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Question: We will begin by quoting you. In the review Études et recherches, fifteen years ago, you wrote that one can arrive at the point where “a world civilization desirous to stabilize history opposes its conservative will to the forces which it had itself released.” According to you, are we there? The Occident, longtime passive witness of the ethnic invasion, America longtime imprudent accomplice of the Islamists — do they still have the moral strength “to stop the course of history” when the clash of civilizations has passed from the stage of the “cold war” to that of the “hot war”?
Guillaume Faye: One epoch terminates, another commences. One cannot foresee what will occur: what we know is that we are at a crossroads; we live the end of an age of European civilization. This civilization has known three great epochs: the ancient, the medieval, then the modern which commenced about the 1850s. Currently we live at the end of this last epoch because Europe is invaded by the very ones it had conquered when it is in full demographic decline. On the moral, mental, psychological level, all European values have reached their conclusion, diluted in humanism and total egalitarianism. The Hegelian “enough” thesis that I defend is that this situation is provoking a world catastrophe which can in the end regenerate us. One does not regenerate oneself cold: one can metamorphose oneself only hot. The central question that one can pose in a dialectical manner is to know if this ethnic, ecological, ethical, etc., catastrophe that European civilization caused by its own decline will be the occasion of a regeneration or a disappearance.
Currently we are colonized, and this invasion is coupled with an incredible masochism on the part of Europeans themselves. Thus, only a terrifying crisis – that I welcome, in this respect -- can change collective mentalities, awake Europeans. In my new book, Avant-Guerre [Before the War], I develop my thesis of “the Colonization of Europe,” while going beyond, by transcending the European context. Because for me, now that we have come right to the clash of civilizations, we go towards the third world war!
Question: The shock of September 2001 seemed to awaken the capacity of analysis of certain media. Then, quite quickly, Bush specified that he did not make war on Islam, and the big media — Le Monde or Télérama in France, Repubblica in Italy — devoted all their energy to make Islam known to us, this religion of tolerance and culture, so near and so remote. Has censorship already returned?
Guillaume Faye: This awakening was a shuddering, a flapping of wings. When Bush and Blair say that they do not make war on Islam, it is risible. Maybe we do not make war on Islam, but Islam makes war on us! It is not you who designate the enemy; it is the enemy who designates you! They knew very well that they declared the war on Islam, which besides is designated in Arabic by the same word as “Islamism”: islamiya. There was thus a small awakening, but it is not very important. The war which Islam makes on us did not begin on September 11, 2001, but in the ’60s. What is positive, it’s that the Islamists went too far, too fast: it’s the Arab mentality which wants that. They passed too quickly from the time of peace to the time of war, whereas they were underway to invade consciousness. If they had been less impatient, nobody would have seen anything. No doubt, so that the eyes really open, there a giant attack will be necessary: but I do not believe that this will take place immediately; it is not in their interest to realize too much of it in the immediate future.
It is possible that there will be a period of calm. We are faced with a terrorism which does not depend on a true terrorist organization, but deploys itself according to the logic of a transnational war, in networks, and which goes beyond the sole capacities of a group like Al-Qaeda: Islam is multinational; the war is not territorialized, nor reducible to the misdeeds of a single organization! The end of bin Laden will not solve anything at all because this last, simple sponsor of the jihad in spite of his posture of Prophet, had only applauded some acts that he undoubtedly had followed and financed, but certainly not organized directly himself!
Question: Which strategy do you recommend for citizens who would like to prepare for the future conflicts? Some have said that you want to found your own political party.
Guillaume Faye: It’s idiotic! That would limit my audience. That goes completely against my current analysis, because I recommend creating and working through a network. It is certainly necessary that there be parties to make agitprop. But the important thing is the network, on a European scale, without a guru or bigwig! To found one more petty sect is completely counterproductive. My “party” is my secretariat and the many friends with whom I collaborate in all Europe. I do not want a label!
Question: In the review Réfléchir et Agir, you recommended a “withdrawal” from associative action, following the example of that which the extreme-Left made. Could you develop this point?
Guillaume Faye: It is not a “withdrawal,” but a general-purpose strategy. One needs parties, publishers, associations, trade unions. It is necessary that our ideas be present in civil society. But all the forms of action are necessary: we should not oppose metapolitics to politics. All action, political, cultural, should be connected by the same vision of the world. It is not a strategy of withdrawal, but of spreading out, comparable that of the Trotskyists — who are today at the head of the State and of the Catholic Church! – from the ’60s. The French national Right is undermined by the culture of defeat, petty bosses, gossip: the different groups of Muslims and Leftists can detest one other, but they have each and all the same enemies against whom they unite. Whereas for many people of our ideas, the enemy is at first his own political friend, for simple reasons of jealousy!
I am stunned to see that associative action has so little been used. There is no association which defends Europeans! Well, there is AGRIF, but they do few things, and they belong too openly to the National Front, which undermines their credibility: S.O.S Racism knew to more or less camouflage its connection to the Socialist Party!
At least, the Left moves: look at Act against Unemployment, ATTAC or Right to Housing, which represent 5,000 people in France! People in our circles are for order, but they are disorganized and inactive, whereas the Trotskyists, in spite of their ideology, are organized people. It is necessary to move! I am struck by the poverty of the associative activity in our camp. I repeat it, there is anti-European racism and no association really stirs itself to get it talked about!
Question: What do you think of this pro-Islamist drift that one observes in the French national Right, a drift often aroused by an anti-Americanism fed on ill-digested antisemitism?
Guillaume Faye: This drift is recognized. They confound the enemy and the adversary: the adversary is that which weakens us, that is to say the United States, the enemy is that which invades us concretely: Islam and the Third World. The funniest thing is that it is I, among others, who, in the ’70s, convinced this circle that one did not have to be deeply pro-American. All the obsessional anti-Americans of today were then pro-Americans! Giorgio Locchi and I, notably with my book Le Système à tuer les peuples [The System Against the Peoples], made Alain de Benoist topple over into anti-Americanism, who was an Americanophile before; to realize it, it is enough to re-read the numbers from before 1975 of the review Nouvelle École! Some suffer from an obsessional antisemitism, coupled with a kind of Stockholm Syndrome which makes them love the true enemy. The Muslims will not hold any liking of them for it: the French “identitarians” who perhaps admired the actions attributed to bin Laden will have their throats cut like the others! Islam is a religion of force which leads certain nationalist militants to prostrate in front of the conquering religion with the fascination of a colonized people. But even if they convert, which is already the case for some, they are always, as Occidentals, only second-class Muslims. Pro-Islamism in the nationalist Right is common enough. Plus these people are “nazis” in the most primary sense of the word, anti-Americans in the most idiotic sense of the term, and plus they are pro-Muslims, without knowing either America or Islam besides. They are fascinated by the neo-romantic illusions which they have of Islam. In circles which claim to be radical, there is an infantile reaction: these people are perhaps extremists, but not radical, because the radicals are those who go to the root of things. It is easy to tag “US go home” or “Long live bin Laden” in the subway; they risk less than if they were going to write “Islam out” in the projects.
Question: As a journalist, which judgment do you give to the sociology of the current media? Does the “politically correct” find its roots in the Third-Worldism of the ’50s and ’60s, in communist engagement, or rather in May ‘68 and the years which followed?
Guillaume Faye: It is a sequence; but I believe that it is the post-’68 period which weighed the most. Those who hold the media are people 50 years old, of my generation, who grew up in a neo-Marxist atmosphere. But one needs to know that there reigns among journalists a true Stalinist single thought: Marxism has ceded in this respect its place to Third-Worldism, then to immigrationism. To succeed socially, it is necessary to have a position which goes in the direction of the anti-[White] racist, immigrationist, and egalitarian software-ideology (as at the time of the USSR, where it was necessary to be pro-Soviet). Knowing that even people disapproving of it participate in this vulgar affair.
Everyone sees the truth in the street, everyone except the current elites, who play ostrich. Some great journalists, totally [in spite] of my ideas, signed the petitions for the “undocumented:” they explained to me that if they had refused, their career was screwed. It does not suffice not to speak of it: one must claim to be anti-[White] racist, as it was necessary to be Stalinophile in the ’50s. Charlie-Hebdo attacked Gérard Depardieu because he refused to sign! That did him no harm, because he is at the top. But a young actor would have seen his career cut short. One must know that many do not speak by conviction, but from fear: they want to be on the side of the whip hand. One must proclaim oneself anti-[white] racist, for immigration, etc. as in the nineteenth century one must go to Mass every Sunday! That means Charlie-Hebdo, directed by “old schmucks,” is the classic example of the “Stalinist rag and informer,” a “media of thought-police and collaborators,” the “freezing point of journalism.” For Europeans to have a true awakening from the conformism and ethno-masochistic blindness of our self-styled “opinion leaders,” we have need of a terrible crisis, which alone can give us the energy to defend ourselves.
From the Guillaume Faye Archive, interviewer and translator not credited.