by Guillaume Faye

Apr 18, 2024

∙ Paid

Guillaume Faye argues that the marginalisation of German and Greek cultures in modern Europe represents a systematic assault on the continent’s historical identity and intellectual heritage.

This is the fourth part of Guillaume Faye’s essay ‘The New Ideological Challenges’, published in 1988. Also read parts one, two, three, and four.

In contemporary Europe, Germany epitomises displacement from heritage, systematic deculturalisation, and betrayal of origins. Germany, divided by both Yalta accomplices, served as a laboratory for amnesia, symbolising the joint attempt by Soviet Russia and the American West to erase European identity. The homeland of Goethe, Mozart, and Hölderlin has become a figure of European cultural martyrdom, the site where the deliberate and programmed destruction of cultural and national identity proved most effective. Consequently, Germany may give rise to the strongest resistance against this identity uprooting — a movement that could potentially become a popular movement, influencing the rest of Europe, even though this movement historically originated from the French and Italian intellectual elites of the ‘New Right’. The threat to Europeans is the loss of cultural identity and attempts to strip them of their origins — especially their ‘Greek’, ‘Homeric’ origins — posing the greatest danger of erasing us from history, committing an ultimate ethnocide with more terrifying efficacy than political-military neutralisation or economic colonisation, which we have also suffered.

In his Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger states that a people enters history with the poetry that establishes its logos and its language and simultaneously establishes it as a people. And we Europeans, he further declares, began to exist as such with the pre-Socratic and Homeric poets or philosophers. But what is happening today? What significance does the cultural war being waged on Europe have, if not the attempt to replace Parmenides, Heraclitus, and Homer with the Bible and the prophets in our memory?

Germany and German culture are naturally subject to the fiercest attacks as they are the most ‘Greek’, belonging to the metaphysical people, the philosophically ‘guarding’ people of Europe, the geopolitical people of the middle.

To sink German culture, its philosophers and, above all, its poets into the vast tepid ocean of Western civilisation (i.e., the mishmash that has been formed in the USA over the last hundred years) is the guarantee that Germans and other Europeans will no longer emotionally refer to their heritage, that their memory will no longer root in their heritage but in the gum-chewing culture of American cowboys, rockers, pastors, or truckers. Germans and Europeans will cease to exist when they have convinced themselves that they are the sons of ‘humanity’ and that their culture stems as much from Hollywood and Milton Friedman as from Parmenides or Hölderlin.

According to Bernard-Henry Lévy, Jacques Attali, advisor to President Mitterrand, lectured that ‘there is no European identity’. The persistence with which some circles suppress any affirmation of a specific culture and anthropology appears as a recent socio-political phenomenon of particular significance. They say Europe does not exist; Europe is just the ‘B-zone’ of the West. Europe has never existed; it is merely the product of crossings, of melting pots. Emphasising the deceptive fact that Europe has always been cosmopolitan and never found its specificity aims, of course, to present the current destruction of our identity through cosmopolitanism as a normal and positive continuation of what has always been. The ‘identity war’ thus dominates our turn of the century. It is a cultural, political, geopolitical, anthropological, and, above all, ideological war. For or against identity? That is the ‘big’ question that animates all ideological debates today, explicitly or not. Since the French ‘New Right’ demanded the ‘right to difference’, this theme has become a focal point of new groupings and debates. Those opposing the identity of peoples, the advocates of cosmopolitanism who are also the heirs of individualism, liberalism, and so-called ‘human rights’, have tried quite cleverly to neutralise it from within. How? By interpreting it as a right to individual difference.

From the perspective of an identity ideology of rootedness, such a distorted view of ‘difference’ can lead to nothing. The doctrine of individual difference, championed among others by geneticist Albert Jacquard, underlies societies that are nothing more than mosaics and tribalised additions of ghettos and aligns precisely with the currently aggressive occidentalist-American ideology. The right to difference must be understood in terms of a common difference. The ‘right to difference’ is primarily the right to belonging — belonging to a community of people.

(translated by Constantin von Hoffmeister)