Schipkov Alexandr Vladimirovich

This article deals with the conceptology of the notion of “tradition,” and the problem of its interpretations in the 20th century and in current scholarship. The author addresses the incorrectness and limited applicability of sociological and historical concepts based on a rigid dichotomy of “tradition-modernity (contemporaneity). ”The confrontation between the two approaches to the phenomenon of tradition, “Weberian” (evolutionary) and “post-Weberian” (dialectical), is described. The article posits a dialectical view of tradition as a guarantor of the fixity of historical changes and social stability — an interpretation of tradition not as an ethno-cultural phenomenon, but as a broader social mechanism responsible for the transfer of social experience and ideals along a chain of generations. In the context of a traditionalistic view, the author offers the concept of a “greater society” based on a contract of generations. The role of tradition in national history is seen as a connection of Russianness with its Byzantine heritage.

The author of the article proposes a program for studying the language of Nazism by using an analysis of the language codes that define and structure the dominant discourse of Western social thought. The first stage of the study consists of a comparative analysis of the linguistic facts accumulated during the periods of Hitlerism (1930–40s) and late Atlanticism (2020s).
The Atlanticist narrative is defined as representing the ideology of the struggle against world evil for the metaphysically and fatalistically understood progress (“progress of everything”, Progress with a capital letter, which is both its own goal and criterion), while the victims of this struggle are presented as inevitable “collateral damage” in the course of human development.
It is noted that the semantics of the concept “Other” in contemporary Nazi language is split into two meanings: the official, “desirable” Other and the unofficial, “undesirable” Other (otherwise: “the Other Other”), which does not fall into the zone of tolerance, does not succumb to Westernization, and therefore is supposedly “aggressive” and “dangerous” (“patriarchal”, “traditional” or “populist”). The reproduction of ideology in the Atlanticist Nazi language is defined as a four-step process: pluralism — nihilism — Nazism (racism) — splitting of the Nazi discourse, revealing its ambivalence.
The semiotic system of the contemporary Nazi language is described in the article as having a core (generating the semantics of Nazi myths) and a conceptual “protective belt”, which includes, in particular, the “retro-discourse of classical liberalism”, formulas of “liberal war” (“military pacifism”, “humanitarian bombing”, “coercion to peace”, etc.), themes of “new ethics”, “post-material values”, “multiple identities”, a general attitude towards technocracy and digitalization of social relations.