>>520834581
All the participants in the World Wars that doomed the West were stupid people, from the Kaiser and the Tsar to Churchill and Adolf. They could not see how creating the two biggest wars in history could end Europe's five century reign as global master and king of planet Earth. They were so spoiled by so many centuries at the top, and the presumption of invincibility that this long reign engendered, that they thought anything they did would not ultimately do existential harm to the West.
As Kunstler likes to say, some people act as if "anything goes because nothing matters." That is the decadent mindset precisely, the nihilistic stupidity of the prideful about to fall, and while Kunstler uses this phrase to describe America today (to which this mindset surely applies, as it is everywhere in this land), the phrase describes perfectly well Europe in the late 1800s and the first half of the 1900s ,when Europeans great and small, top to bottom, were drunk on imperialistic excess and its natural ally: overbeating nationalistic self-worship.
I am not praising India nor China, not Asia in general, Nor am I disparaging Europe and the West, which I see as, by a mile ahead, the greatest civilization ever to grace the earth.
I am, rather, lamenting the idiocy, which unfolded a century ago, that killed off Europe and the West's rulership of the world.
The world was, and would remain, better off under Western rule than under self-rule or Asian rule, because we Westerners are naturally more humane than any other civilizational group by far.
But now the world is doomed because the West is doomed. Our species' potential will never be achieved. We probably, today, occupy heights of accomplishment never to be exceeded in what remains of world history. We are at the peak of the world facing interminable decline.