Che Guevara admired the Incan and Mayan ruins in his native South America—and he cursed the gringos who took the various archeological treasures uncovered at those sites back North. In this, nothing ever changes—just as there have always been people, people written off by Lord Salisbury in the 1890s as peculiar obsessives, who want the Elgin Marbles returned to Greece. Guevara never stopped to ask why neither his beloved mestizo peasants nor their pure-blooded Spanish overlords ever thought to excavate the ruins. For hundreds of years, as Guevara observed, these ruins had lain undisturbed—then the gringo came.
Guevara could not grasp why this could be so because he was a narcissist; he could not understand that different peoples have different inclinations and aptitudes—mestizo peasants have no historical sense, they just live in a perennial present; it was always like that, always will be. Their quasi-Spanish overlords were not curious in that way either, not industrious enough or too busy waving stiletto knives in each other’s faces and spitting, “Puta madre! Now I cut your balls off like a pig.” Only gringos with names like Poncenby Fawcett had any interest in these sites—and only they had the industry to uncover them. If you do the work, you own it—well, Guevara never settled down to work so he never understood; everything should just fall into your lap, and if it rarely does then it must be because the gringos cheated you—perhaps when their Cadillacs have been redistributed everyone will develop the same talent for archeology.
The gringos also thought historically—and this is rare. As Spengler observed, Africa has no history—sure, events happened there but there is no African history; everything there, apart from white civilisation, represents pure biological life. In this respect, it is perpetual—and for the Somali at the steps of the Victor Emmanuel monument in Rome it is contemporary with the Colosseum; it is all one thing, and was always that way—as if it were a geographical feature. As the West becomes more creole, I suspect we lose our historical sense.
I find complaints about racial diversity in historical TV shows a bit tiresome; if a black African crops up in the latest adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, I see why people are annoyed but mass cult has always been this way—thirty years ago it was Darcy stripping off for sex appeal. To complain about it is as if you complained about a turd fleck in your Coke—why are you drinking Coke, an anti-drink, in the first place?
Yet to sustain ahistorical mass cult (“It’s only fiction, innit? No rules in fiction—just like my art teacher said at FE College, ‘Express yourself!’”) you have to collapse the historical horizon into something like the Mayan peasant’s perennial now; it was always this way, the ruins were always ruins—that is just how they are. It was always this way, Darcy was always black—or Indian in this decade’s version, or trans. In other words, the decadent West, via pop culture, moves back to a primitive time horizon where life is purely biological: there is no History, as Fukuyama would say, just “the last man” who fulfils his basic biological needs, as does the peasant—except the last man does so in a technologically fancy way (Hunter Biden).
Yet, fundamentally, nothing ever happens—just like nothing happens in Africa, or on the Yucatán Peninsula; people eat, fuck, and die—it has always been this way. Indeed, I have heard people say—although this is primarily a coping strategy—as regards London’s racial mixture “It’s always been like that”; and that already shows they have “peasant mindset”. “It’s always been like that” sums up the wider attitude—one once found in “unchanging China” or “unhistorical Africa”, but not in the West. “What is that over there?” “El Chupo, the ruins.” “What is it?” Shrugs shoulders. “It is El Chupo.” “But what is it?” Blank stare.