Why We Fight

by Guillaume Faye

  (see chaos, ethnic; ethnomasochism; people; xenophilia)

  * * *

  Region, regionalism

  A region is an ethno-geographic sub-grouping of a far larger bloc to which it belongs. Though not constituting a state or a people in itself, the region is a place of enrootment and a place of irreplaceable identity, especially in Europe.

  Europe’s regions are fundamental to the Continent. An entity of human scale, the region is heir to a long history that has fostered an identity, a sense of place and belonging, a community that is a counter-weight to an anonymous cosmopolitanism and a bureaucratic centralism.

  The regions (beyond the geographic variations provoked by centuries of hazard) represent Europe’s constituent parts, her basic elements, which have made and unmade the various empires and nation-states marking her history.

  The region, as such, is the polycentric expression of the global unity of European peoples. It’s an organic sub-group, an internal division, a reserve of ethnic memory — that helps avoid the fragile rigidity of national ‘blocs’. An example of this can be seen in the fact that non-European aliens readily call themselves ‘French’ or ‘Belgian’, etc., on the basis of the catastrophic jus soli, but it’s far more difficult to call themselves ‘Scots’, ‘Burgundians’, ‘Sicilians’, ‘Bavarians’, etc.

  For ethnographic reasons, globalisation can never weaken the regional imperative. Only reinforce it.

  *

  Pierre Vial sums up the question in this way: ‘Regional identities remain living and demand constant affirmation. This is obviously truer in some regions more than in others. To deny an Alsatian identity, a Breton identity, a Basque identity, or a Corsican identity is an absurdity, a non-starter . . . There’s no need to confine ourselves to the present state of France, with its cold, rigid system . . . We favour a European confederation resting on a recognition and an affirmation of the Europe of the peoples. Europe of a hundred flags?[223] Perhaps even more. In any case, we favour a Europe with flesh and blood fatherlands (patries charnelles)’.[224] In endeavouring to organically (imperially) reconcile the ideas of regional enrootment, the historic nation, and Europe, Vial continues, ‘It’s not a matter of denigrating French identity, as bad-faith critics assert, but rather of giving this identity another chance of being realised . . . We need to affirm an identity that integrates two imperatives: to transcend the nation-state from on high, through Europe — and to transcend it from below, through the region’. Vial appeals to a ‘Confederated French Republic’ (the Sixth Republic), conceived on the model of the German Länder,[225] but also on the basis of the Spanish experience, the Swiss canton, etc. He adds, ‘It’s within a regionalist framework that we’ll be able to return to the political — that is, to being citizens who act directly on their own destiny. It will be a beautiful application of subsidiarity’. He concludes by affirming the necessity of regrouping in the future all flesh and blood fatherlands (patries charnelles), all organic regional entities, of Indo-European origin, within a single continental Eurosiberian bloc, imbued with a destiny of power obviously unrelated to the parody of Europe now represented by the European Union.

  *

  This vision of things — the sole realistic and ambitious strategy of European defence — rests on the following principles:

  1. There exist regions with strong identities and ones with weaker identities. Identity nevertheless constructs itself. It’s not simply a heritage, it’s also a work. The organic, imperial principle is not mechanistic.

  2. The ‘regionalism of the Left’, this Trotskyite and globalist imposture, is no different from the cosmopolitan centralism of the Jacobins. Such ‘regionalists’ are as supportive of the present colonising immigration as Parisian universalists.

  3. Regional attachment is not secessionist. It’s inscribed in a far larger ensemble, infused with power and sovereignty: ‘The union makes us strong’. A central state (not a centralising state), imbued with a will and a project, is now more than ever necessary.

  4. The ‘French problem’ won’t be solved in an emotional manner, but constructively. A regionalist re-enrootment, moreover, will do nothing to threaten French cultural identity, just as it hasn’t in Germany, Spain, Poland, Russia, etc.

  5. In the long term, regions might replace the present départements,[226] heritage of the Revolution’s abstract, identity-destroying rationalism.

  6. It’s necessary to denounce the ambiguities of certain regionalists: Savoyan autonomists, for example, who, in imitation of their Breton counterparts, accord their regional identity to all residents, even non-Europeans.

  *

  The region is no panacea, no miraculous solution; it’s a fluid but undeniable reality, marking a well-identified territory. Regionalisation will enable the central state to better govern and, paradoxically, to strengthen its political function by reducing its preoccupation with local administration. The efficacy of America’s federal state system, for example, is partly due to the fact that it leaves interior administration to the states, which enables it to better defend the Union’s federal power.

  (see enrootment; Europe; Eurosiberia; fatherland; nation)

  * * *

  Resistance and Reconquest

  Faced with their colonisation by peoples from the South and by Islam, Europeans, objectively speaking, are in a situation of resistance. Like Christian Spain between the Eighth and Fifteenth centuries, their project is one of reconquest.

  These two notions of resistance and reconquest are intimately linked. Resistance today is called ‘racism’ or ‘xenophobia’, just as native resisters to colonial occupation were formerly characterised as ‘terrorists’. This is a matter of diabolising and incapacitating those who, in good faith, become conscious of the tragic reality confronting their people and seek thus to resist their subjugation and extinction.

  *

  A semantic reversal is in order here: those — under the anti-racist banner of pseudo-humanitarianism — who favour the immigrant replacement population, whether they’re politicians or self-proclaimed philosophers, ought, henceforth, to be called ‘collaborators’.

  Reconquest will not become a conscious necessity until people feel their backs against the wall, not until tragedy knocks at the door and they sense its urgency.

  Not until the state is visibly colonised by aliens and Muslims (which won’t be long for reasons of demographics and enfranchisement) will there be revolt and resistance. For revolt and resistance arise only in the face of a power seen as alien and illegitimate. For the moment, civil society alone is affected and power still appears to be in native hands — thus no serious resistance is yet possible. But soon, in the course of things, aliens and Muslims will have their own municipalities, legislative deputies, and ministers. It’s of some urgency, then, that we start preparing and organising the resistance — by every means possible, politically and metapolitically — so as to ready ourselves for that moment when the alien colonisers start taking over the public powers.

  *

  One of the principal bases of reconquest will evidently consist in Europe’s demographic redressing, even though the situation is already far gone, since nothing at the moment will halt the massive influx of immigrants and naturalisations, as well as the influx coming from the maternity wards (a third of ‘French’ births!) — all of which, of course, threatens a veritable ethnic deluge. This has got to be one of central programmatic issues of every conscious political party.

  Another key component of reconquest will obviously be that of liberation. The repatriation of aliens can only be accomplished under the auspices of a revolutionary crisis. Many of our false sages claim that it’s already too late, that the aliens will never leave, that the best that can be expected is a more reasonable form of ethnic cohabitation. Hence, their tall tales of ‘integration’ and peaceful ‘communitarianism’. This view, however, stems from a renunciation of hope, from an acceptance of Europe’s death, from blindness and suicidal propensities —
all in the name of a false intellectualist realism that consistently misjudges history.

  Those fatalistically accepting the inescapable and growing presence of the alien masses actually do so on the basis not of reasoned analysis, but simply because they lack ethnic consciousness. What they see as the ‘impossibility’ of reconquest and repatriation comes, as such, from an indifference to their own people and destiny, not from any objective study of the matter.

  *

  On the contrary: nothing tells us what tomorrow will bring. To attend to the imperatives of resistance and reconquest is the only veritable realism. What seems improbable today will perhaps tomorrow appear certain, as the unthinkable becomes thinkable and the unrealisable realisable. Quite simply because the irruption of an emergency completely changes both what is given and what is valued.

  *

  Here are a few such examples: the Spanish Reconquista, the French abandonment of Algeria, the recovery of Alsace-Lorraine,[227] the Soviet collapse of 1991, Germany’s defeat in 1945, its reunification in 1991, and, more immediately, Islam’s transformation into France’s main religion: all these examples were reputedly unthinkable according to ‘analyses’ made before their occurrence! There’s no determined course to history — or rather its course is determined by the idealism of the will — in tandem with brutal changes brought on by crises or civil wars.

  *

  We cannot, of course, imagine exactly how the reconquest will occur. We think with the blinders of present-day reality. The essential, though, is to affirm the spirit of resistance, now and everywhere to come — summoning the idea-force of reconquest, even if we still don’t know how it is to be realised. The Africanisation and Islamisation of Europe are simply unacceptable and must be seen as something entirely provisional. We also shouldn’t forget that resistance and reconquest will need to be organised at the European level, and not merely nationally.

  (see colonisation; consciousness, ethnic; idea)

  * * *

  Revolution

  A violent reversal of the political situation, following the advent of a crisis and the intervention of an active minority.

  Marxism’s imposture has been in proclaiming itself revolutionary, while pursuing a revolution, like the French Revolution before it, that followed a pre-existing ideological and political system. A true revolution is metamorphic, that is, it’s a radical transformation of values. The sole revolutionary of the modern era is Nietzsche, because he alone sought ‘a revaluation of all values’ — unlike Marx, who simply favoured a ‘dialectical’ evolution of bourgeois society. It’s necessary for this reason to be extremely distrustful of the attraction certain intellectuals have for those tendencies associated with the German Conservative Revolution of the inter-war period,[228] which may have resisted modernity, but in the most reactionary way — since it implicitly advocated a return to the ‘old world’, to ‘old values’, and to a nostalgic resurrection of the ‘past’.

  ‘Revolution’ (like ‘people’) is a term that horrifies the former revolutionaries of 1968, who now occupy important political and media positions and who have become (to use a Marxist term that they once used against their adversaries) the system’s watchdogs.

  *

  For Europeans, revolution represents a radical abolition, a reversal, of the present system and the construction of a totally new political reality, based on the following principles:

  1. An ethnocentric Eurosiberia, free of Islam and the Third World’s colonising masses.

  2. Continental autarky, in rupture with globalism’s free-trade doctrines. This implies adopting the criteria of an organic economy — industrially and financially, as well as socially and ecologically.

  3. A definitive break with the present organisation of the European Union — ungovernable, devoid of sovereignty and influence, lacking a credible system of defence, and indifferent to the peoples who compose it — a break for the sake of a radically different Europe.

  4. A general recourse to an inegalitarian society that is disciplined, authentically democratic, aristocratic, and inspired by Greek humanism.

  We are far from all this. This is why only a major crisis — the convergence of catastrophes — has the capacity to unblock the situation and to revive our sclerotic civilisation. We have long since passed the point of no 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’.

  (see autarky of great spaces; economy, organic)

  * * *

  Right to Difference

  The right of every people, ethnos, culture, nation, group, or community to live according to its own norms and traditions, irrespective of ideology or globalist homogenisation.

  It’s an ambiguous notion, like that of ‘ethnopluralism’. Conceptually, the ‘right to difference’ refers back to the differentialist theory, which holds that every people, every ethnic group, is incompatible. It assumes, as such, the doctrine of ‘each in his own home’, the refusal to mix, and a critique of Western and American cultural homogenisation, with its assimilationist policies. Doctrinally, the ‘right to difference’ can also be used to oppose the economic myth of ‘development’ and the Westernisation of the Third World’s traditional subsistence economy.

  From this perspective, differentialism is positive. There are nevertheless numerous possible derivatives of it that are less than positive. First off, to what degree is ‘difference’ to be tolerated? Is it acceptable that agriculturalists in tropical countries destroy primal rainforests? How tolerable are harmful social practices carried out in the name of difference? The concept of difference seems truly ambiguous.

  *

  To demand the ‘right to difference’ for Europeans in Europe also seems a bit much, as if they were already a minority in need of protecting! This perversion of the ‘right to difference’ came initially from the multi-racialist ideologues of the Nouvelle Droite, who accept the presence of alien communities and, terrorised by accusations of racism and ethnocentrism, defend the ‘right to difference’ for both ethnic Europeans and aliens residing in Europe . . . This ploy, however, didn’t quite pay off, for despite their best effort, the good Monsieur Taguieff,[229] master of anti-racism, accused them of a ‘differentialist racism’! In any case, Europeans in Europe don’t need to demand the right to difference, but rather the monopolistic right to exist according to their own model and their own civilisation, with minorities allowed but a minimum right. To say this is to affirm the good sense practiced by every people. In the classical Greek humanist treatment of ‘differences’, foreigners were accorded certain civil rights, in exchange for their cooperation.

  The ‘communitarian’ adepts of the right to difference are now demanding that aliens be given the same rights as native citizens (especially the right to vote) and, at the same time, that they be allowed to conserve the customs of their community. This is not the right to difference but the right to privilege. This is the contradictory position taken by the Greens, the Trotskyites of the PS,[230] and the ‘modern’ Right of Alain Madelin[231] and others — the first two out of ideological fanaticism, the third out of a cowardly opportunism.

  Within a specific political entity and within a single people, the right to difference is never an absolute doctrine, tolerant of every difference, whatever it may be. The ‘right to difference’ risks becoming the ‘right to tolerate everything’. As evident in every multi-racial, multicultural, multi-confessional society, social harmony is impossible because differences remain too important. Even overly diverse mores are inimical to a group’s equilibrium. Heterogeneity is tolerable only when subordinated to the organic principle of homogeneity.

  To speak, for example, of the ‘homosexual community’ constitutes a dangerous trend. Pushed further, this right to difference leads to tribalism, social dissolution, and thus to ‘de-civilisation’.

  In the case of Islam, integration-assimilation (the applicati
on of the right to difference) is simply impossible. Once it achieves a certain force in the state, Islam will no longer tolerate peaceful cohabitation with Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, animism — not to mention paganism and atheism. It’s absurd to demand the right to difference for those who would deny it to others.

  The political and social harmony of a country supposes a minimum of ethnic and cultural unity. Said differently, the right to difference is a concept valid at the geopolitical level (each in his own home, each within his own boundaries), but invalid domestically, within a specific political unity. As partisans of the right to difference, who assume integration is possible without assimilation, communitarians ignore the lessons of history. They believe in the possibility (following the failure of the assimilationist melting pot) of an egalitarian society of juxtaposed castes.

  These differentialist theories defended by the extreme Left, American liberals, French ultra-liberals, and certain Right-wing intellectuals are extremely dangerous: they have passed from an egalitarianism of assimilation to an egalitarianism of juxtaposition, which is one of the worst forms of egalitarian doctrine. As such, the ‘right to difference’, through a conceptual perversion, ideologically leads to a justification for homophilia (pro-homosexual favouritism), to legitimising ‘positive discrimination’ [232] (affirmative action) and racial quotas favouring alien populations, and to the most grotesque forms of feminism.

  Diverted from its original objective (the right of every people to conserve its identity and homogeneity), the right to difference becomes a weapon in the war against Europe’s ethnic cohesion and identity. Starting out as pro-identitarian, the right to difference thus eventually becomes anti-identitarian.