Europe vs. the West – Devlin

Europe vs. the West

By F. Roger Devlin

Pierre Krebs
Fighting for the Essence: Western Ethnosuicide or European Renaissance?
London: Arktos Media, 2012

This newest offering from Arktos is the first translation into English from the works of Pierre Krebs, a leading figure in the European New Right. Born in French Algeria (1946), Krebs studied law, journalism, sociology and political science in France, taking an active role in right-wing politics during the late 1960s. Later settling in Germany, he founded the Thule Seminar, a self-described “research society for Indo-European Culture,” in Kassel in 1980. The German Verfassungsschutz (Office for the Protection of the Constitution) appears to take considerable interest in his activities.

Besides the book under review, Dr. Krebs is the author of The European Rebirth, The Imperishable Inheritance: Alternatives to the Principle of Equality* and a study on Valéry and Wagner. Fighting for the Essence was first published in German translation in 1996, with a revised French edition appearing in 2000.**

Krebs’ nomenclature, original with him so far as I know, draws a sharp contrast between “Europe” and “the West.” “Europe” refers to the great racial and cultural tradition he wishes to defend; “the West” means today’s “Western community of values” that engages in humanitarian bombing campaigns, enforces tolerance at gunpoint on its subject populations, prefers the stranger to the kinsman, and wishes to erase even the distinction between men and women.

Prof. Krebs is good at pointing up the antinomies of this modern ideological abortion: its homogenization in the name of diversity and suppression of particularity in the name of tolerance. Multiculturalism and multiracialism, as he observes, are mystifying terms which function to conceal a culturicidal and raciophobic program of deracination and panmixia. “The doctrine of human rights should be seen for what it really is: the ideological alibi of the West in a battle to the death that it has declared on all the peoples of the world.”

Apologists for Western ideology rest their case upon a false dichotomy between assimilation and fearful isolation:

In fact, just as the self-defined individual who differentiates himself from the surrounding masses does not isolate himself from society, but on the contrary enriches it with his uniqueness, so also a people conscious of their difference do not isolate themselves any more from the human species, but come closer to it every time they endow it with their singularities and their peculiarities. The more a people becomes conscious of their difference, the more their opening up to the world has a chance of profiting others . . . and the more they are inclined to tolerate the differences of others.

The author distinguishes three stages in the development of “the egalitarian lie.” The first, political stage replaces organic democracy with a parliamentary procedure emptied of ethno-cultural content; the second, juridical phase, demands that all nations align their constitutions to this same model; the third, ideological stage breaks down the territorial integrity of nations through open immigration, which leads directly to the final biological abolition of human differences in universal panmixia.

All of this sounds consistent with what might be called the orthodox conservative narrative of Western decline since the Enlightenment. Nor does Krebs depart from that narrative in tracing the origin of egalitarianism to Christianity. In the view of many on the Christian right, modernism is a practical form of the Pelagian heresy, an attempt to bring heaven down to earth—“immanentizing the eschaton,” in Voegelin’s mellifluous words.

But Krebs names the heresiarch Pelagius as one of his heroes. In his view, the egalitarian lie is to be blamed not on any perversion of Christianity, but on Christianity itself—or, as he invariably writes, “Judeochristianity.” He cites Nietzsche’s observation that

Christianity, which has sprung from Jewish roots and can only be understood as a plant that has come from that soil, represents the counter-movement to every morality of breeding, race or privilege—it is the anti-Aryan religion par excellence.

From this Krebs infers that

every discourse which calls for a European Renaissance without separating itself from Judeo-Christian civilization, its dogmas and its rituals, is condemned to failure in advance, since it is enclosed within the very matrix of decline. . . . The monotheistic “Unique” and the egalitarian “Same” are, in fact, the front and reverse side of the same coin. . . . [The] continuity is flagrant between the Jewish will to reduce the polymorphic and polysemic figures of the divine to the univocal figure of the only God, an autocratic being, the absolute ‘I’ of the universe on the one hand; and the secularized monotheism of human rights on the other, informed by the same will to reduce all the racial and cultural polymorphism of the world to univocal figure of a globalized Homo occidentalis, a serial repetition of a Same detached from its identitarian affiliations.

The author also cites Nietzsche’s suggestion that monotheism, “the belief in a normal god next to whom there are only false pseudo-gods,” was a “consequence of the teaching of a normal human type.” Indo-European polytheism, on the other hand, “is fundamentally alien to the notion of messianism or proselytism, the natural sources of the intolerance and fanaticism that are characteristic of the three monotheistic religions.”

Finally, the author accuses “Judeochristianism” of “breaking the bond of friendship between men and nature” through its command to subdue the earth. Anyone with a genuinely European mentality, he says, would find incomprehensible the promise to Noah and his sons that “the fear and dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every fowl of the air: into your hand are they delivered.”

The look which [Westernized Europe] bestows on Nature is no longer the look of the living man who discovers and feels himself a partner of the world. It is the essentially venal, anonymous and cold look of techno-scientific inspection, a utilitarian look that no longer conceives the world as a dwelling in which man is the inhabitant, but as an object that men, endowed with the power of appropriation by Jehovah, have the duty to exploit.

The rejection of Christianity does not commit the author to reject all of post-classical European civilization, of course, or even all of its religious life. He emphasizes that Christianity never truly eradicated the pagan heritage, and claims to find the native spirit of Europe in many great figures of the Christian era, including Pelagius, John Scotus Eriugena, Meister Eckhart, Nicholas of Cusa, Giordano Bruno, Jacob Böhme, Goethe, Hölderlin, Beethoven, the dramatist Friedrich Hebbel, Theodor Storm, Rilke, Teilhard de Chardin, Saint-Exupéry and Heidegger. He also claims that Gothic architecture owed nothing to “Judeochristianity.”

Dr. Krebs’ treatment of Christianity and Western decline deserves a fuller treatment not only than I can give here but also than he himself offers in his slender volume. The issue is of the utmost practical importance, for it represents a rejection of the great majority of his potential political allies.

This reviewer is happy to agree that the rise of Christianity, with its promise of salvation to the world-weary, was closely bound up with the decline of Graeco-Roman civilization. Indeed, I suspect this historical context better accounts for what Krebs finds decadent in Christianity than does its racially alien origin. But does it make sense to blame Christianity also for the decadence of modern civilization?

There is surely considerable temerity in reducing the thirteen or fourteen centuries of European civilization between the conversion of Constantine and the Enlightenment to a list of fifteen personal favorite figures. And the temerity is increased by the implied claim to have understood several of these figures better than they understood themselves.

It is a familiar observation that enlightenment thought amounts to a secularized version of Christian doctrine, a displacement of its eschatology into the realm of politics. Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn is just one example of a Christian conservative who stressed this connection, citing the Latin proverb corruptio optimi pessima: “the corruption of the best is the worst.”

But Krebs the admirer of Pelagius cannot mean this; his explicit positions would force him to deny that the secularization of Christianity is the essential misstep. Instead he must hold that (1) Christianity itself is responsible for the specific way in which it was negated by the Enlightenment, and that (2) Europe has been in a state of decadence since at least the fourth century AD. This bold interpretation of European history may deserve consideration, but the author has hardly made a case for it in the brief manifesto under review.

Next to “Judeochristianity,” Krebs’ greatest scorn is reserved for “the putrid swamps of America,” with their fast food restaurants and comic-book literature. This, of course, is a common trope of European intellectuals across the political spectrum, easily made plausible by comparing American low culture with European high culture. As a long-time American expatriate in Europe, I often had cause to lament mindless lowbrow Americanization myself, but it is hardly a reflection on America that Europeans prefer McDonald’s to Melville. Wilsonian democratic messianism would also have got nowhere without striking a chord in other lands.

Dr. Krebs closes his work with some far more plausible reflections on culture, immigration and territory. He cites Heiner Geissler of Germany’s Christian Democratic Union party as a representative of contemporary elite opinion:

It is not the influx of foreigners but the incapacity for rejuvenation and adaptation of the Germans, combined with their aversion to immigration, that represents the real danger for our future. . . . In the future, Germans will not have to live with just five million foreigners—as today—but with seven, perhaps ten million.

The danger in such a mindset stems from its unfalsifiability. We have no reason to think Herr Geissler unacquainted with the problems connected to immigration; he may well have to deal with them every day. But he has a ready-made explanation for all of them, as well as any that may arise in the future: the “xenophobia” of his fellow countrymen. As long as he clings to this notion, no empirical evidence of immigration’s failure will ever give him cause to reconsider his commitment to it—not even a full-scale ethnic civil war. Such observations, writes Dr. Krebs, “allow one to measure to what a degree of stupidity and blindness the militants of multiracialism have sunk.”

All culture is regional, expressing the beliefs and sensibility of the people of a particular place and time. As such, it necessarily involves an element of exclusion, namely, the exclusion of what is foreign to those beliefs and sensibilities and to the way of life in accordance with them. For this reason, any serious defense of culture boils down to a defense of territory. Let us close with a fine observation Krebs takes from Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt, the Austrian founder of the discipline of human ethology:

The best way to maintain peaceful cooperation between peoples consists in guaranteeing to each of them a territory that each people has the right to administer in its own way, and in which it is permitted to develop itself culturally as it sees fit. . . . To the degree that people accept the implantation of minorities in their territories, they open the door to inter-ethnic competition in their own house.

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Added Notes:

* These two titles refer to Die europäische Wiedergeburt: Aufruf zur Selbstbesinnung (Tübingen: Grabert-Verlag, 1982) and Das unvergängliche Erbe: Alternativen zum Prinzip der Gleichheit (Tübingen: Grabert-Verlag, 1981). Krebs had also published a second complementary volume to the latter known as Mut zur Identität: Alternativen zum Prinzip der Gleichheit (Struckum: Verlag für ganzheitliche Forschung und Kultur, 1988). Also worth mentioning is his later book, Das Thule-Seminar: Geistesgegenwart der Zukunft in der Morgenröte des Ethnos (Horn, Kassel & Wien: Weecke, 1994).

** The original German version was Im Kampf um das Wesen (Horn: Weecke, 1997), and the most recent French translation is Combat pour l’essentiel (Madrid: Paneuropa, 2002). There is also a Spanish translation known as La lucha por lo esencial (Valencia: Los Libros de Aimirgin, 2006).
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Devlin, F. Roger. “Europe vs. the West.” Counter-Currents Publishing, 29 February 2012. <http://www.counter-currents.com/2012/02/europe-vs-the-west/>.

 

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Shock of History – O’Meara

The Shock of History

By Michael O’Meara

 

A propos:
Dominique Venner.
Le choc de l’Histoire. Religion, mémoire, identité.
Versailles: Via Romana, September 2011.

“The future belongs to those with the longest memory.” –Nietzsche

Conservative thinking, Karl Mannheim notes, is essentially historical thinking—in that it orients to the concrete, to ‘what is’ and ‘what has been’, instead of to ‘what ought to be’ or ‘what can be’. ‘Properly understood’, historical thinking (as créatrice de sens) reveals the ‘Providential’ design evident in the course and test of time.

Some anti-liberals are wont thus to situate their ‘conservative’ project within the frame of Europe’s historical destiny and the higher design informing it.

The most renowned of such historical thinkers (representing what Carolina Armenteros calls the ‘the French idea of history’) was the father of European anti-liberalism, Joseph de Maistre—though he is not our subject. Rather, it is the foremost contemporary avatar of anti-liberal historical thought: Dominique Venner.

The 75-year-old, French-speaking European of Celt and German descent, father of five, Venner is a historical scholar, a writer of popular histories and of various works on firearms and hunting, as well as the editor of two successful, artfully illustrated historical journals.

But whatever his genre, Venner bears the knightly (or legionnaire) standard of Europe’s multi-millennial heritage—the heritage, he claims, that took form with the blind poet, who is the father of us all—the heritage whose Homeric spirit knows to honor the brave, bare-foot soldiers of the Confederacy and the social banditry of Jesse James—and, most insistently, the heritage that expects a future commensurate with Europe’s incomparable past.

Venner is not your average academic historians; indeed, he’s not an academic at all. His life has been lived out on the last of France’s imperial battlefields; in Parisian street politics, in the outlawed OAS, in prison, and in laying the conceptual foundations of the European New Right; and finally, since his early thirties, in the various libraries, archives, and communal memories he’s searched to produce the 50 books he’s written on the key historical upheavals of the last century or so.

Unsurprisingly, his historical sense is ‘over-determined’—not solely by an intelligence steeped in the life of the mind, but also by disciplines acquired in those schools of initiands known only to the political soldier.

His latest book—Le Choc de l’Histoire—is not a work of history per se, but a series of meditations, in the form of a book-long interview (conducted by the historian Pauline Lecomte) on the historical situation presently facing Europeans. These meditations approach their subject in parallel but opposite ways: 1) one approach surveys the contours of Europe’s longue durée—those centuries of growth that made the great oak so venerable—and, in the spirit of the Annales School, reveals her ‘secret permanences’, and, 2) a very different but complementary approach that silhouettes the heroic individuals and individual events (Achilles and the Iliad foremost) exemplifying the Homeric spirit of European man—disclosing his possibilities, and offering him thus an alternative to his programmed extinction.

Venner’s thesis is that: Europeans, after having been militarily, politically, and morally crushed by events largely of their own making, have been lost in sleep (‘in dormition’) for the last half-century and are now—however slowly—beginning to experience a ‘shock of history’ that promises to wake them, as they are forced to defend an identity of which they had previously been almost unconscious.

Like the effect of cascading catastrophes (the accelerating decomposition of America’s world empire, Europe’s Islamic colonization, the chaos-creating nihilism of global capitalism, etc.), the shock of history today is becoming more violent and destructive, making it harder for Europeans to stay lulled in the deep, oblivious sleep that follows a grievous wound to the soul itself—the deep curative sleep prescribed by their horrendous civil wars (1914-1918 and 1939-1945), by the ensuing impositions of the Soviet/American occupation and of the occupation’s collaborationist regimes, and, finally, today, by a demographic tsunami promising to sweep away their kind.

The Sleep

The Second European Civil War of 1939-1945, however it is interpreted, resulted in a cataclysmic defeat not just for Hitler’s Germany, but for Europe, much of which, quite literally, was reduced to mounds of smoldering rumble. Then, at Yalta, adding insult to injury, the two extra-European super-powers partitioned the Continent, deprived her states of sovereignty, and proceeded to Americanize or Sovietize the ‘systems’ organizing and managing the new postwar European order.

As Europe’s lands and institutions were assumed by alien interests, her ancient roots severed, and her destiny forgotten, Europeans fell into dormition, losing consciousness of who they were as a people and a civilization—believing, as they were encouraged, that they were simply one people, equal among the world’s many peoples.

Worse, for their unpardonable sins—for what Europeans did to Jews in the war, to Blacks in the slave trade, to non-White peoples in general over the course of the last 500 years—for all the terrible sins Europeans have committed, they are henceforth denied the ‘right’ to be a ‘people’. In the Messianic spirit of Communism and Americanism, the Orwellian occupiers and collaborators have since refused them a common origin (roots), a shared history, a tradition, a destiny. This reduces them to a faceless economic-administrative collectivity, which is expected, in the end, to negate the organic basis of its own existence.

The postwar assault on European identity entailed, however, more than a zombifying campaign of guilt-inducement—though this campaign was massive in scale. Europe after Jahre Null was re-organized according to extra-European models and then overwhelmed with imported forms of mass consumerism and entertainment. At the same time and with perhaps greater severity, she was subject to an unprecedented ‘brain-washing’ (in schools, media, the so-called arts, public institutions, and private corporations)—as all Europe’s family of nations, not just the defeated Germans, were collectively made to bear a crushing guilt—under the pretext of the Shoah or the legacy of colonialism/imperialism/slavery—for sins requiring the most extreme penance. Thus tainted, her memory and identity are now publicly stigmatized.

Venner’s Europe is not, of course, the Soviet/New Class-inspired EU, just as she is not the geographical entity labeled ‘Europe’. Rather than a market, a political/administrative structure, a geographic category—rather even than a race (though in a certain sense it is all about race in the end)—Europe for him is a multi-millennial community of closely-related national families made up of Germans, Celts, Slavs, and others, having the same ancient (Indo-European, Borean, Cro-Magnon) roots of blood and spirit: that is, having the same Thirty-thousand Years of European History and Identity.

This makes his Europe a community with a common civilizational heritage that stretches back to the depths of prehistoric time. Historically, the tradition and identity of this heritage has informed Europe’s representations and values in ways distinguishing/identifying her and her peoples from other civilizations and peoples.

Tradition, though, is not for Venner the metaphysical abstraction of the perennialists or the historical repository of the Burkeans: it is not something outside history nor is it something forged once and for all in the night of time.

Tradition for him is precisely that which does not pass. It is the perpetual spirit that makes Europeans who they are and lends meaning to their existence, as they change and grow yet remain always the same. It is the source thus of the ‘secret permanences’ upon which their history is worked out.

Tradition may originate in Prehistory, but Venner claims it is preeminently contemporary—just as every origin represents a novel outburst of being. It serves thus as a people’s inner compass. It directs them to what and whom they are. It renders what was formed and inspired in the past into a continually informed present. It is always new and youthful, something very much before rather than behind them. It embodies the longest memory, integral to their identity, and it anticipates a future true to its origin. Life lived in reference to tradition, Venner insists, is life lived in accordance with the ideal it embodies—the ideal of ‘who we are’.

In one sense, Venner’s Europe is the opposite of the America that has distorted Europe’s fate for the last half-century. But he is no knee-jerk anti-American (though the French, in my view, have good cause to be anti-US). He’s also written several books on the US War of Secession, in which much of America’s Cavalier heritage is admired. Knowing something of the opposed tendencies shaping American ‘national’ life, he’s well aware of the moral abyss separating, say, Jesse James from Jay Gould—and what makes one an exemplar of the European spirit and the other its opposite.

Modeled on the Old Testament, not the Old World, Venner claims America’s New World (both as a prolongation and rejection of Europe) was born of New England Calvinism and secularized in John O’Sullivan’s ‘Manifest Destiny’.

Emboldened by the vast, virgin land of their wilderness enterprise and the absence of traditional authority, America’s Seventeenth-century Anglo-Puritan settlers set out, in the spirit of their radical-democratic Low Church crusade, to disown the colony’s Anglo-European parents—which meant disowning the idea (old as Herodotus) that Europe is ‘the home of liberty and true government’.

Believing herself God’s favorite, this New Zion aspired—as a Promised Land of liberty, equality, fraternity—to jettison Europe’s aesthetic and aristocratic standards for the sake of its religiously-inspired materialism. Hence, the bustling, wealth-accumulating, tradition-opposing character of the American project, which offends every former conception of the Cosmos.

New England, to be sure, is not the whole of America, for the South, among another sections, has a quite different narrative, but it was the Yankee version of the ‘American epic’ that became dominant, and it is thus the Yankee version that everywhere wars on Americans of European descent.

Citing Huntington’s Who Are We?, Venner says US elites (‘cosmocrats’, he calls them) pursue a transnational/universalist vision (privileging global markets and human rights) that opposes every ‘nativist’ sense of nation or culture—a transnational/universalist vision the cosmocrats hope to impose on the whole world. For like Russian Bolsheviks and ‘the Bolsheviks of the Seventeenth century’, these money-worshipping liberal elites hate the Old World and seek a new man, Homo Oeconomicus—unencumbered by roots, nature, or culture—and motivated solely by a quantitative sense of purpose.

As a union whose ‘connections’ are essentially horizontal, contractual, self-serving, and self-centered, America’s cosmocratic system comes, as such, to oppose all resistant forms of historic or organic identity—for the sake of a totalitarian agenda intent on running roughshod over everything that might obstruct the scorch-earth economic logic of its Protestant Ethic and Capitalist Spirit. (In this sense, Europe’s resurgence implies America’s demise).

The Shock

What will awaken Europeans from their sleep? Venner says it will be the shock of history—the shock re-awakening the tradition that made them (and makes them) who they are. Such shocks have, in fact, long shaped their history. Think of the Greeks in their Persian Wars; of Charles Martel’s outnumbered knights against the Caliphate’s vanguard; or of the Christian forces under Starhemberg and Sobieski before the gates of Vienna. Whenever Europe approaches Höderlin’s ‘midnight of the world’, such shocks, it seems, serve historically to mobilize the redeeming memory and will to power inscribed in her tradition.

More than a half-century after the trauma of 1945—and the ensuing Americanization, financialization, and third-worldization of continental life—Europeans are once again experiencing another great life-changing, history-altering shock promising to shake them from dormition.

The present economic crisis and its attending catastrophes (in discrediting the collaborators managing the EU, as well as de-legitimatizing the continent’s various national political systems), combined with the unrelenting, disconcerting Islamization of European life (integral to US strategic interests) are—together—forcing Europeans to re-evaluate a system that destroys the national economy, eliminates borders, ravages the culture, makes community impossible, and programs their extinction as a people. The illusions of prosperity and progress, along with the system’s fun, sex, and money (justifying the prevailing de-Europeanization) are becoming increasingly difficult to entertain. Glimmers of a changing consciousness have, indeed, already been glimpsed on the horizon.

The various nationalist-populist parties stirring everywhere in Europe—parties which are preparing the counter-hegemony that one day will replace Europe’s present American-centric leadership—represent one conspicuous sign of this awakening. A mounting number of identitarian, Christian, secular, and political forces resisting Islam’s, America’s, and the EU’s totalitarian impositions at the local level are another sign.

Europeans, as a consequence, are increasingly posing the question: ‘Who are we?’, as they become more and more conscious—especially in the face of the dietary, vestimentary, familial, sexual, religious, and other differences separating them from Muslims—of what is distinct to their civilization and their people, and why such distinctions are worth defending. Historical revivals, Venner notes, are slow in the making, but once awakened there is usually no going back. This is the point, Venner believes, that Europe is approaching today.

The Unexpected

History is the realm of the unexpected. Venner does not subscribe to notions of historical determinism or necessity. In contrast to Marxists and economic determinists, anti-Semites and Spenglerians, he believes there are no monocausal explanations of history, and unlike liberals such as Fukuyama, he believes there’s no escape from (no ‘end’ to) history.

In history, the future is always unknown. Who would have thought in 1980 that Soviet Russia, which seemed to be overtaking the United States in the ‘70s, would collapse within a decade? Historical fatalities are the fatalities of men’s minds, not those of history.

History, moreover, is the confluence of the given, the circumstantial, and the willful. This makes it always open and hence potentially always a realm of the unexpected. And the unexpected (that instance when great possibilities are momentarily posed) is mastered, Venner councils, only in terms of who we are, which means in terms of the tradition and identity defining our project and informing our encounter with the world.

Hence, the significance now of husbanding our roots, our memory, our tradition, for from them will come our will to power and any possibility of transcendence. It’s not for nothing, Dominique Venner concludes, that we are the sons and daughters of Homer, Ulysses, and Penelope.

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O’Meara, Michael. “The Shock of History.” Alternative Right Magazine, 23 October 2011 (published online). <http://www.alternativeright.com/main/the-magazine/the-shock-of-history/>.

Notes: Venner’s book Le choc de l’histoire has recently been published in English translation as The Shock of History by Arktos (London, 2015). In Spanish, see a related work by Dominique Venner known as Europa y su Destino: De ayer a mañana (Barcelona: Áltera, 2010).

 

Manifesto of the New Right – Benoist & Champetier

“Manifesto of the French New Right in the Year 2000” by Alain de Benoist and Charles Champetier (PDF – 264 KB):

Manifesto of the French New Right (English)

The following is the original French version of this work:

Manifeste: la Nouvelle Droite de l’an 2000 (PDF – 208 KB):

Manifeste: la Nouvelle Droite de l’an 2000 (Français)

The following is the Spanish translation of this work:

Manifiesto: La Nueva Derecha del año 2000 (PDF – 204 KB):

Manifiesto: la Nueva Derecha del año 2000 (Español)

The following is the Italian translation of this work:

La Nuova Destra del 2000 (PDF – 202 KB):

La Nuova Destra del 2000 (Italiano)

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Notes on publications and translations of the Manifesto:

Alain de Benoist’s and Charles Champetier’s “Manifesto of the French New Right in the Year 2000” (Telos, Vol. 1999, No. 115, [March-May 1999], pp. 117-144) was the first edition of the English version, which was also published in a second edition as Manifesto for a European Renaissance (London: Arktos, 2012). The full text of this manifesto was also included as an appendix within the third edition of Tomislav Sunic’s Against Democracy and Equality: The European New Right (London: Arktos, 2011). The text used to create the file available on this site was retrieved from: <http://www.amerika.org/texts/manifesto-of-the-french-new-right-in-year-2000-alain-de-benoist-and-charles-champetier >. The text in English is alternatively available in HTML format here: <http://home.alphalink.com.au/~radnat/debenoist/alain9.html >.

The “Manifiesto: la Nueva Derecha del ano 2000” (Hespérides, Vol. IV, No. 19 [March-May 1999], pp. 13-47) was the first edition of the Spanish version, which was also published in a second edition as Manifiesto para un renacimiento europeo (Mollet del Vallès, Barcelona: Grup de recerca i estudi de la cultura europea, 2000), which has in turn been recently republished by Arktos (London, 2013). The text of the Spanish translation was retrieved from: <http://www.red-vertice.com/disidencias/textosdisi19.html >.

The “Manifeste: la Nouvelle Droite de l’an 2000” (Eléments, No. 94, [February 1999], pp. 11-23) was the first edition of the original French version, which was also published in a second edition as Manifeste pour une renaissance européenne (Paris: GRECE, 2000). The text of the French retrieved from: <http://www.grece-fr.net/textes/_txtWeb.php?idArt=71 >.

The “La Nuova Destra del 2000” (“La Nuova Destra del 2000” (Diorama letterario, Firenze, 229-230, October-November 1999) was the first Italian translation of the manifesto, which was published in a newer edition as Manifesto per una Rinascita Europea (Rome: Nuove Idee editore, 2005). The file made available on this site was retrieved from: <http://www.alaindebenoist.com/pdf/la_nuova_destra_del_2000.pdf >.

Other translations: The manifesto was also translated into German as “Manifest: Die Nouvelle Droite des Jahres 2000” (published in Aufstand der Kulturen [Berlin: Edition Junge Freiheit, 1999]), into Dutch as “Manifest voor Europees herstel en vernieuwing” (TeKos, Wijnegem, 95, octobre-décembre 1999), into Danish as “Manifest. Det nye højre år 2000” (Nomos, Valby, III, 2005, 1), into Hungarian as “Manifesztum az európai újjászületésért” (A51 [2002], pp. 239-285), into Czech as “Manifest: Nova pravice v roce 2000” (Tradice budoucnosti. Ed. Orientace 1/2008), into Croatian as “Manifest za Europsku Obnovu, Nova Desnica u 21. Stoljeću” (included as an appendix to Tomislav Sunic, Europska Nova Desnica [Zagreb, Croatia: Hasanbegović, 2009]), into Portuguese as Manifesto Para Um Renascimento Europeu (USA & EU: Editora Contra Corrente, 2014), into Polish as Manifest Grupy Badań i Studiόw nad Cywilizacją Europejską (GRECE) (published online: Konserwatyzm.pl, 2013), and into Ukrainian as Маніфест Нових Правих (published online: Національний альянс, 2009, http://nation.org.ua/)

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Further Reading (Major works by Alain de Benoist):

The following works are considered to be the most important books (along with the above Manifesto) by Alain de Benoist which establish the intellectual foundations of the New Right movement:

Vu de Droite: Anthologie critique des idées contemporaines (Paris: Copernic, 1977), which was translated into German as Aus Rechter Sicht: Eine kritische Anthologie zeitgenössischer Ideen (Tübingen: Grabert, 1983-1984), into Italian as Visito da Destra: Antologia critica delle idee contemporanee (Napoli: Akropolis, 1981), into Portugese as Nova Direita, Nova Cultura: Antologia critica das ideias contemporaneas (Lisboa: Afrodite 1981), and in an abridged format into Romanian as O perspectivâ de dreapta: Anthologie criticâ a ideilor contemporane (Bucarest: coll. « Dreapta europeanâ », 2, Anastasia, 1998).

Les Idées à l’Endroit (Paris: Libres-Hallier, 1979), which was translated into Italian as Le Idee a Posto (Napoli: Akropolis, 1983), into Spanish as La Nueva Derecha: Una respuesta clara, profunda e inteligente (Barcelona: Planeta, 1982), into Greek as Oi ιδέες sta ορθο (Αθήνα: Ελεύθερη Σκέψις, 1980), and partially into German as Kulturrevolution von Rechts: Gramsci und die Nouvelle Droite (Krefeld: Sinus-Verlag, 1985).

Démocratie: le problème (Paris: Le Labyrinthe, 1985), which was translated into English as The Problem of Democracy (London: Arktos, 2011), into German as Demokratie: das Problem (Tübingen & Zürich: Hohenrain, 1986), into Italian as Democrazia: il problema (Firenze: Arnaud, 1985), and into Spanish as ¿Es un Problema la Democracia? (Barcelona: Nueva República, 2013).

Au-delà des droits de l’homme: Pour défendre les libertés (Paris: Krisis, 2004), which was translated into English as Beyond Human Rights: Defending Freedoms (London: Arktos Media, 2011), into German translation as Kritik der Menschenrechte: Warum Universalismus und Globalisierung die Freiheit bedrohen (Berlin: Junge Freiheit, 2004), into Italian as Oltre i diritti dell’uomo: Per difendire le libertà (Rome: Il Settimo Sigillo, 2004), and into Spanish as Más allá de los Derechos Humanos: defender las libertades (published online 2008 at Les Amis d’Alain de Benoist: <http://www.alaindebenoist.com/pdf/mas_alla_de_los_derechos_humanos.pdf >).

In German, an important collection of essays by Alain de Benoist has been published in the book  Schöne Vernetzte Welt: Eine Antwort auf die Globalisierung (Tübingen: Hohenrain-Verlag, 2001). Another German collection had also been published as Aufstand der Kulturen: Europäisches Manifest für das 21. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Edition Junge Freiheit, 1999). In Spanish, see also the following two publications: Benoist’s Más Allá de la Derecha y de la Izquierda: El pensamiento político que rompe esquemas (Barcelona: Ediciones Áltera, 2010), and a collection of essays by Benoist and Guillaume Faye titled Las Ideas de la “Nueva Derecha”: Una respuesta al colonialismo cultural (Barcelona: Nuevo Arte Thor, 1986). In Russian, a notable collection of translated essays by Alain de Benoist (Ален де Бенуа) has been published as Против либерализма: к четвертой политической теории (Санкт-Петербург: Амфора, 2009).

Also worth mentioning is a book by Benoist that is only available in French known as Critiques – Théoriques (Lausanne & Paris: L’Age d’Homme, 2003),  but from which selected essays (two important examples being “A Critique of Liberal Ideology” and “The Idea of Empire”) have been translated into multiple languages – including English, Spanish, Italian, German, Portuguese, Russian, among some others – and published in various magazines or journals. In addition, we would like to make note of a collection of essays on racism and anti-racism, which includes Benoist’s important essay “Racisme: remarques autour d’une définition” (translated into English as “What is Racism?”): the book Racismes, Antiracismes, edited by Andre Béjin and Julien Freund (Paris: Librairie des Méridiens, 1986), translated into Italian as Razzismo e antirazzismo (Firenze: La roccia di Erec, 1992).

Finally, it is worth mentioning the joint work of Alain de Benoist and Alexander Dugin on the theory of Eurasianism and the Fourth Political Theory, L’appel de L’Eurasie, conversation avec Alain de Benoist (Paris: Avatar Éditions, 2013), translated into Spanish as ¿Qué es el eurasismo? Una conversación de Alain de Benoist con Alexander Dugin (Tarragona: Ediciones Fides, 2014).

Read more about Alain de Benoist’s life and work at his official website: <http://www.alaindebenoist.com/ >, and see also F. Roger Devlin’s review of Alain de Benoist’s Memoire Vive: <https://neweuropeanconservative.wordpress.com/2013/02/02/benoists-vivid-memory-devlin/ >.

 

Immigration – Benoist

Immigration: The Reserve Army of Capital

By Alain de Benoist

Translated from French by Tom Sunic

 

In 1973, shortly before his death, the French President Georges Pompidou admitted to have opened the floodgates of immigration, at a request of a number of big businessmen, such as Francis Bouygues, who was eager to take advantage of docile and cheap labor devoid of class consciousness and of any tradition of social struggle. This move was meant to exert downward pressure on the wages of French workers, reduce their protesting zeal, and in addition, break up the unity of the labor movement. Big bosses, he said, “always want more.”

Forty years later nothing has changed. At a time when no political party would dare to ask for further acceleration of the pace of immigration, only big employers seem to be in favor of it — simply because it is in their interest. The only difference is that the affected economic sectors are now more numerous, going beyond the industrial sector and the hotel and catering service sector — now to include once “protected” professions, such as engineers and computer scientists.

France, as we know, starting with the 19th century, massively reached out to foreign immigrants. The immigrating population was already 800,000 in 1876, only to reach 1.2 million in 1911. French industry was the prime center of attraction for Italian and Belgian immigrants, followed by Polish, Spanish and Portuguese immigrants. “Such immigration, unskilled and non-unionized, allowed employers to evade increasing requirements pertaining to the labor law” (François-Laurent Balssa, « Un choix salarial pour les grandes entreprises » Le Spectacle du monde, Octobre, 2010).

In 1924, at the initiative of the Committee for Coalmining and big farmers from the Northeast of France, a “general agency for immigration” (Société générale d’immigration) was founded. It opened up employment bureaus in Europe, which operated as suction pumps. In 1931 there were 2.7 million foreigners in France, that is, 6.6 % of the total population. At that time France displayed the highest level of immigration in the world (515 persons on 100,000 inhabitants). “This was a handy way for a large number of big employers to exert downward pressure on wages. … From then on capitalism entered the competition of the workforce by reaching out to the reserve armies of wage earners.”

In the aftermath of World War II, immigrants began to arrive more and more frequently from Maghreb countries; first from Algeria, then from Morocco. Trucks chartered by large companies (especially in the automobile and construction industry) came by the hundreds to recruit immigrants on the spot. From 1962 to 1974, nearly two million additional immigrants arrived to France of whom 550,000 were recruited by the National Immigration Service (ONI), a state-run agency, yet controlled under the table by big business. Since then, the wave has continued to grow. François-Laurent Balssa notes that

when a workforce shortage in one sector occurs, out of the two possible choices one must either raise the salary, or one must reach out to foreign labor. Usually it was the latter option that was favored by the National Council of French Employers (CNPF) and as of 1998 by its successor, the Movement of Enterprises (MEDEF). That choice, which bears witness of the desire for short-term benefits, delayed advancement of production tools and industrial innovation. During the same period, however, as the example of Japan demonstrates, the rejection of foreign immigration and favoring of the domestic workforce enabled Japan to achieve its technological revolution, well ahead of most of its Western competitors.

Big Business and the Left; A Holy Alliance

At the beginning, immigration was a phenomenon linked to big business. It still continues to be that way. Those who clamor for always more immigration are big companies. This immigration is in accordance with the very spirit of capitalism, which aims at the erasure of borders (« laissez faire, laissez passer »).“While obeying the logic of social dumping, Balssa continues, a “low cost” labor market has thus been created with the “undocumented” and the “low-skilled,” functioning as stopgap “jack of all trades.” Thus, big business has reached its hand to the far-left, the former aiming at dismantling of the welfare state, considered to be too costly, the latter killing off the nation-state considered to be too archaic.” This is the reason why the French Communist Part (PCF) and the French Trade Union (CGT) (which have radically changed since then) had, until 1981, battled against the liberal principle of open borders, in the name of the defense of the working class interests.

For once a well-inspired Catholic liberal-conservative Philippe Nemo, only confirms these observations:

In Europe there are people in charge of the economy who dream about bringing to Europe cheap labor. Firstly, to do jobs for which the local workforce is in short supply; secondly, to exert considerable downward pressure on the wages of other workers in Europe. These lobbies, which possess all necessary means to be listened to either by their governments or by the Commission in Brussels, are, generally speaking, both in favor of immigration and Europe’s enlargement — which would considerably facilitate labor migrations. They are right from their point of view — a view of a purely economic logic […] The problem, however, is that one cannot reason about this matter in economic terms only, given that the inflow of the extra-Europe population has also severe sociological consequences. If these capitalists pay little attention to this problem, it is perhaps because they enjoy, by and large, economic benefits from immigration without however themselves suffering from its social setbacks. With the money earned by their companies, whose profitability is ensured in this manner, they can reside in handsome neighborhoods, leaving their less fortunate compatriots to cope on their own with alien population in poor suburban areas. (Philippe Nemo, Le Temps d’y penser, 2010)

According to official figures, immigrants living in regular households account for 5 million people, which was 8% of the French population in 2008. Children of immigrants, who are direct descendants of one or two immigrants, represent 6.5 million people, which is 11% of the population. The number of illegals is estimated to be between 300,000 to 550,000. (Expulsion of illegal immigrants cost 232 million Euros annually, i.e., 12,000 euro per case). For his part, Jean-Paul Gourevitch, estimates the population of foreign origin living in France in 2009 at 7.7 people million (out of which 3.4 million are from the Maghreb and 2.4 million from sub-Saharan Africa), that is, 12.2% of the metropolitan population. In 2006, the immigrating population accounted for 17% of births in France.

France is today experiencing migrant settlements, which is a direct consequence of the family reunification policy. However, more than ever before immigrants represent the reserve army of capital.

In this sense it is amazing to observe how the networks on behalf of the “undocumented,” run by the far-left (which seems to have discovered in immigrants its “substitute proletariat”) serve the interests of big business. Criminal networks, smugglers of people and goods, big business, “human rights” activists, and under- the-table employers — all of them, by virtue of the global free market, have become cheerleaders for the abolition of frontiers.

For example, it is a revealing fact that Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in their books Empire and Multitude endorse “world citizenship ” when they call for the removal of borders, which must have as a first goal in developed countries the accelerated settlement of the masses of low-wage Third World workers. The fact that most migrants today owe their displacement to outsourcing, brought about by the endless logic of the global market, and that their displacement is precisely something capitalism strives for in order to fit everybody into the market, and finally, that each territorial attachment could be a part of human motivations — does not bother these two authors at all. On the contrary, they note with satisfaction that “capital itself requires increased mobility of labor as well as continuous migration across national borders.” The world market should constitute, from their point of view, a natural framework for “world citizenship.” The market “requires a smooth space of uncoded and deterritorialized flux,” destined to serve the interests of the “masses”, because “mobility carries a price tag of capital, which means the enhanced desire for liberty.”

The trouble with such an apology of human displacement, seen as a first condition of “liberating nomadism,” is that it relies on a completely unreal outlook of the specific situation of migrants and displaced people. As Jacques Guigou and Jacques Wajnsztejn write, “Hardt and Negri delude themselves with the capacity of the immigration flows, thought to be a source for new opportunities for capital valuation, as well as the basis for opportunity enhancement for the masses. Yet, migrations signify nothing else but a process of universal competition, whereas migrating has no more emancipating value than staying at home. A ‘nomadic’ person is no more inclined to criticism or to revolt than a sedentary person.” (L’évanescence de la valeur. Une présentation critique du groupe Krisis, 2004).

“As long as people keep abandoning their families,” adds Robert Kurz, “and look for work elsewhere, even at the risk of their own lives — only to be ultimately shredded by the treadmill of capitalism — they will be less the heralds of emancipation and more the self-congratulatory agents of the postmodern West. In fact, they only represent its miserable version.” (Robert Kurz, « L’Empire et ses théoriciens », 2003).

Whoever criticizes capitalism, while approving immigration, whose working class is its first victim, had better shut up. Whoever criticizes immigration, while remaining silent about capitalism, should do the same.

————

Alain de Benoist is a philosopher residing in France. The above article was first published in the quarterly Eléments, “L’immigration; armée de réserve du capital” (April-June 2011, Nr. 139).

———————-

De Benoist, Alain. “Immigration: The Reserve Army of Capital.” The Occidental Observer, 23 August 2011. <http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2011/08/immigration-the-reserve-army-of-capital/>. (See this essay in PDF format here: Immigration – The Reserve Army of Capital).

Note: This is one of Alain de Benoist’s most widely known articles. It was originally published in French as “Immigration, l’armée de réserve du capital” (Eléments, No. 139, April-June 2011, pp. 26-28; republished in Au bord du gouffre [Paris: Krisis, 2011]). It is available in German translation as “Pompidous Irrtum. Masseneinwanderung nach Frankreich” (Junge Freiheit, No. 16, 15 April 2011, p. 20), in Spanish translation as “Inmigración: El Ejército de Reserva del Capitalismo” (published online: Area Identitaria, 4 February 2013, <http://areaidentitaria.blogspot.com/2013/02/la-inmigracion-ejercito-de-reserva-del.html >), in Italian translation as “L’immigrazione, l’armata di riserva del capitale” (Diorama letterario, No. 303, May-June 2011, pp. 10-13), in Portuguese translation as “Imigração: o exército de reserva do capital” (published online: Legio Victrix, 21 November 2011, <http://legio-victrix.blogspot.com/2011/11/imigracao-o-exercito-de-reserva-do.html >), in Polish translation as “Imigracja: armia rezerwowa kapitalu” (published online: Nacjonalista.pl, 25 August 2011, <http://www.nacjonalista.pl/2011/08/25/alain-de-benoist-imigracja-armia-rezerwowa-kapitalu/ >), in Lithuanian translation as “Imigracija: kapitalo rezerviné armija” (published online: Nacionalistas, 21 March 2014, <http://ltnacionalistas.wordpress.com/2014/03/21/alain-de-benoist-imigracija-kapitalo-rezervine-armija/ >).

 

New Right Forty Years Later – Benoist

“The European New Right: Forty Years Later” by Alain de Benoist (PDF – 169 KB):

European New Right Forty Years Later

———–

De Benoist, Alain. “The European New Right: Forty Years Later.” The Occidental Quarterly, Vol. 9, No. 1, (Spring 2009). <http://www.toqonline.com/archives/v9n1/TOQv9n1Benoist.pdf >.

Note: This essay has also been published as a preface to the third edition of Tomislav Sunic’s Against Democracy and Equality: The European New Right (London: Arktos, 2011). It has also been translated into Spanish as “La Nueva Derecha Europea, 40 años después”, published online at El Manifesto (9 Julio 2014) <http://www.elmanifiesto.com/articulos.asp?idarticulo=4773 >.

 

Mars & Hephaestus – Faye

Mars & Hephaestus: The Return of History

By Guillaume Faye

Translated by Greg Johnson

 

Russian translation of this translation here

Allow me an “archeofuturist” parable based on the eternal symbol of the tree, which I will compare to that the rocket. But before that, let us contemplate the grim face of the coming century.

The twenty-first century will be a century of iron and storms. It will not resemble those harmonious futures predicted up to the 1970s. It will not be the global village prophesied by Marshall MacLuhan in 1966, or Bill Gates’ planetary network, or Francis Fukuyama’s end of history: a liberal global civilization directed by a universal state. It will be a century of competing peoples and ethnic identities. And paradoxically, the victorious peoples will be those that remain faithful to, or return to, ancestral values and realities—which are biological, cultural, ethical, social, and spiritual—and that at the same time will master technoscience. The twenty-first century will be the one in which European civilization, Promethean and tragic but eminently fragile, will undergo a metamorphosis or enter its irremediable twilight. It will be a decisive century.

In the West, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were a time of belief in emancipation from the laws of life, belief that it was possible to continue on indefinitely after having gone to the moon. The twenty-first century will probably set the record straight and we will “return to reality,” probably through suffering.

The nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw the apogee of the bourgeois spirit, that mental small pox, that monstrous and deformed simulacrum of the idea of an elite. The twenty-first century, a time of storms, will see the joint renewal of the concepts of a people and an aristocracy. The bourgeois dream will crumble from the putrefaction of its fundamental principles and petty promises: happiness does not come from materialism and consumerism, triumphant transnational capitalism, and individualism. Nor from safety, peace, or social justice.

Let us cultivate the pessimistic optimism of Nietzsche. As Drieu La Rochelle wrote: “There is no more order to conserve; it is necessary to create a new one.” Will the beginning of the twenty-first century be difficult? Are all the indicators in the red? So much the better. They predicted the end of history after the collapse of the USSR? We wish to speed its return: thunderous, bellicose, and archaic. Islam resumes its wars of conquest. American imperialism is unleashed. China and India wish to become superpowers. And so forth. The twenty-first century will be placed under the double sign of Mars, the god of war, and of Hephaestus, the god who forges swords, the master of technology and the chthonic fires.

Towards the Fourth Age of European Civilization

European civilization—one should not hesitate to call it higher civilization, despite the mealy-mouthed ethnomasochist xenophiles—will survive the twenty-first century only through an agonizing reappraisal of some of its principles. It will be able if it remains anchored in its eternal metamorphic personality: to change while remaining itself, to cultivate rootedness and transcendence, fidelity to its identity and grand historical ambitions.

The First Age of European civilization includes antiquity and the medieval period: a time of gestation and growth. The Second Age goes from the Age of Discovery to the First World War: it is the Assumption. European civilization conquers the world. But like Rome or Alexander’s Empire, it was devoured by its own prodigal children, the West and America, and by the very peoples it (superficially) colonized. The Third Age of European Civilization commences, in a tragic acceleration of the historical process, with the Treaty of Versailles and end of the civil war of 1914-18: the catastrophic twentieth century. Four generations were enough to undo the labor of more than forty. History resembles the trigonometrical asymptotes of the “theory of catastrophe”: it is at the peak of its splendor that the rose withers; it is after a time of sunshine and calm that the cyclone bursts. The Tarpeian Rock is close to the Capitol!

Europe fell victim to its own tragic Prometheanism, its own opening to the world. Victim of the excess of any imperial expansion: universalism, oblivious of all ethnic solidarity, thus also the victim of petty nationalism.

The Fourth Age of European civilization begins today. It will be the Age of rebirth or perdition. The twenty-first century will be for this civilization, the heir of the fraternal Indo-European peoples, the fateful century, the century of life or death. But destiny is not simply fate. Contrary to the religions of the desert, the European people know at the bottom of their hearts that destiny and divinities are not all-powerful in relation to the human will. Like Achilles, like Ulysses, the original European man does not prostrate himself or kneel before the gods, but stands upright. There is no inevitability in history.

The Parable of the Tree

A Tree has roots, a trunk, and leaves. That is to say, the principle, the body, and the soul.

1) The roots represent the “principle,” the biological footing of a people and its territory, its motherland. They do not belong to us; one passes them on. They belong to the people, to the ancestral soul, and come from the people, what the Greeks called ethnos and the Germans Volk. They come from the ancestors; they are intended for new generations. (This is why any interbreeding is an undue appropriation of a good that is to be passed on and thus a betrayal.) If the principle disappears, nothing is possible any longer. If one cuts the tree trunk, it might well grow back. Even wounded, the Tree can continue to grow, provided that it recovers fidelity with its own roots, with its own ancestral foundation, the soil that nourishes its sap. But if the roots are torn up or the soil polluted, the tree is finished. This is why territorial colonization and racial amalgamation are infinitely more serious and deadly than cultural or political enslavement, from which a people can recover.

The roots, the Dionysian principle, grow and penetrate the soil in new ramifications: demographic vitality and territorial protection of the Tree against weeds. The roots, the “principle,” are never fixed. They deepen their essence, as Heidegger saw. The roots are at the same time “tradition” (what is handed down) and “arche” (life source, eternal renewal). The roots are thus manifestation of the deepest memory of the ancestral and of eternal Dionysian youthfulness. The latter refers back to the fundamental concept of deepening.

2) The trunk is its “soma,” the body, the cultural and psychic expression of the people, always innovating but nourished by sap from the roots. It is not solidified, not gelled. It grows in concentric layers and it rises towards the sky. Today, those who want to neutralize and abolish European culture try to “preserve” it in the form of monuments of the past, as in formaldehyde, for “neutral” scholars, or to just abolish the historical memory of the young generations. They do the work of lumberjacks. The trunk, on the earth that bears it, is, age after age, growth and metamorphosis. The Tree of old European culture is both uprooted and removed. A ten year old oak does not resemble a thousand year old oak. But it is the same oak. The trunk, which stands up to the lightning, obeys the Jupiterian principle.

3) The foliage is most fragile and most beautiful. It dies, withers, and reappears like the sun. It grows in all directions. The foliage represents psyche, i.e., civilization, the production and the profusion of new forms of creation. It is the raison d’être of the Tree, its assumption. In addition, which law does the growth of leaves obey? Photosynthesis. That is to say, “the utilization of the force of light.” The sun nourishes the leaves which, in exchange, produce vital oxygen. The efflorescent foliage thus follows the Apollonian principle. But watch out: if it grows inordinately and anarchically (like European civilization, which wanted to become the global Occident and extend to the whole planet), it will be caught by the storm, like a badly carded sail, and it will pull down and uproot the Tree that carries it. The foliage must be pruned, disciplined. If European civilization wishes to survive, it should not extend itself to the whole Earth, nor practice the strategy of open arms . . . as foliage that is too intrepid overextends itself, or allows itself to be smothered by vines. It will have to concentrate on its vital space, i.e., Eurosiberia. Hence the importance of the imperative of ethnocentrism, a term that is politically incorrect, but that is to be preferred to the “ethnopluralist” and in fact multiethnic model that dupes or schemers put forth to confuse the spirit of resistance of the rebellious elite of the youth.

One can compare the tripartite metaphor of the Tree with that of that extraordinary European invention the Rocket. The burning engines correspond to the roots, with chthonic fire. The cylindrical body is like the tree’s trunk. And the capsule, from which satellites or vessels powered by solar panels are deployed, brings to mind foliage.

Is it really an accident that the five great space rocket series built by Europeans—including expatriates in the USA—were respectively called Apollo, Atlas, Mercury, Thor, and Ariadne? The Tree is the people. Like the rocket, it rises towards the sky, but it starts from a land, a fertile soil where no other parasitic root can be allowed. On a spatial basis, one ensures a perfect protection, a total clearing of the launching site. In the same way, the good gardener knows that if the tree is to grow tall and strong, he must clear its base of the weeds that drain its roots, free its trunk of the grip of parasitic plants, and also prune the sagging and prolix branches.

From Dusk to Dawn

This century will be that of the metamorphic rebirth of Europe, like the Phoenix, or of its disappearance as a historical civilization and its transformation into a cosmopolitan and sterile Luna Park, while the other peoples will preserve their identities and develop their power. Europe is threatened by two related viruses: that of forgetting oneself, of interior desiccation and of excessive “opening to the other.” In the twenty-first century, Europe, to survive, will have to both regroup, i.e., return to its memory, and pursue its Faustian and Promethean aspirations. Such is the requirement of the coincidentia oppositorum, the convergence of opposites, or the double need for memory and will for power, contemplation and innovative creation, rootedness and transcendence. Heidegger and Nietzsche . . .

The beginning of twenty-first century will be the despairing midnight of the world of which Hölderlin spoke. But it is always darkest before the dawn. One knows that the sun will return, sol invictus. After the twilight of the gods: the dawn of the gods. Our enemies always believed in the Great Evening, and their flags bear the stars of the night. Our flags, on the contrary, are emblazoned with the star of the Great Morning, with branching rays; with the wheel, the flower of the sun at Midday.

Great civilizations can pass from the darkness of decline to rebirth: Islam and China prove it. The United States is not a civilization, but a society, the global materialization of bourgeois society, a comet, with a power as insolent as it is transitory. It does not have roots. It is not our true competitor on the stage of history, merely a parasite.

The time of conquest is over. Now is the time of reconquest, inner and outer: the reappropriation of our memory and our space: and what a space! Fourteen time zones on which the sun never sets. From Brest to the Bering Straits, it is truly the Empire of the Sun, the very space of the birth and expansion of the Indo-European people. To the south-east are our Indian cousins. To the east is the great Chinese civilization, which could decide to be our enemy or our ally. To the west, on the other side of the ocean: America whose desire will always be to prevent continental union. But will it always be able to stop it?

And then, to the south: the main threat, resurging from the depths of the ages, the one with which we cannot compromise.

Loggers try to cut down the Tree, among them many traitors and collaborators. Let us defend our land, preserve our people. The countdown has begun. We have time, but only a little.

And then, even if they cut the trunk or the storm knocks it down, the roots will remain, always fertile. Only one ember is enough to reignite a fire.

Obviously, they may cut down the Tree and dismember its corpse, in a twilight song, and anaesthetized Europeans may not feel the pain. But the earth is fertile, and only one seed is enough to begin the growth again. In the twenty-first century, let us prepare our children for war. Let us educate our youth, be it only a minority, as a new aristocracy.

Today we need more than morality. We need hypermorality, i.e., the Nietzschean ethics of difficult times. When one defends one’s people, i.e., one’s own children, one defends the essential. Then one follows the rule of Agamemnon and Leonidas but also of Charles Martel: what prevails is the law of the sword, whose bronze or steel reflects the glare of the sun. The tree, the rocket, the sword: three vertical symbols thrust from the ground towards the light, from the Earth to the Sun, animated by sap, fire, and blood.

—————-

Faye, Guillaume. “Mars & Hephaestus: The Return of History.” The Occidental Quarterly Online, 7 December 2009. <http://www.toqonline.com/blog/mars-and-hephaestus/ >.

 

From Dusk to Dawn – Faye

From Dusk to Dawn

By Guillaume Faye

Editor’s Note:

This is the first unabridged publication of the following translation with introduction by Michael O’Meara.

Translator’s Note:

The following talk was given in Moscow on May 17, 2005 and recently posted, in French, on the Russian site Athenaeum.

For at least three reasons, I think it deserves the widest possible circulation in White Nationalist circles. The first is one which more and more English speaking nationalists are beginning to realize: Guillaume Faye is today the most interesting, if not pertinent spokesman for the genetic-cultural heritage associated with the White Resistance. Everything he says or writes on the subject of who we are, what we are fighting for, and where the main battle fronts will lie are worth thinking about. In France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, Italy, and now Russia, his ideas have touched the leading debates (even, in some cases, descending to ad hominem issues, which seem the least important of our concerns).

The second reason this article deserves attention is the metapolitical one. Faye is a veteran of the first major effort to practice a “Gramscianism of the Right” — that is, to wage a cultural war against the ethnocidal principles of the dominant liberal culture. Not unrelatedly, he stands out among anti-liberal nationalists, creative force that he is, in having developed a language and a discourse that reaches beyond the narrow confines of our movement, while serving as a radical alternative to the anti-White language and discourse of the existing System.

The third reason is that this talk is a succinct and eloquent synthesis of the ideas — the vision — Faye has developed in the seven books (and countless articles) he’s produced in the eight years since the appearance of his path-breaking L’Archéofuturisme (1998). However provisionally sketched, these ideas aim at helping us through what promises to be the worst storm of our collective existence. At the same time, these ideas speak to something more primordial.

As an earlier student of our historical destiny writes: “All that is great stands in the storm” (Plato). What is coming will undoubtedly determine if we have any greatness left in us. The Whitemen of the West, the men of the Evening Lands (Abandländer), having gone under before, have also a long history of recognizing that it is only in resolutely confronting the dangers bearing down on them that they stand a chance of weathering them and, in doing so, of rediscovering what is still great within themselves.

Faye, I believe, is one of the seers calling us to return to ourselves and to the greatness inherent in who we are. — Michael O’Meara

Not since the fall of the Roman Empire has Europe experienced such a dramatic situation. It faces a danger unparalleled in its history and doesn’t even know it — or rather refuses to see it.

It’s been invaded, occupied, and colonized by peoples from the South and by Islam. It’s dominated by the United States, which wages a merciless economic war on it. It’s collapsing demographically, as its population ages and it ceases to reproduce itself. It’s been emasculated by decadent, nihilist ideologies cloaked in a facile optimism, and it’s been subjected to an unprecedented regression of culture and education, to primitivism and materialism. Europe is the sick man of the world. And its political classes, along with its intellectual elites, are actively collaborating in this race suicide. The argument I’m making is not, though, just about immigration, but also about a colonization and an invasion that is transforming Europe’s biological and ethno-cultural stock; it’s about not giving way to despair; about seeing that the struggle is only just beginning; and knowing that the closely related peoples of Europe have no alternative but to unite in their common defense.

The Destruction of Europe’s Ethno-Biological Stock

The demographics of the non-White invasion of France and Europe is terrifying. In a recent work, “France africaine” (African France), a well known demographer predicts that if present trends continue, more than 40 percent of the French population will be Black or Arab by 2040. Twenty-five percent of school children in France and Belgium today and more than 30 percent of infants are already of non-European origin. Of France’s present population of 61 million, more than 10 million are non-European and have a far higher birth rate than Whites. Every year 100,000 non-Europeans are naturalized as French citizens and another 300,000, most illegal, cross our undefended borders. The situation is not much different throughout the rest of Europe and signals the virtual end of our civilization, though the political classes have apparently yet to notice it.

Worldwide, including the United States, the White race is in steep numerical decline. It’s often said that our technological superiority will compensate for this disparity, but I don’t think so: The only meaningful forms of wealth and power are in human beings. For a civilization is based primarily on what the Romans called “germen,” that is, on the ethno-biological stock, the roots, that nourish a civilization and culture.

The non-European invasion of Europe that began in the 1960s was largely self-engendered, provoked: By left and right-wing politicians contaminated with Marxist and Trotskyist ideas; by an employer class greedy for cheap labor; by Jewish intellectuals demanding a multiracial society; by the ideology of human rights that had sprung from the secularization of certain Christian principles.

In France and in Europe, the collaborators abetting the invasion have established a system of preferences for the invaders that native Whites are obliged to pay for. Illegal immigrants are thus not only rarely repatriated when caught, they continue to receive the lavish social welfare benefits handed out to them by the anti-White forces in control of the state. At the same time, “anti-racists” have introduced a host of discriminatory laws that protect immigrants from normal social restraints, even though they are largely responsible for the on-going explosion of criminality (more than a thousand percent in the last 50 years).

The invasion is taking place as much in the maternity wards as it is along our porous borders. Combined with the demographic decline of the White population, immigration has become an economic disaster for Western Europe. It’s estimated to cost $180 billion per year (if the growing insecurity, as well as the innumerable forms of social assistance benefiting immigrants, including illegals, is figured in). This, in turn, creates new lures for the invaders: It is simply far more interesting to be unemployed in Europe than to work in the Third World. While the educated and creative segments of our population are beginning to flee, mainly to the United States, they are being replaced by Africa’s refuse, which has to be fed and supported by us and hasn’t anything in the way of skills or intelligence to offer.

All these facts suggest that the 21st-century European economy will be a depressed, Third-World one.

Islam’s Third Major Offensive

In addition to this mass, non-White invasion, Islam is again on the offensive. With single-minded persistence, its totalitarian and aggressive religion/ideology seeks the conquest of Europe. We’ve already suffered three great assaults by Islam, which today stretches from Gibraltar to Indonesia. The first of these offensives was halted at Portiers in 732 by Charles Martel; the second in 1683, during the Ottoman siege of Vienna; the third [in the form of the present invasion and colonization] is now underway [and virtually unopposed]. Islam has a long memory and its objective is to establish on our continent what [the leader of Iran’s Islamic Revolution, the ayattolla] Khomeiny called the “universal Caliphate.”

The invasion of Europe has begun and the figures [testifying to its extent] are alarming. The continent, including Russia, is now occupied by 55 million Muslims, a number that increases at a 6 percent annual rate. In France, there are at least 6 million. Like those in Belgium and Britain, these French Muslims are starting to demand a share of political power. The government, for its part, simply refuses to take seriously their objective of transforming France into an Islamic Republic by the year 2020, when the demographic weight of the Arab/Muslim population will have become determinant. Meanwhile, it is financing the construction of Mosques throughout the country in the hope of buying social peace; there are already more than 2,000 in France, nearly double the number in Morocco. Islam is at present the second largest religion in France, behind Catholicism, but the largest in the numbers of practitioners. [The republic’s president] Jacques Chirac has even declared that “France is now an Islamic power.” Everywhere in the West there prevails the unfounded belief that there’s a difference between Islam and “Islamism,” and that a Western, secularized, that is, moderate, Islam is possible. There’s no such thing. Every Muslim is potentially a jihadist. For Islam is a theocracy that confuses the spiritual with the temporal, faith with law, and seeks to impose its Shari’a [Islamic law] on a Europe whose civilizational precepts are absolutely incompatible with it.

The Advent of Race War

The criminality and delinquency in Western Europe caused by mass immigration and the collapse of civic values have reached insupportable levels. In France in 2004, more than a 100,000 cars were torched and 80 policemen killed. Nearly every week race riots erupt in the banlieues [the “suburbs” housing the immigrants masses]. In the public schools, violence is endemic and educational levels have almost collapsed. Among youth under 20, nearly 20 percent are illiterate. While racist assaults on Whites are steadily rising, they are routinely ignored in the name of the anti-racist vulgate, which holds that only Whites can be racists. At the same time, an arsenal of repressive legislation, worthy of Soviet communism, has imposed “laws” whose purely ideological and subjective intent make no pretence to fairness, let alone objectivity. All criticism of immigration or Islam is prohibited. I myself have been tried several time and levied with an enormous fine for having written La colonisation de l’Europe [The Colonization of Europe].

A race war is foreseeable now in several European countries, a subterranean war that will be far more destructive than “terrorism.” The White population is being displaced, a sort of genocide is being carried out against it with the complicity or the abstention of the ruling class, the media, and the politicians, for the ideology these collaborating elites uphold is infused with a pathological hatred of their own people and a morbid passion for miscegenation.

The state’s utopian plan for “republican integration” has nevertheless failed because it thought peaceful coexistence between foreigners and natives, non-Whites and Whites, was possible in a single territory. Our rulers haven’t read Aristotle, who taught that no city can possibly be democratic and orderly if it isn’t ethnically homogenous. . . . European societies today are devolving into an unmanageable ethnic chaos.

I’m a native of Southwest France, of the area along the Atlantic coast, and speak not a word of Russian, but I feel infinitely closer to a Russian than to a French-speaking Arab or African, even if they happen to be “French” citizens.

The Moral Crisis and Archaefuturism

The present situation can be explained, almost clinically, as a sort of “mental AIDS.” Our present afflictions come from the virus of nihilism, which Nietzsche foresaw, and which has weakened all our natural defenses. Thus infected, Europeans have succumbed to a feverish self-extinction. They have voluntarily opened the city gates.

The primary symptom of this disease is “xenophilia:” a systematic preference for the Other rather than for the Same. A second symptom is “ethnomasochism,” a hatred of one’s own civilization and origins. A third is emasculation [dévirilisation], or what might be called the cult of weakness and a preference for male homosexuality. Historically proven values associated with the use of force and a people’s survival — values associated with honor, loyalty, family, fertility, patriotism, the will to survive, etc. — are treated today as ridiculous shortcomings. This sort of decadence owes a good deal to the secularization of Christian charity and its egalitarian offshoot, human rights.

Europeans may take inspiration from certain values still upheld in Russia: For example, the consciousness of belonging to a superior civilization and of maintaining a “right to distance” from other peoples. We need to break with all forms of “ethnopluralism,” which is simply another kind of egalitarianism, and reclaim the right to “ethnocentrism,” the right to live in our own lands without the Other. We also have to reclaim the principle: “To each his own.” Besides, only Westerners believe race-mixing is a virtue or envisage the future as a melting pot. They alone believe in cosmopolitanism. But the 21st century will be dominated by a resurgence of ethno-religious blocs, especially in the South and the East. Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” will never happen. Instead, we’re going to experience an acceleration of history with the “clash of civilizations.” Europeans also need to break with the “presentism” in which they are sunk and learn to see themselves again (as do Muslims, Chinese, and Indians) as a “long-living people,” bearers of a future. The mental revolution needed to bring about this change in European attitudes is, though, only possible through a gigantic crisis, a violent shock, which is already on its way and which I will say a few words about below.

The New American Imperialism

Europeans also have to come to terms with what I called in my last book “the new American imperialism,” an imperialism more heavy-handed than that of the Cold War era, but one that is also more blundering. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, American administrations seem to have lost all sense of measure, becoming even more hubristic, as they embark on a fantastic quest for world domination, dressed up in the simulacra of a new Roman empire. Much of this, of course, is explainable in terms of neoconservative ideology, linked with Zionism, but it’s also driven by a messianic, almost pathological, sense of having a “divine mission.”

What are the goals of this new American imperialism? To encircle and neutralize Russia, preventing any meaningful alliance between her and Europe (the Pentagon’s worse nightmare); to deflect Europe’s challenge to its hegemony by making Islam and Muslim Turkey a part of it; to subjugate the Eastern and Central European parts of the former Soviet empire; to wage a relentless economic war on the European Union and do so in such a way that the latter doesn’t dream of resisting. Everywhere, the crusading spirit of this new American imperialism endeavors to impose “democracy,” especially on Russia’s periphery. “Democracy” has come to mean “pro-American regime.”

But we shouldn’t complain of these American ambitions, which accord with the country’s geopolitical and thalassocratic desire for domination. In history, everyone is responsible only for oneself.

That’s why I oppose the “obsessional and hysterical anti-Americanism” so prevalent in France, for it is counter-productive, self-victimizing, and irresponsible.

A people or nation must learn to distinguish between its “principal adversary” and its “principal enemy.” The first tries to dominate and undermine, the second to kill. We shouldn’t forget Carl Schmitt’s formula: “It’s not only you who chooses your enemy, it’s more often your enemy who chooses you.” America, specifically its ruling class, is Europe’s and Russia’s “principal adversary” at the level of geopolitics, economics, and culture. Europe’s “principal enemy” is the peoples of the South, increasingly assembled under the banner of Islam, whose invasion of the continent is already well underway, facilitated by a political class and an intelligentsia who have opened the gates (to Washington’s delight) and who seek a miscegenated, non-European Europe.

Like Atlanticists, the hysterical anti-Americans overestimate the United States, without understanding that it is only as strong as we are weak. The Americans’ catastrophic and counter-productive occupation of little Iraq, to which they have brought nothing but chaos, makes this all indisputably evident. In the 21st century, the US will cease to be the premier world power. That will be China — or, if we have the will, what I call “Euro-Siberia” — a federated alliance between the peoples of the European peninsular and Russia.

The Convergence of Catastrophes

I’ve postulated the hypothesis that the present global system, founded on a belief in miracles, a belief in the myth of indefinite progress, is on the verge of collapse. For the first time in history, humanity as a whole is threatened by a cataclysmic crisis that is likely to occur sometime between 2010 and 2020 — a crisis provoked by the on-going degradation of the ecosystem and climatic disruptions, by the exhaustion of fossil fuel sources and food-producing capacity, by the increased fragility of an international economic order based on speculation and massive indebtedness, by the return of epidemics, by the rise of nationalism, terrorism, and nuclear proliferation, by the growing aggressiveness of Islam’s world offense, and by the dramatic aging of the West’s population.

We need to prepare for these converging catastrophes, which will mark the transition from one era to another, as their cataclysmic effects sweep away liberal modernity and bring about a New Middle Age. With such a convergence, there will also come an opportunity for rebirth, for every major historical regeneration emerges from chaos. This is especially the case with a civilization like our own, whose very nature is “metamorphic.”

Eurosiberia

The Europe of the future must no longer be envisaged in the mushy, ungovernable forms of the present European Union, which is a powerless Medusa, unable to control its borders, dominated by the mania of free-trade, and subject to American domination. We need to imagine a federal, imperial Grande Europe, ethnically homogeneous (that is, European), based on a single autonomous area, and inseparably linked to Russia. I call this enormous continental bloc “Euro-Siberia.” Having no need to be aggressive toward its neighbors because it would be unattackable, such a bloc would become the premier world power (in a world partitioned into large blocs), self-centered, and opposed to all the dangerous dogmas now associated with globalism. It would have the capacity to practice the “autarky of great spaces,” whose principles have already been worked out by the Nobe; Prize-winning economist, Maurice Allais. The destiny of the European peninsula cannot be separated from continental Russia, for both ethno-cultural and geopolitical reasons. It’s absolutely imperative for America’s mercantile thalassocracy to prevent the birth of a Euro-Siberian federation.

This is not the place to speak of the Israeli state. Only a word: For essentially demographic reasons, I believe the Zionist utopia conceived by Hertzl and Buber and realized since 1948 will not survive any longer than Soviet communism did; indeed, its end is already in sight. I’m presently writing a book on The New Jewish Question, which I hope will be translated into Russian.

Conclusion

Fatalism is never appropriate. History is always open-ended and presents innumerable unexpected caprices and turns. Let’s not forget the formula of William of Orange: “Where there’s a will, there’s a way.” The period we are presently living through is a one of resistance and of preparation for the even more threatening events to come, such as might follow the juncture of a race war and a massive economic downturn. We need to start thinking in post-chaos terms and organize accordingly. In closing, let me leave you with a favorite watchword of mine: “From Resistance to Reconquest, From Reconquest to Renaissance.”

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Faye, Guillaume. “From Dusk to Dawn.” Counter-Currents Publishing. 27 July 2010. <http://www.counter-currents.com/2010/07/from-dusk-to-dawn/ >.

Letter on Identity & Sovereignty – Venner

Letter to My Friends on Identity & Sovereignty

By Dominque Venner

Translated by Greg Johnson

When you belong to a nation associated with St. Louis, Philip the Fair, Richelieu, Louis XIV, or Napoleon, a country which in the late 17th century, was called the “great nation” (the most populated and most dangerous), it is cruel to recount the history of repeated setbacks: the aftermath of Waterloo, 1870, 1940, and again in 1962, the ignominious end of French rule in Algeria. A certain pride necessarily suffers.

By the 1930s, many among the boldest French minds had imagined a united Europe as a way to an understanding with Germany and as a solution to the constant decline of France. After the disaster that was World War II (which amplified that of 1914–1918), a project was born that is in itself legitimate. New bloodlettings between the French and Germans should be outlawed forever. The idea was to tie together the two great sister nations of the former Carolingian Empire. First by an economic association (the European Coal and Steel Community), then by a political association. General de Gaulle wanted to make this happen with the Elysée Treaty (January 22, 1963), but the United States, in their hostility, forestalled it by putting pressure on West Germany.

Then came the technocratic globalists who gave us the gas works called the “European Union.” In practice, this is the absolute negation of its name. The fake “European Union” has become the biggest obstacle to a genuine political settlement that respects the particularities of the European peoples of the former Carolingian Empire. Europe, it must be remembered, is primarily a unitary multi-millennial civilization going back to Homer, but it is also a potential power zone and the aspiration for a future that remains to be built.

Why an aspiration to power? Because no European nations today, neither France nor Germany nor Italy, despite brave fronts, are sovereign states any longer.

There are three main attributes of sovereignty:

First attribute: the ability to make war and conclude peace. The US, Russia, Israel, or China can. Not France. That was over after the end of the war in Algeria (1962), despite the efforts of General de Gaulle and our nuclear deterrent, which will never be used by France on its own (unless the United States has disappeared, which is unpredictable). Another way to pose the question: for whom are the French soldiers dying in Afghanistan? Certainly not for France, which has no business there, but for the United States. We are the auxiliaries of the USA. Like Germany and Italy, France is a vassal state of the great Atlantic suzerain power. It is best to face this to recover our former pride.

Second attribute of sovereignty: control of territory and population. Ability to distinguish between one’s own people and others . . . We know the reality is that the French state, by its policy, laws, courts, has organized the “great replacement” of populations, we impose a preference for immigrants and Muslims, with 8 million Arab-Muslims (and more waiting), bearers of another history, another civilization, and another future (Sharia).

Third attribute of sovereignty: one’s own currency. We know what that is.

The agonizing conclusion: France, as a state, is no longer sovereign and no longer has its own destiny. This is a consequence of the disasters of the century of 1914 (the 20th century) and the general decline of Europe and Europeans.

But there is a “but”: if France does not exist as a sovereign state, the French people and nation still exist, despite all efforts to dissolve them into rootless individuals! This is the great destabilizing paradox of the French mind. We were always taught to confuse identity with sovereignty by being taught that the nation is a creation of the state, which, for the French, is historically false.

It is for me a very old topic of discussion that I had previously summarized in an opinion column published in Le Figaro on February 1, 1999 under the title: “Sovereignty is not Identity.” I’ll put it online one day soon for reference.

No, the sovereignty of the state is not to be confused with national identity. France’s universalist tradition and centralist state were for centuries the enemy of the carnal nation and its constituent communities. The state has always acted relentlessly to uproot the French and transform them into the interchangeable inhabitants of a geographic zone. It has always acted to rupture the national tradition. Look at the July 14 celebrations: it celebrates a repugnant uprising, not a great memory of unity. Look at the ridiculous emblem of the French Republic: a plaster Marianne wearing a revolutionary cap. Look at the hideous logos that have been imposed to replace the arms of the traditional regions. Remember that in 1962 the state used all its strength against the French in Algeria, abandoned to their misery. Similarly, today, it is not difficult to see that the state gives preference to immigrants (construction of mosques, legalizing halal slaughter) at the expense of the natives.

There is nothing new in this state of war against the living nation. The Jacobin Republic merely followed the example of the Bourbons, which Tocqueville has demonstrated in The Old Regime and the French Revolution before Taine and other historians. Our textbooks have taught blind admiration for the way the Bourbons crushed “feudalism,” that is to say, the nobility and the communities they represented. What a brilliant policy! By strangling the nobility and rooted communities, this dynasty destroyed the foundation of the old monarchy. Thus, in the late 18th century, the individualistic (human rights) Revolution triumphed in France but failed everywhere else in Europe thanks to the persistence of the feudal system and strong communities. Reread what Renan says in his Intellectual and Moral Reform in France. The reality is that in France the state is not the defender of the nation. It is a machine of power that has its own logic, willingly lent to the service of the enemies of the nation, having become one of the main agents of the deconstruction of identity.

Source: http://fr.novopress.info/115104/tribune-libre-lettre-sur-lidentite-a-mes-amis-souverainistes-par-dominique-venner/

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Venner, Dominique. “Letter to My Friends on Identity & Sovereignty.” Counter-Currents.com. 6 July 2012. <http://www.counter-currents.com/2012/07/letter-to-my-friends-on-identity-and-sovereignty/ >.

 

Does Identity Depend on Sovereignty? – Venner

Does Identity Depend on Sovereignty?

By Dominique Venner

Translated by Greg Johnson

Author’s Note:

I reproduce here in full a seminal article that I published in Le Figaro on February 1, 1999 under the title: “Sovereignty is not Identity.” This article was part of the debate provoked by the Amsterdam Treaty and discussions about the future EU.

My intention was to liberate the minds of those who see history from a Jacobin and “state-centered” perspective, which has always been taught in France under the influence of an exceptionally powerful centralized state. This history focuses exclusively on the state and practices a kind of negation of the French people and the carnal nation that I hope to rehabilitate. This article provoked some lively debate in those circles most attached to the idea of sovereignty, promoting new thinking on national identity. I reproduce it as it was published at the time.

A wave of panic stirs our remotest hamlets. France, will she survive the Euro, the Treaty of Amsterdam, the conspiracy of the Eurocrats, to the year 2000? Is the loss of sovereignty the loss of identity? On these real issues regarding the challenge of the construction of Europe, historians have remained strangely silent. Yet if there is an area where history can illuminate the future, it is that of French identity in the midst of Europe.

Unlike the German nation, which lived without a unitary state for six centuries, from 1250 to 1871, France has not experienced such an interruption. Here, the unitary state was continuously maintained during the same period. Hence the causal relationship inscribed in our minds between sovereignty and identity. It has even become a kind of dogma, maintained by Jacobin historiography, that the French nation is the creation of the state and that, deprived of the latter, it would be in danger of death and dissolution.

It this were true, such a nation would be worthless. But it is false. Certainly no one would contest that the state, royal and republican, built the political and administrative framework of the nation. However, this has nothing to do with the formation of its substance. The state is not the creator of the French people or the source of our identity. History shows that. But this truth is so contrary to received ideas that it needs some explanation.

Let us refer to the origins, the Oaths of Strasbourg, publicly pledged in February 842 by Charles the Bald and Louis the German, grandsons of Charlemagne. The authentic text was written in Langue d′oïl (Old French) and Old High German. It is the oldest known document attesting to a linguistic separation between German-speaking and French-speaking Frankish barons of the same stock. The Oath of Strasbourg is, in a way, the official birth of the French and the German peoples before France and Germany. In the 9th century, without there ever being a nation state, two peoples and two cultures are already evidenced by the mysterious emergence of two distinct languages.

Move forward in time. From the 11th and 12th centuries, there is ample evidence of radiant French identity. At the time, the centralized state did not yet exist. The little courts of the petty kings of the time had nothing to do with the Song of Roland or Tristan and Isolde or the Lancelot of Chretien de Troyes, primordial monuments of a Frenchness deeply rooted in the European soil. The role of the state is also absent in the emergence and proliferation of the Romanesque style in the following centuries, in the admirable secular architecture of castles, towns, and country houses, neglected by the scholarly historiography up to André Chastel.[1]

What sort of people, what sort of identity? In the 12th century, the famous Suger, abbot of Saint-Denis and adviser to Louis VII, responds in his own way: “We are French of France, born of the same womb.” Five centuries later, the grammarian Vaugelas responsible in 1639 to lead the drafting of the Great dictionary of the Academy offers this definition: “People does not mean mob, but community represented faithfully by its nobility.”

More than the state, the deciding factor of the birth of a nation is the existence of a “core people”: homogeneous, numerous, active, “represented by its nobility,” from which unfold a language and style that gradually extend to similar neighboring peoples. Such was the fate of the historic “core people” of the Ile de France, Picardy, and Neustria, of high Frankish composition. The Capetian kings made it the base of their ambitions. What happened, under the dry rule of the state, to this “core people,” the people of Bouvines and many other exploits, once so strong?

It is to them that we owe our language and its inner strength, so long inviolable. Emile Littre emphasized this in his History of the French Language. He showed how powerful vitality and genuine originality allowed the transformation of a Celticized and Germanized low-Latin into Old French and then French.

Before being ennobled by literature, the language had arisen from the people. Montaigne knew well when he wrote: “I would rather my son to learn to speak in taverns than schools of eloquence. . . . If only I could confine myself to the words used in the market of Paris.” Ronsard said much the same thing by assigning this condition the adoption of new words: “they are to be molded and shaped on a pattern already received from the people.” A pattern which Etiemble, in the 20th century, nicely called the “people’s throat.” Of course there must still be a people, i.e., living and rooted communities, everything that the centralist government dislikes and has always fought.

The state has its own logic which is not that of the living nation. The living nation has nothing to fear from the loss of sovereignty, because sovereignty should not be confused with identity. If further proof is needed, the history of Quebec is eloquent enough. Since the Treaty of Paris in 1763, the French in Canada were totally abandoned by the royal state. Isolated in a hostile land under foreign sovereignty, they not only failed to disappear, but they multiplied, preserving their ancestral language and customs, fighting victoriously against Anglo-Saxon linguistic hegemony.

Identity lies in fidelity to oneself, and nowhere else.

Note

1. One might add that in the 14th century several large fiefs often Carolingian and French escaped the royal state, but not French identity: Great Burgundy, Guyenne, French Flanders, Lorraine, Franche-Comté, and Savoy, not including independent Brittany.

Source: http://www.dominiquevenner.fr/2012/07/lidentite-depend-elle-de-la-souverainete/

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Venner, Dominique. “Does Identity Depend on Sovereignty?” Counter-Currents Publishing, 7 September 2012. <http://www.counter-currents.com/2012/09/does-identity-depend-on-sovereignty/ >.

 

“Indigenous”? How Dare You? – Venner

“Indigenous”? How Dare You?

By Dominique Venner

Translated by Greg Johnson

Translations of this English translation: Czech, Ukrainian

No man is blinder than someone who refuses to see. I thought of this adage recently while reading a long public diatribe by a retired classicist.[1] Enjoying a status privileged in France and even in the United States where he taught at a reputable university, the good professor mocked the term chosen by his compatriots who call themselves “indigenous” or “autochthonous,” i.e., as the Greek etymology indicates, born of themselves, of the same blood and the same soil.

“In the middle of fifth century before our era,” he writes, “a small city-state in Greece was struck by the virus of the ‘hypertrophy of the ego’”—“a frightening epidemic,” added the professor emeritus. Consider: this epidemic “resulted in instituting an annual ceremony in which a speaker, expert in funeral orations, celebrated the immemorial glory of the Athenians before the graves of the war dead.” What an absurd idea, indeed, to celebrate the glory of the city and those who died in war! This disturbing “hypertrophy of the ego” even led the Athenians to build some negligible marble monuments like the Parthenon, which resisted the millennia and various invasions to the eternal admiration of morons like us. It also led them to raise other equally trivial monuments: those of the spirit (the transmission of the Homeric poems, the invention of philosophy, tragic drama, and historical investigation), which nourish us to this day and that the curious classicist finds it astonishing that we still quote. This whole heritage is indeed irritating.

And what a deplorable example! “The [French] historians of the 1880s began to write a history of France, born from itself.” Truly a scandal! And that is not all: “Just as the monks who in 12th century invented the ‘Christian cemetery,’ excluding Jews, infidels, foreigners, and other non-believers, they [the historians] continue to maintain, from one Republic to another, the belief that we are the heirs of the dead, specifically of our dead, since prehistory. The ‘great historians’ [note the quotation marks] vouch for them.” How sad!

To believe our retired academic, in France the idea of the national identity—which thus comes to us from Athens and ancient Greece—is in the air today. This revelation fills him with distress.

Indeed, how inept, given the ascendant global flux of financial exchange, obviously so beneficial, encourages on the contrary a “nomadic” feeling, to use his words. Naturally it is easy to be “nomadic” when one travels only to the most beautiful places in the world, all expenses paid, cocooned by countless employees devoted to one’s comfort and safety.

No doubt the last French “autochthones” who lacked the means or opportunity to escape, for example, from Villiers-le-Bel after the riots of November 2007 would also like to be “nomads” of this type. But their status as poor, aged, or abandoned “autochthones” prohibits that. And yet what a pretty name, “Villiers-le-Bel” (Villiers the Beautiful). An “autochthonous” name, which now resounds with cruel irony.

Why, you might ask, do I speak of such things? Because the historian must also take into account and not to be blind to what happens before his eyes. This is the lesson of Marc Bloch, contemporary and victim of the disaster of 1940. He recognized that his work had led him to be unaware of the importance of the events of his time. “It was a misinterpretation of history . . . We preferred to confine ourselves in the nervous silence of our offices. . . . Had we not always been good citizens?”[2] I cannot deny that such a precedent does not leave me indifferent.

And if one is not a complete idiot, a question emerges: Why is the desire for identity (to be conscious of who one is, in every layer of one’s existence, among those who are like you) creditable among American Blacks, Chinese, Arabs, Israelis, Uyghurs, Turks, or Gabonese but reprehensible among Europeans and French?

Now that is a question that needs to be answered.

Notes

[1] Marcel Detienne, in Le Monde, 12-13 July 2009, under the title: “La France sans terre ni mort” [France without land or dead].

[2] Marc Bloch, L’Etrange défaite (Editions Francs Tireurs, 1946), p. 188. Repenting his previous detachment, the great historian joined the Résistance. Captured, he was shot in June 1944.

Source: “Vous avez dit autochtone?” http://www.dominiquevenner.fr/#/edito-nrh-44-autochtone/3272196

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Venner, Dominique. “‘Indigenous’? How Dare You?” Counter-Currents Publishing, 24 August 2010. <http://www.counter-currents.com/2010/08/how-dare-you/ >.