By Batiushka for the Saker Blog - May 28, 2022

Religion is the key of history – Lord Acton

Civilization

The word ‘Civilization’ comes from the Latin word ‘civitas’, or city, and so ‘civilized’ simply means to live in cities. This word ‘civitas’ gives us words like civilian, civic and civil. Civilization means that people no longer live as nomadic hunter-gatherers, but are settled. Although therefore they have organised agriculture, they are not dependent on everyone working in agriculture as there are food surpluses, greater than for the numbers of human-beings working to grow food. This means that not all have to live off the land and many can do other things and live in cities. They can live off agricultural surpluses, traded in markets for other goods, created by technology, such as building materials, clothing, footwear and utensils, as well as being able to buy and sell services such as education and medicine. All civilizations have not only trade, but also a set of sacred or spiritual values which are at the heart of any civilization, which is called Religion. Religion is at the core of the culture and creates sacred architecture (ziggurats, pyramids, temples, monasteries, cathedrals, mosques…), painting, sculpture, literature and sets the moral values which people live by.

Historians and philosophers of civilization, such as Christopher Dawson, Arnold Toynbee or Samuel Huntingdon, have pointed out the particularity of Western civilization. To quote from Christopher Dawson in his work ‘Religion and the Rise of Western Culture’, written nearly a century ago: ‘Why is it that Europe alone among the civilizations of the world has been continually shaken and transformed by an energy of spiritual unrest that refuses to be content with the unchanging law of social tradition which rules the oriental cultures? It is because the religious ideal has not been the worship of timeless and changeless perfection, but a spirit that strives to incorporate itself in humanity and to change the world’. This means that, unlike Chinese, Indian, Buddhist, Amazonian, Orthodox Christian, Muslim or any other civilization, Western civilization is unique, as it has continually sought to spread itself aggressively in a missionary way, imposing itself on, meddling in and taking over the rest of the world. In other words, it alone claims to be global. No wonder that today it openly calls itself ‘Globalism’.

Western Civilization

The Western world has long pretentiously called itself ‘The Civilized World’, as if to say ‘there is no civilization outside our civilization’. This is why it condemns all other civilizations, both in the present and in the past, as ‘primitive’, ‘savage’ and ‘barbaric’, and therefore arrogates to itself the right to annihilate them. This is why it uses euphemisms to define itself as, for example, ‘the international community’, when in fact it is anti-international, imposing a one size fits all ideology on all and proposing a world dictatorship subjected to its elite. ‘Western’ has come in its eyes to mean Universal. This is why, ironically, it calls itself ‘Judeo-Christian’. We shall return to the use of the word ‘Christian’ later. The claim to be ‘Judeo’ (a racial religion confessed by fewer than 0.2% of the world population, is particularly curious. However, we must understand that what it means by ‘Judeo’ (1) is actually Zionist, that is universalist. From here we understand the very accurate descriptive term for it of ‘Anglo-Zionist’, as used by The Saker. For it is the Anglo-Saxon (2) world or Anglosphere, initiated by the genocidal Cromwell (who, by the way, was idolised by the monetarist Thatcher), financed by Dutch Jews, and spread to the North American colonies, which is today the ideological center of ‘the West’.

Western civilization uses some very twisted definitions. For instance: For it to ‘civilize’ means to massacre the natives, so then it can asset-strip their country. The classic case is North America, but there are dozens of other examples around the world, from Bolivia to Guatemala and the Congo to Afghanistan; justifiers of colonization claim, ‘yes, but we brought them the benefits of civilization like the railways’. In fact, railways were built in countries like India so that minerals could be exploited and troops could be transported in order to quell popular wars of liberation against oppressive and exploitative foreign rule; then we have the promise that, in the name of freedom and democracy ‘we shall bomb them back into the Stone Age’ (attributed to US General Curtis ‘Bombs Away’ LeMay, speaking of Vietnam). As for the Viennese Hitler, that great spreader of Western civilization, he opposed ‘Jewish and Asiatic’ Bolshevism and murdered 27 million in the ultimate Holocaust. He never knew that Asia is the source of advanced civilizations and religions, including Christianity, which was not European, for Christ was hardly some pale, blond-haired Nordic ‘Aryan’.

Western War

Western war has always consisted of highly organised violence, aided by the most aggressive high technology. Advances in military technology have all been initiated by the West. It used to be castles against arrows, the lethal crossbow against pikes, cannon against stone walls, the musket against bows, the Maxim gun, invented by the Anglo-American ‘Sir’ Hiram Maxim (3) against spear-throwing Africans, then it was poison gas (as used by Hitler, that is Churchill (sorry for the Bushism, ‘anyway’) against the Kurds), then Agent Orange, cluster bombs and uranium-tipped shells against rifles. To illustrate this, let us think about how those used to the way that such technology is exploited criticize the special operation (not war) in the Ukraine (4). They claim that the progress of the Russian operation, carried out by relatively small numbers of liberation forces from Donetsk and Lugansk and of Confederate Russian troops, is ‘too slow’.

Here they misunderstand how the Allied/Confederate forces use their military technology. It is quite unlike the US and its Union NATO vassals. The latter carpet bomb, they cause ‘collateral damage’ (the NATO euphemism for the mass murder of innocent victims) and are hugely destructive, as though war was all a special effects show, a spectacle for entertainment as in Hollywood films, most of which portray great destruction. This is why nearly 20 years ago the American Rumsfeld spoke of the US destruction of civilian infrastructure in Iraq as ‘shock and awe’, which is just another euphemism – Hitler would have called it ‘Blitzkrieg’. Yes, of course, Russian civilization conducts military operations ‘slowly’ (5): it is not a US-style special effects operation, it is meant to avoid civilian and military casualties. You cannot translate ‘collateral damage’ into Russian, you can only paraphrase it.

Western Religion

Western religion has a similar story to tell. As we have said, every civilization has a set of sacred values. The Western too and though it calls its religion ‘Christianity’, it is not. For instance, it insists on calling the Crusaders and Teutonic Knights ‘Christians’. But just because you are a bloodthirsty barbarian who commits genocide with a cross on your uniform, that does not make you a Christian. Just as Nazis wore a belt with ‘Gott mit uns’ (‘God with us’) stamped on it, that did not make them Christian either. And when the Nazis put crosses on their tanks and dive-bombers, it did not make them Christian either (though the crosses did take in some naive Western Ukrainians in 1941). And just because God ‘told’ George Bush to invade Iraq in 2003, that did not make him or his forces Christian. Frankly, the Western use of the word Christian is blasphemous to Orthodox Christians and the more accurate use of words like ‘Catholic’ and ‘Protestant’ is insulting to those who are of those religions . . .

[SNIP]