Empire End

Empires are born, rise and grow, and eventually die. Most of the times they die from within. Sure, external forces eventually conquer the civilization that's been built over centuries, but that's only after the empire has begun to rot from within and over-extends its military and economical forces.

It's a well known fact that history, at least the history that survives, is written by the victors. This can be seen by merely looking at the language, the tone that's used to speak about empires. There's an enormous disparity between what empires actually do and how they're represented in history; empires are written about by people who live in the imperial countries and are depicted in a rather celebratory manner. Ever notice how empires are often represented as creators of peace? The Latin word for "peace" is "pax" and we have the Roman empire as "Pax Romana", the British as "Pax Brittannica" and even the current empire as "Pax Americana", when America has been involved with some armed conflict or another every single day since the Second World War. Even the Germans applied to the hypothetical Imperial German victory in the First World War the term "Pax Germanica." Empires are seen as bringers of peace, stability and security, when in fact their births, expansion and death are always colored with the blood of the territories and peoples they conquer. Notice, as an aside, how all these empires have a starring role for, mainly white, European men. If you're still in doubt over the existence or not of "white supremacy" or "white privilege," well, I don't know what to say...

Empires are of course not benevolent forces that set out to bring peace and stability to the conquered territories. There's always an economical or geopolitical reason for the invasion, and these reasons are always of the material kind, not the ideological or even religious kind. It's for the natural resources, cheap (slave) labor and the tributes or taxes that are to be paid to the invaders. Our current empire, with America at its heart, has achieved another way to get the tributes and taxes; they made their dollar the world currency. Empires, in their final stages, reach the limits of expansion sooner or later. Usually this is when they can no longer afford to finance their military; with a larger empire, there's need for a larger, more expensive military to control the expanded borders and to expand even further. That's why the weakening of Empires starts at its heart; the tactics of taxation and suppression first applied to the conquered peoples are, in the end, applied to their own people in order to pay the ever rising cost of the military-, surveillance- and security apparatus.

This is where the current empire is right now. The American people pay the cost for the capitalist expansionist addiction of the corporate state. The rising instability, the distrust of government and institutions, the reactionary response embodied in the election of a clown like Trump, these are all signs of an empire that's rotting from within. And the rot is expanding to the periphery, slowly but surely, with reactionary right wing forces rising in Europe as well. Centuries of exploiting the conquered nations, be it through military or economical force, has left the European and American peoples, especially the white portions, with a sense of entitlement. Only now, when Europeans and Americans feel the pain of capitalist expansionism as opposed to its benefits, do we see a rise of more socialist rhetoric and opposition to the capitalist status quo. We see it in the popularity of a man like Bernie Sanders, or the slightly increased efforts at unionization. It has to be said however, that social democracy or social safety nets in general have been paid for by the benefits that empire's expansionism brought to the empire's inhabitants.

Right now we're at an interesting juncture in history. Previous empires had new territories to expand into. And when they died, there was an external force to invade and take over. In public and political discourse this new enemy, the new head of the new empire, is China. But I dare to question the validity of this generally accepted view. You see, China, and Russia as well, have become an integral part of the current capitalist world empire. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the opposing communist world ideology, we've been living in a neoliberal world economy. Sure, maybe China becomes the new heart, but it's the same empire. And this makes it interesting and scary; there's no way to expand anymore. There are no new territories to be conquered. There's no external force to invade or take over. If we don't make fundamental political and economical changes from within the current empire, the only possible changes we can hope for is a total breakdown from within, or an invasion from outer space. I don't particularly like either of those...

Anyhow, that's it for today's rant. I'll leave you with this equally pessimistic, but very enlightening speech by Chris Hedges titled "The Myth of Human Progress and the Collapse of Complex Societies." In it he draws an interesting comparison between the demise of captain Ahab's ship in his relentless hunt for Moby Dick, and the demise of our society in its relentless hunt for ever more material wealth.

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