George W. Bush: U.S. to illuminate the globe.

"Our country has accepted obligations that are difficult to fulfill, and would be dishonorable to abandon," insisted George W. Bush in his second inaugural address. "Yet because we have acted in the great liberating tradition of this nation, tens of millions have achieved their freedom.... By our efforts, we have lit a fire as well--a fire in the minds of men. It warms those who feel its power, it burns those who fight its progress, and one day this untamed fire of freedom will reach the darkest corners of our world." (Emphasis added.)

Perhaps unbeknownst to President Bush, the "liberating tradition" alluded to in his speech is not that of the American Founding Fathers, but rather the one embodied by the murderous ideologues who brought about the French Revolution. For this very reason, the phrase "fire in the minds of men" served as the title of a book by Librarian of Congress James H. Billington: Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith. The first modern prophet of that revolutionary "faith," Billington documents, was Adam Weishaupt, founder of the Bavarian Illuminati. It was Weishaupt's occultic organization, working through front groups and surrogates, that precipitated the French Revolution, which was intended to be the "flame of the world" lighting the way to global democracy.

After the French Revolution degenerated into murderous chaos and gave rise to Bonapartism, an illuminist scattering took place, leading to the creation of radical secret societies across Europe and Latin America, according to Billington. Those groups eventually coalesced to form the Communist movement, which--like the neoconservative Bush administration--defined "democracy" as a synonym for "freedom." The American Founders, by way of contrast, understood that democracy (unrestrained majority rule, rather than the rule of law) was incompatible with ordered liberty and individual rights, and was a forerunner to mobocracy followed by tyranny.

Billington describes Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky's novel The Possessed as "the most searching work of fiction ever written about the revolutionary movement." Therein Dostoyevsky describes a small town under siege by Illuminati-inspired revolutionaries. After a mysterious fire broke out, a local official observed: "The fire is in the minds of men, not in the roofs of buildings." Dostoyevsky, a former adherent of an illuminist radical group, knew whereof he wrote.

Mr. Bush's second inaugural address was composed with input from a group of neoconservative--or, better stated, neo-Trotskyite--academics and pundits, who almost certainly understood the context of the cryptic reference to "fire in the minds of men."