Friday, October 06, 2006

The American Empire and PC

America is an Empire.

However, it is not an Empire in the classic sense. Since the end of the Roman Empire in Antiquity, there have been, in the Western orbit, two major Imperial regimes:

1) Western Imperialism—with subsets delineated by nascent polities that became nation-states, including, in chronological order, the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, the Dutch Empire, the British Empire, the Russian Empire, the French Empire, the Italian Empire, and the German Empire;

and

2) Islamic Imperialism—with various complex subsets that are not relevant for today’s post.

Western Imperialism began to be institutionally and ideologically deconstructed by the mid-20th century, with profound precursors in the inter-Colonialist tensions and conflicts that finally erupted in the Great War of 1914-1918, as well as the growing influence, socio-philosophically, of an inchoate neo-Gnosticism throughout the 19th century.

What America inherited after World War II was not the bold and outright Imperialism of yore, but rather a paradoxical version that had to function in contradictory terms of a growing sociopolitical anti-Imperialism. This development of anti-Imperialism has been coincident with the larger more amorphous development of PC, which is larger and more amorphous than the Leftism that gave it its birth, confluent with the forces that coalesced to bring an end to Western Imperialism after World War II.

I say that PC is a larger and more amorphous movement than Leftism, because it now affects, and infects, a majority of those on the Right.

Nevertheless, America as the vanguard of the West has a spectacularly tentacular influence over the entire globe on economic, political and cultural levels unprecedented even during the heyday of Western Colonialism, with a military power also unprecedented. This influence is, and should be acknowledged as, imperialistic. And it should be recognized as the most beneficent and progressive Imperialism in all world history. Unfortunately, PC in many ways is, ironically, more powerful than the American Imperialism that was its nutritious incubator and that has become its nutritious matrix; and this PC enshrines and foments a sociopolitically dominant counter-ideology that we are now seeing is the single most significant hindrance to our collective learning curve about that single most significant threat to our Empire—the Problem of Islam.

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