Are We Becoming Gondor?

Are We Becoming Gondor?

By Victor Davis Hanson

October 6, 2026

J.R.R. Tolkien’s vision of a declining Gondor offers a warning for the troubled West—but also a message of hope that renewal remains possible.
-----------------------------------------------
A Pandora’s Box of Western Ills

So, is the West now a teetering modern Gondor?

It too faces both an external threat from a rising communist China of 1.4 billion people that seeks global domination and internal apostasy from a new, nihilistic, anti-Western alliance of socialism and Islamism.

Western borders, with the recent exception of those of the United States, are mostly shattered.

Immigrants and their children together account for more than 30 percent of the population in many Western countries. Thousands of young people from immigrant neighborhoods are currently rioting in the streets of France—attacking churches, indigenous French passersby, and anyone who challenges them. The same sort of violence, once sporadic, now threatens to sweep Europe.

Modern France has never quite recovered from its soldiers’ heroic, blood-soaked victory at Verdun—“Ils ne passeront pas”—which stopped the Kaiser’s assault over a century ago. And after two world wars, an exhausted, postcolonial France gave birth to poststructuralism and postmodernism, which postulate that eternal truths are relative and bothersome historical facts are mere social constructs.

Millions, mostly from the Islamic world, have flooded Europe’s borders in search of security, prosperity, and freedom—but rarely do they seek to become European. Instead, far too many reject integration and assimilation. They treat their magnanimous hosts as naïve, weak, unarmed, infertile, godless—and deserving of replacement by them and their religion.

These immigrants would certainly answer our initial question in the affirmative: they see that the entire European continent is becoming something like a teetering fifteenth-century Constantinople, soon to implode under its own decadence amid a sea of enemies.

Politically allied with these immigrant Islamists are Europe’s homegrown hard Left and radical environmentalists. The latter are responsible for such suicidal policies as shutting down Germany’s nuclear power program during the energy crisis following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, to say nothing of opposing wider access to air conditioning despite estimates of tens of thousands of heat-related deaths across Europe.

LINK