REMAKING A PEOPLE

by Roman Bernard

Bloc Identitaire (Identitarian Bloc) held its convention at the beginning of November in Orange, Provence. This was just two weeks after the party’s youth movement Génération Identitaire memorably stormed the construction site of the Poitiers mosque. Poitiers, located in Central-Western France, is near the actual site of the Battle of Tours (referred to as the “Battle of Poitiers” by French historians) in 732 A.D., when Charles Martel, “Mayor of the Palace,” turned back the Islamic advance in Western Europe.

Because of the scandal aroused by this masterful operation, the convention was overcrowded: 800 people came, and there were of course lots of journalists looking for “proof” of the evilness of the Identitarian activists. So far they’ve been disappointed. The young militants of this ten-year-old party are decent, educated and well-behaved people, instead of the swastika-waving skinheads that the reporters were hoping for.

“Long live our race! Long live the Whites!”

A keynote speech delivered by Mario Borghezio, Member of the European Parliament from the Italian Lega Nord, showed that the “Reconquest” is not a mere slogan. In an inspiring Mussolini-esque performance, he shouted, with a thick Italian accent,“Long live our race! Long live the Whites!” The reception was, to my great surprise, very positive. There were in the audience many people coming from the Left, who were at times highly critical of conservative and Christian speakers, but who totally agreed with the idea that Whites must defend their interests as a race — even if it is at the expense of other races. If anything, this shows that radicalism has a stronger appeal to former liberals than dull, moderate conservatism. The most interesting speeches, besides that of Mario Borghezio, were delivered by young, active militants.

Two round tables were of particular interest: the first one gathered people from all over France, presenting initiatives to assert European identity at a local level. It was aptly titled “Refaire un peuple” (Remaking a people) and several speakers and members of the audience raised the question of the anti-identitarian nature of the modern, managerial Nation-State. A student from the French part of Flanders talked about the mayor of his city erasing the Flemish street names and putting “politically correct” French names instead. For instance, the Zwartestraat (Black Street in Flemish, unrelated to Africa) was renamed Rue d’Alger (Algiers Street in French, in reference to the capital of Algeria). This kind of outrage is possible because in our Jacobin Republic, the local and regional entities are all funded and thus controlled by the state, making of the city a mere administrative district, with unaccountable officials belonging to one of the two main parties. Other activists talked about the necessity of reaffirming the local identity of big cities (Tours, Lyon and, most importantly, Paris), where the indigenous population is being displaced by Third Worlders at a staggering speed, partly because of insane housing costs, endless traffic jams, rising oil prices and crumbling public transportation. Those who manage to stay in Paris have to cope with crime and the ubiquitous imposition of globalist propaganda that negates their very right to exist.

The irrelevance of the Nation-State

The other interesting round table brought together young men from all over Europe, with, among others, a Nordic Fleming, an Alpine Austrian and a Mediterranean Catalan, thus showing the real diversity displayed by the White race, and the ability of young Europeans to overcome the past wars between European nations to unite and confront the mortal dangers Europe faces today: demographic swamping, Islamic colonization and the erasure of what remains of the European culture. For now, these young guys find negative reasons to assert a common European identity (i.e. directed against Islamization and Africanization). There was a lack of positive reasons to be proud of being European. Still, that’s nothing to worry about: a mere five years ago, I was thinking of myself only as a Frenchman, and I know that lots of people from my generation have undergone the same process: first you defend your national identity, and then, as you realize that the national identities have become largely irrelevant today, you discover what is really at stake: the survival of European/Western civilization, i.e. the White race plus the Greek, Roman and Germanic heritage. We simply need time to understand that. How many of us could have imagined having such thoughts a decade ago?

Having a Pan-European mindset is all the more necessary, since viewing the current events from a national perspective leads to major misunderstandings: in France, the common discourse is that Muslims and Africans have an “integration problem” (i.e., crime, welfare-dependency and hostility to the indigenous culture) because of slavery, colonization, and the like. How come, then, that Switzerland, that has always been neutral in world affairs, has never had any colonies, and has never participated in the Atlantic slave trade, is experiencing exactly the same problems as France today?

Is it because of its (non-existent) colonial Empire and trading of slaves that Norway sees her daughters raped by Third Worlders (at the rate of a hundred percent in Oslo)? Do the Germans, who have had a long-lasting alliance with Turkey, "deserve” to be violently replaced by Turks in most major German cities?

It is not specific countries that are under attack, but European civilization itself. More importantly, we are not attacked for what our ancestorsdid (this is a mere pretext, and the history of slavery and colonization is more a concern for guilt-obsessed SWPLs than for Third World immigrants, who hardly know anything about it) but for what weare.

Fabrice Robert, the Identitarian Bloc’s president, should be praised here for his closing statement titled “Nous sommes européens!” (“We are Europeans!”), in which he said, “No, we won’t survive with France alone or by trying to transcribe Maurice Barrès or Charles de Gaulle to the world of 2012.” This is something that would have been anathema in the narrowly nationalistic (and thus increasingly irrelevant) National Front.

Moreover, the idea of Génération Identitaire taking the Battle of Tours as a reference point is a smart move on their part: they celebrate a European victory against a non-European invader, which is a sharp departure from the military celebrations in today’s Europe: the English celebrate their victory against Napoleonic France by welcoming the under-Channel trains at Waterloo Station, whereas one of the main Parisian train stations was named after the Napoleonic victory at Austerlitz against the Austrians and the Russians. In Freiburg-im-Breisgau (Baden-Würtemberg, Southwestern Germany), the first street the French visitor has to cross when he leaves the train station is the Bismarcksallee, reminding them that German unity was achieved thanks to a German victory over Napoleon III’s France. The only national pride that is still allowed in Europe is the remembrance of internecine European wars. In these post-Thanksgiving days, we should therefore be thankful to Bloc Identitaire for calling for the end of such pointless stato-nationalism. May they be imitated by other European movements.

We are the heirs of conquerors

One thing that is still problematic in the Identitarian platform, though, is the very New Rightist principle that “every people has a right to have a country of its own,” something that David Duke tirelessly reiterates at the beginning of each and every one of his podcasts. Well, if our ancestors in central Asia had always respected the “right of every people to have a country of its own”, we would not exist today. There would have been no Greek cities, no Roman Empire, no medieval Germanic Kingdoms, no Viking long ships and no Iberian galleons, no Italian Renaissance, no French literature, no British Empire and no United States of America. Moreover, the very notion of “right” is a Modern one, and the idea that this “right” has to be guaranteed (by whom? By the United Nations?) is very Wilsonian. For this “right” to be enforced, it would take nothing less than a World Government granting each people its own honeycomb in the global beehive.

Of course, it is not what the Identitarians have in mind when they talk about such a right. They are trying, so far with remarkable success, to free European youth of its undeserved guilt about the crusades, slavery, colonization and the Holocaust, which all happened decades or centuries before their birth. But they have to know (and this applies to all New Rightists) that it will never prevent them being depicted as evil “racists” by their enemies. As fair-minded as Alain de Benoist is in his “heterogeneous world of homogenous peoples” doctrine, he is nevertheless still viewed as a beyond-the-pale extremist by the mainstream in France. The reasonable and peaceful nature of the action of Génération Identitaire in Poitiers did not deter the radical Left from demanding the dissolution of the movement on the ground of “racial hatred.” As of this writing, four of the 73 militants who were on the roof of Poitiers’s future mosque face jail time and high fines on the same absurd ground of “racial hatred.”

Furthermore, as it has been written on numerous occasions by Alex Kurtagic, White advocates have to emphasize the positives vis-à-vis their White constituency. It is more appealing to present the European peoples as explorers and conquerors, rather than as sedentary tribes of primitives driven out from their lands by superior conquerors. The latter is at odds with our history, anyway. Even since the end of the European colonial empires, the Europeans have found vicarious ways to quench their thirst for conquest and glory, by landing on the Moon or by discovering the human genome. We can’t remain what we are if we lose our “Promethean” and “Faustian” way of being, which makes us unique in human history.

America and Europe: Brothers in Arms

I’m insisting on that point, because during the convention, a young woman involved in the Identitarian movement compared herself and our people to the Indian tribes. That is problematic because such a mentality undermines the European settlement in America, which gave so much to European civilization.

There is still a huge misunderstanding between the two shores of the Atlantic. In Europe, and especially in France, the American people is conflated with Wall Street, Hollywood, the Pentagon and the Federal Reserve, despite the fact that these elements of American power are hostile to White interests and are persecuting the European-descended population of the United States in particular. It makes no more sense to believe this than to confuse the French people with Nicolas Sarkozy, Marion Cotillard or Tony Parker. When the very Europhile Jared Taylor previously delivered a speech in Paris (in perfect French at that), he received a standing ovation. And I’m quite amused and delighted to see that in America, my fellow countrymen Alain de Benoist and Guillaume Faye have more readers than in our homeland. It shows that there is a growing feeling that we European people are all on the same boat. What we need now is the equivalent of Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation, but this time encompassing all the European nations, to emphasize our common interests and increase our mutual support across the borders that once divided us in deadly enmity.