Universal suffrage? In Afghanistan a majority of psychiatrically normal adults elected the democratic authorities. But when a Christian Bible was recently found in the home of an Afghani, he was to be put to death by those "democratically elected authorities."

Inversely, there was no universal suffrage in Britain until the early 20th century, that is, Britain was not a democracy. But its constitutional monarchy ensured political rights.

What is the probability of annihilation by the dictatorship of China of what is called the "Western democracies" unless they surrender unconditionally?

In the United States, the question is likely to be met by the majority of the population with utter surprise or even laughter.

But let us glance at history. Rome was called Eternal, and to many Romans it was ridiculous to suppose that some savages (ancestors of the west-European nations of today) would topple it.

But they did. Fortunately for them, they borrowed the culture of Rome, rebore it (Rebirth-Renaissance), which later led to the Industrial Revolution, that is, the production out of metal of all kinds of objects, including weapons, and the world outside the "West" soon became Western colonies or new powerful territories like the United States.

The Mongols and then the Japanese were the Easterners who proved that they can be as powerful as the same number of Westerners.

Another incident is worth mentioning. Hitler's Germany, the acme of self-proclaimed ethnic superiority, defeated France within days. But near Moscow of backward semi-Asiatic Russia early in December of 1941 the "Russian savages" routed the supermen of Hitler, who was present personally and said that the war had been lost. He sustained a terrible defeat near Stalingrad in 1942, and in 1945 he committed suicide as the "Russian savages" closed in on Berlin.

Just as their predecessors in flourishing "eternal" cities, many Americans are convinced that their country is "eternal," and the new super-Industrial Revolution in China with its post-nuclear super weapons, developed in cooperation with Russia, is a bad dream, a false rumor, "the China fantasy" (see James Mann, "The China Fantasy," Viking Penguin, 2007). The U.S. all-absorbing goal in the past quarter century was to defeat a small Third-World country named Iraq first by war, then by a blockade, and then by war again.

My family and I emigrated from Russia to the West in search of freedom, that is, constitutionalism. We have found it, and we agree with Churchill that the West has "the worst form of government-except all other forms."

However, while sometimes there is nothing more pleasant and necessary to an individual than freedom, China's dictators think not in terms of freedom for their subjects, but in terms of ruthlessness. As General Chi Haotian put it, "The ruthless have always won and the benevolent have always failed."

Western freedom is subversive for inmates, or slaves, of a dictatorship (given today's cultural and commercial globalism) and thus threatens the dictator's power: in the past 20 years, recall the Tiananmen movement of 1989 in China and the fall of the Soviet dictatorship in 1991. The subversion will never stop until and unless the dictator of China annihilates the West or makes it surrender unconditionally.

There were many radio sets in Stalin's Russia because Stalin expected them to be vehicles of Soviet propaganda. But after WWII, the USA and British began their broadcasts for Russia in Russian. Promptly, Stalin built radio stations jamming the foreign broadcasts, that is, making them unintelligible.

One joke was meaningful. A Muscovite saw a friend of his standing at the corner of a street and howling as a live radio jammer. "What are you doing?" his friend asked. "You see, radio jammers are jamming the Voice of America and other such radio voices. I am trying to jam my inner voice, more subversive than any of the radio voices."

The key to the subversion is the certainty that the country named America (or Britain) does exist. The rest may be myths. Thus a Moscow taxi driver assured me that a car cost $2 in the United States. He might have heard that an American who wants someone to take his old car to the junk yard pays him $2. But in a Russian mind the deal turned into a myth, and it is owing to myriads of such myths that the Soviet dictatorship fell in 1991, though when Yeltsin's and the Putin's regimes came about, those myth-makers and myth-carriers parted with their myths, and public polls show that a majority recall the Soviet regime nostalgically.

In the development of post-nuclear super weapons, which constitutes a new (secret) super-Industrial Revolution, the new geostrategy is based on Sun Tsu's shashou jian (the 4th century B.C.)-victory at a blow, resulting in the annihilation or unconditional surrender of the enemy.

What can the United States do in its present state to protect itself? First of all, while a preemptive war was permitted against Iraq on the basis of false information, will the U.S. Congress permit the development of Sun Tsu's shashou jian geostrategy against the dictatorship of China? Not for a preemptive blow, but to let the China dictator know that should he try to annihilate the United States, the U.S. annihilation of China will immediately follow?

I skip the answer, since the answer "no" closes the issue: today an old-fashioned or purely defensive geostrategy is impossible-only Mutual Assured Destruction will work.

But who will be the top geostrategist in the United States? The Commander-in-Chief, elected by the majority of psychiatrically normal Americans?

Universal suffrage came to the United States via Rome, which had adapted it from the election by the warriors of a primitive tribe of their chief. The chief of the tribe had to have tribal combat qualities, which the tribesmen had observed in tribal combat.

Now, why was, for example, the present U.S. Commander-in-Chief elected?

Einstein said (before the Nobel Prize) that he was understood by seven individuals in the world. I submit that while being crucial to the life and death of freedom versus dictatorship, geostrategy is not mentally simpler than the theory of relativity. If the electorate consists of seven cognoscente, they will elect the right person. But if it consists of 20 voters, most of them will not understand what it is all about and will decide that the candidate must be clinically insane because what he says is incomprehensible to them for all their degrees, ranks, and decorations.

The purely numerical growth of a group leads to the decline of its average intellectual level. When the electorate runs into millions of voters, nothing can be expected than clinical idiocy or Philistine twaddle.

The supreme dictator in a dictatorship identifies himself with his country as with his property.

On the other hand, every year about 400 U.S. federal officials are found guilty by U.S. courts of using their posts for their private purposes. The U.S. federal official known as the U.S. president has never been found guilty of using his post for his own private purposes (such as the use of the Oval Office for sexual rendezvous or the acquisition of Iraqi oil): he is not within the jurisdiction of courts, while impeachment is impossible, since it requires two-thirds of votes in the Senate, but the Democrats did not vote to impeach the Democrat Clinton, and the Republicans are even less likely to vote for the impeachment of a Republican.

The ultimate fatal damage done by a federal official's appropriation of part of Iraqi oil is not the loss of the oil, but the waste of public attention, time, and energy on Iraq, while the United States is, geostrategically, "at the brink," as Lt. Col. Thomas E. Bearden (U.S. Army, Retired) subtitled his 367-page survey ("Oblivion: America at the Brink"), published in 2005, of world post-nuclear super weapons.

Also, it should be remembered that the dictatorship of China is an infinitely deep source of cheap labor and profitable trade for many Americans, making money out of China, while the United States is at the brink of its annihilation or unconditional surrender.

The fact that the population of China exceeds by four times that of the United States enables the dictators of China to achieve the scale of development of post-nuclear super weapons four times greater just pro rata of populations of the two countries. But apart from this geographic advantage, the dictator can invest in the development of super weapons as much as his ruthlessness permits, for the entire wealth of the country is ultimately his, and no congress or parliament can halt him.

For lack of space in this column to compare U.S. and Chinese science, let me give just one example of U.S. university education.

John Stuart Mill, the greatest political thinker of post-Roman Europe, an Englishman, virtually ignored in the United States, never belonged to any educational or research institution and hence had no academic titles or degrees. Einstein was a physicist and hence fared better. His "crazy theory" was verified experimentally, and he received a Nobel Prize. In the United States, there is tendency to lay emphasis not on an individual, but on an institution by whose degrees and titles an individual is appreciated.

When we came to the United States, our son graduated with distinction from a highly respected high school and was matriculated at Yale. He joined a class whose professor assigned an essay "Hegel's Contribution to the Theory of Freedom in His 'Phenomenology of Mind'". Not a single student opened the book. They copied the essays of the previous year in which Hegel figured as all but the inventor of freedom and which had received the highest marks. But our Andrei had no American university experience: he got the book and wrote in his essay that Hegel taught the "Lords" how to beat their "bondsmen" in order to obtain absolute obedience.

The professor did not accept Andrei's essay, the only one he rejected, based on the ugly facts of Hegel's book, and had been accepting for years essays based on beautiful lies copied from the essays of the previous years.

Lev Navrozov's (navlev@cloud9.net] new book is available on-line at www.levnavrozov.com. To request an outline of the book, send an e-mail to webmaster@levnavrozov.com.