Why We Fight

by Guillaume Faye

  Corrupted by the oligarchic careerism of professional politicians, democracy is being disfigured by a republic of judges and by increased censorship of the ‘politically incorrect’ and of whoever diverges from the opinions of the ruling party — and by an oligarchy whose indifference to the people’s welfare is now eating away at the legal foundations of the state. Electoral abstention has reached unprecedented proportions. Governments are increasingly based on minority coalitions. Once it’s realised that Greens or Communists, who represent but a splinter of the electorate, have managed to impose their laws, things become immediately more understandable.

  It’s as if Western ‘democracy’ had adopted a soft model of Stalinism (itself inspired by the despotic masters of the French Revolution). The anti-populist and anti-demagogic intellectual-media managerial class opposes all direct forms of democracy and has developed, especially on the Left, a distrust, a contempt, and a phobia of the people. The West’s pseudo-democracy is actually a neo-totalitarian oligarchy.

  A soft totalitarianism has, in effect, been installed under the guise of ‘democracy’. The political arc of the reigning political parties of Europe (based on fabricated majorities and a fabricated opposition) form a single party — for they all, with certain nuances, subscribe to the same ideology. Direct democracy, like that of the Swiss, is considered illegitimate and the people’s opinion is treated as if it were something immature and dangerous. One party, Austria’s Freedom Party (FPÖ),[67] is officially treated as if it were illegitimate, though it’s regularly re-elected at the polls.

  Paradoxically, the greater the institutional laxity regarding mores, delinquency, and immigration, the greater the political repression, the computer monitoring, and the fiscal burdens on native citizens. Big Brother is making himself into Ubu Roi[68] and vice versa. There’s a corresponding deterioration of society’s vital forces, of its muscles and skeleton, as ossification sets in.

  In economics, we have combined the disadvantages of both capitalism and socialism, without receiving the advantages of either. From capitalism, we’ve retained free trade and open borders without the benefits of free enterprise; from socialism, we’ve retained only statism, trade union corporatism, high taxation, and bureaucracy, without social justice, solidarity, and full employment.

  It’s false to say, as do the theoreticians of the Right and Left, who lack economic expertise or entrepreneurial experience of any kind, that ‘liberalism is the main enemy’ or that we live in a brutal, ultra-liberal society. This is an old canard of Left analysis.

  First of all, it’s unbridled global free trade that needs to be combated and not the play of interior market forces within a protected European continental space. To demonise the ‘market’ plays the game of a sclerotic and communising corporatism. Though criticising ‘market society’ and the ‘reign of money’, we must not forget that performance, economic energy, and innovation are the principal motors of competition and that the maximisation of gain (not virtue) was — and will always be, whether it is deplored or not — the basis of dynamism.

  Criticising ‘market society’ ought not, then, to be a critique of the market and its liberal principle, but rather an opposition to its possible dictatorship and to the speculative forces. It’s necessary thus to demand the presence of a sovereign function to operate above the market — a political decisionism,[69] as well as the correcting mechanisms of social solidarity, to aid those of our people who cannot subsist solely on the basis of their labour.

  The real problem in our society is not an excess of liberalism, but an excess of socialism! And it’s the worst sort of socialism: not the socialism of Proudhon[70] or Blanqui,[71] but Communist-inspired trade union corporatism, protected privileges, colossal pay cheque deductions. Such excesses are remote to any idea of social justice — an idea frequently proclaimed though rarely practiced.

  The great institutions of the public sphere — the basis of every civilisation (schools, hospitals, the army, the police) — along with the constitutive principles of every living society (security, public health, the transmission of knowledge, etc.) — are slowly beginning to decline.

  Society, however, still stands, like a straw man in a field ravaged by crows. This is the ‘new society’, of the ‘new modernity’, which thinks itself strong and healthy (there’s the Internet, isn’t there?), but whose interior is gangrened, like a dead tree, whose bark is still intact but whose fall will come with the first storm.

  With the drying up of the inner sap — that is, with the loss of the values and biological forces counteracting the forces of desiccation — administration hardens and blisters, the heart stops, the blood wears thin, enthusiasm and liberty die off. A fake civilisation emerges from the collapse of real culture.

  *

  One must always hope. Our people still possess immense resources. Despite the ongoing subversion, the tragic creativity of European civilisation has yet to be extinguished.

  France or Europe?

  Several impertinent questions merit posing:

  Does being French still mean anything once one assumes a European identity? A related question: should we remain French, in the actual legal sense of the term, or should we become European? Can we still construct Europe while preserving the French state? Does the disappearance of the French state signal the end of France? Is such an end inescapable and desirable — in a context where we seek to create a powerful, sovereign, identitarian Europe? Is the ideology of the French state, with its Jacobin centralism and cosmopolitan universalism, even compatible with a European identity?

  Will the failings and profligacies of the European bastard born at Amsterdam in 1997[72] return us to the past or will it provoke a flight forward, toward a sovereign Federation?

  Should the European Union now under construction be seen in a Machiavellian sense, as a necessary stopgap, part of an inevitable but provisional process? An imperfect construct built by ‘useful idiots’, which is nevertheless indispensable, though it will have to be renovated from top to bottom? Is European Federation — a veritable historical revolution, undoubtedly the most important event of the last 1,500 years — the sole way to ward off the fatal dangers facing Europe? Should the European revolution be accelerated, to liberate us from the American yoke, to remedy the terrible problem of immigration and Islamisation, to check our demographic decline, to ward off the advent of an already visible economic crisis of massive proportions, to rediscover the brilliance and power of our civilisation? Or is it necessary to renounce the utopia of European Federation, considered by some inherently impotent, and save Europe by returning to the sovereignty of the European nation-states, whose relations will be governed by simple treaties, in the old way? Such are the key questions urgently in need of addressing.

  We are entering a period of great storms, as we’ve long anticipated, a historical cyclone which, in an earlier work, Archeofuturism,[73] I called the ‘convergence of catastrophes’.

  La Grande Europe will in no case be ‘the first step toward a World State’ — but rather toward a New Nation, federal and imperial, based on Europe’s historical regions, not her presently inadequate nation-states, and rooted in her ethnic unity. We need, thus, to struggle against both the old nation-states (which no longer defend us because they’ve become so weak and inadequate) and against the false ideal of a cosmopolitan Europe.

  *

  I’ve always been a ‘nationalist’ — never a ‘French nationalist’, but rather a ‘European nationalist’. Despite dreams of grandeur (which have eluded her), France is too small. To exist, to defend ourselves, to assert ourselves in an increasingly hard world, it’s necessary to regroup at a larger level, as a continental bloc. Certain French virtues (the imperatives of independence and influence, strategic power, state sovereignty . . .) need to be extended to the European level, while at the same time avoiding certain failings of the French state and its ideology: an inveterate cosmopolitanism, a suicidal religion of human rights, bureaucratism, fis
calism, egalitarianism, extreme centralisation, the dogma of jus soli, the conservatism of ‘acquired advantages’, social blockage, etc.

  European nationalism is far more acceptable to an Italian, a Belgian, an Austrian, or a Spaniard than to a Frenchman. Yet it was the French who initiated the process of European construction, which even de Gaulle[74] didn’t try to arrest . . . Paradox of history: certain Frenchmen, unconsciously perceiving France’s insufficiency and dreading the thought of a servile destiny, such as England’s vis-à-vis her American overlord, didn’t hesitate to lead her former hereditary enemy, Germany, into constructing what, in effect, is a neo-Carolingian[75] community.

  Having long opposed the rest of Europe and the Ghibelline[76] idea of empire and having adhered to the cult of the Jacobin state, France became the paradoxical creator of a future European federated community: a dialectical reversal explainable, perhaps, in terms of her peoples’ unconsciousness. It’s as if this nation, the ethnic résumé of Europe, sensing her powers declining after 1945 and again after decolonisation, had wanted to project herself onto a Europe conceived as a ‘France on a larger scale’, pursuing, in effect, a variant of the Napoleonic dream. The history of this effort has already worked out quite differently than the French intended: Europe is not going to be a Grande France — it’s going to be herself, something unprecedented in history. And it’s up to us to see that Europe becomes authentically imperial and does not fall into some sort of political chaos opened to all the world, to all peoples, to all denominations, and to all dangers. Nothing is inevitable.

  To take a larger view, we might consider European unity today as a counterpoint, 1,700 years later, to the breakup of the Roman Empire and the slow birth of nations — and thus the reconstitution, in a different form, of a lost unity, of which Medieval Christendom was also an effort.

  *

  Today, fifty years after the Treaty of Rome, who doesn’t see that the EU’s nation-states are in the process of withering away, devoid of substance? Should we try, then, to re-animate these states or, through a historical metamorphosis, try to create a real Great Nation?

  These questions are especially painful for French patriots. But there are moments when it’s necessary to make heartbreaking revisions, in order to remain who we are — in order to defend the essential.

  Eminently respectable, the ‘idea of France’ is nevertheless not as important to me as the idea of ‘Europe’. Besides, as presently practiced, the ‘idea of France’ seems profoundly harmful to the people of France. In this period of mass immigration and deculturation, even ‘French nationalists’ — supreme irony of history — appeal to the folklore of Alsace, Provence, Brittany, etc., that was once brutally assaulted by the Jacobin state, in order now to recover a ‘French identity’ that official France no longer recognises.

  An Antwerpian of Belgian nationality, a Catalan of Spanish nationality, a Lombard of Italian nationality . . . are my compatriots. They are fellow Europeans. But a West Indian, an African, an Arab, or a Chinese who possesses a French National Identity Card are not my compatriots, though in strictly judicial terms they may be considered French. They themselves see things in this way, contrary to the wishes of assimilationists and other pathetic defenders of the ‘republican model of integration’.

  To see things as such is to react in the way any person or people on Earth would react. Ethnicity is the sole stable basis of human community, as Claude Lévi-Strauss argues in Race et histoire (Race and History).[77]

  The Algerians refused to designate certain former colonials who considered themselves Algerian as ‘Algerian’, because they quite rightly considered them European. Today, the majority of immigrants with French citizenship refuse to see themselves as ‘European’ and still identify as Africans or Asians. This shows that they understand ‘European’ in ethnic terms. In the United States, where pragmatism rules, the term ‘European’ is officially used to designate those descended from white European immigrants.

  From an archeofuturist perspective envisaging the future as a return to archaic principles, once the universalism of modernity fails, the following question about European unification inevitably arises: will Europe be constructed on a model of ethnic chaos, according to the utopian model of communitarian cohabitation that has failed everywhere, or will she be constituted as an organic regrouping of kindred cultures possessing a common will — a central brain, if you will?

  Related to this question is the necessity of distinguishing between Europe’s principal enemy and her principal adversary. Her principal enemy is the South, assembled under the banner of Islam, which, through a colonisation from below, is endeavouring to permanently establish itself there. Her principal adversary is the United States, which, in its double-game, has allied with Islam, as evident in NATO’s aggression against the Serbs.

  Islam strives for revenge and conquest. The United States — logically from its geostrategic perspective — endeavours to neutralise Europe, whose unification threatens American hegemony and economic interests on the Continent. To divide Europeans in order to better rule them, the U.S. endeavours to foster war and discord, it favours Islamic immigration, it seeks to prevent a European alliance with Russia and the Slavs, it keeps us under its military tutelage, and it forces us to open our markets without reciprocating, all the while proclaiming that it’s our protector: this is the logic of America’s perverse hegemony in Europe, which the Europe of nation-states, no less than the Europe of Maastricht and Amsterdam,[78] is unable to defend herself against, because she lacks the will to do so.

  A third way might be considered, which would be a nightmare for both the principal enemy and the principal adversary: a democratic, sovereign, powerful, but decentralised European Federation — economically based on ‘the autarky of great spaces’, refusing Islamisation and Third Worldisation, equipped with an independent military force, and aspiring to integrate Russia into the greatest imperial ensemble that humanity will have ever known — Eurosiberia — seeking, in the process, to arrest its demographic decline, ally with China and India, and thus break with the Islamic and American worlds.

  *

  The tragedy of our age is positive to the degree it offers Europeans, and especially European youth, a way of escaping the torpor of consumer society. As Sartre (who rarely understood the measure of his words) once naïvely observed, it’s in adversity, in the urgency of battle and war, that joy is born.

  The European revolution: this is the fuse that needs to be lit, this is the single glimmer in a world darkened by stormy skies, this is the sole hope.

  Economic Principles

  For Nuclear, Not Petroleum Energy

  The disaster of the oil tanker Erika in 1999[79] reminds us that petroleum energy is the most polluting in the world. The pseudo-ecologists, however, reserve their thunder for nuclear energy, the least polluting form of energy! The reason: oil is a pillar of American hegemony and the financial basis of the Muslim states. Nuclear power, moreover, would make Europe energy independent, which is seen with a jaundiced eye. There exists, as such, an objective alliance between Trotskyist Greens, American interests, and the Muslim states.

  *

  Nuclear energy has been demonised in Europe because it evokes the ‘atomic bomb’ and Hiroshima. Another symptom of magical thought. This energy source, however, is the least dirty of all, the least dangerous, contrary to the twittering of propagandists and . . . despite Chernobyl.

  *

  Nuclear energy, if it is properly mastered, is perfectly respectful of the environment. Classic thermal plants or hydroelectric dams massively pollute the atmosphere and destroy forests and other vegetation.

  Barring accident, a nuclear plant is not ecologically harmful. Since 1950, the very rare cases of nuclear accident (Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukuyawa, etc.) have caused a thousand times less damage than petroleum accidents. Another example: German Greens massively mobilised against the transport of nuclear materials from France to Germany or to Japan, thou
gh there has never been an accident. At the same time, they are virtually silent about accidents and disasters caused by the ground transport of oil products or by oil pipelines! The precautions involved in nuclear production are qualitatively more rigorous than those of the oil companies. But the petroleum industry stands at the centre of America’s military-industrial complex, generating vast profits from which many benefit, including Greenpeace and the Greens.

  Following the stupid German decision, made under the pressure of philo-American and philo-Islamic Trotskyist ecologists, the government of Gerhard Schröder was compelled to abandon nuclear power. Claude Allègre, the former French Minister of National Education, reacted by declaring, ‘Once the question of waste disposal is resolved in the coming decade, nuclear energy will become the most reliable and least polluting of energy sources. The Germans haven’t told us how they are going to generate their energy. All sources emitting carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will dangerously modify the climate. My concern is maintaining France’s energy independence.’ [80]

  Fossil fuels (petroleum, coal, and gas) emit millions of tons of carbon and nitrogen oxides into the atmosphere, which cause cancer (more than the mythical radiation) and diminish the ozone layer, responsible for the greenhouse effect, which raises temperatures and causes climatic disturbances. In France alone, nuclear energy avoids emitting 78,000 tons of dust, 1.1 million tons of nitrogen dioxide, 2 million tons of sulphur dioxide, and 337 million tons of carbon dioxide, the gases that are the most polluting and the most destructive to health. Thanks to her nuclear capacity, France has reduced 70 percent of the polluting gases that come from electrical production, while the other 30 percent are emitted by gas-based motors and cars, which is more than all the waste produced by her industry! Thanks to nuclear energy, France (whose electrical production is the most advanced in the world) pollutes the atmosphere less than any of her EU partners: 6.9 tons of carbon dioxide per inhabitant, against the European average of 8.15 tons and the German average of 11 tons.