Ghosts of a glorious past

By Aussiegirl

Yesterday Vasko Kohlmayer published this thoughtful note on The American Thinker, and quoted a beautiful passage by Whittaker Chambers. Here is Vasko's own beautiful and elegiac final passage: Godless, rudderless, confused, the will to live appears to have largely died in Europe. Like some ghosts stumbling among relics of a glorious past, they slouch toward their ruin with a vacant smile on their face

The American Thinker

Ghosts of a glorious past

Some five decades ago Whittaker Chambers wrote this in his classic autobiography:

They dying world of 1925 was without faith, hope, character, understanding of its malady or will to overcome it. It was dying but it laughed. And this laughter was not the defiance of a vigor that refuses to know when it is whipped. It was the loss, by the mind of a whole civilization, of the power to distinguish between reality and unreality, because, ultimately, though I did not know it, it had lost the power to distinguish between good and evil.

It is striking how applicable this is to Western Europe of today. The depth of their crisis is revealed not so much by the multitude of their problems as by the way in which they have come about and the lack of will to deal with them. The unemployment, economic malaise, unassimilated immigrant enclaves, unsustainable welfare regimes are all self-inflicted, the inevitable result of policies that could have no other outcomes. But instead of swerving off their road to woe, they continue headlong along the same path censuring those who would urge otherwise

It is as if the West Europeans have indeed lost touch with reality and are no longer able to distinguish between right and wrong, good and evil. Their moral confusion demonstrates itself in many ways. None perhaps is more disturbing than their eagerness to embrace those who call for their destruction while condemning those who offer to defend them. Godless, rudderless, confused, the will to live appears to have largely died in Europe. Like some ghosts stumbling among relics of a glorious past, they slouch toward their ruin with a vacant smile on their face.