Perpetual war for perpetual peace (in rezumat) American imperialism, born amid the ashes of World War II, isn’t about profits for the defense industry: it isn’t even about the thrill the neocons get whenever we bomb yet another defenseless Muslim country. It’s about what that thrill tells us about the dominant ideas of America’s political class. America’s ruling elite has been progressive since the dawn of modernity, right before the first world war. This ideology has a name: we call it progressivism. It has a long history, starting with Teddy Roosevelt and his intellectual publicists, continuing through the Great War and the run-up to World War II – when it was the left that was screaming for US intervention in the European conflict – and its aftermath. Based on ignorance not only of economics but of human nature itself, and imbued with religious elements that date all the way back to the post-millennial pietism of the great fundamentalist revival of the early nineteenth century, American progressivism has evolved until it has taken on all the elements of an expansionist, supremely militaristic ideology. It is a creed based on the assumption that government power must be utilized to lift up the ignorant masses: to not only feed, clothe, and educate them, but also to ensure their perfect safety. Once our progressives had transformed the old America into an experimental laboratory for their social engineering projects, it was only natural that these crusading idealists would turn their sights on the rest of the world. Not content to thrust the paw of government power into every aspect of our lives here in America, the nation’s do-gooders are intent on exporting their do-goodism to the four corners of the globe. This is why our foreign policy consists of endless war, as Greenwald puts it: because if your goal is world domination, then the war to establish a global authority – with Washington as its capital – must be necessarily open-ended. That’s because there will always be resistance to such a project: once a rebellion is put down in the Middle East, for example, another one is more than likely to pop up in Africa, or eastern Europe, or someplace else.
Posted on: Fri, 10 Oct 2014 06:46:33 +0000
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