deNiall Ferguson: The West is Not Dying, It Just Looks That Way

First published by CanSpeccy on Wordpress: February 6, 2014: 

According to Niall Ferguson, there’s little wrong with the West that cannot be fixed with some tweaking of institutions.

If Asia is rising while the West stagnates, that is the inevitable consequence of Asia having adopted the institutions that made the West great, namely, the competitive market economy, science, property rights, modern medicine, the consumer society and the work ethic.

If the West seems to be declining, it is, says Ferguson, because our institutions of democracy, capitalism, the rule of law, and civil society have degenerated.

Such arguments are bunk. As we stated elsewhere:

If the institutions of democracy in the West are degenerating, those of the extraordinarily dynamic China are essentially non-existent. If the rule of law in America is increasingly the “rule of lawyers,” in China the rule of law is a concept barely even understood. If free and fair competition in Western economies has diminished as capital has been concentrated in fewer hands, China’ state capitalism is the complete antithesis of the free and fair market that underlay Adam Smith’s invisible hand. As for the the institutions of civil society, the West is still incomparably free compared with China where even association for the purpose of religious worship is prohibited.

So while Western institutions are in decline, China’s are absolute crap. Yet still China’s economy booms as the West stagnates. Clearly, then, there’s more to Western economic decline than the inadequacy of some vaguely defined sets of institutions.

In fact, the West is undergoing willful destruction by fools motivated by the unattainable vision of a global empire based on a the bizarre notion that the Western model of diversity-loving liberal democracy is the natural endpoint for all social and political development.

But like the Communists of old, who though professing a belief in historical inevitability felt it necessary to push history forward by the most bloody revolutionary methods, so today, the liberal globalists, while asserting the worldwide triumph of liberal democracy, seek to ensure that outcome by compelling Western nations to commit suicide, replacing themselves with racial and cultural groups quite alien to the liberal democratic ideology the globalists claim has already achieved global acceptance.

UK Settlers

The absurdity of Ferguson’s refusal to acknowledge the West’s Gadarene rush to self-destruction is noted in Ricardo Duchesne’s review of Ferguson’s Civilization: The Six Ways the West Beat the Rest.

He [Ferguson] is clearly worried by the lack of assimilation of Muslims in Europe, and the key role being played at universities and elsewhere by Islamic centres. He tabulates that if the current Muslim population of the UK continues to grow at the current rate, its share of the total population would pass 50 per cent in 2050 (p. 290). So, it looks like the West needs to show resolve on Muslim immigration and assimilation … by teaching kids Western liberal arts? I doubt a population built on mass migration from non-Western lands would be enthusiastic about Elizabethan England, Homer, Chaucer, Aquinas, or even Shakespeare. He says that ‘mass immigration is not necessarily the solvent of a civilization, if the migrants embrace, and are encouraged to embrace the values of the civilization to which they are moving’ (p. 290). It is worth noting that only westerners are inviting resterners to come to their homelands; there is no ‘reconvergence’ whatsoever in this respect; this is one killer app Asia does not care for. If current trends continue, the West will become a less homogenous civilization, whereas China, Japan, and India will remain uniquely native.

And even if the mass of immigrants to Europe could be Westernized culturally, it would remain the case that the European nations as racial entities quite distinct from those of the countries from which Third World immigrants derive, are being exterminated by policies that not only promote immigration, but suppress the fertility of the indigenous population, and destroy the self-confidence of Western youth by inculcating the belief that Western civilization is a shameful heritage.

Understandably, Ferguson denies the destruction of the European nations by the simple expedient of ignoring this monstrous reality, for there is no rational basis of denial. Irrationally, liberals, if pressed, are ready enough to deny the genocide of the European peoples by simultaneously insisting that racial diversity is good while denying that the indigenous peoples of Europe have their own unique racial identities.

It is now clear that the World will not accept Western hegemony and its attendant culture of decadence because, first, it does not appeal to most of humanity, and second, the West lacks the military might to force it upon the World.

On the contrary, the mass of people migrating from East to the West to raise their standard of living are increasingly inclined to deride Western civilization, whether they be highly philoprogenitive Muslims settlers in Britain or Asian cultural supremacists at Yale University. Moreover, the limited capacity of America’s military has been clearly demonstrated in Iraq and Afghanistan, and confirmed by the the decision to back away from attempting the military overthrow of the unliberal and undemocratic governments of Syria and Iran.

Liberalism, the ideology that underlies the NeoCon drive for US-led Western-dominated global empire, is a death cult, and while we are nowhere near the End of History, we are nearing the point of no recovery for the Western nations.

The antidote to liberalism is conservatism. Conservatism is about reproducing your own people, not replacing it with people from elsewhere, it is about upholding one’s literary, religious and cultural history, not denigrating it as racism and supremacism.

Today, the denial of conservative values amounts to a program of Western self-genocide. It is a project fueled by hatred, the most powerful of political motivations: the self-hatred of brainwashed “anti-racist” Europeans and the ambition of opportunist settler immigrants. It is a program destroying the West by robbing Western youth of opportunity, ambition and hope.

Related:

CanSpeccy: The Rise of the West: Niall Ferguson’s Six “Killer Apps.” How Are They Working For Us Now?

Canspeccy: Niall Ferguson: The Decline of the West Explained – Not