[134] This petition was filed in 1999 by Calixthe Beyala, originally from Cameroon, who was also President of the Collectif Egalité. The Collectif asked citizens to refuse to pay their TV licenses until a quota was established. Although no formal quota has ever been set for French television, there has been an increase in the visibility of Blacks since her complaint.
[135] In November of 1995, a series of general strikes, primarily by railway workers, took place in reaction to some of the policies of the new government of Alain Juppé, which was accused of attacking workers’ and women’s rights.
[136] Zeev Sternhell (1935- ) is an Israeli historian who specializes in the history of Fascism. He is particularly noted for having traced the roots of the ideology of Fascism back to French, rather than Italian or German, philosophy and politics. His works in English include The Birth of Fascist Ideology and Neither Right nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France.
[137] Alexandre Dumas’ famous novel The Count of Monte Cristo (1844) is about a man who spends many years and amasses a fortune in order to have revenge against those who had had him falsely imprisoned.
[138] Alsace-Lorraine was a territory created by Bismarck after the seizure of territory from France along the German border following France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. This led to a great deal of resentment of Germany by the French, and was one of the factors leading to the First World War.
[139] Demosthenes (384-322 BC) was an Athenian statesman and orator.
[140]Libération is a Left-wing newspaper that was founded by Jean-Paul Sartre in 1973.
[141] This is from the song ‘La Rèvolution’.
[142] J.R. Ewing, a (fictitious) wealthy Texas oil baron depicted in the long-running American soap opera, Dallas.
[143] Lionel Jospin (1937- ) was the Prime Minister from 1997 until 2002, of the Socialist Party. He was a member of a Trotskyist group in the 1960s.
[144] From Chapter 18 of The Prince. See chapter 1, note 27.
[145] The Frankfurt School refers to a group of Marxist philosophers who opposed Communism, capitalism and Fascism. It remains highly influential in the area of cultural theory. Some of its most prominent writers were Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse and Erich Fromm.
[146] The French term Faye uses is ‘les rois du cache-sexe’, which literally translated means ‘kings of the G-string’. He uses this term on several occasions to describe politicians who try to conceal the truth.
[147] Liquefied petroleum gas, or autogas. It is an alternative fuel which is low in carbon emissions.
[148] Brice Lalonde (1946- ) is a leader of France’s Green Party, and has run for President in several elections. In recent years he has become known for his Right-wing positions and associations.
[149] Dominique Voynet (1958- ) is a member of the Green Party and was Minister of the Environment between 1997 and 2001, known for her environmentalism and pacifist stances. She is currently a Senator.
[150] Dalle (1964- ) is best-known in the English-speaking world for her roles as a taxi driver in Jim Jarmusch’s Night on Earth (1991) and as a cannibal in Trouble Every Day (2001). She is also known for her run-ins with the police.
[151] Birthright citizenship, or jus soli (law of ground), is in opposition to jus sanguinis, or the right of blood. Most European countries have a policy of blood citizenship in which one’s eligibility depends at least partially on one’s ethnicity, although France and the U.S. have a policy of birthright citizenship, by which citizenship is available to anyone born within its territory.
[152] The Popular Front was a coalition of Left-wing parties in the 1930s. It held power for a single year under Blum, in 1936-37. Faye is referring to the Blum-Viollette proposal of 1936 for Algeria (which was still a French colony), by which only the minority of educated Algerians would have become eligible for French citizenship. The proposal was never put to a vote because of massive opposition from French colonials in Algeria.
[153] André Léon Blum (1872-1950) was the first Jewish Prime Minister of France, and held the office three times. He was imprisoned at Buchenwald by the Nazis.
[154] Milton Friedman (1912-2006), an American economist, is regarded as one of the greatest economists of the Twentieth century. He was a staunch defender of monetarism and the free market. Perhaps his most important work is his 1962 book, Capitalism and Freedom.
[155] Clovis I (466-511) was the first King to unite the Frankish tribes. He also converted to Catholicism.
[156] The title is regarded as being untranslatable, although the term was used in the Nineteenth century to refer to shops that sold cheap liquor, deriving from the French expression ‘to get hammered’. It has been published in translation under its original title as Émile Zola, L’Assomoir (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).
[157] Charles Pasqua (1927- ) is a French Gaullist politician. In the 1995 election he broke with Jacques Chirac to support the RPR candidate for President. More recently, he was accused in Iraq of being one of the people who illegally profited from the Oil-for-Food Program during Iraq’s trade embargo between 1995 and 2003, and in 2009 he was convicted of illegal arms sales to Angola, for which he was sentenced to prison for one year.
[158]Ideological Dictionary. This is another title for Faye’s book Pourquoi nous combattons: manifeste de la résistance européenne (Paris: Æncre, 2001).
[159] Auguste Comte (1798-1857) was one of the founders of positivism. Positivism holds that the only knowledge which can be considered reliable is that which is obtained directly through the senses and via the (supposedly) objective techniques of the scientific method.
[160] The New Left is the name given to a loose confederation of Leftist movements which emerged in the 1960s and ‘70s in an attempt to develop an alternative to Communism that was less authoritarian. In some cases, these movements also sought to reform society through the use of existing democratic institutions rather than through outright revolution.
[161] Latin: ‘economic man’.
[162] Ivan Illich (1926-2002) was an Austrian philosopher and Catholic priest. In his books he accused many of the major pillars of modern society, such as education, medicine and industry, of what he termed ‘counterproductivity’, which is when institutions end up impeding the very goals they were meant to attain.
[163] Gross Domestic Product, or the total economic output of a nation within its borders (as opposed to Gross National Product, which measures the total economic output of all enterprises owned by a country regardless of location).
[164] The Club of Rome is a global think tank which was founded in 1968 to address the problems faced by humanity. In 1972 its members published a controversial book, The Limits to Growth, which held that the rapid increase in the global population combined with dwindling resources would lead to disaster if changes were not implemented.
[165] Vusamazulu Credo Mutwa (1921- ) continues to write today, and has always advocated the idea that Africans should return to their native traditions rather than attempt to imitate Western civilisation. He maintains a Web site at credomutwa.com. He has also collaborated with conspiracy theorist David Icke.
[166] Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) was the founder of the phenomenological school of philosophy, which was the predecessor of existentialism. Phenomenology has been defined as an attempt to apply the objective methods of science to the study of consciousness, which is viewed as the basis of existence. Heidegger, however, although he was Husserl’s student, came to believe that consciousness is only a by-product of existence, which is the actual ground of being.
[167] Rationalism is the belief that all of human experience can be understood by reason, and that all phenomena can be explained using the tools of mathematics and science alone.
[168] In Jewish lore, a Golem is a human-like creature made from dead matter and given life through mystical powers. In some Golem stories, the Golems get out of control and end up destroying their creators. This is seen as a direct forerunner of the many scie
nce fiction stories about intelligent machines turning against their masters.
[169] Hegel regarded consciousness as something determined by historical reality, which is governed by the laws of dialectics. He asserted that history was a process of humanity developing towards ever-greater states (both political and personal) of freedom, thus paving the way for the utopian ideologies of the Twentieth century.
[170] In 1992 a statement signed by many scientists was released to coincide with the environmental Earth Summit. It was a plea for world leaders to avoid advice from irrational or pseudoscientific circles, especially those upholding a call for a return to nature, and other groups hostile to the aims of science and technological progress. It further stated that science, technology and industry are the best means for the ‘indispensable tools of a future shaped by Humanity’.
[171] Diseconomies are forces which increase the costs of production for companies.
[172] Pascal Bruckner (1948- ) is a French social commentator who is best-known for his opposition to multiculturalism. Several of his books have been translated, such as The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism (2010).
[173]Le Monde (The World) is widely considered the most important daily newspaper in France.
[174] René Guénon (1886-1951) was a French writer who founded what has come to be known as the traditionalist school of religious thought. Traditionalism calls for a rejection of the modern world and its philosophies in favour of a return to the spirituality and ways of living of the past (Guénon himself ended up living as a Sufi Muslim in Cairo). He outlines his attitude toward modernity in The Crisis of the Modern World, which is available in English.
[175] This is clearly an excerpt from an account of the famous Battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC, when 300 Spartan warriors, plus a small number of warriors from other Greek city-states, successfully held off an invasion by the much larger Persian army of Xerxes for three days. However, I am unable to identify which source this specific quote comes from.
[176] I am uncertain of the meaning of this statement, since ‘Sabra’ is a term used to designate Jews born within Israel. Perhaps Prof. Shoam was referring to the Israeli-born descendants of the Ashkenazi immigrants.
[177] As of this writing, Islam is still believed to be second to Catholicism in terms of practice in France, reckoned at approximately 10% of the population, although it is difficult to gauge how accurate these estimates are. The statistics released by the Church itself indicate that practice among French Catholics has been dropping rapidly.
[178] King Henry III (1551-1589) was King of France from 1574 until 1589. Prior to that, he had been elected to be by the noblemen of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which had been formed in 1569, and held the titles of King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania beginning in 1573. However, he was also in the line of succession for the French throne, and when his predecessor Charles IX died in 1574 he abandoned the Commonwealth to become King of France.
[179] King Louis XIV of France (1638-1715) was King in 1700, when Charles II, the last Habsburg King of the Spanish Empire, died and designated Louis XIV’s grandson as his successor, who was also in the line of succession for the French throne, meaning that a unification of France and Spain became a possibility. The Holy Roman Emperor formed a coalition of nations to restore the Habsburg entitlement to the Spanish throne, leading to the multi-continental War of the Spanish Succession. Much of the fighting took place in Germany.
[180] Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843) is considered one of the greatest poets of the Romantic era. His work has been translated.
[181] Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) was an Austrian regarded as one of the greatest poets of the Twentieth century. He wrote in German. His work has been translated.
[182] Nina Hagen (1955- ) is a German rock star who has had international fame since the 1970s.
[183] Anne Louise Germaine de Staël-Holstein (1766-1817) was a Swiss writer who was also known as a supporter of the French Revolution and a critic of Napoleon. She also wrote on the cultural trends of the time.
[184] German: ‘Greens’.
[185] Stefan George (1868-1933) was one of the best-known poets of his age. Although apolitical himself, his poetry and ideas were very influential upon the German intellectual Right. His most famous student was Claus von Stauffenberg, the would-be assassin of Adolf Hitler in 1944. His work is available in translation.
[186] This refers to the economic policies of Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619-1683), who was the French Minister of Finance under King Louis XIV from 1665 to 1683. His doctrine, which has come to be known as Colbertism, was built on the premises that the wealth of a nation should primarily serve the interests of the state, and that state intervention should be used to ensure this.
[187] Gosplan, or the State Planning Committee, was the body in charge of economic planning in the Soviet Union.
[188] Prince Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord (1754-1838) was a French diplomat who began his career under Louis XVI, continued through the French Revolution and the reign of Napoleon, eventually turned against Napoleon and aided his opponents, and then under the first three French kings after the restoration of the monarchy. In this context, however, Faye is referring to Talleyrand’s participation as the French representative at the Congress of Vienna in 1814 which sought to restore order to Europe after the Napoleonic Wars. The Congress set up the system of international relations in Europe which lasted until the First World War.
[189]La ligne de mire. II, 1988-1995: discours aux citoyens européens (Arpajon: le Labyrinthe, 1996), or The Line of Sight, vol. 2, 1988-1995: Addresses to the Citizens of Europe.
[190] France is often described as a Hexagon due to its geographical shape.
[191] Brussels is the location of the European Commission, which is the governing body of the EU.
[192] ‘States’, which in present-day Germany includes Bavaria and Saxony. Faye is likely referring to the Länder of the Holy Roman Empire, however, in which then individual states retained some degree of autonomy under the leadership of the Emperor.
[193] Fernand Braudel (1902-1985) was the most prominent French historian of the Twentieth century.
[194] This refers to an agreement that was signed between 25 European nations in 1985 in Schengen, Luxemburg, which allows for the free passage of citizens from one country to another. It was absorbed into the EU in 1999.
[195] General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. Negotiated under the auspices of the United Nations in 1949, it remained in effect until 1993, although its terms are still enforced by the World Trade Organisation.
[196] Gorbachev had used the phrase earlier, but is most famous for using it in an address in Prague in April 1987, in which he was calling for an end to the partitioning of Europe between East and West.
[197] Charles V (1500-1558) was Holy Roman Emperor and ruled over a vast area of Europe. He was forced to fight several wars against France.
[198] The Greco-Persian Wars lasted for half a century, between 499 and 449 BC. Although the various Greek city-states were usually at odds with one another, they united against the threat from the Persians. Thucydides and Herodotus wrote the most famous accounts of the conflict.
[199] Leviathan is a huge sea monster mentioned in the Old Testament.
[200] Behemoth is an enormous creature described in the Book of Job.
[201] Gaius Cornelius Tacitus (56-117) was a Roman senator and historian.
6. A Day in the Life of Dimitri Leonidovich Oblomov[1]
A Chronicle of Archeofuturist Times
Brest, 22 June 2073, 7:46 AM
The Brest-Moscow-Komosomolsk bullet-train left at 8:17 AM. The Plenipotentiary Councillor of the Eurosiberian Federation, Dimitri Leonidovich Oblomov, was running late. He hadn’t slept much and had woken up at the last minute with a furry tongue. He had never taken the step of having one of those new ‘biotronic chips’ that multiply the effects of sleep implanted under his scalp. One hour’s sleep with these
was equivalent to seven hours of ‘natural’ sleep. All high-ranking imperial officers had undergone this small and extremely practical operation to save time for work and avoid wasting precious hours sleeping. All officers, that is, except Dimitri: the prospect of becoming a ‘bionic man’ scared him. He was actually disgusted by men of this sort – an increasingly common sight – who suffered from neither heart problems nor diabetes and had artificial ultra-performing hearts or livers implanted. At the age of 68, he was as fit as a fiddle. Now that cancer and cardiovascular diseases had disappeared among the executive elite of the Empire, his life expectancy was 105 years.
The business meeting with the Ministry of the Navy of the autonomous state of Brittany had gone on until 2 AM, so long had it taken Dimitri to get those Celts – stubborn as mules – to reach an agreement.
The electro-taxi was waiting outside the hotel. Dimitri said the word ‘station’ into the microphone of the vehicle’s on-board computer, followed by ‘fast, arrival at 8:10 AM sharp – I cannot miss the Brest-Moscow-Komsomolsk train’ and inserted his credit card. The computer answered in an artificial female voice, ‘Brest Urban Transport welcomes you on board pilotless electro-taxi 606. Your request has been processed. You have a 76% chance of reaching your destination on time – the traffic is flowing smoothly. You have been charged 8 Eurosesterces.[2] Please take your card.’ Dimitri understood Breton like most of the educated leaders of the Federation. It was a chic and snobby language used in intellectual circles, just like Latvian, neo-Occitan and Basque. The voice repeated the information in Russian, as the credit card suggested this was Dimitri’s mother tongue.
Archeofuturism Page 24
