. @HJBentham. #hegemony. #geopolitics.
Attempts to establish a unipolar world order after the end of the Cold War have proven futile. As the US is controverted by powers it had dismissed, such as Russia, China, and even Germany, the mad dream of an American-led world dies.
The ability to “keep the Germans down” (true friendship?) had been a significant badge of honor for the postwar US regime after it rose to superpower status in 1945. In 2014, the badge finally fell off, as top historiographer Immanuel Wallerstein notes, in the unprecedented breach triggered by US stupidity and ignorance towards European “allies” over the implications of US unilateral spying and other excesses of US hegemony.
Desperate to look strong, the US appears to be anemically drawing on Cold War imagery and fears to reassure itself. This is a pathetic gesture, hiding the regime’s humiliating decline behind the fevered idea of a “new” Cold War, pointing nostalgically towards the Russian specter when the real issue is its own internal crisis and the severe degradation of ties with its own allies. One could say more accurately that the old Cold War is back, because the US has lost its crown.
It is tempting for many jingoists to present America’s senescence as a temporary injury, but it is not. America is dying as a superpower, dragged to its grave by the momentum of history, and it will never heal. The unique circumstances that brought the US to leadership over the world are gone, and a steady demise is all that awaits the US.
As the view that an “exceptional” nation-state is going to “lead” our civilization to the stars loses credibility, we must think about alternatives to such an order. From what is happening to this regime, we can infer key lessons to determine how we might go about shaping the alternative order in succession to what we have already seen in history.
All nation-states will ultimately be retired to the dustbin of history. America, being the most powerful of such entities and an eminent global influence, deserves to be undone before all others.
Lesson 1: Nations don’t exist, including the American nation
Illusions of a new Cold War arising from the 2014 crisis in Ukraine and other inconsequential contests with Russia, China etc. are not tests for US global leadership, but clear signs that the megalomaniacal concept of global leadership under one state’s aegis is over. The United States is beginning to realize it is a single country, no more entitled to govern or monitor the world than Lichtenstein.
Why should any country have more rights than another? Why should US nationalist ambitions be allowed to hijack the machinery of European allied states, who have moved beyond nationalism? There is a fundamental ideological disconnect between a state that views itself as a special “nation”, and more sophisticated states that devalue the concept of the nation, instead seeing their future in the European/Eurasian integration projects and other facets of transnationalism.
The ultimate failure of the lunatics in Washington to bring their regime to a position from which it can rule the world is helping the American people to realize, like other aggressor nations, that they are not special. Let us hope that this compels US leaders to withdraw their obscene claims of “exceptionalism”, i.e. superiority over other states.
Without the runaway powers of the US regime interfering in our lives under the doctrine of exceptionalism, the world will be a safer place. In Europe, the view is that we survive despite America, rather than because of it, so this regime’s demise and military withdrawal from the world stage will be universally recognized here as a blessing when it happens.
In sum, let us call for the Americans to question their country’s doctrine of exceptionalism, and the existence of any kind of “American nation”. Perhaps without this delusion – this inane flag-waving contest – US people will wake up and become as enlightened as the average European today. From there, the US can realize how far behind it is on the cultural ladder, and can start to catch up with remainder of the West as we remove the final vestiges of warlike nationalism and vanity.
Lesson 2: The American culture of aggression threatens the world
The United States is responsible reprehensible and inhumane crimes, and has surpassed all of the European states as the world’s primary source of aggression, with the 2003 Iraq War being the deadliest aggression of the new millennium. American aggression must end, for the United States to move forward.
American aggression is rooted not simply in the militant doctrine of US exceptionalism at the heart of the US establishment, but in a broader culture of “patriotism”, moronic flag-waving and slogans, and blind belief in the lies of fascist authority figures. Such a culture is alien to Europeans today, just as the idea of taking up arms and dying for one’s “nation” in the Nineteenth Century sense is regarded as extremism in Europe now. For the US to remain part of the global story, it must dispose of its archaic ideology by digesting the lessons of its own aggression in Iraq, if it is not capable of learning the lessons of aggression from other countries.
The origin of all conflict, the cancer that murders in the name of peace and security, is the nation. This fraudulent entity, used to delineate differences among mankind, has been the excuse for every mass atrocity known to man. Some blame religion for war, but no lie is as divisive and destructive as the lie that one can be part of a nation or that once can be patriotic.
Lesson 3: Americans must accept their regime’s inferiority
America believes it is superior to other countries. As of 2014, scandals have shown the US is not only morally inferior to its European allies, but is a disgrace to the entire international community.
The turn of events that has set in motion the downfall of the US regime started with the regime’s decision to augment its role in the world with its disproportionate technological strength, especially trampling on its “allies” in this regard. Led on by the narcissistic view that it is a paragon of democracy and freedom, the hypocritical regime applied the totalitarian doctrine of “total information awareness”. As the regime uses the resulting infrastructure of privacy-violation to nullify civil rights on a daily basis by spying on the personal communications of any individual it chooses in the entire world, a strategy has resulted that can only be called thuggish. The regime abuses its technological power not to save lives but to spy, victimizing its own allies and every innocent soul on the planet, including you.
Further hypocrisy exposing how the “democratic” US regime defies its moral and legal obligations are found in the regime’s record of torture, unprecedented prison populations, and political repression. This record portrays an unscrupulous entity that cannot be entrusted as any kind of authority over such international domains as democracy or human rights.
Now alienating its own Western allies by demonstrating the whole new lengths of pervasive greed and cruelty that it can be capable of, the American regime has lost the legitimacy to represent anything valued or regarded as democratic by the world. With such a loss of legitimacy, the regime is no longer able to take up its conceited role as a credible rallying point for the international community. Instead, the name of the United States shall be placed in the category of abominations including Nazi Germany, Apartheid South Africa and its own most loathed ally, the State of Israel.
The sheer hilarity that such a cockeyed and murderous regime might try to preach anything to Europeans or its other “allies” is now apparent for all to see. Why should anyone take lessons on global governance from a hypocrite? One might have a better fate voyaging aboard the Titanic than taking a seat with the lunatic regime, at the present juncture.
