Why We Fight, page 31
[203]Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918-1970) was the leader of the Egyptian Revolution in 1952 and governed as President until his death. His pan-Arab ideology was highly influential in the region and continues to be influential to the present day.
[204]Theodor Herzl (1860-1904) was a Jewish journalist from Hungary who was the founder of modern Zionist ideology.
[205]Faye is referring to his book Le système à tuer les peuples (Paris: Copernic, 1981).
[206]French: ‘residual’.
[207]Raymond Ruyer (1902-1987) was a French philosopher who wrote primarily about the philosophical implications of the discoveries of modern science and his own form of gnosticism. He opposed existentialism and the Leftist trends in the philosophy of his time. He has never been translated into English and is largely forgotten in France today. Faye discusses him at greater length in Archeofuturism.
[208]L’héritage d’Athena (Ploufragan: Presses Bretonnes, 1996).
[209]Catherine Mégret was elected while a member of the Front National, the largest far-Right nationalist party in France. In 1999 she followed her husband into a breakaway party that he founded, after a dispute with the FN leadership, called the National Republican Movement.
[210]Yann-Ber Tillenon was part of GRECE but left at the same time as Faye in the 1980s. He remains active in the Right alongside Faye.
[211]Carré is a painter who collaborated with Faye on the radio programme Avant-Guerre.
[212]Victor Hugo (1802-1885) was one of the most prominent French writers of the Romantic period. He was active in liberal causes for much of his career.
[213]Heraclitus (c. 535 BCE-c. 475 BCE) was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher. Faye may be referring to his most famous statement, ‘One cannot step into the same river twice’.
[214]Ernst Jünger (1895-1998) was one of the most important German writers of the Twentieth century, and was the preeminent Conservative Revolutionary thinkers of the Weimar era. In his book Der Arbeiter (The Worker), he discusses the idea of the Titanic forces as the heirs of Prometheus, a revolt against the gods which is today manifested particularly in war and technology. See ‘Soldier, Worker, Rebel, Anarch: An Introduction to Ernst Jünger’ by Alain de Benoist, available at Les Amis d’Alain de Benoist (www.alaindebenoist.com/pdf/an_introduction_to_ernst_junger.pdf).
[215]The Twilight of the Gods is the final part of Richard Wagner’s tetralogy of music-dramas, The Ring of the Nibelungen. It is the story of the god Wotan as he pursues a magic ring which will give him absolute power over the universe. However, in pursuit of this goal, he makes many miscalculations and ends up sabotaging his own plans. At the end of the drama, he destroys himself and the world out of a sense of hopelessness.
[216]Henri Vallois (1889-1981) was a French anthropologist who wrote several books on the subject of race. Some of his works on other subjects have been translated, but his books on race have not.
[217]From Une Terre, un people.
[218]Jörg Haider (1950-2008) was the leader of the FPÖ between 1986 until 2005, when he and other members split away to form the new Austrian Peoples’ Party. In 1999 he led the FPÖ into a coalition government, which many critics outside Austria condemned as the entry of the far Right into mainstream politics. Haider was strongly opposed to immigration and was often accused of National Socialist sympathies. He was killed in a car accident.
[219]The Collectif Égalité is an anti-racist organisation set up in France in 1998 by a Cameroonian academic, Calixthe Beyala. The Collectif asked citizens to refuse to pay their TV licenses until a quota for the appearance of Blacks in French television was established. Although no formal quota has ever been set, there has been an increase in the visibility of Blacks since her complaint.
[220]Dr. Jules Soury (1842-1915) was a French neuropsychologist who posited a form of ‘psychological heredity’.
[221]René Martial (1852-1955) was a French anthropologist who supported eugenics and was a proponent of selective immigration by establishing biochemical criteria for anyone who would enter France from abroad. He felt that racial mixing was acceptable as long as immigrants met the necessary requirements. He also used his theories to support the anti-Semitic policies of the Vichy regime.
[222]Cheikh Anta Diop (1923-1986) was primarily an anthropologist who is best-known for postulating that the ancient Egyptians were Black Africans and thus the progenitors of civilisation. He also attempted to demonstrate the cultural and genetic unity of all African peoples, a unity which he believed would help to liberate Africa from colonial oppression.
[223]This term was coined by the Breton nationalist Yann Fouéré in his book Towards a Federal Europe: Nations or States? (Swansea: Christopher Davies, 1980).
[224]From Une Terre, un people.
[225]‘States’, which in present-day Germany includes Bavaria and Saxony. The German states are set up on a federalist model in which the various states retain a significant degree of autonomy from the national government, such as in retaining the right to sign treaties with foreign powers.
[226]The present-day departments of France were set up in 1790 during the French Revolution. The departments were purposefully designed to break up the historical regions which had existed previously in an attempt to eliminate local identities in favour of a more universal, national identity.
[227]Alsace-Lorraine was a territory created by the German Empire following its annexation of the regions from France in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71. This region was returned to France in the Treaty of Versailles that ended the First World War.
[228]The Conservative Revolution is a term first coined by Hugo von Hoffmansthal, which has come to designate a loose confederation of anti-liberal German thinkers who wrote during the Weimar Republic. There was a great diversity of views within the ranks of the Conservative Revolutionaries, but in general they opposed both democratic capitalism and Communism in favor of a synthesis of the German (and especially Prussian) aristocratic traditions with socialism.
[229]Pierre-André Taguieff (1946- ) is a French sociologist whose work has focused particularly on the issue of racism. Some of his writings on the New Right have appeared in the American journal Telos.
[230]Parti Socialiste, the Socialist Party of France.
[231]Alain Madelin (1946- ) was a member of the National Assembly of France and the President of the Démocratie Libérale (Liberal Democracy) party. He was known for his pro-American and laissez-faire economic positions. He retired from politics in 2007.
[232]This term is equivalent to ‘affirmative action’ in the United States.
[233]French: ‘for want of something better’.
[234]Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) was an English philosopher who first gave rise to the notion of ‘social Darwinism’. He coined the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’ to describe Darwin’s theories.
[235]Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) was a French Catholic philosopher.
[236]Latin: ‘last resort’.
[237]Georges Dumézil (1898-1986) was a French philologist best known as a pioneer in mythography. He also studied the nature of sovereignty in ancient Indo-European civilisations, which led him to postulate the Trifunctional Hypothesis: namely, that Indo-European culture had developed along a tripartite structure of warriors, priests and farmers. He believed that this was the origin of both the Hindu caste system and the feudal system in Medieval Europe.
[238]Charles Maurras (1868-1952) was a French nationalist counter-revolutionary ideologue who was the founder of the Right-wing Action Française.
[239]Carl Schmitt discusses the concept of Ernstfall, or the state of emergency, at length in his book Political Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
[240]Jürgen Habermas (b. 1929) is a German Marxist philosopher. He discusses the relationship between technology and ideology in his book Technik und Wissenschaft als ‘Ideologie’ (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1968).
[241]Latin: ‘of its own kind’.
[242]Pythagoras (c. 570-c. 495 BCE) was a pre-Socratic philosopher who founded the Pythagorean Brotherhood, an esoteric body which made some of the earliest investigations into science and mathematics in Western history. Their ideas remained highly influential for thousands of years.
[243]Alfred Sauvy coined the term in an article which appeared in L’Observateur on 14 August 1952. He initially intended it as a reference to the Third Estate in France at the time of the French Revolution, which consisted of the majority of the population, yet had little in the way of political influence.
[244]Claudio Mutti (b. 1946) is an Italian writer and Evolian traditionalist. He is a convert to Islam (as Omar Amin) and is the founder of Giovane Europa (Young Europe), a nationalist group. In his work he has attempted to reconcile Evolian traditionalism, the Right, and Islam.
[245]French: ‘free inquiry’.
[246]According to Greek mythology, Achilles was one of the Greek heroes of the Trojan War. The Iliad is largely about his exploits.
[247]Pericles (c. 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.
[248]Romulus and his brother Remus were the founders of Rome.
[249]Saint Francis of Assisi (1181-1226) was the founder of the Franciscan Order of the Church.
[250]This expression originates from John 17:15-16, where Jesus says ‘My prayer is not that you take them out of the world but that you protect them from the evil one. They are not of the world, even as I am not of it’.
[251]The Oracle of Delphi was the priestess of at the Temple of Apollo in the city of Delphi in ancient Greece, known as the Pythia. The oracle made prophecies between the Eighth century BCE and 393 AD, when the Roman Emperor, in the wake of the Empire’s conversion to Christianity, closed it along with all other pagan temples. The Oracle features in many ancient Greek and Roman texts.
Guillaume Faye, Why We Fight
