Another recommended link from the “Your Weekly Stack” set of links to interesting posts on Substack. This, like the previous post, is from an author I hadn’t read before and thought was worth sharing with you.
This is from The American Tribune, making the case that modern Americans (and westerners in general) are in a similar situation to the white minority in Rhodesia:
We stand today in the ruins of civilization. Much as the 9th Century Anglo-Saxons looked at the stone works of the Romans and thought they must have been giants,1 or the Greeks of the post-Sea Peoples Dark Age saw the works of the Minoans and Myceneans and thought only Cyclopses could have constructed such structures,2 we stare at the achievements of the 19th and early 20th Centuries in near-disbelief.
The moon hasn’t been stepped upon since the 70s. Mars remains uncolonized. Municipal infrastructure like water treatment and provision is falling apart and the government either can’t or won’t respond to natural disasters.3 Whereas we once built beautiful buildings that lasted for centuries, structures such as Chatsworth and the Horse Guards Building of Whitehall, now we have ugly structures of concrete and steel that are falling apart already.4
The situation as regards crime and squalor is even worse. As Curtis Yarvin notes in “An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives”:
If you read travel narratives of what is now the Third World from before World War II (I’ve just been enjoying Erna Fergusson’s Guatemala, for example), you simply don’t see anything like the misery, squalor and barbarism that is everywhere today. (Fergusson describes Guatemala City as “clean”. I kid you not.) What you do see is social and political structures, whether native or colonial, that are clearly not American in origin, and that are unacceptable not only by modern American standards but even by 1930s American standards.
So whereas Guatemala was once clean, now America’s cities are towers of concrete surrounded by piles of refuse, mobs of zombie-like drug addicts living on the streets,5 and infested with criminals of both the petty and highly violent variety. As Hartley put it, “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there”. More accurately, the past is like a thriving civilization; they do things better there.
In short, we, like those in the Belgian Congo after the Belgians left, live in an “Empire of Dust” where much of what remains is the ruin of a prior civilization destroyed not because it didn’t work, but because the demented ideology of the present conflicted with its continued, functional existence.6
What happened? A sort of decolonization inflicted upon the Great Powers themselves — namely America, Germany, Britain, and France — after the outlying colonies had long been destroyed. The decay of law and order, the promotion of anti-white hatred, the decay of infrastructure, and the filling of positions with corrupt thugs rather than honorable gentlemen,7 all of it is more or less what happened to the colonies in the ’50s and ’60s. Further, it is similar to what happened later on in South Africa, where a collection of communists, leftists, and NGOs with like mindsets and funded by those like George Soros turned a formerly thriving civilization into what now amounts to a land like Mad Max but with more murder.8
But while the South Africanization of America is certainly an issue that we face,9 it’s not the most accurate comparison to our present problem. South Africa was, when it fell, filled with decades of racial hatred sparked by decades of apartheid that ended only then (though was somewhat overblown), something that Europe never had and nowhere in America has had in over half a century. That unique circumstance created a degree of hatred that was overpowering and, though one with which we largely disagree, understandable. We, then, are somewhat different in terms of where we are and what is happening.
1. https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/data/UQ_363155/s40110183_phd_final_thesis_copy.pdf
2. See The Glory that Was Greece by Stobart
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson,_Mississippi_water_crisis; https://nypost.com/2024/10/03/us-news/north-carolina-hurricane-victims-slam-biden-harris-admin-as-fema-response-sputters/
4. See, for example, https://www.vintagebuilding.com/houses-longer-houses/
5. See, for example: https://youtu.be/9iSkKkzabnM
6. This is what the phrase “empire of dust” comes from: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2148945/
7. https://www.theamericantribune.news/p/the-death-of-the-gentleman-and-the
8. https://www.theamericantribune.news/p/george-soross-hand-in-south-africas
9. I wrote an article on this for Tablet: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/united-states-south-africa-racial-justice
