In my September Diary the other day I said the following thing, in reference to John Lukacs’s new book about Hitler and Stalin:
“The Hitler-Stalin duel was the end of an era in which white Europeans made major war against each other. It was the end of an era in which we could do so, secure in the belief … that the rest of the world didn’t really matter much. With the exception of Japan at the very end of that era, the non-white non-European world was too backward and/or too underpopulated to matter. That is no longer the case.
“Six years ago Kevin Phillips published a book titled The Cousins’ Wars, about the great internecine wars of the Anglo-Saxons, from the English Civil War to the American one. I think that in a decade or so, that will seem like a suitable title for the great European wars of the twentieth century. It seems incredible now that white, Christian Europeans should have engaged in such orgies of slaughter against each other. Would we dare to do so today, with our declining populations, under the eyes of the Arabs, the Chinese, the Africans?
“Half-consciously we know that the great wars of the future, if there are to be any, will be civilizational and racial. That white, European, Christian Germans made ferocious total war against white, European, Christian Russians will seem as preposterous to my children as it seems to me that English people once fought English people, that Britons fought Americans, that Americans fought each other. What on earth were they thinking of?”
Well, tell me I’m wrong, if you can, when even the Irish have stopped fighting each other!
Those late-90s spasms–Irish vs. Irish, Kosovars vs. Serbs–will be seen by our descendants as the last twitches of intra-communal conflict among white Europeans. Future fighting will be civilizational. Like this.