Decline and Fall, Part 4: Palatine or Palpatine?

dueler88

Prerequisite reading:
Decline and Fall, Part 1
Decline and Fall, Part 2: Flexible History
Decline and Fall, Part 3: Civilization vs. Culture

The next point of Ward-Perkins I would like to address is the contemporary conception of “Empire” – that any such system is inherently evil and therefore must be destroyed.

Use of the word Empire to describe the negative context of current events has become quite fashionable. What, however, exactly is an Empire? Webster defines it as “a major political unit having a territory of great extent or a number of territories or peoples under a single sovereign authority.” To expand on that in a contemporary context, Empire’s central organizing principle, I believe, is a proactive need to control as many individual lives as possible in order to support the state.

Ward Perkins argues that greater Rome was not actually an “empire” by our modern definition – that is, by my armchair-historian definition, a central organizing principle of proactive need to control as many individual lives as possible in order to support the state. Ancient Rome, to me, was actually more of a realm of mutual economic protection than it was an oppressive central government. The complex economic system, in spite of its inequities and brutalism, eventually brought an unprecedented level of prosperity and sophistication to nearly all strata of classes within its “empire.” Millions of people throughout the "empire" significantly benefited in a higher quality of life and personal liberty as compared to other civilization around the world at the time. No wonder Thomas Jefferson thought they were so cool. Sadly, such beneficial innovations and social complexities were never again to be seen between for many centuries after the fall of the empire.

Our experience of the 20th century in “Wars for Empire” has certainly left a bad taste in our mouths. This includes not only the obvious colonial-flavored conflicts of the early 20th Century, but also the brutal imperialism of the mid- and late-20th century.

I can’t think of any societies that were more Imperialistic than Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan and Communism, both Soviet and Chinese. It should be obvious to all with even a simplistic knowledge of WW2 and The Cold War era that each of these groups was an instigator of unspeakable horrors against millions of people. The Nazis took race-based elitism to a sickening new, and expansive, depth. The Japanese slaughtered and enslaved hundreds of thousands of Asian people in their implementation of a “Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere” (how’s that for foreshadowing P.C. semantics?) Soviet Communists killed and enslaved tens of millions of their free-thinking citizens in quest of a worker’s utopia, then followed up with the metastasization of oppression upon millions of Asian peoples.

So I now ask the question: as evidenced by the above Imperialistic behavior, can the United States be accused of Empire in its current fight against militant Islam and the despotic regimes that support and shelter it? We have gone to great tactical and strategic lengths to focus our violence and destruction upon a specific group of people who wish to hasten their own form of Imperialist oppression; a group of people, by the way, that has no such self-limitation or targeted use of force.

I submit to you that it is oxymoronic to insist that individual liberty can be forced upon a population. The hundreds of patriotic Americans that have come before me would probably agree with me, in that the Declaration of Independence doesn’t apply just to people living in North America. It applies to every single human being living today. Will we be brave enough to heed JFK’s words to do whatever is necessary to “assure the survival and success of liberty?” Can it be any clearer that JFK’s political party has lost its way?

We are living through an unprecedented time of supporting and defending the ideals of individual liberty by means of killing tens of thousands of people. The advance of technology combines with a brutal enemy’s deceptive tactics to challenge the foundations of our civil liberties. We severely restrain our capacity for horrific violence in order to preserve our own lives, the lives of innocents, and even the lives of our enemies.

Is this the behavior of an Empire?