The city of the whited sepulchers is what Joseph Conrad called Brussels in his haunting novella, Heart of Darkness. The phrase comes from the New Testament: Jesus said that the hypocritical religious and community leaders of his time were like whited (whitewashed) tombs. The outside was bright and shiny, but the inside was full of rot and decay.

Conrad made that point about Belgium under the evil King Leopold II, who ran a genocidal empire in what is now the Congo. By participating in Leopold’s criminally exploitative and viciously murderous regime, Brussels’ commercial, political, and cultural elites, were the worst kind of hypocrites. But in a different sense, the phrase is equally true of Brussels today: it is a city that holds up a glittering facade of international institutions and high ideas to the outside world, while its insides fester with societal breakdown and with the murderous death cults that exploded into the world’s awareness in Paris last week.

No city is more identified with out postmodern, post-historical ideals of cosmopolitan governance. NATO and the EU are both headquartered in Brussels. From here go the edicts to benighted countries and leaders in Europe and beyond. Here thousands of Eurocrats toil for the post-historical future, here the values and aspirations of the West are expressed in concrete institutions. This is, in many ways, the capital of Europe.

Read the article “The City of the Whited Sepulchres” on the-american-interest.com.