Identity, as we shall see, is something peculiar to liberalism; it is the mutilated corpse of civilization. What distinguishes a civilization state is its ability to provide an overarching framework for social and political life and therefore a viable or plausible alternative to the liberalism of the West.
https://www.noemamag.com/the-return-of-civilizations/
A very good article.
My pagan friend of blessed memory, who had a Ph.D. in classics probably would blame Christianity for this. Christianity gave us the idea of a religion that you can abandon the gods of your ancestors and worship a Jewish carpenter if you so feel like it, becoming a new person. :p
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“The European Union is perhaps the best example today of the rich dynamics internal to a civilization state.”
I’m sorry Clarissa, but the article is VERY bad. It’s full of nonsense in fact, and quite wrong in many ways. If there is something that Zionism represented it was the idea of creating a nation-state for the Jews, NOT a civilisational one, since they rejected many if not most of the tenets that made Jewish civilisation Jewish. Herzl and his acolytes were non-believers when not outright atheists, and the reason liberal states were not good at defending Jews was that, quite simply, there were NO liberal states in Herzl’s time.
I think that Ukrainians would do well to take a hard look at what they are letting themselves in by wanting to join the EU: what’s the point of fighting tooth and nail to snatch their sovereignty from the jaws of Russia’s ever-burning imperial ambitions in order to give it up to an equally imperial supra-national, pseudo-democratic, technocratic bureaucracy whose ambition is to destroy all the differences characterising European nations to subsume them into an illiberal fantasy nightmare of so-called “European values”?
None of the billions of euros that Ukraine may get in reconstruction money will compensate for the loss of sovereignty required to join the EU madness project nor, more importantly, to vindicate the blood so courageously and unspairingly spilled by countless brave Ukrainian men and women, young and old.
Hey, did you somehow get your hands on the manuscript of my Ukrainian book?? That’s exactly what I wrote there. What’s the point of dying to defend your sovereignty from Russia only to cede it to the EU?
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The difference would be that they choose to join the EU, and they could always choose to leave again if it doesn’t work out.
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I’d say that China, India, and the US are civilization states, and the EU is trying to become one.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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