One fun thing about our senseless new reality is that it’s now possible to start Substack beef with the
. This is obviously what I will now be doing. My enemies list is long, and yes, you’re on it, but unlike most ordinary opinion-barfers the State Department has the power to have me kidnapped from my home in the middle of the night and secreted away to a tropical island, where cold-eyed men in greasy wifebeaters will electrocute my nuts on a zinc table until I die. A good literary beef should always come with an element of danger: if you’re not fighting someone who has the ability to humiliate you, you probably need to set your sights a little higher. The State Department has left a trail of blood and gore over every inhabited continent. It’s probably the biggest game out there. Let’s go.At the end of last month, the State Department posted a meandering little Substack essay titled The Need for Civilisational Allies in Europe. It writes:
The close relationship between the United States and Europe transcends geographic proximity and transactional politics. It represents a unique bond forged in common culture, faith, familial ties, mutual assistance in times of strife, and above all, a shared Western civilisational heritage.
Our transatlantic partnership is underpinned by a rich Western tradition of natural law, virtue ethics, and national sovereignty. This tradition flows from Athens and Rome, through medieval Christianity, to English common law, and ultimately into America's founding documents. The Declaration’s revolutionary assertion that men ‘are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights’ echoes the thought of Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and other European heavyweights who recognised that all men possess natural rights that no government can arbitrate or deny. America remains indebted to Europe for this intellectual and cultural legacy.
In the aftermath of two devastating world wars, European nations sought to prevent future catastrophes by creating supranational structures that would bind nations closer together and allow for more substantial diplomatic and economic engagements. Proponents of this new order, including well-meaning Christian and pro-democracy parties, sought a grand transformation—a world that would transcend the divisiveness of nationality and creed to usher in an era of unprecedented peace. By overcoming the anchors of nationhood, culture, and tradition, global liberalism promised what Francis Fukuyama famously called the “end of history,” the ultimate innovation of political life.
Today, this promise lies in tatters. What endures instead is an aggressive campaign against Western civilisation itself. Across Europe, governments have weaponised political institutions against their own citizens and against our shared heritage. Far from strengthening democratic principles, Europe has devolved into a hotbed of digital censorship, mass migration, restrictions on religious freedom, and numerous other assaults on democratic self-governance.
The rest of the piece details what they mean by this, which is that people can face legal consequences for praying silently near abortion clinics in Britain, criticising politicians in Germany, or embezzling public funds in France. To be honest, I don’t disagree that a lot of these European speech restrictions are bad and unhelpful, although I don’t see why the current US administration, with its policy of arresting and deporting people who write op-eds it doesn’t like, gets to be smug about this. What really interests me right now, though, are these four paragraphs. The writing is obviously awful; all government communiques might have the same bland, humourless, flatulent tone, but this is probably the first to describe Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas as ‘heavyweights.’ The ideas are similarly unimpressive, a wet glob of regurgitated Western Civ 101. But it’s very worrying if this is what the people who currently run the empire are thinking, because absolutely every claim made over the course of these four paragraphs is completely and utterly wrong.
America and Europe are not both part of something called ‘Western civilisation.’ America is not a product of European traditions transplanted to the New World; in fact, it’s the other way round. More than 1,500 years ago, America created Europe. There really is something genuinely distinctive about Europe, but it has absolutely nothing to do with natural law, virtue ethics, national sovereignty, culture, or tradition, and a lot more to do with the supranational structures that the State Department accuses of undermining Europe’s own values. The world is much, much weirder than the State Department—whose work mostly consists of obliterating small bit of it—could ever imagine.
Let’s start at the beginning. The notion of ‘Western civilisation’ is almost exclusively an American one; Europeans simply do not talk in these terms, unless we’re trying to cash in on the American culture wars. Like most bad ideas, it exists to make you ignore what’s right in front of your face, which is that the United States of America is not a European society, but an American one.
In its culture, institutions, and style of government, the US has no resemblance to France or Denmark, but it does look quite a lot like the Iroquois Confederation or the Aztec Triple Alliance. European countries are integral and territorial: each one is essentially a patch of farmland that could be conquered and defended by some warlord at some point between 476 and 1945, along with its population of bonded serfs. The basic unit of American sovereignty, meanwhile, is the pact, in which various disparate peoples invent institutions for globbing together in a theoretically limitless affiliative chain. The United States is also theoretically limitless: it bubbled away across the continent and then, once it hit the sea, started sweeping over Pacific islands like a tsunami. It may yet swallow up Canada too. This is entirely different to the process in which European territories are expanded or nibbled away at through conquest: the territory is simply wherever the pact is in force.
European society is literate and literary; America is fundamentally imagistic. A country of cave-painters. For the few Americans who can read, the written word is still magical in nature, a charm or amulet, a form of medicine, rather than an ordinary system for relaying meaning. (See, for instance, the basically savage invocation of Aristotle and Aquinas above.) For Europeans, freedom is imagined in social and sadistic terms; for Americans, both before and after Columbus, the notion of freedom is based in a metaphor of physically ranging unimpeded over large tracts of land.
The original founders of the United States understood this entirely, which is why the Sons of Liberty dressed as Native Americans when they threw the Dartmouth’s cargo into Boston Harbour. The 1778 Articles of Confederation may have been substantially inspired by the Gayanashagowa or Great Law of Peace that cemented the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, but unfortunately by 1787 the project was entirely in the hands of Roman Republic cosplayers like John Adams, with the result that most accounts of the origins of American liberalism now involve this tedious traipse from Athens to Rome to Runnymede to Plymouth Rock. There have always been a few visionaries, like Walt Whitman, who saw things clearly, but only recently have people really started pointing out the obvious. The strongest counter-history is the Graeber-Wengrow thesis, which observes that at the moment of contact between Europeans and Americans, the Europeans mostly lived under systems of extreme and explicit hierarchy and domination, while the Americans mostly lived in deliberative communities, governed by elected councils, in which any chieftain’s orders could be countermanded by someone asking ‘Why?’ (Another feature is the democratisation of violence: in Europe, the state could impose hideous punishments, but in America a whole village might collectively torture you to death.) Our entire notion of freedom, they claim, originates here.
Graeber and Wengrow don’t argue that Americans are noble savages, intrinsically more free than Europeans; they locate the origin of liberalism in a specifically American political history centring on the collapse of the despotic, city-building, human-sacrificing state based in Cahokia, near present-day St Louis. This might be true, but it’s worth pointing out that where contemporary America is brutal and despotic, it’s brutal and despotic in a specifically American way. Most European societies (after Rome, obviously) never had a sizeable domestic population of slaves; American ones did. Power in American societies was often embodied in potlatches or nextlaoallis, spectacular squanderings of wealth or life. This is essentially how the American world-empire, which continually consumes the wealth of the entire planet, governs itself.
The liberal counterpart to the reactionary slog back to Aristotle is, of course, the idea that America is a settler-colonial state built on stolen land. This is not entirely untrue—there’s been significant population turnover—but it is unhelpful. The point should be to encourage settler-descendants to more completely integrate into American society. Three hundred million Elizabeth Warrens! The first step would be to replace English the language of government and commerce with one or more native languages. Navajo has the most speakers, but Mohawk would have an obvious symbolic resonance; alternately the heartland is already dotted with Algonquian place names. Education is important; all children should be inducted into their local tribe, made to go through painful initiation rituals, and so on. Most of them don’t require any blood quantum. Longhouse summer camps. Probably a majority of Americans already vaguely believe in the Great Spirit. It can be done.
Where does that leave Europe? The argument that Europe itself is a 1,500 year old American invention is a bit fiddlier, but it does holds together. It hinges on the Yeniseian languages, which are currently spoken by about a thousand people in three miserable villages along a river in Krasnoyarsk Krai, deep in the middle of Russia. (The largest of those villages is called Kellog. As far as I can tell, there’s no connection to the cornflakes.) These are particularly interesting to linguists, because as far as we can tell the closest relatives of Yeniseian are not among other Siberian languages, but the Na-Dené languages of north America. These include the Athabaskan group spoken across Alaska and Yukon, but also Tlingit on the Northwest Coast and Navajo and Apache in Arizona and New Mexico. For a while the assumption was that Yeniseian was another branch of the language spoken by one of the groups of Siberians to have crossed the Bering Strait and populated the Americas, but that seems not to be the case. In 2014, a computational phylogenetic analysis by Sicoli and Holton found that Yeniseian did not branch off before other languages in the family, but belongs to a clade within Na-Dené. In other words, the Yeniseians were back-migrants: Americans who, thousands of years later, crossed the Bering Strait in the other direction and returned to Asia.
In the third century BC, a new people appeared on the borders of China. The Chinese were not unfamiliar with steppe peoples; they’d fought and traded with the Yuezhi, the Altaic and Iranian horse-nomads, for centuries. Confucian tradition assumed that the Yuezhi were basically made of the same stuff as ordinary people; one day, they would inevitably become civilised, obey the Son of Heaven, and adopt Chinese customs. This new people were different. They could not be cooked. The Chinese called them the Xiongnu, and Sima Qian writes that ‘they know nothing of ritual or righteousness… this is their Heaven-endowed nature.’ Something like invaders from another planet: unutterably strange, and warlike in a way China had never experienced. It was Xiongnu raids that spurred the construction of the Great Wall. They lived under a form of government that had never been seen before anywhere in the Old World: the multiethnic tribal confederation. But there must have been one particular tribe at the heart of their pact, because there was a distinct Xiongnu language. Scholars are divided on exactly what this language was. Some assume it was Turkic, because there were a lot of Turkic tribes around at the time. Some conclude it was some kind of proto-Mongolian, because later Chinese wrote that the Mongols were the same as the Xiongnu. But a few linguists, like Edwin Pulleyblank and Alexander Vovin, have tried to study the few scraps of Xiongnu that are actually available, in rough Chinese transliteration. What they find is that Xiongnu bears a marked similarity to Yeniseian.
In 129 BC, the Xiongnu were finally broken against a massive mounted Han army. The survivors fled into the interior of Asia. Some of them stayed and became tributaries of Emperor Xuan. Others, the more warlike ones, started moving west. Their migration sent ripples through the world. Other steppe peoples either joined the confederation, or started fleeing ahead of their advance, attacking whatever weaker tribes lay to their west. The Xiongnu attacked the Turks, the Turks slammed into the Scythians, the Sycthians pressed into the Germans, and the Germans fled across the borders of a soft and over-ripe Roman Empire. Finally, the people who had once been known as the Xiongnu arrived. In 440 AD, a native American brave named Attila the Hun crossed the Danube and made war against Rome.
This was the origin of Europe. In a Roman context, Europe is just a landmass. The world is divided into citizens and noncitizens; Roman citizens in Britain and Syria have far more in common with each other than they do with their Pictish or Arab relatives just across the border. A distinctive concept of Europe, a specifically European mode of social organisation, could only emerge out of the ruins of the Empire, once the Americans had torn it open. The distinctly European form of government that emerged in the Dark Ages is the one that most of Europe still lives under today. Europe is not about nations and peoples, knights and maidens, art and culture, knowledge and power, or freedom and democracy. Its history is the history of a sexually perverted supranational bureaucracy.