by Dan Roodt
Last month a very interesting interview appeared with French thinker Alain de Benoist in American Renaissance. One of its main ideas is that we are living in an increasingly fragmented world. As Benoist puts it:
To see solutions we must conceive of globalization as a dialectic. The more the world is homogenized, the more there is rebellion. Thus, the impulse that homogenizes the planet creates new kinds of fragmentation, new kinds of divisions. Sometimes this resistance can be excessive—it can take the form of terrorism, for example.
Benoist’s solution to this is “localism”, that we should think and work locally to create “liberated spaces”. He is also skeptical of politics as such, especially the party-political system and what he calls the “new class” of politicians, financiers and media. The Swiss system of direct democracy exercised at a local level is the best example of localism at work.
In essence, one has to agree with Benoist’s ideas and that peoples all over the world could benefit from a cantonal system whereby power is devolved down to the lowest level where each town or suburb, arondissement and so on, looks after its own education, health, security and economy. Of course, the globalist and centralist powers will resist such change. As we know so well here in South Africa, globalism and centralism are both forms of parasitism extracting wealth and power from citizens.
Recently I read about an American initiative in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where a group of people wish to secede and form a new municipality called St. George. Within multicultural societies where people chafe under disparate, conflicting norms and standards, everyone wants to secede from something. Apparently underlying the desire of mostly suburban St. George to become independent from inner-city Baton Rouge, are squabbles over the schooling system, educational standards and the power relations between different racial/ethnic groups.
According to the black mayor of Baton Rouge, “Kip” Holden, the movement for the secession of St. George will fail. He is a member of the “new class” that Benoist speaks of, the global nomenklatura that is to be found in all countries and that sees us all as “the same”, to be mixed together so that ultimately there will only be one global consumer left, consuming the same global brands and having one universal, syncretic religion that will go under different names.
The question is: how do we advance the interests of locals against the powerful centralist bureaucrats, financiers and media moguls? For this struggle is not taking place in a vacuum, but amid the reality of geopolitical and financial power relations.
I daresay Benoist takes a somewhat acerbic view of the USA, referring to naive and contradictory statements by Ronald Reagan and Nelson Rockefeller. Similarly, he is justifiably critical of the absurdities of American feminism, exemplified by Judy Butler. He also questions another myth of American academe, that race and sex “don’t exist because they are social constructs; they are only what your mind says they are”.
Of course, South Africa has been so thoroughly Americanized when it comes to race and what is called “gender” that we know all about the absurd slogan: “Race and sex do not exist, but we must fight racism and sexism”. Even that modish, albeit tragic document known as the new South African constitution, expectorates these clichés in its eleven official languages.
However, if our struggle is to succeed, I believe that we must rise above our mutual gripes with one another. I do not know which is worse: America seen from France or France seen from America. An even worse case of mutual stereotyping and historical hostility is that between the USA and Russia, maintained by the continued existence of enough ICBMs to destroy the planet and most of the population in the northern hemisphere.
I feel so much in agreement with Benoist’s thinking – including his exaltation of smaller identities, tribes, etc. – that I can hardly be critical. But if I do have a critique of sorts it is that there is something very French – “hexagonal” as they say in France – about his view of America. This is no mere chauvinism, but like the rest of us, he is a prisoner of history. I get the sense that the relics of the cold war still influence our view of the world, this very new world with its “multicultural” populations and dependence upon technology and the internet.
In summary, both the internet and the end of the cold war have changed us radically and we should try and look at our problems in a new way, unlike George Soros and the American generals who are still fighting Russia.
Whence the title of this piece: “The unity of European culture.” I specifically omitted any reference to “Western” culture. When I grew up, we were taught at school that South Africa was part of the West, just like Britain, France, the USA or West Germany. Toynbee wrote about that West in his little book The world and the West, but we can safely say that that West is dead now. Increasingly, Europe and America are at loggerheads as the USA, being the sole remaining superpower, feels no need for Western European allies anymore. Instead of an alliance, NATO has become more of a colonial army with local recruits, lording it over Europeans and even extending its reach further and further eastwards, threatening to overwhelm Russia.
I really love America. Its culture of resilience, gun ownership and vestiges of race realism are very attractive, as attractive as European refinement and intellectualism. Benoist too, commends Americans for their honesty in at least keeping racial statistics, saying:
You can go to the government and find race statistics on everything, including crime and social patterns. The collection of these kinds of statistics is forbidden in Europe — certainly in France.
Benoist criticises us for not listening to each other’s music or watching each other’s films. Instead, the whole world just consumes American cultural products, in English or some translated form. But last night I watched a horrible French film that had come out earlier this year, a comedy called Les profs (The teachers).
Fortunately I fell asleep halfway as it was French in name only. It contained the same images of multicultural utopia encountered in Hollywood films, dished up with insipid humour.
The point is valid that, as a friend once put it: “I do not have to visit the USA, because I already have it in my living room.” However, that is not our main problem; being a vociferous critic of anglicisation in South Africa I will be forgiven for saying this.
Our main problem is that the global nomenklatura, the people that Alex Jones from Texas calls “the New World Order”, are applying a policy of “divide and rule” against us. If they have a project, it is one of world domination, a one-world government that will impose multiculturalism and sameness on all of us, whether we like it or not. They will probably have some kind of Spanish Inquisition or Guantanamo Bay torture squad hunting down people who do not accept that race is “social construct” or who cling to local identities and languages, if they do not have that already.
The one thing that I like about American movies is that there is usually one man (or woman, as feminism obliges) fighting the whole of the CIA, US government and system. Naturally, this is entirely unrealistic and fantastical, but at least US individualism still keeps open the possibility of resistance to the anonymous leviathan.
Perhaps the CIA and George Soros’s Open Society Foundation are using Toynbee’s views on Russia to steer their assault on that country. According to Toynbee, despite being Christian, Russia has never been part of the West. Interestingly, Toynbee saw communism in that country as “a Western weapon for waging an anti-Western spiritual warfare”. Despite the vast political changes since, most establishment American observers, both liberal and conservative, will agree with Toynbee’s statement from 60 years ago:
The Russian attitude of resignation towards an autocratic régime that has become traditional in Russia is, of course, one of the main difficulties, as we Westerners see it, in the relations between Russia and the West today. (The World and the West, p. 6)
On the other hand, if ever the CIA and American liberal NGOs had to engineer an orange revolution in Moscow and appoint some or other puppet pro-American leader there as they have done in so many East European countries, it will probably be the final nail in the coffin for all of us. Like no other so-called “Western”leader on the world stage, Vladimir Putin has come out in favour of nationality and sovereignty. So his demise will be a major triumph for the globalists and one-world people.
Over the next decade or three, the population of the African continent will double again while that of Europe will decline, and we may even include in that decline the 200 million white Americans. Already, Europeans make up less than ten percent of the world population, with five percent looming on the horizon.
The challenge for us is to overcome the ideological, military, cultural and linguistic divisions of the past in attempting to conceive of a unified European culture and worldview. Linguists are aware of just how close our languages are to one another. Notwithstanding all the universalist ideology of the European enlightenment, each one of us speaks a Germanic or Latin dialect, sometimes (as in the case of English) a mixture of the two.
I am always struck by the way in which philoligists such as Georges Dumézil, for example, could see European and even Indo-European civilisation as a coherent religious, mythological and cultural whole, stretching far back into history. In this respect, I do not agree with Benoist’s characterisation of America as being somehow “non-European”. And if Calvinism played a role in the USA, did it not influence Switzerland too, the country cited by Benoist as a model for us to look up to?
The juxtaposition between “old Europe” and “new America” does not hold either. Europeans went to the USA, not bereft of a tradition, but very much driven and sustained by one. The republicanism of America’s founding fathers was invented in Europe, notably in France, as we know. Much of American modernism consisted of the application of European avant-garde ideas over there, especially in architecture. For Mies van der Rohe and many others, America was simply a playground for experimenting with European modernity. Unfortunately, many decadent, postmodern ideas first dreamed up in Europe, such as cultural relativism, have also made their way to the USA, where they have informed US-style political correctness. Simone de Beauvoir is probably cited even more than Judy Butler or Andrea Dworkin when it comes to the notion that “patriarchy” must be abolished.
Regarding information technology, we have to recognise the sea change that has taken place and which has contributed to the current “deterritorialization”, to use another French term from Gilles Deleuze which has become globally fashionable. It would be a mistake to think of “Europe” simply as a continent. It is more of a civilisation, a Kultur, an idea, which has unfortunately been bureaucratized and given a bad name by Brussels.
To my mind, it has become high time to conceive of a non-territorial Europe which would include Russia, Serbia, Greece and the rest of the Orthodox world rejected by Toynbee and the classical “Western” theorists. It should include those non-mestizo Spanish-speaking nations of Latin America, as well as Australia and the pockets of European settlement in South Africa and elsewhere.
After all, Pan-Africanism includes everyone of African descent, whether they reside in the USA, the Caribbean, the UK, France or Africa itself. Whereas the anarchic competition between nation states has been a threat to many smaller European cultures, not to mention the cause of many catastrophic wars, Pan-Europeanism might be that ultimate “empire” that would ensure our survival and prosperity, being compatible with localism as Benoist astutely observes.
The tripartite rivalry between America, Europe and Russia is not conducive to European survival in the face of the demographic cataclysm already in motion.
We should support any form of a Eurocentric canton, be it in: Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Pretoria, South Africa; or Marseilles, France.
