Aris Roussinos on the man who predicted 2020

I forgot to recommend this essay in Unherd about a leading intellectual of the French New Right of whom I had scarcely heard called Guillaume Faye. One of his books was on Michael Gove's shelf, alongside a David Irving book which incensed leftists on Twitter. How unpleasant, sanctimonious and vindictive much of the Left is. 

I have quit the Augean stables of Twitter. It is useful, I suppose, but very depressing to realise how many fools there are in the world. I quit Facebook too, which is the thief of time.

In case you don't click on the rather long article here are some key quotations.

'Actively supporting Third World national liberation movements, decrying globalisation for its homogenising effects, and sounding urgent warnings of looming ecological collapse, de Benoist and Faye anticipated the anti-globalisation movement of the millennium, before it petered out into commodified pseudo-protest.

'Equally, by warning that mass migration into Europe would lead inexorably to ethnic conflict and mass casualty terrorist attacks, and by railing against the moral and spiritual bankruptcy of globalisation and cosmopolitanism, the Nouvelle Droite anticipated much of the discourse of today’s populist Right, though they explicitly rejected what they saw as their petty nationalisms in favour of the unification of Europe and Russia into a single civilisational superpower.

'....By the year 2020, he claimed, as a result of the inherent fragility created by a globalised financial and political system, civilisation would buckle under a cascading set of interlinked crises. Waves of pandemics, of political disorder and state collapse in the Middle East and Africa, of global financial crashes and ecological degradation would rebound off each other, escalating the pressures upon the international system to the point that the world of the late 20th century would become impossible to sustain. 

'In Faye’s words, “a series of ‘dramatic lines’ are drawing near: like the tributaries of a river, and will converge in perfect unision at the breaking point (between 2010 and 2020), plunging the world into chaos. From this chaos- which will be extremely painful on a global scale- a new order can emerge based on a worldview, Archaeofuturism, understood as the idea for the world of the post-catastrophic age.”'

I am a million miles away from Guillaume Faye on many things, I better add, to defend myself from accusations of fascism. A liberal told me I was a libertarian and I iam pretty close to one, in fact, so long as libertarian does not mean liking abortion and wanting to close down public libraries. (Actually libraries might be anachronistic, now I think of it, though they provide a nice place for unemployed and retired people to shelter and drink tea. )

I want to know much more about the libertarian par excellence Ron Paul, who seems close in his thinking to mine on many things, including unjust liberal wars, abortion and immigration. 

But Faye, unlike left-wing thinkers of the last fifty years, was very prescient. 

Who were the interesting left-wing thinkers since 1945? Anthony Crosland, who pointed the way to Blairism, was interesting. John Gray was not, while he was on the left. He keeps swapping over, but has become interesting since becoming a Brexiteer. Slavoj Zizek seems barren. The French Marxists who invented structuralism were very malign and barren. 

Going further back, Gramsci was a seer who foretold the world we live in, as did writers like Adorno, Marcuse, Reich and the rest of the Frankfurt School of Marxism, a sort of plague bacillus stored in the deep freeze until unfrozen by left-wing students and academics in the 1960s and 1970s.

There have been few if any great thinkers since 1945 just as there have been few or no great writers, artists, composers or statesmen. This probably fits in with the world view of Guillaume Faye. Perhaps I ought to read some of his stuff.