OPINION PIECE: The Decline of the West and the Silencing of Charlie Kirk

“The tyrant dies and his rule is over, the martyr dies and his rule begins.” This quote, from the notes of philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, has acquired a certain immediacy in America after the recent assassination of Charlie Kirk, who heroically paid the full cost of conviction in a civilization that seems to no longer tolerate faith, hierarchy, or deviation from the pseudo liberal orthodoxy.

The event itself, the assassination, has been met with the customary rituals of modern politics: the sterile condemnations, the media’s moral contortions, vague appeals to unity from those who never believed in it. It must be acknowledged, with no small sense of alarm, that many, especially among the younger, radicalized segments of American society and even our society, openly celebrated the act as a triumph of their ideology. In this celebration, we find a deeper and far more troubling reality - that Kirk was not killed by one madman, but in fact by a collective mood, a currently dominant, hegemonic ideology that now governs the moral atmosphere of the modern West.

This same fever, a sickness that affects the entirety of our Western civilization, though born in America and Western Europe, has found fertile ground even here, in Georgia. Ilia Chavchavadze wrote: “Folly, presented under the guise of knowledge and crowned with the word 'liberalism,' will nowhere find a more fertile soil of idiocy for its roots than here in Georgia, where the mind and heart of man still feed indiscriminately upon the leftovers of others.” The average contemporary Georgian liberal imitates mindlessly the current hegemonic ideology dominating the West: a loud, impatient sentiment contemptuous of tradition, deriving its roots, in truth, from Marxism (although this is the subject of another article entirely).

And so we come, at last, to an incredibly important question. In the Georgian political sphere, the words “pro-Western” and “anti-Western” are tossed about with careless frequency, as though the simple attachment or opposition to some perceived distant bloc of states were sufficient to define the moral and cultural orientation of a political force. Politicians employ these labels to signal allegiance, to curry favor, to brandish a sort of moral virtue; yet in truth, the usage of this term masks a profound ignorance. It presumes that the West is a fixed entity, measurable in international organizations and economic agreements, defined by liberal democracy, rather than a living civilization with roots and principles that far outlast any contemporary government. It is first and foremost necessary, then, to ask: what is the West?

Consider, for instance, a recent advertisement funded by the European Union, which aired repeatedly on Georgian television. The spot featured a montage of citizens asking what “Europe” means to them. One after another, the respondents offered answers of astonishing banality: “better quality of life,” “convenience,” “more opportunities,” and other variations on the same theme. The spectacle is revealing not for its content alone, but for what it betrays about the average Georgian’s conception of the West: reduced, in the minds of its admirers, to a collection of comforts and commodities.

This meaningless advertisement exposes the intellectual and moral shallowness of a worldview that equates Europe with ease and material comfort rather than certain values. Georgian youth, ever eager to align themselves with Western trends, are encouraged to internalize this vision: a vision in which the West is defined not by faith, philosophy, or culture, but by some fleeting satisfaction of individual desire and comfort.

The true answer to our question is not found in the aforementioned ad, nor is it found in Brussels or the decrees of pseudo liberal politicians. At its core, the West, simply defined, is Christian civilization, shaped by the cultural and philosophical inheritance of Greco-Roman antiquity, fused with the spiritual vision of Christendom. Its defining characteristics are not simple convenience or affluence, but rather the discipline of the soul, the ordering of society according to the enduring moral law of the ten commandments of Moses, and the cultivation of intellect in dialogue with eternity. Western civilization existed for millennia before the formation of the European Union, and it will, God willing, endure for millennia after its dissolution.

The modern West, as it presents itself today through the institutions of the European Union and the dictates of liberal popular culture, is a civilization profoundly divorced from its historical roots. It is secularized, reducing faith to a private sentiment and often actively disdaining Christian moral norms; it is anti-family, promoting alternative lifestyles as a societal imperative; it is propagandistically pro-deviant; it is internationalist in an almost Soviet manner; it is experimental and fashion-driven, constantly redefining moral and political norms according to the latest social trends; and it is consumerist, placing individual convenience and gratification above virtue, and civic responsibility. The so-called 'West' of today is thus the opposite of the true West that has existed for millennia: a civilization grounded in Christian faith, in which family is the foundation of moral and civic life; in which national tradition guides both governance and education; and in which local and national customs are respected as the framework of society. The question is unavoidable: when Georgians speak of being “pro-Western,” do they mean this great, enduring civilization of two thousand years, which has stood since the conversion of Constantine, or do they mean the transient, pseudo-West of Brussels bureaucrats, dreamed up in the last century, with no true connection to European values?

Georgia is, and has always been, a true Western nation in the civilizational, historical, and moral sense of the term. Long before the formation of the European Union, long before the advent of modern bureaucracies and liberal orthodoxy, the European idea was born, and from it came forth Constantine, Augustine, Aquinas, true Democracy, and the rule of law; Georgia produced kings, scholars, and poets who were unmistakably heirs to Western civilization. Where was Brussels when Pharnavaz was consolidating the Georgian national state, when David IV the Builder led a renaissance of learning and faith, when Shota Rustaveli composed his great epic, when Erekle II defended our sovereignty and our culture, when Ilia Chavchavadze called us to moral and national regeneration? The answer is evident: it was nowhere, because the West is not defined by committees and unions, but by faith and culture, which Georgia has embodied for over two millennia. This is not and cannot be a matter of debate; it is a simple historical fact, and unless Georgia destroys its national culture, it cannot become more or less Western.

Many Georgians, when they profess reverence for the West, speak of it as something sacred - and rightly so, I agree with them entirely. But too often, especially when such pronouncements are made by our youth, what they mean is not the millennia-old civilization of Christendom but the ephemeral structures of the last few decades: the European Union, the revolving political fashions, the imported liberal orthodoxy. By definition, these cannot be sacred; they are transient and provisional. The true West is by nature sacred and holy, a collection of the highest values. To admire the West without understanding this is to admire a shadow, and to risk leading our youth, our institutions, and our culture into the same spiritual decay that now imperils the West itself.

Charlie Kirk was a man of the old order, the old West, standing proud against the current of a decaying culture that no longer reveres its roots. For Georgia, heir to centuries of Western culture, the lesson is unmistakably clear: this ideology, the pseudo liberal ideology that killed Charlie Kirk and remains a threat to our civilization, the ideology that has more in common with the revolution of Lenin than with Classical Liberalism, the ideology that has destroyed nations and overtaken the conscience of man to turn him into a murderer, must never be allowed to take root in our nation.

Written By: Sandro Mrevlishvili

Edited By: Elene Mosiashvili