Meir Kahane Writings
5734-5-6 1974-1976
DEFAULT
October 17, 1975
Men are remarkably strange people who delight in frantic, frenetic and agonizing games aimed at deceiving themselves so that they might not have to think clearly, logically and painfully and so that they might not have to take the difficult and agonizing steps that might save their lives.
New York City is dying. It is a coach filled with people and the horses are racing crazily toward the abyss. The coachmen are helpless and the abyss comes closer. And the passengers? The passengers watch nervously, anxiously, discussing various illusions and delusions that will save them at the last moment. But it is all a charade and there is not one traveler who does not see the edge of the chasm approach and who does not realize that all the clever plans and proposals are sound and fury signifying nothing.
Consider the past year. The lies, the denials, the efforts at covering up the true extent of the deficits and the refusal to face up to a past of politically motivated economic deception. The frantic and frenzied attempts to raise money to pay off debts due in July or payrolls demanding satisfaction in a given week. The excruciatingly complicated plans, the haggard, nerve-wracking meetings, the physically debilitation conferences and each time, “victory”. Victory in the form of success at convincing creditors to purchase bonds that pay exorbitant, usurious rates that must be repaid by New York and that will merely cast more earth on the city grave. All the frantic activity, all the hopeful and hopeless illusions. Nothing can save the city from putting an end to the kind of good life its inhabitants insisted on giving themselves regardless of their ability to create or inability to pay it.
New York is a coach, its horses run amok and its citizens in for a terrible crash. And New York follows Newark and Detroit and in its wake will come Buffalo and Cleveland and a host of other urban centers as the economic blight – and truth – grips them. New York City will writhe in agony and call for help from the State. The laugh is on both for who will save the State? Who will save the State that is but a few steps away, having walked the same proliferate path of its famous municipality? Does anyone ever bother to think of the precarious plight of New York State and the awesome debts it has piled up, debts which it really cannot pay?
The federal government! Yes, the financier of the last resort. The federal government will save us. But who will save the federal government? It, too, survives on the slight-of-hand trickery of borrowing today to pay the debts of yesterday and tomorrow to pay those of today. But here, too, there will someday be no tomorrow and the federal coach, also, will lurch wildly to the chasm.
It has all become one nightmarish delusion, the sometime dream of materialism, the good life, the never-ending money and enjoyment of flesh. People borrowed to satisfy their lust for more and when there was no money left but a great deal of ‘more’ to be yearned for, they borrowed again. Until today individuals and corporations owe some two TRILLION dollars to their creditors. What will happen on the day when the balloon burst? What will happen when a million worlds go up in smoke as their pension plans prove to be nonexistent and their nest eggs are eaten up by mad inflation.
What will happen as the coach careens over the edge? We know what will happen. The passengers inside, shaken at the final moment from their long flirtation with delusion, will lash out at the nearest enemy, will seek the nearest ally. The nearest ally will be the cleverest demagogue, the wiliest extremist, the most dangerous totalitarian. Democracy is a fragile myth, at the mercy of every runaway coach. Those in the urban centers of America who enjoyed the good life for decades will not willingly allow it to slip into history. They will shriek and strike out and grasp any and every brutal and authoritarian ideology that promises them to seize the horse’s reins and stop the fall.
Man is as good as his self-interest dictates and is decent as long as he is not afraid. America is an historically good and decent country because more than any other, it had the kind of national life that did not induce fear or desperation. Because it has had, more than any other empire in the history of the world, an era of peace and the good life.
But today this is ending and default looms on the horizon. It is a default induced by the change in the essential condition of the American people today. For the first time in the brief history of the nation that regularly paid the payments due on the notes of democracy, the American is frustrated, weary, anxious, angry, afraid and hating. Above and beyond the political crises that pushes the United States into a position of weakness and danger and above and beyond the social crisis that tears at long-held values and destroys the sure roots and foundations that every man must have in order to march forward with equanimity and confidence, there is the shattering psychological crises that grips the nation in a deadly embrace. For the first time the American has lost confidence in his nation and in the great American democratic process. For the first tem the great American Manifest Destiny is questioned and Vietnam and the Watergate scandal join with the cancer of flabby morality and ethics and enslavement to materialism, to create a rootless and spiritually terrified society.
America no longer believes in itself and the economic crashes will prove to be the final blows to an already disastrously weakened body politic. The Jew sits on the volcano that is America, threatened twice over. Once as a citizen like all the rest and second because he is not like all the rest. Because he is a Jews.
Default is coming and with it the ugliness of the human being that is unparalleled in all the animal world. And the Jew will feel its horror as no other. Default is coming. Not only in the cities and in the world of economics. Default is coming to the notes of democracy. The debtors – the citizens of the United States – no longer give it full faith and credit. Its value is plunging. There are fewer and fewer buyers. Jew, it is time to go home, to the only place where default does not automatically mean –“the Jew! Let the Jew pay.” It is time to go home to the Land of Israel before there is no chance to go again.
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