by John Young
Arktos Press is putting out some very worthwhile books, and among them are the books by important European New Right thinker Guillaume Faye. Having digested his book Archeofuturism, I couldn’t wait to get my hands on Convergence of Catastrophes.
European New Right thinking is a method of thought all its own that really cannot be understood with reference to the typical left-libertarian-right spectrum, as everything along that spectrum is based on the same fundamental premises of classical liberalism of the enlightenment. European New Right thinking is a series of developing theories and world-views that stand in opposition to those ideals that are a hallmark of modernity and have led us to our current sorry state of affairs.
Left-libertarianism-right do away with notions of an individual being subject to practically any constraints based especially on religion or tradition. Liberalism elevates ideas of equality and universalism among all others, but by dispensing with ideas of hierarchy and faith, reduces Man to the merely material. In such a world, then, the debates between left-libertarian-right focus around the best ways to achieve the greatest levels of material abundance and the best levels of equality of result. Differences among individuals, or between groups, are set aside as meaningless with any differences in outcome attributed to luck, systemic racism/sexism or industriousness.
Because, in a world where the only agreed-upon value is the dollar and everything gets reduced to dollars, humanity gets reduced to homo economicus, the state religion of first America and then the rest of the European world has become Gross Domestic Product. It is this, according to Guillaume Faye, that in large measure is driving all of humanity toward a convergence of inevitable catastrophes.
The other aspect of modernity driving us toward an unavoidable cliff is cultural degeneration. Cultures, religions and traditions, though they do not have the backing of materialist science, were developed over the course of hundreds of generations in concert with our genes, and discarding them simply because they don’t make sense according to political science theories of feminism or seem to be attributed to a religion has turned out to be most unwise. An observant individual will note, for example, that our natality rates are terrible, a third of white babies are born out of wedlock, marriage is in serious decline, and half of all babies born to married couples are ending up in female-headed households. This is certainly not a positive development. The author argues that simply due to low birth rates and lack of achievement we are not going to produce enough people with high enough levels of achievement to even support our civilization.
So the idea of Convergence of Catastrophes is that, as a result of classical liberal values that interpret Man in economic terms and the discarding of all constraints imposed by culture, religion and tradition, European Man is now on a collision course with an unavoidable destiny that will be most unpleasant.
Members of European Americans United and readers of Western Voices will not at all be surprised by the idea that crisis lurks just beyond the horizon. We have long kept readers informed of the likelihood of Peak Oil as well as the unsustainability of our Ponzi-scheme social welfare system. Convergence of Catastrophes barely mentions Peak Oil, likely because when it was originally written in 1999, few people were aware of the phenomenon. Instead, the book describes the catastrophes as resulting from pollution, cultural degeneration, Islamic invasion, shrinking populations, ethnic civil wars, and economic collapse.
I have been and remain somewhat skeptical of some of the claims the author seems to believe, including the claims of global warming caused by pollution. There is no doubt whatsoever that the mindless pursuit of GDP through horizontal economic expansion has caused a burgeoning of Third World populations and a breathtaking expansion of pollution, especially in countries such as China. Though the Pentagon has (subsequent to this book) accepted the claims of global warming and even worked out likely scenarios resulting from weather disruptions, the simple fact is this is extremely speculative and scientists disagree widely. There is no way this can be credibly placed within a certain time frame guaranteeing its convergence with other events. Pollution is definitely widespread, including pollution with endocrine disruptors, but the author in my opinion fails to make the case that pollution will reach such critical levels before 2020 that it will pose an eminent risk to human survival.
A more credible argument in this regard is that of Peak Oil and also rare earth elements. There simply are not enough resources on earth to create an American-style lifestyle for everyone on the planet and even current levels of consumption will give us Peak Oil in the very near future and a peak in rare earth elements by 2070, though the greater near-term risk with the latter is national stockpiling creating artificial shortages.
Cultural degeneration is more directly observable. There is no doubt that large cohorts of our young men are wasting their lives away in front of video game consoles, and that such young men will not be able to take over the reins of running a techno-industrial civilization from their fathers. However, with globalism and up to a million worker Visas being issued annually to import talent from India and China into the United States and with technical support lines being off-shored to India, there is no indication that the ability to maintain techno-industrial civilization generally is slowing down. Rather, it is simply being maintained by people from India and China. Though this would be devastating for us in the sense of our ethnic genetic interests, it doesn’t necessarily foreshadow a world-ending catastrophe that would stop the wheels of our managerial state. As long as 400 channels of garbage and the latest shoot-em-up action game continue to function, I doubt the zombies in front of the tube will care who makes it work.
Islamic invasion of Europe is very real and proximate, much moreso today than when the book was written. The author takes a hard line on Islam, seeing it as an inherently expansive religion geared toward nothing less than world conquest. No doubt, this is true. He fails to take into account that the ideals of modernity are attractive precisely because they appeal to some of the most universal weaknesses of human beings. Whether it be ready-access to blue-eyed blond-haired sex workers or the ability to blow off practically any rule that is inconvenient to ones personal whims, the left-libertarian-right paradigm is extremely corrupting and can easily undermine practically any society, including Islam. However, the shear volume of Islamic immigration, the degree to which political correctness protects it and mechanisms of separatism will keep it from being sufficiently corrupted to be rendered inert.
Shrinking European-derived populations will continue for the indefinite future because the causes of shrinkage show no signs of being ameliorated. This poses a definite risk as pro-natalist policies are highly unlikely when people (no matter their origin) are seen as fungible commodities that can be imported. But the social welfare schemes, as we are currently seeing in Greece and Spain, simply cannot continue because it turns out that the fungible commodities we are importing are too often net recipients of taxes rather than net contributors. This leads to ethnic resource competition and a declining economy as taxes are raised on a shrinking (overwhelmingly white) middle class. This inevitably leads to …
Ethnic civil war. Though it is hard to place a real time frame on this, the levels of inter-ethnic violence that are already occurring in America and many European states reach a level such that they meet the body count requirements to define a civil war. In the last election in the United States, there was a very clear ethnic divide and many ethnic leaders not only took credit for the election of the current President, but also outright stated with obvious pleasure that this election marked the end of white people as a political force. Keep in mind that a state is really secured through violence, and that ethnic electoral competition is really competition to seize a monopoly on force. No multi-ethnic society has ever avoided ethnic civil war in the face of resource scarcity.
The details of each of the catastrophic scenarios proposed by the author can be debated endlessly, and it is very difficult to ascertain the accurate timing of future events that can be advanced or retarded due to thousands of influences that cannot be controlled. But the case he makes that they WILL occur, and are pretty much inevitable, is quite strong, even in the case of things I may doubt such as global warming.
The degree of convergence — all happening at once — is amorphous because all of these things interact. For example, if high gas prices keep the economy depressed, that could retard the rate at which Third World immigrants invade. In the unlikely event that Republicans grow a spine (which I know may be wishful thinking) we could implement immigration and economic reforms that would delay the economic collapse. It is unlikely they would all happen at once, which will affect which collapse scenario proposed by the author is most likely.
Either way, according to the author. societal collapse is inevitable.
Mr. Faye seems to look forward to such a collapse as do, no doubt, many of our readers because we really see it as the only way in which our people can escape a destiny of genocide through assimilation or harsh treatment at the hands of new demographic majorities. He proposes three scenarios: soft, hard, and very hard.
A very hard collapse scenario would come about due to a convergence of all of these events at once or in very close succession. Global warming causes droughts and famine in the Third World which floods into the Northern hemisphere en masse, while pollution forces the Chinese into greener pastures and Peak Oil and the baby boom retirements accompanied by insufficient technical skill in the younger generation drive the final nail into the economic coffin. In such a scenario, there would be all-out ethnic warfare in short order and widespread starvation that would lead to technological levels and living arrangements similar to the Middle Ages.
A hard collapse would result from only a couple of factors converging in close proximity and the result would be a divided society in which a small population maintained a technical-industrial society on a small scale while the rest of the population lived in the Middle Ages.
A soft collapse is both the most likely and most dangerous scenario. In this scenario, crisis is well-managed by governments so that things wind-down while things never get quite bad enough to spark a complete collapse or a revolution. We are all reduced to serfdom gradually as we intermingle with our imported replacements and by the time things get bad enough, we don’t exist anyway so it doesn’t matter.
Convergence of Catastrophes doesn’t tell us how to prepare precisely, but it tells us we should be laying the groundwork NOW to be able to establish command and control infrastructure and the levels of force needed to create the kind of society we would want in the future. We should be ready to move and create a separatist state through secession in a soft collapse scenario, or establish our vision within our communities in hard or very hard scenarios.
We’ll be discussing the details of this in the future.