WarSclerotic

The Full Flowering of Western Decadence, American Thinker, J. Robert Smith, November 5, 2015

Angela Merkel is double-downing on making Europe the stopping point for what eventually could be millions of Muslim refugees.  Throughout Europe, that is, not just Germany.  Reported Bloomberg Business:

Repeating her insistence that Germany “will do this,” Merkel said European Union initiatives hadn’t gotten far enough and that she will push for a permanent distribution of refugees across the 28-member bloc.   

It’s a curious — or perhaps not so curious — aspect of human nature: the insistence on spreading one’s pathology, of co-opting others in one’s sickness, this as a means of attempting to validate that one isn’t sick.  How can one be off if everybody else is in sync with you?

Elitists — of a leftist stripe — in Europe and the U.S. demean Western values and virtues; this is a career choice for many of them, particularly since the 1960s.  To varying degrees, Western elitists loathe and act to subvert the civilization that produced them, nurtured and gave them their success and standing.  There’s a sickness to this, akin to destroying one’s home (all the while rationalizing the destruction as improvements).  There’s a fundamental sickness of the soul that dwells in the anti-West left.

With Frau Merkel, compassion or humanitarianism is just dressed up degradation, cultural, societal.  It’s given a Christian casing.  It seems to be delusional in Frau Merkel’s instance.  It’s a variant of the sickness that plagues the West.

In this latest crisis of the West, Frau Merkel insists that millions of Muslims added to the millions already calling Europe home pose no threat to the civilization there.  Never mind the plentitude of experience with Muslims in Europe over two generations, chiefly.  Never mind that simple observation of the Muslim faith in practice in other lands among alien cultures leads to a simple conclusion: Western Civilization and Islam are irreconcilable.  Both can inhabit the same planet, but their precincts must be distinct.  Given the historic and present aggressiveness of the latter, the former would do well to be constantly vigilant.  On second thought, nay.  Western Civilization needs a rebirth, a revitalization of appreciation, and an assertive defense in the teeth of Mohammedan offensives. 

Islam is proving to be a recidivist faith; you can take the religion out of the Dark Ages, but not the Dark Ages out of the religion, goes the trope.  Islam remains what it has been from the outset: a creed of blood and conquest.  Not, mind you, the blood of the lamb and the conquering of hearts.

Merkel’s belief that Muslims can be situated in Western Europe without injury (dare say, fatality) to the peoples and cultures whose ancestries there are deep in time, is plain loony.  The religion of bloody conquest will keep doing what it was built to do by Mohammed centuries before.  It’s practically an organism driven by instinct, not brains.  Future historians will have a field day making sense of elitist worldviews that permitted the surrender of their territories to aliens practicing a hostile faith.

Western Civilization has been assaulted (from within) and crumbling in Europe for a century.  Godlessness has taken hold.  Vacant materialism reigns.  But not among immigrant Muslims, of course, which serves them well in their rise to dominance in Western Europe.  Faith lends a sureness that faithlessness cannot hope to confer.  Or in the case of Frau Merkel, a misguided, gooey interpretation of Christianity opens the gates to the very peoples intent on destroying Christianity (let’s broaden that to “Judeo-Christianity”).

It’s doubtful that many Western Europeans, long having been schooled that “For God and Country” is disreputable — it being freighted with chauvinism and exploitive of the West’s unwashed Third World betters — are likely to take to the ramparts in defense of what remains of their civilization.  The battle cry, “For godlessness and the welfare state!” rouses whom?  How many aging Germans, French, Brits, Italians, Spaniards, et al, will fight to the death under E.U. banners?  Quite probably, after convulsions (not all Western Europeans are godless creatures of the E.U.), masses of Europeans will “turn Turk.”  Better to switch than fight and lose one’s head.  Europeans with means will flee Sharia Law.

This may sound fantastic to some, or far distant to others, but those of us in our middle years or younger may live to witness the Fall of Western Europe — and in dramatic fashion, given the rapidity of events.

About a century ago, in a mere 52 months, Europe’s empires reduced themselves from the zenith of their global powers through ruinous war; through murder-suicide.  World War I precipitated the decline of Europe.  Subsequent revolutions and wars (and the isms that sparked them) furthered the decline.  What remains in Europe today — regardless the veneer — is hollowness, a palpable played-out quality to the entire affair.  No wonder, whether through Merkel’s twisted compassion or other elites’ world-weariness or still others’ hostility, there’s an unspoken desire — only recently appreciated among das Volk — to turn out the lights and hand over the keys.  Maybe the Muslims deserve it more and can do a better job.

Lest we be accused of only pointing fingers at Western Europeans, the sickness that infects their elites, infects ours.

Decades ago, it was said that Americans had an infatuation with everything French.  Anything fashionable came from Paris, whether clothing, cuisine, décor, art, music — you name it.  Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy was a Francophile.  Even France’s post-WWII existentialism (remember the names Sartre, Camus, and Malraux?) found audiences and adherents here for a time.  Given existentialism’s tendency toward nihilism, it may have more currency now than we suppose.

The joke in days of yore was that Europe’s American cousins were always a step or two behind Europe’s fashions.  Americans aped more than originated.

So, too, with ideology.  American leftism is derivative.  It’s lifted from Europe and applied with all its destructive force here.  Its chief contributions to the cause are operational: Alinsky’s rules and Cloward-Piven, for examples.

As with European leftism, the American version has long ranged beyond economics to attack the moral, religious, and cultural underpinnings of society.  Marriage and family have been targets for decades.  Homosexual unions — and whatever variants follow — are merely extensions of the attack.  Boys thinking (or pretending to think) they’re girls and hanging out in girls’ locker rooms or restrooms and cosmetic sex changes aren’t about ending “gender distinctions” (art cannot trump nature); they’re advanced to degrade minds and trash souls; to muddle then lay low moral reasoning.

The flood of illegals into the U.S. is preponderantly from the south.  Hispanics aren’t Mohammedans, yet they bring their own set of troubles.  No need to catalogue the stresses they impose on society.  President Obama — no believer in American exceptionalism, as his record indicates — has begun importing Muslim refugees.  Red state Idaho is the preferred destination currently.

Along with Frau Merkel, soft-minded Christians here have persuaded themselves that charity means bringing the enemy into the midst of innocents.  Wasn’t it the Good Shepherd’s job to keep the wolves at bay?  Muslims transplanted from Syria or wherever to Idaho or wherever are a welcome sign of “diversity” — diversity being nondiscriminatory and inclusive of anybody other than conservatives.  These Christians (let’s toss in plenty of Jews) suffer from willful ignorance and conceit.  Both sins in their ways.  Both symptoms of a greater malady that afflicts the West.  The critical question lingers, is the West beyond cure?