Olivia Pierson: There Once was a Civilisation

There once was a civilisation which came out of two world wars the world had never seen the like of, and it was brutally hollowed out. Its epicentre, its heart, bones and spirit, however, were still sturdy enough that it limped, wounded and diminished, into the years after, because one of its leaders was a freakishly beautiful giant among men. Winston Churchill knew that letting a culture of 5000 years in the making die undefended by the will of the nearest psycho thug with a massive chip on his shoulder was the worst crime on offer.

That said thug had the loser army of the previous war behind him, the Prussians, already experienced at industrialised fighting and then hunting for victimhood status to balm their injured and maimed egos. Britain pulled itself up by its bootstraps, in a series of mighty contractions while paying the financial cost of continuing to say the true thing while every other significant country of that civilisation made excuses not to care, until they had to care or die. Churchill held the moral line. He had the bodily and psychological stature to let the world wobble on his shoulders, much like Atlas the Titan.

This is not about Churchill. It is about the civilisation he protected as a matter of personal honour. Inside it, the on-the-street freedoms came to be taken for granted: personal liberty, a standard of consistent joy as a daily norm, individual agency, God-given rights and everything in between. It was a Christian civilisation, worked over, again and again, through 2000 years of huge iterations and power shifts. People inherited it and then acted as if humans the globe over were always this reasonable, decent and considered, even though their history books were full of stories about humans who were not.

In the tumultuous times of 2026, Islamic immigration is quite literally the biggest threat to that way of life. Not because Muslims are so strong, they aren’t. But because enough of them are so aggressive and cunning, and because their attitudes toward women, girls, Jews and ‘infidels’ are evidentially beyond despicable. That is not compatible with a civilisation that values and protects the vulnerable, however imperfectly.

The Islamic obsession with infiltrating Christian lands remains sinister and suspicious. Jihad is a central tenet of Islam, not a critic’s nickname, and they obviously want to make their savage points loudly felt in Western lands, and do. Seeing that obsessive interest and deeming it some kind of accident is no longer honest, it never was honest; not for a moment in the last 20 years in which I’ve been making these kinds of comments could it ever be considered honest.

New Zealand paid heavily in our two world wars. We paid, then folks decided the result was somehow automatically guaranteed to us in perpetuity while giving themselves over to pleasant distractions and worry-free fun. What’s running here now is the same thing running through the rest of the inheritors of Western culture: a mentally ill liberal toxic compassion that parades itself in political circles on the left, that opens the country to being a whole system waiting to be looted, and calls the looting ‘tolerance.' It is not tolerance. Churchill’s people did not get to feel tolerant, polite or comfortable while they held the line with totalitarian Germany or fascist Italy - those who were coming for them while trying very hard to not look like they were coming for them.

Neither do we. The great inheritance is still ours, but it will not police itself no matter how much one might wish it to - and clearly we cannot trust the sentiments of Europe again in our time.

What was heroically rescued last century is now even more in need of rescue, because the threat is well inside the gates. The heart, bones and spirit that carried a hollowed civilisation out of those wars are still the only things sturdy enough to matter and attend to.

Olivia is a NZ blogger, author and essayist who likes to write about history and its wide influence on our present time. This article was sourced HERE