So yesterday was the *first round* of the French regional elections. The second round will take place this Sunday.
Before analyzing the results, it seems necessary to explain what a _région_ is in the French electoral context . . . and even to explain the context itself.
So yesterday was the first round of the French regional elections. The second round will take place this Sunday.
Before analyzing the results, it seems necessary to explain what a région is in the French electoral context . . . and even to explain the context itself.
The last presidential and législatives (general) elections were held in April-May and June 2012. On 2012, May 6th, François Hollande, the Socialist candidate, defeated the incumbent president, Nicolas Sarkozy (centre-right), at the second round of the presidential election.
On 2012, June 17th, the socialist candidates won the législatives elections and formed a majority at the National Assembly, which enabled the Socialist Party to establish a government. It was led from June 2012 to March 2014 by Jean-Marc Ayrault; it has, since then, been led by Barcelona-born Manuel Valls.
In 2013, there was no election in France. Starting in 2014, Richard and I have recorded podcasts on every direct election that took place:
The first thing that might be difficult to understand for a non-French reader is the difference between the département and the région.
The départements were established in 1790 by the Revolutionary Constituent Assembly. They were created to replace the former royal provinces and break them down into smaller, geometric units; their purpose was not to be new provinces but simply to make the nation easier to administer by the center, Paris. In every département, there is a préfet, appointed by the central government to uphold the State’s authority locally. This quasi-military function is complemented by a conseil départemental (or conseil général, as it used to be called), which consists of representatives elected at the local level. They vote on local policies, although said policies depend on laws voted by the national Parliament and decrees taken by the central government.
The régions are more recent; created in 1982, they were supposed to revive the former royal provinces, with, in some cases, historic or even ethnic significance: Alsace, Aquitaine, Auvergne, Britanny, Burgundy, Champagne, Franche-Comté, Languedoc, Limousin, Lorraine, Normandy, Picardy, Provence, etc. This cryptic “identitarian” nature of the régions was undermined by a new regional organization decided by the government, effective in 2016. From the 22 régions established in 1982, only 13 will survive, with the dissolution of peculiar régions like Germanic Alsace into greater geographical areas.
Those two territorial levels are not disconnected. Actually, a région is a group of départements.
Thus, this year’s regional election doesn’t happen at the regional level, but at the département‘s level. In every département, there is a number of seats to win. The party that will run the région will be the one that will get the highest number of the départements‘ representatives.
Here is France’s new regional map (the régions‘ inner borders are those of the départements; a région being a group of départements and not a historic province having a peculiar culture, this explains the extreme hyphenization of some régions‘ names):
Here, now, is the same map colored according to the political party that finished the first round at the first place (pink: Socialist Party and its allies; blue: “Les Républicains,” Sarkozy’s party, and its allies; purple: Marine Le Pen’s FN).
Now, it is really important to understand that this is only a first round. In all these régions, the three main parties have obtained the 10 percent threshold that allows them to go to the second round this Sunday.
Out of the 6 régions where FN has managed to finish the first round at the first place, only two are likely to be won:
In the four other régions, the lists that didn’t get the 10 percent threshold but got substantial support are either of the mainstream Left or the mainstream Right; most of their votes will probably go to either one of the two mainstream lists, allowing them to defeat FN, even if an FN victory there is possible.
Notice that I used “likely” and not “certainly” to describe the outcome of the second round in the two “winnable” régions.
Right after the official results were known, the Socialist Party decided to withdraw its lists wherever it finished third. The purpose is for them to make sure FN won’t get any région by supporting the mainstream Right’s candidates, even if it means, for them, losing all their seats in the process. For all their superficial differences, the mainstream Left and Right are hand-in-hand when it comes to opposing what they call the “Far Right.”
The reverse scenario happened in 2009, in a municipal by-election in Hénin-Beaumont (located in Pas-de-Calais, one of the départements where Marine Le Pen is presenting her lists). Sarkozy’s party, which was then in office, supported a left-wing coalition against FN, in spite of the rampant corruption of the local political class.
This year, for some reason, Sarkozy is refusing to follow the same strategy. But if his two candidates opposed to Marine Le Pen and Marion Maréchal Le Pen eventually win on Sunday, they will de facto become the Left’s champions, as was Jacques Chirac when he defeated Jean-Marie Le Pen at the second round of 2002 presidential election.
This systematic opposition of the establishment (mainstream parties but also the media, big companies, judges, trade unions, public servants, NGOs, which have been quite vocal against the aforementioned “Fascist menace” since the beginning of the campaign) to FN, is what made Richard and I use, ironically, the “Glass Ceiling” phrase to describe FN’s prospects. With universal suffrage, you need half of the votes plus one to get elected. And with a turnout rate of only 50%, it indicates that many voters who could wish for a true alternative to the current ruling class don’t see FN as being this alternative.
Even as Marine Le Pen is increasingly popular in France, a scenario like that of Michel Houellebecq’s Submission, where a vast coalition against FN readily votes the Muslim Brotherhood into power, is quite possible in the future, though not as soon as Houellebecq predicted in his last novel (2022).
That said, we’re still in 2015, and there’s the second round on Sunday. I’ll give you a quick update as soon as the results will be public, and we’ll record a podcast the day after.
Stay tuned!
Tony Hilton sent me an interesting article yesterday, taken from the last issue of _The Economist_. Entitled “Own goal,” this piece is about America’s immigration rules, which are “the opposite of what it needs,” according to the London-based weekly.
Borders are open, but not to the people they should
Tony Hilton sent me an interesting article yesterday, taken from the last issue of The Economist. Entitled “Own goal,” this piece is about America’s immigration rules, which are “the opposite of what it needs,” according to the London-based weekly.
I was expecting a long complaint about the plight of poor free-market-asserting, family-values-defending Mexican Randian entrepreneurs, in the same manner as Robert Heineman’s appalling speech during the 2013 H.L. Mencken Club Conference. The picture illustrating the article shows a Hispanic woman holding a baby who wears a “Born in the USA” t-shirt and waves a stars-and-stripes flag. Under the picture, the caption reads: “Getting ready to pay for Medicare, Medicaid and the rest,” which is as counterfactual as you can get. I had thus good reasons to be wary of this article.
But instead of that, what I read was a very complete piece on the reality of immigration in today’s America. Far from the “open-border” situation that some American citizens might imagine, America is actually very closed when it comes to legal, working immigration. Again, that may be surprising to American people who lost their jobs because of the low-wage competition of Mexican or Chinese immigrants, but how many of these immigrants came to America with the normal procedure, i.e. first getting a job and then applying for a working visa? Very few, given that only 6 percent of green cards are given to working immigrants. The remaining 94 percent are handed out to refugees or relatives of U.S. citizens or permanent residents.
The Economist brings the case of a Venezuelan PhD candidate, Andrea Sanchez, who will likely go back to the Bolivarian Republic once her doctoral defense at University of South Florida is over. Sanchez being a very common name among Spanish-speaking people, I couldn’t check what she looks like, but I bet that it’s closer to her neighbor country’s former president, Colombia’s Álvaro Uribe, than to her late presidente, Hugo Chávez. But I digress.
As most foreign students, Andrea works outside the campus. But she’s not the typical student serving melted asphalt sandwiches at Subway between her Post-Structuralist Studies course and her Multiple Identities Seminar. She’s actually studying civil engineering and “is working on a project funded by FDOT to model the lifespan of reinforced concrete in bridges exposed to sea air.” Still, every potential employer she met in Miami was deterred from hiring her by the harsh regulations that apply when a company wants to hire a foreign worker. The Economist explains that “to employ a foreigner, even on a temporary basis,
a firm must file paperwork with the Department of Labour certifying that no American workers are being displaced and that a market wage will be paid (to avoid depressing Americans’ earnings). Once that is approved, the prospective employer must submit evidence of the applicant’s qualifications to the Department of Homeland Security, along with $1,575–5,550 in fees, depending on the size of the company and the urgency of the application. Everything is then passed on to the State Department, which interviews the applicant and checks the other bureaucrats’ handiwork.
Even for companies willing to jump through all these hoops, visas may not be available, as Congress has put a limit on the number that can be issued each year. All 85,000 short-term visas for skilled foreign workers (H-1Bs, in bureaucratese) on offer this year were snapped up within ten weeks. That was a lot better than in April 2007, when the limit was reached in less than a day. Even in the depths of the downturn the quota was always fully used. Indeed, demand has exceeded supply every year since 2003, when Congress slashed the number of visas on offer by two-thirds.
At this point, I want to make myself clear: I’m by no means saying that this girl has a “right” to immigrate to America just because of her skills. The American people should be able to determine whether they welcome immigrants to their country—and if yes, how many. The problem is that Americans have been denied this right for about half a century, since the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. Today, with around one million immigrants settling in the country every year, it seems odd that people who come to work are treated in such a tough way, while future welfare recipients are given a preferential treatment over native Americans. Either borders are open (totally or partially) or they are closed. But they can’t be open only to those who won’t enrich their new country.
The way immigration and border control are managed in Western post-democracies is illustrative of what Sam Francis called “anarcho-tyranny.” Western governments let millions of people in who are, at best, indifferent to the indigenous culture, while people who could contribute to the national life are deemed undesirable. Today, it goes as far as custom agents suspecting every temporary visitor to try to immigrate on a week-end trip from Canada. (I know, because it happened to me.)
This situation is not “inconsistent” at all: it is, on the contrary, perfectly consistent with the will of our rulers to import welfare-depending populations who will be subservient to the power, even if they seemingly disrupt the society’s order. As a matter of fact, even this disruption benefits the political class, which can reinforce their power by promising to bring back “law and order.” There’s no contradiction in the fact that more and more money is invested in security while urban centers and suburbs are less and less secure: the more crime, the more popular demand for security. Why would politicians and bureaucrats solve a problem that legitimizes them?
The only “inconsistent” ones are maybe immigration restrictionists themselves, who give politicians the opportunity of strengthening controls at borders and airports, not to mention preventing competent foreigners from settling in the country. Would people have accepted those degrading TSA scannings after 9/11 if they had not also accepted the necessity of “fighting terror”? Was Muslim immigration in Europe and North America reduced after that? No, it has actually increased ever since. Western populations are now presented with a false choice, that between living in a police state or suffering civil war. As people have families to feed and protect, they naturally chose the former, as if it were an actual antidote to the latter.
The consequence is that, much like in a lunatic asylum, it is now easy to come to the West, but for the people who’re already in, it is becoming increasingly difficult to move inside it. Every people is being locked in its own padded cell, which is called a “nation-state.”
Immigration restrictionists would be better advised to stop giving our governments justifications to restrict our movements even more, and start thinking of another future for their children and those who look like theirs. It would mean letting their bankrupt nation-states go over the cliff, as they should, and instead laying the intellectual ground for the Ethno-State to come. It is a matter of time before they understand that, or, rather, a matter of a generation.
This blog was originally published at AlternatveRight.com in April 2013.
“You can show a woman’s breast being cut off, but you cannot show her breastfeeding.”
Creator of Mad Men Matthew Weiner was recently in Paris to participate in a kind of yearly world fair of TV series.
(Unfortunately, I got wind of it only one week before the event, and tickets were long sold out.)
Weiner appeared on two panels, the first one to talk about Mad Men‘s coming finale (I’ll post an update to the review I wrote last year once the show is over), the second one on his cinematic influences.
In the latter, Weiner talked about the hypocrisy of his own network, AMC, which had no compunction in displaying very violent scenes in its show Breaking Bad, but deleted Mad Men scenes in which characters could be seen getting high or laid.
The fair was hosted by Paris’s city council, which might explain why the image and sound are mismatched in the second video. (In my libertarian days, I would have blamed it on public workers.)
I thus decided to extract the audio and repost it on YouTube with a static picture of Weiner. I also transcribed his statements.
It’s all below.
N.B.: Before you remind me: yes, I know that Weiner is not allowed to cook bagels on Saturdays. That doesn’t make his point wrong, nor does it prevent Mad Men from being high culture.
“I hated the control of language, and I hated the hypocrisy of the network.
They have their other show, Breaking Bad, which you’ve all seen and loved. They would shoot people in the face, and I couldn’t show somebody grabbing a boob!
They would tell me things like: ‘He’s squeezing her butt. Could you just have it happen outside the frame? Could he just reach to the frame?’
And of course, the minute you see that, you realise it’s so much dirtier! Because he’s squeezing her butt and she’s reacting to it with pleasure, and now that I can’t see it I don’t know where his hand is. And it just got a little bit dirtier.
They were doing someone teaching people how to make crystal meth, and I couldn’t show Peggy Olson inhaling a joint! We’re on the same network at the same time. Because people weren’t using the drug, they were just making it.
I don’t even know how to explain you the bullshit of American censorship. You have your own problems here, but we love violence, and we hate sex. You can show a woman’s breast being cut off, but you cannot show her breastfeeding! It’s really messed up.
[…]
Part of the story of Mad Men was the crudeness of the culture happening. You’ll see how much more explicit people become as the show goes on. The first time you hear the F-word — and it has to be bleeped in the United States — is around Season 5. These gentlemen were all in the Navy and the Army, and they know how to swear, and they swear a lot. They did not swear in the office, they tried not to. I had people tell me anecdotes about the first time someone swore in a meeting, and everybody just sort of being like: “Oh my God!”.
There’s a certain decorum, and as you watch the show go on, you will see it becomes cruder, louder, more explicit, less poetic. All of it was a deliberate journey into the modern world.”
If Europeans worldwide don’t want to accept their only true, millennial identity, this African blogger is reminding them who they really are, and they would be better inspired to get it right now than later, when whiny blog posts are replaced with mightier means.
Guillaume Canet, Virginie Ledoyen and Leonardo DiCaprio in Danny Boyle’s “The Beach” (2000).
“Why are white people expats when the rest of us are immigrants?”
The question was raised in The Guardian by a man named Mawuna Remarque Koutonin, who is the editor of SiliconAfrica.com, where his short blog was first published.
Koutonin notes with fury that the word “expat,” short for “expatriate,” only applies to White people away from their home country, while non-White people abroad are systematically referred to as “immigrants.”
While I obviously don’t share Koutonin’s post-colonial resentment, I must say he’s right. Indeed, “expat” is only used for White people. It also works in French, but of course “expatriate” comes from “expatrié.” (Sorry, Jef Costello. Btw, wasn’t Costello a character played by Alain Delon?)
Of course, the main objection one could make to Koutonin’s case is that since most emigrants are relocating to Western countries, the vast majority of White expats settle in other White countries.
And while most Western people define their identity on a strictly national basis (for now), the conclusion someone with our political outlook must draw is that White people are at home in any other Western country, which argues in favor of free immigration for White people between Western countries.
If Europeans worldwide don’t want to accept their only true, millennial identity, Koutonin is reminding them who they really are, and they would be better inspired to get it right now than later, when whiny blog posts are replaced with mightier means.
The scourge of movies whose title starts with the word “American” betrays a lack of confidence.
So I finally had the chance to see American Sniper yesterday night. Indeed, we Western Europeans had to wait one month more to watch it.
Before seeing it, I had read two reviews of the movie (there can’t be spoilers when you already know the ending…), one which I find myself in total agreement with, another one which would be a perfect parody of “freedom fries” patriotism if it wasn’t deadly serious.
My point is not to comment on the film itself though. I have little to say about Chris Kyle. I’m sure he was a valiant soldier, and the movie certainly does him justice in that respect. But he doesn’t seem to be a very interesting character. Or if he was, Clint Eastwood’s “War on Terror” stance clouds it altogether.
My point is rather to comment on the scourge of movies whose title starts with the word “American.” Perhaps this phenomenon doesn’t strike Americans as much as it strikes me. Sure, the fact that most (good) movies come from the U.S. plays a role in it, but I believe there is something more. In my country which, I shall remind my American readers, is the birthplace of film, there are very few movies with “French” or “France” in the title.
Now, according to the Internet Movie Data Base, there are 200 movies with “American” in their title, most of which have been produced quite recently.
The most famous ones, American History X (1998), American Pie (1999), American Beauty (1999), American Psycho (2000), American Gangster (2007), American Hustle (2013), and now American Sniper, have all been made in the last two decades. I believe this acceleration in the use of “American” in the title is not anecdotic.
My interpretation is that it is self-doubt posturing as self-confidence.
This thought would never have occurred to me if I hadn’t spent two years in a vast cold zone where a shallow State feels the need to put its dubious name and leafy flag all over it to pretend it actually exists.
By now most of you have guessed which vast cold zone I’m talking… a-boot. Yeah, “Canada.” In this non-country, the feeling of nationhood is either non-existent or defined by not being American, as illustrated by this embarrassing Molson beer commercial. Usually, people define “Canada” by “the country North of the United States where they speak both English and French” but the American State of Alaska is more to the North than any “Canadian” province, and very few “Canadians” are bilingual.
So “Canadian” officials have resorted to the vain but age-old method of spreading the State’s name everywhere (every federal ministry is called [Something] Canada) and plant its flag on every available square meter to make their de jure British dominion but de facto U.S. protectorate look like it is a sovereign country.
(And before you object that I’m biased as a Frenchman, it is the exact same thing in Québec, where every provincial ministry is called [Quelque Chose] Québec.)
Since I have far more respect for a real thing like America than for a fake one like “Canada,” it saddens me to see America lacking so much confidence in itself that it needs to remind everyone in the world that it does exist (as if we could forget).
Still, one couldn’t imagine directors from the Golden Age of Hollywood, when America was really self-confident, being obsessed with sticking their country’s name everywhere. Could someone then think of such a stupid title as The American Birds?
What needs saying is what is not obvious. So with America’s identity crisis worsening in the coming decades, expect more patriotic posturing in the theaters. Some will fall for it, wiser others will start placing their hopes in something new, something better.
Hans-Hermann Hoppe said that no one can talk seriously about society without a working knowledge of economics, and he was right.
Hans-Hermann Hoppe said that no one can talk seriously about society without a working knowledge of economics, and he was right.
But its importance shouldn’t be overestimated, especially given that it has become more and more interwoven with state politics since 1929.
Today, the economic elite’s outlook is characterised by short-termism. It is promoting policies that will undermine its rule in the long run.
The economic elite comprises three rival ethnic components: Europeans (in the racial sense), East Asians, and Ashkenazi Jews. Though it is on the short run in the interest of some of its members to root for mass immigration from Africa, the Middle East and South America (but only because they outsource the costs to the Welfare State they pay for, which is for the whole elite a zero-sum game), it will more and more affect its dominance. Not only because it will bring the economy down, but also because this elite is intellectually unable of answering the challenges posed by what visionary Lothrop Stoddard termed “the rising tide of color.” Only ethno-nationalists do.
Why does the economic elite act against its own long-term interests? Well, because as everybody, they’re influenced by culture and politics. And I’d even say that they’re more influenced by it than bookworm Bohemians like you and me, who have time to filter this influence. Today, billionaires give money to Cultural Marxists who might have softened their original economic views, but still hold egalitarian beliefs that necessarily conflict with the very idea of an economic aristocracy.
Final remark: you should take more interest in heretical thought. I know you have a doctoral dissertation to write, but academic thought alone desiccates the mind. Besides, a system that teaches “gender theory” as if biological evidence didn’t matter shouldn’t be taken too seriously. Hold your place at the center… but never forget that all creation (yes, all creation) always comes from the periphery.
Several American and British friends asked me to comment on this “earthquake” that no less than shattered the foundations of La République. That such an insignificant event can make the headlines of the Western media tells you much about how increasingly insecure our ruling class is, however wrongly so.
This article was originally published in October 2013.
Being the House Frog of this august assembly, I’m often asked what I think of France’s Front National, despite the fact that I made quite clear, in my debut article here, how negative my opinion of that party is (if it has changed in a year, it’s not for the better).
Last week-end’s by-election was no exception to the rule: several American and British friends asked me to comment on this earthquake that no less than shattered the foundations of La République. My real surprise was that people outside France would have heard of it at all. Not only was it a by-election, but what was at stake was merely one seaton a département‘s council (the département is the French equivalent of the county in the U.S. or the borough in Britain, though it is directly controlled by Paris).
That such an insignificant event can make the headlines of the Western media tells you much about how increasingly insecure our ruling class is, however wrongly so.
Jim Goad, who forgot writing a few months ago that he wouldn’t mind if all French people died overnight (suffocated with freedom fries, maybe), saw Front National’s “victory” as “a step in the right direction.” I’m heartened to see that Jim came back to his senses, but what if Goad wasn’t one of us? And what if these “victories” were not good news for those who genuinely want our race and civilization to have a future?
I’m not sure words are sufficient to make people understand how terrible this party is. I have written many times against stato-nationalism. I have argued numerous times how any organization that places the “nation” above the race and civilization is as much an enemy as any mainstream party. Yet even people with whom I have exchanged hundreds of emails and met with in real life continue to define Front National‘s Marine Le Pen as a “white nationalist.”
Two factors explain why even people with whom I agree on so much else get this wrong:
If words are not enough, will pictures suffice? Here are two campaign posters and a press picture of three candidates, the first one for the general elections in 2012, the two others for the municipal elections next year.
Elie Taieb:
“For a Real National Assembly!”
Mungo Shematsi:
Mungo Shematsi is the one on the left.
Sofiane Ghoubali:
Now, has this appeasement been fruitful? Besides this totally unimportant by-election last Sunday, Marine Le Pen got 17.9 percent of the vote in the last presidential election. Which obviously means that 82.1 percent of the electorate didn’t vote for her, without taking into account the 22 percent who didn’t vote (I was one of them, of course) at all.
One can wonder what the next step in this normalization process is before Front National can not only have a candidate in the second round, like Jean-Marie Le Pen in 2002, but in the presidential palace, and whether the party will still be remotely national when it happens (if it does).
That, of course, is if one believes that actual power lies in public office. Ironically, right-wingers seem to be the last democrats. Only on the Right can one still find this naive belief that the President, or Prime Minister, has a kind of control panel in his office where from everything bad in the country can be solved with a simple tap of the finger.
But let’s be serious with politics, will we? When syndicated columnists define the American president as “the most powerful man in the world,” only eunuchs and morons can be impressed with that phrase. Who with a three-digit IQ seriously thinks that Barack Obama is more powerful than, say, George Soros? Or Lloyd Blankfein?
Even if nationalist politicians managed to get elected at “top” positions in the Potemkin political system, it wouldn’t change a thing since there’s nothing at the other end of the wheel. Yet even that is impossible since the real rulers (bankers, bureaucrats, CEOs, media owners) need the democratic fiction to go on, as the victory of a nationalist party, even one as castrated as Front National is, would prove that no actual power is in the ballot.
And this would make their situation sensibly more precarious than what it is now.
The predictable outcome is as follows: Front National will gain votes in the years to come, and what is taboo on the mainstream Right for now (an alliance with the “Far Right”) will become possible, with a victory of this awkward coalition in the process.
Marine will get a ministry, which of course won’t help her in any way to fix France’s problems, in the unlikely hypothesis that she still knows what they are and how to fix them. I’m not sure if Mungo Shematsi or Sofiane Ghoubali wouldn’t be a better choice than her.
Generally speaking, the right-wing Baby Boomer is subject to the bourgeois dream, which has been known as the “American dream” since the end of the Second World War: a world of peace, trade, and boredom.
The following was delivered as a speech at the second National Policy Institute’s conference, which was held at the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington, DC, on October 26th.
It is not always easy to tell the difference between destiny and randomness.
I discovered the “Alternative Right” three years ago, by a link posted on a Swiss blog. It was a perfect illustration of a famous line in Simon and Garfunkel’s song “Sound of Silence”: “The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls, and tenement halls.”
I was going through a period of questioning at that time. I had been working for a couple of years for the “conservative movement” in Paris and I couldn’t fail to notice that all my efforts had been invested in a cause that was not really mine, that had never really been mine actually.
Until that fateful day of July 2010, I had always centered my attention on France. My only knowledge of the other Western countries was through history books, movies, or touristic trips.
Regarding politics proper, I wasn’t much interested in what was going on outside France. Though I was involved with the Right, I had always been wary of the American Right. For me, being right-wing in America meant worshipping the Holy Scrap (also known as “the Constitution”), waving a stars and stripes flag in the garden of a generic white-picket-fenced house, and making boring, tired jokes about the French who “always surrender.” I had still not digested my dish of freedom fries.
Discovering the Alternative Right was an epiphany for me, as I think the discovery of the European New Right was for many Americans present in this room today. I’m thinking particularly of Richard Spencer and of John Morgan, the editor-in-chief of Arktos Media.
I discovered that though I wasn’t feeling at home in the French “conservative movement,” there were “people like me” on the Web, all over the Western world, who shared my hopes and concerns.
Ironically enough, I even discovered French authors thanks to American publications like AlternativeRight.com or Counter-Currents.com. Of course, the name “Alain de Benoist” was familiar to me, but he was not very popular, let alone read, in my corner of the Right.
Now, it seems that more and more Western people (White people as you say in America) are aware of the fact that what brings them together is much stronger than what divides them. And I’m not only talking about activists like us here. When this British soldier was beheaded in London by two African Muslims last Spring, I could see many manifestations of solidarity by average Western people. It’s something that would have been unthinkable a mere decade ago. As this example shows, reasons for this growing awareness among Western people are often negative ones: Westerners face the same danger of being displaced in their historic homelands.
There are positive reasons, too, the first of which being the fact that we are the heirs of a great civilization. But although it is important to focus on the positive more than on the negative, it’s about a problem that is remarkable but not often commented on that I want to talk today: the generational divide.
When I say that this problem is not often commented on, it is not quite true. Actually, the liberal narrative about generational relationships is that the Baby Boom generation, thanks to a courageous revolution, managed to put an end to an oppressive, reactionary, boring society.
There is some truth to that liberal narrative. But the generational divide applies differently to nationalist movements, and this is what I want to dedicate my attention to today.
More than a generational divide, there is, first off, a generational gap in right-wing movements. If the generation of my grand-parents (born between the two world wars) was rather conservative in the right sense of the word, the Baby Boom generation is, in my experience, much more liberal in its outlook, hence the lack of right-wing activists from this generation. This is what explains “gerontocracy,” i.e. government of the old, in many right-wing movements, especially in Europe.
Even self-defined right-wingers born during the Baby Boom are liberal in their views.
The most striking thing that I noticed, in France, Europe and America, was the inability of baby-boomers, even when they see themselves as dissidents, to completely break away from the institutions. The desire of recognition, the fear of social rejection ensure that the right-wing Baby Boomer gives legitimacy to the very institutions that are eager to destroy him.
For instance, right-wing Baby Boomers show a great deal of respect to Academia. They are very proud of their PhDs when they hold them, and when they don’t, they are all the prouder to mention that an author they publish does. They do this at a time when there are PhDs in Queer, Gender, Black, and even Chicano studies in America—and even doctoral students in the hard sciences have been through the PC gauntlet. Is it so important that we focus on degrees? Wouldn’t we be better advised to give as little legitimacy to university degrees as we can, given the circumstances?
This PhD Cult among right-wing Baby Boomers is related to their own rationalistic, scientistic delusions. Since conservatives are outmoded liberals — and many White nationalists are conservatives—they just want to conserve their people as it is, as if it were possible to save said people without becoming a new one in the process — they still believe in the Enlightenment myth that one would just have to show “the truth” to people to gain credibility and support. (And trying — in vain — to gain credibility from an Establishment that despises them is an important trait of right-wing Baby Boomers.)
But this idea that people would just have to know “the truth” to support the cause of saving Western civilization and the White race is fallacious. People have to be inspired rather than convinced, and they won’t be inspired by a set of bell curves, IQ tables, and cranial measurements. Furthermore, it reduces “the truth” to the only things that can be numbered and quantified. The problem with that idea is that our struggle is a qualitative one. We can’t “prove” that architecture has become ugly since the 20th century, for example. Yet it’s something that has to be said.
I mentioned the PhD Cult because it is one of the most obvious problems in right-wing intellectual circles. But this excessive respect of right-wing Baby Boomers is granted to institutions in general, chiefly to the State, the nation-state.
Since I was born in the 1980s, at a time when the main Western countries had already been “enriched” with mass immigration, I understand that it is easier for me to dissociate myself from my own nation-state.
Here, I’m reminded of an American friend I met in Paris a few weeks ago. He was born in the 1960s, and when I mentioned to him the idea of an Ethnostate, he chuckled: for him, up to 10 years ago, he had always considered he was already living in an Ethnostate: the United States.
And in day-to-day life, it remains common to hear people say “we” and “us” when they talk about the state. “We went to Iraq.” “Our troops are bringing democracy there.” “Syria’s chemical weapons threaten us.” I’m using silly examples here to make a point, but if you listen to people around you, you will inevitably notice that they keep saying — and thus thinking — that the state is them. That the state is the nation.
But it’s getting more and more necessary to get rid of this false consciousness. Since the end of the 18th century and the American and French revolutions, the nation-state has monopolized the way Westerners see themselves. This triumph is so complete that even multiculturalists use the nation-state as a comforting reference to impose their dogma to the West. In every Western country, you can hear the same mantra that “Our [national] identity is diversity.”
Some people in our movement suggest that we should likewise use the nation-state as a means to make people aware of our goals. The problem is that we can’t use the same tactic, for two reasons: first, we are obviously not in charge of the state. Second, a strict national consciousness leads to serious errors of interpretation. It is common in countries that used to have colonies and slaves to hear people say that our problems are rooted in colonization and slavery. In my homeland, the troubles with the Algerian community are thus attributed to French colonization and civil war there.
But Sweden, which never had any colony nor slaves, is facing similar, if not graver threats than Britain, America or France. We are not attacked for what our ancestors did, or allegedly did, but for what we are: White, Western people.
From my understanding, it is easier for my generation to see a brother or sister in another Westerner than it is for the former generation, which was born in the aftermath of the Second World War. In France, Front National is still anti-German, as well as it is anti-British and anti-American. But for the young generation, all these grudges are fading into irrelevance. A Briton might dislike the Germans or the French, wrongly or rightly, but those are unlikely to drug and pimp his daughters, behead a soldier in broad daylight, or burn the city down when a drug dealer is killed by the police.
In case you are wondering, I’m talking about things that actually happened in Britain in the last years.
Young Westerners know that they are more and more becoming one nation, the same way that other races, as Jared Taylor had noted in his book White Identity, are more and more seeing themselves as one people when they live in the West.
The right-wing Baby Boomer is not able to fully understand what is happening in other Western countries, since he relies solely on national, liberal media, unlike young right-wingers who get information via alternative, Pan-Western websites. The liberal media gives him a distorted image of reality. As he knows that mainstream journalists are liberal, he basically inverts their depictions of other “far right” movements in other Western countries to make his own opinion of them. Right-wingers, most often, only define themselves in opposition to the Left. What the Left likes, they hate. What the Left loathes, they love. It is thus easy to manipulate them into supporting a controlled opposition, given that their only justification to support is: “Since liberals hate it so much, it must be doing something right.” By this false standard, George W. Bush “was doing something right” when he made up the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to invade this country.
Generally speaking, the right-wing Baby Boomer is subject to the bourgeois dream, which has been known as the “American dream” since the end of the Second World War: a world of peace, trade, and boredom.
Right-wing Baby Boomers share the project of two American politicians (both born before the Baby Boom though), Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan, whose similarities are more important than their differences. Their common motto can best be summed up as “Leave us alone!”
Well, we of the New Guard don’t want to be “left alone.” We want to rule.
We want to rule not only because we want actual power to get ourselves out of the present situation, but because we know that the “leave us alone” idea, which was behind the White flight phenomenon, is precisely what has led us to our current dispossession. Baby Boomers wanted to be “left alone,” so they fled to even further suburbs, moving further and further away from their own responsibilities. It is this process, White flight, that guaranteed that the ongoing dispossession could go on without being too painful.
The “good news” is that it is becoming impossible to continue the White flight process. Rising housing costs, growing gas prices, the concentration of jobs in city centers are putting the bourgeois dream to an end. It is now almost impossible for a generation that can only wait tables after a masters degree to keep fleeing. Problems will have to be faced, and dealt with.
At this point, I realize that I might seem unfair to the previous generation, but keep in mind that Baby Boomers did what everyone else would have done if given the choice. This choice no longer exists. The quiet, suburban life has become impossible for the reasons mentioned before.
What is to be done, then? As of now, nobody—including myself, of course—has a genuine solution to offer. Many in our circles claim that it is “five to midnight,” but I would argue that it is “five past midnight.” Not because it is too late, but because it is too soon. A mere decade ago, many people in this room, including, again, the foolish 20-year-old liberal that I was, were not aware of what was going on. Our awakening is too recent to find political solutions to our current problems now. For politics as we would like it to be to become possible, we have to win the intellectual and cultural battles, which right-wing Baby Boomers have never really considered worth fighting. It is time we do so.
What we can thus do in the meantime is to get intellectually prepared as a movement (for the individual and practical aspects of this preparation, Piero San Giorgio and Jack Donovan are more competent than I am). The first task would be to get rid with intellectual debates dating back to the Cold War, with the false dichotomies between libertarianism and socialism, conservatism and progressivism, etc.
This necessity to go beyond these false dichotomies seems obvious to activists like us, but it is still in these terms that politics are debated today.
When I say that we have to go beyond Left and Right, I don’t mean that we have to reject both notions altogether—our ethno-national project obviously belongs on the Right—but the way they have been defined and falsely opposed for these past 70 years. The alternative is not between the kolkhoz and IKEA, the best reason for that being that the kolkhoz and IKEA are two sides of the same materialistic coin. We have to find a way out of here, a way forward and upward, and that implies rising above these irrelevant debates.
As a radical movement, we need to attract intelligent and educated young men, who are the future.
Crime statistics and differences of achievement between races are important, to be sure, but no snowboarding session on the bell curve will attract young men to us. We need to show them a way out, and thus to remind them of the need to gradually withdraw from the prevailing disorder, but we also have to show them a way into, and that is what the Old Guard has been unable to do so far.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m not trying to bury the Old Guard, or even to dispute its achievements. We wouldn’t be here today if the Old Guard had not taken the first step in the past. But we can’t keep doing the same things for decades.
It is now clear why we want to found a new society; now comes the harder part: what we want and how we are going to achieve it.
The answer is not sure at this point. What is is that the powers of creation, not only of reaction, will have to be summoned.
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