The Collapse Of Western Civilization

From Free Republic and Israel News:

Decline and Fall of Western Civilization


Israel News ^
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
Daniel Greenfield



Posted on Wednesday, February 13, 2008 6:24:58 PM by MinorityRepublican



It is hard for most people to grasp and understand that they are living through the period of the decline and eventually destruction of their countries and their entire way of life, yet that is what we are seeing now.



The European continent, the core of Western civilization is collapsing. European birth rates have fallen below replacement rates, populations are dwindling and slowly being displaced by large foreign Muslim populations. Wedded to socialism Europe faces a generation in which the elderly and their social services will vastly outnumber a far smaller population of youth leading to economic collapse.



In a century Europe as it has been will be no more. Oh most of the cities will go on standing, some may even keep their former names but the majority of their Churches will become mosques, their streets full of Arabic and Turkic speech and their nations part of the Muslim world. For anyone who finds it hard to imagine Berlin, Paris, London and Brussels' fate, need only look at Constantinople, now Istanbul, once the center of a Christian Empire.



Anyone who wishes to envision how the Vatican will look in a century, need only glance at the Hagia Sophia, now a mosque. Take a look around Istanbul or Alexandria, your favorite European capitals will look just like them too. The Vatican will no doubt survive but the Pope will no longer be at Castle Gandolfo but in Costa Rica or Argentina with as much loot and art as the Papacy will be able to pry out of Rome before the hammer comes down.



Yet this will be less a Muslim conquest than Europe's suicide by defeatism, apathy and selfishness, a process that began after WW2. After all it wasn't the Muslims who forced Europe to abandon its colonies and then export millions of Algerians, Pakistanis and Turks as the cheap labor propping up the charade of socialism. It wasn't the Muslims who convinced Europeans that their own personal happiness took priority over everything else, that badgered them into having fewer children and waiting till they were in their late 30's to do it. It certainly wasn't the Muslims who made the average European provincially xenophobic and yet hopelessly defeatist at home and abroad.



The Muslims are indeed reaping the fruits of a conquest but it isn't their conquest but the conquest of Europeans over themselves. Europe whose armies conquered most of the known world, finally conquered itself. Two world wars and the brutal conflicts of two centuries hammered home to even the dimmest European the futility of nationalistic wars. Communism, liberalism and socialism only provided the intellectual justification for the obvious.



Discarding nationalism as anything more than a resentment of their neighbors and funneling the remnants of it into frenzied and furious displays of Soccer patriotism, Europe settled comfortably into its socialist twilight transitioning comfortably from its various industrial oligarchicies to post-industrial bureaucracies.



If Americans should wonder why Europeans can't seem to hold a soccer match without riots and fatalities, it's because soccer is the last vestige of a continent's militarism that once cost the lives of tens of millions. Living cushioned and imprisoned by a nanny state, soccer is the last vestige of manhood left to a continent of emasculated peoples. The people who once made revolutions, overturned monarchs and fought passionately for a thousand causes now live hollow regimented lives that occasionally erupt when they begin bashing each other's skulls in with stadium seats. The picture in Eastern Europe is no better. The birth rates in some Eastern European countries like Lativa are already on the verge of extinction.



Russia's birth rate problem which was a national secret under the Communists is secret no more and the Russian government is desperately trying to pay women to have children. Like Western Europe, the cities of the former Warsaw Pact nations are filled with foreigners. In a recent marketplace bombing in Moscow, the majority of the casualties were Chinese and other foreign nationals. While Russia engages in one last frenzy of Anti-Americanism becoming once again the arms dealer to the third world, the Slavs are dying out as surely as the Western Europeans. The only difference is the Western Europeans got the chance at a good life that Eastern Europe only received a small slice of.



The healthiest Western nations are the newest such as America and Australia but they too are marking time. The American birth rate is better than the European one but not by nearly as much as people think. The decline hasn't hit us as badly as Europe but all that means is give it more time and it will.



The spigot of immigration at the Mexican border is being turned up all the way by a Republican administration, not only in a quest for votes but because America has adopted much of the European socialist infrastructure that requires a constant incoming immigrant population to serve as the newest recruits in the MLM scheme of programs like social security. Corporations caring for nothing but profits outsource all the jobs they can and import Mexican immigrants to do the cheap and dirty labor they can't outsource.



America's industry is a passing dream and if the streets of American cities aren't populated by large hostile Muslim populations, that's only because Europeans have Arab speaking populations next door while we have spanish speaking ones. If Latino gangs proliferate in small towns and millions of illegals march around waving Mexican flags while demanding citizenship, like the Muslims in Europe they're simply playing the part of the Barbarians at the Gate while we do the work of burning Rome.



From America's birth, the country came with a vision of manifest destiny. When that vision was achieved and America dominated the world, a sheepish and small-minded leadership took a look around and began following Europe's path of national suicide. Devoid of a national destiny or a national goal, a nation becomes nothing more than a provider of services, a government the administrator of those services and its population perennially on the dole waiting for a handout. Once upon a time America had a vision of a glorious future, today no one can articulate a glorious vision for America.



Liberals prescribe more government programs and less national sovereignty in favor of international cooperation. Conservatives offer up doses of bible thumping and religion in public life. Neither address the simple fact that they have no national vision to offer. Neither the right nor the left is actually offering a vision of a future for America, all they're doing is wrangling over the terms of its dismantling.



Consumerism has instead stepped into the breach of vision promoting the pursuit of happiness living the shopping dream. Credit cards, ecommerce indebt people while a daily parade of gadgets, clothes, snacks and cars come packaged in audio, video, text and image promising that happiness is for sale. Without any overriding national goal or vision, all that remains is satisfying manufactured appetites for the output of the same companies that outsource the labor and push immigration in order to create those products at a profit in the first place.



While corporations tempt and dazzle the public with its products, the government leeches away ever income with new programs creating a bigger and bigger runaway bureaucracy. Governments no longer address problems so much as they bury them in paperwork, budgets and new departments. Even America's military capabilities become subservient to muddled political correctness. Is it any wonder that national pastimes like football and basketball have grown more and more thuggish parraleling Europe's impotent soccer riots.



What will America look like then in a century? It will like be a latin-american country in fact if not in name, little distinguishable from Brazil. As politics become more acrimonious and a large spanish speaking immigrant population pours in without a melting pot to melt into, North America will look like South America. And don't count the Muslims out either. Islamic and Arab influence in Latin America is rising. El Salvador has a Palestinian President. Argentina had a Lebanese one, when in collaboration with the authorities Iran carried out a large scale bombing there. A lot of the Spanish stars this side of the border like Selma Hayek or Shakira are actually the children of Lebanese immigrants.



What is the meaning of all beyond the obvious? Civilizations throughout history decline and eventually collapse. We're seeing that now all the more personally so, because it's happening before our eyes. Western civilization of the last six hundred years was an economic civilization living and dying by expanding trade, locating resources for production and exchanging them for manufactured goods. Everything from the colonization of America to WW1 was driven by it. Byproducts of that economic development gave us democratic societies, new countries and broad vistas.



Uncontrolled they also brought on destructive wars, destroyed countries gutting them from the inside eventually leaving nothing but nations of consumers buying products they no longer manufactured, of resources they no longer owned and even whose services and technical support had been outsourced.



Commerce is a river and in the hands of corporations whose CEO's care nothing except for cutting costs to edge out a profit margin this quarter before they're fired and move on to ruin another company, it's a river that flows to where it's cheapest. The very byproducts that created the wealthy and secure Western countries are the ones that insure the river flows away from them. The very technology they research creates greater opportunities for companies to outsource their employment. The Catch 22 is that it's the very things that have made the West successful that are killing it.



By the mid-20th century when the world was explored and conquered and superpowers gazed at each other across an atom bomb, greater ideals died. Nationalism, a thirst for exploration that had turned the world upside down for a century died out. In its place came a selfish existence in which people lived for new cars, mortgages and DVD players; while foolishly believing they were really living for themselves. Ideals were replaced by senseless radicalism. The first world grew fat and grey, never troubling their idyll in their consumeristic paradise to actually have children and plan for the future.



One can look at the coming extinction of Europe and call it the wrath of G-d, which it may well be. But inexplicable as it seems, it is really a civilization cutting its own throat through its small-minded selfishness.



The end, that much prophesied end, will indeed come with a whimper not a bang, unless we make a few bangs of our own. Great new beginnings are explosive ones. We still have the might to tackle great projects, a vast array of enemies gather around us and the stars above call to us.



We can embrace that future with a bang and refuse to go out into the darkness or we will indeed fall with the whimper of warehoused old men lying in cots while outside armed gangs loot and burn and the new caliphate flies its green and yellow flags above our cities.



Civilization is in our hands and the hour is nigh.