Decline and Revival of Western Civilization by Herbert I. London
Decline and Revival of Western Civilization by Herbert I. London
http://www.hudson-ny.org/2002/decline-revival-western-civilization
We live in an era in which any attempt at judgment seems to be regarded as a provocation.. To suggest, for example, that the willing integration of homosexuals into the military services will destroy morale and the spirit needed to maintain discipline, is viewed as hogwash, the vestige of some antiquated past when people lacked understanding. There seems to have been a collapse of monumental proportions of people’s ability to evaluate and judge situations — not only that one — and there is scarcely a word of protest across the land.
Is this because almost everyone buys into the prevailing judgment, or is it because so many do not want to be the target of opprobrium?
Whatever the proposition, discrimination has suffered yet another blow. But while an unwillingness to take a stance is one dimension of civilizational decline, it does not compare in passion or intensity to preemptive capitulation, a desire to support the very movements that exist that openly state as their aim to undermine the West. Worse, the more extreme the movement, the more you find ardent defenders. Jihadists in the United States and Europe, for instance, state without equivocation a desire to create caliphates across the globe and to introduce sharia law as a legal precedent.
Remarkably those on the left, who once renounced orthodoxies of any kind, now embrace the totalistic dimensions of Islam. They insist that the full panoply of civil rights be given to foreign combatants (read: terrorists). They contend that the Islamic faith promotes peace, even when every even the Islamists state that Islam is designed to place the non-believer in a position of submission.
The Danish government that once stood up to Islamic intimidation has seemingly collapsed. Now one minister after another finds some justification for Islamic violence; a rationalization that makes a rational, common-sense defense of Western traditions untenable. And, as many judicial officials opt to maintain order rather than confront extremists, this is rapidly becoming the European defense model
Can the West withstand this dual attack, one a breakdown of judgmental standards, and the other, a capitulation to the most radical forces on center stage? My answer is “yes” — IF the West wakes up from its ideological slumber and attempts to slaughter this dragon of intimidation.
As Adam Smith noted “there’s a great deal of ruin in a nation” — and in a civilization. “The future is unknowable,” as Winston Churchill pointed out in A History of The English Speaking Peoples, “but the past should give us hope.”
Overcoming war, poverty, tragedy, brutality and murder suggests that mankind possesses the instinct for self preservation, even if it isn’t immediately apparent. We root for self realization and self preservation even as we fail to see our failures. Can history resort to a turning back to Dark Ages, where standards of any kind are in disarray except the standard of Might Makes Right?
It may seem that way at this moment, but recovery may be around the corner as an anti-toxin. History has a way of being pliable and unpredictable, stretching unimagined scenarios of replenishment and before just as the hour looks most bleak.
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