“In the unrelenting struggle of peoples, those ascendant at sea have, at least in the modern era, proved consistently successful either singly or on alliance against those with a territorial power base; hence it is the system of beliefs and of government associated with supreme maritime power that has prevailed. … [O]ur faith in democracy, personal freedoms and human ‘rights’, and the other comforting prescriptions of the humanist liberal credo, stem from the supremacy of maritime over territorial power. …

“It is a natural process: seafaring and trade beget merchants; merchants accumulate wealth and bring the pressure of money to bear on hereditary monarchies and landowning aristocracies, usually poor by comparison; and sooner or later merchant values prevail in government. Chief of these are dispersed power and open, consultative rule, since concentrated power and the arbitrary rule of closed cabals are unresponsive to the needs of trade and fatal to sound finance.

“The other distinguishing mark of merchant power is freedom, since both trade and consultative government require the widest dissemination of information and free expression of opinion; thus the basic freedoms of trade spread through all areas of life, tending to break down social hierarchies and the grip of received ideas, creating more open, mobile and enterprising cultures. Liberty has always been the pride and rallying cry of powers enjoying maritime supremacy.

“Territorial empires provide a mirror image: having grown by land conquest or dynastic marriage and absorbed different cultures and ethnic groups, their most fundamental drives have been to preserve internal unity and to protect and extend the external borders. They have necessarily developed centralized, authoritarian governments — absolute monarchies, directorates, dictatorships — supported by landholding warrior elites and professional bureaucracies. They have exhibited total incomprehension and contempt for the needs if trade and sound finance. Central control of trade and industry has often led to spectacular gains in desired directions, but has been accompanied by a general, cumulative uncompetitiveness, the cost of which have been borne by the citizens. Meanwhile the ideals of the nobility of the sword, or latterly ideologues, and the necessity for internal control have produced static, hierarchical societies in which expression of ideas has been curbed by censorship, tortures and imprisonment. In place if freedom, the rallying call of territorial empires has been to patriotism and glory.

“As systems, supreme maritime and territorial powers are each of a piece: holistic, self-sustaining, inevitably conditioning their peoples in different views if society and political philosophy. … It is the clash of the two systems, both within states and between states and alliances, which has provided the underlying structure of modern history, and the success of the maritime system which has resulted in the dominance of Western power and assumptions — in essence merchant power and merchant needs over warriors, bureaucrats and ideological compulsions. …

“This book details the struggles of the first supreme maritime powers of the modern age, the Dutch and the British, and ends with the emergence of their ultimate successor, the United States of America. By this time the ground work had been done and the system had been established for the conquest of the world. Earlier maritime states had been supreme in particular areas, notably the Mediterranean. The greatest was the Venetian Republic, which engrossed the most valuable trades of the eastern Mediterranean and enjoyed a dazzling reputation for wealth, humanist thinkers, arts and a constitution based on tortuous checks to concentrated personal power. In the oceanic age which heralded Venice’s decline, the Dutch were the first to employ the same trading and financial skills to dominate the most lucrative trades of the world, becoming in their turn famed for wealth, humanist thinkers, arts and a constitution exemplifying diffused power. In this sense there has been a direct transfer of market and capital expertise and associated political values from Venice and the city states of the Renaissance, and before them Athens and the thalassocracies of the ancient world, to the Dutch and their British and American successors. The final stages of the process, when the British maritime empire gave way to the American, and democracy and women’s freedoms blossomed from the liberal ideal, require a further book.”

You’re right about Cathedral forces; it seems to be a universal problem for both Hyperboreans and Atlanteans. Dugin calls what we call ‘demotism’ a specifically Atlantean thing (as though it is identified with it) though we recognize Leninism as a demotic movement (albeit, inspired by the West.)

Mountain peoples don’t seem to act the same as plains peoples; and Dugin considers the A-S people as inherently Atlantean (as I think he considers the Slavs inherently eurasian.) My first thought is he has combined ‘mountain’ types with ‘steppe’ or ‘plains’ types.

First idea that pops to my head is that Hyperborean really refers to mountain people and not to plains or steppe people. cf. Appalachia. Appalachia is not authoritarian at all, quite the opposite. They are extremely libertarian to the point of almost being libertarian reactionaries. This might be inherent to being a Mouintain versus a Plains people.

(The obvious recourse to MtG card colors comes to mind, but I’m banishing it)

A sort of Russian Carl Sagan.

http://www.mod-langs.ox.ac.uk/russian/nationalism/shekhovtsov1.html
http://www.4pt.su/en/content/aleksadr-dugin-russian-version-european-radical-right

Apparently he converted in 1999. This makes sense. I’ve read some of his earlier essays, and they’re straight up gnostic. Dugin is getting softer in his old age.