Within a few hours of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon last September, it had become commonplace for even high-ranking government officials and elected leaders to say publicly that Americans would just have to get used to fewer constitutional liberties and personal freedoms than they have traditionally enjoyed. Of course, that was hardly news, though it may have been the first time such leaders actually admitted that our freedoms are dwindling. Americans have been losing their liberties for several generations now and, for the most part, seem entirely content to do so. By the end of the week of September 11, some callers to radio talk shows were saying, quite literally, that they were willing to give up “all our constitutional rights” if only the government could keep them safe from terrorists.

The government seemed ready to oblige. Plans to expand wiretapping and surveillance powers were perhaps understandable, and bans on carrying scissors and razor blades on domestic air flights were not infringements of constitutional rights in any case, but some proposals went well beyond reasonable security measures. A week after the attacks, the Washington Times carried a front-page but none-too-accurate story headlined, “Wartime presidential powers supersede liberties,” which argued that the President’s declaration of a national emergency gave him authority to “impose censorship and martial law.” It also misquoted the U.S. Constitution and garbled American history on the suspension of habeas corpus. “In ‘cases of rebellion or invasion [when] the public safety may require it,’ the Constitution permitts a president to suspend the right of habeas corpus—as Lincoln did during the Civil War,” the story reported.

In fact, the Constitution (in Article I, section 9) does permit the suspension of habeas corpus, but says nothing about permitting the president to do so. The suspension power occurs in the article that deals with the legislative branch, and the whole point about Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus is that Chief Justice Roger Taney held in a famous ruling (ex parte Merryman) that only the Congress, not the president, had the power to suspend it. Taney cited precedents from both previous American presidents and jurists as well as Blackstone and the example of British monarchs. Nevertheless, Congress, under Radical Republican control, upheld Lincoln, who proceeded to lock up pretty much anyone he wanted as long as he wanted. As late as 1946, however, the Court overruled a presidential suspension of habeas corpus in Hawaii that lacked statutory authority.

Regardless of what emergency powers the president really has, the seeming eagerness with which Americans of all ranks and degrees were willing to surrender their freedoms was alarming enough for some civil libertarians to start squeaking in protest. The zeal to smother freedom also contrasted strongly with the silence about the massive immigration into the United States that made the terrorist attacks possible. In the week after the attacks, the FBI nabbed some 75 foreign nationals, mainly on immigration violations, who were suspected of having something to do with the massacres. The terrorist hijackers themselves—the “cowards” as various public leaders kept calling them (this from a nation that routinely drops bombs from 30,000 feet and pushes buttons on guided missiles hundreds of miles away)—were all foreigners who had entered the country more or less legally and had managed to function quite normally within the Arabic-Muslim subculture that has emerged in the United States as a result of immigration. Yet at no time did public leaders—who did not hesitate to inform us that the Constitution was essentially expendable—suggest that immigration should be restricted or that some immigrants and aliens already here should be kicked out.

Indeed, the ruling class not only never even mentioned immigration and its consequences as possible threats to national security, but it persistently insinuated that, for all the dangers of foreign terrorism, the threats of “racism” and intolerance were even more dangerous. The morning after the attacks, America Online posted a greeting that instructed its users to guard themselves against “intolerance” and celebrate diversity, and the graphic showed a young black man reading smilingly from a large book to several young white people, male and female. (Only whites harbor “racism,” you know, and only blacks are able to cure them of it.) Whatever the dangers of global terrorism, the real enemies remained “racism” and the white people who practice it. In the next few days, news stories about “hate crimes” against Arab-Americans, Muslims, and even Sikhs competed with stories about the attacks themselves and their consequences. Both the president and the attorney general went out of their way to denounce such crimes and warn against any displays of intolerance against Arabs and Muslims, and President Bush even traipsed out to a local mosque, where he unbosomed various banalities about tolerance and stupidly remarked, of a religion that boasts of its warriors and its devotion to jihad, “Islam is peace.”

Of course, attacks on Arabs and Muslims were as irrational and ugly as they were illegal, but, like much of the overreaction involving intensified security measures, the overindulgence in the rhetoric of tolerance may point to purposes other than controlling mass hysteria against aliens. What Americans were essentially being told by their leaders and the ruling class in general was that the American public identity was no longer defined by the Constitution or the liberties it protects but by immigration itself and the kind of country that refuses to restrict it. We can get along without the Constitution if we have to, but we cannot halt or restrict immigration without ceasing to be the country we are and want to be, the kind of country (the ruling class likes to pretend) that we always have been. As Angela Kelley, deputy director of the National Immigration Forum, remarked (in a statement that confirmed her genius for regurgitating cliches):

We’re a nation of immigrants. You couldn’t try to solve the problem by attacking all immigrants without really attacking America at its core, and then you’re giving the terrorists what they want.

Immigration and our willingness to accept it—not the Constitution and certainly not the historic identity of the nation—is now the “core” of America.

From the perspective of the worldview and material interests of the ruling class, of course, that message makes sense. The Constitution, after all, is an 18th century document reflecting the beliefs and interests of a long-defunct agrarian and mercantile ruling class and society, while mass immigration and the kind of society it shapes reflect the modern, postindustrial, globalist regime that breaks down all such distinctions and barriers—between nations, cultures, races, and religions themselves. The New World elite can easily get along without the Constitution and those pestilent rights it sets up, but it has to have immigration—not only for cheap labor but as a cultural battering ram to knock down the barriers that separate group identities and limit its power and reach. But the problem (one problem, at least; there are several other problems as well) is that the immigrants in general—and the terrorists of last September in particular—insist on keeping those barriers intact.

What soon emerged about the hijackers of the planes that smashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon made confetti out of the foolish vacuities about a “credal nation” and a “proposition country that pro-immigration ideologues have been bandying about for decades. The 19 hijackers came to this country, lived in it for some years, went to school here, mastered Western technical skills (such as flying jetliners), spoke English, had families, got drunk in bars, joined athletic clubs, ogled girls in swimming pools, and behaved in superficial ways exactly like the Americans they pretended to be. In fact, they hated every man, woman, and child they laid eyes on; they hated them, in some cases, for years; and they were willing and eager to die to satisfy their hate. There was never any question of assimilation. Whatever “creeds” or “propositions” they assented to were not ones that defined this country or ones that most citizens of this country would even recognize. The hijackers were, and remained, enemies of the West.

The attack they perpetrated represented the first time in centuries that non-Western enemies have been able to inflict significant damage within the West itself. For more than a century, the Western peoples have been in retreat from the global imperium they created between the discovery of the New World and World War I;and in the 1960’s and 70’s, terrorists within Western states, acting as surrogates for anti-Western forces under the slogans of “anti-imperialism,” managed to set off a few pipe bombs and occasionally knock off a politician. But not until this September have non-Western agents of non-Western forces been able to inflict major lethal damage within the main citadels of the West itself. Whatever the contributions of the pro-Zionist and often murderous foreign policy of the United States against various Middle Eastern states in the last decade, the world-historical clash of races and civilizations underlies the most recent attack—which is why allowing immigration on the scale we have permitted is suicidal folly.

Indeed, the hijackers represent precisely what Thomas Jefferson was talking about with respect to the dangers of immigration in his Notes on the State of Virginia. “They [immigrants, mainly European in Jefferson’s mind] will bring with them the principles of the governments they leave,” he warned,

or if able to throw them off, it will be in exchange for an unbounded licentiousness, passing, as usual, from one extreme to the other. It would be a miracle were they to stop precisely at the point of temperate liberty.

Not the least of the problems of mass immigration is that the “principles of the governments they leave” will travel with the immigrants, along with the ancient feuds and hatreds those principles imply. The results are bad enough when one alien population fragment imports its beliefs and hatreds; when several do—from the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, not to mention Europe itself—the result will be chaos.

It is perfectly true, as the President and various other wise persons kept telling us after the attacks, that not all Muslims and not all Arabs are terrorists or haters of America and the West. But—once again—the point is not about “most” of anything. The point also is that some are terrorists and haters, and “some”—as few as 19—can bring the most powerful nationstate on Earth virtually to its knees. If these men were cowards, it is just as well the heroes have not yet been deployed. A related point is that the presence within a Western nation of an alien subculture creates an alternative social structure in which terrorists can operate virtually undetected, and it recreates the same cultural soil from which the fanaticism, hatred, and terrorism sprouted in the first place. It is perfectly true that most Muslims and most Arabs are not terrorists, but throughout Muslim history, from Marco Polo’s Old Man of the Mountains to the present day, the use of the assassin’s arts as regular modes of war has been commonplace.

To grasp the relationship between the terrorist attacks in September on the one hand and mass immigration on the other, and to understand the absolute refusal of the American and Atlantic ruling class to confront the relationship and to accept some restrictions on immigration, is a good deal more frightening than anything that happened in or after the attacks themselves. What the relationship means is that the terrorist enemy is already within the gates, and those who have appointed themselves guardians of the gates do not have a clue—not only about how to respond, but even that anything is wrong. Bombing “training camps” in Afghanistan, assassinating supposed terrorist “operatives,” declaring war against somebody or something or everybody and everything, curtailing civil liberties, spending more millions on defense, and “unleashing” the CIA and the Special Forces will accomplish absolutely nothing if an internal subculture capable of breeding more terrorism within the belly of the beast is not eradicated.

What is even more alarming is that, not only does the riuling class have no clue to the danger it has allowed and even encouraged to blossom under its own nose, but it is incapable of perceiving the danger. Because its structural interests bind it to an open-borders immigration policy, to the erosion of national sovereignty and of independence and eventually of the nation-state itself, and to the managed destruction of all distinctive national and cultural identities, it is unable to see that the dynamic of its own interests leads logically to nursing the vipers who will destroy the ruling class itself as well as the society it is supposed to rule. If what remains of the real West—not the hegemonic system of reward and force that the World Trade Center and the Pentagon symbolize, but the Western peoples who still adhere to their real civilization—wishes to survive, it has to recognize that it cannot do so under the leadership of the New World elite. The West can survive only if that elite is removed from its hegemony and a new ruling class, rooted in and loyal to our real civilization, replaces it.