Re: There’s still time to save the West

On 8/20/26 5:31 AM, Julian wrote:
> When The Spectator asked me whether I would write an essay on ‘Why we 
> need to strengthen the West’, I was delighted – and bemused. Why is this 
> even up for debate? That we must explain and justify ‘the West’ at all 
> indicates just how weak it has become. It would be better if it did not 
> need strengthening at all but the truth is that the West has become an 
> invalid.
> 
> What exactly, though, needs to be strengthened? The West is an idea, not 
> a location. It is not a matter of geography, it is a way of life. The 
> idea of the West rests on four pillars: Athens – where democracy was 
> born. Rome – the cradle of the rule of law. Jerusalem – where Judeo- 
> Christian values placed the inviolable dignity of the individual at the 
> centre. And finally, the Enlightenment – whose great thinkers in London, 
> Paris and Königsberg anchored humanism, individual civil liberties, the 
> separation of powers and the division of church and state.
> 
> Herodotus observed a phenomenon after the fall of the Peisistratid 
> tyranny which remains the most vital lesson in political philosophy to 
> this day. The Athenians, he noted, had fought no better than their 
> neighbours as long as they were ruled by tyrants. Yet the moment they 
> threw off the yoke of tyranny, every individual was motivated to give 
> his utmost, proving decisively stronger and more successful in battle. 
> Why? Because he was now working for himself, not for a master. In that 
> single observation Herodotus formulated the timeless argument in favour 
> of self-determination and liberty – the core idea of the West.
> 
> This idea also shapes a view of humanity articulated by Immanuel Kant. 
> Man is not perfect. Kant famously wrote that ‘out of the crooked timber 
> of humanity, no straight thing was ever made’. In the western mind, the 
> implication is: nor should it ever be.
> 
> Freedom’s most important word is ‘no’. Dissent is self-determination. It 
> is liberating to say: ‘No, I see it differently.’ With ‘no’, the freedom 
> to think and act begins. The freedom to say ‘no’ stands in stark 
> contrast to the unfreedom of having to say ‘yes’. Democracies are no- 
> saying societies, while dictatorships are yes-saying. Liberty is 
> inherently critical of authority: it permits and encourages 
> contradiction – precisely that which autocrats cannot abide. That is why 
> dictators wish to weaken the West. And it begins, as so often, with words.
> 
> The word ‘West’ has become suspect and has long been cancelled in 
> politically correct circles. The mandated terms in geopolitical 
> discourse are now the ‘Global South’ and the ‘Global North’. For those 
> using the phrase ‘Global South’, linking the West to colonial guilt is 
> no accident – it is the very purpose of the narrative. UN Secretary- 
> General António Guterres put it bluntly in 2020: ‘The Global North, 
> specifically my own continent of Europe, imposed colonial rule on much 
> of the Global South for centuries, through violence and coercion.’
> 
> The goal is to weaken the idea of the West through the association with 
> guilt. Yet this new terminology is intellectually absurd. It possesses 
> neither moral nor geographical logic: what does China have in common 
> with Peru, Qatar with Haiti or Thailand with Sierra Leone? Where is the 
> common denominator regarding human rights and the rule of law?
> 
> As a community of ideas, however, vastly different nations such as 
> Japan, Singapore, New Zealand, the United States or those of Europe can 
> readily identify with the concept of the West.
> 
> Yet in academia, ‘cancelling the West’ has become mainstream. Entire 
> movements (‘epistemologies of the South’, ‘decolonising sociology’) rest 
> on the claim that academic sociology’s focus on the modern ‘West’ is 
> itself the problem. The West is asked within its own universities to 
> apologise for its mere existence.
> 
> That the West – an open society based on liberty, the rule of law and 
> human rights – is on the defensive is simply a fact. According to data 
> gathered over decades by the thinktank Freedom House, global freedom 
> declined in 2025 for the 20th consecutive year – deteriorating in 54 
> countries while improving in only 35. The most damning finding is that a 
> mere 21 per cent of the world’s population currently lives in countries 
> classified as ‘free’, compared with 46 per cent two decades ago. The 
> number of countries designated as ‘not free’ has risen over the course 
> of 20 years from 45 to 59, and autocracies have grown more numerous, 
> more repressive at home and more aggressive abroad.
> 
> The West is currently threatened and weakened from both without and 
> within. Its three great external adversaries are China, Russia and 
> Islamism – particularly Iran and its terrorist networks. China, Russia 
> and Islamist dictatorships share a common objective: to divide the West 
> in order to weaken it.
> 
> China is now the world’s second-largest economy. Its goal is to become 
> the leading global economy by 2049 at the latest – the centenary of the 
> People’s Republic. The combination of communist autocracy and turbo- 
> charged state capitalism has proved remarkably effective, not least 
> because the West made itself a useful idiot in this story of growth. In 
> hindsight, admitting China as a full member of the World Trade 
> Organisation in December 2001 was the single greatest blunder of western 
> trade policy. The naivety or shortsightedness lay in granting membership 
> to a major non-democratic state that was neither able nor willing to 
> abide by the rules of free trade – while simultaneously blessing it with 
> developing-nation status, thereby conferring all manner of exemptions 
> and preferences. It was akin to giving the most ruthless bully in the 
> playground special rights to beat up his playmates. It had little to do 
> with fair competition. China was thus able to exploit the principle of 
> free trade to further its rise to global economic prominence. In 2001, 
> China accounted for just 3.9 per cent of global GDP. Twenty years later, 
> that figure was 18.3 per cent. Over the same period, the US share fell 
> from 31.4 per cent to 24.2 per cent, and that of the EU from 21.9 per 
> cent to 17.8 per cent.
> 
> The outcome of this experiment was predictable: in the short term, it 
> brought growth and prosperity to all parties; in the long term, it 
> shifted the global balance of power, creating perilous dependencies in 
> America and Europe. The most tragic example is the German automotive 
> industry. For decades Germany’s industrial giants banked on cheap 
> manufacturing and lucrative consumer markets in China. In doing so, they 
> failed to grasp the difference between good business relations and 
> strategic dependence. Friendly cooperation ended the moment China 
> acquired the requisite know-how to launch a heavily subsidised assault 
> on the German car industry, even as Chinese domestic markets were 
> quietly closed off. A Chinese masterclass in expansive geopolitics 
> carried out by capitalist means. Wandel durch Handel (‘change through 
> trade’) – the naive hope of the 1990s – became distorted. Change 
> occurred, but not towards greater freedom, rather towards greater 
> unfreedom, to the detriment of the West.
> 
> This trajectory is now accelerated by the AI arms race between America 
> and China. The US still holds the upper hand but China, through the 
> surveillance of its population, enjoys vastly greater access to data, 
> unencumbered as it is by regulatory or ethical constraints. Moreover, 
> American platform operators report that China is actively fuelling AI- 
> sceptical sentiment across western social media. Propaganda aimed at 
> inducing anxiety and slowing down rivals is taking its toll. There are 
> growing indications that America is becoming ever-more tech-sceptic and 
> it is not impossible that the next presidential campaign will hinge 
> partly on which party promises to better protect voters from AI. Beijing 
> understands that whoever dominates artificial intelligence will dominate 
> economically and politically. It seems only a matter of time before 
> China leads in this area too.
> 
> While America has recognised this challenge and reacted with varying 
> degrees of success, Europe continues to deny the bitter reality. Beneath 
> the soothing bromides of the EU, the continent is gradually drifting 
> towards becoming an amusement park for Asian tourists, offering high 
> quality of life paired with diminishing productivity and value creation.
> 
> The global trend is clear. Democratic economies are becoming weaker, 
> non-democratic ones stronger. In this significant shift, the 
> implications for military power are routinely underestimated. China is 
> still viewed by many as a militarily passive, purely economic power. 
> That picture is false.
> 
> The Chinese military budget doubled from $145 billion in 2015 to $281 
> billion in 2026 – fuelled by its economic growth. The ultimate test case 
> will be Taiwan. Annexing this democratic, western-leaning island nation 
> and integrating it into a monolithic communist republic is one of Xi 
> Jinping’s central missions. China will strike as soon as the odds are 
> high enough that America lacks the strength to intervene – perhaps 
> because western resources have been depleted across the theatres of 
> conflict in Ukraine and the Middle East. Should China achieve its 
> objective without effective western resistance, the global order will be 
> fundamentally altered.
> 
> Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine plays a remarkably helpful role in this 
> strategy. Even if the war is far from a military success for Putin, he 
> has achieved two vital objectives: dividing the West by driving the US 
> and the EU further apart and exhausting American and European military 
> stockpiles. Yet this war of aggression could have been the West’s finest 
> hour. Putin underestimated Ukrainian resilience; had Nato members and 
> the Ramstein Coalition seized the momentum of those early weeks to 
> provide Ukraine with every conceivable resource to fight back, the 
> domestic political pressure on Putin would have grown so immense that he 
> could have been forced to order a swift retreat under flimsy propaganda 
> pretences. Instead, the West remained half-hearted, allowed itself to be 
> intimidated by flawed escalation scenarios and did too little. Putin – 
> ever the student of western weakness – tested how far he could go, and 
> went remarkably far. Now that Ukraine has proved to be the master of 
> modern AI warfare, Putin is turning to a weaker target in the form of 
> hybrid warfare against Germany and other EU nations which promise less 
> resistance and greater prestige at home.
> 
> Putin finds ready allies in Iran and other Islamist-dominated regimes. 
> Islamism hijacks religion for terrorist ends. The primary enemy of 
> fanatical Islam is the world of those they deem godless – the Judeo- 
> Christian West. Article 7 of the founding Hamas Charter of 1988 
> explicitly states: ‘The Day of Judgement will not come about until 
> Moslems fight the Jews, when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. 
> The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew 
> behind me, come and kill him.’ The destruction of Israel and all Jews is 
> merely the first step. The next is the weakening, infiltration and 
> violent re-education of Europe, and ultimately America. The very same 
> article of the charter notes: ‘Since Moslems who adopt the ways of the 
> Islamic Resistance Movement are spread all over the world… the Movement 
> is a universal one.’ Meeting the Islamist threat with a policy of 
> appeasement is like feeding a crocodile in the hope that it eats you last.
> 
> It remains difficult to fathom that the genocidal attack on Israel by 
> Hamas led not to a global wave of solidarity with Israel, but to a 
> massive surge in anti-Semitism. The weakest justification is the claim 
> that Israel’s retaliatory measures in Gaza after 7 October exceeded all 
> bounds, or that its domestic and foreign policy are deeply questionable. 
> Has the Israeli government made mistakes? Undoubtedly. Is that a reason 
> to be anti-Semitic, transferring criticism of Israel onto all Jews? 
> Absolutely not. Yet the trend persists. Anti-Semitism has become a pop- 
> cultural zeitgeist, particularly among the young. Germany, of all 
> nations, recorded 8,725 anti-Semitic incidents in 2025 – the highest 
> figure among the seven countries examined by the 2026 Annual Report on 
> Antisemitism, ahead of the US (6,274) and the UK (3,700). The trajectory 
> is the key: from 2021 to 2025, incidents rose by 124 per cent in France, 
> 131 per cent in the US, and 215 per cent in Germany.
> 
> The primary cause of this development is a reckless, runaway migration 
> policy. Islamist milieus – including strategically placed jihadists – 
> have spent years undermining western societies and their foundational 
> values. Pointing this out is not Islamophobic. True Islamophobia lies in 
> failing to distinguish between those who wish to integrate peacefully 
> into western societies and those who enter to abuse its systems and 
> destroy its values. Under the guise of compassion and humanitarian 
> relief, uncontrolled and frequently illegal immigration contributes not 
> only to the West’s cultural self-abandonment, but fuels – by way of 
> reaction – the rise of right- and left-wing populism and extremism.
> 
> Michel Houellebecq provided the dystopian vision for this in his 2015 
> novel Submission. He describes a France where the Muslim Brotherhood has 
> taken power: a frightened country where women wear progressively longer 
> dresses and unsuccessful white men rejoice at enjoying multiple 
> marriages with underage wives without interference and where news of 
> Islamist terror attacks is eventually suppressed so as not to alarm the 
> populace. The book depicts the exhaustion of western society. Reality 
> appears to be mimicking fiction in the most gruesome fashion.
> 
> The woke movement has become the Trojan horse of this anti-westernism. 
> It is the epitome of the anti-freedom triangle, seamlessly intertwining 
> anti-Semitism, anti-Americanism and anti-capitalism. It has brought 
> about the inversion of western values with remarkable dexterity. Its 
> stated goals bear the hallmark of good intentions: fighting racism, 
> protecting sexual minorities, fighting climate change, questioning 
> privilege and confronting colonial history. Its methods, however, are 
> overwhelmingly authoritarian. Its self-loathing cultural relativism is 
> toxic. The result is the inversion of almost every core value and 
> objective of civilisation.
> 
> In the competition for victimhood status, the concepts of progress, 
> competition, growth and prosperity have been eroded. In the West, being 
> successful was once better than being unsuccessful. Wealth was better 
> than poverty. Beauty was better than ugliness. Under woke ideology, all 
> of this is reversed. It resembles a manual for western self-abolition, 
> born out of the self-hatred of the privileged.
> 
> Even among America’s ‘Democratic Socialists’ – an offshoot of the woke 
> movement – the strongest support does not come from the needy, the 
> impoverished, or genuine victims. Its most passionate advocates are to 
> be found among the daughters of the upper classes.
> 
> Is the West, rendered comfortable and tired, ultimately weakening itself 
> out of a bad conscience? Will we realise what we stood to lose only once 
> it is too late? Or is the crisis the West currently finds itself in the 
> very stimulus required for its renewal? That would be the best-case 
> scenario: that just in time we finally grasp what is at stake and 
> realise that the alternatives are far worse. Why do we need to 
> strengthen the West? Because otherwise, the tyrants win.
> 
> 
> Mathias Döpfner

stop acting like a victim u joo

-- 
why are we god?
let's end war 🙃