This introduction to Guillaume Faye’s newly translated The West as Decline presents “Amerika” not as a mere foreign power but as the diffuse Western system — centered in the U.S. yet embedded within EU institutions and local elites — that shapes Europe’s regimes, culture, and economy.
“Amerika is within us.” This warning, implicitly and explicitly raised by Giorgio Locchi, Faye himself, and many others, can be interpreted in various ways.
One sense, perhaps salutary but ultimately secondary and moralistic, calls for an individual “examination of conscience” regarding how much our personal lifestyles, tastes, language, consumption habits, and—most significantly—our mindset may remain conditioned and influenced in this sense, despite declared claims and choices aligned with identitarian principles.
However, a far more significant meaning of this warning lies in identifying, particularly in the EU zone, the dominant culture, power structures, mechanisms of societal functioning, and even the existing political regimes as integral and defining components of the Western system, of that Système à tuer les peuples (Copernic, 1981) [“System that kills peoples”] which Faye described and anticipated in his seminal essay of the same name.
In this sense, the reference to “foreign domination over our lands” is rhetorically legitimate, but only to the extent that—much like more traditional historical examples of the phenomenon—the ruling classes that locally administer them identify with supranational affiliations and interests. And. as a result, they tend to varying degrees to cease being part of the peoples inhabiting the region they govern, where they may have been born, and whose puppet-State passport they display.
Certainly, “Amerikans” represent a symbol, an exemplary embodiment, a useful polemical externalization of Western civilization. Wagner or Nietzsche used essentially confessional criteria to identify and denounce the tschandala, whose consideration is primarily useful as a warning and a point of comparison for those seeking to define and assert their own distinctiveness. When Giorgio Locchi and Alain de Benoist, in the essay Il était une fois l’Amerique, also known in Italian as Il male americano and in German as Die USA, Europas missratenes Kind, point to the disease afflicting us, they find in this definition a fitting synthesis of what, in the USA, constitutes the very “deep nature” of its pseudo-collective identity. Indeed, their description, along with the one provided in Faye’s pages that follow, of what Western civilization actually entails allows us to refer to the concept of the “American syndrome” without further elaboration on our part.
On a concrete, non-symbolic level, the USA remains the epicentre, the headquarters, the “registered office,” the economic-cultural crossroads of the Western system. Its armed forces, with an annual investment accounting for nearly half of global military spending, represent the primary military arm of this power system, coordinating the operational or deterrent deployment of locally recruited colonial troopers from “allied” states as needed. Their currency and related financial system form a fundamental pillar of the globalization process driven by the West in pursuit of its mondialist ambitions. Their government, although increasingly theatrical as elsewhere in the Western sphere in comparison to the real interplay between the “deep state” and economic and non-economic lobbies interfacing with it, still wields real executive power. It also installs and removes the System’s political proxies worldwide and is tasked with actively suppressing, as far as possible, the “deviations” that emerge internationally or in the domestic political landscapes of other countries.
Nevertheless, the mechanical identification by some “European patriots,” such as those of a liberal-conservative or Gaullist bent, of the United States as a “foreign power” that would simply pursue competitive national interests, or perhaps “imperial” interests—allegedly rooted in a naturalistic “geopolitical” reality—reflects a vision of history and international politics that was already caricatured, superficial, and unrealistic during the Belle Époque. This is particularly true in its complete ignorance of affiliations that are instead ethnocultural, ideological, class-based, broadly religious, regional, economic, in nature. Such ignorance, in turn, leads to a naive (or more often instrumental) confusion of territories, peoples, regimes, dominant classes, and ethnicities as if they were one and the same, reduced to a colored flag. A flag whose meaning is abstracted, in the logic of a Risiko board game, from who concretely wields it and the specific interests and ideas it may represent at any given time—despite the fact that changes in this regard often lead to the flag’s colors being altered or even replaced.
This fiction may have been “patriotically” useful in a certain period of European history, just as the symmetrical and equally abstract disregard for anything beyond class affiliation was useful to Marxist logic. But the current world renders this fiction unsustainable and, worse, gravely misleading, much like the “proletarian internationalism” of the First and Second Internationals was disproven by the developments leading to the First World War. This is all the more true for the USA and the broader power system that dominates its territory, as well as that of the EU zone, only in a more complete and direct manner than the territories that are dominated by the same system elsewhere.
From a European perspective, what is truly relevant at a more directly political level is the Western power over the continent and the long-standing conflict between it and Nietzsche’s and Drieu La Rochelle’s “good Europeans,” as well illustrated for recent history by Piero Sella in L’Occidente contro l’Europa (Edizioni dell’Uomo Libero, 1985). Simplifying and perhaps overgeneralizing deeply diverse phenomena and developments, one could argue that, since the Napoleonic Wars, the Western system itself was born precisely from the repeated clash between genuinely “imperial” political ambitions of various actors on European soil and essentially international power centres.
These power centres have consistently managed to exploit European fifth columns, often active within the actors themselves but especially represented by State entities usefully opposed to the affirmation of the respective projects. Since, outside of naively angelic visions, these projects inherently aim to assert at least a hegemonic tendency of those who embody them—sometimes even posing centralizing, homogenizing, anti-identitarian threats—these conflicts have regularly fed on real clashes of interest. Thus, nationalism, whether well or poorly understood, can certainly work against the abovementioned system of international interests; but, depending on historical contingencies, it can also work in its favor, whether it involves Russians and British against the French, French and British and Italians and Russians against the Central Empires, British, French, Americans, and Soviets against Germans, Hungarians, and Italians, Americans and the EU zone against Russians, and so forth.
However, the scenario that developed between the two world wars, and especially with the conclusion of the second, saw the geographical centre of gravity of the system—now on the path to full, unadulterated self-awareness—progressively align with the USA, as the entity best embodying the “political and ethnocultural zero state” of the Western system. Indeed, it is around the USA—especially after the end of the parenthesis represented by the coopetition with the Soviet Union and the rapid dismantling of various residual sovereignties in the non-aligned world that it enabled—that the “unipolar” world has gradually organized itself.
At the same time, this Americanocentrism has brought about a shift in perspective for the part of Europe most directly involved in the System’s mechanisms, making its current position more akin to that of Latin America, and rendering the colonial regime to which it is subjected more visible. This certainly allows it to better “visualize” an (external) centre of civilization and the powers that still dominate it, but it also facilitates the potential misunderstanding of viewing Europe’s current situation as mere traditional submission to a foreign power.
Outside the already mentioned Risiko logic, the current position of the “Western capital” does not correspond to some law of nature. The epicentre of the (then-emerging) Western system was once in Europe, particularly in London—and to a lesser extent, from at least 1870, in Paris. Of course, despite provocative suggestions made for the sake of paradox by some minor American liberals during Trump’s election, it is entirely fanciful to think that its headquarters could soon relocate back to our continent—perhaps to Brussels or Frankfurt. But even if that were to happen, it would resolve the issue of the “good Europeans” about as much as a Milanese dweller would have reason to rejoice if the mafia moved its centre of operations from Sicily to Lombardy’s capital. In fact, such an unlikely scenario appears all the more disastrous because, as Faye says, the West is an infection for the rest of the world—certainly widespread but, crucially, to varying degrees and in different ways, and recognizable in its forms of the “American party” and the “American way of life”. But for Europe, it is a cancer, a growth fundamentally different from its “authentic” sociocultural fabric, yet self-produced. Its “symbolic externalization” is therefore to be welcomed rather than regretted.
Compared to the unlikely and pernicious scenario of a shift in the opposite direction of its headquarters, a change that is actually underway with respect to Americanocentrism is rather a further delocalization and “virtualization” of what Faye had already described in the early 1980s as an essentially headless system. This System in fact increasingly operates through the dematerialization and globalization of communications, contacts, currencies, hierarchies, regulations, and data storage and processing sites. The physical location of decision-making circuit actors and the remnants of “national affiliation” that such locations might imply are becoming increasingly irrelevant. This creates an illusion of “decentralization” on one hand while rendering on the other nationality even less about participation in a political community and more a mere pretext for yet another faction, cartel, or lobby competing transversally to promote the influence and power of their top members.
This is, of course, exploited at the level of petty politics by the proxies and local entities of the same, unified power system for the sake of (very real) internal rivalries and competitions within the system itself. Naturally, the most treacherous, recalcitrant, and/or ambitious political vassals take the lead here, especially when they can claim at least vaguely rebellious or “reformist” stances relative to the USA or the Western mainstream, similar to how the Orléans party capitalized on discontent against the Bourbons while clearly being part of the same family, class, and political regime. The logic is no different when an association of investment banks—international in terms of shareholders, branches, clients, and culture but historically or coincidentally headquartered in France—solicits solidarity among its members, as well as from the public and politicians of the country in question, against the interests of competing banks based in Luxembourg or England.
In purely theoretical terms, the existence of real or apparent dialectical oppositions within the system’s structure could, as in the past, be exploited by entirely opposing forces—provided, however, that a different “pole,” rooted in genuinely conflicting values, existed first. In the meantime, the primary and effective function of the fervor actively stirred by specific components of the Western system—whether it be EU institutions against the US government, national governments against those institutions or each other, pro-Western parties against one another within individual countries, or industrial companies, cultural-financial-commercial cartels, churches, or competing criminal organizations—is always to preserve, consolidate, and mobilize support for the System as a whole.
The political and, above all, psychosocial phenomenon at play here is what Marx aptly described as “false consciousness.” This mechanism works particularly well when it is possible to “geographically visualize” the entity to be mobilized. It allows the Duke of Brittany, the head of the Trapani mafia clan, or the the Italian Prime Minister to suggest to their serfs, victims, or unfortunate citizens that the “enemy” and the source of their woes is not the feudal regime, the mafia, or the political class of the EU zone, but rather the Duchy of Burgundy, the Palermo mafia clan, or the “eternal Germany.” Similarly, a certain type of “Europeanism” is invoked both to achieve a degree of “autonomy” and “competition” vis-à-vis strictly US instances of the Western world and (naturally, to an even greater extent) to hysterically mobilize the System’s various local entities against resistances, cracks, oppositions, or deviations from unipolar discipline—or, in other words, against threats to the so-called “rule-based world order.” When, in fact, in varying degrees and ways, all these things against which Europeans are called to mobilize represent instead a useful element for those aspiring to emancipation, however possible, from this world order, regardless of their nature, causes, or objectives.
Thus, while this false consciousness typically cloaks itself in patriotic colors at all levels, this preaching is blatantly self-contradictory. For example, the Italian unification process saw Lombard and Venetian patriots act against the Lombardo-Venetian Kingdom, of which they were indisputably citizens, and which they technically betrayed in favor of different and hostile State entities opposing its interests, power, and sovereignty. These entities ended up attacking it, invading its territory, firing toward their homes and families, and fighting against “their” armed forces—meaning soldiers recruited from their own lands and those of the same State. This, of course, rarely led Milanese to entertain the absurd notion of considering themselves Franco-Piedmontese. Instead, depending on the case, it represented either the expression of a perceived shared belonging to one same community (albeit purely ideal at the time)—such as that which leads various inhabitants of the EU zone to sympathize with European forces currently opposed on the battlefield by Western chancelleries and their Ukrainian lackeys—or, simply, an expression of the primordial idea of “the enemy of my enemy” that might lead many to sympathize with attempts to assert sovereignty and identity by actors who may well be entirely foreign to their immediate ethnocultural and geopolitical sphere.
This latter attitude is highly “natural”, not only strategically but also emotionally and psychologically, finding historical echoes even in the Italian national anthem, whose Risorgimento text somewhat extemporaneously speaks of “Polish blood” destined, in the author’s hopes, to burn the heart of the Habsburg eagle, without any implication that Poles and Italians were compatriots or that there were no distinctions between their respective causes. Ultimately, this is an attitude invariably common to all national liberation movements history recalls, in Europe as in other parts of the world, including the Americas, and it seems unnecessary to dwell further on this point.
Conversely, today’s pseudo-patriotism of right-wingers calls for rallying around the banners of respective puppet States or the so-called European Union—which, as is obvious, barring unlikely future developments, is currently neither a union nor European, no more than Queen Victoria’s Indian Empire was an “Indian empire.” Something which mirrors the deprecated “Austrophiles” of yesteryear rallying for the Lombardo-Venetian flag or the Habsburg eagle, with remarkably similar arguments. Yet, curiously, not so long ago, the same circles—sometimes the same individuals—hoped for, invoked, and in some cases praised entirely opposite attitudes among populations within the Comecon/Warsaw Pact, the Soviet Union, and even Russia itself. They ridiculed attempts by their respective ruling classes to present themselves as defenders of their interests—and, accessorily, of universal ideals—and preached not only the opportunity but even the duty to work for enemy powers and sabotage the regimes in place in their respective countries, in pursuit of a “liberation” that, at least in the Russian case, could at best refer to the personal power of the Georgian Stalin, the Ukrainian Khrushchev, or the Ukrainian Brezhnev, to the obvious detriment of the power and sovereignty of their countries.
That said, sociology teaches us how easily, in a concentration camp, the kapo of Barrack 42—the friend of the guards who administers order in the barrack for their and his own benefit, while simultaneously being the immediate tyrant of his fellow prisoners—ends up being reinterpreted by the latter as their “representative” and “defender.” After all, isn’t he the one who ensures behaviors risking generalized sanctions by the guards are prevented, or who demands that the larger pieces of bread not be regularly reserved for “those bastards in Barrack 43”?
At the level of petty politics, this effect is traditionally exploited by many (formerly) separatist, autonomist, or localist, parties that, by compromising with the central power, are in turn entrusted by it with local politics, sometimes through real concessions of privileges, as in the case of Italian South Tyrol. This provides an electoral and harmless outlet for the desire for independence, even involving it in strengthening centralist, Westernist, “Europeanist” governments, and so forth. While the mafia-like pursuit of advantages for one’s electoral district or region by candidates for national parliaments is an unspoken understanding, communicated with winks and nudges, it is interesting how, in the propaganda of the most fanatically “Europeanist” parties and governments, the commitment to go to the EU Council or even its Parliament is explicitly not about supporting a vision for better pursuing “European” interests, but about negotiating, more effectively than rival party representatives, the maximum possible advantages for one’s country in a zero-sum game.
This reality is particularly highlighted, for example, by discussions regarding illegal immigrant landings in Italy. Beyond a certain threshold, the welcomed and encouraged importation of an industrial reserve army to better ensure the exploitation of locals turns into alarm over the loss of at least passive consent from those who see basic services and living conditions threatened. In this scenario, the slogan “The European Union must intervene!” does not, of course, refer to supporting Italy in countering the landings themselves—an action that would consist of a modest international police operation certainly within the reach of individual governments that send aircraft carriers to the other side of the world to prevent far more aggressive landings in… Taiwan. Instead, it refers to the idea that, within the framework of Western geopolitical and ideological interests, the “Europeanist” politician is simply tasked with offloading and transferring as much as possible the negative consequences of the ongoing uncontrolled invasion onto other EU citizens who are not part of the electorate they claim to “fight” for.
On a different scale, the same psychological effect occurs to some extent at the EU level, and in the narrative of its institutions regarding relations with the USA, especially when the latter’s government—which in this case does not answer to an… American ambassador—must at least secondarily take into account its country’s specific interests, much like Israel does even over the interests of Jewish communities and lobbies globally.
In this regard, at an invitation-only conference organized in Milan in 2018 against the then-prominent “Euroskepticism” in public debate, Antonio Padoa Schioppa, in the presence of the author, brilliantly emphasized—even more clearly than Faye and from the opposite perspective—how the real challenge of “Europeanism” today concerns in fact the global affirmation of Western civilization. In contrast to the residual “nationalism” of at least the political and institutional entities of the United States or, for example, the United Kingdom, the European Union already represents a radical overcoming not only of the sovereignty of its member states but, above all, of the temptation to position itself as a sovereign entity—i.e., as a bearer of interests distinct from those of the civilization in question and the underlying power system (economic, cultural, bureaucratic, etc.).
This is of course due, on one hand, to cultural factors (the very founders of postwar “democratic Europeanism” were all fanatical internationalists and globalists) and, on the other, to complex and peculiar mechanisms that today almost completely insulate EU institutions from the moods of their subjects: from the unprecedented autonomy of the ECB compared to any other central bank, to the ability of any small State to veto potentially dangerous “decisionist tendencies”, or conversely, the EU Commission’ and Court’s blackmail and conditioning of the already limited residual electoral self-determination of individual countries.
Yet, this “perfect,” “model student” identification of the EU zone with the Western system, its values, and its “loyalty to the line,” which reaches particular paroxysms in German society and its political system, is leveraged by its politicians (also) as an attempt to carve out a more “independent” role within that context compared to the USA or the international institutions more closely controlled by them, such as NATO. In many cases, this role ends up aligning with that of the fanatical zealot compared to regimes made more sensitive to Realpolitik considerations by the need to ensure, even if secondarily, a rather consensual and painless local self-perpetuation—and thus, to some extent, meet the specific needs of inhabitants, territories, businesses, etc., located within their jurisdiction. As a matter of fact, mere colonial commissioners—even in an era where colonization is no longer attributable to a specific foreign power but to a diffuse international one—evidently have no such need, but rather only the obligation to protect the interests, ideas, and power of those they serve.
In any case, the hoped-for expansion of the EU zone’s role by local politicians and opinion leaders is, for the most part, not a point of friction but entirely convergent with the general dynamics of the Western system, the “national” interests of the USA, and the explicit desires of American governments. This situation is particularly evident with regard to defense issues, where the hoped-for “Rearmament” of European NATO countries simply corresponds to a greater offloading of the enormous costs involved onto the peripheral economies of the system. A typical case here is the purchase, or even joint development, of weapon systems that are unusable and unnecessary outside the strategic framework aimed at countering “rogue States” in current or potential conflict with the West, but especially in a Third World War scenario—where the EU zone would serve as the West’s expendable front line, as Western Europe did during the Cold War.
It is obvious, for example, that the latest-generation fighter-bombers sold to us are as useful as a cannon against malaria mosquitoes for countering, say, the invasion by dinghies that concretely threatens southern Europe; or, even more so, for patrolling streets in order to mitigate the social consequences of said invasion.
But above all, all those systems typically unusable for a liberation struggle in the countries concerned. Not only because European armed forces, even if improbably repurposed for such a goal, do not control the indispensable logistics, and because plausible urban legends suggest their firmware would prevent attacking targets tagged as “allies” by the relevant Friend or Foe Identification System; but above all because, even with external support, such a struggle could only take the form of asymmetric warfare. The case of Saddam Hussein’s famous air force, with “penultimate” generation aircraft costing hundreds of millions of dollars, is instructive: quite reasonably, it never took off in the face of being entirely wiped out in the first fifteen minutes without hitting a single target, thus playing exactly zero role in defending the country from American aggression, compared to the famous IEDs (“improvised explosive devices,” essentially pressure cookers filled with gunpowder), which proved incomparably more useful for a cost eight or nine orders of magnitude lower.
This also highlights the limitations of the type of “anti-American” Europeanism, based on an “us vs. them” dichotomy that is by the way purely (and fancifully) “competitive”, not antagonistic, and remains trapped in the aforementioned fantasy of colored flags.
Yes, the inhabitants and businesses of the USA enjoy (to a certain extent) the privileges traditionally associated with the position of metropolitan subjects compared to colonial ones. Yes, a proportionally larger fraction of them are more directly involved in the decision-making mechanisms affecting their lives and the system’s general direction—mechanisms that, for them too, are all the more tyrannical precisely because they are diffuse and inescapable, as in the case of a company director who, like in Europe, “chooses” to exploit immigrant labor, where a different choice for a small-to-medium family-owned business would simply lead to its replacement by competitors who do, or, in the case of a publicly traded company, to the director’s replacement by shareholders, following an easy Stock Exchange takeover. But it is easy to see that if the US regime primarily represents Western interests and ideas, and secondarily pursues its own interests within that framework, only as a distant third, and only the instrumental reasons highlighted concerns itself with maintaining and spreading specific advantages for the population and territory it formally governs, as opposed to those it dominates indirectly.
In this sense, it seems truly grotesque to consider as (part of) the Main Enemy of the “good Europeans” the blue-collar worker of Irish descent ruined by federal policies, the Native American confined to a reservation, the redneck rebel with his admittedly aberrant cultural references, or even the more or less imaginary “African” who moves directly from desperate underclass to long-term prison population. Barring their own, often even more severe and irreparable, false consciousness, these are, if anything, its first victims.
Symmetrically, it is equally grotesque to consider figures like Mario Monti, Emmanuel Macron, or Mario Draghi—part of the innermost circles of the Western oligarchy, if only as its officers—as representatives or champions of some identity or sovereignty of their respective countries of origin, by virtue of their passports or (occasional) local roles. See, for instance, the incredible quip by the Italian prime minister at the time of writing, who, referring to Draghi’s latest European role, expressed confidence in his propensity to have a “special regard” for “Italian interests” over those of other member states—a stance that would, among other things, constitute a blatant betrayal of the impartiality required by his mandate.
Conversely, the power, extent, wealth, and relative political stability of the USA mean that—beyond the local lunatic fringe, and more interestingly—it hosts refined and iconoclastic post-humanist intellectuals, cutting-edge researchers, less aligned analysts, Promethean and politically incorrect tycoons in the mold of Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, relatively independent journalists or bloggers, and visionary novelists and filmmakers.
Still protected to some extent, depending on the case, by tenure, by the First Amendment, by a few billion dollars, or by commercial success, these individuals often display a degree of mental or at least practical conditioning significantly lower than that found in the “periphery” represented by the EU zone. And there is no reason not to consider, alongside the Chinese scholar reflecting on Confucian tradition, the American scholars highlighting Heidegger’s legacy as opposed to their German colleagues delving into the depths of Woody Allen’s thought. Especially since, within the Western sphere, if one wants access today to critical analyses of the dominant narrative—for example, on the Ukraine crisis or the internal dynamics of less-aligned countries—they are far more readily found in English than in Italian, French, or German. Actually US circles immersed in the local melting pot but mindful of their roots invited the “anti-American” Guillaume Faye, in the final phase of his life, to speak or teach more often than the far more politically correct, albeit sometimes ostensibly “rebellious,” France ever did.
The categories of the political, as identified by Carl Schmitt in his renowned work The Concept of the Political, famously consist of the dyad of amicus and hostis. These are ideal categories, whose concrete identification certainly allows for debate, gray areas, conversions, and realignments, but which inevitably define dividing lines. Moreover, in this conception, the truly fundamental distinction is between hostis and inimicus. The latter is the rival, the competitor, the philosophical, personal, electoral, or legal adversary, while the former is, above all, the (potentially) belligerent adversary. After all, paraphrasing Carl von Clausewitz’s famous dictum, politics (in the strong sense) is but the continuation of war by other means. This second type of adversary may certainly be external to the society in question. But insofar as someone truly considers themselves politically opposed, for example, to those governing their area, the hostis becomes an internal enemy.
By “internal enemy,” as already hinted, we do not refer—at least not primarily—to a metaphorical inner enemy, along the lines of the Islamic distinction between the “lesser Jihad” and the “greater Jihad” that a good Muslim is called to wage within their individual soul, as in expressions like “kill the Westerner within you.” Instead, we refer to the utterly prosaic reality of the existing regime and the power centres (bureaucratic, institutional, economic, military, cultural, etc.) that sustain it, which in our case constitute the immediate, direct, tangible expression of the Western civilization that its adversaries face, the one that concretely oppresses them, and the one they inevitably find themselves fighting against.
In this sense, much of the basic anti-Americanism and, more broadly, of the national, regional, or Europeanist “souverainism” active in the EU zone today tends to invert the terms of the problem. Revolutionaries of every era and stripe have never opposed the local regime because it was “friendly to the foreigner,” but rather were hostile to the foreigner—specifically, to that foreigner—who supported, guaranteed, and defended the power of the local regime they politically opposed. Thus, “liberation,” even if only partial, even for a moment, even based on a repugnant platform, even of a single square meter of territory, from the power of the regime itself—be it the colonial superstructure represented by the EU or that of individual member States—tends to represent a value in itself for an opponent, as it at least unconsciously recalls a collective impulse toward asserting some form of rebellion and popular sovereignty in opposition to it, from Brexit to the unfortunate Catalan secession attempt, in anticipation and pursuit of its complete overthrow.
History, at least until we definitively exit it, takes the paths it chooses—and in European history, we have at least one case, precisely that of Russia, where local tax collectors and praetorians of a foreign power effectively became the architects of independence for the zone entrusted to them. But—while any positive development, no matter how unlikely, remains welcome if and when it occurs—the apparent “maximalism” of this observation is simply rooted in realism. The same realism against which the “utopian moderation” of the Marquis de La Fayette futilely collided, out of its hope to make a revolution with Louis XVI and the consent of the high clergy and aristocracy. Or the even worse moderation and false “common sense” of Vincenzo Gioberti, repellent in its ideological undertones and ridiculous in its aspiration to see the rulers of pre-unification Italian states not be overthrown and defeated along with the structures they served, as indeed happened, but “convert” and spontaneously form, in direct contrast to the ideas and interests they represented, an “Italian confederation,” presided over by the pope (!), to liberate (from themselves?) and unify their collective territory, because “after all, no one but them could ever do it.”
Within the framework of the false consciousness promoted among European peoples, an even more widespread psycho-ideological process remains the social-scale affirmation of Stockholm syndrome, which, as is well known, leads the kidnapped to consider themselves “on the same side” as their captors (based on the rationalization that the captors are, after all, the ones who feed and keep them alive and oppose the risks inherent in liberation attempts, ransom blockades, investigations, etc., which also involve them). Thus, it directly leads the defeated to become praetorians of the victors, the occupied to identify with the occupier, the exploited to sympathize with the exploiter, and persecuted, prosecuted, beaten, or imprisoned ideological minorities to support at least in principle the legitimacy of the repressive system that targets them.
In this regard, Western cultural power, administered today in an increasingly stringent and pervasive manner, especially in the EU zone, but still exerting capillary influence even in the relatively less subjugated areas of the continent, is crucial. It is functional to the affirmation of the Nouvelle société de consommation (again defined and described by Faye in the essay of the same name, Le Labyrinthe, 1984), i.e., the reincarnation of consumerism in a pauperist, epimethean, securitarian, Luddite, and scarcity-based society, founded on the shift to “symbolic consumption” and soft status symbols, occurring simultaneously with the widening gap between the one-percent oligarchy and the mass of the population. This shift is necessary for the global consolidation of a Westernized Brave New World, where the social chasm and polarization created by existing economic mechanisms, also functional to the destruction of residual community ties compared to class-based ones, correspond to a leveling of living standards and relative prosperity across various regions. A change that is made inevitable by the deindustrialization and monocultural “specialization” of areas previously corresponding to “developed” and privileged countries within the framework of a globalist reorganization of the planet’s economy.
In this sense, this profound process of ideological transformation, which Faye’s vision foreshadows in this volume at its earliest signs and decades in advance—the text translated here dates back to 1984 (!)—fulfills an additional function: channeling internal frustrations and conflicts into “forward escapes” represented by more extremist versions of the central themes of the Western narrative.
These range from the renewed push for the universal affirmation of the religion of Human Rights (as discussed in my book Human Rights. Genealogy of a Moral, Moira 2022) against residual local sovereignties, to the fight against Global Warming through (pretended or real) emission reductions, to the promotion of individualist freedom to “come and go” by freely emigrating to the area of one’s interest, to attempts at economic strangulation of less-aligned countries through grassroots actions aimed at obtaining “spontaneous” and moralistic boycotts of those countries by international conglomerates, to the “reinforced restoration” (in the name of combating hate speech, fake news, denialisms, enemy propaganda, etc.) of control over information, which had been partially disrupted by the Internet, through the creation of barriers to the circulation of content from the “relative exterior” of the Western narrative, both in an international and ideological sense.
In this regard, wokeism itself, like the earlier no-global movement, represents a redirection of frustration and contestation toward the essence of the Western civilization into frustration and contestation aimed instead at persistent “imperfections” relative to its underlying aspirations. Wokeism has absolutely nothing really anti-Western about it. Far from wanting to cancel “Western culture,” it is impatient to achieve the erasure of what remains European, all too European —sometimes admittedly in a repugnant form—in the overall legacy of contemporary civilization, and in the processes, periods, figures, and forces that enabled its affirmation. Unsurprisingly, there is no trace of woke currents outside the most directly Westernized space; and its supporters in no way promote or defend the political, religious, social, ethnic, legal, or customary self-determination of the peoples their ancestors are reproached for having “colonized,” thus making a mockery of the very concept of “identity politics” as promoted by this milieu (where the term identity primarily refers to neo-tribal identities like feminist or gender-based ones, those based on sexual or dietary habits, or those constructed around specific forms of disability or deviance, etc.).
For the EU zone, some of these “progressive” pressures place those who resist them, at least to some extent, in an ambiguous position of “conflict of interest” with the reasonable and obvious aspirations of the “global South,” “developing countries,” the “Third World,” or simply Africa or China, to oppose one-worldist expropriation, colonization, alienation, and exploitation. This undermines as much as possible any form of popular anti-Western and anti-oligarchic solidarity of the kind considered by Alain de Benoist, even before the fall of the Soviet bloc, in Europe, Third World, Same Struggle (Laffont, 1985).
The imposition of globalist mechanisms by the WTO, the USA, and naturally the EU certainly prevents Europeans from growing coffee or producing microchips at home; but the understandable reluctance to pay an increasing, perhaps “fair and equitable,” price to those who produce them is essentially redirected toward the idea that the solution is not to secure the means for one’s own prosperity and economic independence, but to try to maintain international exploitation situations from which, until recently, some indirect benefits could still be derived—or even to intensify them, insofar as, producing nothing locally anymore, there is nothing, apart from loans or financial products whose profits are intercepted by very few people, to offer in exchange.
Yet, the tetanic stiffening of Western civilization is not only an effect, but also a cause of its increasingly evident, perhaps ineradicable, fragility. More than thirty years after Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man (Free Press, 1992), the potential for a regeneration of history—and particularly of the history of European peoples, culture, lineages, and spirit—identified by Faye remains just that: potential. But it remains there. Meanwhile, the final affirmation of the Kingdom of the Last Man remains… elusive, if not increasingly distant.
Let’s be clear: illusions create, beyond dangerous misunderstandings, disappointment. Disappointment leads to demobilization. Demobilization facilitates the perpetuation and worsening of the status quo.
Illusions primarily consist in the idea that in Europe, Western civilization and its power system can be promptly and definitively eradicated through some miraculous chemotherapy cycle or the intervention of an external “surgeon”; and that, in all its metastases, it is incapable of opposing any counteraction with a “resilience” that manifests in a series of automatic legal and economic reactions, but also in endless contingency plans and rebalancing processes useful not only for overcoming but, as far as possible, even exploiting the “crises” that arise and the opportunities they may present.
Even worse illusions are created by approaches that focus on the system’s most theatrical aspects. This category includes, for example, the idea that to implement a true change, it would enough to gain control of a given country’s government; or to “self-organize” and “get rich” to acquire formal control of a given company; or to “convert” (or… eliminate), as in the fantasies of pre-Marxist utopian and moralistic socialism, significant figures of the existing oligarchy, as if they were its helmsmen and responsible parties rather than mere, easily replaceable managers and cogs.
A particular version of the illusion of a “conversion” or “change of sense” in the devices of Western domination over our lands and peoples lies, as we have seen, in the rather absurd idea that such a conversion could spontaneously arise from their “competitive strengthening” within that system—a strengthening that at this point should become the primary, if not exclusive, goal of identitarians, independentists, national-revolutionaries, and patriots. It is almost as if more enthusiastic support from the population for the mayor of Milan—a role currently occupied, as of this writing, by a typical exponent of turbo-Westernist and globalist extremism—could ever make him more inclined to proclaim the metropolis a city-state. This form of wishful thinking marks a regression and renunciation compared to more radical—but, as seen, more realistic—aspirations, along lines bizarrely parallel to those of the Western post- and ex-Marxist left. The substantial difference is that the latter’s conclusions represent an actual realization of where it stands; whereas, in our case, they reflect a recurring form of alienation and surrender. But we have already discussed this, and we will not dwell further on it.
Finally, a traditional difficulty for revolutionary movements, which applies even more radically to overcoming the Western status quo, lies in the limited quality and integrity of available human resources, at a human, intellectual, social, moral, cultural, etc., level. As Pareto says, “in a society of thieves, the best thief is king,” but it is conversely also true that in such a society, those who are the best tend, at least statistically, to pursue the relevant career.
There is nothing strange about this. Every society selects its cadres based on its values, making adherence to them an attractive choice for the most capable and ambitious within it—although, in our case, the increasingly limited social mobility in contemporary European societies represents, from this perspective, an advantage and partial counterbalance. Christians and Jacobins, Bolsheviks and fascists, independentists, restorationists, fundamentalists, partisans, secessionists, etc., certainly did not have access, at the start of their trajectories, to the crème de la crème of the societies in which they operated. This remains the case irrespectively of the positions they championed, which likely attracted an initially disproportionate share of lunatics, sociopaths, mercenaries, or simply frustrated mediocrities seeking redemption. Yet, this problem did not prevent many from ultimately succeeding; but it explains the “miraculous” aura that always surrounds successful revolutions, though historians, influenced by hindsight, often present them as inevitable.
Given the limitations of the human material with which any aspiration for change must work, in spite of Western petty politics often openly committed to projects and positions that media, opinion leaders, parties, cultural industries, etc., struggle to build consensus for even among the highly alienated EU zone public, maintaining a legalistic and “democratic” facade becomes all too easy.
This is particularly true because, for the reasons mentioned, processes of obscuring, ridiculing, excluding, demonizing, marginalizing, infiltrating, blackmailing, corrupting, dividing, co-opting, isolating, incriminating, betraying, recovering, and instrumentalizing typically achieve the desired results with populist leaders and circles of various stripes. Thus, these processes sterilize and ultimately compromise the success that, in many cases, they had not struggled too much to achieve—but a success often prepared by decades of obscure and patient metapolitical work. Indeed, this approach is, in the EU zone at least, generally even more effective than the more “expedient” methods that Western powers increasingly resort to when necessary, from coups to “independent” and “spontaneous” snipers.
Similarly, in the international arena, not only do Western power centres easily exploit very real historical, geopolitical, ethnic, and economic conflicts to their advantage, but the countries or armed movements least favored by the Western narrative are invariably plagued by the shortsightedness, compromise, cowardice, corruption, and above all cultural subservience of large segments of their respective leaders. Thus, in their frustration, irritation, or resentment over the marginalization and interference they face in their relations with mondialist power, they struggle to imagine “solutions” beyond attempting to successfully raise the price of their potential surrender or collaboration.
Nevertheless, whatever the weaknesses, difficulties, and lack of vision of the oppositions that continue to emerge everywhere—oppositions that are, predictably, relative, contingent, and confused—what we have been able to count on in recent years is precisely the system’s propensity to generate ever more immune responses. It keeps “in line,” on the path of shared hostility toward it, governments, peoples, ethno-religious groups, ruling classes, geographical areas, and cultural movements that otherwise might have preferred to pursue their internal or regional rivalries, continue betraying their potential destiny, and settle any disputes with Western officialdom and its internationalist rhetoric with a toast. In this sense, the very invasiveness and arrogance of the West have recently worked miracles in muting age-old rivalries, creating at least temporary convergences between radically different ideological and religious worlds, restoring lines of dialogue between mutually hostile regimes, and abolishing decades-long political-economic-military isolations maintained with the active collaboration of countries that were themselves not exactly above reproach, or subject to similar measures.
Accordingly, the epochal changes and realignments accompanying the Ukraine crisis and the parallel escalation of competitive issues between the USA and China have already generated relatively rapid political consequences, are more gradually causing significant economic impacts, and in the long term certainly do not facilitate the sociocultural homogenization of the planet or the hoped-for globalization of Western civilization. This homogenization and globalization are now possibly, though by no means not inevitably, facing a welcome setback in favor of projects rooted in the shared identities of popular communities, capable of mobilizing and expressing, albeit agonistically among themselves, their specificities and collective resources. It is true that the recovery of “traditions” in the Western world (available transversally across its entirety, from Korean waiters dressed as gondoliers to Italian children who feel American on Halloween because they correctly pronounce “trick or treat”) still easily takes on the character of exploiting completely sterilized folklore. Nevertheless, identitarianism, often of a forward-looking and futuristic nature, is already becoming, in many instances, a political and communal cement challenging the myths and fashions conveyed by Western lifestyles and cultural industry.
In this framework, it seems auspicious that an area like Russia—somewhat reluctantly, and after representing, between 1990 and 2014, one of the most advanced examples of civil destructuring, ethnocide, and Western integration—is at the forefront, making once more our continent and local actors a crucial theater for Western ambitions but also for what hinders their ultimate affirmation, and triggering at least a minimal initial reappropriation of local resources in the Russian Federation, and enabling the “disalignment,” to varying degrees, of Belarus, Serbia, Georgia, Transnistria, Hungary, Slovakia, and various circles and minorities in other countries.
Roger Keeran aptly illustrates in Socialism Betrayed: Behind the Collapse of the Soviet Union (iUniverse, 2010) how the suicide of the Soviet Union, and by extension its bloc, while possibly triggered by this or that crisis or the chaotic amplification of contingent events, fundamentally stems from ideological involutions, specifically in a Western and “liberal” direction, already present in the Khrushchev era and to which it was vulnerable due to the problematic legacy of its official ideology. In the collapse of the corresponding political entity and alliance system, the Russian core itself was rapidly transformed into the Latin American variant of Western societies once called a “banana republic”: economically globalist and mafia-capitalist, and based on an underpaid monoculture (with hydrocarbons replacing tropical fruit); internationally directly dependent on Washington; in its internal constitutional working anarcho-authoritarian in a liberal-democratic guise; and socially oligarchic to the brutal benefit of a class partially admitted to Western power centres and acting as their representative and guarantor in the country.
Today, however upleasant they may understandably be for the most directly affected populations—and for those elsewhere who see it used as an alibi for their increasing proletarianization—the ongoing war and the accompanying Western sanctions are fostering a potential process of political, economic (“war is always socialist”), and, to a lesser extent, sociocultural metamorphosis. This process is far more radical and rapid than what the current Russian ruling class—yet a product of the Gorbachev and Yeltsin eras—would ever have had the political strength to impose, even if it had ever intended to. And as American analyst Gilbert Doctorow explains in the blog post Wars Make Nations, this process remains open to the prospect of a national and social revolution.
At the moment, this position does not go much beyond the perspective of a regional power primarily concerned with its specific “irredentist lands,” and Russia largely lacks, compared to the past history of the continent, the kind of “vision” that led Prussia or Piedmont to engage in the unification and liberation of more limited areas starting in the mid-19th century. But nothing prevents us from trusting in the ability of Western chancelleries, and media, stances to fuel reflections and political turns that might undermine even this persistent and residual provincialism. In the meantime, these stances, as mentioned in my essay Intelligent Artificialities: Who Is Afraid of the Big, Bad AI – and Why (Moira, 2023), have, among other things, led to the only announcement so far of a publicly accessible European AI platform, which would have been unthinkable in the pre-crisis Russian Federation, in favor of those by Microsoft/Open AI and Google.
For countries such as Italy or Germany, on the other hand, we unfortunately continue to suffer the consequences of the saying that the fruit rots from the core. While resistances, as always, remain more pronounced in borderlands, the geographical and cultural centrality of Mitteleuropa relative to this space makes the Westernist alienation of its inhabitants and the Western grip on its territories, from north to south, more pronounced than ever. This naturally includes the Italian Republic, which, besides being particularly targeted by massive population relocations, economic pressures, and international interferences, has recently seen the successful suppression of the timid, almost unprecedented since the end of World War II, emergence of a populist transversalism beyond the hemiplegic right-left divide with the so-called, ephemeral “yellow-green majority”. Such populist transversalism is, however, the inevitable prerequisite for attempts to translate identitarian, communitarian, and souverainist positions into political plaforms—hence the need to tirelessly recreate its cultural, ideal, and metapolitical foundations, to which this volume seeks to contribute, however modestly.
The new ideological and international fracture of the unipolar world, daily propagated and represented above all by Western cultural agencies and their local megaphones, often far beyond reality, nonetheless reopens, here as across the continent, the possibility of choice in which historical freedom ultimately consists.
A historical freedom that, if we so choose, could—with the contribution of all Europeans of goodwill and in line with the maxim that what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger—enable us to close a cycle that began in Europe and, once and for all, put an end to Western domination of our lands.
Purchase Guillaume Faye’s The West as Decline
