The Rectification of Names:
Guillaume Faye’s Why We Fight

^[1]1,357 words

Guillaume Faye
Why We Fight: Manifesto of the European Resistance
London: Arktos Media, 2011

Available from Counter-Currents ^[2] and from Amazon.com ^[3]

Guillaume Faye’s newly translated Kampfschrift aims to rally Europe, “our great fatherland, that family of kindred spirits, however politically fragmented, which is united on essentials, favoring thus the defense of our civilization.” He sees even nationalism as a kind of sectarianism which European man cannot afford at present: “when the house is on fire domestic disputes are put on hold.” For this reason, Faye has never belonged to the Front National, but has more recently lent support to the French Euronationalist organization Nationality-Citizenship-Identity (see www.nationalite-citoyennete-identite.com ^[4]).

Over three-quarters of the present volume is devoted to what a Confucian philosopher would call “the rectification of names ^[5].” It is interesting to observe how revolutionary ideologies are never able to express themselves in ordinary language. Being based upon a partial and distorted view of reality, they necessarily create a jargon all their own. Once they succeed in imposing it upon a subject population, they have won half their battle. Who exactly decided that loyalty to one’s people, known since time immemorial as patriotism and considered as one of the most essential virtues, would henceforth become the crime of racism? Faye’s “metapolitical dictionary” is a blow directed against such semantic distortion.

Here follows a brief sample:

Aristocracy: those who defend their people before their own interests. An aristocracy has a sense of history and blood lineage, seeing itself as the representative of the people it serves, rather than as members of a caste or club. Not equivalent to an economic elite, it can never become entirely hereditary without becoming sclerotic.

Biopolitics: a political project oriented to a people’s biological and demographic imperatives. It includes family and population policy, restricts the influx of aliens, and addressed issues of public health and eugenics.

Devirilisation: declining values of courage and virility for the sake of feminist, xenophile, homophile and humanitarian values.

Discipline: the regulation and positive adaptation of behavior through sanction, reward and exercise. Egalitarian ideology associates discipline and order with their excesses, i.e., with arbitrary dictatorship. But just the contrary is the case, for freedom and justice are founded on rigorous social discipline. Every society refusing to uphold law and order, i.e., collective discipline, is ripe for tyranny and the loss of public freedoms.

Germen: a people’s or civilization’s biological root. In Latin, germen means ‘germ’, ‘seed.’ If a culture is lost, recovery is possible. When the biological germen is destroyed, nothing is possible. The germen is comparable to a tree’s roots. If the trunk is damaged or the foliage cut down, the tree can recover—but not if the roots are lost. That’s why the struggle against race-mixing, depopulation and the alien colonization of Europe is even more important than mobilizing for one’s cultural identity and political sovereignty.

Identity: etymologically, ‘that which makes singular’. A people’s identity is what makes it incomparable and irreplaceable.

Involution: the regression of a civilization or species to maladaptive forms that lead to the diminishing of its vital forces. Cultural involution has been stimulated by the decline of National Education (40% of adolescents are now partially or completely illiterate), the regression of knowledge, the collapse of social norms, the immersion of youth in a world of audio/visual play [and] the Africanization of European culture.

Mental AIDS: the collapse of a people’s immune system in the face of its decadence and its enemies. Louis Pauwels coined the term in the 1980s and it set off a media scandal. In general, the more the neo-totalitarian system is scandalized by an idea and demonizes it, the more likely it’s true.

With biological AIDS, T4 lymphocytes, which are supposed to defend the organism, fail to react to the HIV virus as a threat, and instead treat it as a ‘friend’, helping it to reproduce. European societies today are [similarly] menaced by the collapse of their immunological defenses. As civil violence, delinquency and insecurity explode everywhere, police and judicial measures that might curb them are being undermined. The more Third World colonization damages European peoples, the more measures are taken to continue it. Just as Europe is threatened with demographic collapse, policies which might increase the birth rate are denounced and homosexuality idealized. Catholic prelates argue with great conviction that ‘Islam is an enrichment’, even as it clearly threatens to destroy them.

Museologicalization: the transformation of a living tradition into a museum piece, which deprives it of an active meaning or significance. A patrimony is constructed every day and can’t, thus, be conserved in a museum. Modern society is paradoxically ultra-conservative and museological, on the one hand, and at the same time hostile to the living traditions of identity.

Populism: the position which defends the people’s interests before that of the political class—and advocates direct democracy. This presently pejorative term must be made positive. The prevailing aversion to populism expresses a covert contempt for authentic democracy. For the intellectual-media class, ‘people’ means petits blancs—the mass of economically modest, non-privileged French Whites—who form that social category which is expected to pay its taxes and keep quiet. On the subjects of immigration, the death penalty, school discipline, fiscal policies—on numerous other subjects—it’s well known that the people’s deepest wishes as revealed in referenda and elsewhere never, despite incessant media propaganda, correspond to those of the government. Anti-populism marks the final triumph of the isolated, pseudo-humanist, and privileged political-media class—which have confiscated the democratic tradition for their own profit.

Resistance and Reconquest: faced with their colonization 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. Resistance today is called ‘racism or ‘xenophobia’, just as native resisters to colonial oppression were formerly called ‘terrorists.’ A semantic reversal is in order here: those who favor the immigrant replacement population ought, henceforward, to be called ‘collaborators.’

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. [They] do so on the basis not of reasoned analysis, but simply from their lack of ethnic consciousness.

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

For Europeans, revolution represents a radical abolition, a reversal, of the present system and the construction of a new political reality based on the following principles: 1) an ethnocentric Eurosiberia, free of Islam and the Third World’s colonizing masses; 2) continental autarky, breaking with globalism’s free-trade doctrines; 3) a definitive break with the present organization of the European Union; and 4) a general recourse to an inegalitarian society that is disciplined, authentically democratic, aristocratic and inspired by Greek humanism. (Faye has previously written of the need for Euronationalists to reclaim the idea of revolution from the poseurs of the left.)

In a brief closing chapter, Faye answers the question posed by his book’s title:

We fight for Europe. We fight for a Europe infused with ideas of identity and continuity, of independence and power—this Europe that is an ensemble of ethnically related peoples. We fight for a vision of the world that is both traditional and Faustian, for passionate creativity and critical reason, for an unshakable loyalty and an adventurous curiosity, for social justice and free inquiry. We fight nor just for the Europeans of today, but for the heritage of our ancestors and the future of our descendents.

Faye’s writing has a bracing quality which never lapses into elegy or pessimism:

Nothing is lost. It’s completely inappropriate to see ourselves in the nostalgia of despair, as a rearguard, a last outpost, that struggles with panache for a lost cause. World events give us cause to believe that the situation is heading toward a great crisis—toward a chaos from which history will be reborn.

Two years after Why We Fight (2001), Faye published his analysis of the coming crisis under the title The Convergence of Catastrophes. This will be the next of Faye’s works to be brought out in English translation by Arktos.