Does American Exceptionalism Mean Worshiping The State? - By Douglas E. Baker

The fusion of theology and public policy has been evident from the earliest days of the American Republic. With language lifted from the Bible, the United States could best be understood in terms of an extended sermon with various applications from notable preachers disguised as presidents. American exceptionalism – with all its various implications both past and present – is historically and thematically explored by John D. Wilsey’s book, American Exceptionalism and Civil Religion: Reassessing the History of an Idea.

The United States could best be understood in terms of an extended sermon from notable preachers disguised as presidents.

Probing the history of an idea as vague as American exceptionalism requires skill both to discover and interpret the words dotted across the history of American political writing. This is especially true of presidential rhetoric. The founding documents of the United States possess a bilingual capacity to fuse ideas radically opposed to one another in terms that can please all perspectives simultaneously.

For those who believe the American vision emanates from the political theory of John Locke, Baron de Montesquieu, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the Declaration of Independence and Constitution provide the grammatical and syntactical evidence for an Enlightenment-based vision free from the tyranny of religious despots. Conversely, for those who believe America is a fulfillment of biblical prophecies and typologies, there is ample evidence for a logical progression of such ideas throughout the American experiment.

What Wilsey accomplishes with a deft hand is identifying similar categories within the religious history of the United States where the language of the Bible has been used for political purposes. The idea of American exceptionalism is largely drawn from the Bible. The political concept itself cannot be accurately understood apart from understanding key biblical texts (2 Chronicles 7:14 as an example) and their influence at various times in American history.

Full text at: Does American Exceptionalism Mean Worshiping The State?

Yes, We Should Call Them Imperialists | The American Conservative - By PAUL GOTTFRIED

Recently while reading a book by an Israeli scholar named Yoram Hazony with the provocative title The Virtue of Nationalism, I encountered a distinction drawn by the late Charles Krauthammer between empire building and American global democratic hegemony. Like the editors of the Weekly Standard, for which he periodically wrote, Krauthammer believed it was unfair to describe what he wanted to see done, which was having the U.S. actively spread its own form of government throughout the world, as “imperialism.” After all, Krauthammer said, he and those who think like him “do not hunger for new territory,” which makes it wrong to accuse them of “imperialism.”

Hazony responds with the obvious answer that control can be imposed on the unwilling even if the empire builders are not overtly annexing territory. Meanwhile, other neoconservatives have given the game away by pushing their imperialist position a bit further than Krauthammer’s. Max Boot, for example, has been quite open in demanding “an American empire” built on ideological and military control even without outright annexation.   

The question that occurred to me while reading Krauthammer’s proposal and Hazony’s response (which I suspect would have been more devastating had Hazony not been afraid of losing neoconservative friends and sponsors) is this one: how is this not imperialism?

Certainly the use of protectorates to increase the influence of Western powers in the non-Western world goes back a long time. As far back as the Peloponnesian War, rival Greek city-states tried to impose their constitutional arrangements on weaker Greek societies as a way of managing them politically. According to Xenophon, when the Athenians then surrendered to the Spartan commander Lysander in 403 BC, they had two conditions imposed on them: taking down their great wall (kathairein ta makra teixe) and installing a regime that looked like the Spartan one. This makes arguing that territory has to be annexed outright in order for it to become part of an American empire so utterly unconvincing.

·         The Hypocrisy of the Establishment’s Democracy Crusaders

·         A Neoconservative of Conviction

One reason the views offered by Krauthammer and Boot did not elicit more widespread criticism—and have enjoyed enthusiastic favor among Republicans for decades, culminating in the oratorical wonders of George W. Bush—may have been the embrace of another neoconservative doctrine: “American exceptionalism.” The belief that the U.S. is a supremely good nation founded on universal principles has consequences that go well beyond electoral politics. Dennis Prager, a nationally syndicated talk radio host and co-owner of the website Townhall.com, extols American exceptionalism, which he says springs from American values.

Those values have “universal applicability,” according to Prager, and are “eminently exportable.” Glenn Beck has taken up the same theme of “American exceptionalism” as an exportable “idea” that is meant for everyone on the planet. The “ideas” or “values” in question are variously defined by the neoconservative media as “human rights,” “universal equality,” or just making sure everyone lives like us. Whatever it is, we are told that to withhold it from the rest of the human race would be uncharitable. Our efforts to bring it to others therefore cannot be dismissed as “imperialism” any more than the Spanish government of the 16th century thought it was doing wrong by forcing its religion on indigenous people in the Americas.

Although I’m hardly a fan of his political views, former president Barack Obama once said something that I thought was self-evident but that offended even members of his own party. According to Obama, “Americans believe they’re exceptional. But the Brits and Greeks believe they’re special too.” Obama was merely observing that it’s okay for others to believe they’re special, even if they’re not Americans imbued with “the idea.” Yet his statement was received with such uproar that he felt compelled to backtrack. Speaking later at West Point, he made it clear that “I believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being.” This from someone whom Fox News assures us hated America and spent every minute of his presidency denying our greatness! (And, yes, I’ve heard the rejoinder to this: Obama was only pretending to believe in the creed he dutifully recited.)

It might be argued (and has been by neoconservatives many times) that the U.S. is both morally superior and less dangerous than ethnically defined societies because we advocate a “value” or “creed” that’s accessible to the entire human race. But this is hardly a recipe for peace as opposed to what Krauthammer called a “value-driven” relationship with the rest of the world. British journalist Douglas Murray, in his intended encomium Neoconservatism: Why We Need It, tries to praise his subjects but ends up describing a kind of global democratic jihadism. While Douglas admits that “socially, economically, and philosophically” neoconservatism differs from traditional conservatism, he insists that it’s something better. He commends neoconservatives for wishing to convert the world to “values.” Their primary goal, according to Murray, is the “erasing [of] tyrannies and [the] spreading [of] democracy,” an arduous task that requires “interventionism, nation-building, and many of the other difficulties that had long concerned traditional conservatives.”  

Please tell me this is not what it obviously is: an invitation to war and empire building. The quest for hegemony always looks the same, no matter what moral labels some choose to give it.

Paul Gottfried is Raffensperger Professor of Humanities Emeritus at Elizabethtown College, where he taught for 25 years. He is a Guggenheim recipient and a Yale Ph.D. He is the author of 13 books, most recently Fascism: Career of a Concept and Revisions and Dissents.

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/yes-we-should-call-them-imperialists/

Systemic Anti-Americanism - By Jack Kerwick (And how the Big Con is guilty too!)

Living in 21^st America, it’s impossible to go a single day without hearing multiple mentions of “racism.” It seems to be the lifeblood of our political-cultural life.

Because of the ever-increasing rarity of overt instances of white-on-black “racism” (and make no mistakes about it, “racism” is used to refer only to white-on-nonwhite transgressions), the architects and agents of the Racism-Industrial-Complex (RIC) have had to appeal to what they call “institutional” or “systemic” or “structural” racism.

The idea here is that even the best-intentioned of whites are either subconsciously racist or, at the very least, they subconsciously purvey American institutions which embed “racist” assumptions that impede black success.  Eduardo Bonilla, a loyal RIC agent, sums up the gist of this notion in the title of his book on this subject: Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America.

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Very rarely, though, do we hear much about patriotism.  It’s true, of course, that we’ll not infrequently hear politicians refer to the policy proposals of their opponents as “un-American.” Yet it’s supposed to be bad form to question another person’s patriotism. Given the ease with which people, particularly leftists, hurl the R-word (as well as many other derogatory terms) at their opponents, the conspicuous paucity of charges of anti-Americanism is more than a bit curious.

Well, it’s curious on its face. But once we scratch the surface, it’s not hard at all to see why those on the left prefer for the topic of patriotism to go the way of the dinosaur: Given its unequivocal commitment to the fundamental transformation of the Western world, the left has always derived its identity in large measure from its vehement opposition to the national identities that compose that world.

Thus, the left in America is practically by definition anti-American.  Except for when appeals to them prove rhetorically effective and ideologically useful, for the culturally and historically-specific particularities and contingencies that constitute America the left has nothing but contempt.  This is not hyperbole. Logically, it’s impossible to draw any other conclusion from the left’s relentless campaign against the allegedly “racist,” “sexist,” “classist,” “homophobic,” and “xenophobic” character of the country.  How, we must ask ourselves, can those who tirelessly characterize America in these terms have anything but disdain for an entity that they (supposedly) think is so ugly, so evil?

Let’s be frank: America was founded by white people, white Protestant Christians, to be exact, and for white people of (mostly) the same description. As early on as 1790, just a short while after the United States Constitution was ratified, the Naturalization Act was passed.  This law expressly limited citizenship in the new Republic to “free white persons of good character.” Until as recently as the 1960s, America remained nearly 90% white.  Today, at about 63% of the population, America is still majority white.

Considering that it is the white, heterosexual, Christian male on whose shoulders the contemporary left lays the burden of all of the world’s problems, there is no way that leftists can, without being blatantly inconsistent, not seethe with disgust and hatred for this bastion of White Supremacy that they have long referred to as “AmeriKKKa.”

Still, there are indeed individual Americans of a leftist bent who will take offense at the charge of anti-Americanism, individuals who insist upon their love for the United States.  Such folks are doubtless sincere.  Their sincerity, however, goes no distance toward undercutting the anti-American logic of their ideology.

Nor does their intellectual confusion exculpate them from their responsibility for purveying anti-Americanism.

The illogic of the leftist who genuinely proclaims his love for America no more defeats the allegation of anti-Americanism than does the genuineness of the white person who insists on his commitment to racial equality relieve him of responsibility for (supposedly) promoting “racism.”

Now, “institutional racism” is a fiction invented by RIC whose staying power owes to its enormous profitability: RIC needs to perpetuate this Big Lie.

Yet institutional anti-Americanism is all too real.

The ideas constitutive of leftist ideology are indeed anti-American: The cardinal leftist principle or ideal of Equality, i.e. the ideal of a more or less equal distribution of substantive or material satisfactions, leftists labor inexhaustibly to make a reality.  Yet it is precisely a condition of this sort that the decentralized, Constitutional character of American government precludes.  To put it more exactly, the American government, with its wide diffusion of power and authority, is antithetical to the sort of government whose existence is necessary to realize the Egalitarian fantasies of the left.

And, of course, the racial obsessions of the current left also render impossible any love for a country that the left insists is and has always been a bastion of White Supremacy.

But anti-Americanism is also promoted by way of other particularly popular terms and expressions that have become associated with “patriotism” and that are typically used by the conservative movement, what I call Big Conservatism, or the Big Con.

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What all of these expressions share in common, and what makes them anti-American, is that they unequivocally deny the historical character of the country.

For example, Big Conservatives are at least as given, and, truth be told, probably much more prone than are their Democrat liberal counterparts, to characterize America as a “Nation of Immigrants.”  Yet if this was a historically accurate characterization, then one would have expected for earlier generations of Americans, and certainly those members of the Founding generation, to have viewed it as such.  They did no such thing.

In fact, anyone remotely familiar with American history can recognize the Nation of Immigrants line for the whopper of a Lie that it is.

Only if there is already an existent social order is it possible for anyone to immigrate to it. To put it another way, the logic of the concept of “immigrant” logically presupposes both an established society to which the immigrant immigrates and, importantly, the concept of “native” or “indigenous,” i.e. of the non-immigrant.

America was established by those who settled it.  There was no America before specific people at a specific time decided to tame the vast wilderness that would become the territorial jurisdiction of the United States.  Those people were all white, all British, and, at the time of the War of Independence—about 170 years after the first settlers made a home for themselves in Virginia—they were at least 80 percent English and 98% Protestant Christian.

To repeat, there was no America until white, British Protestants created it.

Thus, the term of “Native-American,” designed to refer to those who were formerly described as “Indian,” are patent misnomers. Yet the movers and shakers of the Big Con use it just as frequently as do “Politically Correct” liberal leftist Democrats.

And Big Cons also have long endorsed the notions of “the Melting Pot” and “E Pluribus Unum,” both variations of the Nation of Immigrants Lie.  Yet America was never meant to be a melting pot with ingredients from all over the globe, and “E Pluribus Unum,” every American from more honest generations would’ve insisted, refers, not to a single nation composed of immigrants, but the formation of the 13 original colonies into a single country.

According to another anti-American fiction promoted by the Big Con, America was founded upon “Judeo-Christian” principles or values.  It’s true, of course, that Christianity spun out of Judaism, and that some of the fundamental metaphysical assumptions of the latter were transmitted to the former.  This, however, does not justify, at least not from any remotely historical perspective, the nomenclature of “Judeo-Christian” when referencing the founding of America.  To repeat what has already been repeated more than once above, America was founded almost exclusively by Christians.  That in some abstract sense the “principles” that are read from the founding are embodied by both Judaism and Christianity no more warrants describing it as “Judeo-Christian” than does the fact that some of these same principles are affirmed by Muslims warrants characterizing America as having been founded upon Judeo-Christian-Islamic principles.

This, though, gets us to the heart of the problem, to that which is the most anti-American of all Big Lies purveyed by the Big Con.

This is the Big Lie of “American Exceptionalism.”  Given the ease with which the language of American Exceptionalism flies from the lips of Big Conservatives, one would think that this terminology lends itself to more than one meaning.  This being said, American Exceptionalists always imply that America is exceptional inasmuch as it is the only country in all of human history to have ever been founded upon principles or ideals or values.

This, though, is anti-American because it is radically ahistorical.

Principles, ideals, values, comprehensively, propositions—this is the stuff of thin gruel.  Propositions are inherently abstract and general, i.e. they easily conceal the demographic-specific contingencies constitutive of America as it historically existed while conveying an air of plausibility. The 18^th century Scottish philosopher David Hume puts the point well:

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“It is easy for a false hypothesis to maintain some appearance of truth,” Hume said, as long as “it keeps wholly in generals” and “makes use of undefined terms [.]”  He added that “ideas, especially abstract ones, are naturally faint and obscure: the mind has but a slender hold of them: they are apt to be confounded with other resembling ideas; and when we have often employed any term, though without a distinct meaning, we are apt to imagine it has a determinate idea annexed to it.”

Big Conservatives, in employing the terminology of American Exceptionalism, terminology with unmistakably positive connotations, mean to suggest that they are doing nothing more or less than affirming the singular greatness of the country. American Exceptionalism is meant to imply that anyone who doesn’t affirm the “exceptional” nature of America is less than fully patriotic.

The reality, though, is that this doctrine—and it is an ideological doctrine—is designed to obscure the ethnic, racial, and religious particularities of the American founding. It is designed to veil the founding’s historically and culturally-specific character.

As such, it is anti-American.

Note, I do not mean to ascribe malevolent or unpatriotic motives to those who belong to the Big Con.  Some may very well know what they are doing.  Others, particularly those in the rank and file of the conservative movement, doubtless do not. The point that I’ve been trying to make here is that intentions aside, this sort of anti-Americanism is systemic. It’s anti-Americanism without anti-Americans, to paraphrase Bonilla.

Yet it’s precisely because ideas do indeed have consequences and that Big Conservatism, relying as it does upon key terms and phrases that are, functionally, of a piece with those of the left in facilitating the fundamental transformation of America, that it’s imperative for those of us on the right to call out the Big Con at every available opportunity.

The Best of Jack Kerwick

Jack Kerwick [send him mail] received his doctoral degree in philosophy from Temple University. His area of specialization is ethics and political philosophy. He is a professor of philosophy at several colleges and universities in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Jack blogs at Beliefnet.com: At the Intersection of Faith & Culture.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2018/12/jack-kerwick/systemic-anti-americanism/

How the US Deep State Accidentally Forged a Multipolar World Order - FEDERICO PIERACCINI

In every nation there are power conglomerates that determine and influence the domestic and foreign policy choices their nations. In the United States, it is important to highlight the concept known as American exceptionalism that accompanies these power centers, often called the deep state. According to this principle, the United States alone has been chosen by God to lead mankind.

After the World War II, a notion very similar to that of Nazi Aryan racial supremacy was born - that of the chosen people. In this case, however, the chosen people were Americans, who emerged victorious at the end of the Second World War II, ready to face the «existential danger» of the USSR, a society and culture that was different from that of the US. With such mental imprinting, the trend over the following decades was predictable. What followed was war after war, the capitalist economic system sustained by the US war machine widening its sphere all over the globe, reaching Southeast Asia, but then being forced back by the failure of the Vietnam War, signaling the first sign of the end of American omnipotence.

As the Berlin Wall fell and eliminated the Soviet «threat», American expansion had almost reached its existential limit. What has been a constant element during all of these US presidencies, during various wars and economic growth thanks to a rising capitalism, has been the presence of the deep state, a set of neural centers that make up real US power. In order to understand the failure of the deep state to achieve its goals to exercise full-spectrum control over the globe, it is crucial to trace the connections between past and the present presidencies from the fall of the Berlin Wall.

When thinking of the deep state, it is easy to identify the major players - the mainstream media, think-tanks, central and private banks, foreign-state lobbyists, politicians, intelligence agencies, large industrial groups, and the military-industrial complex (MIC). These are the inner circles that hold the true levers of power in the United States. Often, by analyzing past events over a long period of time, it becomes easier to identify motivations and goals behind specific actions, and the manner in which the various members of the deep state have often accompanied, influenced and sometimes sabotaged various administrations - such as is currently the case with the current Trump administration - for the sole purpose of advancing their economic interests.

During the Clinton and Bush administrations, the deep state was able to maintain a united and compact front, counting on the economic and military power of what was still a rising global power. The mainstream media, the intelligence agencies, the military and the financial and political centers supported both presidents in their ambitious plans to expand American hegemony. From intervention in Yugoslavia to the bombing to Afghanistan through to the war in Iraq, the refrain has been conflict and devastation in exchange for financial impositions that were focused on maintaining the dollar as the reserve or exchange currency for such assets as oil. In Yugoslavia, the strategy also aimed at dismantling the last block linked to the former Soviet Union, the last act of the end of the Cold War. Even the control of opium trading routes from Afghanistan has been of great importance, becoming a key element in US expansion and control plans, other than maintaining a foothold in central Asia for further destabilization attempts.

The war in Iraq, engineered by three fundamental elements of the deep state (false intelligence services, journalists with a specific agenda, and the military straining at the leash to bomb a hostile nation), has produced a number of consequences, primarily the disintegration of the country, leaving the door open to Iranian influence. Over the course of 15 years, Tehran's influence has grown to such an extent that it engages Iraq in a Shiite arch that starts from Iran, passes through Iraq, and ends in Syria, reaching the Mediterranean. In terms of the effect intended and the result actually obtained, the Iraq war may be considered the largest strategic failure of the US deep state since Vietnam.

In addition to a loss of American influence with the petro-monarchies, Iraq has highlighted the American inability to conquer and hold a territory when the population is hostile. Facing local and Shiite militias, the United States paid a heavy human toll, shocking the American population during the ten-year war with planes returning home to deliver flag-draped coffins. This is not to mention the creation of the Afghan and Iraq wars of hundreds of billions of dollars of debt, all placed on the shoulders of the American taxpayer.

In a sense, Obama owes much of his victory in 2008 to the financial crisis and the American defeat in Iraq. Even today, the debate about the role of the deep state in Obama's election is open. The most plausible explanation is based on Obama's telegenic appeal over Senator McCain, likely a decisive factor for Americans. As many Americans did not admit, Obama's election, after eight years of Bush, was a break with the past, a clear message to the elite, especially after Obama's victory over Clinton during the Democratic primaries.

Obama's victory was immediately accompanied by a strategic recalculation by the deep state, which sensed the new opportunity linked to Obama's nature as well as ongoing changes. There were to be no more explicit wars of the type that involve tank divisions. After the disaster in Iraq, even the deep state understood how American military power was unable to prevail over a hostile local population. For this reason, the neoconservatives have been progressively displaced by the liberal, human-rights brigade. Their new approach has turned the Middle East upside down through the Arab Spring, creating a new balance in the region and causing the situation to degenerate in Egypt, destabilizing neighboring countries, ending up human-rights dystopias in places like Libya and Syria, both victims of direct or indirect military aggression on the grounds of protecting human rights.

In this scenario, the most important components of the deep state are the media that, by disseminating false intelligence information through manipulation and disinformation for the purposes of justifying military aggression, conditions the populations of Europe and the US to attack sovereign countries like Libya. During the Obama administration, the deep state rarely faced a hostile presidency, demonstrated by the bank bailout during the 2008 crisis. A few months after the election, it became apparent how empty Obama’s election promises had been, representing the triumph of marketing over substance. By printing money at zero interest, Obama allowed the Fed to donate almost $800 billion to the banks, saving them from a collapse and postponing the consequences of the next financial crisis, which will likely be irreparable. Obama preferred to follow the dictates of the Fed, a key component of the deep state, instead of reforming the banking sector.

The underlying mistakes of the last months of the Obama administration continue to affect Trump's new presidency. Obama's attempt to placate the deep state by arming terrorists in the Middle East, putting neo-Nazis in Ukraine, bombing Libya, and bailing out the banks has only increased the appetite of the deep state, which has progressed to more explicit demands like an attack on Iran and direct intervention in Syria. From this moment on, after having granted virtually all the wishes of the deep state, Obama pulled the handbrake and activated a couple of countermeasures to rebalance the legacy of his presidency. He opposed a direct intervention in Syria following the false-flag chemical attacks, signing and implementing the nuclear agreement with Iran and he restoring relations with Cuba.

It was at this very moment that the deep state declared war on Obama, relying on the indispensable support of intelligence agencies, the mainstream media, and the most conservative wing of the American establishment. Attacks on Obama's presumed weaknesses as president, his inability to defend American interests, and his lack of courage characterized the last two years of his presidency.

It was this perennial state of siege during Obama's presidency that created the conditions for Trump's electoral ascent. The deep state has for years insisted on the need for a strong and determined leader representative of the spirit of American exceptionalism. Initially, the deep state focused on Hillary Clinton, but Trump had the intuition to emphasize the military and industrial aspects of the country, appealing to the yearning of the population for a rebuilding of domestic industry, and opening new opportunities for the deep state. This served to drive a split within the intelligence agencies, the mainstream media, and a good deal of the domestic political class, leaving them in open warfare. Russia's affairs and Trump’s alleged connections to Putin are false news, created to sabotage Trump's presidency.

In the 2016 Republican primaries, Americans voted for a leader who promised to improve their livelihoods by boosting the domestic economy and placing the interests of their country first. This promise almost immediately captured the working component of the population and large industrial conglomerates. Trump later gained the support of another fundamental component of the deep state, the military wing, thanks to the proclamation that the United States will be returned to the role they deserve in the world, salvaging the perverse idea of American exceptionalism.

Trump's decision to embrace the MIC is particularly controversial and represents the beginning of a deep-state faction built upon Trump's presidency. The daily din surrounding his presidency, with constant attacks from the opposing faction of the deep state, became intense with fake news alleging Trump’s links with Russia. With the appointment of generals who subscribe to the idea of American exceptionalism, it can be debated whether Trump intentionally wanted to give a leadership role to his own generals or whether he had no choice, having to associate with some of these deep-state members in order to defend himself against the assaults of opposing deep-state factions.

Recent Trump-related events are all based on these factors, namely a deep state driven by the neoliberal faction that has never stopped attacking Trump, and a neoconservative deep-state faction that has been tightening the noose around Trump.

The immediate results have been a level of chaos that has been unprecedented in a US administration, with continuous appointments and layoffs, the latest one Steve Bannon, not to mention the impossibility of abolishing Obamacare with all the forces arrayed against Trump’s legislative agenda. Trump has progressively had to concede more power and authority to his generals, acceding to bombing Syria and passing sanctions that worsen relations between Moscow and Washington. A self-destructive spiral began with the granting of a primary role to those nominated to key positions.

The final effect of this ongoing sabotage ever since the Obama presidency is a bankrupt US foreign policy and a continuing fratricidal struggle within the deep state. America’s European allies are in revolt over anti-Russia sanctions, which is their main source of energy. Countries like Russia, China and Iran are beginning to undergo an economic revolution as they progressively abandon the dollar; and as these countries take over a Middle East devastated by years of American wars, Moscow gains significant influence in the region. The crisis engulfing the Gulf Cooperation Council, increasingly beset with fickle fractures between Riyadh and Doha.

One of the consequences of two decades of the US deep state’s brazen foreign policy has been the birth of a multipolar world order, with US superpower status being challenged by competing powers like China and Russia. Indeed, Washington’s historic allies in the Middle East, Israel and Saudi Arabia, have borne the consequences of the disastrous policies of the US, with Iran rising to be one of the power centers of the region destined to dominate the Middle East militarily and even economically.

The incredible paradox of the failure of deep state is represented by the emergence of two alternative poles to the American one, increasingly allied with each other to counter the chaotic retreat of a unipolar world order. In this scenario, Washington and all its power centers are in an unprecedented situation, where their desire does not match their abilities. A sense of frustration is increasingly evident, from the incredible statements of many American political representatives on Russian influence in US elections, to the threats of aggression against North Korea, or the game of chicken with the nuclear powers of Russia and China.

If the deep state continues to hamstring the presidency, and the military wing succeeds in pressuring Trump, there are likely to be a number of indirectly linked effects. There will be an exponential increase in synergies between nations not aligned with American interests. In economic terms, there are alternative systems to that centered on the dollar; in terms of energy, there are a host of new agreements with European, Turkish or Russian partners; and in political terms, there is a more or less explicit alliance between Russia and China, with a strong contribution from Iran, as will soon become more evident with Tehran's entry into the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).

By the end of the 1980s, the United States was the only world power destined for a future of unchallenged global hegemony. The deep state’s greed, as well as the utopian desire to control every decision in every corner of the world, has ended up consuming the ability of the US to influence events, serving only to draw Russia and China closer together with the shared interest of halting America’s heedless advance. It is thanks to the firmly ensconced American deep state that Moscow and Beijing are now coordinating together in order to put to an end the United States’ unipolar moment as soon as possible.

It is not entirely wrong to say that the American unipolar moment is coming to an end, with the deep state’s attacks on the Trump presidency preventing any rapprochement with Moscow. The stronger the pressure of the deep state on the multipolar powers, the greater the speed with which the advance of the multipolar world will replace the unipolar one. Early effects will appear in the economic sphere, particularly in relation to movement towards de-dollarisation, which may mark the beginning of a long-awaited change.

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2017/08/22/how-us-deep-state-accidentally-forged-multipolar-world-order.html

Everybody else is racist! - Comments by VoxDay on an article on race

A cuckservative clucks an oft-heard theme:

 The norm throughout history has been that different peoples are different, and that one people would either replace another peoples culture, or even replace them outright genetically.  That is the default, and a default which is still the norm in this day and age throughout most of the world.  The great exception to this is the exceptionalism the embodies America.

Ours is a civic heritage that transcends ethnicity and is not restricted by geographic extent.  And because that is so ingrained into the very essence of America, that there is a revulsion against the global and historical default to define a people by blood or land.

And so, the not-so-great hullabaloo of the “cuckservative” flap reared its head.  The vast majority of conservatives, including the veritable Ace of Spades, the veritable Stacy McCain, Erick Erickson, the folks over at HotAir, and especially SooperMexican (who was subject to rac­ist insults), have outted the White supremacists who are pushing the term — though the term has had its defenders....

These groups and individuals who used “cuckservative” to rage against racial marginalization are defaulting to the tribal norm that has held back humanity throughout the world and throughout history.  It is a rejection of American Exceptionalism, just as much as the Progressivism is a rejection of the same.

But it is true that destroying Western Civilization and America more specifically is a goal of the Progressive Left in order to create a “blank slate” upon which they may paint their deluded pseudo-utopias.  Sweden is but one international example, but this drive towards eliminating White people eliminated in a “soft genocide” does exist and there are indeed those who would love to do exactly what many of the “anti-racism” crowd most fear.

In conclusion: Would you prefer an America with the physical characteristics and beliefs of Thomas Sowell, or an America with the physical characteristics and beliefs of the Swedish Prime Minister?

First, this is more of our friend Sarah's ridiculous "born American in Portugal" nonsense. It isn't historical, it isn't true, and it isn't intellectually honest. It's just lofty, but nonsensical rhetoric meant to convince through evading one's logical circuits by appealing directly to one's emotions. The American civic heritage does not "transcend ethnicity", as I, or any other American Indian, can tell you. And it is restricted by geographic extent. The Chinese, the Portuguese, the Swedes, and the British are not Americans.

Second, a people are defined primarily by their blood, secondarily by their land, tertially by their religion. There are no other definitions. America is not a Proposition Nation, which is easily provable as no one has ever lost their American status for failing to abide by whatever these mythical propositions might be, or granted American status on the sole basis of claiming to accept those propositions.

If you still claim that America is a Proposition Nation despite it having been conclusively proven that it was not and never was, you are worse than ignorant. You are either in denial or you are a deceiver.

Third, the Alt-Right does reject American Exceptionalism. There is nothing exceptional about America except its superior founding stock and its geographic advantages, both of which are now significantly reduced. Indeed, in light of how rapidly America squandered its unique post-WWII military and economic superiority, one can quite reasonably argue that it is the least exceptional empire since the Austro-Hungarian.

Fourth, I would absolutely prefer an America with the physical characteristics and beliefs of the Swedish Prime Minister to those of Thomas Sowell, especially after the Sweden Democrats take power. This is for three reasons:

1.    Genetic Reversion to the Mean.

2.    The MAOA-2R gene.

3.    Based on my personal interactions with him, Dr. Sowell is neither as smart nor is he as intellectually honest as most conservatives wish to believe.

Fifth, an absolute priority of not being racist is neither a functional ideology nor a sound foundation for public policy. Regardless of one's personal perspective, the historical reality is that racism is far closer to being the solution than it is to being the problem.

https://voxday.blogspot.com/2016/06/everybody-else-is-racist.html

False Virtue: The Life and Death of “American Exceptionalism” By Thomas DiLorenzo

 The impending decline of the dollar is apparently imposing a real Halloween scare on the American foreign policy establishment.  An August 22, 2023 article on the Council on Foreign Relations Web site entitled “The Future of Dollar Hegemony” explained that:

“The dollar’s global hegemony gives the U.S. government power to impose crippling sanctions and wage other forms of financial welfare against adversaries . . . .  In 2022, more than twelve thousand entities were under sanction by the Treasury Department, a more than twelve-fold increase since the turn of the century.  U.S. sanctions . . . do ensure that targeted adversaries pay a significant price for continuing to engage in actions the United States opposes” (emphasis added).

This reminds yours truly of a very memorable bumper sticker that had an American flag in one corner and read:  “Do As We Say Or We Will Bring Democracy to Your Country!”  The bumper sticker is memorable because it speaks truth to power in a very sarcastic manner.  It also highlights how “sanctions” are an act of war that has long assisted the U.S. government in acting as the bully of the world.  Dollar dominance is the cornerstone of such bullying since so many dollars are held in so many other countries as their reserve currency.  This allows a massive amount of foreign policy blackmailing to occur.

The bullying is always all about the money, one way or another, just as “follow the money” is always good advice when one investigates the causes of any war anywhere.  But a golden rule of politics is to never, ever admit that one is interested in anything but the moral uplifting of mankind, the eradication of poverty in foreign lands, saving the widows and orphans of the world, or some other selfless, magnanimous gesture.  Protectionists never admit, for example, that their real goal is to use the powers of the state to plunder and legally steal from their customers.  They must cloak their greed in nationalism, national defense arguments, anything but the truth.

In the foreign policy realm one must never speak the truth about the real purpose of imperialistic wars and invasions, as did Marine Corps General Smedley Butler in his famous essay, “War is a Racket.”  General Butler was a two-time Congressional Medal of Honor winner and is said to have been the most highly decorated Marine ever.  Published in the post World War I era, General Butler explained what he really spent his illustrious career doing:

“I spent most of my time being a high class muscle man for big business, for Wall Street and for the bankers . . . .  I helped make Mexico safe . . . for American oil interests . . . .  I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank . . . .  I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers . . . .  I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests . . .”

The Mother of All U.S. Government Lies

For at least the past century and a half American imperialism has been cloaked in a monstrous lie about the supposed moral exceptionalism of Americans and their government.  The lie was never better exposed than by the great novelist Robert Penn Warren in a 1961 book entitled The Legacy of the Civil War.  Warren was asked by Life magazine to write the book to commemorate the centennial of the Civil War.  The most important point of the book is that, after the war, the U.S. government claimed to possess what Warren calls “a treasury of virtue.”  The Republican party, which monopolized federal politics for the succeeding half century, called itself “the party of great moral ideas.”  Lincoln was of course deified after his assassination with court historians comparing him to Jesus Christ, reminding their readers that he died on Good Friday, and claiming that he died for America’s sins just as Jesus died for the sins of the world.  Harper’s magazine published a lithograph of an angel ascending to heaven above an opened tomb with the head of the angel being that of lifelong atheist Abraham Lincoln.

Everything related to Lincoln and his war was all of a sudden sacred and supremely virtuous.  No more draft riots. No more massive battlefield desertions.  No more firing squads for Union Army conscripts who had deserted.  No more mass imprisonment without due process of Northern state critics of the Lincoln regime.  No more shutting down of hundreds of opposition newspapers in the North and imprisonment of their owners and editors.  No more deportation of opposition party congressmen like Democrat Clement Vallandigham of Ohio.  No more calls to deport (euphemistically called “colonization”) all the black people as Lincoln and his idol, Henry Clay, had done throughout their adult lives.

One early biographer claimed that Lincoln’s mother was the most chaste woman in world history, next to the Virgin Mary herself.  His father, said another Lincoln biographer, was so illiterate that he could never even sign his name, but nevertheless somehow “read the Bible.”  Boobus Americanus ate it up and embraced every bizarre, nonsensical story about Lincoln as God’s truth, for Boobus was happy to equate Lincoln’s supposed saintliness with his own.  The deification of Lincoln eventually led to the effective deification of the presidency in general in the minds of many Americans, and then to the government itself.

Robert Penn Warren wrote that this massive and unprecedented propaganda barrage created “a plenary indulgence, for all sins past, present, and future.”  The U.S. government emerged from the Civil War “so full of righteousness that there is enough overplus stored in Heaven . . . to take care of all the small failings and oversights of the descendants of the crusaders . . .”  By “crusaders” Warren apparently meant the likes of General Sherman’s army of plunderers, arsonists, rapists, and murderers of civilians.

The American state adopted “a moral narcissism,” wrote Warren, which fueled “the crusades of 1917-1918 and 1941-1945 and our diplomacy of righteousness, with the slogan of unconditional surrender and universal rehabilitation – for others.”   “The effect of this conviction of virtue is to make us lie automatically,” he wrote.

In order to buy into the “treasury of virtue” ideology, however, one must forget an awful lot about actual American history and fill one’s head instead with false narratives concocted by state propagandists, said Warren.  One must forget, for example, that the Republican Party Platform of 1860 contained an ironclad defense of slavery; that the War Aims Resolution of the U.S. Congress declared to the world that the war was about saving the union and had nothing to do with slavery; that the Emancipation Proclamation freed no one since it only applied to rebel territory; that Lincoln said in one of the Lincoln-Douglas debates that “I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races”; and that in his first inaugural address Lincoln pledged his support of a constitutional amendment (the Corwin Amendment) that would have enshrined the protection of slavery explicitly in the text of the Constitution.  The Corwin Amendment was in fact the work of the Lincoln administration and it passed the House and Senate after Southern secession had occurred.  Lincoln himself instructed William Seward to do the heavy lifting with the Corwin Amendment in the U.S. Senate – and then claimed in his inaugural address that he had never seen such an amendment but supported it nevertheless!

What Did the U.S. Government Do with All that Virtue?

Three months after the end of the War to Prevent Southern Independence General William Tecumseh Sherman was put in charge of the Military District of the Missouri, which was all land west of the Mississippi.  His assignment was to commence a 25-year war of genocide against the Plains Indians.  “We are not going to let a few thieving, ragged Indians check and stop the progress” of the railroads, Sherman declared.  (Sherman had been given a large amount of stock in the government-subsidized transcontinental railroad corporations).  The mass killing of the Plains Indians was to be a veiled form of corporate welfare for the massively subsidize Union Pacific and Central Pacific Railroad corporations.

“The great triumvirate of the Civil War,” wrote Sherman biographer Michael Fellman in Citizen Sherman, which included Generals Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan, would pursue what Sherman called “the final solution to the Indian problem.”  Their “solution” resulted in the death of some 45,000 Indians, including thousands of women and children, and the maiming of far more at the hands of other Civil War “luminaries” such as George Armstrong Custer, Winfield Scott Hancock, John Pope, and Benjamin Garrison.

Fellman writes of how Sherman boasted of his objective of “a racial cleansing of the land,” and he was not above employing ex slaves (called “Buffalo soldiers” by the Indians) to assist in the task.  “All of the Indians will have to be killed or maintained as a species of paupers,” Fellman quotes Sherman as announcing.  As such, wrote Fellman, “Sherman gave Sheridan prior authorization to slaughter as many women and children as men” because it would be too time consuming to discriminate.  Sherman promised to handle the east coast press should anyone find out what was really going on in the West.  S.L.A. Marshall, the official U.S. government historian of the European theatre of war in World War II and the author of thirty-five books on U.S. military history called Sherman’s order to Sheridan and Custer “the most brutal orders every published to American troops.”  Such was our first exhibition of the vaunted treasury of virtue created by Lincoln’s war.

The Indian Wars were over by 1890 and Sherman was dead.  In 1899 the Filipinos finally got rid of the Spanish empire but little did they know that they were about to be forced to become a part of the American empire.  Their three-year fight for independence was known as the Philippine Insurrection during which some 200,000 Filipinos were killed by the most virtuous people on earth, American soldiers, many of whom had honed their genocidal skills during the Indian Wars.  Teddy Roosevelt, the biggest blowhard in American political history, cheered on the slaughter and assisted with rhetoric denouncing Filipinos as Chinese half breeds,” “savages,” “barbarians,” “wild and ignorant people,” and “a lesser race.”  Roosevelt denounced “the menace of peace,” shortly after which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.  U.S. Senator Albert Beveridge of Indiana bloviated that it was “America’s duty” to “bring Christianity” to the Philippines, unaware that Filipinos had been Catholics for about 400 years at that point.

The Spanish-American War of the same era is considered by many to have been the final turning point where America abandoned the idea of a constitutional republic and became an empire.  This was eloquently stated by the great libertarian Yale University scholar William Graham Sumner in his famous essay, “The Conquest of the United States by Spain.”  Sumner wrote of how the war created for the first time a regime of “war, debt, taxation, diplomacy, a grand governmental system, pomp, glory, a big army and navy, lavish expenditures, political jobbery – in a word imperialism.”  The “jobbery” created “enormous wealth for a few schemers” and was “a grand onslaught on democracy.”  Sound familiar?

Also in the early 1890s American corporations had their eye on the wealth of Hawaii and got the U.S. military to conquer yet another “inferior race.”  One John Stevens was appointed as a U.S. government “envoy” to Hawaii.  He arranged for troops to land there and take control, which they did, placing a Judge Stanford Dole as head of the new puppet government.  The troops held the Hawaiian king at bayonet point and forced him to sign a new “constitution” that disenfranchised all native Hawaiians along with Asians who lived there, once again denouncing them all as “an inferior race,” as apparently was the routine of “the party of Lincoln” at the time.  James Dole, the cousin of Judge Dole, then founded the Dole Fruit Company.  Once again the idiotic Teddy Roosevelt opened his big mouth with his giant horse teeth and declared, “I feel it was a crime . . . against the white race that we did not annex Hawaii three years ago.”

And so it went with the treasury of virtue, which morphed linguistically into “American exceptionalism.”  This is what paved the way for the never-ending military interventionism of the twentieth century and beyond, up to the present day.  The “treasury of virtue” has always been the moral cover for all of this greed, racism, barbarianism, and worse.  The good news today is that it is hard to think of anyone with a sound mind who would sincerely believe this any longer.  Of course, it is human nature to deny that one has been duped and lied to for one’s entire life, so there with always be the Boobus Americanus class, so named by H.L. Mencken, that will chant USA! USA! for every bomb dropped on civilian populations anywhere in the world.  But the gig is up.  The party in power as of this writing is run by a man described by Naomi Wolf as “a senile puppet of the Chinese Communist party” whose main mission as president has been to align himself – and his country – with what is generally acknowledged as the most corrupt society on earth, Ukraine.  The “uniparty” in Washington is finally crumbling, David Stockman has recently declared.  If he is right, it is because Boobus Americanus is finally outnumbered and the false treasury of virtue has been proven beyond doubt to have been the mother of all government lies.  There is no longer any moral authority to use “sanctions” to destroy a country’s economy for failing to “do as we say.”  The decline of the dollar will inevitably speed up this process, which is good news for the world.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2023/10/thomas-dilorenzo/false-virtue-the-life-and-death-of-american-exceptionalism/