This is Rabbi Jonathan Cahn. He is the author of the 2012 best-seller "The Harbinger". He suggests that the 9/11 terrorism
attack was
a divine warning to the United States. Cahn ties
the 9/11 attacks to Isaiah 9:10, which reads: "The bricks are fallen down,
but we will build with hewn stones: the sycamores are cut down, but we will
change them into cedar.
The author
says that The Harbinger is a fictional story which is
nevertheless concerned with a real-life connection: a prophecy about ancient
Israel that was eventually fulfilled in the eighth century BC when Israel was
destroyed, and certain events and facts related to the 9/11 terror attacks
against the U.S. in 2001. Cahn calls these events and facts
"harbingers," and argues that they show a connection between ancient
Israel's destruction and a possible coming destruction of the present-day United States. He also says that ancient Israel received a
warning before being destroyed, and that the 9/11 harbingers form a similar
warning from God to America.
The book draws
parallels between the Kingdom of Israel and modern day
America. The author argues that America was founded similar to ancient Israel and
the Founding Fathers envisioned
a country based on the rules of God and a Light Unto the Nations. The author lists a
series of warnings or harbingers that were given to ancient Israel before its
final destruction by the Assyrians and makes a parallel between each and the
events of 9/11.
A summary of Harbingers mentioned in the book are as follows:
1.
The Breach: The author argues that the United States just like ancient
Israel has breached the covenant it made with God at the time of its
foundation. Thus the hedge of God's protection around America was lifted on
9/11 similar to the way the hedge of protection around ancient Israel was
lifted.
2.
The Terrorist: The author argues that similar to the way that the kingdom
of Israel was attacked by Assyrians, The United States was attacked by Al-Qaeda.
The Assyrians were a Semitic people, children of the Middle East. So too were
the terrorists of 9/11.
3.
Fallen Bricks: The most visible signs of the attack on ancient Israel
were that of the fallen buildings and the ruin heaps of fallen bricks. In 9/11
the most visible site of the attack was also the fallen bricks of the fallen
buildings.
4.
The Tower: The harbinger symbolizes the fact that after the Assyrian
attack, the kingdom of Israel did not repent from its sins but vowed to rebuild
its buildings with its own power. Similarly the author argues that United
States also did not repent from its sins after the warning and continued its
path, vowing to rebuild on Ground Zero with its own power.
5.
Gazit Stone: The Israelites carve out quarried stone from mountain rock
and bring it back to the ground of destruction where clay bricks once stood.
Three years after 9/11, a 20-ton quarried rock meant to serve as the
cornerstone of the new building was brought to Ground Zero. A ceremony took
place over the rock in which New York Governor George Pataki pronounced:
"Today, we, the heirs of that revolutionary spirit of defiance, lay this
cornerstone and unmistakably signal to the world the unwavering strength of
this nation, and our resolve to fight for freedom. Eventually, the stone was removed from Ground
Zero after security concerns prompted some redesigning at the site.
6.
Sycamore: In Isaiah 9:10, the nation of Israel declares that its
sycamore trees have been destroyed by the Assyrians during the attack but they
would replace them with cedar trees. After the collapse of the buildings during
the 9/11 attacks, a shock wave was created that damaged most buildings around
the area. Only one building was not harmed which was St. Paul's Chapel, which was protected by a
sycamore tree that is believed to have captured the blast. Cahn points out that St. Paul's Chapel
was also the place that the government of the United States prayed on the day
of the first inauguration of George
Washington on April 30, 1789. The sycamore is known today as
the 9/11 Sycamore and a memorial was built for it.
7.
Erez Tree: In Isaiah 9:10, the nation of Israel vows to replace the
damaged sycamores with cedars, which are stronger. Two years after the events
of 9/11, on November 29, 2003, an actual tree was planted in the place of the
original sycamore in front of St. Paul's Chapel. This tree was a 21-foot spruce
tree and was called the Tree of Hope. The tree itself no longer exists, as it
died and was dug up and destroyed and not replaced.
8.
The Utterance: Or the “the vow” of defiance. For there to be a parallel
with ancient Israel with this harbinger, Cahn says a national leader would have
to speak the defiant vow to rebuild in the nation's capital, which he argues
that U.S. Senator John Edwards did during a 9/11 memorial on
September 11, 2004, when he quoted Isaiah 9:10.
9.
The Prophecy: Another parallel with ancient Israel, according to Cahn,
is that a national leader must utter the Isaiah 9:10 vow as a prophecy, before
such events as the replacing of the tree and the bringing of the cornerstone
rock to Ground Zero. Cahn says this occurred one day after the events of 9/11,
when America issued its official response to the terrorism attacks. Senator Tom Daschle,
who was the Senate Majority Leader at the time and in charge of the official
response, spoke before the Congress. At the end of his speech he quoted Isaiah
9:10.
This is David Solway. He is a Canadian poet, educational theorist, travel writer and literary critic of Jewish descent. He is a member of the Jubilate Circle and formerly a teacher of English Literature at John Abbott College. He has spent most of his life in the Montreal area and now lives in Hudson, Quebec.
Solway is known for his work both as a poet, essayist and as a teacher, as well as for his outspokenness, especially in opposition to Islam and in defense of Zionism, George W. Bush and the war on terror. He has contributed political commentary to the conservative websites WorldNetDaily and PJ Media.
Solway's latest article on PJ Media, "Nine Signs of the Impending American Collapse" lists nine cultural events and conditions that point to a "perfect storm" bearing down upon America. Here is his description of Cahn's nine harbingers and his list of nine signs and their relationship to each other...
I have never been partial to doomsday scenarios.
End-of-the-world prophecies always seem to leave their proponents in the throes
of revisionary confusion, manically adjusting their calculations and hoping to
get it right the next time, and the time after that, ad vomitatum. Mark
Biltz and John
Hagee have belabored
the blood moon event, but lunar tetrads of no overwhelming significance have
occurred before. Population gurus promise mass starvation while the food
supply defiantly increases. Flood experts inform us that the entire eastern
seaboard will soon be under water but ocean levels remain insolently stable.
Global warmists predict an atmospheric inferno while the temperature refuses to
comply and the next Ice Age gradually but inexorably approaches. And so it
goes.
Real threats to our wellbeing and even
existence—a wayward asteroid, an EMP attack neutralizing the electrical grid,
or the cultural debacle of unrestricted Islamic immigration—are exigencies that
can be met, given the mental alertness and political will to prepare for and
defuse them. Doomsday scripts and warnings are another matter, figments of the
realm of theological speculation or pathological fantasy. Yet one must always
allow for a possible exception to the general rule, if only to avoid the intellectual
rigidity of epistemic and ideological dogmatism.
Recently I’ve been reading Jonathan
Cahn’s two disturbing books – The
Harbinger (a
novel) and The
Mystery of the Shemitah (a
non-fiction study) — foretelling the imminent collapse of the United States.
Cahn, who bills himself as a messianic rabbi and pastor, is a dreadful writer,
repetitious to the point of reader catatonia, enamored of the trick of posing
obvious rhetorical questions and then answering them as if he were pulling a
rabbit—or a rabbi—out of a hat, and occasionally prone to assuming premises as
axioms. To take just one example of the latter, the Christian siteLighthouse Trails explains that pluralistic America’s
relation to God is very different from God’s relation to theocratic ancient
Israel—the one initiated by man, the other by God—which Cahn wrongly presumes
to be equivalent. And yet, for the most part, the evidence he marshals for the
revelation he relentlessly advances is inarguably compelling. There is just too
much specific and relevant data to discount. The books need to be closely
studied if one is to get the full brunt of his thesis, but his argument can be
stated in cameo form.
Shemitah is the Hebrew word for “release” or
“remission,” referring to the Sabbath Year enjoined by the Lord in theTanakh (the Hebrew canon) as an obligation
upon the children of Israel. Every seventh year the nation is required to leave
the land fallow and to cancel all debt and credit, a year of cessation from
productive activity commemorating the seventh day of creation when the Lord
rested from his labors. The shemitah is an acknowledgment that the land
belongs not to the people but to God and that all blessings and prosperity flow
ultimately from the Divine.
However, when it is ignored or
forgotten, the blessing it entails upon the people of Israel morphs into a
judgment of disaster. This judgment is foreshadowed by nine harbingers,
adumbrated in strict sequence in the Book
of Isaiah—recorded as the Breach, the Terrorist, the Fallen Bricks, the
Tower, the Gazit Stone, the Sycamore, the Erez Tree, the Utterance and the
Prophecy—intended to warn the people to change their ways and return to the
terms of communion and observance. Every one of these omens, which Cahn
elaborates in minute detail, has occurred from 9/11 to the present with serial exactitude.
But should the auguries fall on deaf ears and blind eyes, calamity inevitably
ensues.
Cahn contends that the harbingers apply not only to
ancient Israel but to contemporary America, which was founded on principles
that formally established it as a second Israel and a nation consecrated to
God. He has in mind the words of dedication from George Washington’s first
presidential address: “there is no truth more thoroughly
established, than that…the propitious smiles of Heaven, can never be expected
on a nation that disregards the eternal rules of order and right, which Heaven
itself has ordained.” Food for thought.
The literal conditions of observance
may have changed, but the recognition of grace and benediction, the belief that
the nation has been consecrated, remains binding. Should the nation turn away
from its origins and betray its hallowed commitment, it will begin to break
apart. “As did ancient Israel,” Cahn writes, “so now America began removing God
from its national life, from its culture, its government, and its public
squares.” Cahn’s narrative surrogate in The
Harbinger pronounces his own
judgment on America: “America must now face the magnitude of its moral and
spiritual descent, the degrading of its culture…and the altars covered with the
blood of the innocent.” For among the multitude of its sins, we come to
understand, America is sacrificing its unborn in record numbers. “Barbarity has
seeped into the culture so completely,” writes conservative author Fay Voshell, “that
its toxicity has poisoned nearly every institution, every court of law, every
educational institution and very nearly every family.”
This is the burden of Cahn’s argument.
America has sunk into the swamp of corruption and venality and is ripe for
chastisement and retribution. As a result, the nine prophetic signs of judgment
have now come to pass, which Cahn charts with mathematical and graphic
precision, making his warnings hard to dismiss as the hallucination of yet one
more cracked soothsayer. The biblical template has been followed to the letter.
Like Israel at the time of the
Assyrian and Babylonian invasions, Cahn warns, America is set to founder,
militarily, financially and economically. Although I am a skeptic by nature, I
readily confess that I cannot simply wish away the many strands of evidence
Cahn presents. Each one by itself may be regarded as problematic, but taken in
their entirety the tapestry he has woven is quite terrifying in its individual
features, completeness, vividness and uniformity. The authors of an American
Vision pamphlet take
issue with some of Cahn’s fiscal data regarding market disarray, but do not
effectively succeed in scuttling his general thesis. In short, his
accounting is unlike the fanciful prognostications of the general run of
catastrophists, whose predictions always fail to be realized. Cahn is on to
something and should be read with an open mind.
What Cahn sees as a biblical prophecy,
I see as a perfect storm, a levy of forces, events and developments coming to
bear upon America—and the West—at approximately the same historical moment and
working eerily in unison. Before I had opened Cahn’s pages, I was drafting a
series of notes toward an essay on the subject of America’s decline, in which I
had compiled, oddly enough, nine signs or harbingers of my own, which I called
“portents” and “heralds” presaging a coming collapse. True, these auspices were
not based upon a biblical pattern and they did not march in the systematic
order of Cahn’s harbingers, nor were they plotted on a temporal graph or
affixed to the calendar. But taken in their aggregate, they seem incontestable
in their collective momentum and persuasiveness.
I have no way of knowing if this
strange alignment of nines is the result of serendipity or mere accident.
However that may be, these were for me unmistakable heralds of cultural
dissolution. Each of the issues I examine has been treated extensively in a
plethora of books and articles over the years, as well as in my own essays, so
they need not be amplified here. I list them in no particular order from the
notes I had assembled, pre-Cahn.
Education. American pre-university education,
with its inbred pedagogical and curricular decrepitude, has been further
compromised by the entrenching of the Common Core program, characterized by coercive federal intrusion and string-attached funding,
monopoly publishing and testing, elimination of pivotal American figures and
historical events, a leftist disposition, and a powerful pro-Muslim bias.
Higher education is in no better
shape. There can be no doubt that the university has been in free fall since
the radical takeover of its mission in the festering 1960s, though its decline
can be traced back to the “progressive,” child-centered pedagogy of John Dewey
in the early 20th century.
Standards have been lowered to admit those who are unfit for the rigors of
post-secondary education; the curriculum has been both diluted and politicized;
the campus has become a hotbed of revolutionary sentiment and activism; debate,
argument and the free exchange of ideas are no longer part of its intellectual
currency as a left consensus has shut down the expression of contrary views;
feminist orthodoxy has exerted a castrating effect on university teaching and
policy; trigger
warnings prioritize
feelings over knowledge, infantilizing a student body that must be spared the
slightest twitch of emotional discomfort; and draconian language laws meant to
combat expressions of “micro-aggression,” no matter how vanilla, have
prohibited statements
like“America is the land of opportunity” or “I believe the most
qualified person should get the job.” In short, the utopian ideal of “social
justice” has snookered the pursuit of truth and the formation of inquiring
minds.
In the language of Jack Cashill’s
recent Scarlet
Letters, a critique of the cult of liberal intolerance, the
university has been commandeered by an “inquisitorial” and “neo-puritanical”
camarilla of administrators, professors and students. Analogously, academic
fascism, writes Walter Williams, “pose[s] a far
greater threat to our way of life than any terrorist organization or rogue
nation.”
In effect, the liberal arts have
ceased to exist.
By the same token, the professional
and technical disciplines have also been corrupted by the race, class and
gender shibboleths on affirmative admission policies that typify the modern
academy. As The Wall Street Journal reports,
“four in 10 U.S. college students graduate without the complex reasoning skills
to manage white-collar work.” The university now graduates in ever increasing
volume a class of sanctimonious and indoctrinated incompetents—a recipe for
social calamity.
Gender Theory. Gender has come increasingly
to be regarded not as a biological fact but as a social construct, and
ultimately as an expression of one’s “inner feelings” (as if there were any
other kind) and affect-laden sense of sexual or personal identity. A man is a
woman is a trans is a tiger is a wolf—in other words, an idiosyncratic
caricature of a normal human being. This absurd and self-indulgent deformation
of nature—living and thinking A
Rebours, to cite Joris-Karl Huysman’s early analysis of cultural
degeneracy—has produced a society—or its patrician echelon—in process of losing
its bearings, unmoored from the traditional usages that served to keep it
intact. The trend toward gross disfigurement and mutilation analyzed in J.
Robert Smith’s incisive article “Trans
isn’t Just for You” is merely another sign of the rampaging
decadence of a culture on the skids. Putting the stamp of legitimacy on the
farce-in-progress, Obama has just signaled his approval of gender dysfunction
in appointing the freakish transgender aspirant Raffi
Freedman-Gurspan as director of outreach and recruitment for
the White House personnel office. It is not only a random group of misfits and
weirdos engaged in a fringe exhibition that should concern us; it is an entire
culture that is mutating away from itself.
Such aberrations follow from and go
hand in hand with a longstanding, aggressive and doctrinaire feminism that
has infected every important social and professional institution, leading
to the legal and societal deprivileging and even the feminization of men,
who must not only endure institutional inequities but must continually
apologize for their existence—another recipe for social and cultural
catastrophe. Janice Fiamengo’s new video series The Fiamengo File is
devoted to a wide-ranging analysis of this sociocultural and academic
travesty and repays consulting.
Immigration. Open-door immigration, a consequence
of programmatic multiculturalism conceived as a social good and justified by
the contentless mantra of “diversity,” is a surefire source of disorder,
tension and sporadic episodes of violence. Indeed, the incursion of Islam into
the West is nothing less than the latest installment of the millennial campaign
to subvert and conquer the liberal democracies of the developed world. The
Islamic doctrine of hijra or migration, emulating Mohammad’s
journeys to Medina (originally Yathrib) and Abyssinia, is being re-enacted
before our noses. The evidence is all around us and is so convincing that only
the deluded, the cowed or the complicit can deny or cosmeticize or facilitate
its progress.
Europe is disintegrating before our
eyes, the Commonwealth nations are gradually being destabilized, and the United
States now finds itself saddled not only with a growing and restive Islamic
community but with dubious Muslim officials embedded in the highest levels of
its administration and a president who has modified
the oath of allegiance so
that immigrants [read: Muslims] need not “bear arms on behalf of the United
States.”
Add to this the unstanchable deluge of
illegal migrants pouring across the southern border, abetted by the current
government, swollen by anchor baby, “birth tourism,” and antiquated chain migration law, and encouraged by the existence
of so-called sanctuary cities. As a result, we have a country losing its
national character and exposing itself to mounting domestic turbulence.
Religion. No less than Nature, the human
spirit abhors a vacuum. The empty pews of the mainstream Christian churches
and, to a lesser degree, the reformist adulteration of the Jewish communion are
obvious signs of cultural desuetude and the evisceration of moral principle,
betokening the decoupling of Judeo-Christian civilization from its sustaining
origins. Human beings, however, cannot live without faith in some aspect of
transcendence, irrespective of how tarnished, brittle or artificial. The vacuum
is ineluctably filled by pretenders to the throne, whether a belief in some
secular ideology, political cause or a competing theology such as Islam
qualified by emotional fervor, self-assurance and communal solidarity (which
the 14th century
Tunisian scholar Ibn Khaldun in his monumental book The
Muqaddimahcalled asabiyyah,
the “bond of cohesion”). One becomes a social justice warrior or a warrior for
Islam or some other substitute for what has been relinquished. As G.K.
Chesterton is reputed to have said, “When men choose not to believe in God,
they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of
believing in anything.”
The problem is that what has been lost
tends to remain lost. The customary and immemorial groundwork of values and
virtues that unifies a people undergoes a tectonic shift and issues in a
ubiquitous sense of social anomie, defined by the French sociologist Émile Durkheim as a condition of anxiety and
disequilibrium caused by the wasting away of standard purposes and ethical
ideals. Aside from the robust evangelical community, the U.S., like Europe, is
turning away from its religious foundations, with the attendant loss of civil
coherence. From one, many.
Replacement Ratio. When a nation ceases to reproduce
itself, the prognosis for long-term survival is patently negative. Every
liberal democracy, with the exception of Israel, has fallen dramatically
beneath the replacement ratio of 2.1, including the United States (reaching an
historic low in 2013, according to Forbes ). This is a palpable sign of
impending ruination that cannot be ignored.
As Western cultures grow increasingly
hedonistic , concentrating on pleasure and entertainment rather than living
productive and reproductive lives—Iain Bamforth remarks in A
Doctor’s Dictionary how
“hedonism has turned into a kind of militancy”— as marriage becomes a failing
social institution, and as pro-choice abortion is now virtually unlimited, it
is only a matter of time before the regenerative mortgage forecloses. The
subprime market of childbearing appears here to stay. Immigration may partially
replenish the census, but the upshot is that the liberal democracies, and
especially America with its double influx, will forfeit their civilizational
patrimony, shrivel and decay.
Anti-Semitism. Although anti-Semitism and its cognate, anti-Zionism, are
by no means a significant social depravity in the U.S., they flourish in three
major constituencies: the elite leftist segment of the population, the
Democratic Party, and, most tellingly, the administration of Barack Obama,
whose foreign policy is demonstrably anti-Israel and pro-Muslim, in particular
pro-Iranian. Throwing his support behind the Muslim Brotherhood while playing
Doctor Faustus to a diabolical ayatollah, he has, in fact, surrendered the
Middle East to prolonged Muslim insurgency, thus endangering the survival of
Israel, America’s traditional and loyal ally. Former Israeli ambassador to the
U.S. Michael Oren’s recent bookAlly,
despite its measured tones, makes this act of treachery amply clear. Similarly,
“if Obama has his way,” observes James Lewis in a short but compendious article for American
Thinker, “Israel will be the first national victim.”
Anti-Semitism is an historically
validated sign that a host nation is working against its own best interests.
Julien Bauer points out in a recent article,
accentuating the unintended irony of self-destructive vengefulness: “The West
is, most probably without being conscious of it, encouraging Israel, and its
high-technology sector, to be increasingly linked with Asian countries,
accelerating the rise of Asia in the world. In that way, the West’s enduring
anti-Semitism, consciously or not, is helping bring about the end of Western
political, cultural, [and] economic…domination of the world.” The anti-Zionism
pervading the American government is another illustration of its approaching
plummet.
Race. Race relations in the U.S. have markedly deteriorated
under the suzerainty of the present administration, in some places resembling
guerilla warfare as black-on-white violence proliferates and race riots are
becoming an almost regular occurrence. Victor Davis Hanson in an article for PJ Media aptly titled “The Tragic
and Complete Collapse of Racial Relations” indicates that “a small cohort of
urban African-American males under fifty—no more than 3-4% of the general
population—is responsible for about 50% of many of the violent crimes
committed.” The racial divide is widening rather than closing and the prospect
for civil upheaval metastasizes alarmingly.
The irony is undeniable. The two-term
election of a black president and the installation of two successive black
attorneys-general—Hanson remarks that the prestigious roster includes “the
secretary of Transportation, the secretary of Homeland Security, the former
head of the Environmental Protection Agency, and the head of NASA,” not
counting overt disproportion in favor of African-Americans in government service
and sports management positions—should have signified to most doubters that
America is clearly putting to rest a troubled history. Instead, a great
opportunity to further the work of the civil rights movement has been
squandered—apparently by design. Civil disorder is radical community organizer
Saul Alinsky’s formula for revolutionary triumph, and his handbook Rules
for Radicals is the Democratic Party’s bible. Alinsky was
the subject of Hillary Clinton’s senior
thesis at Wellesley
College and Obama’s teaching at Chicago University Law
School.
The Economy. The American economy under the
statist and regulatory dispensation of the present administration is plainly on
the verge of implosion. Massive unemployment, the piling on of astronomical
debt, the collapse of the housing market, the insensate printing of fiat money,
the downgrading of the nation’s credit rating, the high cost of the carbon
conspiracy fostered by the false hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming, a
crushing trade
deficit, and the precarious status of the reserve currency all
point to a looming and unprecedented fiscal cataclysm in the making.
Niall Ferguson in The
Ascent of Money observes
that the dollar “depreciated roughly 25 per cent against the currencies of its
major trading partners,” bad news indeed. Similarly, economist Michael Snyder notes the negative ratio of wholesale
inventories to sales in the U.S., the plunge of consumer spending to multi-year
lows, and the sinking of the Dow below the 200-day moving average in the last
four years. These are all indices of a deepening financial crisis and an
imminent major recession. Its reach is global and what Ferguson has called “a
weary American titan” will not be spared.
Obama. Anyone who doubts that Barack
Hussein Obama, to quote James Lewis once again, is a “false messiah” and “a
cancer on the body politic,” a Marxist-trained and Alinsky-inspired radical, an
Islamic sympathizer, a nuclearizing agent for Iran (thus fulfilling Carter’s
legacy), a congenital liar and frivolous narcissist, a contemptible dispenser
of apologies for a country that has been—or had been—a force for good in a
maleficent world, and the worst and most dangerous president in American
history by an order of magnitude—anyone who doubts this has not been listening
or looking or is himself dedicated to America’s destruction.
Add to this the redistributionist
tax-and-entitlement policies Obama has put in place, effectively robbing one class
of earners to subsidize those who do not pay taxes. As former secretary of the
treasury Andrew Mellon wrote in his 1924Taxation:
The People’s Business, “I have never viewed taxation as a means
of rewarding one class of taxpayers or punishing another. If such a point of
view ever controls our public policy, the traditions of freedom, justice, and
equality of opportunity, which are the distinguishing characteristics of our
American civilization, will have disappeared.…The man who seeks to perpetuate
prejudice and class hatred is doing America an ill service.…[B]y arraying one
class of taxpayers against another, he shows a complete misconception of those
principles of equality on which the country was founded.”
Moreover, in the words of Wall
Street Journal deputy editor
Daniel Henninger, it is Obama who “unleashe[d] the left” against the American
university, via a Title IX instrument that imposes a near-totalitarian
compliance on parietal life and conduct. The interstice between Obama and his
“Marcusian mobs” is a place where the sun doesn’t shine.
“Everywhere we turn,” laments former president of Americans for
Limited Government Bill Wilson, “American freedoms and free markets are under
attack—from Obamacare’s insidious individual mandate to the IRS persecution of
conservative groups to the NSA’s warrantless mass surveillance of all
Americans.” The litany of progressive evils continues, launched by a “vast
left-wing conspiracy” epitomized by “selective justice, the perpetual
subsidization of our dependency culture, open borders, a disarmed populace,
vaporized property rights…the ceding of popular authority to the state (and
American sovereignty to the world), the deification of progressive leaders,
mass youth indoctrination via government-subsidized revisionist history, the
debasing of religious freedom [and] the erosion of the U.S. Constitution.”
Protest is contra-indicated and dissent quashed, as conservative film-maker and
author Dinesh D’Souza, arraigned for a minor campaign finance infraction and
ordered to undergo psychiatric treatment (shades of the Soviet Union), has discovered.
Under Obama’s nation-withering hand,
the land of the free and the home of the brave is fast becoming the land of the
hunted and the home of the suborned. Obama is like a Judas goat leading the
sheep into the abattoir. If this ruthless minion of the left completes his term
successfully according to his intentions, the United States will not recover.
It will be fatally riven by internal dissension, infiltrated by avowed enemies
and millions of so-called “undocumented workers” and queue-jumpers, drowning in
unpayable debt, subject to judicial intimidation and repressive state control,
and vulnerable to a host of hostile nations—China, Russia and Iran, to name
only the most prominent. It will be game over.
Of course, Obama did not appear out of
nowhere; the way was already long prepared for him. An almost unbroken series
of inept, amoral and mendacious presidents, a leftist
governing class addicted
to evasion, fabrication and outright deceit, and a dumbed-down electorate have
furnished the White House for his occupancy.
But Obama himself, to use Cahn’s word,
is the ninth harbinger.
A considerable sector of the American
public is surely aware, dimly or acutely, of several, many or all of the nine
signs of approaching national collapse assembled here, even though these
portents are almost universally censored or deliberately misrepresented by the
liberal elite, by government and academia, and by mainstream press and TV
coverage. These entities operate under the aegis of what has come to be known
as political correctness, the assault upon truth, honesty and candid expression
that taints and devitalizes the culture. It serves a triple function, namely,
to suppress anything that opposes orthodox opinion or is felt as unpleasant, no
matter how crucial to our wellbeing, to flatter our exalted sense of ourselves,
and to promote a political agenda by masking its underlying purpose. As George
Orwell famously observed and history has abundantly demonstrated, the
perversion of language is a tried and tested facet of totalitarian strategy,
which seeks to destroy the ability of a subject population to think lucidly and
to make reasoned judgments.
Political correctness is a moral
atrocity and an infallible symptom of social and cultural rot, in essence, of a
reluctance to confront reality and a manifestation of the unholy terror of
plain honesty. It instills a fear in ordinary folk of calling things by their
right names, of speaking truth, or even of telling jokes that might offend some
sensitive soul or of uttering something that violates yet another in a
burgeoning tally of social taboos. The result is that a culture that hides from
itself cannot expect to hide from its enemies. And America, probably the most
litigious country on the planet, is in the grip of this mortal disease.
Consequently, as much as I hate to say
this, I do not see America heeding the decisive signs of national
collapse—Cahn’s nine harbingers or my nine portents, different from one another
but foretelling the same endgame. There have been two major “shakings”—Cahn’s
term from Isaiah—namely,
9/11 and its aftermath, and the stock market and economic collapse of 2007/8.
We are both certain a third is in the offing. What form it will take is not
graven in stone. It may manifest as a financial collapse with global
implications. It may involve a significant terrorist attack on American soil.
It may manifest as a nuclear war in the Middle East now that Israel’s
conventional options against a genocidal Iran, to quote nuclear expert John Bosma, have “been
stripped away by Obama’s decision…to let Iranian bomb-making R&D run
free…while imposing lethal restrictions on Israeli countermeasures”—a war which
would also impact the U.S.in political and economic mayhem. Something
wicked this way comes. One way or another, a malign carnival is
coming to town, and a happy ending is by no means guaranteed.
In the most stunning of Cahn’s
correlations, he points out that Ground Zero, the locus of the first great
“shaking,” faces and was owned by St. Paul’s Chapel, where on April 30, 1789,
immediately following his inauguration at Federal Hall in New York City,
“George Washington, the nation’s first president, [accompanied by] the Senate
and the House of Representatives, bowed together to consecrate the new nation’s
future.” Ground Zero was America’s ground of consecration. It is now the Valley
of Jezreel. The Divine blessing has been transformed into a Divine judgment and
the sacrament has turned into a punishment. America has been warned.
There are a number of ways, as I
suggested at the outset, that I’m not in complete sympathy with Cahn. In particular,
I cannot accept the Christian apologetics of Cahn’s conclusion. I am not able
to take Jesus into my heart, any more than I can convince myself I would have
liked the Hebrew patriarchs and prophets if I had to live with them, rather
than merely reading about their exploits and absorbing their profundities.
Admiration is not conviviality and respect is not intimacy. I don’t know where
I stand with regard to the sacramental but I can recognize immorality, deceit
and corruption when I see it, including in myself. I don’t write from a
holier-than-thou perspective. In an imperfect world full of imperfect selves,
one’s aspirations for thoroughgoing renewal, whether of the individual, the
nation or humanity itself, must eschew extravagance to avoid both harm and
disappointment. In the case under discussion, I would be content with the
prospect of a gradual revival of national will and a sane foreign policy, the
re-assertion of the entrepreneurial spirit, and the re-emergence, however
halting, of an ethic of common decency and administrative prudence.
Implausible, to be sure.
The unmistakable signs of a disaster
from which we would all suffer, the fall of the once-greatest nation on earth,
have left me “shaken.” After all, nothing is too big to fail, not even the
universe as it moves toward the eventual Big Crunch. On a less cosmic but still
critical scale, the question I now pose is paramount. Can the desired election
of a responsible and patriotic conservative administration undo the damage and
turn back the tide of devastation? Can America return to its foundations? The
future, like science, is not settled. Chance—or miracle—may intervene to alter
a trajectory. Nevertheless, it seems unlikely to me, but such is the only
species of “hope and change” that is authentic, that is at least theoretically
conceivable, and that really matters.
