It is in Empire's decline, therefore, that we can see how the human heaven eventually becomes its hell, how our greatest triumphs become our greatest defeats, how Empire's virtues steadily become its vices and how our fragile psyches fall prey, as they always do, to Empire's follies. What man does at its height and full glory, at a time when the baskets are full, springs are flowing and minds are at ease, can tell us who and what we truly are, helping us decipher the human condition, for if when times are good we invariably descend into the ominous caverns of human vice and wickedness, what does that say about us as a species?
Empire's Malignancies
It is inside the parameters of the lands called the United States that the downfall of humanity's latest foray into Empire can readily be seen. Growing in size and proportion every passing year, her decline, while not imminent or yet seen, can nonetheless be felt, upon closer inspection, much like the movement of the winds or the arrival of the tides. Her destiny has always been foretold, much like every past attempt at human Empire, for nothing is as predictable as the human condition and our species' inability to defeat the hands of evolution. In the delusion of our minds Empire seems like the chosen kingdom of the gods, yet in reality is but the consequence of our mammalian pathology, a quest achieved by gang warfare, violence, death, lust for territory, greed, arrogance, corruption of morality, hunger for resources, power, control and the always hovering ego.
Born through Manifest Destiny, growing and expanding, like any Empire before, through war, violence, genocide and ethnic cleansing of peoples whose lands she coveted, her appetite for land leading to rape, pillage and stolen territories, to the decimation and suffering of millions of indigenous peoples, enriching and gorging herself through the natural resources prevalent in the lands she stole in pursuit of Empire, her power and wealth growing exponentially through the mass exploitation and toil, not to mention the unpaid blood, sweat and tears of African enslavement, America set her sails on the course to hegemony, using the blueprints of Empires past to transform herself into a modern incarnation of Rome.
Ethnocentrically centered on her Anglo-Saxon pedigree, America would, in pursuit of possession of lands from Atlantic to Pacific, imitate her English predecessor, embarking on a Crusade of brutal warfare against America's native and darker skinned peoples, decimating millions of human beings through destruction of cultures, decimation of societies, rape of women, pillage of land, genocide, ethnic cleansing and the devastation of a continent at one time fluid with heterogeneous cultures and peoples. It would be during her wars against the native peoples of America that the Empire's xenophobia, racism, antipathy and hatred of those whose skin is the color of the land would be cultivated and conditioned into her population, to remain in perpetuity, transcending time and space, generation after generation.
It would be her sense of superiority over these "different" peoples that would nurture in America's evolving character the belief that their death, cleansing and destruction - whether in the Great Plains or Southeast Asia or Latin America or Mesopotamia or among her very own urban jungles - would be of no consequence or importance, their death a product of expanding the Empire, their suffering seen as no more significant than that of an animal. In the quick span of time and conquest, between and during the intervals of constant warfare, those massacred and cleansed were seen as subhuman, savages and barbarians whose death and tragedy at the hands of Empire's army were logical consequences to resisting Manifest Destiny and god's chosen state.
Of course the torture, dehumanization, rape, pillage, brutal occupation, murder, humiliation, disappearances, decimation of human rights, false imprisonment, tyranny and utter contempt for human life prevalent in America's disasters in Iraq or Afghanistan are not exclusive to the last few years. Rather, it has been methodical and systematic, an unending product of expanding Empire and of maintaining control over her vast fiefdoms throughout the globe, lasting over decades of time, past, present and future, afflicting millions from almost every land, of every religion, of every ethnic origin. It is the nature of Empires, and thus of humankind, from those in Mesopotamia, Asia and Africa and Mesoamerica, from Sumer to Babylon, from Egypt to Greece to Rome, from the Mayas to the Inca to the Aztec, from the Ottomans to the Persians, from the English to the Spanish.
The brutality of the Pax Americana, with the stench of death, indigence and suffering apparent everywhere it lays its omnipresent grip, is the result of policies created and enforced towards maintaining wealth and power, of expanding interests and of retaining control over the vast sphere of influence. It is the result of Empire building and of curtailing rivals and rebellions to its hegemony, of retaining for both the masses and the Establishment the greatest standard of living the world has ever seen. For the Empire, it is standard operating procedure, becoming the modus operandi of presidents, of time periods, of education and of generations born and dead, a policy to be continued until decline and fall or until its philosophy is altered from within.
To the heathens whose skin was and is the color of the earth, Manifest Destiny did not end with the extermination of the Native Indians. It has continued mercilessly, devastating millions of people whose only crime is inhabiting lands whose resources the Empire covets and whose slave labor her population depends on for their ever-expanding waistlines their voracious greed and ever-demanding standards of living. Indeed, it is because of the demands of the citizenry inside the Empire, whether made knowingly or not, by its sheer spending capacity, demand for goods, needs and wants, along with its refusal to institute change that America embarks on the destruction of lands and the near enslavement of peoples. Inside Empire her entrails must be fed and appeased to the engorgement of their lifestyles, less the hunger pains of having to live like the rest of the planet creep into existence, popping the infallible bubble shielded by predatory capitalism and debauched democracy.
The slaughter has not stopped, it has simply evolved, from smallpox-infected blankets, Fire Water and banishment into hellholes called reservations to the wholesale mass murder in the Philippines to the introduction of crack cocaine into America's urban jungles to the devastation of economic genocide called sanctions to the virtual enslavement of land and peoples called market colonialism that has resulted in vast poverty and lost opportunity to the chemical WMD called Agent Orange in Vietnam that has killed hundreds of thousands and riddled with disease countless more to the herbicide warfare in Columbia to today's dirty bombs in Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon called depleted uranium, with cluster bombs, missiles and artillery raining down on innocent populations who will have to live generations with cancers, disease, death and deformities, the American appetite for violence is and has remained unrelenting, a natural product of her imperial and Empire aspirations, along with the love of materialism by her population that has, with the passage of time, only continued to grow.
Unwilling to alter a standard of living that has reached unsustainable proportions, with its population expanding instead of curtailing its outrageous demands for ever-increasing standards of living, its greed of material wealth and love of consumerism outstripping all semblance of control, the population inside the Empire are complicit in the crimes furthered by America. In its locust-like appetite for materialism and consumerism the citizenry of the Empire has condemned billions of their fellow human beings to a life in utter indigence, their abilities and talents used not for the betterment of themselves or their families, but for the greed of the plague hemorrhaging the planet towards its ultimate limit.
Untold millions remain at the margins of society, sacrificing opportunity and happiness, having to live inside polluted lands, under corrupted governments and under extreme duress, all so that the chosen few in America can continue living in privilege, comfort and security, without the concerns and stresses of billions, without knowing what suffering is like, without seeing that reality for billions is a life harsh, brutal and oftentimes full of tragedy, where life is lived one day at a time, meal to meal, surviving living in shacks, drinking foul water, hoping to escape the fate of disease, forced to allow capitalism to exploit your full life, slowly, yet surely, eviscerating the energy inside you that makes you human.
For the prosperity of 300 million people five billion must be sacrificed, their lands pillaged, resources stolen, their nations made subservient vassal states squeezed of their energy, their soils despoiled, air poisoned, water made toxic. Billions of human beings make two dollars or less a day, with billions making a dollar more, all living on fumes, finding food from the garbage heaps of society, forced to become the automatons churning America's unending addiction to materialistic goods, transforming thinking flesh into robotic automation, becoming the slaves of the Empire, of the Pax Americana, the only nation blessed by the Christian god.
Every Empire has its domestic slaves, as well as its foreign ones, a servant class of people engineered by society to do America's dirty, dehumanizing and hard labor, the kind of work hidden from view, tucked away in the armpit of the state's cesspool, jobs Empire's citizens no longer care to perform. It is the labor of sweat, of blood and of tears, of unhinged and exerted energy that punishes the body and drains the mind and that has produced in the citizenry such aversion to its toil as to grant it exclusive reservation to the slave class.
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