SPENGLER: Letter to Chinese friends: We really are different. “Americans never will reconcile themselves to China’s lack of concern for individual rights, for its cruelty to so many of its citizens, and for the absence of mercy in its public affairs.”

More:

China is the world’s oldest living civilization and America is the youngest. How does a new civilization come to be in the first place? It must graft itself onto an older civilization. The American principle is that each individual is sacred, and therefore sovereign, with equal protection under the law and an equal say in governance. Ancient Israel is the wellspring of the American imagination, as I argued in a lecture to the Heritage Foundation in 2016. If China’s national epic is the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, America’s national epic is the King James Version of the Hebrew Bible. America was founded by dissenting Protestants for whom the history of Israel was a map to salvation. It was envisioned by English political theorists who projected a “Hebrew Republic” out of biblical as well as later rabbinic sources, at a time when the Jews had not yet returned to England after their 14th-century banishment, and the Jews were a tiny, scattered and apparently insignificant people.

Fascinating piece; well worth your time.