Let's be brutally honest here. Western Europe today is weak. It is weak spiritually and it is weak in fighting spirit. Scandanavia had become so feminized that Scandanavian women complain that their men act like women now. This is the part of Europe where the Vikings came from. Think about that for a moment.
The Christian faith is mostly dead now in Western Europe. All those huge churches with beautiful and elegant architecture are mostly empty now, relics of a long ago bygone era when the Christian faith inspired art, music, science, bravery and honor.
This essay articluates some the same points of the OP. These sections stood out to me.
No one wants to go toe to toe with ISIS, it seems. Everyone is hoping that they will dry up and blow away if we just “cut off their funding” or “provide more training” to the Iraqi military. People who say such things do not fully understand the power of a fanatical, militant ideology. The only way to inspire men to confront ISIS will be to equip them with an ideology of equal conviction and strength.
But where will such an ideology be found? Western leaders and populations are apparently incapable of dying for their beliefs. People in the West find it bizarre that someone would die for his religious beliefs because they themselves are craven, effete cowards who have no convictions themselves. Even the Vatican is too craven to call things by their true names, and to attempt to inspire a military response to the fanaticism that wishes to destroy it. Instead, we are treated to lectures on peace, love, and exhortations to “understand” the grievances of others.
Even nationalism in the West has evidently lost its luster. Who today can imagine battalions of young Spaniards, Frenchmen, Italians, or Germans willing to sacrifice themselves in combat for an ideal? Why do men fight to the death? For consumerism? For feminism? For the “rights of gender equality”? No.
These are not the ideals that inspire militancy in men. And no one is being honest about this. Decades of enervating propaganda by the Western media has hollowed out and destroyed the fighting spirit of the European male....
What happened to the Old Spain, the closest thing to a “sword of Christendom” that ever existed? Where is she? Where is the pure idealism, and the soaring imagination, that stacked the sacred stones which would eventually create the sublime vaults of the Notre Dame in Paris? Where is the fanatical spirit that crushed the Turks at Vienna, without apology or equivocation?
It is difficult to imagine this ethic today in Europe. Most European militaries are hollowed-out, demoralized, and totally lacking in combat experience. For decades they outsourced their defense to the United States, and preferred to lavish their citizens with social programs and corrupting doctrines that had no basis in history or experience.
The essay is an excellent read.
The Need For A Fighting Ideology