Losing the West (Vic Rosenthal)

Vic Rosenthal's weekly column

Western civilization is going down.

I predict a sudden drop in world population, a result of epidemics, hunger, environmental catastrophes, and perhaps wars, followed by a dark age that may last hundreds or thousands of years.

Although we have the technological tools to deal with epidemics and the ability to suppress the forces that drive us toward chaos, the West does not have the political intelligence or the will to take the appropriate actions.

The United States is going down. Regardless of the outcome of the coming election, the loser will not accept it. Ask yourself: if your candidate loses, will you say to yourself, “well, that’s democracy, you win some and you lose some – now let’s work together to solve the nation’s problems.” I didn’t think so.

So far the markets have been steady. Trouble will come when the big players, the aggressively amoral hedge funds, predict a decline and choose to profit from it. Their actions will turn a gentle decline into a crash that will destroy small businesses and wipe out individual savings. The combination of economic pain, a viral pandemic, and social uprisings – stimulated by psychological warfare waged by America’s external enemies using social media – will be greatly disruptive of the social order (they already are). America’s enemies will also take the opportunity to wage war via ordinary terrorism.

I expect serious infrastructure disruptions, food shortages, and endemic violence. I hope I’m wrong, but I think I’m right.

The elites are at the same time effete and viciously selfish; they will not take action except to secure themselves and their property. I expect some states to secede, and some areas to come under control of warlords, no-go zones to “official” authorities.

Trump has his strong points, but managing complex problems isn’t one of them, nor is developing and keeping a staff competent to do so. His Democratic opposition is increasingly influenced by the party’s left wing, which includes extremists that want to remake America as a socialist state, as well as the very well-financed Obama organization that will almost certainly dominate a Biden Administration if Trump loses.

I think the election will mark the inflection point at which the curve of civilizational decline turns sharply downward. When the US loses its dominant economic and military position, the effects will be felt everywhere. The crisis in the US will begin the sharp acceleration of the decline of the West. The dependence on highly-leveraged technology for basic needs will hasten the decline Think about the consequences if the Internet stops working (yes, I know it’s redundant. But someone needs to maintain the routers and other gear).

Europe is going down. Native Europeans aren’t having children. In order to keep their industries going, their leaders made a deal with the devil by accepting immigrants from Muslim countries who don’t share European values and don’t want to integrate, but rather to take over. There is already a breakdown of law and order as a result. Soon we will see the first oh-so-moderate Muslim prime ministers of Western European countries. After all, it would be islamophobic to vote against someone just because of their “religion.”

Even Israel may be going down. The “government” is incompetent, a collection of parasites feathering their nests at the people’s expense, while they mismanage the response to the Coronavirus pandemic in a way that wrecks the economy without stopping the spread of the virus. I expect that in a matter of weeks the intensive care facilities in the hospitals will be overloaded and people will start to die from lack of care. The few competent politicians – for example, Naftali Bennett – have been marginalized by our paranoid PM. His opposition, blinded by hatred, will do anything to remove him; but they have no coherent plan for what will happen without him. Nobody wants yet another election, but even if we had one, the chances of getting a capable government are small. Every day there are demonstrations in front of the PM’s residence in Jerusalem by the fanatic we-hate-Bibi people. Recently they have become violent when participants block roads and fight with the police.

The Israeli public has totally lost confidence in its “leaders,” and does not follow instructions. The nation and the army are in no condition to respond to an attack by our enemies.

Jew-haters will blame everything on the Jews, as has happened throughout history in bad times. There will certainly be pogroms and expulsions in Europe where the Muslim influence is strong enough; we’ve already seen European cities where it’s become impossible for Jews to live. I expect that Jew-hatred in the US, led by the Farrakhan types on one side and white extremists on the other, will increase. There will probably be areas in America that will no longer be safe for Jews.

How will the Jewish people as a whole fare during the dark age? It will depend on whether Israel can survive. It will not be easy to continue being a “villa in the jungle” when the jungle expands to take in most of the world. In my opinion, the chances are 50-50 or worse. And if there will be no Jewish state to serve as a refuge for those Jews who can no longer remain where there are, and which can maintain Jewish culture when the pressure for diaspora Jews to hide and assimilate becomes insuperable, then it’s doubtful that the Jewish people can survive another forced dispersal.

Survival depends on Israel getting her act together. We don’t have a lot room to fall back, either geographically or economically, so we can’t afford a disaster. And we can’t expect the USA to help us. It will have its own problems – or if the anti-Zionist Obama organization gets control, it may even act against us.

Right now, today, Israel needs to fix the problems in our governance, and our military. We don’t have a lot of time.

Someday, historians will trace the decline. From the “affluenza” of the post-WWII period, the establishment of flawed international institutions, the decline of religion in the West, the increasing bloat of parasitic governments, the flow of wealth to oil-producing countries and their use of this capital to restart the Muslim challenge to the now post-Christian West, the failure of Western educational systems at all levels, the rise of identity politics and the decline of meritocracy, and even the advent of television and now social media.

Whatever. There are plenty of reasons to go around. It is probably too late to do anything now but fasten seat belts and hold on.