European New Right

Review: View from The Right: A Critical Anthology of Contemporary Ideas, Volume I

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View from The Right: A Critical Anthology of Contemporary Ideas, Volume I: Heritage and Foundations
Alain de Benoist (Ed.), trans. Robert Lindgren
Arktos, 2017; orig. published, 1977, with an updated preface (2001) by de Benoist

After 40 years, and following translations into Italian and Portuguese (1981), German (1984), and Romanian (1998), we finally have an English translation of Alain de Benoist’s 650-page magnum opus. Vu de Droite: Anthologie critique des idées contemporaines was first published in 1977 when de Benoist’s GRECE (Research and Study Group for European Civilisation) think-tank was at the height of its influence. It took the French political and intellectual worlds by storm, receiving widespread attention in the mainstream press and winning the Grand Essay Prize from l’Académie française in June 1978.

It is little short of remarkable that we should have to wait four decades for an English translation of a text with such critical acclaim and intellectual pedigree. Credit for bringing about the English translation (published in three handsomely designed volumes and with an updated 2001 Preface) is due to Arktos Media, founded in part in 2010 with the goal of bringing the works of de Benoist to an anglophone readership. A final push to ensure translation of Vu de Droite was initiated in 2016, when seventy-three backers contributed a combined total of around $10,000 via kickstarter.com to bring the project to completion. The dedication and generosity of all involved was not in vain. Although we eagerly await the imminent publication of Volumes Two and Three, the first volume (published in late 2017) is an invaluable work in its own right. Intellectually thorough yet written with admirable economy and agility, View from The Right Volume I: Heritage and Foundations is a useful tool, an invaluable point of reference, and a resounding call to action which has lost none of its relevance or vitality in the decades since its first printing.

The central purpose of View from The Right is to break the taboo on the assertion of right-wing ideas and to present clearly defined intellectual positions (or pathways to positions) on a wide range of subjects as they pertain to right-wing thought. In Volume I, these positions pertain to matters of European racial and cultural heritage, and the broader foundations of contemporary right-wing ideologies. The author describes (ix) his intention to “prepare a portrait of the intellectual and cultural landscape of the moment, to establish the state of affairs, to signal the tendencies, to open the pathways and provide benchmarks to aid (and incite) the task of thinking in a world that is already in the process of considerable change.” For the most part, this effort takes the structural form of powerful and succinct essay summaries of the state of current mainstream scholarship on a number of crucial and fascinating topics. These summaries are then supplemented with commentary from de Benoist and developed still further in his very generous footnotes. Translator Robert Lindgren also deftly assists the reader by occasionally including his own useful commentary on the text, along with a number of very helpful translations and updates of de Benoist’s scholarly citations. Read more

Migrants: “humanitarian” interventions generally make things worse

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The interview that follows was first published in Boulevard Voltaire; translated from the French by Tom Sunic

Q: The photo of that Syrian child stranded on the beach is now in the process of turning a new page in European opinion. In our epoch of “storytelling” it evidently suggests that the migrant issue is a “human drama.”

Of course it is a “human drama.” One must have dry heart or be blinded by hatred if not recognizing it. Muslims threatened by jihadist Islamism, entire families fleeing the Middle East destabilized by Western policies — of course this is a “human drama.” But this is also a political issue and even an issue of geopolitics. Hence the need to figure out the relationship between the political sphere and the humanitarian sphere. Well, experience has shown that “humanitarian” interventions generally only aggravate matters further. The dominance of the legal categories over the political categories is one of the major causes of the impotence of the states.

The migratory tsunami which we are witnessing is adding up to a disaster. First, there was a calculation based on thousands of refugees, then tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands. As of now more than 350,000 migrants have crossed the Mediterranean over the recent months. Germany has agreed to accept 800,000 of them, far more than the entire registry of its own birth rates each year. We are way ahead of the interstitial immigration of thirty years ago! Faced with such an onslaught the European countries are asking themselves: “How are we going to welcome them?” Never do they ask themselves:  “How are we going to prevent them from coming in?” Even the French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius considers “scandalous” the attitude of the countries wishing to close their borders. Will it be the same way when the number of migrants’ entries is counted by the millions? Will the politicians be then more concerned about countless “human dramas” happening in the world right now than about the common good of their fellow citizens? This is the heart of the matter. Read more

The Curse of Victimhood and Negative Identity

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Originally posted at Arutz Sheva: Israel National News, January 30, 2015. Posted here with permission of the author.

Days and months of atonement keep accumulating on the European wall calendar. The days of atonement however, other than commemorating the dead, often function as a tool in boosting political legitimacy of a nation – often at the expense of another nearby nation struggling for its identity.

While the media keep reassuring us that history is crawling to an end, what we are witnessing instead is a sudden surge of new historical victimhoods, particularly among the peoples of Eastern Europe. As a rule, each individual victimhood requires a forever expanding number of its own dead within the context of unavoidable lurking fascist demons.

Expressed in the postmodern lingo of today, the modern media-made image trivializes the real death and dying into an image of a hyperreal and surreal non-event. For instance, the historical consciousness of Serbs vs. Croats, Poles vs. Germans, not to mention the victimological memories of the mutually embattled Ukrainian and Russian nationalists today, are becoming more “historical” than their previously recorded respective histories.

It seems that European nationalists do not fight any longer for their living co-ethnics, but primarily for their dead. As a result, as Efraim Zuroff correctly stated, “in post-Communist eastern Europe, [they’re] trying to play down the crimes of the Nazi cooperators and claim that the crimes of the Communists were just as bad.” (AS,” Top Nazi Hunter: Eastern Europe Rewrote the Holocaust,” by Benny Toker, Ari Yashar, January 27, 2015).

Yet Zuroff’s s remarks, however sharp, miss the wider historical context. Any day of atonement or, for that matter, any day of repentance on behalf of a victimized group, is highly conflictual, if not warmongering by its nature. Read more

Identity and Difference, Part 2: Identity

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Part 1, Difference

Identity

The question of identity (national, cultural, etc.) also plays a central role in the debate about immigration. To begin, two observations must be made. The first is that there is much talk of the identity of the host population, but, in general, there is much less talk of the identity of the immigrants themselves, who nevertheless seem, by far, the most threatened by the fact of immigration itself. Indeed, the immigrants, insofar as they are the minority, directly suffer the pressure of the modes of behavior of the majority. Pulled to disappearance or, inversely, exacerbated in a provocative way, their identity only survives, frequently, in a negative (or reactive) manner by the hostility of the host environment, by capitalist over-exploitation exerted on certain workers uprooted from their natural structures of defense and protection.

The second observation is the following: It is striking to see how, in certain ways, the problem of identity is situated exclusively in relation with immigration. The immigrants would be the principal “threat,” if not the only one, that weighs on French identity. But that is tantamount to overlooking the numerous factors that in the whole world, both in the countries with a strong foreign labor as in those without it, are inducing a rapid disintegration of collective identities: the primacy of consumption, the Westernization of customs, the media homogenization, the generalization of the axiomatic of self-interest, etc.

With such a perception of things, it is too easy to fall into the temptation of scapegoating. But, certainly, it is not the fault of the immigrants that the French are apparently no longer capable of producing a way of life that is their own nor to offer to the world the spectacle of an original form of thought and of being. And nor is it the fault of the immigrants that the social bond is broken wherever liberal individualism is extended, that the dictatorship of the private has extinguished the public spaces that could constitute the crucible in which to renew an active citizenry, nor that individuals, submerged in the ideology of merchandise, turn away more and more from their own nature. It is not the fault of the immigrants that the French form a people increasingly less, that the nation has become a phantasm, that the economy has been globalized nor that individuals renounce being actors of their own existence to accept that there are others who decide in their place from norms and values that they no longer contribute to forming. It is not the immigrants, finally, who colonize the collective imagination and impose on the radio and on the television sounds, images, concerns, and models “which come from outside.” If there is “globalism,” we say too with clarity that, until proven otherwise, where it comes from is the other side of the Atlantic, and not the other side of the Mediterranean. And let us add that the small Arab shopkeeper contributes more to maintain, in a convivial way, the French identity than the Americanomorphic park of attractions or the “shopping center” of a very French capital. Read more

Identity and Difference, Part 1: Difference

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Alain de Benoist

Translated from the Spanish by Lucian Tudor 

* This was translated into English from the Spanish version titled “Identidad y Diferencia,” published in the digital journal Elementos: Revista de Metapolítica para una Civilización Europea, No. 47 (May 2013): 3-10. The Spanish text was the translation and combination of the original French articles titled “Le droit à la différence” and “Qu’est-ce que l’identité? Réflexions sur un concept-clef,” published in Eléments, No. 77 (April 1993): 24-25 & 44-47. The translator wishes to thank Daniel Macek for reviewing the translation and Alain de Benoist for approving of the translation.

Difference

The debate about immigration has raised in a sharp manner the questions of the right to difference, the future of the mode of community life, of the diversity of human cultures and of social and political pluralism. Questions of such importance cannot be treated with brief slogans or prefabricated responses. “Let us, therefore, oppose exclusion and integration,” writes Alain Touraine. “The first is as absurd as it is scandalous, but the second has taken two forms that need to be distinguished and between them there must be searched for, at least, a complementarity. Speaking of integration only to tell the new arrivals that they have to take their position in society as such and what it was before their arrival, that is much closer to exclusion than of a true integration.”[1]

The communitarian tendency began to affirm itself in the early eighties, in liaison with certainly confusing ideological propositions about the notion of “multicultural society.” Later it seemed to be remitted due to critiques directed against it on behalf of liberal individualism and “republican” universalism: the relative abandonment of the theme of difference, considered as “dangerous,” the denunciation of communities, invariably presented as “ghettos” or “prisons,” the over-valuation of individual problems to the detriment of the groups, the return of a form of purely egalitarian anti-racism, etc. The logic of capitalism, which, to extend itself, needs to make organic social structures and traditional mentalities disappear, has also had weight in that sense. The leader of immigrant minorities, Harlem Désir, sometimes accused of having inclined towards “differentialism,”[2] has been able to boast of having “promoted the sharing of common values and not the identitarian tribalism, the republican integration around universal principles and not the construction of community lobbies.”[3] Read more

Alain Soral FAQ, Part 3

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E&R poster: “We want a French Chávez! Labour Left & Values Right, let us unite against imperialism! Equality and Reconciliation proudly supports President Hugo Chávez.”

Part 1

Part 2

What are Alain Soral’s relations with foreign nationalists?

Soral can be said to support all nationalists worldwide who are opponents of “the Empire.” He has previously called himself an “alter-nationalist,” modeled on the borderless-Left’s “alter-globalist.” Put another way: “Nationalists of the world, unite!”

In particular, Soral has said that Hugo Chávez’s brand of socialist, Christian, anti-racist and anti-imperialist nationalism is the closest to his own. In the Muslim world, Soral has supported Iran (especially Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s fight against Israeli colonialism and against censorship of historical research), Syria, and Lebanon (particularly the national reconciliation between Christians and Muslims in Lebanon achieved by General Michel Aoun and Hezbollah). He also supports Vladimir Putin’s Russia as the leading rival to “the Empire.”

Soral opposes the various far-right Zionist nationalists, including the Dutch Party for Freedom and the English Defense League. Read more

Alain Soral FAQ, Part 2

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Go to Part 1.

Where is Alain Soral coming from? Or, from “Game” to Social Conservatism

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A young Alain Soral discusses “game” on television

Born on October 2, 1958, Alain Soral had by all accounts a miserable family life, beaten by his father, a downwardly-mobile déclassé who was convicted of fraud and lost his properties. He went to Paris in 1976 doing odd jobs. Despite having no high school diploma, he found work in the cultural-media-advertising world through his sister Agnès Soral, who as an aspiring actress had a growing network in the mondain world of Paris show business and commercial culture (e.g. marketing).

Alain apparently hated this work as unfulfilling and morally bankrupt, finding it terribly boring. He seems to have been motivated by a sharp sense of humiliation as a bourgeois-turned-proletarian (saying he had a “double consciousness” as both proletarian and bourgeois as a result), a sharp intellect, an acute sensitivity to the nuances of social life around him, and a hunger to prove himself and be loved. Those who have followed the careers of Roissy/Heartiste and RooshV may find it interesting that the young Soral was a dragueur de rue (a street pick-up artist), apparently coming to bed over 800 women, especially enjoying young, narcissistic bourgeois women as a form of “class struggle.”

Jonathan Bowden, who stressed the link between art and radical, dissident politics, might not be surprised to learn that Soral’s first interest was in the arts, going on to study at the Paris Beaux-Arts. He read a large amount of political literature, mainly Marxist, including Michel Clouscard, Lucien Goldmann, György Lukács and others. He would later write in the third person: “Alain Soral, former dragueur de rue who loved books as much as girls, so much so that he has not chosen between them.” Here is clearly a “cultured thug”…

Depressed and reportedly contemplating suicide, he co-authored a book on fashion (Les Mouvements de mode expliqués aux parents, 1984), apparently as a challenge to himself, which became a surprise best-seller. It soon became Soral’s ambition to liberate himself from wage slavery by living modestly from books. Over the next decades he would publish the following works:

  • La création de mode: Comment comprendre, maîtriser et créer la mode(1987)
  • Le Jour et la Nuit, ou la vie d’un vaurien(1991): An autobiographical novel he wrote while being a castle caretaker; did not sell well.
  • Sociologie du dragueur(1996): His guide to “game,” really a kind of autobiographical essay with powerful meditations on epistemology (theory vs. practice, intellectual vs. practitioner), male-female roles, and human existence.
  • Vers la feminization ? : Démontage d’un complot antidémocratique(1999): An attack on official and narcissistic bourgeois feminism.
  • Jusqu’où va-t-on descendre ? Abécédaire de la bêtise ambiante(2002): Politically incorrect analyses of various aspects of contemporary politics and society.
  • Socrate à Saint-Tropez: texticules(2003): The same as above, with legally risqué critiques of communautarisme(e.g., the rise of lobbying by gay/feminist/Jewish elites), the subtitle being a pun on “small-texts” and “testicles”.
  • Misères du désir(2004): A novel.
  • CHUTe ! Éloge de la disgrâce(2006): A novel on the decline and fall of an “honest journalist” (or on the inevitability of official journalism as propaganda).

Soral has also directed a film, Confession d’un dragueur, based on his books on seduction.

I will not attempt to psychoanalyze Soral to try to determine what has made him choose the remarkable and difficult path he has taken. But it is important to know the man’s biography given the nature of Soralian epistemology. Read more