The Religious Origins of Globalism:
An Interview with Hervé Ryssen, Part 1

From Mechanopolis, February 24, 2009

Translated by Greg Johnson

Mechanopolis: Hervé Ryssen, you have just published a book, Les Espérances planétariennes [Planetarian Hopes] (Levallois-Perret: Éditions Baskerville, 2005) which finally exposes the logic of globalism and its religious foundations. For far too long, intellectuals of the nationalist movement have shied away from such controversial topics and avoided denouncing cosmopolitan propaganda. Could you first of all clarify the title of your book for our readers?

Hervé Ryssen: I considered the writings of Jewish intellectuals to attempt to understand their vision of the world. After having read dozens of political essays, novels, and narratives of all sorts, I noticed that the word “hope” appeared regularly in these texts. Of course for them it stands for expectations of a better world, the Messiah, and the “promised land.” Let us recall that although the Christians have accepted their Messiah, the Jews still await theirs. This Messianic expectation is the heart of the Hebraic religion and the Jewish mentality in general, including that of atheistic Jews. This is the fundamental point. As for the term “planetarian,” it is a neologism which simply means the desire for a world without borders.

My work is exclusively focused on Jewish intellectuals. Contrary to what most people think, the use of the word “Jew” is not yet against the law. I know that many in the nationalist milieu begin sweating at the simple mention of the word, probably because they fear hearing anti-Semitic remarks which are indeed strongly punished today. Personally, I am not afraid of this, since my work is exclusively based on researching Jewish sources. Let us say that I have a rational and I daresay completely dispassionate approach to the subject.

Mechanopolis: One often hears Jews speak of the “promised land” and the “messiah,” but we have always misunderstood what these concepts mean. Isn’t the “promised land” the state of Israel?

Hervé Ryssen: Historically, it is the land of Canaan, which Yahweh gave to Abraham, as one reads Genesis, the first book of the Torah. But even before the destruction of the second Temple by the Roman legions of Titus and the dispersion of the Jews, many Jews already lived in the diaspora. There they remained until 1917, when the Balfour declaration created a “Jewish homeland in Palestine,” and certain Jews thought that by recovering the “promised land,” Messianic times were finally at hand. But it should not be forgotten that other Jews, far more numerous, thought at the same time that the promised land was located more to the North, in the immense Soviet Union where, after the revolution of October 1917, so many Jews appeared at the highest levels of power. However, if one reads slightly older texts, in the 19th century, it was France—the land of human rights—that raised Jewish hopes and constituted, in the eyes of Jews around the world, the “promised land.” Vienna at the beginning of the 20th century, or Weimar Germany between the wars, also could be regarded as “promised lands,” since culture and finance, in particular, were very largely influenced by bankers, intellectuals, and artists of Jewish origin.

This hope always ends in cruel disillusion. The state of Israel is no “haven of peace,” to say the least. As for Judeo-Bolshevik Russia, it turned against the Jews who were evicted from power after the Second World War. The France of “human rights” is today in the process of Third-Worldization, and since 2001 some Jews have decided to flee this “anti-Semitic” country where Jews increasingly suffer the anger of young Arabs. In short, for the Jews, it always seems to end badly, no matter where they go, no matter what they do.

For a long time, the “promised land” was incarnated in the American dream. In the 1880s, millions of Jews left Central Europe for the United States where they hoped for a better life, far from the Cossacks, the pogroms, and the hated Tsar. But the most recent “promised land” was obviously Russia after the collapse of the USSR. In a few years, a handful of “oligarchs” had their hooks in most of the privatized Russian wealth. Best known among them, the billionaire Khodorkovski, sleeps today in the prisons of the new Russia of Vladimir Putin. Obviously, this new “promised land” did not work out either! In short, one must understand that since their departure from the ghetto, the Jews have never ceased changing “promised lands,” and their wandering ends systematically in disappointment. Only the United States still represents in their eyes this Eldorado and still nourishes their hopes. But for how long?

Mechanopolis: You speak of history and geography, but aren’t messianism and the idea of the promised land religious concepts instead?

Hervé Ryssen: Here we come back to the heart of the matter. If you talk with a rabbi in the rue des Rosiers, he will immediately tell you that the Jews aspire above all to the creation of a world of peace, a world in which all conflicts will have disappeared, whether they are social conflicts or conflicts between races or nations. It is necessary to arrive at this world of universal peace, since they identify the world of peace with Messianic times. The authors are rather clear here. Here is what the philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas writes on this subject: “One can group the promises of the prophets in two categories: political and social. The alienation which introduces arbitrary political power into the whole human enterprise will disappear; but social injustice, the hold of the rich person on the poor, will disappear at the same time as political violence. . . .” As for the future world, our text goes on to define it as “humanity linked in a collective destiny” (Difficile liberté [Difficult Freedom] [Paris: Albin Michel, 1963], pp. 85-86.).

In Le vrai Visage du judaïsme [The True Face of Judaism] (Paris: Stock, 1987), Jacob Kaplan, the Chief rabbi of the central Consistory, points out the famous passage which is one of the sources of the Jewish messianism: “the wolf will live with the ewe; the tiger will rest with the kid; calf, lion cub, ram will live together, and a young child will lead them” (Isaiah, xi, 6-9). Kaplan adds: “It is obviously an image of the relations which will be established between the nations, happy to maintain unity and concord between them.”

In his book on messianism, David Banon confirms this vision of the world: “The Messianic era such as it was described by the whole of the prophets consists of the suppression of political violence and social injustice” (David Banon, Le Messianisme [Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1998], pp. 15-16.).

Hebraic prophecies thus promise the progression of humanity towards a unified world, and parallel to that, the suppression of social inequalities. Here one can see the primitive sources of Marxism as well as the inspiration of our planetarian ideology at the beginning of third millennium, which, propagated by the media, is the dream of so many of our fellow citizens. Here is the heart of the Jewish vision of the world. One must start here if one wants to understand the mental universe of the Jews. This is what explains why the Jews always mouth the word “peace.” Their “combat for peace” is ceaseless.

For example, in March 2000, Chirac inaugurated a “Wall for Peace” on the Champ de Mars, conceived by Clara Halter, the wife of the writer Marek Halter. It is a kind of hall of glass, where little Clara wrote the word “Peace” in thirty-two languages, to deride, one imagines, the cadets of the military academy just opposite. These works have a religious significance that very few goyim can detect.

One can thus argue that the concept of “promised land” means nothing less than a hope of planetary dimensions, where all the nations will have disappeared. It is just what the philosopher Edgar Morin tells us, when he writes: “We do not have the Promised land, but we have an aspiration, a wish, a myth, a dream: to realize a global fatherland” (Edgar Morin, Un nouveau commencement [Paris: Seuil, 1991], p. 9). And it is also what Jacques Attali speaks about in L’Homme nomade: “to make world a promised land” (Paris: Fayard, 2003, p. 34).  It is thus this unified, pacified world that will be the “promised land.” Sometimes these texts lend the impression that in the minds of certain intellectuals, the idea is taken in the literal sense: that is would be good if the whole Earth were promised to them! Which sometimes leads to behaviors that are a bit invasive . . .

Read Part 2 here.

Read Michael O’Meara’s review of Les Espérances planétariennes.