Guillaume Faye - Why We Fight

Lhistoire est la ralization dides irralisables.

Guillaume Faye

A re these the last days of Europe?

Theres no hyperbole here. If major changes are not soon forthcoming, her peoples face the extinction of their civilisation and their kind. Already she is overrun by millions of alien, mainly Islamic colonisers from the Global South, who have begun to replace her native peoples and supplant her order; she is subject to an American overlord whose world system requires her de-Europeanisation and globalisation; she is misgoverned by technocrats, career politicians, and plutocratic elites indifferent to her blood and spirit. And to all this (to which much could be added), her defenders those who sense the danger and strive to resist it are disunited, at times even unaware of who or what exactly they are fighting. Within a generation, Europe may go the way of Ancient Sumer or the Incas.

Guillaume Faye the one-time enfant terrible of Frances Nouvelle Droite believes the European Resistance has the resources and energies to defeat the Continents enemies, if its various elements and tendencies should form a united front around clear ideas and a common ideology. That is, if her defenders would agree to concentrate their forces. His manifesto, and especially its metapolitical dictionary, aspire to lay the metapolitical foundations for such a unification by designating and defining the key ideas and ideology that will make it possible.

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Why We Fight (as Pourquoi nous combattons ) appeared a decade ago, in 2001.

In a few places it shows its age, but much of it seems prescient in its understanding of the challenges confronting Europes defenders and the ideas that might overcome them. These defenders, whom Faye collectively labels the Resistance, include in their ranks no-droitiers , regionalists, identitarians, traditionalists, and certain other anti-system tendencies upholding the primacy of their particular ethnic distillation of the larger European heritage. A decade after Why We Fight , these oppositional elements (the resistance) have finally begun to emerge from their political ghetto, as they hesitantly mobilise in the streets and, more confidently, merge with the national-populist formations affecting the present fate of parliamentary coalitions. Its fitting, perhaps, that the English translation of Fayes manifesto should appear in this period of rising anti-system agitation.

Influenced by the cultural/ideological forces animating the mounting opposition, Why We Fight followed a series of works that had earlier lit up the resistances imagination. These were the essays collected in LArchofuturisme (1998); the second, augmented edition of Nouveau discours la nation europenne (1999); and La Colonisation de lEurope (2000) (whose characterisation of Europes Islamisation, in anticipating 9/11 and other Muslim assaults, earned Faye and his publisher a 300,000 franc fine and a years suspended sentence).

Why We Fight would be followed by a series of similarly topical and prophetic works: Avant-guerre (2003), La Convergence des catastrophes (2004), and Le Coup dtat mondial (2004). But then, in 2007, the release of Fayes most controversial book, La Nouvelle question juive (in which the Jews place in European life was reconceived in light of the Islamic invasion), set off a heated debate in identitarian and nationalist ranks eventually bringing his role as the resistances leading advocate to an end.

If Fayes decision in the period leading up to 2007 to affiliate with the Zionist bloc in its struggle against Islam discredited him with certain identitarians, it took away nothing from his earlier contribution to the resistance which seems especially the case with Why We Fight, arguably the single best synthesis of the ideas and sensibilities animating the diverse parties and tendencies presently resisting Europes decline.

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Th e reception of Fayes 2007 book epitomises much of what has stifled and stunted the post-war history of European anti-liberalism.

Following V-E Day, the Right, like the rest of Europe, was ordered to Americanise. Joseph Stalin (whose Red Army won the all-important ground war) may have foiled U.S. efforts after 1945 to create a new world order (forcing globalists to wait until 1989), but the American conquerors nevertheless imposed their liberal-modernist system on Western and Central Europe (the system which has since evolved into the basis for the present global market order).

Traditional Right-wing formations critical of the creedal, market-centric dictates of Europes new masters would henceforth be identified with the allegedly barbaric Germans, escorted offstage, and compelled to abandon whatever anti-liberal or anti-modern sentiment still influenced them as was the case in Eastern Europe, though there the model was Russian, rather than American.

By the time the first post-war baby boomers came of age in the late 60s, it was evident that the Right (this now moderate appendage of the liberal Left) was a losing proposition, having failed not only to halt the ongoing erosion of European civilisation, but having, more shamefully, joined the American system de-Europeanising Europe betraying, in this way, the purpose of the political by failing to defend Europes identity, legitimacy, and sovereignty.

Across the Continent in the 60s and 70s, but especially in France, there emerged tendencies endeavouring to rethink the Right project as an alternative to the prevailing U.S. system (which made the circulation of capital superior to everything, including the sacred). The most successful of these alternatives was the Groupement de Recherches et dtudes pour la Civilisation Europenne (GRECE). Its project, of which Faye was an early advocate, was metapolitical: i.e., conceived as a cultural/ideological struggle against the reigning liberal values and beliefs. By means of this Gramscianism of the Right, Grcistes were to create a counter-hegemony to undermine the legitimacy of the subversive forces and thus to create a climate receptive to an anti-liberal politics of reconquest.