In an article the starts out with the following startling assertion: “You and I are living at a turning point in world history. The only time in the known past to compare it with, is the first century B.C.”, Russian columnist Victor Trostnikov traces Western civilization from the fall of the Roman Republic to the present in order to illustrate why, in the year of our Lord 2008, Western civilization in general and the Protestant ethic that the U.S. is based upon in particular, came to an end.
For Russia’s Argumenty i Facty, Victor Trostnikov writes in part:
Two thousand eight years after the birth of Christ will for many centuries to come be written in big letters. We are contemporaries during this grand tectonic shift in the fate of humanity, which have been the result of two factors, simultaneously at work. … First of all, a new crisis within the liberal economy has struck on a global scale, having been let off its leash after the disappearance of the communist threat. Second, there has been an unexpected psychological rejection by the American people of the last remnants of the ancient protestant self-reliance.”
Later, portraying Obama as a kinD of modern-day Super-Uncle Tom, Trostnikov writes in part:
“What kind of person Obama is, we don’t know. Americans don’t know either. But the biracial Obama is associated with the kind, soft, personable Uncle Tom. And the people chose to make the White House his cabin, having exiled Anglo-Saxons from it for making such an incredible mess. What will emerge in place of Western civilization is not yet known. But it’s obvious that this civilization, in its current form, came to an end in 2008. Like the Roman Republic, the West is clinging to life, and in doing so may make an even greater mess.”
By Victor Trostnikov
Translated By Yekaterina Blinova
January 21, 2009
Argumenty i Facty – Russia – Original Article (Russian)
It seems that you and I are living at a turning point in world history. The only time in the known past to compare it with, is the first century B.C. – the fateful hours, as Tyutchev put it in his poem Cicero.
Amid internal strife and clinging to life, Republican Rome left history’s stage, and with it the entire ancient world. In its place an empire was about to emerge – the cradle of new, Christian civilization.
In the year 395, the Roman Empire was divided into West, with capital in Rome, and East, with its capital in Constantinople [Byzantium]. Each went its own way.
READ ON AT WORLDMEETS.US, your most trusted translator and aggregator of foreign news and views about our nation.
Founder and Managing Editor of Worldmeets.US