Can the dead come back to life?

Yago C., in Japan, writes:

You’ve been writing for some time about how foolish are some American authors who write off Europe as being decadent or untrustful, people such as Mark Steyn who see no remedy to the Islamization of Europe.

You keep telling us that although countries such as Britain are already dead, there’s still hope for them to come back to life.

What makes you think that? I’m really curious. I’m Spanish myself, and honestly the situation back there is not very different to that of Britain or France. What makes you think that today’s Britain is recoverable as a functioning nation? I mean, all the history I read just keep telling me about how countries or entire civilizations appear and then, one time, disappear completely not to come back again. I’ve never heard about a country so completely rotten such as Britain right now coming eventually back to life.

The only case I can think of is China, who after thorough intermixing with the invaders, they managed to recover their culture, if in a slightly changed fashion. But Chinese barbarians were more or less the same race as the natives, which makes it different from Pakistanis in Britain.

LA replies:

First, while I’ve been saying since July 2005 that Britain is very far gone, I’ve only been saying in the last few weeks that Britain is “dead.” I said it in relation to two particular developments: the passage of the Sexual Orientation Regulations which require even Catholic adoption agencies to adopt to homosexual couples, combined with the failure of even outspoken conservatives to oppose this law in principle; and Britain’s refusal to place limits on the number of Eastern European immigrants entering the country, which it very readily could do and has the authority to do even under EU law but has refused to do, even as the entire leadership class is whining desperately about the huge and unexpected numbers of immigrants and the crushing social costs they are creating.

Toynbee said that civilizations end by suicide. But there’s never been a suicide like that of the modern West, consisting of, on one side, a civilization’s deliberate trashing of its own moral tradition and historic culture, and, on the other side, the civilization’s deliberate opening of its doors to mass influxes of immigrants of radically different race and culture whose very presence means the loss of the identity and autonomy of the historic society.

The extreme nature—the sheer weirdness—of what the West is now doing to itself strongly suggests that this self-dissolution is not necessary, that the West has not reached its natural term (if there is such a thing) but rather that it is in the grip of a kind of madness, the madness of liberalism. Therefore all that is necessary for the West to reverse its suicide and at least have a fighting chance to survive is for it to stop being mad and return to sanity. And that is possible. Survival and restoration would further require, among other things, the cessation and reversal of immigration. That seems impossible now, but that is because we are still under the sway of liberalism. If the West were to cast off its liberalism, which, if it ever happens at all, I think can only happen in response to the realization that liberalism has literally destroyed our civilization and dooms us, then the West could do what it now cannot do.

The West is not being destroyed by some larger force over which it has no control. It is being destroyed by the lunatic ideology of liberalism that it sinfully embraces. If the West were to wake from that embrace and cast off its liberalism, it could save itself.

However, Yago is talking about more than just a belief system that could be cast off. He is talking about a substantive change that has occurred within the British, their “complete rottenness” as he calls it. But that too can change. Just as a man hits bottom and resolves to change, the same can happen with a society.

In any case, to give up, as so many people do, to say the West is finished, period, is to give up on everything we are, everything we have been, everything our forebears were, everything they created and bequeathed to us. It is to give up on Greece and Rome, on Western Christian civilization and European culture, on America. It means that one has given up all hope, and will not even try to save the West. And that is the worst sin of all.

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Jeremy G. writes:

I completely agree with you. The problem we face is the false liberal ideology, not our physical decline as a people. There are many reasons for being hopeful:

The recent courageous stand by the Republican Congress against our treasonous president’s plan for amnesty.

European nationalist political parties are beginning to attract mass support.

Most of the liberals I know don’t have children, or have only one or two.

My Christian neighbors have many children.

The growth of patriotic web sites

Growing internet based underground

Why are people who visit this site despairing when there are so many signs for being optimistic?

Charlton G. writes:

There are several instances in which the West has rebounded from
tragedies and catastrophes at least as bad as those that hit during the 20th century. The main one was, of course, the disastrous fall of Rome in the fifth century. There were the hard blows of Islamic conquest that were finally resisted and then halted by the eighth century. There was the dreadful period of anarchy and brigandage of the tenth century when the Vikings plundered the West. One of the worst things to occur was the Black Death of the 14th century when a third of Europe perished. That would be the equivalent of about 150 million today! The death and destruction in Germany of the Thirty Years War of the 17th century was at least as bad as WW2 in comparative terms.

I suggest taking the time to view Kenneth Clark’s “Civilization” to get a thorough understanding of what it is that is being lost and why we should not despair. Clark makes a great case for not throwing over our wonderful heritage and he makes plain that the disruptions of his time (late sixties) were not unlike earlier political turmoil. The one thing that is different about the catastrophe that is overwhelming us is the racial angle. If our genes are replaced, our civilization will disappear. We have to renew ourselves spiritually if we are to make any dent in the creature we call liberalism. I cannot see doing this without a terrific struggle.

You can find a DVD of “Civilization” here.

Allan Wall writes:

In regard to dead nations coming back to life, there’s an inspiring example in the book of the prophet Ezekiel, in chapter 36, about the “valley of the dry bones.”

LA replies:

Indeed! And it is read every year in the Easter Vigil. Remember also that the Book of Ezekiel was written when the people of Israel were in exile in Babylon, when the Kingdom of Judah had ceased to exist and the Jews had lost their sovereign land. Yet not long after Ezekial wrote, their land was restored to them.

Ezekiel chapter 36:1-14:

The hand of the Lord was upon me, and carried me out in the spirit of the Lord, and set me down in the midst of the valley which was full of bones, And caused me to pass by them round about: and, behold, there were very many in the open valley; and, lo, they were very dry. And he said unto me, Son of man, can these bones live? And I answered, O Lord God, thou knoWest. Again he said unto me, Prophesy upon these bones, and say unto them, O ye dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. Thus saith the Lord God unto these bones; Behold, I will cause breath to enter into you, and ye shall live: And I will lay sinews upon you, and will bring up flesh upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and ye shall live; and ye shall know that I am the Lord.

So I prophesied as I was commanded: and as I prophesied, there was a noise, and behold a shaking, and the bones came together, bone to his bone. And when I beheld, lo, the sinews and the flesh came up upon them, and the skin covered them above: but there was no breath in them.

Then said he unto me, Prophesy unto the wind, prophesy, son of man, and say to the wind, thus saith the Lord God; Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live. So I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood up upon their feet, an exceeding great army.

Then he said unto me, Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel: behold, they say, Our bones are dried, and our hope is lost: we are cut off for our parts.

Therefore prophesy and say unto them, Thus saith the Lord God; Behold, O my people, I will open your graves, and cause you to come up out of your graves, and bring you into the land of Israel. And ye shall know that I am the Lord, when I have opened your graves, O my people, and brought you up out of your graves, And shall put my spirit in you, and ye shall live, and I shall place you in your own land: then shall ye know that I the Lord have spoken it, and performed it, saith the Lord.

Yago C. writes:

Thank you for the thoughtful answer.

But still, the thing that worries me above all is that: It has never happen in the history of mankind of any entire civilization who has almost given up having children. I remember you saying that natality rates are variable things, that they could get back to reasonable levels, but still, in most of Europe we are well before 1.5 children per woman. Combining that with massive third world immigration we are facing the real possibility of radical population change. The black death killed almost half of Europe, but the surviving were having kids, and the whole Islamic world wasn’t plotting a population replacement like now. Liberalism, and the hedonism it brought has broken the spine of society. Women have children today just to fulfill their individual desires, to feel better with themselves or just to appease their maternal instinct, which of course is biological and even lesbian feminists can’t avoid it.

It could happen that the west casts off its liberalism and regains sanity, but by then we may be facing 30% or 40% Islamic population in Europe, and something similar with Mexicans in the US. Would we then be able to expel them? Half of the population? Not to mention the probable mass-scale intermixing that may had happened by them. The Chinese assimilated the Manchus, but they were less than 10% of the population, and had been aping Chinese culture and mores for centuries. Today’s barbarians despises us and all we believe in. But all we think now is in consuming some more to maintain our individual pleasures. The most talented of our society are not studying philosophy or law, but marketing and business, and of course economics is inherently value-free and global. It doesn’t matter if the one who buys your products has 4 wives and kills his daughter if raped.

If that’s not Toynbean suicide, just tell me what is.

And I have serious doubts about the West having ‘survived’ the fall of Rome. The Christian civilization that appeared in Europe was in many ways very different from classical antiquity. Any serious readings of Roman society would make us puke at how inhuman and degenerate they were. The West today is not the direct descendant of Rome. It’s a German-Christian civilization which used second-hand Roman law and Greek knowledge to organize themselves, but I very well doubt Caesar would feel home in Victorian Britain.

LA replies:

Excuse me, but I have said over and over that we are in mortal peril. I have said over and over that American and the Western world may very well be overrun with non-Westerners, that our civilization may very well collapse from within, that we may very well lose it all, and that we either turn this around, or our civilization dies. That’s what this is all about, for heaven’s sake. What is your point: that it’s all over already, there’s nothing further to do, to hope for, to work for? If that is all you have to say, if that is all you have to contribute to this discussion, then please send your defeatist comments elsewhere. I’m serious. If all you’ve got to offer is more and more arguments saying that it’s hopeless and there’s nothing to be done, then you shouldn’t write to me.

You are correct that the Roman world did not survive. It was destroyed. That’s why we call the Dark Ages the Dark Ages. No one should use the fall of the western Roman empire as an argument for optimism. What appeared in Europe afterward was a new civilization, something that, as Toynbee points out, never happened before in history and probably will never happen again: a civilization coming to a complete end, followed, hundreds of years later, by a new civilization that incorporated major elements of the old.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 12, 2007 12:18 PM | Send