The Fall of Rome
Author Arnold Toynbee wrote that “Great nations die by suicide, not murder.” I was reminded of the quote in a recently published article from the UK Telegraph which summarized the year 2015 as a watershed year defining those to come entitled Our spoiled, emasculated, de-spiritualized societies in the West are in terminal decline:
What we were seeing in 2015, more than ever before, were the signs of one of history’s great geopolitical shifts, as the centuries-old hegemony of the West gives way to the new powerhouses of the outside world.
In the face of every kind of new external challenge, the leaders of the EU and the USA have never looked weaker or more bemused – as over how to deal with the flood of refugees and the terrorist threat unleashed from a Middle East reduced to chaos by our vainglorious interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. Never have our politicians and political institutions been held in less respect.
Everywhere we see Western illusions colliding with reality, as when the reckless bid to suck Ukraine into the EU and Nato inevitably provoked a response from President Putin and a Russian sense of national interest that has left us looking pathetically impotent. Likewise, in his support for Syria’s President Assad, Putin has run rings round the West, just as the murderous regime in Iran ran rings round us in that recent “nuclear deal”, so meaningless that Iran’s “moderate” President Rouhani never even bothered to sign it, almost immediately authorising two illegal tests of nuclear-capable missiles, knowing that no action from the West would follow.
We then saw that even more meaningless “non-binding” deal in Paris, supposed to save the world from global warming. The very fact that it was the West that had dreamed up this scare in the first place was yet another symptom of how easily we fall for illusions; and again it was the outside world, led by China and India, that refused to buy such nonsense.
We might well be haunted by the brilliant title of that otherwise not very good book written by Otto Spengler in the Twenties, Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West). All civilisations, as we know, eventually decline, and Spengler’s title was just 90 years ahead of its time.
The reason why we do not see just how far our spoiled, emasculated, de‑spiritualised societies in the West have lost the plot is that they are the bubble we live in. But these days there is a great big world out there, much less sentimental and much tougher than what we have become used to. Over the coming years, our world is going to change more than we can imagine.
Oswald Spengler
Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West, which was first published in 1918, basically said the argument that the Western world was in the final stage of its development and was headed over the next century for decline and eventually, its fall, and that nothing save the power of a bloody revolution could save it.
I respectfully disagree, as the problems which have plagued the West are for the most part self-created and have entrenched themselves into our society. However, there are two major ones which I am thinking of around which all the others are based:
–Europe and America abort approximately 1/3 of all pregnancies. This is outright suicide/autogenocide. If you cannot propagate, you cannot have heirs to your civilization. Not only that, but we outright defend murdering our progeny even when it is brought to our attention. For the Europeans who have children, the rate is average for the whole EU is somewhere around 1.47. which is still below the bare minimum replacement rate of 2.1.
-Religious faith is practically a joke. Between 25% to 50% of Europeans on average have no religion. Church attendance rates are sometimes difficult to calculate, but the estimate for Catholics is that on average across Europe 20% or less attend weekly, while Protestants are even worse off.
This about sums up all that is wrong with America and Europe- we choose to worship false gods and then we murder our own offspring.
If you will not reproduce, you cannot have heirs to your civilization. If you do not believe in anything greater than yourself that is worth killing and dying for (and for Europe, it would be the Faith which brought it into existence), you have nothing to live for.
That is, in short, the reason why America and Europe are dying- because the people who make up these societies are repeatedly making self-destructive choices and doing nothing to make amends for them. We are choosing suicide.
But don’t worry- there are people ready to claim the remnants of our civilization that we don’t want:
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