Spengler, who apparently patterns himself after the 19th Century German historian, writes some really astonishing stuff from his redoubt over in SE Asia. Don't always agree with him, and he tends toward hyperbole, but he's usually a great read.
A few examples follow.
France: The sacred heart of darkness
It is this that France cannot abide in its sacred heart of darkness. Habsburg Austria was a competitor, but America is an obsession. The fact that America twice saved France during the 20th century merely reinforces the French sentiment of ultimate irrelevance. Centuries of accumulated bile ooze and gurgle in mortification.Why Europe chooses extinction
In 200 years, French and German will be spoken exclusively in hell. What has brought about this collective suicide, which mocks all we thought we knew about the instinct for self-preservation? The chattering classes have nothing to say about the most unique and significant change in our times. Yet the great political and economic shifts of modern times are demographic in origin.
[...]
All Europe caught the French disease, substituting the warrior Siegfried for the crucified God. Christianity's inner pagan ran amok. A second Thirty Years War (1914-1944) gave unlimited vent to Europe's pagan impulses and drowned them in blood. The unfortunate Rosenzweig, who saw the faultlines in Christian civilization so clearly, died hoping that Europe still would embrace its Jewish population as a counterweight against its destructive pagan self. It never occurred to him that Europe would choose destruction and take its Jews with it. Siegfried triumphed over Christ during World War I. No shred of credibility was left in the Christian idea of souls called out of the nations for salvation beyond the grave. In 1914 Europe's soldiers still fought under the illusion of a God that favored their nation. Germany fought World War II under the banner of revived paganism.
The Puritans who settled America, as Gelernter observes, looked backward "to the pure Christianity of the New Testament - and then even farther back. Puritans spoke of themselves as God's new chosen people, living in God's new promised land." The Puritans tolerated none of the old pagan devices to pad the Kingdom of God with corporeal consolations. But they did not abjure the world this side of the grave. Rejecting the old pagan devices, the Puritans instead adopted a Hebrew one, that is, a temporal order in emulation of Israel.
