Terror in the hearts of their enemies was why there were so many routs during the Muslim conquests."

Ibn Khaldun

 

Brussels, the capital of the European Union advertises itself as the heart of Europe. That city is dirty, neglected and its street corners are guarded by soldiers and policemen armed to their teeth. When we arrived rather exhausted in June 2017 in our hotel, the bar was closed and we could not call a taxi. In the heart of Europe it was Ramadan and the Muslim 70 per cent of the taxi drivers were still out of service in the evening and already out of service in the morning.

Depending as it was on Muslims, the heart of Europe was a disheartening site in 2017. The shadow of terror threat was omnipresent. Fear and military presence that have been unknown in our happier half of Europe for decades have become part of everyday life there.

Europe as we knew it when we used to stroll through its cities as tourists with our meagre currency allowances does not exist anymore. The „advanced West” we desperately used to long for has been given its eight count. And they know that. They even know more than that. They start beginning to learn the lesson that no terror act can save us from the next one. That is they have to realise that they cannot feel safe any longer. They also know or at least they feel that they have reached a crossroads. The period between World War II and the financial crunch of 2008 is irrevocably over. A new century, a new epoch, and a new era are underway. New directions would be needed; new ideas, a new vision. But there are no new thoughts, no new projects, nor is there any sense of purpose around. There is resignation coupled with increasingly unmistakable hopelessness instead.

The leading positions in Western Europe are filled with people who are unable to part with the illusion of still living in the late 20th century when they could lead careless, affluent and confident lives. They delude themselves believing to be able to smoothly transfer all that into the new 21st century. But as Karl Lagerfeld told us, yesterday’s successes are not creditworthy; nobody cares for yesterday’s collections. What is true in the fashion industry is also true in politics. All is moving on the Western front, I wrote four years ago. Now would say: all is different on the Western front.

 

The world of the people of the West with its values, its language and its points of reference are those of an endangered species which is forced to accept norms and forms of behaviour which make no sense to them and which make them gradually lose their sense of homeliness. In the implacable culture wars we witness day by day, values that used to be considered vital in the 20th century, like patriotism or free speech and free press are being annihilated, while popular sovereignty is being overwritten by the unfettered self-assertion of globalised elites. Censorship is gaining ground; Facebook has been ordered to be filtered; safe spaces are spreading; hate speech has become a criminal offence and is, not unexpectedly, expanding to new and new areas. Traditional political parties have been tagged closed for refurbishment; very civic organisations who intend to control everything but are reluctant to be controlled themselves claim to be the representatives of the interests of the electorate. Public speech has been paralysed by their politically correct canon and is now gasping for oxygen. This is why there are no new ideas, while new and new gadgets abound.

 

 The effects of the culture wars

 

„Of all our institutions, public education is the most important. Everything depends on it, the present and the future."

Napoleon

 

Our days are submerged under intellectual terrorism. Not one segment of our lives is being spared. Hatred bombs are being thrown at our faith, while a frontal offensive has been launched against our system of values. Nation states and Christianity are in the crosshairs. History is not being taught in many schools in the West, which has made entire generations uprooted and nationless. Group identities are being offered as surrogates of national identity, with the result of our sense of community and of belonging to one nation and one community is being shattered. They want to deprive us of our language in order to make it impossible for us to describe reality and experience. Our free speech is being limited; artificial genders are being introduced and enforced by criminal legislation (see Canada,6/24/2017); and the next generation is doomed to be educated without a precise gender identity. The authorities recognised by society are being destroyed in order to erase from the national past everything that could serve as a reference and inspire pride for the new generations. A wave of statues being pulled down and institutions being renamed is swirling through the Anglo-Saxon world; debates and free thought have disappeared from the universities just like it had happened over here during the glorious days of Communism in the mid last century. All this further aggravates the already existing crisis of orientation. People are deprived of their traditions, roots, faiths, systems of values in order to be made apt to play the role of ethnically mixed and fully automated consumer subjects in the brave new world planned by progressives. We know that recipe very well, having been through a period as test subjects of a similar utopian project. Its failure prompted to present day utopians that they should be more indirect and manipulative in their procedures. But their aims and methods are the same, with the only difference that they claim to be the representatives of human rights rather than of the proletariat. They want those rights to be perceived as universal, but interpreted as being available to everyone except if being used against progress in which case legal deprivation and severe sanctions must follow.

In addition to the battles having been waged by the cultural warriors of the 20th century, the culture wars now extend to brand-new fronts as well. Branding opponents Nazis has been common practice by leftists since the first half of the 20th century. Here is what the 1943 guidelines of the Central Committee of the Communist (Bolshevik) Party of the Soviet Union teach us on that matter: „Party members and frontline organisations must never cease shaming and discrediting our critics. If they make too much fuss they must be branded as fascists, Nazis or anti-Semites. … All these, if being sufficiently repeated, will become facts in the eyes of the public.”