Hitler is a criminal lunatic... yet Hitler has an army of millions of men, aeroplanes in thousands, tanks in tens of thousands. For his sake a great nation has been willing to overwork itself for six years and then to fight for two years more, whereas for the common-sense, essentially hedonistic world-view which Mr. Wells puts forward, hardly a human creature is willing to shed a pint of blood.
by George Orwell, 1941.
Since Orwell wrote, the ruling Establishment have spent decades discrediting and demonising Nationalism and even natural patriotism - especially among European whites of the primary nations (The Anglosphere, France and Germany).
The consumer society and mass media have made almost everybody addicted to the kind of merely common sense, hedonistic society that Orwell attributes to HG Wells. Consequently, as Orwell predicted, nobody will suffer in any significant way to protect the conditions necessary to maintain this society (after all; why should anyone suffer discomfort and inconvenience for a society dedicated to comfort and convenience?).
But in addition, Westerners are insufficiently patriotic to suffer for their nation either: a Hitler, appealing to the mystical destiny of a people or place, has become impossible.
All this has rendered The West (by design and according to plan) feeble, demotivated and cowardly; lacking even the most basic level of self-protection and the most basic prudence about the real, inevitable threats of the future.
It turns-out that when a population has abandoned all belief in God and the spiritual, and believes itself to inhabit the accidental and purposeless universe of mainstream materialism; then people go quietly crazy; come (rightly) to despise themselves and their society; and alternate between a desperate/ futile attempt to stave-off old age and death; and the covert embrace of personal and national suicide.
This was something that George Orwell failed to recognise, in his own life as well as his society; because there was still sufficient residue of Christianity to maintain a coherent and purposive world view. But we are now two or three generations beyond such a buffering effect.
The burning, urgent, crucial task for The West is to become aware of what it lacks and which is killing us, what we personally most deeply yearn for, and what would satisfy our deepest needs.
Continuing as we are is not an option. There is nothing more important than this task - because all other questions depend on it.
