The Two Empires We Must Defeat
By Daniel Greenfield
SultanKnish.Blogspot.com
There is a thread that connects many of our
conflicts, whether it's the one against terrorism or
the one between the Republican establishment and its
conservative insurgency. To win a war, we have to
understand the nature of the conflict and how we got
there. And that's often the missing piece.
The
left blames imperialism for our conflict with
terrorists. And it's right. Just not in the way that
it thinks.
Empires may be expansionist, but they're also
tolerant and multicultural. They have to be, since
out of their initial phase they have to enlist the
cooperation and services of subjects from a variety
of cultures and religions. An empire may initially
be fueled by the talents and skills of a core
nation, but as it reaches its next phase, it begins
sacrificing their interests to the larger structure
of empire.
The argument between the establishments of the right
and the left is over two different kinds of empires.
The Republican establishment in America and its
various center-right counterparts abroad have
attached themselves to the liberal vision of a
transnational empire of international law so much
that they have forgotten that this vision came from
the left, rather than from the right.
This Empire of International Law proved to have some
uses for global trade and security, particularly
during the Cold War. These practical arrangements
however are overshadowed by the fact that it, like
every empire, sacrifices the interests of its
peoples to its own structure. This is true of the
structure at every level, from the EU to the Federal
structure of the United States. The system has
displaced the people. And the system runs on
principles that require cheap labor leading to
policies like amnesty.
The Empire of International Law needs Muslim
immigrants even if its people don't, because it
envisions integrating them and their countries into
this arrangement and rejects national interests as
narrow-minded and nativist.
This formerly liberal vision now embraced largely by
centrists is the left's vision, which includes
today's liberals, is of a completely transnational
ideological empire in which there are no borders,
but there are countless activists, in which
everything and everyone are controlled by the state.
Like the more conventional imperial vision, the
left's red Empire of Ideology depends on enlisting
Muslims and Muslim countries into its ranks. This is
the basis of the Red-Green alliance.
These two types of imperialists are incapable of
representing native workers or communities because
they are transnationalists. Their vision is
cosmopolitan, rather than representative. They are
entranced with a byzantine international arrangement
and uninterested in the lives of the people they are
ruining.
This Imperial blindness is why the West is falling
so swiftly to Islam. It's why the pockets of
resistance are coming from nations outside the
imperial sphere.
Countries like Israel, India or Burma are dependent
on specific groups and are not truly part of either
empire. They are not transnational. They are
national. And it's why they are still holding out.
The empires have made their inroads into them.
Israel has its tycoon class that would love nothing
more than to join the transnational empire. It has
its radical left that would destroy Israel for the
world revolution. But it also has millions of people
that understand that their lives are on the line.
The resistance to Islam has come from outside the
empire. It has come from countries that are neither
part of Islam nor the Empire. Those countries may be
large, like India or China, or precariously small,
like Israel, but they have a dominant ethnic and/or
religious identity and are not truly part of the
Empire, though they have extensive interconnections
with it.
These countries have minority groups, including
sizable Muslim minorities, but they also have a
national interest that is tethered to its majority.
The United States used to be that way, until not
long ago. And then it lost touch with itself. It
became diseased with empire and the disease of
empire has nothing to do with pith helmets or
planting flags. It's what happens when the structure
of the system becomes more important than the
people. When that happens the old principles that
are based on the people are set aside and replaced
with principles that are based on the system.
That is how globalism came to trump American
workers. It's how accommodating Islam came to matter
more than anything else.
An empire may begin by conquering other countries,
but it invariably ends by conquering and consuming
its own. The empire we are part of isn't, despite
the left's rhetoric, a conquering empire. American
territorial expansionism ended long before we became
part of an empire. Instead we are part of an empire
of systems, an empire of principles, an empire of
internationalism, of trade and of pieces of papers,
legal and financial, being moved through the bowels
of our endless systems.
This is the thing that we call international law.
And it has to die for us to live.
This is the empire that feeds armies of foreign
immigrants through our countries. It's also the
empire that pays allegiance to Islam because empires
have to diversify to expand. Diversity isn't the
source of our strength. It is the source of imperial
expansionism which has to absorb many more peoples.
To empires, people are interchangeable. If the
natives have a low birth rate and a long lifespan,
then workers with high birth rates and lower
lifespans are brought in to replace them. If the
natives are reluctant to pay higher taxes,
immigrants from countries that are fine with voting
for high taxation are imported. That is how empires,
not nations, do business.
This is what the political establishment in most
countries believes. This is what tearing them apart.
The only way for the nations to survive is for the
empire, in all its forms, the ideological
revolutionary empire of the left and the centrist
empire of international law, to to be cast off.
Every political revolution that fails to take into
account the power of these two empires on our
national politics is doomed to fail. To win a
conflict, you have to understand what you are
fighting.
We are fighting against two variations on the same
set of ideas about the importance of transnational
institutions over national ones. We are fighting
against the entrenched loyalty to systems and
ideology over people. We are fighting empires that
have displaced people for ideas.
The only possible revolution that can succeed
against these two empires is populist. It must
emerge from the needs of the people of a country to
be free, to be prosperous and to manage its own
affairs. It must proceed by showing the people how
they have been victimized and how they are being
victimized. And it must show them that they reclaim
what their grandparents had if they take back
controls over their own countries and destinies.
The
rhetoric of empire is seductive. Our educational
systems implant it at an early age. It is not the
empire of explorers and conquerors, but of lawyers
and social justice activists. Against it we must
raise the flag of national interests.
The left and the right establishments pretend that
they have two very different sets of ideas about the
world. They have the same set of ideas, one is a
more extreme version of the other. The left fights
its own heresies much more fiercely than it does the
right. Its rhetoric about imperialism is a rejection
of its former ideas about empire for its more
radical empire. And we do not want either empire.
What we must have is an end to empires and the rise
of nations. Only nations that answer to the national
interests of their people can stand against the
savage barbarian migrating tide.