Against Russophobia
In a world dominated by headlines portraying Putin’s Russia as the clear and present danger to Europe, Guillaume Faye championed an altogether different vision: a “Eurosiberian” or “Euro-Russian” civilizational bloc stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific, united by blood, culture, and unmatched geopolitical and economic potential. In the final years of his long-running career as a dissident intellectual and metapolitical activist, Faye increasingly turned his scope towards the crisis of Russian-European relations, stressing the need for a tactful synthesis of sober analysis and visionary daring.
Against Russophobia, the first and definitive collection of Guillaume Faye’s writings on Russia, stands out as a critical guide for a new kind of European diplomat: the diplomat of a Europe that thinks in terms of continental longevity and the global chessboard instead of ideological hysteria and divisive stereotypes. For Faye, only together can Europe and Russia balance their strengths and weaknesses, face down the onslaught of the Global South, restrain globalist warmongering, and meet the economic and technological challenges of the 21st century. At once historic and timely, Against Russophobia is a bold shattering of one of the most daunting Overton window-frames of our days.
From Chapter 1 – “A French Perspective on Russia”:
Russian psychology is divided between melancholy and exuberance, dejection and exaltation, discouragement and enthusiasm, lucidity and blindness, excessive pessimism and negligence, scientific and artistic genius stemming from admirable constructivism, and letting things slide.
But without Russia, European civilization would not be what it is, particularly on the scientific level. And without Russia, European civilization cannot continue to exist. Russians are very proud of their past. They do not cultivate self-mockery and ethnomasochism like Western Europeans. They take pride in the major artistic, philosophical, technological contributions of their people to all humanity. In the circles I have met, even if one admits that Soviet communism was harmful, one cannot help feeling legitimate pride in the idea that Russia was the first power in space conquest. In my view, this was by no means due to communism, but to Russian genius. For there truly exists a Russian genius, from musicians to engineers, from painters to physicists, from poets to philosophers. I would define this Russian genius as an exceptional intuitive capacity.
The Russian weakness is that he is modest, sometimes awkward; he doesn’t know how to sell himself. He does not possess that extraordinary “brilliant vanity” of the French nor that “affirmative naivety” of Americans (the French and Americans complement each other very well). Wounded pride: that is what strikes one in today’s Russian mentality. The nostalgia for the “great Soviet power” — even associated with a rejection of the communist era — or the grandiose period of the Tsars is associated with an inferiority complex vis-à-vis the West, thus with a desire for imitation.
The USSR and the Soviet regime were only a parenthesis in the history of great Russia. Unlike the French Revolution, which was an enormous volcano, the October Revolution was a very small eruption, even on a world scale. More precisely: the French Revolution (which followed the American Revolution) was a small eruption that left enormous lasting traces, while the Bolshevik Revolution was an enormous, ephemeral eruption that will leave few or no traces at all. This was not known in the 1960s, but now it is. It is known because “Bolshevism,” which was nevertheless regarded in the West since the beginning of the 20th century as a movement of unprecedented scope, whether considered an absolute danger or a luminous ideal, was a mountain that gave birth to a mouse.
This remark allows establishing a parallel between Russia and France, but also with China. These three nations have known a secant revolution, that is to say one that cut their history in two France in 1789, Russia in 1917, China in 1949. Now, in the case of China and France, this revolution gave rise to a new regime that has never been abolished. On the contrary, in Russia, the new regime was abolished in 1991. This gives Russia an advantage: indeed, in the Russian mentality and in the memory of the post-communist state, the thread has been reconnected with the Tsarist monarchist past. This allows associating in the same historical continuity the Russia of the Tsars, Soviet Russia, and current Russia. Hence the living notion of “eternal Russia.” On this precise point, Russians are not schizophrenic!
In France, on the other hand, we are schizophrenic: the dominant ideology implicitly thinks of France as associated with the “republic” that appeared in 1789, scorning and devaluing through latent ideological fanaticism the immense period of sacred royalty born in Reims during which France was truly built. Napoleon tried hard to bring together the royal heritage and the revolutionary heritage, but he failed, or rather half succeeded. So that today, as Jean Raspail said in an article in Le Figaro that caused scandal, we have “the Nation against the Republic.” This is very serious, because, in the official mentality, the French state thinks of itself in an ideological and not ethnic manner. As if France had begun in 1789. And as if the “Great Revolution” were the symbolic founding act of the French people, like the American Declaration of Independence. In this sense, France mutilates itself of its past and its ethnic identity, which authorizes thinking that anyone can become French just as anyone can become American. This partly explains the madness of the French political elites who are opening the country to all invasive immigrations and granting nationality to everyone, which can only lead to the pure and simple disappearance of France, through tragic oblivion of the notion of ethnic identity, which Napoleon perfectly accepted.
Russians, on the other hand — as, moreover, the Japanese and Chinese — have this chance to think of their own country as a nation, as an ethnic ensemble more than as a political regime. Current Russia does not consider its founding act with the birth of the Soviet regime. The latter, through universalist Marxism-Leninism or Trotskyism inspired by the French Revolution, risked abolishing the ethnic notion of “Russian” in favor of the purely abstract and ideological notion of “Soviet.” Fortunately for Russians, this is not what happened. The notion of homeland, with its ethnic dimension and its multi-secular historical continuity, remained the strongest. In France, unfortunately, the “republic,” an abstract and ideological notion, comes before the “homeland,” a historical, concrete and carnal notion…
Russia is in the same boat as all White nations: confronting decline, recovering and beginning renaissance. For this, Russia (the healthy and conscious part of Russians) bears great responsibility. Because it represents a fundamental part of White humanity, in other words of European mankind . The United States is not an enemy but an adversary, as I have often said. The ethnopolitical vision of the world, no longer strictly geopolitical, supposes a sort of alliance whose forms remain to be constructed. The future, especially in a globalized world (indeed paradoxically) belongs to races, to peoples, to ethno-biological and cultural links more than ever…
Russians must not let themselves be impressed by moral and democracy lessons given by the West, that is to say by politicians, ideologues and journalists of the European Union and the United States. Because, in matters of democracy, if we take the case of the European Union, there is reason to laugh: the European Union is a non-elected bureaucracy that imposes on European peoples a regime contrary to their interests, particularly one which is organizing, in a manner that can be qualified as criminal, settlement immigration, that is to say the invasion of Europe. This accusation is valid against all French governments of right or left that have succeeded each other for 30 years. Those who give lessons see the speck in the eye of others but not the plank that is in their own.
In any case, it is, in my opinion, in the interest of all European peoples and peoples of European origin that Russia be, in the 21st century, the first White world power. The United States, and now Western Europe, with catastrophic settlement immigration (population replacement), are no longer strictly speaking White powers, White nations. China, India, Japan, etc., on the other hand, remain globally mono-ethnic powers.
One must reflect on this concept of Eurosiberia, which my friend Pavel Tulaev asked me to transform into Eurorussia, rightly so: the strategic union, from Brittany to the Bering Strait of all stock-peoples of the same blood, rid of parasites and invaders. Including with White American populations (the true ones). What an idea, you will tell me! What a madman’s dream! But ideas unthinkable today will perhaps be realized tomorrow — is not all human history a path of madmen, an unpredictable road?
Despite the evils from which it suffers, Russia is nevertheless a country where ethnic consciousness and resistance to migratory invasion is much more marked than in Europe, and where forces of resistance and reconquest exist and can perfectly prevail. The youth, despite frantic efforts by the West to corrupt it by all means, nevertheless remain significantly healthier than here. It is also the country where nationalist and identitarian forces are most numerous and best organized. In France, my ideas shock, they are considered dangerous, therefore repressed. Not in Russia, where I can write and speak with complete freedom. Russians as a people are ill, like other European and White peoples in general, but one has the impression that consciousness of the illness and the will to heal are more stubborn there than elsewhere. This is why I advocate an alliance between Russian and Western European identitarian movements, to prevent Russian identitarians from withdrawing into themselves. Provided, obviously, that we avoid ridiculous and backward-looking folklores. Russia must be the center of reconquest and revolution. Such will be the meaning of the new Russian Revolution.