Given the ways in which the Chinkflu is severely testing the resilience of economies and civilisations around the world right now, it is instructive to look back through history at previous moments in time when similar shocks took down once-great empires and nations.

The lessons of history are absolutely clear. Human progress does not fluctuate around a linear trendline. In fact, if you look throughout recorded and oral history, you will see that human progress has bounced up and down on a wave. Over the past 500 years or thereabouts, the progress has been more or less inexorably upwards, but there have been significant dips and pauses in that upward progress.

The reason for that upward progress can be ascribed primarily to the three pillars of Western civilisation: Graeco-Roman philosophy, Christian ethics and morality, and the European nations.

It is NOT accidental or coincidental that the world has seen its greatest achievements in food production, medical care, human longevity, environmental preservation, exploration, and a thousand other areas, driven primarily by Western and Jewish minds and hands.

Nor is it accidental that the rest of the world has largely languished during this time, and has primarily reaped the benefits of Western expansion second-hand. That is because Western “cultural firmware”, if you will, IS superior to the alternatives and has proven itself to be so on numerous occasions.

Yet there have been times in history where the entire forward thrust of human progress could easily have been halted or even destroyed entirely.

One of those periods is known to modern historians as the “Dark Ages”. Unfortunately, most people assume – because that’s what they were taught, incorrectly, in school – that the Dark Ages were a benighted and terrible three-century stretch of misery and poverty that took place right after the fall of the Roman Empire, and that it was only the Golden Age of Islam that brought Europe out of it, thanks largely to trade with the Islamic world and the establishment of the Islamic Caliphate in Spain.

This view is nonsense.

The evidence uncovered by maverick archaeologist Henri Pirenne in the early 20th Century, and the resulting analysis that he put forth, made very clear that the standard anti-Christian views of Gibbon and Bury were simply wrong. The evidence did not indicate that Christian civilisation had simply collapsed after the fall of Rome; in fact, the “fall” of Rome was nothing of the sort.

In fact, the last “Roman” emperor of the Western empire was actually pretty much a Goth, and he was replaced on the throne by a Goth. The “Romans” of the Empire had long since stopped breeding and had been systematically replaced throughout the military and civil structures of the empire by, basically, civilised barbarians. And the Christian kingdoms of the Visigoths, long extant throughout modern-day Spain, France, and Germany, pretty much picked right up where the Romans had left off.

The true Dark Ages took place nearly two hundred years after the standard narrative, and they came about for one reason, and one reason only:

Islam.

The first great wave of Islamic expansion in the late 7th and early 8th Century simply destroyed the flourishing Christian civilisations of the Mediterranean and cast the entire continent of Europe into backwardness and misery. It was only when that first expansion was stopped cold by Charles “The Hammer” Martel at the Battle of Tours in 732 AD that the wanton destruction stopped and Christianity was able to rebuild.

If that had not happened, Western civilisation as we know it would almost certainly never have existed.

There are a few such moments throughout history:

The lifting of the Siege of Vienna in 1683;

The Battle of Stamford Bridge in 1066 and the subsequent Battle of Hastings, and the conquest of Britain by the Normans;

The Battle of Tours, as mentioned;

The Battle of Chalons in 451 AD;

Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon;

And a rather interesting, and little-understood, period of history going back three thousand years known as the Late Bronze Age Collapse:

The Late Bronze Age collapse of societies throughout the Levant, the Near East and the Mediterranean some 3,200 years ago has been a mystery. Powerful, advanced civilizations disappeared, seemingly overnight. Now an archaeologist believes he has figured out what lay behind the cataclysm.

The trigger seems to have been the invasion of ancient Egypt in 1177 BCE by marauding peoples known simply as the “Sea Peoples,” as recorded in the Medinet Habu wall relief at Ramses III’ tomb. The relief depicts a sea battle (and also carts full of supplies, women and children, something that always puzzled researchers. Why would the women and children have been at a sea battle, and why were there chariots? Did they bring them on ships as well?) The foreigners were depicted wearing distinct head gear.

The narrative states that Ramses III’s army and navy managed to defeat them, but Egypt was never the same. It slid into a decline – and so did its neighbors.

This collapse was apparently very sudden: a line of advanced and powerful cultures collapsed like a row of dominoes, says Eric Cline, professor of classics and anthropology and Director of the Capitol Archaeological Institute at George Washington University.

Down into chaos went the Egyptians and the Babylonians. The Aegean civilizations of the Minoans and the Mycenians descended into a Dark Age. Peoples who had an advanced writing system, seemed to have forgotten it. In fact some scholars suggest that the events described in the Iliad, such as the destruction of Troy and the Odyssey pertain to this period.

Hattusa, the capital of the Hittite Empire in the late Bronze Age (found south of the Black Sea, in modern Turkey) and its surrounding towns were burned to the ground and abandoned. Gone were monumental architecture, writing systems, pottery types and familiar settlement patterns.

The accepted narrative for decades has been that these mysterious “sea peoples” were the entire cause of the collapse. But recent archaeological evidence challenges this view:

Recent high-resolution pollen analysis of a core taken from the Sea of Galilee, by Dafna Langgut and Israel Finkelstein of Tel Aviv University and Thomas Litt of the University of Bonn, has irrefutably shown that the years between 1250 BCE- 1100 BCE were the driest seen throughout the Bronze and Iron Ages. This corroborates with the information from clay tablets found in Afek in Israel, Hattusa in Turkey, Emar in Mesopotamia, and Ugarit in Syria, that record a terrible drought, and the resulting difficulties attributed to it.

“There is evidence in the archaeological record of climatic changes such as climate change, drought (resulting in famine), earthquakes, invasions and internal rebellions at this time. Normally if a culture is faced with just one of these tragedies, it can survive it, but what if they all happened at once, or in quick succession?” asks Cline. “It seems that this is what happened between about 1225 BCE and 1175 BCE, and I think that the Late Bronze Age civilizations were simply unable to weather the ‘perfect storm’ and came crashing down.”

Here is an hour-long lecture from the very same Eric Cline discussing his findings:

The lessons from our present time are very clear. We CANNOT and must not assume that human progress will continue its inexorable march forward.

The parallels between the Late Bronze Age Collapse, as well as the Dark Ages, are plain to see.

Then, as now, there were significant climactic changes involved – NOT caused by human activity or the emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, but by the cyclical activities of the Sun, which we still do not understand particularly well.

Then, as now, mass invasions and migrations rendered nations helpless and resulted in the destruction of various civilisations.

Then, as now, the basic knowledge that builds up human society was lost.

Then, as now, plague and strife stalked the land and war followed in their wake.

And then, as now, various great empires went into significant overstretch and collapsed as a result.

Do not assume that civilisation will simply carry on. To paraphrase our beloved and dreaded Supreme Dark Lord (PBUH), it must never be forgotten that civilisation is essentially an illusion and a gentlemen’s agreement that allows large numbers of people to live in close proximity without dying like flies in the summer heat.

The underpinnings of Western civilisation are both strong and weak at the same time. They are strong because they are rooted in truth. But they are weak because they need people to believe in them and defend them.

When people refuse to stand up for the philosophy that gave them their systems of law and justice, or when they rebel against God the Father and His beloved Son and the covenant that they offer to Man, or when they will not defend their nations against invasion and usurpation, then their civilisation will not stand.