Why We Fight, page 29
[71]Louis Auguste Blanqui (1805-1881) was a revolutionary activist. His version of socialism, however, differed greatly from Marx’s, especially in that he believed that a socialist revolution would not be brought about through a mass movement of the workers, but rather by a small elite who would enact the revolution by imposing a temporary dictatorship.
[72]The Treaty of Amsterdam was a revision of the 1992 Treaty of the European Union.
[73]Published in English as Archeofuturism: European Visions of the Post-Catastrophic Age (London: Arktos Media, 2010).
[74]As President, Charles de Gaulle presided over France’s participation in the formation of the European Community (forerunner of today’s European Union). While he did not attempt to stop the development of the EC, it is true that he went to great lengths to manipulate it to ensure France’s independence from it and the other members, including withdrawing French participation in the EC altogether.
[75]The Carolingian Empire was ruled by Charlemagne and his successors during the Ninth century. At its height, the Empire comprised most of Western Europe, and is seen by historians as begetting the modern states of France and Germany.
[76]The Ghibellines were one of the two main factions of the Holy Roman Empire. They favoured the imperial power of the Hohenstaufen dynasty, in opposition to the Guelphs, who supported the idea of Papal authority.
[77]Claude Lévi-Strauss, Race and History (Paris: UNESCO, 1952).
[78]The European Union.
[79]The MV Erika was a Maltese tanker that broke in two and sank during a storm in the Bay of Biscay on 12 December 1999. It killed much marine life and polluted the shores of Brittany, and remains the largest environmental disaster in French history.
[80]From Le Figaro, 20 July 2000.
[81]As of this writing, Germany remains committed to closing down all of its nuclear plants by the 2030s, a process that has been accelerated in the aftermath of the nuclear accidents in Japan in March 2011. Italy overturned its moratorium on nuclear energy in 2008, which had been in place since 1990, and has signed a deal with France to construct four new plants. Following the Chernobyl disaster, Sweden was committed to ending nuclear power by 2010, but in 2010 the Swedish Parliament voted to replace the existing plants with new ones, halting the phase-out.
[82]Dominique Voynet (b. 1958) is a member of the Green Party and was Minister of the Environment between 1997 and 2001, known for her environmentalism and pacifist stances. She is currently a Senator.
[83]Train à Grande Vitesse is French for high-speed train.
[84]Faye is referring to the Barrage de Petit-Saut dam in northern French Guiana.
[85]Although the Rance Tidal Power Station was indeed the first of its kind in the world, commencing operation in 1966, it is not the only one. Canada, China, Northern Ireland, Russia, South Korea, and the United States all operate tidal power stations, with future plants planned by India and the United Kingdom.
[86]Centralised networks.-Tr.
[87]From Le Figaro, 24 July 2000.
[88]Francis Fukuyama (b. 1952) is an American political philosopher who is best-known for his 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man, which postulated that with the triumph of liberal democracy at the end of the Cold War, humanity had attained the perfect form of government and that the remnants of other ideologies would soon pass away. It was viewed by many as the credo of America’s political and economic dominance of the world during the 1990s. Although widely associated with American neoconservatism at that time, he has distanced himself from the movement in recent years.
[89]The CAC 40 is the French stock market index.
[90]The Asian Financial Crisis began in July 1997 in Thailand when the government, faced with bankruptcy due to its massive foreign debt, switched the national currency from a fixed to a floating exchange rate, causing its collapse. The crisis then spread throughout Asia, resulting in massive inflation which continued to affect many nations until the end of 1998. Indonesia was particularly impacted, culminating in widespread rioting and the resignation of President Suharto.
[91]Faye’s prediction seems to be well on its way to being fulfilled. In France alone, the large-scale riots of 2005 and 2007 by Muslim immigrant youth, the mass protest in 2006 against the government’s attempt to deregulate labour, the 2010 protest against the government’s plan to raise the minimum age of pensioners to combat increasing debt, and the EU’s sovereign debt crisis sparked by the collapse of the Greek economy in the same year, all seem to be the sorts of warning signs foreseen by Faye.–Ed.
[92]Maurice Allais (1911-2010) won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 1988. In his later years, he often criticized the economic and legal foundations of the European Union.
[93]François Perroux (1903-1987) was a French economist who was best-known for his criticisms of economic policies involving the Third World, which he felt were too centred on Western interests and concepts.
[94]A thalassocracy is a state which depends primarily on the sea for its power, either economically or strategically.
[95]Faye is referring to the Gulf War of 1991.
[96]Time Magazine, 5 June 2000.
[97]This was written prior to the American invasion of Iraq in 2003.
[98]Charles Martel (ca. 688-741), which in English means Charles the Hammer, was a great Frankish military commander who fought under the Merovingian kings, defeated a Muslim invasion and thus prevented Europe’s Islamisation, and helped to lay the groundwork for modern Europe.
[99]‘The “Giant Hedgehog” refers to a celebrated poster made at the time of the huge demonstrations against American missiles in the early Eighties. The poster, drawn by the Flemish cartoonist “Korbo”, represented a joyful laughing hedgehog walking along and saying “Pacifist but ready to defend myself”. It was a plea for a well-organised defence according to the Swiss or Yugoslavian model. Once the hedgehog displays his dards he cannot be captured by a predator. So Europe had to leave NATO and to adopt a Swiss citizens’ army able to “network” (maillage in the French terminology of General Brossolet) the territory in a locally-based defence system. General Jochen Löser, with whom I worked for a short time, wrote his thoughts down in several papers about this kind of alternative defence system.’ Courtesy of Robert Steuckers.
[100]Latin: ‘an essential element’ or ‘prerequisite’.
[101]Gorbachev had used the phrase earlier, but is most famous for using it in an address in Prague in April 1987, in which he was calling for an end to the partitioning of Europe between East and West.
[102]French President Jacques Chirac was one of the primary proponents of the Quai Branly Museum, an art museum dedicated to presenting the works of indigenous cultures from around the world, located near the Eiffel Tower in Paris. The museum opened in 2006.
[103]Jus soli, or birthright citizenship, is the official policy of France and the U.S., automatically granting citizenship to anyone born within their respective territories. In contrast, most European countries have a policy of blood citizenship in which one’s eligibility depends at least partially on one’s ethnicity.
[104]‘The autarky of great spaces’. This is a reference to the Historical school of economics, an approach to economics and its administration that arose during the late Nineteenth century in Germany and persisted until the Third Reich. Its adherents maintained that economics could only be understood within the cultural context of a specific historical era, and not using standardised formulas or theories. Its members were also often concerned with the plight of the common workers. Joseph Schumpeter, Werner Sombart, and Max Weber were all members of the school.
[105]‘Cultural exception’ was a concept introduced by France in the 1993 GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) agreement in the United Nations in 1993. It called for cultural products to be treated differently from other types of goods, allowing France to maintain tariffs and quotas designed to protect its television and film markets from domination by the United States.
[106]Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881-1938) was a Turkish military officer in the First World War who led the Turkish national movement following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, later becoming the first President of modern Turkey. His reforms laid the foundation for the secular, democratic Turkish government which has existed up to the present day.
[107]Abd-el-Rahman al-Ghafiqi was the Arab military leader who led the Muslims into battle against the Frankish forces of Charles Martel in 732. His army was defeated and he himself was killed by Franks during the battle while attempting to stop his men from retreating.
[108]From Vouloir, January-February 1995.
[109]‘What if some day or night a demon were to steal into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life as you now live it and have lived it you will have to live once again and innumerable times again; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unspeakably small or great in your life must return to you, all in the same succession and sequence…”’ From Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 194. This is one of Nietzsche’s central ideas.
[110]René Thom (1923-2002) was a French mathematician who is best-known for his development of catastrophe theory. The theory is complex, but in essence it states that small alterations in the parameters of any system can cause large-scale and sudden changes to the system as a whole.
[111]Pareto coins this term in The Mind and Society (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1935), vols. 3 and 4, to describe the transference of people that he saw taking place between two groups in society: those with fixed economic means, and those whose income is variable and depends upon their own ingenuity to be maintained. Pareto believed that some people remained influential in society only because of their situation as part of the former group, while others became influential through their driven to attain more wealth and power. Individuals from the latter group would sometimes cross from one group to the other as a result of their efforts. The degree to which this process takes place, Pareto asserted, determines the qualities of a civilisation. See The Mind and Society, Sections 2026-2029 and 2233-2235.
[112]Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923) was an Italian sociologist whose lack of faith in democracy was highly influential upon the Italian Fascists, and later, the European New Right.
[113]As of this writing, Islam is still believed to be second to Catholicism in terms of practice in France, reckoned at approximately 10% of the population, although it is difficult to gauge how accurate these estimates are. The statistics released by the Church itself indicate that practice among French Catholics has been dropping rapidly
[114]French: ‘New Right’.
[115]As opposed to a universum, which denotes something that is present everywhere, a pluriversum was defined by New Right author Julien Freund as a ‘plurality of particular and independent collectivities or of divergent interpretations of the same universal idea’ (‘Schmitt’s Political Thought’, Telos 102, Winter 1995, p. 11).
[116]Bouvard and Pécuchet are the main characters in a novel by Gustav Flaubert, published in 1881: Bouvard et Pécuchet. The two title characters are office clerks who become friends and, out of their shared enthusiasm for learning, attempt to master all of the various branches of knowledge. All of their efforts are unsuccessful.
[117]As understood in Arabic, the Ummah designates the whole of the community of adherents to Islam, wherever they are in the world, regardless of ethnicity or national boundaries. The term originates in the Qur’an (3:110).
[118]Robert Ardrey (1908-1980) was a widely read and discussed author during the 1960s, particularly his books African Genesis (1961) and The Territorial Imperative (1966). Ardrey’s most controversial hypothesis, known as the ‘killer ape theory’, posits that what distinguished humans’ evolutionary ancestors from other primates was their aggressiveness, which caused them to develop weapons to conquer their environment and also leading to changes in their brains which led to modern humans. In his view, aggressiveness was an inherent part of the human character rather than an aberration. In more recent years, however, Ardrey’s theories are no longer upheld by the mainstream scientific establishment.
[119]Foie gras, or ‘fat liver’, is a dish prepared from a duck or goose liver that has been purposefully fattened.
[120]Veblen (1857-1929) was a prominent American economist and sociologist. He is best known for his 1899 book The Theory of the Leisure Class, in which he postulated that the emerging upper class of modern society was unique in that it consumed a great deal, but contributed little toward the maintenance or advancement of civilisation.
[121]Guy Debord (1931-1994) was a French Marxist philosopher and the founder of the Situationist International, and whose ideas have become influential on both the radical Left and Right. The spectacle, as described in his principal work, The Society of the Spectacle, is one of the means by which the capitalist establishment maintains its authority in the modern world — namely, by reducing all genuine human experiences to representational images in the mass media, thus allowing the powers-that-be to determine how individuals experience reality.
[122]Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) was a French philosopher and cultural theorist who is regarded as one of the most important postmodernist thinkers. In his early works, he analysed consumerism and concluded that capitalist societies instill false needs in the minds of consumers by linking the consumer’s identity to a fetishised object which will give him social prestige if he acquires it.
[123]Jacques Attali (1943- ) is a French economist who was an advisor to Mitterrand during the first decade of his presidency. Many of his writings are available in translation. Faye may be referring to Attali’s article ‘The Crash of Western Civilisation: The Limits of the Market and Democracy’, which appeared in the Summer 1997 issue of the American journal Foreign Policy. In it, Attali claimed that democracy and the free market are incompatible, writing: ‘Unless the West, and particularly its self-appointed leader, the United States, begins to recognise the shortcomings of the market economy and democracy, Western civilisation will gradually disintegrate and eventually self-destruct.’ In many ways his arguments resemble Faye’s.
[124]Pericles (495?-429 BCE) governed Athens during its ‘Golden Age’ between the Persian and Peloponnesian Wars, when Athens made many of its greatest achievements. He also introduced many democratic reforms.
[125]A cumulonimbus cloud is the type of cloud which is conducive to thunderstorms. They tend to have very short life-spans.
[126]Latin: ‘bread and circuses’, a term first coined by the Roman poet Juvenal to describe the entertainments which Romans used to distract themselves from dealing with the larger problems of the Empire. It has come to refer to any such entertainments which serve to divert people’s attention away from social problems.
[127]Carl Schmitt (1888-1985) was an important German jurist who wrote about political science, geopolitics and constitutional law. He was part of the Conservative Revolutionary movement of the Weimar era. He also briefly supported the National Socialists at the beginning of their regime, although they later turned against him. He remains highly influential in the fields of law and philosophy.
[128]From Theory of the Partisan (New York: Telos Press, 2007), p. 85. A footnote to this phrase in the Telos Press edition of this work notes that its meaning is explained in Schmitt’s postwar notebooks: ‘Historia in nuce [history in a nutshell]. Friend and Enemy. The friend is he who affirms and confirms me. The enemy is he who challenges me (Nuremberg 1947). Who can challenge me? Basically, only myself. The enemy is he who defines me. That means in concreto: only my brother can challenge me and only my brother can be my enemy.’ From Glossarium: Aufzeichnungen der Jahre 1947-1951 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1991), p. 217.
[129]From Ex Captivitate Salus (Cologne: Greven Verlag, 1950), quoted in Gopal Balakrishnan, The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt (London: Verso, 2000), p. 132.
[130]Jean de La Fontaine (1621-1695) was a French poet who wrote many fables, in addition to other works. ‘The Dog and the Wolf’ describes an encounter between a starving wolf and a well-fed dog. The dog tries to entice the wolf to take up his lifestyle, pointing out that to the wolf, who must fight for every meal, and the dog merely has to submit to his human masters for food. The wolf, horrified by such a loss of freedom, decides to go back to his hunting lifestyle.
[131]Gaïa is the Ancient Greek name for the goddess of the Earth. In recent decades, the name has been adopted by ecologists, who use it to depict the combined components of the Earth as a living organism with its different parts acting in symbiosis with one another, rather than as a resource merely intended to be exploited by humans.
[132]Latin: ‘one doesn’t command but rather obeys nature’.
[133]This was a term first coined by Jean Thiriart.
[134]Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) was a theorist of evolution who was a contemporary of Darwin. It was he who coined the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’ in his 1864 book, Principles of Biology, to describe Darwin’s idea of natural selection. Darwin himself later adopted Spencer’s term. Spencer also applied Darwin’s theories to the social realm, something Darwin never did.
