Re: There’s still time to save the West

On 8/21/26 8:49 AM, Dude wrote:
> On 8/20/2026 5:19 PM, dart200 wrote:
>> 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
>>
> Let's not get personal, Nick. You should stop being a racist religious 
> bigot hypocritical crude conspiracy nut. Go!

who u calling a racist religion bigot u joo nigger?

-- 
hi, i'm nick!
let's end war 🙃