A decline in courage may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days. The Western world has lost its civil courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, each government, each political party, and, of course, in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite, causing an impression of loss of courage by the entire society. Of course, there are many courageous individuals, but they have no determining influence on public life.Political and intellectual bureaucrats show depression, passivity, and perplexity in their actions and in their statements, and even more so in theoretical reflections to explain how realistic, reasonable, as well as intellectually and even morally worn [justified] it is to base state policies on weakness and cowardice.[1]
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Rather than confront our social, political, economic, and moral problems we define deviancy and weakness down and away. The very vocabulary of our national life represents cowardice. And lies.
Notes
[1] "A World Split Apart." Commencement Address, Harvard University, June 8, 1978. By Alexander Solzhenitsyn, American Rhetoric. Online Speech Bank.
5 comments:
It seems to me to be a decline in confidence in the worth of white Western societies as much as a decline in courage, Col.B.
Fred Siegel's book The Revolt Against the Masses: How Liberalism Has Undermined the Middle Class, bears out your comment. Liberals in the U.S. apparently gave up on the U.S. after they saw that WWI had failed to bring about the result they pined for, world government. Forgive me if my memory's hazy on this point. Bottom line: they didn't like the result and they turned against the American scheme with a vengeance.
Even then, they didn't so much as lose confidence in America as lose any affection for her. The hatred only grew from that time to where it is now -- at insane levels where suicide is the ardently desired goal of politics.
PS - I don't think normal people lost their confidence in America. What normal people can't grasp, I think, is that fellow citizens can actually be of the opinion that a country that is so decent and fine is rotten, corrupt, and indefensible.
If America slides into a socialist hell, then every Western country will follow suit.
With no gold standard for decency and integrity - and America has been that for a very long time, despite what her detractors claim - the rest cannot hold.
There is decency aplenty other parts of the world. That slide into the socialist hell is what is troubling. As is the betrayal of the ruling classes of the West, who are hostile to free markets, besotted by foreigners, and infected by the progressive delusion that life and economies can be managed by god like themselves.
Of late, U.S. public life seems utterly infested with lies, so the quality of integrity is just absent from public life. The chief lie is that the Constitution is faithfully observed by the political class so that the stealth revolution that has taken place goes unacknowledged. Multiculturalism the next big lie.
The pushback against all this everywhere in the West is feeble. There's a vestigial strength in the U.S. but the madness of having a simpering, Muslim mystery man as the chief executive bodes ill for us all. If people accept that without falling on the floor with laughter, you know it won't end well.
The socialist war on arithmetic and human nature has carried the day for the last 100 years or so, fueled by the vitality of free markets. Obviously all of that is coming to an end soon.
Bit of a rant . . . .
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