The West has failed

We won’t be around to see this turn of events, which makes our lack of concern all the more appealing.  It’s always nice to know that if you’re wrong, it will be future generations that pay the price.

Nonetheless, the West is fading.  Trump’s Poland speech, if nothing else, demonstrated that.  Not only was his speech critiqued, but so was the very idea of the existence of Western Civilization, and whether  or not defending it should be implicitly (or explicitly) linked to racism and grave evil.

Ross Douthat commented on this.  I was actually looking for this when I stumbled upon the last Douthat piece on Charlie Gard.   I usually try to stretch out my sources.  Nonetheless it’s an interesting piece on post-Western thinking then compared to now.

It also made me reflect on one of the greatest speeches of the 20th century, if not all time.  Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s legendary 1978 Harvard commencement address.  Rather than embarrass myself by trying to add a jot or tittle to his prophetic utterances, I’ll leave you to listen to the man, the speech, the legend (which has proven to be more accurate today as it ever was in those hazy, crazy disco days of the late 70s):

“The West has failed. It shall all go up in a great fire, and all shall be ended. Ash! Ash and smoke blown away on the wind!”  J.R.R. Tolkien