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The West is a civilization that has survived all the prophecies of its collapse with a singular stratagem. Just as the bourgeoisie had to deny itself as a class in order to permit the bourgeoisification of society as a whole, from the worker to the baron; just as capital had to sacrifice itself as a wage relation in order to impose itself as a social relation—becoming cultural capital and health capital in addition to finance capital; just as Christianity had to sacrifice itself as a religion in order to survive as an affective structure—as a vague injunction to humility, compassion, and weakness; so the West has sacrificed itself as a particular civilization in order to impose itself as a universal culture. The operation can be summarized like this: an entity in its death throes sacrifices itself as a content in order to survive as a form.
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The Invisible Committee (The Coming Insurrection)
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By the early 2000s, dangerous anthropogenic interference in the climate system was under way. Fires, floods, hurricanes, and heat waves began to intensify. Still, these effects were discounted.
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Naomi Oreskes (The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future)
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Her demise would result in civil war, which for Westerners would mean especially the collapse of trade, the default of loans and the emergence of more Boxers. And so, for these overwhelming reasons, the Allies decided not to pursue the empress dowager.
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Jung Chang (Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China)
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Unfortunately, with the collapse of classical civilization, these philosophical discussions and debates were lost. The concept that there could be a paradigm explaining the universe was forgotten for almost a thousand years. Darkness spread over the Western world, and scientific inquiry was largely replaced by belief in superstition, magic, and sorcery.
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Michio Kaku (The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything)
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Western scientists built an intellectual culture based on the premise that it was worse to fool oneself into believing in something that did not exist than not to believe in something that did.
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Naomi Oreskes (The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future)
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Twelve years and four months after it began, the Thousand-Year Reich had ended. Humanity would require decades, perhaps centuries, to parse the regime’s inhumanity, and to comprehend how a narcissistic beerhall demagogue had wrecked a nation, a continent, and nearly a world. “Never in history has such ruination—physical and moral—been associated with the name of one man, the chief instigator of the most profound collapse of civilization in modern times,” wrote Hitler’s biographer Ian Kershaw.
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Rick Atkinson (The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe 1944-1945 (The Liberation Trilogy))
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Indeed, ridiculously and violently, Trump administration of the United States has blown down all the rules and principles of the United Nations Security Council and its incredibility, which nations of the world had established and decided unanimously and consistently on the failure of the League of Nations for the world peace and security in a fair, and equal way. Trump's Middle East Plan, executes only the humiliation of itself; whereas, self-determination of the Palestinian nation will stay definitely with its all dimensions regardless of some Ali Babas' betrayal and treachery of slavery-minded Arabs to the Palestinian cause. One may consider such a plan as a Bare Political Mafia-ism that will result in a collapse of civilized-morality, equality, honesty, and transparent justice in the context and concept of Western and American own perspectives and values. Palestinians boldly speak; however, civilized societies cowardly stay silent. It is a sensitive and shameful matter, tragedy, and the death of humanity and human rights.
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Ehsan Sehgal
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Science fiction writers construct an imaginary future; historians attempt to reconstruct the past. Ultimately, both are seeking to understand the present. In this essay, we blend the two genres to imagine a future historian looking back on a past that is our present and (possible) future. The occasion is the tercentenary of the end of Western culture (1540–2093); the dilemma being addressed is how we—the children of the Enlightenment—failed to act on robust information about climate change and knowledge of the damaging events that were about to unfold. Our historian concludes that a second Dark Age had fallen on Western civilization, in which denial and self-deception, rooted in an ideological fixation on “free” markets, disabled the world’s powerful nations in the face of tragedy. Moreover, the scientists who best understood the problem were hamstrung by their own cultural practices, which demanded an excessively stringent standard for accepting claims of any kind—even those involving imminent threats. Here, our future historian, living in the Second People’s Republic of China, recounts the events of the Period of the Penumbra (1988–2093) that led to the Great Collapse and Mass Migration (2073–2093).
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Naomi Oreskes (The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future)
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Yet in many cases, the social components were the dominant system drivers. It was often said, for example, that climate change was caused by increased atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases. Scientists understood that those greenhouse gases were accumulating because of the activities of human beings—deforestation and fossil fuel combustion—yet they rarely said that the cause was people, and their patterns of conspicuous consumption.
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Naomi Oreskes (The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future)
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When scientists discovered the limits of planetary sinks, they also discovered market failure. The toxic effects of DDT, acid rain, the depletion of the ozone layer, and climate change were serious problems for which markets did not provide a spontaneous remedy.
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Naomi Oreskes (The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future)
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Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day” (Quran 9:29), kill
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Michael Youssef (The Barbarians are Here: Preventing the Collapse of Western Civilization in Times of Terrorism)
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The Quran says that Christians are doomed to destruction for believing that Jesus is the Son of God (Quran 9:30; 19:35–37).
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Michael Youssef (The Barbarians are Here: Preventing the Collapse of Western Civilization in Times of Terrorism)
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Franco won the civil war with the aid of the Axis. He remained throughout the Second World War entirely politically committed to the triumph of the Nazi New Order in Europe, and he contributed a great deal materially to that end and all the time without the “alibi” of occupation. Yet through a series of favourable historical circumstances he also survived its collapse. This set of circumstances made for a political “career” unique in Europe. Franco was never defeated in any war. Under the changed Western priorities of the cold war world, Franco’s Spain took its place (in the days before inter-continental missiles) as a “sentinel of the West” with an international veil drawn over the regime’s murderous “past
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Helen Graham (The War and Its Shadow: Spain's Civil War in Europe's Long Twentieth Century (The Canada Blanch / Sussex Academic Studies on Contemporary Spain))
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This table only counts physical health effects due to disruptions that took place in the Illusion of Control phase. It considers both short-run and long-run effects. Each of the claimed effects is based on a published study about that effect. First on the list is the disruption to vaccination programs for measles, diphtheria, cholera, and polio, which were either cancelled or reduced in scope in some 70 countries. That disruption was caused by travel restrictions. Western experts could not travel, and within many poor countries travel and general activity were also halted in the early days of the Illusion of Control phase. This depressive effect on vaccination programs for the poor is expected to lead to large loss of life in the coming years. The poor countries paying this cost are most countries in Africa, the poorer nations in Asia, such as India, Indonesia and Myanmar, and the poorer countries in Latin America. The second listed effect in the table relates to schooling. An estimated 90% of the world’s children have had their schooling disrupted, often for months, which reduces their lifetime opportunities and social development through numerous direct and indirect pathways. The UN children’s organisation, UNICEF, has released several reports on just how bad the consequences of this will be in the coming decades.116 The third element in Joffe’s table refers to reports of economic and social primitivisation in poor countries. Primitivisation, also seen after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, is just what it sounds like: a regression away from specialisation, trade and economic advancement through markets to more isolated and ‘primitive’ choices, including attempted economic self-sufficiency and higher fertility. Due to diminished labour market prospects, curtailed educational activities and decreased access to reproductive health services, populations in the Illusion of Control phase began reverting to having more children precisely in those countries where there is already huge pressure on resources. The fourth and fifth elements listed in the table reflect the biggest disaster of this period, namely the increase in extreme poverty and expected famines in poor countries. Over the 20 years leading up to 2020, gradual improvements in economic conditions around the world had significantly eased poverty and famines. Now, international organisations are signalling rapid deterioration in both. The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) now expects the world to have approximately an additional 100 million extremely poor people facing starvation as a result of Covid policies. That will translate into civil wars, waves of refugees and huge loss of life. The last two items in Joffe’s table relate to the effect of lower perinatal and infant care and impoverishment. Millions of preventable deaths are now expected due to infections and weakness in new mothers and young infants, and neglect of other health problems like malaria and tuberculosis that affect people in all walks of life. The whole of the poor world has suffered fewer than one million deaths from Covid. The price to be paid in human losses in these countries through hunger and health neglect caused by lockdowns and other restrictions is much, much larger. All in the name of stopping Covid.
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Paul Frijters (The Great Covid Panic: What Happened, Why, and What To Do Next)
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But it is not just Western youth who will be destroyed due to this madness; it is Western Civilisation that will crumble as a result.
What took millennia to build and shape will be broken apart in mere decades. Traditions and cultures that were passed down from
generation to generation and have evolved and existed for thousands of years will be forgotten and lost. The rich Western
heritage, history and Western way of life will all be washed away within a century of madness.
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Mark Collett (The Fall of Western Man)
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But the eventual triumph of the West vindicated Harry Truman’s vision declared before Congress in 1947. In the decades between Truman’s speech and the collapse of the Iron Curtain, America had, in fact, become Reagan’s “city on a hill” and FDR’s “arsenal of democracy.
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Joe Scarborough (Saving Freedom: Truman, the Cold War, and the Fight for Western Civilization)
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From Gibbon to Spengler to Toynbee and the Durants, the symptoms of dying civilizations are well known: the death of faith, the degeneration of morals, contempt for the old values, collapse of the culture, paralysis of the will. But the two certain signs that a civilization has begun to die are a declining population and foreign invasions no longer resisted.
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Patrick J. Buchanan (State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America)
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The hearts of many on the Right are in cutting marginal tax rates and eliminating the capital gains tax. Good causes to be sure. But what doth it profit a man if he gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his country? Is whether the GDP rises at 2 or 3 or 4 percent as important as whether or not Western civilization endures and we remain one nation under God and one people? With the collapsing birthrate, open borders, and the triumph of an anti-Western multiculturalism, that is what is at issue today — the survival of America as a nation, separate and unique, and of Western civilization itself — and too many conservatives have gone AWOL in the last great fight of our lives.
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Patrick J. Buchanan (The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization)
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You know what happened with physics, at the beginning of the century? Everything began to be called into doubt. The fundamentals, I mean, the very most basic assumptions. It was like a building that creaks and groans and you have to go down to inspect the foundations. People began to be doing not physics but rather meditations on physics. [...]
The same sort of thing has happened in the novel. The foundations have had to be looked into. Which is no coincidence, because it was born at the birth of this Western civilization of ours, and it's followed the same arc, the same trajectory, right down to this moment of collapse. Is there a crisis in the novel or is it rather a novel of crisis? Both. One delves into its essence, its mission, its worth. But it's all been done so far from the outside. There've been attempts to carry out the same examination from within, but one would have to go deeper. A novel in which the novelist him- or herself is included. [...]
I'm not talking about the figure of the writer inside the fiction. I'm talking about the possibility of the extreme case, in which it's the author of the novel that's inside the novel. Not as an observer, though, or a chronicler, or a witness [but as] just another character, the same sort of character as all the rest, which however do come from the soul or spirit or anima of the author. The author would be a man maddened, somehow, and living with his own doubles, aspects of his own self.
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Ernesto Sabato (Abaddón el Exterminador)
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Our historian concludes that a second Dark Age had fallen on Western civilization, in which denial and self-deception, rooted in an ideological fixation on “free” markets, disabled the world’s powerful nations in the face of tragedy. Moreover, the scientists who best understood the problem were hamstrung by their own cultural practices, which demanded an excessively stringent standard for accepting claims of any kind—even those involving imminent threats.
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Naomi Oreskes (The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future)
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The historical pessimist sees a decaying or decadent present systematically undoing the achievements of the past. The Nietzschean cultural pessimist sees the present as simply an extension of the same corrupt and meaningless values of the past; true cultural health, he concludes, requires the rejection of both. The imminent collapse of a decadent civilization is not a tragedy but a cause for celebration. It clears the way for something new and unprecedented, a rejuvenated cultural order built on an entirely new principle.
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Arthur Herman (The Idea of Decline in Western History)
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the United States has by far the highest rates of incarceration in the Western world; it witnesses more gun violence than any other so-called civilized country; its entertainment industry glorifies violence, misogyny, sexual promiscuity, and infantile self-indulgence; it offers less medical and family support for the poor than any other Western nation; it maintains inequalities of wealth on a par with the kleptocracies of the Third World; its rate of infant mortality is several times higher than most western countries; and, most grievously, the nation is witnessing a disastrous collapse of the two-parent family as the accepted norm for giving birth and raising children. The US racial history is not solely responsible for these indices of social pathology but that history has contributed substantially to every one of them.
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Bryan Loritts (Letters to a Birmingham Jail: A Response to the Words and Dreams of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.)
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For primitive societies in Toynbee’s schema, the depredations of an empire such as imperial Rome or Victorian Britain presented a stark choice: between “being carcass or vulture.”51 But Toynbee suggested that civilization itself, already in the stage of disintegration, also faces a fateful decision. It must either abandon its imperial ambitions and risk complete internal collapse and revolt by its hungry underclass, or transform itself into an all-encompassing universal state. The universal states like imperial Rome form the most spectacular stage of Toynbee’s process of decline, “when a disintegrating civilization purchases a reprieve by submitting to forcible political unification.” But even with its vast colonial empire and its sweeping claims to universal dominion, the declining civilization remains split along an inner and an outer axis.
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Arthur Herman (The Idea of Decline in Western History)
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The notion that social groups are never merely aggregates of their members, and that “we must study the history of the [social] group, its traditions and institutions, if we are to understand and explain it as it is now,” once propped up Romantic nationalist history and universal histories of civilization from Hegel to Toynbee.3 Now it has become dogma among feminists, proponents of African-American studies, and other minority group-identities. Without it, in fact, much of the multiculturalist program would collapse under its own weight.
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Arthur Herman (The Idea of Decline in Western History)
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In 1988 the German oceanographer Hartmut Heinrich was the first to come up with the firm geological evidence for such a cataclysmic 'iceberg-calving' process during the last Ice Age. By examining deep-sea drill cores sampled at various points across the North Atlantic he demonstrated the existence of widely dispersed layers of 'ice-rafted detritus' -- millions of tonnes of rocks and rocky debris that had once stood on land, that had been clawed up by the ice-sheets and that had ultimately been carried out to sea frozen into huge icebergs:
'As they melted they released rock debris that was dropped into the fine-grained sediments of the ocean floor. Much of this ice-rafted debris consists of limestones similar to those exposed over large areas of eastern Canada today. The Heinrich layers as they have become known, extend 3000 kilometers across the North Atlantic, almost reaching Ireland.'
The Heinrich layers record at least six separate discharges of 'stupendous flotillas of ice-bergs' into the North Atlantic -- discharges that are now known, obviously enough, as 'Heinrich Events' and that are thought to have unfolded in concentrated bursts of activity that may, in each case, have lasted less than a century. Because of the progressive thickening of the Heinrich layers towards the western side of the Atlantic and the continuation of this trend into the Labrador Sea in the direction of Hudson Bay, it is obvious to geologists that 'much of the floating ice was sourced from the Laurentide ice-sheet'.
However, other debris has been found intermingled in some Heinrich layers that 'could only have come from separate ice-sheets covering not only Canada, but Greenland, Iceland, the British Isles and Scandinavia'. Likewise, research into southern hemisphere ice-caps in the Andes and New Zealand shows that these too 'grew and then collapsed synchronously with the ice-rafting pulses recorded in the North Atlantic'. The implication [...] is that some 'global rather than regional forcing of climate change' must have been at work.
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Graham Hancock (Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization)
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key attribute of the period was that power did not reside in the hands of those who understood the climate system, but rather in political, economic, and social institutions that had a strong
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Naomi Oreskes (The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future)
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A culture can pull back from the brink of collapse if it tears off its suicidal blinders in time. This can still be achieved, but it requires a recognition above all of the paradox that so many fail to understand. This is that freedom only exists within clear boundaries, and that preserving the values of western civilization requires a robust reassertion of the Judeo-Christian principles on which its foundations rest. And that requires moral, political and religious leadership of the highest order, not to mention buckets of courage.
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Melanie Phillips (Guardian Angel: My Journey from Leftism to Sanity)
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The collapse of this ideology in the Soviet Union and its substantial adaptation in China and Vietnam does not, however, necessarily mean that these societies will import the other Western ideology of liberal democracy. Westerners who assume that it does are likely to be surprised by the creativity, resilience, and individuality of non-Western cultures.
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Samuel P. Huntington (The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order)
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Machiavelli concluded that “it is difficult, or rather impossible, either to maintain a republican form of government in states which have become corrupt or to create such a form afresh.” Instead, the old vitality simply ebbs away. Final disaster comes not from outside, but from within.46 Freedom is doomed to fail. This was the final dismal conclusion Machiavelli reached by the time he finished The Prince. By then Florence and Italy, the cradle of modern European liberty, were bowing down to foreign tyrants and their armies. Machiavelli called the situation a stench in the nostrils of humanity at least for now.47 But the political will for liberty had collapsed. If men wanted to be free and to realize their highest nature, they were going to have to look somewhere other than politics.
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Arthur Herman (The Cave and the Light: Plato Versus Aristotle, and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Civilization)
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In 378, the emperor Valens confronted roving war bands of Germanic Goths at Adrianople near Constantinople. With a massive cavalry charge, the Goths shattered Valens’s army and killed the emperor. It was a disaster of the first order.28 The capital managed to shut its gates against the German invader. However, the price of the Eastern Empire’s survival was the loss of the West. One Germanic tribe after another—Goths, Vandals, Franks, Allemanni, Burgundians—shot westward through the Balkans, overrunning the Rhine frontier and the Roman provinces on the other side, including Italy. The basic framework of imperial government, like the Roman road system dating back to Caesar Augustus, collapsed under the strain. So did law and order. Only the Church held firm. In virtually every town, starting with Rome itself, its leaders became symbols of resistance. Like the young Genovefa (later canonized Saint Genevieve) in Paris, they rallied citizens to stand fast and defend their cities; like Pope Leo I with Attila the Hun, they struck deals with the invaders to spare their congregations. When negotiations failed they organized humanitarian relief for the devastated areas and offered words of comfort and hope when everything looked its bleakest. The Catholic bishop became the one upholder of a social and cultural order to which the people living in his diocese, including pagans, could still cling.
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Arthur Herman (The Cave and the Light: Plato Versus Aristotle, and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Civilization)
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The soul of reason. The light of truth. The path of dialectic leading to understanding, even of goodness itself. These are Plato’s great ideals. Still, the Myth of the Cave reveals a bitter truth: Most people prefer life in the cave. The world and institutions around us reflect it—and as Glaucon realized, people get upset and even furious when someone challenges their fondest illusions—what Francis Bacon would call the Idols of the Tribe—especially if everything else is collapsing around them.
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Arthur Herman (The Cave and the Light: Plato Versus Aristotle, and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Civilization)
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The intermediate objectives for achieving U.S. defeat may be enumerated as follows:
Make the Americans stupid – Disorient the people of the United States and other Western countries. Establish a set of myths useful from the standpoint of the long-range strategy. Examples of such myths: Josef Stalin is our “Uncle Joe,” a man we can trust; the Cold War was triggered by paranoid anti-Communists; Senator McCarthy blacklisted innocent people; President Kennedy was killed by Big Business and the CIA; the Vietnam War was fought on account of corporate greed; Russia and China are irreconcilable enemies who will not be able to combine their forces against the United States; the Soviet Union collapsed for economic reasons; Russia is America’s ally in the War on Terror.
Infiltrate the U.S. financial system – Financial control through organized crime and drug trafficking. To this end the Eastern Bloc began infiltrating organized crime in the 1950s and, in 1960, began a narcotics offensive against the West which would generate billions of dollars in illicit money which banks could not resist laundering. In this way, a portal was opened into the heart of the capitalist financial structures in order to facilitate future economic and financial sabotage.
Promote bankruptcy and economic breakdown – The promotion of a cradle-to-grave welfare state as a means to bankrupt the United States Treasury (i.e., the Cloward-Piven Strategy). Welfare simultaneously demoralizes the workforce as it bankrupts the government.
Elect a stealth Communist president – As an organizer for the Communist Party explained during a meeting I attended more than thirty years ago, the stealth Communist president will one day exploit a future financial collapse to effect a transition from “the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie” to the “dictatorship of the proletariat.”
Exploit the counter-revolution – Some strategists believe that a counter-revolutionary or right wing reaction is unavoidable. It is therefore necessary, from the standpoint of sound strategy, to send infiltrators into the right wing. Having a finger in every pie and an agent network in every organization, the Communists are not afraid of encouraging counter-revolution, secession, or civil war in the wake of financial collapse. After all, the reactionaries and right wing elements must be drawn out so that they can be purged or, if necessary, turned into puppet allies. Already Putin is posturing as a Christian who opposes feminism and homosexuality. This has fooled many “conservatives” in the West, and is an intentional ploy which further serves to disorient the West.
Take away the nuclear button – The strategists in Moscow do not forget that the neutralization of the U.S. nuclear deterrent is the most important of all intermediate objectives. This can be achieved in one of four ways: (1) cutting off nuclear forces funding by Congress; (2) administratively unplugging the weapons through executive orders issued by Obama, (3) it may be accomplished through a general financial collapse, or (4) a first strike.
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J.R. Nyquist
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The whole world stands to be engulfed. The destruction, when it is unleashed, will be unprecedented. The totalitarians in Russia, China, Iran and the Arab world are preparing for war. Now that Bush's position is collapsing and the Party of Outright Appeasement has begun its reign, the enemies of freedom see their chance. Cowardice and stupidity have conspired, and the result is "opportunity." Western progress has finally given the totalitarian regimes a generation of "last men," about whom Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote: "The earth hath become small, and on it there hoppeth the last man who maketh everything small." The "last man" comes at the end, when civilization begins to die. And indeed, the Western democracies are dying. I am reminded of Titus Livius's description of Rome's descent into despotism as "the dark dawning of our modern day when we can neither endure our vices nor face the remedies needed to cure them." We congratulate ourselves on the interest-group demagogy that produces policy in the West, throwing up words like "democracy" and "freedom" when the reality of the situation is better described by words like "anarchy" and "licentiousness.
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J.R. Nyquist
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Postmodernism is grounded in the assumption that the ideological system sustaining the cultural and material practices of Western European civilization is bankrupt and on the point of collapse. It claims that the intellectual schemata of the Enlightenment have been abraded by history to the point that nothing but a skeleton remains, held together by unreflective habit, incapable of accommodating the creative impulses of the future.
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Paul R. Gross (Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science (Revised))
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Aristotle tells us that the plot should be so tight that if you took away any one incident, the whole would literally collapse:
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Michael Tierno (Aristotle's Poetics for Screenwriters: Storytelling Secrets from the Greatest Mind in Western Civilization)