Fatherland
The notion of fatherland (Latin: patria; from "patris", meaning "father") links a ‘people’ with a ‘land’, the land of one’s fathers, ancestors, and lineage.
History
The need for a ‘native land’ is ethnologically and biologically rooted in the human spirit — and no form of globalisation can abolish it. Identification with a fatherland is one of the pillars of human psychology — a fatherland in which the crystallisation of the territorial imperative and the ethnic imperative coincide.
The history of European peoples is so complicated and entangled that the choice of a fatherland is difficult to make in a ‘rational’ or ‘mechanical’ manner. Will it be Brittany, Lombardy, or Flanders? Will it be France, Italy, Germany, or some other nation-state? Will it be America, to which European elites continue to emigrate? The French ideology of the nation-state, like the German ideology of Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s "fatherland as language and culture", has diminished the idea of fatherland, basic to all anthropological relations.
In revealing a certain European schizophrenia, this question can only be answered from above: to each European his own fatherland, national or regional (chosen on the basis of intimate, emotive affinities) — and to all Europeans the Great Fatherland, this land of intimately related peoples. The consciousness of belonging to both a ‘small native land’ and a ‘great fatherland’ is very difficult for contemporaries to grasp. The future, though, will likely compel them to understand it. The Great Fatherland organically encompasses and federates the native lands of Europe.
The modern world lives the assumption of the homeless and the accession of the deracinated. A nomadic métis, modern Western man is a passer-by in a world that has become a Global Village — organised into networks, with universalism and global capitalism constituting its virtual fatherland. This, though, is an illusion, a remnant of a modernism already out of date. There’s no doing away with the notion of a fatherland, for it’s archaic and atemporal, inscribed in our genes, and, in this sense, it’s futurist — archeofuturist.
Even the Third World immigrant colonizers of Europe remain attached to their fatherland — to the land from which they came. But for them, especially Muslims, Europe is a new fatherland, a conquered land (Dar al Islam). But beware: as a constant feature of human history, resting on the permanent conflict-cooperation dialectic governing the relations between different peoples, there will always be a temptation to occupy other people’s land. In a rather unique boomerang of history, Europe today is a victim of this alien inversion.
Essential to the idea of fatherland is not just an identity with a particular land, but an identity with a particular ethno-spiritual community. The fatherland is not simply a territory, but a biological lineage, the place where one’s ancestors are buried. Hence the tragedy of the pieds-noirs who settled Algeria, where their family tombs have since been profaned — where they once lived and worked and from which they were forcibly expelled. To survive today, Europeans no longer need to search for other countries to conquer, but to defend the Great Fatherland that comprises all the native lands of which they are the sole rightful occupants.
At the Continental level, the notion of fatherland must resume a dialectical dynamic. The new horizon of European man — following the failure of European colonisation, the tragedy of the present Third World colonisation, and the fantasy of a ‘Western world civilization’ — is now shaped by the need both to reconstruct their native lands and to construct an imperial Great Fatherland, Eurosiberia, stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
Words, of course, are always a bit imprecise. They are not mathematical concepts, but things expressive of the spirit’s subtleties. The fatherland, as a notion, has a meaning related to that of the ‘nation’, which etymologically refers to those who are closely related. The essential, however, is that all these notions possess an unshakeable popular basis. Let me give Éric Delcroix the last word here: ‘Where is the real native land, in which our contemporaries still recognize themselves as being within Europe, where they can make their life worth living and thus eventually worth sacrificing? There needs to be a people, though, before there can be such a land — however legitimate their attachment to all that they have historically and sentimentally invested.’ In his view, this people is the French, who are presently being disfigured by mass immigration, to such a degree that they risk becoming strangers in their own land, given that their new ‘compatriots’ are non-European.
The issue here is to define the term ‘patriotic’ on the basis of ethnic and historical criteria rather than according to the cosmopolitan ideology of the French Revolution. As Corneille wrote in his Horace, ‘To die for one’s country is such a worthy act / Men should contend to gain its glorious prize’. Again, it’s necessary that a fatherland corresponds to a single homogeneous people, for in American-style multi-racial society it’s even denied that its soldiers are sacrificed for the nation’s sake.
