The question of how many civilizations there have been and are in the world is an open one. For example, among others, there are the Babylonian, the Chinese, the Hindu, the Egyptian, the Buddhist, the Greek, the Roman, the Japanese, the Christian, the Muslim, the Amazonian, the Mayan, the Aztec, the Incan, the North American Native, the Western, the Polynesian, the Zimbabwean.

One thing is clear, however: civilizations are always inspired at origin, and are then shaped by, spiritual faith, religious belief. Indeed, it can be said, that the purer the original spiritual inspiration, the finer the civilization, the less pure, the more barbaric. And if spiritual inspiration and purity fail, then the civilization fails, it becomes barbaric and decadent and finally collapses.

Here we should not be surprised by the description of a civilization as ‘barbaric’. Many were barbaric. We know that, among others, the Aztecs and the Mayans, practised some human sacrifice; most others at times practised slavery. All at times practised wars, sadistic cruelty and torture. The Western practises massive child-sacrifice, killing millions of its own children every year in abortion. And each time, absurdly, these civilizations justified their wars, cruerlty and torture by religion, so making it into an anti-religion. We have just seen this in the Western invasion of Iraq, in which hundreds of thousands of people have died, been cruelly tortured and maimed in the name of the Western ‘crusade’ for ‘freedom and democracy’, which words are spelled ‘oil and gas’.

Indeed, this barbarism is particularly clear in the case of Western civilization. This first came into being in the eleventh century and so has now existed for 1,000 years. Overlaying its original spiritual inspiration, it began among Frankish tribes by reviving Roman paganism and then ruthless asserted itself, slaughtering all possible rivals. These then included Jews, Muslims and Orthodox Christians, in its so-called ‘Crusades’ – genocides in the name of the Cross. It tried to deny that they even existed – ‘go away and shut up’ as a British politician said to it last week.

As this Western civilization developed, it became global and ever bloodier, attempting and achieving the total elimination of rival civilizations with less aggressive military technology, in the Americas, in Oceania, in Africa, murdering those with bows and arrows with guns. Thus, it ensured that the great civilizations of the Amazon and the Mayas which it destroyed have only just been rediscovered from beneath the jungles that overgrew them. In this way, it strove to ensure through its unparalleled global aggression (‘globalization’) that it would become the last ‘civilization’ left on the planet, leaving no choice.

This it did by consistently replacing its inherited religious inspiration of 1,000 years before with its apocalyptic technology, asset-stripping the rest of the world after applying the technology of death to those who resisted it, creating: castles, armoured horsemen, bows, cannon, muskets, grenades, industrialization, financial control, rifles, artillery, machine guns, concentration camps, aircraft bombs, poison gas, tanks, submarines, rockets, atomic bombs, chemical and bacteriological weapons, missiles, the illusions of virtual technology….And if these do not destroy the world and poison its food, other Western-invented pollutants, chemicals, plastics and modified genetics, will.

We can compare this with Christian civilization, the greatest rival to Western civilization, which for that reason Western civilization so hates and has again and again attempted to annihilate. Christian civilization is a Eurasian civilization, far broader than simply Western civilization. This, founded on the tiny, Westernmost tip of Eurasia, cut itself off from the rest of the world, creating in its self-imposed isolation the myth of ‘Europe’, a purely artificial construct. It invented itself and defined itself by aggressive technology, becoming the evil empire.

On the other hand, Christian civilization, founded in Jerusalem, quickly spread to East (the word ‘Asia’ means ‘East’) and West (the word ‘Europe’ means ‘West’), to India in the East and Africa in the West. This has had in its near-2,000-year old history three capitals after Jerusalem, the First Rome, the Second Rome (Constantinople) and the Third Rome (Moscow), and thus, by transferring the centre of its power has miraculously survived for almost two millennia.

Western civilization has again and again tried to wreck and destroy the centres of Christian civilization, as in the 13^th century, in the 17^th century, and then in 1812 and 1854. However, its aggression has become especially clear since 1914. Thus, it invaded the remaining centre of Christian civilization again in 1914, usurping the legitimate Christian power there in 1917, sending in Russian-speaking enemies to destroy it, invaded it again in 1941, murdering 27 million human-beings, declared a Cold War on it for nearly fifty years, crippling it between 1992 and 2000 and, as it miraculously revived against all the odds, again attacks it today, surrounding it and menacing it with its weapons of mass destruction, eating away at its borderlands.

However, it is true that this Western aggression has only been possible because of internal treachery, the apostasy of most of the elite and then of other traitors within Christian civilization itself. This can clearly be seen by the successive defection down the centuries of Russian-speaking boyars/aristocrats/oligarchs from the values of Christian civilization.

However, Western civilization has over the last fifty years or so systematically rejected the source of its own inspiration, ever accelerating its apostasy. This apostasy at first emptied its churches, but now undermines even the most fundamental and universal cultural values of all civilizations, for example, denying that a man is a man and a woman is a woman, as was prophesied by the apostle in his second letter to Timothy.

Thus, the nations of Western civilization, only 10% of the world, gradually become over 1,000 years an anti-religion and so anti-civilization, die out, renouncing the source of all civilizational inspiration. Thus, even its families die out, its peoples are denatured, and Western civilization ensures not only its collapse, but its suicide and extinction.

Conversely, over the last fifty years or so Christian civilization has slowly set out on the path of restoration, accelerating its return by repentance, especially in the last thirty years, to the source of its inspiration in Christ and His Church. It is still not clear how far this still very fragile restoration will go, but there are great hopes – our only hopes for the last Civilization.