Honoring the Dead – A Mark of Civilizational Greatness

Honoring the Dead – A Mark of Civilizational Greatness

It wasn’t Zeus, not in the least, who made this proclamation—not to me. Nor did that Justice, dwelling with the gods beneath the earth, ordain such laws for men. Nor did I think your edict had such force that you, a mere mortal, could override the gods, the great unwritten, unshakable traditions. They are alive, not just today or yesterday: they live forever…. These laws—I was not about to break them…and face the retribution of the gods. So for me, at least, to meet this doom of yours is precious little pain. But if I had allowed my own mother’s son to rot, an unburied corpse—that would have been an agony!

Sophocles, Antigone, 499–522

No one, unless utterly brainwashed by relentless propaganda, can remain unmoved by the fate of the brutally murdered Israeli hostages. We can tell a lot about a civilization by the way it honors its dead. Israel treats both the living and dead with dignity and humanity; its enemies desecrate both the living and dead with ruthless barbarism.

While all human beings are born with equal inherent worth and rights, this does not mean that all cultures and civilizations around the world are created equal in terms of the values they stand for. Western values—from Classical Greece, through Judeo-Christian moral guidelines, and culminating in the foundational principles of America—consider human life precious and sacred.

Numerous other cultures and regimes—from cannibalism to totalitarian socialism—do not. Honesty requires, in contravention of the deafening leftist propaganda that labels all cultures as equal—and in fact, cherry-picks half-truths to demonize the West—that we admit the moral superiority of Western civilization and stop its suicidal spiraling.

Some 15 years ago, I worked for a government contractor as part of a program that recruited interpreters and translators from various languages to support U.S. government missions worldwide. I still remember one assignment, whose purpose was to locate remains of missing U.S. soldiers, going as far back as World War II. I was deeply impressed and moved by the attention and resources dedicated to bringing everyone home, albeit symbolically, by discovering a trace of someone’s DNA. “This is the mark of a great civilization,” I thought.

One day, our program received a letter from an elderly woman, whose husband had been drafted mere days after their wedding and was later presumed dead. Our efforts helped locate his DNA. The letter contained the woman’s heartfelt gratitude for finally finding closure and peace, after so many restless decades. She had never remarried and had spent her life hoping against hope that her husband might return someday.

Yeonmi Park, the courageous North Korean defector, who was sold as a sexual slave and after a harrowing journey made it to safety in the West, remarked how in North Korea there were dead bodies all over the streets, and no one cared, or dared, to show them any respect. We know that both National Socialism and communism have a horrendous record of committing mass murder and disrespecting life; yet we are on the verge of abandoning Western tradition, which has brought about the most humane and prosperous societies.

In 2019, a Swedish scientist entertained the suggestion that people should eat human flesh in order to fight climate change. The majority of mainstream media did not express any outrage or shock.

When we abandon the objective morality of the Western world and embrace a radical atheistic, relativistic, and materialistic ideology, nothing sacred, good, or true remains.

Melanie Philips warned:

This crisis has been caused by the west’s retreat from its core values based in Christianity but which ultimately derive from Judaism. The people tearing down the hostage posters were tearing the Jews out of their sight, out of their conscience and out of their world.

This is why the fate of the Israeli hostages is a crisis for the west. Challenged by the October 7 atrocities to defend civilisation against barbarism, it did not defend civilisation.

We have but a dwindling window of opportunity to save the values that make our civilization uniquely beneficial for human flourishing and preserve the greatest traditions in history. The time is now.

Nora D. Clinton is a Research Scholar at the Legal Insurrection Foundation. She was born and raised in Sofia, Bulgaria. She holds a PhD in Classics and has published extensively on ancient documents on stone. In 2020, she authored the popular memoir Quarantine Reflections Across Two Worlds. Nora is a co-founder of two partner charities dedicated to academic cooperation and American values. She lives in Northern Virginia with her husband and son. 

Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.