Special to WorldTribune.com

By Alexander Maistrovoy, September 14, 2026

It is common today to compare the spiritual and political collapse of the West to the decline and fall of the Roman Empire.

Undoubtedly, both processes share several common features in terms of their scale and dramatic nature, yet the comparison is extremely far-fetched. In reality, the collapse of Western civilization is far more terrifying and grim than the fall of Rome.

If the fall of ancient Rome can be likened to the slow dying of an infirm, chronically ill, and jaded old man, then the demise of the modern West is more akin to the irrational suicide of a person in the prime of life, possessing every advantage.

For one thing, Rome was unfamiliar with the destructive pseudo-Marxist concepts — such as Identity Politics, Critical Race Theory, Institutional Racism, Intersectionality, “White Privilege/Male Privilege”, Cancel Culture, etc. — that have infected every sphere of intellectual and spiritual life in the modern West.

The Roman elite were mired in debauchery, perversion, corruption, and cynicism, yet this pales in comparison to the self-hatred and self-flagellation practiced by the West. Class-based and racial gradations that divided citizens into the “inferior” (white Christian men and Zionist Jews, viewed a priori as exploiters, racists, manipulators, and colonizers — modern ‘Untermenschen’) and the a priori “oppressed” (ethnic and sexual minorities, migrants, and peoples of the Third World — modern ‘Übermenschen’) were unthinkable to the Romans.

Romans in the twilight of the empire continued to respect ancient philosophers and their own culture. It would not have occurred even to a madman in Rome to call Plato, Aristotle, Epictetus, the founders of the Republic, Scipio, Caesar, or Cicero “dead white European males” (DWEM). Fashions, beliefs, and ideas changed, but the memory of their ancestors and admiration for them remained alive in the hearts of the Romans.

They took pride in Rome that conquered, ruled, enacted laws, and built bridges, amphitheaters, and roads, and they did not torment themselves with pangs of conscience. They were also aware of the evil nature of man and rightly considered that Rome — for all its vices — represented the highest manifestation of the human spirit when compared to the barbarians.

Secondly, Ancient Rome, even as it was dying, continued to maintain a rich spiritual life. The ideas of Stoicism and Epicureanism (Epicurus’s philosophy had nothing in common with unbridled hedonism) provided food for the intellectual and imaginative life of the educated Roman, laying the foundation for the Italian Renaissance. Followers of Pythagoras and Plotinus (Neoplatonists), as well as Gnostics, engaged in vigorous intellectual debates regarding the fundamental philosophical issues that have always occupied the human mind: Divine providence, the origins of the cosmos, the causes of evil in the world, the paths to the salvation of the human soul, and the nature of virtue.

Rome’s military elite was captivated by the mystical cults of Mithraism. Among intellectual circles, a fascination with Judaism became a sign of the times: Caesar himself and Octavian August were famous for liking of Judaism, and Horace, Seneca and Cassius Dio used to write that the Jewish religion had spread across the whole of the empire.

This ferment of ideas ultimately contributed to the spread of Christianity and the formation of the modern Church, shaping the future of Western civilization. Judeo-Christianity is not an empty cliché. It is a complex of moral and ethical paradigms — such as the concepts of conscience, empathy, reflection, guilt, and remorse, as well as the striving for a spiritual ideal — that has elevated humanity above primal animal instincts.

No other culture has created anything like it. The West has committed many terrible crimes in the past. But ONLY the West was willing to accept repentance. Neither Japan, China, nor Turkey, nor the peoples of Africa and Asia — and certainly not the Muslim nations — feel the slightest pangs of conscience for the atrocities they have committed and continue to commit.

What ideas define the intellectual and spiritual state of the West today? Only one: endless Marxist mutations in their most repulsive and absurd forms.

Rome left behind the fertile seeds of countless ideas and concepts. The West leaves behind a spiritual wasteland scorched by quasi-Marxism, a graveyard of ideas, and a cult of perversions — leaving nothing but a vacuum. But nature abhors a vacuum, and it is already easy to predict who will fill this void.

Václav Havel called the Soviet system ‘Absurdistan.’ Today, the West itself resembles ‘Absurdistan,’ even when compared to the Soviet empire.

Thirdly, the Romans invited barbarians into their midst, yet the barbarians quickly and willingly integrated into Roman society, adopting its way of life, worldview, and ideals. Even upon entering Rome, Alaric, the leader of the Visigoths, sought to minimize senseless bloodshed and the desecration of sacred sites.

Today’s Muslim barbarians are filled with an instinctive, irrational hatred of the West. They crave its humiliation and destruction. They bring their most vile habits and primitive traditions to the West, including a crude cult of force, cruelty, violence, contempt for women and minorities, pedophilia, female genital mutilation, incestuous marriages, polygamy, blood feuds, hatred of animals, and patriarchal mores.

Militant Islam is reshaping Western culture, erasing it just as it has previously erased so many others.

The founder of modern liberal democracy Alexis de Tocqueville wrote: “I studied the Koran a great deal … I came away from that study with the conviction that by and large there have been few religions in the world as deadly to men as that of Muhammad”.

There is the following characteristic of the Church historian Philip Schaff: “Mohammedanism conquered the fairest portions of the earth by the sword and cursed them by polygamy, slavery, despotism and desolation. The moving power of Christian missions was love to God and man; the moving power of Islam was fanaticism and brute force”.

Ernest Renan called Islam “the heaviest chains which have ever shackled humanity.”

Yet it is precisely Islam [in all forms] that is welcomed by the Western elites as a “good and peaceful religion” of the future.

The collective West threw its doors open to fundamentalist Islam, represented by the Muslim Brotherhood and its patrons, most notably Qatar and Turkey. This is not merely suicide — it is the most agonizing and merciless suicide imaginable. It would have been far less painful back then to let in Soviet tanks than to welcome the Muslim Brotherhood, with their mosques, seventh-century Sharia law, and cult of superiority.

No, the demise of the West is not the fall of Rome. The demise of the West is not a process of dying at all; It is suicide — and in its most horrific form.

Born in Moscow, Alexander Maistrovoy is a journalist based in Israel and the author of “Agony of Hercules or a Farewell to Democracy (Notes of a Stranger)”, available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

  As bad as the fall of Rome? No, worse