The questions remain whether today in large nations (we omit the direct

democracy of small Swiss cantons) the man in the street is capable of

understanding the content and nature of the occasionally momentous problems
facing his country and whether in a great emergency he would not
thoroughly lose his head. The case of Germany�s two economic collapses
(1923 and 1931) with millions of unemployed followed by the electoral
victories of the brown and red enemies of parliamentary government should
be as much in our minds as the support given by the peasant masses to the
red armies during Russia�s civil war of 1918-1920. Sins will get punished
beyond the grave, but follies right here on Earth. The German sheep were led by
their National Socialist butchers to the battlefields on three continents and
were roasted alive by the Allies in their cities. The Russian peasants, hellbent
on grabbing the remaining good-sized estates, were collectivized or, if
they resisted, murdered�quickly or slowly�by the millions. History is
pitiless.

We all have to face the grim, indisputable fact that the abyss between
thtScita�the political, economic, technological, scientific, military,
geographical,
psychological knowledge of the masses and of their representatives�
and the Scienda�the knowledge in these matters that is
necessary to reach logical-rational-moral conclusions�is incessantly and
cruelly widening. In a sense we are all becoming more and more ignorant.
And he who no longer acts with the support of knowledge or experience can
only rely on intuition (as Wilson, F. D. Roosevelt, Benes, and Hitler
admittedly did) or on mere feelings. In a constantly shrinking globe such a
thoroughly antique form of government is hopelessly obsolete.

There is nothing more fatal than sentimental amateurism. The switches

were wrongly set in 1789 with the French Revolution. The three fundamentally
leftist revolutions, those that spawned France�s democracy,
Russia�s international socialism, and Germany�s national socialism, formed
and fashioned the history of the last two hundred years and established the
�Centuries of the G��guillotines, gaols, gallows, gas chambers, and
gulags.

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For example, the unwarranted identification of democracy

with liberty is precisely what has caused a great many of the recurrent
tragedies of American foreign policy (as well as a number of internal woes).
One need only recall all the wars, all the propaganda, all the pressure
campaigns for the cause of democracy, how every hailed victory of democracy
has ended in terrible defeat for personal liberty, the one cause really dear to
American hearts.

This is by no means a new story. Even Burke, in the beginning,

welcomed the French Revolution, and eminent Americans praised it. But it
all ended in a forest of guillotines. Mr. Woodrow Wilson enthusiastically
welcomed Alexander Kerenski�s government which would make Russia �fit
for a league of honor. �But how long did it last? The Weimar Republic, the
near-republican Italian monarchy, the Spanish Republic, the decolonized
free nations from Haiti to Tanzania, North Vietnam to Indonesia, Nicaragua
to Buenos Aires�all have been grievous disappointments to �progressive�
Americans, terminating as they have in dictatorships, civil wars,
crowded jails, confiscated newspapers, gallows and firing squads, tyrannies
and sequestrations, nationalizations and social engineering.
Yet beyond these obvious failures, beyond the brutal overt elimination of
liberty and decency, the democratic evolution leading to nonviolent slavery
is traceable to a turn of mind and outlook basically the same as the one that
brings about the more obvious forms of tyranny. One should not be
surprised, because the roots of the evil are historically-genetically the same
all over the Western world.

The fatal year is 1789, and the symbol of iniquity is the Jacobin Cap. Its
heresy is the denial of personality and of personal liberty. Its concrete
realizations are mass democracy, all forms of national collectivism and
statism, Marxism, which produces socialism and communism, fascism and
national socialism�in short, leftism in all its modern guises and manifestations.
It is to this that in America the old familiar term �liberalism,�
perversely enough, is being applied.