After European Civilisation

Abstract

After European Civilisation Desmond Fennell A common explanation of why the West is in turmoil has been the ‘populist’ risings against the ascendancy of ‘liberal political and cultural elites’. But the root cause of the disorder lies further back: in a series of events and a non-event that began with the American nuclear massacres in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and culminated with the ending of the West’s European civilisation that immigrants had brought with them to the USA. That ending meant entry by the West into an inter-civilisational period such as previously experienced in Western Europe in the centuries after the fall of that part of the Roman Empire. An inter-civilisational period is inevitably one of socio-political, moral and intellectual chaos. To return to the start. A civilisation, we know from history, is a politicalintellectual construct to which a large number of people adhere, which has a coherent set of values and rules derived from a venerated source – god, seer, lawgiver, holy man or the ancestors; in the European case, God as interpreted by the Christian church. This whole enables its members to enjoy the fullness of their human capacity by seeing and feeling sense in life. That last quality is the decisive reason why the societies we have called ‘civilisation’, unless destroyed by suicide or external force, have lasted hundreds, even thousands, of years. If a political and intellectual construct lacks that critical quality, it presents, rather than a sense-making framework for life, a senseless life. European civilisation took shape in Western Europe in thetwelfth century. When, on 6 August 1945, the American bomber crew was about to take off for Japan with its lethal cargo, official America, in the person of an air force chaplain, affirmed its adherence to European civilisation by using Euro-speak to address a hybrid God of the Old and New Testaments in the following words: ‘Almighty Father, who wilt hear the prayer of them that love thee, we pray thee to be with those who brave the heights of thy heaven and who carry the battle to our enemies ... May they, as well as we, know thy strength and power, and armed with thy might may they bring this war to a rapid end. In the Name of Jesus Christ, Amen’. Subsequent to that formally blessed massacre, the nuclear bombing of After European Civilisation Studies • volume 107 • number 428 461 Nagasaki took place on 9 August. While the meaning of the two bombings was still sinking in among the American public, three public calls were made for President Truman to repent (as, incidentally, Germany, and Western Europe generally, had repented the Jewish Holocaust). The most forceful of those calls came in March 1946 from the US Federal Council of Churches, in a report signed by twenty-two Protestant religious leaders. (Truman was a church-going Protestant). ‘We would begin’, they stated, ‘with an act of contrition’. They continued: ‘As American Christians we are deeply penitent for the irresponsible use already made of the atomic bomb. We are agreed that, whatever the judgement of war in principle, the surprise bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are morally indefensible. They repeated in ghastly form the indiscriminate slaughter of non-combatants that has become familiar during World War Two … As the nation that first used the weapon we have sinned grievously against the laws of God and the people of Japan’. The report also condemned as immoral ‘the massive fire-bomb raids’ that had preceded the atomic bombings. It urgedAmericans to offer a ‘convincing expression’ of repentance … and to cease the production of atomic weapons. The church leaders spoke on the common understanding that America was a Christian nation within European or Western civilisation and that, within that comity of nations, the Christian church determined what was morally right or wrong. The bombings they were condemning had been carried out, moreover, expressly in the name of the Christian God. Truman did not respond. In view of the actions that would be taken in the 1960s and 70s by official America, we can assume that there was much thought and deliberation within it regarding what, apart from official silence, the response or reaction...