Some say that the fall began with the First decline. We used to call it World War One. The Great Civilizations of the West sacrificed its young and paid a bigger price with its soul. Hope died on the battlefields of the Somme, Verdun, Passchendaele and Cambrai. We fought each other to a standstill and then buried in the thick mud any moral clarity that we may have had. The Old order disappeared and from the flames of total war we birthed a toxic cynicism. We had earned the right to no longer believe in ourselves and from that end onward it is as if we had been cast astray.
The fact that the war was an unfinished debt that had not been repaid was all too evident. It was what allowed us to march head fast into an even greater conflict almost two decades later. Once again the civilization tried to take its own life. It beat back one barbarism (fascism) with another (communism). The death rates soured. Millions were horded into camps and massacred. The planet ached, screeching for relief as it succumbed to an even greater carnage.
For a time being we rolled back evil but the price we paid was extreme. D-Day, Stalingrad, El-Alamein and Midway were celebratory victories that we would not enjoy for long. Europe was finally gutted. It had been reduced to a tattered mess from whence it would exist as a plaything in an ideological struggle between the American juggernaut and the Soviet Totalitarian state.
More than that it couldn’t offer. Its locus of power that had peaked in the century before was gone and like the Ottomans before it now owned the moniker of the sick old man. Past glories from the era of Louis XIV, Napoleon, Bismarck and Disraeli could only sustain it so long. Without a soul the great cathedrals, museums, galleries and palaces that has shone with such brightness not too long ago would grow dimmer with each passing decade.
We all lost a lot and we didn’t replace it with much. What we had gained was the technological power to render ourselves obsolete.In this we could rejoice.
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