Dying Alone
Once, what seems like a thousand years ago, I was presented with the question: why should the United States of America be involved in politics all over the world? My answer at that time was based on my limited world view. I didn’t think we should. In short, I believed that we have an entire continent over here in the Americas to manage, and that it doesn’t matter what happens in the rest of the world. Why bother responding to genocides among the Eastern nations, anyway, when it’s very unlikely that left to their devices such things would arrive on our doorstep. I saw genocide as something that happened to other nations.
Sure, we had that slavery thing. But that was over, wasn’t it? And that’s not really genocide, more like genocide-lite — or so I thought at the time. And I held onto this superficial belief long enough to join the Libertarian party and become immersed in the ideas of Objectivism. I’ll save my Rand-rant for later. If you’re interested in what I think about that now, check out my free collection of short stories Gemini Book, and particularly that first story called The Akston Society. I’ll leave you to that exploration, and right now will return instead to the implicit question here: what changed my mind?
I got woke.
Laugh, chuckle, or whatever you have to do to get it out of your system, and then go check your opinion of the word against the word as we’ve defined it here at Right and Freedom. All that means is I started thinking critically about things inside the United States. In the ultimate act of self-checking, I began wading through our murky history, and what I found there horrified me.
This isn’t a list of reasons why you should reconsider your opinion of ‘American exceptionalism’, although statistically if you’re reading this you most certainly should. This blog entry is to discuss why staying plugged-in to the world is a requirement for any nation that wishes to continue to exist. Here’s what I learned.
Isolation is Inherently Unsafe
The world is smaller than we think. Look to the issue of slavery and the labeling of anyone who didn’t ascribe to the European ideas of enlightenment as savages all the way back to the Romans, who labeled anyone beyond the empire as barbarians. As we look back on the events of history, we tend to look through the lense of the oppressors and not the oppressed, so we lose sight of several facts. One such fact is the impact of isolation.
When the Europeans landed in the Americas and on the various islands in the Caribbean, they had better tools for war than the people in the lands in which they’d landed. It might have gone differently — but it didn’t. The reason isn’t because people in the places that the Europeans landed were more peaceful. They had wars too, but the arms race had gone in a different direction. All anyone knows of their weapons were that they must to be better than the weapons of their enemy. Native Americans had no knowledge of the weapons of people who they’d never met. The consequences of this are astounding. Without the weapons and frankly the technologies that they had, the “settlers” couldn’t have overpowered the native Americans. And, more importantly, the native American’s couldn’t have known that the conflicts beyond the ocean would bleed over onto their soil.
Ultimately, what dethroned the native Americans was the spillover of a battle between the then world superpowers into their territory. It was the real ‘World War One’ if you update what western society knew of the world then. Okay, so they weren’t really pushed aside until Andrew Jackson and his Manifest Destiny displaced them cruelly from their homes, but without the Western superpowers, and the result of an expanding colonial technology base, the westward expansion may not have been successful. Compounding this was the fact that the view of native Americans as savages (mirroring Rome’s view of anyone outside of Rome as barbarians) prevented what little trade there was from benefiting them.
The point here is that isolation set the upper-limits for the expectation of technology, which itself was bound to the environment in which the native Americans lived. So there wasn’t a need for the types of weapons that the Europeans had (some of these being massive war ships, for example).
Technology reached what’s called in optimization algorithms a ‘local maximum’, due to constraints of large swathes of land and cultural respect for the land, among other things. Better information on what was happening beyond America would have let them know that they were lagging behind some other nations in the technology being used for making war. And, early intervention or disruption of some of those trading patterns that existed in Europe and some of those alliances could have made all the difference in whether the Europeans even bothered trying to come across the ocean. In fact, a half-decent navy would have helped dissuade the Europeans from even sending their settlement ships over as they were lost or destroyed.
Isolation yields ignorance, and ignorance only increases danger, never detracts from it.
We Have a Lot of Enemies
This is a hard fact to learn. When I was a child, things such as manifest destiny and the three-fifths compromise were taught as good things. Soak that up. The deliberate replacement, confinement, mass-murder of native Americans was something to be proud of. Naturally, nobody talked about that part of it — not where I grew up in Texas. Just that the United States needed to be from sea to shining sea. Also, the three-fifths compromise was ridiculous. Very little has done more to damage the United States past having black people in enslavement camps counted for the census and calculated as a basis for representation. It was taught as “look - see? Black people counted too”. But what it really did was solidify slaveowner control of the nations government. It’s not like those same enslaved people could vote. And yet, they still counted for the apportionment of representatives.
The nazis modeled oppressing the jews in Germany after what the United States did to the enslaved people, right down to the blood-lineage and anti-miscegenation laws. And that’s only the stuff that happened on American soil. I didn’t discuss the multitude of banana republics and regime-change operations that happened all throughout history. We’ve seen so much bad in our history that we have a hard time understanding what’s bad and good anymore. Anything that conflicts with American Exceptionalism is considered taboo.
Well let me tell you right now: America is not exceptional on human rights.
We just aren’t. It doesn’t matter how you spin it, we do horribly at it because we aren’t emotionally invested. Think about what’s happening in Ukraine at the time I write this. An entire news outlet is spewing misinformation about what’s happening to a sovereign nation that has been invaded without cause. People are being raped and murdered.
What does this matter? It’s what happens at home that matters, right?
Sure. That’s what the people who lived here thought as the wars were unfolding overseas. All that matters is here. As we’ve known, and as we’ve instigated, what happens beyond a nation’s borders matters. Hawaii didn’t ask to become a banana republic. Neither did Haiti (sugarcane) or Cuba. None of the people living in colonial territory had intentions of becoming second class citizens in their own homes. And yet, through circumstances they didn’t know about due in part to their isolation, this is exactly what became of them. And it was we who did it to a lot of them. A consequence of this is a strong suspicion of Western culture that manifests right now as failure to gain allies among Indians or Africans in this Ukrainian conflict.
We Are Experiencing Growing Pains
The unrest we feel today are either the dying vestiges of an installed aristocracy (courtesy of the Federalists and the slave states), or is the re-entrenchment of the dissolution of our democracy. One of the major political parties in our nation have gone rogue, and seem hellbent on reversing our progress of the last two-hundred plus years to turn us back into an autocracy.
And they might win.
It’s a sad fact that a significant chunk of our nation have turned their back on democratic values. The sadder part of that fact is that it didn’t have to be this way. One segment of the population, for decades, has stalled, balked, and repeatedly refused to help others. Another of our major political parties here has only made tentative forward steps — for some good and some bad reasons, but with the same net result: convincing many citizens of the United States that the federal government mistreats its citizens. And to an extent, and throughout history, this has been true. It can’t be argued very well, and makes it hard to convince anyone that we’re moving in the right direction.
But we are still moving in the right direction, despite the odds.
The resurgence of totalitarianism and the vehemence with its rise is a direct response to the growth of the United States. I know, I know… bear with me. The United States grows more diverse by the day. I don’t mean to talk along color lines of white and black, because not all white is the same, and not all black is the same. I mean that cultures and values are mixing together as the population continues to grow. More mixed people exist now than at any other point in history. Once the anti-miscegenation laws were lifted back in the seventies, it turns out that people will have sex across racial lines quite often.
As these cultures mingle, we’re learning about each other. Those walls that divide us are coming down.
So what does this have to do with our involvement in the world beyond our borders? It’s simple. Our most vicious attackers are currently spreading their ideologies through conquest to other nations. As they do, the megaphone for spreading misinformation — much of which has already made it into our nation — gets larger. The information available gets smaller, and as has been shown in North Korea and Russia and to a lesser extent China, once the government controls the media, then it’s only a matter of time before the people are brainwashed enough to sympathize with their oppressors. That’s why 80% of Russians support the Ukraine invasion — they don’t know what’s actually going on in Ukraine! They never will either. They’ve bought in so hard as to become complicit in genocide, and it will be very hard to convince them of that fact because to admit their complicity is to admit to genocide itself. That won’t happen.
Bit if Ukraine falls, Russia’s megaphone gets larger and their ability to do harm grows. Ukraine supplies millions of tons of food throughout the world. If Ukraine falls, then Russia controls a significant portion of the world’s food supply, beyond just the oil — and we’ve seen how they use the oil as leverage already.
Imagine what happens when Russia controls that food supply.
And that’s just one of our enemies. China is making significant inroads and basically predatory-lending its way through Africa, scooping up land and loyalties along the way. As strange as it may seem, they have the moral high-ground in Africa seeing as how they didn’t actively participate in the whole Scramble for Africa or slave trade. One of Communisms selling points was that it views all people the same — and for the most part, both the USSR and China have kept to that part of it — as long as you’re not trying to install a democracy. Not praise — they do a lot more wrong than they got right, and Africa is starting to see that as they suffer from what’s basically Scramble for Africa part 2. I digress.
In Conclusion
The point here is that we can’t protect ourselves from that which we can’t see. And even seeing isn’t enough to protect ourselves if we let rogue states like Russia run over everyone in their way. Democracies don’t typically last. Our representative democracy is the longest lasting in history. For the rest of time — kings and emperors. It’s easy to keep a state when you control all of the information. It’s much harder when you don’t — that’s why the first amendment exists.
But even with such strong guarantees, repeat the same lie enough times and it starts to look like the truth — ask any of millions of Trump-supporting Americans the truth of that. With a-la-carte you-only-have-to-read-what-you-want news, we’re siloing away from each other. Out of all of the conjecture about why Rome’s democracy failed, it comes down to in-fighting. And that in-fighting in Rome’s case mostly originated in Rome. But in our case, a good majority of Americans still believe in democracy and that it’s worth fighting for. But what happens in the rest of the world impacts us. Look at the 2016 elections.
So if we truly think democracy is worth fighting for, it’s time to get rid of the isolationist tendencies. We have to. Because what’s waiting just outside of our bubble is the death of our nation.
Who was it who said that the best way to predict the future is to make it?
If we want a democracy here in the United States, then we will need democracy worldwide, or we need reliable partners who won’t tamper with ours. Either way, we need to have influence and trust absolutely everywhere, among our friends and enemies alike. Our friends who follow democratic principles must have complete faith that we will come to their aid, as we must be able to that they will come to ours. Our enemies who tamper or otherwise interfere in democracies, be it through misinformation or economic leverage or other means, must be absolutely certain that our collective retribution will be worse for them than just leaving us be.
We can’t not be interventionists. That’s not going to support our longevity. We must be involved, and we must be growing democracy where we can. Anything else leads to our eventual demise — as we’ve no doubt begun to guess after the travesty that was the 2016 election cycle.
