Category: Articles

Perhaps one World War could have been tolerable to the European piggy-bank, but two was pushing it too far.  Entire economies and wholesale infrastructures devastated and nations completely impoverished in a set of engagements from which Europe still has genuinely to recover, god knows the cost to American foreign policy.  Unable to maintain their extended empires, the Western sphere of influence winnowed and shrank dramatically, its only remain exponent of any influence being the United States which was already gearing up for a third and titanic conflict–this time with the Soviet Union–that thankfully never came to fruition.  But nature despises a vacuum.  All the pomp and national spirit that had characterized western nations at the outset of World War One had been totally drained.  Within this came something born of the egalitarianism of the West but something I’m forced to characterize altogether differently; Marxism, already germinating within the national character of all western nations grew infectious and lugubrious, the constant threat of red revolution now a problem of international scale.  This gave rise to post-modernism, the obscene doctrine of Derrida and other filthy counter-culture gurus which would ultimately erase any last semblance of national pride in several generations time, a Read More …

We’ve come down to a subject I’ve been deliberately avoiding for weeks, something I perhaps find terrifying, something for which, if I elucidate it incorrectly, I will never ever be forgiven.  So we’ve described the conception of Western Civilization, its spread, its development, its survival through times of darkness, and we’ve come upon the precipice of the great conclusion: the modern period which saw the rise of powerful western states with modern legal systems, modern manufacturing, modern notions, and modern ways of making war.  Everything, quite naturally, changed.  This conclusion will necessarily be a multi-part document.  I want to talk about the ways in which the interaction of western states changed, starting with the Crimean War.  I also want to talk about the World Wars in context, and I finally want to discuss our contemporary, what’s often called the “Post Modern Period,” which in our general malaise is more a threat to our way of life than any regiment of bayonets or battery of artillery.

I confess, this reads like the connecting link holding together the whole argument of this western civilization series, and it may in many ways seem completely obvious; nevertheless, it’s important to relate. The Romans really are fascinating.  It’s easy to get lost, considering how much of our daily life is Roman: our beliefs in politics, our laws regarding property and inheritance, even some of our burial rights, the model of the standing army; I’ll be here all night if I try to list off all the ways.  It’s true that the Greeks may have invented Western Civilization, what was then what we would call “Hellenic Culture,” but in spite of the spread of many Greek colonies through much of the Mediterranean basin, it was really the Romans that, having adopted this culture and having modeled themselves after this culture, spread it wheresoever they feet or their rudders should take them, which was a fair bit further than the Greeks. Doesn’t really seem funny though, does it?  Why should the Romans not make use of what they consider to be good ideas, ideas that would advance their cause and increase their standing among nations?  Have you ever read the Iliad?  Seems Read More …

I’ll admit, this one had me stumped for weeks.  I wrote this article several times over, and I’m still unsure if I’m really happy with it.  Such are my pains, my beloved audience.  Bear with me as we bear through this. I think we need to understand, to begin, that Western Civilization did not always mean “Europe,” and for a while it meant much beyond.  Western Civilization only traveled as far as the Macedonians and Romans could carry it, the nascent ovum derived from the Athenian city-state.  Rome never traveled to the far North, barely extended into Eastern Europe whatsoever.  These absent peoples were assuredly Europeans but, at the time, “Westerners?”  Hardly.  The Vikings represent one example of a people that self-westernized, rather in the way that cats self-domesticated, eventually assimilating with the arrival of Catholicism upon their shores, which they nevertheless fought viciously, invited really by their importance generated by all their military adventurism.  To the greater fold of the West, they brought with themselves the new blood and vigor that the West would need to continue developing along new ideas and fronts while remaining indelibly “Western.”  It would be finally, and partly thanks to the Scandinavian influence, the Read More …