Earlier, in 1919, Valéry had confessed that “we…know that we are mortal….We realize that a civilization is as fragile as a life.”

Crisis & Decline: the Twentieth Century

by Mark Malvasi

The theme of this “historical meditation” is the crisis and decline of civilization in the West during the twentieth century. That perspective is the product both of an individual temperament and also of a historical consciousness. One hundred, or even fifty, years hence neither the temperament nor the perspective may matter very much. But I am of the twentieth century and can see only where the past has brought us, not where the future may take us. I am a skeptic and a pessimist, although I am not a fatalist. Somewhat like those scientists who discern evidence of divine intelligence in the order and intricacy of nature, I have sought always to glimpse the hand of God moving beneath the surface of this confusing and chaotic age.

I. The Crisis of the World Wars

“What is Europe now,” lamented Winston Churchill in 1947, “a rubble heap, a charnel house, a breeding ground for pestilence and hate.” The Second World War was the most destructive war in history. Estimates of the dead range as high as fifty- five million. The material costs were equally staggering. Everywhere cities were in ruins. Bridges, railroads, waterways, highways, harbors, factories, and mines had all been destroyed. Farmland was laid waste and livestock slaughtered.

At the same time, millions of homeless and hungry men, women, and children wandered through city and countryside, many of them forcibly displaced from their homes, their communities, their nations. Members of families searched for one another, not knowing whether their loved ones were among the living or the dead. Prisoners of war tried to make their way home, while Jewish survivors of the death camps, or those Jews who had spent the war in hiding, struggled in vain to resume normal lives.

Compounding the human misery and the physical devastation was the political degradation of Europe. The Second World War produced a monumental shift in the international relations of power. The dominance of Europe, based as much on European prestige as on European power, was at an end. The war showed that power now resided outside of Europe, with the two most important offspring of European civilization: the Soviet Union and the United States. By 1945, the age of European supremacy was over.

The Second World War was primarily a European war that neither the Americans nor the Russians wanted. It grew out of European concerns, problems, and conflicts. The First World War had convinced Adolf Hitler that Germany was the most powerful state in Europe. In the east, the German army had defeated the Russians; in the west, the Germans would have fought the French and the British to a stalemate had it not been for the intervention of American troops. From the earliest days of his political career, Hitler dreamed of reversing this humiliating and unwarranted German defeat. Once in power he resolved to destroy the Treaty of Versailles and to forge a vast German empire in central and eastern Europe.

Hitler believed that only a war of conquest would win for the German nation the territory and security it required and that the German people, as a superior race, deserved. War was thus an essential component of Nazi ideology from the outset, because for Hitler the First World War had never ended. The Second World War was incontrovertibly Adolf Hitler’s war.

Like a terrible earthquake, the Second World War shook European civilization to its foundations. Yet the First World War, not the Second, was the single most important event in shaping the history of Europe during the twentieth century. The Great War altered the course of Western civilization, deepening the spiritual crisis that had helped lead to its outbreak.

II. The Failure of Communism ....

III. The Rise of Nationalism .....

IV. The Ethos of Democracy ....

V. The Descent into Barbarism ...

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