Life After the Collapse

How whites will emerge from the rubble.

Guillaume Faye, Archeofuturism, Arktos Media, 2010, 249 pp., $22.95,
available from arktos.com, soft cover, (originally written in 1998)

reviewed by Thomas Jackson

Ex: http://www.amren.com/

Guillaume Faye is one of the most brilliant and provocative writers to emerge from the French New Right. He has written a great deal in his long and varied career, but Archeofuturism is his best-known and probably most important book. Written in 1998, only now has it been translated into English, thanks to the Arktos Media publishing group, which has made a number of New Right classics available to English-speakers.

Archeofuturism is hard to place on an American political spectrum. It is openly race-realist — “The ethnic question today is taboo, and hence crucial” — but has a revolutionary fervor that we associate with the left. Dr. Faye is passionately attached to the people and culture of Europe but wants completely to overthrow the current civilization. “The only strategy is all-out war,” he writes. “Compromise must be abolished.”

Archeofuturism is Dr. Faye’s blueprint for the future age that will succeed the cataclysms we are foolishly bringing upon ourselves. Much of it is fanciful, but Dr. Faye’s guesses about the future are never dull, and are based in a far more realistic understanding of history and human nature than the babblings of conventional “futurologists.”

The importance of race

Dr. Faye takes it for granted that race is real. “I insist on the importance of biological kinship to define peoples, and particularly the family of European peoples,” he writes. “The inherited characteristics of a people shape its culture and outlook.” This is why he so opposes “the current demographic colonization of Europe by Afro-Asiatic peoples, which is prudishly called ‘immigration’.” He asserts that Third-Worlders have none of the notions of brotherhood or “multi-culturalism” that hypnotize whites; they come with the intent to dominate. “One land, one people: this is what human nature requires,” he writes, noting that only whites pretend otherwise.

For Dr. Faye, the notion of the West is disappearing, eventually to be replaced by a northern coalition of whites facing waves of invasion: “The twenty-first century will witness global ethnic warfare and the legions of immigrants in Europe will serve as the ‘fifth column’ of an aggressive South.” He points out that all non-whites think in terms of race, “unlike Parisian intellectuals,” and that our rulers are digging their own graves just as surely as they are digging ours: “We shall be submerged by more vital, more youthful and less well-meaning peoples with the complicity of a delinquent bourgeoisie that — whatever it may do — will itself be swept away by the tide it has so heedlessly caused.”

Dr. Faye has nothing but contempt for the present era. The central dogma of the age is egalitarianism, he writes, and it survives only because of a blind faith in miracles. The dogma’s failures are evident everywhere; just as individuals vary enormously in their talents and abilities, so do the races and nations. Forcible equality is tyranny.

Dr. Faye is passionately attached to the people and culture of Europe but wants completely to overthrow the current civilization.

Dr. Faye also denounces what he calls “pathological altruism,” or the perpetual propping up of failed people and failed societies. Our rulers ignore the dysgenic effects of welfare and — even worse — tax their own people to feed Third-Worlders who long to dispossess the North. “Pathological altruism” is partly explained by what Dr. Faye calls “pathological individualism.” Because our rulers think only about the individual — and not about nation or race — they promote dysgenic policies at home and raise armies of overseas enemies who will march against their own children.

“Pathological individualism” is also behind such modern distractions as homosexual marriage. The government should not recognize unions that are by definition barren and have no role in perpetuating society. As Napoleon explained, concubines take no notice of the law and the law takes no notice of them. Dr. Faye thinks homosexuality should likewise be a private matter, of no interest to the pubic or the state.

Homosexual marriage, however, is typical of the interests of Western governments because our rulers are incapable of grasping the questions that really matter. In Dr. Faye’s view, Western democracy is so cut off from reality, so amputated that he calls it “democtomy.” Only “pseudo dissent” is permitted, and Europeans prefer to ban political parties that actually challenge orthodoxy. In France, for example, the authorities call Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front “intolerant” because they want to ban it.

Dr. Faye argues that one of the goals of modern society is “to abolish thought in favor of spectacle” by promoting such things as professional sports. He can think of nothing more idiotic than paying money to watch people play games, and believes it is perverse to build up passionate attachments to outcomes that haven’t the slightest meaning or importance. Tennis champions or soccer players are nothing but performers, and their position in society should be no different from that of circus acrobats. Video games likewise clog the brain and prevent thought, which pleases our rulers because thought is dangerous. Dr. Faye also decries the disintegration of the family, the decline of education, and the replacement of culture with audio-visual pap.

Only radical, revolutionary acts, writes Dr. Faye, can destroy modernity. Unfortunately, Europeans are so domesticated they will never abolish egalitarianism and build a vigorous, self-conscious Europe. Instead, their infantilized world will be pulled down around them by “convergent catastrophes” that Dr. Faye predicted (writing in 1998) would strike between the years 2010 and 2020.

Disaster upon disaster

Among these, of course, are colonization by the South, which will lead to the collapse of multi-racial societies (which only whites have encouraged to take root in their midst). As Christianity continues to disintegrate in the face of Islam, Europe will face the prospect of “imperial theocratic totalitarianism.” At the same time, the West will be saddled with millions of old people with only a few young workers — or hostile Third-World immigrants — to support them.

The South is creating disasters of its own as non-whites try to mimic whites. Any Third-World attempt at democracy, for example, “leads to tragic consequences because of intellectual incompatibilities when it is forcefully imposed upon the cultures of the South.” Africans, for example, have lost their traditional societies and are incapable of replacing them with anything that is not squalid and cruel.

Illegal immigrants in France.

Dr. Faye laughs at anyone who thinks science will save us. He predicts plagues of drug-resistant diseases and, most catastrophically, exhaustion of the planet. The earth will run out of energy, he writes, adding that the notion that people would constantly get richer was a delusional spasm that lasted only 100 years. Dr. Faye roundly dismisses the fantasy of 7 billion people, all living like 20th-century Americans.

Cascading catastrophes will mean financial panic, global recession, plummeting world GNP, race war, and mass die offs. Europeans who survive will live by different principles: the principles of archeofuturism. Dr. Faye believes that what emerges from the rubble is the society Europeans would build deliberately if they were sane, but it will instead be forced on them by catastrophes of their own making. He hopes his book will guide the thinking of those who survive to lay the foundations.

Archaic, not conservative

After the crash, “most of humanity would revert to a pre-technological subsistence economy based on agriculture and the crafts.” An overexploited earth will permit no higher level of material existence. How will society be ordered? Dr. Faye rejects “conservatism,” or nostalgia for an older order: “We should avoid being backward-looking, concerned with restoration and reaction, for it is the last few centuries that have spawned the pox that is now devouring us.” Instead, he predicts the emergence of “archaic” values, that is to say, “answers that stretch back into the mists of time.”

People will live in hierarchical, inegalitarian communities that bind members to a common destiny. Atomized individualism will be impossible because there will be no government handouts, and people will depend on each other for survival. There will be distinct castes, in which the warrior caste will have great prestige. Duties will come before rights, infractions will be severely punished, sex roles will be clearly defined, and marriages will be unions of entire families rather than contracts between individuals. Dr. Faye conceives governance as something like that of the Germanic tribes, or Athens of the fourth century BC.

Unlike today’s system, which falsely promises that anyone can be “a scientist or a prince” — and which only causes envy and resentment — hierarchy will be ingrained but accepted. Free of “individualistic hubris,” even the humble will take pride in their limited contribution.

Dr. Faye insists that these societies will not be inferior to our own; just different. Dr. Faye imagines mystic initiations, rites of passage, and fervent forms of religion in what he calls “the new Middle Ages.” He sees most people as poorer but much more attached to their communities, and happier than people of today.

Not all people will live this way, however. Advanced technology will not have completely disappeared. A small elite will enjoy its benefits, and will live in material abundance. Just what the relations between the elite and the masses will be, Dr. Faye does not make clear, but he seems to think the elite will run things kindly through an aristocracy that renews itself through talent rather than heredity. The masses, in turn, will be satisfied with their lot, barely conscious of the gilded lives led by their betters.

The elites will, in fact, live in a world of “hyperscience” — the futurism of archeofuturism — unfettered by today’s “pseudo-ethical obstacles.” Nuclear power will proliferate, and Dr. Faye believes genetic science will unleash dramatic eugenic breakthroughs. He even imagines useful crossbreeds between humans and animals, and cloned organ banks. None of this will be available to the unscientific masses, so the gaps between the two worlds will grow ever larger.

A new world order

Dr. Faye speaking at the 2006 American
Renaissance conference.

Dr. Faye’s prescriptions for Europe are part of his post-catastrophe scenario, but could conceivably come about without a world-wide crash. He predicts the establishment of Eurosiberia or the United States of Europe, which would be home to the “folk whose natural and historical territory — whose fortress, I would say — extends from Brest to the Bering Strait.” He believes that in the face of Islam and Third-World immigration, whites are uniting within their common homeland and around their common culture, just as the Greeks did when the Persians invaded. He does not expect Eurosiberia to be entirely exclusive, however: “We can accommodate guests, but not invaders.”

Like many thinkers on the European right, Dr. Faye thinks the nation state is finished. Europeans will have deeper attachments to regions, which will have great autonomy in matters of culture, education, and language. In the meantime, he urges support for the European Union. Dr. Faye recognizes that this is a risky strategy, given the stifling, aggressively egalitarian nature of EU institutions. He nevertheless thinks they will become the framework of his beloved Eurosiberia when the collapse shatters egalitarianism and the belief in miracles on which it depends.

Eurosiberia will be just one of perhaps four or five autarkic blocs that Dr. Faye predicts will emerge. All will be racially more or less homogeneous, with the possible exception of the North American Union. Dr. Faye seems to believe that if anyone can make a success of multi-racialism, it is the Americans, but he is not sanguine about that either. The blocs — all with a large pre-technological populations and small elites — will not have much contact with each other, and there will certainly be no foreign aid.

Always entertaining

Clearly, Dr. Faye does not hesitate to make bold predictions, and his speculations are always entertaining. Whether anything he predicts will actually happen is anyone’s guess, but he is unquestionably right about two things: the central role race will play and the impotence of today’s Western ideologies. Whether one accepts his conception of archaism or not, there is no doubt that Islam and the Third World have the spirit of conquest and absolutism that once characterized Christianity and the West. Muslims are famously willing to die for their faith, and non-whites are famously ready to riot for whatever they want. Whites are famously willing to make endless concessions in the name of “human rights” to people who have nothing but contempt for anyone else’s “human rights.” As the game is played today, it is an abysmally unequal contest.

Let us hope it will not take “convergent catastrophes” to jolt whites out of their suicidal softness, but if it does, let the catastrophes come soon. The longer that day is put off, the larger the Third-World “fifth column” will grow, and the more desperate will be the struggle for European survival.