Sir Edward Grey was Foreign Secretary in the Asquith government at the start of the Great War in 1914. His name is well known, not because he was a remarkable or accomplished Foreign Secretary, but simply because he had the misfortune to occupy his office at the historical moment when European civilization decided to destroy itself.In fact, through his ineptness and miscalculations during the prodromal period of 1905 to 1914, Sir Edward helped contribute to the catastrophe. It’s doubtful whether even Gladstone or Palmerston could have staved off the inevitable, but Sir Edward Grey was no Gladstone or Palmerston.
He did, however, leave us with a statement which became an epitaph for Europe prior to 1914. Just before the war began he said to a friend, “The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.”
He was quite right; the lamps were not re-lit within his lifetime, nor within the several lifetimes that have elapsed since. In fact, it is doubtful that they can be rekindled in time to illuminate a continent that could recognizably be called “Europe”.
The Great War gutted the vital core from Europe. Western Civilization still manages to lurch along, but its beating heart no longer resides within Europe.
Sir Edward Grey comes to mind because the year 2008 is starting to look a lot like 1911 or 1913. Events in disparate parts of the globe, but particularly in Europe, are converging again. Another grand spectacle seems to be in the offing, but this time it doesn’t promise mud and trenches and military stalemate. There won’t be any mobilization or declarations of war on this occasion. No Western Front or armistice will make the coming conflict neat and well-defined.
Civilization will collapse piecemeal and in slow motion, but collapse it will.
Back in August I wrote about “the Year of the Jackpot”, the idea that cataclysms in human affairs occur when cyclical curves of varying periodicity all bottom out at the same time.
- - - - - - - - -
In my post I mentioned the constitutional crisis in Belgium, the instability in Pakistan, the Iranian nuclear program, and the possibility of a Hillary Clinton administration.
Since then the world has given us six additional months without a real central government in Belgium, the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, the repudiation of Musharraf’s faction in Pakistan’s elections, the continuing defiance and determination of the mad mullahs in Tehran, and the rise of Barack Obama.
To these we can add the renewed Motoon crisis in Denmark, the signing of the Treaty of Lisbon, the freefall of civil society in the UK, the crisis in Chad, the independence of Kosovo, and a possible global economic slump triggered by the subprime mortgage crisis.
No, none of those curves is rising yet, and none of them has finished bottoming out.
Then there’s the increasing suppression of free speech through the Western world. The USA experienced the first little shiver of the coming winter a few days ago in the St. Louis minaret incident, but in Europe and elsewhere the puddles are freezing over rapidly.
Perhaps we should start keeping a central registry of people, blogs, or publications that have been censored in the name of political correctness, because the list is becoming rather long: Paul Belien, Mikko Ellilä, Lennart Eriksson, Ezra Levant, Lionheart, Dahn Pettersson, Mark Steyn, and Tomashot, just to name a few off the top of my head.
So when will all these curves simultaneously reach their nadir?
2009 is one possible candidate. The Treaty of Lisbon will go into effect then, and the EU will begin the formal integration of its member states into a single “soft totalitarian” regime which will gradually become harder.
The new Wahhabist state in the Balkans will be a year old.
500,000 more immigrants — mostly Muslims — will have arrived in the UK, and 250,000 more native Britons will have departed.
Dozens of additional young women will have been flung from balconies in Sweden by their male relatives.
Pakistan will have seen another year of seething, intrigue, and assassination.
The United States will be on the verge of pulling its troops out of Iraq under President Obama…
Yes, we live in increasingly interesting times.
The jackpot may be delayed a little while longer; after all, it may take until 2012 or 2015 until the Iranians have a fully deliverable nuke. Pervez Musharraf may yet avoid the car bomb with his name on it for a while longer. The “youths” of the Parisian banlieues may not storm nearby bourgeois neighborhoods for a couple more years.
But the lamps are definitely being extinguished. You can see them winking off one by one.
Turn the last one out when you go, would you?
39 comments:
Two things worry me greatly about this trend. For one, I don't think 2009 will be the worst year, that's because 2010 will be even worse. 2011 will be worse yet. Nor can I say there was any year that was 'better' for western civilization in over a century. Like the roman empire, when you start with a huge lead, it is easy to fall and fall for centuries and never quite topple. We are in the process of that vast, neverending topple, caught in the grip of gravity yet still watching our lives flash before our eyes, searching desperately for a way out, knowing in the backs of our heads that there are none. Even if some enterprising Diocletian turns back the tide temporarily through personal excellence, it will only crash down on us all the harder after his death. This is because the root causes of western decline are demographic. And demographics don't just turn around. When a people goes extinct, it goes extinct. There's no recovery.
The compounding worry is the environment. Using our impressive technological know-how, based on an intelligent free rational society, we have created an unprecedented way of life for an unprecedented number of people. This has not come for free though. All of the earth's mineral and energy resources are tapped out. Lower and lower grades of oil are being used, the water table is exhausted, mineral ores are being extracted from impurer and impurer veins. Should civilization fall, there is no recovery. The earth has been scraped clean of every usable resource and picked bare, like a carcass devoured first by wolves, then ants, then even fungi--returning to a wolf economy and hoping to feed off the bounty of the earth-carcass is hopeless. Only ever more efficient feeding got us the scraps we have today--the old civilization cannot find them. That means humanity only has two choices, extinction or continuous progress. There is no 'stabilization point.' Without easy access to simple rudimentary copper and iron age technology, requiring large easy access to coal and copper etc, we will never relearn what we learned the first time. Instead we will simply forget and war over the ever-dwindling scraps of an economy we can no longer maintain--legend will fade to myth until even myth is lost to the sands of time. Every other time civilization takes out the environment, it cannot recover, unlike a silly war or plague which you recover from in a few years. The incas who destroyed their irrigation networks never recovered, nor did Easter Island recover after cutting down the last tree. The west, before it falls, will have destroyed the entire environment of the world, in terms of what a more primitive society can exist in, making sure no recovery can be made anywhere. The urgency of success is infinitely greater this time than any other fall. While the fall of Rome was recoverable (after a mere 1000 years), the fall of the West is not. We bet everything on this civilization. It's all or nothing.
We are doomed to failure. We MUST succeed. The gordian knot presents itself.
"All of the earth's mineral and energy resources are tapped out. Lower and lower grades of oil are being used, the water table is exhausted, mineral ores are being extracted from impurer and impurer veins."
OK, you are going to have to post links to prove all this.
The "grades" of oil being pumped today are the same as they always were.
2/3 of this planet is water. It may not be where you want it or in the condition you want, but those are engineering problems.
Yes, we are mining less pure grades of ores, but that is because we have figured out ways to do it cheaply.
If civilization does fall, then we will have access to grades of ores that our forefathers could only dream of in the stuff not being used any more.
YEAH Diamed. We're almost out of whale oil, too.
Australia....it is Sunday morning here at the mo.....and having just woken up, what was the first silly thing I did, turn on the bloody computer!
Boy oh boy, between the Baron and Diamed, there does not appear to be much hope for Western civilization.
I think I'll go back to bed!
Baron, while your analogy to the Great War is unerringly familiar, there are nevertheless many variations when comparing those times and ours. The biggest standout factor of course being the mass immigration by the Muslim peoples.
While overall it does appear, looking through our own eyes, that Europe is now in it's own self delusional cloud cukoo land which may eventually cause it's demise, there are also little lamps being relit, such as in Denmark.
I don't believe the Danes or the Swiss will tolerate any more stupidity from the Muslim usurpers. It appears to me that both countrys are fully aware of the imported problem they now have to contend with. How they deal with that problem, hopefully, will encourage other nations around them. One can only hope on this score! Time for breakfast. Terry
I think 2007 marks the end of any sort of positive momentum by the US against Islam.
The Democrats have took their chairman seats, leaving the oversight of the Federal govt in the hands of people who dont know that Al Qaida is a Sunni (and not a shia) group,
It marks George Bush's capitulation to the James Baker wing of foreign policy that Condi Rice embodies.
It marks the realization that Israel has lost its nerve and that Bush is willing to throw Israel under the bus for the sake of alliances with the Muslims.
North Korea: Appeased
Iran: Appeased
Kosovo: Appeased
Palestinian Authority: Appeased
HAMAS: Appeased
Hezbelloh: Appeased
Now all we wait for is the twelvers to make their move to herald in the age of the Antichrist, Islam's Messiah Mahdi.
Maybe it's Barack...
Interesting thoughts, Baron... things do seem to be getting worse. There is hope, but only if Europe starts to stand up to Islam properly.
As for which year will be the worst, maybe it'll be 2012... after all, isn't that the year the world is supposed to end according to the Mayan calendar or something like that?
You folks always forget one thing.
"Yes, there's always the unexpected, isn't there?"
Jack Hawkins as Major Warden - The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)
The latest scientific evidence seems to point to the conclusion that physical
reality is irreducibly random. Of course that is only a theory.
You know;
Sometimes, when your watching things around the world unfold in real time, in real life - I find it best, to take a back seat, and play the role of interested bystander, and from that point, form a constructive opinion of what it is I see.
Theres an old English Idiom that states that; - "we must Seperate the wheat from the chaff".
What I see in both Europe and Britain today, is a plethera of leftist entities and governmental quangos, putting this notion into practice, but in reverse gear, reverse psychology if you will.
Yes, their seperating the wheat from the chaff, but in this crazy, politically correct era in which we live, its the chaff and not the wheat, that our leaders are desperate to hold on too.
Don't they realise that when they've disgarded all of the wheat, their beloved chaff will then be rendered useless, and from that point on they're doomed to starvation.
It really is a frightening concept.....
(computer crashed while I was working on this post previously so I have to start from scratch)
It might just be me, but this post seems needlessly pessimistic and surprisingly irreligious. I realize that not all posters and commenters here share my views, but I had assumed (perhaps incorrectly) better from the blog owners.
I'll admit to a personal failure to see the big picture from time to time - particularly in my line of work where so much focuses on exactly what I do know and can prove to a higher-ranking audience - but sometimes it becomes all the more necessary to sit back and think about Who's really in control of everything.
That said, there's still plenty that we can do on an individual level to affect our working and living environments - we just need to remember that we're not alone.
A few individual notes on different issues that have been brought up here.
Environment. For anyone interested in the global warming issue - who doesn't mind wading through a lot of scientific articles - I would highly recommend reading through the following threads:
http://forum.dvdtalk.com/showthread.php?t=516531
http://forum.dvdtalk.com/showthread.php?t=502454&page=1&pp=40
http://forum.dvdtalk.com/showthread.php?t=495668
http://forum.dvdtalk.com/showthread.php?t=460329&page=1&pp=40
Now as far as the European jihad situation, I don't have a vast amount to chime in about here being that my time there has been very limited and most of my knowledge is limited to this and similar sites.
North Korea on the other hand is something that I consider to be a current specialty by virtue of my position and assignment. That said, I must confess that I am disappointed by much that I have seen on the topic in the US press and opinion pieces - especially coming from John Bolton. While I realize he had some good points in the past, and I respect his work at the UN, I believe that being dropped from the inner circle on this issue has embittered him somewhat and his current information is no longer timely or accurate.
Tuan Jim, I have a few questions about your post:
First, what do you mean when you say that this post is "irreligious"? I looked up the definition of the word (just to make sure I understood what it meant) but I still am not really clear why you said that...
Second: this isn't just directed at Tuan Jim - this is for anyone reading this. Tuan Jim says that this post is "needlessly pessimistic". Obviously we're talking about some pretty serious stuff here, but all of it's true. I mean, in my view (and I know there are people who differ with me), Western civilisation is going to fall if it continues in the direction it's been going. To me, that is not a pessimistic view: it's realistic. Sure, it's depressing, but it's a truth we must face. We shouldn't just not talk about it because it's not a positive or happy topic. It's an issue that needs to be addressed and discussed.
Cheer up folks! The lights may be going out, but at least we got the music. :-)
Sam Hall: If civilization does fall, then we will have access to grades of ores that our forefathers could only dream of in the stuff not being used any more.
The above is almost innocently prophetic. There is a nascent technology which guarantees that “we will have access to grades of ores that our forefathers could only dream of in the stuff not being used any more.”
While the infant science of nanotechnology seems like some remote scientific pipe dream, it promises to bear fruit in ways limited only by the human imagination. For a stupendous introduction please view this brief animated video by Nanorex. It is the single finest short piece demonstrating the fundamentals of nanoassembly.
A principal component of nanotechnology will be the nanoassembly robot. It will share both similar size and other properties of bacteria in that it will also be self-replicating. Able to assemble or disassemble material at the atomic level, it will perform the most basic functions of nanotechnology.
Sidebar: As with other hazardous bacteria, like Ecoli, nanodisassembly robots will need to be designed such that they are destroyed by exposure to earth’s ambient environment (i.e., oxygen and moisture). This is a required feature in that—due to their ability to self-replicate—nanodisassembly robots are estimated to be able to reduce the entire earth’s surface to gray atomic slime in about two weeks.
Once such elementary precautions are taken, these minute machines can be put to use in an infinite variety of tasks. As the linked animation shows, their ability to assemble tools that are both compact and of heretofore unprecedented power is nothing short of miraculous. Another application of their disassembly capability might literally save the world.
Imagine a structure the size of an Olympic sized swimming pool. Enclosed within a nitrogen or argon atmosphere tent would be the ultimate recycling machine. Consisting of several billion or trillion nanodisassembly robots, this pool could receive any sort of inorganic waste and convert it back into its basic elements.
Such difficult and awkward waste objects as refrigerators, sofas, whole automobiles and all forms of electronic equipment could be dumped into one end of this recycling pool and be broken down into atomic level subcomponents that are extracted at the other end. This is single stream comprehensive recycling in its ultimate form.
An offshoot of this is that such a large-scale recycler could digest entire landfills. While this alone seems like a great boon, it is almost impossible to overstate how important it is to reclaim the vast quantities of pre-purified ores that reside in such landfills. Nanodisassembly would allow these elements to be harvested without any of the previous smelting, sintering or other energy intensive processes. Besides reduced air pollution from energy use, it would also minimize environmental impact by slowing damage from geological extraction methods like strip mines and other devastating forms of resource acquisition. Additionally, extremely valuable urban real estate could be rehabilitated for housing and other applications. Finally, immense wealth—in the form of all the precious and refined metals—would be derived from these recycling methods.
The harvest of metals and basic elements would preclude the immediate need to begin costly asteroid mining and remove such dangerous contaminants as heavy metals like cadmium from intrusion into ground water supplies. The benefits are simply incalculable and the eventual costs are so minimal as to make the such technologies like bio-fuels look like wasteful old fashioned gold extraction.
As noted in the sidebar, there resides a danger in malicious development of nanodisassembly technology for weapons technology. Such abuse would necessarily have to be punished with nuclear annihilation if only to wipe out any surviving nanodisassembly robots. The fact remains that this one single technology promises to reverse the entire history of environmental damage wrought by industry and science.
Other applications for nanoassembly robots include the realization of long distance space travel. Currently, one of the greatest dangers of prolonged space voyages lies in continually exposing a human body to hard radiation such as gamma rays. Transporting massive shields consumes vital fuel reserves and increases a vehicle’s overall bulk. Instead, nanoassembly robots could be used to circulate within the human body in order to repair broken DNA at a molecular level and thereby reverse chromosomal damage encountered during long voyages to Mars and destinations outside of our solar system.
None of the above even begins to touch upon such incredible applications as:
Clothing that generates energy from physical movement
Flawless compact precision optics
Microcircuitry that is orders of magnitude smaller than today’s silicon chips
Fabrication of diamond wire or graphite nanotubes for a “space elevator”
Exceptionally cost-efficient water desalination and air filtration
Low cost synthesis of genetic materials and wonder drugs
Flexible fabrics with electronic circuitry or body armor properties built in
Non-normal metal and mixed material alloys of unimaginable strength that are also impervious to chemical attack or kinetic impact
And finally:
Chemical synthesis of ordinary compounds like hydrocarbon fuels at near-zero cost
The list is endless. All we have to do is protect Western civilization for a few more decades and a host of seemingly insurmountable problems could vanish with the advent of this one single technology. None of this includes the maturation of other sciences like biochemical processes, MEMS (MicroElectroMechanical Systems), genetic engineering, fusion power and other existing technologies.
DO NOT listen to those who preach gloom and doom.
For every light that is being extinguished there are A THOUSAND new lamps being lit.
Here is a well-balanced essay about the downside of nanotechnology. Some excerpts:
Molecular manufacturing will be a general-purpose and dual-use technology. What that means is that it will not only make benign products, but can create powerful weapons as well. It promises miraculous benefits, but also dire consequences.
When individual countries are able to provide their own goods and services, without the need for import or export trade, they will have less incentive to maintain good relations with others. When economic security is no longer an issue, the only remaining security concern will be military.
This scenario contains all the elements for a terrible new arms race. Every country possessing unrestricted molecular manufacturing capability will have the ability to design, test, and inexpensively stockpile huge numbers of powerful weapons of any size. If nanotechnology development is allowed to proliferate, we can expect that many countries will achieve both economic independence and unprecedented military prowess.
Will we then see a stable equilibrium, a tenuous balance of power similar to the Mutually Assured Destruction of the Cold War? Not likely. Nuclear weapons require massive research efforts and industrial development, which can be globally tracked with greater ease than nanotech arms programs. Molecular manufacturing will enable quicker weapons optimization due to cheap, rapid prototyping. Once a design is approved, vast numbers of powerful new weapons could be produced overnight. It will be nearly impossible to know how much war-making capacity your enemy or your neighbor might possess in the near future.
And:
We also must consider the potential negative impacts of advanced nanotechnology on our current socio-economic structure.
Low-cost local manufacturing and duplication of designs could lead to monetary upheaval, as major economic sectors contract or even collapse. For example, the global steel industry is worth over $700 billion. What will happen to the millions of jobs associated with that industry—and to the capital supporting it—when materials many times stronger than steel can be produced quickly and cheaply wherever (and whenever) they are needed?
Productive nanosystems could make storable solar power a realistic and preferable alternative to traditional energy sources. Around the world, individual energy consumers pay over $600 billion a year for utility bills and fuel supplies. Commercial and industrial uses drive the figures higher still. When much of this spending can be permanently replaced with off-grid solar energy, many more jobs will be displaced.
The worldwide semiconductor industry produces annual billings of over $150 billion. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the industry employs a domestic workforce of nearly 300,000 people. Additionally, U.S. retail distribution of electronics products amounts to almost $300 billion annually. All of these areas will be impacted significantly if customized electronics products can be produced at home for about a dollar a pound, the likely cost of raw materials. If any individual can make products containing computing power a million times greater than today’s PCs, where will those jobs go?
Did you catch that?
customized electronics products can be produced at home for about a dollar a pound
Natalie - in reference to your comment on my comment: I've only been reading this site for a couple weeks now (if that - I've had more free time in the days lately), and going through the archives at a fairly rapid pace I picked up what I thought was a fairly general sense of the beliefs and viewpoints of the Baron and Dymphna. Now it's probably just me, but I used the term "irreligious" because I'm not seeing the same sort of (how to say it) Christian sentiments that were embodied more clearly in earlier postings.
I'm not saying that every single post needs to contain that same framework, but I do think that for those of us who do believe, there's a higher hope for things above and beyond us. It's not that we don't still need to work to protect our rights and the rights of others here on earth in this life, but there's still room for optimism because we know there's something better waiting for us no matter what happens to us. I guess it's easier for some of us in some situations than for others elsewhere (ie. Lionheart), but I'm certainly not of the opinion that the current situation is anywhere close to being irredeemable at this time.
I hope that clarifies a little.
I'm a Christian and I think Islam and the Muslim world is the system described in prophecy.
I am perfectly content with how GoV is written. It's perfect just the way it is. I don't need a blog to give me "hope". I am not a B Hussien Obama voter.
In any case,the blog is run by two people.. if they had it in them to be more religious in their writtings, then they would have been. So I think it's borderline rude to ask them to be something they're not.. or not willing to do.
I'm sort of glad it's not.. there's enough screwballs here , we don't need the added factor of people sitting on thier sectarian perch nitpicking or fighting about this or that aspect they disagree with.
Vince, at risk of dragging this completely off topic I used to think the same as you, but I've since come to the conclusion that all of the prophecy within the book of revelation concerns the first century AD, specifically the fall of jerusalem. It fits better then trying to squeeze disparate prophecies onto some future event.
I'm more hopeful this way. The idea that Islam is the antichrist or something removes the possiblity for hope. It removes the possibility that we can win this fight and I don't like that. It prevents coherent action by making us believe that it is all ultimately futile. I don't believe in inevitability (except in death and taxes) and I don't particularly believe that God would allow the death cult to overtake the entire world.
The best part is, Islam's own apocalyptic prophecy predicts that Islam will completely disappear. I think, rather than worrying about whether the dispensationalists or the millenialists or the other ones are correct we should be working hard to bring about Islam's own prophecies in that regard. Let them die out.
we don't need the added factor of people sitting on thier sectarian perch nitpicking or fighting about this or that aspect they disagree with.
Ooops. Sorry. :D
Two thoughts.
First, Sir Edward wasn't a terrible foreign secretary, but he was highly averse to making definitive statements of his nation's position without a signed, sealed order from the Prime Minister, duly ratified by a vote in Parliament. He believed that keeping the nations of Europe in a state of uncertainty about Britain's intentions come this-or-that eventuality was the route toward deterrence of war and the maintenance of a favorable balance of power on the Continent. (Read his autobiography Twenty-Five Years for a fuller development of this thesis.) He was wrong, but he was following a definite line of thought, rather than merely bumbling along from crisis to crisis.
Second, with regard to the "year of the jackpot" -- not one of Heinlein's best stories, really, but he was rather young then -- one must not neglect to observe the counter-trends, such as the rise of anti-Islamization sentiment in Denmark, Holland, and (gasp) France.
Our own difficulties with the Religion of Conquest and Subjugation are barely begun, but we can see what's happening in other lands. A significant community of opposition to Islam has already arisen in the United States, and is likely to get larger and more vocal still as news of such things as Hamtramck and the St. Louis and Boston mosques is well noised about. In this connection, Gates of Vienna is an important player. Do not succumb to pessimism. Our fight is a good fight. We can still win.
Zenster--
'All we have to do is protect Western civilization for a few more decades and a host of seemingly insurmountable problems could vanish with the advent of this one single technology.'
In this we are in agreement. For me it is cheap spaceflight. "all we have to do is protect western civilization until we can get off this planet." But the point is the same, no technological progress will be made in the Islamic world. None ever has been, none ever will. If western civilization falls, technology falls with it. Those who fight against islamization/immigration are Gondor, we steadily lose ground but maybe we buy some time each backward step. Technology is our Rohan, able to strike them from the rear and completely reverse the day. Since I cannot help invent some miracle cure, I necessarily fight for Gondor instead of Rohan, but I'm certainly in favor of both.
When I extend my arm I realize the extent of my control and remind myself to: "get a life".
A provocative post, Baron.
I think this is a very good time to provide a link to one of the exceptional Bill Whittle's exceptional essays.
For those of faith, referenced deep within are passages from Isaiah that basically confirm that G*d will not necessarily save us all, but always a remnant.
As we have descended into the mire of materialism, one commenter above has postulated that nanotechnology will be our savior if we can but hold out for a few more decades.
This assumes that there will be adequate capital to finance the R & D. As the markets continue their decline, more and greater percentages of wealth are being spent on the foolhardy social programs that yield no benefit to society as a whole.
We are so thoroughly infiltrated and influenced by the Left that we barely recognize their presence. They dominate our media, our institutions and even some of our churches.
The Islamists and the international socialists recognize common cause with each other to bring down the West. Neither ideology can survive so long as there is a place on Earth to escape them. We are losing even the Anglosphere.
But we're not lost yet.
Tuan Jim (and others) --
I’m a Christian, as most of you know, but I often don’t write from a strictly Christian viewpoint. There’s a good reason for this: in order to succeed, the Counterjihad has to generate a successful alliance among Christians, Jews, Sikhs, Hindus, Buddhists, and at least some secularists/atheists. There isn’t time for everyone to be converted to Christianity before we get our throats cut by the mujahideen.
Not only that, I’m not by nature a proselytizer, especially among atheists, who make up a large proportion of Gates of Vienna readers. Actively Christian writing makes many of them angry. I am mindful of this fact, and I hope to be effective, so I deliberately moderate what I write.
Occasionally I will write a “Christian” post, but most of the time it would be inappropriate. It’s like writing about automobile manufacture or the study of penguins — what would be the strictly Christian approach to the discussion of those disciplines? Oh, you could do it; but would it have particular utility?
These things are laid out before me; I observe them, discuss them, and above all draw analogies. I’m not predicting the end times or the lack of them; they don’t enter into my thinking about what’s happening.
And it’s easy to fit current events into the schema laid out in the Book of Revelation — people have been doing it for 2,000 years. The fact that all have been wrong so far makes me loath to do similar things. ALL ominous events seem to portend the fulfillment of prophecy, but none has done so up to now. To think that we are right — that “our” times fulfill the prophecies when so many generations before us have thought the same thing and been mistaken — is the height of presumption.
God has laid our tasks out clearly before us. We can undertake them without reference to Him, without thinking about Him, and without even believing in Him, and still be successful.
Being mindful of the will of God (and attempting to discern it) is what got me into this thankless job in the first place. But my #1 recognition is that many thousands of people are being drawn into the Counterjihad from other religions, or having no religion whatsoever.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Hi Graham.
I would never recommend that we give up the fight against Islam. I may think that Islam fits the prophecies but that doesn't mean I'm going to be correct.. and if it is correct, that is even more reason to fight it.
"The Great War gutted the vital core from Europe. Western Civilization still manages to lurch along, but its beating heart no longer resides within Europe."
I couldn't let this pass in blank.
I felt a bit of American (or perhaps Westerner)chauvinism here.
The beating heart of Europe is curently beating in Europe. Just not in London, Paris or Brussels. Much less anywhere in the New World. It is beating in the streets of Belgrade, in Servia. In the near future, I hope it to beat in Moscow to. We really (specially you Americans) need to start looking to Russia as a friend and to Serbia as a martyr.
I'm with Afonso. There was a piece in yesterday's London Telegraph deploring a resurgent, autocratic and Orthodox Russia. Our pc-ridden elites and politicians can gnash their teeth, but all people of the West should welcome it. Baron, Dympha, we really must have a mature conservation about Russia without the usual "democracy" goo-goo.
Well demographically the muslims will be majority soon, so the Russia we see today will soon change if something is not done.
Glad you agree eatyourbeans, what we have to do is recreate that Europe in the West to. It is not a right, it is a duty.
Also, I think I found "THE" date for the jackpot.
First, I want to apologise for coming here, to the Gates of Vienna comment's section, to bother you with my crazy predictions. Baron, you can do what you will with this text, even delete it, I won’t censure you. I feel a little bad by doing this, I feel I am abusing your blog's privacy but I will speak up because I think that there is at least one person in this vast GoV community that will be interested in this and that that singular person may even enjoy what I am going to expose. I would like to know what people think about it, though. Please, don’t take me as a dumb little guy, it has no scientific base, it is just my political instinct (do I have one?) or maybe it is just a common sense interpretation of news that hit us all 24/7.
I think that “THE” jackpot year is
While I agree with Diamed that our relationship with the environment should be of paramount concern to us in the West, we need only look at impoverished countries to see the most rapacious destruction of natural areas and natural resources. Only remnant forest cover exists in some of the most biologically diverse parts of the planet-- Madagascar, Pacific slope of Ecuador, much of Indonesia. Haiti is 98% deforested. Poverty and rape of the environment go hand-in-hand: they reinforce one another out of local and regional needs as well as external pressures.
This necessity stems in large part from demand from developed countries (mining, timbers, etc.) but also from hopelessly corrupt governments in the Third World. No one argues that they can or should attain our level of development (imagine half of Nigeria's population owning a car) but without establishing their own environmental stewardship how can they raise their standard of living?
"I'm with Afonso. There was a piece in yesterday's London Telegraph deploring a resurgent, autocratic and Orthodox Russia. Our pc-ridden elites and politicians can gnash their teeth, but all people of the West should welcome it. Baron, Dympha, we really must have a mature conservation about Russia without the usual "democracy" goo-goo."
I dunno. From the political symmetry point of view this could be for counter-Jihad what Michael Moore's "Al Qaeda are the minutemen of Iraq" was for the antiwar left.
Baron, your unspoken premise is that Europe needs to return to what it was pre-1914. This is a path to disaster, because what Europe was before 1914 inevitably led to World War I - aggressive nationalism, within large, powerful nation states.
The proper model for Europe in the 21st Century is "aggressive continentalism." This means not dumping the EU, but making the EU a strong defender and promoter of the interests of its peoples, in the same way that Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Austria-Hungary, and Russia were aggressive promoters of their interests pre World War I
Tuan Jim, thanks for clarifying your post. Now I understand what you meant. Personally, I don't agree with it, but that's ok :)
I personally don't believe in God. As an atheist, the Counterjihad movement is especially important to me because I don't believe there is anything beyond this life, so I want this life to be good. I don't want to be forced to be a Muslim (which is probably what would happen if Western civilisation fell to Islam).
I'm not trying to say that I would want to ally with religious people in Counterjihad or that Counterjiahd is less important to a person who believes in God than to one who does not.
Nodrog --
Baron, your unspoken premise is that Europe needs to return to what it was pre-1914.
That's not my unspoken premise. That's your unwarranted assumption.
I have no unspoken premises. What I mean is what I say.
I have no desire to return to Europe prior to 1914. People of my class background would have been poor, uneducated, powerless, and short-lived in the Europe of those days.
You have once again made a tendentious reading of my words. Normally I ignore such things, but this time I couldn't let such an egregious assumption go by.
HH,
You may be right, but I look around for somebody with the b@lls for this fight and, voila!, there's only Russia. The EU is nothing but a state of the art sheep pen, the USA can't wait to go eee-wee-wee all the way home.
In any event, it's high time we widened our discussion to include the Orthodox lands.
Then there’s the increasing suppression of free speech through the Western world. The USA experienced the first little shiver of the coming winter a few days ago in the St. Louis minaret incident, but in Europe and elsewhere the puddles are freezing over rapidly.
How do you reconcile this statement with the statement of your fellow blogger Dymphna on February 10 that the statements of the Berkeley City Council were "seditious." "Sedition" is generally a word used to describe a criminal act of speech.
Hopefully, you and Dymphna are not falling into the LGF/GCP rayra-esque trap of decrying infringement of free speech activities from those you support, while advocating criminal sanction of speech that you abhor.
I'm relatively optimistic myself. Of the chance of final victory at least, if not about the path there being very nasty. It will get a lot worse before it gets better of course.
Baron,
(1) Your answer to 'Tuan Jim and others' contains bullshit, I think. Talking about a god, Allah or Jesu father, is there a difference? Believing in a god is OK with me, but why choose the christian/jewish attempt of a stupid interpretation before the mohammedan immitation? Same shit, same selfdelusion - no, not quite, Islam is worse.
If ever there is something to call god or creator, it is of such inconceivable, inexplicable complex incomprehensibility that man, you, me, George Bush, archbishop of Canterbury, the Pope, any blody imam or future man, just cannot.........
Call it CREATION - and let us rejoyce that it has combined and organized matter so that matter can see, study and experience itself. Show some gratitude to CREATION and for existing by practizing and applying the simple golden rule in your dealings with co-creatures; the negative variant of course - the one you are capable of: never do to others... etc.
How many "christians" have ever succeded in this modest undertaking?? - instead it is a lot of blaha about loving your neighbour, the other cheek etc. rewarded with a dull eternity in paradise - acts that will for ever remain unattainable for such a creation's creature, of necessity egoistic, that are you or me or our neghbours.
(2) Zenster's comment about a probable nano-technological future is most inspiring to the immagination. Here you can download the basics of 'the Nanotech Revolution' (2005; PDF, 18 MB).
Lights are on in the Orthodox Church, not only in the east but in many parts of the world.
The gates of Hell shall not prevail against it.
The analysis of Sir Edward Grey's part in the events leading up to WW 1 is utter tripe. British diplomacy in the run up to the war and it's eventual entry were dictated by what had been the cornerstones of British foreign policy since the time of Elizabeth I. Namely the preservation of the balance of power in Europe and the prevention of an adversary obtaining control of the ports of the Low Countries. He essentially continued the policies of the previous conservative administration headed by A. J. Balfour and Lord Landsdowne who actually established the Entente Cordiale with France. Balfour btw although out of office remained a leading member of the principal British Defense body The Committee of Imperial Defence. There are masses of books on this topic, you should open a few.
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