Dr. Mehmet Perinçek, gave a speech on December 16, 2025, at a round table discussion titled “The Spiritual Aspects of Cooperation in Greater Eurasia,” organized by the ruling United Russia Party in Moscow. The session was chaired by Andrei Klimov, head of the party’s International Relations Bureau.
Other participants included Aleksey Gromyko, grandson of Andrey Gromyko, who served as the USSR’s foreign minister for 28 years, and head of the European Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences; and Mushahid Hussain Sayed (Pakistan), Vice President of the International Association of Asian Political Parties (ICAPP).
We are sharing the text of Perinçek’s speech with our readers.
This roundtable discussion, where we are discussing the spiritual aspects of cooperation in Greater Eurasia, is also, in fact, a discussion about civilization. And to deepen this discussion, we first need to establish the following fact:
The sea has dried up for Atlantic civilization. A new world is being built.
The sails of humanity are now filled by the winds of the Asian era.
Western civilization, which arose in the 15th and 16th centuries, has come to an end.
In fact, the decline of Western civilization began in the late 19th century. The entry of capitalism into the imperialist era also marked the beginning of the system’s collapse. With imperialism, the progressive feature of capitalism, based on the exchange of equivalents in the market and competition, became history. The capitalism established by the Puritans was replaced by a three-card economy: currency, stock exchange, and interest.
Imperialism is moribund capitalism. The innovative nature of the system that emerged at the dawn of capitalism has been destroyed not only in the economy but in all spheres.
Imperialism suppressed the free market, productivity, humanism, liberalism, romanticism, rationalism, democracy, scientific discovery, democratic culture, cooperation, solidarity, love, gender equality, hope, and optimism. It fragmented and disintegrated.
The imperialist capitalist system alienated humanity from labor, production, society, and itself. It even alienated people from their gender. It imposed fictional genders on society beyond male and female. It made women men and men women. It invented even more genders. It added letters of the alphabet to these fictional genders, starting with LGBTQ+, and then descended into a madness in which not a single letter of the alphabet remained.
The Atlantic system drove its youth toward egoism, drugs, loneliness, gambling, madness, anarchism, and nihilism, plunging its future into darkness.
The system was so profoundly at odds with humanity that it offered no solution other than to render society stupid. The solution to the problem of forced submission to the system was to drug people. The Atlantic system destroys all forms of creativity but establishes an order that only fools can obey.
As the imperialist system became increasingly mafia-like, it plunged society into the darkness of cults and sects. The Atlantic civilization salvaged witchcraft, fortune-telling, and prehistoric superstitions from the swamps and offered them on the altar of its decaying civilization.
The neoliberal system destroyed not only humanity but also the natural environment in which it lived, polluting the seas and rivers. It poisoned the soil. It has turned the green of forests and trees smoky. It has made healthy people sick.
Humanity has never worshiped the vehicle it traveled in. The automobile has become a totem in this system.
The recent coronavirus pandemic has also exposed the impotence of the imperialist system in all aspects affecting humanity.
Perhaps most importantly, the neoliberal system has lost reason and logic.
The system is destroying not only the human mind but also the sense of beauty. The Renaissance, Romanticism, Expressionism—all have been trampled. Now the system seeks beauty in pessimism, despair, murder, suicide, and nothingness.
This system has stretched its filthy hands upon everything sacred, including the fig leaf that hid the beauty of our Mother Eve. It has condemned humanity to nakedness.
However, a new civilization is rising from Asia. A civilization where states are independent, nations are brothers—a humane, libertarian, collectivist, mutually supportive, democratic civilization is coming!
Our humanity is under powerful attack. We can respond to this attack with ideology and patriotism. We must participate in the great ideological struggle. Against the ideology of neoliberalism, we can respond with our revolutionary, patriotic, national, and working-class ideology.
We, as heirs to the civilization that founded the states that shaped world history in Asia, the cradle of the state, will contribute to the creation of a new civilization emerging from Asia on the cultural and scientific fronts, in today’s conditions, when the global system has reached a dead end. We will challenge the attempts of the global masters of imperialism to sow discord and hostility between nations, religions, and sects, reviving the culture of coexistence among peoples in the Asian empires. We will fight against the decaying culture of imperialism that spreads selfishness and self-interest, undermines honesty, destroys family and morality, and alienates people from humanity and their own gender, using the virtues of Asia as an argument.