a made-up history of white colonisers

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Donald Trump’s response to the shooting in Washington DC on Saturday reiterates his only coherent narrative – an obsession with being a Great Man of History. He was “honoured” to be a target, he said, because “when you look at the people… whether it was an attempt or a successful attempt, they’re very impactful people. Just take a look at the names.”

For once, I agree with the US President. He will be remembered as a big name, but not necessarily in the way he intended. For all his professed obsession with “Western civilisation”, he is perhaps America’s first non-Western president. The one who has shown the fragility of the US alliance with Europe, threatened to break apart Nato, and more importantly, consistently violated the values people who believed in “The West” thought were its own. The actions of this US President and other populists will be remembered for exposing the idea of “The West” first to breaking point, and now to total narrative collapse.

That this US administration believes fervently in the idea of “The West” is not in question. In a National Security Strategy published in December, it warned that Europe faces “civilisational erasure”, warning of a loss of “national identities and self-confidence” thanks to migration policy, censorship and a lack of strong militaries and economies. It called for the restoration of “Western identity”.

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Identities are constructed, and the idea of being “Western” is no exception. The problem with this particular identity is how tenuous it is. There is not, and has never been a “West”. The crass chaos of the Trump administration has only helped strip away the facade for what the narrative of “the West” has always been: a made-up history of white colonisers at every longitude – from Argentina to Israel.

It is about nations addicted to the industrialised killing of perceived “others” to maintain, ironically, a story about rights, and the rule of law, and how civilised they are. It has always been a story. Democracy in Britain was built on autocratic rule in the colonies, where dissidents were imprisoned and shot.

A police K-9 Unit officer works outside the venue following a shooting incident during the annual White House Correspondents' Association dinner in Washington, D.C., U.S., April 25, 2026. REUTERS/Ken Cedeno
Emergency services at the scene following Saturday’s shooting at the White House correspondents’ dinner in Washington DC. Trump suggested assassination attempts happened to ‘impactful people’ (Photo: Ken Cedeno/Reuters)

Colonial history has a way of continuously resurfacing. A recent leak from the Pentagon, suggesting the US could trade British sovereignty over the Falklands for support in the Iran war, powerfully makes the point. Trump shows great support for Argentinian President Javier Milei, one of the world’s most enthusiastic cheerleaders for so-called “Judeo-Christian” values – merging religious teachings to advocate for a conservative moral outlook.

Milei is one of the doomsayers of a much older tradition, the idea of Western decline. “The West is in danger,” he warned earlier this year.

That this sentiment may lead the USA and Argentina to unite against Britain, which has no logical business owning land in the South Atlantic in the first place, is a mind-boggling example of this “Western” incoherence. An American president is using the language of anti-imperialism to side with a populist in Argentina against Britain, a democracy whose continuing imperial possessions are a reminder of how hollow these ideas have always been.

In the 19th century, Europeans crafted a new origin story about their identity, imagining them in the early democratic ideas of Ancient Greece and Rome. The fact those empires were physically and intellectually closer to Asia and Africa was an inconvenient detail.

It’s hard to pinpoint the exact historical moment the myth of “Western civilisation” captured the imagination of the political class. But it wouldn’t be far off to say its roots lie in a war with Iran.

Nineteenth-century politician John Stuart Mill said that the Battle of Marathon in 490BC – in which the Athenians repulsed a Persian invasion – “as an event in English history, is more important than the Battle of Hastings”.

Had the Greeks lost, as Mill put it, “the Britons and the Saxons might have still been wandering in the woods”. The reality could not be more different. Ancient Greece drew its ideas from Africans, and Ancient Rome survived into the Middle Ages in Turkey. Their ideas were kept alive not by Europe, but by Islamic scholars, who harboured and evolved them for centuries before they were introduced to Europe.

The real origins of ideas considered “Western” are far from the actual “West”. So for most of my life, I assumed the mythmaking around the so-called “Western civilisation” would undergo a series of factual corrections until it was rendered essentially redundant.

Instead, it’s more muscular and violent than ever. Trump and his populist allies have not only revived this fiction, but shouted loudly about this “civilisation” while simultaneously demonstrating how uncivilised it can be.

Assassinating leaders in the midst of negotiations, as the US and Israel did to Iran, before lamenting there is “no one left to negotiate with”. Threatening to seize territory from allies such as Denmark, who have jumped to the aid of US aggression in previous wars, like the war in Iraq. Attacking the independence of the judiciary, law firms, universities and government officials and anyone else who does not behave like the President’s private staff. Carrying out unlawful interventions abroad, such as Venezuela, and supporting unlawful, fatally armed insurrections within, like January 6.

‘The West’ is now whatever America says it is

The West has problematic racial ideas baked into the very core of its identity. To position itself as “The West” has always required an other, giving rise to “The Third World”, the “The Far East”, “The Middle East” and other identities formed to bolster an innate sense of “Western” superiority.

The fate of Jewish people is one of the most powerful examples. Long before Mill and German-American political philosopher Francis Lieber, who came up with the phrase “Western civilisation”, proto-ideas of “The West” wreaked havoc against Jews. A belief in defending “Christendom” and the Catholic Church – even Christianity was bad if it was “eastern” – drove Crusaders and genocidal Europeans to persecute and murder Europe’s Jews.

The nations that would later congratulate themselves for existing at the heart of “The West” carried out inquisitions and pogroms. Right up to the 20th century – the Nazi Holocaust was met, at first, with a level of indifference.

“Western civilisation” allowed the murder of Jews to “bounce off consciences like peas off a steel helmet”, as George Orwell described it in 1944. It’s one of history’s greatest ironies that Israel has now hijacked those same ideas to continue the most violent of the West’s projects.

At least the 19th and 20th-century architects of the idea of “The West” genuinely believed in its values. For John Stuart Mill, it was the promise of democracy. For US political scientist Samuel Huntington, Christianity and the rule of law. For the Australian writer PD Marchant, it was the dream of “a Man with one wife, a vote and a union card”.

Even African American thinkers like W E B Du Bois believed “Western values” could be the ultimate emancipatory tool.

It’s becoming harder for any sensible person to look at the world now and believe everything will be OK if only the West has its way. Fossil-fuelled, industrialised consumption has gone from the ideal of progress, to one of the most suicidal ideas in history, making our planet uninhabitable. “The West” has deteriorated into whatever America says it is.

America, rather than protecting those “Western civilisational” ideas, flawed as they are, has become a predatory hegemon. Less the actual Crusades – although those are a legacy damning enough – more Crusade cosplay. Ironically if they were alive today, I suspect the original creative writers of “The West’s” identity would be the most embarrassed by its crude demise.

Afua Hirsch is the author of Brit(ish) and Decolonising My Body. Her documentaries include Enslaved with Samuel L Jackson and BBC series Africa Rising. She is professor of journalism at the University of Southern California

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