patrick.net

Napoleon famously observed that every European war was essentially a civil war, a brutal clash among brothers rather than a conquest of strangers. Pat Buchanan captured a similar truth when he called Europe’s wars from 1914 to 1945 a slow-motion suicide. Europe was never truly conquered; it destroyed itself. What it lost went far beyond land or political influence. It lost its memory, its nobility, and ultimately its right to define its own destiny. ...

Under the banners of democracy and anti-fascism, the victors laid waste to what remained of Europe’s independence. The Red Army spread over half the continent, installing client regimes that ruled by terror and fed on the wreckage of tradition. In the West, the United States imposed its own form of occupation, softer, subtler, but no less real. American money rebuilt the rubble, but the price was spiritual: re-education, moral disarmament, and a permanent place within a global consumer empire. In both East and West, the result was the same. Europe would never again command its own destiny.

This second war marked the final rupture between Europe and its aristocratic memory. The very concept of a sovereign nation rooted in culture and sacred duty was deemed the cause of the catastrophe. In its place rose an anti-Europe defined by universal rights, managed decline, and a pathological fear of strength. ...

What followed 1945 was not peace, but occupation. The Third Reich had fallen, but so had Europe itself. What emerged was a continent subdued by American consumer liberalism and Soviet managerial communism, both alien to its organic traditions. In the East, Red commissars erased the ancestral, looted the sacred, and built a grey, lifeless parody of human community. In the West, Coca-Cola and the dollar replaced sword and cross. Both systems trained their subjects to forget. The final war, the war against memory, had begun.