America: vampire of the world (part 1)

Of course I’m constantly dreaming up new ways to seduce innocent, unwary young progressives into the dark nets of UR. I thought this title might be just the thing.

But I do mean it, though. Though I must note that by “America” here I mean the government of America, aka Washington, aka USG. America the continent is a wonderful slab of real estate. America the population is pretty great, mostly—including both its “red” and “blue” components. America the political structure is up to no good at all, and it needs to be stopped.

The idea of America as “vampire of the world” will hardly be unfamiliar to any American. Surely, if you saw an opus of the Chomsky school with this title, it would not surprise you. It is more or less impossible to escape from an American university without learning that one’s own country is a bloodsucking predator. So why should I bother? Hasn’t the point been made?

No, actually, it hasn’t.

The best way to understand the progressive mind is to think of it as a sort of magic trick. We live in a free country where anyone can think and say more or less what they want, and yet nonetheless—as Schopenhauer put it—“Clio, the muse of history, is as thoroughly infected with lies as a street whore with syphilis.” Supposing for a moment that this is true, how could it be true?

Think of it as magic. The art of magic is the art of tricking the human brain into constructing a false narrative of reality. Beyond this no generalization is possible. Any illusion is fair. The basic principle of magic is misdirection, but only in the crudest sense: when a magic trick is performed, the audience is typically looking right at it.

So what better way to conceal the reality that America is the vampire of the world, than for distinguished Americans—such as Professor Chomsky—to evangelize that very same proposition? The purloined letter is in plain sight. It is not, however, the letter you think it is.

Not that this is intentional—oh, no. The Chomskys and Burkes of the world are perfectly sincere. Like all the best magic, the spell is so strong that it works on the magus himself. Does this confuse you? Perhaps it should. Hopefully by the end of the post it will be clearer.

I’m afraid the title is not original. I stole it from Count Ernst zu Reventlow, whose Vampire of the Continent (1916), translated by the Irish traitor George Chatterton-Hill, then smuggled to New York by (I kid you not) U-Boat, is today available to all and sundry, courtesy of the innocent young progressives at Google Books. Read it now, before they realize their terrible mistake.

I can’t really endorse Reventlow’s Vampire. For one thing—unlike the aristocratic German nationalists I really do admire, e.g., Ernst Jünger, Ernst von Salomon and Fritz Reck-Malleczwen—he succumbed to the brown poison, i.e., became a Nazi. And Vampire is not about America, of course, but England. (The translation is half the length of the original—I’m sure any morsels of counter-Americanism were scrubbed for propaganda purposes.) Nor is it a terribly cogent piece of analysis. Reventlow often finds calculated malice where I see only accidental incompetence. He is, after all, writing war propaganda.

Vampire is still a fun read, however. I’ll bet you’ve never read any German World War I propaganda. Better yet, wash it down it with some Allied propaganda—such as George Herron’s The Menace of Peace. Herron, who was perhaps even more Wilsonian than Wilson, was actually employed by that dear President as a peace emissary in negotiations with Emperor Charles. It is with great surprise that I report that the talks were not successful. I would quote from Menace of Peace, but I really don’t think any excerpt can do it justice.

Our goal today is to do for US foreign policy more or less what Reventlow did for its British counterpart. As we’ll see, there is quite a bit of continuity between the two. We’ll go from George to George—that is, George Washington to the Russo-Georgian war.

Let’s start with the latter. There are quite a few things that make the Russo-Georgian war fabulous, but the resemblance to the start of World War II is especially amusing. To delineate the resemblance, let’s play a little game. Who uttered the following quotes, A, B and C? Hitler or Goebbels, or Putin or Medvedev?

A:

All warfare is retaliation, all acts of war are reprisals, and everything appertaining to the enemy is a military objective. Consequently, such expressions as “reprisal raids” or “retaliatory measures” may be all right for civilians but they are not for soldiers. The “eye-for-an-eye” principle is old testament doctrine. In war’s new testament, if your enemy shoots your toe, you shoot his head.

B:

Whether the effort should be made to indoctrinate hatred toward the enemy must be considered a practical training question rather than a moral issue.

Since killing is the primary means by which the enemy is compelled to submit to one’s own discipline, one of the ends of the training must be to so indoctrinate the soldier that he is not only willing but anxious to work bodily destruction upon the foes of his country. That state of mind is not possible unless the soldier is motivated by hatred in the hour when he is at grips with his enemy.

C:

Let there be no more talk of war as if it were a sporting proposition fought under the Marquis [sic] of Queensberry rules. When a Jew / Chechen or Pole / Georgian acts sporting, it is time to smell a rat.

Since this is UR, you know the question is probably a trick. Indeed. In C, read “German” and “Japanese.” All the above quotes are from the following publication:

Unusually for UR, this is “original research.” Guide to the Use of Information Materials (1943, 30 pages) is a pamphlet I found in my grandfather’s war papers and scanned on Flickr. (Try the slideshow view. Read the whole thing—you’ll enjoy it.)

These quotes may astonish you slightly. After all, World War II is “the good war.” Obviously not every side in this war was a good one, but we’d like to think there was one good side, namely, ours. Of course we all know of the indiscriminate aerial devastation wreaked on Germany and Japan, but, but, but…

One easy way to banish this oddity from your memory is to put it down as a piece of “old army” dogma, a relic of the cowboy era, a product of the same hirsute, violent, ultra-American militaristic subculture that massacred the Indians, invaded Cuba and massacreed the Filipinos, and is currently doing the nasty in Iraq. Well—not quite. Here are some other bits from the Guide:

The force of the arms of the United States is being directed toward putting an end to the rule of gangsterism in international affairs, and equally toward the reestablishing of order in the world society and the restoration of law as the rule of action in the intercourse of nations. We fight to preserve for our own people and for people throughout the world the chance to learn or to continue learning how to govern themselves and how to live with each other. […] The men and women of the United States Army should know better than any, or instruction should inform them, that the only possible justification for war is the fashioning of a less imperfect peace; also that military victories are indeed meaningless if the peace arrangements built upon them satisfy the victor less than the arrangements that led up to the war. Such arrangements must eventuate in an organization of both local and world society which seeks to be constructive rather than destructive, for such is the definition of peace. […] The United Nations are not simply a common military front formed for the duration of hostilities. They are an alliance looking toward the solutions of the problems of the peace. The Atlantic Charter— to which all have subscribed in principle—was the first testament of that purpose. A later pledge which implements it is the Joint Four-Nation Declaration given at Moscow by the governments of the United States, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and China, stating among its articles that these nations “recognize the necessity of establishing at the earliest practicable date a general international organization, based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all peace-loving states, and open to membership by all such states, large and small, for the maintenance of international peace and security.”

Don’t these phrases, which you have probably heard parroted by an army of schoolteachers, journalists and professors big enough to invade Nazi Germany all on its own, sound a little strange in the same booklet as “if your enemy shoots your toe, you shoot his head?”

Presumably someone at least read this pamphlet before distributing it. How, exactly, did they fit together their little jab about “Marquis of Queensberry rules” with “putting an end to the rule of gangsterism in international affairs?” How could anyone fail to see a small contradiction here? Today we are informed daily by the great and the good that to prevail in any military conflict, one must first dig in and fortify the “moral high ground.” No one ever seems to tell us that this essential tactic involves the “indoctrination of hatred toward the enemy.”

The Guide does not list an author, although its prose is too good to be the work of any truly bureaucratic committee. But there is one name in the flyleaf which you might recognize: George Marshall. Marshall may well be the most respected American of the last half-century. The establishment tolerated Joe McCarthy for a while, but when he attacked George Marshall, he had gone too far.

There is no organized political force in the US or the world today to which Marshall is anything but a hero. There is no organized political force which opposes the United Nations. (If you find it odd that the UN is mentioned in 1943, it is simply another word for the Allies.) There is also no organized political force which would utter, or even fail to condemn, “war’s new testament.” As we so often say on the Internet: WTF?

Moreover, the deeper we dig, the worse it gets. The Guide is almost certainly the work of the Office of War Information. Twice in the 20th century, the US press was gleischgeschaltet as a government agency: once as the CPI, once as the OWI. Significantly, this was done not by appointing some general to tell journalists what to say, Goebbels-style, but by bringing journalists themselves into government. The legacy of these coordination events is more or less what we mean when we say “mainstream media.” So imagine a world in which the New York Times tells us about “war’s new testament,” and you pretty much have the picture.

A couple of recent popular books, one by Pat Buchanan and another by Nicholson Baker, have taken a revisionist line on World War II. You can read a typical omnibus review of both here. One more cogent review of Baker’s book, which I think actually engages with what the writer was trying to accomplish, is here.

Buchanan is a paleoconservative and isolationist. He says more or less what you’d expect him to say: the war wasn’t worth it. It is Baker’s book, really, that is far more interesting, because Baker is a progressive and progressives are supposed to believe in World War II. Pretty much the same way Christians are supposed to believe in Jesus.

What happened to Baker is that, as part of his library-saving campaign, he found himself the owner of huge volumes of WWII-era OWI journalism. Being Baker, he had to read it. And reading it, he found himself face to face with the mentality of the Guide—and realized that the airbrushed morality play we learned about in school has very little to do with what actually happened. Baker’s aim in Human Smoke is to reproduce the sense of shock and confusion he felt, as a good 21st-century progressive and pacifist, on exposure to the actual Allied mind.

Here’s another example: the Holocaust. The elementary-school version of World War II runs roughly as follows: we fought the Nazis because the Nazis were bad. The Nazis were bad because they killed the Jews. All sorts of illustrations can be hung on this basic moral armature.

And yet: the word Jew does not appear in the Guide. This is not a coincidence. The Guide’s choice of atrocity, rather: the Greek famine of 1942. Doubtless you’ve heard all about it. Moreover, given the recent history of the tactic…

If we are to understand World War II in terms of its results, the Holocaust must figure prominently. It is certainly difficult to imagine the murder of the Jews without the war. However, if we are to understand the war in terms of what the people who fought it were thinking, the Holocaust cannot be too relevant to the calculation. Since no one on either side saw fit to publicize it, hardly anyone on either side was thinking of it.

In other words: if in April 1945 the Allied armies had discovered a huge Lager containing five or six million surviving Jews, the narrative of the war would have been almost exactly the same. Moreover, lacking the Aktion Reinhard, history would have another excellent candidate for the word holocaust—the destruction by aerial fire of the cities of Germany and Japan. The Jews were murdered; but this fact has no place in the case of “der brand,” because neither the people responsible for strategic bombing, nor most of those who were bombed, had any idea that the Holocaust existed. (It was, after all, a military secret.)

And if it had not existed, how would history have judged the strategic bombers? I suppose we’d probably think of something. If the Third Reich had won the war, how would Germans today think of the Aktion Reinhard? As a mistake, probably. A regrettable outbreak of excess enthusiasm, in the course of a fundamentally just and noble conflict. You get the picture.

This simple exercise leaves a vast moral vacuum where “the good war” ought to be. If said war was not fought to save the Jews, what was it fought for? The freedom and independence of Poland? If so, surely to be “good” a war should be successful…

Yet it is also a historical error to equate an Arthur Harris with an Adolf Eichmann. Both were personally responsible for actions which resulted in untold numbers of ghastly, horrifying deaths; both justified these actions through a sense of military duty and a philosophy that explained them as the lesser of two evils. But these philosophies were very different. To describe them both as merely murderous does not help us understand either.

And which matters more? We study history not to understand the present, but the past. The Third Reich, the Confederacy, and the Soviet Union do not exist in the real world. The first two were destroyed utterly, the third is changed beyond recognition. It may be interesting to study them. It may be educational in some abstract sense. It is not a matter of your personal safety.

Whereas the entity that defeated all three—the government of the United States, USG—is still very much alive, well, and kicking. Is it a problem? I think it’s a problem. You may disagree. But for us to disagree intelligently, we have to look at this USG, and the wars it won. The side that matters in these total wars is the victor—because the victor still exists.

So the Civil War, for example, is taught today very much as the Anti-Confederate War. One can very easily find all sorts of information on how weird, creepy, and awful the Confederacy was. Some of this is exaggerated, some is not.

But for me the important question is: what the heck were the Unionists thinking? Were they ethical, sensible, and competent? Or crafty, rabid, and inept? Because our own dear USG is the modern descendant of the grand old Union. And if it was crafty, rabid and inept in 1861, what is the probability that it has since somehow improved?

The question deserves its own post—but I note merely how much less attention is paid to the blue side of the picture. Magic.

What we’re seeing with the Guide—this moment of cognitive dissonance, this sense of not understanding—is an essential step toward recapturing the real pattern of history. To learn to see the real, start by learning to unsee the forgery. You reach an intermediate point at which you simply don’t know what you’re looking at, and this is the beginning of real observation.

As I see it, in WWII there are two main forgeries to be unseen. One is the idea that the war was an Allied crusade to rescue the Jews. No one ever tells you to believe this, because it simply isn’t true. But hardly anyone, except Nicholson Baker, will tell you not to believe it. So it floats around as a sort of half-heard, half-felt bassline in the backs of peoples’ heads.

The second fake, which is actually at least somewhat controversial, is the idea that WWII was a war of self-defense. Consider, for example, FDR’s Navy Day speech, October 27, 1941. FDR, having just finished misrepresenting the Kearny incident, comes out with the following:

Hitler has often protested that his plans for conquest do not extend across the Atlantic Ocean. But his submarines and raiders prove otherwise. So does the entire design of his new world order.

For example, I have in my possession a secret map made in Germany by Hitler’s government-by the planners of the new world order. It is a map of South America and a part of Central America, as Hitler proposes to reorganize it. Today in this area there are fourteen separate countries. The geographical experts of Berlin, however, have ruthlessly obliterated all existing boundary lines; and have divided South America into five vassal states, bringing the whole continent under their domination. And they have also so arranged it that the territory of one of these new puppet states includes the Republic of Panama and our great life line-the Panama Canal.

That is his plan. It will never go into effect.

This map makes clear the Nazi design not only against South America but against the United States itself.

Your government has in its possession another document made in Germany by Hitler’s government. It is a detailed plan, which, for obvious reasons, the Nazis did not wish and do not wish to publicize just yet, but which they are ready to impose-a little later-on a dominated world-if Hitler wins. It is a plan to abolish all existing religions-Protestant, Catholic, Mohammedan, Hindu, Buddhist and Jewish alike. The property of all churches will be seized by the Reich and its puppets. The cross and all other symbols of religion are to be forbidden. The clergy are to be forever silenced under penalty of the concentration camps, where even now so many fearless men are being tortured because they have placed God above Hitler.

In the place of the churches of our civilization, there is to be set up an International Nazi Church-a church which will be served by orators sent out by the Nazi Government. In the place of the Bible, the words of Mein Kampf will be imposed and enforced as Holy Writ. And in place of the cross of Christ will be put two symbols-the swastika and the naked sword.

A God of Blood and Iron will take the place of the God of Love and Mercy. Let us well ponder that statement which I have made tonight.

Baker, I believe, quotes a bit of this in Human Smoke. Now, let’s imagine you heard George W. Bush come out with this, replacing Hitler with Putin. (Suppose a US destroyer had been escorting a Georgian convoy across the Black Sea, depth-charged a Russian submarine and then been torpedoed by same.)

What would your instinct be? Your instinct would be: he’s back on the sauce. “let us well ponder that statement which I have made tonight.”

But, of course, we know Hitler was evil. So perhaps he did indeed have a secret map of South America. And an International Nazi Church. I have seen no evidence of it, however. And if there was such evidence, a lot of people had an interest in finding it. I quote Hugh Trevor-Roper, from his Mind of Adolf Hitler—found in this edition of the Table Talk:

Compared with this great problem—the conquest of the East and the establishment thereby of a millennial German Empire with a new racial religion to confirm its rule for ever—all other problems seemed to Hitler secondary. Even the war with the West was secondary. Long ago he had formulated his attitude toward the West. The West, in spite of its victory in 1918—achieved only through the famous “stab in the back”— and though still powerful at this crucial moment, was, when seen in the long perspective of this crucial moment, clearly in decline. It could be left to decline. Hitler had no interest in it. For England, indeed, he had some admiration, mixed with envy and hatred. He admired the British as a “pure germanic people” and a conquering people. On the other hand he envied England as an upstart, self-confident world-power—what right had England to claim a history on the basis of its beggarly three hundred years compared with the thousand-year German Reich?—and he hated it, as so many German nationalists have hated it, as the great Carthage which by trade had colonised the world and sought to strangle the honest land-empire of Germany. But since England and the West were anyway destined to fall behind, Hitler was content to ignore them if they would keep out of the immediate battle, the great land-struggle now pending in the East. England would surely keep out, for what interest had England in the Ukraine? Hitler was anyway, in his benevolent moods, prepared to “guarantee” the British Empire as an element of stability in the irrelevant maritime world. France, it is true, might have to be knocked out—for France, in the days when Hitler wrote Mein Kampf, was the centre of a system of Eastern alliances. But by 1940 those alliances had gone and France was crushed. Only England was left to lick its wounds, recognize the facts, contract out of the world-struggle, and either moulder quietly away in its Atlantic corner or accept, like the rest of Europe, German patronage. Ultimately the “best” elements in Western civilization—that is, those elements which were acceptable to Hitler—would be preserved by such patronage, just as Greek culture was preserved by the Roman Empire… Unfortunately this did not happen. England, the England of Winston Churchill, continued obstinately to fight, and, fighting, to inflame the otherwise conquered and quiescent West. To Hitler this was unintelligible, irresponsible, intolerable: it involved him in a naval war which he did not understand and in Mediterranean politics which he could not control, and it fatally interfered with his Eastern project, the be-all and end-all of his war.

With these forgeries removed, we are farther away than ever from understanding WWII. Never mind FDR—what, exactly, was Churchill’s interest in the Ukraine? Especially considering the current proprietor of that district? Obviously, the fate of Eastern Europe, which the West accepted almost without demur, rather precludes the theory that the nominal cause of the war was also its actual cause. What is left?

Imagine you are the captain of a merchant ship, and you pick up a lifeboat in the Sargasso. In the boat are two men, one living and one who has just died of thirst, and assorted small body parts of a third. The living man explains that the third was a murderous cannibal who wanted to eat the other two, who had to kill him in self-defense. They have the wounds to prove it. Since he was dead, well… but then the survivor noticed an ugly glint in his partner’s eye, and the two faced each other down with marlinspikes until one died of thirst. The question is: what actually happened in the lifeboat? Did it contain one cannibal, two, or three? And do you want the survivor to come aboard, or should you just gaff him and push the boat back out to sea?

I am more than satisfied that the Third Reich and the Soviet Union were criminal regimes. Whatever their specific plans to achieve world domination, they would not have rejected it if offered. But the criminality of these two corpses has no bearing at all on the morals of our survivor. Criminals may fight with honest men, or with other criminals. And USG must be judged for itself, not for its defeated enemies.

But to judge it, we have to understand it. So let’s do so. USG’s foreign policy fits into three basic patterns, which we’ll call A, B, and C.

Pattern A (which I personally favor) is one we can call neutralism. Neutralism is the policy of Washington and Hamilton’s Farewell Address (well worth reading in its entirety, since so much of it has gone unheeded at such great cost):

So likewise, a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification. It leads also to concessions to the favorite nation of privileges denied to others which is apt doubly to injure the nation making the concessions; by unnecessarily parting with what ought to have been retained, and by exciting jealousy, ill-will, and a disposition to retaliate, in the parties from whom equal privileges are withheld. And it gives to ambitious, corrupted, or deluded citizens (who devote themselves to the favorite nation), facility to betray or sacrifice the interests of their own country, without odium, sometimes even with popularity; gilding, with the appearances of a virtuous sense of obligation, a commendable deference for public opinion, or a laudable zeal for public good, the base or foolish compliances of ambition, corruption, or infatuation.

As avenues to foreign influence in innumerable ways, such attachments are particularly alarming to the truly enlightened and independent patriot. How many opportunities do they afford to tamper with domestic factions, to practice the arts of seduction, to mislead public opinion, to influence or awe the public councils? Such an attachment of a small or weak towards a great and powerful nation dooms the former to be the satellite of the latter.

Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence (I conjure you to believe me, fellow-citizens) the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake, since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government. But that jealousy to be useful must be impartial; else it becomes the instrument of the very influence to be avoided, instead of a defense against it. Excessive partiality for one foreign nation and excessive dislike of another cause those whom they actuate to see danger only on one side, and serve to veil and even second the arts of influence on the other. Real patriots who may resist the intrigues of the favorite are liable to become suspected and odious, while its tools and dupes usurp the applause and confidence of the people, to surrender their interests.

The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible. So far as we have already formed engagements, let them be fulfilled with perfect good faith. Here let us stop. Europe has a set of primary interests which to us have none; or a very remote relation. Hence she must be engaged in frequent controversies, the causes of which are essentially foreign to our concerns. Hence, therefore, it must be unwise in us to implicate ourselves by artificial ties in the ordinary vicissitudes of her politics, or the ordinary combinations and collisions of her friendships or enmities.

Our detached and distant situation invites and enables us to pursue a different course. If we remain one people under an efficient government, the period is not far off when we may defy material injury from external annoyance; when we may take such an attitude as will cause the neutrality we may at any time resolve upon to be scrupulously respected; when belligerent nations, under the impossibility of making acquisitions upon us, will not lightly hazard giving us provocation; when we may choose peace or war, as our interest, guided by justice, shall counsel.

Why forego the advantages of so peculiar a situation? Why quit our own to stand upon foreign ground? Why, by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humor or caprice?

It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world; so far, I mean, as we are now at liberty to do it; for let me not be understood as capable of patronizing infidelity to existing engagements. I hold the maxim no less applicable to public than to private affairs, that honesty is always the best policy. I repeat it, therefore, let those engagements be observed in their genuine sense. But, in my opinion, it is unnecessary and would be unwise to extend them.

Taking care always to keep ourselves by suitable establishments on a respectable defensive posture, we may safely trust to temporary alliances for extraordinary emergencies.

Harmony, liberal intercourse with all nations, are recommended by policy, humanity, and interest. But even our commercial policy should hold an equal and impartial hand; neither seeking nor granting exclusive favors or preferences; consulting the natural course of things; diffusing and diversifying by gentle means the streams of commerce, but forcing nothing; establishing (with powers so disposed, in order to give trade a stable course, to define the rights of our merchants, and to enable the government to support them) conventional rules of intercourse, the best that present circumstances and mutual opinion will permit, but temporary, and liable to be from time to time abandoned or varied, as experience and circumstances shall dictate; constantly keeping in view that it is folly in one nation to look for disinterested favors from another; that it must pay with a portion of its independence for whatever it may accept under that character; that, by such acceptance, it may place itself in the condition of having given equivalents for nominal favors, and yet of being reproached with ingratitude for not giving more. There can be no greater error than to expect or calculate upon real favors from nation to nation. It is an illusion, which experience must cure, which a just pride ought to discard.

Okay. Could this be edited? It could. But, I mean, come on, it’s George Washington. Even I have to give it up for tha Prez.

Many people are familiar with this message. For some reason, though, they often seem to think that some new military technology or other has invalidated it. I don’t see any mention of muskets or powder-horns in the above, and I think it’s obvious that North America’s military ability to “defy material injury from external annoyance,” perhaps the most debatable point in the original, has pretty much steadily increased for the last 200 years or so.

You have to understand the extraordinary circumstances under which the Farewell Address was delivered. The question was not whether the US would settle Europe’s quarrels, as in 1917, but whether it would ally itself with one side in the struggle between England and France, both of which were far more militarily powerful, and either of which probably had the power to reconquer North America by force. Moreover, most of the partisans of a French alliance—the nascent Jeffersonian party described pejoratively, but accurately, as “democrats” or even “jacobins”—considered Washington’s Federalist faction as hardly neutral, but pro-British, perhaps even royalist. Witness the vituperation over the Jay Treaty.

There’s an obvious reason that actual neutrality would strike a Jacobin agitator as pro-British. The view of international relations that Washington is promoting is straight out of Grotius or Vattel. He is essentially proposing that the US take its place as a normal, independent, well-behaved sovereign country in the classical Westphalian system.

As opposed to—say—perhaps—um—joining the French in their attempt to light the world on fire? I don’t think most Americans realize how many extremely lethal bullets their political system managed to dodge in its early years. And much of this luck was not luck, but simply the sheer level-headed groundedness of George Washington, and the essentially reactionary, quasi-monarchical restoration for which he was largely responsible.

It is not clear whether or not Washington (and Hamilton, who wrote much of the address) anticipate a world in which the US is big enough to boss other countries around, as opposed to being the mouse in the France–England elephant fight. But the geographic potential of North America was clear enough.

So this is foreign policy A. Neutralism. Ie: no foreign policy. If USG reverted to policy A tomorrow, a lot of people would be out of work.

We move on to foreign policy B. For B, we’ll adopt the terminology of its critics, who are numerous indeed, and call it colonialism or imperialism. It can also be described as reactionary aggression. Policy B is not very popular on our college campuses.

Policy B is best defined as a profit-oriented foreign policy. It disregards the sovereignty of other Westphalian actors, for the purpose of producing some practical advantage for some or all Americans. The best example of policy B is the Mexican War. I live in territory acquired via policy B, so there must be some good to it. Or at least some profit.

Moreover, although policy B is not in principle averse to piracy, plunder and predation, there is no reason at all that its effects need not be profitable for America and its target alike. The easiest way for America or Americans to profit from foreign countries is not to pillage them, but to do business with them. Most, if not all, violations of strict Westphalian sovereignty in the golden age of colonialism were highly beneficial to the “victim.”

A good example in the American sphere was the Open Door Policy and the international free port of Shanghai, which (in case any Chinese nationalists are reading: your real problem is policy C) presaged the modern design of “one country, two systems.” There is also the corporate domination of Latin America, e.g., the relationship between United Fruit and Guatemala. Several major university departments are devoted to this exploitative horror, in which commercial stability and political stability reinforced each other. Here, for example, is an American visitor’s description of Guatemala City in 1935:

Guatemala [City] is a clean, fresh little city of a hundred and fifty thousand people. […] Traffic rules are numerous and well-observed. At each intersection a driver slows down, honks ever so gently, and waits until the policeman signals him on with a whistle as dulcet as the motor’s horn. If he leaves town, an officer takes his number, telephones it ahead; and if his spin has been a trifle too dizzy, the speeder finds himself arrested at his destination. It would be redundant to state that accidents are rare. […] Aside from what the Europeanized minority needs, everything that Guatemala produces or uses comes into the great market behind the Cathedral. Need I say that it is quiet and orderly, clean and pleasant? All the Guatemalan tribes converge there, and its sights and sounds and smells together reflect a wavering and imperfect image; but still an image of the whole country. No Indian lives on too distant a mountain to make his way sooner or later to the capital, bringing the wooly blankets he wears at home; or in too trackless a jungle to turn up some day in El Mercado Central with an ocelot skin or a choice bit of alligator meat for sale. Most Indians come to town in typical dress, for every hamlet has its own: costumes so striking in color and style that they reduce the whole correct city and vapid white race to a paltry background for their display.

Present-day visitors to Guatemala City may think of many adjectives, but I’m not sure “clean,” “fresh,” “quiet” or “orderly” would be among them. I suspect standards of dress among the Indians have slipped a little, as well. And as for the “vapid white race,” most of them probably live in Miami by now. Some might describe this as progress. I do wonder what Ms. Fergusson, who is quite liberal and seems to have friends at the Carnegie Foundation, would make of it.

There is actually one country today in which a foreign corporate monopoly and a one-party state have a relationship not unlike that of Guatemala and United Fruit: Botswana (with De Beers). With perfect if typical indifference to consistency, Botswana is generally described as a story of postcolonial democratic success. Wonders, apparently, will never cease.

But enough of policy B. It is simply not terribly important in the grand scheme of things. Like all things sensible and reactionary, policy B is constantly trying to seep through the cracks in its evil twin, policy C. And like all such things, it is constantly being swatted down.

Policy C can be called idealism, or transnationalism, or supranationalism, or revolutionary aggression. I prefer transnationalism, which gives us the wonderful abbreviation tranzi. The term is of recent invention, but the concept (contra its inventor’s opinion, which follows the usual “conservative” line, under which America existed in a perfect golden age until the writer’s approximate birthdate) is, as we’ll see, centuries old.

Incorrect, but commonly used, labels are internationalism (which should refer to policy A), and Wilsonianism (which credits the wrong inventor—“canningism” might be better). 19th-century reactionaries often described the institutional forces behind policy C as Exeter Hall. Where policy B is associated with soldiers, merchants, and settlers, policy C is the preferred choice of missionaries, intellectuals and bureaucrats.

Essentially, policy C is the policy of promoting “american ideals” around the world. As with policy B, the results can often be benign— although not, I would say, quite as often. But under the terms of Westphalian sovereignty and classical international law, policy C is aggression, pure and simple.

There is absolutely no place in the system of Grotius and Vattel for making war on an evil regime, in pursuit of peace with the good people whom it oppresses. There is also no place for accomplishing the same objective via bribery, extortion and propaganda, aka “soft power”.

The key to policy C is its Orwellian definition of the word “independence.” Transnationalist independence is to actual independence as the Holy Roman Empire was to the Roman Empire. Given that the word “independent” is composed of the particle “in-”, meaning “not,” and the word “dependent,” meaning “dependent,” you might think people would blush a little when they tell us, for example, that “Zimbabwe became independent in 1980.” But no. Over the centuries, they have simply lost all shame.

Policy B, being a fact of nature, is eternal. But policy C has a father, and its name is George Canning. The classic expression of Canningism was the “independence” of Greece. As one 19th-century history so charmingly puts it:

Canning was, in fact, the founder of modern Greek liberty. The rule of Turkey was becoming intolerable to the Greeks. Russia favoured and fomented the national uprising of the Greeks against their Turkish oppressors. The sympathy of these countries was given almost universally to the cause of the Greek patriots. Lord Byron threw his whole soul into their cause and lost his gallant life for it, not even, as he fondly desired, dying sword in hand for Greece on a Greek battlefield, but perishing prematurely of fever among the swamps of Missolonghi. Lord Cochrane lent all the generous ardour of his energetic nature to support the Greeks in their struggle. An immense wave of popular sympathy with Greece passed over this country. Numbers of brave and brilliant young men went over from London, from all parts of Great Britain and Ireland, to help the Greeks in their struggle. Lord John Russell told the House of Commons, many years after, of the manner in which, regardless of the strict letter of international law, he and other sympathisers had openly helped to raise recruits in England for the support of the cause of Greek independence. The nation became young again in its generous sympathy with Greece.

Don’t you love that “regardless of the strict letter of international law?” Regardless of the strict letter of domestic law, someone once broke into my garage and stole my bicycle.

This, in other words, is basically what zu Reventlow is complaining about. When England wants something, it is “regardless of the strict letter of international law.” When its own ox is being gored, it’s “putting an end to the rule of gangsterism in international affairs.” All customers can be satisfied with this infinitely flexible approach.

Most people who believe in policy C simply don’t see it as aggressive in any way, shape or form. This is largely due to the Orwellian use of words such as “independence,” “freedom,” “liberty,” and the like. At least in my world, “freedom” and “liberty” are a quality-of-government issue, which has no necessary correlation with either the race, color, language or creed of the governors, or the process by which they are selected.

And “independence,” as previously described, is the opposite of “dependence.” When a Greece gains its “independence” at the hands of a Canning—or, to be more exact, a British Navy— what has actually happened is that Greece has ceased to be a Turkish possession, and become an informal British protectorate. In other words, Britain has liberated it from Turkey, very much as my bicycle was liberated.

As patriotic Americans may not know, the essence of policy C in the first century of USG—the Monroe Doctrine—was in fact an invention of none other than… George Canning. Instead of liberating Greece from Turkey, he was liberating South America from Spain. The principle, however, is the same.

In one of the wonderful old New York Times Current History volumes, I have located this excellent history (1916) of the Monroe Doctrine. 1916 is a perfect year for such a history: it ends the era in which US foreign policy was more or less confined to said Doctrine—with the small, and surely understandable, exception of Asia. Read the whole thing, as they say. It requires some reading between the lines, but I suspect you are prepared for this.

Particularly notable, and quoted by the anonymous editor, is John Quincy Adams’ restatement of policy A, in the Monroe Doctrine address itself, as regards Europe:

Our policy in regard to Europe, which was adopted at an early stage of the wars which have so long agitated that quarter of the globe, nevertheless remains the same, which is, not to interfere in the internal concerns of any of its powers; to consider the Government de facto as the legitimate Government for us; to cultivate friendly relations with it, and to preserve those relations by a frank, firm, and manly policy; meeting, in all instances, the just claims of every power, submitting to injuries from none.

Ladies and gentlemen: foreign policy in one sentence. With a few subordinate clauses.

We also note in our editor’s discussion the fact that, in the early days of policy C, it was by no means in conflict with policy B:

England was beginning already to feel the influence of the liberalism which was pervading her domain and which resulted within a few years in the Reform bills. Moreover, by the restoration of the South American colonies to Spain her trade would undoubtedly be reduced and imperiled.

Two great tastes that go great together! The calculation on our side of the Atlantic, of course, was much the same. “independence”—that is, protectorateship—precluded Spanish interference with the lucrative British and American carrying trades.

I am confident that Greece was better off as a British protectorate than a Turkish possession. I am not sure I can say the same about South America. Most of us know very little about the history of Latin America from 1550 to 1800, basically because there wasn’t any. People lived and worked, the laws were enforced, systematic violence was generally absent, etc., etc. When you hear of American expats in Mexico, for instance, bragging that they have a “colonial-era house” or live in the “old town,” they may not know they are making a statement about the Monroe Doctrine. But you do.

Interestingly enough, our editor denies that the Monroe Doctrine represented a full protectorate under the 19th-century definition of the term. Moreover, he has evidence to prove it:

Our Government has never maintained that the Monroe Doctrine committed us to any sort of protectorate over the independent States of this hemisphere, so that we would be in any way called upon to espouse their quarrels. We always admitted that they were responsible for their own misconduct and could be held to a strict enforcement of their obligations. In 1861 we admitted the right of France, Spain, and Great Britain to proceed by force against Mexico for the satisfaction of just claims. As evidence that we did not consider ourselves the guardians of the South American republics, John Bassett Moore, former Counselor of the State Department, cites the following instances as illustrating our refusal to interfere with the affairs of South or Central American republics: In 1842 and 1844 Great Britain blockaded a part of Nicaragua for a claim without our protest, and in 1851 she laid an embargo on the Port of Salvador; in 1862 she seized Brazilian vessels in Brazilian waters in reprisal for the plundering of a British bark on the Brazilian coast. In 1838 France blockaded Mexican ports, and in 1845 Great Britain and France blockaded the Port of Buenos Aires for the purpose of securing the independence of Uruguay.

Unfortunately, by this standard, more or less every country in the world (Russia and China notably excepted)—and certainly every country in South America—is an American protectorate today. Compare, for example, to the Suez crisis. Washington would not come close to tolerating any of the above actions today.

But really the worst thing about policy C, in my opinion, is the way it managed to relight the flames of ethnic nationalism, so antithetical to the “liberalism” which supposedly animates it. The flame of Greek nationalism which Canning lit, for example, still burns quite brightly. As a kid I lived in Cyprus for a couple of years, and let me tell you— Greek nationalism is the worst. The most vile, degenerate Southern racism has nothing on it.

Moreover, policy C introduced the world to the strange concept of “good nationalism” versus “bad nationalism.” Good nationalism (Greece, Italy, Kosovo) is subservient to the emerging transnational order, i.e., the empire of Britain or America depending on your century. Bad nationalism (Germany, Japan, South Ossetia) is either (a) its own weird thing, or (b) subservient to some other order. In any case, it is bad, bad, bad, and not to be tolerated.

I mention Italy, whose case was very similar to Greece. But Italy beat Greece in that it had, rather than mere gangs of marauding bandits, some charismatic leaders. One of the most popular—in America, at least— was Giuseppe Mazzini. The best way to think of Mazzini is as a sort of 19th-century Mandela. He was the cynosure of liberal evangelists everywhere. He lived in Britain. And sure enough, when the rubber hit the road, the British Navy helped him out. Here is Jane Addams, on Mazzini:

I came into my father’s room one morning to find him sitting beside the fire with a newspaper in his hand, looking very solemn; and upon my eager inquiry what had happened, he told me that Joseph Mazzini was dead. I had never even heard Mazzini’s name, and after being told about him I was inclined to grow argumentative, asserting that my father did not know him, that he was not an American, and that I could not understand why we should be expected to feel badly about him. It is impossible to recall the conversation with the complete breakdown of my cheap arguments, but in the end I obtained that which I have ever regarded as a valuable possession, a sense of the genuine relationship which may exist between men who share large hopes and like desires, even though they differ in nationality, language, and creed; that those things count for absolutely nothing between groups of men who are trying to abolish slavery in America or to throw off Hapsburg oppression in Italy. At any rate, I was heartily ashamed of my meager notion of patriotism, and I came out of the room exhilarated with the consciousness that impersonal and international relations are actual facts and not mere phrases.

Ah, Hapsburg oppression in Italy. How one cherishes, today, that lovely line of Metternich’s: Italy is a “geographic expression.” Does Georgia even reach that level? If it fell into the Black Sea, would cartographers notice? Alas, my notion of patriotism is all too meager.

The difference between good and bad nationalism is expressed nowhere more gloriously, or at least nowhere I have found, than in a 1930s-era biography of Mazzini by then Communist Ignazio Silone. Silone has a serious problem: he needs to explain the difference between the Risorgimento (good) nationalism of Mazzini and Garibaldi, and the Fascist (bad) nationalism of Mussolini. Take it away, Ignazio:

“In Europe today,” wrote Mazzini, “the word revolution is synonymous with the word nationality. It implies a redrawing of the map of Europe; a cancellation of all treaties based on conquest, compromise, and the wills of reigning houses; a reorganization to be made in line with the temperaments and capabilities of the peoples and with their free consent; a removal of the causes of selfish hostility among the peoples; a balancing of power note the British catchword—MM among them, and therefore the possibility of brotherhood. The sovereignty of that goal must replace the sovereignty of force, caprice and chance.”

In line with that attitude Mazzini became the champion of all oppressed nationalities. The causes of Croatia, Bohemia, Hungary, Poland, he embraced and defended along with the cause of Italy. One must observe, however, and in most emphatic terms, that the various schools of modern nationalism based on biological or racial myths have no reason to regard Mazzini as one of their forefathers. A criterion of race can serve, at the most, for classifying horses. Neither geography nor language nor religion is alone adequate for constituting nationality. One cannot deny that the Swiss people constitutes a nation, yet it speaks four languages, is part Protestant, part Catholic, and at a number of points in Switzerland cannot be said to have clearly definable frontiers. Nationality is an historical phenomenon resulting from a given evolution of human civilization within certain limits of time and space. For Mazzini the original germ of nationalism lay in the consciousness of a common calling, or mission. “Nationality is the share that God has assigned to the given people in the progress of humanity. It is the mission which each people must fulfill, the task it must do, on earth, that the divine idea may attain its full expression; it is the work which gives a people the right to citizenship in the world. It is the sign of that people’s personality and of the rank it occupies among other peoples, its brothers.” The more tenaciously a people cherished the consciousness of its mission, even under the rule of foreign peoples, the nobler would be the message that God would entrust to it for the betterment of all.

[…]

Mazzini imagines his prophet people calling a world conference, a real “Council of Humanity,” to be attended by “those who are the best in wisdom and virtue among those who believe in eternal things, in the mission of God’s creatures on earth, in the worship of progressive Truth. And these will assemble reverently to feel the soul pulse of collective humanity and to ask of those peoples who feel a stirring within them but are uncertain of themselves and of the future: ‘How much of the old faith has died in your hearts? How much of the faith of the future has begun to live within you?’ ”

A certain kinship of spirit and language may be noted between the messianic proclamations of Mazzini and the philosophy of Polish nationalism as preached about that time by Mickiewicz and Cieszkowski, a definitely messianic doctrine which, in view of peculiar circumstances in Poland, continues to count followers there even today. Never before that time had sentiments of nationalism been so lavishly exalted. But those patriots, it should be noted, did not think of a nation as asserting itself at the expense of humanity. In view of the fact that each nation had been created by God’s will, each nation was subordinate to a divine plan of universal utility. To violate the rights of another people was to do harm to society as a whole and therefore to oneself. The nationalisms so popular in our time are exclusivist, chauvinist, xenophobic, antisemitic, imperialist—in a word, reactionary. The nationalism of Mazzini was tolerant, conciliatory, humanitarian, cosmopolitan, progressive. There is little in common between the two systems. Modern nationalism is showing itself to be the enemy of nations.

If you say so, Iggy.

We’ll finish off next Thursday with part 2, covering the 20th century and solving the riddle of World War II. Which may already be obvious. But if it’s not, we’ll certainly beat it to death.