Western Civilization’s Unrelenting Expansion – Part 5 “[I]t’s idiotic to expect people to be stopped by some scrap of paper called a property deed. Property rights are a superstition. One holds property only by the courtesy of those who do not seize it (Bertram Scudder, 1957).”[i]
I was recently in a debate with some men at a restaurant I frequent, who advance the ridiculous notion that no good thing has ever been produced by the Western World. Once our friendly sparring session was over, one of the guys pulled up his calendar on his Android to check an appointment; his comrade in arms hopped in his Mercedes Benz and departed for home; and the last brother logged off the Internet and packed his lap-top until our next rendezvous. What hypocrisy! I’d have more respect for these men, and their view of the West would be more noble if they shunned the evil and the good like they were the plague.
Like most informed individuals, I have my criticisms of the West, but I must concede that I appreciate many of the accoutrements that are available in America and abroad: Protection against unreasonable search and seizure; the Fifth Amendment shield against self incrimination; freedom of religion; the right to own property, a business or other assets; and as an author and teacher, I particularly value the freedom to write and speak without censorship. I also love the idea of living in a modern society, filled with gadgets and tools that increase my productivity and enhance my leisure time.
Who wouldn’t want to live in a society that offers the prospect of the pursuit of happiness, along with the other perks of a democracy? Well, if one looks at the social landscape right now, the answer seems pretty simple—democracy is winning the war of ideas. And one could easily make a strong argument that the average person would fare better under a democracy than under any other social system. However, a historical examination of Western democracy causes its luster to diminish. It is one of history’s great paradoxes.
A study of Western democracy is a study of the destruction of human civilization. From its incipient steps on the shores of the Americas to this moment, the presence of Western Civilization has brought death and destruction to mankind, and there lies the paradox: How is it that a society that gave the world the Renaissance; the Industrial Revolution; the 40-hour work week; the concept of overtime, double-time, triple-time and hazard duty pay; paid vacation, holidays and healthcare; instant communication; high-speed transportation; massive computing power; the American dream; and rescued the world from the tyranny of World War II, have caused so much widespread misery to humanity?
The Native Americans were one of the first to witness the carnage that followed in the wake of Western expansion: their lands were seized and their societies decimated at the hands of the European settlers. This land-grab initiated a domino effect that resulted in the Atlantic slave trade and the subjugation of the Caribbean. By the time the West had focused its attention on Africa, its imperialist appetite had become so efficient, it was able to carve up the entire continent in 15 short years.
In what would later become known as the ‘Scramble for Africa,’ the European powers set up a framework for divvying up the Dark Continent. In 1885 the Berlin Treaty established the ground-rules for how the Western powers would seize control of Africa, offering each nation access to various parts of the land free from interference by others, giving new meaning to the phrase ‘honor among thieves.’ By the turn of the 20th Century, there was no more land to be had.
What the Berlin Treaty could not predict, however, was that once the latecomers to imperial expansion – Germany and Italy – had sunk their teeth into the confiscation of the African continent, they were not going to be satisfied with the imperial limitations offered them under the terms of the agreement. Italy snatched parts of Libya and Germany sought to gain hegemony over the crumbling Hapsburg and Ottoman empires. Britain and France took note of Germany’s growing influence in the region, and their alarm intensified as Germany forged an alliance with Austria-Hungary and Turkey. Hostilities between the European expansionist powers soon erupted into the European Civil War, better known as World War I. The struggle for German expansion came at the expense of other Western imperial powers which had made prior claims on territories Germany was seeking to annex.[ii]
Germany lost New Guinea, as well as its European and African territories at the conclusion of World War I. However, she came back and seized control of many of those same regions, igniting World War II, and then in a dazed state of déjà vu, she lost them again. In an unusual stroke of imperial irony, both world wars were the results of Western Civilization engaging in a tug-of-war over territories that were already under its control. Those wars taught the Western aristocracy that if it did not want to experience further attrition, then it had to confine its imperial ambitions to non-Western regions.
With the exception of the hiccup between the end of African colonization (1900) and the end of World War II (1945), Western Civilization has been on an otherwise unrelenting, clandestine march toward global rule since the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria. During this 500 year period, no region in the earth has been unscathed by its imperial predation: It has devoured Andean Civilization, Mayan Civilization, Hindu Civilization, Japanese Civilization,[iii] and many of you reading this article witnessed the destruction of Eastern Orthodox Civilization, where the former Soviet Union sat at the perch of leadership. And if we consider the hundreds of societies simpler than civilizations that have been destroyed by the West, it brings into sharper focus how absolute Western incursion into other cultures has been.[iv]
If we consider that the Chinese are drinking themselves to death with the hemlock of Western Capitalism, the only formidable foe that stands between the West and its total domination of the earth is Islamic Civilization. Islam is formidable in the sense that there are more than one billion Muslims in the earth, and Pakistan has nuclear weapons, while Iran is pursuing its own nuclear weapons’ program. These nuclear ‘chips’ by Pakistan and the push by Iran to enter the atomic poker game, permits a dying Islam to cling to its centuries old modes of thought and actions. However, America’s sustained wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with the recent cries for democracy in Africa and the Middle East, demonstrate that Islam’s capacity to resist the crave for Western values has significantly diminished since the days of U.S. flag burning under Ronald Reagan. And in order to accelerate this shift towards democracy in the Muslim world, the Western powers have made plain their willingness to invade sovereign nations that stand in the way.
When President George W. Bush invaded Iraq in 2003, he did so under the pretext that Saddam Hussein participated in the September 11th attacks and that Saddam was pursuing an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. On its face, this invasion seemed to be a logical response to an ambitious tyrant who participated in the worst attack on U.S. soil since Pearl Harbor and who was becoming an even greater threat to world peace; however, further examination of this war proves otherwise.
It was not long after the Iraq invasion that Bush and his supporters had to concede publicly that there were no weapons of mass destruction and that there was no linkage between Saddam and the 9/11 attacks. However, one would reasonably conclude that with a nearly surreal intelligence apparatus, Bush should have drawn those conclusions before committing American resources to war. The most reliable evidence that the Bush administration was promoting in the preparation for the Iraqi war was the famous “16 words” from a dubious intelligence report that alleged that Saddam had attempted to purchase “yellowcake” uranium from Niger during the Iraq disarmament crisis. However, in 2002, nearly one year before the invasion in Iraq, former United States diplomat, Joe Wilson, went on a fact-finding mission to Niger, at the request of the CIA, to investigate these allegations, and he concluded that “[I]t was highly doubtful that any such transaction had ever taken place.”
Wilson went on to contribute an op-ed piece in the July 6, 2003 edition of the New York Times entitled “What I Didn’t Find in Africa,” where he concluded that “Based on my experience with the administration in the months leading up to the war, I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.” Ironically, this is the same conclusion that officials from U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair’s office drew in the now infamous Downing Street Memo. It was their accrued opinion that Bush was twisting the facts to accommodate the foreign policy goal of removing Saddam: “Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”[v]
It is clear that Bush’s dubious campaign for war in Iraq was a thinly veiled attempt to remove a Muslim leader, who was hostile to the West, and replace him with a more accommodating figure, while simultaneously maintaining a justifiable presence in the Middle East. With “boots on the ground,” the United States and its Western allies would have more surgical access to influencing the affairs of the region. Therefore, it is no coincidence that the current dissent in the Middle East and Africa has avalanched into a region-wide cry for freedom. Since the coup d’état of Saddam, the United States has funneled billions of dollars and other resources into promoting Western democracy and destabilizing the Islamic regimes in that part of the world.
I have been a big critic of former President George W. Bush (see my four part series on his presidency), but I will concede that he must be somewhere gleefully rehearsing his lecture series titled, “I Told You So,” and President Barack Obama is following his imperial footsteps. His invasion into Libya, betrays the peace initiative that he campaigned on, and certainly defies the spirit of his Nobel Peace Prize. However, once you understand that no man/woman can ascend to the presidency of the United States without the tacit approval of the aristocracy, then you will realize who employs Obama.[vi] What makes the Western drive for global hegemony so extremely ingenious is that it now has an African American face to do its bidding.
Notwithstanding that Westerners may oppose Libya’s form of government, Moammar Gadhafi is obligated to suppress any social unrest in his country. It is irrelevant that the dissent may be fueled by cries for democracy. If demonstrations erupted across America advocating the overthrow of its form of government, the president of the United States would have a legal responsibility to subdue the demonstrators. In fact, 18 U.S.C. makes it a federal offense to “knowingly or willfully advocate, abet, advise, or teach [others to] overthrow or destroy the government of the United Sates,” and such lawbreakers shall be subject to a prison sentence of not more than 20 years.[vii] I’d have to believe that most nations have a similar ban on demonstrations that promote the overthrow of its government.
Does not America’s participation in the NATO attacks on Libya rise to the highest level of hypocrisy? On the one hand, it will prosecute those who advocate the overthrow of its government, but on the other hand it has demonstrated a willingness to topple regimes which block the road to global domination. Between 1945 and 2005, the United States has attempted to overthrow more than 50 foreign governments.[viii] In an EU poll, that ranked which countries contribute most to world instability, the U.S. was seen as a bigger threat to world peace than Iran, Iraq and North Korea – the trio dubbed the “axis of evil” by President George W. Bush.
For more than 70 years, the world was conditioned to believe that the Western nations were the only barrier between freedom and a world ruled by Communist dictators. However, in one of history’s great surprises, Communism passed away in the middle of the night without firing one desperate shot for survival, and in the greatest irony of all, Western Civilization has made the global soil fertile for the rise of the antichrist.
…to be continued
© 2011 by David R. Tolson
[i] Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (New York: A Dutton Book, 1957) p. 135.
[ii] Chinweizu, The West and the Rest of Us, White Predators Black Slaves and the African Elite, (Legos: Pero Press, 1987), pp. 14-19. (“As a result of Germany’s imperial ambition, Britain and France teamed up with Russia in an effort to prevent the coalescence of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Turkey. When in 1914 Serbia sought to assert her independence from the Hapsburg Empire, Austria moved to crush her. Russia moved to aid Serbia; Germany and Turkey moved in to protect their ally Austria; and Britain and France went to aid Russia. The Entente powers were finally pitted against their feared rival, Germany, and World War I began.” (p. 18 of The West and the Rest of Us.))
[iii] Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope, A History of the World in Our Time, (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1966), p. 7.
[iv] Quigley, p. 8.
[v] Downing Street Memo, July 23, 2002, p. 1.
[vi] The electoral college was instituted as the means of presidential selection in order to guarantee the succession of power and to eliminate the possibility that a ‘popular’ candidate, who may not have the best interest of the aristocracy at heart, will be elected.
[vii] 18 U.S.C. §2385: US Code advocating overthrow of the US Government
[viii] William Blum, Rogue State, A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower (Maine: Common Courage Press) pp 1-2.
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