Why We Fight

by Guillaume Faye

  Let us therefore immediately cease the endless debate over details — these are pursuits for the time after the rebirth of our civilisation. What we need are clear guidelines, unbending principles, uncompromising values, and an unshakeable belief in our culture and our people. Those are the indispensible conditions of victory! For we know one thing: we will remain forever, so long as we maintain the law of ethnic homogeneity without fail, against all propaganda to the contrary. We must also remain true to that indestructible heritage of the blood that transforms human beings without altering their essence. Our law stems from a divine will — from the only god whose name we know: heritage.

  By following the teachings of this book, we allow this will to show us the way, to create a foundation and develop a vision for why we fight. We will together unleash the furia francese of which Guillaume Faye speaks, along with the furia espanola, teutonica, italiana, russia, croatia or islandia — and out of these furia europeana, new forces will coalesce that will put this world back on the foundations of Life. The time is short! The challenge is huge, yet it is from our enemies’ folly that wisdom is born, from this will that life is passed on, and from this despair that hope rises: for only at the very epicentre of danger does that which saves continue to grow — provided one knows, believes and wants it. Summoning Nietzsche, who wanted to write on all the walls, wherever walls existed, we too are ready to write down for our brainless peoples, in marble letters that even the blind can read, the inviolable laws of the blood that maintain the Being of every people and house the Being of each culture. More than ever before, what is at stake is the primordial fire of our genos,[42] and the Being of our ethnos. Yes: it is about the spinning wheel of our germen[43] — that which engenders the Being of our Soul and Spirit, both of which are indissolubly tied to the Being of the Race shaping them.

  Long live the New Will perpetuating the Race, and may the Spirit triumph.

  Pierre Krebs

  Kassel, Germany, 2006

  Dr. Pierre Krebs, born in 1948, is the founder and Chairman of the Thule-Seminar, which he established in 1980. The Thule-Seminar, which describes itself as a group dedicated to research into and cultivation of Indo-European culture, remains the most prominent New Right organization in Germany. Like Faye, it has worked closely with the Terre et Peuple group in France. Krebs graduated from the École Supérieure de Journalisme and the École des Hautes Études Sociales with degrees in philosophy, history and law.

  A Note from the Editor

  There were no footnotes to the French edition of this book. Therefore, all footnotes to Faye’s text are my own, apart from those marked with ‘Tr.’, which were added by the translator. The footnotes to Dr. O’Meara’s Foreword are his own, and the footnotes to Dr. Pierre Krebs’ Foreword were also added by the author, with the exception of those marked with ‘Ed.’, which were added by myself. I would like to thank Robert Steuckers for contributing the information which I have added as footnote #46 in the ‘Preliminary Elements’ section. Wherever possible, references have been given to the English translations of texts; if a reference is to a work in another language, I was unable to locate an English version of it. All references to Web sites in the footnotes were verified as accurate and available during the period of February and March 2011.

  This translation was made directly from the original French edition published in 2001, with the exception of the Foreword by Dr. Krebs, and the dictionary entries for ethnocracy and genopolitics, which were also added by Dr. Krebs for the German edition of this book that was published in 2006. A few changes that were made for the French version of Dr. Krebs’ Foreword have also been incorporated into our version. I would like to thank Martin Häggkvist for providing a translation of the additional texts by Dr. Krebs and Daniel Friberg for his input. The layout of the book was also modeled after the German edition, which we felt was superior to that of the French edition.

  I would also like to thank Michael O’Meara for putting so much time and energy into this project. The time he spent on his Foreword, on checking and rechecking the manuscript, and on critiquing the footnotes went far beyond what is typically expected of a translator. Likewise I would like to express my sincere appreciation to Matthew Peters, who was originally only asked to proofread the manuscript, a task which he performed with great skill and alacrity. However, his contributions ended up going far beyond that, as he provided many valuable suggestions pertaining to the editing and footnotes of the present book. Sergio Knipe was also kind enough to volunteer some of his time to assist in reviewing the manuscript and he also contributed to the translation of the Foreword by Dr. Krebs. I thank all of you for helping to ensure that this is the best book possible.

  JOHN B. MORGAN IV

  Mumbai, India, April 2011

  1. Preface and Precaution

  Unite on the Basis of Clear Ideas Against the Common Enemy

  The worst wars are the undeclared ones. They break out quietly, like an uneasy breeze, and are the harshest, most deadly.

  Europe today faces the greatest danger in her history, a danger threatening the very existence of her civilisation. For she is at war and doesn’t even know it. She may sense the danger, but refuses to see it, burying her head in the sand, like the ostrich, hoping to conjure it away.

  We Europeans are rapidly and massively being occupied and colonised by peoples from the South and by Islam. We are subject to America’s economic, strategic, and cultural New World Order. The two march hand in hand. We are emasculated by ideologies of decline and by those of a facile optimism, we are menaced by a regression of culture and education toward primitivism and by the faint simulation of prosperity.

  Europe is the sick man of the world. It’s obvious in her demographic decline, in her physiological devirilisation, and in the reigning ideology of ethnomasochism, imposed by politically correct censors and the controlled media. We are gnawed at from within and attacked from without. We are set upon by assailants, occupiers, and collaborators, who make up the majority of the political, media, and intellectual classes, whether of the Right or the Left. The people have yet to see it because their shopping carts are still full. And though everyone may secretly suspect that the war has begun, the majority denies it, because for the moment no one has the courage to fight it. For the moment . . .

  The deepening crisis and the march toward the enveloping chaos are requisite to an awakening and a revolt. And we haven’t seen anything yet. The tragedy is still early in its first act.

  Like every war, the defenders’ freedom of expression is compromised. There is no use complaining: such are the rules of the game. Throughout Europe, we possess immense resources. Nothing yet is lost and pessimism is no option.

  In history it’s always struggling minorities who make the difference, not the amorphous masses. And it’s no longer a matter of Left or Right either, but whether you’re part of the resistance.

  Given the tragedy bearing down on Europeans and the futile disputes dividing identitarians, there’s an evident need for a worldview powerful enough to rally the Continent — to rally our great fatherland, that family of kindred spirits, however politically fragmented, which is united on the essentials, favouring thus the defence of our civilisation and our imperilled identity, but especially favouring the principles of our regeneration.

  Everywhere, one awaits a mobilisation based on a clear, federating discourse of resistance and reconquest — free of outdated ideas, sectarianism, and the paralysis of nostalgia. Never before has the urgency for such a discourse been so great. What matters most at this point is a unifying ideological platform that goes beyond sectarianism in the sincerity and lucidity of its reflections. When the house is on fire, domestic disputes are put on hold.

  * * *

  An ideological regrounding is necessary — a regrounding that is both a synthesising affirmation of a general doctrine and, at the same time, a rigorous definition of concepts, arguments, and propaganda. This is why the following manifesto takes the form,
in large part, of a ‘dictionary’.

  Doctrinal confusion, phony debates, artificial oppositions, intellectual approximations and misunderstandings, sectarian skirmishes, the blunting of ideas for respectability’s sake — they have gone on for far too long. What’s needed is a clear line. A strongly formulated minimum around which the largest number of sensibilities and wills can coalesce.

  We have entered a period when things no longer need to be said in half-measures, as we amuse ourselves with ‘two-faced discourses’. What we need now is radical thought — not in the guise of extremist gestures, but in getting to the root of things. The truth is always a winner and it’s the most effective ruse.

  The time has come for identitarianism, in the broadest sense, to reaffirm itself as the most lucid and ambitious form of thought. The identitarian view of the world is simply more realistic and better adapted to the future than the dominant egalitarian and cosmopolitan ideology, which affects everyone from soft Rightists to the craziest neo-Trotskyites. All the facts, whether historical, geopolitical, demographic, ethnic, economic, or social, substantiate the identitarian and inegalitarian view of the world. Its vision — the sole authentically rebellious and dissident form of thought — is bound to prevail everywhere in Europe, for once the Twenty-first century succumbs to the approaching crises, the slate will be wiped clean — as ideological revisions, unexpected designations, and surprising radicalisations arrive with the force of circumstances.

  * * *

  Fifteen years ago, I published a small work titled Pourquoi nous combattons (Why We Fight), as well as Petit Lexique du Partisan européen (A Small Lexicon for the European Partisan), written in collaboration with Robert Steuckers and Pierre Freson. These two works have appeared in several pirated editions. But though they’ve retained much of their pertinence, they no longer quite fit the present state of emergency.

  Since then, no comparable manifesto or ideological synthesis has been published — with the exception of Pierre Vial’s last book, Une Terre, un Peuple (One Land, One People), a work whose conceptual and ‘archeofuturist’ orientations, in defending both ancestral traditions and an imperial future, are closely akin to our own idea of resistance and reconquest.

  Beware of False Friends

  Throughout Europe, young resisters and dissidents need to be wary not only of cooptation by the system, but also by those posing as defenders of European identity, the so-called ‘artisans of renewal’. I’m thinking here of those de Gaulle described as ‘kids jumping about crying: Europe! Europe! Europe!’,[44] talking of ‘renaissance’, but all the while defending decadent, permissive, censorious values that envisage Europe as a sort of ‘tolerant’ Disneyland, open to all the world, an ethnopluralist pandemonium — without a defining identity, an internal order, or a will to power. The ideological lure of such discourses is great, especially if conveyed in intellectually pretentious language. It’s of utmost importance, though, that we resist such pseudo-identitarians, whose conformity and craving for respectability surreptitiously camouflage multiracial and multicultural dogmas in the form of a ‘European idea’ that actually dissociates Europe from her ‘imperial idea’.

  Anything can be found in today’s supermarket of pseudo-rebellion: the anti-racist viaticum; a post-’68[45] ‘anti-utilitarian’ Leftism; a multicultural, multi-confessional, multi-anything ethnopluralism that discovered, thirty years later, the theses of American communitarians (somehow taken to be anti-American); an anti-liberalism derived from Bourdieu[46] and his friends; or else, at the other extreme, an ultra-free-marketism and a naïve, disarming idolatry of Americanism.

  Even among regionalists one finds the cosmopolitan ideology of the far Left, which, in its pretence of fighting French Jacobinism, resolutely ignores the European character of the regionalist identity it defends.

  We need, thus, to watch out for false defenders of European identity, those who have only formally broken with the Greens, Cohn-Bendit,[47] or José Bové.[48] For their fraudulent discourse is a simulacrum, which functions in the following manner: in the name of a repetitive, dogmatic, and badly argued anti-Americanism that invokes a convenient, neo-Marxist and economically superficial anti-liberalism, they pose as dissidents; they even label themselves European federalists, though they resist all thought of a powerful, imperial Europe; they pretend to be anti-globalists, proponents of the enrooted — identitarians — but at the same time they are ‘open to all cultures’, partisans of the ‘cause of all peoples’, and effectively pro-immigrant; they profess to be ‘anti-progressive’, but in the spirit of a vaguely realist ‘sense of history’, they judge every idea of Europe’s ethnic reconquest as unrealistic; they say they are pagan, Christian, pagan-Catholic, or agnostic, depending on the restaurant, but applaud Islam’s advance in the name of ecumenism — doing so, though, more out of conformity and ignorance than deception, etc. The most dangerous of these types are the pseudo-pagans, who systematically confuse things with their sophism and tolerant-mad polytheism — that is, with their anarchy. Sad to say, not a few Right-wing intellectuals have been snared in this way.

  * * *

  The mechanism is simple: they mount a phony opposition to the system, attacking superficial aspects of it, but never challenge its foundation. The threats presently facing Europe — notably, Europe’s colonisation by the Third World and Islam, devirilisation, the decay of values, the Africanisation of culture, demographic decline, bureaucratic fiscalism and the metastasis of the regnant social democracy, triumphant homophilia — are prudently ignored by these fake resisters, who lack any geopolitical, strategic, economic, ethnic, or cultural vision of resistance — who lack a will to power. The principal enemy, everywhere known, isn’t even mentioned.

  These phony oppositionists excuse themselves by claiming to be thinking, but ‘to think is not enough’, as Jules Renard says, ‘you must think of something’.[49]

  There’s another danger, the inverse of these: a nostalgic, pessimistic discourse steeped in sectarianism and impotence, marginality, and inept resistance. This is the logic of history’s eternal losers, vanquished in advance, embittered and discouraged, seeing themselves as the last line of defence, rather than the first. Every resistance not arising on a foundation of reconquest is destined to fail.

  * * *

  We should also be wary of certain spiritual, metaphysical, and so-called ‘philosophical’ tendencies. Wary especially of those impostors who call themselves ‘theologians’ in the confines of their office . . . though a spiritual renewal is absolutely necessary — for the sake of Europe’s rebirth — and against materialistic narcissism, which is the primal cause of her present tragedy.

  Spirituality is not spiritualism. It isn’t something to be decreed or instrumentalised, like a computer program. I’m a devoted reader of Evola,[50] particularly of his extraordinary political and social-philosophical texts, but take heed of ‘Evolianism’ (and the even more dangerous ‘Guénonism’)[51] that turns away from practical, tangible issues. Reflection must serve action and is not to be confused with metaphysical tautologies. I particularly address this warning to my Italian friends.

  Distrust is no less warranted in respect to that artificial and instrumentalised ‘paganism’ that threatens to succumb to either a New Age disconnected from any worldly struggle, or worse, in the name of a badly understood polytheism, to xenophilia and a catastrophic ‘Love of the Other’. I should add that I have long considered myself a pagan, fully pagan, allied to traditional Catholicism, and a friend of Hinduism, but a fierce adversary of the desert’s totalitarian monotheisms.

  A similar prudence is needed in respect to Catholic charismatic spirituality, with its enervating mysticism, and particularly its destructively pacifist dismissal of ethnicity and the will to power.

  We need, in a word, to be alert to demobilising mysticisms, to a pretentious but hollow intellectualism, to easy refuge in a ‘spirituality’ or ‘philosophy’ whose attitudes, postures, and loopholes are ultimately tangen
tial to the resistance.

  I’m not at all disparaging spiritual or religious pursuits, which are one of the glories of European civilisation. Real spirituality, though, is possible only in combat. Few are those who find it in pure meditation. For the dangers of disembodiment are great and, in such cases, the most profound aspirations metamorphose into a form of prattle and a refuge from life’s conflicts, part of history’s flotsam. To give meaning to one’s life one must struggle and take risks for one’s ideals and especially for one’s people. From such engagements there arises a true spirituality — an inner flame, not another bourgeois decorum. I think Evola, Heidegger, and Abellio[52] understood this, since their spirituality stemmed from their engagements.

  Spirituality is the enemy and opposite of spiritualism, just as intelligence is the enemy and opposite of intellectualism, and philosophy is the enemy and opposite of philosophism. Spirituality grows out of biological and ontological struggle, it neither precedes nor continues, but is linked to it and is coupled to it, like a nest of vipers.

  The word ‘divine’ refers, perhaps, to the end. But the divine is born only from the physical, concrete, practical ardour of men. It appears only if a humble, harrowing, but proud struggle has begun.

  The physical and mental aptitude for struggle, the possession of a clear doctrine, the qualities of courage and resistance — are, for the moment, the stuff of fire and tragedy, far more important than any spiritualist soothsaying. Mens sana in corpore sano: a healthy mind in a healthy body. Let us not forget that Socrates was a hoplite and Xenophon a military magistrate.