America is a great country, but its downfall will be in greed and lust.
St John of Shanghai
Every people and every country has gone through turning points in its history in order to get to its present stage. Some turning points are positive, others are negative, many are both; in all cases they are epoch-making. For example in the history of England, everybody would agree that the genocidal Norman Invasion of 1066 and the 16th century Reformation when the State exchanged the popular religion for another were such turning points. However, there have been many other turning points in English history, whose relative importance historians discuss and the balance of whose positive and negative consequences are controversial.
As regards the USA, how did it get to its present stage as a Superpower seeking world hegemony, with bases in some 130 foreign bases? How has the country of such an open, generous, warm-hearted and welcoming people become so strongly disliked? Why are its only, and even then sometimes critical, friends to be found in the Anglosphere of the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and in vassal-like countries in parts of the EU and in Japan? Why is the USA so isolated? Why in so many parts of the world is there such fear of and hatred for the USA, a fear and hatred which have increased almost exponentially since 1945 with the ritual burning of US flags almost worldwide? In other words, when did the American Dream turn into the American Nightmare?
There are some who would suggest that the USA was corrupt even before it began. There never was an American Dream, only ever an American Nightmare. The USA was, so they say, founded by a mixture of sectarian Puritans, unable to accept the religion of the majority in England, and greedsters, who wanted to steal a relatively empty land and its rich resources, had no qualms about slaughtering the native inhabitants, settling their country and exploiting it with imported slaves. In the 18th century, so they say, such was the greed of the slave-owners in control that they started a war against the colonial power and its tax system. In this they were influenced by revolutionary masonry, whose symbols appear on the dollar bill and mark the city planning of Washington D.C. to this day. The USA, so they say, is simply a colony which got out of control and became deregulated, living not by moderate European values and codes, but by extremes, by the law of the jungle, by gun law, becoming ‘the Wild West’.
Many would reply that the above is a totally unfair and jaundiced view. There was, so they say, much that was good in the early settlers who lived with the Native Americans in relative peace and brought Christian values of hard work, morality, freedom, justice and humility. This was the American Dream.
A more substantial number of Americans, especially in the South, would suggest that the rot set in only with the American Civil War (1861-65) with over 600,000 dead. Then the greedsters took control from the Christian elements in the nation. Then, so they say, the industrial North under the cunning Lincoln decided to ravage the South in order to take slaves, who had lived in Patriarchal conditions in the South, to wage slavery in grim and fast-expanding factories in the North. For them the US Civil War was an act of genocide, which destroyed a whole civilization of Southern rural and agrarian values for a Northern industrial world of filth and exploitation, which destroyed the Shire for Mordor. The concept of ‘a wonderful life’ of Confederation, of unity in diversity, local and family values, was lost for the Big Brother world of capitalist and centralized Unionism, ultimately of Imperialism. And after the Civil War, so they say, there were no more checks on the slaughter of Native Americans, who were increasingly herded into giant concentration camps established on the worst and poorest lands, called ‘reservations’, so that their lands could be exploited.
Many would reply that this is a myth. The economy of the South was based on slavery and racism, the Civil War was about freedom, justice, development, progress and unity. The Union was a great victory over tyranny, backwardness, ignorance and racism.
Others assert that nothing really went wrong until the USA began violently stealing land from Mexico in the 1840s and then creating overseas colonies, notably in the Philippines, Puerto Rico and Cuba at the end of the 19th century. This, so they say, led to further meddling in Latin America and then overseas, across the Atlantic in Europe after 1917 and 1941, across the Pacific against the Japanese Empire after 1941 and then worldwide after the Second World War. The USA, so they say, should have remained independent, sovereign and in isolation from others.
Many would reply that, on the contrary, so-called US ‘meddling’ was actually massive self-sacrifice, that US heroism saved suicidal Europe from itself twice, saved the Pacific Region from Japanese imperialism and then numerous countries from Communist and other tyrannies.
Others, perhaps more conspiracy theorists, affirm that all was basically well until Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963. He was, so they say, the last obstacle to the complete domination of the USA by the ‘military-industrial complex’ (Eisenhower’s phrase), the annihilation of ‘small town America’ and its values and worldwide meddling. Only after Kennedy did there come the catastrophe of Vietnam, CIA-installed right-wing military puppet juntas in South Vietnam, the Philippines (Marcos), Greece (the colonels), Iraq (Saddam Hussein), Chile (Pinochet), Argentina (the generals) etc, which always turned sour through the particular junta’s fanatical nationalism, in Cyprus, Kuwait, the Falklands or elsewhere. The same has happened today in the Ukraine, where, again in the name of mythical ‘freedom and democracy’, the CIA, and so the USA, has backed another loser, once more been spending billions of dollars on setting up, backing, training and equipping criminal nationalist oligarchs and war criminals, as usual the most hated, awful, corrupt and genocidal people in the country, such as Poroshenko-Waltzman. After all, so they say, until Kennedy, the USA was a Christian country and there was no question of its administration rejecting puritanism in favour of lust and spreading sodomy worldwide.
The above thoughts are but pebbles dropped into a pool. It is for American readers to watch for any ripples and decide whether all or part or any of the above is true. We wish the American people only the best, whatever they may think of both worthy and unworthy US administrations. What concerns us is that perhaps the original American Dream, founded on Christian values, has been forgotten, first for greed and then for lust, that there may be a cultural time-bomb ticking in Washington, which will one day be set off by the accumulation of historical errors over 250 years and more, and this may create an American Nightmare. And if that should happen, then the whole world will be unable to sleep.