What Leads To The Fall Of Civilizations

I've been reading Bill Whittle's latest essay, You Are Not Alone.

If you've never read any of his essays, I strongly suggest that you do. He is, to me, one of the best essayists on the web today.

It was while reading his latest that I came across this passage that got the hairs on the back of my neck to stand up on end.

Throughout history, civilizations rise and fall. They fall for the same reason, by my reading of history: the lack of will to defend her, a cancer which starts not from the bottom but invariably from the top. A fish rots from the head, say the Russians, who ought to know. From Nero to Chamberlain, the elites evolve away from an understanding that retaliation against the lawless and the barbaric is not a vice but a virtue. They take the manifest blessings of civilization as a given and foist their own personal guilt and moral cowardice upon the entire city. They open the gates to the savage peoples who have always stood outside of progress and gentleness and culture.

It has always been this way. If you feel you see it happening now, before your very eyes, well… you are not alone. A society unwilling to enforce the laws that civilize it, that is unable or unwilling to see the advantages of civilization, a society led by the pampered, the narcissistic and the corrupt, is not long for this Earth. Our enemies look at us and see precisely these symptoms, and the symptoms are worsening. Our unwillingness to retaliate when retaliation is called for – indeed, the uneasiness with the very idea of retaliation against betrayal – has them licking their lips in anticipation. They see all this decay and they are right to see it, for it is there.

(Emphasis mine)

It is apparent to me that too many of the Democrat Left are the aforementioned elites, taking Western Civilization for granted and not willing to do what's necessary to defend it. Somehow we are always at fault for the attacks against us. Somehow in their eyes our civilization is inferior to others that condone infanticide, beheadings, genital mutilation, slavery, chattelization of women, crushing of dissent, torture, radicalized and violent religions, and a host of other horrors. Yet they see these cultures as somehow more worthy than our own.

They will push multiculturalism to the point that our own culture is drowned out. We have seen the results of this kind of policy in Europe, where the immigrant minority holds the native majority hostage to their own cultural beliefs (France, Belgium, Holland, Sweden, Norway, and Germany). Some how it is wrong to support our own culture because “it might offend” a non-assimilated immigrant, one with no plans to assimilate.

This nonsense has got to stop.