World War One and the Decline of European Civilization

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World War One and the Decline of European Civilization
by Fjordman

I have just watched several DVDs with documentary film, lightly colorized and with added sound, but otherwise authentic historical footage, about World War One. It is a French-Canadian co-production, written and directed by Daniel Costelle and Isabelle Clarke. The version I watched was retold in English as “World War One: The Apocalypse.” I did not agree with every single narrative comment, but overall, the series was fair and relevant.

The original footage is amazing. While books may be great for historical analysis, there is something very powerful about images, especially moving images. It brings people and events to life in a way that no text can ever match. In the Alps, in mountainous battles against the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Italians used the basic WW1 tactics of trench warfare even in the snow. I vaguely knew that, but I had never seen it illustrated before.

What struck me the most when watching this footage is how much Europe has changed in the past century. Some of this change consists of technological advances. In the early twentieth century, airplanes were a very recent innovation. Indeed, the First World War was arguably the first major war where airplanes were used in combat to any significant extent.

A few visionaries such as Konstantin Tsiolkovsky were already dreaming of space exploration in those days. Yet in the early 1900s, this was more or less science fiction. A person transported from Europe in 1914 to 2014 would have been amazed to see a European space probe orbit a comet and land a robotic science probe on its surface. This was achieved in 2014 by the European Space Agency’s Rosetta spacecraft.

However, while technological advances have been huge, they cannot fully mask the cultural decline that has arguably affected the continent during the same interval. Europe in 1914 was optimistic and confident. It was so strong that even great cataclysms such as the First and Second World War didn’t fully destroy it, at least not immediately. Europeans in 1914 still ruled much of the world. A century later, Europeans don’t even rule many of their own suburbs.

The European percentage of the global population had reached a peak in the early twentieth century. In the twenty-first century, it is dropping to levels never before seen in historical times. Meanwhile, other regions such as Africa and parts of the Muslim world are undergoing an unprecedented population explosion. The global South is dumping some of its excess population in Europe, in effect colonizing the continent. They are not just trying to do so. They are being allowed to do so by European authorities. Natives who object to this development are stigmatized, marginalized, ridiculed and sometimes legally prosecuted.

A European transported from 1914 to the present day would marvel at some of our technology — for example, our mobile phones, satellites and electronic computers connected by a giant web through the Internet. However, he would probably have been shocked and horrified to witness how large sections of the continent are being given away to alien and often hostile tribes. Many of Europe’s politicians and intellectuals outright celebrate this process.

A time traveler from 1914 would most likely have concluded that something went horribly wrong with Europe’s dynamism, self-confidence and moral compass in the intervening century. He would also have been right.

World War One set in motion a chain of events that Europe still has not entirely recovered from, a full century later. Without WW1, there would have been no Soviet Union and no Nazi Germany. There would probably have been no European Union, either.

This does not mean that all of Europe’s dangerous ideas were developed because of WW1. Marxism and The Communist Manifesto existed decades before this. So did Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, alias Lenin. However, Lenin was not able to gain power and implement his version of Marxist thought until the power vacuum and chaos in Russia triggered by the war (plus cynical German aid) provided him with the opportunity. The brutal Marxist dictatorship of the Soviet Union, created by Lenin and his murderous thugs, was a direct result of WW1. It survived until 1991. People groomed by the Soviet Union and the KGB still hold prominent positions in Eastern and Western Europe today.

WW1 was not the sole reason for Europe’s decline. That would be too simplistic. But it was clearly a turning point for the worse. While Marxist theory was a product of the nineteenth century, it was implemented as a state ideology in certain countries only in the twentieth century. Both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were more or less direct byproducts of WW1. Generations after his death, Europe still cowers in the shadow of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler. This implies that we have still not fully recovered from World War One.

Stefan Zweig’s Vienna was very different from Adolf Hitler’s Vienna. Today, entire sections of the city of Vienna are dominated by Turkish, Arab or other Muslim immigrants. Even Stefan Zweig did not anticipate this in his book The World of Yesterday, written shortly before he committed suicide in February 1942.

All people have mood swings. Yet those who suffer from manic-depressive illness (bipolar disorder) have this to an extreme and unhealthy degree. Europe has been a manic-depressive continent since World War One, going from one extreme to the next. One fears that this pattern will continue.

World War One is one part of the story. It is not the whole story. Nevertheless, there is good reason to suspect that when future historians write about the current decline of European culture and civilization, they will devote significant space to WW1.

It was unquestionably a great cataclysm. It did not entirely create the ideas that were to dominate European societies in the following generations. However, it destroyed the old order and radicalized the continent, making Europe more receptive to all kinds of radical and dangerous ideologies.

World War One helped establish the myth that all wars are pointless. I don’t believe that this is true. All wars may be unpleasant, but some of them may be necessary, or at least the lesser of several evils. However, many of the things that took place during WW1 really were pointless. The senseless mass slaughter of Verdun, Somme and other places undermined the belief in old truths. In the long run it opened the continent up for moral relativism and cultural pessimism.

It’s likely that none of Europe’s military and political leaders in the summer of 1914 wanted a protracted and extremely bloody war lasting more than four years. Not in France, Britain, Italy, the German Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Russian Empire or any of the other state combatants. Yet a protracted and extremely bloody war is what they got. Europe’s senior leaders made many foolish and erroneous decisions. Even though the Germans received the major part of the blame, these mistakes were not exclusive to one country.

Globalization was a major issue in the years before WW1, just as it is today. It was believed that trade, travel and international connections would make war impossible. That prediction was wrong then. It may well be wrong now.

In the early 1900s, nationalism was used to fuel the passions of the masses. A century later, Western elites are suppressing nationalism and dismantling European nation-states. Instead of creating empires by colonizing other peoples, they are now trying to create an empire, the EU, by allowing other peoples to colonize Europe. Their policies have not yet led to bloodletting similar to what took place in the trenches between 1914 and 1918. Yet the conflicts due to Multiculturalism and mass immigration are still in their infancy. Their long-term result is hard to predict, but likely to be very destructive.

In Berlin, Amsterdam, Brussels and Paris, a rising number of people live in fear of violence from immigrant gangs in the streets. A few generations ago, Great Britain was the heart of one of the greatest empires the world has ever known. Now, Muslim immigrant gangs rape and abuse girls and children on a nearly industrial scale in cities across Britain. The ruling elites seem to react to this with the same casual indifference as they did to men rotting in the trenches during the First World War. They feel sure of their grasp of power.

Tsar Nicholas II of Russia probably felt sure of his grasp of power in the spring of 1914. A few years later he was gone, and his regime swept away. One can only hope that once the EU finally collapses, those who pick up the pieces are better men than those who exploited the power vacuum left behind after Tsar Nicholas.

Europe may or may not need another Charles Martel. But the continent does not need another Lenin.

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43 thoughts on “World War One and the Decline of European Civilization

  1. Would you consider a possible explanation for the decline of Europe and the West to be biological?

    Assume that inheritance influences, or determines, personality. Assume that people with traits likely to win them wealth, influence, power, and honor allowed them to have more children, and protect them better, than people who simply scrabbled for a living. The traits of intelligence, integrity, honesty, courage, and various skills, were selected for by the pressures of a Europe and Asia with moderate or hostile climates.

    With the advent of modern medicine, and socialism, resources were drawn from productive people to support any child or family, regardless of their ability or willingness to be productive. In other words, the traits we value were no longer being selected for. The natural mutation rate of genes, well-documented and modeled, assured that special traits in the European and American populations deteriorated, as they were no longer being selected for.

    I think there’s a biological reason why courage, intelligence, analytic ability, and the willingness to look into the future, are shrinking from the voting population. The influx of migrants is an important diluting factor, but the change would have occurred anyway, with socialism devoting resources to supporting the ability of not-so-desirable people to procreate, and with modern medicine using princely sums to maintain non-viable fetuses and infants.

    It’s all very well to track cultural trends and movements as explanations for decline, but that approach has no predictive power. It is limited to examining the present situation and trying to construct a post-facto chain of reasoning to explain it.

    It’s important not to confuse natural selection with government selection. There would be no greater disaster than for the government to try to explicitly modify populations. It would be even more disastrous than when government tries to explicitly modify economies, and for the same reasons.

    • For one reason or another and in relation to Fjordman and your own valid arguments – We (the West) have become intrinsically weak. Being weak is never a long term survivable condition – regardless of the cause.

      • Do you allow a different Point of view?

        Because of our advanced medicine many people live who had died in earlier times. This was called Evolution.

        Add to this that we are so highly civilized (fisticuffs are bad taste) we no longer have the willpower and Stamina. We are just like the decadent Romans at the end of their empire. Our doom is at hand.

        But to be honest: If I had to make the choice bétween a fast and clean death on the one Hand and a long drawn out illness with no hope of recovery I take the first one. Better die with a bang then whimper away.

        • “Do you allow a different Point of view?”

          I personally not only allow a different point of view: I invite it. One of the reasons for posting on a site like GOV, with its very intelligent contributors, is to subject my ideas to critiques and to determine if I need to change my ideas.

          I don’t think a longer life and comfortable death are incompatible with modern medicine, but it is incompatible with mindless religious decrees and rigid government control. For example, the vicious government persecution of assisted suicides and the use of pain killers to help people live who have painful, but manageable illnesses.

          There was a case with Dr. Kavorkian. A man living in pain requested his assistance for suicide. Dr. Kavorkian determined that man did not have a fatal disease, but lived in pain that could be controlled. Dr. Kavorkian arranged for another physician to prescribe enough narcotics so the man could continue living and functioning. The doctor who prescribed the narcotic relief was prosecuted for overprescribing controlled drugs.

          And yes: the wealth of the Roman Empire, and its practice of distributing food and money to essentially unproductive street plebians may well have contributed to the deterioration of the Roman population, enough so that they lost their edge as a warrior people.

          • Prior to WW1, European nations were filled with people whose outlook on life was more spiritually based, i.e. Church every Sunday and strict religious observations – such as Sunday being the day of rest. The populations may not have been united as individuals but they were certainly united to the country they were born into and the Church they attended.

            Two World Wars has certainly taken its toll on the ‘spirituality’ of the European individual, and I would add, the Westerner in general who has abandoned his Church and even his nation due to no longer accepting what was once taken for granted on the assumption that there was a greater force than Man who Man would be accountable to come Judgement Day.

            I would suggest that this point in time and outcome for the West was planned well before the advent of both World Wars by some very smart but evil folk whose grasp of humanity and Man’s weaknesses would make a schoolboy of Freud.

            The First World War could have been easily avoided, especially as the most important European and English Monarchs were related. When one studies the causes of WW1, they will find no defining moments that may be looked upon as the ‘trigger’ or ‘triggers’ that started the blood bath. There is no specific incident recorded that shouts out to the researcher this is the trigger that caused The Great War.

            And that is odd for such a human conflagration to have come about.

          • I admit that my post was written in haste and I have to admit I forgot one point I wanted to bring into light, and ist not an easy one:

            It is the Point of Darwinism.

            In earlier times because of illness, accidents, combat, duels and social pressures only those people survived who took care of their bodies, their lives, obeyed rules of the community and proper behaviour.

            Either you behaved or you were ostracized or even killed. Just try to imagine a boy of today trying to come close to a woman of 1900. He would be lucky if he would just be chased away. He would have no chance of siring children and have his genes continue into the next generation. His line would die.

            I do not know any other term than to describe it as a sorting or selective process.

            Now, with medicine and social norms nearly non-existing, could it be that we have stopped our Evolution while other societies did not?
            Could this be the reason for our decline?

            (No, I do not want the days of hunting bears with spears to be back, but our soft society is wrong, too.)

    • Use Ockham’s razor (or at least something sharp with wit) to find a better answer. This kind of “dysgenics” high tone is reminiscent of the younger Aldous Huxley’s position until he was embarrassed into taking the opposite view.
      People who win wealth, influence, power, and honour come from all sections of modern society. Common experience of the world tells us this. James Cook, Picasso…Braque (a house painter by trade!)…Logie Baird (unemployed loser)…the list goes on and on.
      No, this not about eugenics.

      • “No, this not about eugenics.”

        I think I should clarify my position.

        I am not advocating and artificial support for the upper classes. While the upper classes on their own are likely to be more productive, the mechanics of genetics are such that highly intelligent, productive people come from all classes. The general quality of the population is raised when these people are allowed to keep their resources and devote their own resources to raising their children (or supporting their offspring).

        If the resources of the “lower” classes are confiscated to support the “upper” classes, the upper classes will soon deteriorate, along with the society in general.

        IQ tests are correlated with productivity and success. It is tempting to advocate that government support high-IQ individuals, and encourage their offspring, but this is very mistaken. As I stated elsewhere, government will get it wrong, and will mess up population engineering as badly as economic engineering.

        In addition, a population based solely on high IQ, which is a general measure, will be almost as dysfunctional as a society based on welfare support of non-viable offspring. As in economics, the factors composing a successful population are too complex to be modeled. The function of government is to create a system of rational commerce and security.

        If individuals want to take personal steps to support racial purity, I have no objection, as long as they work through voluntary associations and actions. I don’t happen to share their bias, having experienced extremely intelligent, empathic, productive individuals who were non-white.

        I think what government needs to do is get out of the welfare business at the federal level. Allow private agencies to deliver welfare from resources they achieve through voluntary resources. Some agencies may require sterilization of their recipients, so as to prevent further candidates for handouts. The recipients would have a choice between accepting the conditions, or finding another private agency with different conditions.

        The Catholic institutions discourage every form of birth control and advocate support of every fetus, viable or non-viable. I have no object to their position, except that obviously even if they used church resources to support this idea, they would not be able to. This is why the Catholic Church has been in the forefront of transfer of wealth schemes. There is no way they can maintain their vision without socialism.

  2. That was a great article, and I agree with it. I especially admired this bit.

    “In the early 1900s, nationalism was used to fuel the passions of the masses. A century later, Western elites are suppressing nationalism and dismantling European nation-states. Instead of creating empires by colonizing other peoples, they are now trying to create an empire, the EU, by allowing other peoples to colonize Europe.”

    Nationalism will actually be key. It will be a rallying point, together with what’s associated with it once the stigma that’s been imposed on it evaporates.

  3. There’s a great song by the prog-rock band IQ called “The Seventh House” which is about WW1.

    One line in it is “For all their tomorrows we gave our last today.”

    I think soldiers from WW1 would be horrified to see how we squandered their sacrifices. The hedonism, the spitting on tradition, and handing over the West to Islam… It’s sick.

  4. It’s interesting to look at popular culture like “Downton Abbey,” which is a leftist circus.

    Ever since WW1 ended on that show, they’ve been diving into all the “change” with delight. Loosening morals, etc. It’s always presented as wonderful and the sympathetic characters revel in it. (Shirley McLaine’s character was constantly pontificating on how everything is changing and you’d better get with the program.) We’re all supposed to look at it and say goodbye to the fuddy-duddies of the past. It’s gruesomely one-sided.

  5. One thing you didn’t mention is that WWI caused people to lose confidence and faith in Christianity. This created a sort of spiritual vacuum into which people started to put their faith in other things to save them. While some did things like try to revive old pagan beliefs that were essentially lost (such as “Wicca”) many more put their faith in the new religion of Marxism-Leninism and other socialist beliefs such as National Socialism.

    Religious cognition is essentially hard wired to some degree in everyone, as suggested by scientific research, so take away what is conventionally recognized as religion and that cognition latches on to something else that social-religious cognition can understand. This typically seems to result in a cargo cult like following of some sort of Utopianism, which is exactly what Communism is all about.

    At this point in time it seems that things like National Socialism have been replaced by International Socialism. The common feature between these things seems to be that rather than worshiping a traditional deity or deities, humans are worshiped as though they were deities. This has the effect of people placing undue faith in government authoritarianism, and the belief that any problem can be solved given sufficient governmental authority. Ideas like “giving oneself over to God” get replaced with the idea of giving oneself over to government authority, and all this happens without anyone in government even having to pretend to represent God like they would have done in a less scientific age.

    But everyone is told not to worry, because as long as supernatural deities aren’t involved it’s all perfectly rational and everyone in the past just got “unlucky” with supporting the wrong absolute dictators in the not so distant past.

    If there were a better understanding of computational complexity theory then it might be more apparent to people what sort of single point of failure and lack of computational resources are created by centralized authoritarianism, particularly when accountability is defeated by propaganda and censorship that cause massive denial within the populace.

    • What you’re saying is that a degree of authoritarian process is hardwired into humans, and it can be expressed either through religious faith or faith in authoritarian government. I guess you’re concluding that it’s better to be Christian than to be socialist. Of course, with religious organizations such as the Catholic Church, the United Methodist Church, or the Union for Reform Judaism, you have both.

      It was 20th century economists such as Ludwig van Mises that pointed out the complexity of economic systems, and the folly of trying to centralize decision-making in a centralized government. Even Adam Smith in the 18th century described how the pressures of a free market compensated for weaknesses in individuals. Computational theory is not necessary to understand the folly of centralized government control over the economy.

      With modern technology, a smaller group of people become increasingly productive, enabling a redistributionist government to creak along by taking resources from productive people and passing them out to an increasingly irrational and non-productive electorate. The entire socialist edifice will eventually collapse on itself, as rationality leaves the system, and the government focuses increasingly on extracting the resources of any productive people with more-than-average wealth.

      The economist Peter Bauer, an underrated prophet of the free market, described how devastating government interference was for developing economies. In particular, he described how an intrusive government apparatus focused more on productive citizens than true criminals, because it was easier and safer to harass innocent civilians than gang members.

      Notice that the common feature of the socialist ideal, and the leftist churches is that they assume that everyone is responsible for everyone else, and that it is moral and ethical to take from the rich and give to the poor. This is explicit in the Catholic, Vatican teachings of the last few decades.

      The ability of a country to maintain freedom is dependent on its ability to put off immediate satisfaction for future profit. Once government levels out all differences in wealth, there is no longer any incentive to use logic or foresight in living one’s life or making decisions.

      Responsible people put a great deal of resources into raising and educating their children. People who put 3 or more children through college literally deplete their own retirement. Irresponsible people receive benefits, medical attention, and race-driven scholarships for their children, regardless of how many children they have. There is no way that sort of dynamic doesn’t affect the biological composition of a population.

      • It’s true that Christianity doesn’t solve the authoritarianism problem, it still supported a divine right of kings mentality in Europe, but the main difference between Christianity in Europe at the time and something like Marxism-Leninism is that the latter was promising to bring about a utopia through specific human action, whereas with traditional religion it seems to be suggested that if a utopia happens it will only happen as some sort of emergent phenomenon that can’t be intentionally caused (or in religious thinking terms, by some sort of divine act beyond the power of humans).

        So there was a transition from reasonably sane expectations of what political power could do to totally insane cargo cult like expectations of what political power could accomplish.

        • Well, here in America we abolished the divine right of kings…

          …and it looks like I get to choose between a Clinton and a Bush.

          Yay.

          Looks like humans refuse to learn.

          • It’s early times yet. Yes, the MSM have their anointed ones, but sometimes their orders are ignored. Bush 2 was NOT chosen over Gore, it was the other way around. Gore was a Dem favorite from the get-go. Only the Supreme Court’s ruling that Florida needed to stop dragging its feet on the vote count allowed the suffering to end. The Dems became increasingly quiet over that as Gore went ’round the bend and slowly slid past any rational comportment. He’s a sad ruin of a man. His father groomed him for the spot and he didn’t make it so his life past that point has been a shambles. Sad.

            Bush was never “chosen”. He was considered the black sheep of the family and it wasn’t until he sobered up and cleaned up that he began to seriously question his life’s direction. He spent some time learning the ropes by helping others get elected in state politics before starting up on his own to run for governor. Yeah, he had money and position on his side – national politics was in his family for three generations by then.

            Politics aside, Bush was the last sane person in the WH, and the last decent person to even run for that office since… well, since his dad or Ronald Reagan, maybe. [Jimmy Carter was a decent person and very bright – you had to be ultra smart to be one of Rickover’s boys. But the office can undo a decent man & I think that happened to Carter with the implosion of Iran. He was the first one to have to deal with Islam and he wasn’t prepared. No one was prepared for that.]

            None of these men had any skeletons in the closet or bimbos in the Oval Office. None of them had to burn the paper trail of their previous life in order to get ahead. The press sure tried very hard to drum up scandals for Bush but in the end they were reduced to complaining that he was boring and took too many vacations. Now major scandals and failures explode with regularity in the current administration yet the MSM gets quieter with every passing disaster. They know how dangerous this man is, but they also know their own culpability.

            Clinton *might* make it past all the messes she caused but I don’t think MSM approval will turn the vote to her. On her side, she’d be the first woman president. So we celebrate another first with another freak?? IF she makes it past the primaries to front runner, just wait for the stories to start pouring out. Those tales will make her husband’s compulsive skirt-chasing look boring in comparison. The themes will center on character, her hateful treatment of the people around her, compulsive lying, etc. THAT back-story stretches all the way to her first days in Washington, before she even left to be with Clinton in Arkansas.

            An increasingly popular – and MSM-pushed – candidate is O’Malley from Maryland. Right now Hillary’s moles are busy trying to find his Achilles’ heel. I don’t think Elizabeth Warren has much of a chance against her, however.

            The Republican bench is a little deeper: Senators Cruz and Paul both have popular programs (e.g., the flat tax). Governor Walker has survived the SIEU concerted and thuggish attempts to bring him down in Wisconsin. All three men are pro-Tea Party, which could prove dangerous since the boys who run the Republican National Committee inside the Beltway loathe the Tea Party and have repeatedly tried to destroy it. All professional pols hate populist movements…

            RKae, I don’t think people refuse to learn…more likely it’s that they have to perceive a VERY good reason, a compelling one, to pay attention to politics. That is supposed to be stuff carried on in the back rooms and then people show up to cheer whoever wins. If it weren’t for the threat we face from the Muslim Brotherhood, their lack of interest would be normal – it has ALWAYS been that way: people are busy leading their lives, raising their families, etc.

            Republicans rise to the top when they present robust candidates who ignore the Beltway Boyz and run their campaigns on their own terms. Romney failed to do that. He listened to the experts, cut the Tea Party out of the loop, and failed to stand up to a cardboard opponent. It was his race to lose, and that’s precisely what he did. The white men ignored the whole thing.

            In the end, it will be whoever captures the attention of the white men and their compatriots who will win. If Hillary wins, it will be because the white men stayed home and did something else than listen to politicians. That’s the inconvenient truth no one is allowed to say without being branded a waaycist. If this country survives it will be because enough white men didn’t care what the ankle biters said about them.

          • What happened in the US is that the divine right of kings was replaced by the divine right of the individual. The people who wrote the Declaration of Independence knew that, because of the divine right of kings, they were going to have to justify their “treason” in theological terms. So they basically said “this divine right of kings stuff is crap. In reality, everyone has the divine rights of individuals. Therefore the king has no more special divine right than anyone else and he can take a hike if he disagrees.”

            The problem is that this notion of natural law and individual rights is currently pinned on the social cognitive idea that these individual rights are granted by an omnipotent deity. When people stop believing in this deity, the link is broken; atheists start believing that rights are just “socially constructed” by whoever gets elected king.

            The idea of natural law doesn’t actually need to depend on a deity any more than the laws of physics need to depend on a deity. Really these things just depend on the notion that there’s such a thing as objective reality that is governed by natural laws of cause and effect and that nothing, including society, is some sort of special exception to this.

          • The ‘divine right of the individual’ provides for the primacy of the individual over any other entity. Thus liberty becomes license as the individual has the “right” to gratify himself at the cost of the community, which has no such ‘rights’…the perfect recipe for anomie, which the French philosophers saw quite clearly as the logical (and poisonous) end result of the destructive French Revolution.

          • The thing that alleviates that problem is the idea that individual rights are tied to individual responsibilities. Without the idea that rights depend on responsibilities, people start using “rights” as an excuse to prey on others.

            I often think that the main problem with the U.S. constitution is that there’s a bill of rights but no bill of responsibilities to go along with it.

            At one time it was an underlying assumption that rights implied responsibilities, but at some point (probably just after WWII), people started demanding their rights to this and that while denying that they should be responsible for anything. At this point the social contract really started breaking down and I fear that this continues to happen.

          • Nimrod:

            Holy smoke! I say that all the time! We need a Bill of Responsibilities!

            *You are responsible for raising every child you conceive. (See what I did there? “Conceive”?)

            *You are responsible for the health and well being of yourself and your child.

            *You are responsible for your education and your child’s education.

            The list goes on and on. I think it’s a great idea.

          • Nimrod, the US Constitution was designed for a moral people. A moral people don’t need a bill of responsibilities as their adherence to morality includes their responsibility to others and the nation.

            I guess we are now witnessing what the founding fathers warned about – no God = no morals.

          • There’s more than one belief that can support morality, but a certain definition of God is certainly one of them if. The thing that’s absolutely needed is a belief in ultimate individual accountability. For example, in addition to the idea of being judged by God, someone might instead believe in kamma-vipaka (karma) where one is essentially judged by natural law itself. One might also believe that God created kamma-vipaka (meaning action-result) as a way of automating the judging process, or believe that it “just exists”. Also critical is the idea of an afterlife, otherwise people (like Anthony Weiner) may simply conclude that any immoral action they can get away with in their current lifetime is OK because they’ll just be annihilated after that and thus face no consequences.

            So if you ask me, morality is lacking in full support unless people believe in some sort of ultimate accountability whether it’s based on God, natural law, or both, and some sort of afterlife in which one is held accountable even if they manage to die before being held accountable in their current lifetime.

            While it’s impossibe to empirically prove these things in existential terms, it is possible to study the effects of beliefs. So this is the most “scientific” argument that I can make given that it’s a hypothesis that could be studied scientifically through observation of behavior, whereas the usual existence/no existence arguments can’t be.

          • We are creatures who grow to become pre-conditioned by whatever the accepted status quo is at the time. It takes a life time of learning this simple fact and many will simply never learn from it.

            Mark Twain’s quote about the most important part of the human life was first, being born, and then second, finding out why you were born. I believe that profound utterance goes to the heart of the human individual’s dilemma in trying to understand what life is really all about.

            Some will follow the status quo without question while others will learn to see the status quo as being repressive to human development.

            In my lifetime I have been witness to some very strange things that have left some questions unanswered for which I continue to seek answers. Life is a learning curve that many simply abandon. Our lives today revolve around the physical aspects of our world while the spiritual side to our being is denigrated – to me that is an agenda organized by a very malevolent force that most would never entertain the idea of let alone devote time to trying to understand the ramifications of such a force.

            The old Roman legionnaire adage of; ‘Drink and be merry for tomorrow we die’, could apply to many people’s lives today who see just a big dark void for them when their turn comes to shuffle off this mortal coil. Their self-indulgence precludes them from ever learning the rich and rewarding truth that ancient and modern history can teach us. History speaks about humanity and its foibles, excesses, greatness and the lessons never learned. Lessons that today’s self-indulgent, arrogant and heedless folk truly need to take note of.

  6. Not biological but class and economic.

    Look the bipartisan elites that run Europe and the U.S. have always been very isolated from the working classes. Their children go to the finest private schools and then into well paying sinecures, never knowing work or real toil. They cannot relate to people who work and suffer and don’t know if they’ll have a job the next day. This is why they can push globalization, demographic destruction, etc.

    This sort of detachment allowed the English aristocratic generals to march their armies right into German machine gun fire and watch 60,000 die in a day without so much as a wince. The same with the French and German elites who sent their lower classes to be slaughtered, time after time.

    That’s how you make a stupid war like WWI last 4 years instead of suing for peace after the first year. Because no one gave a rat’s behind. Did the Queen of England, the Kaiser or the inbreds in the Austro-Hungarian empire lose their son’s in battle? No. War and suffering are abstractions to the pampered elite of the last 300 years.

    People need to understand we are nothing to the elites. As senator Sessions recently said, they view us as commodities. During the age of the robber barons, the people were just widgets to be used in their factories, including children as young as 4. Go back to the 1500’s and you had the English aristocrats throwing the farmers off their lands to herd them into the cities for their factories. Dicken’s wrote about this lot.

  7. The Great War was catastrophic for Britain, there was no need for us to involve ourselves in it. The human cost of it can be seen in the disproportionately long lists of names, on the war memorials throughout the length and breadth of the country, even in tiny villages and hamlets. It truly was a lost generation, and the loss was so great that I don’t think we ever truly recovered. I wonder sometimes on what Britain’s future would have been: if WW1 hadn’t been part of our past.

    • The principle seems to be that the catastrophe of World War I opened the way for the decline of national identity and the rise of totalitarian governments, paving the way for Muslim invasion through immigration.

      I think the facts do not support that view.

      The glaring counter-example is Sweden, with Switzerland as a backup. Sweden took very little part in World War I or II, and certainly did not lose its populations, infrastructure, or territorial integrity. Same for Switzerland. And yet, Sweden is the most glaring example of surrender to Muslim immigration and suppression of ideas counter to the globalist ideals.

      Hence, it was not the destruction and slaughter of war that accounted for the continental change or the mindless and irrational wholesale importation of Muslim immigrants.

      • I never mentioned immigration, Third World or Muslim; I was referring, obliquely, to the damage done to the gene pool in the U.K. – for example a friend of my great-grandmother lost her husband and all three of her sons and the financial cost; which is almost incalculable as WW1 was the catalyst for WW2: which altered the world forever.

        The Great War ended approximatley 10,000,000 lives in total and cost almost all the wealth which had been created by the Industrial Revolution.

        I don’t think one can compare the U.K. and Sweden regarding immigration to those countries and the reasons for it. The one a small country, the other a large one (by western European standards); one with a relatively large population, the other a small population and one with massive overseas territory and subjects, the other without.

        • An excellent summation. The few surviving males who had children would see them killed off in WWII.

          No one has mentioned the harshly punitive aspects of the Versailles Treaty. Had there been, instead, something akin to the Marshall Plan, WWII might have been averted. A punished people is a powder keg w/ a delayed time release. To which many an abused child can attest.

        • To Patrick: I apologize if I did not address the main points you wanted to make.

          For me, a prime question is, was the waste and carnage of World War I a cause of the subsequent decline and surrender of the European cultures, especially to Muslim invaders?

          A subsidiary question is, did World War II lay the specific foundation for the disastrous European governments now surrendering the well-being of their constituents to Muslim invaders? We are agreed that the peace conditions of World War I probably put the Nazi government into place.

          I brought Sweden in as a counterexample to the idea that the devastation of a country through war was what brought about weak governments that surrendered the sovereignty of the country. The Swedish developments say to me that other factors can and do bring about a similar decline in the identity of a country.

          I would like to see a chain of logic by which factors unique to Sweden brought about its decline, completely apart from what brought about the decline of England.

          My hypothesis is that the deterioration of the population was brought about by aggressive socialism and the penalization on productive people and their ability to produce offspring. The changing population became more focused on receiving government handouts and less focused on the process of good government. This allowed, rather compelled, politicians to pursue monied interests for support.

          The carnage of a war does not necessarily change the characteristics of a population, unless there is a selective mechanism on who is killed. And the children of the British aristocracy served in the military as points of honor. So, without further evidence, I do not accept the assertion that the British “elite” got off scot-free from the carnage of World War I.

          • Yes the aristocrats of England were harmed by WWI as well. Bloodlines ended and altered. But never enough for them to cry uncle and end the war early.

            But the lower classes paid the most. Their best and brightest were shuttled off to the meat grinders of WWI and WWII. And again bloodlines ended and altered. The weak stayed home and bred.

            Fast forward to the 80’s and Britain was still tottering about quite well until Thatcher came into power and decided to privatize and demilitarize the country. She delivered the first blows. Her cutbacks caused a war with Argentina who saw her dismantling of the military as chance to take back the Falklands. Her gutting of heavy industries and privatization of government run agencies merely enriched a handful of insiders while devastating entire communities and regions with permanent layoffs. Now lower class men and women had no useful work anymore. The only thing they had was watching soccer games and getting blitzed.

            Just like what happened when NAFTA and China PNTR were enacted here in the U.S. where we created a permanent white underclass.

            But none of that explains the demographic destruction of Britain. To that you have to look at the folks that succeeded her like Major, Blair and Cameron and their supporters at the highest levels of business and politics. They look to be global elitists to a one, bent on self-enrichment and Orwellian control of the country no matter who gets hurt.

            These people within 25 years have radically altered the country and stripped the people of their voice in government and rights.

      • Sweden is a special case. The entire country is one giant political science experiment of a sort.

        This book goes into it:

        The New Totalitarians Brave New Sweden by Roland Huntford

        link:
        http://eindtijdinbeeld.nl/EiB-Bibliotheek/Boeken/The_New_Totalitarians__Brave_New_Sweden___1980_.pdf

        And it shows how malleable you can make people if you have the time and resources. Don’t need to have a mastery of eugenics and genetic engineering to alter a people.

        The elites in Sweden managed to turn their people into modern day Eloi through a system of education/indoctrination, destruction of the family structure, inculcation of dependency, passivity, marginalizing gender differences, etc. Very progressive and scientific.

        Galton, Goebbels and Bernays would be proud.

    • Throw in the Spanish Influenza immediately after WWI and you truly have a wipe out of the citizenry.

  8. The social “safety net” may have evolved it’s own “cargo cult”, as people choose to organize their lives to capture as much of the “safety net” bounty as they can receive. This quickly morphs into a culture that views unwed motherhood and general joblessness and homelessness as attractive features of life, rather than as forms of suffering. Furthermore, it infuses a whole new element into the culture, the wholesale strategy of taking offense at any criticism of lifestyle or economic choices, which is an indirect method of defending the continuance of the safety net “free stuff”. Where the widespread rolling over and accepting of non-assimilating inmigration comes from, I am not sure. Perhaps it reinforces the entrenchment of the safety net, for those who fail to understand or refuse to accept the economic limits of robbing Peter to provide for Paul.

    • Immigrants who are resistant to or outright unwilling to assimilate provide a persistent underclass that can easily be exploited with vote buying schemes.

      • A native underclass, one created by socialist entitlements, can be bought/exploited just as easily. The criminal class in charge at the moment wants more than just the vote, they want to destroy the culture via envy and destruction of the middle class. This is unfortunate since the middle class provides so much of the governmental revenue.

        • Saw Nick Hanauer interviewed for the BBC yesterday. He points out what should be obvious, that a prosperous middle class buys the stuff that other people make; poor folks don’t drive an economy.

          • But even before that you have to have a group of makers, producers. Well-paid government workers have purchasing power but what can their money buy if the “stuff” isn’t being made?? Too much government is a killer in more ways than one. China is largely filling in the vacuum left when producers were driven out of business in the West by over-regulation.

            China and IKEA, what would we do without them?

  9. The stuff of scandinavian countries is more like Norway and the Quislings. Capitulating and consorting with the enemy to save your own [fundament] and base of power however shortlived that might be.

    What has always amazed me was how quickly Britian threw out Churchill and welcomed in socialism after just winning a war against fascism and the soviets imposing their will on Europe at the end of WWII. Was the legacy of those Brits who fought and died to be diminished so quickly? It has been downhill ever since while those defeated, e.g. Germany and Japan, at least had a few decades of renewal and ascendancy in the global economy. Much of it provided by the Marshall plan for Europe and MacArthurs’ plan for Japan paid for by the US taxpayer.

    What kind of thinking goes from facing the cult of death to welcoming in a smooth talking [disgusting being]? Have the people lost all their senses?

    • Churchill was portrayed as a ‘wartime leader’ and not someone to lead the British into peace – with that description of him by the Labour Party being most prominent at their political rallies, socialism was then sold as the magic panacea to right the ship of state.

      One needs to remember that the problems with communism, as per the Soviet system, was not generally known about by the ‘common folk’ who actually trusted their governments at the time to do the right thing by them.

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