The Crash of Civilization

Fjordman, incisive as always, discusses the response to the attacks on 9/11 and the eventual failure of the West to do what needed to be done.

From Gates of Vienna

By Fjordman

The terror attacks of September 11, 2001 were the type of shocking event where many people remember exactly where they were and what they did that day. Personally, I was living in Egypt at that time. I had started studying Arabic language at the University of Bergen in western Norway. In 2001 I continued these studies at the American University in Cairo.

My linguistic skills in Arabic were mediocre. Since I left the Middle East in 2003 and haven’t practiced the language since, my Arabic has deteriorated and is now quite poor. For me, studying Arabic primarily became a door into studying Islam and Islamic culture. I was far better in this field of study, and continued my personal studies of Islam for years. I am at heart not a linguist, but rather an analyst with a strong interest in history.

Before September 2001, I was already growing more skeptical of Islam based on my own studies and personal experiences. Still, living in the largest city in the Arabic-speaking world during the September 11 Jihadist attacks was certainly interesting. The Mubarak regime imposed a curfew on Tahrir Square and parts of downtown Cairo that day. Perhaps they feared that some local Muslims would publicly celebrate the attacks, the way some Palestinian Muslims did. When Egypt received billions of dollars in aid from the USA, this would not have been good publicity.

I followed the news and newspapers back home via the Internet. They claimed that all Arabs and Muslims were sad and horrified by the attacks. This is not true. I know. I was there. Some of my Egyptian Muslim neighbors celebrated with cakes and said openly that they were very happy about the attacks.

To me, the most shocking thing about this was not that many Arabs and Muslims hated the West in general and the USA in particular. I already knew that. What was truly disturbing was that virtually the entire Western world seemed to be in complete denial about this fact. This was an entire civilization which once used to cultivate logic and reason, yet now seemed to have lost the ability to think rationally. That really scared me.

The Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu completed his book The Art of War around the year 500 BC. Despite being more than 2,500 years old, it remains surprisingly fresh and relevant. This is because Sun Tzu focused mainly on the psychological aspects of conflict. While human technology has changed greatly in 2,500 years, human psychology has changed a lot less. One of the most famous quotes from The Art of War is this:

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”

From what I observed in September 2001, it seemed that the Western world had forgotten who our enemies are. Far worse, though, was that we had even forgotten who we are, and the roots of our own civilization.

A decade later, another terror attack would have an even more direct impact on my life. Both attacks became national traumas. Yet the 2011 attacks in Norway were carried out by a single individual acting alone, whose alleged terrorist network only existed inside his mentally disturbed head. The 2001 attacks in the USA were carried out by many different individuals from a real international terror network whose ideology has adherents worldwide. Moreover, when a small country is attacked, this is bad for that small country. When a large and powerful country is attacked, this has geopolitical consequences.

By 2011, I had been living in the same flat in Oslo for eight years, since my return from the Middle East. When the July 22 attacks happened, some people blamed me personally for the atrocities. I suddenly found myself near the epicenter of an international news story. This was extremely unpleasant, but in some ways also educational. If the 2001 attacks weakened my trust in Western mass media, the 2011 attacks totally destroyed it.

I was now in a position where I knew exactly what was true. At the same time, I could follow the way the media presented the case. What they said was at best a highly distorted version of reality, at worst a total reversion of it. Some of this bad journalism could be due to sloppiness, laziness and plain incompetence. But not all of it. Sometimes the journalists would willfully leave out important information, grossly inflate other information, actively distort the truth or even flat-out lie.

I have seen such purposefully misleading journalism presented many times, by many different media outlets about me personally. However, I have also noticed very similar patterns on other subjects. In my view, Western media present a distorted view of reality on a wide range of important subjects.

The mass media are the eyes and ears of our society. When they feed the public misleading or distorted information about various important issues, this will lead to imbalances in our society. This media bias is undoubtedly a major factor contributing to the growing problems experienced by Western nations.

In order to win any struggle, you need a clear picture of what end goal you desire, as well as a realistic strategy for how to attain it. The Americans and their Western allies had neither in 2001. When President Bush in September 2001 stated that “ Islam is peace” and called the struggle a War on Terror, the fight had already become unwinnable.[1] Even for most terrorists, terrorism is just a tool, not the end goal.

President Bush further stated in September 2001 that the teachings of Islam are “ good and peaceful.”[2] This lie was repeated by other Western leaders. They freed Islam itself from criticism and blame, claiming that it is a religion of peace. The fight now consisted of spending untold billions on poorly thought-out plans to fight evil people with no specific background who had nothing to do with Islam. Such a strategy could never work.

The sensible thing to do after September 2001 was to suspend all Muslim immigration to Western countries. Yet this was not done. On the contrary, Muslim immigration continued as before. In some cases, it even increased. Many more Muslims live in Western countries now than in 2001, and more mosques have been built. This is a massive betrayal by Western authorities of the people that they are intended to serve and protect.

A generation after the September 11 attacks, the Islamic world has not changed much, apart from having an even larger population than it did in 2001. Movements such as the much-hailed Arab Spring in 2011 did not make a major difference. Meanwhile, the Western world has become more Islamic and less free.

The motivation used by the Bush Administration in October 2001 for invading Afghanistan was that the al-Qaida Jihadist terrorist network led by Osama bin Laden was operating there, protected by their allies in the Taliban. A few weeks after Islamic terrorists from al-Qaida had murdered thousands of Americans, this seemed reasonable. Some form of military response to the September 11 attacks was probably appropriate and necessary. However, proceeding to occupy the country for years was an entirely different matter.

The American government also decided to invade Iraq again in 2003. While Iraq’s secular dictator Saddam Hussein was never a pleasant man, he had absolutely nothing to do with the 2001 attacks in the USA.

The decisions to occupy Afghanistan and Iraq for years and attempt nation building and export democracy there were foolish in the extreme. This mistake will forever tarnish the reputation of President George W. Bush and his administration. These misguided policies were then continued by the next administrations, including eight years by President Barack Hussein Obama. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq contributed greatly to the astronomical levels of public debt which the USA currently suffers from.

The Americans had no realistic understanding of Islamic culture or how the local clan structure functions. They seemed to suffer from some naïve delusion that every illiterate Afghan goat-herder really was a secret Thomas Jefferson. Today, some left-wing Americans probably don’t even want Muslims to turn into Thomas Jefferson. After all, were not he and the other American Founding Fathers evil white men?

The majority of the Western soldiers who died in Iraq and Afghanistan were white men. Yet they often receive little gratitude for this. In fact, some veterans returning from Afghanistan may encounter more hostility than the Taliban. Since 2001, and especially after Obama became President, an ideology to combat alleged “white privilege” and “white supremacy” has been on the ascendance. It now permeates most sectors of American society, including the military.

When the Taliban destroyed statues of the Buddha in March 2001, many people were horrified. Yet the USA and several other Western countries now seem to have their own local versions of the Taliban. Since people supporting Black Lives Matter (BLM) started burning and looting in American cities in 2020, many statues have been attacked or taken down. So far, every single Western statue that has been attacked or removed represents a white man or woman. Those who support this development rarely complain about Islam’s founder Muhammad, who according to Islamic sources was a slave owner.

For several decades, Afghanistan has exported large numbers of migrants to other countries. Coming from an extremely brutal clan culture, some Afghan Muslims in the West have been convicted of rape, murder and terrorism. Despite exporting many migrants, Afghanistan has nearly doubled its population between 2001 and 2021. The country has one of the highest birth rates in the world outside of Africa.

The Taliban ruled over most of Afghanistan in September 2001. They rule over even more of Afghanistan in September 2021, with nearly twice as large a population. In addition to this, they have also inherited modern military equipment worth billions left behind by Western forces. This is the only thing 20 years of war in Afghanistan has achieved. That, and some brutal gang rapes and murders committed by Afghans in Western countries.

When the Cold War had ended, the American political scientist Samuel Huntington developed his famous “Clash of Civilizations” thesis.[3] This was first formulated in a lecture in 1992, then in an essay in 1993, and finally in a book in 1996. Put simply, Huntington foresaw the return of competing cultures and civilizations as sources of international conflict. Years later, many observations that Huntington made in his Clash of Civilizations thesis seem largely correct. He emphasized Islam’s bloody borders with other cultures, the rise of Asia and Chinese assertiveness, plus the gradual decline of the Western world as a part of the global population and economy. In the years before he died in 2008, Huntington was also increasingly concerned about the declining internal cohesion of Western societies and the corrosive effects of mass immigration. Yet fractures within the Western world today are larger than he anticipated in his original thesis in the early 1990s.

Xi Jinping became the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party in 2012 and President of the People’s Republic of China in 2013. He has established himself as the powerful authoritarian leader of an increasingly assertive and globally influential superpower. Yet totalitarian suppression of dissent has also intensified under his leadership. China has largely crushed dissent in Hong Kong, and displays aggressive behavior towards Taiwan and in the South China Sea. Under the guise of free trade, China has been waging de facto economic warfare against the West for many years. Western authorities, with a few notable exceptions such as U.S. President Donald Trump, have allowed them to do this.

A couple of decades ago, some Western thinkers assumed that over time, people in the Islamic world and China would become “more like us.” This was both arrogant and stupid. If anything, the Western world is becoming more Islamic, and in some ways more like China. Censorship, surveillance and ideological indoctrination have not decreased in China. But they have greatly increased in the Western world.

Ostensibly in order to combat Jihadists and militant Muslims, the power and influence of Western intelligence agencies were enhanced after 2001. The actions of Julian Assange and Edward Snowden by making secret documents publicly available remain controversial. Yet there is little doubt that their warnings against the rise of mass surveillance in the West have some truth to them. The enhanced powers and capabilities of intelligence agencies are increasingly used to harass and suppress Western citizens who oppose mass immigration, or want to retain their culture and national heritage.

The United States of America does not seem united about anything anymore. Not a shared ethnic background, religion, culture, ideology or common political goals, and hardly even a shared language. Some Americans feel that the country is more divided than it has been at any point since the American Civil War in the 1860s. Even President Joe Biden stated this in June 2021.[4]

Donald Trump officially received 74.2 million votes in November 2020, significantly more than when he won the presidency four years earlier. Yet according to official numbers, he still lost because Biden received an unprecedented 81.2 million votes. Joe Biden is thus supposedly the most popular President in American history. Yet he lacks personal charisma, does not have an impressive political track record, did not generate enthusiasm even in his own Democrat party and publicly displays disturbing signs of dementia. At times, he hardly seems to be mentally present.

Withdrawing from Afghanistan was necessary. However, the implementation of this withdrawal in August 2021 was exceptionally poor. This turned out to be a huge embarrassment for President Biden, and a global humiliation for the USA and NATO. Within a few months of taking office, Joe Biden has already proven to be an extremely bad and weak President.

Probably no presidential election in U.S. history has been mired in more serious allegations about voter fraud than the 2020 election. Millions or tens of millions of Americans suspect some sort of foul play.[5] Regardless of the truth in these accusations, such suspicions serve to increase internal levels of anger and tensions that were already high to begin with. Cracks have grown for years and developed into a chasm that seems almost unbridgeable. Some Americans feel that their country is experiencing a form of ideological civil war.

In the spring of 2021, two public letters signed by many French soldiers, including some retired generals, warned about the risk of France collapsing into a civil war.[6] The main reason for this is the growing power of Islamic separatism. Muslim immigrants have become so numerous that they dominate certain areas, which have partially broken free from the control of national authorities.

The thought that major Western countries could collapse into civil war is no longer unthinkable. Mass immigration of people with a very different mentality and cultural background is destabilizing entire countries. It is breaking down national cohesion, and dissolving the glue that used to hold society together.

A major internal struggle is taking place simultaneously throughout the entire Western world. On the one hand, you have traditionalists who value their cultural heritage and want to preserve their nation states and national identity. On the other hand, you have Globalists and Multiculturalists who are aggressive anti-nationalists, at least against European nations. They favor mass immigration and transnational rule.

The Globalist ruling elites show not just indifference, but open contempt or active hostility towards Westerners who still cling to their national heritage and cultural traditions. They sense that millions of ordinary citizens oppose the agenda of open borders. However, the Globalists still control the mass media and most instruments of power. They use any tool at their disposal to suppress Europeans who desire self-determination and self-preservation. This struggle is now creating dangerous ripple effects throughout the Western world. It is undermining basic trust between the rulers and ordinary citizens.

We are not merely witnessing a clash of civilizations. This is also a clash within the Western world itself. Perhaps even a crash of civilization. What used to be called Western civilization is clearly in decline. If current trends continue, Western societies may even be headed for some form of collapse in the not-too-distant future.

Notes:

1.		georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010917-11.html “Islam is Peace” Says President
2.		Remarks by the President at Islamic Center of Washington, D.C. September 17, 2001.
3.		georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010920-8.html Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People United States Capitol Washington, D.C. September 20, 2001.
4.		www.britannica.com/biography/Samuel-P-Huntington Samuel P. Huntington, Britannica online, September 2021.
5.		www.foxnews.com/politics/biden-us-never-been-as-divided-since-civil-war Biden says US more divided than at any time since the Civil War. June 24, 2021.
6.		www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-poll-idUSKBN27Y1AJ Half of Republicans say Biden won because of a ‘rigged’ election: Reuters/Ipsos poll November 18, 2020.
7.		www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-56899765 Anger as ex-generals warn of ‘deadly civil war’ in France. 27 April 2021. www.france24.com/en/live-news/20210427-french-generals-cause-backlash-with-civil-war-warning French generals cause backlash with ‘civil war’ warning. 27/04/2021. www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-57055154 French soldiers warn of civil war in new letter. 10 May 2021.