It's Not the End of the World, It's Just the End of You: The Great Extinction of the Nations

This is an eclectic collection of articles/blogs that range from erudition to nescience, from absolute greatness to incredible idiocy. That one person could wander through so many subjects, and have insufficient knowledge on some of them to even write on the subject is only fascinating in the abstract, for there are serious subjects in here that demand far better information and knowledge, as well as analysis and opinion. It is unsubstantiable opinion, above all else, that rules this book and his second book,  How Civilizations Die: (And Why Islam Is Dying Too) , and that do a great deal of damage to the serious knowledge that is require to make great decisions. He argues that most of the casualties in our Civil War came after the South had lost, i.e. after Gettysburg. How could the South know that Sherman would be so successful, and that his success would elect Lincoln instead of McClellan in 1864? If no Sherman's march, McClellan wins, and the South is independent still today. So, to let Spengler critically analyze anything is to sprinkle vapid and shallow on the subject. Spenglers time machine is broken, and his crystal ball is opaque. Spengler criticizes Robert Spencer, and I presume, silently, others, for "pointing to the violent passages in the Qur'an." He also points out that Christianity and Judaism have a violent past, pointing to Dueteronomic injunctions, Charlemagne and the Saxons, and the Cathers. By Spenglers analysis, Mein Kampf was a silly little book that inspired no one. A few idiots almost accidently, just because, wiped out 6 million Jews, and started the bloodiest short war in human history. For Churchill to have used Mein Kampf in his attempts to arouse the British in the 1930's must have been foolish. Just because Hitler said what he was going to do, put it in writing, and spoke about it constantly, and then actually did his best to live up to his own statements, must have been an accident. We needed to analyze each and every Nazi individually, because there were so many wonderful, peaceful Nazis that everyone wanted to have one for their neighbor. Its not the Nazi beliefs, ideals and values, it s how individuals acted. So, every Jew should be Moses, and have the Levites kill those that aren't true believers. Every Jew should wipe out their friends of another tribe, like Americans, just like they did with the Midianites, just because they are not Jews. Wiping out all the other tribes, Ammonites, Moabites, Gileadites, Caananites, etc., etc., could be horrid., but even if one assumes the worst, as Spengler must believe, rather than that these folks all lived in irremediable sin, the point is that all the folks that the Jews were commanded to kill and conquer are all dead and gone. This was circa 1500 BC to 1000BC. Jesus came along 1000 plus year later and preached "turn the other cheek". Muhammad came along, 600 years after Jesus, and Allah preached Sura 9.5, "Kill the Unbelievers wherever you find them..." It's like Islam went back in time to before Abraham, and preached to just fight endless wars with endless slaughter everywhere with everyone, forever. The folks that Allah and Muhammad command to be killed and subjugated, are Christians, Jews, Polytheists (Hindus, Buddhists, etc.), atheists, in general all non-believers. We are all still around. Moses and Joshua weren't commanded to kill everyone in the entire world through to today unless they converted to Judaism. If that was the case, the Jews in David and Solomon's time would have gone to war with Egypt, and everyone else, forever, as the Wahhabis (Salafists) did from the time they were founded. The Wahhabis are also still around. Perhaps apocryphally, after WWII, a concentration camp survivor was asked what he had learned. He said, "If someone says he want to kill you, believe him." So now, if someone's god says he want to kill you, maybe, just maybe, we should pay some attention to that. We, the Western World, said, after World War II, that if someone wrote a book, and someone followed the commandments of that book, then we needed to act like we should have in 1932, or 1935, or 1937. 20-20 hindsight vision is easy, applying this to the future is difficult, but the book is the Qur'an, the author is Allah, or Muhammad, and the followers are Muslims, or Islamists or IslamoFascists, or IslamoNazis. Winston Churchill was right about the Nazis, and ahead of his time. Winston Churchill was right about Soviet Communists, and ahead of his time. Churchill was right about the IslamoNazis, and ahead of his time by our standards."How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries... The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property<either as a child, a wife, or a concubine must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men....but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith." Christianity, by its most basic precepts, the New Testament, is, if anything, a pacifistic religion. Turn the other Cheek, etc. There is nothing within Christian teachings that made Charlemagne kill Saxons if they didn't convert, but there is in the Qur'an for Muslims to act so, as they did in Afghanistan and India, as well as throughout every land they conquered. It is called the Hindu holocaust for a reason, and it killed 10 to 15 times as many Hindus as Hitler killed Jews. The Islamists arms were so tired of beheading Hindus, 100 million Hindus later, that they informally admitted them to the Sura 9:29 "People of the Book" category, and allowed them to live in submission, paying the Jizya, just like Coptic Christians in Egypt today. Certainly the Crusades were a valid Western Civilization response to 400 years of unrelenting Jihad, but it was a perversion of Christianity, an incorporation of Islamic rules, temporarily, just to be able to survive, that made it a Crusade. Emperor Heraclius, circa 622AD, started the first "Crusade". He couldn't convince his soldiers that this was a civilizational survival fight against the Persian Sassanids. Therefore, he commandeered the Churches riches, put them to great civilizational surviving secular work, and perverted Christianity to make this a Holy War against the Zoroastrian fire worshippers who were out to destroy Christianity. He was also a great trainer of men, a great general, and a great leader. He needed more, and the Holy War fervor gave him that. Without such, the empire would have vanished. Choices are choices, and Heraclius chose survival, rather than extinction. Edward Gibbon, author of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, believed that the adoption of Christianity by the Roman Empire had a great deal to do with the continued decline and fall. He believed that Christianity sapped the vitality out of folks and turned them into lambs for the slaughter. He is partially correct. Matthew 10:34 is the most violent verse, by far, in the New Testament. "Think not that I am come to send peace on earth, I came not to send peace, but a sword.". The only other real world violence is on the Mount of Olives when Jesus re-attaches the ear that a sword, misused, cut off. Just because some folks perverted Christianity, while other folks followed the Jihad perfectly does not make Islam and Christianity comparable. Of all the Terrorist attacks since 1970, minus the Tamil Tigers, one or two have been by Jews, one or two have been by Christians, and 10,000 plus have all been by Muslims. The Muslims shout Allahu Akbar, i.e. they are following the commandments of Allah and Muhammad. The Christians and Jews do not do it because God told them to do so, they are just sick people. It took centuries of theological debate before Christianity rationalized self-defense, articulated as "just war". Jihad almost became the sixth Pillar of Islam, and Islam is the single bloodiest political ideology that has ever stalked the earth, killing more non-Muslims than the entire 20th century killed, period. I have read Mein Kampf. I have read 8 different translations of the Qur'an. The Center for the Study of Political Islam states that the Qur'an has, quantitavily over twice as much hatred for Jews in it as Mein Kampf does. They say the Qur'an has qualitatively, infinitely greater hatred in those passages than Mein Kampf does. My analysis, before I ever heard of the CSPI, absolutely agrees with them. There is also far more, and far greater, hatred of Christians and other non-Muslims in the Qur'an than there is for untermenschen in Mein Kampf. Spencer points out the evil that is the Qur'an so that non-Muslims can understand the level of hatred that Islam has for them, and the ill treatment that is in store if Muslims become a functional majority in a Western Civilization culture. For Goldman to criticize Robert Spencer is very unbecoming, and does a great deal of damage to those of us that are trying to save the world, and the USA, from Islam. The Crusades were a perversion of Christianity, but Jihad is true Islam. So the USA went on Crusade, a Crusade in Europe, in WWII, in the words of Dwight Eisenhower. But when George Bush used the same analogy after 9/11, ie a USA Crusade, not a Christian Crusade, he was chastised with lies by the Islamists and their apologists, like Bill Clinton But, Islam can go on permanent Jihad and that's just Ok with almost everybody. Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the current head of the Muslim Brotherhood, has stated: "The civilizational-jihadist process...is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and `sabotaging' its miserable house...so that it is eliminated and God's religion is made victorious over all other religions." Hitler never said anything better! Spengler criticizes Obama endlessly, and that is all great, but he says he is not a Muslim. How would Spengler know? I would suggest reading my reviews of the two books,  Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance  and  The Audacity of Hope Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream , by Barack Hussein Obama. "China poses no strategic threat to the United States". I presume he is talking about Taiwan! American military estimates and wargames show that as the world is currently turning, China will be able to successfully deny the US access to the Western Pacific, forcefully, by the early 2020's. Nice, hegemonic military buildup, China! They are serial currency manipulators, eating us for lunch, riding us hard, and putting us away wet every day! China kept our P-3 in early 2001. They support Iran and its nuclear program as they do with North Korea. They were an enormous aid to Pakistans' nuclear bomb and missile programs. They block every UN vote we support. They are buying up 100% of the critical mineral rights and supplies around the world. Nickel, Magnesium, the rare earths, everything you need to build electronics, hi-tech devices, and all kinds of military stuff. Their desire is to be the OPEC of the world for all of this stuff, to our great demise. And they are making great progress. If there ever is a shooting war, it will have to be a short one, for our military industry won't be able to make squat with zero materials. They are constantly running cyber attacks on the US, our government, industrial, and military databases and systems. A Christian China will be not be our friend any more than Christian Nazi Germany was! China poses a clear and present strategic threat to the United States! On balance, this book has done far more harm than good. It should be consigned to the ignorant and foolish trashbin of history.

These are recycled, expanded, and loosely edited essays. Some have been published elsewhere, but most are based on Goldman's personal "Spengler" blog posts.If you are not used to Goldman's characteristic mix of geopolitical analysis and cultural history (and even if you are) the book may seem uneven -- because it is. Since Goldman has only a few interrelated big ideas that appear in all his writing, a collection like this seems less like a collection of essays and more like a book that ought to be organized under a single thesis. However, in the absence of a single, overarching thesis, the book seems disorganized and in need of a heavy-handed editor. The minority presence of cultural history essays makes them seem most out of place, but they are also the best material.Goldman is capable of an occasional bravura performance as an outstanding amateur historian of European cultural and religious history. He is most qualified as a musicologist, and his piece on Wagner is in my view the best thing he's ever written. (It likely benefited from other editorial staff at First Things, where it first appeared.) Unfortunately this essay stands out as an oddity in this book because there is so little else like it.Goldman's main avocation and voice remains that of the self-taught international intelligence analyst who became a financial expert on long-term investment. In the essays written in that voice, facts and data are mustered to support broad claims that blossom into polemics against Islam and Islamic cultures that lay the basis for Goldman's personal foreign policy agenda for the US and Israel. All of this is based on Goldman's picking of future winners and losers based on birth rates and the religious ethos of different nations. Goldman preaches this gospel with such certainty he seems like a historical determinist. He comes across as prophet who has perceived the will of God in history, and God's will is doom for those who follow other gods.Goldman's other book -- How Civilizations Die -- released the same time as this one, offers the most updated, reworked, and unified presentation of his geopolitical forecasts. Yet in both books Goldman seems better at hindsight than foresight; he is at least more dispassionate when looking back on history. When surveying the present and future, an emotional and reactionary tone emerges that is insistent, certain, dogmatic, and finally unpersuasive. He may have some worthwhile points to offer, but he is so hell-bent on selling his full program -- which gets into areas beyond his competence and usual subjects -- that he comes off seeming a bit unhinged. Readerly skepticism is aroused.He would be the lunatic of one ideaIn a world of ideas, who would have all the peopleLive, work, suffer, and die in that ideaIn a world of ideas. He would not be aware of the clouds,Lighting the martyrs of logic with white fire.His extreme of logic would be illogical.--Wallace Stevens, "Esthétique du Mal"

This book is a collection of essays by Goldman and repeats in great part his "Why Civilizations Die". Goldman enters into a discussion of Wagner, relative to which my lack of knowledge in musicology blocked much understanding. Goldman is a rarity and always worth reading.

One of the best books of essays I've ever read, everyone should read it! Learned a lot from it. Buy it now.

Oh wow - this is hard hitting stuff, from an erudite man. Demographics, God, Philosophy, Islam, Europe, History, War (the thirty years war parts are fascinating and having been so much neglected in our modern world, it came as a surprise to read about those horrors again in this context) Wagner, Israel, America, Evangelists and so much more. Not a dull word.It is controversial and I didn't agree with some of it - but this is a thought provoking and marvellous work - it really gets you thinking.