The School Shooter Civilization

July 22, 2011, Oslo. A man in a police officer’s uniform parks a van at the Regjeringskvartalet government complex. He walks away, leaving the van in front of the building holding the office of the Prime Minister, enters a different car parked elsewhere, and begins the thirty-mile drive to the vacation island of Utøya. The van detonates, killing eight people. At Utøya, Anders Behring Breivik begins massacring the attendees of a Labour Party summer camp, killing an additional sixty-nine people, the majority being children and teenagers. He lures many of them with his policeman's disguise and the promise of safety, then executes the children at close range.

In the over 1500-page manifesto released by Breivik, he told the world that he intended to wage war against Cultural Marxism and Islam (p. 816), supposed forces attempting to destroy Western civilization. The goal of his murders was to eradicate the coming generation of liberal and left-wing leadership. Of all the concepts that Breivik shovelled into his verbose and overlong manifesto, civilization served as the terrorist’s chief preoccupation. Picking up a thread started by Western far-right activists after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the bipolar world order, Breivik was spurred to action by the existential stakes supposedly posed by a new struggle for the soul of Europe. It is not to be a conflict determined by policy cleavages, but those of fundamental culture and religion. 

It is from the same twisted root of this “civilizationist” imaginary that the worst excesses of Donald Trump's foreign policy have grown, from his April 7th threat that Iranian “civilization will die” if the Islamic Republic refused to accede to his demands, to his lawless regime change operation in Venezuela, to his peremptory moves towards the same in Cuba. There is a red thread that ties together the highest echelons of American power, a wave of murderous terrorism across the Western world, and esoteric thinkers scribbling in the political wilderness. That thread is the civilization-state. It is from the emergent civilizationist discourses of the ’90s that MAGA attempts to redefine the identity of Americans, and of America as a state. In embracing civilizationism, our society would be rejecting democracy and hurtling down a path of majoritarian violence, ethnic cleansing, and wars of conquest and control.

Breivik is their Mandela

While it is easy to simply generalize Breivik as a madman or bigot, he framed his actions as being for the preservation and advancement of an expansive and constructed abstraction of a people, based in supposed shared language, culture, ethnicity, traditions, and/or values. Civilizationism rejects the universality of liberalism and the “young” identities of nations for an identity legitimized by the supposed age, prestige, and uniqueness of a “civilization.” Civilizationists like Breivik aim to redraw borders in blood, to reject the sovereign rights of the upstart nation-states of the last two centuries. 

Few beyond sympathetic fanatics could say they expected then that the same civilizationist paradigm guiding this deranged terrorist would come to be the guiding paradigm of American foreign policy fifteen years later. And yet, the State Department now publishes civilizationist manifestos as strategic documents. Europe is now told by Michael Anton that it must regain civilizational “self-confidence” and “health” if it does not wish to be subject to MAGA’s version of Russian active measures. Officials have made it expressly clear that investigations and prosecutions of right-wing extremist elements in Europe and America are unacceptable, and that a Europe that replaces its cultural roots—as Breivik complained of—will be destined for ruin. Breivik (p. 706) explicitly identifies this civilizational struggle in the same paradigm as the White House: Western Civilization, a shared Christian, continental, cultural, and philosophical heritage from ancient Greece and the Roman Empire, which is under threat of erasure. There is an existential threat to the West’s spiritual and cultural health posed by The Left on one hand and immigration from the Middle East and other predominantly Muslim countries on the other, and the only solution is a political program that imposes a new civilizational identity on a recalcitrant population.

Breivik may not be the first terrorist acting in the name of civilizational struggle, or even an American, but he is one of the most important and influential of the post-9/11 era, and a subject who represented the lethal confluence of American and European civilizationists and their gradual acceptance of political violence. Breivik’s writings commonly cited blogs and figures of the American and British Islamophobic scene, providing insight into the ideological underpinnings of a multi-decade wave of white supremacist terrorism. They proved the shooting was a logical result of a transnational movement to construct a civilizational identity, one in opposition to the existence of an “Islamic civilization” that does not exist. Breivik’s cause found recognition among the luminaries of the Republican Party’s future ideological elite, being seen by Anton ally and Tech Right guru Curtis Yarvin as comparable to that of an unsuccessful Nelson Mandela—an instructive example of how they relate to Breivik’s cause. For Yarvin, the only difference between Mandela and Breivik is that Breivik was unsuccessful in producing political change.

Following the killings, the venue Breivik targeted was condemned by Pamela Geller for its politics, even as she scrubbed old posts to maintain plausible deniability of an endorsement of terrorist violence. Geller, along with Robert Spencer and Frank Gaffney, was one of the principal activists behind the first Trump administration’s Muslim ban. All were featured on Breitbart radio in the months leading up to Trump's election. All were featured in Breivik’s manifesto. In this light, civilizationism is not simply populism under slight rhetorical tweaking, but has implications for America’s foreign relations, future conflicts, self-conceptualization, and state identity. 

Who did their Mandela inspire? Future shooters. A Minnesota man who killed children at a Catholic school adorned items with “Hail Breivik.” The Christchurch mosque shooter, Brenton Tarrant, wrote positively about his contacts with Breivik. Tarrant embodied the dovetailing of Breivik’s terroristic impulse with the identitarian movement, a neo-Nazi movement seeking to establish a white supremacist European civilization spanning the Atlantic to the Russian Pacific. Having correspondence with both Breivik and the identitarian activist Martin Sellner, Tarrant bridged a gap between Breivik and the New Right political faction, which had to contend with the public’s distaste for violence while still satisfying the demands of the bloodthirsty radicals making up its base.

The New Right solved this issue through quiet legitimization. The Great Replacement conspiracy theory motivating these shooters was mainstreamed in the Republican base by MAGA’s most important pundit at the time, Tucker Carlson, and explicitly under that name within two years. Lauren Southern, the Sellner ally and identitarian activist closely tied to multiple organizations that received donations from Tarrant and produced videos aligning with those conspiracy theories, took a contributor job at Sky News in Australia around the same time. Tarrant’s obsessive opening lines in the manifesto written before gunning down fifty Muslims, “It’s the birthrates. It’s the birthrates. It’s the birthrates,” are now echoed in the obsession of MAGA’s most influential backer, Elon Musk.

What is civilizationism?

Civilizationism is a discursive strategy rather than an actual political theory, meant to build an authoritarian public consensus through an anti-liberal vocabulary and cultural programme. As put by the political scientist Bruno Maçães, civilization “is an exercise in political reason, the effort to organize collective life around principles that express our fundamental relation to truth, to the world and to each other,” and it follows that the project of the civilization-state is to define and control those relations through a state apparatus. In pursuit of authoritarian consolidation, states have increasingly taken up the identity of a “civilization-state,” incorporating this framing into a new state identity. These states conceptualize themselves not as nation-states, which are territorially limiting and lack the prestige and legitimacy of states staking a claim to centuries of continuity, but as something more expansive and nebulous. 

Liberalism faces a similar treatment, being inadequate for the needs of the civilization-state and posing a repugnant threat to its values. Creedal democracies such as America are further incompatible with this vision, which is why American civilizationists champion regime change toward rule by a Caesar. To the civilizationist, the values shared as Americans matter less than the supposed deep heritage of “our Western, Anglo-American civilization.” This heritage is variously defined as religious, ethnic, linguistic, or historical commonality, or whatever arbitrary criterion the civilizationist needs to exclude the threat du jour.

The post-1945 world order, as defined by the Atlantic Charter, was to be a world of territorially-bounded nation-states, equally sovereign within their own territories. In the long struggle of the Cold War this aspiration was frequently violated, but the aspiration remained, and remained powerful—as the impact of the Helsinki Final Act on anticommunist movements in Eastern Europe demonstrates. The civilizationist imagines no such international equality. The civilizationist’s world is defined by transnational civilizations, marked by "deep," "genuine," "ancient," "true" heritage. Ukraine is not even a nation, Vladimir Putin argues, let alone a civilization. The great civilizations of Earth extend beyond national borders, and while civilizations may exist in relations of competition with each other, they are owed only subservience by those peoples unfortunate enough to lack one. Civilizations are owed subservience within their historical mandates, and may freely act to "instruct and guide" those lesser nations.

Yet civilizational identities are largely bogus and constructed with political goals in mind, as part of a broader project that often papers over damaging truths. Han civilizationists do not restrict themselves to Han borders, but embrace Manchu territorial and maritime claims. Their Western counterparts are strikingly similar to the cruel, thoughtless, and self-destructive sons of Tarquin and Brutus, not of the Caesar and Augustus they fantasize of being. This ideological flexibility in service of state and private brutality is illustrated by the diverging conceptions of civilization offered by two of civilizationism’s most influential thinkers, Bat Ye’or and James Buchanan.

Constructing MAGA’s civilizational identity: the crusader

Gisele Littman, writing as Bat Ye’or, is a British author who proved incredibly influential on Breivik’s manifesto, which not only borrowed central concepts within her writings such as Dhimmitude and Eurabia, but explicitly stated that Littman had contact with Breivik and recommended him various readings (p. 42). A central ideologue of the counter-jihad movement, Littman served as a lodestar for the American Islamophobes that would come to dominate MAGA’s attitudes towards Muslims, and its modern civilizational identity as Crusaders defending Christian lands from Muslim encroachment. Even today, Littman’s work finds itself cited in the pages of Republican media like the Free Press and promoted by think tanks like the Middle East Forum, made all the more relevant in those circles by the ongoing war with Iran and domestic political and interfaith tensions over Palestine. 

Littman defined a civilization as a “comprehensive system of laws, traditions, and culture, evolving in duration according to specific and structural parameters, which maintain its homogeneity, its behavioral patterns, and their transmission.” While important for understanding MAGA and the New Right’s concept of Western civilization, it’s an incredibly expansive and open-ended categorization. Consider “dhimmitude,” supposed to be a civilizational identity shaped by the restrictions and norms imposed in the ancient past by Islamic legal systems on followers of other Abrahamic faiths, a legacy Littman claims not only supposedly persists today but stands to experience a revival as part of a conspiracy to establish Islamic theocracies throughout Europe, a project she calls “Eurabia.” Breivik alleges Littman sent him a European strategic document for European relations with Mediterranean partners, pointing with outrage at its goal to “pursue, in order to fight intolerance, racism and xenophobia, the dialogue between cultures and civilisations” as evidence of her “Eurabia” conspiracy theory and of Europe’s relegation to dhimmitude (p. 42).

Littman constructs an identity from narratives of perpetual victimhood at the hands of Muslims spanning the history of the religion, but it’s an identity that lacks commonality beyond that victimhood. She would have little use for Breivik’s Knights Templar roleplay or find much in common with him beyond their shared bigotry. However, Littman’s theories are extremely useful for the crusader identity undertaken by Breivik, MAGA, and the European far right, further evidenced in the identitarian movement by its embrace of her concepts and of a Muslim scapegoat (see José Pedro Zúquete, The Identitarians, p. 180). It is absurd to claim that countries like France, Germany or Norway are in a condition of dhimmitude, and yet they are clearly positioned by Littman as being so simply on account of Muslims being present in that society. Littman’s theories demonstrate that the “civilization” within civilizationism is a nebulous and constructed identity with a political goal in mind regardless of cultural realities, an identity that flexibly adapts to align behind that goal.

The MAGA intelligentsia recognises this. It is why they will claim “at the heart of Western civilization lies this central truth: that man is a rational, free, and moral being” while dilating on Aristotle and Aquinas and also, in the very same speech, say that “What constitutes ‘the West’ is…not the right question. The West is not a laboratory experiment to be endlessly dissected and reclassified. It is a particular people, a particular civilization—one you know when you see it, when you experience it, when you belong to it.” In the end, they do not define “the West” in any coherent way. If the nation is an imagined community, civilization is the delusion of a shared consensus. A consensus of who they are, and who the enemy is.

Future relations of the American civilization-state: the continentalist

As a revisionist concept, the civilization-state exists in direct opposition to the multi-century development of a liberal world order, rejecting the norms established during the Westphalian and post-WWII periods. Civilization-states have little regard for inconvenient borders or pesky questions of sovereignty. Instead, they build an identity as “civilizational” hegemons based in past and current cultural and political relationships, and historical claims. Slavic and Chinese civilizational unities are the justifications and supposed motives behind invasions of Ukraine and Taiwan, respectively. MAGA foreign policy too now embraces a similar constructed framing, depicting Canada, the United States, Greenland, the Panama Canal, and occasionally Cuba as “Greater North America,” positioning an explicit claim to sovereignty over this newly declared sphere of influence. Greenland, once under US occupation during the Second World War, finds itself again designated as a stage for American power projection, this time at the behest of a former Reagan official.

Whereas Russia and China are making claims based on cultural similarity, former political control, and a return to imperial grandeur, the United States instead claims the right to assume control of its allies. It is assuming a chimeric role of crusader and continental overlord. In its war with Iran, wartime command staff are delusionally bragging to their subordinates that they are waging a holy war to bring about Armageddon and the return of Christ Himself, assuming the role of the Christian crusader state premised in a shared narrative of civilizational assault by the Muslim Other. 

Patrick J. Buchanan, often seen as a forerunner of Donald Trump and a foundational ideologue of MAGA and its foreign policy, wrote in his book A Republic, Not an Empire of a need to untether American interests from European conflicts. And yet, while ostensibly a book about how America should not be an empire and avoid European entanglement, it opens by celebrating the removal of “French, British, Spanish, and Russian influence from our continent.” If not a continental empire, then clearly a hemispheric hegemon with the exclusive right to dictate its neighbours’ business. Buchanan went even further with China, pleading the case for “peaceful removal” of supposed Chinese agents in Panama and functionally placing the hemisphere under the sole control of the United States.

Buchanan’s writings before and after the release of the book also tell an entirely different story. In "The Monroe Doctrine: Use It Or Lose It," Buchanan wrote in defence of Operation Just Cause and positioned the Monroe Doctrine “as the cornerstone of U.S. policy in the hemisphere.” His justification for the overthrow of an American-backed narcoterrorist foreshadowed American action in Venezuela. In several op-eds around the time of the Quebec sovereignty referendum, Buchanan advocated annexing a supposedly disintegrating Canada, saying it isn’t wrong for Americans to dream of absorbing the country (and purchasing Greenland) by 2000. According to the Trump Department of War, this is a revival of the “quarter-sphere” strategy, an idea briefly proposed after the Fall of France in 1940, in which America would have functional control over the political and economic future of North America and the northern portions of South America. Buchanan’s view of Chinese and Russian posturing, that they should get their own Monroe Doctrines—that is to say freedom to pursue imperialism in their civilizational demesne—overlaps considerably with the functional realities of the quarter-sphere strategy. He writes in A Republic, Not an Empire of a future president confronted with an invasion of Taiwan and questioning whether it would be worth violating China’s own “Monroe Doctrine,” eerily prefiguring Trump’s own apathy towards the island nation’s security.

In contrast to Littman’s influence on MAGA’s counter-jihad and Christian fundamentalist elements and their construction of Judeo-Christian civilization with America (and Israel) at its forefront, Buchanan constructs an identity as being continentalist, racial, and hegemonic, and is rather disdainful of America’s continued entanglements with Israel’s geopolitical interests in the Middle East, regardless of his admiration for Littman’s works. As a so-called paleoconservative, Buchanan was at the forefront of mainstreaming white nationalism during America’s post-Cold War honeymoon. Buchanan is of the opinion that America should have never intervened in the Second World War, that so-called white civilization is dying, and that—most important to this essay—Breivik was right in his manifesto’s prescriptions of Western society’s supposed ills. Buchanan’s construction of a continental America ends at America’s southern border because Buchanan unabashedly views his civilization as white. Hysteria over shrinking white demographics and continual immigration permeates his Death of the West. What we see in this shared position is a desire to return to an ethnic majoritarian body politic that is found in civilization-states like Russia, China, and India. 

Even if the movement fails to live up to the entirety of their policy prescriptions, the intellectual debt MAGA owes to its forerunners helps predict what it will do next. The Trump administration has made it clear Cuba and Mexico are in its sights. Trump himself has stated that Cuba will be his to take, in whatever form that would be. His plan to force Cuba to open itself to America is simply an application of Buchanan’s prescription for dealing with the island. Instead of conquering Cuba as a new territory to manage, the United States would establish it as a client state, ensuring the U.S. an unimpeded and potentially exclusive right to exploit its resources. It is exactly the “colonial hat” MAGA elites like Erik Prince, who dreams of living as a Denardian mercenary king on an endless neocolonial safari, say they want America to wear.

A world of civilizations and subjects

Quarter-sphere posturing suggests America will take a much more drawn-back response to an invasion of Taiwan, out of anticipation of a catastrophic loss or pullback from the East China Sea, further enabling the colonial ambitions of its supposed rivals. When it was conceived, the quarter-sphere plan was a strategy of concession, conformity, and adaptation to an era of continental empires led by the totalitarian societies of the Axis, each a civilization-state reviving its mythical glory through the colonisation and control of its historically and geographically significant neighbours. Just as it would then, any modern revival of the strategy answers colonial aggression by revisionist powers against American allies in favour of a détente maintained by geography and regime similarity. Its analogue would be the Concert of Europe and the decades of colonial expansion it structurally incentivized. To the glee of self-declared civilizationists such as Claremont’s Andrew Beck, it represents the rebirth of the American Empire.

Whether hegemon or empire, history has seen liberal powers take this sort of imperial turn before. In 1906, against the backdrop of the American colonization of the Philippines and the westernization of the Meiji-era military, the Japanese nationalist intellectual and art critic Okakura Kakuzō wrote the Book of Tea, propounding that Japanese culture and art was of equal consideration to the West. This intermingling of geopolitics and culture defined the first quarter-century of the Showa period, which scholars such as Christopher Coker position as the origin of the civilization-state. To Okakura, Asian civilization was constructed not as imperialistic, but inward-facing. As a proto-civilizationist of his time, Okakura’s vision of an Asia free of “progressive” Western imperialism saw Japan less as a military hegemon (outside of the Korean peninsula) than as the inheritor of Asian cultural knowledge, a religiously diverse society influenced by traditions across the continent. In contrast with the intellectuals of the succeeding imperial period, Okakura was aghast at Japan’s mimicry of European armies in a bid for modernization, famously writing with disdain of how the West refused to regard Japan as a peer during its isolationist peace while only recognising the nation as civilized for its brutal military victories over Russia. To Okakura, Japan risked falling to the White Peril forced upon the other nations of Asia: obliterating its culture to become European and take on the bloody baggage of European empires (The Awakening of Japan, chapter V).

While it is difficult to imagine Okakura would be enthusiastic about how his work was adopted during the cruel excesses of Imperial Japan, his pan-Asianism was used to justify Japan’s aspirations for a continental empire, echoing the pan-Germanism of Nazi Germany and the Roman posturing of Mussolini's Italy. Okakura was not a liberal by any means, but his engagement and criticism of the civilizational dialogues of his time and resultant reconstruction of Japanese values is instructive for understanding where America is heading. As Japan had at the turn of the last century, America too faces the prospect of conflict with Russia and China. It feels the need to expand its territory and regional hegemony. It is obsessed with securing critical commercial mineral access. Imposing the cultural values of a failed imperial era on the modern United States will not “modernize” its military but instead force it into obsolescence. Creating scapegoats out of the obsessions of yesterday’s radical right instead of dialogue will not unify the people under a civilizational identity, but threaten to fracture them with tribalism. 

Okakura foresaw the impending disaster his country faced, saying in 1904 “In the name of commerce, we have welcomed the militant, in the name of civilization we have embraced the imperialistic, in the name of Christianity we have prostrated before the merciless.” Today, we see new American acolytes of “Western civilization” assume the mantle of crusader and colonizer, cloaks woven whole from the administration’s admiration of such cruel legacies. Have these heralds of “Western civilization” changed from the White Peril described by Okakura? Have they become less militant? Imperialistic? Merciless? They send children to a Central American gulag archipelago with the backing of armed masked thugs. They fantasize of being Knights Templar and slaughter children at summer camp with the express intent to decimate a generation of future leadership. They threaten the annihilation of their “civilizational” adversaries in war. If these are the actions of the forefront of the new civilizationism, what brutalities are in store for the victims of the new American “civilization?”

Featured image is Curtis Yarvin, by Elekes Andor