Counter-Currents
1,581 words
Czech version here
Editor’s Note: The following translation is reprinted by kind permission of Der Schattige Wald at the Actaeon Journal. The interview was originally published in the Italian journal Il Giornale on July 7.
A little over a week after the outbreak of the riots, Alain de Benoist draws up their genealogy: French specificity, the anteriority of mass immigration, the culture of denial, the occultation of ethnic realities, individualism . . . everything contributed, more than elsewhere, to fanning the flames.
IL GIORNALE: The demonstrations these days bear witness to the failure of multiculturalism. How did we get here?
ALAIN DE BENOIST. They of course show the failure of multiculturalism, but to stop there would be simplistic. The violent urban riots we are witnessing at the moment also testify to a country divided and fragmented, not because of immigrants but because of a dominant ideology that has substituted the law of profit for moral rules in the general population. In a society dominated by market values, which structurally create the conditions for social fragmentation, it is not surprising that no one cares about the common good.
The Left mainly saw in these riots a social revolt (against discrimination, exclusion, unemployment, etc.), while the Right spoke of an ethnic revolt heralding a civil war. There is some truth in both interpretations, but they are both short-sighted. For 40 years, tens of billions of euros have been invested in “urban policy” and the rehabilitation of “difficult neighborhoods” without any results. On the other hand, an urban riot is not a civil war. In a civil war, two armed factions of the population clash, with the police and the army being equally divided, which is not the case here.
Generally speaking, it is the strictly political interpretations that prove incapable of taking the full measure of the problem. The current urban riots have no political character. The rioters have no claims to make. They only want to destroy and plunder. When representatives of the Left, or the extreme Left, go to the suburbs to make it known that they “understand the anger” of the rioters, they are expelled or get spit in their faces!
IL GIORNALE: To what extent does the crisis of French and European identity influence the demonstrations?
ALAIN DE BENOIST: The French population today has lost all feeling of belonging to a community. The rioters have one — or believe they have one. The crisis of French identity has ancient roots. It is the result of the influence of an ideology that is both individualist and universalist, and which believes that men are “everywhere the same” and that ethnocultural factors are not important. No society can solve its problems through legal contracts and the stock exchange.
IL GIORNALE: Is the French state being challenged because many immigrants do not recognize the authority of French institutions?
ALAIN DE BENOIST: The rioters don’t care about the French state, which is indifferent to them. When they attack the police with fireworks, when they set town halls or fire stations on fire, it is less because they see them as representatives of authority than because they perceive them as intruders . They reason in terms of territory (the “invisible border”), in a purely tribal way. They also attack schools, bookstores, grocery stores, shops, and cars. They look at each other as a gang attacked by a rival gang.
It would be another mistake to believe that the rioters do not want to follow any rules. On the contrary, there are rules that they very much respect: their own! Most of them come from clan-like family cultures and societies, and they continue to behave in a clan-like manner. If one of them is a victim of “police violence,” all of them see themselves as victims as well. This is what the public authorities, who are prisoners of their ideology, fail to understand: the mother of a child killed after committing an armed robbery will never say that her son behaved badly. She will say that through him, the whole clan was attacked. This is the very principle of clan tribalism: My people are always right because they are mine.
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IL GIORNALE: Why are the second and third generations more radicalized than the previous ones?
ALAIN DE BENOIST: They are more radicalized because they suffer from a much more significant loss of identity. Such riots are never the work of first-generation immigrants, who came to settle in France voluntarily while retaining a clear awareness of their origins, and therefore of their identity. The second, third, or fourth generation consider themselves to be Algerian, Malian, Moroccan, Senegalese, etc., even when they have French nationality, but they know practically nothing of the countries from which their parents or grandparents came. They do not feel French, but have only an artificial or fantasy alternative identity. Their frustration is total. They can no longer express what they are except through violence and destruction.
IL GIORNALE: In this context, did the French judicial system, which is often accused of being too lax with regard to immigrants who commit crimes, play a role, in your opinion?
ALAIN DE BENOIST: The laxity of the judicial system is very real. The rioters know well that they are basically not taking much risk, because the law is not being applied. A hit-and-run offense can theoretically result in up to ten years in prison, but such sentences have never been imposed. Moreover, there is no more room in the prisons! This contributes to the demoralization of the police.
IL GIORNALE: Serious demonstrations took place in France already in 2005. What has changed compared to the situation almost 20 years ago? Has the situation gotten worse?
ALAIN DE BENOIST: There are differences between 2005 and 2023,. The greater scale of the riots, which in five days have already done more damage than those of 2005, which lasted three weeks, is explained primarily by the simple fact that there are many more immigrant populations from which the rioters come today. The current predominant role of social networks should also be taken into account. In 2005 the riots were concentrated in the big cities, while today they are affecting the small towns. The rioters are also much younger (a third of those arrested are between 13 and 15, and were unknown to the police), and are much more violent. In the suburbs, a culture of gratuitous violence has developed: One no longer resorts to violence just to steal something, but simply for receiving a “bad look” — someone refusing to offer a cigarette, or simply for nothing — if not merely for pleasure. And we quickly go to extremes: We continue to hit someone who is already on the ground, and we do not hesitate to kill. In France, according to a National Institute of Statistical and Economic Information (INSEE) survey, there is a gratuitous attack every 44 seconds . . .
IL GIORNALE: The problem of immigration does not only concern France, but also other major European nations such as Germany — where, however, phenomena of this magnitude have never occurred. What went wrong with the French immigration model?
ALAIN DE BENOIST: This is precisely the proof that multiculturalism alone is not enough to explain the riots. What is special about France is that it was a pioneer in terms of immigration: The problem was already there when immigration was just beginning in countries such as Italy, Germany, Spain, or the United Kingdom. There is also the fact that immigration to France remains associated with the memory of the colonial period, which gave rise to resentments that have not yet ended. Finally, it cannot be ruled out that certain policing techniques which have proved to be the most effective elsewhere are not always utilized by the French police. The relentless denial of problems for decades has had explosive consequences.
IL GIORNALE: Will the protests today also have political consequences, in view of next year’s European elections, by strengthening the Right?
ALAIN DE BENOIST: Yes, it is obvious. Disturbances such as the ones we are witnessing at the moment help to open our eyes. National Rally has already become the leading party in France, and the polls show that it will win in the next European elections. French public opinion is overwhelmed; it can’t take it anymore.
The people see that the government is completely overwhelmed by what is happening. A majority of French people would like to see the army intervene in the suburbs. Emmanuel Macron is being criticized for not having instituted a state of emergency, as was done in 2005. The most significant symbol is the incredible success of the fundraiser that was launched on social networks to help the family of the police officer who fired the shots that sparked the riots: In less than four days, it exceeded one-and-a-half million euros (before being closed)! This has never been seen before.
IL GIORNALE: Is France lost forever or is there a chance of putting an end to this situation?
ALAIN DE BENOIST: Never say never! The old countries of Europe have known much more serious ordeals in the past, and have always recovered from them. Everything that is actualized potentiates a reaction in the opposite direction. History is unpredictable. It is by definition the domain of the unforeseen.
IL GIORNALE: Do you think that what is happening today in France could also happen in Italy?
ALAIN DE BENOIST: It is possible, if not probable. The whole question is whether the Italian government will be able to learn the lessons from what is happening today on the other side of the Alps.
* * *
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15 comments
Growing up in a New England Brahmin family, the challenges that these hordes of savages pose is sometimes unfathomable. My grandmother warned me about unruly German immigrants with their beer gardens and burly, brutish stature and I won’t bother mentioning her views on the Irish. Fortunately, she passed before I married an exotic blue eyed, blonde haired Czech woman; she would be appalled at me marrying outside my caste.
It just perplexes me a century ago fellow Europeans were seen as too much; now savages from all over the world have free reign. It’s all so tiring sometimes.
This ever increasing conflict is racial. It is as obvious as our Sun rising in the East. Repatriation is the only solution, otherwise, conflict will never cease. Look at USA, the racial problem has never gone away, &, will never. The problem has only gotten worse.
Benoist is dreaming. The destruction of the ancien regime 2.0 (aka postwar France) is of course a political project. That the teenagers out in the street are not acting to achieve a secular political programme is beside the point. The muslims have flexed and the Rothschild puppet that is the head of state bent over and grabbed his ankles.
At times this violence looked more like a series of mini-Tets than they did “riots”. Some reports put the number of destroyed bank branches at over 200.
In the event that NATO intervenes in Ukraine and France goes along with this, expect more of the same, but worse. And do not be surprised if there is a Syrian (that is to say Russian) hand in this.
Hopefully the French officer corps has not suffered the same purges that have undermined the US military. Sending Macron to the guillotine would present NATO/EU with a hard choice: invade Gaul to restore globalist rule or attack Russia to prop up what is left of New Khazaria.
Remember that the rioters in Europe and the US in 1968 were not immigrants at all, they were French, Germans, Americans, and they successfully fought and destroyed their own states. The Weathermen were not Mexicans or Arabs. So the problem isn’t foreign immigration or religious strife only.
“So the problem isn’t foreign immigration or religious strife only.” The conflict is racial, but, you already know that, you’re just trying to misdirect – you failed. This racial conflict will escalate, unless of course, Europeans wake-up & repatriate.
If the French state in 1968 had decisively and violently suppressed the “student” riots organized from abroad, if it had used artillery guns against those “freedom fighters”, as the idols of these same freedom fighters did, Mao Zedong, Che Guevara, Trotsky, Ho Chi Minh, which they carried in portraits during demonstrations, if the government had eliminated their subversive ideologues, all these Cohn-Bendits and Sartres, by means of political assassinations, then perhaps the current riots would not have happened.
Absolutely.
We should have nipped this nonsense in the bud at the start.
Yes, but not via any ideological suasion. Rather, the physical destruction of the Left in ’68 (how glorious would that have been!) would have destroyed the whole physical, and thus ultimately mental, infrastructure which enabled the race traitors to pursue the Great Replacement at all. The average Frenchmen no more wanted Replacement than average white Americans. But there has always been a sizable {white as well as semitic} minority which did want immigration invasions, and they were just powerful enough, whether financially, academically, or in media position and influence, to blunt any movement towards mass indigenous ethnopolitics (during all which time of delay in indigenous awakening the sheer population transfers continued … and continue still …).
“It would be another mistake to believe that the rioters do not want to follow any rules. On the contrary, there are rules that they very much respect: their own! Most of them come from clan-like family cultures and societies, and they continue to behave in a clan-like manner. If one of them is a victim of “police violence,” all of them see themselves as victims as well. This is what the public authorities, who are prisoners of their ideology, fail to understand: the mother of a child killed after committing an armed robbery will never say that her son behaved badly. She will say that through him, the whole clan was attacked. This is the very principle of clan tribalism: My people are always right because they are mine.”
Trayvon. Michael Brown. St. George. Rodney King. OJ Simpson and countless others in anonymity. The same phenomenon exists in America with its albatross population.
A population that rejects the legal system of its nation rejects the nation itself. Thus, they have no business inhabiting that nation. It is a de-facto declaration of war/invasion if they are permitted to inhabit the nation while rejecting the legitimacy of its legal system. They never object on grounds and in terms of the legal system itself. They object and reject based on tribe/race. Will the nation defend itself and deport the population that rejects its legal and law enforcement system?
Alain de Benoist may be one of the world’s towering contemporary intellectuals, but he’s still a bit of either a jackass or a coward. I admit, I’ve never liked him. He’s a ‘weasel’; the Jewish Eric Zemmour is far more forthright than ‘native son’ Benoist about what the “immigrants” (read: “violent alien colonizers”) are, and how they are 100% to blame (as elsewhere) for all of France’s racial and civic problems. There is no link whatsoever between what Benoist calls “The Market” and the savagery of the aliens. France was once a far freer nation than today, including in its economy. Many of the great classical liberal defenders of property and liberty were French. Yet France did not have these violently nihilistic modern disruptions (at least until the Jewish communists – “les soixante-huitards” – starting poisoning young French minds). I would have opposed the revolutions of 1789 and 1848, too, but at least those had some legitimate basis in anti-aristocratic resentments.
By the end of WW2 , if not earlier, France had been “modernized”: that is, economic opportunity had been substantially extended to talented persons from all sections of society, and, for better or, more usually, worse, the franchise had been democratized. These riots are explained by two factors alone, both inherent in the nonwhite colonizers: their essential anti-ethical savagery, which accounts for the mass looting and gratuitous destruction of anything beautiful and expressive of French civilizational excellence, and their racio-cultural hatred for the True French, which is the reason for their violent assaults on French people and their genuine authorities (the police and military).
Learned intellectuals like Benoist like to parade their erudition by means of ‘complexifying’ what is really quite simple. What causes nonwhites to riot in France is what causes them to riot in any and every white nation.
Perhaps one of the most important reasons was that France irrevocably (self-)destroyed its best population in the completely unnecessary World War I, when the French were thrown into the slaughter against Germany for revenge for 1870 and the “return” of supposedly French Alsace with such “native” French names as Strassburg or Mühlhaus. The human losses were so great that France never recovered from them. It is not surprising that parasites developed in such an weakened environment that poisoned the minds and souls of the French, which was especially clearly manifested not even in the 1968 riots themselves, but in the fact that the government, headed by the great De Gaulle himself, was unable to effectively suppress them. Fifty years earlier, the French could have died by the thousands in an unnecessary war with the Germans, but in 1968 they were no longer able to disperse the rebellion of several thousand young people “drugged” by subversive ideas. The arrival of migrants and their violence is also only a consequence, not a cause.
It’s easy in retrospect to see the folly of August 1914, however the forces in England, America, France and no doubt Austria and Germany which wanted the war were careful to make it seem both inevitable and desirable. One and a third millions of men died in French service, an horrendous toll, something like a quarter of those of military age. Birth rates were more than halved during the war, leaving a dearth of men of prime fighting age in 1939. And yet there were over four million male children aged twelve or less in 1914 whose genetic posterity was not affected by the war. France limited the damage to its genetics when patriotic Frenchmen wrested the government from the internationalists and withdrew from the war against Germany in 1940. Probably less than 200,000 French combatants died in total 1939-1945 and only 60,000 in the defence of France from the Wehrmacht.
I agree. I’ve often said that the world wars destroyed the martial flower of European Man – the ones who kept our race’s proneness to sentimentalism, egalitarianism, and utopianism in proper check, and that our postwar liberal weakness directly stems from this enormously disproportionate and dysgenic slaughter of so many of the “white tough guys” on all sides. Of course, I don’t claim this aspect of our decline to be its sole cause, but it is, I argue, an often overlooked one.
I think the author is not criticizing the free market as such, but pointing out that the transcendent in French society has been suppressed. Without transcendent ideals, what you are left with is Economic Man, a person devoted solely to satisfying his material wants and narcissistic desires.
The free market is vital to a free society, but without strong devotion to virtue, it is just an enabler of depravity.
I wholly agree with your second paragraph. As to the first, Benoist – who is not Christian – likes to criticize “Americanism” or “American expansionism” (generally correctly, imo), but then often incorrectly associates the essence of what he objects to about America’s malign influence with our {nb: heavily regulated, taxed, and government-misdirected and misincentivized} capitalist economy, instead of our imperialistic ‘diversitism’ and hostility to tradition, especially the indigenous ones of the ‘thick’ ethnocultures of Europe. Criticizing Americans for overseas McDonald’s instead of aggressively exporting wokeness is just plain evasion of the real issues.
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