As for ‘regional peoples’, it’s necessary to oppose Left-wing regionalists, self-professed anti-Jacobins and anti-globalists, who unhesitatingly accept the concept of French or American jus soli — who confuse citizens and residents, and who recognise as Bretons, Alsatians, Corsicans, etc., anyone (even of non-European origin) who lives in these regions and chooses to accept such an identity.
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In belonging to a people, its members are emotionally inclined to define themselves as such, which implies political affiliation. For this reason, we say that a people exists at that point where biological, territorial, cultural, and political imperatives come together. But in no case does mere cultural or linguistic attachment suffice in making a people, if they have no common biological roots. Alien immigrants from people X who are installed on the territory of people Y — even if they adopt cultural elements of their host people — are not a part of Y. As De Gaulle thought, there might be minor exceptions for small numbers of compatible (White) minorities, capable of being assimilated, but this could never be the case for, say, French West Indians.
Similarly, in defining the notion of a people, territorial or geopolitical considerations must also be taken into account. A people is not a diaspora: the Jews felt obliged to reconquer Palestine as their ‘promised land’ because, as Theodor Herzl[204] argued, ‘without a promised land, the Jews are just a religious diaspora, a culture, a union, but not a people’.
There’s a good deal of talk today, on the Left and the Right, about people being ‘deterritorialised’. In reality, there’s nothing of the kind. Every healthy people, even if they possess an important diaspora (Chinese, Arabs, Indians, etc.), maintains close relations with its fatherland.
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Modernist gurus have long claimed that the future belongs not to peoples, but to humanity conceived as a single people. Again, there’ll be nothing of the kind. Despite globalisation and in reaction to it, the Twenty-first century will more than ever be a century of distinct peoples. Only Europeans, submerged in the illusions of their decadence, imagine that blood-based peoples will disappear, to be replaced by a miscegenated ‘world citizen’. In reality what is at risk of disappearing are Europeans. Tomorrow will be no twilight of peoples.
On the other hand, the twilight of several peoples is already possible. One often forgets that Amerindians or Egyptians have disappeared — hollowed out internally and overrun. For history is a cemetery of peoples — of weak peoples — exhausted and resigned.
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A caution is necessary here: Right and Left-wing theoreticians of ‘ethnopluralism’, opposed to humanity’s homogenisation, speak of ‘the cause of peoples’, as if every people must be conserved. In reality, the system that destroys peoples[205] — the title of one of my books that was misunderstood by certain intellectuals — only threatens unfit peoples, i.e., present-day Europeans. It also threatens those residu[206] peoples, whose fate is of interest only to museum-keepers. It seems perfectly stupid and utopian to believe that every people can be conserved in history’s formaldehyde. What a pacifistic egalitarian vision.
The main threat to the identity and existence of great peoples occurs, in contrast, through the conjunction of deculturation and the colonising invasion of alien peoples — which we’re presently experiencing. The Western globalist ‘system’ will never threaten strong peoples. Are Arabs, Chinese, or Indians threatened? On the contrary. It reinforces their identity and their desire to conquer, by provoking their reaction to it.
The people in danger — largely because of its own failings — is our people, for reasons as much biological as cultural and strategic. That’s why it’s necessary to replace the egalitarian ideology of ‘the cause of peoples’ with the ‘cause of our people’.
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There are three possible positions: first, peoples don’t exist, or no longer exist — it’s an obsolete category — only humanity counts (the thesis of universalistic egalitarianism); second, all peoples ought to exist and be conserved (the utopian — also egalitarian — ethnopluralist position — completely inapplicable to our age); and third, only strong, wilful peoples can subsist for long historical periods — periods of selection in which only the most apt survive (the voluntarist, realist, inegalitarian thesis). We obviously support the third position.
What’s essential is reappropriating the term ‘people’ and progressively extending it to the entire Eurosiberian Continent. The present understanding of ‘European’ by the reigning ideology at Brussels is inspired by French Jacobin ideology. This ideology makes no reference to an ethno-historical Great European people, only to a mass of disparate residents inhabiting European territory. This tendency needs to be radically replaced.
We propose that European peoples become historical subjects again and cease being historical objects. In the tragic century that’s coming, it’s especially crucial that Europeans become conscious of the common dangers they face and that, henceforth, they form a self-conscious community of destiny. This is well and truly a matter of forging a ‘new alliance’ that — through resurrection, metamorphosis, and historical transfiguration — will lead to a refounding of a Great European people and, in the midst of decline, succeed — not without pain, of course — in giving birth again to the phoenix.
(see Eurosiberia; nation; populism; region)
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People, Long-Living; short-living people
A people that desires and knows how to preserve itself in history, ensure its biological line, and maintain the longevity of its civilisation.
This concept comes from the philosopher Raymond Ruyer.[207] The Arabs, Chinese, Jews, Indians, and others are typical examples of such long-living peoples. Numbed by Western civilisation, which they tragically created and which has turned against them, Europeans today no longer see themselves as a long-living people. For like short-living people, they are not concerned about their ancestors or their posterity — their lineage, cultural heritage, or future. They are devoted to the cult of the immediate present, in their pursuit of small individual pleasures and in the nervous preservation of their material acquisitions.
Small peoples are destroyed by their demographic, military, and technological disadvantages. Great peoples, on the other hand, who sink into the oblivion of time, die because of anaemia, of a lack of will — despite the apparent force of their actually fragile civilisation. This was the destiny of the Incas, the Aztecs, the Egyptians, and others. A long-living people is characterised by the following qualities: demographic vigour, collective ethnic consciousness, popular solidarity, and a common spiritual ideal. A long-living people possesses deep biological roots, a memory and common history, an idea of the divine and a project. This is everything that Western civilisation lacks, since it can’t even project itself five years into the future. All this is fit for reconstruction.
(see history)
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Personality, Creative
The superior type of man who mobilises and leads his fellows, imbuing them with a goal and a project.
Humanity is divided into two types, as numerous psychologists have noted: the ‘creative personalities’ and the generic human. The latter imitate and reproduce social behaviours and are led only by disciplines external to themselves, by enthusiasms forged by others, by norms that are learned. The first type, the creative personality, is far rarer, imbued with superior capacities. They are their own master, they are self-disciplined and creative.
History is nothing but the fertilisation of peoples by their creative personalities — by their political leaders, poets, artists, spiritual masters, philosophers, inventors, warriors, or entrepreneurs. The very notion of a creative personality affronts the dominant egalitarianism. For it implies that human societies are not haphazard mechanisms, but force fields, dominated by wills and talents, whose advances always come from exceptional energies and intuitions.
Creative personalities exist at every level of the social organism, even the most modest. T
his notion has nothing to do with ‘class’ and even less with monetary wealth. In no case must the creative personality be confused with a ‘bourgeois elite’. It can appear in the most unexpected realms. It doesn’t expect success, for it’s often disdained in its lifetime. It’s the seed that fertilises the soil. Sometimes, it even reshapes history.
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Present Western society is decadent because it tries to eliminate its creative personalities — for the sake of bureaucrats or ideological conformists. It’s an old story, well known to Rome in its decline, but also a struggle lost in advance. No social system can abolish the power of fascination that the creative personality exerts over the generic human, the man at the base. Molière, Mozart, Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Van Gogh, or Céline are not forgettable. But the system tries to make us forget them — however in vain.
The creative personality is animated by what the Greeks called poeisis, poetry, the ‘power to create’. Its dimensions are both political and aesthetic, though the two can be the same. The creative personality possesses both a force that comes from below — telluric, genetic, ancestral, Dionysian — and by a force that comes from on high — what the ancients called ‘inspiration’, that Apollonian energy of unknown origin. The creative personality can be defined by a single word: enthusiasm — which, etymologically, means ‘divine possession’.
(see aristocracy; born leader; elite)
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Philia
Aristotelian concept signifying ‘friendship’ — ethno-cultural consensus between members of the same City.
For Aristotle, democracy is possible only within homogeneous ethnic groups, while despots have always reigned over highly fragmented societies.
A multi-ethnic society is thus necessarily anti-democratic and chaotic, for it lacks philia, this profound, flesh-and-blood fraternity of citizens. Tyrants and despots divide and rule, they want the City divided by ethnic rivalries. The indispensable condition for ensuring a people’s sovereignty accordingly resides in its unity. Ethnic chaos prevents all philia from developing. A citizenry is formed on the basis of proximity — or it is not formed at all. The abstract, integrationist doctrines of the French Revolution envisage man as simply a ‘man’, a resident, a consumer. Civic spirit, like public safety, social harmony, and solidarity, is based not on education or persuasion alone, but on cultural unanimity — on common values, lifestyles, and innate behaviours.
For more on this crucial notion, Yvan Blot’s L’héritage d’Athena[208] ought to be consulted.
(see democracy; fatherland)
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Politics, Grand Politics
An activity (the political) or a function (politics) whose object is the longevity and defence, in every domain, of a City (whose Greek etymological root is polis) — that is, of a human group constituting a community of origin and destiny — whose chief function is accordingly the exercise of sovereignty.
In contemporary political philosophy, sullied with economism, the essence of the political is ‘the management of the nation’, conceived as some sort of business. This transforms the political class into a caste of careerists, similar to the apparatchiks of the former Communist regimes. A people’s destiny totally eludes the politician’s political vision, as does every other historical dimension of political activity.
The political doesn’t exist in day-to-day management or in the American pursuit of happiness. It’s also not simply the designation of the enemy, as Carl Schmitt taught, however just and instructive this designation may be. The essence of the political is above all — fundamentally — the designation of the friend — i.e., the comrade, the one belonging to the same community and sharing the same values. In this sense, it is primarily the delineation of a field of belonging. Who is on our side? Who is who? Such is the central political question.
The essence of the political is aesthetic, poetic, and historical. According to the Greek verb poeisis — to create, to make. In effect, the ultimate vocation of the political is to create — to make — a people in history. It follows that the essence of the political is not solely about economics, justice, social equilibrium, civil peace, and international security, but also architecture, ecology, the fine arts, culture, demography, biopolitics, etc.
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The political is the domain of will and sovereignty. It’s not surprising that our age does everything to destroy the political for the sake of economics or individual interest. Contemporary politicians have been depoliticised and Europe suffers from this abdication of the political, i.e., from the non-existence of the sovereign function. These politicians are the subject of jokes and the false flatteries of money and the media, but their calculations are inevitably short-term and they lack a historical project; similarly, they have no real power, which resides entirely in the hands of the financial forces.
The state itself has ceased to possess either a monopoly of power or a political will. It has ceased being a political authority in order to be a techno-bureaucratic authority. In either Brussels or Paris, it’s nothing but an administration, a corporation with short-term schedules. Functionaries or politicians — the two often being confused — act like salaried employees or corporate executives, but not like the people’s servants. Without exception, European politicians are situated somewhere between the stars of show-business and the upper echelons of corporate management. Vanity and money, but no real power. For real political power presupposes both a disinterested understanding of its exercise and a visionary spirit.
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Finally, we arrive at the notion of Grand Politics, a term fashioned by Nietzsche. It expresses the essence of the political: to inscribe and maintain a people in history, as the autonomous creator and actor of its own destiny, preserving its identity and, if possible, spurring its ascension. Grand Politics is inscribed thus in history’s longue durée, which is the opposite of the politicians’ ‘petty politics’ — which is basically presentist and non-historical. Grand Politics situates itself at that crossroad between the individual’s welfare and the people’s longevity, between pacification and power, between loyalty to tradition and ambitious innovation.
Grand Politics must henceforth take account of the following essential factors and objectives (the list is not exhaustive), which are totally ignored by French and European politicians today:
1. To confront the revival of Islam’s ancestral struggle against European peoples.
2. To check the Continent’s demographic decline and to reverse its colonisation by the Third World.
3. To ensure the economic protection of European territories.
4. To liberate Europeans from their subjugation to the Americans — to win their independence; to construct a real continental union of power with Russia and to have as their principal allies China and India.
5. To find an alternative to the present short-term, catastrophic direction of the global economy, especially in respect to ecology.
We are far from any of this. But the dramatic sanctions that will soon spring from our lack of foresight could well put things back in their rightful place.
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The political never supercedes the spiritual. But the spiritual is nothing without the political. The notion of the political supposes ideas of sovereignty and a transcendent sense of history.
(see history; sovereignty)
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Populism
The position which defends the people’s interests before that of the political class — and advocates direct democracy.
This presently pejorative term must be made positive. The prevailing aversion to populism actually expresses a covert contempt for authentic democracy. Like its corollary anti-demagoguery, anti-populism is a semantic ruse of politicians and bourgeois intellectuals — to deflect the people’s will, especially that of the modest social strata, reputedly dangerous, because they are the most nationalist.
The cosmopolitan bourgeoisie, whether of Left or Right, that presently holds power attacks ‘pop
ulism’ because it rejects direct democracy and because it’s convinced that the people is ‘politically incorrect’. On the subject of immigration, the death penalty, school discipline, fiscal policies — on numerous other subjects — it’s well known that the people’s deepest wishes (as evident in referendums and elsewhere) never, despite the incessant media propaganda, correspond to those of the government. It’s logical, then, that those who have confiscated the ‘popular will’ tend to associate populism with despotism.
From this follows suspicions about Swiss-style cantonal democracy, or the EU’s illegal sanctions against Austria for allowing the populist party, the FPÖ, into the government, though it had won the right at the polls. In actuality, populism is the true face of democracy — in the Greek sense — and anti-populism that of the present, fundamentally anti-democratic elites.
Why We Fight Page 22