Looking Ahead in an Age of Darkness

Behind the Accelerating Crisis of the West

By Mark Weber



Addressing the meeting in Stockholm,

April 18, 2015

Text of an address given at a meeting on April 18, 2015, in central Stockholm organized by Logik Förlag publishers (Sweden) in cooperation with Counter-Currents Publishing (USA). More than a hundred people, many in their twenties and thirties, gathered for this conference, with some travelling from Norway, Denmark and Britain. The text has been edited for posting here, and source references have been added.







In our work, we aim – or should aim – our efforts, first and foremost at reaching those who will be leaders in the new age that must emerge from the wreckage of this dismal era. So I am all the more pleased to see so many younger faces here today.

I also have a personal reason to appreciate this opportunity to address a meeting here in Sweden. In 1909, 106 years ago, Nils Olaf Svedlund left his homestead near the small town of Alsen in Jämtland, in central Sweden, not far from the Norway border, never to return. He departed with his wife and children, including an infant daughter -- my mother’s mother -- to move to a remote part of the Alaska territory. He and his family made a new home in a small oceanside community of just a few dozen people that was cut off from all overland contact with the rest of the world. He and his wife and children began a new life as homesteaders, supporting themselves on what they grew, caught and killed, and dwelling in a modest log cabin that he built with his own hands.

Over the years, my admiration has grown for my great-grand-father, a man who, incidentally, was proud of his Swedish heritage, and for the resourcefulness and perseverance he showed in building, for himself and his family, a new life in an inhospitable patch of virtual wilderness.

One of the most remarkable developments of recent years in Europe has been the rise of anti-establishment political parties. In May of last year, dissident parties scored impressive victories in the European Union parliamentary elections.

Commenting on the surprising results, a New York Times columnist wrote: / 1 “The European Union is still reeling from the insurgency of this past week's elections to its 751-member Parliament. But after a political `earthquake,’ as the French prime minister, Manuel Valls, called it on Sunday, it is also worth sifting through the rubble of hyperbole in search of resilient continuities ... In Denmark, the far-right Danish People's Party topped the poll, and doubled its number of members in the European Parliament. In France, Marine Le Pen's National Front also achieved the best results. Across the Channel, the United Kingdom Independence Party, known as UKIP, did the same, beating all the main parties.” And in Hungary the dissident Jobbik party is now the country’s second largest political formation.

Reviewing the results of the May 2014 election in France, a BBC News commentator wrote: / 2 “It is hard to overstate the momentousness of what has just happened in France. A party that just two or three years ago was regarded as not just contemptible, but untouchable, has won a national election. Today the Front National really is - as the posters rushed out at party headquarters put it - the biggest force in the land. Up until Marine Le Pen's take-over in 2011, the party was effectively under an establishment banning order ... Today - unbelievably - it has the largest number of French MEPs. In a legislative body that is an integral part of the European system of government, the FN - the historic pariah - is stronger than both the Gaullists and the Socialists.” And last month, the results of local elections across France re-confirmed the National Front’s continuing vitality and appeal.

Commenting on the steady erosion of support for Europe’s traditional parties, a BBC News analyst wrote just a few weeks ago: / 3 “Why is this happening? The obvious answer is that it is partly the result of years of economic crisis, particularly in southern Europe. For many voters, mainstream parties have failed to step up to the challenge. But there's also a more general malaise - a feeling that ordinary lives are being buffeted by forces and institutions beyond the control of voters ... Traditional parties across Europe are under pressure as never before in recent memory.”

All this is an expression of much more than anxiety about the lackluster economic situation. It reflects a broad and growing unhappiness with the general direction of social, cultural and economic life.

It was this outlook that recently moved Pope Francis to sharply denounce what he calls the “throwaway culture” of greed that prevails in the West, with its “atrocity” of high youth unemployment. The “idolatrous” social-economic system that prevails in Europe and the US, the Roman Catholic leader went on to warn, is now near collapse. / 4

Large scale immigration, especially from Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia, is driving an accelerating “third-worldization,” dramatically transforming the continent’s cultural, racial and ethnic character. Across Europe, the birthrate is well below the replacement level. Europeans are dying out.

Across the continent, as well as in the US, people sense that something is very wrong. Public opinion surveys on both sides of the Atlantic show high and unprecedented levels of distrust in politicians and major institutions -- in short, of the “System.”

The “establishment” parties that have governed since the end of the Second World War -- whether they regard themselves as conservative, moderate, or middle class, or whether they regard themselves as leftist or progressive -- lack any persuasive or inspiring vision for the years ahead. “Mainstream” political and intellectual leaders – in Europe as well as in the US -- are utterly unable to offer any convincing way forward, or any credible prospect of a better future.

In these trends, America is “setting the pace.” With each passing year, the United States is ever more obviously and rapidly becoming an unrecognizable `third world’ country. During my lifetime, many cities and entire regions of the US have been transformed demographically – with the replacement of an overwhelmingly European-origin population with a non-white one. Over the past half century, southern California, where I live and work, has been transformed more radically, more fundamentally than Poland, Hungary, and other eastern European countries changed during 45 years of Soviet Russian occupation and control.

The single most insightful and probing look at the crisis of Europe and the West, in my view, is a German book that was first published five years ago, Deutschland schafft sich ab, or in English, “Germany Does Away With Itself.” / 5 It’s not merely the content of this book that’s remarkable. It’s also important because this challenging analysis of the trends of recent decades was written by someone whom few would expect to produce such a work. The author, Thilo Sarrazin, is not a cranky dissident, but a man of impressive standing and credentials, who writes with authority based on years of first-hand experience.

He served as a member of the governing board of Germany’s central bank, the Bundesbank. For seven years he was the Finanzsenator of Berlin, that is, the financial affairs minister of the government of Germany’s capital city. And for many years he was a member of the SPD, the country’s leftist, establishment Social Democratic Party.

Sarrazin’s book is carefully written, diligently researched, and compellingly argued. The author presents his case with reason and rigorous logic, supported by solid data and empirical evidence.

Following its publication in 2010, “establishment” newspapers and prominent public figures lost no time in furiously denouncing the book and its author. But the attacks and smears had the effect of greatly stimulating sales. Everyone in Germany, it seems, was talking about the book and, more importantly, the serious issues it addresses. Probably no German work since the end of the Second World War has had such an impact on the country’s national discourse. One and a half million copies of it have been sold.

In the introduction, the author stresses that the problems of Germany – and, of course, by extension, of Europe and the wider Western world – are deep-rooted. The sluggish economy, he says, is only a symptom of much more serious and entrenched social, cultural, demographic, and genetic-biological problems. In addition to the socially suicidal birthrate, Germany’s future is endangered because of the steady, continuing increase in the portion of the population that is less capable, less socially stable, and less intelligent.

Economically, he goes on, Germany is now in the final phase of a Golden Era – one that began about 1950 or so, and which is now coming to an end. Over the past 20 years, he notes, income in real terms for the average worker has not increased, and within ten years at the most, he says, it will decline – at first slowly, and then more rapidly.

Because this stagnation and decline is due, above all, to long-term demographic factors, the trend is inevitable and unstoppable. However impressive Germany’s achievements in exports, research and so forth have been and, from time to time, will continue be, they cannot reverse the basic trend.

Germany -- and, once again, it should be noted, the rest of Europe and the entire Western world as well – has been destroying the foundation for future economic growth – both quantitatively and qualitatively: quantitatively, Sarrazin explains, because for the past 45 years each new generation is markedly smaller in size than the previous one, while at the same time life expectancy has been rising; and qualitatively, because with each new generation, the genetic and social-cultural foundation of the nation is steadily falling.

Germany, he goes on to explain, is a society in denial about basic realities of social- political life. He writes: “In spite of my years of experience [in public life] I’ve been astonished at the negative response that’s generated when a public figure points out, simply and clearly, the most elementary facts of social-political life.” Here again, what Sarrazin writes applies, with some variations of course, to the entire Western world, including the United States.

Another important factor behind the long-term trends he discusses is the way in which Germans are socialized or socially motivated. In the nation’s schools and mass media, young people are encouraged to lead a self-oriented life, or if they prefer, a life that has no focus or meaning at all. In Germany today – and, again, throughout the western world – it is taken for granted that individual concerns and identity are paramount. According to this prevailing view, the wants and desires of the individual are far more important than the health and well-being of the community or the nation.

In Germany, not surprisingly, there is a widespread sense of dull fatalism about the future. Germans accept, or are supposed to accept, their country’s steady, continuing decline.

Sarrazin emphasizes the close and empirically irrefutable relationship between the level of orderliness and prosperity in a society, and the average intelligence level of its people. He also notes a fact that so many of those in educational and political life deny or ignore: that human intelligence is 50 to 80 percent determined by heredity.

He provides solid data to show that in the West the genetic intelligence level has been falling in recent decades because, in general, the less intelligent are having more children than the more intelligent. He also points out that the average intelligence level of the many migrants who are settling in Germany is significantly lower than the average intelligence level of the “native” German population.

In short, he writes, the social system that prevails means that Germany is doing away with itself. Again, I cite Sarrazin’s detailed analysis because it applies, with some variations, naturally, to Europe as a whole, and to the entire Occident.

The outcome of the Second World War meant that, for the first time in history, Europe was entirely under the control of outer-European states, or, at any rate, of regimes on the periphery of the West, namely, the USA and the USSR. More importantly, the outcome of the Second World War meant the imposition on Europe of an egalitarian ideology – a Soviet, Marxist version in eastern and central Europe, and a more seductive individualistic American version in western Europe. In the years since the collapse of the Soviet empire, the American egalitarian- individualist outlook, including US-style mass democracy and consumerism, is now the governing ideology across the continent.

According to this outlook, the ideal society is not a nation united by ethnic, racial, cultural or religious bonds, but rather a collection of individuals of maximum “diversity,” bound together only by a legalistic “social contract,” or a supposedly shared embrace of what are called “democratic values.” The highest social-political goal, according to this ideology, is not a healthy or enduring nation, but rather a “multicultural” society devoted to material prosperity, individual “rights,” and to what the US Declaration of Independence calls “the pursuit of happiness.”

In the United States, this outlook was, from the beginning, considered so magnificent and transformational that the country’s founders regarded the USA as a radically new kind of society, a nation that would be a model for the world. That’s why the Great Seal of the United States, which is on the back side of every one-dollar note, proclaims that 1776 is not merely the year of the country’s birth, but marks the founding of what it calls, in Latin, a “Novus Ordo Seclorum” – a “New Order of the Ages.”

In keeping with this view of American society and its form of government as superior to all others, politicians of both major US political parties proclaim with almost religious fervor their belief in something called “American exceptionalism.” And you’ll hear this not only from those who call themselves conservative. Even President Obama, in an address at the West Point military academy, said “I believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being.” / 6

This ideology not only means that the US regards itself as the morally superior leader and grand architect in forging a “New Order” in the world, but implies that there is a purposeful trajectory to history, a definite direction in human development, and that Americans are the providentially ordained pioneers in shaping the entire world in accord with that ideology.

Over the past century, American presidents have repeatedly affirmed this confident -- but also arrogant and utopian -- view about the direction of history, and America’s role in it. In 1917, when the United States entered the First World War, President Woodrow Wilson solemnly declared that he was sending young Americans across the ocean to kill and die as part of a grand undertaking to end all war, and make the entire world, as he put it, “safe for democracy.”

During the Second World War, President Franklin Roosevelt made similar pledges, likewise in keeping with this purposeful view of history and America’s central ideology. The United States, he stressed, is the great world leader in shaping a new global order in which aggression will be eliminated permanently, and, beyond that, he pledged, a new age in which even fear and want will be banished everywhere in the world. / 7

It is this same messianic outlook that moved President George W. Bush to refer to his so-called "war on terrorism" as a "crusade," and, in a major speech, to proclaim a US foreign policy dedicated to, as he put it, "ending tyranny in the world." / 8 In this great US-led undertaking, he announced, neutrality is not an option. “Either you are with us,” he declared, “or you are with the terrorists.” Faithful to America’s ideology, President Obama proclaims that an important feature of US foreign policy is to push for what are called “gay rights” -- everywhere around the world.

Because the United States is still very powerful and influential, it has the ability to promote and often to impose, with sometimes astonishing arrogance, its egalitarian- individualist ideology.

Prominent Americans take pride in the notion that the US is, or should be, the great leader in making an ever more diverse, non-racial and multi-cultural world. This view has been voiced, for example, by US General Wesley Clark, the Supreme Allied Commander Europe, with overall command of NATO military forces on the continent. “There is no place in modern Europe for ethnically pure states,” he said in 1999. "That’s a nineteenth century idea, and we are trying to transition into the twenty-first century, and we are going to do it with multi-ethnic states.” / 9 What General Clark, along with other American leaders, mean is that France must not be French, Sweden must not be Swedish, Poland must not be Polish, and so on.

In keeping with its ideology, the United States works to break down cultural, racial and religious identity and cohesion around the world -- prodding, cajoling, persuading and pushing every country to be like the USA: a collection of individuals, a cultural and racial melting pot. / 10 Thus, the Americanization of Europe means the cultural-biological death of Europe.

In spite of its relative economic prosperity, Europe today is in greater danger than ever before in its history. Far worse than the consequences of military defeat, a terrible war, or a devastating plague, Europe is threatened with cultural, ethnic and racial extinction – that is, the destruction of the very foundation of everything that is European in any real or lasting sense.

What is Europe? It is, of course, a geographic designation. But it is much more than that. Without Europeans, the continent is little more than an administrative or geographic designation, no more meaningful than the term “North America.”

Europe is not only a priceless cultural achievement built over millennia. It is also an equally priceless genetic heritage. The European cultural heritage cannot be separated from the distinct peoples that created it. There can be no real Europe without Europeans. That’s why, far beyond the continent, “Europe” as a social and cultural factor, has arisen wherever European men and women have settled -- in Australia, in New Zealand, in Canada, and in the United States.

Indeed, the central fact of American history is that it was founded, settled and developed by people of European race and culture. If my homeland had been founded and developed mostly by people from Africa, or East Asia, or by the continent’s native population, its social, cultural and political character today would be very different. If the territory of the USA had been developed by the native peoples of the western hemisphere, it would today be a society that resembles Peru, Guatemala or Bolivia. Or if it had been founded and developed mostly by people from Africa, it would resemble Haiti.

Not just Europeans and most Americans, but many millions of people around the world want to live in societies built and fashioned by Europeans. But the blunt truth is that it is not possible to have a European-style society without a racially European population. It is not possible to sustain a society like Denmark with a population like that of Pakistan or Nigeria.

These days, of course, and as everyone here knows, that’s not what we’re told. In Europe, as well as in the US, the leadership of the major political parties, along with the mainstream media, and the educational establishment, tell us that race does not matter, that it’s merely a “social construct.”

As fashionable as this doctrine is today, it was not always so. Until World War Two it was still possible to speak openly and candidly, even in a mainstream forum, voicing views that were in accord with the sentiment of most people of European race and culture.

One man who not only understood this reality, but who proclaimed it boldly was Charles A. Lindbergh, the famed American aviator, author and peace activist.

In an article titled “Aviation, Geography, and Race,” written shortly after the outbreak of war in Europe in 1939, he warned – in words that bear remembering today -- against the efforts by some to bring the United States into the conflict. In this article, which appeared 76 years ago in Reader’s Digest, the most widely read American magazine of the time, he wrote: / 11

“We, the heirs of European culture, are on the verge of a disastrous war, a war within our own family of nations, a war which will reduce the strength and destroy the treasures of the White race, a war which may even lead to the end of our civilization ... It is time to turn from our quarrels and to build our White ramparts again ... Our civilization depends on a united strength among ourselves ... standing together as guardians of our common heritage ... We can have peace and security only so long as we band together to preserve that most priceless possession, our inheritance of European blood ...”

A few weeks after this article appeared, Lindbergh spoke to the American public in an address broadcast on nationwide radio. “Our bond with Europe,” he said, “is a bond of race and not of political ideology ... It is the European race we must preserve; political progress will follow. Racial strength is vital; politics, a luxury.” / 12

Today, of course, the cultural situation is so drastically different that it is all but impossible to imagine a renowned figure presenting such views on mainstream media to millions of the general public.

On both sides of the Atlantic, political, cultural and intellectual leaders relentlessly promote an egalitarian-universalist ideology -- a delusional outlook divorced from reality that refuses to acknowledge the most elementary truths of society, of heredity, and of history. In accord with this ideology, political leaders in Europe as well as in the United States push policies that break down, and are meant to break down, the traditional cultural, racial and ethnic character of Western nations.

The current malaise of the West is the entirely predictable result of policies based on the premises about life and society of the prevailing egalitarian-individualist ideology. In the months and years to come, events will continue to unfold in keeping with the futile effort to make reality conform to an impossible governing ideology. That is, the trends of the present will accelerate, which means, inevitably, more conflict, crime, racial strife, and overall social-cultural disintegration.

Just as the former Soviet Union eventually fell apart as an inevitable consequence of trying to organize society on the basis of an ideology and principles unrooted in historical, social and biological reality, so also this society will and must continue to decline as it tries to force nature and reality to conform to wishful thinking based on an unsound worldview.

A nation that embraces an ideology that is not rooted in reality – that is, an ideology of denial, falsehood, and wishful thinking -- cannot endure. It will not survive. It does not deserve to survive.

Given the gloomy trends of our age, it is entirely understandable that many people – even men and women of good will – despair and turn inward, seeking solace and refuge in a self-contained or narrowly focused life. Personally, I find it helpful to remind myself that by keeping expectations low, one can avoid or at least minimize disappointment.

During the final years of the Second World War, the leaders in Germany and the other Axis countries repeatedly warned that defeat would be a mortal calamity for all of Europe. In 1943, the great French writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline wrote that the German and other Axis forces were the last great bulwark of the West. Accordingly, he said, “The fall of Stalingrad was the end of Europe.” If the stern warnings of the German leaders in 1943, 1944 and 1945 were valid, and if Céline’s grim assessment was correct, than no one should be surprised by the social, racial and cultural disintegration of our age, and, correspondingly, our expectations today should be very low indeed.

While I regard the outcome of World War II as a calamity for Europe and the Occident, I hope, of course, that Céline and the others who shared his view were wrong in their belief that the outcome was a mortal or fatal blow. In any case, it’s not a matter that should overly concern us.

The era we are living in today is one that religions of the East call a “Kali Yuga” – an age of perverted values -- one that rewards those who deceive, and punishes those who tell the truth. You may recall the tale of “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” in which a small boy in a silent crowd is the only one to say out loud what the grownups think but are too conditioned or intimidated to say: “Look, The emperor has no clothes!” And with those few, honest words, the boy exposes and deflates a pretentious fraud. We must be like that honest young lad in the tale because the frauds that prevail today, while no less pretentious, are far more dangerous.

In an age of universal deceit, George Orwell once said, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. Today, more than ever, it is vitally important to defy the imposed conformity of our age, and forthrightly re-affirm basic truths: Diversity is not a strength. A healthy, enduring nation is more – much more – than a collection of individuals. Race is not a `Social construct’. History matters. Heredity matters.

What is needed today are not simplistic slogans, or wishful thinking about a utopian rainbow future, or foolish efforts to save some remants of a vanishing age, but candor, honesty, and defiant determination. Instead of merely complaining about what’s wrong, or asking what someone ought to do, each of us should, rather, ask himself: What can I do. We should, each of us, strive to our duty as our mind and our heart tell us, obeying the commands we give ourselves.

At the same time, we must not permit intimidation, malicious smears or threats to keep us from affirming what is true, and doing what is right, strengthened by the confidence that future generations will respect us, and history will vindicate us.

Our duty is to hold fast, to not despair, and to persevere in this long, twilight struggle, before the dawn of new and better age.

Source Notes

1. M. d’Ancona, “Europe’s Dangerous New Fault Line,” The New York Times, May 30, 2014. ( http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/31/opinion/dancona-europes-dangerous-new-fault-line.html )

2. H. Schofield, “France Front National: From 'untouchables' to EU force,” BBC News, May 26, 2014. ( http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-eu-27577964 )

3. C. Morris, “No-one can predict European politics,” BBC News, March 24, 2015. ( http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-32022742 )

4. “Pope Francis claims global economy is close to collapse and describes youth unemployment rates as an ‘atrocity’,” The Independent (Britain), June 14, 2014. ( http://www.independent.com.mt/articles/2014-06-14/news/pope-francis-claims-global-economy-is-close-to-collapse-and-describes-youth-unemployment-rates-as-an-atrocity-5472747521/ )

5. Thilo Sarrazin, Deutschland schafft sich ab. München: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2010. A review of this book by the German scholar Volkmar Weiss is posted at:

http://www.amren.com/news/2010/09/ignoring_biolog/

6. Barack Obama speech, May 28, 2014. ( https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/05/28/remarks-president-united-states-military-academy-commencement-ceremony )

7. Franklin Roosevelt “Four Freedom’s” speech of Jan. 6, 1941, delivered to a joint session of the US Congress.

( http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/fdrthefourfreedoms.htm ) ; Pres. Roosevelt “Flag Day” address of June 14, 1942, broadcast to the nation by radio. ( http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=16276 )

8. George W. Bush inaugural address, Jan. 20, 2005. ( http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=58745 )

9. Quoted in: John O’Sulivan, “In Defense of Nationalism,” The National Interest, No. 78, Winter 2004-5, p. 33.

( http://www.jstor.org/stable/42897502?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents )

10. There is, of course, a striking exception to this grand American policy – one that reflects the interests and agenda of those who wield decisive power in the US. American politicans insist that one country, Israel, must be recognized and maintained, even at the cost of American lives, as a specifically Jewish ethnic- religious state.

11. Charles A. Lindbergh, “Aviation, Geography, and Race,” Readers Digest, Nov. 1939, pages 64-67.

( http://library.flawlesslogic.com/lindy.htm )

12. Charles A. Lindbergh, “Neutrality and War,” Oct. 13, 1939. ( http://charleslindbergh.com/pdf/NeutralityandWar.pdf )