Why We Fight Read online

  Why We Fight

  Guillaume Faye

  Why We Fight

  Manifesto of the European Resistance

  Translated and Introduced

  by Michael O’Meara

  ARKTOS

  Original:

  Pourquoi nous combattons:

  Manifeste de la Résistance européenne

  Éditions de L’Æncre, Paris, 2001

  German edition, Wofür wir Kämpfen, published in 2006 by Ahnenrad der Moderne.

  First English edition published in 2011 by Arktos Media Ltd.

  Copyright to the English edition © 2011 by Arktos Media Ltd.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilised in any form or by any means (whether electronic or mechanical), including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without

  permission in writing from the publisher.

  Printed in the United Kingdom

  isbn 978-1-907166-18-1 (Softcover)

  isbn 978-1-907166-19-8 (Hardcover)

  BIC classification: Social & political philosophy (HPS);

  Conservatism and right-of-centre democratic ideologies (JPFM);

  Nationalism (JPFN)

  Translation: Michael O’Meara

  Editor: John B. Morgan

  Co-Editor: Matthew Peters

  Cover Design: Andreas Nilsson

  Layout: Daniel Friberg

  ARKTOS MEDIA LTD

  www.arktos.com

  Dedication

  To the ancestors of my native Charente and Poitou,

  indomitable old Gauls.

  To Gilles Soulas and Georges Hupin.

  To Lisa-Isabella, primavera di bellezza, daughter of the Roman Louve, and to all those of my dear Italy.

  In memory of the Countess Hella von Westarp, high representative of Europe’s true aristocracy, who resisted the barbarians and was martyred, sacrificing her blood to save that of her people.

  To everyone, from Brittany’s Aber Wrac’h to the Bering Straits,

  from Norway’s Nordkapp to Greece’s Xhora Sphakion, who keeps the flame of resistance alive.

  Ac eis quos Imperium imperat, quibus honoris nomen fides dicitur.

  ‘For some, I’m a dream, for others a nightmare.’

  –Merlin the Magician

  ‘A beautiful night summons a night of wolves.’

  –Pierre Vial

  ‘We’re going to prevail, because we’re already dead.’

  –Olivier Carré

  ‘So I’ve been told: I must avenge myself.

  With that, deep in the woods,

  The wolf carried it off and ate it,

  Without further ado.’

  –Jean de La Fontaine

  Table of Contents

  Translator’s Foreword: Prophet of the Fourth Age

  Foreword to the German Edition: It’s About The Primordial Fire

  A Note from the Editor

  1. Preface and Precaution

  Unite on the Basis of Clear Ideas Against the Common Enemy

  Beware of False Friends

  2. Preliminary Elements

  The Logic of Decline

  Ethnic Colonisation

  The Blocked Society[65]

  France or Europe?

  Economic Principles

  For Nuclear, Not Petroleum Energy

  The Imposture of the ‘New Economy’

  Toward a Planetary Economic Crisis?

  3. Strategic Principles

  America and Islam Against Europe

  The Dangers of European ‘Disarmament’

  Notions of the ‘Menace from the South’ and the ‘Domestic Front’

  Toward a Eurosiberian Strategic Doctrine: The ‘Giant Hedgehog’ [99]

  4. Metapolitical Dictionary

  Aesthetics

  Alien

  Americanism, anti-Americanism, philo-Americanism

  Anti-Racism

  Archeofuturism

  Aristocracy, new aristocracy

  Assimilation, assimilationism

  Autarky of Great Spaces

  Belief in Miracles

  Biopolitics

  Born Leader

  Bourgeoisism

  Chaos, Ethnic

  Chaos, post-Chaos

  Circulation of Elites[111]

  Civil War, Ethnic

  Colonisation

  Communitarianism

  Community, community-of-a-people

  Competition, struggle for life

  Conception-of-the-World

  Consciousness, Ethnic

  Consciousness, Historical

  Consumerism

  Convergence of Catastrophes

  Cosmopolitanism

  Cultural Struggle

  Culture, Civilisation

  Decadence

  Deculturation

  Democracy, democratism, organic democracy

  Designation of the ‘Enemy’ and the ‘Friend’, ‘enemy’ and ‘adversary’

  Destiny, becoming

  Devirilisation

  Discipline

  Disinstallation

  Domestication

  Ecology, ecologism, ecological productivism

  Economism

  Economy, Organic

  Economy, Two-Tier

  Egalitarianism

  Elite, elitism

  Empire, imperial federation

  End of History

  Enrootment

  Ethnocentrism

  Ethnocracy

  Ethnomasochism

  Ethnosphere, ethnic blocs

  Eugenics

  Europe

  Eurosiberia

  Fatherland, Great Fatherland, native land

  Genopolitics

  Geopolitics

  Germen

  Globalisation, globalism

  Grand Politics

  Happiness, ‘small pleasures’

  Heredity

  Heritage

  Heroes

  Heterotelia

  Hierarchy

  History, conceptions of history

  Homo Oeconomicus

  Homophilia

  Human Rights, human rightism

  Humanism, surhumanism

  Humanitarianism

  Idea, ideal, historic idealism

  Identity

  Ideology, hegemonic ideology, Western ideology, European ideology

  Immigration

  Individualism

  Inegalitarianism

  Interregnum

  Involution

  Judaeo-Christianity

  Land, territory

  Legitimation (positive or negative)

  Liberalism, managerial liberalism

  Liberty, liberties

  Mass, massification

  Memory, collective memory

  Mental AIDS

  Mercantilism

  Meritocracy

  Metapolitics

  Miscegenation

  Modernity, modernism

  Museologicalisation

  Nation, nationalism, new nationalism

  Neo-primitivism

  Nihilism

  Order

  Paganism

  People

  People, Long-Living; short-living people

  Personality, Creative

  Philia

  Politics, Grand Politics

  Populism

  Preference, European; national preference, alien preference

  Presentism

  Progress, progressivism

  Promethean

  Race, racism, anti-racism

  Region, regionalism

  Resistance and Reconquest

  Revolution

  Right to Difference

  Sacred

  Selection

  Society, Marketr />
  Sovereignty, the sovereign function, tri-functionality, bi-functionality

  State, nation-state, statism

  State of Emergency[239]

  Techno-science

  Third Worldism

  Tradition, traditionalism

  Tragedy

  Universalism

  Values

  West, Western civilisation

  Will to Power

  Xenophilia

  5. Conclusion

  Why Are We Fighting?

  Translator’s Foreword: Prophet of the Fourth Age

  ‘L’histoire est la réalization d’idées irréalisables.’

  –Guillaume Faye[1]

  Are these the last days of Europe?

  There’s no hyperbole here.[2] If major changes are not soon forthcoming, her peoples face the extinction of their civilisation and their kind. Already she is overrun by millions of alien, mainly Islamic colonisers from the Global South, who have begun to replace her native peoples and supplant her order; she is subject to an American overlord whose world system requires her de-Europeanisation and ‘globalisation’; she is misgoverned by technocrats, career politicians, and plutocratic elites indifferent to her blood and spirit. And to all this (to which much could be added), her defenders — those who sense the danger and strive to resist it — are disunited, at times even unaware of who or what exactly they are fighting. Within a generation, ‘Europe’ may go the way of Ancient Sumer or the Incas.

  Guillaume Faye — the one-time enfant terrible of France’s Nouvelle Droite — believes ‘the European Resistance’ has the resources and energies to defeat the Continent’s enemies, if its various elements and tendencies should form a united front around clear ideas and a common ideology. That is, if her defenders would agree to concentrate their forces. His manifesto, and especially its metapolitical dictionary, aspire to lay the metapolitical foundations for such a unification — by designating and defining the key ideas and ideology that will make it possible.

  *

  Why We Fight (as Pourquoi nous combattons) appeared a decade ago, in 2001.

  In a few places it shows its age, but much of it seems prescient in its understanding of the challenges confronting Europe’s defenders and the ideas that might overcome them. These ‘defenders’, whom Faye collectively labels the ‘Resistance’, include in their ranks néo-droitiers, regionalists, identitarians, traditionalists, and certain other anti-system tendencies upholding the primacy of their particular ethnic distillation of the larger European heritage. A decade after Why We Fight, these oppositional elements (the ‘resistance’) have finally begun to emerge from their political ghetto, as they hesitantly mobilise in the streets and, more confidently, merge with the national-populist formations affecting the present fate of parliamentary coalitions.[3] It’s fitting, perhaps, that the English translation of Faye’s manifesto should appear in this period of rising anti-system agitation.

  Influenced by the cultural/ideological forces animating the mounting opposition, Why We Fight followed a series of works that had earlier lit up the resistance’s imagination. These were the essays collected in L’Archéofuturisme (1998);[4] the second, augmented edition of Nouveau discours à la nation européenne (1999); and La Colonisation de l’Europe (2000) (whose characterisation of Europe’s Islamisation, in anticipating ‘9/11’ and other Muslim assaults, earned Faye and his publisher a 300,000 franc fine and a year’s suspended sentence).

  Why We Fight would be followed by a series of similarly topical and prophetic works: Avant-guerre (2003), La Convergence des catastrophes (2004), and Le Coup d’État mondial (2004). But then, in 2007, the release of Faye’s most controversial book, La Nouvelle question juive (in which the Jew’s place in European life was reconceived in light of the Islamic invasion), set off a heated debate in identitarian and nationalist ranks — eventually bringing his role as the resistance’s leading advocate to an end.[5]

  If Faye’s decision in the period leading up to 2007 — to affiliate with the Zionist bloc in its ‘struggle’ against Islam — discredited him with certain identitarians,[6] it took away nothing from his earlier contribution to the ‘resistance’ — which seems especially the case with Why We Fight, arguably the single best synthesis of the ideas and sensibilities animating the diverse parties and tendencies presently resisting Europe’s decline.

  *

  The reception of Faye’s 2007 book epitomises much of what has stifled and stunted the post-war history of European anti-liberalism.

  Following V-E Day, the Right, like the rest of Europe, was ordered to Americanise. Joseph Stalin (whose Red Army won the all-important ground war) may have foiled U.S. efforts after 1945 to create a ‘new world order’ (forcing globalists to wait until 1989),[7] but the American conquerors nevertheless imposed their liberal-modernist system on Western and Central Europe (the system which has since evolved into the basis for the present global market order).

  Traditional Right-wing formations critical of the creedal, market-centric dictates of Europe’s new masters would henceforth be identified with the ‘allegedly’ barbaric Germans,[8] escorted offstage, and compelled to abandon whatever anti-liberal or anti-modern sentiment still influenced them — as was the case in Eastern Europe, though there the model was Russian, rather than American.

  By the time the first post-war baby boomers came of age in the late ‘60s, it was evident that the Right (this now ‘moderate’ appendage of the liberal Left) was a losing proposition, having failed not only to halt the ongoing erosion of European civilisation, but having, more shamefully, joined the American system de-Europeanising Europe — betraying, in this way, the purpose of the ‘political’ — by failing to defend Europe’s identity, legitimacy, and sovereignty.

  Across the Continent in the ‘60s and ‘70s, but especially in France, there emerged tendencies endeavouring to rethink the Right project as an alternative to the prevailing U.S. system (which made the circulation of capital superior to everything, including the sacred). The most successful of these alternatives was the Groupement de Recherches et d’Études pour la Civilisation Européenne (GRECE). Its project, of which Faye was an early advocate, was ‘metapolitical’: i.e., conceived as a cultural/ideological struggle against the reigning liberal values and beliefs. By means of this ‘Gramscianism of the Right’, Grécistes were to create a ‘counter-hegemony’ to undermine the legitimacy of the subversive forces — and thus to create a climate receptive to an anti-liberal politics of reconquest.

  Effective at first in arousing public debate and reviving aspects of the repressed cultural heritage, the GRECE by the mid-1980s had evolved into just another marginalised tendency. In his recently translated Archeofuturism,[9] Faye attributes this to its proclivity, especially pronounced in its leader, Alain de Benoist, to privilege the ‘meta’ in metapolitics at the expense of ‘the political’, which had the effect of making cultural/ideological engagement a substitute for, rather than an active facet of politics.[10]

  At one level, Faye’s Why We Fight is a blistering critique of de Benoist’s leadership of the GRECE. Its many negative references to ‘the Right’ or to ‘certain Right-wing intellectuals’, etc., are aimed, almost exclusively, at him and the type of politically irrelevant, often system-friendly dilettantism he has come to represent for Faye.

  The book’s numerous references to Pierre Vial and Robert Steuckers, on the other hand, point to what Faye considers a more viable metapolitics. A university historian and former president of the GRECE, Vial left the group in the late 1980s to join the National Front, where he organised its Terre et Peuple (Land and People) faction,[11] which helped shift the NF away from its earlier Jacobin-Reaganite nationalism and toward the socially-conscious, identitarian populism that has since made it the leading party of the French working class.[12] Steuckers, a Flemish linguist and arguably the most formidable intellectual talent to emerge from the Nouvelle Droite, is the organiser of Euro-Synergies — which synthesises and diffuses much of
the most significant thought influencing European anti-liberalism.[13]

  *

  ‘Today, as always, the corner-stone of society is a tombstone.’ [14]

  In assuming the inextricability of culture and politics, Faye’s notion of metapolitics stems from his ‘archeofuturist’ philosophy, which holds that the European tradition is pre-eminently a ‘revolutionary’ one — constantly revolving back to the archaic sources of its form of life in order to revolve forward, toward other, original expressions of it. In Italian terms, his archeofuturism combines the revolutionary traditionalism of Julius Evola and the radical Futurism of F. T. Marinetti. Less simply said, it marries the perennial attributes of, say, the Hellenic Classical heritage[15] to the most pioneering forms of European thinking and endeavour.[16] Like the primordial and the perennial, the archaic here refers not to some ancient, fossilised canon, but to the original assertion of European being, which, as an origin (an outburst or birth of being), functions as another original opening to the future — in the structuring, civilising sense distinct to Europe’s Hochkultur. It’s not, as such, a traditionalism, an antiquarianism, or a reactionism — but rather a primordialism that constantly renews Europe’s rooted life forms by adapting them to face the challenges that come from the future.

  Opposing modernity’s dysgenic values for the sake of those instincts and refinements that have historically guided Europe’s destiny, Faye’s archeofuturism strives — in its conception of the world — to revive the Continent’s threatened identity, to pull her back from the abyss into which she presently gazes, but, above all, to make certain she gets another chance, a fourth chance, to begin again.

  *

  The present counter-civilisation, whose reality-denying entertainments, obsessive consumerism, and nihilistic miscegenation have drained all meaning from our world — this liberal-modernist system that succeeded Europe’s Ancient and Medieval civilisations — is not the ‘enemy’, however, for (in any political, especially Schmittian, sense) the enemy has to be someone or something (‘a fighting collectivity of people’) threatening imminent death.[17]