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Jan. 13, 2022 - Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor
01:01:53
French Elections, Lessons from Singapore, and ‘The Ancient Ethnostate’
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Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to a special edition of Radio Renaissance.
I'm Jared Taylor with American Renaissance, and with me as a guest, and not just any guest, with me is Guillaume Durocher.
He is a European patriot of long standing, a historian of Europe, and a speaker at dissonant conferences.
He has written for a large number of dissonant publications, He is also the author of The Ancient Ethnostate, his recently released book.
We will talk about that.
But I believe what I would like to do is, first of all, welcome, Mr. Durocher.
And I think we'd like to talk about the French elections.
He is a very keen observer of politics in Europe, especially in France.
So welcome, Mr. Durocher.
I'm delighted that you've agreed to join me.
Hello, it's great to be here.
Wonderful.
But let's leap right into the French presidential elections.
The aspect of it that has caught the attention of racially conscious people really all around the world is the appearance of Eric Zemmour as a serious candidate.
It seems that he could be in the second round, as I think most of our listeners probably know the way the French elections work is you have a large field of candidates that run in the first round and then the two top vote getters move on to the second round that really decides the election.
But Eric Zemmour is now polling at number two or number three.
And against Emmanuel Macron, the current president who is polling in the top spot with about 20%.
And then there is this sort of centrist kind of conventional Republican style.
A conservative named Valerie Peck-Ress and then maybe Zemmour, Marine Le Pen.
So why don't you start by telling me your impressions of Eric Zemmour, who's really come right out of nowhere with no political experience and has really attracted enormous amount of attention.
So Eric Zemmour is a genuinely new force in French politics.
He has no political experience and in that sense he is an outsider.
But he has long been on the media scene as a conservative pundit, and by far France's most popular and well-known conservative pundit.
So he is well known for his television appearances, his radio appearances, his columns for the Figaro newspaper, and for his books.
He has written a lot of books.
And what we're seeing is another step in the collapse of political parties in France as necessary support in presidential elections.
He has no, he has a brand new political party, but yeah, he had no party support prior to that.
And so this is something quite new and quite different from Marine Le Pen for me in the sense that she has advanced her career by toning down The National Front's message by rebranding as the National Rally, Rassemblement National, and by really, in my eyes, getting house trained by the media to some extent, by really having a very narrow position.
And he has progressed by doing the opposite, by always speaking his mind on certain issues, even when it's unpopular, but somehow, unpopular with certain people.
He's been able to thrive in the media nonetheless.
One of the things that strikes me is his willingness to say that the problem is not radical Islam.
The part of the problem is Islam, that Islam and French civilization are essentially incompatible.
That is a very strong position that Marine Le Pen's father might have taken.
But as you say, I like the expression you've used.
She's been house trained by the media.
She's been sort of furling her sails over the last five or six years, it seems to me, ever since her loss to Emmanuel Macron the second time around.
But Zemmour, he has, it seems to me, he has been very firm about the necessity of France remaining French.
In a way that no one else who is a major figure in French politics comes close to him in that respect.
Would you not agree, Ian?
He is extremely strong on immigration.
It is his central plank.
Marine Le Pen, when she is asked by the media, do you believe in the Great Replacement?
She agrees with them that it's a conspiracy theory and that it's not something which is happening.
This is awful.
For the so-called nationalist candidate.
It is not a conspiracy.
It is a sociological historical fact without precedent in the history of Europe since the Bronze Age to have this level of population replacement and population change.
Eric Zemmour puts the Great Replacement as the centerpiece, opposition to it at the centerpiece of his campaign.
And he stresses, citing Charles de Gaulle, that France to be French has to be overwhelmingly European and white and Christian.
And if that changes, you know, you can have individual black people who are French citizens.
You can have individual Muslims.
If they are patriotic, that is fine.
But if you remove that ethnic core, France will no longer be French.
That's what Charles de Gaulle claimed.
And Eric Zemmour cites him now to, let's say, tone down the enthusiasm a bit.
Eric Zimmer is a assimilationist.
He is not a, you know, ethno-nationalist per se, but he is an opponent of the Great Replacement, and he wants zero immigration, and he wants to seal that in a referendum.
This is the center of his campaign.
Yes, I find it quite remarkable, and my understanding is that He makes an appeal to the party that is now called Les Républicains, the Republicans, who claim the mantle of Gaullism.
And my understanding is that he is saying to their supporters, look, if you really think you're Gaullists, you should vote for me, not for this wishy-washy woman that the Republicans are running in the elections.
Because I'm the guy.
I'm the guy who stands for Charles de Gaulle's legacy.
Absolutely.
And he often talks about one of the earlier Gaullist parties, Rassemblement pour la République, the RPR, which was the conservative party of the 80s and the 90s.
Because in that period, they adopted very hard line policies against immigration in their campaign manifestos.
So they were going to stop any welfare for foreigners.
They were going to abolish birthright citizenship.
They were promising all these things, but they never did it.
And that's something that Eric Zemmour, as a conservative journalist, because at one point he was a reporter for a long time in his earlier career, he was seeing all these conservative politicians always failing, always failing to live up to their promises.
Always kowtowing to the media in the end, trying to be liked by people who don't have France's interests at heart.
And he saw that again and again with Jacques Chirac, with Philippe Séguin, with Nicolas Sarkozy.
And now he is 63 years old.
And he thought, look, it's now or never.
None of these politicians are going to do it.
I might as well try my luck.
I think it's, I think it's just great.
It, I, uh, I was listening to a French podcast in which there were interviews of some of his supporters and they were saying exactly what you've said, that the so-called conservatives have sold us out every time they took power.
We can trust Eric Zemmour to stick to his guns and not sell us out.
And my impression of him is he's been saying these things.
Very vigorously for, what, 20 years now?
And so the idea that he would take power and then turn his coat seems very unlikely to me.
What do you think?
He has been saying this for as long as I can remember, and he's been writing politically incorrect books since at least 2005.
So I don't know what to say to people who think he's just being purely cynical or That he's not sincere about this.
I think he is seriously concerned about Islamization and about Arab immigration.
I think his personal background as a Jew from Algeria, where, I mean, his family left before he, before independence.
But, you know, his family left because the Arabs and Muslims were taking over in that country and kicked out the one million Europeans and the Jews from that country.
So he knows about ethnic conflict.
And I think that that influences him.
Well, that is, of course, one of the reasons why, as a Jew, he would certainly oppose Islam.
But I suppose for many of the people who are suspicious of him, they might very well say, well, OK, it's very well for this Algerian Jew to be talking about France for the French, but he's not really French anyway.
But I have no reason whatsoever to doubt his sincerity about this.
You described him as an assimilationist, and yet, if he really does want to end immigration, is that not an admission that assimilation is only of limited effect, that assimilation ultimately fails?
How do you square his assimilationist view with this desire to just completely stop immigration?
Well, I think it's a contradiction in his position.
He has spoken with younger French nationalists and there's an interview of him where the nationalist tells him, well, you know, you're talking about assimilation, but really this has failed and it's a waste of time.
And he has conceded that this is a generational difference, that he comes from a generation where there was this idea that you would become French over time.
And he would say, as he has done.
I think, I don't know if it's an electoral position, I don't know if it's a personal position, but I do think there's a contradiction there simply because the amount of non-Europeans in France is so high that assimilation already is impossible, even if you stopped all the immigration today.
Are you thinking about an interview that he had with Marion Maréchal, Marine Le Pen's niece?
In which he essentially concedes that there is essentially a racial element to being French.
I think it was with another nationalist, but I hadn't heard of that one.
Yes.
No, it does seem contradictory and I can understand a certain bewilderment Among French identitarians and other identitarians around the world, that it should be a man from Algeria of Jewish heritage who is going to save France for the French.
But in my view, as I say, I see absolutely nothing insincere about his devotion to France and to its history, to its culture.
And if it takes an Algerian Jew to save France, we all need our own Algerian Jews, for heaven's sake.
So I find his candidacy quite refreshing, and it serves Marine Le Pen right for constantly trimming her sails.
My recollection is that she has also dabbled in all sorts of economic policies that are sort of semi-socialist.
She was talking about leaving the euro, but she's sort of switched back and forth on those things, has she not?
Is that not also part of her weakness, would you say?
I think it, uh, she has been finding her feet and being a politician, uh, is, uh, also about improvisation and, uh, what seems good, uh, like a good position at one time, uh, may become, uh, a bad position later on.
So, uh, I don't, uh, attack her in that sense, but I do think that her message has gotten muddied over the years.
And, um, well, Eric Zimor is a fresher politician and over time, uh, You know, he might have to do gyrations that people will be able to comment on.
But generally speaking, I think his promises are more reasonable.
You know, I think he doesn't think France can just be a welfare state at the scale that it is.
He is a bit more pro-business.
He is protectionist to some extent, like Marine Le Pen is.
He does think the retirement age should be increased to some extent.
Um, but more than anything, his priorities are clear.
I mean, the, the, the priority is immigration.
And then, uh, most of the other policies are details to some extent.
I mean, whether one thinks they're good or bad, some are good, some are bad.
Um, for me, the two most important ones are.
The referendum on ending immigration to France, certainly non-European immigration.
And the second for me is that he would says he says he would, uh, abolish the hate speech legislation.
I don't see how you cannot support that.
legislation relative to genocides, and he would cut the subsidies to so-called anti-racist
NGOs, who are really the enforcers of this legislation.
And so for me, those two points, it makes it, you know, I don't see how you cannot support
that.
I mean, this is a huge step forward in terms of buying time for the French nation, and
in terms of opening up space for identitarian discourse.
I agree.
I think it's I think it's wonderful.
And I think you've listed absolutely the key points in his political platform that every identitarian, every racially conscious white person around the world should support.
I suppose Marine Le Pen is Paying the price for having taken her electorate for granted.
She figured that people who are French nationalists have no place else to go.
And so to try to make herself more acceptable to the media, she has been tempering her positions.
And now she's being forced back into a path of much more vigorous nationalism.
But we will see what happens as far as those two are concerned.
The latest opinion polls that I've seen have Emmanuel Macron coming out number one at 20% in the first round, but then he is followed in the number two position by a woman named Valerie Peck-Ress, who is the representative of this group that claims to bear the Gaullist mantle.
And then number three might be Eric Zemmour, number four Marine Le Pen, And with Eric Zemmour and Marine Le Pen sort of neck and neck with 13 or 14 percent, Valerie Pecres with 16 percent.
Can you tell us anything about her?
Is there is there any hope that she would do even a shadow of the kind of vigorous things that Zemmour is promising?
I don't think so.
I think Les Républicains have always been rhetorically against immigration.
They've always put it in their manifestos.
They've always talked about it and they've very rarely done anything about it.
And that's the problem.
Valerie Procrest in particular is very poorly positioned to do anything about it because
I don't think she cares personally.
She has been the president of the Ile de France region.
So this is basically the region that includes Paris.
And this is the most cosmopolitan region in France.
It is where the deracinated wealthy French live.
And that's who she appeals to.
So in a lot of ways, she appeals to roughly the same kind of people who vote for Emmanuel Macron.
She is part of the liberal wing of the Conservative Party.
Personally, I think it's good that she was chosen by Les Républicains.
Because I think if a more, um, identitarian figure, because there are, there are real identitarians in the conservative party.
If it had been somebody like Eric Soti, I think the right wing would have been a bit too crowded and it might have really split the right wing vote a bit too much.
So, uh, so I think it's a good thing that she was chosen by the Republicans.
Uh, And, uh, but I don't think she will deliver any, uh, any, any, anything on the identitarian front.
She has talked about reducing immigration recently, but, um, you know, she has described herself as being a two thirds Merkel and one third Thatcher, which is not good at all.
And, uh, previously, uh, she had her, her book reviewed by, uh, actually, uh, Eric Zimmer on a, on a talk show.
This was like 10 years ago.
Uh, and, uh, he described her book as being of a rare vacuity.
And, uh, I think that it's typical of these, uh, urban politicians.
There are others like her, like on the left wing, there'd be Anne Hidalgo would be another one, uh, from the socialist party, uh, mayor of Paris.
Uh, no, I don't think she can do any, uh, take any hard, uh, immigration measures.
And I think, uh, something which, um, has to be stressed is the human environment that these politicians operate in.
I mean, the media environment is one thing that they are very sensitive to, but there's
also the human environment, which is to say that if they do take hardline measures, if
they do take unpopular measures, they face social stigma in their circles, like among
the people they frequent.
And I think they are sensitive to this.
They are human beings.
That's something which we could maybe talk about, which is, he talks about this a lot
in his recent book, Eric Zimmer does, that many of the conservative politicians back
down from taking what would be popular measures because in their social circles, it would
make them unpopular.
Well, I suspect that is the case.
The case in the United States, at least to some degree, and the idea of conservatives making nice promises about immigration and then betraying their voters when they actually take power.
That has such a familiar ring and not just in the United States, not just in France, but in Great Britain and a number of other countries.
As soon as they are out there and become targets of the media and also subject to criticism in their own social circles, it seems they all wilt.
And it's a very, very disappointing thing.
And certainly in that respect, Zemmour, I don't get the impression that he would wilt.
It would be astonishing to me.
Of course, I'm interested, I'm intrigued by your view that it's good that Valerie Peck-Ress became the anointed one for the Republicans, because if they really had a tougher guy, he would be more likely to split the vote in a destructive way between Marine Le Pen and Eric Zemmour and himself.
On the other hand, this Peck-Ress, because, as you say, she appeals to some of the Oh, deracinated whites in the Parisian area and also in the rest of France.
She appears to be the one who would probably give Emmanuel Macron the hardest fight in the second round if she gets into the second round.
So it's it's really it's sort of a toss up.
Unfortunately, according to the predictions that I've seen, None of them.
Well, certainly not Eric Zemmour nor Marine Le Pen would be able to beat Macron in the second round.
Valérie Pecresse has perhaps a chance.
And in your view, would Pecresse at least be an improvement over Emmanuel Macron if she turns out the one to make it in the second round and defeats him?
Or is this really Tweedledee and Tweedledum in your view?
I really can't say whether she would be better.
I would even almost say probably not, because Macron, say what you will, I actually think he understands a lot.
I think he understands a lot more than he lets on.
He has quite frank discussions with Victor Orban, with Eric Zemmour, and he's quite open to identitarian arguments, in fact.
And in the past, he has publicly voiced concerns on multiple occasions about Yes.
African fertility rates and the need to get them to go down if the immigration issue was
ever to be managed.
And so he is a part, he has created the globalist party in France.
And so he could never really be an anti-immigration candidate.
But I think he understands some of these issues in a way that, in which I'm not sure if Valerie
Procrest does.
I mean, I don't know her enough to be able to say that, but I would be surprised if she
did.
I mean, it's very hard to say.
Maybe because she's a conservative, she would take a slightly tougher line than he would.
But to me, it's very similar.
On the second round chances, I honestly am agnostic at this stage.
Because yes, we do have polls, but polls can change.
And for me, Zemmour is really in the early Trump stages of the candidacy.
I see a lot of parallels between Trump and Zemmour.
And, uh, you know, early on, very few people said that Trump could be a viable candidate when it finally, you know, went beyond the Republican primaries and when it finally got to the, uh, to the election itself.
So I think it can actually change as a, as this goes on simply because he has so much more energy than all the others.
And there is this job because, you know, they are.
You know, he'll have like 15,000 people in a room and they say, well, this violates the COVID measures and you're infecting all these people and they will counter.
Well, you can't even get anybody to show up at your rallies.
So of course you don't mind having only a few hundred people as the limit.
And I think that's something, I think that's, that's, you know, the energy is something which is real in elections and there's a kind of momentum that gets going that snowballs.
So that's one thing.
Another thing.
Which I have to confess, I don't understand a good chunk of the French electorate.
And I will identify the particular one that I'm referring to.
Macron, when he broke free from the Socialist Party before the 2017 election, did arouse quite a bit of enthusiasm in certain circles.
Which I thought was surprising, but he was not coming from... He created his own party, just like Zemmour is doing, and it's kind of a new factor.
He broke the two-party system in French politics.
But soon after his election, support for him went down quite drastically, as is common among French presidents.
But nonetheless, I'm always surprised at these people who are disappointed in their presidents, because You know what you were voting for.
I mean, he wasn't running a dishonest campaign.
He was quite open about it, what he wanted to do.
I think he was broadly faithful to what he campaigned on, in fact.
And I think those people maybe are the ones that are getting behind Picres.
And there's this idea that, oh, she's a woman.
She's part of the Conservative Party.
It's a breath of fresh air, as if this changes something other than, you know, optically.
But maybe those people are the ones that are giving Picress a bit of momentum at this stage.
Another thing that I wonder is the extent to which when French voters are polled as to their voting intentions, they are reluctant to say that they would support someone like Eric Zemmour.
We certainly have this phenomenon in the United States.
That people would hesitate to say that they were going to vote for a candidate such as Donald Trump who is considered a fascist and a racist.
Do you know to what extent that's likely to be the case in France?
I do recall some speculation that Marine Le Pen would do better than her polling for that reason, but it didn't seem to really turn out that way.
No, she did not do well in the election.
And I'm actually, I'm a bit surprised at the current polls that now put her at 47% because I think she got about 35% last time and now the polls say she could get 47% and I'm just very, I would like to talk to those 12% of Frenchmen who have changed their opinion on her because I figure the Le Pen brand is so well established that this would not be the case.
But there you go.
One thing I would say, I watched her debate with Emmanuel Macron after the first round, when it was just the two of them going head to head, and I was deeply disappointed in her performance.
She was almost hoyden-ish in her aggressiveness, unnecessarily aggressive.
And she seemed to know a surprisingly small amount about economic matters.
He was able to point out errors in her thinking, factual errors.
I thought she came across very, very badly.
And most many of her supporters felt the same way.
My suspicion is that if Eric Zemmour gets into the second round, He would not do badly at all.
He is really quite the master debater, very smart, very quick on his feet, full of allusions to history.
Now, I don't know how he may have to bone up some on economic policy, but he's a very smart guy.
And I think he would do very well in this traditional debate between the two candidates in the second round.
Do you not agree?
Um, I can't really say.
I think, uh, he is a very good debater, but I'm also, uh, aware of the fact that he before has been a pundit.
And so I have watched a few of his debates with politicians as a candidate.
Uh, and it is a different dynamic because, um, as a pundit, he was really, uh, looking at the contradictions of politicians or media stars or, or people like that.
Whereas now he's the one who is more, uh, under scrutiny.
Uh, and so I, I wouldn't say his, uh, Performances in the media have been been flawless, but he is clearly much brighter than Marine Le Pen.
I mean, this is simply the way it is.
And he has a much more well-developed personal position on countless issues.
And he'll have a historical reference and a quote for just about every issue.
And he is not defining them based on, you know, changing political expediency. These are positions he has
come to as a journalist, as an analyst, as a pundit. And so he sticks to them. And there's many,
many of these positions that are politically incorrect. Too many to go into, but it
works for him.
And that to me is one of his great strengths.
He is not captured or beholden really to anyone.
He has taken these positions without regard to winning votes, and he has stuck to them.
And so I'm very pleased by that.
Let us talk briefly, because they don't really deserve much more attention than just a few brief minutes, but about the candidates on the left.
It's quite amazing to me that the left, which used to be a very significant force in France, we had socialist presidents not all that long ago, François Hollande, before him Mitterrand.
We've had this succession of real leftist presidents.
But the current Socialist Party candidate, Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, she's pulling at 2% in the first round.
And there is this sort of perennial leftist candidate, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who is at 12%.
But the left as a whole is splintered.
They've got a Green Party candidate who's not doing much.
They actually have a, sure enough, Communist Party candidate who is really going nowhere with 1.5%.
It's almost amazing.
It's surprising to me that they should have such a dinosaur as an outright Communist Party candidate in Western Europe these days.
But the collapse of the left is something that's extremely encouraging to me.
And all of the French commentators are marveling at the extent to which France as a whole is moving towards the right.
Do you agree that there is a movement, a larger movement towards the right in France?
I know that some of the commentators that I've been listening to, they tend to be lefties themselves, as most journalists are, so they may be exaggerating things, but there may be something to that.
What do you think?
Well, I think that certainly Macron has not governed as a A pure globalist on all issues.
I mean, he kind of says everything and it's opposite.
And he has tried to get illegal immigration to some extent under control.
He has tried to take on Islamism in some cases.
So there is he does feel that need to appeal to that section of the electorate, even as he also does a lot of really woke stuff.
So it's a very mixed bag.
But the left has collapsed in terms of presidential politics.
So they are still strong, often at the local level.
But at the presidential level, they have collapsed.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon was the only one polling in the double digits.
And I think they are paying the price of François Hollande's non-presidency.
Because personally, I do believe that Uh, presidential candidates in general have to be able to credibly promise something.
It's not just to say that you have to have a generous position or a good position that people agree with.
They also need to believe that you can do it.
And after Francois Hollande, it became clear that the socialists could do nothing.
They just simply can do nothing given the state of the French economy as it As it is in today, the level of taxation, the level of protection for workers, and given the fact that we are in the Eurozone, we are in the European Union, we are in an interlocking system that enforces certain globalist economics, certain macroeconomic policies, that simply meant that your left economics are not credible coming from the Socialist Party.
And Mélenchon, because he's a grande gueule, as we say in French, he's a very aggressive speaker, a very outspoken man.
He still appeals to some people.
But I do maybe find surprising that the Greens, for example, aren't polling higher because they are popular in certain elections, often in European elections, for example.
But there you go.
The left is divided.
And there are calls to try to have a single left-wing candidate, because that would be their only chance of making it to the second round.
Yes, I understand there is a popular desire to have some kind of leftist primary, but Jean-Luc Mélenchon, he absolutely refuses.
He's top of the heap on the left, and others would hesitate as well.
But then let's talk about one last lefty, and this is a black woman, Christiane Taubira.
The left had already been splintered with socialists, greens, and Mélenchon, and then communists, and all of these other no-accounts.
And then she jumps in and says, well, the left can be unified behind me.
And of course, all the leftist candidates who are already there were saying, well, wait
a minute, well, that's rather arrogant coming in late in the game like this and saying that
you're going to unify the left.
But she's polling at 7%, which is a number two for the lefties.
And she's not an official declared candidate yet.
But I believe at the end of the month, she said that she's going to decide whether or
not she's going to be a candidate.
Can you tell me a little bit about her?
She had some sort of minor governmental post under Hollande, was it?
Under the socialists?
Well, she was a minister of justice.
So quite an important portfolio.
And she passed the law on gay marriage.
So she does have a few important achievements in terms of mainstream politics.
But what's interesting is that she presents herself as, you know, a champion of the French Republic of Republican values.
But she is, in fact, an ethnic activist.
And the reason we know this is because she started her career in the 1990s in Guyana.
So this is France's overseas possession, which is And she was an independentist in Guyana.
She wanted Guyana to be independent.
And I have to share with you a quote from that year, from even more recently, from 2007, where she was advocating for the expulsion of more immigrants from Guyana because we are at an identitarian turning point.
The native Guyanese, Guyane de Souche, have become minorities in their own land.
So this is what she says about Guyana.
But of course, in France, she's an ardent immigrationist.
And she is also responsible for a law which recognized slavery and the slave trade as a crime against humanity.
So you see what she's what she is getting at.
So she is a opportunistic politician who is a very good marker of the racialization of French politics and of the hypocrisy that accompanies that.
Good grief.
I didn't realize that she had been such an independentist and such a pure racial identitarian in Guyana.
How strange it is that we have this black Guyanese and then an Algerian Jew both claiming to be the incarnation of French Republican values.
But that is one of the fascinating things about French politics as opposed to American politics.
We're stuck with these two parties.
As you say, and I think this is a very important development in France, these new parties are popping up right out of nowhere.
I was very impressed at Emmanuel Macron's ability to basically start a new party from scratch and become president of France.
Almost unimaginable in the United States, you have a few of these sort of flash in the pan efforts, but it actually worked for him.
And then as you say, Eric Zemmour, no political experience at all, but he really has a chance at this point.
So French politics, I mean, you get all the way from communists to black racial activists, I agree.
to real, genuine, anti-Great Replacement identitarians.
You've got a much broader and far more interesting political panoply, certainly than anything
we've ever had in the United States.
I think from that point of view, it's really quite exciting to see things playing out in
France.
I agree.
And really, we can never predict the future, but we have nothing to lose.
And I gives them more, at least a one in three chance of winning.
I think it's perfectly possible.
And I dare even to be optimistic that if he were elected, or if Marine Le Pen were elected, why not?
That they would be able to do a lot more than an American president might be able to.
Because I think power in most European states, including France, is more centralized.
And we did see how Matteo Salvini, even as Interior Minister, not even as Prime Minister, even as Interior Minister, was able to get quite a lot done in terms of shutting down illegal immigration in Italy and to get very popular doing so.
And we do see how Viktor Orban's government in Hungary has been very stable and has been very explicit in tackling Europe's demographic crisis.
You know, I don't exclude the possibility that Zemmour can be our Viktor Orban.
Well, let's keep our fingers crossed.
And thank you very much for all of your many insights on what's going on in France.
Let's hope that this is an augury for more patriotic movements all throughout Western Europe.
Let's switch now to that excellent article that you wrote for American Renaissance a couple of weeks ago.
About Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore.
As you noted, Lee Kuan Yew had the extraordinary challenges of taking a multiracial society on a small, practically resource-free island, and then turning it into a successful political entity.
Can you tell me a little bit about the lessons you think that he might provide for those of us who are thinking in terms of eventually trying to build some new political entity or whatever other lessons you might draw from Lee Kuan Yew's success?
Yes.
I've been researching the career of Lee Kuan Yew in recent months and learning more about Southeast Asia, which is It's not a place we tend to think about very much.
And the more I was reading about it, the more I was amazed at the accomplishments there.
And I think one problem that we often have on the right is that our models tend to be marchers.
You know, some people will look to the Confederacy.
Some people will look to The French monarchy, some people will look to Salazar or Franco or, you know, other figures who at the end of the day didn't really succeed or didn't make very solid states.
You know, they didn't make enduring governments.
And Lee Kuan Yew is not a European.
He is an ethnic Chinese.
And I thought Singapore was just a A tax haven, you know, like like Luxembourg or something, and then therefore, you know, not so interesting, the fact that it was rich.
But in fact, it's a lot more complicated than that.
And essentially, the British Empire had been a kind of first wave of globalization in Southeast Asia.
It had developed capitalist economies.
It had a it had a moral vision of treating the natives reasonably well, of fairness.
And it had mixed up all the ethnic groups there because they were creating economic opportunities and therefore enterprising Indians and Chinese were moving into Southeast Asia.
And this was leading to conflict with the native Malays.
And by the 1960s, everyone was agreed that the Brits had to get out.
But the Southeast Asia was an incoherent ethnic mess, and it was a place marked by the nationalism of the Malays, but also by the communism, which was popular among the Chinese because of Mao Zedong's triumph in mainland China.
And Lee Kuan Yew was able, on his little island, to navigate all these challenges and to make a coherent nation, a multiracial nation, 75% Chinese, out of this mess.
And I think it's worth looking at his career and what he said, because he really has a lot of insights for us.
Well, I thought your article was full of interesting observations.
about what Lee Kuan Yew was able to achieve.
And I am struck by the observation you just made about the fact that he was able to build something
that was enduring, unlike the Confederacy, which lasted four years, or Salazar,
or some people look at National Socialist Germany as some sort of a model of racial unity.
But what did last a dozen years?
As you say, Lee Kuan Yew, not only did he build A nation that was very successful, but if I'm not mistaken, as you point out in your article, even after he has left the scene, it's continuing.
This has not been a one-man band.
He built institutions that are persisting very much along the lines that he envisaged.
Indeed, he really took a great interest in his succession.
So he was a prime minister for about 30 years, and then he sort of semi-retired because he still had other positions, and they sort of sound strange to Western ears, like a senior minister or a minister mentor were his later positions, but basically he let his How to say that the second generation take over and now it's his son who is in charge, but there were other people in the in the interim, so it's not exactly.
It's not exactly a monarchy, but he really took a principled stand in favor of the type of government that he wanted, and he was against divisive multiparty politics.
He wanted an orderly state, and it's very common in East Asia to Have the initial phases of capitalist development be done by non-electoral regimes or even authoritarian regimes.
And in his case, it was an authoritarian but elected regime.
And the fact that he had regular elections gave his government the legitimacy to take illiberal measures when necessary.
And thanks to this, they've had stability.
They've had virtually no racial conflict in Singapore, unlike the rest of Southeast Asia.
And this is a principled position.
They want to have the best people in government and they want stability.
It's kind of a Neo-Confucian vision.
And he doesn't believe in, you know, demagogic electioneering.
You know, he really doesn't think the government can plan for the future well, if that's what you have.
And that means that he's been able to get people into the government that share his vision and share a common vision.
And one aspect of that is Maintaining the racial balance of Singapore's population.
So to keep it 75% Chinese, the rest being a mix of Malays and Indians, and that ensures a certain stability and ensures that the Singaporean society and government keep their character.
Is it your impression that the Malays and the Indians accept a kind of subordinate status?
This is something that would be A little difficult to imagine in the United States, but it seems to be working.
As you say, it's my impression that the higher reaches of government are dominated by Chinese.
Perhaps there's a token Malay or Indian here and there, but to what extent is it your impression that the other two groups accept a kind of subordinate status?
So I think that the Malays often feel they have a subordinate status because they are a socioeconomically relatively unsuccessful group.
So this is simply a reality.
The Indians, on the other hand, I think, are quite successful and quite grateful to be part of Singapore.
So they're only, I think, 7% of the population, but it's something which is very positive for them.
Uh, and, uh, both Malays and Indians are included quite ostentatiously in the government.
So it is by no means a Chinese ethno state or anything like that.
It is a multiracial state.
It has a multiracial, uh, ideology, but one that celebrates the, uh, racial identity of all the groups.
So I don't know how they, um, how do they pick the members of the government, but I think having members of all the races is certainly a factor.
Well, it sounds as though they've really made an admirable success of the hand they were dealt.
Of course, the origin of Singapore as an independent nation, when it broke up from what was, I suppose at the time, was that the Malay Federation?
It was in 1965 or so, was it?
Is that when the separation took place?
It was a recognition that The larger political entity was being run by the indigenous Malays in a way that was to the detriment of Singapore, which did have a Chinese majority.
And yet it seems that it was a very deft management of the situation for Lee Kuan Yew to then take A nation in which Chinese were a majority, but then protect the interests of the minority.
It's really quite remarkable what he managed to achieve.
It's remarkable how insecure their position was in those early years.
I mean, we don't know anything about this.
This is never talked about in the West or no one knows about this, but their position was extremely insecure because communism really was very popular among the Chinese.
And so this explains the apparently so bizarre decision to try to merge into Malaysia, so to join into this Malay Muslim majority state.
But the idea was this will prevent us becoming communist.
But the Malays were too nationalistic and too chauvinist because the Malays really, really considered that they are bumiputera, which means sons of the soil, that we are the native people and therefore we have primacy.
And they were They have organized official discrimination against the Chinese, and they did not see it as a shared enterprise.
And Lee Kuan Yew was quite shocked at the incompetence of the federal authorities.
He is really someone who has absolutely no tolerance for sloppiness or slowness or anything like that.
And so they had to leave.
It was extremely difficult for the government at that time.
But they meant that they had no hinterland.
They had no local trading partners.
And they had a very low GDP per capita, you know, $500 per head per year.
But they decided to go global.
They decided to align with the West to have stability.
And they found the magic combination of good order and private property and investment, which enabled their development.
They learned the lesson which China has learned much too late for them.
I wonder if this success depended on an Asian or a Chinese majority.
I wonder to what extent a European people would have accepted the semi-authoritarian nature Of Lee Kuan Yew's rule.
This is not to say that he does not have important lessons for us, but his success might have depended on having an Asian majority to work with.
It's hard to say, but we certainly must not subtract from the remarkable achievements.
And it is my impression that most Singaporeans are happy with the state of affairs.
I see very little sense that there's any kind of Yes, and there is some liberalization.
There are critics.
There are a lot of critics in academia, by the way.
Most Singaporeans are grateful, as you say, the Indians included.
They're grateful, they're happy to be living in such a successful state
that really does recognize the interests of everyone.
Yes, and there is some liberalization.
There are critics, there are a lot of critics in academia, by the way.
But by and large, the system has held.
And I tend to agree with you.
I think that if the population was not East Asian, I'm not sure that this kind of government would be able to persist.
This is only an impression, but my impression is that Europeans, and especially Northern Europeans, would be more willing to contest authority.
Well, Mr. DeRocher, let us turn to your book.
I understand this is your very first book.
And it's one called The Ancient Ethnostate.
Congratulations, by the way.
And I understand that it's primarily about the Greeks, but do tell us what you aim to achieve in this book, what listeners to Radio Renaissance could learn from it.
So this is a book which goes through ancient Greek literature from Homer to Aristotle.
This tries to distill what I call biopolitical messages from that literature.
This essentially means a Darwinian analysis of ancient literature, because a people doesn't exist by default.
A people exists because it has had the biological and cultural traits to survive in conflicts with other groups.
Darwin talks about this.
Darwin talks about the fact that any traditional culture will be oriented in a kind of rough and unconscious way towards the flourishing of that group.
And so when we go back in our history, we can try to identify what made those cultures survive and thrive.
And I can't claim to be a, you know, a master of the Western canon.
I have not, you know, I've not studied everything.
I wish I had more time to study.
But I do find with the Greeks that they are directly biopolitical.
They are proto-Darwinian.
In a enthusiastic way.
They are obsessed about the needs of group cohesion, about having children, having good children, having a lineage.
They are also patriots.
They are extraordinarily proud of their civilization and of their people.
They always understand themselves as a kinship group.
We're always calling for solidarity in the face of barbarians, even if like modern Europeans, they often too often had a conflict among themselves.
And so I think it's important.
I believe in history.
I believe it is an excellent education to to life and to politics.
And I think it is good to go back to when our civilization was expanding, when it was growing and to try to imbue ourselves with a bit of that spirit.
Well this sounds like a very interesting and insightful study of our intellectual and even biological origins.
How can our listeners find the book?
I assume they can order it from a website?
So it is available on Amazon, on most of the national websites of Amazon.
I am working on getting it available from an alternative website to Amazon because understandably people I don't want to give Jake Bezos more money, but that's the main place that's available now.
Okay, and once again, it is The Ancient Ethnostate by Guillaume Derocher.
I'm intrigued in particular because there's another book that has come out recently, and it is a translation of Dominic Venner's book, and the English translation is called A Handbook for Dissidents.
And then the subtitle is A Samurai of the West.
The subtitle surprised me a little bit, but Dominic Venner shares your interest in the Greeks and his veneration for them, really.
And in his book, he refers to Homer almost as if it were scripture for the West.
Do you share his admiration with Homer to that degree, to think that those are the founding myths, the establishment of our nature?
Are they really to be found in Homer the way Dominic Venner thought they were?
I think Homer is marvelous.
And I think The vast majority of Greek literature is really excellent.
So you can take Homer, you can take Herodotus, you can take Aristotle.
I think if you read any of those, you're going to get a tremendous amount out of it.
Homer is the mindset that Dominic Venner in particular wanted us to have.
So there is a pagan subtext to this.
You know, there is a He agrees basically with Nietzsche that we have to go back to those original values, those aristocratic martial values.
Venner sees the Iliad, he calls it a subterranean river in European history because time and again you do have this kind of epic martial poetry coming back.
So he compares it, for example, to the Song of Roland, which is a medieval poem, early medieval poem of France, really, I think, perhaps the first piece of French literature that survives and has a very similar ethos, but that time in conflict with the Saracens.
And he also sees the same spirit in Ernst Jünger's Storm of Steel.
And so this is the idea of Conflict being central to human existence giving a certain nobility to human existence But without being moralistic, you know without this kind of moral hatred of the adversary and so veneer absolutely Wanted us to to turn to Homer Well, I'm I'm struck again by
I suppose it's not entirely a coincidence, but you're bringing out a book on the Greeks, and what did you call it?
A Darwinian analysis of ancient literature?
I think that's a very original undertaking, and yet I suppose Dominic Venner was doing something of a similar kind, finding in these founding notions The basis for a mentality that we must return to if we are to survive as a people.
Why did you give your book the title The Ancient Ethnostate?
Because the Greeks had ethnostates, by which I understand states which were related to the well-being of their people, also understood as biological entities.
So they did not consider reproduction to be a purely private affair or a caprice.
They felt that it was absolutely imperative that you carry on your lineage, both for the sake of your family, but also for the sake of your society, in their case, for the polis.
And so they had quite a diversity of states.
And there are differences in emphasis in the literature that I cover.
They are biopolitical in different ways.
But some of it is more in terms of mindset.
So that would be the case of Homer, for example.
Some of it is more anthropological.
So Herodotus, for example, he's looking at how all these nations and cultures and states are in conflict.
And he has an analysis of it, which is You could almost say Darwinian.
I mean, it certainly has selection as part of the equation.
And then you have those who are, let's say, most explicitly biopolitical.
And so that would be the political philosophers.
Aristotle, Aristotle especially, I think he is very useful today.
I think he can he can be used by us really today.
I think he's an excellent introduction to what to what politics should be.
And so I think it can serve as inspiration for the kinds of states that we might have in the future.
Well, I expect fully for your book to be to be reviewed at amran.com.
And I wish you every success in its publication and distribution.
And in the meantime, let me just remind our listeners of the title, The Ancient Ethnostate by Guillaume Derocher.
And I believe I will end this podcast and by thanking you very much for your willingness to talk about all of these things and your many insights and observations, which I'm sure our listeners will have enjoyed very much.
So again, thank you very much for joining me on this podcast.
Thank you, Jared.
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