Amerika

Preparing for World War III

Avant-Guerre: Chronique d’un cataclysme annoncé
(Pre-War: Account of an Impending Cataclysm)

Guillaume Faye
Paris: L’ Æncre, 2002
24 Euros

382 pp.

Reviewed by Michael O’Meara

Readers of The Occidental Quarterly are probably unfamiliar with the work of Guillaume Faye, but his ideas are increasingly those of Europe’s nationalist vanguard.

An early associate of Alain de Benoist and one of the architects of the European New Right, the young Faye left politics in the late 1980s to pursue a career in media.  In 1998 he returned, instantly re-establishing himself as the intellectual force on the nationalist right.

He has since published five books, each of which has had a major impact on the struggle against multiculturalism, Third World immigration, and globalization.1 Unlike Benoist and other New Right theoreticians, whose defense of the European ethnos is waged almost exclusively on the cultural terrain, and unlike Le Pen’s National Front, which favors the assimilation rather than the forced repatriation of non-Europeans, Faye claims that race is not only primary to cultural identity, but that race and culture are, at root, inseparable.  For this reason he argues that the struggle to preserve Europe’s cultural patrimony is no less a struggle to defend its genetic heritage and the ethnic integrity of its Lebensraum.2

His latest work—Avant-Guerre: Chronique d’un cataclysme annoncé (Pre-War: Account of an Impending Cataclysm)—is reminiscent of Spengler’s Hour of Decision.  Like Spengler, Faye looks at the storm clouds on the horizon and predicts that within ten years a coming era of world-altering tempests will descend on the white race, determining if it is to have a future or not.

In his view, these cataclysms will be neither ideological nor economic in character, but (à la Huntington) racial and civilizational, involving clashing continental blocs and warring ethno-racial groups. They are thus likely to engender unprecedented violence and destruction, forcibly shaking white people from the stupor that is leading them toward extinction.  Although presently unprepared to fight such wars and alienated from all that is distinct to their race and heritage, the struggles of the twenty-first century, he believes, will give Europeans on both sides of the Atlantic a final chance to throw off the forces that have denatured and debilitated then over the last half century.

Europe and America

Like most “nationalists” who fight in Europe’s name, Faye is extremely critical of the American government and the role it has played in repressing the worldwide forces of white solidarity. But unlike many on the anti-American right, Faye does not believe the U.S. is Europe’s principal enemy, even if its Judeo-liberal New Class has been responsible for eroding European autonomy and demonizing its culture. An enemy, he contends, does more than corrupt and intimidate, it threatens one’s biological existence. Taking his cue from Carl Schmidt, he thinks it is more accurate to characterize the U.S. as Europe’s “adversary”—an adversary that needs to be opposed if Europeans are ever to re-assert the Faustian project distinct to their ethos—but nevertheless one with whom a life-and-death struggle is not at all inevitable.

The real enemy threatening the white homelands comes, he claims, from the Third World.  Accordingly, the terror attack of “9/11” suggests one form his predicted cataclysm will take. But while Islam is Europe’s principal enemy, it is not, paradoxically, America’s. Based on the work of General Gallois, Alexandre Del Valle, and a new generation of European geopoliticists, Faye argues that Islam has long served the U.S. in furthering the hegemonic ambitions of its global village, specifically in dividing Europe and weakening Russia. That its recruitment and arming of Islamic fanatics to fight in Afghanistan and Chechnya and in Bosnia and Kosovo at last boomeranged ought not to detract from the fact that for a quarter century the U.S. systematically incited Islamic insurgencies for the sake of its strategic aims.

In Faye’s view, America’s principal Third World enemy, and thus the power it will face in World War III, comes not from the Middle East (even if militant Islam continues to target it), but from a rapidly developing and technologically armed China bent on contesting its dominance in the Pacific. In this potential Sino-American conflict, Faye believes the future lies entirely on the Chinese side. Unlike the Middle Kingdom, the U.S.’s disparate mix of race and cultures has left it without a coherent heritage and thus a destining project worth dying for. This makes it not a nation in the European sense, but simply une symbiose étatico-entrepreneuriale. Because such an entity is likely to fly apart if challenged by a determined enemy, in the great cataclysms to come it will be Europe (and Russia), not the U.S., that will stand at the center of the struggle to defend the white West from a hostile non-white world.

Islam

While America’s future holds out the prospect of an interstate war with China, Faye believes Europe faces an intrastate war with the forces of an insurgent Islam—a war, to repeat, that will resemble 9/11 more than the conventional military engagement the U.S. can expect in the Pacific.

In the four decades since 1962, when Africa broached Europe’s southern frontier, the continent, especially France and Belgium, has been inundated by successive waves of Third World immigrants. The amplitude of this immigration, involving masses not individuals, is such that not a few demographers contend that it is more accurately described as “colonization.” Due to disproportional birthrates, the unrelenting influx of non-white, unassimilable, and largely Muslim immigrants has already begun to “de-Europeanize” Europe. For example, virtually everywhere they have settled in France they have succeeded in “ethnically cleansing” former neighborhoods, establishing not ghettos, but conquered territories, from which future conquests are being prepared. With their seven to eight million inhabitants, these territories have become, in effect, hostile African/Middle Eastern encampments within an increasingly besieged France.3

This immigration is creating an extremely volatile situation, for Europe lacks the massive police apparatus and vast geographical expanses that have kept ethnoracial tensions ‘manageable’ in the U.S. Typically, in urban areas where neighborhoods have been lost to Islamic civilization, Europeans have come to experience not only escalating levels of violence and insecurity, but the loss of their laws and institutions. There are now more than 1400 zones de non-droit in France (including eleven towns), and in nearly a hundred of these, republican jurisdiction has been supplanted by the shari`a (Islamic law).4

Within such zones, whose deteriorating conditions politically correct public officials persist in describing in socioeconomic rather than biocultural terms, it is nearly impossible for a Frenchman to reside in the public housing estates (HLM) built for the French working class, to find a café serving wine or ham, or for his wife to dress or behave in public as do European women. In contrast to the Little Italies and Germantowns arising in many American cities in the last century, these non-European enclaves have not the slightest intention of assimilating into the dar-al-Harb (the “impious” non-Islamic world, which Muslims view as the “world of war”), and have, in fact, begun to assert their autonomy vis-à-vis it. In recent years, hardly a week passes without a newspaper report of a riot or bloody incident provoked by clashes between police and Muslim gangs.

Since 1990, urban violence has grown five percent annually—since 2000, by ten percent—as the anomie, violence, and disintegration associated with America’s inner cities becomes an increasingly familiar European reality. In fact, in 2000, for the first time in history, French criminality, whose ethnoracial character is overwhelmingly non-European, surpassed that of the U.S. crime rate; and Paris, once the City of Lights, became the least safe of the major European cities.

In the face of these threats to the continent’s demographic, cultural, and institutional foundations, the media, the academy, and the established “anti-racist” organizations (mostly controlled by Zionists) attempt to silence whoever criticizes such changes, all the while making the term “multiculturalism” emblematic of the mobile postmodern society of optional values and fashionable identities that comes with globalization. Instead, then, of mobilizing the Christian West against such threats, these New Class forces preach cowardice, resignation, escapism, and a self-destructive humanitarianism.

An ethno-masochistic response of this kind has naturally emboldened the more militant members of France’s Muslim community, who now call for jihad against the “white cheese.” Public authorities, though, persist in distinguishing between violent fundamentalists (who number perhaps 40,000) and the “peace-loving” Muslim community, unable or unwilling to acknowledge Islam’s inherent hostility to Europe’s secular society.  Between orthodox and fundamentalist Islam, Faye, though, claims there is solely a difference in temperament. And even this is increasingly compromised by fundamentalist aggressions. Years before the 9-11 attack on the symbols of U.S. hegemony, this “monstrous offshoot of Judaism” had already begun its third great offensive against the dar-al-Harb, targeting Europe as a future Muslim homeland.5 Buoyed up by U.S.-protected strongholds in Southeast Europe (Albania, Bosnia, Kosovo), U.S. pressure to admit Muslim Turkey to the EU, and large stockpiles of sophisticated arms, Islamists have already begun organizing for a new conquest.

It is not surprising, then, that Faye interprets the growth of European Islam as the opening salvo in a larger struggle for the continent’s future.6 Faye’s militant opposition to Islam does not, however, bear a resemblance to that of President Bush’s handlers. The struggle against Islam, he insists, is a struggle to free Europe from a dire threat to existence—not a justification for further Zionist aggression.

What War Will Bring

In the coming cataclysms—likely to involve street battles between rival racial communities, guerrilla skirmishes, mega-terrorism, perhaps even small-scale nuclear exchanges with “dirty bombs,” along with conventional-style invasions from neighboring Islamic armies—Faye believes Europe will either perish or experience a rebirth. In any case, the confrontations ahead will create a situation in which the present politically correct delusions are impossible to sustain.

For like every great struggle affecting human’s natural selection, war privileges the elemental and the vital. With it, the subtleties and distractions that sophists and simulators have used to misdirect Europeans cannot but cease to count, as will those minor differences that have historically divided them. Then, as “money and pleasure” cede to the imperatives of “blood and soil,” only the traditions, the way of life, and the genetic principles defining them as a people will matter.

The situation the white race finds itself in today may therefore be unconditionally bleak, but in that hour when everything risks being lost, Faye believes a final opportunity for renaissance will present itself.

In this vein, he predicts that the dominant musical theme of the twenty-first century will be neither an orchestral ode to joy nor the doggerel of an urban savage, but rather a solemn military march based on ancient hymns. Europeans on both sides of the Atlantic, he advises, would do well to keep step with its strong, marked rhythm.

Michael O’Meara is a scholar who resides and teaches on the West Coast of the United States. He is the author of numerous articles and book reviews.

End Notes

1. L’archéofuturisme (1998); Nouveau discours à la nation européenne, 2nd ed. (1999);  La colonisation de l’Europe (2000); Pourquoi nous combattons (2001). All these works have been published by L’Æncre and can be purchased at the Librairie Nationale, 12 rue de la Sourdière, 75001 Paris, or on the Internet at www.librairienationale.com/.

2. See Michael Torigian, New Right, New Culture: Anti-Liberalism in Postmodern Europe (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2003).

3. The number of non-Europeans in France is not officially known. The cited figure is the estimate of one of the country’s leading demographers. See “L’avenir démographique: Entretien avec Jacques Dupâquier,” in Krisis 20-21 (November 1997). Another academic (J. P. Gourevich) claims it is closer to 9 million. Some put the figure as high as 14 million, while the media usually refer to 4, 5, or 6 million. But more alarming than these figures is the fact that one-third of the population under 30 is now of non-European origins and has a birth rate four or five times higher than the European one.

4. Jeremy Rennher, “L’Occident ligoté par l’imposture antiraciste,” in Écrit de Paris 640 (February 2002). Even the politically correct editor of Violences en France (Paris: Seuil, 1999), Michael Wieviorka, acknowledges that the explosion of violence and criminality since 1990 is an outgrowth of Islamic power. Because the French government keeps most data on immigrant crime and racial terror securely under wraps, the little that is known has been surreptiously leaked by frustrated officials. The publication with the best access to these leaks is the monthly J’ai tout compris! Lettre de désintoxification, edited, not coincidentally, by Guillaume Faye.

5. The first, Arab wave of the seventh century brought the Muslims to Poitiers, and the second, Turkish wave of the twelth through the seventeenth centuries led to the destruction of Christian Byzantium and the seige of Vienna. The third wave, in the form of the present colonization, is stealthy in character, but potentially even more catastrophic.

6. Accordingly, the more militant Europeanists now invoke the need for a new reconquista. This is especially evident in Philippe Randa’s novel Poitiers demain (Paris: Denoël, 2000) and the album Reconquista by the group Fraction (Heretik Records).

Tags: Michael-O'Meara