Back to the Future

AFTER AN ABSENCE of thirteen years, Guillaume Faye, the French New Right’s prodigal son, has returned to the fray with a rich and stimulating essay called L’archeofuturisme. Returning to the “philosophy of the hammer” which made him so popular among young supporters of the neo-right, Guillaume Faye has readapted his eighties modernism to develop a neo-Nietzschean conception of the world. against modernity and its carcinogenic metastasis he urges the restoration of archaic values in an ultra-technological universe. To be archeo-futurist is to think in the manner of an old hoplite but one in front of a computer, ready to conquer Mars or to carry out genetic manipulation.

Faye affirms that GRECE failed in its strategy of infiltrating the established media. Inspired by the works of the scientists René Thom and Ilya Prigogine, he believes he can see in current events the first stirrings of a global catastrophe which he expects to break out in the early years of the twenty first century. We therefore have to anticipate the implosion of the West and state of the world which will come out of that implosion. That is the reason for Faye’s suggestion of an innovative, European radical and dissident approach: archeo-futurism. Archeo-futurism sees itself as a “re-emergence of archaic social configurations in a new context”. For the societies of the future we need to think in terms of a combination of the advances of techno-science and the return to traditional solutions out of the mists of time. That may be the true nature of post-modernity, as far removed from a nostalgic cult of the past as it is from an idiotic worship of whatever is current. Between the longest memory and the Faustian soul should not be a question of “or” but of “and”. For they do match. To bring together Evola and Marinetti...The Ancients are not to be aligned with the moderns but with the futurists, for...globally the future needs the return to ancestral values and that applies the whole world over.” As a new-post Western ideology, archeo-futurism is based on vitalist constructivism, the positive and persuasive name given to anti-egalitarianism. In the first chapter of his book, the ex-journalist and radio animator, levels some friendly but pertinent criticisms of the French New Right. If he disagrees with the communitarian thesis expressed in recent issues of éléments and insists that by restricting itself over-intellectual and insufficiently polemical activities it is responsible for the decline in support it suffered in 1983-1984 (the time when support for the Front national was rising) he also admits to what he now believes are errors of his own. The most significant change concerns geopolitics. Between 1978 and 1985 Faye was in favour of a European-Arab alliance, supported radical Islam and denounced the USA as an archetype of what he termed “the West in decline”. Today he considers that the so-called Third World is the principle enemy of the European peoples whilst the United States is simply a competing nation which must be reappropriated by the European in order to create a world of the North, “a Septentrion” to face the menace of the South. Another important change is in his attitude to the Front National. Although he had already shown an inclination towards the so-called “national preference” politics of Jean-Yves Le Gallou, Faye used to berate the Front National as a “Regano-Papist” organization. Now, (writing before the party split) he sees in the Front National the one and only authentic revolutionary movement in France!

The three chapters which follow are brief and confused outlines (Charles Schmitt follows the decriminalisation of all drugs) of archeo-futurist application to social life, science and the economy. No partisan of consensus or the so-called “soft ideology”, Faye believes that the Left has made its peace with the international bourgeois system. With the pretext that it is fighting against exclusion, the spirit of egalitarianism will have nothing to do with ideological differences based on group difference. Normally a despiser of puritanism in all its forms, Faye impatiently looks forward to the official sanctioning of houses of pleasure and impatiently awaits the advent of transgenetic man. He protests too against what he calls “the devirilisation” of European man, which, he claims, has led to an upsurge in male and female homosexuality.

On the subject of immigration, which favours multi-racial and therefore inevitably multi-racialist, societies Faye discerns three factors of so-called “immigrationism”: xenophilia, ethno-masochism and electoralism. However, because he believes, as he puts it, and rightly in this reviewer’s opinion, that the future belongs to peoples and not to tribes, he considers the “national preference” to be an anachronism. He suggests that it be replaced instead by an “ethnic preference” which would be the norm for homogenous populations. This follows on logically form his proposal to abolish the United Nations in order to make way for vast unity reaching from Iceland to Kamtchatka, which Faye calls Eurosiberia. The integration of a nation like France into Eurosiberia would not have to mean the loss of French identity. On the contrary, it would permit a redefinition and rediscovery of itself as Gaul, a land ethnically Gallic.

The sixth and final chapter is a science-fiction novella describing the day in the life (in 2073) of a high dignitary of the Eurosiberian federation. The first quarter of the 21st century has witnessed natural and human induced cataclysms. Europe has been able to rise again drawing on constructivist and vitalic principles, supported by national-populist Slavic governments in war with Islamic invaders between 2014 and 2028. The new nomos of the Earth dreamed by Faye gravitates around great ethnically centred continental blocs.

This provocative book will excite the post-modernist imagination. Unfortunately, some of the arguments are hide bound to the present. Guillaume Faye can’t get away from the belief in the importance and future of nationalism, in this case a nationalism with continental dimensions. Arguing that to be nationalist today is to give to the word “nationalism” its original etymological meaning: namely to defend one native people, is disingenuous nonsense. Faye confuses nationalism, a wholly modern concept, with populism, which has always existed, even when today the crowd and the mob are tending to replace the people as the driving force behind it. So to write, as Faye does, that “being a nationalist today is to become aware of the dimension of a European people which indeed exits, is threatened and is not so far prepared to defend itself politically” reveals a peremptory reductionism. Does a European people and hence a European nation really exist ? Certainly there are European peoples living on the continent of Europe for the most part with a common recent ethnic ancestry, who share the same civilisation and await the same historical destiny. But this very diversity is not compatible with a political construct based on a “European nationalism, democratic and federal”. Moreover, Faye’s ethnically homogenous regional areas is in hopeless contradiction with the archeo-futurist notion of Empire. It is time that other words are found, which bring archaisms into the future, words such as peoples, communities, homeland and province. Whatever Faye insists to the contrary, his archeo-futurism will be a multi-cultural melting pot.

Guillaume Faye sees Islam as a major threat to Europe. This Islamophophia is quite surprising, for unless Faye is suggesting the non too realistic crusade against all the Muslims of the world, with the purpose of extirpating the “religion of the Prophet”, Europe has to accept the geopolitical proximity of Islamic lands on the south coast of the Mediterranean. If it is necessary as Faye puts it to, “become aware of our responsibilities, to rediscover the taste for power”, then Islam is an adjuvant. The author forgets that under the yoke of Saracen and Tartar, the Spaniard and the Russian receptively found the way to a new Renaissance which was to transform them into Empire builders.

L’archeofuturism will scandalise the naive dreamers who believe that we are approaching the Golden Age of prosperity and brotherly love. He will shake those who are not familiar with the theses in his first book, Le Système à tuer les peuples. The contents of L’archeofuturism are subversive, because, as the author writes, “we now own the monopoly of alternative thinking, the monopoly of rebel thinking.”

Georges Feltin-Tracol

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