And its punch-line - despite Auden's second thoughts - is and remains:

"We must love one another or die".  

So that - i.e. having understood that, AWOKEN to that - is our "European uniqueness"??... and what's more, it's  our ... universal message = mission?

To testify that we've been there, done that, the whole imperial caper, rival empires caper, colonisations caper, whiteman's-burden caper, wars-of-conquest caper, nationalisms/religious rivalries caper, bombs and corpses caper, bigger-and-better-armaments caper - been there not once but countless times, done 'em and played 'em all every whichaway - so time and time again we've stared into the abyss and the abyss has stared back into us.. until at last, at long-long last, we-the-stained-survivors somehow stepped back from the brink, shook our heads and swore "Never Again".  

(...cymbals, trumpets, rays of dazzling light ...)

At which point we-the-awakened can all/should all now stretch out our hands to those still unawakened, to try to pull them back out of the abyss of ignorance i.e. mutual devastation and destruction cycles to the newfound solid ground - and only hope of ultimate planetary survival - that acceptance of our salvation-through-reconciliation message can ensure?

If so - if this really is what's behind at least PART of Europe's self-image - this "European Gnosis" myth is totally discordant with the American narrative not only in PNAC version but in its "normal" versions - also re the way of reading WW2, war in general... which could explain some of the nerviness, the feeling of non-communication that sometimes sets in... as we're talking totally at cross-purposes - from different mythological foundations, different cosmologies ??


"Ignoring moralities is always undesirable, but doing so systematically is really worrisome." Mohammed Khatami