Empire: The Self-inflicted Cancer
Obtaining short-term prosperity through force guarantees long-term decay, especially in a democracy.
Libertarians can very often use the phrase “I told you so” justifiably, and one area which has become perfectly clear that they were right is “the Empire always comes home”. The US Empire was given a new opportunity to wage all-out-war 20 years ago with the hilariously named ‘Patriot Act’ expanding their ability to spy without any sort of due process. Obviously, they did that already, but no longer needed to hide it. I’ve written before on this topic by showing the similarities between the US and Rome that when the elites of an expansionary empire can no longer expand outwards, in the quest for further power and wealth, they turn their soldiers inwards.
But there is another sinister element that we see unfolding alongside that many aforementioned libertarians won’t talk about, as it concerns ethnicity and multiculturalism, some of their greatest blindspots.
One thing that the Romans did which the British and American empires did not was to make all of their occupied territories legally the same as even the non-Roman Italian territories. For a long time, only people who were born in Rome itself of pure Roman stock were full Roman citizens. A person in the northern Italian alps and a person in Libya were functionally identical in their political categorisation. An African was equally as “Roman” as a non-Roman Italian, which is to say, not very Roman at all. The underclass was defined by an ethnic hierarchy little more complex than “there’s 100% Romans and everyone else.”
This meant that if a Libyan then moved to Rome, a city of many ethnicities, they had no reason to resent their non-Roman Italian neighbour; both of them had just as much reason to resent the 100% Roman patricians, but they were as untouchable as our current elites are anyway. A good way to highlight this is to say there were no talks of ‘Italian privilege’, all non-Romans were equally underprivileged.
It might sound like I’m making this up to try and fit history into a modern liberal or even Marxist class lens, but trust me, I’m not and have no desire to. The point is only further illustrated when in 212 AD Emperor Caracalla granted full Roman citizenship to every man and woman in the empire’s dominion. Italians were not granted this any sooner than anyone else, because the empire did not grant any favours by ethnicity.
None of this was ever due to any sort of concern for equality, which any of those subjects would split their sides laughing at. It was a purely pragmatic arrangement to minimise the risk of revolt and backlash of subjugated territories. If you were in Hispania, there were still of course reasons why you may want to revolt, but other non-Roman regions or races being treated better than you could never be one of them.
Compare this to the British Raj in India. India was already an extremely hierarchical society with it’s well-known caste system, and the colonial British elite had a mutually beneficial relationship with the Brahmins at the top; but it was never in dispute which of the two were superior simply on ethnic grounds. You could be a Brahmin man, wielder of immense power who gets the lower classes to clean your shoes with their tongues, now being bossed around by a scrawny, speccy, middle-class man from Norwich called Bert who had been sent as a delegate. He is who you would primarily be holden to, not Queen Victoria (unless you managed to really piss her off), just by virtue of his race. That would be an extraordinarily humiliating arrangement and breed ethnic tension wildly.
This would inevitably progress to the point when, after the imperial gold-mine ran dry, Britain itself opened its doors to immigrants from her colonies, as Rome the city proper did. Combine this with full suffrage democracy and a civic nationalist policy that anybody born on British soil was a full citizen, regardless of their parent’s status, you now have a pool of voters with a tangible stake in the politics of the country, and who have reason to hate that very same country on ethnic grounds for historic actions.
Now we have Ash Sarkar, a descendant of lower-tier Brahmins, born and living in Britain whilst explicitly hating it and what it stands for, working to make it communist - and there’s no political way to stop her. One example of many such cases.
Along with foreign toffs who pretend to be downtrodden proles for political purposes, we’ve also come to realise in Leicester that making religions and ethnicities who utterly despise each other live on the same street is quite the recipe for disaster. Indian Hindus and Pakistani Muslims have put a British city in lockdown by forming roaming gangs of hundreds of people out to lynch each other. These groups have been killing each other for hundreds of years over these grounds in the subcontinent, but BBC News will tell you that it’s happening here due to a cricket match.
(Note to the reader: This article has been sat in my drafts for a few months, this was recent news when I started writing. It’s now already forgotten.)
It only shows how many layers into multimultimulticulturalism you are when you've “progressed” past immigrant-native tensions to immigrant-immigrant tensions, reminding me of the blood feuds in Scorcese's Gangs Of New York - a suitably murderous and impoverished depiction of the low-trust society that can only come out of such an arrangement.
So who could have ever possibly predicted that wildly differing cultures actually can’t peacefully live together? Common sense, perhaps, but there are many names, one of which being Enoch Powell, but we might talk about him another time.
Just to close this out I want to discuss a country which I think has actually done a decent job of minimising the disfunctional effects of imperialism: New Zealand.
Colonialism should not happen. We’ve discussed the negative effects which occur post hoc, but prima facie, displacing people from their homeland is monstrous. It was monstrous when European governments did it to other people, and it's monstrous now as European governments do it to their own people.
Yes we can point out that the Aztecs were sacrificing humans in droves before Cortez came, but he did not come to wipe them off the face of the earth. European settlers in North America didn't - however, their later descendants did. But, again, probably a conversation for another day and one which is yet again wrapped up in subtextually religious grievances.
The settlers in New Zealand did, for the most part, settle. There were wars, however these were small, with individual tribes, ended in peace deals, and left a country with two separate cultures for a while who respected the others boundaries and people. The settlers saw the Maori as people of immense honour who put up a hell of a fight with their scarce means, and did not seek the conquer them.
Since then there has been integration, but primitive Maori tribes remain, and not in the disastrous American reservations way; but a way which developed naturally over time as the two groups adapted to each others presence. There is no forced integration or segregation on the part of the Maori - if they want to live on their own with their customs and heritage, they can just fine. If they want to live in the European society, they can, and they understand that they will receive little or no special treatment, as there isn't the same culture of racial-oppression-fetishism as there is in the rest of the West, primarily the US.
Of course, there is still some of that. Affirmative action and abundant scholarships exist exclusively for Maori people, but significantly less in number and in promotion/activism as in the UK & US. And, while the Maori can live totally self-segragated, you can of course bet your left leg that Europeans would not be allowed to if they so desired. In this world we really are beggars now, and should sometimes be realistic rather than choosy. I’m not saying that the ethnic state of affairs in New Zealand is ideal, I only ever said that they have managed it better than others.
Even managing the pitfalls well doesn't change the fact that they are pitfalls. Whilst European-Maori relations have been good for a long time, the liberals have an extraordinarily easy time perpetuating the “country of immigrants” narrative to force the borders open, and believe they have a particularly good precedent for it due to these good past relations. As I've said, these relations were good because they were about as voluntary as colonial ethnic relations can be - live together or live separately, make your choice and just get on with it peacefully. Now that they've opened their doors in the same way the UK did, and for many of the same demographics which are now at war here, what reason do the Kiwis have to not expect the same in the future? They have none.
All of this is to say that I understand the reflexive response to deny that imperialism and colonialism are bad. The left push it really hard and in their trademarked disgusting and off-putting manner. But even if the reasons they give suck, the statement seems to me undeniably true. A few hundred years ago it saw Europeans exerting dominance over native people for short-term political and economic gain, and today has left us with the most chaotic and unstable position that our civilisations have been in for one and a half thousand years.
We know the icebreaker question “if you could talk to anyone in history who would it be?”, and I'd simply ask the mercantilists who brought this about for their own gain, “was it worth it?”