Classic Essays

America’s “Planetary Renouncement of Our White Race”

cau_cropJEAN CAU (pictured) was a leading French writer and recipient of the Prix Goncourt. He was known as an apostle of Travail, Famille, Patrie — everything that was most dear to Marshall Pétain. For years Cau promoted the Ortega y Gasset view that the mob has taken over Western civilization.

Cau’s 1978 book Discours de la décadence astounded readers when it was published in Paris. Though Nietzsche would find little new in it, it was a shocker to his followers:

I will speak of egalitarianism, the scourge of our time, and I will tell you loud and clear what is now only in the murmuring stage: In the unleashing of this evil, Christianity bears an immense responsibility — the religion of the slave has penetrated the city.

Cau here is palpably incensed at the new god Demos, who manifests himself as a liberal in the US and as a totalitarian in Russia. But, and here comes the surprise, Cau has finally gone on record as preferring one face of this Janus-like god to the other. After stating that “the true son of Jesus, Jean-Jacques, and Marx is not Hitler, but Stalin,” he declares that the more decadent of the two superpower giants is the US — homeland of the “golden American mud,” a country which has “no sense of history” and “which [having] never known tragedy can only export mimics, gags, cheap merchandise, fads, managerial techniques, nervous skin diseases, receipts, and psychological and sociological pathos.”

America has made a “planetary renouncement of our White race,” says Cau, who then accuses Washington liberals and Soviet dissidents of trying to mortify the Russian soul with doses of American decadence.

Finally, he asks the fatal question (fatal, that is, for a professional conservative): “Which of the great peoples of the West has been less infected by the myth of cosmopolitanism that has accomplished this irreversible decadence? Which is the people in this latter part of the twentieth century which still acts and thinks like a people and a nation? It is the Russian people and nation.”

It was only a question of time until some European intellectuals would come to Cau’s conclusion. After all, Drieu La Rochelle was saying the same thing when he committed suicide in 1944 to escape being purged by the American, Gaullist, and Marxist “liberators” of France. Instauration magazine and an obscure American writer named Fred Farrell have been calling attention to the developing Russian paradox for years.

But no American conservative is likely to agree with Cau because there is no American conservatism worth the name. There are only the Reds-under-every-bed Birchers, the dollar-bill reactionaries of the Simon and Jarvis school, and the Buckley and Kosher conservatives who have now become the mainstay of modern liberal culture.

From now on many Frenchmen will call long-time right-winger Cau a Soviet agent, particularly after pondering this statement of his:

Europe has not been able to be, has not known how to be or wished to be, French or German. Europe is no longer a formative force in history. Europe, having been conquered, has no longer any planetary will and hangs on pitifully to the American skirt. I repeat that compared to American cosmopolitanism and its hatred of Western identity for civilization, Russian nationalism constitutes our last bastion.

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Source: based on an article in Instauration magazine, November 1978

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Arvin N. Prebost
Arvin N. Prebost
3 April, 2016 2:29 pm

I have read that a lot of Frenchmen went to help Russia in their squabble with Ukraine.

Maybe this guy is more popular than we think.

“Christianity bears an immense responsibility”–I think that it did. But now it is only a religion of women and strange people; the Germanization is long gone.

Unapologetic White Man
Unapologetic White Man
4 April, 2016 12:14 am

This Cau fellow sounds confused. Blaming Christianity for evil?

You can blame heresy for evil.

You can blame apostasy for evil.

You can blame hypocrisy for evil.

You can blame faithlessness for evil.

But actual Christianity is not to blame for evil.

If you’re looking for excuses to hate Christ, there are none. Unless you’re evil.

Arvin N. Prebost
Arvin N. Prebost
4 April, 2016 8:32 pm

No, UnAp, look at the broad picture. Christianity posits universalism—-all men will respond, in the same manner, to the same message, the Christian message of salvation. And Christianity posits egalitarianism—-all men are equal before God. Therefore, all must be accepted in the Christian assembly. I say, Cr*p!!! All men do not respond in the same way to anything. And all men cannot be assembled together without one group or another achieving dominance, and enforcing their accustomed way of doing things. Have you not noticed that this is why everything flows downhill? Especially in the Christian Church? The loud jibber-jabbering drowns out thoughtful reflection; the shouting and jubilating drowns out a restrained and inner-centered worship; the flashing lights, loud music and bright spotlights make impossible a serene retreat into one’s inner… Read more »

Old Aardvark
Old Aardvark
Reply to  Arvin N. Prebost
8 December, 2021 11:03 pm

Ask any Christian if there will be Negroes in Heaven? The answer will always be, “Yes.” That says it all.