Alexander Dugin: “Americans are reaping the harvest of their own education system. For decades, they trained students to hate patriotism, strong leadership, and order. They raised a generation of decayed, narcissistic, and perverse beings now rising up against the last remnants of order.” [The Coming New American Civil War, geopolitika.ru]
It was in 2023 that I had last visited Oregon. Stopping by a random lamppost in Portland, I had imagined breathing a faint tang of tear gas. “How long has it been since the 2020 arson and riots?”, I had wondered. Across the street, there was a mural of a raised fist that faded under graffiti tags; perhaps a misplaced attempt to defy the Willamette River, which glinted under a grey sky. The city wanted to break free, not just from the US, but from its story, the idea of it. And who better than me, a lifetime nomad, to understand the mind that craved a world without lines?
But wandering borders from Karakoram to the Danube and then some, slipping through checkpoints with a slight nod and a bribe, I have also come to question at times about the heart that yearns that. Is it every rebel’s dream? Or is there a lie in the longing to tear it all down?
I have been what you could label a “Bauman-liquid”, for decades now; I have flowed past barbed wire and visa stamps more than I can remember. I have, oftentimes, cheered when a people dared to dream of its own flag — Catalonia or Kurdistan. And why not? Borders are fictions, drawn by men who never walked the lands they carved. I had followed a bit of that spark in Portland back in 2020 — protestors chanting for a new world, some even calling for Cascadia, a bioregional utopia splitting the Northwest from the USA and Canada. The idea was seductive: a highland paradise of forests and salmon, free from the influence and neglect of the epicentre of global politics.
Freedom isn’t a flag
But my ideas have wizened over the years. The nomad that I am today, knows better than to trust a random dream’s first flush. Freedom isn’t a flag; it is a fight, and not every fighter’s ready for the cost. The ones there who burned precincts and scrawled “ACAB” on every wall? They thought they could remake the world by breaking it. I remember meeting a kid named Riley outside a shuttered coffee shop, that evening in 2023. “We don’t need cops,” he had said, “or borders, or any of it.” His eyes reflected the old fire as he spoke to me. He made me wonder: what comes after the flames?
I have seen breakaways before — South Sudan, Eritrea — where the new dawn brought new chains. The nomad can slip away, but what about a people, a place? Don’t they remain stuck with the wreckage? What happens the day after? Portland’s rebels did not realize that not everyone was as lucky as me, able to drift to the next horizon. The grass on the other side? It’s often just dirt.
The shadow of Black Lives Matter looms even to this day; one that shaped from a man’s death under a cop’s knee. George Floyd wasn’t a saint — his rap sheet was long; drugs and robbery stained his past. The nomad does not care about saints; he cares about truth. Floyd’s death was a spark, a raw wound that could have cut through the lies of a system that chews up the weak. But the movement it birthed? It twisted fast. Riots tore through cities — $2 billion in damages, shops looted, lives upended. The founders? They cashed in, scooping millions while buying mansions in places far from the streets they claimed to fight for. I saw a BLM flag still flying in a Portland bookstore, but it felt like a sorry relic, a brand gone sour. Even the wanderer, who despites dogma, cannot back a cause that traded pain for profit.
Defunding the police, another cry from those days, sounded noble until you walked the world’s darker roads. I’ve been to places like Karachi and Peshawar in Pakistan, where no uniform and no laws means no mercy. Portland’s experiment in cutting cop budgets led to a murder spike — homicides jumped 83% from 2019 to 2021. Riley might have dreamt of a world without handcuffs, but this nomad has seen what he’s seen. He knows what happens when the thin line frays. Freedom is not the absence of order; it is the chance to move through it, to slip its knots. Most folks aren’t nomads. They need this world to hold together, even if it is flawed.
The world is still too messy
So where did that leave me that evening in Portland, as I watched the river flow and the mural peel? The heart wanted a borderless world, where no one remained caged by lines or lies. But three years down that evening, my eyes saw the catch: not every breakaway worked, not every rebel was right. Cascadia was a pretty thought, but it would need armies, discipline, a collective spine.
BLM could have been a reckoning, but it sold its soul for money and clout. I’m no realist preaching stability; because God knows I have dodged enough regimes to hate their weight. But but I am no dreamer either — a man blind to the chaos of good intentions. This world is too messy for either extreme.
I had moved past the lamppost after a while that evening, my boots scuffing the wet pavement. But reading Dugin’s article today made me wonder if LA and parts of the US are again dreaming those fractured visions. I have kept moving past the different borders and their battles. To a nation being pushed to a civil war — maybe the answer is not breaking free or staying put, but finding a way to live in the cracks, like I do? But for those who cannot wander, who’s to say what’s worth the fight.
