Would the Last Dutchman Out Please Turn Off the Lights?

"It's funny," said Folkert Jensma, the editor in chief of the respected Handelsblad daily. "We now want to teach immigrants more about our identity, and we discover that we're not sure what's left of it!"

This and other excerpts from an article by Roger Cohen in the International Herald Tribune provide a provocative opening for today's Belmont Club post entitled "The Return of the Madman." Belmont's proprietor, "Wretchard," runs one of the best sites in the blogosphere when it comes to military and political analysis of the deep sort. He immediately ties in today's rise of Islamofascism in Europe back to Neitzsche's prophetic remarks in his 1882 "Parable of the Madman," in which the title character famously declared that God was dead and that Europe had essentially killed him. Neitzsche's idea was to free man from the bonds of religious superstition that prevented his deserved evolution into Superman. But those who later actually "killed" God were themselves equally enslaved to the more attractive Baal of Marxism--a point that Neitzsche might not have foreseen.

The intellectual mafiosi of the left, both in Europe and the US, have done their level best to eliminate the West's inconvenient biblical God by persecuting and/or competing with organized Western religions that continue, seemingly in vain, to vigorously promote His Laws. The problem is, the left's organized secular religion has failed. But it's still running on autopilot, courtesy of refinements to Marxism put in place much earlier by the Popular Front and Antonio Gramsci. It could truly be said of today's leftist that "They know not what they do."

Their enduring legacy today is the shallow, short attention-span popular culture now dominating the West. Since everything, even right and wrong, is now proclaimed to be "relative" and a personal decision, successive new generations are being weaned on a rich, tempting diet of sex, entertainment, sports, and "personalities," with most of the latter achieving "excellence" only in the sheer ugliness of their pierced, tattooed faces or sloppy, provocative attire. The order and majesty of religion, the beauty and grace of the arts, and the ideal of romantic love and devotion--the hallmarks of Western civilization even when in retreat--have all been replaced by a cult of instant gratification where every whim is some new flavor of "constitutional right" and where everything that can't be consumed in five minutes is simply not worth the time.

The original aim of dumbing down our civilization was to leave the West ripe for the pickin' by superior socialist cadres who would watch our civilization topple under the weight of its own ignorance and contradictions. The fact that it was actually the Communist-built Berlin Wall that was torn down--as Ronald Reagan demanded--is an irony completely lost on these clueless buffoons who call themselves intellectuals.

The West, and most certainly Europe, may now be potentially defenseless, low-hanging fruit for the mullahs and their minions. Perhaps one day soon, they'll roll into Paris, Berlin, Copenhagen, Antwerp, and The Hague handing out burqas and death sentences to stunned Europeans who no longer believe in themselves, their nation, or their future.