The Decline and Fall of Civilisations

by Kerry Bolton

  With this is the rise of the “modern woman”, where “instead of children she has soul-conflicts, and marriage is a craft-art for ‘mutual understanding’”.39 Augustus made desperate attempts through laws to raise the birth-rate of Romans, but to no avail; such was their hedonism that children became a burden. Buggery and abortion became the preferred options of Romans.

  In the custodian of the Late West, the USA, a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences “found that middle-aged, white Americans have been getting sicker and dying in greater numbers, even as the rest of the world is living longer and healthier… The authors of that study attributed the trend to what we called ‘despair deaths’: mainly suicides, drug overdoses, and alcohol-related liver disease…. between 1999 and 2014, mortality rates in the U.S. rose for white Americans aged 22 and 56. Before that, death rates had been falling by nearly 2 percent each year since 1968”.40

  Of particular significance is the drop of fertility rates. A study of the trend in the USA shows:

  “Fertility rates have dropped to their lowest ever recorded in America, a new CDC [Center for Disease Control] report reveals. In the first quarter of 2016, the birth rate is 59.8 babies born to every 1,000 women. That means for every 100 fertile women, fewer than six will give birth at least once. The staggering statistics follow the steady trend of decline since records began in 1909, when the birth rate was 126.8 babies per 1,000 mothers. Research shows a key driving factor in this trend is the increasing numbers of women delaying childbirth to a point where they experience more fertility problems”.41

  Another major problem is the low health stamina of women: “Now, the biggest problem appears to be underlying health conditions - such as high blood pressure, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease - which the mothers had before giving birth”. 42

  The modern Western economic system has not encouraged large families; it has encouraged women to become integrated production units. Feminism and socialism have assisted greatly.43 Now, after generations of promoting birth control, abortion and female labour, there is panic that aging populations will destroy the economy:

  “Initially, reduced child dependency rates were actually beneficial to economic growth. By delaying childbirth, men and women could gain an education before starting a family. This was important in a shifting labor market where smaller, family-run businesses were in decline and a more skilled and specialized labor force was in demand. Men and women could also choose to start their careers before having families, while paying more in income taxes and enjoying the benefits of a higher disposable income. Increased spending power creates demand, which stimulates job growth – and the economy benefits in the short-term… As this large aging population exits the workforce, most of the positive trends that were spurred by declining fertility rates will be reversed, and economic growth will face a significant burden. … Worldwide fertility rates began to fall substantially in the mid-1960s”.44

  In 2005, Catholic theologian George Weigel, Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, posed pertinent questions in his book The Cube and the Cathedral.45 He was invited to speak to members of the European Parliament. He made what he called “rather obvious points” which, however, are not obvious to those masses, whatever their position in society, who lack historical perspective. Weigel stated:

  Europe is committing demographic suicide, systematically depopulating itself in what British historian Niall Ferguson has called ‘the greatest sustained reduction in European population since the Black Death in the 14th century’.

  This unwillingness to create the future in the most elemental sense, by creating new generations, is at the root of many of Europe’s problems, including its difficulties assimilating immigrants and its fiscal distress.

  When an entire continent—healthier, wealthier, and more secure than ever before—deliberately chooses sterility, the most basic cause for that must lie in the realm of the human spirit, in a certain souring about the very mystery of being”.

  Whether “Europe”, or Late Western civilisation is “healthier” is debatable. People are living much longer, but is this not a reflection of mass medication rather than healthier lives? With environmental toxins, chemical additives, loss of soil nutrients, and mass food processing, the quality of food is hardly comparable to what it was during the much-maligned Medieval epoch, as shown by William Cobbett.46 The contention that we of the Late West are “more secure and wealthier than before” might itself be an answer as to why there has been “a certain souring about the very mystery of being”. Indeed, the answer, as Weigel states, “must lie in the realm of the human spirit”.

  The ease of modern Western life in the material realm has meant a loss of the tension of polarities that Carl Jung regarded as essential to the release of the lIbido, or psychical energy. In the matter of the history of an ethnos we might hypothesise this to be an entropic loss of focused collective lIbido. No longer are there the challenges that spur the creative faculties. Ease is sought as a measure of success, and estimated at one’s material comfort. A nation’s health is measured by the statistics of its Gross National Product and balance of payments.

  Returning to the demographic problem, again we might see how children become a burden, as they did with the last of the Romans. Yet this ease of life does not allow for genuine fulfilment, as reflected in the rates of suicide, alcoholism, and drug addiction that seem to increase, along with feelings of pointlessness, as material comfort and security increase. “A certain souring about the very mystery of being”, wrought by the triumph of “reason” over faith, has resulted in precisely the opposite of what is intended: the Liberal ideal of the “happiness of the greatest number” becomes ever-more elusive, and no more so than in those who are the wealthiest and most “successful” in Western societies.

  Degenerative Culture

  “You’d have to be a recent immigrant from Outer Mongolia not to know of the role that people with Jewish names play in the coarsening of our culture. Almost every American knows this. It is just that most gentiles are too polite to mention it … The sad fact is that through Jewish actors, playwrights, and producers, the Berlin stage of Weimar Germany linked Jews and deviant sexuality in all its sordid manifestations just as surely as Broadway does today. Much of the filth in American entertainment today parallels that of Germany between the wars”. — Rabbi Daniel Lapin, Toward Tradition, January 2005.47

  One thinks of a “hero” in terms of Thomas Carlyle’s study on the role of the heroic individual in shaping history,48 what has been called “heroic vitalism”. In former generations the hero was typically a saint, soldier, empire builder, someone who lived or died for a higher purpose than the self. The definition is that of transcendent self-sacrifice.

  The state of cultural decay is indicated by the types who are elevated into the status of today’s “role models”, especially for the young. They are Anti-Heroes. The definition is the antithesis of the Hero. The Anti-Hero one of lives for him or herself alone. Hedonism is the lifestyle, narcissism the temperament. The outlook benefits consumer capitalism, as it translates economically into a never-ending thirst for acquisition. This situation is concomitant with the general degradation of social morality, where self-indulgence is elevated into virtue, and immediate gratification is expected.

  Paradoxically, this heralding of selfishness as the path to “happiness” as the purpose of life has resulted in a contagion of drug addiction, alcoholism, suicide, and mass medication and therapy for psychiatric disturbances. The self-quest for happiness has resulted in nothing but dissatisfaction and unfulfilled searches for meaning. The most discontented, the drug, pill and alcohol ridden, neurotic and narcissistic, are heralded as role models who symbolise and epitomise “success” in the Late West: the movie and music “stars”. It is no coincidence that they also happen to be overwhelmingly “liberals”, eagerly jumping on the bandwagon of every transient “feel-good” cause, while Hollywood has from
its founding been one of centres for the spread of global spiritual-syphilis.

  Hollywood has for generations defined “American culture”, which through globalisation has long become synonymous with “Western culture”. However, “Western culture” has been deconstructed and redefined by a foreign culture-organism. Hollywood is what Jewish commentators have referred to as “their empire”, where Jewish movie moguls were from the start of the motion picture industry able to define the “American Dream”.49 In the realm of music Sumner Redstone’s Viacom and MTV are at the apex.

  The character of the USA was redefined by Emma Lazarus, whose poem, “The New Colossus” (1883) adorns the Statue of Liberty, to greet “The wretched refuse of your teeming shore”, and by Israel Zangwill with his play “The Melting Pot” (1908). Both were ardent Zionists who did not endorse multiculturalism among Jews. That is for Western consumption.50

  Such influence is not a “conspiracy”; it is a natural occurrence when one wilful, vital culture exists within another, whether it is the British in India or the Spanish in Peru. Whether such an influence is positive or negative, symbiotic and complementary or destructive, depends on the culture organisms involved. Gumilev regarded the Jewish culture-organism as a perennially foreign element51 whose influence causes the “zig-zagging”, or distortion, of a culture’s life-path.

  The Jews as a nomadic people, albeit unified across the world by a traditional axis mundi (Jerusalem) and religion, have been a catalyst for the breakdown of national consciousness among other peoples. Their nomadism makes them natural agents for internationalist ideologies, whether of the capitalist or socialist varieties. Other nomads, such as the steppes peoples of Russia and central Asia, have an ecological niche and have the potentiality to form nations and empires. Jews do not have an ecological niche, and remain wanderers, which is not to say that Jews per se are innately incapable of being absorbed into Western culture. Such absorption however has been fanatically resisted by the rabbinate and more recently by Zionism, as explained by the heretical Jewish scholar Dr. Israel Shahak.52

  When traditional dynastic states were broken down and capitalism arose, eroding the authority of the landed aristocracy and the Church, Jews became “harbingers of political and economic change”.53 The “court Jew” became a feature of the rulership of Europe. There were “several hundred”, who shaped the emerging capitalist economies, according to Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz,54. The Reformation and the English Revolution accelerated the process. Of the latter, Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel, leader of Jewish community in The Netherlands, addressed an appeal for the re-admission of the Jews to England to Oliver Cromwell, whose Puritans had established their tyranny in the name of “liberty”. England would gain by Jewish migration because of “Profit”. “It is a thing confirmed, that merchandizing is, as it were, the proper profession of the Nation of the Jews”. Because God had taken the Jews from Israel, as a “chastisement”, and they were a people without a land, their protection was in their “Riches and possessions”, which they could put at the disposal of a nation’s ruler.55 From Italy, Germany, Holland, Poland, Turkey, Egypt, etc., the Jews had profited those places through their international commerce. Hence the Jews are “a Plant worthy to be planted in the whole world, and received into Populous cities…”56

  The Jewish people thrive during the Late civilisation epochs where Money and City have displaced Faith and Land. While Jews, despite allegations throughout history to the contrary, are not the cause of this culture-crisis, it is the Late epoch during which they are positioned to take advantage, which is why we see Jews in prominence especially in the USA, reshaping politics, economics and culture as a people of four thousand years duration amidst a state of 240 years duration.

  That the Jewish culture-organism is foreign to the Western culture-organism should be axiomatic and stated without accusations of “anti-Semitism”. Theodor Herzl founded Zionism precisely on the assumption that Jews are unable, and indeed must not, assimilate into Western society, or any other. Although the Old Testament shows that foreign culture-organisms assimilated into the Hebrew this was undertaken entirely on Israelites terms, as conquerors. No “zig-zagging” of the Israelite culture-mission and identity was tolerated.

  As an unassimilated foreign body the Jewish intelligentsia deconstructs Western culture. When Carl Jung broke with his mentor Sigmund Freud, this was a conflict between antithetical world-views: the Western and the Jewish. Laurens van der Post wrote of the breach:

  “Sex, however important was only part of the story. From there arose his [Jung’s] first great and ineradicable difference with Freud. To illustrate it at its most immediate and simple level, he could no more see a great Gothic spire, soaring above the finest of medieval cathedral achievement’s, as merely a phallic symbol, than mistake a horse for a mule”.57

  Eminent Jewish historian Dr. Howard Sachar, wrote that the primary motivation of pioneer Freudians was,

  “the unconscious desire of Jews to unmask the respectability of the European society which closed them out. There was no more effective way of doing this than by dredging up from the human psyche… sordid and infantile sexual aberrations… Even Jews who were not psychiatrists must have taken pleasure in the feat of social equalisation performed by Freud’s ‘new thinking.’ The B’nai B’rith Lodge of Vienna, for example, delighted in listening to Freud air his theories …”58

  When the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory in Weimar Germany synthesised Freud with Marx into the “sex-pol” (“sexual politics”) ideology and were sponsored as Jewish refugees from Hitlerism to re-locate to Columbia University, and to the Institute of Social Research, New York, their doctrine under various permutations promptly became a primary method for the deconstruction of Western culture, and particularly of Western man.59

  * * *

  1 Spengler, The Decline…, Vol. II, 506-507.

  2 Adrian Pabst, “Henry VIII and the Birth of Capitalism”.

  3 Max Weber, 1905, Chapter V, “Ascetism and the Spirit of Capitalism”.

  4 Ibid.

  5 Ibid.

  6 K. R. Bolton, Opposing the Money Lenders, 1-4.

  Brooks Adams, The Law of Civilization and Decay, passim.

  7 Max Weber.

  8 Ibid.

  9 Ibid.

  10 Ibid.

  11 Ibid.

  12 Ibid.

  13 Nichoals Hagger, 4-5.

  14 Spengler, The Decline…; Vol. II, 455.

  15 Lorenz, 14.

  16 Ibid., 13.

  17 Ibid.

  18 Ibid., 14.

  19 Lorenz, 20.

  20 Lorenz, 21.

  21 Ibid.

  22 Ibid.

  23 Ibid., 22.

  24 Ibid. 23.

  25 Ibid., 26.

  26 Bolton, Opposing the Money Lenders, 1-3.

  27 Adam Forman, “New York City in Crumbling”.

  28 Ibid.

  29 Adam Forman, et al, Caution Ahead: Overdue Investments for New York City’s Aging Infrastructure, 5.

  30 Elliot Sander in Forman et al, Ibid., 7.

  31 Dave Dildine, “Crumbling Capital”.

  32 Pierre Loti, 286.

  33 Colonel Marc Harris, et al., 2014, 4.

  34 Ibid.

  35 Ibid., 12.

  36 Ibid.

  37 Ibid.

  38 Spengler, The Decline …, Vol. II, 103-104.

  39 Ibid., 105.

  40 Olga Khazan, “Why are so Many Middle Aged White Americans Dying?”

  41 Mia de Graaf, “Fertility Rates Drop to Lowest EVER in America”, 2016.

  42 Ibid.

  43 Bolton, Revolution from Above, 160-181.

  44 Caitlin Cheadle, “Fertility Rates Keep Dropping, and it’s going to hit the economy hard”.

  45 George Weigel, 2005.

  46 William Cobbett, 1824.

  47 Daniel Lapin, “Jews have Debased American and Jewish Culture”.

  48 Thomas Carlyle, 1840.

  49 Neal Gabler, 1988.


  50 K. R. Bolton, Babel Inc. , 135-147.

  51 Lev Gumiliev, Dreviania Rus’ I veliaia step’, 2004. See Mark Bassin, The Gumilev Mystique, passim.

  52 Israel Shahak, 1994.

  53 Paul R. Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz (ed.) 1980, 7.

  54 Ibid.

  55 Menasseh ben Israel “To His Highnesse the Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland (1655)”; in Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz, 9.

  56 Menasseh ben Israel, Ibid., 10.

  57 Laurens van der Post, Jung and the Story of our Time.

  58 H. Sachar, 1991, 400-401.

  59 K. R. Bolton, “‘Sex Pol’ Ideology: The Influence of the Freudian-Marxist Synthesis on Politics and Society”, 329-355.

  Cultural Pathology as Geopolitical Strategy

  If the premise is accepted that Western civilisation is in an advanced state of decay, and that the USA is the self-chosen and universally acknowledged leader of the rotting West, America’s identity as the primary carrier of worldwide cultural contagion will be the logical conclusion. The process by which this contagion is taking place is called “globalisation”. With economic globalisation comes cultural globalisation.

  While prior Late civilisations such as the Alexandrian sought to control the “known world” what is unique today is that the outreach of the Late West literally does impact on every corner of the world due to Western technics. There cannot remain any remote area, any hill tribe, any desert nomads, that are secure from the cultural pathology of the Late West. On this Alexander Stille commented:

  “Globalisation may well raise the standard of living and introduce democratic reforms to countries around the world, but it is also bringing about an unprecedented homogenisation of culture that will almost certainly accelerate the disappearance of thousands of … distinct cultures.”1

  The Catholic, palaeoconservative writer, the late Joe Sobran, wrote of America’s global outreach: