Why Are We Defending a Decadent West?

A clash of monumental proportions seems likely as the post-war liberal order breaks down. This could happen if the present flashpoints in Ukraine, Israel, North Korea, and Taiwan expand and involve the major powers and their spheres of influence.

Thus, many analysts rightly frame America’s involvement in today’s conflicts as a defense of the West. The stakes are indeed high since any outbreak threatens not individual nations but the present state of the world.

Defending the West

However, certain currents do not see the battle this way. They question the purpose of defending the West in its present state of decadence. They might even sympathize with Iran’s ayatollahs and other adversaries of the West who see America as the “Great Satan,” responsible for the world’s evils.

Indeed, Western nations seem to have done much to corrupt the world with their globalized networks, immoral fashions and decadent cultures. A Davos-driven establishment promotes the woke and ecological agendas everywhere. Other anti-Western powers like Russia and China claim to represent cultures that oppose these alarming trends.

Thus, some wrongly affirm that one must not defend the West because of this decadence. They think it better to retreat into isolationism and let the globalized system with its corrupt elites fall apart.

A Universal Revolution Affecting Everyone

Such an attitude is wrong. It does not consider three main points that put this great struggle in perspective.

The first point is that a universal worldwide crisis afflicts the whole world. Neither East nor West is exempt from its dominance. It attacks, in varying degrees, all states, cultures, and systems.

Brazilian thinker and man of action Prof. Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira called this crisis the Revolution, a historical process that started with the Protestant Revolution and advanced with the French and Communist Revolutions. Today, it manifests itself in the Cultural Revolution. Its goal is to extinguish all traces of Christianity.

This moral crisis deep inside the soul of modern man is driven by movements of pride and sensuality. It is a revolt against God that affects everyone. Today’s globalized networks facilitate its spread worldwide, leaving no one untouched.

To contend that some regions like Russia, China or Iran are exempt from its influence is an illusion. Indeed, the moral scourge of procured abortion, pornography and promiscuity are found in these places and everywhere. Irreligion, egalitarianism and nihilism are likewise rampant on both sides of these conflicts.

Thus, this fight must be seen in this context in which both sides are infected with the same germ of this Revolution, although manifested differently.

The Revolution Is Not the West

Second, this Revolution cannot be equated with the West. Rather, the Revolution’s main target is Western Christian civilization. It embeds itself inside the Western structures that dominate the world. Like a cancerous tumor, its ideological germs contaminate and metastasize all over the world.

Thus, the real crisis is much more inside these Western structures than a clash of East and West. What the world is witnessing is the destruction caused by nineteenth-century philosophies, like socialism, liberalism, and Hegelianism, that have deteriorated the souls of all nations, East and West. Nihilism and “woke” ideas are targeting and destroying Western narratives, notions of identity and social structures wherever they are found.

This same Revolution also incites other cultures to attack the West. They are urged not to destroy the Revolution (which would be a very good thing) but that Christian civilization the West once so vibrantly represented.

If the world is to return to order, everyone must attack the common enemy, which is this moral Revolution. To do this, the real fight is to identify and oppose the most radical manifestations of the Revolution that carry forward its destructive process.

Defending the West—or What’s Left of It

That is why America must defend the West—or better, what remains of it. As long as the West as an ideal exists, it threatens this Revolution.

The West, as an ideal, represents that family of nations, especially in Europe, that were influenced by Christian morals and beliefs. The point of dynamic unity of the West was Christendom under the guidance of the Catholic Church. These nations coalesced around the person of Our Lord Jesus Christ and, with His Gospel, transformed the world.

This same West generated Christian institutions, philosophies, arts, culture and ways of being that still survive embedded in daily life. The present state of the Revolution seeks to destroy these things. These social structures are much more the target of Russian, Chinese and Iranian hostility than the rightly condemned moral decadence—which also finds great opposition from activists in the West.

For this reason, the Western nations are in better conditions to fight the Revolution with their remnants of Christian civilization than the anti-Western countries that would suppress all these remnants together with the West. Moreover, the West still finds souls willing to fight for these ideals, oppose the Revolution and implore the help of God’s grace.

The alliance of Chinese Communism, Iran’s political Islam and Russia’s mystical “Fourth Political Theory” governing philosophy represents an advance in the Revolutionary process. Its dark triumph would seriously jeopardize a counter-revolutionary response.

That is why America must defend this vague Christian ideal of the West, even in its present state of decay. The West remains the platform upon which a resistance, with the aid of God’s grace, can still be awakened and nourished.

As long as some glowing embers of Christian civilization exist, a Counter-Revolution can nurse them back into a raging fire, depriving the Revolution of all conditions to prevail and thus securing a return to order.

Article first published on the Return to Order website: https://www.returntoorder.org/...