Tuesday, March 3, 2015

Overstating the Case for Western European Civilization



One comes across from time to time statements about the greatness of Western Civilization, such as this one:

 . . . Respectable conservatives are too busy being the shadow that follows the continuing leftist revolution that has made holy everything that opposes white, Western, Christian civilization.

Source:  Dr Michael Hill, ‘LS at CPAC’, League of the South, http://leagueofthesouth.com/ls-at-cpac/, posted 27 Feb. 2015, accessed 3 March 2015

Or from Rudy Giuliani:


Or indeed whole books on the subject:


But there are two things that must be kept in mind when evaluating Western culture’s place among the other cultures that have and do now exist:

1.  ‘[W]hite, Western, Christian civilization’ did not spring to life on its own; it only became possible as a result of the True Faith being brought to Western Europe out of love by the ‘dark-skinned’ people of Palestine, Syria, and North Africa.

2.  The peoples of Western Europe were not faithful to the Ancient Faith of Christ and His Holy Apostles that was preached to them and accepted by their forefathers of earlier centuries.  They instead mingled it with humanism.  This was done first by the Pope of Rome at the time of the Great Schism of 1054 A. D. (though there were other important developments in this regard before this date) who banished Christ as Head of His Church on earth, thus making Christianity a product of the Pope’s merely human will.  Later this error took root among all Western Christians by the work of the Protestant reformers: Christianity for Protestants is defined by the conviction of each individual believer. 

It should therefore be no surprise that indifference and now hostility towards þe thought of eternal, unchanging Truth should infect more and more people of Western Europe and her children (including the South), as Roman Catholics and Protestants continue to squabble over which doctrines are true and which false.

Þe faithful weard of Christianity has not, withal, been Western Europe but ræðer Eastern Europe (Hungary, Serbia, etc.), Russia, and parts of the Middle East and Africa.

Father Andrew Phillips, Orthodox priest in England, wrote a fitting rebuke for those Westerners who think too highly of themselves and the things they have made, who follow not the law of love, and are bereft of humility:

 . . .

The history of Western hypocrisy stretches back into the millennial past and even beyond. Europe, and later its settlements around the world, was built on the systemic violence which started with Charlemagne, called ‘the Father of Europe’, on massacres, invasions, ‘crusades’, inquisitions, persecutions, burnings and feudal wars, on the systemic killing, enslaving and looting of the peoples of the planet, from Saxony to England, from Jerusalem to Constantinople, from the Americas to Asia, from Australasia to Africa. Gold and slaves were taken in the name of the idol of ‘progress’, concentration camps (‘reservations’ and ‘detention camps’) set up in a process called ‘spreading Western civilization’, the price of which is a billion Western and Westernized prosperous consumerists, a billion modest, three billion poor, three billion desperately poor and a planet on the verge of ecological catastrophe.

The history of Western hypocrisy goes back then to that point in history when the elite of the peripheral Western European provinces arrogantly appointed itself as the centre of the world, usurping even the authority of God through its new ideology called the ‘filioque’. This asserts that all the power and authority of God (‘shock and awe’) comes from fallen human nature, which takes the place of God and, worshipping itself, calls itself ‘humanism’ and ‘rationalism’. Thus, the elite then usurped the legitimate Christian Empire, making the pagan vestiges of Old Rome into its model and plundering the Christian capital in New Rome with its barbaric, military might. Today this is still apparent when Western people refuse to become Christians, that is, refuse to join the Orthodox Church, because they prefer their ‘Judeo-Christian’ (deformed Christian) culture, for they put their culture before the Church.

Western culture is then filioquized, that is, it claims the supreme authority of God for the fallen human nature of the Western and Westernized (‘filioquized’), thus idolizing and absolutizing that nature. Hypocritically, Western culture claims to be multicultural. It is not. It is strictly monocultural. Its cultural arrogance, utter intolerance and blasphemous disrespect are breath-taking. Only when any religious belief is reduced to folklore or psychopathological schism, degutted and castrated, is it acceptable to the West. Any, including perhaps especially Western people, who seriously reject and challenge Western atheism in favour of authentic and consistent Christian beliefs, are ostracized, mocked, despised, condemned as ‘eccentric’, ‘backward’ or ‘retarded’ and their faith blasphemed. The West may be at the very centre of apostasy, but spiritually it is hopelessly provincial, as it always has been.

This is why, like its model, the pagan Roman Empire, the egocentric and formerly ethnocentric modern West lives in moral degradation amid suicidal depopulation, too selfish even to reproduce, relying on cheap immigrant labour to function. This is the grave that Western ‘civilization’, with its aggressive atheism, has dug for itself. The only Christian alternative to Western totalitarian disrespect for spiritual belief is centred in Russia, at the heart of Christian civilization. Viciously attacked by Western materialism and atheism in 1917 and left for dead, it has risen from the tomb. Although it is now facing a new propaganda onslaught from the atheist West, which is also arming the Nazis in Kiev, its new Vietnam, it is the only strong centre of faith in the Risen Saviour, around which the last spiritually healthy forces of Europe and of the world can gather as the storm clouds of 2015 loom.

Source:  ‘The Origin of Western Hypocrisy’, Orthodox England events ‘blog, http://www.events.orthodoxengland.org.uk/the-origin-of-western-hypocrisy/ , posted 15 Jan. 2015, accessed 3 March 2015. 

(For further thoughts on this subject, the reader is invited to read this essay, also by Fr Andrew, ‘Why Does the Western Elite Want to Destroy Russia?’  http://www.events.orthodoxengland.org.uk/why-does-the-western-elite-want-to-destroy-russia/)

Instead of the pride of Rudy Giuliani, Rodney Stark, and others, let there be repentance in the West and a return to the Ancient Orthodox Faith of our forefathers.

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