By Batiushka for the Saker Blog
Religion is the key of history - Lord Acton
Civilisation
The word 'Civilisation' comes from the Latin word 'civitas', or city, and so 'civilised' simply means to live in cities. This word 'civitas' gives us words like civilian, civic and civil. Civilisation means that people no longer live as nomadic hunter-gatherers, but are settled. Although therefore they have organised agriculture, they are not dependent on everyone working in agriculture as there are food surpluses, greater than for the numbers of human-beings working to grow food. This means that not all have to live off the land and many can do other things and live in cities. They can live off agricultural surpluses, traded in markets for other goods, created by technology, such as building materials, clothing, footwear and utensils, as well as being able to buy and sell services such as education and medicine. All civilisations have not only trade, but also a set of sacred or spiritual values which are at the heart of any civilisation, which is called Religion. Religion is at the core of the culture and creates sacred architecture (ziggurats, pyramids, temples, monasteries, cathedrals, mosques...), painting, sculpture, literature and sets the moral values which people live by.
Historians and philosophers of civilisation, such as Christopher Dawson, Arnold Toynbee or Samuel Huntingdon, have pointed out the particularity of Western civilisation. To quote from Christopher Dawson in his work 'Religion and the Rise of Western Culture', written nearly a century ago: 'Why is it that Europe alone among the civilisations of the world has been continually shaken and transformed by an energy of spiritual unrest that refuses to be content with the unchanging law of social tradition which rules the oriental cultures? It is because the religious ideal has not been the worship of timeless and changeless perfection, but a spirit that strives to incorporate itself in humanity and to change the world'. This means that, unlike Chinese, Indian, Buddhist, Amazonian, Orthodox Christian, Muslim or any other civilisation, Western civilisation is unique, as it has continually sought to spread itself aggessively in a missionary way, imposing itself on, meddling in and taking over the rest of the world. In other words, it alone claims to be global. No wonder that today it openly calls itself 'Globalism'.
Western Civilisation
The Western world has long pretentiously called itself 'The Civilised World', as if to say 'there is no civilisation outside our civilisation'. This is why it condemns all other civilisations, both in the present and in the past, as 'primitive', 'savage' and 'barbaric', and therefore arrogates to itself the right to annihilate them. This is why it uses euphemisms to define itself as, for example, 'the international community', when in fact it is anti-international, imposing a one size fits all ideology on all and proposing a world dictatorship subjected to its elite. 'Western' has come in its eyes to mean Universal. This is why, ironically, it calls itself 'Judeo-Christian'. We shall return to the use of the word 'Christian' later. The claim to be 'Judeo' (a racial religion confessed by fewer than 0.2% of the world population, is particularly curious. However, we must understand that what it means by 'Judeo' (1) is actually Zionist, that is universalist. From here we understand the very accurate descriptive term for it of 'Anglo-Zionist', as used by The Saker. For it is the Anglo-Saxon (2) world or Anglosphere, initiated by the genocidal Cromwell (who, by the way, was idolised by the monetarist Thatcher), financed by Dutch Jews, and spread to the North American colonies, which is today the ideological centre of 'the West'.
Western civilisation uses some very twisted definitions. For instance: For it to 'civilise' means to massacre the natives, so then it can asset-strip their country. The classic case is North America, but there are dozens of other examples around the world, from Bolivia to Guatemala and the Congo to Afghanistan; justifiers of colonisations claim, 'yes, but we brought them the benefits of civilisation like the railways'. In fact, railways were built in countries like India so that minerals could be exploited and troops could be transported in order to quell popular wars of liberation against oppressive and exploitative foreign rule; then we have the promise that, in the name of freedom and democracy 'we shall bomb them back into the Stone Age' (attributed to US General Curtis 'Bombs Away' LeMay, speaking of Vietnam). As for the Viennese Hitler, that great spreader of Western civilisation, he opposed 'Jewish and Asiatic' Bolshevism and murdered 27 million in the ultimate Holocaust. He never knew that Asia is the source of advanced civilisations and religions, including Christianity, which was not European, for Christ was hardly some pale, blond-haired Nordic 'Aryan'.
Western War
Western war has always consisted of highly organised violence, aided by the most aggressive high technology. Advances in military technology have all been initiated by the West. It used to be castles against arrows, the lethal crossbow against pikes, cannon against stone walls, the musket against bows, the Maxim gun, invented by the Anglo-American 'Sir' Hiram Maxim (3) against spear-throwing Africans, then it was poison gas (as used by Hitler, that is Churchill (sorry for the Bushism, 'anyway') against the Kurds), then Agent Orange, cluster bombs and uranium-tipped shells against rifles. To illustrate this, let us think about how those used to the way that such technology is exploited criticise the special operation (not war) in the Ukraine (4). They claim that the progress of the Russian operation, carried out by relatively small numbers of liberation forces from Donetsk and Lugansk and of Confederate Russian troops, is 'too slow'.
Here they misunderstand how the Allied/Confederate forces use their military technology. It is quite unlike the US and its Union NATO vassals. The latter carpet bomb, they cause 'collateral damage' (the NATO euphemism for the mass murder of innocent victims) and are hugely destructive, as though war was all a special effects show, a spectacle for entertainment as in Hollywood films, most of which portray great destruction. This is why nearly 20 years ago the American Rumsfeld spoke of the US destruction of civilian infrastructure in Iraq as 'shock and awe', which is just another euphemism - Hitler would have called it 'Blitzkrieg'. Yes, of course, Russian civilisation conducts military operations 'slowly' (5): it is not a US-style special effects operation, it is meant to avoid civilian and military casualties. You cannot translate 'collateral damage' into Russian, you can only paraphrase it.
Western Religion
Western religion has a similar story to tell. As we have said, every civilisation has a set of sacred values. The Western too and though it calls its religion 'Christianity', it is not. For instance, it insists on calling the Crusaders and Teutonic Knights 'Christians'. But just because you are a bloodthirsty barbarian who commits genocide with a cross on your uniform, that does not make you a Christian. Just as Nazis wore a belt with 'Gott mit uns' ('God with us') stamped on it, that did not make them Christian either. And when the Nazis put crosses on their tanks and dive-bombers, it did not make them Christian either (though the crosses did take in some naïve Western Ukrainians in 1941). And just because God 'told' George Bush to invade Iraq in 2003, that did not make him or his forces Christian. Frankly, the Western use of the word Christian is blasphemous to Orthodox Christians and the more accurate use of words like 'Catholic' and 'Protestant' is insulting to those who are of those religions.
It is notable that when Western colonisation took its so-called 'Christianity' to its colonies, it did not 'sell' in Asia, where they have a more sophisticated sense of religion, whether, Muslim, Hindu or Buddhist. It sold or rather was forced down throats at swordpoint, and then only in specific forms, only to animists in Latin America, Africa and the Philippines. Western religion is a State-organised and manipulated affair, the 'opium of the people' (6), more exactly, something, together with football, to keep the toiling masses under control. Even in Western places of worship, people file in under control and are seated in carefully controlled rows like sheeple. Western religion is a subversion of faith, for it is manipulated by Western States into whatever they want it to be. For example, sodomy was once considered outrageous by Western religion; today it is officially approved. After all, the State has spoken. Indeed, today Western religion is secularism, the sense of the sacred is gone, and whatever the politically correct elite has decided is their religion, regardless of whether you still believe in the 'old superstition' that God exists. In other words, contemporary Western religion is Anti-Religion.
Anti-Civilisation
This brings us to consider some sort of definition of today's Western Civilisation. If its Unsacred Religion is Secularism, an Anti-Religion, then surely its Civilisation must be an Anti-Civilisation? The record of 'Western Civilisation' does tend to confirm that. The current events in the Ukraine, where the Western elite is intent on destroying as many Ukrainians as possible, both soldiers as well as civilians used as human shields, stationing troops inside hospitals and schools, creating a massive refugee crisis, indebting the country for ever, possibly creating a famine there and in other areas of the world, possibly provoking violent riots and revolts among the impoverished peoples of Western Europe and North America, would suggest that whatever Western Civilisation once was, it is no more.
Notes:
1. Another Western misuse, or rather abuse, is the term 'Anti-Semitic'. It makes no sense, since the Arab peoples, including the Palestinians, who are dispossessed and oppressed in the Gaza Strip concentration camp and elsewhere, by Jews, are Semites. Anti-Jewish is the correct term.
2. We use the term 'Anglo-Saxon' not in its incorrect academic sense of Early English/Old English/pre-Norman, but in its modern sense of Anglo-American, as in the term WASP, 'White Anglo-Saxon Protestant'.
3. In 1882 in Vienna an American had told Maxim: 'If you want to make a pile of money, invent something that will enable these Europeans to cut each others' throats with greater facility'.
4. The 19th century Hapsburg usage of the word 'Ukraine', meaning simply 'borderlands' in Slavonic languages, that is, in this case the area on the eastern borders of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, is absurd when used for areas far from those borders.
5. Even so, in only some ninety days, of the remaining 24 provinces of the Ukraine (the 25th, the Crimea was returned in 2014), five of the richest Ukrainian provinces under Kiev regime oppression have either completely or else in large part been liberated. These are: Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson, Zaporozhe and Kharkov. If Allied forces wish to take all of the Eastern Ukraine/Novorossiya, there remain only the three provinces of Dnipropetrovsk, Nikolaev and Odessa. Together these eight heavily-populated provinces have about half of the population of the Ukraine, some 20 million people. Of the other two-thirds of the country, presumably the nine provinces of Central Ukraine will remain as part of the real Ukraine, a future, demilitarised Russian Protectorate, leaving the seven provinces of Western Ukraine to be demilitarised and shared out between Poland, which could perhaps receive five of them, and the other two perhaps shared out between Hungary, Romania and Slovakia. See:
Little wonder that even the failed diplomat Kissinger is calling for the Ukraine to meet at least some of Russia's demands. Clearly, all of them will have to be met, but at least one 98-year old pensioner can show the beginnings of pragmatism. He shows that some in the West realise that they have lost.
6. Let us not, however, forget the famous saying that Marxism is 'the opium of the intellectuals'.