A lifetime ago now, in 1955, his final year as Prime Minister,Winston Churchill—in a speech best remembered for its warning about the dangers of nuclear annihilation—concluded by sternly reminding the House of Commons that the most challenging task of that time was “the revivification of Western Civilization.”
Today in a world obsessed by competition between the forces of nationalism and globalism, the very idea of Western Civilization is a concept rarely mentioned, and even less understood. Its high ideals seem more honored in the breach than in the observance, to judge by every day’s grim headlines.
As the only man to wield power at a high level in both world wars, Churchill was uniquely positioned to fully grasp both the horror and the catastrophic consequences of those conflicts. English historian Arnold Toynbee described the 1914-1945 continuum as a European Civil War similar to the 30 Years War (1618- 1648). The German historian Oswald Spengler in his epic Decline of the West described an unfolding civilizational suicide pact.
The empires that in 1914 ruled a third of the world's population were in 1945 scenes of smoldering rubble and near-total economic ruin that afflicted victors and vanquished alike. The towering achievements in science, music, literature and philosophy built over centuries appeared almost irrelevant amidst the unimaginable human carnage that seemed to be the principal legacy of the 20th century.
The gravest and most enduring damage wrought by this apocalyptic age was the abandonment by the Western intelligentsia of their traditional dedication to truth and universal values in favor of political ideologies and nationalistic sentiments, notably fascism and communism.
Foretold by the French philosopher Julien Benda in his 1927 classic The Treason of the Intellectuals, this seismic shift in attitude strongly influenced by nihilism and cultural self-loathing left little room for the Christianity and Humanism that had been foundational to Western Civilization for centuries.
The occasion for this rumination is the publication of a remarkable book by Douglas Murray entitled On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of Civilization. Murray is a British journalist who is a columnist for The Spectator, London Telegraph, New York Post and is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. He is the author of eight books including the international bestseller The Strange Death of Europe and The War on the West.
This newest book revolves around the October 7th, 2023, massacre and hostage-taking of Israeli civilians by the terrorist group Hamas. While the facts of this atrocity and the ongoing warfare that followed are well known to most Americans, Murray brings a perspective and depth of understanding that has largely been missed.
Because Israel is correctly perceived as a formidable military power, it is easy to overlook just how tiny the world's only Jewish state is—9 million people compared to 333 million in the USA. Thus if a comparable terrorist attack had been perpetrated in the US, 44,400 Americans would have died in a single day—the equivalent of fifteen 9/11’s—and 10,000 would have been taken into captivity.
Murray also illuminates the speed and singular character of the Western world's response to October 7th. One day later hundreds of Americans gathered in New York City to protest not against the genocidal death cult Hamas, but against democratic Israel.
Within a week, hundreds of thousands gathered in London along with similar but smaller anti-Israel protests in cities across Europe and the United States. At the same time the internet exploded with gruesome videos produced by the terrorists as they butchered, beheaded, burnt alive, and raped men, women, and children at a music festival and kibbutzimin southern Israel.
With amazing swiftness elite Western opinion (i.e the intelligentsia) rationalized the barbarism of October 7th as somehow the fault of Israel, a just punishment for the long oppression of the Palestinian people. Fleeting sympathy for the Jewish victims and hostages was soon dwarfed by mounting international outrage against Israel when it invaded the Hamas-controlled territory of Gaza.
Levels of anti-Semitism not seen since World War II, masquerading as objections to Israel's “over-reaction,” blossomed in every Western country. Fire-bombing of synagogues and killing of individual Jews became routine news items. The United Nations, which rarely condemns terrorist groups, voted to condemn Israel for the 219th time.
However, the most damning Western response was the moral disgrace of its greatest universities – once citadels of reason, free speech, and tolerance – that were transformed into howling celebrations of anti-Semitism and genocide, places best described by the poet William Butler Yeats where “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” And these are the custodians of our cultural heritage?
Spengler asserted that the decline of the West was irreversible. Churchill's call for the revivification of Western Civilization insisted that we shouldn't give up. Murray certainly doesn’t call for giving up either, but he warns that the hour is late. Future historians will tell us who was right—if history is still being written then.
William Moloney studied history and politics at Oxford and the University of London and received his doctorate from Harvard University. His articles have appeared in the Wall St. Journal, USA Today, The Hill. The Washington Post, Washington Times. Philadelphia Inquirer, Baltimore Sun, Denver Post and Human Events.
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