Well beyond the rubble, debris and dead bodies, September 11th, 2001 marked the moment when the surviving half of the postwar order fractured. It was a time where one could call “a spade, a spade” without being labeled a ‘racist’. Before, Westerners rarely suggested that Western thought and culture weren’t exceptional or superior to other civilizations. Americans balanced the separate spheres of faith and politics with scientific inquiry successfully enough to where it was perfectly acceptable for one to openly proclaim his Christian faith influenced his decision making when determining the appropriate actions to worldly challenges―certainly better than today, anyway. Objective truths still mattered; you simply didn’t pretend to be something you weren’t born to be. Science wasn’t politically correct or ‘regulated’ by the court of public opinion, and it definitely wasn’t ‘settled’. It was still cool to be an American, to wave the Stars and Stripes, to celebrate Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, and the Fourth of July. In all my life I never saw America more unified than in the year following 9/11. Yet things had already changed in ways we didn’t comprehend, wouldn’t manifest for several years, and not simply because we weren’t soon plunged into a generation of warfare or were to witness the world’s largest economic collapse in nearly 80 years. No. This was spiritual.
The Cheshire Cat advised Alice in Wonderland that if she didn’t know where she was going, “it doesn’t matter which way (she’ll) go.” What once characterized America’s rich and diverse colloquial heritage was corrupted by its own democratic institutions promoting a new culture of intolerance and hostility which over 50 years ago, Bobby Kennedy explained “(discourages) initiative (by) paralyzing will and action, and dividing Americans from one another, by their age, their views, and by the color of their skin.” Entering the third decade of the 21st century nearly three centuries after the Age of Enlightenment, the West, having slowly rejected its Judeo-Christian roots, finally forgot what it was and the source for its majesty. America became ‘a republic of forgetting’, a nation captivated by the crass irrationality of the ghoulish left-wing professor Ward Churchill after 9/11, surrendering her identity because she no longer believed she had anything worthwhile to say, that her children of tomorrow must atone for this irredeemable institution’s past sins. After 230 years of unprecedented historical progress, creeping secularism invites learned jurists and dishonest politicians to reinterpret the wording in the Constitution as a living document, encouraging summary justice while their discriminating appetites lay America low at the mercy of foreign actors and rogue ideologies.
Western humanism is no longer able to project its power to compete against implacable ancient cultures while it rebrands its foundation as built on some idea predicated on politically-correct language designed to discard its ‘racist’ history, traditions, culture, or people. In his commencement address at Harvard University in 1978, Nobel Prize-winning author and exiled Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn noted that the West had “lost its civic courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, in each government, in each political party, and, of course, in the United Nations.” Classical Western philosophy is oft treated as passé. Logical debates devolved into full-blown sophistry and, as such, Western civilization may ‘abolish’ itself with few words in its defense. It’s now hate speech to defend Western civilization without foolishly proclaiming that ‘Diversity is our strength’ because doing so would reveal that the sum of the parts whole embodies something much deeper than its innovations of democracy and the art of rhetoric, the scientific method, harnessing electricity and splitting the atom, the industrial revolution and the digital age, mathematics and most importantly, the spread of Christianity. It’s now racist and one can be ‘canceled’ simply for acknowledging that thousands of years of Western history are most importantly linked to its vast array of languages and customs, with ethnic Europeans heavily populating no fewer than five continents which, at the time they were colonized, were sparsely populated. Many thriving nations today didn’t exist prior to the arrival of Europeans following the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1492, nor would they now. With the exception of Latin America, most of the Eurasian landmass, the Americas and Australia were populated primarily by nomadic tribes migrating wherever wild game was plentiful. Descendants of prisoners interned in penal colonies such as Georgia or New South Wales as well as serfs and slaves over several centuries, even thousands of years, reside in lands foreign to their ancestors. For better or worse, without European colonization the outside world would’ve retained its ancient primordial stature: today for example, India’s Hindu majority might still be the subjects of its prior Muslim rulers within the Mughal Empire rather than electing parliamentarians to serve in a Westminster style of government inherited from the British. But because the consensus to invalidate the existence of entire nations and customs emerged during decolonization and the collapse of communism, Western civilization gave way to parallel societies wherever descendants of African slaves or foreign subjects of old empires still reside in the name of ‘multiculturalism’. In the process, the West’s failure to properly assimilate these disgruntled demographics have dehumanized and invalidated the existence of billions of people, both dead and alive―especially the ancestors connected to the loudest screamers.
With this in mind, the UN seeks to ‘westernize’ all nations beneath the yoke of a false proposition that the Western democratic model is the final stage in the evolution of human government. To make this work a technocracy comprised of the legacy media, Big Tech, the Green industry, Hollywood, K-Street and Wall Street are systematically deconstructing Western civilization by pitting different demographics inside Western nations into pitiless struggles in order to disenfranchise the mainstreamof each society. Through shared interests they embrace ‘paganism’ and ‘godless politics’, collude with foreign governments to regulate the flow of international commerce and the information we consume, ‘cancel’ critics and indoctrinate the masses through subliminal messaging, advertisements, disinformation, and false propaganda campaigns to mislead and distract the public, while hiding the truth about Western interests in Third World countries. Their ‘terms of service’ introduced a new breed of pluralism prohibiting anyone from rendering ‘judgments’ according to ‘pre-existing criteria’ in matters such as truth, morality, beauty, politics, history, the rule of law and professional ethics (political correctness) in order to erase entire nations and national identities. We’re told that such sweeping efforts to secularize Western civilization legitimizes the new world order’s mandate to ‘assimilate’ the West and foreign cultures into a planetary regime in order to judge and measure each nation, religion, and culture ‘objectively’. Similar to Marx and Hitler, the technocracy’s objective to manufacture ‘the new person’ who will look, think, talk, and behave the way they find desirable has succeeded beyond their wildest dreams―in the West, that is. Not so much on the outside.
Solzhenitsyn indeed was correct: “the greatest power within the Western countries, more powerful than the legislative power, the executive, and the judiciary” really is the media and its Big Tech aggregators. Therefore, reevaluating whether the same Western humanism that failed to erase the history and culture of their former colonies can defend a multicultural America politically incorrect to define is critical. A society without rules is lost in entropy, and it’s well-known that the Left considers things like the art of rhetoric, deductive reasoning, logic and rationalism, the arts and sciences, as well as religion to be ‘abstract’ elements with no bases in reality. In adopting this worldview, democracies like America fell prey, or as Napoleon put it, leaped from “the sublime to the ridiculous” in the matter of a century.
Reclaiming and rebuilding Western civilization will require retracing its ancient roots and reevaluating the Enlightenment’s virtues and vices to identify and remove all defects responsible for its decline into sophistry and loss of its Judeo-Christian identity. What comprised the whole of Western Christendom―the Catholic West, Byzantium, as well as the Protestant nations―will require an intensified effort to contest and condemn the holes in Hellenism and the British Enlightenment with a renewed commitment to a sustainable Christian exegesis until a mature, atomized product embracing subsidiarity, renewed civil dialogue and religious liberty reemerges. Reversing these trends won’t occur overnight of course; it’ll take a generation or more to prayerfully condition fresh young minds to reject the syncretized hubris behind secular humanism. One method perhaps is to communicate why logic, rationalism, language and our understanding of semantics are not democratic things and therefore do not comport with anarchy; or in Ronald Reagan’s words, we cannot “be afraid to see what we see.” Language especially must be subject to rules and laws regulating their use, the preservation of our culture, and national borders. Through proper discernment the West may rediscover that history isn’t subjected to some revisionist narrative or abstract historiography: it simply happened.
Lastly, reevaluating the bonds connecting all Americans regardless of race must ultimately validate our founding principles, reassert a refreshed understanding of what America and the West’s present reality is, not what it has been or what powerful people are forcing it to be. Killing this trending narrative that we’ve arrived at some end point of history in which liberal democracy will become the final form of human government is also vital. As the world evolves beyond the ‘mass society’ of the industrial period into a new age where people interact remotely around the world through technology that provides limitless access to information at their fingertips, understanding why people today report feeling more isolated than at any other time in recorded history highlights the state of social atrophy in the West. Addressing the matter demands that we tear down these artificial walls of separation before rebuilding each individual by reminding them they have value, that humanity is not some static timeless reality but rather a community―things that people used to learn from their pews. Unless we reject voices attacking law-abiding ‘clingers’ by painting God as some unfair and divisive “hard man, taking out what (He) did not put in, and reaping what he did not sow,” secularism will lay low what few institutions remain of Western civilization sooner or later (Luke 17:22).
Article originally published on The Conservative Historical Review
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About the Author:
Jonathan P. Henderson (B.A. in History, Minor in Pol. Sci.; Univ. of Tennessee, 2012) is a resident of Knoxville, TN. He is Owner/Administrator/Editor-in-Chief of The Conservative Historical Review and a blogger/columnist for PolitiChicks and Intellectual Conservative.
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