Is American decline the product of chance or of design?

Look around and ask yourself if the United States of America is growing stronger or weaker.

If you think it is stronger than it was 20, 30 or 50 years ago, then God save you when you figure out what is really going on, because you are going to be very angry when things start to fall apart.

If you think it is already crumbling, then don’t stop there, but ask yourself how it happened. How did the country, in just a half a century or so since the end of World War II, go from the mighty defender of freedom with a standard of living unequaled in history to the miserable paper tiger we are now?

Do you really think that happened by accident?

Or is it not possible, indeed even likely, that the collapse of the American giant occurred because there were forces underfoot that recognized our Achilles’ heel and struck at it?

I suppose it is hard to believe that a system as complex and powerful as the American government, not to mention the entire American economy, could be brought down by the directed action of a few revolutionaries, but virtually every revolution in history has accomplished a similarly gargantuan task against great odds. Revolution starts with a manifesto, or a statement of ideas, created by one or more people. It then either proceeds or dies based on the ability to turn those ideas into action.

I think, if we go back and look at the manifestos of the 1960s youth revolution led by Bill Ayers and the Students for a Democratic Society, we will discover that — unbeknownst to most of us — their revolution has long since achieved most of its goals.

In previous columns, we have talked about the desire of SDS to bring about a revolutionary transformation of education into a tool for fighting against the traditional culture, economy and government of the United States. But that was just one front in a multi-pronged assault. Let’s step back and look at the big picture rather than get caught up in polemics about the quality of education in America.

The education system per se is still as strong as ever in the United States when compared to education in other countries. You can’t fault American educators for doing a bad job at educating; they are for the most part superb. This is not an issue of American ingenuity we are talking about, but rather a question of American naivete. The issue is not how well students are being taught — but WHAT they are being taught — and why we as a society have capitulated to our own debasement.

Sure, most of us have trudged forward with blind acceptance of American exceptionalism and a complacent view of our ability to remain atop the heap of nations, but others have worked tirelessly to use our boundless generosity as a tool to turn America into an exceptional failure. It is our unwillingness to take seriously that threat which has made us so vulnerable.

Indeed, because of our naivete, it is widely regarded as a foolish waste of time to even entertain the notion that those 1960s radicals were a danger to the government of the United States. How could those anti-establishment termites have possibly brought down the most powerful country in the world?

Perhaps that question should be addressed to someone familiar with pest control rather than to the “giant intellects” that populate our national media, government and academies. Then the answer would be clear. Tiny termites bring down houses one bite at a time. And what is true for wood is also true for the world. Whether you see them or not, you ignore them at your own risk.

That was the case in Russia before World War I, Germany before World War II, and Iran before the Islamic Revolution. Such examples have not been lost on the new American revolutionaries. It was not armed rebellion that won those wars for the radicals; it was propaganda and the promise of hope and change

That’s why, back in 1969, the radicals in America were not just taking to the streets. As we saw last week, they were also infiltrating industry, high schools and other institutions in order to work from within to turn people against the government and against capitalism. And they were also thinking way beyond any one strategy for achieving their goal of “world communism.”

As Time Magazine noted in its Aug. 1, 1969, issue: “Activists not attracted by the call of the assembly line have focused on community organization projects, propagandizing and planning. In Boston, 200 radicals are attending a nine-week ‘Movement School,’ at which they are to develop a ‘critique of American society’ and plan future tactics.”

It would be wonderful if we could dig up the notes for that “critique of American society,” and find a blueprint for the future tactics that would be employed to achieve a classless society, wouldn’t it?

In fact, a contemporary source does exist which provides just such a critique and blueprint. In the June 18, 1969, issue of New Left Notes, you can read the revolutionary manifesto signed by Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, Mark Rudd, Jeff Jones and seven other members of the radical SDS faction known as the Revolutionary Youth Movement.

This document was called “You Don’t Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows,” after a line in a Bob Dylan song, and it tells everything you need to know about the goals of the communist revolutionaries who wanted to overthrow the U.S. government from within.

For Bill Ayers and his friends, the central point of understanding is that the United States is an oppressor nation and an imperialist nation whose wealth was derived from exploiting the masses both at home and abroad. We need not take time now to explore the absurdity of calling the United States an imperialist power when history plainly shows the opposite, but it would be interesting to know how many people accept this terminology today as self-evident. That would be an indicator of just how successful the SDS revolution has been from a propaganda point of view.

Ayers and his fellow radicals declared, “It is the oppressed peoples of the world who have created the wealth of this empire and it is to them that it belongs; the goal of the revolutionary struggle must be the control and use of this wealth in the interests of the oppressed peoples of the world.”

In other words, the primary goal of Ayers and SDS was not ending the war in Vietnam as a naive reading of history might presume, but rather the Marxist goal of “redistribution of wealth.” Mind you, this is not just about helping the poor people of America, because as the “Weatherman” document plainly spells out, even the poor people in America (described as the “enslaved masses”) have a “material existence very much above the conditions of the masses of people of the world.”

Therefore, what the Weathermen sought was very explicitly “international revolution,” a movement of wealth outward from the United States to the control of the “oppressed people of the world.” Just such a shift of wealth has of course occurred in the past 50 years, and it’s possible to imagine that it occurred randomly, but it is much more reasonable to envision a scenario whereby it occurred as part of an intentional strategy to bleed the American treasury dry.

If such a strategy had been implemented, it would explain the three main aspects of the American decline of the past 50 years — the loss of capital and jobs overseas; the draining of billions of dollars into foreign aid and foreign wars; and the geometric increase of domestic entitlements to vastly unsustainable levels. Although the government agents and politicians who implemented these policies may have been unwitting pawns, there is no doubt that they played perfectly into the hands of the revolution championed by Bill Ayers.

We’ll see how next week.