Why is Alexander Dugin suddenly attacking ‘Whites’?

The Russian philosopher has sparked outrage, but his target is not race – it’s the liberalism and nihilism of modern Western civilization “Whites? They are destroyed the world and themselves. To be white means to be nihilist. It is self hatred race. It caused so many troubles to others and to itself. It lost the right to be something. No arguments to support their existence.” This is what Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin wrote on X on May 5, 2026, triggering a storm of harshly critical replies, many of them crossing the line into verbal abuse, mostly accusing him of racist anti-white hatred and hypocrisy. This reaction betrays an utter lack of understanding of Dugin as a thinker. Dugin’s critics read him as though he were speaking in the language of modern racial politics, identity engineering, and population arithmetic. Instead, he is speaking in the language of civilization, metaphysics, and historical destiny. When he attacks ‘Whites’, he attacks a spiritual condition shaped by centuries of liberalism, materialism, and desacralization. He points towards a civilization that abandoned memory, faith, hierarchy, rootedness, and historical continuity in exchange for consumption, individual appetite, technological acceleration, and abstraction. His target is the modern West as a mode of existence rather than Europeans as a biological people. He describes a civilizational type that dissolved its own foundations through universalism and endless self-criticism until every inherited structure became an object of suspicion or demolition. The statement reads far less like racial hatred than like a furious condemnation of modernity itself. Anyone familiar with Dugin’s broader body of work can see this pattern immediately. His entire intellectual project revolves around the rejection of liberal universalism and the defense of distinct civilizations against homogenization. He has long expressed support for the French New Right and for European traditions resisting Western liberal culture.

That fact alone destroys the shallow interpretation advanced by his opponents. A man calling for the annihilation of Europeans would hardly spend decades engaging with European philosophers, praising European traditionalist movements, or drawing intellectual inspiration from figures such as Martin Heidegger, Julius Evola, and Alain de Benoist. He has remained remarkably consistent for years in his hostility towards liberal modernity and in his distinction between civilization, ontology, and race in the biological sense. His vocabulary often sounds extreme because he writes as a metaphysician rather than as a conventional political commentator. Read more ‘The EU has gone mad – it must be stopped,’ says Sergey Karaganov The real error comes from reading every statement through the narrow framework of identitarian discourse. Contemporary political culture trains people to interpret every conflict through categories of race management, oppression narratives, demographic blocs, and media outrage cycles. Dugin approaches these questions through philosophy, religion, myth, sacred history, and civilizational destiny. He treats the crisis of the West as a crisis of the soul rather than merely a political or ethnic dispute. In his view, the modern West dissolved its own traditions in pursuit of endless progress, economic expansion, consumer comfort, and ideological universalism. Christianity lost transcendence and became mere moral administration. Politics transformed into social regulation. Culture became entertainment. Identity became consumption. Human beings themselves became interchangeable units inside a global market civilization. That process produced the emptiness he associates with nihilism. This also explains the deeper contradiction inside liberalism itself. Liberalism presents itself as universal, humanitarian, and post-racial, yet in practice it functions as the final global