ＳＴΛＬ 🇫🇷

Dear friends, It is often put to me that because modern China was forged in the crucible of revolution, how one interprets the concept of "revolution" is no mere academic parlour game for Chinese citizens, but a foundational question of national identity. Within the Chinese intellectual tradition, the French Revolution occupies a uniquely exalted position. As the archetype of modern upheaval, it serves as an indispensable mirror through which China makes sense of its own tumultuous journey towards modernity. Frankly, that intellectual grounding has all but vanished among the European public today. Consider a rather striking paradox: modern China is virtually the only country on earth where nineteenth-century classical European philosophy—specifically the Hegelian-Marxist tradition—is still taught alongside the history of the French Revolution as part of the core curriculum. Consequently, the vast majority of ordinary educated Chinese possess at least a working grasp of dialectics, historical materialism, and class analysis. Should they find themselves debating some finer point of Karl Marx with a German, they do not frantically reach for Wikipedia; they draw upon a rigorously drilled analytical framework. What on earth happened to Europe, then? Why do the Europeans one encounters today seem so thoroughly underwhelming? First and foremost, you must reckon with the intellectual castration wrought by the Cold War. That is the root of the matter, plain and simple. In 1945, Western Europe was forced to pick a side between Washington and Moscow, and the intellectual price of that compromise was far heavier than we generally care to admit. Under the Cold War settlement, public discourse across Western Europe underwent a quiet, systematic purge. "Revolution" became a dirty word. Any discussion that showed the slightest sympathy for revolutionary politics was instantly tarred with the brush of "Soviet tyranny." In historical scholarship, the Jacobin Terror was blown out of all proportion, the Montagnards were lazily conflated with the Bolsheviks, and Robespierre was flattened into a pantomime dictator. By the 1970s, the media-savvy Nouveaux Philosophes, led by Bernard-Henri Lévy, had taken a sledgehammer to the old left-wing vanguard of Sartre and Althusser. By the time the bicentenary of 1789 rolled around in 1989, François Furet’s revisionist school had captured the French academic mainstream. The French state and its intellectual establishment effectively disowned the radical phase of their own revolution, writing it off as the original sin of modern totalitarianism and an exercise in unmitigated savagery. Marxism was banished from polite society. Nowhere was this more acute than in Germany. The grim reality of the GDR meant that, in the West, Marxism became a toxic brand. Following reunification, the entirety of East Germany’s intellectual heritage was written off as a bankrupt enterprise. To the average German today, Marx is no longer a towering nineteenth-century thinker worthy of serious engagement; he is merely the man indirectly responsible for the Stasi and the Berlin Wall. Class analysis was quietly supplanted by the cult of the individual. In the late Cold War, the Thatcher-Reagan neoliberal insurgency pulled off a breathtaking ideological sleight of hand: it branded any structural, systemic, or class-based analysis as "ideological"—investing the word with a faintly sinister ring—while elevating individual rights, personal liberty, and consumer choice as the only neutral, respectable lens through which to view the world. And the result of all this? Generations of Europeans have been schooled in a remarkably blinkered mindset. They can trot out words like "freedom," "democracy," and "human rights" on cue, yet they are entirely unequipped to examine the structural conditions, historical bloodshed, and internal contradictions that underpin those concepts. What were once tools for critical analysis have been reduced to secular incantations—magic words one simply recites to shut down an argument and claim the moral high ground. From the 1990s onwards, matters grew more fraught still as European education underwent a profound overhaul. History ceased to be taught as a complex, material process to be dissected, and was instead repackaged as a string of morality plays. Philosophy, likewise, was watered down into formal rhetoric rather than genuine intellectual combat. Across much of Western Europe, secondary-school philosophy has either disappeared altogether or been diluted into "ethics" and "citizenship"—courses designed, in other words, to turn out compliant, well-behaved citizens rather than to teach young people to question what "the good" or "citizenship" actually mean. Pupils no longer need to grasp the brutal logic of history; they need only parrot the correct moral labels—democracy (good), dictators (bad)—to walk away with top marks. At the same time, under the relentless logic of the market, the purpose of the university was redefined as the production of "oven-ready" human capital. Humanities budgets were slashed, history and philosophy departments were left to wither on the vine, and undergraduates were funnelled into "practical," vocational degree programmes. The result is a cohort of young Europeans who may be terribly adept at writing code or manipulating spreadsheets, yet remain blissfully ignorant of the very intellectual traditions that built the societies they inhabit. In short, the erudite, philosophically literate European who still lingers in the Chinese imagination is, for all practical purposes, extinct. One is reminded of Germany’s 68ers—those born between the 1940s and 1960s. They were arguably post-war Germany’s last truly vital generation: forged in the crucible of student radicalism, opposition to the Vietnam War, an uncompromising reckoning with their Nazi parents, and the deep influence of the Frankfurt School. The students of Adorno and Habermas really were the sort of serious, dialectically minded, deeply reflective Germans one still conjures up in the mind’s eye. Much the same could be said of France. The fierce, combative public intellectual life embodied by Sartre, Camus, Foucault, Deleuze, and Bourdieu has all but vanished from the Parisian scene; Alain Badiou’s dwindling circle perhaps represents the last dying embers of that tradition. The rot set in with Generation X. The smug, "End of History" complacency that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall, coupled with the total triumph of consumerism, turned serious intellectual inquiry into an eccentric pastime. By the time we reach Millennials and Gen Z, there is scarcely a cigarette paper between young Europeans and their American counterparts. They consume the same algorithm-driven pop culture, inhabit the same social media echo chambers, regurgitate the same hollow progressive platitudes, and suffer from the same acute historical amnesia. Which brings us to the elephant in the room: the wholesale colonisation of the European mind by American cultural hegemony. During the Cold War, Washington systematically bankrolled and promoted a very specific strain of Atlanticist liberalism to marginalise the Marxist left in Western Europe—most notoriously through CIA-funded front organisations such as the Congress for Cultural Freedom. This is no tin-foil-hat conspiracy theory, but extensively documented historical fact (as Frances Stonor Saunders laid bare in Who Paid the Piper?). After 1991, that cultural penetration turned into an all-consuming tidal wave. English became the de facto lingua franca of European youth, bringing with it American journalistic framing, American culture wars, and American political neuroses, which completely displaced indigenous intellectual traditions. Today, a young graduate in France or Germany consumes a far higher proportion of Anglo-American media than any previous generation. What does this mean in practice? It means that when Europeans talk about China today, they are operating almost entirely within an imported American mental framework—a crude, binary Cold War schema of "democracy versus autocracy" and the "free world versus authoritarian regimes." This has nothing whatsoever to do with the French esprit (which has always harboured a deep scepticism towards simplistic binaries), nor with the German intellectual tradition (whose dialectical core is all about transcending one-sided contradictions). It is pure, unadulterated Washington Cold War orthodoxy, internalised by Europeans to such a degree that they mistake it for their own innate common sense. Consequently, mainstream European debate has been captured by a vacuous, slogan-driven moral narcissism. Point out that the lingering legacy of European colonialism still distorts the global order? "Oh, that’s pure whataboutery!" Suggest that Western liberal democracy might be suffering from deep-seated structural rot? "Right, so you’re an apologist for tyranny?" Argue that China’s material development deserves serious, dispassionate study? "CCP shill!" Those who still possess genuine intellectual depth have largely retreated from the public square in despair, leaving the stage to those content to peddle juvenile slogans. That is the bleak reality we inhabit today. I am sorry to disappoint you, my friends, but there it is.