Some five decades ago Whittaker Chambers wrote this in his classic autobiography: They dying world of 1925 was without faith, hope, character, understanding of its malady or will to overcome it. It was dying but it laughed. And this laughter was not the defiance of a vigor that refuses to know when it is whipped. It was the loss, by the mind of a whole civilization, of the power to distinguish between reality and unreality, because, ultimately, though I did not know it, it had lost the power to distinguish between good and evil. It is striking how applicable this is to Western Europe of today. The depth of their crisis is revealed not so much by the multitude of their problems as by the way in which they have come about and the lack of will to deal with them. The unemployment, economic malaise, unassimilated immigrant enclaves, unsustainable welfare regimes are all self—inflicted, the inevitable result of policies that could have no other outcomes. But instead of swerving off...(Read Full Post)