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The thinnest veneer of civilization

General Ideas

Civilization is fragile. It hinges on ensuring the stuff of life.

To be able to eat, to move about, to have shelter, to be free from state or tribal coercion, to be secure abroad, and safe at home – only that allows cultures to be freed from the daily drudgery of mere survival.

Civilization alone permits humans to pursue sophisticated scientific research, the arts, and the finer aspects of culture.

So, the great achievement of Western civilization – consensual government, individual freedom, rationalism in partnership with religious belief, free market economics, and constant self-critique and audit – was to liberate people from daily worry over state violence, random crime, famine, and an often-unforgiving nature.

But so often the resulting leisure and affluence instead deluded arrogant Western societies into thinking that modern man no longer needed to worry about the fruits of civilization he took to be his elemental birthright.

As a result, the once prosperous Greek city-state, Roman Empire, Renaissance republics, and European democracies of the 1930s imploded – as civilization went headlong in reverse.

We in the modern Western world are now facing just such a crisis.

We talk grandly about the globalized Great Reset. We blindly accept the faddish New Green Deal. We virtue signal about defunding the police. We merely shrug at open borders. And we brag about banning fertilizers and pesticides, outlawing the internal combustion engine, and discounting Armageddon in the nuclear age – as if on autopilot we have already reached utopia.

But meanwhile Westerners are systematically destroying the very elements of our civilization that permitted such fantasies in the first place.

Take fuel. Europeans arrogantly lectured the world that they no longer need traditional fuels. So, they shut down nuclear power plants. They stopped drilling for oil and gas. And they banned coal.

What followed was a dystopian nightmare. Europeans will burn dirty wood this winter as their civilization reverts from postmodern abundance to premodern survival.

The Biden Administration ossified oil fields. It canceled new federal oil and gas leases. It stopped pipeline construction and hectored investors to shun fossil fuels.

When scarcity naturally followed, fuel prices soared.

The middle class has now mortgaged its upward mobility to ensure that they might afford gasoline, heating oil and skyrocketing electricity.

The duty of the Pentagon is to keep America safe by deterring enemies, reassuring allies and winning over neutrals.

It is not to hector soldiers based on their race. It is not to indoctrinate recruits in the woke agenda. It is not to become a partisan political force.

The result of those suicidal Pentagon detours is the fiasco in Afghanistan, the aggression of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, the new bellicosity of China, and the loud threats of rogue regimes like Iran.

At home, the Biden Administration inexplicably destroyed the southern border, as if civilized nations of the past never needed such boundaries.

Utter chaos followed. Three million migrants have poured into the United States. While some cross over clandestinely, others clear border stations without an adequate audit, and largely without skills, high-school diplomas or capital.

The streets of our cities are anarchical – and by intent.

Defunding the police, emptying the jails and destroying the criminal justice system unleashed a wave of criminals. It is now open season on the weak and innocent.

America is racing backwards into the 19th-century Wild West. Predators maim, kill, and rob with impunity. Felons correctly conclude that bankrupt postmodern “critical legal theory” will ensure them exemption from punishment.

Few Americans know anything about agriculture, except to expect limitless supplies of inexpensive, safe and nutritious food at their beck and call.

But that entitlement for 330 million hungry mouths requires massive water projects, and new dams and reservoirs. Farmers rely on steady supplies of fertilizer, fuels and chemicals. Take away that support – as green nihilists are attempting – and millions will soon go hungry, as they have since the dawn of civilization.

Perhaps nearly a million homeless now live on the streets of America. Our major cities have turned medieval with their open sewers, garbage-strewn sidewalks and violent vagrants.

So, we are in a great experiment in which regressive progressivism discounts all the institutions, and the methodologies of the past that have guaranteed a safe, affluent, well-fed and sheltered America.

Instead, we arrogantly are reverting to a new feudalism as the wealthy elite – terrified of what they have wrought – selfishly retreat to their private keeps.

But the rest who suffer the consequences of elite flirtations with nihilism cannot even afford food, shelter and fuel. And they now feel unsafe, both as individuals and as Americans.

As we suffer self-inflicted mass looting, random street violence, hyperinflation, a nonexistent border, unaffordable fuel and a collapsing military, Americans will come to appreciate just how thin is the veneer of their civilization.

When stripped away, we are relearning that what lies just beneath is utterly terrifying.

Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness. He is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author of “The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won,” from Basic Books. You can reach him by e-mailing authorvdh@gmail.com



25 Comments on "The thinnest veneer of civilization"

  1. makati1 on Sat, 8th Oct 2022 4:17 pm 

    “What goes around , comes around.”

    “Blow-back is a bitch.”

    “As ye sow, so shall ye reap.”

    Amerika is now reaping the seeds of war and destruction they have sown over the years. Maybe bombs will never fall on Amerikan cities, but there are other ways to destroy a country. It is happening now to brainwashed, dumbed down, druggie, obese, Amerika. So be it. Well deserved.

  2. Theedrich on Sun, 9th Oct 2022 1:08 am 

    Everyone knows Biden is the NS pipelines fiend. The U.S. considers Germany its vassal — or rather, its slave.  The servility of German leaders to the United States crime syndicate is nauseating, and is now leading to the complete collapse of Germany, with France and the rest of Europe to fall in short order.

    Every sentient being also knows that the U.S., according to The Intercept at https://theintercept.com/2022/10/05/russia-ukraine-putin-cia/, “Secret U.S. operations inside Ukraine are being conducted under a presidential covert action finding,” that American troops have long been fighting in Ukraine.  When asked about this by reporters, Biden literally — literally — walked backwards grinning maliciously and left them ASAP.  So, another lie from the criminal on the throne.  Under a “covert action finding” the U.S. can commit any crime, and the complicit mainstream media will cover it up until it’s too late to do anything about it.

    American mainstream media, plus the social media (Facebook, etc.), specialize in mendacity.  They blame Putin for Biden’s crimes, they distort, ignore and mask the war crimes committed by the Zelenskyy regime in Ukraine against the Russian population.  And they do everything possible to generate hatred against Russia in the American population and Russia itself.  Now that Biden has floated the idea of “Armageddon” at a Democrat funding party, Zelensktyy’s call for a “preemptive” nuclear strike on Russia becomes all the more ominous.

    Perhaps Biden thinks that World War Three will help him and his party win the forthcoming elections.  The Germans could start to save themselves by first canceling the contract with the U.S. for maintaining the Ramstein airbase on their territory and throw the U.S. out, and, secondly, they could quickly halt all shipments of anything to Ukraine and resume negotiations with Russia.  Otherwise their future will be grim indeed.

    𝖁𝖊𝖗𝖎𝖙𝖆𝖘 𝖑𝖎𝖇𝖊𝖗𝖆𝖇𝖎𝖙 𝖛𝖔𝖘.

  3. Biden’s hairplug on Sun, 9th Oct 2022 1:42 am 

    The US did a sloppy job on destroying NS, one NS2 pipe is still functioning and Gazprom is willing to deliver. The German street could force its government to jump over its own shaddow, prompting the US natural born helper thuggs UK and Poland to threathen Germany. France would play a key role in such a standoff.

    We are living in the last days of empire.

    Difficult to see how the US can organize an orderly elections next month, with the result generally accepted.

    Meanwhile, China, the laughing third, is keeping its powder dry. Like America in 1944, China will enter the war last, with corresponding results.

    As I have said here since 2014:

    France and Germany will turn to Moscow.
    China will kick AUKUS out of East-Asia.
    This will prompt CW2 in North-America.
    WW3 will end on North-American soil, with European, Russian, UK and Chinese troops fighting for new spheres of influence.
    Anglosphere/Five Eyes will cease to exist.
    Exit Jews from history.

  4. Duncan Idaho on Sun, 9th Oct 2022 10:03 am 

    If only Biden has licked Putin’s boots like Trump did

    https://digbysblog.net/2022/10/08/if-only-biden-has-licked-putins-boots-like-trump-did/

    Would be hard to do– the Fat Boy is an expert.

  5. FamousDrScanlon on Sun, 9th Oct 2022 1:39 pm 

    “There are 17,985 police agencies in the United States which include city police departments, county sheriff’s offices, state troopers, and federal law enforcement agencies.”

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_enforcement_in_the_United_States

    Do the libtards have to wave their magic cancellation wand 17,985 times or just once really hard to defund the police?

    VDH is another sad, paranoid and deluded Boomer who has lost his shit and is frightened of a world that has passed him by 20 years ago.

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    “Civilization alone permits humans to pursue sophisticated scientific research, the arts, and the finer aspects of culture.”

    Such as growing brains in mice to “fight” Toxo (Small Brains Considered – 9)?

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