LIES, DAMNED LIES, AND E-MAIL

If Mark Twain was alive today, he might have to change his famous comment to:

The following is currently circulating via the e-mail Fw:Fw:Fw: system:

At about the time our original 13 states adopted their new constitution, in the year 1787, Alexander Tyler (a Scottish history professor at the University of Edinborough) had this to say about the "The Fall of the Athenian Republic" some 2,000 years prior.

"A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship."

"The average age of the world's greatest civilizations from the beginning of history, has been about 200 years. During those 200 years, these nations always progressed through the following sequence:
From bondage to spiritual faith,
From spiritual faith to great courage,
From courage to liberty,
From liberty to abundance,
From abundance to complacency,
From complacency to apathy,
From apathy to dependence,
From dependence back into bondage."

The quote is supposed to be from a book called The Cycle of Democracy, however, neither that book or any other by "Alexander Tyler" is available from Amazon.com. Furthermore, nothing by Tyler is listed at Project Gutenberg. An Internet search turns up nothing about Tyler except sites which contain the quote. Either Tyler is extremely obscure, or he never existed.

At the Internet sites which mention the Tyler quote, site "A" refers you for more information to site "B," which referrs you to site "C," which referrs you to site "A." It is an excellent exercise in circular logic ---- no one has a primary source.

The logical conclusion from this is that the quote is bogus. It is disinformation. It is part of a sofisticated campaign by people who prefer the strong-leader Stalinist form of government to such a messy thing as Democracy. They want to cast doubt on democratic institutions. They want to make it appear that the weakening of Democracy is a normal thing. They want you to think that the time for Democracy has past. And they are succeeding. We have "The Patriot Act," we have the rounding up of Muslims, we have lost the right of habius corpus, we have lost the right to a lawyer, we have secret trials, we have abandoned the Geneva Convention, we have started a preemptive war, and we use torture. This is not the America of 1776! We are being attacked from within. The greatest threat to American Democracy doesn't come from Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, or any outside source, it comes from the neocons--the ultra-conservative wing of the Republican Party. This e-mailed quote may be a part of that attack.