The European Civil War Starts Again

by Kevin DeAnna

Kevin DeAnna pays tribute to Charlie Kirk, Iryna Zarutska, and Liana Kassai, arguing that their killings inaugurate a new age of martyrdom and struggle for the future of European peoples.

Historically, Western Civilization has existed as a unity. From the Greek alliance against the Persians, to Rome, to the Crusades, the West has found its highest expression when it fights as one. Since the rise of the nation-state, such expressions have been few. In many ways, the entire twentieth century was one great European Civil War, with the global right and left warring over the destiny of Western Man. The victor was not the Communists nor the traditional Right but the extra-European, American creed of individual liberation and international capitalism. In the eyes of critics like Julius Evola, this was a foreign conquest as dangerous as that of Soviet Communism.

Yet, while it is rational for Europeans to oppose American interference on the Continent, it does not change the reality. Despite repeated boasts of European “strategic autonomy” from figures like Emmanuel Macron, the EU has failed to chart a course separate from Washington, and in many ways seems more committed to center-left transatlantic institutions than America itself. The more traditionalist and arguably authentic European Right remains submerged and politically marginalized, while Donald Trump, despite his failures, provides a rallying point for Western patriots worldwide. We can mourn that America has become the Metropole of the West, but what happens in the United States affects everything that happens in Europe.

The killings of Iryna Zarutska, Liana Kassai, and Charlie Kirk could provide an unexpected spur to united action. The murder of Zarutska is almost overdone in its scripted poignancy – a beautiful Ukrainian refugee, practically a poster child for the sympathetic victim that the neoliberal establishment has been championing. She received shelter in America, exactly the kind of case that the liberal media would use as a club against the Trump Administration’s anti-immigration and arguably anti-Ukrainian policies. She got a job and begins making her way in the big city, almost a walking advertisement for progressives who want a living rebuttal to nativism, patriarchy, and Putinism.

All this was annihilated overnight as she was butchered before the uncaring denizens of Chicago by a career felon who was already arrested more than a dozen times. Decarlos Brown Jr. was released by a magistrate on the basis of a “written promise” he would show up for court, despite numerous past offenses and wild rantings to police that materials in his body were controlling his action. Despite his supposed insanity, he somehow managed to expertly ambush the one white girl within his car from behind, avoiding potentially more dangerous targets. Audio after the event suggests that he muttered “got that white girl” to himself as Zarutska bled out on the dirty floor, fodder for cell phone footage by gawking spectators. Needless to say, the murderer has already been referred to mental health counseling, and we await the inevitable ruling that he cannot be held criminally responsible.

The manner of Zarutska’s end also made her immortal. In shock from the sudden stabbing, she curls in a fetal position and looks up fearfully, almost childlike in appearance. As life drains from her, she sobs while the other passengers on the train ignore her. She then slides off the seat, dead within seconds. There is no gore or fountain of blood, but a combination of vulnerability and beauty that can’t help but inspire rage and a frustrated desire to protect her in every white man that viewed it. Her final moment is iconic, and it compels and yet sickens one to look upon it.

In her, we also see the countless other victims of terrorism and crime, mostly committed by non-whites throughout Europe. It’s impossible not to think of Liana Kassai, another Ukrainian refugee killed at a train station in August, this time in Germany. She was reportedly killed by an Iraqi refugee who had been denied asylum. German authorities initially suspected suicide, though the victim’s family immediately objected. In this case too, we are told the alleged murderer is schizophrenic. Despite his asylum request being denied, the alleged killer remained in the country for years.

Angela Merkel’s boast of “Wir schaffen das” appears doubly tragic, as the Fatherland’s inability to assimilate millions of resentful Muslims now compromises its ability to shelter its European kinsmen fleeing from war. The bright promises of European unity and even the German rearmament supposedly needed to guard the Continent against Russian aggression are especially hollow when refugees are in danger from non-European migrants admitted by Berlin itself. History is rebuking Mutti Merkel, with reality showing Europeans that no, we cannot do this, we cannot admit unlimited numbers of migrants from the Third World and remain who we are.

The assassination of Charlie Kirk is the capstone to this trifecta of tragedy. Kirk was a singular figure on the American Right. Only 31, no one in recent political history has filled so many roles. The founder and lead organizer of the most powerful campus conservative organization, he was also a talk show host, a political organizer who helped win the last presidential election, a close ally and advisor of the White House, a campus speaker, and an online fixture. No one else was simultaneously pushing the margins of political debate while remaining relevant within the mainstream, advocating realistic policies from within the corridors of power while simultaneously widening the Overton Window.

For the extremely online Dissident Right, Charlie Kirk and TPUSA were something of a joke years ago, famously confronted during the first “Groyper War” by activists pressuring him on immigration, anti-white discrimination, Israel, and other issues. Recently, however, Kirk had shifted his rhetoric away from Conservatism Inc. bromides. He proclaimed that there was undeniably a war on whites. He told whites to be proud of who they were. He called for ending the “H1B visa scam.” His final post on X read: “If we want things to change, it's 100% necessary to politicize the senseless murder of Iryna Zarutska because it was politics that allowed a savage monster with 14 priors to be free on the streets to kill her.” The hard right did not appreciate Kirk until he was martyred, and many of us found to our shock that his opinions were not so different from ours after all.

Despite a deeply dishonest effort by media to muddy the waters, it appears the killer is exactly what most people expected: a progressive radicalized by the violent cults of “antifascism” and transgenderism. Though he was raised in a conservative family, it appears Tyler Robinson converted to the clichés of the modern egalitarian religion and felt he had not just the right but the duty to kill Kirk because he was a “hater.” Perhaps more than the killing itself, it is the reaction to the murder that has radicalized the Right. Soldiers, nurses, teachers, government workers, emergency dispatchers, and others in positions that Americans depend on in their most vulnerable moments have revealed themselves as reveling in the public execution of one of mainstream conservatism’s most beloved figures, one whose entire approach was characterized by a dedication to open debate with even his most militant opponents.

Yet what is most remarkable about the assassination of Kirk is how it has echoed around the world. In England, his name, along with that of Iryna and Liana, was cited by activists at the Unite the Kingdom rally. In Vienna and Leipzig, impromptu monuments to Iryna and Kirk were created, and then promptly targeted and destroyed by antifa. In Poland, Dariusz Matecki held up a picture of Iryna on the floor of the Sejm while proclaiming “White Lives Matter.” The names of our martyrs are known throughout the West.

The past European conflicts over borders, language, and empires fade to insignificance as we see the war raging within each of our countries. While whites cling to post-racial illusions, non-whites within our countries put race first in both political and personal disputes. Unlike in the last European Civil War, leftists do not fight in the name of class justice, but in solidarity with non-whites to defeat “hate” and “racism.” Whatever local issues confront us, the essentials of mass immigration, crime, anti-white discrimination, and the repression of right-wing figures are common to Europeans worldwide. This struggle is forging a new civilizational identity, if for no other reason than that we face the same enemy pursuing the same goal of the Great Replacement.

Few of those on the authentic Right can have any illusions that American-style “conservatism” offers a way out of the death spiral of the West. Yet that is secondary. What matters is the forging of a constituency and ultimately a people that is aware it is under deadly, existential threat. The assassination of Kirk and the butchery of Iryna and Liana have brought that home to millions. “Our fellow citizens” mean nothing compared to those of kindred blood who have felt the pain of these losses and rallied against them. The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church – and the Faith is Europe, and Europe is the Faith.

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Kevin DeAnna, popularly known under the pen name James Kirkpatrick, is the author of Conservatism Inc., available from Arktos.