It doesn’t get more profound than this

Reclaiming a Civilization’s Dreams to Save its Soul

By Sultan Knish

The surest way to destroy a people is to kill their dreams because when you destroy a people’s dreams, you also destroy their sense of self-worth, their ambitions, their principles and their goals. Men and women are not animals that need nothing but survival and creature comforts, yet the surest way to destroy a people’s soul is to reduce them to just that, to gluttons chasing after creature comforts and finally rats living in the walls of their own society struggling to stay quiet and survive.

If you think this imagery is farfetched, consider that it is already a reality. Where nations like America, Europe and Israel once lived by dreams of the greatness they could achieve and went out and achieved it, today they walk the edges of their own shrinking frontiers trying to understand how to justify their existence to their own people.

While Australia apologizes to the aborigines for its existence, the Archbishop of Canterbury accepts the inevitability of Islamic law in Britain. American pundits wonder whether America has a right to exist and puts forward three candidates who think it does not even have a right to control its own borders. Canada persecutes critics of Islam while protecting Islamic terrorists and Israel dithers in the face of Islamic terrorism from Gaza, the very territory it forcibly ethnically cleansed Jews from in order to make room for the terrorists. All across the oceans and the seas, the oasis’ of civilization are faltering as their peoples bow their heads in apathy and confusion to the knife.

How did it get this way? Part of the answer is that when their dreams died, these nations dried up and became husks without the lifegiving virtue of faith in their own destinies. America no longer believes in Manifest Destiny, Britain has given up Empire for the New Britain and Ireland has embraced the New Ireland, Israel no longer believes in Zionism and all across the continents the peoples that have carved out great nations out of desert and trackless wilderness now apologize for the dreams that brought them to transform those lands into civilizations.

The human spirit by its very nature must expand or contract, seek out new horizons and broader destinies or wither and shrivel up. But there are no frontiers left and on all sides the frontiers of civilization shrink in the face of a great southern tide of immigration. The rear guard action being fought by anti-immigration and anti-Jihad activists are not nearly enough because they can never hope to rouse these nations by without reviving their spirits without restoring their dreams.

How do you restore a nation’s dreams? It isn’t enough to shout about perils and warn about invasions, such things do not move a people that has learned to be apathetic, to grasp after a handful of material comforts and hold its place in the great bureaucratic queue that is the new placeholder of civilized societies, that great endless line at which paltry social benefits are distributed and taxes are collected. And this is why conservatives who fail to articulate a national vision all too often flail about when trying to connect with voters.

To revive a nation you must give it something to believe in, something to strive for and something to truly fight for beyond survival. If you can rally a people to believe in itself again then the threat of rogue barbarians quickly becomes something petty and paltry to be brushed off. If you do not, then building tall walls and isolating yourself only walls in the rot and the declining birth rates and culture will take care of the rest, as Japan is amply demonstrating for us.

What then are these dreams that a nation must dream to truly live? There will be different opinions on this matter, but they are in the doing of great deeds, in the bending of frontiers and the transcendence of merely human limitations. Only in the shadow of heroes and great men can a civilization flourish and only a people that truly believes in its own greatness can be happy and free.

I give you the following quotes, the echoes of national dreams, the dreamstuff of the mythos of nations that truly believed themselves to be great.

“We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.”

“If you will it, it is no dream.”

“Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising up every time we fail.”

“Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checked by failure…than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.”

We live in that gray twilight now that Theodore Roosevelt spoke of above, in civilizations swallowed by the gray twilight there is neither true defeat nor victory, instead a long aimless drifting toward futility. In the first quote JFK was speaking of voyaging to the moon, but it is a quote that applies equally to any great endeavor. Great goals make great men because they provide great challenges to measure them against.

The Dhimmitude and decay that has filled Europe and North America, Australia and Israel, the absence of morale, the falling birth rates and the sense of confusion and hopelessness are all natural enough when you consider what happens to men who cease to move forward, they inevitably grow weary and lazy with decline. If we are to survive, we must do more than fight for survival, we must recapture a great destiny again. No party that merely shouts alarms in the people’s ears will succeed, by now most of the residents of the civilized world have developed extremely effective ways of tuning out what they do not want to hear. Only a party that can offer a great dream, a great destiny can capture the hearts of people.

Tens of millions of young people across the world hunger for a dream and instead find only apathy and cynicism. They reach for fraudulent mockups of the real thing, for politicians who offer hopeful rhetoric and the set dressings of optimism and destiny but no true vision. When those shams stand revealed and all their allure is stripped away by betrayal and disappointment, apathy and cynicism rule in the ruined houses of their minds and spirits. They learn to distrust everything, to display contempt for their country, to believe any snide remark about their own civilization and beliefs and embrace it, thereby triumphing over the pain of their betrayal. Yet within them they still carry the flickering embers of a betrayed faith, one that now becomes displaced onto terrorists and killers.

Saving our civilizations will take more than winning an argument or ringing the warning bell, it will mean restoring a dream and raising it high so that there stands a clear choice between the appeasers and the defeatists of the status quo and those who strive to see the nation rebuilt in all its glory. Let the dream fly on the wind.