The day the West crashed and burned
September 11, 2001. I turned on the car radio. The BBC. Was it some kind of promotion for a new disaster thriller? No, it was 911! It took my wife and I a few moments to grasp the new reality we had just entered. The contrast was utterly striking. Before our eyes stretched beautiful, peaceful Devon. Before our ears stretched the ugly death that people were at that very moment contemplating. People who that same morning had gone to work or boarded a plane in the same way as millions do every day. It was the stark rift between the normal and the seeming impossible that was so shocking.
On September 10, 2001, the West was comfortably complacent. On September 11, 2001, that complacency was shattered. What happened thereafter was twenty-five years of decline. What crashed and burnt on 911 was not just planes, towers and people. It was the sense that for all its travails the US-led West was unassailable. It was not. As such, 911 was the dawn of foreboding, the dangerous debut of debilitating decline.
On September 10, 2001 America was supreme, Europe was at peace. The Great European Project was progressing and the golden light of the end of history was reflected in a myriad droplets that in hindsight were little things. On September 11, 2001 the edifice that was the West began to crumble as the pillars of artifice upon which it was built began to crumble. Afghanistan, Iraq, the banking crisis and the destruction of public finances, the Eurozone crisis, Brexit, COVID and major war again in Europe pushed the once mighty West into the place it is in today – a West so indebted it can no longer afford to defend itself. A West in which servicing debt is now so costly that democracies are really bondocracies so in hock are they to the Bond Barons.
The Americans rightly wanted revenge for that Day of Days but good strategy is rarely born of bad acts and deep, deep anger. Their anger transformed Manifest Destiny into corrupted power. What followed thereafter simply accelerated the West’s decline. The decadent elites that ran much of the Western world proved wholly incapable of facing up to the dark realism of a new Dark Age. Rather, they retreated into the signalling of false virtue. They were found to be dreamers when what we needed were leaders, so incapable that they preferred to dream rather than act. As if paralyzed by fear they refused to abandon their elite world of small crises, welfarism, institutionalism, multiculturalism, consumerism, globalism and Europeanism in which talking was forever confused with doing.
Europe’s inept leaders also turned Europeans into prey for a host of predators. Prey for Islamists. Prey for nationalists. Prey for imperialists. First Osama bin Laden, then Putin, now Xi and a host of others who are using the globalist fantasies of Europe’s elite against them with the people they are meant to protect paying a terrible price. And, of course, inept democracies began what inept democracies always do when so badly led that they decline into populism and nationalism.
911 might have begun the destruction of the West as an idea, but it ended when its greatest Power, the United States, decided in its anger that it no longer wanted to be the Shining City on the Hill. In their rage Americans turned in on themselves and elected Donald J. Trump.
The great tragedy of 911 is not just the memory of all those hundreds of thousands of people who without that terrible Day might still be living. It is also the fact that 911 began a decline in Western power so precipitous that those who would not have dared challenged us do so now with seeming alacrity. And, that hatred has replaced reason not only in the world but in the new sectarianism which post-911 democracy is now spawning.
At the very moment of crashing, burning realisation my wife and I were parked at Okehampton Castle. To this day that snapshot of place, horror, foreboding and sad, sad, sadness is seared into my brain. A previous generation had said they all knew where they were when they heard the news Kennedy was shot. My generation all know exactly where we were on 911; the moment hatred crashed and burned itself into our lives and the West began its long descent towards the crash site of today. It is still burning and our incompetent leaders haven’t a clue what to do about it.
