Monday, March 2, 2009

Vulnerability of the West

The Western world is more vulnerable at present than any time in our history. Our leaders have not defended our civilization and we, like children in a candy factory, are consuming and buying foreign goods to an extent that our future way of life is threatened. What is the real problem? We desire material items more than human life. We neglect the vulnerable, the weak, the unborn, and the elderly. We want fancy cars, big houses, and the appearance of something that will give status. In this pursuit we have facilitated the decline of our civilization and aided the rise of the next great power China. One cannot overestimate the power this totalitarian regime has over the U.S. because of its control of the dollar. The surprising thing is that the majority of American citizens are entirely unaware of true situation in the world. We hear speeches from elected officials who speak of our greatness, but no one addresses our vulnerabilities. No leader is discussing our relative weakness and offering solutions. In a way, the time for simple solutions has long passed. There is no simple way that we can stop the transfer of power without facilitating a decline in our standard of living. This drop is not preventable for the time being. What brought these events forward?

Our weakness was in adopting economic reasoning as our cultural norm. We have purchased goods produced by the cheapest labor, partially owned by totalitarian regimes that do not only take away freedom, but have mandated abortion as a state policy. We have not heeded the warning of important people who escaped the global center of communist regimes in the past. For example, on June 30th, 1975 Solzhenitsyn gave a speech that warns the West that Lenin figured out early on how to overcome capitalist economic systems. We would buy the very rope that would be used to hang ourselves. Once our cultural reasoning is understood by those who wish to surpass our civilization, all that they had to do was to supply cheap goods that we would purchase to our own demise. Our cultural norms would be used to facilitate our destruction. Our desire to maximize our wealth seems like a good thing in itself, but when the cost is the destruction of our civilization it is problematic. And which of our leaders have spoken about this? When Solzhenitsyn gave his warning the Soviet Union was a rival power, but now his words are ignored. His warning is has more salience today than it had over thirty years ago when they were written.

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