Free Republic

Full headline: Are America and the West headed toward collapse? New study finds startling similarities to fall of past civilizationsPredictions of America’s doom and gloom ahead are nothing new, as it’s always easier for us to see the glass as half-empty rather than half-full. So it’s not surprising that a new study has made a similar ‘prediction.’ But unlike many past analyses, a new look at an old study by historian Arnold Toynbee in his 12-volume magnum opus “A Study of History” examined his findings and identified key elements within each past great civilization that explained why they collapsed. In...

Western culture, sometimes equated with Western civilization, Occidental culture, the Western world, Western society, and European civilization, is a term used very broadly to refer to a heritage of social norms, ethical values, traditional customs, belief systems, political systems and specific artifacts and technologies that have some origin or association with Europe. The term also applies beyond Europe to countries and cultures whose histories are strongly connected to Europe by immigration, colonization, or influence. For example, Western culture includes countries in the Americas and Australasia, whose language and demographic ethnicity majorities are European. The development of western culture has been...

Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) on Monday denounced GOP leaders' move to remove him from all committee assignments, calling it a "political decision that ignores the truth." “[House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s (R-Calif.)] decision to remove me from committees is a political decision that ignores the truth," King said in a statement shortly after McCarthy told reporters that the Iowa congressman would not receive any committee assignments in the new Congress. King was previously a member of the House Judiciary, Agriculture and Small Business committees. He had also served as chairman of a House Judiciary subcommittee on the Constitution and...

In 1903, during America’s darkest period of hate, W. E. B. Du Bois heartbreakingly affirmed his intellectual affinity with Western civilization. “I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas,” Du Bois wrote in “The Souls of Black Folk.” “I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension.” Half a century earlier, Frederick Douglass had paid tribute to the 18th-century British orators whom, at age 12, he had discovered in a collection of political speeches. “Every opportunity...

Every time I see another disparagement of American history and American white males, I am poked to compose a list of their accomplishments that put everyone on the left to shame. The left's contempt for America is total – suggesting that leftists see nothing redeeming in who we are. This list should be burned into our memory to counter the left's fifty-year slander of American history. The advances on this list are the result of a unique degree of freedom blended with the Founders' exceptional knowledge of history that created a trickle-down effect in moral influence that no one can...

In the early years, when he was still a secessionist who believed northern Italy should break off and become an independent state called Padania, Matteo Salvini held his fellow countrymen in such contempt that he even supported Germany over Italy in the 2006 World Cup. “Italy ... is the worst of the worst,” he said at the time. “My support goes to anyone who is more serious.” Today, the 45-year-old has adopted “Italians first” as a political ideology and is in many ways the European leader who most resembles Donald Trump, from his embrace of impulsive and often racist rhetoric,...

Close your eyes and imagine holding someone’s scalp in your hands. I don’t mean cradling his skull as you thousand-yard-stare at his lifeless face. I mean a real scalp, Indian-style, of some enemy you just killed on the battlefield; somebody you hated and who hated you back. You killed him, won the day, carved off the top of his skull, and now you’re standing over him victorious on the now-quiet field of battle, with a quiet breeze blowing through your hair. Your adrenaline is still pumping with that primal feeling of victory and the elation of having survived when others...

“If you’re … pathetically weak, the country is going to be overrun with millions of people, and if you’re strong, then you don’t have any heart, that’s a tough dilemma. … I’d rather be strong.” So said President Donald Trump, on issuing his order halting the separation of children from parents caught breaking into the country. Trump’s enemies are celebrating a victory. Yet the issue remains. Under U.S. law, teenagers and tots cannot be detained for more than 20 days and must be held in the least-restrictive facilities. But if the children cannot be separated from the parents as they...

The 21st century is reminding of us of some uncomfortable truths. Abroad, recent controversies over the rise of Chinese mercantilism, the specter of Iranian and North Korean nuclear weapons, tensions in the European Union, the calcified Palestinian question, mass migrations, and the resurgence of Islamic terrorism all offer a number of lessons. At home, just as instructive is the strange juxtaposition between Obama’s suave progressivism and Trump’s coarse conservatism. Here are 10 takeaways from our current controversies. The Western world is in turmoil largely because of the widening gap between what the people see as true and the “truth” that...

Raymond Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.PJ Media. What role if any did Islam play in shaping Europe’s identity, both in the past and the present? Akbar Ahmed, Chair of Islamic Studies at American University, Washington, DC, and author of the new book, Journey into Europe: Islam, Immigration, and Identity, claims that Islam had a largely positive impact on Europe’s identity (including by invoking the Myth of the Andalusian Paradise). Thus, any European suspicion or rejection of Muslim migrants is wholly unwarranted.  As Ahmed elaborates in a recent article: To understand what is happening...

MORRISSEY has slammed London Mayor Sadiq Khan following the rise of violent attacks recorded in the capital saying London is “second only to Bangladesh” and claimed Mr Khan “cannot talk properly”.The former Smiths frontman lashed out at the Mayor of London in an interview discussing his views on racism, violence and the capital. And Morrissey stated that London “is debased” and that “civilisation is over”. Going on a rampage against Mr Khan, he added: “The Mayor of London tells us about ‘Neighborhood policin’ - what is ‘policin’? “He tells us London is an ‘amazin’ city. What is ‘amazin’? This is...

A soon-to-be-released updated edition of an Advanced Placement (AP) U.S. History textbook teaches students that white Christian Americans are finding it “difficult to adjust” to becoming a minority and puts forward the perception that President Donald Trump’s election occurred because his apparent “racism connected with a significant number of primary voters.” James Fraser’s By the People: A History of the United States, 2ndEdition, is published by Pearson and has a 2019 copyright date. Alex Clark – co-host of the Indiana-based morning radio Joe and Alex Show– tweeted photos of the cover and several pages of the book that she reports...

Remarks by French President Emmanuel Macron that he wanted to repair church-state ties caused uproar Tuesday, sparking charges he was tampering with France’s longstanding secular tradition. The Church and the state were for centuries virtually indistinguishable in France, but the 1789 Revolution marked the first step by republicans to exclude religion from government affairs, codified in a 1905 law separating the two. But tensions have persisted, with conservative politicians often accusing officials of denying France’s cultural heritage — as seen in efforts to install nativity scenes at town halls during Christmas. Macron, who prides himself on tackling difficult issues head-on,...

Today, the Stalinists in Russia are enjoying their greatest heyday since 1953. And the West doesn't understand nor want to admit it. The Kremlin’s strategy toward the West has been in place for some time and is based on a vision of Russia as a great power in the Stalinist style for namely under him, the country experienced the peak of "great power" status..." Stalin, who in their estimation, ‘saved Western civilization from Nazism/fascism.” The only difference is that Stalin strove to Sovietize Western countries while Putin and company seek the fundamental weakening of the West, Western institutions, and the...

Probably one of the most lucid articles on the takeover by Muslims (Moslims) in the West. I recommend it: Why are so many Western Christians either silent about, or actually complicit in, the Muslim hegira to the West? One would think Christians would be at the forefront of opposition. Some are, but most are not, and these latter include Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Lutherans, mainline “Protestants,” and evangelicals in America. These churches have made four claims... ...Samuel Huntington, too, understood this. In his Clash of Civilizations (1996) he wrote, “The underlying problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism but Islam,...

As history demonstrates, in France as elsewhere, the Church is always rising from the dead because the gates of Hell cannot prevail against her... It’s not that secularism is dead...It isn’t (like the poor it is always with us). It is simply that it does not have the power to defeat the forces of Christendom... “A few years ago,” Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, “I started to realize something. Whenever I was less than five minutes early for Mass, I had to go to the overflow room, and I would typically have to step over people sitting on the floor to get there....

Since at least the 1960s – swathes of the Western world have witnessed unprecedented religious change and (for the most part) decline. We have simultaneously witnessed a series of social and cultural revolutions, most recently the technological and media revolution driven by the internet. That alone has profoundly changed the way people think and act... This “new evangelisation” requires that we (and I mean all Christians) are embarking on a centuries-long endeavour. And given this, we need to approach it in the right frame of mind, fortified with a spirituality of patience and perseverance. While we tend to think of...

The Shock of America is based on the proposition that whenever Europeans of the last 100 years or more contemplated those margins of their experience where change occurred, there, sooner or later, they would find America. How Europeans have come to terms over the decades with this dynamic force in their midst, and what these terms were, is the story at the heart of this text. Masses of Europeans have been enthralled by the real or imaginary prospects coming out of the USA. Inspiration, provocation, myth, menace, model: all these categories and many more have been deployed to try to...

Our adversaries are doomed because we will never forget who we are. And if we don’t forget who are, we just can’t be beaten. The Polish martyr, Bishop Michael Kozal, said it well: “More horrifying than a defeat of arms is a collapse of the human spirit.” Through four decades of communist rule, Poland and the other captive nations of Europe endured a brutal campaign to demolish freedom, your faith, your laws, your history, your identity — indeed the very essence of your culture and your humanity. Yet, through it all, you never lost that spirit. Your oppressors tried to...

Three weeks after college, I flew to Senegal, West Africa, to run a community center in a rural town. Life was placid, with no danger, except to your health. That danger was considerable, because it was, in the words of the Peace Corps doctor, "a fecalized environment." In plain English: s--- is everywhere. People defecate on the open ground, and the feces is blown with the dust – onto you, your clothes, your food, the water. ... Never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined that a few decades later, liberals would be pushing the lie that Western civilization...