Short Commentary on Crooke's “Goodbye Westification: The World Moves On"

Yesterday, Crooke's essay was published, and I made a short comment about it at Moon of Alabama hoping to generate some discussion over this rather deep excursion that continues his examination of what the West is doing to itself. But it seems to have been beyond most as it was rather late in the day, plus some of the better minds have been absent from that blog given the recent onslaught of trolls. But I needed to revisit it after receiving a reply to my comment about it from Pepe Escobar that I made on his VK page for it tied into one of the points Crooke had made. (Before reading further, I highly suggest clicking the link below and read Crooke's essay before continuing here. It would also be helpful to leave some commentary about your reaction.) That in turn motivated me to write this additional comment at MoA:

Back to Alastair Crooke's essay, "Goodbye Westification: The World Moves On", where we read this toward its end:

"Nonetheless, under the palimpsest of diverse European protest camps, we are witnessing inklings of recovery peeping out from behind the ruins: old values, earlier social forms are returning in a new, fecund form. Most of today’s ‘discontented’ will be oblivious to this and may never seriously address the deeper layers to the history of thinking, or to that ‘other’ vision from which they derive.

"But that is not the point, for even as the leaves of western civilisation fall to the ground, seeds are being set into our collective psyche."

First word of note is palimpsest, "a manuscript page, either from a scroll or a book, from which the text has been scraped or washed off so that the page can be reused for another document."

Given the preceding four paragraphs of context--especially the fourth which I must provide:

"What we in the West possess today, MacIntyre suggests, is nothing more than mere fragments of an older tradition (a heroic society). But evidently, these fragments simply are too sparse, since our moral discourse which still deploys terms like good and justice and duty, nonetheless has been robbed of the context that would make these terms intelligible. In other words, it places the virtue of the heroic Homeric world beyond the reach of a collective West."

Crooke says the West is not at all what it thinks of itself, particularly those that aren't elites, which is also saying the elite are out of touch with reality--they are removed, or have removed themselves, from the values that once gave meaning to the concept of Western Civilization. Thus, without those anchoring values, Western Civilization ceases to exist. It got canceled by those promoting Cancel Culture leaving us with the need to build something "with a very different ontological basis."

All this may seem esoteric, but it matters a great deal. Yes, it helps to have closely read Crooke over the last several years and those he cites; but if you take your time, you can discern his argument that the West is in an existential crisis brought about by its own hand--not Russia's, not China's, not Iran's, nor any other civilizational state. How else can the humans in charge of western nations and institutions think it's perfectly fine to plunder their own people and others to pad their bank accounts? Their megalomania has become self-destructive, yet they are completely blind--oblivious--to their actions.