushchev both precipitated the Cuban missile crisis and approved the publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s account of a Soviet Gulag, “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” arguably the most subversive novel to have been legally published in the U.S.S.R. Beneath the sanctioned renaissance sprang up an illicit counterculture that defied the Soviet cult of reason with occult religion.

From this spiritualist subculture emerged the young Dugin, by all accounts unforgettably. Tall, regal, and formal looking, he looked like “a representative of a higher race,” one of his friends said. He was a walking paradox: in the aristocratic Russian manner, he wore cavalry jodhpurs and rolled his “R”s; at the same time, he adopted the style of a medieval peasant, complete with a “pudding bowl” haircut. The writer and poet Eduard Limonov recalls in his memoir “My Political Biography” that Dugin was a “plump, cheeky, belly, busty, bearded young man” who was “full of exaggerated emotions.”

While Putin got a law degree and entered the intelligence services, Dugin dropped out of aviation school and took up with a different sort of secret society: the Iuzhinskii Circle, a group of writers in Moscow’s “metaphysical underground.” The circle had been formed, in the nineteen-sixties, by Yuri Mamleev, a novelist who has noted, “We felt distinctly that there was a bottomless chasm beneath us and that the whole planet was sinking into it.” The first members of the salon gathered in Mamleev’s small Moscow apartment to listen to him read from his writings, which were too outlandish to be published even during the thaw. One novel, “Shatuny,” was regarded as a kind of sacred text. A late-twentieth-century answer to “Crime and Punishment,” it follows a half-witted, sex-crazed serial killer as he screws and slaughters his way through Russia, in an effort to glimpse his victims’ souls. Dugin said that the novel was “the secret seed of the nineteen-sixties,” writing, “It is as though what you hold in your hands is not a book, but an empty space, a black, impish vortex that can suck large objects into itself.” A similar feeling may have been induced by the circle’s initiation rites—Bacchic episodes with copious drinking and sex.

Mamleev immigrated to the U.S. in 1974, before Dugin joined the circle. When Dugin became a member, the group was meeting at the dacha of Sergey Zhigalkin, a mystical philosopher who became Dugin’s close friend. Zhigalkin told me that life in the circle was not just intellectually risky; members were in danger of being arrested or sent to a mental asylum. He said that Dugin opposed both the Soviet system and “modern civilization as a whole.” This gave Dugin a grim outlook, Zhigalkin explained: “In Russia, and America, too, we live in the paradigm of a new time: in postmodernism, which is purely earthly and has no spiritual dimension—that is the tragedy.”

Dugin began not as a writer but as a musician. He brought a guitar and an accordion to circle gatherings and performed original material. Charles Clover, who was a Financial Times correspondent in Moscow at the time, chronicles the metaphysical underground in his book “Black Wind, White Snow,” and writes that Dugin’s songs were “composed of as many antisocial elements as its creator could find.” Clover recalls, “Strumming away around a bonfire in the evening sunset, he belted out a song, ‘Fuck the Damn Sovdep.’ ” (The Soviet Deputies were the organs of local government in the U.S.S.R.) The lyrics essentially called for mass murder of the Soviet leadership: “Two million in the river / two million in the oven / Our revolvers will not misfire.” Eventually, Dugin had his own cult following. “We just fell down and worshipped him,” one acolyte told Clover. “He was like a messiah.”

Soon enough, Dugin came to the attention of Putin’s colleagues in the K.G.B. Dugin’s father—his government career hindered, or possibly ruined, by his son—may have tipped off agents. In 1983, Dugin was sent to K.G.B. headquarters after performing dissident songs at a Moscow art studio. Agents later discovered a samizdat archive of Mamleev’s writings at the home of Dugin’s parents. According to Clover, Dugin was told by his interrogator, “The U.S.S.R. will stand forever. It’s an eternal reality.”

Dugin was released after a night of questioning and started working odd jobs while exhausting library shelves. He inhaled the European canon and Eastern philosophy. M. Gessen, in their book “The Future Is History,” relates an anecdote about Dugin wanting to read Heidegger’s “Being and Time.” He couldn’t locate a Russian translation, so he tracked down a German copy—on microfilm. He retrofitted a 35-mm. hand-cranked projector on his desk. “By the time he was done with ‘Being and Time,’ Dugin needed glasses,” Gessen writes. He’d also taught himself German. He then learned English, French, and Italian, too, along with various ancient languages. He gravitated to latter-day Continental metaphysicians—Heidegger, the German radical conservatives Oswald Spengler and Carl Schmitt, the traditionalist school of René Guénon and Julius Evola—who shared a hopelessness about Western civilization, if not civilization generally, and a morbid aversion to modernity. A striking number of these thinkers were members of the Nazi Party, or were otherwise fascist. Dugin could declaim on their work for hours, and did.

“He liked to give a lecture,” Misha Verbitsky, a mathematician and a former friend of Dugin’s, told me. “He dared to think in directions where nobody else would. Like Nietzsche, I suppose. Of course, some of the directions were very unhealthy.”

Dugin also read deeply in the Russian canon. The notion that Russia is more than a state or nation—that it is a holy empire with a world-saving duty—goes back at least half a millennium. “All Christian realms will come to an end and will unite into the one single realm of our sovereign, that is, into the Russian realm, according to the prophetic books,” the Russian theologian Filofei predicted in 1510. “Both Romes fell, the third endures.” The idea was brought to its highest polish in the nineteenth century, the apex of tsarist imperialism and, not coincidentally, of Russian letters. That era is the origin of Dugin’s views of the West and Ukraine, and of Putin’s recent thinking. Indeed, it can be seen as the true start of the Ukraine war.

As hard as it is to imagine now, Russia was then seen, and saw itself, not as the existential foe of the West but as its protégé. When Tsar Alexander I chased Napoleon Bonaparte from a charred Moscow to Paris, in 1814, he was hailed as the deliverer of Europe. Alexander came to believe that God had ordained him to save Europe, and also all of humanity and Christianity. Russia was both a physical and a spiritual empire—the Third Rome, as Filofei suggested. So holy was Russia that the two words merged in the language: svetlorusskaia, or Holy Russia. Tellingly, in “Being and Empire” Dugin calls Russia “the last kingdom—the Third Rome.”

If Alexander was the progenitor of the messianic imperialism that Putin expresses today, Alexander’s most imaginative acolytes were poets and novelists, not his court propagandists. As Eugene Onegin rides home from Europe, in Alexander Pushkin’s verse novel, he longs for “Holy Russia, her fields, her deserts, cities and her seas.” In “Dead Souls,” Nikolai Gogol rhapsodizes at Russia, “You are overtaking the whole world, and shall one day force all nations, all empires to stand aside,” and, geographically speaking, at least, he wasn’t wrong. By the time Alexander expired, in a fog of lunatic spiritualism, in 1825, his empire was the largest the world had ever known, stretching from the Baltic Sea to the far side of the Pacific Ocean, from the Black Sea to the Arctic Ocean.

Simultaneously, the Russian intelligentsia was in a debate about the empire’s soul. The so-called Westernizers, reform-minded writers who believed that Russia must continue looking to Europe to keep up in a changing world, stood against the Slavophiles, who countered that Russia was its own place with its own history, its own Church and traditions, with no need of a constitution, a free press, settled law, or other indignities of Western modernity. Ironically, the Slavophiles’ argument came straight out of European Romanticism and idealism, which similarly questioned the rationalist claims of the Enlightenment. The Slavophiles’ distinction was their tone of self-pity. The radical journalist Alexander Herzen, a Westernizer, determined that Slavophilia was not so much a philosophy as “a wounded national feeling.”

The debate remained largely theoretical until the Crimean War broke out, in 1853. Russia’s former allies France and Britain became its opponents, joining the Ottoman Empire against Tsar Nicholas I, Alexander’s younger brother. The war gave the Slavophile argument a deadly rationale, and convinced Nicholas that Europe could no longer be trusted. When Mikhail Pogodin, the leading Slavophile historian, wrote a memorandum to the tsar, saying, “We can expect nothing from the West but blind hatred and malice,” Nicholas commented in the margin, “This is the whole point.” Nicholas came to see the war as a personal holy struggle—but this time Russia was not saving Europe from conquest but saving the world from Europe.

Russia lost the Crimean War, but the aftershocks can still be felt today. In Putin’s 2014 speech celebrating the annexation of Crimea, he suggested that he was belatedly righting the defeat of Nicholas, whose bust greets visitors to Putin’s Kremlin offices. Nicholas never psychologically recovered from his loss, but his ideology permanently shaped Russian politics and literature. Perhaps its most impassioned proponent was Dostoyevsky. Although he turned out monuments to humanism in his fiction, in his political writings Dostoyevsky adopted an apocalyptic nativism. “Any closer intercourse with Europe might even exercise a harmful and corrupt influence upon the Russian mind,” he warns in “A Writer’s Diary,” which brought him to fame when it was published, in the eighteen-seventies.

Dugin has written that Dostoyevsky is his country’s “greatest national genius” and “the writer who wrote Russia,” and Dugin’s political writing can be seen as a decades-long fugue on “Diary.” In “Putin vs. Putin,” he writes that the Russian Empire is “something alive, sacred,” chosen by God to “speak for all of those who have been humiliated and insulted.”

The Crimean War also helped incite an independence movement in Ukraine, which was then known in Moscow as Malorussiya, or Little Russia. The Russian intelligentsia had once admired Ukraine, seeing in it the birthplace of the Muscovite dynasty and Orthodoxy. That admiration ended, and contempt for the prospect of Ukrainian autonomy was one matter on which the Slavophiles and Westernizers agreed. The literary critic Vissarion Belinsky, a Westernizer, argued that Ukrainians were “a people without consciousness of itself.” Dugin echoes this in “Foundations of Geopolitics,” calling Ukrainian culture “devoid of any universal meaning.”

Alexander II, Nicholas I’s son and successor, banned Ukrainian-language publications. The tsar did this even as he abolished serfdom, with an eye on a new empire with messianic pretensions: the United States. Certain Westernizers such as Herzen saw promise in the U.S. But Slavophiles such as Pogodin, who, in his essay “The Slav and World Mission of Russia,” called America “no state, but rather a trading company,” saw the zenith of the soulless materialism that they believed was ruining Europe. America was the future, and the future was loathsome.

The Slavophilia debate ended with the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, which gave rise to Russian fascism and to the short-lived Ukrainian People’s Republic, a state that was stamped out by Moscow. In the Soviet era, Slavophilism was eventually revived by exiled thinkers such as Nikolai Trubetzkoy, an accomplished linguist and Lithuanian royalty. Trubetzkoy’s hatred for his Communist dispossessors was matched by his hatred for Europe, which had, after all, exported Communism to Russia. He envisioned a post-Soviet Russian Empire based on Orthodoxy, high Russian culture, anti-Westernism, and the subjugation of Ukraine. In his 1927 essay “The Ukraine Problem,” Trubetzkoy argued that Ukraine was the vector of inferior Western ideas into Russia. For Russia to realize its imperial destiny, he wrote, “Ukrainian culture must become an individualized variant of all-Russian culture.” Dugin, whose publishing house has reissued Trubetzkoy’s work, repeats this argument nearly verbatim in “Foundations of Geopolitics,” demanding that “Ukraine should be strictly a projection of Moscow.”

As it turned out, the Soviet regime that Trubetzkoy opposed was meeting his demands. Stalin reinstituted the ban on the Ukrainian language, liquidated Kyiv’s political class and intelligentsia, and starved millions of Ukrainians to death.

In Dugin’s 1997 book “Templars of the Proletariat,” he writes that, after the U.S.S.R. disbanded, “that which had seemed without end had collapsed in a single moment.” What this meant intellectually was that “the meaning and content of Russian history is a question addressed these days to everyone.”

In the West, we tend to view the end of the Soviet Union as the beginning of a tragically brief period of Russian democracy. In Russia, it is thought of less wistfully, as a period of social collapse and economic ruin. Former Soviet territories descended into a civil war that recalled the nineteenth century. The Russian Federation’s first President, Boris Yeltsin, wrote in his 1994 memoir that he was choosing “a path of internal development rather than an imperial one.” Yeltsin signed an agreement with the newly independent Ukraine that deemed it and Russia “equal and sovereign States.”

The fear and shame felt by Russians in this era can’t be overstated. Putin once said, “We remember the horrible nineteen-nineties,” when the West “called us friends and partners, but they treated us like a colony, using various schemes to pump trillions of dollars out of the country.” One result was the resurgence of Russian fascism. The movement was led by the National Patriotic Front, a party that had, for a time, a banner depicting the Romanov double eagle, a swastika, and Jesus, along with the slogan “God! Tsar! Nation!” The group’s manifesto stated that democratic reform was a plot to “open the floodgates to Western capital,” which sounds like something Dugin would write, though it’s unclear whether he contributed to the document. The main appeal for him may have been that the name by which the party was popularly known, Pamyat, or Memory, was apparently taken from an experimental novel.

Dugin ultimately left the National Patriotic Front and began meeting with Eduard Limonov, the writer, who had just returned to Russia after nearly two decades in exile. In his absence, Limonov had become an underground legend. He had been a petty thief in Kharkiv, a samizdat poet in Moscow, a punk sensation in New York, and an acclaimed litterateur in Paris. In a series of autobiographical novels about his poverty, crimes, and sexual exploits, he helped invent the genre we now call autofiction. But Limonov, though a libertine, was no liberal. His success in the West hadn’t left him applauding its freedoms but, rather, made him despise its materialism; in “My Political Biography,” he describes the U.S. as “the enemy of all.” Dugin wrote, “When I saw Limonov at an opposition rally for the first time, it seemed to me that a myth was coming true.”

Limonov loathed what he found in the new Russia no less. He wrote that he abhorred “Yeltsin with all my being,” as Dugin did, for adopting Western neoliberal policies—and for relinquishing the Soviet Empire. The two men were in synch: Dugin wrote that “all of Russia’s misfortunes can be attributed” to it being a “copy of the secular European model,” and Limonov argued that “what the insensitive Russian citizens, who react only to extremely brutal, horrifying and shocking events, really want is the arrival of Fascists.”

In 1993, Dugin and Limonov founded the National Bolshevik Party. Article 1 of its charter stated, “The essence of National Bolshevism is the incinerating hatred of the anti-human system of the Trinity: liberalism/democracy/capitalism.” Article 2 was the party’s enemies list: the U.S., Europe, NATO, and the United Nations. Article 3 was the group’s main policy goal: the creation of a “giant continental empire” that must include “the accession of the former union republics.” In other words, the independent state of Ukraine would be abolished.

The group cited a mishmash of historical inspirations, ranging from Russian heroes of the Second World War to Hermann Göring and Joseph Goebbels. This paradox was reflected in its official banner: a red background with a white circle in the middle and, in the place of a black swastika, a black hammer and sickle. According to Limonov, they liked to suggest at press conferences that he was the Hitler to Dugin’s Goebbels. Marat Guelman, the former political consultant for Yeltsin, who knew Dugin and Limonov, told me that Limonov didn’t himself know whether the party was “an art project or real politics.” From one perspective, their fascism was a punk gesture. The National Bolshevik headquarters, the basement of a residential building near a metro station, also served as a performance space, a literary salon, a drinking hall, a sex den, and the sole bureau of the party newspaper Limonka, which can translate to either little lemon or grenade. Dugin claims to be descended from a radical priest who was beheaded by the state, and the proof of it may be in his fearlessly splenetic Limonka columns. In one such column, he lambasts Yeltsin’s Kremlin, writing, “We are disgusted by the mafia-market society of violence and oppression, we passionately love our Motherland, our people and our culture and do not want traders and bastards to squander the lands watered with the blood of our fathers.”

But Dugin and Limonov were also fascists in the foulest sense. They craved absolutism and suffering, believed in cruelty for its own sake, and thought war to be the most exultant mode of existence. Their movement was an imperial death cult. The National Bolshevik greeting was an arm thrown forward and to the side—Sieg heil style, but with a clenched fist—alongside the exclamation “Yes, death!” Dugin’s former friend Misha Verbitsky told me that Dugin’s “favorite idea is that the whole world will be destroyed, and that it’s actually a good thing.”

Yet the National Bolsheviks, who gained an international following, did at least reject the bigotry of classical fascism: they forbade ethnic and religious discrimination. The party had Asian, Muslim, and Jewish members and at least one Black member—a Latvian activist who would later be arrested in Ukraine for supporting pro-Russia activists. Although Dugin’s obsession with Nazis is undeniable, there is surprisingly little antisemitism in his writing.

In the nineties, Limonov joined separatists fighting in Georgia and Moldova. After attempting to smuggle weapons into Kazakhstan to incite a pro-Russia insurgency, he spent two years in prison. He then went to Crimea to urge on pro-Russia separatists, and got banned from Ukraine in the process. Dugin’s concession to action was a 1995 run at a parliamentary seat. The title of his platform was “With the People Against the Dictatorship of Scum.” He won less than a per cent of the vote. But by that point he’d found a surer entry into the main arena of Russian politics.

Dugin was hired to write for another publication, Den: Journal of the Spiritual Opposition, by its editor, Alexander Prokhanov, a veteran of the Iuzhinskii Circle, a cult novelist, and an unabashed imperialist who wrote the mission statement for a group of reactionary politicians and generals who tried to depose Gorbachev in a coup, in 1991. Prokhanov told me that Dugin “astonished me with his vocabulary, terms, philosophical categories, which he brought into our public debate.” Den ran a column called “Conspiratology.” In a nine-part series, “The Great War of the Continents,” published in 1992, Dugin outlined the “geopolitical conspiracy” of the Soviet Union’s demise and the establishment of Ukrainian independence. Among other things, he claimed that NATO was turning Ukraine into a cordon sanitaire through which it would infiltrate Russia—the very claim that Putin would adopt two decades later. The West was, Dugin wrote, “luring Russia into a Ukrainian trap.”

The Russian intelligentsia, many of whom had opposed Ukrainian independence when the Soviet Union fell, was receptive to this line of thinking. In the book “Rebuilding Russia,” Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who had gone from being an anti-Soviet dissident to a neo-Slavophile, says that the Ukrainian language was a “falsehood” and warned against Ukrainian self-governance, even though much of his family was Ukrainian.

Prokhanov introduced Dugin to Moscow’s reactionary élite, and in the mid-nineties Dugin became an informal adviser to Gennady Zyuganov, the leader of the still powerful Communist Party, who ran against Yeltsin for the Presidency on a platform of a “voluntary” reconstitution of the Soviet Union. Dugin simultaneously advised the candidate Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the leader of the Liberal Democratic Party, who wanted to invade Ukraine and even go to war with NATO, to win back the Soviet Empire. Zhirinovsky was the son of a Ukrainian Jew, but such was the vicious vaudeville of Russian politics in the nineties. When he and Zyuganov overperformed in parliamentary elections, in 1995, a chill went through Ukraine and the West.

Dugin’s Den series was the basis for his 1997 book “Foundations of Geopolitics.” It appeared shortly after Yeltsin won reëlection. Russian conservatives were crestfallen, and Dugin’s book provided fresh inspiration. “The battle for Russian world domination is not over,” he reassured readers. Describing the Russian Federation as a merely “transitional formation,” he wrote that, throughout history, the Russian people had perpetually moved “towards the creation of an Empire.” More than that, any “refusal of the empire-building function” wasn’t just unnatural but “national suicide.” And the first order of business of the new empire must be the end of Ukraine: “The continued existence of a unitary Ukraine is unacceptable.”

“Foundations of Geopolitics” was a sensation. The historian John B. Dunlop observed, “There has perhaps not been another book published in Russia during the post-Communist period” that has exerted as much influence “on Russian military, police, and foreign policy elites,” adding, “If its ideas were to be implemented, then Ukraine would cease to exist.”

After Putin took office, three years later, Dugin told an interviewer that the new President was “the ideal ruler” for the times—ideal not because he was particularly competent but because he was “a tragic figure.” This was an unseasonable claim; Putin was then being hailed as an optimist, an internationalist, and a reformer. He declared that Russia might even join NATO. He was one of the first heads of state to call George W. Bush on 9/11, and, on meeting him, Bush found him “straightforward and trustworthy.” But Dugin looked at Putin’s sphinxlike frown and sensed something else. With Putin, Dugin promised, “the dawn is breaking,” but it would be a “dawn in boots.”

On December 30, 1999, Putin published an essay in the newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta titled “Russia at the Turn of the Millennium.” He has since lamented the collapse of the Soviet Union, but he didn’t take that view in the essay. Concentrating instead on the “outrageous price our country and its people had to pay for that Bolshevist experiment,” he wrote that “only fanatics or political forces that are absolutely apathetic and indifferent to Russia and its people can make calls to a new revolution.”

Putin didn’t mention Ukraine. Not until 2004 did his thoughts seem to turn to his country’s neighbor. Ukraine held a Presidential election that year. In the memoirs of Condoleezza Rice, then Bush’s national-security adviser, she recounts paying a visit to Putin in the Kremlin. Rice was surprised when a Ukrainian politician, Viktor Yanukovych, suddenly emerged from a side room. “Oh, please meet Viktor,” Putin said to her. “He is a candidate for President of Ukraine.” Rice writes that she “took the message that Putin had intended: the United States should know that Russia had a horse in the race.”

When Yanukovych prevailed in the second round of the election, amid allegations of fraud, Ukraine erupted with protests that became known as the Orange Revolution. When he relented to his Western-friendly opponent, Viktor Yushchenko, suspicious Russians smelled a plot: Ukraine had been host not to a popular uprising, they believed, but to a foreign coup. At a 2005 press conference in Moscow, Dugin warned that “an absolutely serious threat of the Orange Revolution looms over Russia.” Putin appears to have adopted the same view around this time. Looking back, the Orange Revolution may have marked a switch in his thinking comparable to that of Tsar Nicholas I’s revelation during the Crimean War: Putin became convinced that the West could not be trusted, and that its leaders sought only to undermine Russia’s domestic stability.

In a 2007 speech to the Munich Security Conference, Putin jolted the room when he said that the U.S. had “overstepped its national borders in every way.” He was actually voicing a sentiment felt by many, as the U.S. was carrying on two wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan, and making noises about a third, in Iran. But it was a breach of diplomatic decorum. At a NATO summit in Bucharest the next year, Bush, possibly wanting to return the favor, shocked the assembled statesmen when he called for Ukraine to be fast-tracked for membership. Russia was not in NATO, but the organization and the Kremlin had a good rapport, so much so that Putin was at the summit. The American diplomat Angela E. Stent was also present, and in her 2014 book, “The Limits of Partnership,” she recalls that Putin took Bush aside and said, “You have to understand that Ukraine is not even a country.” Four months later, Russia invaded Georgia, which, like Ukraine, was in talks with NATO.

At the same time, Putin was becoming a more devout Orthodox believer, and he was evidently doing some reading. “If you look at the reasoning of our thinkers, philosophers, and representatives of classical Russian literature, they see the reasons for the disagreements between Russia and the West,” he said in an interview. “The Russian world view is based on the idea of good and evil, higher powers, and the divine principle. The basis of Western thinking—I don’t want this to sound awkward, but the basis is still interest, pragmatism.”

In 2012, Putin published a series of essays in Russian papers laying out his new vision of the country’s future—and the world’s. In Nezavisimaya Gazeta, he noted that the West was foundering because of its lack of traditional values. Russia offered a more conservative and harmonious alternative. The echoes of Dugin were unmistakable. “European politicians have started to talk openly about the failure of the ‘multicultural project,’ ” Putin wrote. He compared the “U.S.-style ‘melting pot,’ where most people are, in some way, migrants” to Russian culture, which “has been a joint affair between many different peoples.” Putin cited Dostoyevsky’s claim that the “great mission” of the Russian people was to “unite and bind together a civilization,” one in which identity is “based on preserving the dominance of Russian culture.” (Putin didn’t mention that Dostoyevsky had arrived at this vision only after spending four years in a Siberian prison.) As though answering Dugin’s call, in “Templars of the Proletariat,” for the new Russia to wash itself in blood, Putin declared that Russians “have confirmed their choice time and again during their thousand-year history—with their blood, not through plebiscites or referendums.”

Dugin’s emerging intellectual alliance with Putin was underscored when Dugin quit the National Bolshevik Party, having fallen out with Limonov, who dismissed his old friend as a “degenerate servitor of the regime.” Dugin was given a chair in the sociology department of Moscow State University, where he formed a think tank, the Center for Conservative Studies.

He also founded a party of his own: the Eurasia Party. Ostensibly, the party was devoted to promoting Nikolai Trubetzkoy’s notion, articulated in the nineteen-twenties, that Russia’s future rested among the ancient truths and autocratic traditions of Asia. Dugin apparently believes in this notion, but, on a practical level, the party, with minimal membership and no seats in parliament, may have been a front for a more shadowy political group led by Dugin: the International Eurasian Movement. One of this group’s projects was forming a pro-Russia Fifth Column in Ukraine. Dugin’s followers set up branches around the country, according to Anton Shekhovtsov, a Ukrainian researcher who spent time with them. A member of the group told Shekhovtsov, “Our foremost priority is to focus on the creation of the empire.” They trained for violent street protests and collected signatures for a referendum to establish a breakaway republic in the Donbas region of Ukraine. The Ukrainian government learned of Dugin and his followers’ insurrectionary activities, and he was banned from the country.

As for Putin, his distrust of the West increased with his hostility toward Ukraine, which he contended was both a security problem and the primary vector of Western cultural infection. He may have arrived at the same syllogism as the Slavophiles and Trubetzkoy: Ukraine was essentially the West, the West was modernity, and modernity was loathsome; therefore, Ukraine was loathsome. Thomas Graham, a senior director of Russian affairs on the National Security Council in the Bush Administration, told me, “The evolution in Putin’s thinking about Ukraine parallels the evolution in his thinking about the United States.”

Russian politicians and media portrayed Ukraine as a puppet of the U.S. Russian diplomats increasingly spoke about NATO aggression and Ukrainian waywardness, often depicting them as the same phenomenon. The idea that the Ukrainians might have their own legitimate concerns about their powerful neighbor was dismissed. In February, 2014, Russia invaded Crimea. Putin claimed that he was heading off a NATO takeover of the peninsula—the threat that Dugin had warned of more than two decades before.

Dugin lavishly praised Putin. He called the President “predetermined by history,” and said, “Putin is becoming more and more like Dugin, or at least implementing the program I have been building my entire life.” In “Ukraine: My War,” published the same year as the invasion, he writes that at stake was not just Crimea or the Donbas, where Russia had begun backing an insurgent war, but “the victory or defeat of Russia in the battle with the existential enemy (Atlanticism, the global financial oligarchy, the West).”

In an interview, Dugin offered a revelation. “I myself am Ukrainian,” he said. “I’m ashamed of that small but still significant part of my blood. And I want this blood to be cleansed with the blood of the scum, the Kyiv junta.” He went on, “And I think, Kill, kill, and kill! There is nothing else to say.” That is never true of Dugin, of course, so he added, “I am saying so as a professor.”

By that point, however, such rhetoric was commonplace among Russia’s growing movement of neo-imperialists, and a rebuke from the traditional intelligentsia was a badge of honor. Dugin was made the editorial director at Tsargrad TV, a network affiliated with the Russian Orthodox Church. His fame spread abroad, and his Twitter account surpassed two hundred thousand followers.

Dugin has said that “the American scenario in Ukraine is to bring neo-Nazis to power,” along with “their Jewish sponsors.” This was far-fetched even for him. But by 2021—as Russia prepared to invade Ukraine again—these claims, too, were commonplace. In an essay that Putin published on the Kremlin’s Web site that summer, titled “On the Historical Unity of Russia and Ukraine,” he claimed that Ukraine, with its Jewish President, was overrun by neo-Nazis. Many other passages of the seven-thousand-word essay, which is full of tendentious scholarship and specious interpretations, call to mind Dugin’s “The Great War of the Continents” series in Den three decades earlier. “Western authors of the anti-Russia project set up the Ukrainian political system,” Putin wrote, adding—in what could have been a direct quote from “Foundations of Geopolitics”—that this was “comparable in its consequences to the use of weapons of mass destruction.” He concluded, “Our spiritual unity has also been attacked.”

Putin even attempted to marshal literature to his cause. He listed famous Ukrainian writers to make the case that, although they may have been born in a place called Ukraine, they wrote in Russian. His chief example was Nikolai Gogol, whom Putin saw as “a Russian patriot.” He failed to mention that Gogol wrote his magnum opus, “Dead Souls,” not in Russia, where Nicholas I censored him, but in Europe. Putin also omitted the fact that Gogol was as proud of his Ukrainian heritage as he was of his Russian heritage. Gogol once wrote, “I never would give preference to the ‘Little Russian’ before the Russian, nor to the Russian before the ‘Little Russian.’ ”

After Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Dugin became one of the war’s most vocal advocates. He wrote that it followed “the logic of the entire historical path of Russia.”

In his lecture at the Traditions festival, Dugin moved from peasants to a survey of modern Russian intellectual history. “The eighteenth century was generally serfdom, Westernism, total degeneration, rejection of all sacred aspects, traditions, modernization, science, these damned institutions,” he told the audience. “But in the nineteenth century the Slavophiles, and our colossal achievements, begin.” And “when our children begin to see history this way,” he said, “they begin to love our past.” A few hours later, the child whom Dugin had taught to see history this way—his daughter, Daria Dugina—was incinerated.

The Moscow élite turned out for her memorial service, at Ostankino Tower, near the headquarters of Channel One, Russia’s largest state TV channel, which broadcast the event. National Bolshevik demonstrators had once occupied the tower as Dugin cheered them on in the pages of Limonka. Now, in a cavernous, black-draped studio, politicians and oligarchs lined up at a microphone and read aloud condolences from Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Patriarch Kirill I, of the Russian Orthodox Church. The billionaire Konstantin Malofeev, the chairman of Tsargrad TV, vowed that there would be a Daria Dugina Street in the Ukrainian capital after Russia rebuilt “Kyiv and all the other cities of Ukraine as part of a future Great Russia.”

The parliamentarian Sergey Baburin said, “The entity that was the most interested in this atrocious crime is the demonic West.” The organizer of Traditions, Zakhar Prilepin, singled out “the civilized world, all Europe.”

Dugin finally stepped to the microphone, looking noble in his grief. He said, of his daughter, “Almost her first words, which of course we taught her, were ‘Russia,’ ‘our state,’ ‘our people,’ ‘our empire.’ ” Tearing up, he went on, “She lived in the name of victory and died in its name, in the name of our Russian victory.”

Putin awarded Dugina the Order of Courage—a state medal whose prior recipients include generals, an astronaut, and the President of Chechnya. In a speech commemorating the annexation of portions of Ukraine, he said that “the collective West,” which seemed to encompass Ukraine, “sees our thought and our philosophy as a direct threat,” He added, “That is why they target our philosophers for assassination.”

In a macabre form of poetic justice, Dugina’s death has become the subject of the sort of conspiracy theories that her father traffics in. A former Russian parliamentarian claims to have proof that she was actually killed by Russians, as part of a false-flag operation. In Paris, a man stood before the Eiffel Tower yelling that French intelligence was involved. A British scholar of Russia tweeted, “There is zero evidence that Alexander Dugin killed his daughter as part of a ritual sacrifice. I can’t believe I have to write that.”

Since his daughter’s death, Dugin has remained prodigiously productive: along with publishing “Being and Empire,” among other books, he has posted many essays online. He has a fellowship at Fudan University, in Shanghai, and has given lectures and interviews. But Dugina is never far from his thoughts. On Facebook, he regularly posts her picture or writes something about her. Last year, he told The Spectator that her death had made the war personal for him: “They have killed not only her. They have killed me and my wife. Everything stopped on 20 August 2022. It was a success for Satan and his slaves.” In the same interview, he urged Putin to use nuclear weapons on Ukraine.

In Dugin’s preface to “Eschatological Optimism,” a book of inspirational Neoplatonic philosophy that Dugina had been writing, which was published posthumously, he says, “I’d rather believe that I don’t exist, that we all don’t exist, than her.” He calls her a “philosophical hero,” adding, “A Russian hero is first and foremost a victim. He knows that his fate is tragic, and his path is suffering.”

Suffering was also the theme of a speech that Putin gave, in September, 2022, celebrating the annexation of captured Ukrainian territories. For a speech meant to mark a victory, it was oddly victimized in tone. Before Putin fell in thrall to the idea that Ukraine is a Western puppet and an existential threat to Russia that must vanish from maps, he was—publicly, at least—as allergic to self-pity as he was to ideology. But the speech was a paean to that “wounded national feeling” which the journalist Alexander Herzen had identified in the Slavophiles. Putin didn’t dwell on the suffering of the thousands of Russian soldiers who had died for the cause of annexing Ukraine, nor did he touch on the suffering of the millions of Ukrainians whom he claimed to be saving from themselves. Instead, he focussed on the centuries of Russian suffering at the hands of the West, which was “ready to cross every line to preserve the neocolonial system that allows it to live off the world, to plunder it thanks to the domination of the dollar and technology.” He decried the Western “overthrow of faith and traditional values,” which was “coming to resemble a ‘religion in reverse’—pure Satanism.” The invasion, then, was meant to save not just Ukraine, or Russia, but Christianity, and therefore all mankind. The speech might have been written by Nicholas I or Fyodor Dostoyevsky—or Alexander Dugin. 

[rametarin]

And furthermore

I often hear the same crap from the same Antifa flag flying people about "all the Nazis" and "all the fascists" in tabletop games and videogaming.

Yes, there are idiots like that one dude from Spain that painted his stupid war gaminng miniatures up to look like Nazis. How many fuckers do you think have thought they were clever by painting up their guys like Soviets? Are you going to accuse them of being unironic advocates of genocide of Polish people, and Jewish Slavs, and all the other ethnic groups that Soviet Russia tried to, or managed, to cleanse?

I hear endless amounts about how there's apparently all these Nazis and fascists that only leftwingers can see. And to me, it's like hearing the Ben Shapiro types complain about all the mincing, crossdressed pedophiles walking around making lewd tongue gestures at their children. More of a caricature and a boogyman than an actual thing, but one they insist is pervasive, ubiquitous and a growing threat.

You know when people like that start going on and on about [hated enemy], they're trying to provoke with stories and see if you'll believe in the alleged frequency and numbers of [hated enemy], thus giving the impression of how dire it is they be untolerated and awareness of them be spread.

They allege that even a fringe minority of Warhammer 40K people actually think the Emperor is "good, ackshully," and that the Imperium of Man as an empire "is good." Because of course they'd say that's true. They believe western countries by default are white supremacist imperial powers and the only cure is abolishing the existing nations and instituting socialism.

They exaggerate the numbers and severity of the worst kinds of fans and treat it like they need to, "take back" hobbies and gaming and institute their own morals and gatekeeping on the fandoms they invade.

I think if you want to start talking about all the supposed Nazis and fascists that are invading your hobby, you should start showing some receipts. You want me to believe your story and give you the benefit of the doubt? Okay, well, we live in the internet era. We can print screens and take audio clips and video clips.

Please start collecting evidence when you see users openly celebrating actual fascism, not "this is fascist if you stand on your head and imagine Hail Britannia is white supremacist patriarchy" interpretation of everything as fascist. The more mental gymnastics you take to try to convince me some rube asshole on the internet is TOTALLY A NAZI, YOU GAIS, or insist wearing one of those stupid MAGA hats makes you synonymous with a Nazi, the more I'm going to maintain people are overreporting the wolves at the gates to play into a narrative.

The burden of proof is on you, not on me to DISprove the existences of "all the Nazis" supposedly infesting videogames and comic books and cartoons. I'm sure there are ignorant racists to be found, more than a share of edgy teenaged boy with stupid ideas and 30-something wannabes.

The Manosphere speaks for itself (derogatory), but they're not Nazis. Stupid, yes. Delusional losers, yes. But they're also largely overhyped for their small number, and their very existence at all is considered affirmation of a worldview that imagines western society as just stuffed to the gills with ignorant, misogynistic machismo as a status quo. The most they ever mattered was when radical feminism treated them like a threat that they ultimately are not. However, they fit the mold for that Old Boys Club would-be gender equalists want to have a big revolution and subvert about. So, they'll do, I guess. Except, they're a poor substitute for anything to actually "resist."

They ultimately have less traction than even cheesy rock&roll bands did in the 80s. They'll grow out of the stupid man-o-sphere alpha-alpha-alpha "WHU CLURR ES UR BOOGOTTIII?" shit in less than a decade.

Unless you can prove the numbers you are insisting of "all these Nazis" supposedly in these fandoms, I'm not going to pay the insistence any mind. I've seen scarce few examples. And when I'm gaming, or cruising for fandom, I look.

[kitcat-italica]

I do a weird thing sometimes where I go on Wikipedia rabbit holes, and make Google docs listing and organizing historical events or political shifts (like medieval monarchical dynastic disputes, civil wars, successful revolutions or unsuccessful peasant uprisings, political party dominance trends) to try to make sense of it all.

After my most recent foray into looking into 'Western civiliation' (focusing on the Middle East and Europe), examining societal shifts from the Bronze Age onward, I have come to some vague conclusions:

-society runs in cycles of 1. New power structure solidifies, 2. Solid power structure provides enough stability for the economy and culture and art to flourish, 3. Instability starts cracking the power structure, usually a combo of a. External pressures like climate shifts, invasions and warfare, famines, plagues, etc.; b. Internal incompetence of the power structures mismanaging responses to the crisis; and c. People questioning the very power structures in the first place and no longer respecting the existing authorities, and 4. The internal and external problems are too compounded, the center cannot hold, and society retreats and is in tatters for either a few decades or a few centuries, until 5. A new power structure rises to fill the void and provide some stability again.

I know this is very obvious to students of history, but I am a dabbling amateur at best. Seeing it laid out before my eyes last night just kinda clicked it into place.

-most recent stability was at its peak in the 1990s. Post-USSR collapse in 1991, USA was the undisputed global hegemon (for better or for worse). And the EU started in 1993, which tbh is one of the coolest things to ever exist after the last 1500 years of constant warfare among its kingdoms and dynasties, they finally decided 'nah, we'd rather integrate and play on the same team', and they made their own super-parliament and turned their borders into lil chalk lines on the sidewalk and lots of them combined their monetary policy and yeah it's not perfect and there's sacrifices but they DID IT and it's been WORKING my entire lifetime and war between them is now the furthest thing imaginable when 80 years ago it was the only reality???? Wild

-we are currently in stage 3. external pressures and internal incompetence in leadership responding to those pressures, and people turning on society itself. Climate shift since 1970s-ish + economic crises like 2007-2009 + COVID in 2020 onward do not inspire confidence that current leaders and power structures can provide long-term stability. They fuckin failed, and are continuing to fail.

-stage 4 means conservatives take over for a lot of people. Instability creates fear. Fear means people cling to what they think will keep them safe, even at the cost of civil liberties. In the crisis of the 3rd century (238-280s-ish) in the Roman empire, climate shifts caused widespread failing crops, and Germanic tribes enroaching at the borders in search of food and good farmland once theirs failed. The empire was already stretched too thin and relied on bribing its army heavily to maintain imperial legitimacy (since there was no organized system of imperial inheritance, they just made it up emperor by emperor naming their heirs, with LOTS of civil wars and assassinations along the way), so the societal disorder from climate famine and Germanic tribes just pushed it past its breaking point. There were dozens of 'barracks emperors' constantly being proclaimed only by their legions and killing each other and bankrupting the empire from bribes and paying their soldiers, so currency hyperinflation became a thing, public safety broke down, roads were no longer safe, trade was therefore in massive decline.

BECAUSE OF ALL THIS, people who used to be involved in trade and merchant activity and could buy food from other parts of the empire, could no longer rely on that. They left the cities in droves, and went to work on wealthy estates in the countryside as farmers. They lost a lot of rights in the process, and became sort of proto-serfs, but they did it anyway, because it was a guarantee for food and protection. This stuck around even when the crisis 'resolved' and the empire was administratively divided into West and East, and by the time the West fell legally, people had already been living in a very early form of political feudalism and economic manorialism for a while. It didn't quite evolve into the true forms of feudalism and manorialism until the Early and High Middle Ages, but the seeds were planted (literally and figuratively lol)

So when faced with societal upheaval, people packed up and left their rights behind in exchange for promises of security. Sound familiar?

-while there are cycles, they're not necessarily just rises and falls. Sometimes the fall of one power structure and the rise of another is more like a 'transition', a lateral move or a more complicated movement. Take the Early Modern Period, 1600s-1800. Big transitions were from absolute monarchies to more individualistic, capitalistic, and democratic societies. Culminating in the big revolutions (American in 1775-83, and French in 1789-99 + Napoleonic Wars 1803-15). But before that culmination of individual conscience and demanding social contracts from government, the big shifts were the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment. Deciding we should explain the natural world with evidence instead of established doctrine? Wanting to choose your rulers and have them be responsible for upholding their side of the bargain to the people? Unthinkable for so long, but suddenly people questioned the old way of doing things! So while it's a 'fall' in the sense that old power structures fell away, it's not a societal collapse. More like a 'transition'

-the bottom line: I have no idea if our current time, the last decade and the next few decades, will be a transition to a new power structure, or a full collapse of current society. Either one seems equally likely to me at this point. We can't see beyond the fog of the future, we can only step forward and hope we don't sink into a swamp. And if we do find a swamp, we navigate it as best we can, and try not to drown.

So ultimately: no, you're not crazy for thinking things are fucked. Things get fucked every few centuries as we try to solve our problems and make things stable enough to survive.

And: no, things will not stay fucked forever. We humans are very good at surviving as a species, although these upheavals do kill people each time and I wish they didn't. I have no idea how long it will take for things to smooth out again, or if it will be in our lifetimes. But they will. Eventually.

[just-chaotically-me]

The Roses of Heliogabalus-Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema-1888

Lust, Gluttony, and Sloth. Three of the Seven Deadly Sins are depicted Many other sins are depicted alongside these cardinal vices making this an extremely wicked painting. it depicts the infamous party scene hosted by Emperor Heliogabalus. The Roman emperor lies nonchalantly, drinks his wine, and observes as his guests below are smothered to death by rose petals. This is the ultimate party prank. This is the ultimate Roman death. the Victorians viewed themselves as the inheritors of the former Roman Empire. the Victorians reflected on Roman Imperial history with its peaks and pitfalls. Emperor Heliogabalus was definitely a pitfall worthy of note. Heliogabalus was a Roman Emperor who ruled from 218 to 222 CE. In his short four-year reign he scarred Roman society and the annals of world history with his extremely debauched lifestyle. Frequent scandals surrounded Heliogabalus due to his decadent lifestyle and his transgressions against sexual and religious norms. He was an extremely unpopular emperor, and he eventually alienated everyone supporting his regime. His lifestyle must have been that ridiculously unacceptable because, after only four years of ruling, Emperor Heliogabalus was assassinated by his family, including his own grandmother! depicts one of the most infamous moments in the life of Emperor Heliogabalus. It is recorded in the Historia Augusta that Heliogabalus invited guests to his palace one evening to partake in his drinking party and orgy. After several hours of drinking heavy wine and swapping sexual partners, his guests were hopelessly intoxicated and tired. They lounged listlessly around the room. While they were so delightfully glowing from the heavy drinking and amusing entertainment, the ceiling above them opened and flutterings of flower petals began to fall. At first, the gentle wafting of petals added to the dream-like prettiness of the party. It perfumed the atmosphere with a slight floral scent. It heightened the senses and added pleasure to the moment. More petals fell, and more, and more. The petals became a cascade of flowers. More flowers fell, and more descended upon the sleepy guests. A waterfall of petals erupted upon the helpless guests. They were showered, covered, and blanketed. Puddles formed into lakes that formed into oceans of petals. Hills had become petal mountains, and the guests were smothered under the endlessly growing sea of flowers. They breathed, and choked, and gasped for air. Petals entered their lungs, and they died covered in floral glory. The quickening smell of death was masked by the smell of flowers. Floral perfume wafted from the human-infused mountains of flowers. Emperor Heliogabalus was amused by the floral carnage and continued to drink his wine. Death was tonight’s real entertainment. Emperor Heliogabalus used violets and other flowers to suffocate his dinner guests. However, Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema uses roses as his method of death. During the late Victorian era, when Alma-Tadema painted The Roses of Heliogabalus, roses represented lust and desire in the Victorian language of flowers Roses were a more appropriate flower for Alma-Tadema to paint because violets represented faithfulness and modesty in Victorian floriography. Emperor Heliogabalus was many things, but he was certainly not faithful and modest. Therefore Alma-Tadema smothers the guests of Heliogabalus in roses and not violets, and adds a contemporary meaning his audience would have recognized. as the guests’ lust was smothered by the lustful rose, so does lust smother the virtuous soul. A contemporary message was conveyed using an ancient anecdote. Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema fuses Victorian morality and symbolism with Roman Imperial history It brings to life a moment from one of Rome’s most hated and reviled emperors. It brings ancient history to a contemporary audience. It makes it both entertaining and educational. Who knew that a Roman Emperor literally smothered his dinner guests with flowers? a history lesson on canvas. It is the ultimate party prank. It is the ultimate Roman death.

-Daily Art Magazine