Not Our Catastrophe

Already before the turn of the last century, one of the leading thinkers of the contemporary Right, Guillaume Faye, predicted what he called a ‘convergence of catastrophes’ in the early part of this millennium. In his Archeofuturism, Faye enunciates his idea as follows:ⁱ

Many civilisations have disappeared in the past, but these were disasters that only affected certain areas of the Earth, not the whole of humanity. Today, for the first time in history, a world civilisation — the global extension of Western civilisation — is threatened by converging lines of catastrophe produced by the implementation of its ideological plans.

These ‘converging lines of catastrophe’, according to Faye, would lead to a radical restructuring of the world’s political and social organization, and potentially open new possibilities to human societies which at present seem naught more than mere pipe dreams.

Faye himself distinguishes between various kinds of catastrophe: broadly speaking, we might categorize them as the economic, the socio-political and the environmental (Faye includes also religious and geopolitical catastrophes in his own taxonomy; I subsume these both under the broader heading of socio-political). As examples of each: An economic break, such as occurred in 2007 and yet more spectacularly in 1929, might produce, given the present level of global economic interdependence, dire ramifications for the societies and the governments of the entire globe. On the socio-political plane, the increasing numbers of terrorist attacks in Europe and the demographic changes being wrought on the countries of all the West (with but pathetic few exceptions), could lead to widespread social decay, the fragmentation of the standing political order, and even civil or religious wars; or again, there are only so many times our governments can shatter the ‘debt ceiling’ before they find themselves floundering in the airless pockets of space, or plummeting into a default which might well be, in the case of the larger countries like the USA, globally devastating far beyond the feverish arenas of Wall Street. On the environmental level, possibilities include droughts, famines and diseases (such as will be, according to some, the nigh inevitable results of global warming), but also volcanoes, earthquakes, asteroids or somewhat more localized catastrophes, such as typhoons, hurricanes etc. etc.

It is difficult to avoid the sense that Faye foresees the coming of such disasters with a certain relish. There is no malice in this, but rather the longing of a warrior spirit for hardier and more violently vital times. There is also another element to his expectation which is somewhat more widespread among present-day nationalists or ethno-nationalists: namely, the realization that things have come to such a head in our day, and the powers against us are so ubiquitous and so firmly entrenched in the seats of political and economic control, that a catastrophe of global proportions might well be the only way of shaking them loose. More importantly, it might be the one remaining way of awakening our people to the urgency of their predicament: as Faye puts it, ‘When forced with their backs against the wall, human societies always react.’

To ignore the possibility of a catastrophe such as those which Faye indicates would be irresponsible of us in the highest degree; for Faye is absolutely right that all the signs point to the coming of at least a single disaster of this order within the century we are presently living, if not to a convergence of several. Nonetheless, the opposite tendency must be as strenuously exorcized: namely, the complacent expectancy of such an event, the resigned awaiting of some deus ex machina which shall descend of its own will to wreak havoc on the organization of our enemies and thereby to provide us a route of entry into the rubbled halls of power.

I am convinced that Faye intends his convergence of catastrophes to be the very opposite of a doctrine of complacency; it is meant as a vivifying, regulating idea, one which forces us into awareness of the radical contingency and unpredictability of the future. To the extent that we take it as such, it can do us nothing but good. At the same time, we cannot permit Faye’s idea to transform, quite against his will, into an excuse for stagnation and immobility. For the first danger to this idea is that it appears to preclude the feasibility of any present action, apart from action in the sense of generic preparations for some ill-defined and unforeseeable future event. It is alas all too easy to take it as a pretext for doing nothing. For truly, if it will require nothing less than a global catastrophe to startle our people from their slumber, what good could it possibly do for us to go about scratching at the granite borders of their complacency with essays or protests?

Two points must be considered here — two reasons that not mere waiting, but conscious and deliberate action, is absolutely incumbent upon us in the present moment.

In the first place, even supposing that the strength of our adversaries is such that we really are reduced to nothing more than expectancy and dubious hope in a coming catastrophe (I will dispute this in what follows), it is equally clear that a disaster of this magnitude can result in nothing but chaos. But then, even to confront such a whirlwind—to say nothing of riding it—we must be prepared, both in a personal and in an organizational sense. We must have in place such associations, such Männerbunden, that, even should the sky fall on us, we can support its weight. This becomes a matter of ever more pressing urgency; the efforts which have been made in this direction are to be thoroughly commended, but we must work always under the standing presupposition that whatever we have done, is not enough. For no man can measure the dire potential of the future, and it is a matter of wisdom, in uneven and fragile times like ours, to expect and prepare for the worst. Toward this end, initiatives like those we see in the Italian CasaPound are much to be lauded; these hardly limit themselves to ‘political’ agitation, but attempt to prepare human beings for a new way of living.ⁱⁱ

There is another and more fundamental problem, however, with this kind of philocatastrophism: It seems to presuppose that we are the only ones capable of clearly seeing the possible emergence of catastrophe. Faye indicates as much when he suggests that most of these catastrophes have been made possible precisely by modern ideology and its heedless progressivism. All contemporary liberal observers of our situation are therefore evidently blinded by their meliorism or ingenuity, and simply cannot perceive the possibility that this great Modern ship of progress we have launched might break upon any number of hidden reefs. This would put us at a great advantage, for in our realism and our clear-sighted view of the true impossibility and inner contradictions of ‘liberalism’, we could prepare ourselves for its breakdown, which will be nothing but surprising to most of those who still dwell contentedly within its borders.

But although we are the last to deny that a great many progressives in our day, including politicians, intellectuals and men of high station, do indeed suffer from such blindness, even to a criminal degree, there is yet another and far more dangerous category of men who have their eyes very open indeed. I am speaking of the globalists, the Atlanticists, the New World Orderers, or however we would like to call them — in short, the men who are pulling the invisible strings which make our politicasters dance. Whatever we are in a position to see, they are yet moreso. They are, moreover, in a much more favourable position than we to extract profit from any kind of grand economic or social or environmental upheaval.

Worse yet, there is good reason to suppose that these very individuals are in fact machinating precisely several of the catastrophes that Faye identifies. Evidence for this proposition is easily enough unearthed: suffice it to mention the constant reference the globalists make to the necessity of depopulation.ⁱⁱⁱ In one very interesting video, produced by none other than the co-founder of Italy’s Five Star Movement, a Third World War, which reduces the world population to a mere billion souls, acts as a catalyst to the arising of ‘Gaia’, a futuristic technocratic one-world government in which everyone exists exclusively in and through Google.^iv

More yet: we know, because we have seen time and time again, that the same individuals who press most importunously for the advent of a future single world government are also those who most like to foment revolutions and economic emergencies in nations throughout the world, both in and out of the West. The so-called colour revolutions, which Soros, to name only the most infamous example, has had his gloved hand upon on countless occasions,^v are but one example; idem the economic meltdown that opened this millennium, which was produced by the very same banks that later profited handsomely from it.^vi Nor is this anything new; Goldman Sachs came into its power precisely in the Great Depression, which it itself was also partially responsible for causing.^vii These men are chaos feeders, who are long accustomed to earning their pilf and winnowing their power from broad regional misfortunes. If a catastrophe arises from a source which no man can predict or control (as for instance an environmental disaster), these men will be ready for it; and if it comes instead from some inner element or aspect of our societies or economies, or from, for instance, some artificial epidemic, they may well be they themselves the architects of such catastrophe, which puts them in a prime position to advance their own agenda through the confusion they themselves have sown.

As but the most evident example, take the ‘migrant crisis’ presently afflicting Europe. It is no secret that men like Soros are the foremost instigators of this ‘crisis’, both insofar as they fund the ‘NGOs’ that have, until the recent interventions of Italy’s new government, dog-like fetch the teeming African and Middle Eastern masses,^viii and insofar as they constantly admonish Europe and America to accept the same in ever greater numbers.^ix (Soros himself has imperiously demanded a baseline of at least a million a year, the implication surely being that if the Europeans are to be good children, they will take in many more than that.) They do none of this blindly, and anyone who believes that they are merely aiming to turn a dollar, utterly heedless of the future, gravely misunderstands these men, who have ruthlessly and unswervingly pursued a single global vision for at least seventy years, since the close of the War.^x

Yet it is still occasionally proposed that the European ‘migrant crisis’ is presently resulting in unintended consequences, even so far as these globalists are concerned. I dispute this fact; if there are any ‘unintended consequences’, they are none that these chaos feeders will not know how to work. There is nothing unintentional, for instance, in the fact that jihadists and Islamic revolutionaries are being systematically imported from foreign countries amidst the boatloads of supposed ‘refugees’; the terrorist attacks that these chaos agents inevitably commit provide precisely the excuse the globalists need to tighten the close net of security and to put stronger controls on our freedom of speech; the blood of every man who is cut down in the name of Allah on our shores goes first and foremost to feed the tree of the One World Order. Our politicians sometimes suffer the consequences of popular backlash against unpopular immigration policies; the globalists are more than immune.

Obviously, demographic displacement (I would prefer to call it cultural erasure, since that is the real aim; these globalists want neither our demographic nor any other to prevail in the end) has been an abiding goal of theirs since at least as far back as the Kalergi Plan.^xi But beyond that, even the very real threat of the establishment of Sharia law in important centres of Europe is far from disadvantageous to them: for should this threat really come to crisis, no better excuse than this could be found to consolidate the power they have already long been gathering, to centralize more strength and unity to the super-political units they have been developing, such as the European Union, the United Nations, NATO, the International Monetary Fund etc. etc., and to construct strong legal and super-legal harnesses which can as easily be slipped around the jaws of nationalists as of religious extremists.

It is therefore clear we cannot depend on catastrophe to save us from our plight; in certain cases, we must even do whatever we can to stave off such catastrophe, when we see that it plays directly into the hands of the men who are our most powerful and truest enemies in this world. This demands a degree of awareness of our situation which is not easy to attain; and it is a constant temptation to resort to easy platitudes and to commonplace evaluations of the present state of affairs. It is easy, for instance, to turn the brunt of our animus against the hostile alien colonists (I use Faye’s apt and precise term here, rather than the more common ‘invaders’) who are now assailing our lands, and whose presence and negative influence is so much more immediate and obvious than any action taken by the occult globalists.

But this is precisely what these globalists are counting on. They have had their way now for decades precisely because they act at a level of political and social things which is so far from the common perception that the common people, and even a great many serious thinking men, never catch so much as a glimpse of it. Despite the extraordinary power they exert, most of these men are literally anonymous; any negative reference to them whatsoever on the part of this or that individual can therefore easily be dismissed by the media (over which they exert powerful influence) as ‘conspiracy theory’. We must accustom ourselves to a level of analysis which is at once uncommon and uncomfortable. This is not simply in the interest of some remote or abstract notion of truth — though there is that, as well: but this is really and fundamentally a question of our survival. If we permit our enemies to dwell and move within a sphere which is so broad and so distant that it secretly encompasses our own, our actions will redound to their benefit; we will almost certainly fail in anything we attempt to accomplish.

Where, then, does this leave us? I have already discussed one aspect of our present plight: namely, the necessity of preparing our associations for all possible vicissitudes, including a catastrophe of the order which Faye predicts. We must indeed be prepared equally both for a catastrophe which catches the whole world unawares, and for an engineered and deliberate catastrophe, though this last is much more difficult to gauge or plan against.

Archeofuturism by Guillaume Faye.

In the same Archeofuturism, Faye takes the French New Right hard to task for its ossifying into a merely intellectual position without any kind of practical manifestations. We must absolutely avoid this pitfall; whatever political action we might taken, whatever successes, even be they small, we can secure on the level of local or regional or national or international politics, must be sought after by us with all the power at our disposal. Even when these represent but half-measures or compromises to our harder and brighter worldview, nonetheless we must recognize that small gains are preferable to great losses. More than anything, we are in need of a new system of education, one which we ourselves begin to build up, which is capable of standing against the debilitating and degenerative tendencies of modern living, and of undermining the diseased academia.

One thing remains true above all others: no matter what can or cannot be accomplished on a metapolitical or political level today, no matter what possibilities are open to us or closed in the absence or the coming of catastrophe, there is a single sphere which remains radically within our control, as even the Ancients used to teach: the sphere of our personal lives, our actions, decisions, choices, and our own conscious deeds within, and upon, ourselves. It is noble of us to make attempts to change this world in which we find ourselves, quite regardless of whether or not our attempts might ever bear fruit. But we are compelled both by present necessity and by that same nobility to till a soil which we know can bear fruit: the soil of our souls. Be there storms or doldrums upon this horizon, let us forge ourselves into such men as will know to navigate them both.

Footnotes