You may have seen a recent NBN about the peace process. It was about Israel's peace process coming to America. The Peace Process has now come, full bore, to America. This is the theme of this series.

The point of the earlier NBN was that "the peace process" as policy is radically illegitimate, meaning no state or ruler has the legitimate power in a nation or large human body to carry out such a policy. Far from there being something profound and hard to understand in this, the radical illegitimacy of the peace process as policy is as simple as any human thing can be: people require political order and there have always been (and can only be) many such bodies of various kinds. The peace process as policy conflicts with the existence of such bodies and therein with human life. Although you would think the Jews, of all people, would know this and therefore cling to Israel with every breath instead of being the world's teacher of peace processes, in fact this is a simple mistake. The most obvious fact about the Jews, which is that they don't make states or political order even while the Jewish religion is all about being "a nation," suggests that the peace process, like liberalism, communism and being the first in the community to insist upon tolerance for Muslims, is what they prefer. Mr. Bush is only being not-an-anti-Semite when he breaks bread with the leaders of U.S. Muslim support organizations for terrorism in the Arab and Muslim worlds. 

As for the political bodies of ordinary people, exactly they are oppositely constituted as "sovereign" or as possessing the power to be such a body. The "power to be such a body" is the power to kill anyone not of that body, above all when like bodies (or outside individuals or lesser bodies) undertake attacks. The peace process literally reverses this. For years the Israelis said the Israeli Arabs of the triangle were not going to murder the Jews. Of course Arabs are a people and kill them now that they are winning. It is really the Jews who are killing their own people in this, at second remove. Read further.

A representative or ruler that does not exercise its power in these instances, called extreme cases by Aristotle in which the common good is most apparent because the body's reason for existing at all is being challenged, is illegitimate. Far from possessing a "right" to make peace meaning the authority to permit this challenge or to permit "sacrifices for peace," the ruler has no choice but to go to war to bring this challenge to the body's reason for existence to an end. But isn't peace better than war? Shouldn't we always "give it a chance?"

"Peace processes" were never heard of in the world before the rise of 20th century totalitarianism. The Germans and the Russians, pushing Western societies to accept "terrorism" as a way of life for others, ultimately turned these societies into what are in effect totalitarianisms in process. Terrorism, then, is the effect of outside murderers, whether singly, in movements or in states and civilizations, which bring about an unlimited power of the state to effectively murder its own people (totalitarianism) at second remove; at the same time or by means of a reputation for benignity or peace. In effect, the state grows at the expense of its reason for being, or, literally, by permitting the nation (it is its people) to be killed. The treason hence the actual "murder" is in the permission to permit the killing: in the peace process. For example, the degeneracy of the peace process in Israel (and in Ireland or Macedonia) is immediately clear in the murder of people, accompanied by (among other things enhancing the power and reputation of the peace processing state and its outside supporters). But this clarity of the processes' degeneracy into murder at second remove has the effect of fastening the process upon the existing state, raising its reputation and calls for yet greater efforts toward peace.

 Israel has done all of this for the past decade, at least. The policy of the American administration to make common cause with terrorist regimes and much more is what is meant in saying the peace process is now in America, at least.

The peace process Idea is a revolutionary situation meaning the ruler has forfeit obedience and has committed the highest kind of treason, and that the members, the ruled, have the power, as they have the necessity, to replace that ruler.

Now of course none of this is realistic today. This is why it is the blackest possible day in Western life to see that now, full bore as we say, the peace process is here, in America and in Western societies. It is likely here to stay.

Today such policies are carried out as the essence of state legitimacy. "Everybody" as the pro-peace process and Jewish New York Times says, "should be a minority., a quintessential American idea." But then this is why Israel on the one side, is the beau ideal of peace processes and of what underserves them or the ideal of a single world "state" is the "advanced case of Western Afflictions." It is also why, on the second side,  the U.S., Jews and liberals have made "The" peace process the affliction, a ferment of decomposition, in America and now palpable in Western societies as a whole.

The peace process brings us face to face with the illegitimacy of our regimes and the decay of our societies. This is why the peace process is called a "revolutionary situation." Of course there will be no revolution. This is why the advent of the peace process in America and in Western societies was called an affliction. Mr. Bush's approach to the September 11, 2001 attack is a cameo of The Peace Process. The coalition and all of the rest, starting with the Homeland and security approach, is the beginning of the superstate, the criminalizing of citizens, the search of a coalition composed of the enemy (at home as well as in foreign lands), and (a side if cruel but expected irony) the making of the entire Jewish state, a sacrifice for peace in the large. Israel has been left out of the coalition against terrorism.

And this suggests what "decadence" means in our civilization. It means that democracy, founded in revolution rooted in constitutions in which private citizens had rights and governments had powers no longer exists. The governments have rights.

If the U.S. and other Western societies continue in their present course with respect to Muslims and Islam, the recent remark by Mr. Berlusconi of Italy -that Western civilization is superior to Islam -will be outrageous for its falsehood (and, in the very near future, for its irrelevance since there will be no Western civilization worth speaking about in any case.)

Western civilization is Christian civilization. Israel and pagan Greece, so far as they are Christianized, are a part of Christian societies, and so far as what is subversive of Christianity in those two -paganism in Greece and a politicization and immanentization of the divine in Israel -has not risen to submerge it. We'll continue with this outrageous observation in the next installment -with congratulations to Ann Coulter whose fine essay in praise of the heroic Barbara Olson concluded thus: "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity." We are in effeminate times meaning our men are women. But our women are good.

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