The West is incapable of soberly assessing its situation and taking appropriate and necessary action. There has been and will continue to be constant competition in the world between different civilizations, states, nations, ethnicities or tribes for resources and living space or simply for prestige. If our ancestors had not understood this and had given up the battle of Poitiers, Vienna or Lepanto in advance, Western society would have disappeared long ago. Every civilization that exists today was invented and conquered at the expense of others that did not survive. From the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries onwards, the West, by a favourable coincidence, developed enormous intellectual, economic and military power that literally paralysed the vast empires of Asia, Persia, the Ottoman Empire, the India of the Great Mughals or China.
Every civilization that exists today was invented and conquered at the expense of others that did not survive.
This paralysis is over. Non-European nations have adopted modern technology and a powerful economic base and are seeking to regain the position they once held in the world system. Unless the West understands this threat and challenge, it will succumb. No one has mercy on societies that choose to indulge in idleness, profligacy or have lost their sense of reality. At the end of the first millennium, arguably the most economically developed region of the then world was in Central Asia, in what is now Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and northern Afghanistan. All it took was a few serious historical mistakes and failures by local elites for these once prosperous and prosperous lands to become the epitome of underdevelopment, poverty and devastating conflict. It is entirely up to the political will and determination of the people of the West to prevent a similar development on our continent.
