By Patrick J. Buchanan

“This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper,” wrote T.S. Eliot in the closing couplet of “The Hollow Men.”

Eliot’s poem was written after the Great War of 1914-1918 had carried off 9 million soldiers, wounded twice as many more, brought down the Romanov, Hohenzollern and Habsburg empires, and ushered onto the world stage Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini and, soon, Adolf Hitler.

Readers have ascribed various meanings to Eliot’s words. One college professor of English suggested Eliot was looking back to the “whimper” in the cradle in Bethlehem that signaled the end of the old world, the Pax Romana, and the coming of the new Christian age.