A Second fall of civilization
Posted by Jillian
Becker
A disaster far more devastating even than universal economic
collapse is underway, and our governments, our pundits, our professoriat, the
most powerful of our movers-and-shakers, are averting their eyes from it,
pretending it is not happening.
Europe is dying. Unless it
is prevented by some as yet unproposed and almost unimaginable means, its
greatness is coming to an end. The shadow of Islam, an ideology out of the Dark
Ages, is advancing over it day-by-day, mile-by-mile, state-by-state. The
European nations are dwindling and Islamic peoples are replacing them. Perhaps because the disaster is too dreadful
to contemplate, we distract ourselves
with imaginary urgencies like climate-change, racism, feminism, gay marriage,
and, with the loudest hullabaloo, the zealous promotion of the very cause that
is destroying us: ‘multiculturalism’, the pretence or fatal illusion that there
are other civilizations not just equal to but worthier than our own, and that
to them we must give way.
What is threatening is nothing less than the Second Fall of
Civilization. European governments are
doing nothing to stop it happening. In
various ways they are expediting it: admitting millions of Muslims as
immigrants; permitting the establishment of Sha´ria courts, Sha´ria-compliant
finance, Saudi-supported madrassas that teach the fundamentalist Wahhabi creed,
and the building of thousands of mosques; bestowing tax-payers’ on Muslim
groups without control over how it is used; all-too-easily accommodating Muslim
demands for footbaths or prayer-rooms (even in Buckingham Palace); knowingly
sheltering terrorist leaders and supporting them and their families; policing
those who expose Muslim sedition rather than the seditious themselves; laying
down Newspeak rules for official commentators so that Islam cannot be
associated with the terrorism that Muslims carry out – and so on. The list
could be very much longer.
In the late eighteenth century Edward Gibbon wrote, in The
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: ‘The
system of arts, of laws, of manners … distinguish, above the rest of mankind,
the Europeans and their colonies. The savage nations of the globe are the
common enemies of civilized society; and we may inquire with anxious curiosity,
whether Europe be still threatened with a repetition of those calamities which
formerly oppressed the arms and institutions of Rome.’
Rome
fell. It was arguably the greatest disaster in history. Darkness descended over
Europe for a thousand years. Like a mansion
decayed, deserted by its owners, half buried by an encroaching wildness, it
sheltered precariously under its broken roof tribes of lawless and illiterate
barbarians restrained only by the terrible would-be-totalitarian power of the Catholic
Church.
But the essence of Rome
never died. Light broke again, eventually. Europe
rediscovered its Roman heritage. Our culture is fundamentally Roman - or to be
more precise, Greco-Roman.
The silver age of Rome
(no golden age ever existed) was the Republic.
The republican idea – surely one of the greatest ideas that humankind
has ever conceived - arose in ancient Greece: the idea that people of different
origins and customs could live together, pursue their chosen trades and
occupations, bring knowledge and information, inventions and techniques from
many sources, contribute in individual ways to the general prosperity, act and
express themselves freely, provided only that they accept the rule of the same
law; and the law was to be made by the people themselves. It was the innovation
of popular self-government, revolutionary and unique.
The citizens of the Greek city-states realized that they
could dispense with the autocratic authority of a king, a chief, a headman.
They alone in all the world broke the old universal pattern of human
organization - adherence of person to family, of family to tribe, of the tribe
being rooted in a piece of earth, its cohesion forcefully maintained by the
arbitrary rule of an hereditary chief. To this day the old tribal pattern
prevails in Africa and the Middle East. It
continues among native peoples of all continents, even where European colonists
have established themselves as permanent populations. In Europe itself there
are traces and remnants of tribalism, persistent in atavistic sentiment, and
lately in active political movements for reversion (for example, among Celts in
Britain, Basques in Spain, the Flemish in Belgium.) Such political movements
are pathetically nugatory in the dying days of the continent.
The Renaissance was the re-birth of Greco-Roman
civilization. Again, as in Rome and classical Greece,
thinkers began to speculate freely, in defiance of the Universal Church.
Science and philosophy could flourish there again, and flourish they did. Exploration
and discovery opened new worlds. Europe
rapidly became the most fertile and powerful civilization of all time. In the
most potent and productive states, kings weakened into figureheads; the people
ruled.
From Europe and its
erstwhile colonies, the science, the technology, the inventions that the world
desires, have flowed. The inventions themselves are copied by far distant
nations, which grow wealthy on their production and sale. But few of those
countries copy the condition of freedom-under-the-law, and the institutions
that preserve it, which allow and therefore foster innovation and experiment,
those magnificently daring adventures into the new, with all its risks and
rewards. So what will the world do if the source dries up?
Now ‘those calamities’ which threatened Rome
are again threatening Europe, as Gibbon feared
they might. It is not a clash of civilizations, but of civilization with
barbarism. If Europe will not raise a finger to save itself, will America be willing once again to save Europe? What could it do? And if it can do nothing, is
there any attempt by Americans to prepare for the time when they’ll no longer
have any European allies?
The answer may depend on what leadership comes to power in
the United States
in the near future. One candidate for
the presidency obviously does not recognize the approaching catastrophe, and
seems even to have some sympathy with Islam. The other may see and hear it, but
will he act against it?
Whether the darkness descends slowly through change in the
demography of Europe, or is hastened through aggression by a nuclear armed Iran, it will be deep and persistent, unless the
American Republic resists it. This time Europe will not be lawless. Worse, it will be under a
system of law that, far from protecting freedom, ensures oppression. Sharia,
the law of Islam, fixed since the Dark Ages and unchangeable, will hold the
people in subjection. Less escapable
and even more cruel than the mediaeval Christian Church; utterly opposed to
Justice as it is conceived in the post-Enlightenment West; contemptuous of
women, forbidding homosexuality, caring nothing for ‘the environment’,
unfavorable to figurative art and music; resistant as iron to innovation, is
the law of Islam. It proceeds, Muslims believe, from an authority higher than
any king or tyrant, and more absolute: their God. To him all must submit
absolutely. ‘Islam’, remember, means ‘submission’.
Western civilization has at present the political, economic,
military, and intellectual resources to prevent a second fall. What is missing
as yet is the will. To gain it, we must first take pride in our achievements;
recognize, believe in, and have the courage to proclaim the superiority of our
customs and ideals over the customs and ideology of our enemy.
The US
presidential election of 2008 may be decisive as to whether our civilization
resists and survives, or submits and falls.
Jillian Becker
September 2008
http://www.theatheistconservative.com/articles/2008/09/24/a-second-fall-of-civilization
