It is increasingly apparent America is not ours any longer. Founded as a willing union of states united by a common culture, language, and ancestry. The overwhelmingly British protestant settlers and their descendants forged thirteen unique colonies which, under repeated abuses by the crown and parliament, banded together and gained their independence. From this alliance was born the United States of America. However, as time wore on, the differences between these colonies turned states grew greater and greater. The once similar peoples drew apart. Ancestry was no longer counted from the old country. Instead, men from each state took great pride in the role his ancestors played building the state he lived in.
Economic interests compounded these new found ethnic interests. Industry in the north far outstripped that of the south. Influxes of immigrants like the Irish allowed for cheap factory work in the north. New technology like the cotton gin made cotton production not just possible on a large scale, but immensely profitable. As cotton sales and exports rose, imports of luxury items and other merchandise poured into the south. Manufacturing interests in the north saw the market in the south and began to use and support tariffs on foreign goods as a means to limit competition.
These and other sources of friction came to a head on the issue of slavery. If slavery were ended, the economic and historical back of the south would be broken. Farms and plantations would be forced to hire workers and the production of cotton would be opened to northern investors. As states were added to the union, the issue of whether or not they would be slave or free became critical. Were the balance broken, the stalemate would end in favor of one side or the other.
These tensions eventually broke when the first states left the union. In the months that followed, other states did the same. At this point, the United States of America that remained made the choice which transformed them into an empire: they declared war on the Confederacy with the express intention of reunification and collecting taxes. With this action it became openly acknowledged by the eventual victors of that war that the union was not a willing one.
With the war over, a new balance of power emerged. With the United States of America no longer being a willing union of individual states, political power began gathering in the new seat of government: Washington D.C. Over the next hundred and fifty years, this continued, resulting in the bloated monstrosity of a federal government we currently have.
An empire is large collection of territories, states, or nations under the rule of one authority. This is an empire.
Now, this might not have been a problem. The British and Roman empires were the best things to ever happen to their citizens. While the political situation would have never had been the same again and the citizens would have never regained their lost freedoms, an American empire could ultimately have been the greatest nation known to mankind.
This was not to be, however. For it is not an empire of a certain people. The Romans do not flaunt their iron rings nor do British soldiers patrol our streets. As time went on, immigrants added to the nations population and helped fill out both the massive spaces opening up in the west, but also the industrial factories back east. Immigration from other European nations was not ideal but tolerable. The Catholic Irish and Italians certainly did not mesh well with their English and Dutch neighbors, but at least they came from the same general area, had similar genetics, and worshiped the same God. As time wore on, immigrants became even more removed from the original stock of the nation. Northern Europeans gave way to Europeans in general. Most of these lacked the cultural and historical basis for the culture and way of life enjoyed by the American natives, even under the increasing excesses of the new founded empire. Over the next ninety-nine years, this pattern continued until the Immigration Act of 1964 was passed which forbid the government to discrimination on the basis of race or national origin among other things. The result can be seen today. Wave after wave of non-European immigrants have brought their own issues, interests, and needs to our shores, multiplying the problem of coexistence of the already disparate empire.
It is not an empire of a single belief, either. In fact, despite protestations to the contrary, America is not an empire of anything. Truth, justice, democracy, tolerance, and freedom are touted as the unifying force which holds us together. Yet, the truth is openly mocked by our leaders. Justice is trashed for in-group favoritism. Democracy – ever a terrifying prospect – is either undermined or used to further group divisions. Tolerance is a cudgel used to batter into submission any who dare raise their voice in opposition to the empire or its disastrous choices to treat like equals those who should be its subjects. Even freedom, supposedly the greatest of these virtues, is paid mere lip service to. While vices like weed, prostitution, sexual immorality, and self-indulgence are increasingly encouraged by the state – “its your life, you should live it how you want” – the true freedom to live and act in ways contrary to the empire are ratcheted down. Jack Donovan said it best in his book, Becoming the Barbarian. Quote,
“The Empire of Nothing is an international collection of self-interested and self-perpetuating systems with overlapping interests. These systems – banking institutions, military institutions and their vendor companies, governments, unions, special interest groups, manufacturers, retailers, real estate developers, entertainment companies, media conglomerates and so – all of these systems are all struggling to survive in Darwinian fashion. They are all made up of managers trying to advance their careers or protect their profession fiefdoms or maybe just keep their employees from getting fired. They are made up of normal people lookout for themselves. Big and small businesses trying to grow. Managers of departments trying to justify their budgets. People with various interests asserting them. Boring stuff. Bureaucracy.”
Here he is referring to the international Empire of Nothing. America is a microcosm of that larger empire, a province, a territory, though a powerful one (for now). This is the truth of our nation. It is not ours. It is not anyone’s. It exists, like so many other western nations currently do, to simply perpetuate itself and provide fodder for the cannibalistic individuals who run it.
Here is the difference, however, between nations of the old world and ours. Where European nations both belong to a distinct people, America does not. Certainly, descendants of the original colonists and those who founded the nation can claim parts of the nation, but they cannot claim the vast stretches of the mid-west farmed for generations by German and Scandinavian settlers. They cannot claim Texas or Louisiana, settled, fought for, and won by Spanish and French settlers. Indeed, this question of ownership and claim are muted by the transience of modern life and the continued invited invasion of non-Americans into America.
In the end, the American empire will end like all other empires. Split apart by disparate interests and peoples, it will fall to the scavengers and rebuilders. The ancient romans had no claim on what followed them by the end. They foolish policies and treaties with foreign tribes which made a mockery of their borders and their people allowed them to be replaced as easily as could be. In just such a manner, those who built the American empire will have no claim on what replaces them. With short sighted greed for power and wealth, they have doomed their homeland to division and destruction.
For these reasons, I say this: America is not ours. It is not our home. It is not our land. It is not our people. Because of the idiotic decisions made by its leaders over generations, what could have been a glorious imperium, stretching through time and space, has fallen into its last days. Its power wains; its reach diminishes. Soon the chaos chewing at its borders will break through, debts long unpaid will be called for accounting, and the dissimilar regions, peoples, and religions will break apart. In this, you will find no aid from the empire. Its resources spent, it will seek only to protect itself. The corrupt who have perpetuated it will draw their lines tighter and tighter until they find themselves holding nothing at all. They care only for money from you now, why, when you either cannot or will not provide that any longer, would they care for you then? America is not ours.
