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Entry: America: An Empire? Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/america_an_empire#12875 Post contents: @ Mr I Am Not Spartacus, "the Chinese have to steal and/or reverse engineer much of the technology they will eventually misuse." Yep, and they do the same thing to Western ideas of ALL kinds, including Marxism. I have ALMOST nothing but contempt for Karl Marx and his crackpot ideology, but Marx had SOME good qualities and a FEW ideas worth thinking about. But Mao and the Chinese Communist Party turned "Marxism" into something they call "socialism with Chinese characteristics", which is not the least bit Marxist or Western at all. If Marx could have seen Mao's Communist Party, or today's Chinese Communist Party, he would turn over in his grave and then convert to Christianity (which, for all we know, Marx might be doing in Purgatory. Although I've become a Protestant, Purgatory is one of the beliefs of the Catholic Church which I think the Protestants were stupid to repudidate.) And the contemporary Chinese interpretation of "free markets" is equally as bastardised as Mao's interpretation of Marxism. Americans who believe in China's "economic miracle" are not only stupid, but willfully evil in their refusal to think about this in honest ways. And you wrote: "I think one reason so many Americans buy into the China threat is they are victims of the paranoid propaganda produced by the establishment Empire which needs an enemy abroad to justify limiting liberty at home." True to some extent, but there's more to it than that. The American fantasy of China as a "great power" (which Europeans have shared to a lesser extent) is over 200 years old. But it's especially American to fantasise about China as a "great power", and a lot of it has to do with the American fantasy of "going West" toward El Dorado while repudiating Europe, as all too many so-called "non-interventionists" (many, but not all of whom were Nazi fifth-columnists) did in 1940. Robert Taft advocated American intervention against Mao's China in the early 1950s. I admit, he was mostly a wise and honourable man, but I wish his acolytes among the American so-called "Old Right" would take a closer look at the flimsy (albeit honourable) icon of Saint Robert Taft, who tended to agree with the America Firsters (like JFK who got us into the swamps of Viet Nam), whose policy was not so much "America First" as it was "ASIA First!" The American-nationalist tendency to look toward the Far East as the locus of America's manifest destinty, is over 200 years old. I'm asking our readers to step back and take a deep breath and please think about that, a lot, and hopefully then some of them MIGHT begin to re-think the myths they believe in, about Saint Robert Taft (a good man, in my opinion) and Charles Lindbergh (a useful idiot of the Nazis, in my opinion), and the whole complex narrative of the American "Old Right", which needs to do a hell of a lot of re-thinking. (Oh and for what it's worth, my grandfather, John D Ball Sr (1899-1962), was nicknamed the "Mr Republican (in the 1940s-50s meaning, the 'Robert Taft') of Montgomery County Pennsylvania." My grandfather adored Senator Taft - in my grandfather's time. But then in 1974, shortly before Nixon (a man whom I admire in many ways) resigned, my father (who had "converted" to the Democratic Party because of his scorn of the corruptions of Nixon's party which KEPT our boys in Viet Nam for TOO long) - my father said, at the dinner table in 1974, that "the Republican Party should have gone extinct, like the Whigs, in 1969 after Nixon broke his promise and kept our boys in Viet Nam...." That said, throughout the Viet Nam war my father always wrote letters, once a month, to every one of his former students who was sent to Viet Nam. Because my Dad remembered (from 1944-45) what it was like to be a very young man in combat, far from home. But my Dad began to curse Nixon in 1969, because Nixon broke his promise to get America out of that stupid war in which several dozen of my Dad's students were killed. Anyway, that PS is just my way of letting you know that I, too, belong to the heritage of Senator Robert Taft. I just hope that all of Senator Taft's other acolytes will think a bit more about how inconsistent the American "non-interventionists" have been. JFK belonged to "America First", but then he got us entangled in the swamps of Viet Nam. So here's a reminder, that there's a big difference between "talking the talk" of non-interventionism, versus CONSISTENTLY "walking the walk." So-called "non-interventionists" can (and often do) arbitrarily define foreign wars as matters of American national interest. As I'm a lawyer, I of all people understand how (as Mark Twain said), "the difference between lightning and a lightning bug is only one word." So, please, all of your self-described "non-interventionists", please always remember, that the difference between "intervention" versus "America's national interest" can very easily be changed, through just one word, arbitrarily spoken. Sent at: 2009 01 07