Jared Taylor, American Renaissance, February 16, 2012

Guillaume Faye, Why We Fight: Manifesto of the European Resistance, Arktos Media, 2011, 278 pp. soft cover $27.00, hard cover $42.00.

For more than a decade, Guillaume Faye of France has been one of the most prominent and controversial spokesmen for our race. His books have been translated into many continental languages, and he is in frequent demand as a speaker in Europe and Russia. Now, thanks to translations commissioned by Arktos Media, he is finally becoming known in the English-speaking world.

In the 1970s, Mr. Faye helped found the French New Right, together with Alain de Benoit. The books he wrote in the 1980s and ’90s were a mix of the ideological and deliberately provocative, with titles such as The System that Kills People, The New Consumer Society, and A Manual for Seducers in a Hurry (which he wrote under a pseudonym). He later broke with his former New Right colleagues and began to write more explicitly about race; it was his 1998 book Archeofuturism that put him at the center of what Europeans call identitarianism and what we call racial consciousness. The appearance of The Colonization of Europe in 2000 and Why We Fight in 2001 established him as the continent’s foremost identitarian spokesman. The Colonization of Europe, in which he warned of the demographic threat posed by Muslim immigration, resulted in a 300,000-Franc fine (approximately $60,000), and a one-year suspended sentence under France’s oppressive anti-free-speech laws.

Mr. Faye has continued to publish at a rate of nearly one volume every year, elaborating on his central themes while developing new ones. In 2007, he surprised some of his admirers with The New Jewish Question, in which he argued that Zionism is an important ally in Europe’s fight against Islam. His latest book, published in 2011, is Sex and Corruption.

Why We Fight is a manual for people who already understand the importance of race. In this translation into vigorous, engaging English by Michael O’Meara, Mr. Faye wastes no time getting to the point: Europe, he says, is fighting for its life. Low birth rates and relentless non-white immigration are destroying and displacing native Europeans, without whom Europe is nothing but a landmass. “The base of everything is biocultural identity and demographic renewal,” he writes, adding, “This is why the present situation in Europe is so tragic: for the first time in two thousand years, Europe is quite literally in danger of disappearing.”

What Mr. Faye calls “the struggle for the heritage of our ancestors and the future of our children” will be decided soon: “If the generation of native Europeans that turns 20 between 2000 and 2010 doesn’t act, everything will be lost — forever.” He writes that “for our civilisation, the twenty-first century is to be a trial of life or death, with no possibility of appeal,” warning that that “the threat is graver than any of the previous plagues and wars that Europe has known.”

Although Mr. Faye is a man of words and ideas, he stresses that “one doesn’t fight for ‘ideas,’ one fights for a people.” And for what people do identitarians fight?

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 Nationality Identity Card are not my compatriots, though in strictly judicial terms they may be considered French.

Mr. Faye notes that immigrants may sometimes call themselves “French” or “Belgian” but never manage to become Scots, Bavarians, or Sicilians.

The tragedy of the struggle is that Europe “is at war and doesn’t even know it.” So long as their shopping carts are full, Europeans will not wake up to the crisis of dispossession. For those who see clearly, however, traditional European distinctions of Left and Right are petty distractions. The only distinction that matters is who is, and who is not, part of the European struggle against oblivion.

To be sure, there are questions of strategy. Should a French identitarian hope to return to a France that is authentically French, or should France cede sovereignty to a strong, self-conscious Europe? Should a European patriot try to use the powers of the European Union to hurl back the Third World or should he try to undermine those powers in the expectation that racial consciousness can arise only at the national level? These are legitimate questions on which identitarians may disagree.

They should all agree, however, that traditional Christians and non-believers must work together to preserve Europe. Mr. Faye is not a Christian, but believes that a traditional Catholic should be able to say “I respect all the Christians of the world, but nic et nunc [here and now] I fight for my people above all, whatever their religion.”

He notes that neither Judaism nor Islam has ever been “masochistic” like Christianity, but points out that Christianity itself is not the source of our collapse: “We shouldn’t forget . . . that the egalitarian virus is also found in non-Christian conceptions of the world and that Medieval Christianity knew how to protect itself from it.” As for liberal, mush-minded Christianity, he sees no salvation for it, and wishes it would disappear.

Historical ignoramuses

Mr. Faye is slashingly contemptuous of the mentality of the elites who are herding Europe into the abyss, calling them “historical ignoramuses” and “stargazing intellectuals.” He wonders if they can really believe we will live happily ever after in the multi-culti utopia, for there is no “mixing of cultures,” only conquest:

India, China, Black Africa, the Arab-Muslim or Turkish-Muslim world, etc., are affirming their identities, tolerating neither a colonising immigration nor a cultural mélange on their soil. Only our pseudo-European elites defend the dogma of a ‘mixed planet,’ which is pure illusion.

Nor can Mr. Faye excuse the naiveté (or duplicity) of those who would open the West to strangers in the name of Western values those strangers will never adopt. Our rulers say that because Europe accepts pluralism and celebrates differences, it should welcome millions of Muslims or Hindus — who despise pluralism and hate differences. Mr. Faye concludes that “it’s absurd to demand the right to differences for those who would deny it to others.”

Mr. Faye notes that the regnant ideology amounts to a belief in miracles: that unskilled Third-Worlders can make up for declining European birthrates; that social security can keep paying for more and more old people as the number of workers declines; that there can be infinite development without polluting the planet or running out of raw materials; that we can encourage the proliferation of incompetents without fatally burdening the competent.

Mr. Faye denounces European Green parties that claim to be anti-globalist and rooted in local cultures because, “[A]t the same time they are ‘open to all cultures,’ partisans of the ‘cause of all peoples,’ and effectively pro-immigrant.” He calls them part of “a phony opposition to the system, attacking superficial aspects of it, but never challenging its foundation.”

Mr. Faye points out that “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.” This is because the people retain a faint sense of what is right, and if the decision were put to referendum, Europeans would restore the death penalty, expel Third-World immigrants, and curb the powers of the European Union.

For the present, however, the racial consciousness that is vital for European survival is not strong enough to break through smothering layers of sham democracy because identitarian instincts have been destroyed by bourgeois individualism. “Consumerism is a form of slavery to which the mass men of our age have succumbed,” writes Mr. Faye. “Domesticated man is a conformist, he doesn’t revolt, he never resists.” Above all, now that treachery to Europe is the basis for respectability, the mass man “doesn’t want to feel ‘Other,’ independent, for that would mean being excluded (the great contemporary terror).”

For those who actually do understand what is at stake but go no further than cautious conservatism, Mr. Faye reserves his deepest contempt: For him they are miserable cowards.

The American adversary

When Mr. Faye wrote this book in 2001, he took the view that although the true enemy of Europe was Islam and Third-World immigration, America was also an adversary. Here is a typical passage:

The United States — logically from its geostrategic perspective — endeavours to neutralize Europe, whose unification threatens American hegemony and economic interests on the continent. To divide Euroepans 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.

He also writes this: “The Pentagon’s nightmare is an ethnocentric Eurosiberia [European whites united from the Atlantic to Siberia] . . . . free of Islamisation, American hegemony, and non-European colonization.” And this: “The U.S. seeks to weaken Europe by favouring her Islamisation and her transformation into a multi-racial, Africanised society.”

He writes that America opposes the European nuclear energy industry because a nuclear Europe would be free from dependence on Middle Eastern oil. This dependence prevents Europe from throwing off the Muslim invader, and “Islamo-Arab governments accept their provisional subordination to American Interests for the sake of American aid in conquering Europe.” He even wonders if Green parties oppose nuclear energy in Europe only because they have been bought off by “American-Muslim oil suppliers” who want to keep making money selling oil to an increasingly weakened and Islam-dominated Europe.

This is, to put it charitably, misguided. Much of what the United States does is objectively harmful to Europe — denial of race and genetics, worship of immigration and miscegenation, celebration of diversity — but America is not deliberately trying to weaken Europe. America, in its blundering, arrogant way, wants Europe to be like America, and if it weakens Europe it is only because it is weakening itself. Nor is the United States in any sense in league with Islam — even though it tolerates it in the name of the same one-sided and foolish principles that Mr. Faye finds so dangerous in Europe. American interests are allied with those of Israel, and relations with oil producers are always considered in that light.

There is reason to think Mr. Faye has modified some of his views in the last decade. He will be speaking at the forthcoming American Renaissance conference, and the title of his talk is “America and Europe: Brothers in Arms. A French Point of View.” Even in 2001, at the time he wrote Why We Fight, he was on surer ground when he wrote that if Europe wants to counter American products and culture, it should do so not by being anti-American but simply non-American. Racially conscious Americans invariably see Europe identitarians as allies in a world-wide struggle.

Out of the crisis

Mr. Faye has no hope that Europe can save itself through conventional politics. As he has written in Archeofuturism, he believes that only a “convergence of catastrophes” — economic collapse, Islamic jingoism, environmental degradation — will jolt Europe out of its stupor. “The repatriation of aliens can only be accomplished under the auspices of a revolutionary crisis,” he writes. “We have long since passed the point of return, the point where it’s still possible to check the prevailing decadence through peaceful reform. In no case will the European Revolution be a ‘velvet revolution.’ ”

Mr. Faye writes that Europe must build a huge, exclusively European army to fight the racial-religious civil war that will break out when Europeans finally rise up. However, he believes Western man will act only when Muslims overplay their hands and turn their burgeoning numbers into outright oppression. When that day comes, it will not be a time for compromise or half-measures: “Every resistance not arising on a foundation of reconquest is destined to fail.”

Metapolitical dictionary

As noted above, Mr. Faye calls on us to fight for our people, not for ideas, but ideas are weapons in the fight, and ideas are expressed in words. Pierre Krebs, who wrote the preface to the German edition — which is included in this translation — writes that “the more you pervert the language of a people, the more its spirit will be distorted and its resistance weakened.”

Mr. Faye therefore devotes 180 pages of this 278-page book to what he calls a “Metapolitical Dictionary.” It is a listing, in alphabetical order, of what he considers the key terms of the struggle, and is an attempt to fight the perversion of language by coining new words and giving correct definitions to old ones.

Mr. Faye’s most successful coinages are probably “ethnomasochism” and “xenophilia,” which he says are the correct names for what goes by the name of “anti-racism.” He considers this a pathological contempt for one’s own people and a fawning belief that the “Other” as always better.

The definitions in the Metapolitical Dictionary all buttress an identitarian view, and can be quoted to good effect almost at random (his definitions are actually short essays; these are very partial excerpts).

Assimilation: “All assimilation is equivalent to cultural genocide, for the assimilator or the assimilated.”

Anti-racism: “Anti-racists use their fake struggle against racism to destroy the European’s identity.”

Colonisation: “We must speak of colonisers rather than immigrants and stop talking about their being exploited. It is they who come to live at our expense and exploit us. Colonisation will bring Europe’s greatest possible tragedy if it succeeds in destroying Europe’s ethnic stock.”

Democracy: “The system, in fact, refuses real democracy since with it the people might express dangerous or morally condemnable opinions. . . . It’s always on questions of secondary importance that the people or its representatives are consulted.”

Destiny: “Destiny is not haphazard or random; a good part of it is willed. . . . A people unconscious of its destiny is a people destined to disappear.”

Egalitarianism: “A pathological refusal to accept the inegalitarian nature of human societies . . . . [E]galitarianism gives rise to new inequities and does so in the name of justice.” It is “an institutionalized lie.”

Ethnocentrism: “The psychological condition necessary to a people’s (or nation’s) survival. . . . In the struggle for survival, the feeling of being superior and right is indispensable for acting and succeeding.”

Human Rights: “The ideology of human rights is above all strategically used to disarm European peoples, by making them feel guilty about almost everything. . . . The ideology of human rights is the principal weapon being used today to destroy Europe’s identity and to advance the interests of her alien colonisers.”

Heroes: “Egalitarians reject heroes because they are superior personalities. . . . Heroes are models, who sacrifice for their people’s sake: something completely incomprehensible for today’s ‘clerks’. . . . Our decadent, ethnomasochistic society cannot, however, avoid forging pseudo-heroes or sub-heroes: football players, soap opera stars, humanitarian doctors . . . .”

Humanitarianism: “The metaphysical unity of the human race imposes an obligation to help the ‘Other,’ rather than one’s own kind.”

Mental AIDS: “Mental AIDS is an infection of a psychological nature that affects virtually all the ‘elites’ — the political class, the media class, show business, the ‘cultural’ community, ‘artists,’ filmmakers — inclining them to . . . advocate degenerate values as if they were actually ones of regeneration. . . . Mental AIDS confuses, in effect, the enemy with the friend.”

Miscegenation: “In the name of anti-racism, the dominant ideology insists that miscegenation (métissage) is the planet’s fate. It’s only Europeans, however, who actually believe it, not the world’s other peoples, who are now organising themselves into ethnic blocs to preserve their identity.”

People: “In no case does mere cultural or linguistic attachment suffice in making a people, if they have no common biological roots. . . . Only Europeans, submerged in the illusions of their decadence, imagine that blood-based peoples will disappear, to be replaced by a miscegenated ‘world citizen.’ ”

Sacred: “The essential elements of the sacred are the cult of the dead, of ancestors, and the various rites and rituals accompanying the different stages of human life (birth, death, etc) — that is, everything that makes the perpetuation of a people’s lineage transcendent.”

Third Worldism: “The proper attitude to the Third World is one of relative indifference . . . . Europe has no obligation to peoples whose destiny is not their own. . . . These populations are alone guilty of their incapacity to govern themselves. We are not ‘responsible’ for them.”

As is clear from these short excerpts, Guillaume Faye is just as serious about regenerating language as he is about regenerating his people. There is a great deal happening in Europe, and Mr. Faye is at the center of it.