Europe Against the West

Europe must break the Western spell and reclaim itself.

Andrea Falco Profili declares that Europe must break decisively with the Anglo-American fraud called “the West,” reject its corrosive individualist creed, and reassert itself as a sovereign civilizational power.

We must end this farce once and for all. “The West” does not exist. It is an imposture, a semantic fetish if you want, but most of all it is a geopolitical scam aimed at Europe. Westernism has been administered to us for eighty years as a drug to prevent us from remembering who we are: Europeans.

The use of this word is not neutral. We are not “Westerners”. The difference between European and Westerner is metaphysical more than geographical. The West, imposed on us in Yalta with bombs, the dollar and cinema, is not the extension of Europe; it is its radical negation. America, the beating heart of this artificial “West”, is a nation with a negative genesis; it is not a civilization for but a civilization against something, and that something is us. It was born against Europe as its material and ideological rejection.

Everything that Europe could not stand, or that could not stand Europe, fled there. The bigoted puritanism, uprooted sects, the starving who hated their land, the asocial. They built a world on the removal of History. America was not founded by pioneers carrying European values into the New World, but by exiles and the disinherited, animated not by a desire for continuity, but by a bilious spirit of revenge against the motherland. The new men beyond the Atlantic had no past, or rather, their past was an obscurantism to be fled, against which they vowed vengeance. The difference, as diagnosed masterfully by Locchi and De Benoist, is clear: theirs is a quantitative civilization. The West measures everything in dollars, in bucks. The only hierarchy they recognize is that of the bank account. They are Homo dollaricus uniformis. European civilization is qualitative. It is tragedy, myth, style and Kultur. The West is Spengler’s Zivilisation, hypertrophic and mechanical but ultimately soulless. The West is Carthage, a thalassocracy of merchants. Europe is Rome, a land power founded on Law and Empire.

We are not the same thing. Mind that, even the term “West” was originally coined as a moral barrier, some sort of border on the Atlantic so that the exiled could leave “rotten Europe” behind and cleanse themselves in the “New Israel”. The irony lies precisely in this: the term “West”, born to trace a distinction and reject Europe, is now used in a psychological subversion to convince Europeans that their place lies with the Anglosphere and the Atlantic world. As Olivier Eichenlaub rightfully points out in a recent essay published by the French Institute Iliade named “Europe Puissance” (European Power), the West is a Cold-War era subversion aimed at convincing Europeans to reject Eastern Europe and the Slavic world as a fundamental “otherness”, to antagonize and isolate it in a distinct “Orthodox civilization”. It does not take much to realize that this is the vision which brought us to the fundamental tragedy of today, of a continent split into a fratricidal war orchestrated in Washington.

And here we are at the crux. At the heart of the fracture. Europe, in its profound core, is vertical. It is communal and organic. Our conception of power, even when it becomes revolution, has its own sacredness. In Polis, in Demos, in Empire and in Nation, the community comes before the individual. The Anglo-Saxon world, and its western metastasis, is the exact opposite. It is the libertarian fetish, the eulogy of the most vulgar individualism and the deranged atom of the individual that claims to be the measure of all things. Western “freedom” is the freedom of the businessman, the freedom to buy, sell and consume. It is the bellum omnium contra omnes disguised as “rights”. The final apotheosis as capitalism elevated to a state religion. This poison has not only infected us, turning us into docile consumers. It infected the British Isles long before, crushing the insular Celts under the boot of the London merchant and Puritan. The British Empire first and the American one later are in a strict continuity.

Let’s make some examples for the sake of clarity: in Europe, the sacred function of command is out of discussion, even in fundamentally Jacobin systems such as the French Republic. In the Anglosphere, authority is nefarious and detested, perhaps ever since the Magna Carta. The American president must constantly exorcise his own function; he must kiss babies, play golf in public, roll up his sleeves and joke with his voters to reassure the masses that he will NOT use the power they will invest him with. The military is another example. Mind that this applies exclusively to the United States and not to the British military tradition: American militarism is a rejection of any sort of Prussian spirit of service; it is an intrinsically “antimilitarist militarism” because it rejects all authority, discipline and hierarchy. The Marines are seen as obedient corpses; the disenfranchised and the gangsters make up the frontline infantry. They go to war only against their will, either forced by events (1917, 1941) or when the enemy is already on the verge of collapse (the natives). If the war becomes too hard, the soldier “loses his mind”, becomes a drug addict, gets PTSD, falls into depression and eventually meets a tragic end. The army itself reflects civil society. The use of slang, patting each other’s backs and even the military music is aimed at making the military less virile and authoritarian.

This system shatters when the enemy is not imaginary or broken, such as the natives, but determined (Korea, Vietnam and Afghanistan). Facing defeat, the G.I. has a breakdown. America does not understand defeat; their reaction goes from optimism to catastrophism or even a sadism which manifests itself in the cathartic desire to commit atrocities against civilians, such as in Korea, as brutalizing civilians reminds the collective military psyche of the American war machine of the days of the wars against the Native Americans. Their reaction is an escapism into puritanical hypocrisy; suddenly “they never wanted the Vietnam War”. This further escalates into a hatred for the survivors and the refugees, seen as living examples of a failure, which in turn leads to the American disgust for veterans, which drives many men who joined this death machine to either starve on the streets or commit suicide, with the approval of the political system.

So you see that there is a civilizational divide that we can ignore no longer. As the multipolar world emerges from the ruins of American unipolarity, we are called upon to choose.

To continue believing in the fiction of “the West” is to ask Europe to renounce itself, to abandon a part of its being to accommodate the idiosyncratic Anglo-Saxon world. This is because it would mean renouncing our vision of property, which has never been the absolute fetish of the Anglo individualism, but has always contemplated a social dimension—from French integralism to Catholic economic doctrine to “Third Way” experiments and syntheses that did NOT fear the word “socialism”. It means renouncing our organic conception of society in favour of a social contract built on the toxic myth of the atomized individual who does as he pleases. To reclaim our otherness is not chauvinism, nor a pretense of superiority. If anything, it is realism, a pretense of otherness which does not see anything wrong with the Anglo world retaining its ethnic system of capitalism and individualism at home, but merely hands it back to them, because we do not want it. It is recognizing that this marriage has not worked. It has pushed Eastern Europe away from us, and we lament it; it has poisoned us, making us import a civilization model which eroded our own. It is recognizing, as Jean Thiriart recognized, that our destiny is not played out in the suffocating Atlantic enclosure, but in a civilizational continuum that begins in Lisbon and ends in Vladivostok.

We seek no enemies, but we must recognize who we are. And we are different. Our homeland is Europe, as a sovereign and geopolitical power. To act in the world again, we must first stop seeing it through the eyes of someone else. It is time to separate ourselves from this West that denies us, to reject the hated adjective, to “remigrate” the Anglo-Saxon moral compass and become Europe once more.