Music and the Rise and Decline of Western Civilization

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Music and the Rise and Decline of Western Civilization

From the desk of Fjordmanon Fri, 2009-10-02 12:56This text overlaps with a few of my earlier essays like

Why Muslims Like Hitler, but Not Mozart

. I have had some interesting discussions with Ohmyrus, the essayist whoruns the Democracy Reformblog. He is a Chinese man who appreciates aspects of Western civilization that many Westerners have forgotten or rejected. He is not uniquein this regard. One of the best books about European culture is

Defending the West

bythe former Muslim Ibn Warraq, who was born in the Indian subcontinent. As a nativeEuropean it is strange to notice how some (non-Muslim) Asians apparently appreciatemy civilization more than intellectuals in my own country do. The Iranian-born ex-Muslim Ali Sina denounces Western Multiculturalism in his book

, which I have reviewedonline: “If any culture needs to be preserved, it is the Western, Helleno-Christian culture. It isthis culture that is facing extinction….We owe our freedom and modern civilization toWestern culture. It is this culture that is now under attack and needs protection.”Ohmyrus believes, like myself, that the West is in decline, not just in relative terms as a percentage of the global economy or population but in real terms. He points to structuralflaws in our democratic political system, which “tends to divide people, pitting one raceagainst another and one economic class against another” and is by the nature of its shortelection periods not well suited for long-term planning. European civilization reachedits peak when it was pre-democratic, and Muslims have found it easier to penetratedemocratic than pre-democratic Europe. In nineteenth century Britain, Queen Victoriaand the aristocracy were not as powerful as their ancestors had been, but they wieldedmore power than today. Power was divided between the monarch, the House of Lordsand the House of Commons in Parliament. This corresponds to what ancient politicaltheorists such as Aristotle would have called a good balance between the monarchic, thearistocratic and the democratic elements of society.Ohmyrus, who is a Christian, believes that one of the reasons why the ScientificRevolution took place in Europe and not in Asia is Christianity, which taught peoplethat God had created the universe according rational laws which could to some extent bediscovered and described by humans. While the West originally enjoyed more freespeech and free inquiry than most other societies, in some critical aspects related toimmigration, free discourse in the West has in recent years become stifled byideological censorship. As he states, “Anyone suggesting that some races are moreintelligent than another is labeled a racist and even threatened prosecution for a hatecrime. Substitute ‘heretic’ for ‘racist’ and we are almost back in medieval times. Butover here in Asia, there is hardly any problem in discussing it.”Ohmyrus thinks that Western civilization is currently living off the cultural capital produced in earlier times when power lay in the hands of a better educated elite whose personal interests coincided with the long term interests of the country. This may be partly true, but I personally believe that one of the greatest problems facing us today is precisely the fact that the interests of Western nation states do not always overlap withthe narrow interests of the elites. In previous generations, rich and influentialindividuals would often support nation states not only emotionally but also pragmatically in order to enhance their own wealth and power. In the age of international organizations and powerful multinational corporations that wield more power than many smaller countries, this is no longer the case. These same elites willnow look to other organizations and tools to further their personal interests andcareers.The democratic system has its flaws but worked to some extent as long as there

was sense of being a

demos

, a people with a shared identity and common ethnicinterests. This is gradually breaking down in Western countries, starting from the top.Powerful groups frequently have more in common with the elites in other countries thanthey have with average citizens in their own. Without a pre-political loyalty, emotionalties or even a pragmatic interest in supporting nation states, the democratic system becomes a vehicle for distributing favors to your friends at home and abroad, for betraying your voters and hopefully ensuring a lucrative international career along theway. You will have few moral scruples against importing voters from abroad for maintaining power or because your business friends who provide you with financialsupport desire access to cheap labor. This process is related to technologicalglobalization but has gone further in the self-loathing West than in any other civilization.In Western Europe, much of the real power has been transferred to the unelected organsof the European Union. Between 1999 and 2004, 84 percent of the legal acts inGermany – and the majority in all EU member states - stemmed from Brussels. Nationalelections are becoming an increasingly empty ritual. The important issues have beensettled behind closed doors. Our daily lives are run by a bloated bureaucracy, which is becoming increasingly transnational.In the eyes of the left-wing American theorist Noam Chomsky, “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, butallow very lively debate within that spectrum.” In most Western countries the public hasa choice between left-wing candidates who champion mass immigration and “right-wing” candidates who also champion mass immigration and implement the left-wingagenda at a slightly slower pace. This is called “freedom.” The mass media present a biased and ideologically filtered view of the world. The fact that members of the mediaand the academia tend to be more, sometimes a lot more,left-leaningpolitically than theaverage populace is well-documented.This situation is intensified by the fact that globalization of communications andtransportation, ironically to a large extent created by European and Western inventions, puts severe pressure on our nations in ways which were unthinkable a few generationsago. When the Christian Gospels were written down at the end of the first century AD,the population of the Roman Empire was maybe 60 million people. This mirrors theannual population growth in the early twenty-first century. In other words: The global population grows by another Roman Empire every single year. Our system wasn’tdesigned to cope with such numbers.Virtually all Western countries have lost control over their borders, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the political elites, substantially aided by multinationalcorporations and cheaper travel, have deliberately vacated such control. This is not asustainable situation. You can call your political system a democracy, a dictatorship, arepublic, a monarchy or whatever you want to, but a country that does not control itsterritory will eventually die.I am increasingly supporting the conclusion that the political and economic elitesthroughout the Western world are cooperating on dismantling their nation states in favor of a new, global world order. Swamping their countries with immigration is one step inthis planned “creative destruction.” Author Bat Ye’or in her well-researched book

Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis

from 2005 documents how the European Union isactively collaborating with the Arabic-Islamic world on promoting Muslim immigrationand culture in Europe. I myself wrote a book entitled

Defeating Eurabia

while goingthrough her claims, and found them to be sound.A flaw frequently pointed out in thedemocratic system is that the “common man” is on average not smart enough to run a

country, but when it comes to promoting Multiculturalism and mass immigration of alien and often hostile peoples it is in every single Western country the political,economic and academic elites who are pushing for this. Resistance to these suicidal policies comes from the common man. Another problem is that in the post-Enlightenment ideological environment, especially after Marxism, there is a tendencyamong some educated elites to view the common man as a guinea pig for their socialexperiments.The West is a non-traditionalist civilization. We have unquestionably made greatadvances that no other civilization has done before us, but maybe the price we pay for this is that we also make mistakes that nobody has done before us. Organized science isa modern Western invention. Organized national suicide, too, is a modern Westerninvention. Our university system once represented a great comparative advantage for Europe vis-à-vis other civilizations. Today that same system is undermining the verycivilization that gave birth to it.Marxists have essentially completed their Gramscian “Long March” through theinstitutions of the Western world during the second half of the twentieth century,accelerating from the 1960s on with the Western Cultural Revolution. YoungWesterners are at best taught indifference, at worst outright hatred, toward their owncultural heritage and civilization. The irony in this is that it is precisely the moreeducated groups who are the most anti-Western ones because they have spent manyyears absorbing anti-Western teachings.If you have one brainwashed generation thenyou have a problem. If you have two brainwashed generations then you have a veryserious problem. If you have three brainwashed generations then you have a problemthat is so big that it becomes difficult to solve, because few in living memory canremember how it was to have a sane worldview. We are now fast approaching a pointwhere young Westerners, indoctrinated with anti-Western hatred, not only do notreceive a correction from their parents, but in many cases not even from their grandparents. By then we have reached a serious cultural discontinuity.As much as I personally loathe admitting it, Marxists and other anti-Western forces have been far more successful at staging a slow, “permanent” revolution in the West than they ever were at staging an armed revolution. They have partly succeeded in their goal of eradicating Western civilization from within and are now working hard to physicallyeradicate the European peoples who created this civilization to ensure that it cannot berebuilt in the future, either. They achieved this feat not by gaining control over themeans of production but over the means of indoctrination, the mass media and theeducation system.Out of all the criticism against Europeans, the claim of “Eurocentrism” is the mostunfair. All cultures are ethnocentric to some degree. Frankly, I would be tempted to saythat the default position of mankind is that “We are the best people, the others are barbarians.” I'm not going to claim that you cannot find serious cases of bigotry inEuropean history. You can. But what is unique about Europe is our ability to sometimestranscend this basic human impulse. Even during the colonial period, WesternEuropeans could show an unusual degree of curiosity about other cultures and their history. This is one of the major reasons why archaeology and comparative linguisticswere invented by Europeans; we were one of the least ethnocentric groups, yet for somereason the only ones who are denounced for our alleged ethnocentrism.The problem isthat whites are now the only ethnic group on the planet who are not allowed to retaindistinct countries or pride in their heritage. This is creating a wave of quietly simmeringanger against immigration and at least as much against Western authorities, rightly perceived as indifferent or hostile to their interests. It is debatable whether supporting a“Christian revival” is the right solution to this situation since Christianity promotes

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