{"id":4230,"date":"2020-07-21T05:36:56","date_gmt":"2020-07-21T09:36:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cafe.nfshost.com\/?p=4230"},"modified":"2020-07-21T05:36:56","modified_gmt":"2020-07-21T09:36:56","slug":"the-existential-crisis-of-the-west-redux","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cafe.nfshost.com\/?p=4230","title":{"rendered":"The Existential Crisis of the West – Redux"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Throne, Altar, Liberty\n<\/a>\n<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

The Canadian Red Ensign<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"The<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Friday, July 17, 2020<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

\nThe Existential Crisis of the West – Redux\n<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n\nThe prescient have seen it coming for a century now. In 1918 and 1922, the two volumes of Oswald Spengler\u2019s The Decline of the West<\/em>\n were first published. In his magnus opus Spengler examined the \ncivilizations or cultures \u2013 he used the latter term but the way the two \nterms were used and distinguished in the German thought of his day was \nvery different from how they are used and distinguished in English today\n \u2013 of human history, and identified a super-organic life cycle that they\n each passed through, of which, he maintained, the modern West with its \n\u201cFaustian\u201d spirit of empirical exploration \u2013 the spirit exemplified by<\/a> the Ulysses of Alfred Lord Tennyson\u2019s eponymously titled poem<\/a> \u2013 was entering into its final season.

\nIn 1964, James Burnham\u2019s The Suicide of the West: An Essay On the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism<\/em> was published for the first time. This book is probably best understood as the third in a trilogy, the first of which was The Managerial Revolution<\/em>,\n written immediately after Burnham\u2019s break with his Trotskyite youth and\n the Socialist Workers Party and published in 1941, arguing that the \ncapitalist world was evolving into something that would not be the \nsocialist worker\u2019s paradise predicted by Marxism, but rather the rule of\n a new class of technocratic corporate managers and government \nbureaucrats. The second was The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom<\/em>,\n published two years later, in which Burnham gave an overview of a \nRealpolitik theory regarding the inevitability of elites and the nature \nof political power that he traced from the writings of Florentine \nRenaissance political scientist Niccol\u00f2 Machiavelli through the \nnineteenth to early twentieth century writings of Robert Michels, \nVilfredo Pareto and Gaetano Mosca, the philosophical framework that he \nhad turned to after abandoning Marxism. By the time he wrote The Suicide of the West<\/em>, Burnham had become one of the original members of William F. Buckley Jr.\u2019s editorial team at National Review<\/em> and the magazine\u2019s principal analyst of geopolitical events. In The Suicide of The West<\/em>\n he discussed liberalism as being the ideology of Western suicide. A \nfamiliarity with the first two books is helpful in understanding what he\n meant by this, for he did not mean that liberalism was formulated to \nbring about the end of Western Civilization, but rather that it was an ex post facto<\/em>\n rationalization on the part of the governing elites for Western \nCivilization\u2019s self-imposed collapse. Although this was written at the\n height of the Cold War \u2013 the Cuban Missile Crisis had taken place two \nyears prior to the book\u2019s release \u2013 the \u201csuicide\u201d Burnham was talking \nabout was not merely what he perceived to be a losing strategy against \nthe Soviet Union in the \u201cStruggle for the World\u201d (1) but also included \ninternal moral, cultural, and social decay, into which category he put \nthe immediate historical antecedents in his own day of the \u201cwoke\u201d race \nrevolutionaries of our own.

\nIn 2002, Patrick J. Buchanan, syndicated columnist, speechwriter and \nadvisor to Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Ronald Reagan, and Reform \nParty nominee for the 2000 American Presidential Election, released his The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigration Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization<\/em>.\n The subtitle pretty much sums up the thesis. As Christendom \nthrough secularization became Western Civilization, it lost not just its\n faith in God but its faith in itself. Since this process was more or \nless complete by the end of World War II, the period since has seen a \nradical and sustained fall in fertility throughout the Western world. \nTo prevent the economic disaster that this threat to Western population \nsize poses, and for other reasons, the governments of the liberal West \nhave been admitting unprecedented numbers of immigrants from outside the\n West, and specifically the Third World. This combination, which adds \nup to a massive and rapid demographic transformation, spells disaster \nfor the survival of Western Civilization in any recognizable form, and \nin the meantime, a far left ideology that is hostile to Western survival\n \u2013 Cultural Marxism \u2013 has captured the major cultural institutions of \nthe West, from the schools to the media, and has been promoting an \nagenda of pushing the West\u2019s loss of faith in God and its own \ncivilization and its embrace of the suicidal combination of domestic \nanti-natalism, mass immigration, and radical multiculturalism ever \nfurther and further.

\nAs their Cassandra like predictions of doom progressed from decline to \nsuicide to death, Spengler, Burnham, and Buchanan each provided valuable\n insights into the phenomenon that four years ago I described as \u201cThe Existential Crisis of the West<\/a>.\u201d\n Today, I rather regret having used up that title so early. At the \ntime we were seeing Europe inundated with migrants, whom the media \nrepresented as being asylum seekers from the Syrian Civil War despite \nabundant evidence that the majority came from outside the region \naffected by the conflict, and many of whom clearly displayed hostile \nintent towards the countries they were entering, as the plot of the late\n Jean Raspail\u2019s The Camp of the Saints<\/em> materialized before our \nvery eyes. Today, the news and entertainment media, academic \ninstitutions, big tech companies and other corporations, and bureaucrats\n and politicians of every stripe have united in insisting that no \ndissent be allowed to the Marxist Critical Theorists\u2019 indictment of our \ncivilization as being built upon racism and so thoroughly permeated by \nit that all white people are collectively guilty of it even if they have\n never had a conscious racist thought. This has been accompanied by a \nlarge scale campaign of intimidation on the part of far left activist \ngroups such as Black Lives Matter and Antifa. The chaos has evolved \nfrom the familiar pattern of previous race riots \u2013 inner city arson, \nvandalism, looting, and violence \u2013 to the Maoist assault on figures of \nthe past \u2013 to the current wave of vandalism and arson targeting \nChurches.

\nA question I have frequently encountered from those who are fed up with this sort of thing is \u201cwhat do we do about it?\u201d

\nThe answer which people who ask this question are inevitably looking for\n is a practical answer, that is to say, one that would resemble a \u201cHow \nto\u201d manual. How to stop Cultural Marxism in ten easy steps, or \nsomething along those lines.

\nI do not have such an answer, and, frankly, I have my doubts as to \nwhether one even exists. The left devoted a century to capturing our \ncultural institutions and turning them into vehicles for disseminating \nits hatred of our civilization before making this aggressively \ntotalitarian move and that preparation unquestionably is a major factor \nin their effectiveness today. We do not have that sort of time to \nprepare a counter-attack which is required immediately.

\nThis much, however, I will say, and that is that unless we recognize \nthis crisis as the threat to the very existence of our civilization that\n it is are prepared to deal with it as such, we have already lost. \nThis means no more apologies for our history. No more apologies for \nbeing white. No more apologies for believing the Christian faith and \npracticing the Christian religion. No more wasting our time trying to \npersuade those who are determined to \u201ccancel\u201d anyone and everyone whom \nthey condemn with one of their ever-growing list of \u2013ists and \u2013phobes \nthat they are in violation of the canons of liberal thought because they\n don\u2019t care.

\nWhen we are all in agreement on that, then maybe we can find a practical\n strategy for finally defeating this Marxism and saving what is left of \nour civilization.

\n(1) This is the title of another of Burnham\u2019s books, the first of a trilogy that addressed the Cold War. It came out in 1947.
\n\n\n\n\n\nPosted by\n\n\n\nGerry T. Neal\n<\/a>\n\n\n\nat\n\n7:43 AM<\/abbr><\/a>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nLabels:\nAlfred Lord Tennyson<\/a>,\nGaetano Mosca<\/a>,\nJames Burnham<\/a>,\nJean Raspail<\/a>,\nNiccol\u00f2 Machiavelli<\/a>,\nOswald Spengler<\/a>,\nPatrick Buchanan<\/a>,\nRichard Nixon<\/a>,\nRobert Michels<\/a>,\nRonald Reagan<\/a>,\nVilfredo Pareto<\/a>,\nWilliam F. Buckley<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Throne, Altar, Liberty The Canadian Red Ensign Friday, July 17, 2020 The Existential Crisis of the West – Redux The prescient have seen it coming for a century now. In 1918 and 1922, the two volumes of Oswald Spengler\u2019s The … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2284,2281,2282,2283],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cafe.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4230"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cafe.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cafe.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cafe.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cafe.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4230"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cafe.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4230\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4231,"href":"https:\/\/cafe.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4230\/revisions\/4231"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cafe.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4230"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cafe.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4230"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cafe.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4230"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}