Why We Fight

by Guillaume Faye

  Factors of social rupture in Europe will be aggravated by an economic-demographic crisis that will culminate in mass poverty. Beginning in 2010, the number of active workers will no longer be sufficient to finance the baby-boomers’ retirement. Europe will teeter from the weight of its senior citizens. Her ageing population will then experience an economic slowdown, handicapped by the need to finance the health needs and pension requirements of her unproductive citizens; such an ageing population, moreover, will dry up techno-economic dynamism. Add to this the Third-Worldisation of the economy that comes with the uncontrolled mass immigration of unskilled populations.

  A third dramatic line of the modernist catastrophe: chaos in the Global South. In pursuing an industrialisation that comes at the cost of their traditional culture, the countries of the South, despite their deceptive and fragile growth, are creating social chaos that will only get worse.

  The fourth dramatic line of catastrophe, recently explained by Jacques Attali,[123] is the threat of a world financial crisis, which promises to be qualitatively more serious than that of the 1930s, bringing another Depression. Stock market and currency collapses, like the East Asian recession of the late 1990s, are signs of what’s coming.

  The fifth line of convergence: the rise of fanatical, fundamentalist religions, especially Islam. The upsurge of radical Islam is a repercussion of modernity’s excessive cosmopolitanism, which has imposed on the whole world its model of atheistic individualism, its cult of merchandise, its despiritualisation of values, and its dictatorship of the spectacle. Against this aggression, Islam has been radicalised, as it returns to its tradition of conquest and domination.

  The sixth line of catastrophe: a North-South confrontation, highlighting ethnic-theological differences. With increased probability, this confrontation will replace the former East-West conflict. We don’t know the exact form this confrontation will take, but it will be very serious, given that its stakes are much higher than the former, rather artificial conflict between U.S. capitalism and Soviet Communism.

  The seventh line of catastrophe: the uncontrollable pollution of the planet, which threatens less the planet (which has another four billion years before it) than the physical survival of humanity. Environmental collapse is the fruit of the liberal-egalitarian (as well as the Soviet) myth of universal economic development.

  To this should probably be added: the likely implosion of the European Union, which is becoming more and more ungovernable; nuclear proliferation in the Third World; and the probability of ethnic civil war in Europe.

  The convergence of these factors on our extremely fragile global civilisation suggests that the Twenty-first century will not witness a progressive extension of today’s world, but rather the insurgence of another. We need to prepare for these tragic changes, lucidly.

  (see chaos, interregnum, modernity)

  * * *

  Cosmopolitanism

  The belief that the systematic mélange of cultures is preferable to the identity of each culture — the belief that comes from the prejudice that some sort of world civilisation is necessary.

  Etymologically, cosmopolitanism is the establishment of a ‘world city’, whose every inhabitant is a citizen, no matter his origin. Cosmopolitanism is a pillar of the dominant Western ideology. Islam exploits Western cosmopolitanism in order to establish itself in Europe, but it lacks cosmopolitan ideals, for it strives to be culturally hegemonic and monopolistic. Islam is ‘universalistic’, but not cosmopolitan.

  Cosmopolitanism is nothing but a failed differentialism. Its ideal of mixing cultures for the sake of creating a single world culture is essentially totalitarian. With its simulacrum of heterogeneity, there lurks the will to uniformity.

  *

  Classical Greek democracy fiercely opposed cosmopolitanism, for since Pericles[124] it rested on the rights of blood and on ethno-cultural homogeneity. Only in the Eighteenth century, with the Enlightenment, was democracy associated with cosmopolitanism, this same cosmopolitanism which the Greeks saw as a source of political chaos and thus tyranny.

  Cosmopolitanism’s principal argument is that ‘the mixing and mélange of cultures is an enrichment’. As an example, Nineteenth-century Vienna and its flourishing culture are often cited. This, though, is sophistic, for what is here held out as cosmopolitan was not at all cosmopolitan, for Vienna was solely about the peoples and cultures of Europe, and was thus rooted in her native substrata.

  The present European discourse on cosmopolitanism insists on a necessary Africanisation, as if it will be some sort of godsend.

  In reality, Europe’s cultural wealth owes little to extra-European contributions, despite the claims of the official vulgate. Today, cosmopolitanism seeks to dissolve European originality and specificity into a jumble of world cultures. It has no future. There’s never been a ‘world culture’. Europe is the sole victim of cosmopolitan propaganda for a future ‘mixed world’; everywhere else there’s been a reinforcement of identity and ethnic blocs.

  (see miscegenation; people; universalism)

  * * *

  Cultural Struggle

  The defence and creative assertion of threatened European cultures.

  Political struggle is sterile without a cultural struggle to support, accompany, and justify it. A dynamic, identitarian culture, buttressed by its native biological stock, is essential to the survival of a people or a civilisation. All political movements neglecting cultural struggle, all states rejecting a policy of cultural identity, operate in a void.

  Cultural struggle is not restricted to the defence of the patrimony, the maintenance of tradition, or dialogue with the historical memory — it’s also creative. For it’s not enough to denounce the destruction of European culture in order to save it — we need a counter-offensive.

  *

  To this end, cultural struggle needs to address: Americanisation, Islamisation, Africanisation, as well as society’s present neo-primitivism. Cultural struggle is polymorphic, both defensive and offensive. It involves the school, no less than the plastic arts, music, audio/visual, language, literature, etc. It must reject both cosmopolitanism and antiquarianism. With the present censorship and subversion, cultural struggle has a vested interest in attack and imagination, as it continues to transmit the common heritage.

  Cultural struggle also resists the substitution of memory (to which Europeans have been victim) and the effort to make alien cultures preferable to our native culture; it resists replacing pride with guilt and repentance, and resists all effort to make ethnopluralism (which demotes the significance of European culture) everywhere hegemonic.

  At the same time, it’s necessary to beware of pseudo-identitarians, the system’s secret collaborators and hirelings, who endlessly profess their admiration for ‘all the cultures of the world’, even those hostile to us and seeking the destruction of our culture.

  Cultural struggle doesn’t entail defending all cultures, only European culture, which it assumes is superior to other cultures.

  (see culture, civilisation; ethnocentrism; neo-primitivism)

  * * *

  Culture, Civilisation

  Culture is the compass of a people’s mentalities, traditions, mores, and values. Civilisation is the tangible material expression of the culture, representing culture’s practical realisations.

  As an ethnic group, a people can superficially adopt the civilisation of another group, but it can never be integrated into the culture, since the latter ultimately rests on a hereditary or biological disposition.

  A civilisation grows out of a culture’s mental and spiritual stock, whose ethnic disposition is largely inherited. Language is an attribute of civilisation, but not culture, except insofar as an acculturated population can adopt the civilisation and language of another people by reconstructing it in an ethnicised and hence deviant way (French-speaking or American-speaking Blacks, for example). Culture is the basis of civilisations, but culture also rests on a people’s genetic capacity —
that is, on its bio-anthropological substrata, its germen. Civilisation is the material, exterior aspect, or projection, of a culture. Contrary to the illusions of Marxist and liberal philosophers, culture is not some sort of superstructure produced by a given techno-economic condition, but is, instead, the mental infrastructure determining social and economic forms.

  *

  As an integral part of man’s physiological nature, culture is the ‘grid’ upon which man interprets the world in terms of his heredity and milieu. The West has tried to impose itself as a homogenising ‘world civilisation’, founded on economic materialism, plutocratic democracy, and the egalitarian humanitarianism of human rights. But it has failed. The revival of Islam and several other ethnospheres (India, Black Africa, China, Latin America . . .) demonstrates that the plurality of civilisations, produced by distinct races and cultures, like the conflicts that divide them, are intrinsic to humanity.

  The Twenty-first century heralds a clash of civilisations — not the advent of a unified, humane civilisation, as modernists believe.

  ‘Western civilisation’ is not actually a civilisation at all, but rather a technical mode of life, lacking depth, based exclusively on a quasi-Pavlovian domestication of material habits; and, as such, it’s ephemeral, for it rests on no memory, no tradition, no cultural substance, but rather on modes as fleeting as a cumulonimbus cloud,[125] on the most superficial forms of conditioning.

  Islam denounces Western civilisation, like it formerly denounced Communism, and for good reason. But what it proposes in its stead is something even worse: another form of totalitarianism. Above all, its civilisational project is totally incompatible with European culture, for it’s founded on the notion of absolute submission and lacks, as a consequence, an organic, harmonious accord between freedom and order.

  Today, the two principal adversaries of European culture and civilisation are American-Western civilisation and Islamic civilisation.

  *

  Nothing is ever permanently acquired. Everything can be lost. A people can see its culture die, either through a modification of its ethnic substrata (colonisation), a loss of its inner substance, or through decadence. The latter is explainable only in terms of the psycho-biological decline of its life force. European peoples today are threatened by the exhaustion of their identity and cultural vigour (by cosmopolitanism, Africanisation, Islamification, and the transformation of their culture into a folkloric remnant), but the principal cause of their decline resides in themselves and not in the aggressions assaulting them. In dereliction, one is rarely an innocent and almost always a consenting victim.

  (see decadence; deculturation; germen; West)

  D

  Decadence

  The weakening of a people or civilisation resulting from internal causes that leads it to lose its identity and creativity.

  The causes of decadence are usually the same throughout history: excessive individualism and hedonism, the softening of mores, social egoism, devirilisation, contempt for heroic values, the intellectualisation of elites, the decline of popular education, the abandonment of or turning away from spirituality and the sacred, etc.

  Other causes: modification of the ethnic substrata, the decay of natural aristocracies, the loss of historical memory, and the forgetting of primordial values. Decadence ensues whenever concern for the community-of-people in history fades, whenever the communal lines of solidarity and lineage slacken. One could say, in effect, that decadence occurs whenever apparently contrary symptoms combine: the excessive intellectualisation of elites, more and more cut off from reality, and the people’s primitivisation. Panem et circenses . . .[126]

  Europe today knows such a situation. Most of the time, decadence is not seen as such and thus denied. Those who denounce it are stigmatised as prophets of doom. Periods of decadence sometimes even initially assume the guise of a renaissance. Such periods seek to conjure away the real, occultating its negative symptoms in order to reassure everybody.

  No decadence is irreversible. We would do well to cultivate Nietzsche’s tragic optimism.

  (see devirilisation; individualism; neo-primitivism)

  * * *

  Deculturation

  The loss of memory and cultural references.

  There are several forms of deculturation: first, there’s the American-Western model that afflicts Europe (much more severely than African, Arab-Muslim, Chinese, Indian, etc., cultures); then there’s the deculturation that comes from our Islamic colonisation. These two types of deculturation can be combined, as in the Afro-Americanisation of present-day youth (rap, raï, hip-hop, etc.).

  We need to give up the myth that immigrant youth, the ‘Beurs-Blacks’, are victims of deculturation. Just the opposite: like the mentality of other colonisers, they’ve developed an identitarian counterculture (music, language, clothing, etc.), which is both Afro-Arab and American — and, as such, radically opposes French and European culture. French youth, in contrast, who adopt the Beur-Black counter-culture through imitation or ethnomasochism, are the real victims of deculturation.

  The dominant ideology wilfully contributes to the present deculturation, to the de-Europeanisation of youth, because it wants to detach youth from their roots and cause them to lose their identity, which is reputedly dangerous. Illiteracy, the abandonment of the study of history and classical humanism are well-known examples. The present deculturation of European youth is pursued not for the sake of a superior, more elaborate culture (which was the case when primitive populations encountered Europe’s superior culture in the Nineteenth century), but for the sake of an inferior, massified, and neo-primitive culture: that of zapping, video games, tom-tom, degenerate pop art (the opposite of ‘popular art’), etc.

  The struggle against deculturation is not merely a matter of re-enrootment or teaching history, but also of identitarian creation and imagination.

  (see culture)

  * * *

  Democracy, democratism, organic democracy

  A political system in which the people is sovereign and governed by its elected representatives.

  Etymologically, democracy, as it appeared in Athens, was the ‘power of the demes’, administrative units in which only members of the demos (free citizens) were eligible to vote and hold office, unlike the metics (métoikoi, ‘strangers’). Democracy differed from tyranny or oligarchy. It was originally a constitutive part of the European tradition (Hellenic, Germanic, Scandinavian, Celtic), unlike Oriental political systems based on despotism.

  Reappearing with the Eighteenth-century Enlightenment, democracy has since been largely corrupted — not only in the ‘popular democracies’ of Soviet Communism — but no less so in the present Western democracies. Democratism is now a world dogma, but it’s a sham democracy, for it neglects the people’s interests. Western democracies are actually oligarchies that conceal their betrayal of the Hellenic-Germanic tradition of democracy.

  What’s wrong with Western, and especially French, democracy?

  First off, it has been transformed into a plutocracy (‘power of wealth’), in which access to power and its exercise are conditioned by money. Second, it’s dominated by a political class that has been institutionalised as a largely corrupt careerist caste. Third, real power is not exercised by the people’s so-called representatives, but by unelected technocrats (at the national and European level) and by financial and economic decision-makers, pressure groups, and corporate and minority organisations. The people has lost control of its destiny and a disguised totalitarianism has come to control it: in the guise of a false plurality, the parliamentary Left and Right function almost as a single party, dealing with issues only if they are politically correct. That is, only if they serve the interests of the oligarchy and the dominant ideology.

  Democratism is becoming all the more virulent given that real democracy has been eliminated by the system. The system, in fact, refuses real democracy since with it the people might express dangerous or morally condemnable opinions
. Democratism openly violates real democracy and accuses true democrats of being ‘populist’, which has been given a pejorative connotation. The refusal to hold referendums on the death penalty or immigration; the incessant attacks on the Swiss model of direct cantonal democracy in which naturalisations are submitted to the people’s vote; the demonisation and illegal exclusion of Austria from the European Union after Haider’s FPÖ, a democratically-mandated party, though reputedly one of the ‘far Right’, was let into the government; the system’s presumption that ‘nationalist’ parties, however legally and democratically represented, are illegitimate; state indifference to the mass influx of aliens (everywhere opposed among the population), and contempt for the ‘law and order’ demands of the popular classes — this all suggests that the dominant ideology may be democratist but it’s hardly democratic. Though the principle of democracy is always acknowledged in discourse, it’s not in practice. Democracy, as such, is acceptable only as simulation.

  In Western Europe, the best illustration of democracy’s absence is the fact that the established powers objectively favour our replacement by non-European, Islamic colonisers, without ever having consulted native Europeans. The people’s destruction, its ethnocide, is indeed programmed by the present pseudo-democracy. This makes it completely anti-democratic, since it destroys what needs conserving. Besides, it’s always on questions of secondary significance that the people or its representatives are consulted. Important issues are settled elsewhere. France’s Constitutional Council is the very emblem of our anti-democratic institutions: being an assemblage of notables, appointed, not elected, who are empowered to judge the constitutionality of laws voted by the people, doing so in the name of so-called constitutional principles that are, in reality, purely ideological.