The Death of American Empire
An asylum for the sane would be empty in America. --George Bernard Shaw
Step back and look at the big picture. The farther you step back, the bigger the picture gets. Step back too far, and the world becomes a reductio ad absurdum, resulting in a kind of Buddhism. My departed friend Charles Bukowski wrote in one of his many poems, “We cannot acquire too much...there are laws we know nothing of.” What prompts this avenue of thought is a gloomy editorial not too long ago in Capitol Hill Blue by its founder, Doug Thompson, out of Washington, D.C. Every once in a while, like some of us, Thompson seems to nosedive into a depression. The title of his article ( March 9th, 2007) indicates as much: “Turn off the life support: America is dead”. Here’s a sample:
Maybe, just maybe, it’s time to pull the plug on this failed democratic republic called The United States of America. Turn off the life support. Disconnect the IVs. The US of A is brain dead with no chance for revival....
It doesn’t matter who controls Congress. Congress is a dead institution, ruled by timid legislators who no longer exercise any real role in the governing of this nation. It doesn’t matter what the Supreme Court may or may not do. The President of the United States has declared himself a “war time President” and granted himself dictatorial rights that no one in Congress or the Court appears able to successfully challenge him....
We need to rethink this experiment called America. Maybe we need to start with a clean sheet of paper.... Maybe it’s time for a new American Revolution. After all, the last one started because another guy named George tried to destroy our way of life.
All of this may be accurate, but it is too idealistic. [In fact, in the interim, Thompson has toned down the article, removing some of what has just been quoted.] We do not live in a perfect world. We live in a world of the possible, the tolerable, and/or the just barely manageable. We cannot go back to the dream of the Founding Fathers of the American Republic or to its original Constitution. To attempt to halt the present day free-for-all in America and begin anew would likely make matters worse, opening the door to greater demagoguery and perhaps complete chaos.
The truth is, the U.S. Constitution no longer exists. It is long gone, and nobody is particularly concerned. That optimistic framework of self-governance and independence was rendered irrelevant by the Civil War (a.k.a. The War of Northern Aggression) which lasted from 1861 to 1865. The legitimate issue of slavery aside, when half the country invades, pillages, ransacks and subjugates the other half, that event can in no way be indicative of the rule of law, and was certainly not authorized by the Constitution. The Civil War marked the end of the American Republic of 1789. We live in the aftermath, a postscript; we are making it up as we go along. Many wonderful and fantastic achievements have occurred during this aftermath--in the realm of inventions, science, entertainment, industry, space exploration, the arts, business, etcetera--for which Americans can justly be proud. But many terrible things have happened as well, mostly in the governmental sector, for which Washington must take the blame, along with the citizenry who tolerated or ignored what Washington was doing.
On the foreign policy horizon, let’s keep everything in perspective and on the table. G.W. Bush, who is a modern day, real-life Charlie McCarthy, and his mentor, Richard Cheney, who corresponds to Edgar Bergen, are only symptoms of a larger problem, a mystery bigger than the aberration misnamed “neoconservatism”. Bush and Cheney are the end-products of an historical development a century in the making.
**
America’s current predicament on the world’s stage can be accurately diagnosed, but not so easily reversed. May I suggest that it is the result of two overly ambitious concepts in the realm of foreign affairs, which concepts have evolved over many decades, commencing around the start of the 20th Century, at the time of the Spanish-American war of 1898.
First, there was the brainstorm borrowed from the British Empire experience, innocently conceived by President William McKinley and by his idealistic Secretary of State, John Hay, that to get America directly involved in overseeing the internal affairs of other nations was a brilliant, beneficent idea for all parties concerned. Hay and McKinley did not recognized it as inherently dishonest, at odds with the tradition of a republic born in revolt against an empire. They did not comprehend that it was meddling and officious. Soon their idea was taken for granted in the hallways of the White House, starting with Teddy Roosevelt. By the time of Woodrow Wilson and that of his mysterious éminence grise, “Colonel” Edward House, American triumphalism was firmly entrenched. It was an article of faith that led to wars. Some were small, like the guerilla insurrection which broke out in the Philippines after the Spanish-American war. Others were titanic, like the Second World War and its precursor, the Great War of 1914-18.
Second, the entire body politic of America--not just “the elites” in Washington, but “the man in the street”--came to believe that the United States had somehow acquired the right, indeed the duty, to intervene in matters that were legitimately none of America’s business. It was a presumption which amounted to hubris across the board. There is no such right, duty or obligation. Ezra Pound stated in 1927: “The principle of good is enunciated by Confucius; it consists in establishing order within oneself. This order or harmony spreads by a sort of contagion without specific effort. The principle of evil consists in messing into other peoples’ affairs.” Pound was correct, and so was Confucius. But hubris is still with us, big time. Indeed, it remains the sine qua non of American foreign policy.
No matter how unwise, deluded and suborned the politicians in Washington might be, no matter how powerful its various war lobbies and special interest groups might become, America could not have arrived at the point of being where it is today--an overextended and perhaps near bankrupt empire--unless the above two premises were in place and in play.
**
On February 15th, 2007 an important article appeared in The New York Review of Books by foreign policy scholar William Pfaff. It was entitled “America’s Manifest Destiny” and explicates some of the above ideas in great detail. Pfaff argues for a more reasonable and a less grandiose approach to American foreign policy; he argues against the interventionist and triumphalist mode which has proven to be so counter-productive, if not actually self-destructive. Such heresy has routinely been denounced as “isolationism” for the past 70+ years, but it is nothing more than common sense.
The most thought-provoking sentence in Pfaff’s long article could be his rhetorical question: “What is the threat that America keeps at bay?” The short answer is that most of the presumed threats are illusory. More to the point, they were created by Washington to advance a private agenda, often quite brazenly. This is becoming clear as mud today, but it has been the case since 1917. The train wreck in the Middle East, which accelerated out of control after 9/11, should force at least some literate Americans to reevaluate their history and ask themselves the simple question, “How did we get here?” How, indeed?
For starters, take the Cold War. It was a response to the actual threat posed by the Soviet Union, its surrogates and satellites. But the Soviet Union as a “Superpower” entity was itself the creation of American interventionism. The cause of Soviet communism was hugely advanced when Washington, in the person of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, intervened in the internal affairs of Europe in the late 1930’s. This meddling by Washington culminated in a fratricidal war on the continent of Europe, which ended with Stalin and the Red Army in full control of half of it.
Please note that the Second World War began as a European war in September 1939, when Hitler invaded Poland, the upshot from a long-standing, unresolved border dispute between Germany and Poland. This dispute was due to the bizarre circumstance of the German port city of Danzig on the Baltic Sea having been detached from Germany by the Versailles “peace” treaty of 1919. Danzig was left surrounded by Polish territory of the newly-resurrected Polish state. The new Polish republic was itself a creation of English, French, and American diplomats at Versailles. Without a doubt, the disagreement with respect to the northeastern border of Germany could have been resolved peacefully by the two parties concerned through negotiations, had it not been for the outside interference of London and Washington. That interference directly led to the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact of August 1939, signed in Moscow, in which Germany and Russia sought to regain territory they both had lost to the Poles in the Great War. The conflict continued on Polish territory, which served as a battle ground in a gruesome struggle between Germany and Russia, and resulted in the German military occupation of all of Poland. It ended in 1945 with the outright annexation of eastern Poland by the Soviet Union, and with the submergence of the rest of Poland behind the Iron Curtain for more than forty years.
To a remarkable degree, still unappreciated to this day, the war in Europe which commenced in 1939 was promoted behind the scenes by the Roosevelt Administration, using London as its cat’s-paw. The first and perhaps greatest victim was Poland. The sequence of events is as follows. At Washington’s instigation, London and Paris declared war against Germany, but not Russia.
Then, after declaring war, London and Paris did absolutely nothing to assist Poland as she found herself invaded on two sides--from the west by Germany and from the east by Russia. These realities set in motion a chain reaction that the White House realized it could not control from the sidelines. It obliged Roosevelt, a few years later, to railroad an “isolationist” America into the war in Europe, using the ruse of the “surprise” Japanese attack in December, 1941 on the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. Roosevelt’s treachery at Pearl Harbor was followed by his military crusade on the European continent, which resulted in, among other things, the carpet bombing of Germany into rubble, the immiserization of Italy and, in general, the wholesale wrecking of Europe as an independent entity. Then came the crowning achievement, the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, authorized by Harry Truman, which events killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians in a flash, a war crime for the ages.
True, Roosevelt’s intervention in Europe and Asia did, as intended, provide a winning formula to terminate the Great Depression and to divert attention away from the failure of Roosevelt’s domestic agenda. However, in the aftermath it left all of Europe starving, in ruins, and occupied by extra-territorial forces. Moreover, England was broke and reduced to a nullity, the once great British Empire was kaput, the Empire of Japan was smashed, the Red Chinese were in power, the Korean communists in the ascendency, and Stalin had conquered half of Europe, with his agents actively subverting the other half. Such were some of the more obvious benefits of Washington’s triumphalism up to that time for the people on the ground and on the receiving-end.
Bear in mind, as well, that the Second World War was preordained by the defeat of the Central Powers in the Great War of 1914-18. The collapse of Germany and Austria-Hungary in 1918 was the direct result of Washington, in the person of Woodrow Wilson, arriving at the eleventh hour to rescue the leaders of the British Empire who had miscalculated and gotten in over their heads, and who had already lost their war against the Kaiser on the Western Front in France. John Bull had finally met his match. The Great War and the vindictive Versailles peace treaty of 1919 not only made the Second World War inevitable, but also created the Soviet Union and launched the career of Adolf Hitler. Twenty years later, the secret diplomacy of another U.S. President, FDR, would propel Moscow into the very heart of Europe and lay the groundwork for the Cold War. This latter enterprise was a belated attempt by Washington to prevent Moscow and the Red Army from ingesting the rest of Europe. It succeeded when the Soviet Union and the fraud known as “communism” finally imploded in 1989 due to the weight of internal contradictions, thereby leaving Washington on stage as the world’s “lone surviving Superpower.”
In brief, the bloodstained track record of U.S. foreign policy since 1898 has been an amazing saga of buttinskyism degenerating into bullying on a grand scale, all masquerading as altruism. The record has been remarkably consistent. [Perhaps the only notable exception was when the U.S. Senate, led by Harvard historian Henry Cabot Lodge, defied Wilson and refused to ratify the Versailles treaty and declined U.S. membership in the League of Nations.] Like the present impossible fiasco in Iraq, presided over by Cheney and Bush, both world wars of the 20th Century were “of choice”, entered into by determined hypocrites and prevaricators operating out of the White House. Sad to say, “Operation Iraqi Freedom” is not unique or unprecedented. It is part of a pattern. Except for Soviet ICBM’s during Cold War, America was not a target and has not been in actual danger from any of the countries which Washington has chosen to invade, overrun, or bomb to smithereens. Prior to September 11th, 2001, continental America had not come under attack since British redcoats occupied Washington in 1814, and burned its public buildings to the ground.
The average American, on whose behalf (presumably) and in whose name all this aggressive adventurism was undertaken, has been bamboozled and utilized as cannon fodder by the powers-that-be. Today, a moderate form of mass hysteria reigns. We have been advised or propagandized that America must now confront an Islamic terrorist threat, and we should be prepared to engage in a protracted “clash of civilizations” otherwise known as the “fight against terrorism”. This conflict with Islam magically appeared on the radar screen very soon after the collapse of Communism, which brought the curtain down on the Cold War. Gore Vidal’s wry, off-the-cuff comment--”It’s not a conspiracy; it’s a coincidence”--is most appropriate, if not spot on.
The new threat has been wildly exaggerated and, to a certain extent, fabricated. The jihadist danger was entirely avoidable, including the atrocities of 9/11. That is what makes it all so maddening. Indeed, whatever threat does exist was brought into being by Washington’s own counter-productive activities. To cite the most obvious example, in our post 9/11 world, al-Qaeda and terrorism in Iraq did not exist until Cheney and Bush invaded and occupied Iraq. Do you recall the Christian foreign minister of Iraq, Tariq Aziz, explaining in the run-up to “Operation Iraqi Freedom” that Baghdad did not even have diplomatic relations with the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, which was sheltering Osama bin Laden? But now, with a straight face, Bush proclaims that the terrorism, which his own invasion of Iraq created, must be defeated at any price, no matter how long it takes—or America will be placed in mortal danger. This is insufferable, ridiculous and embarrassing. By far, the actual danger to America and Europe is from “blowback”—the unforeseen, unintended but inevitable consequences of bizarre foreign policy initiatives executed by Washington’s crackbrained politicians of both parties. Due to laziness and misinformation, such policies have remained unknown to the vast majority of the American people, who at this point are understandably bewildered and confused. Is it any wonder?
**
Have you thought about what motivated the Arab terrorists who attacked New York City and Washington, D.C. on September 11th, 2001? It must have been something. It may well have been, as Middle East expert Robert Fisk pointed out the following day, a set of circumstances impacting the Middle East which profoundly affected and disturbed them, and which ultimately drove them insane. We were informed by the White House in the immediate aftermath of the attacks that it had something to do with the terrorists’ hatred of our freedom and democracy. But that glib explanation was designed to divert attention away from the true significance of what had happened. It showed no appreciation for the destructive forces unleashed thanks to decades of U.S. foreign policy arrogance, neglect and malfeasance in the Middle East.
There is a common thread woven through the Great War, the Second World War, and now the multiple battlegrounds in the Middle East. The European bloodbath of the Great War, known as World War I, ended with the defeat of the Central Powers. This unlikely outcome destroyed the Ottoman Empire and gifted the world with Communism for Russia, Zionism for Palestine, and a land grab by the British Empire throughout the Middle East and beyond. How is that for a dose of freedom and democracy?
The entry of Woodrow Wilson, late into the conflict on the side of England in 1917, was an impressive accomplishment. It marked a decisive turning point, for which the honorable gentlemen in Whitehall—Lloyd George, Sir Arthur Balfour and Winston Churchill—felt compelled to reward, as a quid pro quo, a kind of gratuity, Palestine to the Zionists, notwithstanding that this transfer would represent a blatant betrayal of the Arabs who had fought alongside the British and against the Turks, and notwithstanding that it violated the most basic human and political rights of the indigenes, the people already there, to wit, the Palestinians, both Muslims and Christians, in the Holy Land.
Albion perfide. I am referring here to the long forgotten Balfour Declaration, the final draft of which was composed in Washington during the summer of 1917, before being passed back to London for a signature by British Foreign Secretary Lord Balfour in November of that year. This cryptic document consisting of three short paragraphs, and its subsequent implementation by London starting in 1920 under the leadership of Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill, provided the legal framework for a massive confidence trick on the back porch of Europe, which continues to this day. It is the root of our present difficulties.
The rest, to coin a phrase, is history. There is an unbroken connection between the Great War, America’s unnecessary participation in it, and everything which has transpired since then all over the Middle East. It is a continuum. In Iraq, Lebanon and in Palestine, we are witnessing today the third chapter, in effect, of the European war begun in 1914—a war which destroyed Old Europe and which may, in the end, destroy America. International power politics at a critical juncture in the annals of the British Empire have combined with an incendiary U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, based on American domestic politics, to turn the world upside down.
We live in that world. America was sidetracked in 1898, and soon thereafter hijacked by its own unscrupulous, vainglorious politicians, just like England before it. At present, the capitol city of the new empire is carrying out a policy of disruption, war and manipulation in the Middle East to advance the same hidden agenda, just as London did after the Great War. This is the central reality of our time, a reality which is increasingly difficult to deny or ignore, because it has become so apparent and brazen. One fact should also be clear: this project did not start the day before yesterday with Dick Cheney, G.W. Bush and with their accomplices, those agents provocateurs known as “the neocons”. These latter have only perfected a pre-existing scheme and taken it to a new level, employing the diversionary cover story they invented, to wit, “the clash of civilizations.” From one empire to the next. We cannot go back to the dream.
Patrick Foy is author of The Unauthorized World Situation Report.
Comments
excellent piece. after reading it i ask myself, is there any hope for our republic to be awakened from this nightmare?
unfortunately americans do not give a flipping damm in the majority.
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“The truth is, the U.S. Constitution no longer exists. It is long gone, and nobody is particularly concerned.”
If that is a factually accurate statement, then the only legal stance to take is that the original governing structure of these United States springs back into legality. The Articles of Confederation, established in 1781, was shoved aside in 1789 when a sufficient number of states ratified the new Constitution. Ten different presidents served under the Articles of Confederation.
Far from being a badly designed scheme of government, the Articles served as the structure to give order and coherence to the Revolutionary War even before ratification of sufficient states to bring the articles into legal existence in 1781. Its crowning glories were the defeat of monarchical governance in the person of George III and the enactment of the Northwest Ordinance.
Apparently the Congress of the Confederation met for what turned out to be a final meeting on October 10, 1788, but never adjourned sine die as it would have were it to have intended to disappear into history.
In any case, a fallback structure exists that could provide a federal structure if a need arose.
[For the know-nothings, the Articles of Confederation was not the government of the Confederate States of America.]
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Thomas Jefferson said: “Every generation needs a new revolution.” We are long, long overdue.
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I’d like to add to or say something profound about Patrick Foy on The Death of the American Empire but I can only say thanks for the history lesson.
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The amusing part is that most Americans don’t realise the American Empire is dying. They are to busy with tv sports, porn, working at Wal Mart, and other diversions to take notice. They behave as if the US were still top dog. All the while, ther US is being invaded at home and being humiliated abroad. If and when Ameicans finally wake up, I sincerely hope they will take action against those responsible: the traitors and subversives in Washington DC, corporate headquarters, and the media outlets.
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How many men in 100 understand this vs. the History
Channel version of the last 100 years? How many are
willing to endure the psychic scarring that occurs when
you realize you were raised on lies? How many are willing
to try and wrestle the steering wheel back from THEM?
The answer is not enough. This train must wreck and
until then, worse is better, worse is better.
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“The new threat has been wildly exaggerated and,
to a certain extent, fabricated. The jihadist
danger was entirely avoidable, including the
atrocities of 9/11.”
Just how avoidable, and more importantly, just
how fabricated, is becoming all too clear:
http://www.st911.org/
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American involvement in the affairs of Europe at the
beginning of the 20th century was inevitable. The decline
of the power of the British Empire and the rise of
Germany meant America would be faced with a hostile
Europe under German rule in the twentieth century.
America could not rely on the British Navy to protect
Western interests and had to assume Britain’s
responsiblities in the world.
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The Constitution has been severely wounded, but the fascination with Rep. Dr. Ron Paul shows that there’s still hope & that the effort to force the Federal Government back to within its Constitutional Bounds is worthwhile.
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Perhaps Mr. Foy is right that WWII resulted from an
arrogant, misguided foreign policy on the part of the
United States. Alternately, it could have occurred because
a genocidal, nihilistic, megalomanic happened to get
control of the greatest military force in the world.
I think I’ll go ask a few of the many WWII combat vets.
I know which interpretation they favor. Oh, that’s
right, they’re all misguided dupes like the rest of us.
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Mr. Foy wrote: “Then came the crowning achievement, the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, authorized by Harry Truman, which events killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians in a flash, a war crime for the ages.” Would Mr. Foy and friends have had American soldiers, marines and sailors die so that he could sleep soundly? The purpose of war is to terrorize the enemy into submission. Being shot at is not the most pleasant of sensibilities. Japan, not Germany, killed the most during World War II. Just ask any Chinese. I have never met one who had great sympathy for Japanese. Americans have contrived to forget we were the great suppliers of the Japanese war machine before Pearl Harbor.
In 1995 when Japanese Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama visited Peking he was met by an accusation in the People’s Daily, the newspaper of the Chinese government, that 35 million Chinese died due to brutality of the Japanese. Within days the New York Times had an article written by their Tokyo correspondent and Pulitzer Prize winner which credited only 10 million Chinese dying due to Japanese depredations. Who would want to quibble over 25 million dead Chinese? It must be noted this number was over four times the number of Jews killed by the Nazis and occurred in the period remembered by Jews as the Holocaust to the exclusion of other people dying and by most of the rest of the world as World War II. The Chinese have never forgotten this, and one must assume one day they will make sure the rest of the world, most particularly the United States, does not either.
Forgotten by most Americans has been the Russian entry into the war against Japan. When counting the dead Mr. Foy should make allowances that the Japanese attribute more dead from Russian captivity than both atomic bombs.
Americans should only apologize and cringe so much.
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Great piece of historical analysis. Thanks.
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Wow,
it’s really embarassing to hear so many
grown free men admitting defeat.
Not me brothers, not me.
I’m as free as a bird and the
Federal government can kiss my lilly white butt.
Yes, I’m caged, but it’s my SWORN duty to escape.
Ron Paul for President!
Will Blalock
Brazoria, Texas
Ron Paul’s Fighting 14th District
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And here I thought the purpose of war was to defend youself against unjust aggressors. silly me.
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Mr. Foy is on target, but not on the bullseye. The Spanish-American War was blueprinted in “American Interest in Seapower” by A. T. Mahan in 1897, except that Mahan was tactful enough not to suggest taking the Philippines from Spain. William Jennings Bryan’s finest hour came when he resigned as Wilson’s Secretary of State because Wilson’s brand of neutralism between the Allies and Central Powers was guaranteed to bring us into the war on the British side, and Bryan, a Christian pacifist, wanted no part of it. There is some speculation that Wilson truly believed that God intended the Anglo-Saxon race to rule the world in the name of Jesus Christ. Whether Germany would have won had the US sat it out is an interesting question. Had the two sides negotiated a mutually tolerable peace, Adolf Hitler might have had a successful career doing watercolors of ancient buildings.
The US having interfered and helped dictate the Treaty of Versailles, WWII was inevitable. Hitler and Stalin’s divvying up of Poland was essentially restoring that part of the map to what it had been before the Paris Peace Conference. Roosevelt II certainly wanted America’s strength to facilitate an Anglo-Soviet victory, but he was far too much of a ship-lover to have sat back and let the Pacific Fleet get skunked the way it did. All we needed to be at war with Japan was to be attacked, not skunked. Also there was no guarantee that war with Japan necessarily meant war with Germany and Italy. Pearl Harbor, December 7. Declaration of war with Japan, December 8. There was no war with Germany until Hitler declared war on the US on December 11 and the US responded on December 12. If Hitler had had the canny forbearance to sit back while the America Firsters ended lend-least to Churchill and Stalin so that the US could concentrate on Japan, he just might have won. Had Roosevelt known what Admiral Yamamoto was up to, he was astute enough to imagine this and act accordingly. Sorry, try again.
As for Truman’s failure to accept Churchill’s advice about how to deal with Stalin and his allowing a serious cold war to get started unnecessarily, rather than keeping things down to a brass-knuckles game of chess, the less said the better.
Wha’s really dismaying is that the US, having become the world’s only (military) superpower, has taken up all the ghastly practices the “Readers’ Digest” used to excoriate the USSR and Red China for when I was a kid. And it’s all a self-destructive mistake. Karl Rove is a big fan of McKinley and his administration. The neoconservative (neoimperialist) mistake is to think that they can do it all over again. Their fatal fallacy is in failing to acknowledge that, in 1898, the US was on the way up. We’ve been on the way down since VJ Day, but nobody wants to admit it and rethink things accordingly.
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This is an excellent overview. Rather than America and the Anglosphere being the ‘good guys’ they have been led by Elites who use their peoples as cannon fodder and tax slaves to wage wars, physical and cultural, first and foremost to weaken and humiliate, if not necessarily destroy, all nations that could, might could we would emphasize in the hill South, revive its part of historic, pre-Modern Christendom.
America, taking over for the British Empire, is serving the role as imperial giant to replace the vestiges of Western Christian Civilization with centralized, multicultural secularism held together by military force and bread and circuses.
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It fascinates me how nearly everyone has his own inviolable interpretation of history. Everyone is a sort of revisionist, yet no one wants his interpretation revised. Maybe Henry Ford was right when he said that history is mostly bunk. Change a critical fact or two in any construction of history and the whole edifice comes tumbling down. For my own money, George Washington gave the best advice when he counseled us to eschew entangling alliances (mind our own business). That was our Founding Father’s parsimonious political model for foreign affairs. But that’s no fun, is it?
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Mr. FoSquare’s citation of the functionally illiterate Henry Ford does hit the edge of the target. History is too much fun to be mostly bunk, though many interpretations do have a high buncombe content. Reading various accounts, including ones with which one instinctively disagrees, and deciding for oneself is the best way to go about it. Washington’s rejection of entangling alliances was commonsense enlightenment when the United States was [not were] materially self- sufficient, militarily weak, and enjoyed thousands of miles’ worth of saltwater insulation with no Atlantic cables to disturb our domestic tranquillity. Sad to say, things have changed since then. What the answer is I don’t know, but it’s easy to identify things which aren’t. Such as so-called neoconservatism.
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Our entangled relationship with Israel by itself has constituted a catastrophic foreign policy. This relationship isn’t driven by economic inter-dependency, the “shrinking globe,” military needs, or by any other reasonable explanation. It’s driven by the pervasive influence of Jewish Power throughout our vital institutions. The so-called neo-conservatives (Zionist penetration of the Republican Party) are just a more recent manifestation of that insidious virus, and only one dimension of it. Yes, the world is a more complicated place today. But Washington’s cautionary advice applies as well today as a starting point for foreign policy as it did in his time.
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It is true, as Mr. FoSquare says, that America’s entanglement with Israel has constituted a catastrophic foreign policy. But as that did not occur until 1948 and the catastrophies began much earlier, focusing on Israel is to highlight a symptom rather than the cause.
The great cause is that once the Yankees won The War and made Anglo-Saxopn Puritan culture America’s mandarin culture, the reconstituted singular USA was bound to become a self-righteous empire that would promote Jewish interest because ideas have consequences, they move toward inherent and sometimes unavoidable ends. As A-S Puritanism was the quintessential late Reformatiion era hardcore Judaizing heresy, it is a given that any culture it rules, it directs, will become very much like the USA of the past century and more.
Oliver Cromwell and Benjamin Disraeli and Abe Lincoln and British Empire worshiping Woodrow Wilson lead almost ineluctably to today’s Neocons and the final transformation of America into a centralized ‘democratic’ empire mandating worldwide abortion, homosexual promotion, religious syncretism and indifferentism, and philosophical relativism ruled by Anglophonic Elite might makes right judgment.
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Mr. Foy,
I linked here from Antiwar. What an excellent overview. Personally, I found Stennett’s “Day of Deceit’ and various reports on how America was seduced/dragged into WW I real eye-openers in understanding the degree to which US foreign policy - along with that of many other nations - has been so nakedly driven by interests far removed from those of the citizenry involved. Most of the stories we grew up on in which most Germans were monsters, and now most Islamists are fascists, were and are hogwash. It takes quite a bit of hard work, not to mention a certain amount of courage, to be able to penetrate the fog of mass deception in which we all blunder along. Again, this is an excellent overview.
PS. One link I have on WW I is this, for those who are interested. The paragraph which includes ‘March 5’ (to search for) is particularly interesting in revealing how the creation of the Zionist state was central to getting the US involved in WWI, something which to this day is largely unknown, and certainly not ‘kosher’ cocktail party fare!
http://www.hypocrisy.biz/Balfour.html
I don’t know anything about the website as a whole; this link came about from a search for connections between Zionists and the Balfour agreement and US involvement in WW I about which I had read earlier and elsewhere but not saved.
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Very Interesting! Glad to hear someone talk sense. Islam does not condone violence but it does talk about fighting back and dignity. Islam is misunderstood on two fronts firstly by the idiots who purport to be representatives of Islam and the secondly by the Western governments who fear Islam (and rightly so). Jihad is the usual point of discussion, of which, sadly I have seen very few people talk sense. I see a change in America, a land itself occupied, whose inhabitants were killed to make way for people yelling ‘new world’ when the world was not new at all. A history tainted and written in the blood of others, cannot bring peace to others. Islam will and is rising in America. Peace will prevail then. For those who are upset with the brief description of a few aspects of Islam, I suggest you read the Quran before you comment.
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The “Death of the American Empire” is simply the best, concise, short history of America and of our horrific impact on the world stage and on what we have lost as a nation since Lincoln’s War, that I have ever read in my 57 years. Nothing can compare to this article in terms on enlightenment, or sadness at the well hidden history and failure of the greatest experiment in self-government and liberty in world history.
For those of us who seek truth, love history and who bear the burden of living in a nation where false history, propaganda and unrighteous self-delusion surround everything we read and observe involving politics, the news and current events, Patrick Foy provides us a brief moment of sanity and sincere honesty about what we really have become.
The first step on the road to recovery from a tragedy whether a serious addiction, the loss of a loved one or the sobering realization that we have made a tragic mistake with terrible consequences is to see ourselves and our actions as they really are. I can’t quarrel with a single point in the article or the conclusions.
It is time that we as Americans, take stock of our true situation, spread the word about where we are and how we got here hopefully in time to preserve our wealth and begin to restore our liberties so we can survive as a people as the empire crashes down around us.
I’ve found that when you realize that you’ve taken the wrong road, the best action is often to backtrack to the last sure landmark that you can remember. It is the same for our nation and I believe we should go back to our original limited government, the Articles of Confederation as established by our Patriot Founding Fathers.
I will today, forward this article and URL to the thousands of people on the e-mail lists from my websites and I urge you to do the same to all of your friends who love liberty and seek to understand our real history and restore the failed legacy of our Founding Fathers. In addition, I’ll add a link to it in my new online book, “The Swiss Preserve Solution” a new politically incorrect guide to defending your wealth & liberty from attack during the latter-days of the American Empire. More info on the free book can be found at http://www.swissconfederationinstitute.org
Back to The Articles,
Ron Holland
President of The Swiss Confederation Institute and marketing coordinator for FreedomFest.
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Brilliant writing. Yes, there’s a common thread. Zionism. Zionists bludgeoned Wilson into restarting WWI to: 1. acquire Palestine, and; 2. smash the Kaiser. Sadly, all the rest follows from that Jewish pressure applied to Woodrow Wilson. Balfour, Versailles, WWII, the postwar breakdown of traditional White border controls, the non-White invasions in all White lands, Neocon control of Washington, and now Iraq. A war devised and run by Likudniks. Yes, it’s time for a revolution. Ron Paul can be part of that revolution.
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No Arabs did 911 on America. If the author could not see this,then I question any of his history remarks. Hitler’s Germany was also funded by USA and not one word why Germany attacked Russia-Twice. And who are we grooming today to attack Russia? EU !Sad part is the Zionist hating the Russians and we die for them .
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This article is very objective and near to truth from
a westener. This world history and if you go through Koran then the fate
history fate of most of the rulers when they were
arrogant and were not stoped the world had to suffer the same
the same case is with America.They have lost the credi
bility to lead the world. We Muslim are direct sufferer
of American Hegamony. History repeats as the American
destroyed Pealr harbour and attacked Japan, the same
idea happened with Muslims
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Arab terrprist attacked on 911??? Evidence please. Sheesh, what nonsense! At least seven of the accused are still alive. There are no airport videos. Names do not appear on passenger lists. What garbage.
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Mr. Foy does not give nearly enough credit to the Zionists for our involvement in the destruction of the Mid East. Zionists pushed for the destruction of Iraq, are aiding a civil war in what is left of Palestine, trying for another in Lebanon and are howling for nuclear destruction of Iran. All of this destructive evil just to to “legitimatize” the theft of land. America’s insane participation in this crime will someday be so clear to anyone shifting through the ashes of a ruined empire.
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I find it amazing that an arrogant mental runt like George Bush, could so easily and quickly destroy, what was once the greatest nation on earth. Certainly, Dick Cheney gets much credit. We have nothing left to go with, credibility, gold or silver, constitution, congressional oversight, justice, nothing; except nuclear weapons and delivery systems. I suppose we use those weapons and then the end. Ron Pollan
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The article does show America drifting into destruction by violating its own Constitution by greedy, power hungary politicians, and now by Corporate Greed, displacing USA workers for foreigners. The displacing of American workers is treason by Corporate America.
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People of faith believe in their inherent power to change their surroundings. When enough people within the United States begin to believe that we can and must remove the current leadership and restructure our government it will happen. Until then, we will not be swayed by intelligent “ringers” planted for the specific purpose to destroy the hope and efforts of the faithful. The sheep are awakening!
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The American Empire is dead. Chimpy and Cheney killed it.
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Excellent material, all.
Reminds one never to believe deeply in anything, since when confronted with conflicting facts the mind goes into cognitive dissonance which is an impossible state of mind.
For my part, I look to Quigley’s “Tragedy and Hope” for a fairly accurate expose of modern history. The villans are ll lined up and their intent soundly defined. Carroll, though, saw no problem in a world run by the few, as did Plato before him. Me and mine, however, are preparing the Walters Compound for meaner times ahead, and are as anxious as children on Christmas eve.
“Good luck and good hunting” might be an appropriate quote these days.
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Nothing new here, just some history lessons and spin
and italicized foreign words (including some that
don’t need to be italicized; they have already been
assimilated).
No abstract thoughts in this this article.
For a more thoughtful approach, I would suggest
referring to the work of Morris Berman ("The Twilight
of American Culture” or Stewart Ewen.)
This is not our century. We are 5 percent of the
world’s population, and that will be reflected in
world economics and politics. We have, as the author
noted, lost our way, but we had a pretty decent life
as late as the Fifties or Sixties.
Capitalism was refuted by experience in the Thirties.
We never would have escaped from the Great Depression
had it not been for World War II, no matter who
started it.
Thompson is right. Look for a new way, just as the
Declaration of Independence says you should. Happy
Independence Day.
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Big gap in your knowledge of history, sir. The Jacobin revolution of 1861 saw our States invaded, cities burned to the ground, and civilians starved and murdered on a scale much larger than in 1814. That was the end of the Republic and the shredding of the Constitution. You can look the other way if you want, but that won’t make it go away.
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A wonderfully, well-written analysis of history and the state of affairs we have today. Sadly, far too few Americans have the intellectual honesty or curiousity to consider this story. May that start to change.
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I’ve some minor quibbles with Mr. Foy’s argument about American responsibility for both world wars (there’s no denying that Austro-Hungarian imperialism ignited the first, nor that Hitler sought to achieve his goals through war as well), but the main point of the article is factually accurate: the United State has been an empire for over a century, thanks to the messianic Yankee Puritanism that triumphed in 1865 (see Acton’s letter to Lee about the cause lost at Appomatox to understand this fully). The question now is whether it can recover from it (assuming there’s any will to do so) and how. When it comes to that, I’m a pessimist.
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Wow! Every now and then one comes across a corner
of the internet where clarity reigns. Both the art-
icle and the excellent comments about it give
me hope in this time of deep, deep darkness.
It is heartening to see that not everyone thinks
that history started in 1945.
Kudos to all!
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This was a brilliant piece. But James Cantrell should be writing
his own pieces! He is a genius.
For example he wrote ...
America, taking over for the British Empire, is serving the role as imperial giant to replace the vestiges of Western Christian Civilization with centralized, multicultural secularism held together by military force and bread and circuses.
Oliver Cromwell and Benjamin Disraeli and Abe Lincoln and British Empire worshiping Woodrow Wilson lead almost ineluctably to today’s Neocons and the final transformation of America into a centralized ‘democratic’ empire mandating worldwide abortion, homosexual promotion, religious syncretism and indifferentism, and philosophical relativism ruled by Anglophonic Elite might makes right judgment.
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Rather, Manifest Insanity. “The World Turned Upside
Down”, indeed!
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Great piece, Mr. Foy, and accurate. To those above who complain that it’s only Mr. Foy’s version of history, I draw your attention to these three disparate pieces.
If you have access to the LA Times Archives or Lexis-Nexis: “Commentary; A Serious Case of Mistaken Identity; The U.S. is not the ‘indispensable nation,’ as a growing WWII mythology would suggest”; BENJAMIN SCHWARZ. Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles, Calif.: Jun 22, 2000. pg. 11. Schwarz was the Literary Editor for the Atlantic Monthly at the time.
The second is “Equality, not Zionism, Will Save Israel” by Anthony Loewenstein on Tony Karon’s excellent blog. Karon is the Senior Editor for Time Magazine, a South African, Jewish, and lived on a kibbutz in his youth: http://tonykaron.com/2007/06/11/loewenstein-equality-not-zionism-will-save-israel/
The third is far more controversial for its content: Benjamin H. Freedman’s 1961 speech at the Willard Hotel in D.C. Freedman was a successful NYC Jewish businessman who broke with Judaism in 1945, and changed his last name to represent how he felt. One of the last interviewers to talk to him before his death discovered that Freedman’s father was a co-founder of the American Jewish Committee in 1906. Freedman was present at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 with Bernard Baruch when they were carving up Germany. His speech describes what led up to it and what happened afterward, The link: http://www.themodernreligion.com/jihad/freedman.html. If you search online for Benjamin H. Freedman, you can find a recording of it.
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Brilliant article. The real culprit in all this is your Constitution. It can be interprted to mean ANYTHING by an unprincipled, crafty lawyer and you have a wealth (no pun intended) of those in America.
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Ron Paul for President.
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The USSR was never a threat to the United States. On the contrary, WE were a threat to THEM. Their nuclear weapons were acquired to deter any US nuclear attacks on Soviet soil. (Remember Hiroshima and Nagasaki--there was a precedent.) Horrible as the Soviet experiment was, their foreign policy was essentially defensive and highly cautious.
And their invasion of Europe was a result of the bloodletting that cost them 20 million lives. Incidentally, Hungary and Rumania were Axis countries that participated in the German invasion of Russia.
This, of course, goes against all US orthodoxies, whether liberal, conservative, or libertarian.
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How did we get from there and then to now? First off, the south could not have been allowed to survive as a slave state. Secondly, to suggest that Hitler would have been satiffied with Poland is ridiculous. Thirdly to suggest that the present insanity can be laid at the feet of the fact that government of, by and for the people is somehow obsolete is to deny the last great hope for humanity. I will leave you with a line from my son’s first play “Wine To Blood” in which Sean O’Leary says, ‘I don’t konow if there is a Utopia, but I am certain that we must act as though there can be”.
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Fascinating summary which I mostly agree with, except – WWII. You don’t seem to attribute any homicidal malice or danger from Adolf Hitler, and I don’t think the world would benefit from his having conquered western Europe and England. I don’t think that would have been nice or beneficial at all. And the loss of even more Jews would have seriously deprived us culturally, intellectually, scientifically, etc., not to mention the poor example set by the death camps. That really had to be interfered with.
Otherwise, I agree that we absolutely should let the rest of the world, especially the Middle East, take care of its own business, while maintaining human intellligence to monitor events that could affect the U.S. Bring home all soldiers, weapons, equipment from South America, Europe, Korea, Middle East. We can be sure the oil will always find its way to the market.
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‘Death of American Empire’ by Patrick Foy is an outstanding article
eloquently but neatly summarising reality.
The only element I personally would like him to have included would be a
reference to ‘Ozymandias’ - Percy Bysshe Shelley’s inestimable comment on
the inevitability of nemesis following hubris:
‘My Name is Ozymandias King of kings
look on my works ye mighty and despair’
The ‘traveller in an Antique Land’ may well have been traversing
Mesopotamia [The land between between two rivers]- or modern day Iraq -
while the concluding desolation of the last few lines
‘Nothing beside remains. Around the base of that colossal wreck the lone
and level sands stretch far away’
well pressages the outcome and the end game for the insane delusions of US
foreign policy.
It is further noteworthy that throughout history the end of empire tends
always to be immediately preceeded by severe economic pressure brought
about by grandiose overstretch - combined in the last throes with the
feverish sabre rattling of terminal decline and ultimate collapse.
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Now we know why Southerners fought so valiantly in the War to Prevent Southern Independence. Lincoln was admired by Karl Marx and openly said so. Mr. Foy would enhance his position more by including more on the War of northern Agression and the similarities that exist today between W the Emperor and Abe I. Also lost on all of this is the massacre and genocide of Native Americans after the end of the CSA. Much of the terrorist tactics against Indians were lead by Sherman, who had perfected them against innocent civilians in the South.We can now see the nation’s propoganda machine in rewriting the true history of our country in today’s vilification of anything southern including her culture and symbols mainly ,the battle flag which is the only true American flag.. the other S$S one represents empire.How can we make Mr. Foy’s work more widespread to wake the rest of us up? I see this as a daunting task in the face of what Jimmy Carter called a malaisse. Godspeed Mr. Foy!
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Brilliant insights,I would suggest Patrick Foy might have stepped back further in US history that would reveal an impulse of the Judeo-christian project ( in-group loyalty, out-group contempt) that started with the domination and subsequent genocide of the native americans. Today most of those people have disappeared without leaving a trace as to who they were and how they lived and what they thought felt or believed.
This puts the “democratic” forms of the project into context. No matter what the constitution says and who gets elected the project continues. After all the land belonged to someone else.
Once north america had been overrun the original impulse drove what Patrick Foy has described, and the quest for global domination continues.
In Palestine or Iraq, this impulse finds its current expression as enslavement is followed by ethnic cleansing. This impulse will continue until the US empire implodes much as the soviet project imploded. Lets hope this happens before the peoples of the middle east disappear like the native americans.
In both cases there is only fear and loathing expressed towards the victims’ way of life and culture.
The takeover of the US by the military Industrial Zionist Allaince, combined with the complete ignorance of the general public makes any other outcome highly unlikely.
The huge danger is that the dozen or so sociopaths in AIPAC that run this country are now hell bent on instigating nuclear war and the outcome may be armaggedon.
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“There is an unbroken connection between the Great War, America’s unnecessary participation in it, and everything which has transpired since then all over the Middle East. It is a continuum. In Iraq, Lebanon and in Palestine, we are witnessing today the third chapter, in effect, of the European war begun in 1914”
Yeah, that’s exactly it. After the decline of the oppressive Soviet empire, much of Europe has finally returned to smaller, free states similar to those in place before 1914. I guess that marked the end of “chapter two” of the Great War.
Right about that time (1990), we then began to see more substantive shifts in the Middle East. I’m still waiting for the press to even begin to discuss what’s happening in geopolitical terms.
Beyond that, there’s been so many good books come out in recent years about Iraq and the Mid East that have been given very little attention by the U.S. press.
While we surely must blame both Republicans and Democrats in the Congress for giving Bush and the neocons a free ride on Iraq, the press continues to give them just as much of a free ride, never asking the obvious hard questions about either our goals or the historical/political context.
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Interesting article. It makes me more proud to be a member of the Communist Party and feel more contempt towards the greedy savages that run this country. America should convert to socialism, so that working class people can get what they need and those loyal to the Bush regime, as well as future Bush types, will get the kick in the pants they deserve
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Interesting reading. People have no idea when I say, “America has a history of pouncing on weaker nations and taking what it wants.” I have traveled the world and America is perceived as a aggressor nation and they wonder if they shall be next. People do radical things when afraid. I left working for the DOD after I found I could no longer sleep at night knowing what I knew about how the government works.
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