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Thread ID: 6532 | Posts: 4 | Started: 2003-05-07
2003-05-07 08:42 | User Profile
Buchanan hits on something (probably unwittingly) that I've long believed: that it's not the notion of empire which is repellent but the idea of a dying nation using empire the way a sodden drunk uses a gram of cocaine: as an aphrodisiac stimulant after it's much too late to even hope for an erection. One thing has been pretty clear these past two decades: we initiate wars for any number of reasons - public relations (Grenada), influencing upcoming elections (Gulf War I), disciplining ambitious errand-boys (Panama), and Israel-said-so (the current one). But never for the benefit of Americans, and certainly not for the glory of America. Any nation that makes sure to always position a subhuman before the camera for the photo-op (to make sure everybody knows we're really and truly sorry for being Evil White Men once upon a time) is marking time, improvising on the fly, and utterly bereft of the sort of "imperial faith" no nation can achieve greatness without. Oil reserves notwithstanding, the Middle East is the sort of region you'd draw straws to avoid conquering - if you were a great nation bent upon surviving and thriving. But Weimar America is barely fit for self-rule these days; and when it comes to the health of the Republic, seemingly every elected leader we've got cites "other priorities". When they're not looking at white working Americans like we're costly luxury items they'd just as soon replace outright with mass-produced, economy-class Mexicans and wogs, that is.
[url=http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=32390]http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article....RTICLE_ID=32390[/url]
Why America's empire will vanish Pat Buchanan
Posted: May 5, 2003 1:00 a.m. Eastern
é 2003 Creators Syndicate, Inc.
Niall Ferguson is a novelty ââ¬â a British historian who celebrates the British Empire and yearns to see America take the path trod by the Mother Country. But he is dubious about our staying power.
Citing President Bush ââ¬â "We will remain in Iraq as long as necessary, and not a day longer" ââ¬â he fears the American empire will be "the most evanescent in all of history."
"Other empire-builders have fantasized about ruling subject peoples for a thousand years," Ferguson writes in the New York Times Magazine. "This is shaping up to be history's first thousand-day empire. Make that, a thousand hours."
Why cannot Americans sustain an empire? Because we "lack the one crucial character trait without which the whole imperial project is doomed: stamina."
Ferguson is both right and wrong. Americans are indeed feckless imperialists, but not because we are lacking in stamina. Our generation, after all, persevered through 40 years of Cold War to prevail against a Soviet Empire that was steeped in stamina.
What we lack is an imperial faith, an unquestioning belief in our God-given right to rule other peoples and instruct them in how to live ââ¬â the faith that compels men to create empires.
When Spain, France and England came to the New World, it was not only for gold and land, but for the greater glory of God ââ¬â Ad Majorem Gloriam Dei. Christians came here to convert pagans, smash their idols, demolish their civilizations and rule over them until they, too, embraced the faith.
In our wars with Indians, Mexicans, Spanish and Filipinos, we Americans were also driven by a belief in the superiority of our race, culture, faith, civilization. We did not hesitate to impose our rule and American way of life on the defeated peoples Kipling called "the lesser breeds without the law."
There was in the West in those years an absolute self-confidence, reinforced by Darwin, that we had gotten where we were because we were superior. That self-confidence is gone, because that faith and belief have died in the West, and been replaced by something akin to their antithesis.
Today, it is the reigning dogma that the Western empires were the cause of all the evils of mankind for 500 years: racism, colonialism, imperialism, slavery, xenophobia. In the week before 9-11, the United Nations held a conference in Durban, South Africa, the purpose of which was to demand, on behalf of peoples of color, vast reparations from the West as restitution for the crimes and sins of the West.
Today, our children are tutored in the evils of our history and the tenets of egalitarian democracy, a new dogma that holds that all races, religions, cultures and civilizations are equal, and none has a right to impose its values or rule on other peoples. The United Nations is a shrine to this idea. Followed logically to its end ââ¬â and given the West's shrinking fraction of world population ââ¬â this idea must lead to what James Burnham called "The Suicide of the West."
Moreover, when Americans go abroad in search of monsters to destroy, we can never get around the Jeffersonian dictum that all just powers come from the consent of the governed. Or the Wilsonian dictum, embedded in his "14 Points," that all peoples have a right to self-determination. Once those twin ideas took root in the minds and hearts of Western elites, the old empires were finished.
So it was seen at Versailles in 1919. When British and French divided up the German and Ottoman empires after the war fought to "make the world safe for democracy," Wilson insisted that the newly acquired colonies be called "mandates." They were to be ruled by the imperial powers only until they were ready for self-rule. Ireland, Egypt, India and Iraq got the message ââ¬â and swiftly rose up to violently claim their rights.
An American empire cannot endure because it both contradicts our anti-imperialist tradition dating to 1776, and our democratist ideology, which says that all peoples are equal and all have the right to rule themselves. When the Iraqis invoke American principles against us, the Americans will pick up and go home.
Put bluntly, if you invoke our creed, you can kick us out.
Because we believe this, the only way America is able to attack and invade nations is to first portray their regimes as threats to our security. Serbia's Milosevic is thus a Balkan "Hitler" who must be stopped. And Iraq must be invaded because Saddam is building weapons of mass destruction, to give them to Osama bin Laden.
But once the enemy is invaded, overthrown and disarmed, we have no legal or moral doctrine that permits us to stay on, to rule, and to instruct the natives to give up their beliefs and embrace ours.
Democratic empire is a contradiction in terms. And Americans are simply not a people who can live long with contradictions. Sorry, Dr. Ferguson.
2003-05-07 10:17 | User Profile
Nice succinct article. The kind that could be rewritten every month with the thesis intact but with additional material incorporating the latest nail hammered into our collective coffin. Nor will there be a shortage of Englishmen eager to expand on the rapid decline of the American Empire, thus making its predecessor appear all the more glorious. Of course they will be right, both by way of accomplishment and longevity.
But once the enemy is invaded, overthrown and disarmed, we have no legal or moral doctrine that permits us to stay on, to rule, and to instruct the natives to give up their beliefs and embrace ours.
This may be true as far as the delicate masses are concerned, but how one ââ¬Årulesââ¬Â is tallied differently nowadays. Maintaining garrisons is no longer in vogue and no one cares about the beliefs of natives, certainly not after a successful expedition when there is no need to feign humanitarianism as motive for intervention. In lieu of planting flags we plant Mickey Ds and such. The object is to rearrange economies, to induce dependency, and to facilitate our leaching. All it takes is installing a likeminded or befuddled local government and the international monetary financing scheme does the rest.
Doubtless Buchanan knows all this but grabs what he can to dissuade others from imperialist inclinations, and if it helps to say that some moral doctrine ought to be equally applicable elsewhere so be it. Come to think of it, living with contradictions is the easy part.
2003-05-07 13:32 | User Profile
PJB's thesis assumes that the American people will have any say in it.
While the American people (whatever that means) clearly don't have the drives required for empire, the Likudniks clearly do.
And as this latest war shows, the Likudniks are the ones who count.
The American people don't care that they were lied to about the true motivations for this war. They just couldn't care less. They want cheap gasoline at the pump and cheap Chinese imports at Walmart. That's it. Politics means making sure you keep the masses fat, dumb & happy while the Inner Party hijacks the machine to world domination.
Bread and circuses to keep the native masses quiet, and a professional military of increasingly foreign-born mercenaries to bring in loot were the very stuff of imperial Rome.
It seems to me that's where we're headed.
Walter
2003-05-07 18:49 | User Profile
An atypically obtuse article from the other squinty Pat. He seems to be trying to write several incompatible essays using the same set of sentences. I did, however, enjoy this one clear piece of thought:
Because we believe this, the only way America is able to attack and invade nations is to first portray their regimes as threats to our security. Serbia's Milosevic is thus a Balkan "Hitler" who must be stopped. And Iraq must be invaded because Saddam is building weapons of mass destruction, to give them to Osama bin Laden.
If Pat would hammer this point instead of blathering about our "evil racist xenophobic history", he would be doing far more good for his country.