History is filled with ruins. Stones, broken statues, and scattered manuscripts bear witness to civilizations that once believed themselves eternal. Thebes, Carthage, Byzantium, and Tenochtitlán each stood as mighty centers of culture and power, yet today they live only in history books and archaeological fragments. Their destruction was not just military defeat; it was cultural annihilation. They were erased.
The West, in its current trajectory, stands on a similar precipice. Victor Davis Hanson’s “The Dying Citizen” and “The End of Everything” capture this reality in stark terms: a hollowing out of institutions, a fragmentation of civic culture, and a loss of will that once bound nations together. Hanson shows that civilizations collapse not only by the sword but also by decay from within; cultural amnesia, decadence, and the abandonment of shared identity.
But there is another story of attempted erasure that offers the West both a warning and a chance at redemption: the Black American experience. Unlike Thebes or Carthage, Black America was not destroyed despite a centuries-long campaign to uproot, erase, and obliterate its people. That survival is not just historical resilience; it is prophetic.
The Erased Civilizations
Thebes was razed by Alexander the Great, its people sold into slavery, its memory meant to be a cautionary tale for others. Carthage, after centuries of rivalry with Rome, was not only conquered but symbolically erased, its land salted so nothing would grow. Byzantium, the great Christian empire, fell in 1453 to the Ottomans; its libraries, traditions, and liturgy were subsumed under new dominion. Tenochtitlán, the jewel of the Aztec empire, was dismantled stone by stone, its temples replaced by cathedrals and its cosmology by the cross of empire.
Each case reflects Hanson’s thesis: civilizations are not immortal. They vanish when their cultural identity collapses or when enemies exploit their internal weakness.
The Black American Experience
Black Americans were never meant to survive in the New World. The Middle Passage tore people from their languages, religions, and histories. Slavery sought to strip identity, family, and memory. Reconstruction was met with Jim Crow, lynching, and a legal architecture designed to erase civic participation. In the 20th century, mass incarceration and economic marginalization attempted to extend the work of erasure through other means.
Even in culture, the pattern continued: Black creativity in music, language, and style was often appropriated, diluted, or commodified until it lost connection to its roots. The attempt at erasure was total – physical, political, and cultural.
And yet, unlike Thebes or Tenochtitlán, Black America survived. Through the church, through music, through movements for justice, Black communities forged continuity out of rupture. Out of the ashes of attempted annihilation, a prophetic identity was born; one that speaks truth to the hypocrisy of the West itself.
The West Mirrors What It Once Inflicted
Today, the decline Hanson describes across Western societies eerily resembles what was long imposed on Black America. The weakening of the family unit, the loss of institutional trust, addiction epidemics, and a culture of rootlessness now afflict the majority as well. The West, in short, is tasting its own medicine.
Where Black America endured systemic destabilization imposed from above, Western societies now face destabilization from within. The shared civic identity Hanson mourns has eroded, replaced by tribalism, polarization, and cynicism. Citizens no longer believe in the very institutions designed to protect them.
The irony is unmistakable: what was once inflicted on a minority is now the condition of the majority.
Prophetic Lesson
The survival of Black America is not merely sociological; it is prophetic. It reveals that erasure is possible but not inevitable. Unlike Thebes or Carthage, Black America endured the storm and, in doing so, became a mirror. It shows the West both what it has done and what it risks becoming.
The prophetic lesson is this: cultural survival requires memory, resilience, and rootedness in identity. Erasure comes when memory is lost, when decadence replaces discipline, when people no longer believe their culture is worth defending. Black America survived because, even stripped of its original homeland, it created new forms of memory – spirituals, sermons, songs, and stories to hold a people together.
If the West continues down its current path of amnesia, it may not be so fortunate. The great civilizations of history prove Hanson’s point: nothing is immune to annihilation.
Conclusion
History teaches that erasure is the final judgment on civilizations that forget who they are. Thebes, Carthage, Byzantium, and Tenochtitlán serve as warnings etched into the ruins of time. Black America stands as both an exception and a sign; a people who were supposed to be erased but endured.
For the West, the question is urgent: will it continue its slide into cultural oblivion, repeating the fate of civilization’s past, or will it learn from the resilience of those it tried to destroy?
The future of the West may depend on whether it listens to the prophetic witness in its midst-before history adds its name to the list of civilizations erased.