November 15, 2011

A Double-Dose of Spengler

By Herbert E. Meyer
How Civilizations Die (And Why Islam is Dying, Too) David P. Goldman Regnery Publishing, $27.95   It's Not the End of the World (It's Just the End of You) David P. Goldman RVP Publishers, $22.95 Back in the 1990s, a publication no one had ever heard of, Asia Times, began to run a column written by someone calling himself "Spengler" -- as in Oswald Spengler, the German author of the classic Decline of the West.  These columns were so insightful, and so well-written, that the urge to forward them to other readers was irresistible.  (I seemed to get about 10 copies of each Spengler column from various friends and ex-colleagues in the intelligence business, and I probably forwarded each column to a dozen of the ex-spooks I'd worked with during the Reagan administration.)  Before long, more than a million people each week were reading these columns, and a lot of them were asking one another: who's Spengler? Given the extraordinary depth and breadth of his columns,...(Read Full Article)