Heritage

The ensemble of capacities and cultural traits transmitted from one generation to another that structures a people’s identity.

Heritage has both a cultural and a bio-anthropological nature. A dual imperative: blood and spirit. Any rupture in the heritage’s transmission, whether popular, artistic, cultural, artisanal, or technoscientific, eradicates a part of a people’s memory, preparing the ethnocide that will cause it to disappear.

Europeans, especially the French, are now prone to a triple sabotage of their heritage: first, the sabotage of their cultural and historical memory, in which the public schools actively take part; second, the submerging of Europe’s cultural patrimony and creative forces under American/Western mass culture and by the neo-primitivism that comes with Africanisation (the ‘tom-tom cult’ Céline predicted); and third, assaults on their biological germen, through race-mixing, a declining birth rate, and the growing weight of alien populations. The transmission of the biological and cultural heritage is the sine qua non for maintaining European peoples in history. Once there’s no longer anything of one’s own to transmit, one ceases to exist. A people without a heritage is an alienated people and, if things continue in this way, Europeans will find themselves far more deculturated than the Third World populations they formerly dominated.

But there’s a paradox here. Though the biological heritage hasn’t suffered any major changes, the cultural heritage in European history is always in constant metamorphosis, far from being something fixed. The cultural and civilisational heritage is a movement. Like a flame that always remains the same, the substance it burns is ceaselessly being renewed. The essential is that there exists within the heritage a hard core, a nucleus, of ‘fundamental values’ — mindful of the historical memory.

(see enrootment; heredity; history)