European Civilization Will Not Survive Here
Aspen
It was 1916. Pancho Villa had raided the American border village of Columbus, New Mexico, on the border with Mexico proper. Pancho Villa, was a Mexican revolutionary from Durango who had originally backed the US until the government-backed Carranza. The attack on American soil even today is considered one of the few times American soil was attacked. General Pershing, the man who would eventually go on to win WWI for the US and launch the trajectory that got the US to conquer Europe, was originally tasked with bringing this Mexican bandito to justice for his attacks on the US. The subsequent year-long expedition was supposed to catch Pancho Villa, who along with his ally further south, Emiliano Zapata, would become folk heroes in the Mexican Myth. Here, we saw the First Aero Squadron take flight for its first major engagement, the earliest aviation unit in American History. We also saw America’s first usage of mechanized warfare. Certainly, under conventional wisdom, Pershing would’ve annihilated Villa under the glorious new Western technic warfare. After all, the “kill-to-death ratio” was better for the Americans.
That is not what happened. Pershing failed to meet many of his objectives while claiming some victory, and he had failed to catch Pancho Villa. The nature of the punitive expedition was as much a loss for the Americans as Afghanistan is today, and this was in a time of imperial ascendancy where the US was the most technologically advanced country in the world. It also had many millions of young men willing to fight and die in wars. However, when Mexico teetered on the brink of failed state status, mechanized warfare from the newly crowned American Empire failed to penetrate this area. Elites in Washington following this event mostly left Mexico alone, not even intervening when Mexico nationalized its oil assets from American companies.
I consider the Mexican Revolution to be the beginning of Aridoamerica’s preculture period. Not only were the Americans unable to penetrate Northern Mexico, here we saw the ethnogenesis of Mestizos as a distinct group. Mestizos from this date onwards also began to expand northward again (albeit as refugees and later immigrants) which would lead to the revival of the Tejano and Nuevomexicano identity and the birth of the Chicano identity. After this event, we would begin to see an explosion of new ideas, including many on the American side of the border. All underneath the hood of the American Hegemony. However, if America suffered this type of loss more indicative of conflicts such as “American Decline Wars” like Afghanistan or Vietnam in a period of blatant ascendency, then it shows much less American Decline and a more jarring reality, European Civilization cannot survive here.
The American East, full of forests identical to Japan and Europe allowing for a more European mentality which is backed by demography, gives way to the Aridoamerican Plane, a land much more Arid and Rugged. One where technics goes from being favorable to being a blatant parasitic cancer. It extracts water, ores, and physical resources and does not return them to the land. This area does have technological knowledge, but views this industrial civilization as fundamentally demonic. Indigenous communities for example are utterly repulsed by the dams constructed to siphon their water, or mining operations which contaminates their land with pollutants. Here, Aridoamerica is viewed as a laboratory for Modernity and as a resource extraction colony for the Anglo Empire, yet Modernity is hated by the locals. Religious environmentalism comes from this area for good reason. Much like how the Arabs despised the Appollonian Pagans for the encroachment and damaging of their land with their excesses, so too do many of these White/Mestizo/Indigenous despise many of the industrial excesses present in Modernity. Here, nature cannot be dominated. It is simply too vast and harsh for that. Religious environmentalism and land preservation comes from here because it’s a vast array of diverse fragile micro-ecosystems all unified under a similar desert aridity. It is the land where the Jaguar, Bison, and the Black Bear meet.
Much like how the Arabs in their arid mentality developed their perceptions around the clash of light and dark in the world cavern due to this desert polarization, here the aridity mentality has become The Clash of Industrial Civilization and Nature within the World Biosphere. William Irwin Thompson came to a similar conclusion with his Planetary Culture Hypothesis, but he likely was shaped by an Aridoamerican bias and not a planetary one. The trope of Indigenous people as champions of nature doesn’t come from them being natural hippies (Indigenous people had their own unique politics and wars, some of which were very bloody), but because they were the first victims of technics and have better knowledge on how to deal with this land and its unique demands. Many Anglo and Hispanic men, gloating of this, must reconcile with the fact that technics wants their blood now too. As everybody else in the Aridoamerican Plane has come to the realization of Industrial Civilization as demonic and Modernity as disgusting, they have thus begun to indigenize their thinking.
Canada and Australia may boast their indigenized thinking, but they are still fundamentally much more Anglo. The vastness of the Aridoamerican Plane in truth is fundamentally much more indigenized, not just due to the population of Indigenous people being far greater or many Chicanos looking to Mesoamerica, but due the land being way more demanding to a particular form of life which Industrial and European civilization cannot ever hope to accommodate. Religious environmentalism as a result comes from the repulsion to seeing industrial technics damaging not just the natural beauty of the land and tapestry of arid micro-ecosystems that broadly form the Aridoamerican Plane, but the human ecology as well. The Faustian technics’ attempt to dominate something which cannot be dominated, nor should it. Los Angeles, a city responsible for Modernity’s pseudomorphosis on Aridoamerica (which will be getting its own article soon) has exported many of this land’s unique world perceptions across many of the World Cities. However, these world cities have absorbed this Aridoamerican thinking with their cynical urban mentality to show many of the self destructive aspects of modern enviromentalism.
Even John David Ebert, a man who I completely consider to be of the internal Aridoamerican Plane, views Modernity’s presence on this land as a shallow crust, doomed to go the way of Petra. Indeed, cities like Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Phoenix will be viewed as wretched cancers of a dying decedent civilization just as the Jews and Arabs viewed Babylon and the Classical Pagans. When Modernity withdraws from here due to its own material contradictions, it will set the stage for the next chapter of North American history following the end of the Westerners and Mesoamericans. European Civilization will not survive here, and it was never supposed to.
Excellently written!