WRITING THE RESISTANCE

BACK TO THE FUTURE

GUILLAUME FAYE

This is the third piece in the series Writing the Resistance and, having covered apostate Right-wing powerhouse David Horowitz and inquisitive political historian Diana West, we move from America to France. Guillaume Faye was a co-founder of the nouvelle droitistes, which in the 1970s grew out of GRECE (the Groupement de Recherche et d’Études pour la Civilisation Européenne), a fractious Right-wing think-tank which birthed a minor ideological movement.

Here, we will concentrate on a major work, Archeofuturism, as well as referring to other works by Faye. For reference, the following will be used for Faye’s titles:

A – Archeofuturism

CE – The Colonisation of Europe

CC – Convergence of Catastrophes

WWF – Why We Fight

Guillaume Faye was a political ideologue with a broad vision, one which encompasses ideas familiar and agreeable to any reader of the Right, and some which seem to jar, such as his insistence that environmental disaster looms for mankind, and his championing of a European federal state, albeit one very different from the EU. Overall, however, his is an anti-Socialist, proudly Caucasian program for world redemption after what he sees as the inevitable collapse of the West.

Faye’s two major concepts are complementary. The ‘convergence of catastrophes’ refers to a synergistic collection of imminent global disasters after which Western civilisation will need to regroup and (re)discover itself, rebuilding economies and societies along lines very different from those which produced the catastrophes to begin with.

Archeofuturism, far more complex than simple conservatism, is Faye’s program for that renaissance. Faye’s ‘rebel thought’ aims at a re-assessment of the Right; ‘Against modernism, futurism. Against attachment to the past, archaism’ (A). Archeofuturism would thus be ‘a future society that combines techno-scientific progress with a return to the traditional answers that stretch into the mists of time’ (A). And this temporal bifurcation is held together by an apparent paradox. Where our current technocracy recognises only its own, tunnel-vision version of Enlightenment reason, in which all movement is forward, modernistic and progressive, Faye’s vision, Janus-like in looking backwards as well as forwards, contains a surprise element;

‘Techno-scientific and neo-archaic areas will share an inegalitarian and naturalist worldview: one informed by rationality in the case of the former, and by irrationality in the case of the latter’ (A).

This is a Nietzschean combination, one which goes back to The Birth of Tragedy, and Faye calls The Antichrist one of his formative texts. He emphasises that the first signs of the catastrophic convergence will be during the first two decades of the 21st century, which are just mathematically finishing and already have as bookends the twin towers of 9/11 and the twin viruses of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter (BLM).

With this in mind, it is tempting to see Faye as a visionary whose time has come. Both Europe and the USA, despite the best efforts of the media to disguise the fact, were undergoing financial and social crises before COVID-19 and BLM, and it is in the relation between these two power blocs that Faye seeks a key. He sees America as ‘not an opponent but a rival’ (A), but is forthright about its role;

‘The cultural hegemony of the United States and the gradual and veiled colonisation of France and Europe by the Third World are not merely the product of manipulation. We have let such things happen to us.’ (A).

However, Faye also detected change on the breeze early, writing Archeofuturism as he did in the 1990s and predicting;

‘…the imperial American republic, the leading world superpower but one whose geostrategic and cultural decline has already been “virally” programmed for the first quarter of the twenty-first century’. (A)

Faye even suspects the US of;

‘[Collusion] with the forces of Islam to divide and weaken Europe for the sake of her global empire [so that it may]… dominate the continent of Europe, destroy its ethno-cultural identity and take over its markets and techno-economic resources’. (WWF)

This animus towards America would seem to ally Faye with the traditional British Left rather than conservatism, but the genuine surprise is the ally Faye suggests for the formation of a new European bloc;

‘As history is gaining momentum, if Russia were to join us we could start working on the tremendous project of building Eurosiberia’. (A)

If this alliance looks shocking at first glance, it has a subtle logic that becomes familiar as one reads Faye in depth. As a French European, Faye sees far more similarities between his countrymen and those countries in between France and Russia, and the ‘virtual citizens of a common empire’ (A) which could stretch the ‘25,000km that lie between the shores of Groix and those of Kerinask’ (A). He continues;

‘Our linguistic differences are only details compared to our ethnographic commonalities. This is the Germanic approach to history as ethnic logic asserting itself against the utopia created by the French Revolution, which has nothing particularly “democratic” about it (in the Greek sense of the word) but, on the contrary, is strikingly totalitarian’ (A)

We note in passing that Great Britain is not included in Faye’s provisional sketch for a Eurosiberian empire, and we are reminded that, for Islam – to which we turn next – Britain is referred to as the ‘Little Satan’ to America’s ‘Great Satan’.

Faye is unremitting in his belief that Islam is an enemy he views as more dangerous than Communism. But, before we turn to his views on colonisation and reconquista, let us step back to review the Islamic problem Faye sees as the greatest threat faced by the West. Islamism has of late been eclipsed by COVID-19 and BLM, but it will be looking to take advantage of the destabilization caused by both. Muslim groups have been relatively silent on BLM, except for a little general taqiyya in support of BLM’s inchoate cause. But history teaches us that one thing Islam knows how to do is wait. As a mujahideen once said to an American journalist, you have all the watches, but we have all the time.

The Muslim colonisation of Europe facilitated by the ruling elites and their globalist handlers has been both deliberate and malevolent. Most Muslim immigrants are and will remain unemployable. They are not a replacement workforce but a calculated drain on European economies. Many of them are psychotically violent, and this is intended to intimidate part of the populace and provoke the rest. Patterns of murder, assault and rape are protected by European police forces, and any criticism of Islam is tantamount to – and in some cases actually is – a criminal offence. The most deleterious thing the elites could have done to Europe is give it to Islam, and this is precisely why they have done so.

As with America, who he does not blame for its desire for cultural hegemony, so too Faye does not exhibit an animus for the occupying hordes of Mohammedans, but it is as occupation he views Arabic and Maghrebian immigration. ‘One does not’, he writes, ‘despise the enemy, one simply fights him’. (CE)

Europe, Faye writes, is ‘undergoing a demographic and ethno-cultural tragedy, one that is concealed by the fragile screen of economic illusions’, and aided by political and religious ‘collaborators’ (CE). Chiming with the current BLM, media-endorsed mantra against colonialism, Faye accurately points out that ‘colonialism was an effort towards civilisation, whereas the colonisation of Europe is a quest for decivilisation’ (CE).

Europe’s people are being undermined by their own liberalism, which the invading hordes view – and this is completely culturally appropriate – as weakness. These are a warlike people, Faye writes, and do not share the late, neo-Rousseauist Romanticism of Europeans who wait with open arms for the noble savages they have been told are coming to share their materialist paradise. Islam views these Europeans as;

‘...decadent, feminised and homophilic. It therefore proceeds to attack us. And from its point of view, it has every right to do so’ (CE)

And, once again, we see Faye as a synergistic writer, as he draws together strands of his own thinking which must necessarily work in concert to save Europe through its own reinvention and renaissance;

‘We will have to imitate Islam and violate the very laws we have adopted in order to come out safe and sound… I also feel that Europe, ultimately defined as Eurosiberia, will remain unable to apply these incorrect, or rather untimely (in the Nietzschean sense), principles, these axioms of liberation and reconquista, until it experiences a grave disaster. Let us wish the latter upon ourselves, for nothing else could awaken our youths and empower their inventiveness’. (CE)

Let us grant Faye his extraordinary route to a new Europe, a Europe reaching from France to the Russian steppes. After the economic collapse and climatic disasters, after the first, Islamic reconquista and the necessary and bloody reactive second one to take back control from the ummah, what kind of phoenix will rise from the ashes? Again, to the surprise of the contemporary Right, with their jaded politesse and their faint-hearted wish to conserve a pre-lapsarian age which never really existed, we see Faye taking Islam as a model, but instead of reaching back for eighth-century blueprints for a new society, Faye wishes to go much farther back in time, into the coulisse of pre-history, back to paganism.

Paganism, for the British, invokes images of a dozen kindly old druids and some girls who run a new age shop in Glastonbury, sitting around a fire at Stonehenge along with a raggle-taggle band of drug casualties and refugees from illegal raves, watching the sun come up at solstice or equinox. It has far more depth than this.

Collin Cleary, in his examination of the pagan mind in Summoning the Gods, has the following to say about paganism, and invokes one of Guillaume Faye’s erstwhile colleagues in GRECE, Alain de Benoist;

‘While I am skeptical that we can revive ancient traditions, I am hopeful that we can revive or recover the way of being that gave rise to them. Benoist is getting at this when he insists that contemporary paganism need not involve, for example, the worship of Odin, but does involve “looking behind religion and… seeking for the ‘mental equipment’ that produced it, the inner world it reflects, and how the world it depicts is apprehended”’.

The pagan mind is pre-technological and thus anti-technological, and for Faye technology is a false idol, ‘an engine out of control’ (A), as it was for Heidegger, who Cleary goes on to quote;

‘[O]n the earth, all over it, a darkening of the world is happening. The essential happenings in this darkening are: the flight of the gods, the destruction of the earth, the reduction of human beings to a mass, the pre-eminence of the mediocre’. (Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics).

For Faye, paganism means reverence for ancestors, a Nietzschean ‘yes’ to life (as opposed to the mediocre nihilism of technology and the robot-self), biological and cultural identity of peoples, the ‘refusal of all fanaticism, dogmatism, and proselytism’ (WWF). It is absolutely opposed to the fusion of peoples, and absolutely dedicated to ‘the notion of the City, inseparable from notions of patriotism and ethnic identity’. (WWF).

Eurosiberia will thus be an ethnic project of identitarian rediscovery for which technology is a tool not a dominator. After its collapse and rebirth, its vanquishing of Islam and its casting off of the cultural shackles of Americanism, the new world will keep the best of the ancient world and use it to forge the identity of the new.

The last section of Archeofuturism shows that Faye could have earned his living as a writer of first-class science fiction. A Day in the Life of Dimitri Leonidovich Oblomov* is sub-titled A Chronicle of Archeofuturist Times and is set on a train (one capable of speeds of up to 14,000km per hour) in 2073. In the story, a high-ranking Eurosiberian official falls into conversation with a beautiful Hindu daughter of a diplomat, and tells the story of what happened in the West in the 21st century;

‘Following the traumatic occurrence of the Great Catastrophe of 2014-2016, the Renaissance of 2030 and the building of the Eurosiberian Federation… the Revolutionary Federal Government had chosen to make a clean break with the ideas of the past…’ (A)

And so it is with Guillaume Faye, reaching back into lost aeons of time in order to craft a Nietzschean future alive with pagan worship but bedecked with the very best that servile technology has to offer. It must be so, Faye insists again and again, or else, or rather precisely because;

‘All of a sudden everything will stop and the magic will end’. (CC)

* Faye is making a double literary play with this title, referring as it does both to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and a novel, Oblomov, by Russian writer Ivan Gonchorov.

Mark Gullick is a philosophy PhD from London, England, who went on holiday to Costa Rica four years ago and forgot to go home. He now works there as a musician. His debut novel, Cherub Valley, is available as an ebook here'.

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