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Topic Summary

Posted by: Giuliano Taverna
« on: May 17, 2009, 06:56:50 pm »

Empire or nation state?


In the history of western civilization we have had many organizations and theories regarding how societies should be structured. In the ancient world we had tribes, based on families. The tribal structure then evolved into city states, when warring tribes came together to form a larger structure. These tribal identities then disappeared and unified into a city state identity. A classic example of this is in the founding of the roman kingdom, the various tribes living along the Tiber consolidated into the city, Rome. This was to the Latin tribes the equivalent of globalism today, sovereign governing bodies coming to form one nation. It wasn’t without conflict, as the Sabine war demonstrates.

Later, as city states expanded they began to conquer their neighbors. This created confederacies of city states, the Latin league in Rome. The delian league of Athens and the Peloponnesian league of Sparta are classic examples of this. These leagues would usually be formed to oppose an external threat, and be dominated by the most influential city state in the league. However another form of empire began to form, the military state. The most famous example for this system is the Assyrian empire. The city state of Assur conquered its neighbors through a mix of military prowess and terror. The central state of Assur ruled the entire Middle East through subjugation, terror, and maintained an economy based on tribute or taxation. Other systems were more legalistic. The Babylonians for example gave rights to their conquered people by imposing universal laws, enforced by the kings dictatorial power.

However, with the rise of the Persians a new factor entered into the equation, wining the hearts and minds of the conquered, rather than subjugating them became the standard. Cyrus offered a choice, join the Persian empire, and you were allowed to keep your religious and cultural institutions intact, and were protected from enemies, and had access to public works, trade, and commerce, in exchange for offering taxation and supplying troops to the king. This motivated many nations to go over to the Persians willingly, and many hailed them as liberators.

The next revolution came with the Greeks, who founded the concept of democracy. This was exclusive in Athens. For only Athenians were considered human and thus deserved the rights of a citizen. Foreign Greeks from other cities were treated fairly well, but had no legal rights, and no chance for advancement in Athenian society, barbarians or non Greeks were treated as slaves regardless of their race religion or creed. There was no way to become an Athenian citizen except being born one.

The most important revolution came with imperial Rome; the Romans had created the concept of citizenship. By performing acts of merit, non citizens, and slaves could become Romans. Indeed by the end of the empire all free men from Britain to Babylon, and from the Danube to the Sahara, were Romans. Romans indeed could be Italians, Gaul’s, Germans, Greeks, Asians, Semites, Africans or any other race, and many of the later emperors were of non Italian dissent. As citizens they had legal rights and could receive a variety of welfare programs instituted by the empire including free grain and tax rebates or gifts. They also benefited from the public works, and the trade and commerce that flourished under the Pax Romana.
As Rome disintegrated do to a variety of factors the western world regressed into the era known as the Dark Age. In this era society was based on feudalism. Kings and nobility ruled over the populace who were serfs or peasants. They had few or no legal rights, and where subject to the will of their sovereign. This system was very local and based on agriculture rather than trade. The primary power of this system was theocratic and military. The fear of god, and of the knights who were little more than armed muscle, kept the peasants pacified.

The next stage came with the formation of empires and the ideas of the enlightenment. As Europe began to found colonies and met primitive cultures, they did what they had always done when faced with foreign people. They conquered and subjugated them. Because these cultures were primitive, they were very easy to subjugate. The Europeans concluded that this inequality of power was the result of some fundamental difference. They concluded that these people were sub human and that was the reason their cultures were so primitive. They then used this newly created supremacist ideology to justify long periods of selective subjugation. Eventually the ancient practice of taking slaves which had always been multi racial became discriminatory.

This age of empires lasted until the First World War, in which the American president Woodrow Wilson argued for nation states to replace empires. He concluded that each race should self determine and form a nation. This was the polar opposite of the aforementioned roman concept of unity or the Pax Romana, which held that all peoples could and should work together for the good of the empire. This new idea held that different cultures could not work together and should be separate. It also held that they should abolish war, and all states should be independent, and remain independent. This was used by the other allied powers to expand their empires through the pretense of nation building. The idea being that these primitives needed help to become independent. However their aim was instead to keep them from becoming viable, so they could forever exploit and dominate them.

The Nazis took this concept of domination to the next logical level, they concluded that the other races should be outright enslaves or exterminated. The imperial Japanese and the soviets under Stalin held similar beliefs and tactics, and this lead to genocide. Genocide is the end result of the nation state. If you decide that different races and cultures cannot work together as they do in an empire. Then they will decide that it’s them, or everyone else. They will then dominate and exterminate other cultures, and ethnic cleansing will take place within nations to protect their ethnic and cultural identity.

In recent times an echo of the roman concept of universal peace and unity has revived under the banner of multiculturalism and globalism. However both these ideologies are lacking due to their naiveté regarding primitive cultural practices. If you cannot discriminate between the good and the bad aspects of a given culture, adopting the good, and eliminating the bad, as the Romans did. Then you will only create more social problems as your society begins to fragment.

More over the idea that unity can be achieved without conflict is a dubious notion and the threat of radical concepts like collective ownership of goods, and class struggle can and will bring about calamity in any global system, just as they destroy any national system.

Therefore we should strive to create a new global empire or Pax Americana, where all people can work together as equals for the common good, under a just republican system. However, to work towards this goal will mean to overcome the problems in our own society and those of others. The greatest threats to civilization are racism, Marxism, feudalism, elitism, radical liberalism, radical conservatism, anarchists, neo confederates, secessionists, and radical relativists.
The consequence of rejecting the globalist ideal of a multicultural civilization or empire is a continuation of all the problems afflicting the modern world; Genocide, endemic warfare, xenophobia, and exploitation. As long as you maintain that two cultures cannot live together, you leave them with no other option but to destroy each other. With the advent of nuclear weapons, this can lead to the total destruction of the human race.