Quo Vadis America?

Never did it occur to me, and even now I find it difficult to believe, that I would see the end of American democracy before my own country was restored to the concert of free nations. Never did I think, until it happened, that the Baltic states would regain their freedom before Cuba did, or that the Eastern bloc, and the Soviet Union itself, would disappear in my lifetime or that Communism would be relegated to Oriental mandarinates -- and Cuba! That no one else imagined such a thing did not stop it from happening; nor shall the U.S. remain invulnerable to Marxism because most refuse to believe what is already obvious to some. Once you get over the conviction that it can't happen here because it is in fact happening here before your very eyes, then there is nothing unusual about it. The question then becomes not "How did it happen here?" but "How did it not happen here long ago?"

America's enemies have always known that it is impossible to topple the government of the United States by force. "Carthago delenda est" is simply not an option for them. So instead of war they have resorted to terrorism, which is the tactical equivalent of stabbing your enemy in the back, and have amassed isolated "victories" which are ultimately meaningless because no individual action, nor all actions together, will ever result in America's annihilation, or achieve much of anything except a series of coups de théâtre.

Terrorist acts such as those of 9/11, while gratifying to America's enemies and embarrassing to the U.S., will obtain nothing for their cause but its further marginalization and irrelevancy. To destroy Western civilization, which is their real object, symbolic attacks will not be enough. Terrorist bombs could melt the Statue of Liberty into the world's largest copper nugget; the vellum originals of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, housed at the National Archives, could be turned to crackling; and the White House itself reduced to rubble, and the democratic institutions of this country would still stand with or without these symbols.

If you want to defeat America, or, specifically, the American idea of representative democracy, it is not necessary to blow up the White House but to occupy it.

Lincoln was right, of course. It is not possible to fool all the people all of the time. But, of course, you don't have to. In a democracy, you only have to fool 50 percent plus one.