The Complete Spengler

Whatsa martyr with you?
The ingenue of Tom Wolfe's new novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons, by rights should have been a martyr to debauched university life. By sparing his protagonist from martyrdom, Wolfe, rather than holding up the mirror of tragedy to his public, ultimately gives us a smiley-face - and thereby comes close to the literary ideal of US neo-conservatives. (Jan 24, '05)

Two cheers for hypocrisy
The blue-state metrosexuals ridicule as "hypocrites" church-going folk who re-elected US President George W Bush. Yet apart from the saintly, only the unashamedly wicked are guiltless of hypocrisy. The rest of us give lip-service to standards we cannot or will not live up to. It is what makes life, which is by definition a failure, livable. (Jan 18, '05)

For whom the chopper lands
For the aborigines of the Sentinel Islands, the last stone-age people to resist contact with the world, an Indian Coast Guard helicopter landing on their shores seemed a direr threat than the tsunami: it appeared as an exterminating angel. The Sentinelese, for the time being, have kept the chopper at bay. Others are not so fortunate. (Jan 10, '05)

Is 'Americanism' a religion?
Islamists and neo-conservatives concur in calling "Americanism" a religion, for entirely different reasons. And they are both entirely wrong, for both confound American religion with the Bush administration's strategic agenda. (Jan 3, '05)

Santa Clausewitz, a minor Chinese god
Santa Claus, were Christianity to disappear, would live on in China as a minor prosperity god. The Chinese love to shop, so do Americans, exemplified by the Santa symbol of Yuletide acquisitiveness. The US contribution to Chinese prosperity and success goes beyond symbols, however. The result will be Sino-American global duopoly. (Dec 20, '04)

Writing off Europe
Europeans hate and fear the United States, but Americans barely can summon the energy to ignore Europe, which they have written off as a decadent and soon-to-disappear civilization. Indeed, Western civilization, as the heritage of great Europeans of the past, may be harder to preserve than America's pension system, or the "Hooah!" of the US Marine Corps. (Dec 6, '04)

What makes the US a Christian nation
Few people doubt that the United States is a Christian nation. But discontinuity makes American Christianity a baffling quantity to outsiders; only a small minority of American Protestants can point to a direct link to spiritual ancestors a century ago. Yet is the very nature of America that allows Christianity repeatedly to re-create itself there.(Nov 29, '04)

Muslim anguish and Western hypocrisy
Smugness oozes from European politicians who demand that Muslims repudiate violence as a precondition for residence in the West. To repudiate the death sentence for blasphemy, as meted out to Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, would be the same as abandoning the Islamic order. (Nov 22, '04)

The assassin's master sermon
Horrified though they may be by the thought, Westerners have something to learn from the letter that Mohammed B pinned with a knife to Theo van Gogh's corpse after he murdered the Dutch filmmaker this month. The message: antagonistic modes of faith underlie the conflict between the West and the Islamic world. (Nov 15, '04)

Power and the evangelical womb
What we have observed in the demographic shift in the US in favor of "red" (Republican) versus "blue" (Democrat) is only the thin end of an enormous wedge. Religious ("red") Americans will continue to have children, and secular ("blue") Americans will continue to extinguish themselves. "Red" America, characterized first of all by evangelical Christianity, is thriving. (Nov 8, '04)

'It's the culture, stupid'
Liberal commentators blame the high voter turnout of evangelicals - whose numbers plausibly were the factor that won George W Bush re-election - on bigotry. On the contrary, parents become evangelicals, and evangelicals become political, precisely in order to draw a line between their families and the forces of moral decay. (Nov 4, '04)

What Osama might have told America
Everyone is talking about rejuvenated Osama bin Laden's videotape, but television channels aired only four minutes of it. What was in the remaining 14 minutes of it? Plenty. By the time an American child reaches the age of 18, he will have seen on television 40,000 murders and 200,000 other acts of violence. And plenty of sex. This is why Islam will prevail. (Nov 1, '04)

In praise of premature war
Rarely has the West suffered by going to war too soon. On the contrary: among the wars of Western history, the bloodiest were those that started too late. The West, therefore, should be thankful that it has in US President George W Bush a warrior who shoots first and tells the CIA to ask questions later. (Oct 18, '04)

When you forget why you hanged yourself
Frits Bolkestein is the newly notorious member of the European Commission who warned that Europe would implode like the Austro-Hungarian Empire if Turkey were admitted into the EU. But he, like many Europeans, forgets why Austro-Hungary choked on the poisons of its own culture, and so cannot see why Europe is doing the same today. (Oct 5, '04)

Squeegee men and suicide bombers
The anti-terror strategy of the US Department of Homeland Security has criminalized not only terrorists, but also their ideological sympathizers. What this means is that individual Muslims will suffer. Remember, either you are with us ... (Sep 27, '04)

Bush, Marshal Foch and Iran
The situation in Iraq might look hopeless for the US. In fact, as Marshal Foch famously said, "Situation excellent. I shall attack." The target will be Iran, and Iraq will no longer be a problem as it will cease to exist. (Sep 20, '04)

Why Americans love George
Outsiders can see clearly that Democrats are cleverer, better dressed and better looking than those currently running the White House. But it is just the sort of Americans who know they are neither clever nor good-looking who will vote for President George W Bush in November, and that is why he will win.(Sep 13, '04)

BOOK REVIEW
Faith, fertility and American dominance
The Empty Cradle by Phillip Longman
This American journalist is not the first person to be horrified by declining birthrates among "modern" civilizations, and to extrapolate that anti-modernists such as evangelical Christians will eventually breed themselves into a position of global dominance. In this book, he hatches schemes such as tax incentives to encourage bigger families and save modernity from itself. (Sep 7, '04)


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