Traitors Within Our Walls

Kim du Toit
May 29, 2002
2:43 PM CDT

“A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear.”— Marcus Tullius Cicero

Cicero’s words are as true today as when he spoke them, around 45 B.C. They become even more portentous when we look at recent history for an example. Bear with me while I give one example.

I’ve just finished reading William Shirer’s The Collapse of the Third Republic in which he describes, in excruciating detail, how easily the once-mighty French Republic fell to the German invasion in World War II.

Too many people have ascribed the fall of France in 1940 to the efficiency and generalship of Hitler’s Wehrmacht. In fact, the seeds of destruction were sown long before that, perhaps even before the First World War.

What most people don’t realize is that France was desperately weakened by the slaughter of an entire generation of men from 1914 to 1918. Just as an injured man is vulnerable to infection unrelated to his injuries, so was France thus vulnerable. And yet, even so, the strength of the Third Republic’s constitution was strong enough to have survived the First World War—but when war came again, her fall was inevitable.

For in the corridors of power, there were men who hated the Republic--hated its formation, hated its structure, and hated its Constitution. The reasons may have varied, but the end result was the same.

What were those reasons? There were some whose political ambitions had been thwarted; others hated the very essence of a republic, seeking instead to exchange it with a plebiscite or worker’s state; some hated it simply because of the people who supported it; and yet others saw in its destruction the potential for personal enrichment.

So these men, these bitter little men, began to chip away at the foundations of the Third Republic. And, in retrospect, it was so simple.

The traitors were helped by an appalling democratic process, a process which allowed as many political parties as there were seats in the Assembly and the Senate. Thus, coalitions were many, which created an unstable system of government. A vote of no-confidence would inevitably be followed by the resignation of the entire government, and the formation of a new one, sometimes without any interim popular vote. The traitors were further helped by the survival of the office-holders—last year’s Minister of Justice, following the fall of yet another government, might become the Minister of Foreign Affairs for the new government. Thus, while governments came and went, the same fifty people still ran the country—but it became impossible to create any kind of viable long-term government strategy, and in this uncertainty, the traitors flourished.

Only two institutions provided any kind of stability in France during the first forty years of the 20th century: the bureaucracy of State, which allowed the mechanism of government to continue; and the Army, the savior of the country at the Marne and at Verdun. (I mean, of course, the Armed Forces in general, but for brevity I’ll just use the word “Army”.)

Yet even these stable institutions carried within the seeds of their own destruction: the bureaucracy was stable, but it was also inflexible, and it could not implement any change swiftly, no matter how dire the consequences; and the Army contained within it charismatic figures like Marshal Pétain, heroes of a bygone era behind whom the country could rally in times of crisis--but who were woeful naive politically. These heroes could be manipulated by the traitors and could provide cover for traitorous activity.

Of course, the traitors were assisted by others in their endeavors, sometimes actively, sometimes by default. Most often, these helpers were in the Press, and they likewise despised the Republic, and the Army too. More tellingly, the traitors were helped by an apathetic voting public, who wearied of constant political strife and intrigue, of seeing the same faces running government regardless of election result, and of the constant clamor in the Press detailing this or the other new scandal.

The traitors began their work by undermining the Army, by denying it the funds necessary to operate and innovate, and by ensuring that the Army maintained a pacifist, defensive mentality. Hence the Maginot Line, a massive and unnecessary drain of funds on a structure out of date the day it was completed. All this could be done, the traitors knew, behind a screen of “popular support” because the people of France were sick of war, bled white by the slaughter of 1914-1918. It also served their cause to have in place a weak and incompetent Army chief, General Gamelin. Despite overwhelming evidence of his incompetence, Gamelin stayed in power, because it suited the traitors to keep him there; his weak and misguided military strategy undermined the Army’s power and ability to fight a modern war.

The traitors next turned their attention to the pillars of freedom guaranteed by the French Constitution, and little by little they chipped away at them, hiding behind the continuous confusion of new government and the apathetic electorate. Most scandalously of all, the Press showed itself to be irresponsible beyond comprehension, acting like a child given a deadly weapon, scything down established principles, and using the very freedoms guaranteed by the constitution of the Republic to weaken the Republic itself.

None of this, of course, happened in a political vacuum. Outside France, there were two different types of government the traitors could support: the Communist model of Russia, and the totalitarian dictatorships of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Both had their French supporters, and both would cynically unite to defeat their common enemy of the Constitutional Republic.

France was thus divided, weak, and in no position to defend herself, so when the German Army invaded in May 1940, strategic error was compounded by fatal divisiveness, and in no time at all the Germans were able to conquer France, leaving only the rump state of Vichy France to continue.

Of course, Vichy was no republic, because in the dying hours of France’s war with Germany, the intriguer Pierre Laval was able to institute (by outright lies and forgery) a totalitarian government headed by erstwhile war hero Marshal Pétain, run behind the scenes by himself and a cabal of rightwing zealots. The new government allowed that both executive and legislative power rested solely in PPétain’s hands, and all individual rights under the old Constitution were permanently suspended. It is hardly surprising that Vichy began to ape its model of Hitler’s Germany—Jews were rounded up, imprisoned or sent off to Germany for slave labor or execution, freedom of the Press disappeared, dissidents were summarily arrested and detained indefinitely, and the iron hand of the State began to clamp down on the French people who lived in unoccupied France.

So much for the history lesson. What does it mean for us today?

Here’s what it means: the history of the fall of the Third Republic gives us an invaluable means to identify the traitors in our midst today, little more than half a century later.

And I use the word traitors advisably. Like the French intriguers, these are people who despise our own Republic, who would replace it with another form of government, and who will form any alliance, no matter how unholy, to achieve that end. Remember too that while these are in the main politicians, they are ably abetted by their camp followers in the Press and in the bureaucracy.

Here are the means with which to identify these modern-day traitors to our Republic:

1. The first manifestation of traitors is those who would change our government completely—in other words, replace our representative form of government with a popular one. These are people who talk the most about “the majority of the people”, but mean “the majority of the voters”. These are people who believe that Al Gore should have won the Presidency because more people voted for him nationwide. These are people who would seek to abolish the Electoral College and replace it with a simple plebiscite. These are people who would talk of running the country and making its laws by popular referendum rather than by popular representation. Above all, these are people who talk about America as a democracy rather than as a republic, mendaciously allowing the inherent rightness of the former to be confused as an end per se, rather than as the process by which we maintain the republic.

2. The next manifestation of traitors is those who would replace our basic freedoms, either by legislation or by regulation. The most common of these can be found among people who consider the Constitution a “living document”, one whose terms may have been applicable when first formulated, but which seem hopelessly archaic now. Thus, for example, we get approval for curtailment of political expression under the guise of “campaign finance reform”, curtailment of our right to be armed under the guise of “protecting the children”, “ending violence” or the “terrorist threat”. Thus too, we get approval for principles and policies that are inimical to the future welfare of the Republic which are not only faulty in philosophy, but have been proven to be failures in practice: confiscatory taxes levied only on “the rich” through the politics of envy; State confiscation of private property for “the public good”; and regulatory oppression of rights where legislative oppression is impossible to implement. Thus, for example, while the right to bear arms is entrenched in the Constitution as a universal right, the city of Chicago can ban firearms by local fiat.

3. Another manifestation of traitors is to create disunity in the republic. In a country like France, which had an ancient culture and a single language, disunity had to be created and maintained through the political process, which as we have seen was inherently unstable. In a (largely) two-party republic like ours, this is more difficult. How then is the traitor able to create and maintain perpetual disunity and instability? By creating social division. Thus we find the common glue of communication, the English language, replaced with a multiplicity of tongues and the concomitant social irritation, all under the guise of “equality”. We find likewise our common culture and heritage replaced by a policy of relativism, whereby foreign cultures are as worthy as our own, and therefore our common culture is replaced by a multiplicity of cultures, all in the name of “diversity”. Of course, the natural human instinct is for conformity—we do not by nature embrace diversity—so diversity must perforce be imposed on an unwilling populace by legislation and regulation, which engenders yet more resentment and disunity.

4. Finally, we find the manifestation of traitors in those who espouse causes other than (small “r") republican ones: those who call themselves “progressives”, “socialists”, “communitarians”, “populists”, “globalists”, and so on. Make no mistake about it: all these people want to replace our Republic and its forms with another type of state, one which serves their own ambitions or goals—or, most reprehensibly, the ambitions and goals of those outside our borders. Thus we find little formal opposition to United Nations-mandated land use, under the guise of “international heritage sites”. We find support for international (instead of local or national) tax authority under the guise of “uniformity” or “equality” and under the auspices of unelected bodies like the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). And we find support for “open borders”, in the final analysis a means whereby the system can be flooded with people who owe no allegiance to our society, our laws, our culture or our heritage. Each one of these is a traitorous activity, for they would surrender our national sovereignty to strangers; aggregate them, and there should be a prima facie case for criminal arraignment, especially if these activities are performed by elected or appointed officials sworn to uphold the Constitution.

We ignore these warnings and lessons at our own peril. Remember, the final objective of our modern-day traitors is no different to that of those traitors in France during the final decades of the Third Republic: they seek to replace the republic with something else.

And lest anyone think that simply desiring a different form of government is neither treason nor traitorous, it should be noted that after France was liberated by the Allies in 1944, and after a long and exhaustive trial, Pierre Laval was executed by firing squad.