Most of the thinking described as “conservative” is a kind of “Political Hygiene”: it is oriented towards what is natural, normal or best and functional in the social order. One danger of this focus on the right order is that it leaves us unprepared for emergencies. Thus, we all know otherwise intelligent conservatives who would continue, in the midst of generalized social uprising, even if blood flowed in the streets, to talk about the need to … elect some fiscally responsible leftists and progressives to … parliamentary office! The best cure for this peculiar kind of “autoimmune blindness” and “psychogenic stupidity” is an intensive course in political pathology, such as Guillaume Faye’s book on Archaeofuturism.
The author of Guillaume Fay was for many years one of the leading figures of the notorious GRECE – “Groupement de Recherche et d’Etude pour la Civilisation Européenne” (Groupement de Recherche et d’Etude pour la Civilisation Européenne), of his friend Alain de Benoist. Starting from the principle of “no Lenin without Marx”, Benoist conceived his political activities as part of a “Gramscian” strategy (or “hedgehog strategy that would systematically seek to make the domination and repression of the Regime prohibitively expensive, by participating in a widespread resistance) to undermine the hegemony of liberalism. In the early 1980s, as Fay recalls, each issue of the Group’s magazine “Elements” was “an ideological hammering that sparked angry criticism from the mainstream press,” and people rose up and paid attention to the ideological-political “Parisian Conferences” (“Colloques Parisiens”) that his organization sponsored. The educated men of this “New Right,” as it was called, despised the young National Front as a … “tiny group of worthless people” and even forbade “that pirate old soldier,” the “rude” Jean-Marie Le Pen, from participating in their meetings.
However, within a few years things changed, as disaffected “New Rightists” flocked to the Front. Any doubts they had about Le Pen’s peculiar populist… “vulgarity” were offset by the impression that his organization was the place where “something was finally happening.” And Fay eventually concluded that the New Right had become a mere literary salon: “since 1986 I began to feel that a “clique” spirit and a literary pagan romanticism prevailed over the historical will… To be effective, ideological and cultural action must be supported by specific political forces, which it incorporates and expands.”
The book “Archaeofuturism” marked the author’s return to the political scene after a conscious absence of twelve years. His first chapter is devoted to a friendly critique of his former comrades and colleagues. For example, in the publications of the “New Right” he notes an excessive emphasis on folkloric aspects of the European heritage, such as …. the “Brittany hats” and the “Scandinavian woodcarvings”. Such charming, but absolutely harmless and invulnerable to the regime, traditions have their counterparts in all the peoples of the earth. Fay prefers to maintain and emphasize “the creative primacy of Western civilization” represented by our tradition in scientific research, philosophy and engineering, as well as our unparalleled artistic and literary “high” culture.
Fay also sees the New Right as tied to a flawed political paradigm in which “America” – methodically understood narrowly as the Hollywood/Wall Street/Foggy Bottom axis [Foggy Bottom, in the capital Washington, D.C., across the National Mall, is a government and cultural center, with the infamous U.S. Department of State and the riverfront John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, home to the National Symphony Orchestra and the Washington National Opera] – this tripolar axis is our enemy! This way of thinking is well expressed in the title of the great Alain de Benoit’s book “Europe-Third World: The Same Struggle.” Benoit in a romantic delirium invites the entire non-American world (even Muslims!) to “a fruitful exchange of dialogue between the parts of this world that are clearly in relation to each other.” In other words: a noble, wishful, romantic multiculturalism, with a seat at the table reserved…. for White Europeans too! Despite the intellectual greatness of the persistent and militant Benoit, Fay rightly dismisses this as a “Disneyland dream”!
Starting from what Fay considers “a correct Nietzschean assessment” of primitive Christianity as an egalitarian, leveling, and ethno-masochistic movement, the New Right launched a reckless attack on the popular Catholicism of ordinary French people. In the meantime, they ignored the right target they should have set: an attack on “establishment Christianity,” on “the Bolshevism of antiquity,” among the corrupt and degenerate high clergy, characterized by slavish-immigrant tendencies and autoethnophobia. This is the tendency that some have called the “de-Germanization of Christianity.” The New Right would be much better off joining forces with traditional Catholics in its fight against it than alienating its natural allies by accepting ungrounded puritanicalisms without social correspondence.
Finally, while the New Right rightly expressed its admiration for the German jurist Carl Schmitt, it never made any practical application of his concept of the “Critical Situation” – “Ernstfall”: that extraordinary political and social “serious case” that cannot be dealt with within the normal framework of constitutional law. When Hannibal is at the gates of Rome, when the Royal Guard mutinied – there can be no recourse to the law! Such unforeseen situations can only be dealt with by the virtue of prudence, that is, the ability to make sound judgments about what should be done in specific cases.
This blind spot can be fatal, because Fay is convinced that the liberal regime is leading Western civilization towards an “Ernstfall” the likes of which the world has never seen! He describes it as a “Convergence of Disasters”. Its components include: the failure of multiracialism, the disintegration of family structures, the disruption of the transmission of cultural knowledge and social branches, the replacement of popular culture by the passive consumption of industrially produced “mass culture”, the increase in crime and drug use, the disintegration of community, anti-national and homogenizing “anti-white” neo-racism, the proliferation of nuclear weapons and the re-emergence of viral and microbial diseases resistant to antibiotics and treatments, public debt and the preferential treatment of speculative profits, that is, the construction of our economy on the supports of “investor confidence” instead of the solid ground of production.
Furthermore, liberal ideology has proposed a utopian ideal of supposedly planetary universal “development,” according to which every last African hell is supposed to become a …. prosperous, tolerant, democratic, and efficient consumer society. The nations of the Global South have been thoroughly convinced by this well-filmed and much-advertised project, dazzled by the deceptive prospect of economic growth. They have set in motion a process of industrialisation that has destroyed the natural environment, undermined their traditional cultures, and created social chaos, including terrifying modern “urban jungles” like Calcutta and Lagos. The resentment over the broken promise of “development” runs deep, and the resurgence of fierce religious fanaticism is one of its expressions.
Under the banner of “integration,” the liberal regime is now importing legions of immigrants who will act as the “fifth column” of an aggressive Global South. “The ethnic war in France has already begun,” Fey wrote prophetically in 1998, a full seven years before the shocking racial and religious uprisings that came to be known as “the riots of the suburbs” (“les émeutes des banlieues”). These 2005 riots were a three-week period that took place in the suburbs of Paris and other French cities in October and November 2005. The riots involved “French” Afro-Arab youth (whom the then French-Jewish Minister of the Interior and later President of the Republic, Nicolas Sarkozy, called “cockroaches”) in numerous violent attacks and the burning of vehicles and public buildings.
These are the lines of destruction that Fay expects to converge around the second decade of this century. His prophecy is reminiscent of Andrei Amalric’s 1969 essay “Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?”—which, of course, turned out to be outrageously accurate. [The Russian historical writer Andrei Alekseevich Amalrik, (Андрей Алексеевич Амальрик, 1938 – 1980) was known mainly in the Western world for this essay]. However, the modern “suspected” wise reader would not want to overestimate Fey’s time frame. Much is perfectly clear about the crisis we face, but …. not even the angels in heaven know the day or the hour!
The French writer and political thinker’s masterpiece, Archaeofuturism: European Visions of the Post-Catastrophic Era, was first published in French in 1997, while an English edition was released by the renowned Arktos publishing house in 2010. The foreword to the English edition is written by the American political scientist and thinker Dr. Michael O’Meara, a respected scholar of Fay’s work.
In his book, Fay calls for a synthesis of will to restore the traditions of the West and the “boldest” technological and social developments, as well as an Empire that would include most of the Eurasian continent.
The book has been praised as being truly original and important, but has also been heavily criticized for its sometimes fantastical ideas about genetic manipulation, the existence of “human-animal chimeras,” and for its uncritical promotion of unity between Europe and Russia.
Archaeofuturism is the stance that approaches the future in terms of ancestral values, believing that the concepts of modernization and traditionalism must be dialectically overcome!
Fey tells us: “Archaeofuturism opposes both modernity and conservatism, seeing them as opposites of each other and believing that modernity is regressive, having failed to realize both its ideals and its great works. Technoscience, for example, is incompatible with the humanistic and egalitarian values of modernity. The twenty-first century will see the revival of struggles that bourgeois and Western cosmopolitan ideology thought they had buried long ago: Identity conflicts, traditional and religious conflicts; geopolitical fissures; ethnic issues raised on a planetary scale; battles for scarce resources… I need not develop the concept here, since I have devoted an entire book to it – Archaeofuturism – to which one can refer.”
Archaeofuturism, an extremely important work in the tradition of the European New Right, which, by questioning many assumptions of the Right, provoked heated debates when it was first published. Fey believes that the future of the Right requires overcoming the divide between those who desire the restoration of past traditions and those who demand new social and technological forms – creating a synthesis that will enhance the strengths and limit the excesses of both: the synthesis of Archaeofuturism.
Fey also provides a critique of the New Right: An analysis of the ongoing damage that Western liberalism, political inertia, uncontrolled immigration, and ethnic hatred are doing to our White selves, as well as the need to abandon past positions and dare to confront the realities of the present in order to realize the ideology of the future. He prophesies a series of disasters after 2010 caused by the unsustainability of the current world order, which, he claims, will offer an opportunity for the reconstruction of the West and the implementation of Archaeofuturism on a large scale.
This book is indeed a must-read for anyone interested in the path that the Anti-Establishment, Patriotic, Popular and Nationalist Right must take in order to face the growing crises and challenges that the White World will face in the coming decades.
The thinker emphasizes that the impending collapse, the ongoing melting of the White European world, also offers us historical opportunities: “When people have their backs against the wall and suffer piercing pain, they easily change their views!” The stormy century of iron and fire that awaits us will make people accept what is currently unacceptable. The right today must position itself so that it is perceived as “the alternative” when the inevitable crisis strikes. This means devaluing the left’s pseudo-dissent, the left’s pseudo-resistance, which is simply a demand for the intensification of official ideology and practice. It also means acquiring a monopoly on alternative thinking: not by imposing a party line, but by uniting all healthy forces at the European level and abandoning the regional “provincial disputes” and narrow dogmas, which undermine the necessary “European Nationalism”. (Please also read the analysis titled “The West – as it is today – has set“)
