The Decline and Fall of Civilisations

by Kerry Bolton

  The Meiji regime sought to change the traditional social structure. Although there was a move towards democratisation, the aim was to establish the Emperor as the axis of Japan, and to restore Shinto as the focus of belief. However, the foreign influences increased. The Tokugawa hierarchy of samurai, farmer, artisan, and merchant was abolished by 1871.235 The samurai ethos continued to be undermined, with many becoming merchants and bureaucrats. Feudal land was replaced by market capitalism. Taxes were paid with cash rather than in kind. Industrialisation proceeded from the 1870s. “The Meiji leaders also modernized foreign policy, an important step in making Japan a full member of the international community”.236 Despite constitutional changes, and parliamentary government, with increasing party influence, the Japanese eschewed both Westminster and U.S. constitutional systems, maintaining a very limited franchise. The Emperor remained the ultimate authority.

  The Meiji constitution remained in force until 1947,237 then democratisation was imposed by the occupying powers. As in Germany, the ruling strata of several hundred thousand were purged and 700 were executed. “State Shinto was disestablished”, and Hirohito was obliged to repudiate the divine status of the Emperor.238

  Despite the foreign imposition of the post-1945 epoch the great strength of the Japanese continues to be their concept of social relations based on traditional religions of Shinto and Zen Buddhism. “Harmony, order, and self-development are three of the most important values that underlie Japanese social interaction”.239. The individual is a constituent part of a social organism.

  “Japanese children learn from their earliest days that human fulfilment comes from close association with others. Children learn early to recognize that they are part of an interdependent society, beginning in the family and later extending to larger groups such as neighbourhood, school, community, and workplace. Dependence on others is a natural part of the human condition; it is viewed negatively only when the social obligations it creates are too onerous to fulfil”.240

  Despite superficial appearances, the Western Liberalism that sanctifies individualism and the Free Market has been rejected and the social organism maintained. Hierarchy also remains strong; based on Confucianism, which maintains the social organism.

  “Confucianism emphasizes harmony among heaven, nature, and human society achieved through each person’s accepting his or her social role and contributing to the social order by proper behavior. An often quoted phrase from the Confucian essay Da Xue (The Great Learning) explains, ‘Their persons being cultivated, their families were regulated. Their families being regulated, their states were rightly governed. Their states being rightly governed, the whole kingdom was made tranquil and happy’”.241

  “This view implies that hierarchy is natural”;242 that is to say, it is an organic view of society.

  How much longer Japan can be maintained as one of the few remaining traditional societies is problematic, given that it is a culture within the orbit of the decaying West, and particularly with its role in globalisation. Any other people-culture-nation-state would have succumbed within a few years of enforced democratisation, pacifism, equality, and market-economics. Religion, Emperor and Family remain the foundations that have allowed Japan to endure. The Japanese have a unique quality of being able to synthesise what is useful from other cultures into their own without infecting their culture-soul. This is not proof for “enrichment” through “multiculturalism”. To the contrary, there has been nothing “multicultural” about Japan. The Japanese have amalgamated aspects of other cultures into their own on their terms. Amaury de Riencourt, an expert on Asia who, like Spengler, wrote of history as organic, stated of this process:

  “For more than a thousand years, every element of Chinese Civilisation seeped into Japan, and yet the Japanese character remained unimpaired in its essence. What the Japanese did later on with Western Civilisation they did at this early stage with Chinese forms and ideas, and in such a way that other people known to history have ever been able to adapt themselves so promptly and readily without at the same time destroying their own personality.

  “The essence of their peculiar character was already well shaped in these early days and it has not changed since. The Japanese were and are neither creators nor imitators but exploiters and adapters”.243

  The Japanese “enters into organic relations” with an alien culture form through an “instinctive but always creative metamorphosis”. The Japanese were able to adopt Chinese forms, “yet preserve their inner, instinctive self…”244 A most eminent teacher of Zen Buddhism, D. T. Suzuki, explained how Japan had been able to absorb foreign elements, to enable the strengthening of the Japanese culture:

  “Zen typifies Japanese spirituality. This does not mean Zen has deep roots within the life of the Japanese people, rather that Japanese life itself is ‘Zen-like.’ The importation of Zen provided the opportunity for Japanese spirituality to ignite, yet the constituents themselves which were to ignite were fully primed at that time. Zen arrived in Japan riding the wave of Chinese thought, literature, and art, but Japanese spirituality was by no means seduced by these trappings. It was nothing like the entrance of Buddhist literature and thought that took place during the Nara period (646-794). The Buddhism of the Nara and Heian [794-1185] periods was merely tied conceptually to the life of the upper classes, whereas Zen put down its roots in the midst of the life of the Japanese samurai. It was cultivated and it budded in that which existed at the depths of the samurai’s seishin. These buds were not foreign clippings but developed from the very life of the Japanese warrior. I said it put down roots, but that is not quite the correct expression. It would be better to say that spirituality of the samurai was on the verge of breaking through to the surface, and that Zen removed all the obstacles from its path… Thereupon, although the Zen Sect of Japan was content to allow the supremacy of Chinese literature, the Zen life of the Japanese came to full flower in Japanese spirituality”.245

  With the militarily defeat, foreign elements were imposed on Japan, not absorbed and harmonised. A dichotomy is at work which is coming into ever sharper focus. The Japanese character of thoroughness has combined with Faustian technics, and the Japanese ethos of “harmony” has been lost. As in China, Faustian technics is destroying the land, and in so doing the soul of Japan. Japanese thoroughness and efficiency is pushing society into a faster rate of destruction than even that of the West. The particularly insightful Japanologist, Alex Kerr, has written of the destructive process:

  “Writers on Japan today mostly concern themselves with its banks and export manufacturing. But in the greater scheme of things, for a wealthy nation does it really matter so much if its GNP drops a few percentage points or the banks falter for a few years? The Tang dynasty poet Du Fu wrote, ‘Though the nation perishes, the mountains and rivers remain.’ Long before Japan had banks, there existed a green archipelago of a thousand islands, where clear mountain springs tumbled over mossy stones and waves crashed along coves and peninsulas lined with fantastic rocks. Such were the themes treasured … in everything that defined Japan’s traditional culture. Reverence for the land lies at the very core of Shintoism, the native religion, which holds that Japan’s mountains, rivers, and trees are sacred, the dwelling place of gods. So in taking stock of where Japan is today, it is good to set economics aside for a moment and take a look at the land itself.

  When we do, we see this: Japan has become arguably the world’s ugliest country. … the native forest cover has been clear-cut and replaced by industrial cedar, rivers are dammed and the seashore lined with cement, hills have been leveled to provide gravel fill for bays and harbors, mountains are honeycombed with destructive and useless roads, and rural villages have been submerged in a sea of industrial waste.

  “Similar observations can be made about many other modern nations, of course. But what is happening in Japan far surpasses anything attempted in the rest of the world. We are seeing something genuinely different here. The nation prospers, b
ut the mountains and rivers are in mortal danger …

  “During the past fifty-five years of its great economic growth, Japan has drastically altered its natural environment in ways that are almost unimaginable to someone who has not traveled here.

  “Across the nation, men and women are at work reshaping the landscape. Work crews transform tiny streams just a meter across into deep chutes slicing through slabs of concrete ten meters wide and more. Builders of small mountain roads dynamite entire hillsides. Civil engineers channel rivers into U-shaped concrete casings that do away not only with the rivers’ banks but with their beds. The River Bureau has dammed or diverted all but three of Japan’s 113 major rivers. … Meanwhile, Japan’s Construction Ministry plans to add 500 new dams to the more than 2,800 that have already been built. …It is not only the rivers and valleys that have suffered. The seaside reveals the greatest tragedy: by 1993, 55 percent of the entire coast of Japan had been lined with cement slabs and giant concrete tetrapods …”246

  Japan’s organic destiny lay in China. American interests prevented Japan from following its life’s course. Japanese expansion in China was seen as a threat to the USA’s global markets.247 To use Gumilev’s term, the life-course was “zigzagged” by foreign intrusion. Japan still has the inner strength to rebel, if that strength can be directed back toward tradition. However, Japan after the trauma of the world war, and the foreign occupation, adopted the Faustian impulse without synthesising and harmonising this in the manner that had for millennia been, like the Jews and the Chinese, Japan’s strength. The Faustian impulse has instead been a poisonous intrusion. Animism, the pervasiveness of spirit throughout nature, is the basis of Japanese religiosity. The Faustian intrusion is a perpetual raping and killing of the Japanese soul.

  Afrikaner

  The collapse of the Afrikaner civilisation in South Africa is an example of a culture that decayed through internal weakening, while also being an example, like the Hebrews, of race-formation beyond genetics. Afrikaner civilisation is referred to because it constitutes a unique cultural organism within Western civilisation. It was a “Moonlight Civilisation”, reflecting the glow of Western Civilisation, a term used by Amaury de Riencourt in describing the Korean and Japanese “Moonlight Civilisations” vis-à-vis the Chinese. Afrikaner civilisation existed outside the mainstream of the diseased Western civilisation as a conscious effort to preserve a cultural vitality amidst the West’s decay. It was the last of the Western cultures to maintain rural values and something of the ethos that had expired in Europe centuries previously. The Afrikaner collapse was the result of succumbing to Western pathogens.

  The assumption that the Afrikaner, due to apartheid, and before that, anti-miscegenation laws, must be among the purest of races is incorrect. While Virginia and other U.S. states had the “one drop of blood” anti-miscegenation law, there was no such rigid criterion among the Afrikaners. If one looked “white” one was “white”. The racial test consisted of skull measurement and complexion. The proportion of non-white genes within the Afrikaner ranges from 5% to 7%. J.A. Heese, studying the Afrikaners of the period 1657–1867 concluded the genetic composition to be: Dutch 34.8%, German 33.7%, French 13.2%, British 5.2%, Other European 2.7%, Non-White 6.9%, Unknown 3.5%.248 G.F.C. de Bruyn found the non-European genetic composition to be 5.4%, and Unknown to be 3.9%.249 From an early period there were marriages between the European settlers and Coloured women. From parish records Heese, found that by 1807 between 7.2% and 10.7% of the Afrikaners had African and Asian descent. The approximately 2000 emigrants from Holland, Germany and France, who founded the Afrikaner colony in 1650 intermarried with the Khoi and the San “relatively frequently”. They were augmented by Indian traders and Malayo-Negroid hybrids from East Africa and Madagascar.250

  Afrikaners have a higher non-Caucasian genetic inheritance than Berbers and Brahmin. Afrikaners have a larger proportion of sub-Saharan DNA than Portuguese who have the highest proportion of sub-Saharan genes of any European population, albeit still low, and whose decline is assumed by racial materialists to be the result of miscegenation.251 However, here too the number of African slaves imported into Portugal at a time when many Portuguese males were departing for Brazil, has been exaggerated. The American physical anthologist Carleton S. Coon, often quoted by racial materialists, stated of the Portuguese:

  “Non-Mediterranean elements in the Portuguese population are rare and of little importance. A few Nordics are scattered throughout but are particularly concentrated in the north. Traces of Dinaric blood, as we have already seen, may likewise be found on the northern coast. ... On the whole, the absorption of Negroes by the Portuguese has had no appreciable effect on the racial composition of the country. Portugal remains, as it has been since the days of the Muge shell-fish eaters, classic Mediterranean territory”.252

  Returning to the Afrikaners, if one objects to migration to European lands on the basis of genetics then the Afrikaner must be of lesser desirability than many elements from India and North Africa.

  Boer soldiers relaxing during the war with Great Britain.

  The strength of the Afrikaner had not been from genes but from race-forming myths of the Great Trek, and the Battle of Blood River. The “had race”, in the Spenglerian sense, as the strongest races have it, through factors other than biological. They had sworn a holy oath to God on 16 December 1838. They had made a covenant with God for victory against the Zulus, every much as significant as Abraham’s covenant is for the Jews. It is such a mythos, such as the celebration of the Day of the Oath, and the celebrations at the Voortreker Monument, that made the Afrikaners as immune from culture disease as the Hebrews, Japanese and Chinese, and for the same reasons, with a sense of their own holy mission, for which apartheid was significant above all as a symbol. Afrikaners have their equivalents of the Jewish Passover and Purim as holy celebrations of the volk. It is this mythos that formed the Afrikaner “race”; not DNA.

  Infection by Western pathogens via Liberalism caused the decay of the Afrikaner culture organism. The culture pathogens entered the Afrikaner culture organism as early as the 1960s. Even in 1949 the Christian-based Afrikaner world-view was being undermined. The theologian professor Ben Keet argued against a scriptural justification for apartheid253 that was the premise of the Reformed Church and the spiritual foundation of the Afrikaner culture. The Reformed Church was as important in forming and sustaining the Afrikaner folk as Judaism is for the Jews, Hinduism for the Indians, Confucianism for the Chinese, Shintoism for the Japanese, and Eastern Orthodoxy for the Russians. As the Israelite prophets knew, religious purity is more significant for the maintenance of a race than “blood” purity. The Afrikaner was destroyed by subverting his Church.

  Another primary factor in culture decay was industrialization, undermining the peasant ethos of the Boer, which had, like the Amish in Pennsylvania, made them an anomaly in the Western world. The Anglo-Boer wars and the ongoing ill-will directed towards the Boers from the outside world was a culture conflict between “Money and Blood” to use Spengler’s term. Donald Akenson refers to an Afrikaner “rural cosmology”.254 This enabled the Afrikaner to maintain order amidst the chaos of the fast-changing pace demanded by industrialism. The rural population in England during the Industrial Revolution had no such “rural cosmology,” since the Reformation had destroyed the traditional social order of the rural communities. The English and German-Jewish traders, the so-called Uitlanders or “Outsiders” that the Boers had fought to keep at bay, served as the carriers of the culture-pathogen of industrialisation. Historian Professor LeRoy Vail wrote of this modernisation:

  “What was common for all the region’s peoples – the blacks and whites alike – was that many of them were gradually losing control over their lives and control over that most basic factor of production, the land, slipped from their grasp. No longer were rural communities – whether black of white – able to exist autonomously beyond the reach of capitalism and colonial administration… fo
r white Afrikaners, land ownership was also important, kept alive as the ideal Afrikaner way of life even among the poor whites of the cities and towns”.255

  Akensen comments that “within Afrikaner society what was developing was a contest between a rural, pre-capitalist covenantal cultural grid, and the material reality of modern industrial capitalism, and all this was taking place within the context of the decline of the second British Empire.”256 Afrikaner solidarity was undermined by an alliance of money between the Jewish, English and Afrikaner bourgeoisie and upper classes. This also contributed to breaking Afrikaner cultural hegemony. Afrikaners were “increasingly awash with a tidal wave of foreign films (most of U.S. origin) and television (which was introduced in South Africa only in 1975). Despite efforts at restriction, “these media gave access to a world of international values that Afrikaner society previously had been able to keep at bay”.257

  Most importantly, Afrikaner “covenantal cosmology” was undermined by culture-pathogens subverting the Afrikaner churches. Self-doubt eroded the belief-system that had maintained the Afrikaner for several centuries. Akensen refers to this “belief in their own corporate personality every bit as vivid as that shown by the ancient Hebrews”.258 During 1969-90 three of the Dutch Reformed churches that had hitherto been united in support of Afrikaner identity, took three different courses. The NHK maintained its traditional position. The Gereformeerde Kerk repudiated the formative idea of the Afrikaner as a covenant volk. The main body of the Dutch Reformed faith in South Africa, the NGK, maintained a traditional position until backing down in the face of world condemnation in its 1986 theological document Kerk en Samelewing (“Church and Society”), which Akensen describes as “confused” and “contradictory”, in trying to justify an about-face. The document “completely destroyed the religious basis of everything that the Afrikaner culture had developed during the previous 125 years”.259 The Afrikaner was no longer a “convent people” above all others. The trinity between state, volk and church was discarded. The focus on the Old Testament, that had scripturally justified apartheid, was dropped. “Thus did the leading Dutch Reformed Church effectively declare the covenant dead”. 260