The Principle Prevails

The cowardly vandals who destroyed the Goddess of Democracy statue erected by Angelenos intent on commemorating the student martyrs of Tien An Mien Square already have failed. They have failed because events in places as disparate as Beijing and Budapest have proven again that democracy is not a gift of any god or goddess but the fruit of man’s own reason. And, as the poet Czelaw Milosz put it:

Human reason is beautiful and invincible.

No bars, no barbed wire, no pulping of books,

No sentence of banishment can prevail against it.

It establishes the universal ideas in language,

And guides our hand so we write Truth and Justice

With capital letters, lie and oppression with small.

Like the ruthless soldiers who toppled the original goddess with their tanks, the vandals here struck under cover of night. Darkness may obscure their actions, but not their purpose. Neither soldiers, however well-armed, nor thugs, however stealthy, will prevail in this, because their true opponent is not a statue, but a principle derived from that right reason according to which men everywhere naturally seek to order their lives.