Convergence of Catastrophes, page 1
Convergence of Catastrophes
Guillaume Faye
Convergence
of
Catastrophes
Translated by E. Christian Kopff
ARKTOS
London 2012
Original edition, La Convergence des catastrophes,
published in 2004 by Diffusion International Edition, Paris.
First English edition published in 2012 by Arktos Media Ltd.
Copyright to the English edition © 2012 by Arktos Media Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilised in any form or by any means (whether electronic or mechanical), including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publisher.
Printed in the United Kingdom.
isbn 978-1-907166-46-4
BIC classification:
Social forecasting, future studies (JFFR)
Social & political philosophy (HPS)
Nationalism (JPFN)
Translation: E. Christian Kopff
Editor: Matthew Peters
Co-Editor: John B. Morgan
Cover Design: Andreas Nilsson
Layout: Daniel Friberg
ARKTOS MEDIA LTD
www.arktos.com
Table of Contents
A Note from the Editor
Foreword
Introduction: An Explosive Cocktail
Believing in Miracles
Man, a Sick Animal
The Golem Parable, or the Machine that Went Mad
The ‘Billiard Ball’ Theory
‘Catastrophe Theory’ and ‘Discrete Structural Metamorphoses’
We Must Stop Believing in Sorcerers: Techno-science Gone Mad
1. Toward the Collapse of the Terrestrial Ecosystem
It is Already Too Late
How Times Have Changed!
Countdown to the Climate Bomb
Confronted by Global Warming, the Utopias of the Ecologists
Violent Climate Change is Going to Provoke Geopolitical Earthquakes
The Spectre of Shortages
Examples of Ecological Disasters
And Let’s Not Forget Epidemics
2. Toward the Clash of Civilisations
The Globalisation of War
Toward the Most Bellicose Century in History
Terror as Art of Living
Is It a Question of War between Islam and the West?
China against the USA
When Everyone Has Nuclear Weapons
Israel’s Tears
Two Examples to Make Us Think
The Return of the Titans
3. Toward Chaos in Europe
In the Eye of the Cyclone
The Horrible Spectre of Ethnic Civil War
Economy: Tomorrow, the Great European Depression
The Demographic Coma
The Cancer of Decadence
The European Union: The Shattered Dream
4. Toward a Giant Economic Crisis
The End of the Paradigm of ‘Economic Development’
The Impending Death of World Economic Development
Toward a ‘Civilisational Break-up’
There is No Reason to Believe that Traditional Economies are ‘Underdeveloped’
Is the Techno-scientific Economy Viable?
The Neo-global Economy of the Post-Catastrophe Age
A Non-egalitarian Economy
Techno-science as Esoteric Alchemy
When the Worst is Probable
The End of ‘Growth’
Economism is Condemned
The Fraud of the ‘New Economy’
The Dangerous Fragility of Globalised Liberal Capitalism
Some Small but Worrying Signals
The Spectre of Poverty
Cancelling the Debts of Poor Countries is a Farce
Conclusion: A New Middle Ages
Chaos and Post-Chaos
Humanity, the ‘Adjustment Variable’
The Drunken Boat
Catastrophe Scenarios
1. The ‘Soft’ Scenario
2. The ‘Hard’ Scenario
3. The ‘Very Hard’ Scenario
The End of Contemporary Humanity, Predicted by Tradition
Out of Chaos into the Light
A Note from the Editor
There were no footnotes to the original French edition of this book. Therefore, all footnotes to Faye’s text are my own. Wherever possible, references have been given to the English translations of texts; if a reference is to a work in another language, I was unable to locate an English version of it. All references to Web sites in the footnotes were verified as accurate and available during May 2012.
This translation was made directly from the original French edition published in 2004 by Diffusion International Edition. This edition was printed under the name Guillaume Corvus at the request of the publisher.
I would like to thank Professor E. Christian Kopff for the translation, as well as Jared Taylor for providing an excellent Foreword at short notice, and to Sergio Knipe, who translated the back cover text from the French edition. I also wish to express my gratitude to Matthew Peters, who did the bulk of the editing and proofreading for this volume, including painstakingly comparing the translation against the original French.
JOHN B. MORGAN IV
Bangalore, India, May 2012
Foreword
by Jared Taylor
I first met Guillaume Faye in Paris in 2003. On previous visits, I had met a few figures from the French Right, such as Alain de Benoist, Charles Champetier, Bruno Mégret, Bruno Gollnisch. Pierre Vial, and Jean-Yves Le Gallou. All were brilliant and charming men, fully engaged in the struggle to defend their nation and its culture.
But of all these remarkable Frenchmen, it was Guillaume Faye with whom I fell into the quickest intimacy. The two of us — a French dissident and an American dissident — discovered that we had been driven out of respectable discourse for the same reasons and by the same forces. I hasten to point out that Mr. Faye is a dissident of a much broader sweep than I. As readers of this book will find, nothing is safe from Guillaume Faye: politics, culture, sex, foreign policy, economics, or religion. But when it came to an understanding of race, of the biological foundations of European civilisation, we were immediately old comrades.
Since that time, we have met on both sides of the Atlantic, and Mr. Faye has been a speaker at two conferences I have organised. In 2006, he spoke on ‘The Threat to the West’, and in 2012 his subject was ‘America and Europe, Brothers-in-Arms: A French Point of View’.
I like to think that those trips have given Mr. Faye a more comprehensive view of the United States. As one of the founders of the French New Right, he shared that group’s deep suspicion of Americans, and in his 2001 book Why We Fight he wrote at considerable length about ‘the American adversary’.
I certainly do not support most of what the United States government does, but I believe Mr. Faye was mistaken when he wrote, for example, that Americans have tried to form alliances with Islam deliberately to weaken Europe. The multiculturalism and mass immigration that the United States promotes for all White countries certainly weakens them, but the American governments do not push these things only on others. They practice them relentlessly on their own people. The United States therefore does not weaken Europe deliberately. It weakens it, as it weakens itself, perversely and tragically.
Anyone with a vision of the West must look beyond governments to the people they misgovern, and what Mr. Faye and I discovered at that meeting in 2003 was, indeed, what became the theme of his 2012 talk: that the people of America and Europe are brothers-in-arms. I am not certain he knew it when he wrote Why We Fight, but Mr. Faye certainly knows it now: the struggle to save Europe is the struggle to save America. It is the struggle to save all the children of Europe, whether they live in Canada, Australia, South Africa, or anywhere else. When Mr. Faye warns of catastrophe for Europe and writes of his hopes for redemption, he warns and hopes for all of us.
For virtually any other member of the French New Right, it would be heresy to talk of Americans and Europeans as brothers-in-arms. Such language came naturally for Mr. Faye in his recent talk, because he spoke of the American and European peoples rather than their rulers. As he pointed out, the people are the roots from which culture, civilisation, and everything else grows, and if the European peoples — wherever they live — are replaced by others, all is lost.
Of course, in this book Mr. Faye warns that catastrophe looms no matter what we do: ‘It is impossible to stop the headlong race of contemporary planetary civilisation to the abyss, because there exists no power with the decisive will to do so. How to change the direction of six billion people?’
And he warns that it is the people of the West who are the worst prepared: ‘[W]e have never been less prepared: invaded, devirilised, physically and morally disarmed, the prey of a culture of meaninglessness and masochistic culpability. Europeans have never in their history been as weak as at this very moment when the Great Threat appears on the horizon.’
For some, Mr. Faye is nothing more than a prophet of doom, but in my view, for at least the last ten years, he has been Europe’s foremost spokesman for our people. Thanks to the translations by Arktos, his books are now available to the English-speaking world.
I particularly welcome this translation by E. Christian Kopff, whom I have known for nearly twenty years, and for whom I have the highest admiration. He has fully captured the slashing, uncompromising style that makes Mr. Faye so provocative and so memorable. I cannot think of a better match of author, publisher, and translator to bring these important ideas to new readers, and I envy them the pleasure of their first encounters with the work of Guillaume Faye.
Jared Taylor
Oakton, Virginia, 3 May 2012
Jared Taylor has been the editor of the journal American Renaissance since 1990, and founded the New Century Foundation in 1994, both of which have been among the most prominent institutions to analyse the problems being faced by those of European descent worldwide. He is also the author of Paved with Good Intentions: The Failure of Race Relations in Contemporary America (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1992); The Real American Dilemma: Race, Immigration, and the Future of America (Oakton, Virginia: New Century Foundation, 1998); and White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the Twenty-first Century (Oakton, Virginia: New Century Foundation, 2011).
Introduction: An Explosive Cocktail
‘The modern world is like a train full of ammunition running in the fog on a moonless night with its lights out.’
— Robert Ardrey[1]
For the first time in its history, humanity is threatened by a convergence of catastrophes.
A series of ‘dramatic lines’ are approaching one another and converging like a river’s tributaries with perfect accord (between 2010 and 2020) towards a breaking point and a descent into chaos. From this chaos — which will be extremely painful on the global scale — can emerge the new order of the post-catastrophe era and therefore a new civilisation born in pain.
Let us briefly summarise the nature of these lines of catastrophe.
The first is the cancerisation of the European social fabric. The colonisation of the Northern hemisphere for purposes of permanent settlement by the peoples of the global South[2], which is increasingly serious despite the reassuring affirmations of the media, is pregnant with explosive situations: the failure of the multiracial society, increasingly full of racism of all kinds with different communities becoming more and more tribal; the progressive ethnic and anthropological metamorphosis of Europe, a true historical cataclysm; the return of poverty to Western and Eastern Europe; the slow but steady growth of criminal activity and drug use; the continual disintegration of family structures; the decline of educational infrastructure and the quality of academic programs; the disruption of the transmission of cultural knowledge and social disciplines (barbarisation and loss of needed skills); the disappearance of popular culture and the increasing degrading of the masses by the culture of spectacles.[3] All this indicates to us that the European nations are moving toward a New Middle Ages.[4]
But these factors of social breakdown in Europe will be aggravated by the economic and demographic crisis which will only get worse and end by producing mass poverty. By 2010 the number of active workers will not be large enough to finance the retirements of the ‘grandpa boomers’. Europe will collapse under the weight of old people; then its ageing countries will see their economies slowed and handicapped by payments for healthcare and retirement benefits for unproductive citizens; in addition, the ageing of the population will dry up technical and economic dynamism. Besides these problems, the economy will increasingly resemble the Third World because of the uncontrolled immigration of unskilled populations.
Modernity’s third dramatic line of catastrophe will be the chaos of the global South. By displacing their traditional cultures with industrialisation, the nations of the South, in spite of a deceptive and fragile economic growth, have created social chaos that is only going to get worse.
The fourth line of catastrophe, which has recently been described by Jacques Attali,[5] is the threat of a world financial crisis, which will be much more serious than the crisis of the 1930s and will bring about a general recession. The harbinger of the crisis will be the collapse of the stock markets and currencies of the Far East, like the recession that is striking this region at present.
The fifth line of catastrophe is the rise of fanatical religious cults, principally Islam. The rise of radical Islam is the backlash to the excesses of the cosmopolitanism of modernity that wanted to impose on the entire world the model of atheist individualism, the cult of material goods, the loss of spiritual values and the dictatorship of the spectacle. In reaction to this aggression, Islam has radicalised, just as it was already becoming once again a religion of domination and conquest, in conformity with its traditions.
The sixth line of catastrophe: a North-South confrontation, with theological and ethnic roots, will appear on the horizon. It is increasingly likely to replace the risk of an East-West conflict, which we have so far avoided. No one knows what form it will take, but it will be serious, because it will be based on collective challenges and sentiments much stronger than the old and artificial partisan polarity of the United States and the Soviet Union, capitalism and Communism.
The seventh line of catastrophe is the uncontrolled increase of pollution, which will not threaten the Earth (which still has four billion years to look forward to and can start evolution over again from zero), but the physical survival of humanity. This collapse of the environment is the fruit of the liberal and egalitarian myth (which was once also a Soviet myth) of universal industrial development and a dynamic economy for everyone.
We can add to all this the probable implosion of the contemporary European Union, which is increasingly ungovernable, the risks involved with nuclear proliferation in the Third World, and the probability of ethnic civil war in Europe.
The convergence of these factors in the heart of a globalised and very fragile civilisation allows us to predict that the Twenty-first century will not be the ‘progressive’ continuation of the contemporary world, but the rise of another world. We must prepare ourselves for this tragic possibility with lucidity.
Believing in Miracles
We are dealing with a general prejudice inherited from the egalitarian and humanitarian utopias, like the philosophy of Progress, according to which ‘we can have everything at the same time’ and that reality never has negative consequences.
People believe they can have their cake and eat it too. They imagine, according to the liberal faith, that an ‘invisible hand’ will spontaneously restore a harmonious equilibrium. I shall mention a few examples of believing in miracles:
• Imagining that the dogma of the unlimited economic development of every nation is possible without massive pollution and ecological catastrophes that will destroy this very development. This is the illusion of indefinite development.
• Believing that a permissive society will not produce a social jungle, and that you can obtain at the same time libertarian emancipation and self-disciplined harmony. We see this drama being acted out in the shipwreck of our schools, where violence, insecurity, ignorance, and illiteracy are arising out of the illusion of progressive education, an educational method which rejects any form of discipline for its students.
• Believing that it will be possible to preserve retirement systems and social and medical entitlements while remaining faithful, in a period of demographic decline, to the ideal of ‘solidarity of distribution’. This is the illusion of the Communist conception of solidarity.
