The Path of Western Self-Destruction

Nationalists have often pointed out that the defense of European-descended people and the civilization we have created does not depend on any belief in their intrinsic superiority. Even the most primitive and backward peoples defend themselves and advance their group interests, and there is no reason we should be different.

Yet, once Europeans opened up the world during the age of discovery, it became obvious to many of them that their civilization was also superior to the other civilizations, notably in its comparative rationality and its long record of achievement and invention. From the days of the conquistadors until the early 20th century, most people of European descent would have regarded this as obvious. And contrary to a now-widespread perception, confidence in Western superiority never involved any small-minded desire to deny or downplay the genuine achievements of others. A self-confident people feels no need for such dishonesty...

Ricardo Duchesne notes in his new book Greatness and Ruin that it was no accident such views found expression shortly after the Second World War by a philosopher from defeated Germany. Jaspers clearly saw National Socialism as an extreme example of cultural divergence, and like many men of the early postwar era, hoped to ensure future peace through international cooperation and understanding. It is the same thinking which gave rise to the exaggerated hopes for the United Nations, and something of it survives to this day in what is called "globalism."...

Ten of the eleven chapters in Greatness and Ruin are devoted to analyzing and celebrating Western greatness, while the final chapter is reserved for its ruin, i.e., the contemporary crisis of white European civilization manifested most clearly in today's mass immigration. Dr. Duchesne's thoughts on this subject are so important that I will reserve them for discussion in Part II of this review.

... In his final chapter, the author turns from the greatness to the ruin of the West, most clearly seen in the crisis brought about by “antiracist” thinking and the mass immigration it has inspired.

He begins by remarking on the inadequacy of a recently popular diagnosis which traces our predicament to cultural Marxism...

The West’s weaknesses are rooted in liberalism, not Marxist radicalism. Yet liberalism itself is rooted more deeply in European individualism, which goes back at least 2,000 years before liberalism’s 17th-century origins. The heart of liberalism is its view of man as naturally an individual, existing independently of his fellows, and a consequent understanding of society as artificially instituted by men for their convenience and protection. The new doctrine found its first full expression in John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government (1689).

In fact, as Dr. Duchesne demonstrates at length, individualism is not natural or primitive but represents an historical achievement of European man...

By Locke’s time, individualism was so well-developed in Northern Europe that it had come to be taken for granted...

As Dr. Duchesne writes: “Liberalism is almost epigenetically rooted in the historically evolved psychology of Europeans.”...

In Dr. Duchesne’s words, [German] historicism

... By the 1960s, once a new generation with no memory of the Germany of before 1945 began coming of age, this reeducation program began succeeding beyond anyone’s dreams. Many Germans now quite sincerely believe their ancestors were scoundrels, and not only those who lived during the National Socialist period...

Of course, this liberal-progressive variant of brainwashing was not restricted to Germany, but soon spread throughout the West...

As the author notes, “liberalism is unlike any other ideology or traditional normative order in that it lacks a metaphysics about the ultimate nature of reality, about the highest values in life, or what ends individuals should pursue..."

From John Locke to John Rawls, liberal thinking has been forced by its own internal logic to adopt a kind of two-tier thinking...

And we find liberals advocating with the fervor of the Spanish Inquisition the hunting down, silencing, and punishing of such people — all in the name of freedom and toleration. It amounts to a reductio ad absurdum of liberalism itself...

He [Duchesne] recounts some of the legislative landmarks of racial liberalism in the Anglosphere. Since the goal aimed at is utopian and unachievable, successive laws have become ever more comprehensive and enforcement provisions ever more draconian... Over time, whites have been made the scapegoats for the project’s failure — amounting to an ascription of guilt by race in plain contradiction with antiracism’s original goal... 

The battle against racial discrimination was then extended beyond national frontiers when it was discovered that immigration policies based on race or nationality violate the nondiscrimination principle of modern liberalism...

Liberalism requires nothing short of completely open borders to ensure the demographic replacement of the racist natives of the West...

What liberalism can never do, however, is extend the recognition of group identity to the natives of the West itself...

It is not possible to turn the entire world into liberal individualists by importing them to the West and sending them to classes on how to think as we do. But it is possible to preserve a part of the world wherein a moderate individualism can continue to flourish. This will involve protecting the only race that has so far developed the necessary psychological mechanisms for it...