Before the next attack
Once examined, the terms 'British values' and 'Western values' unspool into a sequence of connotative links connecting territory, birth and culture in a roughly 'historicist' manner. It is a given that 'the West', for example, is not a geographical entity so much as a historically produced caste of national states comprising Europe and its colonies, from North America to Australasia. This white West is connected to its supposed values through the crucial vector of culture. Thus, it just so happens that white people are the legatees of a particular level of civilizational and cultural development that give them these unique, priceless assets such as democracy. This necessitates forgetting how passionately and often violently democracy was resisted within the social formations of 'the West', as well as how much modern democratic revolutions owed to the decidedly 'non-Western' Haiti. But the link between territory and values is most forcibly made through the example of the Second World War, with the Cold War providing a distant second point of reference, which is why 'terrorism' is always discussed as if it's the equivalent of the Third Reich stamping on the toes of the British Empire.
It goes without saying that the meaning of culture, in this neo-Powellite culturalism, is greatly reduced. Culture, aside from being cross-sected by multiple antagonisms, never ceases to be constructed, its points of reference continuously displaced, and thus never arrives as a finished essence. But in the dramaturgy of "Western values" and "British values", culture has to do perform the same theatrical purpose as biology once did, and thus it has to be frozen and essentialised. If biology is not destiny, culture certainly is: in the warmed up 'modernisation theory' of the post-Cold War era, it is the destiny to which all formerly abject peoples were suddenly racing.
What the race fable tells us, then, is that we belong to an indomitably superior culture that is radiantly attractive to others, part of whose superiority lies in its generosity, its openness, and its ability to incorporate those of lesser cultural breeds - whether through an overly relaxed immigration policy, or through an excessively benign policy of military intervention. It tells us that there are some who, given this priceless opportunity, decline to accept it; they revert to type, repudiate it, and spit in our faces. With few resources, but endless guile, they seek to persuade others of their status also to repudiate the gift, and kill us instead. And in doing so, they come to resemble their kin in the non-West, while 'we' resemble ourselves only more perfectly as 'we' stoically respond to the challenge. This is 'terrorism'.
— Richard Seymour
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