Re: There’s still time to save the West

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!