Civil Defense Perspectives vol. 38 #4
Many commentators refer to the “American Empire,” and the state of America is frequently compared with the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. The U.S. has no formal colonial administrations like the British did, and nations have no formal colonial status. Yet the U.S. could surely be considered a hegemon, as it has some 600 off-shore military bases, dominant economic power, and strong political influence. “Regime change” occurs often in countries that oppose American policy. “Imperialism” has a strong negative connotation, suggesting exploitation and treatment of vassal states as inferiors.
Victor Davis Hanson explores various empires, noting that a common feature is leaders believing that their policies were motivated by the desire to do good and not merely by self interest.
The Athenian Empire required conquered city-states to become democracies. A good objective? It threatened to destroy any who opposed it, and sent a force of 40,000 troops to Syracuse to conquer the largest democracy in the Greek world. This Sicilian Expedition ended the Athenian Empire itself. Astonishingly, in the war between Athens and the oligarchy Sparta, most Greeks wanted Sparta to win (http://tinyurl.com/mry28cnk).
In Caesar’s Gallic Wars, and in later Roman literature, we read that Rome brought civilization to Gaul—while in a nine-year period, Romans killed perhaps one million Gauls and enslaved another million (ibid.). But we have “the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome.”
In the 16th century, imperialist Spain, with a force of 1,500 soldiers under Hernán Cortés, destroyed Tenochtitlán, ancient Mexico City, wiping out probably 200,000 people. They converted souls to Christianity and stamped out sodomy, cannibalism, and human sacrifice—while gaining land, gold, and riches.
Rudyard Kipling sums up the common imperialist mindset: that imperialism is a burden, undertaken reluctantly and for the good of the uncivilized. The 1899 poem “The White Man’s Burden” was addressed to the U.S., which was then fighting what many saw as an imperialist war in the Philippines:
“Take up the White Man’s burden / In patience to abide / To veil the threat of terror / And check the show of pride / By open speech and simple / An hundred times made plain / To seek another’s profit / And work another’s gain.”
Despite the supposed advantages of imperial power, the costs are never quite outweighed by the benefits, Hanson writes. “The imperialists tend to be oblivious to the expenses, perhaps because of the power and grandeur that come with empire.”
The British Empire, which Hanson considers to be the most civilizing and humane of any empire in history, had 420 million people under its sway and covered 12 million square miles of territory, seven times the area of the Roman Empire. Yet, as portrayed in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, published near the peak of the Empire in 1852, there were vast numbers of people who were in poor-houses in London at the same time the country was spending its resources far and wide on its great imperial civilizing mission. “This phenomenon of neglected and hollowed-out cores coupled with widespread overseas investments and commitments tends to be characteristic of empires,” Hanson states. See San Francisco and East Palestine, Ohio.
One corollary to the unprofitability of empire is that it tends to corrupt the character of the imperial power.
Empires fail. Even Kipling, known to be a great supporter of the British Empire, seemed to be warning of its destiny when in 1897, at Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee marking her 60th year as queen, he presented the poem “Recessional,” a bleak poem of lamentation with the stanza:
“Far-called, our navies melt away / On dune and headland sinks the fire / Lo, all our pomp of yesterday / Is one with Nineveh and Tyre / Judge of the Nations, spare us yet / Lest we forget—lest we forget!”
As old empires fall, ambitious new ones strive to take their place. Hanson sees two: China and the globalists at Davos.
“China today is creating something very much like the British Empire, although the Chinese are more like the imperialists of the Ottoman Empire…in that they are neither apologetic nor shy about what they are doing. If the Chinese have an imperial enclave in Africa, they rope it off and don’t allow Africans nearby. Nor do they allow colonial peoples, for the most part, to go to Beijing and be educated or integrated. Like the Ottomans who conquered Constantinople, China has a monolithic culture.”
The elitists of the World Economic Forum who meet annually in Davos, he writes, envision a transnational ruling class, issuing edicts that override the will of national majorities, in the tradition of utopian empires gone astray.
Great Empires
One student of history names three empires, two Christian and one Muslim, which were not only powerful militarily but well developed culturally, philosophically, economically, and ethically, lasting as long as they strictly observed the divine principle.
The Eastern Roman Empire overcame problems that led to the destruction of its Western part in the 5th century A.D. It endured until the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Empire in the 15th century. It was arguably the world’s leader in science, architecture, art, and trade. Citizens called themselves Romans; the term Byzantine was used only near the end.
Few people other than medieval historians know that both the Byzantine Empire and the Islamic Empire during the early middle ages were long-standing powerhouses of wealth, culture, and military power, with rule based on respect for divine law.
The Holy Roman Empire, later called the HRE of the German nation, began around 800 A.D. with the coronation of Charlemagne, had a great resurgence in 962 when Pope John XII crowned the most famous German emperor Otto I. This remarkably stable entity lasted until Napoleon—nearly 1,000 years, versus three centuries for the British Empire.
In contrast, the western Roman Empire lacked internal stability, and the great empires had no equivalent to Caligula, Nero, Commodus, Valeria Messalina, or Tiberius of the Capri Spelunca fame, with their sexual perversions including pedophilia.
“For heathen heart that puts her trust/ In reeking tube and iron shard,/ All valiant dust that builds on dust,/ And guarding, calls not Thee to guard,/ For frantic boast and foolish word—/Thy mercy on Thy People, Lord!” (“The Recessional”)
Contemporary Colonialism
Centralized global one-size-fits-all pandemic policies are a reiteration of colonialism, which Africans and all nations must fight, writes Nick Hudson (https://tinyurl.com/4hckmttp).
“The architects of such globalist trajectories are held out as great intellects. But they are nothing of the sort. We know both in theory and in practice that centralization causes nothing but misery, because it destroys the mechanisms of error-correction.” “History is replete with examples of tyrants enamoured of their centralizing visions believing each time that they hold some perspective or asset that their predecessors lacked.”
More data and bigger computers will not make this time different, he states.
WHO’s COVID policies were disastrous in Africa. Attempts to implement lockdowns caused immense economic damage, hurling millions into grinding poverty, and destroying the educational prospects of entire cohorts of children.
The ambition of Africa’s CDC to spend tens of billions of dollars vaccinating Africans against COVID is “wild lunacy.”
Pandemic preparedness is but one of the centralization scams. Hudson’s proposes three criteria for identifying them: (1) a propagandized global crisis, (2) admitting only global solutions, and (3) viciously silencing dissenting voices.
“Climate change” also fits the definition perfectly.
A Westphalian-Eurasian World Order?
With the Ukraine war, the two to three centuries of Western hegemony is ending, writes Pepe Escobar in a commentary based on the book The Ukraine War & The Eurasian World Order by Glenn Diesen, a professor at the University of Southeast Norway and an associate editor at the Russia in Global Affairs journal (https://tinyurl.com/3b23kk47). He writes that “the hegemony of the collective West could only be fully achieved by applying Divide and Rule across Eurasia.” In his view, “ ‘the unique world order’ produced by controlling ‘the vast Eurasian continent from the maritime periphery is coming to an end.’ ”
In the late 19th century, Russian Finance Minister Sergei Witte wanted to develop a road map for a Eurasian political economy, ending Russia’s role as an exporter of natural resources to Europe, as it resembled “the relations of colonial countries with their metropolises.” This goes back to Dostoyevsky, who argued that “Russians are as much Asiatics as European. The mistake of our policy for the past two centuries has been to make the people of Europe believe that we are true Europeans…. It will be better for us to seek alliances with the Asiatics.”
“Dostoyevsky meets Putin-Xi,” writes Escobar.
Escobar writes that the Rosetta Stone of Anglo-American geopolitics is to “prevent the emergence of a hegemon or a group of states capable of dominating Europe and Eurasia that could threaten the dominant maritime power. That explains everything from WWI and WWII to the permanent NATO obsession in preventing a solid rapprochement between Germany and Russia, by any means necessary.”
Diesen sees BRICS+ as “anti-hegemony and not anti-Western,” with the objective of creating a multipolar system. However, Escobar writes, “There will be no peaceful road towards a Westphalian [multipolar] world order.” The problem is that “the rarified plutocracy that really runs the show will always refuse to acknowledge reality.”
“Irrespective of the outcome of the [Ukraine proxy] war, the war has already become the graveyard of liberal hegemony.”
Historical Perspective
In a letter to John Dalberg-Acton, dated Dec 15, 1866, Robert E. Lee wrote (https://tinyurl.com/yfb5s2b7):
While I have considered the preservation of the constitutional power of the General Government to be the foundation of our peace and safety at home and abroad, I yet believe that the maintenance of the rights and authority reserved to the states and to the people, not only essential to the adjustment and balance of the general system, but the safeguard to the continuance of a free government. I consider it as the chief source of stability to our political system, whereas the consolidation of the states into one vast republic, sure to be aggressive abroad and despotic at home, will be the certain precursor of that ruin which has overwhelmed all those that have preceded it.
Finance Imperialism
Economist Michael Hudson, in an essay on “Perfecting Imperialism,” discusses the metamorphosis of industrial capitalism, which built the West, into finance capitalism, which makes or builds nothing and is based on debt (tinyurl.com/3jb3y4xp).
To learn how imperialism worked, he writes that he went to work for Wall Street banks because their concern was how to make exploitation better. The banks say they don’t need to understand how the economy works. They just need to work insider deals with the politicians they get elected.
He sees the World Bank as a key to the U.S. strategic control of other countries’ economies. One of the most fateful requirements of the World Bank is that it only makes foreign exchange loans—for developing the export sector. This is to accomplish its purpose of preventing countries from growing their own food. He writes that the World Bank is an arm of the U.S. military. With the International Monetary Fund (IMF), it can control what countries can invest in. If their reserves are in dollars, they are subject to economic blackmail. The U.S., he states, is now threatening to grab all of Saudi Arabia’s American holdings if Saudi Arabia opposes the joint American-Israeli attempt to take over the Near East and attack Iran.
De-dollarizing is an attempt to keep money where it can’t be confiscated. The U.S. went off the gold standard in 1971 because France and Germany were cashing in dollars that were thrown off by American military spending. With a gold reserve or a reserve controlled by the global majority, the U.S. could not simply finance its military spending by printing dollars, Hudson writes.
Now that finance capitalism (neoliberalism) has deindustrialized America, Hudson asks, what does America produce that the rest of the world wants, except not to be bombed? Thus, it’s a militarization of what used to be called imperialism, he writes.
The problem of unpayable debt, now confronting us, is age-old. In the ancient Near East, where economic practices such as accounting, interest, coinage, and contracts began, the necessity of periodic debt cancellation was recognized (also see Leviticus 25). The blind spot in the West about this economic history, and rulers’ obligation to the gods of justice, Hudson explains (tinyurl.com/yasv2xj3), is leading us to the same end as Rome.