What was his fucking problem?

What was his fucking problem?

Being right

What's yours you boring mindless retard-level memeing muppet?

His wife kept referring to his minerals as rocks.

Being right.

He was attacked by academia with simply idiotic accusations. That he desires war, death and so on. He was correct though.

He tried to corner Walter after he realized he was a meth dealer.

1/5
The Decline of the West
ALMOST immediately after the end of the Great War a German wrote a highly successful or widely boomed book called “The Decline of the West.” [by Oswald Spengler, 1880-1936] The most human inference (in the opinion of many) was that the German, having assisted at the spectacle of the Decline and Fall of the German Empire, naturally wanted all the rest of us to decline and fall with him. He felt it would be obviously a breach of taste and tact for any nation to flourish if Germany had declined; if indeed, he was even aware of the existence of such fringes of his Empire as France or Flanders or England. Anyhow, he applied his doctrine to all that is most active in our civilisation, whether we are so constituted as to call it the Indo-Germanic race or prefer to call it Christendom. But there was more in this theory of his about a general collapse; which was also a theory of a recurrent collapse. In this, indeed, and in his general idea of a modern phase of decline, his view was quite reasonable and very persuasively stated. But there was bound up with it another set of ideas which are not necessarily any part of the theory, either that civilisations periodically weaken or that our civilisation has weakened in our period. Those two theses may quite well be true; but the thesis of the book was false.

2/5
For me, at least, it was false because it was fatalist; false because it was unhistoric; and false because it involved a particular falsity about the very spirit of the great culture which the critic criticised. It is the whole point of that culture that it has been continuous; it was the whole point of the critic that it have been discontinuous and disconnected. He was not content to say that civilisations revolve in separate cycles, in the sense in which we might be said to belong to a different civilisation from the Druids. He cut up ordinary European history into chunks, that were supposed to have no more to do with each other than Chinese history and Aztec history. He chopped ordinary Christian history in two in the middle, in order to deny that either part of it was Christian. So far as I remember, he attributed the first half of it to entirely to the Moslem Arabs, because they were not Christians; and the second half of it to people of the type of Faust, because they were rather fishy sort of Christians, and Germans as well. And he talked about these divisions as they were like the abysses that might separate a stratum full of primordial crystals from a stratum, aeons afterwards, containing the first fantastic traces of marsupial life.

3/5
Now, I am quite certain, as a matter of mere common sense, that the history of Christendom, or even the history of Europe, was never so fragmentary as that. We are much more connected with the ancient Greeks than the German writer would allow us to be with the later mediaevals, or even the earlier moderns. The sort of distinction he suggested only happens when a cycle of civilisation really dies, and then fossilises and remains as inscrutable as an ammonite. We have no idea what was the religion of the Cro-Magnons, though we infer from certain pictures of ritual dances (as well as from our own common sense) that they had one. We do not know the significance of the Cup and Ring Stones, though the fortunate and civilised of us still use rings, as in the case of wedding-rings, or cups even in the sense of wine-cups. We do not even know if we interpret the signs rightly, or whether they are signs at all. Now, the Greek gods have never died in that fashion; and the Roman Empire has never dies at all. Of the most modern industrial cities in England, many have in their very names the title of the Roman Camp; and wherever there stood the Roman Camp, there stood afterwards the Christian Cathedral. There was never one moment, in the long history from Herodotus to Herr Spengler, when all the men who counted in any age did not count The Fall of Troy; there was never a generation when young poets did not make that old tale a topic for new poems. I wonder whether a poem by Heredia about Antony, or a poem by Morris about Arthur, belongs to the dead Greek period or the dead Arabic period? There was never a generation of poets that did not invoke Virgil, if only to imitate him. There was never a generation in which philosophers did not refer to Aristotle, if only to contradict him. The thread of our cultural continuity has never been broken.

4/5
I think the fact worth recording at the moment for two reasons. The first is that the same energetic German author has just launched another book, of much less dignity and of much more dogmatism, reaffirming his theory, and especially the most gloomy and barbaric parts of it. The other is that there is a horrible possibility that what he says falsely about our past may be said truly about our future. I mean that, hitherto, the men of our ancient tradition have done everything except forget. Whatever might be fanatical or ill-balanced about their religions or their revolutions, they have each, in turn, taken particular care to remember the deeds of their fathers. Even when they poisoned the purer Paganism if Homer and Pindar, they did not destroy it; they left it standing for ever against them as a reproach. Even when they dethroned the Greek gods they did not dismiss them; in the first just fury they denounced them as devils, but in the long run they let them remain as elves. They let them remain as fanciful and fabulous figures, for literary metaphor or plastic decoration, so that Christendom has left the nymph in poetry or the cupid in sculpture. It is true that now, for the first time, the race that always remembered is invited on every side to forget.

5/5
Yes; it is true that to-day, for the first time, our newspapers and our new politicians have asked us to forget, not what happened a thousand years ago or a hundred years ago, but what happened twenty years ago. When it is a question of shifting a policy or rehabilitating a politician, they will ask us to forget what happened two years ago or two months ago. Here, indeed, we have the great Spengler System, of total separation of one historical episode from another. Here is the true trick of regarding ourselves as divided by aeons and abysses not only from our fathers, but from ourselves. Thus, by reading the daily paper every day, and forgetting everything that it said on the previous day, we can divide human history into self-contained cycles; each consisting, not of five hundred years, but of twenty-four hours. By this means we can consider the slogans and swaggering policies which we ourselves cheered only recently, as if they were hieroglyphics as unintelligible as the Cup and Ring of Stones. This new quality of forgetfulness, in our current culture, does give some justification to the pessimism of the German professor; and if we accept such oblivion, then doubtless our “cycle” will really curl up like a worm on the floor and lie still for ever.

~G.K. Chesterton: Illustrated London News, September 3, 1932.

Spengy btfo

One of the few modern German nationalists who could write philosophy.

It's a shame he couldn't write it good.

Turns out, you can't come up with a complete and accurate theory of the lifecycle of civilizations on the basis of race hatred alone.

>Anglo delusions
Boy would fatty feel stupid if he saw the world right now

I don't see a single prediction in that text, just relativizing Spengler.

Except our modern politicians absolute ask us to forget whatever major scandal they were in or whatever promises they made.

>not an argument
Do you an actual refutation which involves reading all 5 paragraphs or are you just going to read the first paragraph out of fear your hero spengy will be shown as a fool?

He is right in that the determinist thesis is bullshit. You only have to look at today's China for example as testament that some civilizations go trough a second "awakening" and re-define themselves. There is no reason why this could not be the case for Western Civilization, since Spengler falls into paranoid racial fallacies about the "coloured" races trumping the white West because of the expansion of technology. This posterity has shown that its false, and that throughout history there was more inter-cooperation between civilizations than outright murderous competition.

Chesterton is wrong though on Spengler's thesis about European history, no historian has made clearer what Western civilization is about. That Western Europeans wrote and painted about Ancient Greece, is nothing more than a particular expression of a Faustian sentiment which is romanticism.

That's the nature of democracy and Chesterton saw that as a reactionary. Still isn't a prediction.

Spengler in 1917 predicted that within the next 80 to 90 years Russians will abandan communism on their own because it's ultimately a western ideology incompatible with Russian civilizational values. All this why Marxists cheered the creation of USSR as the nail to the coffin of capitalism, and when that brainlet Evola said communism is the "natural expression of the Slavic race", all of those were fucking idiots while Spengler was right.

Spengler also predicted the total erosion of nationalism (in the 1910s when nationalism was at its zenith), the refugee crisis, the rallying towards populism, social malaise and yearning for a Caesar figure, the non-whites weaponizing our technology against us when we lose the will to fight (see the genetic engineering and artificial wombs in China while westerners would rather argue about tranny pronouns) etc.

It's also funny how the diabeetus head Chesterlard snarkily remarks that Spengler confuses the decline of Germany with decline of the west, when not even 30 years after he wrote that the British empire too imploded and faded into irrelevance with a whimper and apathy.

Yet he agreed that he West was declining. Spengler demonstrated here and that the whole idea of dividing up European history into "Faustian" epochs is incorrect. Europe is a continuous history.

After seeing what he saw in Mexico he got PTSD.

Fuck off back to plebbit holy fucking shit

>That's the nature of democracy and Chesterton saw that as a reactionary. Still isn't a prediction.
No so much its a result of democracy. If anything Chesteron was worried about the result mass consumed news would have on the psyche of people when it comes to history. Chesterton also rightly predicted that a time might come when Europeans, far from utilizing the text and stories of our ancestors (be it to criticize them, affirm them, dispute them or reinterpretation them as we have done in the past) would just flat out forget they even exist. You can see this in how modern American schools are more interested in teaching about "to kill a mocking bird" than "The Odyssey" or "the Iliad."

Chesterton made a analogue to the fact that dividing up European history into chucks where they're really wasn't anything to divide is a grave error.

>That Western Europeans wrote and painted about Ancient Greece, is nothing more than a particular expression of a Faustian sentiment which is romanticism.
Western Europeans had extensive contact with the ERE until it fell in 1453. Many Greeks fled into Italy as a result of the fall of Constantinople. This is what caused the "rebirth" mindset.

Read Spengler's book, he specifically refutes "the Renaissance" as a revival of greco-roman culture, specially with regards to architecture, religion and literature. Also the Byzantine empire for him wasn't a part of western faustian civilization , but magian.

>magian
That's the problem. Also i'm not disputing that Spengler didn't view the renaissance as a rebirth. I'm simply stating that significant swaths of southern Europe never stopped having extensive cultural diffusion with ERE. Germany might not have had extensive cultural diffusion, but all of Europe isn't Germany.

He is not excluding diffusion, for example he cites the Roman pantheon as the basis of Magian architecture.

His thesis is actually very subtle, of course he is not denying that for example renaissance painters painted Helen of Troy. The point of his statement is that a civilization has a central idea out of which it is born, The typical Ptolemean historical understanding of history is thrown out of the window with Spenger.

Read the first of chapter of his book and you will understand.

>muh racism
Kill yourself.