From Bach to Wagner, European music carried a coded message. According to Giorgio Locchi, the breakthroughs of tonal music ushered in a new sense of historical time: neither the linearity of Christian history nor the cyclicality of the ancients, but a three-dimensional vision encompassing past, present, and future. Finding artistic expression in Richard Wagner and philosophical articulation in Friedrich Nietzsche, this tendency marked a new beginning for European civilisation through a new myth: Suprahumanism.

In this seminal essay, first published in Italian in 1982, Locchi traces the origins of the Suprahumanist Myth, examines the intellectual kinship between Wagner and Nietzsche, and sets out an open theory of history.

Today, Europe faces a choice between the triumph of egalitarianism and the ‘end of history,’ or regeneration through the affirmation of Suprahumanism that resounded in the Wagnerian epic.

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In this exclusive interview with Arktos Journal, New Zealand historian Dr. Kerry Bolton, the author of Yockey: A Fascist Odyssey, discusses the life and ideas of Francis Parker Yockey, the American lawyer and author of Imperium.

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Most of us have heard the latter half of the Alexander Pope couplet that opens this essay. This is undoubtedly because it resonates so deeply with us inherently flawed things. Each of us has erred, of course, and will go on erring; it…

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A dispatch from Tim Vorgens, the author of Legitimate Preference, on the French riots, the Left’s return to the barricades, and the three traps facing the nationalist Right before the next presidential election.

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In Fascism Viewed from the Right, Julius Evola analyses the Fascist movement of Italy, which he himself had experienced first-hand, often as a vocal critic, throughout its entire history from 1922 until 1945. Discussing — and dismissing — the misuse of the term ‘fascism’ that has gained widespread acceptance, Evola asks readers not to allow the fact of Italy’s defeat in the Second World War to distract them from making an objective analysis of the ideology of Fascism itself, since the defeat was the result of contingent circumstances and the personalities of those who led it, rather than flaws that were inherent in Fascism as an idea.

Evola praises those aspects of Fascism which he believes to have been in accordance with the best traditions of European governance, in particular the Classical Roman tradition, while he remains critical of those aspects which ran contrary to this ideal, such as its socialist, proletarian and totalitarian tendencies, as well as what he saw as its petty moralism.

Evola also distinguishes between the Fascism of the ‘Twenty Years’ between 1922 and Mussolini’s overthrow in 1943, and the ‘Second Fascism’ of the Italian Social Republic, which he considered much more problematic. He likewise criticises the Fascist racial doctrine for being based on false principles. Frequently quoting Mussolini’s own words, Evola presents the core of the Fascist ideal, arguing that, for all its flaws, it remains superior to the political system which has since arisen to replace it.

Fascism Viewed from the Right is now available in audiobook on Amazon Audible.

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In his own lifetime and in ours, Julius Evola stands out as many lives in one. Philosopher and magician, scholar and warrior, writer and mountaineer, avant-garde artist and political visionary — Evola’s words and deeds defy all the boundaries of the modern landscape.

In Julius Evola: An Adventurous Life, Andrea Scarabelli presents the first comprehensive biography of the legendary Italian Traditionalist, drawing on archival documents, correspondences, and testimonies from across Europe and beyond.

Undermining long-standing clichés and bringing to light previously unknown materials, Scarabelli’s chronicle of Evola’s adventures weaves together a dual geography: Evola’s ‘inner landscape’ of militant political and cultural undertakings guided by his quest for reviving sacred Tradition, and the ‘outer landscape’ of the 20th century’s turbulent transformations. This unprecedented biography traces Evola’s many paths — through newspaper offices and silent cloisters, Dionysian nightlife and Apollonian ascent, the frontlines of wars and the behind-the-scenes of political regimes and dissident movements.

Evola’s life resurfaces in all its complexity and vibrancy at the intersection of action and transcendence, confronting readers with the challenges of a life lived in pursuit of higher meaning against the grain of the modern world, yet in the very thick of it.

When one thinks of the European Union today, one of the things that comes to mind — besides the Brussels bureaucracy — is the European Central Bank in Frankfurt and the currency we use to conduct our everyday monetary transactions. The euro fulfils a number of different purposes today. For starters, it is a means of payment for the everyday European. At the same time, it serves as a symbol of Europe’s economic integration, a mechanism preparing the ground for future political integration and, through some wishful thinking, an expression of European power.

The euro is not the world’s most widely used currency, which remains the US dollar, but it is nevertheless the world’s second most important international currency, and it has become one of the principal structures holding today’s Europe together, however imperfectly. Yet today, debate within the European Union often divides into two broad camps: many on the institutional Left and centre want to preserve the euro as it currently is, despite the pain and economic stagnation it has imposed on parts of southern Europe, including my own country, Greece, as well as Italy, Spain and Portugal, while parts of the Right — as illustrated by a recent video featuring Alice Weidel, the AfD’s co-leader — want to leave the euro.

Those parts of the Right, however, overlook the euro’s practical achievements, particularly its integration of the European market. Before the euro, a Belgian company purchasing Italian goods would face conversion costs as well as uncertainty surrounding the franc–lira exchange rate. The euro therefore eliminated internal exchange-rate fluctuations, removed many currency-conversion costs, simplified tourism, trade, investment and cross-border employment, and made prices more easily comparable across borders. It also contributed to monetary and price stability across major eurozone economies and eliminated competitive devaluations between members such as France and Germany.

At the same time, the euro gives Europe greater international monetary influence than German, Greek or Belgian currencies could exercise on their own. Simply returning to the Deutsche Mark or another national currency would not restore the economic and geopolitical conditions of the pre-euro era. The euro was introduced in 1999, and the world has changed substantially since then. In 1999, the world was still experiencing a unipolar moment under US hegemony, while social media, smartphones, platform companies such as Uber, and contemporary artificial intelligence had not yet transformed everyday economic life.

Today, we are entering a more dangerous multipolar world carrying a greater risk of conflict in several forms, both military and economic, including tariffs and currency disputes. The Deutsche Mark, Italian lira and French franc would therefore operate in a very different and more competitive international monetary environment than they did in 1998. Debt levels were also substantially different from those carried by many European economies today.

One also has to consider that, despite the euro’s benefits and drawbacks, eurozone countries share one currency and one monetary policy at the same time as they have different government budgets, debt burdens, welfare systems, productivity levels, demographics and industrial structures. A European Central Bank policy that might work for Germany might therefore not work for Greece or Italy. A country that might need to devalue its currency to make its products and services more competitive cannot do so independently. The paradox is that the euro solved the problem of fluctuating exchange rates within the eurozone, but did so by abolishing the national currencies that had previously allowed individual economies to adjust to their own conditions. This places Europe in a rather peculiar position. Other major-power currencies, such as the US dollar, the renminbi and the rouble, are issued by states with central governments, treasuries and broadly unified political systems, meaning that their monetary centralisation reflects their political centralisation.

Europe, on the other hand, differs from those states, as it possesses a continental currency but is neither a nation-state nor a fully developed federation, and each of its member states retains its own culture and government. This absence of political unity is usually treated as a deficiency to be remedied through further integration and eventual political centralisation at the European level. Yet because the EU is not a nation-state, it does not need to create the monetary architecture of a conventional nation-state.

What appears to be Europe’s current weakness, combined with the rise of a multipolar world, could become the foundation of a more original and decentralised monetary order founded on subsidiarity through a two- or three-layered system:

1. The first layer would consist of a reformed euro that would be backed by gold and used for continental reserves, settlement and international trade.

2. The second layer would comprise national currencies serving macroeconomic policy and everyday economic life.

3. The third layer would comprise complementary regional or city-based currencies for local circulation and monetary experimentation.

The euro’s role would change: it would become a gold-backed European reserve currency for settlement, international trade and large cross-border contracts, with its issuance constrained by a defined link to gold. It would serve several related functions, including international and intra-European commerce, while remaining available to Europeans who preferred to hold it or use it when travelling between European countries. It would thereby function as a civilisational currency.

The gold-backed euro could be used collectively to purchase energy and strategic commodity reserves when required. It could be backed by independently audited gold reserves held across the Eurosystem and governed by issuance rules to ensure that its legally defined reserve ratio was maintained. To strengthen public confidence, this arrangement could include a blockchain-based proof-of-reserves-and-liabilities system. Independently verified information about the gold held across Eurosystem vaults, including bar identifiers, weight, purity, ownership and custody, could be recorded or cryptographically anchored to a publicly auditable ledger and compared with the total quantity of euros issued. Blockchain could not by itself verify the physical existence, authenticity or legal ownership of the gold, so regular inspections by independent auditors would remain essential. Its purpose would instead be to create a transparent and tamper-evident record, making discrepancies between the euro’s issuance and its underlying reserves easier for governments, institutions and citizens to detect.

The gold-backed reserve standard should not necessarily be seen as fixed for eternity. This is mainly due to the emergence of new technologies such as cryptocurrencies, specifically Bitcoin, which is increasingly acquiring the characteristics of digital gold and possesses many of gold’s valuable properties in digital form. Therefore, an annual review could provide a way to evaluate whether it would be worthwhile to transition from a gold-backed euro to a Bitcoin-backed euro, to hold Bitcoin as part of European reserves alongside gold, or, eventually, even to abandon the euro altogether in favour of Bitcoin. Such a review could examine factors such as Bitcoin’s volatility, liquidity and market depth, on-chain activity, merchant acceptance, general adoption, long-term trajectory and suitability as a reserve asset. This would also mean that the euro would cease to bear responsibility for managing every national economy. That responsibility would return to national central banks. This would restore a degree of domestic monetary flexibility based on each country’s economic needs. That flexibility would nevertheless be tempered by competition with the gold-backed euro, because excessive monetary expansion, depreciation or debasement would encourage citizens to shift their savings and contracts into the euro in search of greater monetary stability.

It is also worth considering that, in a world where the US, China and Russia might enter into trade and currency conflicts or other forms of confrontation short of direct war, accompanied by competitive currency depreciation, a gold-backed euro could aspire to become an anchor of international monetary stability, attracting capital from these regions in search of a stable monetary refuge.

The reintroduced national currencies would have their own roles within the European economy: tax collection, the payment of salaries and pensions, banking and credit, mortgages and other contracts, and national public expenditure. This would restore national economic flexibility by allowing domestic currencies to respond to the particular economic conditions of each country, rather than requiring the euro to perform every monetary function across structurally different European economies. Greece would no longer have to follow the same monetary policy as Germany or every other eurozone country, and could adjust its exchange rate without having to rely on mechanisms such as wage compression and European fiscal transfers. The national currencies would trade against the gold-backed euro, which would impose a degree of external discipline as countries regained their monetary sovereignty and autonomy. Excessive issuance or depreciation would become visible through the national currency’s decline against the gold-backed euro. National monetary freedom would therefore return together with visible consequences, forcing governments to exercise greater discipline.

The third monetary layer would not be compulsory, but would instead complement the other two and operate at the lowest viable level through cities, towns, municipalities or small regions introducing their own currencies. These currencies could operate under local monetary rules and circulate only within the participating region, city or town when necessary, alongside the gold-backed euro and the national currency. Where such a system was adopted, a city, town or region could shape its local monetary rules around its particular economic conditions and support local private and public initiatives such as businesses, public transport, local agriculture, cultural institutions, local cooperatives and community investments. This could take the form of the local currency being backed by national-currency deposits, and it could also be accepted for limited local taxes, municipal fees and public services. The purpose of these currencies would not be separatism but rather local circulation, monetary and economic experimentation, and comparison and competition with currencies developed by other communities. Such a currency would allow a local community to keep part of its purchasing power circulating among its local businesses and institutions while expressing local and regional belonging.

These three currency levels would express three different things:

1. The gold-backed euro would express civilisational sovereignty and stability;

2. The national currency would symbolise national sovereignty;

3. The local currency would express economic belonging rooted in a particular place.

The distinction between these different forms of money should not be understood only in monetary terms, but also in terms of identity. From a Traditionalist perspective, perhaps one could say that the horizontal function of money is that of calculating prices and settling transactions. Money could even be understood as a language that allows people to communicate monetary value to one another by expressing how much they value a particular good. Depending on time, location, scarcity and individual need, one person may value the same good much more highly than another. Someone living in a large city next to a supermarket might value a bottle of water at 50 cents or 1 euro, while someone stranded in the desert under the scorching sun who has not drunk water for a day or two might value that same bottle at thousands or even a million euros, if they possessed the means to pay it. The difference between 1 euro and 1 million euros therefore becomes a language for communicating differences in subjective value. At the same time, the money used to make such an exchange can represent time, labour and productive effort previously expended on something that another person valued enough to pay for. In this sense, money can be understood metaphorically as a store of accumulated time and effort, preserved in units that can later be exchanged for something else that its holder values.

Money is also a form of conceptual technology. Its monetary meaning does not arise simply from the physical object itself, but from the shared human recognition that the object or unit can represent value and be exchanged for goods and services. No other species understands money in this sense, and viewed from a sufficient distance, what human beings are doing is exchanging colourful pieces of paper, pieces of metal or digital units for goods, services and sometimes for other monetary units. Before banknotes and coins became widespread, human societies used many other forms of money, from grain, tea bricks and whale teeth depending on their culture and surroundings, while smaller economies also relied to varying degrees on barter, exchanging perhaps three sheep for two goats or three litres of milk for one kilogram of meat. Eventually, coins and banknotes became dominant because they fulfilled the three principal monetary functions more effectively than many of their predecessors: serving as a store of value, a unit of account and a medium of exchange. No form of money has ever fulfilled all three functions perfectly, but coins and banknotes proved remarkably effective at combining them.

If the horizontal function of money concerns the value it communicates, perhaps its Traditionalist vertical function concerns the meaning it acquires beyond that value: its relationship to cultural identity, memory and symbolic meaning. Different cultures and peoples throughout the world have used different forms of money and objects of exchange shaped by their particular surroundings and ways of life. One striking example can be found in Fiji, where sperm-whale teeth, known as tabua, acquired considerable economic, ceremonial and symbolic value. Their rarity contributed to their value, but their importance extended far beyond exchange alone. The tabua became associated with authority, status and social obligation and could be presented during marriages, important family occasions, peace settlements and acts of reconciliation, as well as gestures of goodwill in political and chiefly negotiations. What mattered, therefore, was not merely the value that the whale tooth communicated in an exchange, but the accumulated meaning that generations had attached to it. Over time, the object became embedded in Fijian social and cultural identity. In this sense, money and monetary objects can possess a vertical meaning alongside their horizontal function: they can become vessels through which a culture expresses authority, memory, obligation and belonging.

In Europe more specifically, grain also functioned as a form of money in different places and periods. It could perform a number of monetary functions, including the payment of rent and taxes and the settlement of debts. From a horizontal perspective, this made considerable sense: grain could be divided and measured according to standardised weights, allowing different quantities to communicate different amounts of value in much the same way that different denominations of coins and banknotes do today. Yet grain could also acquire a vertical meaning beyond its immediate monetary function. From a Traditionalist perspective, it could embody ideas of fertility, security and continuity. Unlike an abstract monetary unit, grain was also food, and food was indispensable to the survival of the family and the wider community. A store of grain therefore represented more than accumulated economic value: it represented the capacity to endure the winter, survive scarcity, sow again in the following season and continue the life of the community from one generation to the next. In this sense, grain could communicate value horizontally while symbolising continuity vertically.

Likewise, salt occupied an important place in the economy of Ancient Rome because of its value in preserving food at a time when long-term preservation depended heavily on salting and other traditional methods. Traces of the cultural importance attached to salt remain in expressions such as “to be worth one’s salt,” while the modern word salary derives from the Latin salarium, a term historically associated with salt. Yet as monetary systems developed from commodity forms toward coinage and, eventually, the banknotes of modern nation-states, this vertical dimension did not disappear; it changed form. With whale teeth, grain or salt, symbolic meaning could arise partly from the nature and cultural importance of the object itself. With modern coins and banknotes, that meaning increasingly came to be carried by the images and symbols placed upon them. National currencies were adorned with rulers, writers, scientists, artists, monuments, landscapes, historical events and other symbols associated with the nation. Money therefore became not merely a means of communicating economic value, but also a surface upon which a people could represent its history to itself. Such imagery could reinforce common national memory and belonging while, in some cases, connecting the present generation with older historical, cultural and ancestral inheritances.

This three-layered civilisational monetary order could therefore become an attempt to bind a civilisation together through corresponding layers of identity, memory and belonging. At the highest level, the gold-backed euro could become a vertical vehicle of civilisational memory, allowing Europeans to represent their shared historical inheritance to themselves without displacing the national and local identities beneath it. Its banknotes could depict successive periods of European history that played a formative role in shaping Europe into the civilisation it is today, creating a visual journey through that inheritance from antiquity to the modern age. The euro would therefore communicate more than monetary value: at the civilisational level, it could become a medium through which Europeans encounter, remember and transmit the historical continuity of their civilisation.

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The reintroduced national currencies would provide the second layer of this symbolic order, expressing national memory, historical continuity and belonging. Whereas the euro would represent the broader civilisational inheritance shared by Europeans, national currencies would preserve the particular historical memories of the nations composing that civilisation. Their notes and coins could once again depict national heroes, rulers, writers, scientists, artists, monuments, landscapes, historical events and other symbols through which a nation recognises its own past, much as many of Europe’s former national currencies once did. In some countries, this national memory could also reach further into older ethnic, cultural and ancestral inheritances. The national currency would therefore become more than an instrument of domestic monetary sovereignty: vertically, it could serve as a medium through which each nation encounters, remembers and transmits its own historical identity from one generation to the next.

Finally, the optional local currencies would complete this symbolic order by binding money to place and local memory. If the euro speaks at the level of civilisation and the national currencies at the level of the historical nation, the local currencies would speak at the level of the lived locality itself. Their notes or tokens could depict local historical sites, regional heroes, monuments, churches, legends and natural landscapes such as lakes, rivers, mountains and forests. In this way, the local currency would become the most intimate layer of monetary identity, rooted not in an abstract collective but in a particular town, region or landscape that people know directly. The Brocéliande forest in Brittany, France, mired in Arthurian legend, comes to mind as an example of the kind of site that could be depicted at the local or regional level. The local currency would therefore become more than an instrument of local exchange: vertically, it could serve as a medium through which a community encounters, remembers and transmits the memory of its own place.

Of the three layers, European, national and local, the most unusual may be the local currency, since it is rarely considered part of modern monetary policy. Yet local currencies have been attempted at different points in history. One such example is the Wörgl experiment. In 1932, the Austrian town of Wörgl introduced a locally centred complementary currency experiment that continued until September 1933, when a legal challenge initiated by the Austrian National Bank brought it to an end. The experiment began during the Great Depression, when Wörgl was facing high unemployment, declining tax revenues, municipal debt and an urgent need for public works, while the Depression and widespread hoarding had reduced the number of Austrian schillings circulating through the local economy.

Inspired by the economist Silvio Gesell, Mayor Michael Unterguggenberger introduced labour-value certificates denominated at parity with the Austrian schilling and formally backed by schilling deposits held at a local bank. The municipality used the certificates to pay workers employed on public projects, local businesses accepted them, and residents could use them to pay local taxes, rents, water charges and other municipal fees. The principal monetary innovation was a demurrage charge: to keep a certificate valid, its holder had to purchase and attach a monthly stamp worth 1% of its face value. This encouraged holders to spend the certificates rather than retain them and thereby accelerated their circulation through the town. The certificates helped finance public works including roads, sewers, a bridge and street lighting. Contemporary and later accounts also reported that unemployment declined in Wörgl while continuing to rise across Austria. The Wörgl certificates did not replace the Austrian schilling but remained complementary to it, while the schilling continued to function as a store of value, a means of trade beyond the town and the currency in which external debts were settled. The success attributed to the local currency attracted interest from other towns and municipalities. This alarmed the Austrian National Bank, which regarded the certificates as an infringement of its monopoly over currency issuance. Following a legal dispute, the experiment ended in September 1933.

The Wörgl experiment illustrates how local currencies may strengthen economic resilience under particular conditions when national monetary conditions fail to provide sufficient liquidity for local exchange and investment. This does not mean that every local currency should follow the Wörgl model. Different communities could instead develop limited monetary rules adapted to their economic conditions and designed, where appropriate, to provide some protection against external shocks. Introducing local currencies as a third layer in Europe’s monetary reconstruction could therefore contribute to a more resilient European economy while creating space for local experimentation and institutional innovation.

The euro remains a controversial currency. If one asks northern and western Europeans about it, many are likely to describe it as a positive development, but among southern Europeans one is more likely to encounter negative views. Its achievements are nevertheless noteworthy, yet its functions do not necessarily need to remain concentrated in one currency and could instead be distributed across two or three monetary levels.

In the three-level version proposed here, however, the gold-backed euro could preserve continental power and serve as a beacon of stability in a multipolar world increasingly marked by currency disputes and competitive devaluations among the great powers. National currencies would restore monetary adjustment, responsibility and democratic control, while local currencies could create room for economic belonging, experimentation and local resilience in the face of economic crises.

Such a model is uniquely suited to Europe because Europe is not a nation-state, but a civilisation, and it may be uniquely positioned among potential great-power blocs to implement it, since Europe’s political and monetary order remains “under construction” when compared with the more consolidated political and monetary orders of China, the United States and Russia. This would allow the three layers to deliver permanence at the highest level, sovereignty in the middle, and experimentation and innovation at the lowest, thereby reflecting Europe’s organic plurality as a civilisation.

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The savagery of the riots that have ravaged France’s major cities over the weekend of October 18-19 is such that the media are struggling to deny the obvious: a France drawing closer to the abyss with each passing day. And an LFI [La France Insoumise] that may well fall victim to its own strategy.

Sunday morning: general consternation in the face of disaster. For once, the whole little media world is more or less in agreement. Le Journal du dimanche runs the headline “Chaos.” But La Tribune dimanche, its rival little brother from the central bloc1, does the same, with… “Chaos.” More revealing still, on Le Monde‘s website, its live coverage of recent days is still presented under the banner of “Chaos.” As for Le Parisien, a traditionally timid daily, it is more explicit still, with this huge front-page headline: “Scenes of Insurrection.”

Has something unprecedented happened, then, this past weekend? Evidently, yes.

Emmanuel Macron, like a sub-prefect in the fields…2

Nearly a thousand members of the security forces injured, and even more shops ransacked and looted; the Tourist Office and the Hôtel de Ville of Limoges engulfed in flames. And that is not an exhaustive inventory. Meanwhile, Emmanuel and Brigitte Macron are swaying along to Céline Dion at one of her final Paris concerts. Granted, they say it was the one not to miss; but for a President of the Republic, it is perhaps not the first place to be seen. All the more so since the next day he was flying off on a tour of the Persian Gulf. That left him just enough time to address the French people on the evening of Sunday 18 October, to survey the damage, declare that all this was intolerable, and say he would act with the utmost firmness. Certain “presstitute”3 colleagues, more or less leftist trash and surely ill-intentioned, claim this little speech was drafted with the help of artificial intelligence. That is surely a gross exaggeration, given that for spouting such platitudes a genuine idiot does the job perfectly well. Better still: in these times of budgetary famine, he comes even cheaper. In short, it’s not that this necessarily reeks of the end of a reign, but it looks damned like it.

Meanwhile, Laurent Nuñez, Minister of the Interior, tenders his resignation, which the Élysée immediately refuses. After all, why deprive oneself of the best? Here again, the press is unanimous. The Place Beauvau4 failed to gauge how large events would grow. Too many police where fewer were needed, and not enough where more would have been. Above all, the police were tired. Physically, certainly, but morally too. Especially when Emmanuel Macron reproaches them for their “lack of empathy” towards young protesters who are adult enough to throw Molotov cocktails at the police, but too young to sample the delights of penitentiary hospitality.

Left-wing papers that no longer know which foot to dance on…

Unsurprisingly, Libération and L’Humanité, pleading the lack of foresight shown by Laurent Nuñez’s services, single them out as the chief troublemakers. Here, their dialectical contortions are worth the detour. For L’Humanité, which leads with “The Social Explosion,” it would be indelicate to mention violence by housing-estate thugs and far-left activists; the paper once founded by Jean Jaurès confines itself to castigating an Emmanuel Macron who “is only reaping what he has sown,” which, in a sense, is not entirely false. One simply notes that the historic Communist daily has become a leftist rag. We had known it for a long time; now it is confirmed.

The case of Libération is more Jesuitical. Reality is not denied there, though it is deemed to warrant a few adjustments. To be sure, the paper does not skip over the racailles5 from the “quartiers,”6 but it means to decouple them from the political activists who emerged from Mélenchonism and its immediate surroundings. Bad luck: the paper publishes a photo of a branch of MAIF, the well-known insurance company. On its vandalized façade, the inevitable ACAB tags, as if the small-time dealers of the DZ Mafia7 knew what this Anglo-Saxon acronym meant. To blame all this violence on the children of immigration is a dangerous game. Moreover, a resident of the Canal Saint-Martin interviewed by our colleagues at Libé unwittingly reveals what he really thinks: “Of course it’s frightening. When we were young, if we wanted cash, we pushed our luck a bit: we went down into the street to sell drugs. Today these kids are obsessed with money. They don’t give a damn about anything anymore.” True enough, my good sir: the ultra-left really was better in the old days.

The trap of racialization…

It is just as true that the ultra-left was once a White affair, and that it was Whites, paradoxically, who theorized anti-White racism. A conceptual boomerang that now smacks them right in the teeth. One should never let children play with grown-ups’ things. For this witness cannot be unaware that his descendants also conceptualized the famous “convergence of struggles” between “conscientized” youth and its “racialized” counterpart, knowing that, with a few exceptions (Bally Bagayoko and Rokhaya Diallo had the good fortune to have their studies paid for by the colonial state), these two populations do not obey the same logics. A dialectical hiatus at least as tortuous as those LGBTQUI+ QWERTYUIOP activists head over heels in love with a Palestine where their life expectancy would not exceed two minutes flat.

Precarious intellectuals and rich kids from the posh districts want the end of capitalism (not a bad idea in itself), whereas the marginals of the housing projects, dealers in assorted wares — drugs, tracksuits or trainers — think only of money and see themselves as capitalist entrepreneurs, complete with bimbos and swimming pools, with Dubai as their ultimate Mecca.

So this is a “convergence of struggles” that does not necessarily bode well for Jean-Luc Mélenchon, especially when one knows that a far from negligible share of this France born of immigration aspires only to live in peace, just like any Français de souche,8 going so far as to vote 15% for the Rassemblement National. Proof of this: in Paris, many of the shops looted by these children of immigrants were run by other children of immigrants, as Pascal Praud noted on Europe 1, and the least one can say of him is that he is anything but a rabid immigrationist.

This France presented as “new”9 is thus more a racialist concept than plain reality. Worse, this insurrection, even if partly infiltrated by LFI, seems to have taken on proportions that could become uncontrollable, and may well do no favors to the president-for-life of La France Insoumise (LFI).10 His strategy of sound and fury has been designed to put him in a second round against Marine Le Pen. But he still has to reach that last step of the podium. In light of these events, it is not certain he is on course for it.

Originally published in Éléments on October 20th, 2026

Translated by Alexander Raynor

What the Hell is That?

You don’t quite believe your eyes or ears: on a large stage, late at night, a rock band is playing in the bright glow of torches and spotlights. The long-haired musicians are dressed in black, adorned with silver-shining studs, metal spikes, and ammunition belts, giving them a menacing appearance.

Their faces are decorated with a kind of white war paint, at first glance a mixture of Hollywood Vikings and clowns, making the overall image even more striking.

Large white animal skulls are mounted on wooden stakes. In a semicircle around the rear of the stage, several living young women hang from crosses, completely naked. The band plays a brutal, heavy sound, but the singer doesn’t sing at all; no, he screams in a rasping voice, making it impossible to understand anything.

A large crowd of exclusively white spectators presses forward in front of the stage, all of them dressed in black as well. Many raise their hands in the air, forming a sign by extending their index and little fingers while keeping the remaining fingers together, creating a kind of animal’s head.

This, or something similar, is how many “black metallers” present themselves at their concerts. This naturally raises a legitimate question for the uninitiated: What kind of bizarre spectacle is this?

Is it for the Right, too?

The English-language book From Nihilism to Transcendence, by Weltanschauung Italia, a metapolitical project of the Italian Right, provides a brief but comprehensive background report on the subject. It is an informative publication, which aims to shed light on “Black Metal” (BM) as a phenomenon that originally emerged from a subculture but has, within just a few decades, become an established part of rock music worldwide, with many thousands of bands. Hardly anyone can make sense of the sheer volume of songs, concerts, bands, and styles anymore. Even experts struggle to keep up.

However, the focus of this book is not on the genre’s commercial bands, which have by now been absorbed into the musical mainstream, but on genuine artists with depth who, consciously or unconsciously, have affinities with the political Right. The authors analyze in an informed manner whether and how Black Metal can be reconciled with Right-wing cultural ideas. Their work identifies what is interesting in musical, lyrical, and aesthetic terms. They, who seem generally sympathetic toward BM, succeed in presenting their positive assessment in a highly convincing and understandable way. In principle, BM is something for the political Right, but not for everyone: one must have an affinity for many elements that take some getting used to in order to be moved by them on an emotional level.

Where Did This Musical Genre Come From, and How Did it Develop?

The authors sensibly trace the origins of BM back to 1984. They explain how rock music continued to fragment and evolve. The genre’s heyday in the 1990s is outlined, followed by the development of post-Black Metal between 1996 and 2000. Finally, the book surveys the latest developments over approximately the past 20 years.

Against Commercialism

Alongside commercial BM bands, the “true” scene is anti-commercial. Its members are often connected through relatively loose groups that are self-sufficient and content to exist on their own terms. Making concessions to anyone or anything is frowned upon. Some go so far as to cover their faces completely during concerts, making themselves unrecognizable so that the audience has to concentrate entirely on the music.

The authors describe the standards of quality that prevail within the scene, how its members communicate, what they want, and what they reject. It is a remarkably creative laboratory in which lifestyle, politics, art, and much more intermingle. Meanwhile, artistic elements of Black Metal—from aesthetics to music—have increasingly seeped into various areas of the mainstream, albeit somewhat beneath the surface. The film industry is one example.

A Broad Spectrum

Naturally, the various subgenres and offshoots of BM are also covered. The main varieties discussed in the book range from “atmospheric” Black Metal without vocals to “pagan” and “suicidal” BM, all the way to the highly political “National Socialist Black Metal” (NSBM), which takes National Socialism as its ideological point of reference. The spectrum addressed extends from the depressive, introspective brooder to the political activist. By the authors’ own assessment, however, the vast majority of bands are not political. Nevertheless, from a Right-wing perspective, one can identify a consistently positive metapolitical significance in almost all of them.

The authors explain the aversion to Christianity found in most bands. They explore why this fierce reaction against Christianity occurs and what the opposing worldview looks like. The authors also explain the sense of elitism openly displayed by many, along with their anti-humanism and anti-egalitarianism.

One of the most disturbing aspects of BM is its overt Satanism. The book explains this phenomenon just as convincingly as it explains the beliefs of BM’s neo-pagan adherents, including the relationship between these two currents.

It should be expected that a musical genre involving tens of thousands of musicians and a relatively large following will exert an influence beyond its own community, despite certain tendencies toward isolation. That community must also draw on intellectual and musical sources that nourish and inspire it. Indeed, a genuine exchange with a variety of cultural elements does take place. The authors illustrate this through Tolkien’s influence on BM, which in turn has affected how the film industry receives and interprets the genre.

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Further Distinctive Features, Contradictions, and Opposing Views

There is no need here to address every aspect of Black Metal mentioned in the book. The wide range of topics, even if some are treated very briefly, covers the main issues relevant to the subject. Readers can use this as a solid overview and then conduct their own further research.

The broad BM scene is heterogeneous in every respect. There are differing opinions on virtually everything. At the same time, homogeneous fan communities have formed around particular bands, styles, and subject matter. It is in the nature of the scene that men are overwhelmingly dominant within BM. The authors have, of course, not overlooked this fact.

“Truth” and “purity” have led to disputes within the BM scene, as has the emergence of explicitly “Christian” or “National Socialist” BM groups. The division between Left and Right that is unavoidable in society is also reflected in the BM scene. This is particularly significant where commercialization corrupts bands and where individuals and media outlets attempt to make money from the subject.

Despite the book’s sympathy for the genre, it is not an excessively one-sided defense of BM. Many issues are questioned and examined critically as well.

What is Not Explored in Detail

Naturally, this Italian book does not examine German BM bands, their history, or their musical output in any particular depth. It also leaves aside the state repression of bands, as well as efforts by the music, media, and live-event industries to politically censor BM.

The book does not specifically address why BM is an exclusively white cultural form—although, according to the reviewer, this supposedly requires little explanation: the answer supposedly follows from BM’s content, musical style, and aspirations.

Negative activities by BM musicians and their followers, such as murders and church arson attacks, are also mentioned only in passing. Thankfully, the book likewise does not dwell on how the scene treats a gay singer or on the disputes among its members over content and music.

Thus, alongside an overall survey, the book focuses on the ideological and musical core of the part of BM that the reviewer considers positive, and on the successful attempt to establish a connection with the cultural world of the political Right. The decision to leave certain subjects unexplored has proved worthwhile, since many of them have already been extensively covered by alternative media and even by media loyal to the established system.

Ultimately, the question must remain open as to the extent to which simply consuming radical music keeps young people in particular away from active politics, encourages destructive subcultures, or even leads to depoliticization through immersion in dream worlds. At least, the authors have identified those positive aspects of BM that may help prevent precisely these outcomes.

Alex Kurtagic as a Further Recommendation

For readers who would like to gain an overview in an even shorter format alongside reading the book, and discover additional perspectives, this reviewer recommends the article “Black Metal — Die Konservative Revolution in der Populärkultur,” included in Alex Kurtagic’s book Ja, Afrika muß zur Hölle gehen [“Yes, Africa Must Go to Hell”, a German language collection of Alex Kurtagic’s writings —Ed]. A similar version, in English, of the article is also freely available online as a PDF through The Occidental Quarterly.

Conclusion

At 112 pages of text, the book is not particularly long, but it covers the subjects discussed in such a way that readers, whether specialists or newcomers, gain a good overview and insight into the topic. The book is recommended without reservation and is an absolute must-read for Black Metal fans. The political Right should certainly pay more attention to this field of cultural politics as well. With this book, the first step has been taken.

The above is a review, originally published in German by Thymos Kvltvrmagazin, of From Nihilism to Transcendence: Black Metal as a Spiritual Phenomenon, brought to you by Arktos and available on Amazon:

For those who know how to go beyond the surface, beyond the noise and provocation, black metal will remain what it has always been: not a destination, but a powerful and dangerous means of embarking on that inner journey that every human being, sooner or later, is called upon to undertake.

In the panorama of 20th-century music and subcultures, few phenomena have been so misunderstood and embodied such striking contradictions as black metal. From Nihilism to Transcendence: Black Metal as a Spiritual Phenomenon explores how this movement of rebellion, rejection, and darkness came to represent a spiritual and artistic laboratory for generations.

Tracing the genre’s origins, evolution, and main themes through a rich synthesis of musicology, sociology, and philosophy, From Nihilism to Transcendence moves beyond sensationalism and moral panic to uncover black metal’s paradoxical paths to rediscovering the sacred. Black metal’s soundscapes, symbolisms, and controversies are revealed in new light as creatively reflecting the fundamental, existential issues of our disenchanted and superficial age.

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Alain de Benoist sets out three remarks on immigration ahead of France’s next presidential election. He argues that no restriction is possible as long as judges rule in the name of human rights rather than the people, that opponents of immigration must also confront the capitalism that depends on it, and that assimilation cannot work for large, established communities.

Mass immigration and its corollary, lack of public safety, are not the cause of Europe’s decline but a symptom of it. They are, on the other hand, the primary cause of the rise of populisms, and they will be one of the main issues of the next presidential election. Let us contribute to this debate with three simple remarks.

First remark: nothing can be done in the fight against settlement immigration unless we first blow open the lock held by the judges, who have now become the censors of the Republic. Whatever measure a government determined to curb immigration might wish to apply, or even to implement a policy of reversing migratory flows, the judges will oppose it. They have long since ceased to judge in the name of the French people. They judge instead in the name of human rights, that is, in the name of the primacy of the juridical over the political, of the rule of law over democracy, of “non-discrimination” over the common good, and of the sacralization of subjectivities over the will of the people.

Stopping immigration means stripping judges of the power to censor the content of laws for failing to conform to the diktats of a dominant ideology that have been improperly “constitutionalized.” It means dissolving the Constitutional Council and the Council of State and refounding them on new bases, obliging them to keep to their original function. And it means treating as null and void the rulings of the European Court of Human Rights and similar bodies, which have no democratic legitimacy whatsoever.

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Second remark: fight against immigration or economic growth — one must choose. Drawing on a recent book by Paul Morland and Philip Pilkington, Anthony Marinier recalled in these very pages the “trilemma” arising from the fact that it is impossible to combine falling birth rates, economic growth, and ethnic and cultural continuity all at once. Either falling birth rates are coupled with growth, and recourse to ever more massive immigration becomes inevitable: this is the choice made by the leaders of Western Europe. Or immigration is refused without birth rates being raised: this is the choice made by Japan, which for two decades has posted near-zero growth despite its recourse to robotization. In a period of demographic crisis, fighting mass immigration means ceasing to treat growth as an absolute.

Not a single European country today still prides itself on leaving its borders open; not a single one still sees in the steady rise of immigrant flows an “opportunity” for society. No party openly calls for “more immigrants.” Only big business still does. It was big business that first primed the suction pump of immigration at the end of the 1950s (despite a high birth rate), and it is big business that today stands as its last defender. In January 2026, in Spain, the government of Pedro Sánchez announced the legalization of half a million illegal immigrants “to support growth.” “The economy massively needs immigration,” proclaims Patrick Martin, president of the Medef1, which at least has the merit of clarity.

The capitalist system rests on wage labor and produces not so much goods as things made to be sold, that is, commodities. It has a vital need for an influx of uprooted masses, yesterday through the rural exodus, today through immigration. These masses offer a triple advantage: they have been stripped of the forms of social protection present in their communities of origin; they are scarcely unionized and therefore a priori less inclined to press demands; and they are eminently usable for exerting downward pressure on wages while increasing the number of consumers.

In its essence, mass immigration is indeed the reserve army of capital, a capitalist invention.

Liberalism, for its part, sees in immigrant communities nothing but sums of individuals, without regard for the “externalities,” that is, for the anthropological, cultural, and social consequences of their influx. It has always declared itself in favor of the free movement of people, capital and goods, perceiving every political border as an obstacle to the free market and an instrument of coercion wielded by public authority. For the libertarian Murray Rothbard, “no land area, no square footage in the world shall remain public; every square meter of land must be privatized.” By accelerating the division of labor, migratory flows would supposedly contribute to “progress.” Nomadic humanity and generalized uprootedness versus human biodiversity!

To criticize immigration while remaining silent about capitalism amounts to ignoring capital’s capacity to neutralize whatever resists it. This is an inconsistency of the first magnitude, and it casts a rather strange light on the overtures which anti-immigration parties make to win over big business. In reality, one can only dismiss both sides equally: those who claim to fight capitalism while refusing to oppose immigration, and those who claim to fight immigration while refusing to oppose capitalism.

Third remark: assimilation is an elegant way of describing the abandonment or dispossession of everything that once was more than mere numerical individuality2. Assimilation is possible for individuals or small groups, provided that immigration is limited in time and in volume and that the cultural differences between the society of departure and the society of arrival are not too great. But it is impossible for large populations and established communities.

As early as 1994, Jean Mabire posed this simple question: “How could a country that has not managed, in thirty years, to fully integrate one hundred thousand harkis3 who had fought to remain French be capable of assimilating fifty or a hundred times as many?” Civilizational facts are not an optical illusion. It has not been sufficiently noted that immigration is also proof of the failure of the decolonizations.

Stranger still is the sight, today, of historic adversaries of the Enlightenment calling for an “Islam of the Enlightenment,” and of anti-moderns reproaching Muslims for not being modern enough. These anti-moderns turn against Muslims exactly the same arguments their own adversaries once used against Catholics (”medieval” mores, the subjugation of women, etc.), and in doing so they join their voices to the chorus of those who sing the praises of the “liberated” immigrant, reduced to the state of an individual swallowed up by the model of Homo economicus.

One cannot at once extol the merits of collective memory and enjoin newcomers to renounce or ignore their own. It is the excesses of assimilationist universalism that have produced, by reaction, the racializing identitarianism of the “wokeists.” That universalism was founded on the alliance of morality and economics, and it believed that one need only appeal to the universal to make the common spring forth. Yet living in common is something altogether different from “living together.” Communities can just as well foster integration as feed secession. Today as always, it is the refusal to take differences into account that feeds separatism.

As Marcel Gauchet has observed, Jean-Luc Mélenchon behaves like a perfect liberal when he calls for “the free movement of people, in other words, the right to immigration, perhaps the neoliberal cause par excellence in our historical moment, the proof in action of the universality of individual rights in a world without borders.”

For different reasons, wokeist progressives and the captains of industry alike have every reason to rejoice at the emergence of a “new France” at last “rid of all its previous culture and all its popular traditions” (Jean-Claude Michéa). What they fail to see is that by substituting the “multicultural” for the old cultural identity, one also mechanically creates the conditions for a war of all against all. It bears repeating: the false dilemma of “inclusive society” or “republican universalism” is unacceptable.

Originally published in Éléments no. 222, October-November 2026

Translated by Alexander Raynor

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What happens when a civilisation loses all understanding of manhood and womanhood?

In these provocative and uncompromising writings from 1921–1971, Julius Evola launches a fierce critique of the modern crisis of sexuality, gender relations, and the spiritual meaning of masculinity and femininity. From feminism, eroticism, and prostitution to marriage, modesty, and the “American way of life,” Evola’s perspectives laid out in The Woman Problem challenge nearly every assumption of the modern age.

Integrating metaphysical principles and cultural reflections with lively commentary on current fashions and developments, Evola demonstrates in myriad ways how relationships between man and woman reflect a deeper polarity at the heart of human existence.

The incisive and often entertaining texts brought together in The Woman Problem offer not only unprecedented insight into the mind and times of Julius Evola, but unabashedly address the profound disconnects affecting societies and hearts today.

The Woman Problem is now available in audiobook on Amazon Audible.

Don’t forget:

While the debate on discrimination remains locked down by a one-sided view of racism, François Bousquet, director of La Nouvelle Librairie and editor-in-chief of Éléments, dares to break a taboo with his latest book: Anti-White Racism.

In this unprecedented investigation, he begins by dismantling the dogma of systemic racism, which has become an ideological lock preventing any recognition of the suffering of the petits Blancs or “little Whites”1. He then gives the floor to those who are never heard: middle and high school students, residents of relegated neighborhoods, people assaulted and humiliated, often in silence. The result is a chilling collection of testimonies — voices stifled for too long by a detached progressivism.

In this exclusive interview with Breizh-Info, François Bousquet discusses his approach, denounces the blindness of the elites, and warns of the widening fracture between real France and official France.

Breizh-info.com: To begin with, there are three books on anti-white racism published in the early 2000s and 2010s, and then nothing: one by Hervé Ryssen, another by Gilles-William Goldnadel, and one published at the time by Une Autre Jeunesse and the Identitaires. What has happened since?

François Bousquet: The theory of systemic racism happened. It is a muddled, delirious, hegemonic theory imported from the United States. It has petrified the debate as if after a nuclear winter. Frozen debate = sterilized thought. In the days of communism, people spoke of the Soviet glacis2, a belt of vassalized countries that prevented any form of dissidence. The decolonial glacis works the same way. At its center is a Manichaean vision of the world: wicked Whites and nice “racialized” people. The French Trofim Lysenko of this racial fiction is Éric Fassin.3 From the height of his university chair and his many Franco-American op-eds, he has decreed that the earth is flat and that, as far as the “social sciences” are concerned, anti-White racism does not exist. Merely mentioning this reality, which I document extensively in my investigation on the basis of some forty shocking testimonies, immediately condemns you to academic and media excommunication. That is how the debate has been locked down. For on top of this leaden ideological blanket comes de facto censorship: publishers back away, and researchers don’t research. Anti-White racism has become a willful impensé,4 something deliberately left unthought.

Breizh-info.com: Your book opens with a quotation taken from an online forum. Why did you choose this source rather than an institutional or academic one?

François Bousquet: Truth may come out of the mouths of babes, but even more out of the mouths of adolescents. They are the ones who take the hostile looks, the racial slurs, the bullying on playgrounds and football pitches. They are the ones who, more and more often, have to lower their eyes and hug the walls. That is what you find on discussion forums. They are the cahiers de doléances of the young.5 Journalists, educators, and adults should consult them more often. They would discover an abandoned youth exorcizing its malaise in the registers of language proper to adolescence: not pathos, but sarcasm, sneering, provocation, which seize the hand that is not held out to them… in order to bite it.

Why follow institutional discourse? Having deserted reality, it no longer has any credibility. It has taken refuge in ideological bubbles where any empirical approach is disqualified. In such cases, you have to start again from the ground up. Take France’s pulse not on the terraces of the gentrified cafés of the big cities, but in YouTube comments, on online gaming forums, on the networks where an invisibilized youth expresses itself. In an age when the great voices have fallen silent or become complicit, we must learn again to listen to the small ones.

Breizh-info.com: The heart of your book is the testimonies. Why did you choose this direct method? What impact did it have on your own perception of the phenomenon?

François Bousquet: They are the ones who tell us what reality is, unfiltered, unsweetened, and it does not match the dominant narrative at all. If I chose this method, the raw spoken word, it is because there had been virtually nothing until then. No serious fieldwork, no public report, no academic study worthy of the name. Nothing. A desert. This documentary void allowed activist researchers to decree that anti-white racism did not exist, for lack of evidence. And so the loop was closed: we don’t look, so we don’t find, so it doesn’t exist. I made the opposite wager. I went out to meet society’s stifled chorus: teenagers, students, employees, teachers, parents. By turns I was shaken, moved to tears, outraged by these accounts. Not only as a journalist, nor only as a man, but as a Frenchman, as a European, and, dare I say it, as a white man. All of a sudden it was no longer a matter of concepts, but of betrayed trust, of abandonment, of contempt. It was at that moment that I became not their spokesman but their megaphone: I do not speak in their place; I speak so that they may be heard.

Breizh-info.com: Why does anti-White racism remain such a tenacious taboo in the media, in the university, and in the political sphere?

François Bousquet: Anti-White racism is the taboo of taboos because it threatens the entire ideological edifice of victimhood. It breaks the monopoly on grievance. It disturbs the symbolic balances on which the mental architecture of post-national societies rests. In these societies, the historic peoples are ordered to fall silent, to submit, or to resign. To acknowledge the existence of anti-White racism is to blow apart this asymmetrical logic, which is the logic of multiculturalism: oppressors on one side, the oppressed on the other.

Breizh-info.com: You distinguish the “big Whites” or grands Blancs from the “little Whites” or petits Blancs. Is this fracture at the heart of the invisibilization of this form of racism?

François Bousquet: Absolutely. Anti-White racism strikes the petits Blancs, not the commentators at Radio France. There are two kinds of Whites in France: the big and the small. The first has the words, the positions, the networks. The second has contempt, silence, belittlement. The grand Blanc campaigns for open borders, but not in his own building, still less in his children’s school. He celebrates diversity, provided it remains theoretical. If there is such a thing as White privilege, it is only ever his own: a caste privilege (progressive, leftist, metropolitan, sanctuarized) that opens every door. The grand Blanc campaigns for the unconditional welcome of others, but it is the petit Blanc who must bear the consequences. He is the one insulted in the schoolyard, abused on the football pitch, humiliated on the school bus. This fracture is not anecdotal. It explains why anti-White racism remains taboo: it affects those who have neither megaphone nor relay.

Breizh-info.com: Can we say that this racism targets the most vulnerable first, geographically, socially, educationally, in places the state seems to have deserted? And what does this say about the divorce between the elites and the people?

François Bousquet: No one is safe anymore: the death of Élias at the start of the year, in Paris’s 14th arrondissement, was a tragic reminder of that. But in fact anti-White racism strikes the working classes first. That is what emerges from the only survey on the subject, conducted jointly by Insee and Ined in 2008–2009; there will never be another.6 One non-impoverished French person in seven belonging to the “majority population” (whether we like it or not, the Français de souche7) says they have been a victim of racism (in this case, anti-White), but among impoverished French people it is one in four. You can see the gap. Anti-White racism strikes where the state has withdrawn: in zones of relegation, forgotten margins, abandoned schools. The further down the social ladder you go, the more exposed people are, and the stronger anti-White racism is. Put another way: the fewer means you have for segregation (spatial, social, racial), the more exposed you are.

Sheltered behind his flights of rhetoric about social mixing (mixité), the grand Blanc practices segregation, a muffled segregation, behind the walls of gentrification and the social codes he masters better than anyone. Mixing is a farce that only the poor live for real, at their own expense. They do not have the luxury of choosing it or measuring it out. They take it head-on, in environments where one no longer speaks of coexistence but of confrontation. They have the means neither of avoidance nor of separatism.

Here we are at the heart of the hypocrisy and the pretense: those who proclaim that anti-White racism is a fantasy are precisely those who have the means never to be confronted with it. They live in a fictional France; for everyone else, it is a frictional one.

Breizh-info.com: Do you think this should be made a universalist struggle, even at the risk of falling into the fashionable tendency of victimization?

François Bousquet: Universalist? Certainly not. It was precisely in the name of an abstract universalism and of a Republic supposedly blind to differences that antiracist ideology came into being more than forty years ago, only to drift into a war machine against indigenous peoples and legitimate forms of belonging. The point is not for us to resort in turn to a mirror-image victimization, but to expose the perverse effects of multiculturalism imposed from above, without consent, and to give ourselves the concrete means to respond to it, starting from a diagnosis of failure.

Breizh-info.com: The book also describes a Balkanized, demographically fractured society. Can anti-White racism really be separated from the effects of mass immigration?

François Bousquet: The one does not go without the other. The taboo on anti-White racism will not fall so long as people refuse to see what feeds it: the massive demographic imbalance produced by out-of-control non-European immigration. Anti-White racism is not a spontaneous emanation of the spirit of the age. It is the product of a fractured, Balkanized, archipelagized society, in which the majority element becomes a local minority, often amid the indifference, or even with the blessing, of the elites. A multicultural society without a common culture becomes a battlefield. Multiculturalism is not an enrichment; it is a powder keg.

Breizh-info.com: Will SOS Racisme8 one day add an “s” to “Racisme” to make it plural, as Desproges suggested? In other words, do you see a broader political awareness emerging, including on the left? In a word: is the taboo falling, or will reality have to impose itself even more brutally before it breaks?

François Bousquet: The government spokeswoman, Sophie Primas, stated on CNews that she has no qualms with speaking about anti-White racism. On the same channel, Aurore Bergé, the minister in charge of equality between women and men and the fight against discrimination (quite a program in itself), said the opposite. Though she has been called a “dirty White woman,” with spitting to boot, she does not recognize that anti-White racism exists. Clearly, ethnomasochism still has fine days ahead of it.

The good news, nonetheless, is that a crack is appearing in this bleak panorama. The Crépol affair and the death of Thomas marked a turning point. Not because the justice system saw clearly. On the contrary, it is working to avoid any finding that the crime was racially aggravated, at the cost of a biased investigation. The turning point came because public opinion is increasingly aware that these are not “random incidents” but rather are “social facts” (faits divers vs. faits de société9), expressions of an anti-European rage cultivated and channeled by years of resentment.

The wall of silence around anti-White racism is thus beginning to crack. More and more people are speaking about it freely. One cannot indefinitely take refuge in denial, delinquency, and delirium (the law of the three Ds, to which I am particularly attached) without inviting a violent return of the repressed. Welcome to reality!

Originally published on Breizh-Info. Interview conducted by YV.

Translated by Alexander Raynor

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François Bousquet’s Anti-White Racism: The Forbidden Investigation is hot off the press from Arktos and available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble:

In this interview with Écrits de Rome, Romain Petitjean of the Institut Iliade discusses the relationship between the European New Right, paganism, and Christianity today.

Écrits de Rome: First of all, you declare yourself a “pagan.” Could you go back over the meaning of such a term, which may seem obscure to some of our readers? Is it a matter of fidelity to certain family traditions, or the outcome of a personal journey?

Romain Petitjean: It is a way of being in the world: rooted, pluralist, active, and intrinsically bound to a people and a land. It is not a doctrine or a dogma. It is a spirituality in which fidelity, meaning loyalty to one’s ancestors, to one’s land, and to one’s people is paramount.

It is rather difficult to speak about paganism because we are so dependent on categories imposed by Christianity. Notions such as revelation, orthodoxy, heresy, holy scripture, dogma, and conversion are proper to Christianity and foreign to paganism. The greatest difficulty is that Christianity regards religion as a matter of faith, of inner conviction. Paganism, by contrast, is above all an orthopraxy, a practice. A gesture, a word, or an action in keeping with the order of the world is often enough; the rightness of acts matters more than the correctness of beliefs. The urbanization of our lives and the lack of places of worship of our own somewhat hinder this daily practice. Even so, at the solstices, the seasonal festivals, and family rites, I perform the gestures and speak the words that seem right to me.

That said, if one had to define paganism, I would say it is above all a religion, a spirituality, of the here and now, in which the divine is emanated through the world rather than standing outside it. What counts is the immanence of the sacred more than some hypothetical transcendence or a consoling hereafter. In fact, it is a matter of confronting the reality of the world, facing destiny, and saying “yes” to life. Pindar told us: “O my soul, do not aspire to immortal life, but exhaust the field of the possible.” It is action and the sensory gaze that allow us to give form to the world and to reveal the divine. I love this line of Ernst Jünger’s:

“When the world seems to be tottering on its foundations, a glance at a flower can restore order.”

This is the same world that structures Greek philosophy and justifies the image of the gods.

Moreover, there is a contrast with the linear and eschatological vision which belongs to Christianity and also to the desacralized modern West. For a pagan, life is cyclical: time turns, and everything returns eternally to the source.

“The beginning and the end are one and the same, and where you stand is the hinge of the ages.” — Hugo von Hofmannsthal

Finally, the pagan vision is fundamentally plural and non-universalist: there are as many paganisms as there are lands and peoples. Each paganism, with its own pantheon, is born of the unique and “magical” union between a people and its land. They are not interchangeable, and attempts to compare them with the universalisms of revealed truth often fall flat.

EdR: It must be acknowledged, as a Catholic, that the Church of the twenty-first century is not always very attractive to anyone who cares even a little about the destiny of Europe. The clergy seem scarcely interested in that destiny. A Catholic author such as Laurent Dandrieu even gave one of his recent books this eloquent subtitle: Le pape et le suicide de la civilisation européenne (The Pope and the Suicide of European Civilization). We are indeed a long way from a St. Pius V calling for a halt to Ottoman expansion… How do you view the Church today?

RP: I know little of its inner workings. I note that the number of practicing faithful keeps collapsing (only 5% of adults attend Mass at least once a month), and so does the number of priests. At the same time, there is a certain revival among the trads. On the countrywide scale, however, this remains marginal. As a political institution, the Church carries less and less weight and is becoming above all symbolic, like the King of England. Even so, the Pope’s encyclical on artificial intelligence did manage to show a thoroughly European sense of measure in the face of the prevailing hysteria.

Within the Church, moreover, the clashes are many, in keeping with the history of this ancient institution.

As a pagan, I observe that the Christian Church is endlessly torn between two pulls. One is a return to the biblical sources of the texts. The other is the decisive European contribution, brought about notably through medieval syncretism (the Marian cult, the cult of the saints, and so on), which allowed Christianity to reveal its genius.

But Christianity largely drove out the gods; that is Nietzsche’s well-known critique. It created such a distance between a single God, Alpha and Omega, and His creatures that the creatures forgot God. Driven out of the world and confined to the private conscience of believers, the Christian religion is in difficulty. All the more so because a great many Christian virtues have seeped into society, which has largely become a dechristianized society (the egalitarian utopia, the monotheism of values, and so on), and this mechanically weakens the original vehicle. And Christians today face the emergence of new churches imposed by the market and consumer society. The high masses of Apple product launches are the best-known and most caricatural example.

Logically, and in keeping with its universal vocation, the institutional Church of the twenty-first century has largely ceased to think of itself as the guardian of a particular civilization. It now speaks the language of abstract humanity and of undifferentiated welcome. Its universalism no longer distinguishes between peoples, lands, and heritages. We are indeed a long way from Pius V, from Lepanto, or even from the Christendom that for centuries gave form to Europe. This does not mean that Christianity is foreign to our destiny. The European soul expressed itself through it: in the cathedrals, in chivalry, in the cult of the saints, and in Marian devotion. All of this is a pagan and Roman sedimentation that the Church of former times knew how to embrace.

It was this Europe that magnified Christianity, and not the reverse. The present institution is turning away from this synthesis to return to a disembodied, globalized Abrahamism. In doing so, it betrays both Europe and what was highest in its own tradition. That is why many young Europeans today find in Christianity a form of identitarian assertion. This assertion not only dispenses with obedience to the Church’s official authorities. Even more significantly, faith does not necessarily occupy a central place in it.

To sum up, today’s Church is not “unattractive” by accident. It has chosen to stop being the religious expression of a well-defined civilization and to become the instrument of a proselytism without borders.

Europeans who still care about their destiny need not wait for the Church to produce a new Pius V. It is up to them to reconquer for themselves the sense of the sacred, of transmission, and of continuity. With or without it.

EdR: You are the coordinator of the Institut Iliade. It has never concealed its closeness to the ideas of the New Right, yet it welcomes a not insignificant number of Catholics. That may surprise Catholics as much as pagans of the older generations. Why such openness on the part of your institute?

RP: The Institut Iliade counts Catholic comrades among its cadres. It stands at the crossroads of several ideological and political schools, but the legacy of the New Right (Nouvelle Droite) is clearly preponderant. Indeed, we have just published a history of the New Right with Éditions de la Nouvelle Librairie1. Beyond paganism properly speaking, all of our themes fit together and are consistent with a pagan worldview:

• Europe as a civilization

• political realism and geopolitics

• the importance of the sacred

• the critique of philosophical liberalism

• the struggle against the monotheism of values

• the defense of identity

Now, many Catholics share several of these themes, so collaboration becomes natural. Others, obviously, such as ethno-differentialist advocacy, they share less.

This program and our ideological positions are known to all. You can find them notably in our Manifesto (Guardians of Heritage), or in our collective books What We Are and For a European Awakening.

On this basis, Catholics apply to our training programs knowing exactly what they are getting into, and so do Protestants, atheists, and Orthodox. They are strongly drawn to this corpus and, it must be said, guided by an intelligence and an intellectual curiosity that otherwise tend to be disappearing.

So we are open, for two reasons. On the one hand, pagans are known for their tolerance, which is partly the cause of their weakness. On the other, openness is the very principle of training. To train only people who are already convinced is to condemn oneself to staying in a phone booth.

That said, it is not our purpose at the Institut Iliade to settle a theological score. We simply observe that the fight for the permanence of the European peoples today brings together several groups:

• identitarian Catholics

• traditionalists

• beyond them, all those who, like us, remain faithful to a spirituality rooted in the old European tradition and share a common collective history and memory

For now, the divide is not so much between Christians and pagans as between those who accept the demographic and cultural suicide of Europe and those who refuse it. Catholics who sincerely wish to wage this fight often do so intelligently. That presupposes self-criticism, since the Church bears its share of responsibility for the collapse of our world, as Laurent Dandrieu reminds us.

EdR: Within Catholicism, the traditionalist current (not the integrist one) has embraced a number of “identitarian” themes. How do you view this current? Does the Tridentine liturgy, with its Latin, its Gregorian or polyphonic chant, and its verticality, speak to you, even if you do not share the faith that animates it?

RP: Yes, I have understood that this aspiration exists, though it may seem contradictory at first sight. How can one legitimately defend a specific land if we all end up in paradise afterward? And how can one defend a specific people if we are all brothers in Christ beyond borders? I am caricaturing. But this debate agitates Catholics first and foremost and creates many dissensions among them, which clearly shows that being Christian and identitarian is far from natural.

As for the liturgy, I have attended very beautiful Orthodox ceremonies in Romania. And it is true that the traditionalist Catholic liturgy is magnificent; one would need a heart of stone not to be moved by the beauty of the chant, the decorum, and so on. Personally, I regularly enter Christian places of worship, which my ancestors built on ancient pagan sites of worship, without any problem and with pleasure. That said, the pleasure generally ends when I hear the parish priest telling home-grown Gauls Oriental stories whose place names and spirit are utterly foreign to us. No doubt Latin, incomprehensible to ordinary mortals, makes it possible to avoid such ruptures by offering the faithful an encounter with God through grandeur and mystery.

But fundamentally, one must be able to distinguish what derives from the Book from what emanates from Tradition, which is sometimes very far removed from the biblical verses.

And to strike a positive and syncretic note, I like to recall that polyphony was born on the site of Notre-Dame de Paris. Several voices, each singular and each bearing its own complex universe, manage to sound together while being opposed, even contradictory. They do not merge into one single voice. They form a harmony in which the “general voice,” if I may say so, makes itself heard without extinguishing the voices that compose it.

Let us not forget the Council of Trent, which fixed the Catholic liturgy until Vatican II. It initially wanted to proscribe Renaissance polyphony in favor of a return to Gregorian monody, because polyphony risked rendering the text unintelligible: the one Word, the sole truth, should be carried by a single voice. This regression was prevented by the prelates of the day. They were steeped in the humanism of their century, and for them theology did not erase the teaching of the Ancients. We owe them our thanks.

In music as in philosophy, there is nothing more pagan than polyphony.

EdR: It must be admitted that the ultimate aims of pagans and Christians are not the same, including on the political plane. Pagans intend above all to defend certain “natural laws” relating to family and homeland (to borrow Dominique Venner’s words). Catholics respect these natural laws in principle, but they ultimately aim at the establishment of Christendom. How are these differences approached at the Institut Iliade, and how would you define the collaboration that prevails there despite the divergences?

RP: One must not misunderstand the historical vocation of paganism, that is, its political dimension. Here, the comparison with Christianity naturally tends to create a misunderstanding. The sacred nature of power, and of the institutions inherited from the ancestors, is deeply anchored in the pagan conception of the world. It innervates society, it sanctifies its bonds, and it makes public action the expression of the assembled community. However, in ancient societies it was strictly unthinkable to place politics in the service of a mission dictated by spiritual imperatives. Thus the Ghibelline tradition, particularly vigorous during the Middle Ages, never ceased to oppose any primacy of the divine city over the human city. So paganism follows no missionary plan. Nor is it its vocation to turn into a program the conservation of a certain social order, or of a worldview governed by eternally fixed laws. It does not claim an immutable truth that would be the truth of “Man,” in the singular, with a capital M.

If paganism has a goal, it is that of the law of the ancestors, the mos majorum. A good pagan perpetuates the best of the heritage he has received. He devotes his life to creating new things worthy of being inherited by his own heirs. Far from being a conservatory of the past world, his life is a conquest of the world to come. But his creativity alone cannot suffice for this conquest. So in his adventure he must draw on all the experience accumulated by those who came before him. Experience is another word for heritage, for tradition.

This principle, however, is not merely individual. It must also be inscribed in collective action, that is, in politics. That is why the orientation we have given our fight is the defense of our civilizational heritage. It is not the definition of an ideal society, a programmatic ideology, or an eschatology. This heritage is particular to us, because our horizon is European civilization. It predated Christianity, and the odds are good that it will outlive it. But this does not mean that it necessarily excludes Christianity. The various manifestations of Christianity can also take part in the mos majorum, at least in part, provided they constitute powerful elements of collective identity.

EdR: Finally, if we place ourselves on a civilizational rather than a theological plane, do you think there is a certain continuity between the pagan and Christian heritages? In particular, do you identify a certain type of European man, an anthropological ideal, that runs through the ages from Antiquity to Christendom and to which we could all refer today?

RP: Humanism has found appreciably different expressions over the centuries. The term itself refers only imperfectly to a certain conception of man exalted through the successive ages of our civilization. But there is a continuous thread:

• Greece: the Greek ideal of kalos kagathos, the “beautiful and good” man, celebrates man in his fullness.

• Rome: Ciceronian humanitas is its Roman extension. It expresses the profound unity of the Greco-Roman ancient world, which the Renaissance would rediscover.

• The Middle Ages: the medieval millennium is the age of feudalism and chivalry. Across these centuries, the figure of the knight corresponds, with obvious variations, to that of the ancient citizen.

• The modern era: the ideal of the honnête homme2 renews this same human ideal.

It is difficult to deny that the passage from a pluralist religious logic to an exclusive one constitutes one of the fault lines of European cultural history. But the syncretism that took place in Europe left deep traces, and Catholicism in particular is today one of the vehicles of our old paganism. Vincenot, Thibon, Giono, and many anthropologists and historians of religion bear excellent witness to this.

The temples that sheltered the old gods are in ruins or covered over by new churches. The oracles have fallen silent, and the processions belong to the past. But the experience they expressed has not been entirely erased. We still speak of the genius of a place, the silence of a forest, the majesty of a landscape, or the soul of a work of art.

Fundamentally, and especially in these times of identitarian drift, paganism is a religious, philosophical, and political recourse for Europeans. Of that I am convinced.

As for the pagan type of man, he is the one who fights as an heir for what transcends him and for what will outlive him. He is attached to his land, to his people, and to God, or to the Gods, as you prefer. He was partly sacrificed in the great European civil wars of the twentieth century, and he is ceaselessly attacked by the little men of the twenty-first.

That is why, beyond our differing religious choices, we try to rally into the same cohort those who do not lower their eyes and do not bend the knee. This is in keeping with our vocation of training the cadres of the European awakening.

These are my comrades.

Originally published in Écrits de Rome issue no. 35 (October 2026)

Interview by Louis Furiet

Translated by Alexander Raynor

READ MORE:

The masterpiece of the godfather of the Institut Iliade, Dominique Venner, is now available from Arktos:

“Our world will not be saved by blind scholars or jaded erudites. It will be saved by poets and warriors, by those who will have forged the ‘magic sword’ of which Ernst Jünger spoke — the spiritual sword that makes monsters and tyrants turn pale.”

30,000 Years of Identity lays out the reflections of a historian who witnessed the defining events of Europe’s new dark age. Through an exploration of thirty millennia of history, it poses the questions Europeans are now compelled to ask themselves: What is Europe? Who are we, and where are we headed?

For Dominique Venner, Europe did not begin with markets, treaties, or ideologies. It arose from a cultural community whose roots stretch back into the depths of prehistory. It is an ancient civilization, enriched by its many peoples, a common spiritual heritage, and a noble ethos that has often had to be defended.

Returning to these roots and restoring long European memory is the purpose of this book, which presents nothing less than a metaphysics of history. Here, readers rediscover what is uniquely our own: from the cave art of the Stone Age, the Homeric epics, Celtic and Norse legends, and the Greek and Roman legacy to the medieval imagination and the ideals of courtly love. Venner masterfully uncovers the depths and continuity of European identity, encouraging us to rediscover authentic European tradition’s distinctive way of confronting life, death, love, and destiny.

American Civilization brings together Julius Evola’s writings from 1930 to 1968 on the United States of America.

Reflecting on the rise of the US as the defining power of modernity, Evola goes beyond critiquing American politics to examine the spiritual and cultural dynamics of the egalitarian, consumerist, and democratic order that America has imposed upon itself and the world.

Delving into popular culture, American capitalism, the Cold War dilemma between the US and the USSR, and the problem of race in American identity, Evola foresaw the trends and crises which have haunted America and the world with only greater force over recent decades.

Selected by the Julius Evola Foundation and equipped with a fiery foreword for Americans by Kevin DeAnna, these articles are essential reading not only for understanding the legendary Italian Traditionalist’s views of the post-war 20th century, but also for pondering the fate and possibilities facing Americans and Europeans today.

American Civilization is now available in audiobook on Amazon Audible.

Don’t forget:

Beneath Frankfurt airport, buried in the thickness of concrete, somewhere between the parking lots and the underground business center, a nightclub has been built. Under Johannesburg airport, there’s exactly the same one. In Oslo, the same again. In Tokyo and Chicago, the same. Soon, in Nairobi, Athens, Rio, Rome…

In this same nightclub, you hear the same music everywhere, played on the same turntables, scientifically selected by the same music marketers.

Let’s go back to the surface: in the great global cities and, gradually, in the surrounding provinces and countryside, the landscape is changing. The planetary traveler feels less and less out of place: he finds the same blocks of glass and steel. People are dressed in the same jeans, the same anoraks. The same cars crisscross the same roads, lined with the same shopping centers, where you find roughly the same products.

In individual living cells, you are greeted by television. Obviously, the programs change from one world city to another. But soon, the Time-Life program, broadcast by geostationary satellite, will unify all of them. Sitting in front of the TV, someone is reading a newspaper. No, he’s not reading. He’s looking at the images of a comic strip. It’s Popeye. He closes his newspaper, he looks at you: he’s Japanese, Norwegian, Italian or French. It doesn’t matter. He explains to you, in a very soft voice, in basic English, with an accent from nowhere, that he has some Western citizenship and is seeking happiness. He has two children, a boy and a girl. They look terribly bored. The girl hums advertising slogans. The boy, somewhat dazed, taps on an electronic football game.

You leave the cell; you cross the lawn (you saw the same one yesterday, around the same dwelling, ten thousand kilometers from here). You get into your rental Toyota (you had the same one yesterday). You turn on the car radio: music. The same as in the nightclubs. Your memory, a marvelous machine, has now recalled every note. The music stops: advertising slogan. Well, it’s the same as earlier; but it’s also the same as the day before yesterday, when, in a Holiday Inn, you had turned on the television in the room. But, by the way, what does the advertisement say? It’s about a book. The title reminds you of something: a love story that takes place amidst a disastrous adventure. You think for a few seconds at most; but your neurons don’t need to function, because you’ve just passed by a cinema, where the poster announces exactly the same title as the book. That’s it, the image has stimulated your brain: you saw this film four days ago, very far from here, in… well, in another city, in another country, which doesn’t really matter that much after all. But what was this film about? It’s silly not to remember: it now comes back to you that you saw it a second time, on the plane that brought you here. No matter: it was an American film, which was roughly about a story of love and disaster, exactly what the advertisement just said.

Moreover, the music in the advertisement is — it comes back to you — the same as the one that set the rhythm of the film, obviously, the same as the one from the nightclub, the other evening in… well, it doesn’t matter.

This world tour, paid for by your company, X.X.X. and Co, for you to visit its clients around the world, is instructive indeed.

You could wake up; all this could be a nightmare; but it’s no longer one. In Africa, the last tribal communities are disappearing. In Latin America, in the favelas produced by the Western commercial order, young people are rapidly forgetting their ancestral culture. In the European countryside, popular dance balls increasingly resemble the clubs of the Rive Gauche.

But you’re not reactionary. Peasant women in headscarves and rugged dialects are not eternal. One must be in favor of the modern world. But which modern world? Where has modernity gone? Futuristic dreams have vanished. Television, social security, human rights, traffic jams on the A86 ring road, fake Formica beams, the mini stereo system on credit — is this the modern world? We’ve stopped wanting to go to the moon. If you’re lucky enough not to be unemployed, everything around you exudes comfort. Comfort… it’s comfortable, obviously, but it’s not exhilarating. Don’t you find this modern world somewhat boring? But to entertain yourself, there’s always cinema and television. There, the modern world becomes exciting. Technology shows its full potential; we set off on adventures to planets on space cruisers. But you know well that all this doesn’t exist, that it’s all just a simulacrum. Yes, that’s it, you live in a simulacrum. A simulacrum of happiness, of adventure, of love, of violence, of religion.

One thing at least is reassuring: you have your personality, perhaps a bit narcissistic, but if nervous depression is lurking around the corner, a psychiatrist will help you rediscover yourself. If your home looks like your neighbor’s, if your clothes resemble your neighbor’s, at least your mind resembles no one else’s. And then, you are respected. You are free. Your neighbor is too, by the way. Their self is respected, like the millions of little “selves” of all Westerners, your neighbors and your brothers, who have, of course, nothing to do with yours.

Certainly, you have the same musical tastes as your neighbors: you all buy the same cassettes. Certainly, they all fear, like you, nervous depression… or cancer. They all become passionate, like you, at 8:30 PM, about the same TV series. But isn’t the meaning you give to your existence fundamentally original?

Original?

Acquiring a comfortable situation, having pleasant vacations, being able to do DIY on weekends, managing to pay the installments for the dining room set, the stereo system, the 11-horsepower car, being able to practice windsurfing — is this really original?

Look at what you aspire to for your children: there, you distinguish yourself from your neighbors. You want your children to resemble you, just one notch above, quite simply.

If you still have doubts, tell yourself that you are French. That’s something. A stroke of luck. Most Westerners, your neighbors, and non-Westerners who will soon be Westerners like you (you’re not racist) don’t have this luck.

French: we have a particular VAT (value-added tax) regime, the growth of our GNP (gross national product) is not exactly the same, and above all, we have a very different history: the history of France, Joan of Arc, Saint Louis, Louis XIV, etc. Okay, agreed, it’s in the past, but it counts.

No, decidedly, you doubt your originality. Your mind, your clothes, your menu, your car, your hi-fi system, your dining room, your vacations, your urban landscape, your office, your 8:30 PM TV programs, your hobby, your musical tastes, your idol artist, your favorite actor, your shaving cream, your smell, your fears, your nervous depression, your administrative procedures, your social status, your retirement plan, your sexuality, your news magazine, your professional ambitions, your glasses, your desires, your standard of living, your refrigerator — are they so different from those of your millions of neighbors?

What are you saying? That you’re afraid of originality? You don’t want to step out of the uniform to find yourself alone, without roots, without belonging. You don’t want your neighbors to point fingers at you and your children to reproach you for not doing like everyone else. No, decidedly, you’re not foolish enough to stand out…

From Civilization to System

How should we designate this vast planetary enterprise of massification and depersonalization? Optimistically, Marshall McLuhan spoke of a “global village.” But can we still speak of a village, of a (world) society or (Western) civilization? Aren’t we deluding ourselves by using these reassuring old words that refer to the already known while we are entering into the unknown, the never before seen?

What is being born before our eyes, after a long maturation in Western egalitarian ideology that appeared in the 17th century, no longer has anything to do with civilization. The antagonism between cultures and civilization, dear to Friedrich Sieburg, Norbert Elias, and Oswald Spengler, is now surpassed. Today’s reality consists of ethno-cultural and national entities threatened with disappearance, of peoples gradually emptied of their substance by a supra-continental macro-structure.

Without territory but installed everywhere, this giant octopus is primarily based on the organization of technology and economics. Cultures, nations, regions — all collective entities shaped by history are its potential prey. This macro-structure currently being installed over the world through a metamorphosis of Western civilization displays all the characteristics of a system. A civilization, even a world civilization, is always founded on a cultural past and aims, more or less, to perpetuate itself into the future. A civilization remains human. A system, on the other hand, has something mechanical and timeless about it, even if it is alive. A machine, a bacterium, a human organism, a cancer cell are, in various ways, systems. They lack what Ludwig Klages called a soul. In the famous debate that pitted him against Jürgen Habermas and the philosophers of the Frankfurt School, the German sociologist Arnold Gehlen had already drawn his readers’ attention to this transformation of civilization into a system: while liberal society persuades itself that it has built a world of prosperity, liberation and progress, social reality reveals an inorganic environment — that is to say, dead, without inner life, closer to machinery than to a growing organism.

The Invasion of Technology

Western societies are becoming machines before our eyes. Technology penetrates social and individual life so deeply that institutions eventually become technologies themselves, technological apparatuses. Through the extensive use of techniques — administrative, computing, industrial, commercial, etc. — institutions fade before these instruments. The large administration comes to function for itself, so that its own gears can turn. The computerizing firm ends up bending to computing itself. Nineteenth-century technology did not have this particularity. Today, traditional institutions have lost their weight: Justice, School, Army increasingly merge with the “technical gears” of a macro-administration comparable to a machine, powered by multiple technologies.

From this convergence between institutions and the techniques that animate them, a system is born; institutions are “swallowed up” and progressively undifferentiated. For Gehlen, modern societies increasingly resemble an immense integrated technical ensemble that groups together science, technology, industry, the military, culture and administrative technocracy. A common structure, comparable to an enormous “social engine,” digests institutions that were once functional and specialized. Managing a municipality increasingly resembles managing a firm. The interdependence between economic decisions and family lives increases. The army functions partly as a testing ground for military exports. Cultural products depend on commercial strategies.

Technology, in the form of management techniques, information, mechanization, takes charge of activities traditionally produced by human processes and vital efforts. Contrary to what the proponents of liberal technocracy claim, techniques are not neutral and do not constitute simple adjuncts to institutions. Arnold Gehlen highlighted the absorbing character of technology that emerges as soon as it is not subject to rigorous will. Techniques do not extend institutions, they modify them; they merge with society’s institutional framework. Administration, which should reflect the collective will of a people, achieves a social and political purpose, becomes a technique, “administrative technique.” This diversion of function experienced by institutions marks a retreat of civic consciousness. Institutions, organs of collective discipline — that is to say, transmission of a code of values endowed with conscious meaning — degenerate into mechanical procedures. “Models” and “programs,” computerized or not, obscure voluntary projects and traditions. Instead of imprinting institutions, collective will and consciousness are imprinted by them.

This phenomenon is not solely sociological; it is also metabiological. A “new human mutation” has occurred; it has given rise to a second human nature, entirely original: a new anthropological complex has been born that brings together and homogenizes culture and society. “The apparatuses of technology,” writes Gehlen, “are now part of the human organism just as the shell is part of mollusks.” Can we still psychologically and physiologically do without social security — which is an administrative “technique” — heating, media, rapid transport, telephone? This is not a criticism, but a simple observation.

This mutation is not necessarily regressive, contrary to what Gehlen suggests. It is simply risky, and we must know this. It constitutes a formidable challenge that Western industrial society has not perceived and has not wanted to take up…

This is an excerpt from The Ethnocide System, by Guillaume Faye, brought to you by Arktos:

In the new global era, the peoples of the Earth find themselves under the monstrous tentacles of a techno-economic system which sees only numbers. Spawned by the American mercantile order but now supplanting it, this system uproots, domesticates, and homogenizes national identities, replacing them with an anonymous global society under “scientific” management. Instead of nations and cultures, histories and visions, only consumers and “standards” remain. This mindless, self-serving system gnaws away at consciousness and the will to live. In exchange for cubicles, cars, and TV shows, it kills peoples, deletes history, and smothers destiny.

Faced with this totalitarian spectacle, which dresses itself in the virtues of human rights and socio-economic well-being, Guillaume Faye summons us to pinpoint the system’s workings, decode the pitfalls of modern ideologies, and defend the right of peoples to be themselves and go their own ways.

The Ethnocide System, the first magnum opus of one of the most provocative and inspiring masterminds of the New Right, now translated into English for the first time, is a tour de force of the desperately needed showdown between the peoples of Earth and the globalist machine.

The Murder of Territories

The nature of the System is mysterious. It is not, like an institution, a nation, or a specific culture, definable by positive criteria. It corresponds to no legal reality. It breaks with all previous forms of collective life based on the dual reality of history and territory. Human groups have until now always gathered around the representation of a common origin and a space that one “inhabits,” in the “poetic” sense that Heidegger gives to this term. Even medieval Christianity, which claimed to transcend borders, did not succeed and could only survive because it took root in European peoples or used the idea of empire to its advantage, thus operating with a reinterpretation of history. The System, on the other hand, performs this considerable upheaval of bracketing both the historical-national principle and the political-territorial principle which constituted the modern translations of the spatial imperative and “tradition.”

The criteria of belonging chosen by the System are economic and technical. The “Westerner” is not defined by nationality, ethnicity, past, or territorial origins, but by lifestyle, type of consumption, rhythm of existence, the purposes of their “professional sector,” etc. A bank executive from Singapore will be more “Western” than a Breton farmer who still speaks his language and follows his ancestral culture. One will be part of the System, the other will not.

Our planet, Earth, is not experienced as space, but as a set of zones. It is perceived as an instrumental and depoeticized platform from which goods and services are drawn as if from a machine. The Earth, put into exploitation, is no longer put into conquest. A people, on the other hand, experiences Earth under the mode of territorial control, even when it comes to extracting mineral wealth or exploring oceanic mysteries; but today such research is no longer understood as adventure, but instead is relegated to the prosaic and pragmatic degree of technical exploitation. The space of the Western system falls under a mechanical architecture of networks and deterritorialized transfer currents; its function is to provide comfort, but not to dominate space.

There are two consequences to this state of affairs: nations caught in the System’s nets no longer control their geopolitics; on the other hand, the collective feeling of territorial habitat, ethologically indispensable to human groups, tends to be lost.

While peoples think “in terms of continents” and remain attentive to their territorial integrity or protection, the Western system strips “national territories” of any significance other than formal and legal; it abolishes economic, cultural and mental borders in favor of a commercial and “zonal” conception of geographical divisions. The idea of geopolitical mastery of space then declines; territorial power is interpreted only as an instrument of economic and commercial security (preservation of exchange networks and centers of raw materials extraction) or maintenance of market zones to sell the products of the merchant economy.

The United States, which inspires the Western system’s vision of space, does not behave as an empire (maritime or continental), as Raymond Aron believed, but as a “commercial thalassocracy,” according to Jordis von Lohausen’s expression. Under these conditions, the System becomes geographically vulnerable; despising territories, it risks military conquest; supported by “zones” rather than specific spaces where peoples live, it does not conceive that its “currents,” its “networks” and its “markets” might harm territorial sentiments that are still alive. The example of Iranian nationalism, or of African nationalists who, outraged by Western capitalism’s disregard for Africa’s territoriality, were thus tempted to join the Soviet orbit, is telling of this forgetting of peoples’ spaces that characterizes the System.

An internal uprooting of populations then occurs. We no longer know where we are; European governments lose all will for protection and geopolitical domination, Europe as a space no longer exists, as countries and regions have ceased to exist. It is certain that this absence of habitat — from the village level to that of the continent — has psychological consequences that we still know little about, but which factor into the biological exhaustion, manifested by demographics, of Western populations.

These populations suffer from an affliction that could be called “territorial dispossession.” Inhabiting is an existential and ethological function that Heidegger and Lorenz have described, each in their own language, as indispensable to the psychological balance of individuals and groups. However, the system makes us residents rather than inhabitants. The hypocritical maintenance of territorial differences on the legal level and on that of individual customs controls, like the transformation of national borders into toll booths or police checkpoints, deprives us of the sensation of occupying our specific group space. The planet is instrumentally experienced and perceived as a juxtaposition of specialized zones: the vacation-sun zone, the oil zone, the West-Europe zone, etc. As a result, a pathology of lived space appears: terrestrial nature loses its mystery and becomes, according to these ideologies, a “park” (ecologists), a garbage dump, or a mine for exploitation. Even space conquest, commercialized and accounted, lost in the years 1975–1980 its power of adventurous evocation on which, fundamentally, all its dynamism rested. We barely know our planet, and already the sense of spatial-territorial curiosity that was one of the driving forces of the European adventure shows its decline. Exploration is now supported only by the imperatives — fundamentally fragile — of economic profitability and energy prospecting.

At the level of national territories, the System operates a double action of definitively fixing borders while disrespecting territories through economic invasion and the internationalization of production and consumption markets. The two phenomena are logically concomitant: the insistence on the legal fixity of borders legitimizes their de facto disrespect by multinational firms, the Americanization of customs, linguistic uniformization, etc.

But the techno-economic principle of belonging to the System, while transcending spatial and historical borders, takes care not to directly confront the institutions and mentalities it intends to make disappear. National and territorial realities are always legally guaranteed: they “subsist” and slowly fossilize. Western political classes even have the compensatory function of insisting redundantly on principles that are concretely disappearing, such as homeland, nation, national culture, region, etc., even as these political classes compromise with the System’s technocracy, submit to the ukases of transnational economics and open their doors to mass sub-culture.

The apologetic discourse of ideology masks, as often happens, a radically opposite practice: today in France, no one questions the national idea anymore, but everyone puts behind this concept their party’s program, which serves as proof that the idea has become neutral. The appeal to homeland, to regional roots, etc. becomes an empty discourse that legitimizes and seals economic and cultural cosmopolitanism; the decline of European languages in Europe in favor of basic English and the growing Americanization of national radio and television programs have never been seriously fought by political powers, because the latter continue to lack will and means in the face of the worldwide network of economic interests, and an international “logic.” Letting pass, letting things work out, and obeying the gears and programs always remains the easiest solution. In this way, benefiting from so much practical complicity, the System does not impose itself on territorial and ethno-national realities (im-pose in the sense of posing within, by force); rather, it super-poses itself, that is to say it “sits on top of them,” leaving them only the choice of sinking into the soil of oblivion or becoming marginalized.

Territoriality, for example, is not repressed by an explicit ideology since, despite their globalism, international institutions guarantee national sovereignty and inviolability. It’s simply that these concepts are gradually emptied of their meaning. National legal sovereignty is “circumvented” by the System’s de facto economic interference; respect for military integrity is worth nothing if one encourages a people to consume American “culture” through pressure from economic logic, or if their original language gradually becomes that of the dominant power, as is the case with Holland and Scandinavian countries.

An unofficial praxis — economic, cultural, diplomatic and financial in nature — empties national and ethnic realities and their territorial roots of their content. Mass tourism, food uniformization, and the depersonalization of musical and cinematographic merchandise make people lose any notion of roots, territorial origin, and the “spatial situation” of things and men. The System justifies this psychological uprooting by presenting it as an “opening” to other peoples, to everyone’s customs, to the “world.” This is the argument developed by Guy Scarpetta. In reality, this cosmopolitanism does not lead to knowledge and respect for the other, but to the destructive negation of their specificity. It is indeed a cosmopolitanism of integration: one integrates elements of all origins into one’s dietary, clothing or cultural menu, all kneaded in the same transatlantic sauce.

Modern electronic music, that of the hit parades heard from Johannesburg to Tokyo, music composed by computers, has ingested Celtic, African, Caribbean elements, etc. The example of reggae remains famous. The same method for the world cinema industry: the screenplay is “international”; it synthesizes all cultural elements and stimuli, the “culturemes” of most diverse origins in order to sell the product, which is thus reduced to the lowest common cultural denominator to reach the greatest number of consumers across the world.

The System’s globalism, therefore, does not proceed by conquering or repressing territorial and national entities, but by slow digestion; it diffuses its material and mental structures by installing them beside and above national and territorial values. One “establishes oneself” like a Quaker, but does not govern; one parasitizes the values and traditions of rootedness. Consciousness of the phenomenon then proves difficult. Alongside their “national” training, young executives worldwide now need a diploma from an American school to sell and value themselves. There is nothing mandatory about this procedure, but, little by little, the value of this American and “Western” diploma supplants national training, whose credibility withers. A single world economic education then emerges. It quite naturally conveys the System’s ideology.

In this regard, the System uses the same procedures as the Church which, through syncretism, superimposed its dogmas and rites on particular pagan religions, which were progressively ingested and forgotten. In the same way, people today will forget their nations, without betraying them, the latter attitude requiring too much effort. The dominant forms of life will slowly marginalize values of belonging, of rootedness, of lineage, which may even be attributed a certain formal prestige in public speeches. Political ideologies never cease to refer to regional specificities or to praise the family. The rediscovery of “roots” is successful on television when people become passionate about peasant serials. These are most often only ornaments, masks, compensations: a smoke screen that hides the progress of cultural homogenization.

The man of the System occupies a dead space, while the man of a people “dwells poetically,” that is to say as a founder, according to Heidegger’s word. The man of the System is no more than a resident who situates himself on a chessboard; his “address” is nothing like a place, but resembles mathematical coordinates. Populations thus delocalized have lost the sense of time and history.

READ MORE:

Guillaume Faye’s The Ethnocide System is available from Arktos and on Amazon

“Is the Left a Gnostic Death Cult?”

— with this provocative question headlining a livestream in 2022, Keith Woods reignited debates over the religious shades of modern liberalism.

In The Gnostic Question, Richard Storey and Keith Woods confront the dark underbelly of modernity, exploring how ancient religious ideas and archetypes underlie the crisis of the modern West. From liberal statecraft and the frenzy of wokeism to the cult of technology, they offer competing diagnoses of the metamorphosis of Western civilisation, yet converge on the need to recover the deeper spiritual roots of the European soul.

In addition to the perspectives exchanged between Storey and Woods, The Gnostic Question features additional commentary in an editorial foreword by Arktos Editor-in-Chief Dr. Jafe Arnold, an afterword by Tyler Hamilton of the Theopolitics podcast, and a section of critical appreciations offered by respected scholars: Prof. John Milbank, Prof. Frank van Dun, and Dr. Paul Tyson.

Join the debate: order your copy of The Gnostic Question on Amazon or from Arktos.

Remigration? Fine — but for who, and how many? Between Alain de Benoist, the foremost philosopher of the New Right, and Jean-Yves Le Gallou, author of Remigration: For a Europe for Our Children, agreement on the diagnosis is not enough to mask disagreements over the modalities of remigration. It is a long way from reversing migration flows to reversing the course of affairs. Hence this debate on fundamentals, which obliges us to ask all the questions, the ones too often brushed aside: Who must leave? Based on what criteria? This is a taste of the conference to be held on Saturday, 31 October, in Paris: “Remigration – Let’s Open the Debate.”

— François Bousquet, editor-in-chief of Éléments, author of Anti-White Racism: The Forbidden Investigation.

ÉLÉMENTS: Alain de Benoist, in your latest editorial in Éléments, you raise the possibility of “implementing a policy of reversing migration flows.” Jean-Yves Le Gallou, for his part, speaks of remigration. Aren’t you quarrelling over the word more than the thing? What separates you: the scale, the means, or the very principle of remigration?

ALAIN DE BENOIST: The definitions of remigration given by those who wish to put it into practice vary a great deal. More than a matter of agreement or disagreement, the question is where remigration begins, and also where it ends. In his book on remigration, Jean-Yves Le Gallou lists the first categories targeted: illegal immigrants, parasites, delinquents, and so on. Up to that point, I am in complete agreement with him (and in agreement, too, on abolishing birthright citizenship). For all these categories, Jean-Yves Le Gallou lists perfectly acceptable grounds for expulsion. These grounds concern things for which the members of these categories can legitimately be reproached: things they have done (or should not have done), rules they have not respected, reprehensible conduct.

But these categories represent only a fraction of the population of immigrant origin: three million perhaps, at best. What about the others (the majority), to whom none of these grounds apply? In the ten pages of his book devoted to “repatriation,” Jean-Yves Le Gallou says little on the subject and leaves things vague. That is why questions can be raised. If one stops sanctioning individuals for what they have done and starts sanctioning them for what they are, one enters an entirely different perspective. One is no longer punishing delinquents; one is designating surplus people. So I would like to know whether the aim is to halt migration flows or to set in motion a process of ethnic cleansing. They are not the same thing. My political ideal is not a racist or segregationist state.

Races exist; recognizing this is in no way racist. For more than fifty years, the Nouvelle Droite [New Right] has advocated an antiracism of the ethnopluralist or differentialist type. Put plainly: neither apartheid nor generalized mixing. That position has never ceased to be mine. I have written three books against racism (one of them, published in Spain, is in fact titled Contra el racismo [Against Racism]), in which I explain why racist theories are, in my view, as false as they are harmful. Racism, the infantile disorder of the metaphysics of subjectivity, is in my eyes a modern ideology whose origins must be sought in the internal contradictions of universalist historicism. History has shown, moreover, that every politics founded on race is doomed to failure. I therefore condemn without reservation every form of racism (including of course, and first and foremost, anti-white racism). This also applies to Occidentalism when it dons the impolitical costume of “white nationalism.”

READ MORE from Alain de Benoist, brought to you by Arktos:

ÉLÉMENTS: Alain de Benoist speaks of the “judges’ lock”; you speak of a JUGEXIT. Aren’t the various courts, French and European, the main obstacle to a policy of remigration today?

JEAN-YVES LE GALLOU: JUGEXIT means blowing up the judges’ lock. An example: politicians regularly propose depriving the parents of delinquent children of welfare benefits. But that is impossible as long as the Constitutional Council strikes down the laws. Others propose instituting mechanisms of national preference or national priority: again impossible without overriding the Constitutional Council. The Council of State1, the administrative courts, and the National Court of Asylum Law (CNDA) must also be shaken up. In short, political power must take back… power. And not only in France. The ordinary courts in Italy, the High Court of Justice in Great Britain, the Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe in Germany, and the Court of Justice of the European Union in Luxembourg are paralyzing powers that hold the upper hand over security and immigration policy.

ÉLÉMENTS: You have spoken, in connection with remigration, of a risk of political arbitrariness, even if it were a sovereign choice. So be it. But then why would the return of the political be legitimate against government by judges (or the rule of law) yet illegitimate when it comes to deciding the criteria for belonging to a political community? All things considered, doesn’t the choice of remigration fall under the categories dear to Carl Schmitt: Who decides? Who is sovereign? Law or the political?

ALAIN DE BENOIST. I have trouble understanding your question. Arbitrariness, which designates a decision not motivated by rational or logical necessity, is by no means synonymous with sovereignty. Wishing for the return of the political is one thing (and of course I subscribe to it); pointing to the need to avoid political mistakes, or recalling that political power can also degenerate — not into “dictatorship” in the Roman sense of the term, but into despotism or tyranny — is another. In a democracy, balance is established both by decision (from above) and by consent (from below), that is, by the conjunction of national sovereignty and popular sovereignty.

ÉLÉMENTS: It is one thing to say that the hand of the political must not tremble; it is another to determine the criteria for belonging to the French nation or to Europe. Take a third-generation Frenchman, a dual national, married to a Frenchwoman, with French children: on what basis does one decide that he must remigrate? And to where, given that such a man may never have set foot in his country (or countries) of origin?

JEAN-YVES LE GALLOU: There are a great many people to remigrate before we even reach the very real question of dual nationals: illegal immigrants (1 million), foreign delinquents at large (100,000 to 200,000), foreigners living mainly, if not exclusively, on welfare or unemployment benefits (2 million). And above all — above all — all new immigration must be stopped. Then there remains, of course, the question of dual nationals. Three categories must be distinguished: assimilated dual nationals (no problem); unassimilated but non-hostile dual nationals (they should be encouraged, without being forced, to go back: they will be better off in their country of origin); and unassimilated, hostile dual nationals. The last should be stripped of citizenship when they are delinquents or take part in demonstrations hostile to the French and to France. Put differently: the parents of delinquents and rioters must clear out along with their offspring. Let me add that many dual nationals have, as you put it, already “set foot in the country of origin”: they call it “going back to the bled”2. Here is how it works: they generally leave on an Algerian passport (or another) and come back on a French one.

ÉLÉMENTS: Alain de Benoist, you write that the partisans of remigration are “very great optimists,” because they believe the catastrophe is still avoidable, whereas you consider that “it has already happened.” Doesn’t your realism risk turning into fatalism? Jean-Yves Le Gallou, doesn’t your voluntarism risk mistaking wishes for realities?

ALAIN DE BENOIST: Do not confuse lucidity with resignation, or pessimism with amor fati. For having announced the decline of the West, Oswald Spengler was constantly accused of “pessimism”; today we can see how things stand. Had I ever been tempted by fatalism, I would certainly not have set out on the path I chose. I have always thought, on the contrary, that even in the darkest night one must work for the return of the light. But one must still remain realistic, as Julien Freund used to say. Politics consists in making possible what is necessary, not in making necessary what is impossible! Setting oneself the program of emptying France of nearly a third of its current population seems to me neither possible nor reasonable. One does not do good work by repeating like a mantra that “will is enough,” that one must not “drive Billancourt to despair”3, and that “faith moves mountains.” Sorry, but mountains do not move. And when one is waging war, one better harbor no illusions about the lay of the battlefield. Otherwise, the result is failure and disillusionment. One clarification in passing: the “catastrophe” you speak of corresponds, for me, to the domination of the world by the values of planetary capitalism. That is why I think that even if the immigration problem had never arisen (but it has!), we would still be living in an abject world.

JEAN-YVES LE GALLOU: One can indeed choose to do nothing. Provided one weighs the consequences:

1. The demographic tipping point when, in 8-15 years, European newborns will be a minority in maternity wards in France (and in other neighboring countries). In a word: the disappearance of the original identity.

2. The electoral tipping point in favor of the most pro-immigration parties of the left within 10 years. Perhaps sooner. Because the votes of native voters are split among the various parties, while the communal votes of minorities concentrate on the far left (in France on LFI, in Germany on Die Linke). In the end, this means the loss of sovereignty for the original people.

In short, if one acknowledges the Great Replacement (a demographic reality) and anti-white racism (a sociological reality), then one has no choice but to work for remigration by widening the Overton window and stressing the extreme urgency of remigration.

A clarification all the same about the numbers! Even in its most maximalist definition, remigration does not concern “a third of the French population.” Let us not hide behind our little finger4: everyone knows perfectly well that the problem is non-European immigration — Muslim and African in particular. So let us look at the figures: there are (excluding illegals) 4 million non-European foreigners; as foreigners, they have no right to permanent residence. As for non-European dual nationals, they number around 7 million. Once again, no worry about those who are assimilated. But the racailles5 who insult the French, burn down high schools, and assault “gwers”6 have no place in France. Alain de Benoist and our readers may rest assured: that does not add up to 23 million people!

OUT NOW from Arktos:

This book is an investigation in two parts. First, it uncovers the unspoken truths and lies behind the official discourse about “systemic racism.” Second, it plunges into the dirty underbelly of the everyday reality of anti-White racism.

Beyond an ideological critique, this book gives a voice to the victims — those who are silenced because acknowledging their suffering would shatter the dominant narrative. Through in-depth interviews, case studies, and an exploration of cultural context, Anti-White Racism reveals how insults, discrimination, humiliation, and violence experienced in everyday life form part of a larger normalization of racial hostility that official policy and the media seek to deny, but whose effects they can no longer hide.

In this courageous, unsettling, and richly documented investigation, François Bousquet exposes the rising reality of anti-White racism — and asks how long the silence can last.

ÉLÉMENTS: How can one defend remigration while proclaiming oneself liberal and capitalist? Isn’t there a contradiction in promoting a market economy based on the free movement of everything except people? In other words, how can remigration be carried out without at the same time opting for deglobalization?

JEAN-YVES LE GALLOU: One need only observe the facts: Japan is liberal, capitalist, and globalized, yet it remains closed to immigration. The United States is liberal, capitalist, and globalized, yet it has embarked on a policy of remigration, driven by Trump, Vance, and Musk. And I am not even going to talk about China.

In a market economy, adjustments happen through prices: if labor is scarce in a sector, then working conditions and wages must be improved.

National preference, which is currently prohibited, must also be legalized: as things stand, a restaurant owner (or a building contractor) has no right to choose French employees or employees of European origin. If he does, he will be criminally prosecuted and exposed to severe penalties. Here is a law that could be repealed with positive consequences for liberty and for identity.

And then let us look at the facts: even more than labor immigration, what we are suffering from is an immigration of welfare predation. Here again, let us take an example: the unemployment rate in Seine-Saint-Denis is 50% higher than the Île-de-France average, and that department has 84,000 households receiving the RSA and 949,000 beneficiaries of the various CAF benefits.7 It is the welfare state that acts as a suction pump for immigration. The Danish Social Democrats have understood this well: to protect their social model, they close off access to it to the whole world. In short, a great deal can be undertaken without making exit from globalized capitalism a precondition, as some do, or exit from the European Union, as others do.

I nonetheless acknowledge the effectiveness of communism in preventing immigration: in ten years of chavismo (2015–2026), not one immigrant entered Venezuela, but 5 million Venezuelans left.

ALAIN DE BENOIST: I wrote in the editorial of the latest issue of Éléments: immigration is an invention of capitalism, or at least one of its consequences. “The economy massively demands immigration,” proclaims Patrick Martin, president of the Medef8 — this at least has the merit of clarity. Market society obeys only the law of supply and demand. It knows nothing of peoples, only of individuals; it knows nothing of citizens, only of consumers. When capitalist countries refuse immigration, they can do so only in violation of their own principles. In other words, they cherish the causes whose consequences they refuse. That is the whole problem with liberal conservatism.

ÉLÉMENTS: Alain de Benoist, you recall the following trilemma: immigration, growth, or birth rate. With a falling birth rate, it is impossible to maintain both economic growth and ethnic and cultural continuity without immigration. Which of these terms would you sacrifice?

ALAIN DE BENOIST: Here too I gave my answer clearly in the editorial already mentioned: “In a period of demographic crisis, fighting mass immigration means no longer making growth an absolute.” That is why I reject both the choice of today’s European leaders, who imagine they can reconcile growth with “controlling immigration,” just as they imagine they can “moralize capitalism” or rely on “sustainable development,” and the choice of Japan, which is staking everything on robotics, thereby taking part in the great replacement of man by the machine (allow me to add that, if I am ill, I would far rather have an immigrant nursing assistant at my bedside than a robot!).

JEAN-YVES LE GALLOU: Ethnocultural continuity obviously takes priority. The population can decline, so long as it keeps its identity. It will be possible to set off again. If it is diluted in multiracial and multicultural chaos, that will be more difficult. In short, it is better to follow the model of Japan than that of England. As long as there remain Europeans of blood and spirit, everything will be possible.

ÉLÉMENTS: Citizenship or identity? National preference or civilizational preference? If belonging can produce no criterion other than legal nationality, what can be done to uphold European peoples’ right to their historical continuity?

ALAIN DE BENOIST: Civilizational preference. But perhaps the question should rather be: citizenship or nationality? If the European peoples wish to continue their history and give themselves a destiny, the first rule is to see what ought to be staring us in the face — namely, that we are entering a world of a kind never seen before. Jacobin nationalisms, like “the values of the one and indivisible Republic,” are no longer able to settle anything. Nations cannot become multicultural or multiethnic without disintegrating. That is not the case for empires (or federations). The Europe of the future will be built with all those it has managed to convince to take part in its imperial destiny.

JEAN-YVES LE GALLOU: This is a particularly delicate subject. Identity is the bedrock of the city.

Yet we have cheapened our citizenship by granting nationality automatically or semi-automatically, to people from elsewhere, very few of whom were able, willing, or knew how to assimilate to our culture and our civilization. It cannot be denied that there is a problem with certain dual nationals. For the short term, three directions seem desirable to me:

1. The abolition of deferred birthright citizenship — that is, the automatic acquisition of French nationality at 13 or 18 for the children of foreigners born in France;

2. A moratorium on naturalizations so as not to aggravate the problem;

3. Stripping unassimilated and hostile dual nationals of citizenship.

How can one not think of Renaud Camus’ words:

“It is with nations as with education: they have their foundation in segregation.”

Originally published in Éléments on October 5th, 2026

Translated by Alexander Raynor

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The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, born in 1942, was one of those thinkers to whom broadly speaking left-wing intellectuals readily referred in the early 2000s; whereas Emmanuel Levinas was associated with the period’s endlessly repeated concept of “the Other,” homo sacer was Agamben’s term. Both were, unsurprisingly, used to delegitimize opposition to immigration and national sovereignty, a lazy habit which always entailed the instrumental trivialization of thinkers who were valuable in certain respects.

Agamben was, and remains, a rewarding observer of history and society, not least through his interest in sovereignty and the dichotomy between zoe and bios. He is a continental philosopher; the influence of, among others, Dumézil, Heidegger, and Schmitt is obvious, and among his friends over the years we find names such as Debord, Pasolini, and Negri.

Although the pro-immigration left made use of Agamben and attempted to connect immigration to homo sacer, he has also at times come closer to both the genuine and the more populist right. His thoughts on Europe and the EU were an example of the former, his criticism of the handling of the pandemic an example of the latter. This was, not least, a logical consequence precisely of homo sacer, the human being reduced to the purely biological, as well as of Agamben’s interest in sovereignty and biopolitics. Agamben’s blog Una voce contains several worthwhile articles (the internet has several translation tools for those who do not speak Italian).

We recognize the gloomy, pessimist perspective from Adorno; it recurs frequently in Agamben, which should hardly be surprising. The world in which he grew up no longer exists—neither its culture, its demography, its nature, nor its morality—and he has explicitly written that we live “among the ruins.”

In The Failure of Humanity, Agamben compares our species to an insolvent debtor, unable to

“repay the debts it has successively incurred with regard to the earth on which it lives (including the atmosphere, which is no less polluted than the earth). The creditors’ committee would, in addition to representatives of all aspects of the earth and air, include living species that have disappeared or are threatened with extinction.”

This is humanity in “a state of complete spiritual collapse.” Further, Agamben describes

“the real problem with artificial intelligence as being that it was made possible by a general loss of the capacity for imagination, almost as if its emergence had been preceded by the establishment of an all-encompassing artificial imagination.”

He interprets Trump and Netanyahu through Christian, eschatological concepts, writing about them that “anomos, the lawless, is not an external principle, but the form that the institution itself assumes in its decline.” His pessimism about history is almost devastating: he speaks not only of the end of the West, but also of the end of Judaism through Zionism, the coming downfall of Ukraine and the EU, the disappearance of the Italian people, and the last days of humanity.

All of this is intellectually stimulating and at times brilliant, including the attempt to interpret the history of the West through Indo-European grammar, but the absence of a historical subject makes it all rather unedifying. In a certain sense, this suggests the limitations of continental philosophy.

Agamben and Imperium Europa

The historical subject that at times can be glimpsed in Agamben after all is Europe, though not in its present Eurocratic form. He does not hesitate to call Italy a protectorate: “

According to international law, a nation that has as many bases (some of them secret and equipped with atomic bombs) on its territory as the United States has in Italy does not have sovereignty over its foreign policy, but only over its domestic policy; that is, technically speaking, it is a protectorate.”

Agamben has wrestled with the question of European unity for a long time. In a text on Kojève and the Latin Empire, among other things, he wrote that

“a Europe that claims to exist exclusively on an economic basis and ignores real affinities in lifestyle, culture, and religion is today displaying all its fragility, particularly at the economic level.”

Although he lacks Evola’s crystal clarity, there is an edge directed against the American empire’s occupation of Europe. Agamben writes in this regard:

“the only appearance of unity is achieved when Europe acts as a vassal under the United States and participates in wars that in no way correspond to common interests, still less to the will of the people.”

Agamben and continental philosophy thus readily end up close to some form of European federalism, which also entails an affinity with the New Right:

“the idea of a European constituent power is the specter haunting Europe today, a specter that no one dares to invoke.”

READ MORE about Europe’s imperial potential — hot off the press from Arktos:

Agamben and the Pandemic

Agamben’s thoughts on the pandemic clearly connect to his broader perspective; concepts such as the state of emergency, homo sacer, and biopolitics permeate his texts.

In the days of COVID-19, he also carried out a more explicit political intervention than usual. At the same time, he skillfully balanced between conspiracy theory and razor-sharp social analysis. Agamben wrote, among other things, concerning the lockdown of societies:

“it is difficult not to think that the situation they are creating is precisely what those who govern us have repeatedly tried to achieve: that universities and schools should finally be closed and teaching conducted exclusively online; that people should stop meeting and talking for political or cultural reasons and instead exchange only digital messages; that machines should, wherever possible, replace all contact—all contagion—between human beings.”

Thus, he interpreted social distancing through the lens of Canetti’s theory of the masses:

“what social distancing and panic have created is certainly a mass—but an inverted mass, so to speak, consisting of individuals who keep their distance from one another at all costs.”

The essay “Medicine as Religion” compared medicine to both Christianity and capitalism, while the vaccine was interpreted against the background of homo sacer.

Overall, Agamben is an interesting and rewarding thinker, hardly surprising given his use of thinkers such as Dumézil, Schmitt, and Heidegger. Attacking the consensus during the pandemic was not entirely without risk, but Agamben’s thoughts on geopolitics are also controversial in places. His pessimism is something best consumed in limited portions.

EXPLORE MORE Continental philosophy with Arktos:

Michael Millerman’s Beginning with Heidegger: Strauss, Rorty, Derrida, Dugin and the Philosophical Constitution of the Political is essential reading.

Continued from Parts 1 & 2

7. Niklas Luhmann and the Autopoietic Nature of the Liberal-Capitalist System

What could a relatively unknown German theorist of “social systems,” writing before mass immigration became a central political issue, teach us about White ethnocide? Although Niklas Luhmann produced a large body of work—sixteen of his books have been translated into English—and has been praised as “the closest the social sciences have come, in a long time, to an actual thinker,” he remains largely unknown outside a narrow circle of systems theorists. Most educated Westerners, if they have heard of him at all, know him only through his 1971 debate with Jürgen Habermas.

Because Luhmann accepted Talcott Parsons’s view that the object of sociology is to explain how society maintains order and reproduces itself, and because in the post-1960s mainstream sociology was already committed to progressive activism, Luhmann came to be widely regarded as a conservative defender of the status quo interested in the orderly functioning of societies, receiving thereby far less attention than countless third-rate Leftist theorists offering to “emancipate humanity.”

In Germany, however, public and academic admiration for the undeniable theoretical sophistication of Luhmann’s work began to grow in the late 1980s. As Habermas came to be regarded as the “state philosopher” of institutionalized progressivism, a growing number of younger academics turned to Luhmann precisely because they found his systems theory more original and less subservient to the standard progressive claim that the purpose of sociology and education is the endless “radical critique” of “oppressive conditions.”

Now, while Luhmann accepted Parsons’s premise that society is a system whose continuance must be explained, he rejected Parsons’s claim that order is maintained through a shared culture, arguing instead that order is maintained through the ongoing self-reproduction of differentiated function systems, each operating according to its own cognitive codes. He argued that the defining characteristic of modernity was the differentiation of society into multiple “autopoietic” (self-reproducing and operationally closed) institutional systems. Luhmann borrowed the concept of autopoiesis from the Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, who first elaborated it in the late 1970s and early 1980s as an answer to the question of what constitutes the defining characteristic of living systems. The term combines two Ancient Greek words, auto meaning “self”, and poiesis meaning “creation” or “production”.

Focusing on the living cell, Maturana and Varela define an autopoietic system as

“a closed topological space that continuously generates and specifies its own organization through its operation as a system of production of its components, and does this in an endless turnover of components.”

The cell, in other words, is an autonomous system with a capacity to produce and continuously regenerate its own components, organize them into a coordinated whole, and thereby maintain itself as a distinct unity without assistance from another external system.

The key point here is that anything a cell (or system) does is determined by its internal structure (the components inside the cell and the relations among them). While autopoietic systems exist within environments that shaped them, they are operationally autonomous. Maturana and Varela thus came up with the term “structural coupling” to designate the selective exchanges between a system and its environment (which includes other functionally differentiated systems), where each system produces “irritations” or perturbations inside other systems, without losing its identity or operational autonomy.

Luhmann transferred the theory of autopoietic biological systems to social systems, arguing that modern society is characterized by the functional differentiation of relatively autonomous subsystems (economy, law, politics, science, education, mass media, art, religion), each of which operates according to its own internal binary code and discourses. For example, science operates on the code true/false, the economy on payment/non-payment, politics on power/no power (or government/opposition), and the media on information/noninformation. A function system can be identified only to the degree to which it has differentiated itself from its environment and from other systems.

This is what Luhmann means when he writes, in a highly erudite lecture course subsequently published under the title Introduction to Systems Theory (2015), that “a system is the difference – the difference between system and environment”.

Function systems differentiate themselves, and attain “operational closure,” when they develop a specialized discourse, pedagogy, key texts, organizations, and experts that shape how problems are framed, how judgements are reached, and how events are conceptualized. The internal operations of social systems, accordingly, occur through communications, not metabolic processes. The systems reproduce themselves by linking communications to communications according to their own binary codes and discourses, remaining operationally closed while remaining open to irritations from their environment. These irritations are processed only insofar as they are translated into the code of each system.

There is no overriding system, no state power or theocratic order, that regulates the cognitive dynamics of the individual systems. Cognition is always specific to each system. Luhmann admits that he is a “radical constructivist”. This may seem odd given the associations of systems theory with science and objectivity. According to him, however, each systems produces knowledge through its own operations, not by mirroring the world as it is in itself. When he writes that the code of the function system of science is true/false, he means what the scientific community itself means when it communicates in terms of a specific methodology characterized by logical consistency, controlled observation, and empirical testing. Science applies this methodology to the slice of the world it is concerned with. This code is not arbitrary; thus, papers are accepted or rejected in referred journals, or experiments are validated or rejected according to whether they meet (or fail to do so) this experimental criteria.

Although every system is aware of its “environment” and interacts with other systems (including biological systems and psychic systems of thoughts and emotions), external events only produce “irritations” that the system translates according to its conceptual apparatus. As Hans-Georg Moeller quotes Luhmann:

“Every function system can only perform its own function. No one can in the event of a crisis or on a continuing or supplementary basis sit in for another one. When there is a government crisis, science cannot help out with truths. Politics does not have its own means to create economic success – as much as it may be politically dependent on it and as much as it pretends to be able to do so. The economy can let science take part in the conditioning of money payments, but it cannot produce truth with all the world’s money. Through financing one can attract, one can irritate, but one cannot prove anything. Science honors financing with ‘acknowledgments,’ not with provable argumentation.”

Science, therefore, cannot determine the nature, or constitute the foundation, of the other systems. Politics does not become true or false because a paper published in a referred science journal says that a government policy counters the findings of genetics. Likewise, a law does not become legal or illegal because it goes against the standards of the system of education. Each system uses its own code. Evolutionary psychologists who claim that they have discovered the “foundations” of society are stepping outside the system of science, as if science can occupy a position “beyond all systems”. Science is incapable of observation “without itself being a system”:

“namely, a system with a network of communication, a system with certain institutional arrangements, a system with certain value preferences, a system with individual careers, and a system that depends on society”.

Scientific knowledge is possible precisely because the system of science is “operationally closed” with its own methodology, expertise, and focus on certain aspects of reality. It is impossible to observe “the entire world” as it is in itself. Luhmann’s systems theory does not make any such transcendental claims. His own theory, he writes is “second-order observation”. By this he means that as a systems theorist he observes how other systems observe without claiming to dictate how any other system should function. Systems theory itself operates inside the function system of science and its code; it does not stand outside society, but is a construction of reality from the perspective of systems theory.

Luhmann saw this differentiation as the great achievement of modernity in its allowance of social complexity and prevention of total domination by any single logic, as happened in pre-modern stratified societies or totalitarian Communist regimes. Under conditions of functional differentiation, society becomes largely indifferent to traditional forms of identity. As Hans-Georg Moeller writes in his introduction to Luhmann, “it does not matter which region, religion, or race functions — as long as it functions.” Modern function systems are thus, in principle, open to everyone and do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, or ethnicity because they operate according to functional rather than traditional or ascriptive criteria.

Although Luhmann did not write specifically about mass immigration or liberal progressivism, his framework offers powerful conceptual tools for understanding the resilience of the fused liberal-capitalist order. One must be careful, however, in applying, without reservations, Luhmann’s model toward understanding the current dynamics of the Western world. He tended to treat modern society as a neutral, technocratic system of differentiated codes without adequately appreciating the inherently progressive nature of modern liberal society, particularly from the 1960s on, and how this progressivism has penetrated and coordinated multiple subsystems. While he does recognize social movements like environmentalism and welfare programs, he treats them as “irritations,” rather than as central to progressivism.

I will employ his theory to argue that in the contemporary West, liberal universalism no longer functions as a mere critique, but as a widely shared meta-code inscribed into the supposedly neutralized codes of the subsystems. The ability of progressivism to become a meta-code should not be difficult to envision, since the major subsystems of Western modernity were themselves shaped by classical liberal principles. Thus, the economy was shaped by freedom of trade, property rights, and freedom of contract; the legal system by equality before the law, contract law, maritime law, corporate law, and the like; and the educational system by the ideal of open inquiry and the liberal arts. Once these systems had been constituted along liberal lines, with their ideal that everyone should enjoy equality of liberty, the conditions were set for the post-1960s version of liberalism to act as an overseeing meta-code across all sub-systems.

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The Ethnocide System, the first magnum opus of one of the most provocative and inspiring masterminds of the New Right, now translated into English for the first time, is a tour de force of the desperately needed showdown between the peoples of Earth and the globalist machine.

Today, this meta-code is powerful enough that even “objective” science, with its commitment to the true/false code, now faces prohibitions on research into racial or IQ differences. Scientific American and Nature, two of the leading science journals, explicitly refuse to publish or even consider race-realist research. More recently, in August 2026, the New England Journal of Medicine published an article claiming that the questioning of Jason Arday’s credentials was an instance of racial persecution (despite the decisiveness of the evidence showing that he was a plagiarist with a CV full of falsehoods, which violated the modern code of the education subsystem).

We are past the relatively sane and neutral world of Luhmann’s time, when universities still retained, despite their liberalism, a commitment to meritocracy and to the pure code of education/non-education. The majority of universities now declare that one of their key missions is diversity, equity, and inclusion. It is almost impossible now for a professor (or a graduate student seeking an academic position) to question the merits of mass immigration, feminism, or racial integration. The economy continues to operate on the code of profitable/unprofitable, yet businesses are expected to adopt progressive stances on race, gender, and immigration. The legal system still distinguishes legal/illegal, but the content of law is heavily shaped by civil-rights doctrine, anti-discrimination rules, and equity considerations. In this sense, liberalism behaves as a self-referential, self-reinforcing meta-system that keeps the subsystems “progressive” in their operations. It has established its own meta-binaries across all the systems—liberal/illiberal, inclusive/exclusive, progressive/reactionary—structuring their internal operations and actions.

To be clear, functional differentiation still prevails; no function system controls, dictates, or acts on behalf of any other. Science cannot prescribe its way of doing things to politics any more than politics can prescribe to science the direction of scientific research. My point is that the specific codes of all the subsystems in the progressive West operate within a meta-liberal post-Fordist order.

Luhmann underappreciates this meta-moralizing power because he understands liberalism primarily as a “semantics” invented to fit the requirements of functional differentiation rather than as an ideology with independent moral force. He regards the language of universality, human rights, personal freedom, and individualism as simply the most suitable semantics for a society no longer organized by hierarchical or stratified principles. As he writes,

“Freedom and equality are now [semantically established] because all limitations and inequalities are set up only by the codes and programs of the individual function systems since general directives for the whole of society no longer exist.”

He notes further (as cited by Moeller) that

“new principles of inclusion are sought and found that are given the names of freedom and equality and that take on the form of civil or even human rights… Equality means that no other principles of inclusion are accepted besides those determined by the function of the systems themselves.”

This perspective explains why it largely escapes his attention that liberalism may constitute a meta-code with its own cognitive construction of reality. Ironically, in some of his writings he does sense the extraordinary power of this ideology, even describing the ideas of human rights as the “true” fundamentalism of our time that semantically grounds the structures of contemporary society.

The case of contemporary China further demonstrates the limits of the reductionist claim that liberalism is merely a “semantic” by-product of modern functional differentiation. China is already a highly modern, functionally differentiated society in which markets operate according to the economic code, and education and science largely follow their own respective codes. Yet China is definitely not liberal in the Western sense. A strong ruling party maintains overarching control, prioritizes ethnic homogeneity (even Han supremacy), and subordinates the subsystems to nationalist goals.

This demonstrates that functional differentiation does not inevitably produce openness, universalist inclusion, or indifference to race and ethnicity. Given that Luhmann’s research was almost entirely focused on Western modernity, perhaps we should not be surprised that he missed the dynamic reality of liberalism and capitalism, like a fish in water.

Despite these drawbacks, Luhmann’s concepts of autopoiesis and operational closure remain extremely valuable. His theory elucidates how social subsystems such as politics, law, media, education, and the economy are self-referential, and how they process external “irritations” or events like grooming scandals, populist revolts, or Black violence, through their cognitive structures and internal codes (filtered through the progressive meta-code) rather than viewing “reality as it is,” or as critics of immigration claim it to be. It teaches how institutions prioritize self-reproduction, systemic continuity and cognitive coherence, over solving external “real” problems.

Reading Luhmann allowed me to see with keener eyes how the fusion of liberal universalism and capitalist optimization has become an autopoietic mega-system. It reproduces itself through institutions, law, media, NGOs, and corporate incentives. This is the “deep liberal state” that everyone talks about, but which no one explains.

8. The Path-Dependent Civilizational Trap of the West

The Great Replacement is now on a path-dependent trajectory that will be extremely difficult to reverse. The concept of path-dependency is relatively common in the social sciences. It describes institutions or patterns of development in which past decisions constrain or define later ones, locking systems into old and inefficient ways of doing things simply because changing course has become too costly or difficult.

The trap the West is experiencing, however, is different. It is dynamic and optimizing. The West remains highly effective (compared to other nations) at generating short-term economic growth, opportunities for elite status, openness to multiple lifestyles, entertainment, and self-reproduction. The problem is that the Western promise that multicultural capitalist optimization would overcome the ethnic conflicts that have “plagued humanity” is generating exactly the opposite result: increasing ethnic tensions across the West, grooming gangs in the UK, disproportionate Black violence in the US, permanent welfare dependency, no-go zones, and migrant assaults throughout Europe. Instead of creating a new world order of racial harmony, it is systematically undermining the demographic and cultural foundations of European societies.

Many dissident analysts reject the idea of a path-dependent trap. They are guided by the Platonic ideal that if only people are educated about the costs of immigration, the liberal establishment would eventually “see reason” and change course. This expectation rests on an outdated understanding of what liberalism has become. We are no longer in the world of classical liberalism. The liberalism that ushered in the 1700s and 1800s, eloquently embodied in the writings of Voltaire, Denis Diderot, Jeremy Bentham, and John Stuart Mill, was oriented toward criticism of tradition, church authority, hereditary privilege, and obscurantism. It truly cherished reason, evidence, and reform.

By contrast, progressive liberalism, especially since the post-1960s and the post-Fordist era, has largely abandoned that critical spirit when it comes to its own (institutionalized) values. Its supposed pluralistic tolerance has become a self-righteous and authoritarian mode of thinking. This attitude was already implied in John Rawls’s belief that liberal societies cannot be fully neutral, that they must actively propagate attitudes of diversity and tolerance across all major institutions while systematically discouraging and marginalizing illiberal or traditional norms. It is implied in Jürgen Habermas’s argument that liberal values are already built into human communication itself, which aims at “mutual understanding” and the creation of a public sphere in which individuals rely on their rational capacities freed from the “distorted communication” of illiberal traditions and particular ethnic groups.

Liberalism is dedicated to the expansion of equality of rights among all social groups and the dismantling of sexist, ethnocentric, Islamophobic, or nationalist prejudices. Its claim that the good life emerges from the propagation of diverse cultural and sexual lifestyles makes it inherently antagonistic to outlooks rooted in ethnic particularism, biologically established sexual identities, or “rigid” traditions. For this reason, inconvenient facts that point to major failures in multiculturalism are not treated as evidence of failure, but are interpreted, rather, as proof that the progressive project has not gone far enough, or as that society needs to improve its behaviours through further “re-education.” The system is no longer primarily seeking truth in the Enlightenment sense.

This is why Niklas Luhmann’s concept of autopoiesis is so useful for understanding the path-dependent trap. The main goal of Western institutions is not to maximize truth or the culture of Whites. These institutions are designed for economic growth, the actualization of its progressive ideals, and self-reproduction. This is why the system is so reluctant to speak openly and honestly about the failures of multiculturalism. It processes migrant problems and populist reactions as “irritations” or perturbations through its own binary codes (racist/anti-racist, progressive/reactionary, legitimate/illegitimate), treating them as further confirmation that more anti-racism, more diversity training, or more suppression of “hate speech” is needed.

Operationally closed systems cannot directly interfere with the operations of other systems. What happens in one system does not bring about a determinate reaction in another; it can only produce, in the words of Luhmann, “irritation” and “resonance.” Each system constructs its own observations according to its cognitive apparatus and binary code. Thus, when a migrant crime is reported, the legal system evaluates it not only in terms of whether a law has been broken but in terms of whether criticism of immigrants creates a “hostile and discriminatory climate” for “minorities”. The legal system is not designed to investigate the merits of immigration. The mass media is designed to offer information and reports of news (that draw an audience) without deviating from the liberal meta-code. It deems any information that focuses on the criminal behavior of particular immigrant or racial groups as either “discriminatory” or as “irresponsible” information that undermines the multicultural cohesion. This was notoriously evident when the editor of The Economist accused Elon Musk (earlier this year) of creating tensions and undermining integration efforts with his X postings about migrant crimes. Similarly, the political system tends to interpret rejection of multiculturalism as a threat to integration and to order itself, since the code of the system is power/no power within the meta-code of peaceful integration of diverse cultures. In the Western world of our times, the maintenance of order coincides with the maintenance of the progressive project.

The popular argument that what is currently occurring in the West is primarily the result of “Bioleninist” or “Communist” voters and leaders does apprehend some proximate aspects of Western politics today. It can’t be denied that a sizable proportion of leftist activists are no longer motivated by a desire to make Western societies more functional but, rather, by a resentful desire to see stable White communities dismantled. This explains why these groups persist with their “destructive” policies, like blaming “institutional racism” for Black assaults and thievery, calling for more Muslims, Somalis, and Haitians despite repeated evidence of high welfare costs, nepotism, and violence.

However, as I see it, this mindset has itself been generated—and is now reinforced—by the progressive meta-code that treats White racism as the supreme evil, holds that Whites are still unfairly gaming the system for their own benefit, and blames them for the wars and inequalities of the world. Radical activists sincerely feel they are justified in their vindictiveness. Moreover, now that large non-Western populations are inside the system with full political rights, at the same time that they are categorized as victimized “minorities”, while having strong in-group racial identities, we cannot but expect an increase of statements such as the one Hasan Piker made a few months ago: “We’re here to destroy the White race, bitch”.

We need to be careful, however, not to lose sight of the fact that the West is still controlled by business elites, a managerial educated class, trained scientists, and lawyers. While excessive wokeness and equity mandates can have deleterious effects on business maximization, the West still innovates in technology, finance, consumer culture, limbic business, and now AI. What needs to be understood is how this dynamism is framed within a liberal order that associates the continuance of multiculturalism with the preservation of order. Even when elites privately sense that something has gone badly wrong, that the post-WWII promise of harmonious diversity has instead produced persistent racial tensions and populist backlash, it can’t contemplate turning the ship around. The Western multicultural system is now deeply path-dependent.

But how exactly does this trap operate? First, as Milton Friedman famously put it, “the sole social responsibility of the firm is to maximize profits,” which in the post-Fordist age entails importation of immigrant labor. The costs in welfare, the loss of cultural identity, and the migrant violence we read about at X are either spread out over large populations or not inconsistent with GDP maximization. The people who benefit right now (corporations, politicians, academics, entertainers, NGOs, and non-Whites) don’t really feel those costs in their daily lives.

Second, liberal universalism has turned diversity and non-discrimination into the most sacred values. It is extremely hard for someone to build a career or profession while advocating openly for remigration, race realism, or White identity. The elites would rather ignore information about failures of multiculturalism than admit that culture and ethnicity matter, that Blacks and many immigrant groups don’t integrate well, that social trust has deteriorated, and that liberal multiculturalism is therefore based on fundamentally flawed premises.

Third, whole industries and professions have been incentivized to support the status quo: diversity consultants, immigration lawyers, refugee organizations, corporate HR departments, and large parts of the welfare state, including schools and universities. Politicians get praised for sounding humane (even conservatives strive to look “compassionate”). Businesses get “flexible workers”. NGOs and academics get funding and moral prestige. Changing this path would require dismantling entire institutions and eliminating the careers of millions who are heavily invested in the system.

Fourth, the ethnic composition of a large number of Western cities is already demographically locked in. In the metropolitan cores where capital, media, universities, and political power are concentrated—in cities like Houston, Miami, Dallas, Detroit, Philadelphia, Atlanta, London, Paris, Birmingham, Toronto, Malmö, Stockholm, Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Vienna, Frankfurt, Vancouver, Manchester, Leicester, Brussels, Auckland, Sydney, Melbourne, and a growing list of others—the native White population is either aging rapidly or reproducing well below replacement.

The next generations that will shape the next decades are already substantially more diverse. This non-White population not only has full legal rights, but rapidly growing political influence. Once a city becomes majority non-White, local politics, school boards, the concerns of police departments, and government departments at large tend to favor the new diverse citizens. Any attempt to bring about a serious program of remigration would bring about widespread court challenges, intense media reactions about “ethnic cleansing,” and major economic disruptions.

It is getting worse. The trap is now being strengthened and deepened by the fusion of limbic capitalism and artificial intelligence that will make escape even harder. The regular style of control involving deplatforming and financial exclusion (executed through conventional administrative, legal, and corporate decisions) is already being supplemented by more effective AI tools for surveillance, content moderation, algorithmic personalization, and synthetic media designed to shape public opinion and to control the wiring inside the brain of the masses. We may be heading into an AI-limbic technocratic trap of atomized race-mixed individuals combined with Chinese methods of control but without ethnic cohesion.

9. Can the West Escape the Trap?

The intention of this article is not to instill pessimism and defeatism. Its purpose is diagnostic. It is focused on identifying and explaining the root causes of the current trajectory of the West. From a Luhmannian perspective, it is naïve to believe that society can be redirected simply because enough people discover the negative facts about diversity, “as if society were not a system.”

If we agree that social systems operate autopoietically, it follows that they cannot be steered from the outside simply because a party eliminates DEI in some institutions, abolishes the teaching of transgenderism in primary schools, or takes a tougher stand on black criminality. The election of a populist party (on its own) can only “irritate” the liberal-capitalist order or alter the “environment” (via new regulations on immigration, or legal constraints on the excesses of wokeness) to which other systems respond. It cannot, however, override or impose an alternative comprehensive worldview upon the economy, law, media, or education. These systems will continue to operate according to their own discourses, as they are filtered through the prevailing liberal meta-code. The capitalist economy will remain operationally closed, processing events according to its own code of profitability versus unprofitability in the age of post-Fordism.

Many popular alternative explanations fall short because they lack an adequate theoretical grasp of society as a structured order of systems. Insofar as they assume that “society consists of concrete human beings and relations between human beings,” without seeing that individuals act under the structural imperatives of function systems, they treat the great replacement as the product of particular intellectual elites or particular leaders, and thus as mere ideas or leaders that could be reversed or replaced by electing new elites or by persuading those in power with better ideas. Luhmann’s theory, however, teaches that the communications and operations that reproduce the function systems are not the products of individual subjects.

From this Luhmannian perspective we can see that while Nathan Cofnas’s critique of the “equality thesis” is factually true, it naively assumes that current elites can be rationally persuaded to reject the belief that all human groups are biologically equal and to adopt race realism independently of the institutional imperatives of liberalism and the structural dynamics of post-Fordism. Christopher Rufo focuses on civil rights law and DEI as the primary problem, believing that repealing them would restore color-blind meritocracy, while ignoring the institutional logics of demographic replacement. Helen Andrews’s article on “race communism” explains well how the redistribution of positions and resources by race no longer makes sense in an American nation that is now populated by millions of non-White immigrants without a past experience of slavery or discrimination and where Whites are set to become a minority. Yet she assesses this problem from a strictly ideological and legal perspective, assuming thereby that a solution can be found through the mere revocation of old civil rights legislation. Gad Saad’s simple theory of “suicidal empathy” offers a truncated psychological account of the “WEIRD” psychology of Whites, which he wrongly assumes to prevail among Westerners in general, including Jews and non-Whites, even though only Whites exhibit a characteristically weak ethnocentric disposition. Saad’s approach, moreover, remains at the individual level and implies that Westerners can gradually be persuaded to become less sympathetic simply by reading him. These approaches, all in all, treat the problem primarily as one of bad ideas, bad laws, or personal inclinations, underestimating the path-dependent and autopoietic character of the regime.

Jared Taylor is right that Helen Andrews ignores the empirical reality of IQ racial differences and therefore underestimates how hard it is to restore color-blind meritocracy in a society that is now thoroughly multiracial. We need to ask indeed: why has the liberal order, across the entire West and not merely the United States, so consistently refused to absorb the findings of behavioral genetics and psychometrics? Clearly, it is not lack of awareness; research on IQ differences has been public for decades. Universities have the resources to discuss those findings openly.

My view is that race realism can’t be popularized for the simple reason that it is incompatible with the institutional realities of a society dedicated to liberal multiracialism. Steven Pinker seems to have sensed this when he recently adopted the position, despite being an Enlightenment liberal and a defender of free inquiry, that it is better not to popularize Black–White IQ differences in the public sphere, because the social costs would outweigh the gains. Even though he is the most famous critic of blank slatism, and does not deny IQ differences between racial groups, he seems to recognize, even if only tacitly, that in a society already committed to multiracial liberalism, open acceptance of group racial differences would result in the widespread belief that Black individuals are members of the “dumb race”. Race realism cannot be construed as a merely neutral theory, as Bo Winegard would like it to be. In its implications, it is a direct attack on the sacrosanct liberal meta-code that all humans, regardless of race, have equal dignity. It does not matter if the classical liberal insists that he judges individuals on the basis of merit alone and recognizes that there are Blacks with a high IQ. The reality is that full meritocracy in a multiracial society inevitably entails de facto racial ranking.

Kevin MacDonald’s work deserves open discussion for its scholarly substantiveness and historically grounded arguments. MacDonald argues that Jewish intellectual and political movements, such as Boasian anthropology, Freudianism, Frankfurt School critical theory, multiculturalism, and Neoconservatism have played a disproportionate and leading role in undermining Western ethnic cohesion. He places particular emphasis on the Jewish leading role in the implementation of the Celler Immigration Act of 1965, among many other ideas and policies that “serve Jewish group evolutionary interests” while demonizing any expression of White identity. He frames this as a “group evolutionary strategy” rooted in Jewish ethnocentrism and high verbal intelligence. In his later work Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition, MacDonald clearly argues that Jewish promotion of universalism and multiracialism appealed to Whites precisely because these ideas resonated with their historically rooted individualism and low ethnocentrism.

However, it seems to me that as much as MacDonald understands that the inordinate role of Jews requires an understanding of the Western liberal tradition itself, his critique remains primarily ideological and focused on individual actors.

What Luhmann has conveyed to me is that social systems cannot be derived from the intentions of persons or groups. When politicians, judges, company managers, or professors speak or act, they do not communicate as self-legislating individuals in terms of their personal conscience, religious values, or “greedy” interests. They do so as occupants of positions through which the social system reproduces itself. The style and tenor of communication may vary from one person to the next, but this does not mean that newcomers can recode the systems. In the course of time, we see generations of individuals passing through the same positions, reproducing the systems, not remaking them anew.

While MacDonald’s account goes deep into the evolutionary selection of individualist behavioral traits among prehistoric Europeans, and while it explains a whole host of cultural and political dynamics in American society (Israel lobby, the inordinate influence and spread of many radical leftist movements, Hollywood, and other topics), it lacks a deep analysis of the economic and institutional structures behind the diversity regime. Jewish influence is minimal in many Western countries outside the United States, France, and the UK, yet we find similar patterns of mass immigration driven by native business associations and progressive groups. The disproportionate influence of Jews is better framed within the prior institutional logic of liberal universalism and the post-Fordist capitalist logic.

But what about the common complaint that mass immigration was never demanded by the native population through any clear democratic mandate, that it was a project orchestrated by elites? This view also ignores the systemic institutional dynamics of our times. The elites who initiated diversity “from above,” and the generations who continued to enforce it thereafter, were/are reproduced inside the same liberal institutions. The systems of law, economy, education, and media, and the liberal meta-code, continue to process claims against immigration from non-White nations as morally illegitimate, and the “newcomers” as necessary for the functioning of the economy. From the beginning, elites have been of the opinion that opposition to diversity is a temporary situation that an education in progressive values, combined with economic growth and a new generation of “open-minded” diverse individuals, would eventually overcome.

By examining this debate, from a Luhmannian perspective, I have come to the conclusion that reversing this order will require a prolonged sequence of cascading events and crises leading to major ruptures capable of undermining the liberal meta-code itself and the institutional conditions under which liberalism reproduces itself.

There are three potential rupture points in the Western order:

• Economic or Energy Breakdown: A severe, prolonged economic collapse and energy crisis could make the current model unsustainable. The question is how large this crisis would have to be to break the system. The 2008 financial crisis, seen as the greatest since the Great Depression of the 1930s, barely disrupted the system; it was absorbed through bailouts, political consensus across party lines, and the attribution of blame to isolated personalities, without leading to fundamental policy reversal. It is worth remembering that the Great Depression did not push the West out of its liberal-capitalist path, but instead accelerated its progressive dynamic. It seems that only a much deeper crisis, or the simultaneous occurrence of crises in other systems, would be required. Would there be viable political parties with extensive networking across the systems of society capable of exploiting such a chaotic breakdown and redirecting one (or two or three) Western nations out of their current paths?

• Geopolitical or Military Defeat: What about a major external shock such as a double strategic defeat of NATO and the US military in both Iran and Ukraine-Russia? The post-WWII liberal international order is built on the perception of Western (especially American) military and technological supremacy. Simultaneous failure against Iran and a loss against Russia would no doubt constitute major setback for liberal NATO and American power. It could ignite further populist anger, intensify questions about the “incompetence” of liberal elites, trigger energy shocks, and undermine the notion that liberal interventionism is the best way to create a “rules-based international order”. However, it is hard to conceive how the systems of politics, education, law, media, and the meta-code of liberalism in the domestic sphere would break down from such defeats. Previous disasters (Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan) were absorbed without any serious abandonment of liberal interventionism (other than policy changes away from outright nation-building projects). This is not to deny, however, that additional defeats of the magnitude of Iran and Ukraine would likely bring about the end of American unipolarism and the consolidation of multipolarity.

• Major Legitimation Crisis: What if enough native Europeans (including growing segments of the middle class and cultural producers) lose faith in the moral legitimacy of the diversity project? Jürgen Habermas teaches that a legitimation crisis occurs when a society’s institutions lose public trust, undermining their perceived right to govern even while they retain political power and legal authority. We can envision a situation in which sustained, visible failures of mass immigration, such as continuously high welfare costs of migrants, persistent migrant violence, rising native discontent with the loss of national and cultural identities, and other problems eventually result in widespread erosion of the liberal ideals of diversity. We could anticipate a situation in which widespread acceptance of arguments such as Kevin MacDonald’s on Jewish influence, or the case for race realism, could undermine the dominant post-WWII moral narrative about “anti-racism” and “ethnic nationalism is evil,” thereby undermining double standards against European ethnic identity.

Of the three rupture points, I am inclined to believe that a deep legitimation crisis offers the best realistic chance of breaking the trap, because it directly attacks the moral and ideological meta-code sustaining the system. Luhmann’s theory of the mass media system offers useful insights here. As he observed, “Whatever we know about our society, or indeed about the world in which we live, we know through the mass media.” The media is “structurally coupled” to many other systems in that it constructs a common reality (or “environment”) that politics, law, education, and the economy largely take as given. The media, as Luhmann explains, is always observing, and reporting about “the observations of the other systems”. It is not oriented toward consensus or problem-solving; rather, it continuously generates novelty, conflict, moralization, and drama. The media system accelerates the tempo of society by continuously providing new irritations and new information.

If the media aimed for total consensus, it would lose one of its essential functions, as happened in the Soviet Union, where the media eventually lost all credibility and popular attraction. As Luhmann observes, in liberal societies “viewers are not expected to join in any consensus of opinion. They are at liberty to agree or disagree.” This is, I would add, intrinsic to liberal pluralism and its cultivation of multiple lifestyles, which generates a permanent state of diverse opinions, notwithstanding the liberal dislike for “illiberal” views. Luhmann is persuasive in arguing that, when the media world is taken in its totality (not only news but books, magazines, videos, and podcasts), it “contains and reproduces differences of opinions in plenty,” offering audiences conflicting views, different values, and choices. This allows for a “restless,” contested reality with opportunities for dissidents to challenge the liberal order, to create exciting alternative perspectives that draw attention.

The position of the media as a common environment for all the other subsystems, combined with its dynamism, thus makes it a unique platform for change. If dissident voices, media like X, and powerful figures like Elon Musk, succeed in undermining the information monopoly of progressives, they may be able to create a strong counter-narrative. Musk is not your average libertarian; he has adopted many populist ideas in his call for remigration and his rejection of “anti-White” narratives. He has genuinely widened the Overton window. The media, particularly through X, may thus afford dissidents, independent thinkers, alternative media, and so-called “cultural creators” significant opportunities to bring about a legitimation crisis.

10. Conclusion: Media, Legitimation, and the Possibility of an Overdetermined Rupture

We must avoid false hopes, however. The media is only one system among others, which means that even if dissident voices and platforms seriously augment their influence, the other subsystems will continue to construct their own reality according to their own codes and discourses.

There are, moreover, inherent limitations in the capacity of the media to generate a cohesive social movement capable of reversing our current trajectory. This is what Luhmann’s complete theory, as articulated in The Reality of the Mass Media (1995), shows. The media, by its very nature, is not meant to generate a cohesive world view that would be required to counter the institutionalized power of liberalism and limbic capitalism. The media is structurally geared to select information with the qualities of surprise, conflict, quantities (about crimes, inflation, immigration, drug addiction) without much context, stories that are scandalous and point to norm violations, and that entail moralization, celebration or condemnation of personalities. It is not designed for sustained analysis and elaboration of plans to bring about institutional change.

X itself thrives on excitement, conflict, personality contests, and limbic stimulation. Most participants, including many dissidents, are primarily concerned with the number of followers and their own personal popularity, unconnected to any mass movements. They are, in other words, all too liberal. X both reflects and stimulates this individualism through its monetization and its limbic system of likes and reposts. Its founding principles remain structured by the liberal meta-code.

A legitimation crisis requires elite dissent inside other function systems: inside universities, corporations, legal institutions, the administrative state, and parts of the economy. There is, as of now, no comprehensive counter-ideology in the West, no counter-elites, and no kinship network standing outside the system from which liberal modernity, with its total control of all subsystems, even X, can be redirected away from its current trajectory. Fascism was tried and defeated. Traditionalism is unrealistic in a White population that is epigenetically WEIRD.

Does this mean that we are stuck with only minor populist reforms?

I believe that one of the ways the current path-dependent trap could be broken is through a situation in which things “skid out of control.” This can happen through a cascading sequence of failures and crises in which multiple systems begin to fail simultaneously, producing what the structuralist Marxist Louis Althusser called an “overdetermined” revolutionary rupture, a situation in which contradictions accumulate across the economic, political, legal, media, and cultural subsystems, seriously undermining the liberal meta-code.

Here is a scenario in which the trap may be broken. Due to increasing failures of immigrant integration and growing rejection of the multicultural narrative, a strong populist party comes to power in a major European country. Let’s use Germany’s AfD as the most likely real case example. Alice Weidel has said that in the first hundred days her party will “close the borders, eliminate social benefits for migrants, and carry out Germany’s largest deportations” of illegal and undocumented immigrants. Such a government might indeed carry out a program along the lines set down by Martin Sellner’s Phase A (“Immediate Stabilization of Asylum Chaos”): close national borders and increase security forces to prevent entry of undocumented migrants, “stop abuse of asylum system,” and repatriate illegals.

During this initial phase, these measures are implemented so that they are still processed through existing legal and administrative codes, without targeting legal immigrants, invoking race realism, or identifying citizens in terms of their “Germanic” ancestry. Nevertheless, these moderate measures agitate the radical Left, the woke media, universities, courts, political parties, and segments of the bureaucracy. There is a concerted condemnation of these measures as “existential threats” to “democracy and freedom” that “cannot be tolerated in an open society.” This intensifies polarization, court challenges, street protests, and elite resistance, leading thereby to the beginnings of the cascade.

The AfD, however, not only remains determined to go through with its remigration policies, but it then implements Sellner’s Phase B, “Repairing the Migration System,” and perhaps more. It calls for an end to “legal replacement migration,” termination of “all residence permits for migrants who burden [Germany] economically, financially, and criminologically,” and starts to push for German pride and abolition of multicultural programs. A remigration department is created, with a dedicated staff in charge of remigration flights. The AfD starts to ban Islamic minarets, imposes dress rules in public institutions, and condemns “parallel societies.” More than this, it decides to take legal and punitive actions against “woke extremists” who destroy property, burn things down, and disrupt the functioning of institutions, with thousands actually incarcerated for “illegal activities.”

This is the point when the cascade really starts: when the AfD starts to recode German society, by remigrating settled citizens and giving preferential treatment to citizens of German ancestry, and implementing a program of public de-Islamization. These measures lead to extreme polarization.

As this polarization grows, the diversity regime’s failures coincide with (or are preceded by) the onset of a geopolitical rupture, such as the defeat of NATO in Ukraine, along with the breakup of NATO, leading the AfD, or other populist parties, to formally abandon liberal unipolarism in geopolitics. At the same time, or around the same time, an economic recession hits, after prior decades of environmental policies and growing AI unemployment, coupled with the determination of Muslims to preserve and expand their “parallel” Islamic communities, a housing crisis in the major cities, and continuing sexual migrant violence. Native German populations, especially working and middle classes, grow more impatient and complain that the reforms are too slow or not strong enough. Calls for the remigration of millions spread from the fringe to mainstream discourse in the media.

A full legitimation crisis hits Germany and other Western nations. Community trust collapses; schools cannot perform properly due to racial, cultural, and religious tensions. Non-Whites start to promote the creation of parallel political orders operating on their own. In fact, we can speculate that in other European nations the elections of populist parties would come in the wake of, or together with, the rise of more “Mamdani-type” figures, explicitly acting in racial ways, attacking Whites as Whites, winning local and then national offices, openly advocating for their in-group interests. Defections among members of the professional and business classes finally begin, with the authority of the state fragmenting. The media system, operating according to what Luhmann calls its “selectors” (conflict, norm violation, moralization, novelty), amplifies every incident.

Violence, previously sporadic, increases on both sides. Alternative media, with a mass following, document the daily failures of diversity, how most non-Whites are not interested in integration, and how they are actually organizing as a political force to take power. The liberal meta-code can no longer control the narrative; its legitimacy erodes among growing elite segments of the native population. At this point, or as these events are unfolding, more “extreme” elements within the AfD gain popularity (or more determined populist parties gain in popularity in other Western nations, even gaining power at various levels of government). More radical policies are implemented, such as concerted actions against “Islamization” and parallel societies, outright rejection of multiculturalism, and mandated financial incentives for millions of immigrant citizens to remigrate. White identity politics spreads.

Eventually, multiple pressures converge. Economic recession, geopolitical setbacks, energy shocks, bringing about a full legitimation crisis within the liberal meta-code. Non-White political organizations, parties, and street movements grow more confrontational, interpreting White identity politics as an existential threat that can only be met with escalating violence. Native White populations, feeling demographically and politically cornered, realize that their “backs are against the wall.” White parallel institutions, self-defence networks, and more radical political organizations, start to spread. The progressive meta-code finally loses its capacity to reframe events. Elite defections become widespread. Members of the security forces, army and police, local administration, businesses, schools and universities, and mainstream media producers start choosing sides based on racial interests. The old liberal consensus collapses.

At this point, the situation resembles Althusser’s overdetermined crisis in which no single contradiction is decisive, but their “condensation” leaves a power vacuum with a chance for populists and German nationalists to take full power. The political system can no longer process the conflict through normal elections and legal procedures. Violence becomes more organized, resembling the “civil-war” situation outlined by David Betz, with major cities sliding into political warring zones (“feral cities”), and the state losing effective control of the rule of law.

Thus, what began as limited populist reforms has “skidded out of control” into a true revolutionary situation.

Of course, we can’t assume that this condensation of crises will automatically translate into a new ideological meta-code. A new meta-code would have to be constructed before or at least emerge from within the “overdetermined” crisis itself, otherwise the economy, law, and other remaining administrative and educational systems and organizations would continue to process events according to their own liberal logics. There would have to be a cultural revolution, a sweeping set of transformations of the existing subsystems. The “overdetermined crisis” could well generate liberal emergency measures and imposition of a full authoritarian order, rather than yielding to an ethno-national revolutionary transformation.

It might indeed be the case that a populist party, recognizing that events are “skidding out of control” if it presses too hard, risking a destructive civil war, settles down for moderate policies, such as the ones visible under Trump and among other populists. This would mean limiting itself to the removal of illegals with criminal records, cutting back on legal immigration, and cultivating a stronger sense of civic nationalism. It would also entail cutting back DEI and racial preferences; and reasserting color-blind meritocracy and individual rights. That is, it would limit itself to measures that could be handled by the existing legal, economic, and political codes, and the liberal meta-code itself — and that could easily be reversed as a more liberal party gets back into power with the support of immigrants.

We could witness a scenario in which populist or strong conservative governments spread across the West, determined to meet populist expectations beyond past conservative leaders, because they finally realize that the only way a “multiracial democracy” can be successful is through greater public safety, less welfare dependency among migrants, less anti-White narratives, and less economic hardships for the native populations. These governments would allow European nations to preserve some degree of their ethnic and cultural identities without trying to reverse the reality of multiracialism, aiming to create a more manageable liberalism, and thereby avoid risking a bloody civil war.

This ending brings to mind the words of Antonio Gramsci:

“The old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

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One of the standard institutions associated with labour today is the labour union. Labour unions have been around for almost 150 years, having emerged from three converging developments in the late nineteenth century. The first was industrialisation, initially in Britain and later in continental Europe. The second was the influence of Marxist, socialist, and even anarchist thought concerned with protecting the worker. A third component, which developed somewhat later, was conservative Christian social thought, in which empathy and social responsibility played a role in further shaping labour unions as institutions of worker protection.

Labour unions are therefore usually associated with the political Left, as much of their intellectual heritage stems from socialism and Marxism, and for most people unions are understood as left-leaning in one way or another. In unions’ own rhetoric and self-presentation, this association is largely correct.

Yet in their actual structure and operation, labour unions are inseparable from industrialisation itself, and industrialisation meant capitalism, and more specifically liberalism. The labour union was, in this sense, a response to liberalism, but one that remained embedded within a liberal framework. What is often missed is that labour unions possess a distinctly liberal metaphysics: despite their collectivist rhetoric, they focus on workers’ rights, and rights presuppose the liberal idea of the individual as a rights-bearing subject. In practice, therefore, the union does not transcend individualism so much as it aggregates individuals, organising labour through claims and rights made on behalf of the individual worker.

Thus, labour unions are focused primarily on a defensive posture: they are concerned with what one must not - or in some cases must - do to the worker. This is not in itself a failing. Few would wish to work in conditions lacking basic dignity, or to be treated as an expendable resource rather than as a human being. For this reason, one should not dismiss the importance of labour unions in the manner the political Right sometimes does, as they have performed an important role in preventing abuses against fellow citizens that might otherwise have taken place.

Having said that, rights and claims protect individuals from abuse and poverty and provide a measure of safety, but they do not concern themselves with the formation of the worker’s character, responsibility, skill, or moral and technical excellence in and of themselves. The worker’s actual competence, whether he is an experienced craftsman who has honed his skills over time, and his mastery of a craft become secondary, or even irrelevant. Moreover, responsibility is externalised to the state through regulation and law, as workplace disputes are resolved through legal mechanisms, courts, and regulators. This both expands state bureaucracy and produces an ever-growing legal apparatus, as the state becomes the final arbiter of workplace order. Under such conditions, accountability becomes procedural rather than moral.

This metaphysics of proceduralism may have its roots in industrialisation itself, insofar as labour unions assume that labour is interchangeable — much as liberalism assumes people to be, regardless of the culture from which they stem. This assumption emerged from the fact that industrialisation largely dismantled older forms of specialisation. Where once master carpenters produced end-to-end, small-scale works meant to last a lifetime, industrial production replaced this with segmented labour, in which multiple workers performed repetitive tasks. The worker no longer needed to understand carpentry as a whole, but only the narrow, specialised function he mechanically repeated. Mastery and skill were thus displaced by efficiency. Ironically, for a liberalism that prides itself on the individual, value came to be produced collectively, procedurally, and repetitively rather than through individual excellence. Labour unions, shaped by these conditions, therefore organise around job categories and tend to privilege seniority over mastery.

What is understood as mastery is, under these conditions, increasingly displaced to universities. Universities, however, have gradually lost much of their original institutional character, even prior to more recent ideological developments. Historically, universities were neither diploma mills nor primarily intended to serve the employability needs of future workers in multinational corporations. Industrialisation instead gave rise to a managerial class that came to rely on formal credentials, such as MBAs or similar degrees, as markers of advancement, sidelining the original purpose of the university in the process.

Technical fields, which historically had little or no place within the university, often lag behind industry practice, and the material taught to students is frequently out of step with the tools and technologies used by most firms. As a result, many students graduate believing themselves prepared for professional life, only to encounter job requirements they do not meaningfully understand. Universities thus come to distribute credentials that substitute for demonstrated mastery of skill. In doing so, the university as an institution is diminished: education shifts from the pursuit of truth and deep inquiry, once centred on disciplines such as philosophy, medicine, literature, history, and theology among others, toward a system that primarily signals the ability to complete a prescribed sequence of tasks over several years, rather than fostering genuine formation and intellectual inquiry.

In response to labour unions and their spillover effects into other institutions, conservatives should not position themselves simply in opposition to labour organisation as such. Instead, they should articulate and build labour institutions grounded in their own values, capable of being offered as a credible alternative. As noted earlier, labour unions, despite their collectivist language, are oriented toward individual entitlements and rights, reflecting their underlying liberal metaphysics. Prior to the industrial revolution, however, an alternative institutional form existed—one that centred not on rights but on skill, competence, and merit: the guild.

Where unions tend to treat work as a set of tasks performed within a defined job category and understand workers primarily as a class in conflict with capital, guilds organised around crafts and understood work as a vocation and as part of personal identity. They accepted hierarchies of competence acquired through sustained practice over many years. Entry, formation, character, culture, skill, and standards were central to the guild, traditionally structured through three stages: apprentice for those entering the craft, journeyman for those with established competence, and master for those who had attained full mastery. Authority within the guild was therefore peer-based and organic rather than procedural, exercised by practitioners who had themselves demonstrated excellence. Guilds were self-regulating institutions, relying on reputation, certification, and exclusion to maintain standards, rather than on external courts or regulatory bodies.

Those who attained mastery of a craft were themselves active practitioners, continuously familiar with the latest tools, techniques, and developments within their field, and they transmitted this knowledge through peer evaluation and the instruction of apprentices. Within a guild system, responsibility came first and rights followed; reputation and respect were earned through demonstrated competence rather than claimed by entitlement. Guilds therefore did not merely protect work, but actively shaped durable skills, professional identities, and confidence, while reducing the need for external arbitration and enforcement by the state.

Labour unions emerged and developed in a period characterised by interchangeable workers and highly centralised employers, in which skill, while still relevant, was secondary to the repetitive nature of most tasks. As technology now advances rapidly, most notably through artificial intelligence and autonomous systems, many of the tasks historically performed by unionised workers are increasingly subject to automation. Execution thus becomes cheap, while judgment, particularly the judgment of quality, error, and consequence, becomes scarce. Under these conditions, taste, restraint, and responsibility assume renewed importance.

This shift implies that automated systems will ultimately be directed and supervised by practitioners who understand the work itself, and who have demonstrated mastery of a craft. Peer recognition and reputation therefore regain centrality as markers of competence and trust. In this context, labour structures such as guilds become relevant once again, not as nostalgic restorations but as institutions suited to organising judgment-intensive work.

A contemporary neo-guild, however, would need to accommodate both older technical crafts and newer technological domains: alongside plumbers, masons, stoneworkers, and metalworkers, guilds could plausibly emerge in fields such as cybersecurity, robotics integration, smart contract auditing, and advanced systems engineering, areas in which execution can be partially automated, but responsibility cannot. Modern neo-guilds could use technological tools such as videos for apprentices to learn what does not require physical presence through recorded videos and have in-person meetings at the guild for personal mentorship and in-depth teaching of things that require physical presence.

Recreating guilds in such a way would also echo Guillaume Faye’s idea of Archeofuturism, combining an ancient idea or value with today’s technologies.

Moreover, since technical formation would move to guilds, this would mean that universities could focus again on their original purposes such as theory, philosophy research, and civilisational memory, thus shifting the funding from technical occupations taught at the university towards research and development instead.

Beyond skill and character formation, guilds historically also incorporated systems of mutual aid, and a contemporary or neo-guild framework could plausibly do the same as an extension of professional responsibility. Rather than relying on state-administered unemployment entitlements, guilds pooled resources through member fees and other revenues into internal insurance funds. These funds provided support in cases of illness, injury, temporary unemployment, periods of transition between engagements, and even death, with payments often extended to the widows of craftsmen to ensure basic security.

Support was typically temporary and conditional, aimed at reintegrating the member into productive work rather than sustaining indefinite dependency. Because assistance was administered within a community of practitioners, members were subject to indirect but real social pressure to remain active: prolonged withdrawal from work risked reputational damage among peers. This arrangement introduced a moral dimension to welfare, in which eligibility depended not only on need, but on continued commitment to the craft and its vocation. Unemployment solidarity thus became embedded within institutions that formed skills, cultivated discipline and character, and incentivised members to remain competent and engaged. Were a similar system implemented within a modern neo-guild framework, the role of the state would shift accordingly, from primary provider of unemployment benefits to guarantor of last resort, intervening only where professional institutions proved insufficient.

If neo-guilds were to become a normalised feature of labour organisation, this would imply a significant reduction in the scope of the state, particularly by removing large portions of bureaucracy associated with labour administration, retraining programmes, regulatory oversight, and arbitration. Under such conditions, the state would be recast less as a manager or caretaker and more as a guarantor, intervening where necessary rather than administering labour relations directly. This would not, however, eliminate the state’s responsibilities toward its citizens. Provision would still be required in cases of severe disability, old age, and systemic shocks that exceed the capacity of professional or communal institutions.

This implies not the abolition of welfare, but its reorientation. The role of the state would be to support a welfare framework that encourages responsibility within one’s own community, through the transmission of culture and knowledge, intergenerational continuity, and family formation, rather than substituting for these functions. In such a model, social protection is preserved, but it is anchored in institutions that form responsibility, rather than eroding it.

Neo-guilds could also become one of the institutional pillars of a broader remigration strategy through several complementary functions. First, they could help develop skills among the native population through apprenticeships in fields such as elder care, construction, and the skilled trades, with younger or less experienced members receiving practical instruction from experienced practitioners within their professional communities.

Second, technological development could reduce the amount of labour required for some routine and repetitive forms of work. Consider, purely as an illustration, a warehouse employing 100 workers in highly repetitive tasks: if advances in artificial intelligence, robotics and automated logistics allowed the same volume of work to be performed with 70 workers, labour demand would fall by 30%, while supervision, troubleshooting, and judgment would become relatively more important than the manual execution of the tasks themselves. This figure is hypothetical, since automation affects occupations unevenly and does not eliminate every task within an occupation. Nevertheless, structured warehouse activities such as picking, sorting, moving, and tracking goods are among the kinds of repetitive work particularly exposed to further automation. Administrative processes surrounding such work could also increasingly be automated through software and, where appropriate, technologies such as smart contracts.

At the same time, neo-guilds operating across Europe could help connect workers with opportunities beyond their immediate locality. Because members of the same professional community would remain in contact across borders, a guild could offer retraining, apprenticeships or employment opportunities elsewhere in Europe to, for example, an Italian in southern Italy or a Greek living in an isolated village. Labour mobility could therefore emerge organically through networks of practitioners who know where particular skills are needed, rather than depending primarily upon governments to coordinate employment and movement across Europe.

The scale of Europe’s existing labour potential makes this question particularly relevant. The European Commission estimated that approximately 51 million EU residents aged 20–64 were outside the labour market in 2024. This figure should not be mistaken for 51 million immediately available native European workers: it includes migrants, older people, people with disabilities, those with caring responsibilities and others facing barriers to employment, while only around 10 million reported that they would like to work. Nevertheless, it points to a substantial pool of labour-market capacity that exists alongside Europe’s reliance on imported labour and raises the question of how much more effectively Europe’s existing population could be trained, connected and mobilised before external recruitment becomes the default response to labour shortages.

For all of these possibilities, neo-guilds should not be treated as a panacea. They could become an important institutional pillar within a broader long-term remigration strategy, particularly by developing domestic skills, improving labour mobility and reducing the amount of labour required for some repetitive occupations, but they could not by themselves eliminate Europe’s immediate dependence on migrant labour. Guilds provide part of a labour, vocational, and technological policy; they do not constitute a demographic or family policy capable of sustaining the native population over generations and ensuring a sufficiently large future workforce.

This is where such institutions would have to be situated within a wider social framework, including the kind of conservative welfare state I have proposed elsewhere. From a Traditionalist perspective, but also even from a horizontal and purely economic one, policies that make family formation and child-rearing more viable could be understood partly as a long-term investment in demographic continuity and future productive capacity.

The argument is not simply that a larger population automatically produces greater prosperity, but that a sufficiently large, well-formed, and economically active future generation could expand the domestic labour supply, sustain public institutions and potentially enlarge the pool from which future entrepreneurs, craftsmen, and professionals emerge. Over one or two generations, such demographic renewal could therefore reduce Europe’s structural dependence on external labour.

The difficulty, however, is temporal. Demographic change operates over decades, while labour shortages exist in the present, and automation is unlikely to replace every repetitive or labour-intensive occupation at the same pace. Some continued reliance on foreign labour could therefore remain necessary during the transition. Rather than treating temporary labour migration and permanent settlement as the same phenomenon, one possible policy model would distinguish more sharply between them. Naturalisation rules currently differ substantially between EU member states and are determined principally under national law; there is no single EU rule under which every foreign worker automatically acquires citizenship after a fixed number of years. A more explicitly temporary labour framework could instead admit workers for defined periods in sectors experiencing shortages, while making clear that the labour permit itself does not constitute an automatic route to permanent residence or citizenship. Versions of temporary migration already exist in European law: the EU Seasonal Workers Directive, for example, provides for limited stays of between five and nine months within a twelve-month period, after which the worker normally leaves unless another lawful residence status has been granted.

Such a system could be used during the period in which automation, vocational reconstruction and demographic renewal have not yet reduced labour shortages sufficiently. If, over time, Europe’s domestic labour supply became capable of meeting a greater share of those needs, the scale of temporary recruitment could then be reduced or the system reconsidered altogether.

A durable civilisation cannot rest on individual rights alone. A society that focuses exclusively on rights lacks the institutions necessary to form people of skill, character, and responsibility; over time, this deficit is compensated for through bureaucracy, procedural control, and an expansive welfare state. Neo-guilds, understood as new institutional forms inspired by their predecessors but adapted to modern conditions, point toward a technological labour order that prioritises responsibility and mastery over entitlement, and continuity over fragmentation, through shared standards and vocation.

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