There is a total void of “leadership” in Washington. There is no “Biden.” Just Team Biden: a corporate combo featuring low-rent messengers such as de facto neocon Little Blinkie. They do what they’re told by wealthy “donors” and the financial-military interests that really run the show, reciting the same old cliché-saturated lines day after day, bit players in a Theatre of Absurd.[i]
We are ruled by men and women of power that essentially believe in the religion of power[ii] and the grasping for more power only to use that power to lord it over men for their own greed and pleasure (Eccl.8:9). That is why power politics is such a potent aphrodisiac: it leads to the desire for even more.[iii]
America First or Something Else?
The problem with “nationalism” is that it has the tendency to project itself beyond historic boundaries, both morally and politically.[iv] Indeed, the very thing the State insists it will protect the people from - danger - it ends up precipitating in an ironic quest for power and control.[v] This is an old process used again and again throughout history.
In ancient Greece a man named Plato wrote of this very tendency in his book, The Republic. He noted the tendency of those in power to pull the eminent danger card by “constantly inciting wars, in order that the people may stand in need of a leader” in an attempt to maintain both their position and control in and of society.[vi]
During the Roman Republic, we find the same scenario occurring as Freeman noted in his book Egypt, Greece & Rome, “A traditional view has seen Rome primarily as a defensive power, reacting to events rather than creating them. According to this view the Carthaginians, Philip of Macedon, the invading Celts, were all threatening forces to which Rome had to respond as she had had to respond early in her history to those who had threatened her on the exposed plain of Latium.”[vii] Yet in ancient Rome, “A number of forces, economic, social, and political, thus combined to create an active will for war and this explains why Rome was seldom at peace.”[viii]
Nonetheless it was these "forces" that moved the Roman Republic, similar to the Greek City-States "beyond historic boundaries" in a quest for empire even though the justification was protection of the people and their freedoms. The latter ended up destroying itself in the Peloponnesian War; the former became the largest empire of the ancient world until it exhausted itself and collapsed.
American “Interests” or Private Investments?
At first blush, there appears to be no correlation between what happened long ago and far away with that of America. After all – "this is America." However, and similar to the 1913 creations of the IRS and Federal Reserve, another group of institutions, these privately owned, had developed during the 20th century. Oddly enough, they would be publicly noted by departing President Eisenhower in a Farewell Address as president: the Military Industrial Complex.[ix]
There are various companies that exist but there are ten main contractors that provide America, as well as other nations and countries willing to pay, the hardware necessary to project power over others.[x] It seems obvious, that as profit making enterprises, this portion of American business interests has had a vested “interest” in war as war means profit, regardless of how one attempts to justify the existence of “defense contractors.”
Equally of note, if America needs to build up its military then the government will need money to supply the Pentagon with a fiscal budget to execute war. Thus, Congress must agree to borrow the money[xi] which means it borrows from the Federal Reserve/Treasury consortium.[xii]
In other words, what was once the guiding political structure of the American people long ago began to institutionalizeand solidify.[xiii] When that happened, the purpose of these institutions changed from service to the maintaining of power and the projecting of power both domestically and internationally and that for profit. The original purposes were laid aside; something new had taken its place that consumes large amounts of time, money, effort and blood to hold together. America would find out that, similar to ancient Rome, it was one thing to defeat a foreign power (or invade it to "liberate it"), it was another thing to maintain control over it ("rebuild it"?).
As Susan Wise Bauer noted in her The History of the Ancient World, “Rome had thrown its net across peoples on the outside, and as it began to mutate towards an empire it faced the same difficulties as the Persians or Spartans: how to combine people with great power (the original conquerors) and those with no power (the conquered, now absorbed) into a harmonious whole.”[xiv]
Unlike the Romans who would plunder rebelling countries or exact tribute from them, America does neither thus forcing the American tax-payer either short-term through taxes or long-term via the Federal Reserve’s inflation of the currency to bear the burden of such wars (all the while ignoring the business deals that take place in the wake of our "intervention"). Equally of note, and unlike Rome, we make little change upon the countries we war in thus making our “American influence” nothing more than a body-count. Through it all, no one seems to want to challenge the cost of keeping it all together nor the danger for the common man domestically or internationally.[xv]
As Niall Ferguson noted in his book Colossus: The Price of America’s Empire, there are seven characteristic phases of American engagement that can be discerned:
1. Impressive initial military success.
2. A flawed assessment of indigenous sentiment.
3. A strategy of limited war and gradual escalation of forces.
4. Domestic disillusionment in the face of protracted and nasty conflict.
5. Premature democratization.
6. The ascendancy of domestic economic considerations.
7. Ultimate withdrawal.[xvi]
We need to ask hard questions as to who and what it is that drives our foreign policy. Equally important, and with regard to America, we need to take a step back and ask if everything really is for America’s benefit? And if it is for “America’s benefit” – which America, represented by whom, for the good of whom? Do statesmen or predators run our country and foreign policy?
The Future Will Be?
Yet in opposition to this paternalism is an Augustinian reality[xvii] that is simply this: government interventionism whether abroad militarily, or via legislation and regulation domestically, will not ultimately change a people and make them “good,” nor the world “safe for democracy.” Indeed, if history shows us anything, it is that those who act “in the name of the people” when taking away various freedoms “for the protection of the people” may in fact be the enemies of the people in the long run.
Christian Liberty Homeschools offers a different alternative to government education by showing the real purpose of education: freedom. See us at: www.homeschools.org
Books on My Shelf:
God and Government:
Moses and Pharoah: Dominion Religion versus Power Religion:
https://www.amazon.com/Moses-Pharaoh-Dominion-Religion-Versus/dp/0930464052
Citations:
[i] https://strategic-culture.su/news/2024/01/19/the-ukraine-charade-revisited/
[ii] https://www.amazon.com/Moses-Pharaoh-Dominion-Religion-Versus/dp/0930464052
[iii] https://fee.org/articles/political-power-lust-thrives-in-a-democracy/
[iv] “Governments, with rare exceptions, seek to expand their power beyond the mandate to restrain evil, preserve order, and promote justice. Most often they do this by venturing into religion or moral areas. The reason is two-fold: the state needs religious legitimization for its policies and an independent church is the one structure that rivals the state’s claim of ultimate allegiance.” Charles Colson, Kingdoms in Conflict, (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1987), p. 172.
[v] Similar to all the other programs that must be paid for including banking bailouts in 2008 and 2009. Thus the Matrix of banking, politicians and businessmen who rule America. See: G. William Domhoff, Who Rules America, (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1964, 2009).
[vi] The Republic, 566:3.
[vii] Charles Freeman, Egypt, Greece & Rome, (United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2014), 392.
[viii] Ibid, p. 393.
[ix] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military%E2%80%93industrial_complex See actual speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8y06NSBBRtY
[x] www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2013/03/10/10-companies-profiting-most-from-war/1970997/
[xi] http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/inflating-war/
[xii] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve_System
[xiii] Carroll Quigley, The Evolution of Civilizations, (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1979), p. 103-118. As Carroll Quigley points out in The Evolution of Civilizations, the engine of a civilizations progress, once institutionalized, becomes the instrument of its stagnation, and eventually its destruction. Few people realize that a shift that took place in the early church from organizing believers according to families and neighborhoods to that of large institutions patterned on the type found in the secular Roman world that were top down and bureaucratic. Michael W. Kelley expertly summarizes how this occurred in his book The Impulse of Power, (Minneapolis, MN: Contra Mondum, 1998), p. 128-129.
[xiv] Susan Wise Bauer, The History of the Ancient World, (New York, NY: The Norton Company, 2007), p. 555.
[xv] https://mises.org/blog/they-made-us-reds-fight-reds
[xvi] Niall Ferguson, Colossus: The Price of America’s Empire, (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2004), p. 48.
[xvii] An “Augustinian reality” refers to Church Father St. Augustine’s perspective on government only being for the purpose of protecting people’s lives and property and punishing evil; nothing more.