A Global Coup

by Guillaume Faye

  The New Right believes that the ethno-cultural identity that characterises the various communities currently inhabiting France must no longer be restricted to the private domain and become, instead, the focus of genuine recognition in the public sphere.

  Let us the reassure our beloved authors: this is precisely what is happening with Islam. The System is actually in line with the New Right, and vice versa.

  So as to make it perfectly clear that Europe is to become a heterogeneous kaleidoscope, the authors declare themselves to be ‘opposed to a “European nation”’ and in favour of a ‘federal Europe’, which they describe, in fact, as a neo-medieval system ‘within a plurality of special statuses’. One can hardly imagine how this headless centipede could ever stand up to American imperialism…

  Mimicking the prevailing ideology in a most faithful manner (as well as its Leftist version, if possible), our brilliant theoreticians

  assert that

  … negotiated reduction and the sharing of working hours must be encouraged […] in relation to all “heteronomous” tasks, meaning that people would work less in order to give a better work performance and gain more time to enjoy life.

  They are thus anti-consumerists, anti-materialists and the supporters of a leisure society, all at the same time. Amazing. Then, in a position that surpasses even that of Alain Lipietz and José Bové, our two mental magicians have a go at paleo-Marxist science fiction:

  The impossible return to full-time employment, therefore, implies that we must break with the logic of productivism and henceforth consider a gradual departure from the era when wage-earning served as a central insertion model into social existence.

  I see; so, what model are we supposed to adopt, then? The primitive communism of a gathering economy? The African village model? Or perhaps a phalanstery? They never specify which. On the other hand, these shockwave economists present us with the portrait of a novel collectivist paradise:

  It is furthermore imperative [sic] for us to gradually disassociate work from revenue by considering the option of introducing a general living allowance [Is that so? And who will pay for it, I wonder?] or a “minimal citizen’s revenue” that would be given to all citizens free of charge [sic] and last their entire lives, beginning at birth.

  In his above-mentioned private journal, de Benoist also informs us of the following, making use of his habitual exclamation marks: ‘I am in favour of both work-sharing and the right to be lazy’! And there we have it: the remains of Leftism, experienced thirty years later…

  In short, we are to earn money without working and take the welfare state (which has already been criticised), assistantship and generalised economic irresponsibility to absurd extremes, without forgetting to strengthen the immigration suction pump through the granting of allocations: such is their brilliant plan. One can hardly even imagine how a Europe that has been organised in harmony with these extremely hackneyed anarcho-unionistic notions could ever resist the American power… Let us not forget, however, the icing on top of their manifesto’s mellow cake: Chirac’s own concept of ‘cancelling Third World debts’.

  It is thus very hard to distinguish what sets these ‘rebels’ apart from the Greens’ nerdiest left-wing members, the Trotskyites of the Force Ouvrière 19 , SUD 20 , the French Socialist Party, Attac, or even the French Communist Party. Unfortunately for them, they could never join the latter’s ranks, as this would definitely cause some clatter…

  While denouncing ‘American hysteria’, Alain de Benoist has, in turn, fallen prey to anti-American hysterics. He has replaced every argument-based demonstration on how American imperialism represents a threat and how one should choose to resist it with demonising anathemas, formulated using intellectualistic and lyrical political cant which, having run out of breath, is highly reminiscent of a Maoist style of expression (‘lecherous vipers’, for instance) and of the rhetoric used by communist intellectuals during the 1960s. Let us now enjoy his jargon’s alluring musical melodies:

  Under the pretext of guaranteeing security, the USA has created a reticular Leviathan founded on technological and military savagery, as well as on the absolute surveillance of our bodies and minds, thus putting an end to human liberties. (Éléments, April 2003, p. 2.)

  To summarise, this ‘reticular Leviathan’ (Come again?) is said to be worse in terms of savagery than Stalin, Hitler and Pol Pot combined. Are we truly expected to take this seriously? The Atlanticist milieus must be rubbing their hands with delight at this type of sketchy, demonising and extremist thinking.

  To convince those that may yet doubt the ‘New Right’ ’s complete coalescence into the cosmopolitan and multiracial Left and its opposition to European identity, it would suffice to quote the statement made by its leader (de Benoist) in his private journal and read between the lines:

  The Right has risen from Jacobin assimilationism through its nationalistic mystique, which insists on the cultural, judicial, administrational and even ethnic homogeneity of all social members. The Left, by contrast, respects differences and advocates a “multiculturalism” that often mingles with cosmopolitanism. […] It is this very Left that respects human nature and diversity best. (Dernière Année, p. 211.)

  His diary also contains the following pro-immigrational confession, worthy of the RCL21 :

  When hearing the expression “too many immigrants”, most people tend to remember the word “immigrants”. As for me, I spontaneously wonder about the philosophical meaning behind the expression “too many”. It is incorrigible. (Op cit., p. 259.)

  We can thus conclude that, in the eyes of our rebellious thinker, there is an insufficient number of immigrants on our soil….

  Stigmatising ‘xenophobic propaganda’, our glorious investigator warns: ‘The manner in which one speaks of Islamism today so as to denounce its “awakening” is not very convincing at all’ (p. 117). Indeed, it would be a vain endeavour to look for an Islamic mass presence in France or search for any signs of its growth. It must all be a delirious fantasy of ours.

  Denouncing the alliance that he believes to perceive between the American Satan and Russia, an alliance which has resulted from the ‘colonial war’ that the latter has been waging in Chechnya, the author proceeds, ever faithful to his pro-Islamic bias, to state that

  … capitalism22 […] is attempting to profit from the Islamophobic wave that it has now triggered on a global scale, in an effort to turn “international terrorism” (or radical Islamism) into a new foil with the potential to legitimise its chokehold. (Taken from an interview with Le Félin Identitaire, broadcasted on the Internet in October 2003.)

  Such sub-Marxist political cant, which resorts to a snobbish and hollow pseudo-neologism that the author obsessively reiterates (thus betraying his fascination for the term), basically means the following: ‘International capitalism is simultaneously exploiting and promulgating the world’s hatred towards Islam, in order to justify its domination through a fictitious threat and the fear of alleged Islamic terrorism’.

  What is interesting here is that the ‘New’ Right’s foremost thinker has thus taken on the primary role when it comes to formulating the central views of pro-Islamic Trotskyism. What is being implied is that the threat of Islamic terrorism has been exaggerated and is only the desperate result of global, Judeo-American capitalistic greed; that Islam does not actually threaten Europe in any way (unlike what those ‘White commoners’ claim); that Islamophobia is morally intolerable; and that the principal threat to our civilisation stems exclusively from capitalism and the USA. One could apply the Pareto method to this analysis and distinguish the following prejudice and clichés, all of which are fully ‘neo-communistic’: Americano-centric capitalism represents the devious and oppressive bourgeoisie, the squid, so to speak, with Islam, the Third World, the immigrants and so on embodying the new proletariat and playing the part of sanctified victims and martyrs.

  In an attitude that typifies the ideology in which anti-Americanism is but a pretext
for people to embrace Islamophilia, Third-Worldism and pro-immigration stances, the ‘New Right’ leader proceeded to become the zealous spokesman for all Leftist litanies (still in the same interview), explaining that fear of Islam relates to a ‘fear culture […] conducive to all deliria and especially the latter’s exploitation’. He claims that it is all but ‘an allegedly menacing threat’ (let us rather not discuss this pleonasm). Turning a completely blind eye to the massive Islamic chokehold smothering Europe (an apparently irrelevant and politically incorrect truth that is unworthy of ‘philosophical’ analysis,) our second-rate thinker asserts that Washington has invented the Islamist threat ‘in order to legitimate its own domination’. He thus remains blatantly oblivious to the fact that the roots of Islamism reach deep into the latter’s core and that, even if America and Israel did not actually exist, Islamism would still remain equally menacing, as history has repeatedly confirmed since the 8th century.

  The author then goes on to explain that

  … our greatest foe is not necessarily the one for whom we feel the greatest hate, nor the one for whom we have the least amount of sympathy. Our main enemy is simply the one endowed with the greatest strength. As long as one fails to comprehend the fact that we are now living in the world of international capitalism [always the same hollow words] and the realm of mercantile imagination […], one has not, in my view, understood anything at all.

  Let us now reformulate things more explicitly:

  Our main enemy, my dear prejudiced and stupid people, is not the one that targets us specifically with harm, nor the one who imposes his customs and presence and who you have no sympathy for. Our main enemy, in fact, is Uncle Sam, along with his bombs and international finances.

  The French Communist Party’s own discourse has basically been adopted by a bunch of bohemians, who are attempting to negotiate (quite unsuccessfully) their repenting conversion from the extreme-Right to the extreme-Left.

  A grave confusion regarding the very notion of ‘power’ is to be noted here. Europe’s chief enemy is thus said to be the one possessing the greatest material power from an international perspective. This conception is utterly materialistic and superficial. Does the power that characterises the immigration wave, its demographic fertility, the Islamic mentality, the devastation of European societies, and the feeling of dereliction and abandonment burdening European natives, who watch as their lands and ethnic identities are betrayed, not matter ultimately at all? All of this is allegedly harmless in comparison with the Yankee hydra and the terrifying sword of Damocles that hangs above our heads, embodied by

  … the world of international capitalism [again!] and the realm of mercantile imagination […], which generates global conditions of self-deprivation.

  What we are facing here is a textbook case of the intellectual delirium that ails our French mentality. By copying the Leftist jargon and adopting the (misunderstood and unreferenced) formulas of Debord, Lefevbre, Bourdieu and Baudrillard, plagiarist de Benoist presents us with the perfect example of pure bourgeois thinking.

  The latter is characterised by a complete denial of reality as specifically perceived by our people, meaning by society as a whole. It is a mixture of pretentious contempt and sententious intellectual laziness.

  What you see is not real, my dear folks; your suffering and apparent foes are nothing but an illusion. It is we intellectuals who, as the sole keepers of science and veracity, can explain to you all that your main enemy is not at all the one that you perceive as such, for you are all foolish and uneducated, belonging to the category of people who “ascertain things in a purely reactive fashion, instead of granting analysis and reflection due priority”. (As stated by the same author in the very same text.)

  What threatens you most, therefore, are the scholarly conceptions and abstractions which we have specified. Instead of wallowing in racism, learn how to recognise your foe in international capitalism and ‘the axiomatic system’ impelled by the American military-industrial complex.

  This priggish reasoning was both normal and usual within the dogmatised, Leftist intellectual bourgeoisie, whose members have always preached that whatever people experienced in their everyday lives was nothing but an illusion and that those who ‘spoke the truth’ were demagogues. In the above-mentioned text, de Benoist has adopted this very same illusionism:

  Apart from a ceaseless pedagogical effort, I fail to see the potential of any other daily strategy to lead people’s minds towards maintaining a greater critical distance from both the state of things and themselves.

  In other words, it is through propaganda (‘pedagogy’) that one must persuade common people, who are all simpletons and readily fanaticised, that the things they experience are false and what they feel is of little importance when compared to the metaphysical and moral truth which we, as enlightened intellectuals, are alone to possess. We must convince them of the fact that immigration, Islam, insecurity, foreign preference, and decadence are all mere delusions.

  The above-mentioned enlightened intellectual bourgeoisie is obviously completely unfamiliar with the issues of insecurity or precariousness experienced by our native people. It can thus allow itself to ‘maintain’ a ‘critical distance’ and advise others to follow suit. What could ever be more normal and logical than for this contemptuous — and contemptible — attitude to prevail within the ‘New’ cosmopolitan Left? There is, however, something quite tragicomic about seeing these Parisian intellectuals, who once made much hay out of our ‘European identity’ and still continue (albeit with ever-increasing difficulty) to live off the Identitarian public, repeat word-for-word the ideas advocated by the bohemian Left. This desperate about-face, conducted in the hope of being forgiven by the System for one’s capital sins and being accepted as ‘righteous rebels’ under the sublime pretext of embracing philosophy and freedom of thought, is but a priggishness that cannot deceive anyone (as A. de Benoist himself has stated, ‘when View from the Right was reedited a year ago, it might as well have been entitled View from the Left’.

  The Anti-Americanism of Those Ignorant about America

  I shall now allow myself to refute the anti-American vulgate that usually characterises Identitarian milieus, a vulgate that only serves to reinforce American positions through its fallacious arguments, especially those which attempt to demonstrate that the USA is actually the main, or even the sole, enemy that threatens European survival.

  The Polémia website (www.polemia.com) usually comprises excellent analyses which always defend Europe’s power and identity. It sometimes happens, however, that one comes across some biased arguments there, arguments in which ideology has replaced practical reasoning and neglected facts that are mostly too blatant to ignore.

  For a certain time now, I have been defending the notion that it is mass immigration, paired with Islam’s tightening grip and supported by all the collaborators who exacerbate the situation, that actually represents our principal foe (a fact that I have made particularly clear in this book). I have also been stressing the idea that the American policy has, for a long time (since the 1892 war against Spain, in fact), been the main adversary that Europe has had to contend with as a power, which applies to the economic, geostrategic and cultural level. An enemy is not an adversary. The former seeks to erase your presence, even physically, and longs to settle into your home. The danger he embodies is an urgent one to tackle and may turn out to be fatal in the medium term. An adversary, on the other hand, only strives to weaken you and subjugate you, but never to eliminate you completely, for he requires you to be his vassal.

  Such a distinction and hierarchisation of threats, however, often remains unacknowledged, as it conflicts with ideological passion, which, in this case, happens to me an emotion-based Americanophobia that uses clichés and untruths as its main arguments. The analysis published by this Polémia editor does not, of course, drown in extremism, nor has it been rendered blind by OHAA; its logic does not, therefore, crumble, nor does it p
retend that the US is our sole enemy and that the twofold threat of Islam and immigration does not actually exist.

  In no way does Polémia’s openly declared doctrine neglect the immigrational and Islamic menace, but merely subordinates the latter to the American threat, considering the latter to be its very source. I will attempt to prove that this viewpoint is not only political in essence, but also counterproductive and especially flawed, since its understanding of things is virtual and does not reflect the reality of our society and world.

  ***

  Let us now analyse and refute Polémia’s arguments one at a time, all of which have the merit of being both concise and precise.

  Nowadays, our principal enemy is embodied by the United States. The “Yankees” represent a powerful danger that the “Arabs” could hardly ever incarnate, except of course on our own soil.

  First of all, the fact of generalising the ‘United States’ is an effort to regard it as a bloc and fully identify it with Washington’s policy, as if the latter were never going to change in future. The USA is thus perceived as an immutable civilisation, akin to the Islamic one, which constitutes a first error in judgement. Next, the ‘Yankee’ appellation denotes a polemical and emotional tendency to substantialise the Americans, whose ties to the Northern camp of the American civil war are, however, growing ever thinner. Last but not least, one detects a grave confusion when the author asserts that the ‘Arabs’ (in a likely reference to the Muslim-Arab world) represent a lesser power compared to that of the USA. This may be obvious on a geostrategic and economic level, but this is hardly the issue here, since what we are focusing on are direct, first-hand threats that have been burdening Europe. The author is, in fact, guilty of a surprising antilogical periphrasis and reduces his previous argument to naught when stating: ‘except of course on our own soil’. For it is obviously ‘our soil’ that matters most. A grammatical analysis of the author’s words shows that he acknowledges the fact that, on a global scale, the ‘Yankees’ represent a more dangerous power than the “Arabs”, even with regard to our own interests, but it is in fact the opposite that applies ‘on our own soil’. Either that, or my interpretation of the preposition ‘except’ differs from the author’s. Through his syntactic lapse, the latter pre-demolishes the very idea that he plans to defend and expresses his genuine, secret opinion, while implicitly acknowledging that he abides by ideological thoughts rather than common sense.