Part of the answer lies here: Don't Converge the Streams. The essence of the idea is that modern times saw the convergence of some uniquely toxic ideas and memes. Taken together, that convergence gave those who who are driven by the will to power the environment (in all respects), the ideas and the means to embark on the road to slaughter, ruin and atrocity - and I say that it is slaughter, ruin and atrocity for its own sake - beyond anything the world had seen. And, it continues unabated to this day. Somewhere, everywhere.
That's only part of the answer. Power's tough for some to resist. The power to harm others without consequence is more intoxicating than any drug to a particularly evil subset of humanity. The are other convergent factors that have combined to make modernity, for all of our technology and vaunted sophistication, one of the most barbaric episodes in human history. Consider Quigley's Pakistani-Peruvian Axis in the light of those convergent factors. I'm exploring another 'axis' - what I'm calling for now, the Scandinavian-Slavic axis. Loosely rendered, the Scandinavian-Slavic axis is composed of he following elements. First, the two-class warrior culture of the Vikings, who dominated far more of the post-Roman world than most people realize. The Vikings eventually came to conquer and to dominate the pastoral Slavs with their two-class (conqueror and conquered) militaristic culture. The combined nascent culture greatly admired and were dazzled by the power and the relative prosperity of the extant Byzantine culture, who in turn got their notions of totalitarianism from the old Roman Empire.
Byzantine Christianity also took a very different path with respect to its outlook - amounting to a Platonic view of Man and his place in the universe vs the more Aristotelian view.
The upshot is that the Western Christian outlook - so eloquently summarized by Quigley - never took hold in that part of the world. The outlook that eventually developed was totalitarian in the sense that the state essentially owned its subjects, nihilist in the sense that the world was viewed as an un-knowable and corrupt place and that death was the only respite from an evil existence, and that the core essence of Teutonic tribalism in all of its arrogance, savagery and lack of regard for human life never went away - it merely submerged itself in Teutonic sensibility until it was awakened by the monsters of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Beaten into submission in WW II, it still exists today.
Also recall that the Byzantine Empire eventually fell to one just as cruel and sadistic in its outlook (if not more so) - Islam.
That severing of the Byzantine connection left us with what I’m calling the Scandinavian-Slavic axis. It’s funny, isn't it, what happens to your outlook when you start looking at human history in terms of culture and ideas AND events rather than the conventional “one damn thing after another” event-only approach. Because “one damn thing after another” - a series of empty correlations - is all one can come up with absent an acknowledgement of the roles of culture and outlook - as embodied by those two great currents of human culture, custom and outlook.
Against those currents, we here in America stand very much alone.
Excellent thoughts, well-presented. Please do add me to any list you might have so I can be notified when your book comes out. I'd love to read it.
Our dit name is Poitiers: generation upon generation upon generation of small-time farmers, laborers, and people of no historical consequence whatsoever . . . but people who lived in the grand Acadian tradition of do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Our USA branch started in the 1920s.
Can you elaborate on this?