So what are we going to do about it?

This question used to drive me potty in the days I still spoke at conservative conferences. I knew that even in such august circles, connotation meant more than denotation.

In effect, my listeners were telling me to stop theorising and philosophising. For the English soul, and especially its conservative subdivision, is innately pragmatic. If no itemised plan for action is presented quickly, that soul begins to fidget and yawn.

However, as that founding book of our civilisation tells us, it was the Word and not the Deed that was in the beginning. Translated into quotidian realities, this means that thought, first conceived and then enunciated, should precede action. If the thought goes awry, so will the resulting acts.

This applies to every issue staring us in the face. Just look at the two conflicts endangering the world at the moment, Gaza and the Ukraine. Neither our governments nor most people have grasped the nature of those conflicts and their interconnection.

The title of Samuel Huntington’s book, The Clash of Civilisations, is an accurate description of the situation. (I haven’t advanced beyond the title: the book is set solid in such microscopic type that I can’t read it even with glasses.)

It’s not just Israel and the Ukraine that are under threat, but our whole civilisation. It lies exposed to barbarian attacks, and much of it is its own fault.

If a fish rots from its head, civilisations rot from their intellectual and moral innards. And once the decay has set in, even a slight push from outside may suffice to bring the structure down.

True enough, over the past few centuries we’ve been busily trying to raze the edifice of our civilisation, mendaciously passing off demolition as innovation. But though it’s tottering, the house still stands, nurturing hope that it may in time become sturdy again.

And the only way to buy it time is to resist the swinging wrecking ball, otherwise known as Russia, Iran, China and so forth. In order to survive we must kick against the BRICS, if you’ll forgive this bowdlerisation of another scriptural quote.

The BRICS countries, led by Russia overtly and China covertly, with the other members in for the ride, are neither reticent in their words nor ambiguous in their actions. They have stated their intention to destroy the West’s standing in the world, relegating it to the status of a playground for barbarians to get their various jollies, a sort of a Ye Olde West theme park.

They seek to replace our civilisation with something else, a world they call multipolar but which will end up as bipolar, a world of oppressed, suppressed and depressed people bowing their heads to evil.

This isn’t to say that our civilisation is unequivocally good, far from it. In this life we aren’t blessed with perfect civilisations, and ours is at present further away from any such ideal than it ever has been. Still, it’s infinitely better than anything that can be conceivably ushered in by BRICS.

We’ve abused the good core of the West, but it’s still there, and so is the hope that one day its rotten periphery will be peeled away. Such a hope doesn’t apply to any BRICS alternative – its very core is rotten, whatever its periphery may look like to an outside observer.

At the moment, BRICS’s assault on the West is spearheaded by Russia and Iran, with China providing tacit and underhanded support. They correctly see the Ukraine and Israel as the flesh of the West’s flesh, whereas we see both as at best our bothersome allies and at worst as drains on our resources.

Unless we change this understanding, we are heading for defeat, capitulation and, for all civilisational purposes, annihilation… Here we are, 700 words in, and not a single one of them has provided a practical reply to the question in the title. However, in the absence of this protracted introduction, no practical reply would make sense.

Once we’ve established the framework of this overarching understanding, then – and only then – can we start talking about specific steps to take. What can we do to ward off this aggression against our civilisation, our liberties, our very essence?

Once the question is worded in this way, only one answer is possible: ANYTHING IT TAKES. This may include committing our troops to battle, but mercifully we don’t have to do that yet. Ukrainians and Israelis are happy to do our fighting for us, while we pretend not to realise that their fight is also ours.

When someone you love would die without an expensive treatment, you wouldn’t be counting the cost. The categories of costs and benefits or debits and credits no longer apply in emergencies. When the survival of a beloved child, wife or mother is at stake, no decent person would hesitate to take out that second mortgage or sell assets even at a loss.

So the question is: Do we love our civilisation? One can have doubts on that score, when observing the horse-trading in Western parliaments, the attempts of Western governments to limit aid to a barely sufficient trickle, or the approving nods of so many Westerners listening to Trump’s pronouncements along the lines of “Putin can do whatever the hell he wants” to any NATO member that doesn’t pull its fiscal weight.

Of course, all Western countries must do their fair share (or “pay up” in Trump’s customary bean-counting parlance). Most of them are beginning to realise this, although their actions are still trailing behind their words. But Trump’s rhetoric is like that of a son refusing to pay for his father’s lung-cancer chemo because “Dad shouldn’t have smoked”.

The looming global problem shouldn’t be fractured into small pieces, be that of silver, gold or any other monetary equivalent. Let’s solve it first and then count the cost.

This doesn’t seem to be the thinking of our powers that be. Either they don’t realise that the Ukraine and Israel are fighting our battle for us, in which case they are mind-numbingly, bone-crushingly ignorant, or they are too impotent to act, in which case they should get some moral Viagra.

The West must repel the on-going and accelerating threat, and I hope we have enough military experts and technology boffins to figure out the specifics of what that will take. In fact, I’m sure such experts exist.

But before generals bend over their maps and engineers over their drawing boards, they must be pointed in the right direction. There have to be some minds in positions of power who understand that it’s not only the Ukraine and Israel but also the West in general that’s fighting for survival.

This is what scares me: those who understand have no power, and those who have power don’t seem to understand. Unless that situation changes, the question in the title won’t have a satisfatory answer.