Is this the end of Europe as we have known it?
Civilisational Suicide
This is how nations die.
The rioting now going on all over Europe tells us a lot about our civilisational struggle. Will the West in general, and Europe in particular, last much longer? Time will tell, but things are looking quite bleak. Many have been warning about all this for quite some time now.
The Warnings of History: How Civilisations Collapse
Here I present some important quotes that I have long made use of. They are roughly arranged by when they were written:
“The average age of the world’s greatest democratic nations has been 200 years. Each has been through the following sequence:
From bondage to spiritual faith
From faith to great courage.
From courage to liberty.
From liberty to abundance.
From abundance to complacency.
From complacency to selfishness.
From selfishness to apathy.
From apathy to dependency.
And from dependency back again into bondage.”
Lord Macaulay
“America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.” Abraham Lincoln
“Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”
William Butler Yeats
“Civilisations die from suicide, not murder.” Arnold Toynbee
“Of the twenty-two civilisations that have appeared in history, nineteen of them collapsed when they reached the moral state the United States is in now.” Arnold Toynbee
“A great civilisation is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself within. The essential causes of Rome’s decline lay in her people, her morals, her class struggle, her failing trade, her bureaucratic despotism, her stifling taxes, her consuming wars.” Will Durant
“From barbarism to civilisation requires a century; from civilisation to barbarism needs but a day.” Will Durant
“Civilisation is not inherited; it has to be learned and earned by each generation anew; if the transmission should be interrupted for one century, civilisation would die, and we should be savages again.”
Will and Ariel Durant
“To build may have to be the slow and laborious task of years. To destroy can be the thoughtless act of a single day.”
“It is idle to talk about preventing the wreck of Western civilisation. It is already a wreck from within. That is why we can hope to do little more now than snatch a fingernail of a saint from the rack or a handful of ashes from the faggots, and bury it secretly in some flowerpot against the day, ages hence, when a few men begin again to dare to believe that there was once something else, that something else is thinkable, and need some evidence of what it was, and the fortifying knowledge that there were those who, at the great nightfall, took loving thought to preserve the tokens of love and truth.”
Whittaker Chambers
“Whereas other civilisations have been brought down by attacks of barbarians from without, ours had the unique distinction of training its own destroyers at its own educational institutions, and then providing them with facilities for propagating their destructive ideology far and wide, all at the public expense.”
Malcolm Muggeridge
“In the end, more than freedom, they wanted security. They wanted a comfortable life, and they lost it all — security, comfort, and freedom. When the Athenians finally wanted not to give to society but for society to give to them, when the freedom they wished for most was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free and was never free again.”
Margaret Thatcher
“Conservatism starts from a sentiment that all mature people can readily share: the sentiment that good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created. This is especially true of the good things that come to us as collective assets: peace, freedom, law, civility, public spirit, the security of property and family life, in all of which we depend on the cooperation of others while having no means singlehandedly to obtain it. In respect of such things, the work of destruction is quick, easy and exhilarating; the work of creation is slow, laborious and dull. That is one of the lessons of the twentieth century.”
Roger Scruton
“A good deal of the world seems to have lost the taste for life… Today’s cultures are dying of apathy, not by the swords of their enemies.”
David Goldman
“There is one problem with the enlightened view: In the absence of faith, human beings show little interest in living. Humankind cannot bear the burden of mortality without the promise of immortality. … For the first and only time in recorded history … prosperous, secure, and peaceful societies facing no external threat have elected to pass out of existence.”
David Goldman
“There is a fine line between civilisation and the abyss.”
Mark Steyn
“Dangers to a society may be mortal without being immediate.”
Thomas Sowell
“This is the intifada coming home. The West’s craven failure to hold the moral line after 7 October, its indulgence of the Islamo-left mobs who hailed Hamas and libelled Israel, has started a fire of anti-civilisational hysteria that it will be incredibly difficult to put out. The nation that erodes its borders, tells newcomers their culture is just as valid as ours, fails to assimilate its foreign-origin youths and coaches its own young to feel shame over their national history is a nation that has signed its own death warrant.”
Brendan O’Neill
The West Loses Its Christian Foundations
“The West has denied its Christian roots. A tree without roots dies.”
Cardinal Robert Sarah
T S Eliot’s Notes Towards the Definition of Culture:
It is in Christianity that our arts have developed; it is in Christianity that the laws of Europe have — until recently — been rooted. It is against a background of Christianity that all our thought has significance. An individual European may not believe that the Christian Faith is true, and yet what he says, and makes, and does, will all spring out of his heritage of Christian culture and depend upon that culture for its meaning. Only a Christian culture could have produced a Voltaire or a Nietzsche. I do not believe that the culture of Europe could survive the complete disappearance of the Christian faith. And I am convinced of that, not merely because I am a Christian myself, but as a student of social biology. If Christianity goes, the whole of our culture goes. Then you must start painfully again, and you cannot put on a new culture ready made. You must wait for the grass to grow to feed the sheep to give the wool out of which your new coat will be made. You must pass through many centuries of barbarism. We should not live to see the new culture, nor would our great-great-great-grandchildren: and if we did, not one of us would be happy in it.
While I call it a “mind virus,” it's really much deeper than that. What we are seeing is an all-out spiritual battle for the very soul of Western civilization. Wherever there is chaos in the West, the Palestinian flag is always there. We see it flying everywhere among the rioters in France and Italy. We have seen it during violent outbursts here in America and elsewhere over the past three years. It's become the international symbol of anarchy and Islamo-communism—that unholy red-green alliance that wants to destroy Judeo-Christian Western civilization. We are living in a revolutionary moment. Western civilization hangs in the balance.
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