Terrorist attacks do not only kill people. They change the course of democracies when they find, behind them or in their wake, political forces willing to betray their nations. September 11, 2001 in the United States and March 11, 2004 in Spain are two clear examples of how terrorism — almost always Islamist — combined with the complicity of progressive forces, has altered the history of two Western democracies and opened the door to toxic alliances that erode our civilization.
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On September 11, 2001, nineteen Al Qaeda jihadists crashed commercial planes into the Twin Towers, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania. Nearly 3,000 dead. The American response was immediate and monumental: the Department of Homeland Security was created, the Patriot Act was passed, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were launched, and domestic surveillance and the security apparatus were massively expanded.
The long-term costs have been enormous. According to estimates from Brown University’s Costs of War project, the total budgetary spending associated with the post-9/11 wars easily exceeds several trillion dollars. Many American soldiers died. Executive power was reinforced at the expense of Congress. Mass surveillance was normalized. Political polarization deepened — and the Democrat party has exploited the resulting climate to betray American democracy.
Three days before the 2004 Spanish elections, bombs planted on commuter trains in Madrid killed 191 people and wounded more than 1,800. A narrative was constructed in which the Islamists had carried out the attacks in retaliation for President Aznar’s political support for President Bush. Evidence was eliminated, scapegoats were prepared, false leads were planted. The consequence: the People’s Party of José María Aznar — which was governing and which according to all polls was about to win the elections by a comfortable majority — lost, handing power to the radical socialist José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero.
The electoral impact of 11-M is documented: it increased turnout, mobilized young and left-wing voters, and a false narrative was constructed. The result: terrorism changed the outcome of a democratic election and changed the destiny of a country.
Zapatero came to power and reoriented the country. He withdrew troops from Iraq, betraying Spain’s natural allies. He promoted the Historical Memory Law, which reopened the wounds of the Civil War and the Franco era under a unilateral reading. He negotiated with the entourage of ETA, the socialist terrorist organization. He sought support from nationalist secessionist forces and the radical left. In the name of “peace” and “plurality,” national unity was mercilessly attacked. The message was clear: terrorism can alter the political chessboard, and those who capitalize on fear or historical guilt obtain political dividends.
Pedro Sánchez, Zapatero’s successor, is the continuation of that same logic. Allied with secessionist movements, heirs to terrorism, and far-left parties, he has created a clearly national-socialist government, enacted unconstitutional judicial reforms, and provoked a systematic weakening of institutional checks and balances. His policies, from the very beginning, have cloned Hugo Chávez’s trajectory in Venezuela — turning a European democracy into an authoritarian regime through the gradual erosion of genuine political alternation under formally democratic appearances. Spain today lives under an authoritarian regime. Sánchez’s submission to the Moroccan regime has been made most evident by the recent invasion of the city of Ceuta by Moroccan invaders directly sent and directed by the government of Rabat — to which the Spanish government has done nothing.
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In both cases — the United States after 9/11 and Spain after 11-M — the same pattern emerges: Islamist terrorism does not act in a vacuum. It needs, or finds, the passive or active complicity of political forces that prioritize multicultural narrative, Western guilt, or electoral calculation over the firm defense of sovereignty and cultural identity. The European progressive left, and its equivalent sectors in the United States — the Democrat party, which is now an undisguised radical socialist party — have consistently minimized the ideological dimension of jihadism, treated political Islamism as just another expression of diversity, and effectively allied themselves with those who reject the foundations of liberal civilization. The result is a double weakness: capitulation before the blackmail of terror, and the weakening of internal cohesion.
However, the responses to the two attacks were radically different — and that is why hope remains for the United States while barely any remains for Spain. In the United States, 9/11 was met with great displays of patriotism. In Spain they were conspicuously absent, with a people cornered and subjected to the narrative of the terrorists and of those who exploited death and desolation for political gain. The United States went to war to defend itself and exact just retribution. Spain withdrew from the war, capitulated further, and fell electorally further to the left — with the chain of consequences we still suffer: economic backwardness and democratic devaluation. In the United States there has been the courage to confront the crime culturally and overcome it. In Spain the wound was closed superficially, with the theatrics of a trial that never determined the intellectual authors, whose few convictions are more than questionable, but which served to reinforce the left’s narrative.
And always, Islam behind the terrorism and the crime. Let us not forget that the savage terrorism of left-wing groups across Europe during the 1960s and 1970s always had the financial and logistical support of Islamic regimes — Libya, Iraq, Iran. No terrorist group has power or is capable of changing history if powerful political organizations or states are not behind it.
And worst of all: the perverse effect, suffered in both countries, of large sectors of our population accepting the guilt narrative instilled by the aggressors — a guilt that has divided our countries into two radicalized camps: the defenders of the terrorists and their culture, and those of us who refuse to accept guilt and submission. The left, always allied with evil, sides with the terrorists and their culture, and accepts mass Muslim immigration — both in the USA and in Europe — as if it were possible to assimilate a culture that exists not for peace and concord but for violence and submission. Nowhere in the world, as history demonstrates, has Islam been able to coexist with another religion or another culture. It has always fought until it subjugates the others. And that is the fate that awaits us if we do not implement radical policies of mass expulsion and remigration of the millions of Muslims who, within a couple of generations, will be majorities in many of our territories. And when they are the majority, there will be no possibility of a solution.
W. Galt is a regular contributor to American Thinker. His political thriller Cold Monster — a dystopian novel set in the collapsing West of 2050, where a secret organization controls governments, media, and elections from the shadows — is available at cold-monster.com and on Amazon.
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