Archeofuturism

by Guillaume Faye

  In human history, the establishment of a Eurosiberian complex would represent a revolution greater than that of the short-lived Soviet Union or even the United States of America. This event of global importance could only be compared with the foundation of the Chinese or Roman empires.

  Whatever the reasons explicitly given to justify the process – and which are of little importance – the European family is coming together in its common home. As in the past – like the Greeks against the Persians almost 2,400 years ago[198] – we are uniting our cities to face a vague but already perceivable threat. Greater Europe must be peaceful and democratic, yet autonomous, inflexible and invincible – clearly, in the technological and economic sphere too; for what need does an empire have of being imperialistic? An imperial logic will extend to all peoples of the earth. Each folk in its own land to defend itself from the aggressions of others, effectively managing the destiny of spaceship Earth.

  The chaotic event we are witnessing – this disorderly grouping of Europeans, which only awaits to organised – may represent the reconstitution and historical reoccurrence, in a different and larger form, not only of the Roman Empire, with its centre in the Mediterranean, but also of the Holy Roman Empire, with its centre on the vast Eurosiberian plain, which opens onto four seas. Leviathan[199] and Behemoth[200] rolled into one.

  A view of tomorrow: from the harbour of Brest to Port Arthur, from our frozen islands in the Arctic to the victorious sun of Crete, from the fields to the steppe and from the fjords to the maquis, a hundred nations free and united, regrouped to form an empire, will perhaps be winning for themselves what Tacitus[201] called the Kingdom of the Earth, Orbis Terrae Regnum.

  [1]René Thom (1923-2002) was a French mathematician who made many achievements during his career, but is best remembered for his development of catastrophe theory. The theory is complex, but in essence it states that small alterations in the parameters of any system can cause large-scale and sudden changes to the system as a whole.

  [2] Alain Lefèbvre (1947- ) is a French journalist who was one of the founding members of GRECE in 1968.

  [3]Jean-François Lyotard (1924-1998) was a French philosopher who, from the 1970s onward, was one of the primary expositors of postmodern philosophy. His ideas have had a huge impact on the fields of philosophy, cultural studies and literary theory. As with all postmodernists, Lyotard rejected the idea of any type of universal meaning, claiming that meaning only exists when it is created by individuals or by small groups using their own narratives to understand reality. Thus, efforts to understand all of human experience within the context of a universal ideology, such as Communism or Fascism, are doomed to failure since they attempt to impose one system of understanding upon the universe, when actually meaning is something unique to every individual and thus cannot be extrapolated to others’ experience. Many of his works have been translated.

  [4] Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) was a French philosopher who is widely regarded as the most important of the postmodernist philosophers. His work has had an enormous impact on philosophy and literary theory since the 1970s. Most of his work is available in translation.

  [5] Michel Foucault (1926-1984) was an erudite French philosopher, historian and sociologist who has been associated with both structuralism and postmodernism, although he rejected both labels. He wrote not only on philosophical themes, but also on the subjects of insanity and its treatment, prisons, medicine, and the history of sexuality. He was openly homosexual and a sadomasochist who died of AIDS, and he supported extreme Leftist ideas. All of his major works have been translated.

  [6]Paul Virilio (1932- ) is a French philosopher who writes primarily about technology, as well as what the use of physical space tells us about the institutions that utilize it. Many of his works have been translated.

  [7] ‘Pre-war’.

  [8] François Mitterrand (1916-1996) was the President of France between 1981 and 1995. To date, he has been the only member of the Socialist Party to become President, and was also the longest-serving President of the Fifth Republic.

  [9] This story forms the sixth chapter of this book.

  [10] Latin: ‘slip of the tongue and of writing’.

  [11] This quote appears in Vaneigem’s best-known work, The Revolution of Everyday Life (London: Action Books, 1972), although the quote actually reads: ‘Discipline and cohesion can only come from the pleasure principle.’ Faye appears to be paraphrasing, since in its original context, Vaneigem is referring to the discipline and cohesion of revolutionaries.

  [12] Raoul Vaneigem (1934- ) is a Belgian philosopher who has written many books on anarchist themes. He is best-known for being part of Debord’s Situationist International during the 1960s.

  [13] André Breton (1896-1966) was the founder of the Surrealist art movement in the 1920s, and wrote its most important essays and treatises.

  [14]The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Pantheon, 1970).

  [15] The Conservative Revolution is a term first coined by Hugo von Hoffmansthal, which has come to designate a loose confederation of anti-liberal German thinkers who wrote during the Weimar Republic (1919-1933), although scholar Armin Mohler, in his classic study of the movement, has identified Conservative Revolutionary thinkers going back as far as the Nineteenth century. There are some who speak of a ‘conservative revolution’ in today’s world, representing the same spirit as the Weimar movement, although it is more commonly used to designate the historical school of thought.

  [16] As Faye was writing in 1998, he is referring to the Twenty-first century.

  [17] The Tarpeian Rock was a cliff located near the site of the Roman Forum on Capitoline Hill in ancient Rome. During the days of the Roman Republic and later the Empire, dangerous criminals and the physically or mentally disabled were executed there by being thrown off the cliff.

  [18] See Introduction, note 7 about Debord. The more widely accepted reason given for his suicide on 30 November 1994 is that he wanted to end the pain inflicted by a chronic illness he had contracted as a result of his alcoholism.

  [19]The Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone Books, 1994).

  [20] Plato discusses his concept of justice at length in The Republic. In the context of the state, Plato saw justice in the ideal ‘good city’ as something that could only be attained in a state that was ruled by philosopher-kings, since he believed that philosophers’ knowledge of Truth, and belief in Truth over self-interest, makes them less vulnerable to the corruptions of power than other types of men. Thus, justice is a matter of knowledge, and not merely the exercise of power in order to fulfil the wishes of the people, since the people may not have knowledge of what is best for themselves.

  [21] The crisis in Indonesia was part of the larger Asian Financial Crisis which began in July 1997. It began in Thailand when the government, faced with bankruptcy due to its massive foreign debt, switched the national currency from a fixed to a floating exchange rate, causing its collapse. The crisis then spread throughout Asia. In May 1998, Indonesian currency also collapsed, causing enormous inflation and resulting in riots throughout the country and a pogrom against ethnic Chinese, who were blamed for the crisis. Nearly two thousand people were reported to have been killed in the rioting, and there were many rapes of ethnic Chinese women as well.

  [22] Sir James Michael ‘Jimmy’ Goldsmith (1933-1997) was a magazine publisher, financier and politician who represented France in the European Parliament between 1994 until his death. He also founded the Referendum Party in the UK. He published a book, The Trap (London: Macmillan, 1994), in which he argued that global free trade, which results in widespread competition over cheap labour in the Third World, is a threat to worldwide social stability.

  [23] Jules Monnerot (1908-1995) was a French sociologist. He remains largely unknown in the English-speaking world.

  [24] Jacques Attali (1943- ) is a French economist who was an advisor to Mitterrand during the first decade of his presidency. Many
of his writings are available in translation. Faye may be referring to Attali’s article ‘The Crash of Western Civilisation: The Limits of the Market and Democracy’, which appeared in the Summer 1997 issue of the American journal Foreign Policy. In it, Attali claimed that democracy and the free market are incompatible, writing: ‘Unless the West, and particularly its self-appointed leader, the United States, begins to recognise the shortcomings of the market economy and democracy, Western civilisation will gradually disintegrate and eventually self-destruct.’ In many ways his arguments resemble Faye’s.

  [25] The Second Vatican Council, or Vatican II, was convened in the 1960s in an effort to bring the doctrines of the Church more in tune with the problems of modern life. Many traditionalist Catholics regard it as a surrendering of the Church to secular pressures.

  [26] It is interesting to note that Faye wrote these words prior to the large-scale Islamist terrorist attacks in the U.S., Spain and the U.K., before the outbreak of the related wars in the Middle East, and also before the mass rioting of Muslims in Paris in 2005, all of which only appear to reinforce his thesis.

  [27] Louis Farrakhan (1933- ) is the leader of the Nation of Islam, which is the most prominent Black supremacist organisation in the U.S.

  [28] See chapter 1, note 27.

  [29] World Health Organisation, an agency of the United Nations.

  [30] The complete text of Castro’s address can be found on-line at www.nnc.cubaweb.cu/discur/ingles/14mayo98.htm.

  [31] The Earth Summit, sponsored by the United Nations, was held in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992. The Kyoto Protocol, which was a further effort by the UN to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, was signed on 11 December 1997 and went into effect in February 2005. As Faye says, the United States, which was responsible for 36.1% of emissions in 1990, has never ratified it.

  [32] The millennium bug, or Y2K, was a problem that resulted from much of the computer software designed in the late Twentieth century only using the last two digits of the year for dating rather than all four, meaning that at midnight on 1 January 2000 many electronic systems would be unable to tell whether it was 2000 or 1900. Computer software designers went to work on this problem for years prior to the millennium, however, and there were no significant problems when it finally came. However, many experts during the late 1990s were predicting catastrophic consequences for global civilisation after Y2K.

  [33] Robert Ardrey (1908-1980) was a widely read and discussed author during the 1960s, particularly his books African Genesis (1961) and The Territorial Imperative (1966). Ardrey’s most controversial hypothesis, known as the ‘killer ape theory’, posits that what distinguished humans’ evolutionary ancestors from other primates was their aggressiveness, which caused them to develop weapons to conquer their environment and also leading to changes in their brains which led to modern humans. In his view, aggressiveness was an inherent part of the human character rather than an aberration. Ardrey’s ideas were highly influential at the time, most notably in the ‘Dawn of Man’ sequence of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and also in the writings of GRECE, in which Ardrey was frequently cited. They also elicited responses from scholars such as Konrad Lorenz and Erich Fromm. In more recent years, however, Ardrey’s theories are no longer upheld by the mainstream scientific establishment.

  [34] A thalassocracy is a state which depends primarily on the sea for its power, either economically or strategically. The Greek historian Herodotus described ancient Phoenicia as a thalassocracy, since it controlled little territory on land but possessed a large network of city-states which flourished through maritime trading.

  [35]Les nuisances idéologiques (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1971), or The Ideological Nuisances. It has never been translated.

  [36]Les cents prochains siècles (Paris: Fayard, 1976), or The Next Hundred Centuries. It has never been translated.

  [37] ‘What if some day or night a demon were to steal into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life as you now live it and have lived it you will have to live once again and innumerable times again; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unspeakably small or great in your life must return to you, all in the same succession and sequence…”’ From Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 194. This is one of Nietzsche’s central ideas.

  [38] ‘“Wood” is an old name for forest. In the wood there are paths, mostly overgrown, that come to an abrupt stop where the wood is untrodden. They are called Holzwege. Each goes its separate way, though within the same forest. It often appears as if one is identical to another. But it only appears so. Woodcutters and forest keepers know these paths. They know what it means to be on a Holzweg.’ From Martin Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. v.

  [39] Ancient Greek: ‘to make’. It is the etymological root of the word poetry. Plato, in his ‘Symposium’, defined poiesis as the method by which mortals attempt to transcend death, such as through sex, fame or knowledge.

  [40] Richard Wagner (1813-1883) was the greatest German composer of operas in the Nineteenth century (although he preferred to call his mature works ‘music dramas’). The influence of his music and writings has had a tremendous influence on all aspects of culture in the West.

  [41] The Apollonian/Dionysian dichotomy was first coined by Nietzsche in his early work, The Birth of Tragedy. He defined the Apollonian as that which was related to dreams, rational, and most apparent in the visual arts. He understood the Dionysian as intoxication, being passionately tied to the instincts, and best seen in music.

  [42]Umwertung aller Werte, or ‘transvaluation/revaluation of all values’. This was a key concept in Nietzsche’s last works. He wrote: ‘Let us not underestimate the fact that we ourselves, we free spirits, already constitute a “revaluation of all values”, a living declaration of war on and victory over all old concepts of “true” and “untrue”.’ From The Anti-Christ , Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols and Other Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 11.

  [43] This quotation is attributed to various officials of the Revolutionary Tribunal during the French Revolution, which sent many people to the guillotine. The occasion was the sentencing of the chemist Antoine Lavoisier, often called the ‘father of modern chemistry’, to death in 1794.

  [44] Faye is probably referring to the Eurasianist Movement in Russia, a concept which dates back to White Russian émigrés of the 1920s and which was most notably revived by the political philosopher Aleksandr Dugin in the 1990s. It is a geopolitical theory, often seen as a corollary of Dugin’s ideology of National Bolshevism, which asserts that Moscow, Berlin and Paris form a natural geopolitical axis that Dugin believes must be realized in order to bring about a revolt against American world domination. Dugin’s Eurasia Party was officially recognized by the Russian government in 2001, and it was widely rumoured to have sympathizers at the highest levels of Vladimir Putin’s administration, although in subsequent years Dugin has been critical of Putin.

  [45] Charles Maurras (1868-1952) was a French Catholic counter-revolutionary philosopher who was the founder of the Action Française (see chapter 1, note 12).

  [46] Peter Mandelson (1953- ) was the M.P. for Hartlepool from 1992 until 2004, and helped to rebrand the Labour Party as ‘New Labour’, which was key to Blair’s electoral victory in 1997. He served in Blair’s cabinet.

  [47] Wolfgang Schäuble (1942- ) was a member of Kohl’s cabinet between 1984 and 1991, and chairman of the Christian Democrat group in parliament between 1991 and 2000. He is currently Federal Minister of the Interior. He was very popular in Germany during the 1990s and was widely speculated to be Kohl’s successor as Chancellor, but as the Christian Democrats were defeated in the 1998 election this never came to pass.

  [48] Helmut Kohl (1930- ) was Chancellor of West Germany between 1982 and 1990, and then became the first Chancellor of reunited Germany between 1990 a
nd 1998.

  [49] This was said at a seminar held at the British Embassy in Bonn on 15 March 1998.

  [50] Latin: ‘authority’.

  [51] SPQR was meant to embody the idea that the government of the Roman Republic represented the rule of the people. It continued to be used during the Roman Empire and by Fascist Italy, and remains the motto of the city of Rome to this day.

  [52] Arnold Gehlen (1904-1976) was a German philosopher who was active in the Conservative Revolution. He joined the Nazi Party in 1933 and remained in its ranks until the end of the war, being drafted into the Wehrmacht in 1943. After denazification, he continued to write and teach after the war, and his ideas remain influential on the German Right to this day. His post-war books Man in the Age of Technology and Man, His Nature and Place in the World have been published in English.

  [53] A patent application for a technique to produce a human/chimpanzee hybrid was filed by Stuart Newman, a Professor of cell biology, and Jeremy Rifkin, a biotechnology activist, in 1997. However, after a lengthy debate, the U.S. Patent Office rejected the patent in 2005 on the grounds that the 13th Amendment (the abolition of slavery) prohibits the patenting of humans. Prof. Newman said he was actually overjoyed by this defeat, since he had never intended to produce the hybrids, but had used the application, in anticipation of its rejection, as a means to establish a legal precedent to prevent patents being issued on living things, as the Patent Office had already issued patents to several other products of genetic engineering.