Leftism is a disease of civilizations. In and of itself it is not fatal – or, at least, it’s not likely to be the cause of death. Instead, much like AIDS, leftism destroys the natural defenses of civilization and leaves it vulnerable to attack by opportunistic infections and diseases.

Western civilization’s strength is (or, at the very least, was) multi-dimensional. Each of these strengths worked together to create a system of interlocking defenses which assured our continued superiority over other inferior civilizations. Without such defenses, even the lowest, the most backwards, the most barbaric of civilizations can defeat the most advanced and cultured. One need only look to the defeats of the Greeks, the Romans – or even the Chinese – to understand this.

A barbaric civilization with confidence and will can – and often will – defeat even the most advanced civilization if it lack them.

What were the bulwarks of Western superiority?

They weren’t material. Though in recent centuries we have enjoyed superiority in this area, that was not always the case. Nor was it the cause of our success.

They were our faith, our families, and our history. The finest weapons, the greatest accumulations of wealth – these are all worthless if there’s no one with the will to use them. We have the latter because we had – and to some degree still have – the former.

These things: our religious faith and our faith in ourselves, the strength of our families, our knowledge of and pride in our history – these are what gave us the strength to make use of our material superiority.

A century ago a relative handful of Britons ruled most of the world. The United States conquered a continent with fewer men under arms than the NYPD has today. Japan defeated China and made itself the master of much of Asia. A few hundred Spaniards conquered the New World.

They did these things not through material strength alone – but through moral, cultural, and civilizational strength. They had confidence in their destiny and in the rightness of their cause.

Forget material things. Those things – our faith, our families, and our history – are what gave us the strength to have and to use them. With them, we were safe. Without them we are not.

They were our immune system, the natural defenses of our civilization. All of the medicines in the world will not, in the end, save a body without those defenses. In such cases, medicine can delay – but it cannot deny.

Leftism will not destroy civilization in and of itself. Most of it is, taken independently, relatively harmless nonsense. Most leftists (though not all) are basically well-meaning people. But the contagion they spread will leave us at the mercy of other, less benevolently-minded, forces.

Just as a person suffering from AIDS will die of diseases which a healthy body could have fought off, so too will a civilization suffering from leftism die from prosaic causes.

Do you really think that Mongols would have been able to conquer a healthy China?

Rome fell to barbarians only after it was weakened from within.

The reasons for the weakening, of course, are not consistent or identical across the span of centuries: but the final result is the same. A civilization whose defenses have been destroyed from within will succumb to the historical equivalent of a cold.

One needs look no further than our present struggle against the Islamists to understand how this plays out. Under normal circumstances, a healthy civilization would – as we did during the challenges posed by Islam in the past – be able to quickly (and without too much fuss) fight off the disease. However, because of LCIDS (Leftist Civilizational Immune Deficiency Syndrome), we lack the moral capacity to employ the strong measures necessary to truly defeat – or even effectively slow – the advance of the disease.

We have been stripped of our faith and, with that, of our ability to see anything clearly – and to make firm and complete judgements. Stripped of those abilities, many of our brethren find themselves lacking the moral clarity to see the degree of our peril – or the necessity of the cure. Instead, they sit on the fence. They’re not ready to surrender and die (yet, at least) and they’re not ready to win, either. So instead they’re willing to countenance only half-measures and, because these morons regrettably vote, we’re stuck at the speed of our slowest ship.

Without the strength of our families – and that is something that we’ve lost – we no longer have others to defend or whose future to truly worry about. It continually amazes me that people can spend so much time obsessing about hypothetical threats which may or may not come to pass a century from now, while at the same time dismissing the very real threat of an Islamic conquest of Europe – and never mind the threat posed by those who would like to kill millions of us today.

That disconnect is a symptom of a post-modern political age, where people’s political beliefs – at least in many cases – have far more to do with keeping pace with changing trends than they do with anything else. Such epic silliness is a direct result of our nihilistic and egocentric concern for the individual about all other things – and the sad reality that most of us don’t have “family” to worry about in the traditional sense. There are no families of dozens, no extended families. There aren’t even intact families for most.

Without that sense of permanence – that certainty that these things really do matter – people feel free to indulge the stupidest and most unserious fantasies imaginable.

And, finally, without a sense of history – of where we came from, of what we had to do to get here, and of our own place in the greater scheme of the future, there’s little motivation to do any more than simply to live for today.

Without faith in our history, in our destiny, what motivation is there to care for anything beyond purely selfish concerns? I can see none.

Instead, we go so far as to degrade our ancestors and their lives to the point of mockery and ridicule. We denounce them for their sins and we forget their virtues. We teach our kids to worship marginal third world figures like Gandhi or Nelson Mandela, instead of the truly great men of history – like Churchill or Lincoln. We spend more time teaching our kids about Greek homosexuality – and trying to gay-up history – than we do teaching them about the heroes of the Civil War. We spend more time trying to blow up insignificant figures of politically-convenient flesh-pigmentation than we do teaching the truly inspiring stories of our past.

This terrible disease attacks the basis of our greatness and, as in the case of that other famous disease, there is no known cure. We can only treat it as best we can and hope for the best.

This theory is, like all of my work, something of a work-in-progress. I expect that it is a theme to which I shall return in the near future.