The Barbarians Among Us

Every civilized person with a brain who has witnessed the horrors of the last month now knows the undeniable truth — we have barbarians among us.

We who consider ourselves civilized and enlightened, worship, elevate and patronize these barbarians at our own peril. They are not noble savages. When they are not busy killing each other, they continue to conquer, rape, and pillage our culture — just for the fun of it. The refined barbarians among us, mock and twist our sacred institutions and laugh in our faces.

Barbarians are slaves to their lower passions. Like carrion crows, they feast on the rotting corpse of civilization and take what they want, when they want. Art, music, drama, and even simple amusements have all been warped and twisted by these villains. They tear down statues and debase our cultural inheritance as we bow and kneel at their feet and beg forgiveness for having the audacity to exist.

I came to these realizationss after reading a quote from historian and writer Hillaire Belloc:

The Barbarian hopes — and that is the mark of him, that he can have his cake and eat it too. He will consume what civilization has slowly produced after generations of selection and effort, but he will not be at pains to replace such goods, nor indeed has he a comprehension of the virtue that has brought them into being. Discipline seems to him irrational, on which account he is ever marvelling that civilization, should have offended him with priests and soldiers…. In a word, the Barbarian is discoverable everywhere in this, that he cannot make: that he can befog and destroy but that he cannot sustain; and of every Barbarian in the decline or peril of every civilization exactly that has been true.

We sit by and watch the barbarian. We tolerate him in the long stretches of peace, we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence; his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creed refreshes us; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond, and on these faces there are no smiles.

― Hilaire Belloc

From This and That and the Other published in 1912.


Barbarianism is a mindset that afflicts all peoples of the earth. If Belloc surveyed Western civilization and came up with this conclusion in 1912, imagine his shock if he saw how things stand 108 years later in 2020?

No matter how much we try to deceive ourselves, the unspoken truth is that we have barbarians among us who if left unchecked will destroy our civilization. We fell asleep at the watch post. We got lazy. We did nothing. We allowed it. We have no one to blame but ourselves.

So what are we going to do about it?


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