A Global Coup

by Guillaume Faye

  In Critical Utopia (‘The Sovereignty of Nations and the “Trojan Asses”’, July 2003), Claude Karnoouh and Bruno Drweski commented on the submissive stance espoused by Central Europe (meaning by former communist countries and the various candidates for EU-membership) with regard to the American empire, an empire that intends to force our continent into submission using its gullible Trojan horses, or rather its ‘Trojan asses’. The authors point out that unlike Europe, ‘the USA adheres to an actual statal policy’. Implicitly criticising the lack of means and strategic will behind Franco-German ‘multilateralism’ and the rebellion against Washington (which is restricted to pure and simple rhetoric), they state:

  Globally speaking, there is thus no alternative strategy to that of the American hyperpower and the PESC project remains, at least for the time being, a mere passing idea that allows the EU to garner further sympathies, without however increasing the latter’s efficacy as a counterweight. At a time when the EU (and most countries that constitute it) has not yet adopted a clear strategic approach allowing it to break with America’s imperialistic hegemony, American imperialism has, by contrast, embraced a strategy aiming to take control of other nations through various means such as war, economic pressure, political coups, the bribing of “decision-makers”, the creation of entire networks of influence agents and propaganda, and so on.

  Their analysis is indeed a sound one, but it could never justify those nations’ idle-handedness. Moral condemnations have no value whatsoever.

  E. Cultural Imperialism?

  The most hilarious attitude is the one that typifies those who stomp their feet while vehemently protesting against American cultural domination and the ‘cultural war’ waged upon us by the US, declaring themselves to be fighting for a French ‘cultural exception’. Within this single opprobrium, they confuse the American way of life and America’s ‘mass subculture’. It would all be credible if their pious condemnations were supported with acts. Most of the time, however, the accusers themselves indulge in the American way of life, in a display of monumental hypocrisy, which is (particularly) true of the individuals that adulate Tradition and express contempt for consumeristic materialism. Their own lifestyle thus contradicts their imprecations.

  On the other hand, before they proceed to scream out their protests at ‘American cultural imperialism’ (which is admittedly a blatant fact), Europeans had better avoid sinking deeper into cultural and artistic decadence. They have done this to a greater degree than the Americans, since Europe is truly a beacon in matters of degenerate art (my spreading of this expression is bound to make me incur the wrath of the politically correct), while America is but a modest semaphore. The utter depths of ‘faecal culture’ (plastic arts, literature, the theatre, cinematography, etc.), anti-aestheticism, pretentious worthlessness and masochistic subversion can unfortunately be found more in Europe than the US.

  It is a tragedy when one determines that American culture resists decadence more effectively than our contemporary European culture. It is as if Europe held a fascination for ‘stooping ever lower’. Under these circumstances, would it not be preferable to contradict and counter American cultural imperialism instead of merely denouncing it? Would it perhaps not be wiser to raise the level of our European productions and increase their appeal? Who else is to blame but us if American films dominate Europe? The same is true of television series and games.

  The same rules apply in the field of cultural war as in matters of economic and technological warfare, for actions speak louder than words. The European brain drain towards the USA is not due to the Great Satan’s ‘imperialism’, but the result of European incompetence (according to a report published by the Economic Analysis Council, the rate is as high as 50 % of all engineering and business university graduates).

  As part of the competitive historical struggle opposing our world’s civilisations, peoples and nations, it is all a matter of production efficacy and palpable achievements. Moralistic and anti-American imprecations are simply ridiculous and could never succeed in convincing the public to boycott Hollywood and preventing our creative minds from crossing the ocean.

  Owing to subsidisation processes and ideological preferences, artistic and cultural dregs may well hold sway in Europe. In France itself, it is our taxpayers that finance both low-rate films and pretentious, morbid junk that will never find its own audience. This could never happen in the USA. The dominance of the American culture stems from its epic and popular aspects and its ability to globally evade the blurry and unfounded intellectualism that characterises sponsored European authors and artists. In the eyes of the masses, this is precisely what accounts for its superiority. It gets worse, however: it is, in fact, to American novels and films that we owe the popularisation of Europe’s ancestral sagas during the past 40 years, and not to our own European productions. As for ‘mass American subculture’, as it is often called, it challenges us and demands but one response: that of outdoing it, attracting our own crowds and refraining from digging an impassable divide between ‘popular culture’ and ‘elitist culture’. The grandest cultural works have always been popular.

  ***

  One of the leitmotivs characterising OHAA (Obsessive and Hysterical Anti-Americanism) is the notion of ‘American subculture’. Once again, even if it is not a completely mistaken attitude, it is nonetheless still an exaggeration. One thus proceeds through reductionism, as common sense is blinded by scorn. There is, of course, an audio-visual and televisual discharge connected to mass bewilderment, especially in the case of youths. It is channelled through everything that we are familiar with, meaning everything that has been extensively denounced and analysed everywhere (including the US) and founded upon sport spectacles, TV programmes, music, video games, pornography, and so on. Ultimately, however, both Europe and Japan participate in this subculture as much as America itself. It is impossible for anyone to demonstrate that the USA is the actual driving force behind this phenomenon or that it attempts to impose anything at all through force. Crédit Lyonnais, Vivendi Universal and various Japanese banks all lined up to finance Hollywood. Neither TF1’s prime time programmes, nor those of private French music radio stations have been defined by American interests.

  Furthermore, by criticising this subculture (one that has, in fact, been greatly inspired by America), one tends to quickly forget that the USA has also been, in a very broad sense, responsible for an elitist and high-quality cultural production. The fact of considering America to be a cultural desert that only floods the world with stupidities is not very wise indeed. Moreover, French intellectuals belonging to both the Left and the Right (with the latter imitating the former) have no other option but to increase their references to their American counterparts. How sad it is to notice that, on all possible levels, transatlantic cultural creativity is endowed with greater vivacity than the European one. This is not due to some cynical chokehold orchestrated by the USA; the real cause lies rather in a sort of anaemia that has stricken Europe’s imagination.

  When OHAA supporters explain that both the Muslim-Arab ancestral culture (with all the dogmas and narrowmindedness that Voltaire once mocked) and native African cultures are far superior to everything that America produces, it is no longer an analysis or an opinion that one is dealing with, but an imprecation. How extraordinary it is for us to listen to the babbling of formatted intellectuals telling us that Disneyland is a deculturating factor and a catastrophe (for our European identity, of course), but that the ever more rapid Islamisation of our lands is far less of a serious problem, an unimportant issue or even a blessing. I am not particularly fond of Disneyland, MacDonald’s, or American television series, but let us not lose sight of our common sense here: they are not even remotely as harmful to our identity as the blatant invasion at the hands of Islam and the Third World; and the accelerating cultural impregnation which Islam and the various immigrant populations subject us to smothers our identities with much greater efficacy and violence than ‘Ameri
canisation’ ever could, since the latter remains a veneer.

  Chapter VI: Islamism and Americanism

  A. The USA Versus Islam: The Weakness of a Factitious Power

  It is obvious that the Iraqi Baathist regime was an absolutely classic and age-old example of oriental despotism disguised as a ‘republic’; that Saddam Hussein modelled himself according to Stalin; that Saddam’s power was of a tribal nature (that of Tikrit Sunnites); and that his two sons, Uday and Qusay (the alleged heir), would have been worthy of the court of Sardanapalus. As part of its numerous, successive and contradictory justifications of its Iraqi campaign (known as ‘Freedom for Iraq’), the USA claimed that it was striving to ensure liberty and democracy in Mesopotamia.

  Why does it not attempt to implement its messianic will to China, Kuwait, Algeria and especially Black Africa? The answer is too obvious to be formulated. However, beyond its interested cynicism, America is honest in its liberty- and democracy-motivated messianism. As understood by Giorgio Locchi, American imperialism is founded on the almost religious and global implementation of its civilisational model, which completely disregards the ethnic and cultural particularities that define various peoples. For the latter’s sake, the USA intends to meddle in the affairs of others on a permanent basis, an approach which, from a long-term perspective, can only be a source of trouble for the Americans themselves.

  ***

  In spite of having adopted Hobbes’ principle of power, the ruling Republican neoconservatives have not gone all the way. They persist in their chimeric desire to convert other civilisations in a manner that would ultimately shape the entire world in accordance with the American system.

  And this is precisely where one realises that there is nothing imperial about the NAI, since it is not Machiavellian at all. Instead, it is rooted in naïve utopianism. A genuine form of imperialism would tolerate differences and would not long to impose its own morality on a global scale. It would be content to dominate, without attempting to change political regimes for ethical reasons. The USA claims to be ‘democratising’ the Muslim Middle-East, which is an absolute impossibility, since the latter’s ancestral traditions are autocratic, theocratic and tribal in essence and not democratic. The Romans had greater respect for the religion of conquered peoples.

  Just like the French republic in its longing for the creation of a ‘secular Islam’, the American republic intends to compel the Islamic Middle-East to conform to its Protestant worldview. It is a purely childish, utopian attitude. Both the foolish cowboy and the French intellectual preacher pretend that they could actually model Islam — one of the most powerful human civilisations — in harmony with their ‘democracy’, which they believe to be both universal and timeless. Islam’s entire socio-political philosophy and sacredness, however, rest upon totalitarianism (which is not to be understood pejoratively), unconditional obedience to immutable ‘divine’ precepts and the demonisation of any and all free will.

  The American dream is to have the whole world reflect America’s image and for cultures to restrict themselves to simple folklore, a folklore that is subordinate to the consumeristic and democratic way of life. Alas, there is nothing folkloric about Islam, which embodies a specific lifestyle and thought system whose roots go very deep.

  The examples of Germany and Japan, both of which were forcefully ‘democratised’, remain embedded in the American unconscious. But this recipe cannot be applied to Muslim peoples, simply because, in its central concept of Jamahiriyah, Islam fails to comprehend the notion of general will and displays a preference for mobilising the masses of Muslim believers around a Calif, a leader shrouded in a halo of mysticism.

  ***

  Faced with Muslim peoples, puritanical and naïve America has come up against both a granite boulder (represented by Islam’s superstitious masses) and the oriental lime of local rulers, who are always willing to compromise and surrender to corruption. The Arabs obviously feel humiliated, especially following the military venture in Iraq. They have long been aware of their own material powerlessness and structural inability to even come close to Western techno-economic and military capacities (as have many peoples in Third World countries). However, the USA is delusional in its belief that the sole historical source of power is of a material nature. Muslim peoples are focused on an entirely different domain, one that will truly pay off in the long term: their own demographic dynamism and their simplistic religion’s power to attract, a religion which can resolve any issues that may arise.

  The USA seems to have claimed victory in the Iraqi campaign, as if it were a filmed spectacle. Nevertheless, it is losing the war against Islam, which is rapidly seeping into its soil (and the European one as well).

  B. Islamophilia, an Inadequate Weapon Against America

  At a time when many chose to embrace Americanomania (even though they have, in the meantime, submitted to anti-American hysteria), I was among the first people in ‘Identitarian’ milieus to warn against the dangers of Americanomorphic mass culture. I nonetheless feel that this ‘American subculture’, which was initially denounced by the neo-Marxists of the Frankfurt school back in the 1950s, is far less of a threat to us that the mental Islamism and general Muslim worldview taking root in Europe.

  The first reason for this is that the Muslim worldview is literally (and not pejoratively) ‘totalitarian’, addressing all of society, from the elites to the commoners, from the educated to the uneducated, without any distinction. By contrast, American ‘mass subculture’ only affects those who are willing to succumb to it. Its impact is admittedly powerful, yet remains superficial and purely distractive.

  The latter cause stems from the former: the Islamic worldview encompasses all aspects of life, regardless of whether they are spiritual, intellectual or material. It has an answer to everything, keeping the individual in a state of enslavement from which all notion of free will is excluded. It is therefore deep, since it enroots its dogmas into the utmost depths of the soul, which makes it similar to Marxism, but with a heavier and more permeating impact as a result of an omnipresent divine dimension. In contrast, mental Americanisation does not affect the deeper aspects of the individual, nor does it formulate any social and philosophical prescriptions. It is both disorderly and pellicular. It is akin to grime that is deposited upon a surface but can still be cleaned, whereas Islamic impregnation resembles indelible ink or blood stains that have been completely absorbed by a fabric.

  Despite the global spreading of the Americanomorphic subculture, its ‘non-lethal’ character is due to its shallowness and inherent disorder, perhaps even to its stupidity. It renders imbeciles even more imbecilic, hardly affecting the elites, if at all. It does not convey any message, nor a coherent worldview, restricting its role to audio-visual flashes.

  On the other hand, the spreading of the Islamic worldview has far more dire consequences. Islam’s worldview is neither stupid, nor shallow, but merely simplistic. Manichean and binary (with everything having a Good and Evil aspect), it confines the mind to a sort of straightjacket that fully excludes all doubt, experience, free judgement and curiosity. Any and every form of reasoning is prohibited to the benefit of dogma and gnosis. Hence the impossibility to achieve any genuine mental creativity, a creativity that has been replaced with mental orbiting around the Koran and the Hadiths, i.e. the famed sacred texts which constitute an endless plugging of affirmations and imprecations proscribing any and all possible discussion. The result is that all entrapped minds end up like a group of asses revolving around the stake to which they have been tied.

  Mental Americanism is devoid of such a dimension, limiting itself to the level of fashion. And we all know that no fashion is long-lasting. Cultural Americanisation is weed-like and easy to outroot, never impacting the soil’s fertility, whereas Islamisation is a source of pollution that seeps into the fertile soil, transforming the land into a barren desert.

  ***

  The first stupid mistake made by Islamophiles (especi
ally intellectual converts, who have succumbed to mental bedazzlement) is that they imagine their ‘Islam’ to be an anti-American weapon, when the truth is that:

  1) The Manichean roots of the Puritan civilisation are close to Islam’s;

  2) In its geopolitical approach, the NAI does not attempt in any way to hinder the Islamic expansion, but, on the contrary, to facilitate the Islamisation of Europe.

  In fact, the love which these intellectuals feel for Islam is not merely motivated by ‘Islam’ itself (a religion that even converts know little about), but also by anti-Judaism and a visceral and unfounded anti-American attitude.

  The deception practiced by the Islamophilic milieu lies of course in the fact that, using a most scandalous type of historical manipulation, it claims that an alliance between Europe, the Third World and Islam against the Great Satan is absolutely indispensable. There is an allegedly profound affinity between the European continent and the Muslim-Arab world. This viewpoint is untenable and founded upon a blatant disregard for the following facts:

  1) Ever since the 8th century, the relations between the above-mentioned world and Europe have always been sanguinary and conflictual. Islam has always acted as the aggressor (the Muslim invasion of Spain, the events in the Balkans, 800 years of bloody pirate raids, etc.). All Europeans have ever done is defend themselves. As for European colonialism, it was beneficial to the Muslim civilisation and a grave charitable mistake on our part. There is no need for me to demonstrate the obvious.