Outside The Envelope

THE IMPERIAL ROAD: ORIGINS OF THE  PAX AMERICANA

America comes as a liberator – not as a conqueror.  To my knowledge, the US is the first country in history that had the world’s most dominant military power, and yet did not use that hegemony to conquer, enslave, and plunder weaker nations. – Dr. James Dobson

 Immediately after I had finished the last Moneychanger the idea of “empire” captured my attention, especially the Assyrian Empire.  The imminent war against Iraq was weighing on my mind, but I have learned not to question my insistent curiosity too closely.  It’s better just to let it run and follow.

Assyria has many connections with the present war.  Iraq occupies much of the territory of the ancient Assyrian empire.  The Assyrian Empire was distinguished not only by its administrative innovation, but also by its superior military technology, brutal cruelty, and policy of relocating peoples for conquest and consolidation.  Are there any parallels to instruct us today?  Any warnings for our personal lives?[1]

Events of the last few months surrounding the war on Iraq have dismayed me for the United State’s future.  Not even Vietnam – when I was in the Army, by the way, and most intimately interested in the war’s course – constituted such a brazen, unilateral, and self-justified violation of another nation’s sovereignty and international law.  By the Iraqi incursion, the United States steps forth as the world’s brutal master, casting aside law and diplomacy to impose its will by force.  The United States removed the mask of its former persona – honest, virtuous, disinterested, generous, do-gooding America – and stood forth uncovered as the ruthless, mail-clad emperor armed with an implacable will.

When I try to sort through all this, what impresses me is the abyss between how Americans picture the United States and the reality.  Their definition of America is more than 150 years out of date, dead and never to be revived.  The picture of the United States as it is, the US as the rest of the world sees it, is something they cannot – or will not – see.

THE AMERICAN EMPIRE

Americans don’t think of the United States as an empire – it rattles too loudly against their self-image.  Nonetheless, Lincoln’s war against the South converted a confederation of diverse agrarian republics into a unitary, centralised empire.  The war concentrated enormous wealth in an oligarchy that profited from supplying and financing the government.  That created a symbiosis between government and big business that continues to rule us today.  From self-righteousness to ruthless warfare (breaking with 1800 years’ of Christian thought and practice) to revolutionary Reconstruction, that war transformed the United States into an empire – an infant empire, to be sure, limited to its original boundaries, but an empire still.

The infant cut his teeth on the final solution to the Indian problem, but he flowered to full youth in the Spanish American War.  US politicians unblushingly adopted both the rhetoric and policies of the imperial fad sweeping European capitals while they grabbed for crumbs of overseas possessions.  From that foundation, only a short jump remained to Teddy Roosevelt’s Big Stick navy and World War I.[2]  By the time World War II broke out, it was impossible to restrain.

I’m not asking you to approve or to disapprove of this imperial evolution.  It happened.  The American empire exists, whether we like it or not.  Thus we ought to discard our illusions about the US, the constitution, republicanism [small “r”, having nothing whatever to do with the Republican Party] and democracy.  We ought to look the truth square in the eye – not merely because that nourishes our souls, but also because it is essential to our individual survival.  An empire is a big animal.  You don’t want to be standing in the way when he rolls over.

WHAT DO EMPIRES HAVE IN COMMON?

Every empire stands on three pillars:  power, money, and religion.  Whichever member of the imperial trinity dominates a particular empire, the Wille zur Macht, the will to power, is always there.  Behind the friendly face always lurks an army.  As that great American Imperial philosopher, Al Capone, put it, “You can get a lot farther with a gun and a smile than you can with a smile alone.”

Although empires naturally differ in particulars, in general they must follow the same pattern.  Wealth concentrates in an oligarchy, and the oligarchy rules the empire.  The oligarchy may take the form of “temple-capitalism” as in Sumeria or Phoenicia, or merchant-princes and family capitalism (Assyria, China, Rome, and Venice), or corporations (Assyria, Rome & England), or, rarely, individual entrepreneurs (Greece).  All of these (except the entrepreneurs) foreshadow today’s multinationals.  Since foreign trade involves risks and capital needs too vast for most individuals, some group must finance and manage it.  Almost always the imperial government also regulates trade to benefit the imperial oligarchy. Over time, any empire must raise larger and larger – and more brutal – armies and navies.

RELIGION

Imperial religion is usually, but not always, superficial -- justification rather than motivation.  Imperial religion is always syncretistic, merging into itself all the religious practices of its targeted subjects.  After all, nothing (certainly religion) can stand in the way of commerce. Syncretism gradually wears down the details of local culture and religion, replacing that identity with an imperial identity. Because religion glues empire together, the empire is forced to worship the “god of a thousand faces.” 

Consider imperial Rome.  She was perfectly content to allow Christians to practice their religion, as long as they would worship once at the altar of the imperial cult and proclaim, “Kaiser kyrios!”  Caesar is lord!  Precisely because Christianity’s claimed exclusive truth --  the total sovereignty of Christ –they were doomed before the imperial bureaucrats. 

ASSYRIAN SYNCRETISM

With sophisticated ingenuity the Assyrians exploited religious syncretism to subvert local rulers and to justify their military aggression theologically.  As the direct servants of their god Ashur, the “order” they imposed on a “disordered” (read:  “free”) world was the order of Ashur, king of their gods.  “Assyria was a militaristic state, and the king was the chief military leader,  … In marching to war the army was a sort of religious procession, led along by priests and statues of the gods.  All wars were religious wars, justified by the will of Ashur.”[3]  The Assyrians claimed always, “Our gods can beat your gods.”

When the Assyrians forced local rulers into alliances or vassalage, they made them swear to these treaties both by Ashur and local gods.  When the locals inevitably wouldn’t or couldn’t pay the tribute imposed, the Assyrians attacked, accusing them of blasphemy and sacrilege against their own gods. The rebels became “war criminals,” so to speak, because to resist Assyria was a crime against God and man.  After conquering a rebellious tributary, they sometimes went so far as to take the local gods back to Nineveh and install them in shrines there, where they would be properly respected.  Later they might even repatriate the idols.

Obviously an oath is powerful to the pious mind, even the pious idolater.  This historical background makes much clearer Hezekiah’s complaint to God when the Assyrians attacked him (II Kings 19:14-19, and II Kings 18 & 19 for the entire story).  The stakes were literally a contest between gods.  Was Jehovah really God, or Ashur?

PHOENICIAN SYNCRETISM

The same syncretism appears in the Phoenician empire.  Where the Assyrians softened up their targets with commercial missionaries (merchants), the Phoenicians added religious missionaries.  Their temples served as banks and distribution networks.  Wherever Phoenicians went, the promoted the cult of their god Melqart (a.k.a., Ba’al, Ba’al Hammon, etc.). 

Since Israel (Samaria) sat across the most important middle eastern trade routes, the king of Tyre Ethbaal (“[I am] with Ba’al” ) formed an alliance with the Israelites, and sealed it by marrying his daughter Jezebel (“Ba’al is my husband”) to the crown prince Ahab.  Into Israel Jezebel imported 450 prophets of Ba'al and 400 “prophets of the groves” for the worship of Astarte, Ba’al’s consort.  By merging the worship of Jehovah with Ba’al and Astarte, they would eventually supplant Jehovah and tie Israel more closely to Tyre.

As the Phoenicians spread to the west, they carried Melqart to their colonies in Carthage, Cadiz, and Hadrumentum.  In Carthage Melqart transmogrified into Ba’al Hammon.  His consort, called by the Carthaginians Tanit instead of Astarte, assumed greater importance.  A particularly hideous feature of the Carthaginian Ba’al Hammon/Tanit cult was child (and even adult) sacrifice.[4]  Children up to six or eight were thrown onto the outstretched arms of a superheated idol, then fell into a brazier or pit beneath the hands to be consumed by fire.  Thousands of burials in the “tophet” or temple precinct prove the popularity of the cult.  First born sons and daughters were particular favourites for immolation, and dangers to the colonies were liable to draw out a flurry of child sacrifices from the upper classes. In Carthage’s political crisis of 310 BC, as many as 500 children were sacrificed.[5] At Himera in 490 BC over 3,000 captives were sacrificed to Melqart.[6]  The temple precinct (“tophet”) at Carthage holds an estimated 20,000 burial urns containing the remnants of child sacrifices deposited from 400 to 200 BC.[7] 

As the god of fertility and power (the sun, king of the sky), Melqart was often represented as a bull.  His wife, Astarte, was the goddess of the moon.  “Apparently shaving of facial hair was a religious function, and many sacred razors are found in Punic tombs.”[8]  Ba’al temples offered temple prostitutes, both women and young boys.[9]  Plainly, Melqart offered everything necessary imperial success:  money, power, and sex.  Melqart slipped into Hellenism as the Greek Herakles, and into the next empire, Rome, under the guise of Hercules.  The Carthaginians often represented Ba’al symbolically rather than as a man.  You know this symbol well, because it appears on the back of your dollar bill.  It is the eye in the pyramid.

COMMERCE

Every empire is ‘commercial” in that it aims to exploit the peoples it conquers.  Typically, commercial domination precedes military conquest and political rule, and softens up the victim. 

Commercial empire begins by exporting luxuries.  Why?  Those are the most profitable goods and the easiest sold. Trade increases the desire for luxury, and luxury first softens, then enervates national character.  What began as a luxury becomes (in the minds of the target people) a “necessity.”  Once they reach that stage, their conquest is already accomplished.

THE CHANGE OF CHARACTER

FROM REPUBLIC TO EMPIRE

Spiritually and morally this progress begins to explain why our ancestors and all free agrarian republics warned against  “luxury.  Inevitably, with luxury come excess and effeminacy.  The national character leaves duty and concentrates on self-indulgence.  As Calvin observed,  “Self-denial is the commencement of all piety.”[10] Effeminacy spreads as a people and their culture lose manliness.  It chiefly embraces not physical softness but softness of character.  The people become passive, excitable, emotional, gullible, easily led, servile, and self-indulgent.

In short, they become the rightful subjects of empire.

And what characterises the rightful leaders of empire?  Shrewdness, ruthlessness, indirection, calculation, perfidy, self-serving – these are imperial virtues.

AGRARIAN OR IMPERIAL

I won’t do it here, but one might argue from the Garden of Eden that God's, taking man from the earth, still bound him inseparably to the earth.  Living on the land presents the creation – and the Creator --  with such immediacy, so that it denies luxury’s artificial world and maintains us in a correct perspective of ourselves and the world.  In an agrarian culture, every man works with his hands.  While wealth in the abstract, commercial sense may be limited, wealth in character, family, human values, love, and the ability and desire to serve God are at their greatest.

What shapes the character of the citizens of any polity?  Whatever values they treasure most.  In a commercial empire only one value stands judge over all things: gain.  On the other hand, the agrarian republic has only contempt for mere material gain.  Rather, it aims at what the Romans called pietas, what we might call “piety” but better “honour” or “character.”  The republic aims to raise up men who are honest, faithful, loyal, self-denying.  The following anecdote from the Roman republic explains this preference quite clearly.

“The little country house of Manius Curius, who had been thrice carried in triumph, happened to be near [Marcus Cato’s] farm.  Going there often and contemplating the place’s small compass and the dwelling’s plainness, he could form an idea of the owner’s mind.  Manius Curius, being one of the greatest Romans and having subdued the most warlike nations -- nay, having driven Pyrrhus out of Italy --  now, after three triumphs, was still content to dig in so small apiece of ground and live in such a cottage.  Here it was that the ambassadors of the Samnites, finding him boiling turnips in the chimney corner, offered him a present of gold.  But he sent them away, saying that he who was content with such a supper, had no need of gold, and that he thought it more honourable to conquer those who possessed the gold, than to possess the gold itself.”[11]

Transition from republic to empire typically removes land ownership from the smallholder while at the same time concentrating wealth in a few hands.  The shift America has undergone in the past 70 years follows a pattern identical in Assyria and Rome.  “[T]he connection between land lot and a family or kinship group, which had characterised earlier periods, [eroded in the Neo-Assyrian empire.]  Eventually land becomes freely alienable.  The upshot of this is that `some families are completely deprived of landed property (and enslaved for debts), while other families accumulate large extensions of land …”  Both processes led to landed property being concentrated in the hands of only some individuals or families. … [W]ealth came to be concentrated in the hands of the leading families who held the top administrative positions in the empire.  Liverani’s model points to the impoverishment of an increasing number of Assyrians who lost their family lands…”[12]

ASSYRIA & AMERICA

What particularly prompted me to think about the Assyrians was their strategy of resettling captive peoples on their own uncertain borders.[13] Resettlement destroyed their old separatist ethnic identity and implanted a new imperial one.  Cut off from native lands and leaders, resettlement left these isolated ethnic groups unable to revolt against the Assyrian empire, and replanted them on unsettled borders where their survival depended on their loyalty to the empire.  Not coincidentally, the empire could use them in their new location with greater economic efficiency. 

The Assyrians were the first empire to practice this policy consistently, and in our time were followed by Joseph Stalin and now the US. The Assyrians did not build an empire based on race.  Empires must include, not exclude.  The true goal of Assyrian “multiculturalism” (to borrow a term from today) was to impose a single uniform Assyrian culture on the whole empire.  Multiculturalism meant only Assyrianisation.[14]

Doesn’t US immigration policy and multiculturalism today share the Assyrian goal?  We are witnessing one of the greatest migrations in world history, massive numbers of Third Worlders into the United States.  The outcome is inevitable.  Coming from tyrannical, brutal, servile cultures, these immigrants will make loyal imperial subjects to replace the potentially restive native version.  They will not ask questions, and they will not insist on any silly “ancient rights.”  Heart, soul, and bank account, they belong to the new imperial order.

If the United States is still a republican polity, its immigration policy is suicidal.  If it is an empire, it’s immigration policy is logical.

But something else had me comparing America and Assyria, and that was the proposed military attack on Iraq.  For the first time, the US would undertake a war of undisguised aggression, opposed by virtually all of its allies.  For all the promises and hints and press conferences, the supposed justifications of the war – Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction – have not yet surfaced.  Of course, the aggression was justified because “we must fight evil wherever it exists in the world.”

Now think about that. 

Logically, t is positively ridiculous.  It means that as long as one man, anywhere in the world, beats his wife, I must go find him and bring him to justice.  It completely ignores rightful jurisdiction. 

One very intelligent ex-military subscriber, who disagrees with me about this war’s necessity, explained it this way.  “I am in favour of life, but if a poisonous snake comes into my yard, I’m going to kill it, because my son is there.”

“Right,” I said, “but do you go out all over the county hunting down poisonous snakes?”

The presupposition behind “American must fight evil wherever it exists” is simply, “America must rule the world.”  This is raw empire.

ASSYRIAN SHOCK & AWE

The Assyrians were no fools.  Before they invaded any country, they first propagandised.  They proclaimed loudly in their diplomacy, and in the monuments they everywhere erected, what they would do to their rebellious allies. 

You can find an example of the Assyrian propaganda barrage in II Kings 18:13 ff., after King Hezekiah has rebelled against Sennacherib King of Assyria.  He sends an envoy, the Rabshakeh, to Jerusalem under siege.  He shouts up to Hezekiah’s officers standing on the wall, in Hebrew.  He offers to furnish them 2,000 horses if they can find 2,000 riders to sit on them.  And don’t think the Egyptians or your gods can save you.  They haven’t saved any other cities.

Hezekiah’s officers on the wall beg the Rabshakeh to speak in the Syrian language.  The Rabshakeh’s answer is a classic of military psy-ops: “Hath my master sent me to thy master, and to thee, to speak these words?  Hath he not sent me to the men which sit on the wall, that they may eat their own dung, and drink their own piss with you?”

Then he makes an offer to the besieged Jews in the city.  Come out and surrender, and I will transport you to another land, a rich land, and you may live, and not die. 

If the besieged rejected the offer of surrender and resettlement, the Assyrians unleashed their full fury and savagery.  They raised statues and monuments everywhere to publicise their “shock and awe” for its full effect as psychological warfare.  Here’s an example from an inscription of Ashur-nasir-pal II, 883-859 BC. 

“In strife and conflict I besieged and conquered the city.  I felled 3,000 of their fighting men with the sword.  I carried off prisoners, possessions, oxen, and cattle from them.  I burnt many captives from them.  I captured many troops alive:  I cut off some of their arms and hands; from others I cut off their noses, ears, and extremities.  I gouged out the eyes of many troops.  I made one pile of the living and one of the dead.  I hung their heads on trees around the city.  I burnt their adolescent boys and girls.  I razed, destroyed, burnt, and consumed the city.”[15]

And here’s another jolly message from Ashur-bani-pal, 668-631 BC. “The rest of Arabia which had fled from my weapons, Erra the strong overcame them.  Disaster broke out among them so that they ate the flesh of their children to keep from starving.  All the curses which are written in the oath in the naming of my name and those of the gods, you [=the god] decreed for them exactly as their terrible destiny:  a camel-foal, a donkey-foal, a calf, a lamb might suck at seven milk-giving animals and could still not satisfy their bellies with milk.  The people in Arabia asked each other:  `Why has such a disaster fallen on Arabia?’ - `Because we did not abide by the great oaths of [the god] Ashur, and sinned against the kindness of Ashur-bani-pal, the king who pleases the heart of [the god] Enlil!”

In 1989 I stood in London’s British Museum looking at the gates of an Assyrian city.  Across it were bands of copper that had been chased with figures, much like a comic strip but it wasn’t very funny.  It depicted the Assyrians laying siege to a city, then slaughtering all the inhabitants.  In some scenes they merely stabbed them.  In others Assyrian soldiers, who were paid a bounty for every head they brought in, carried handfuls of bleeding heads to heap them up.  Some soldiers blinded captives with knives while others buried long pointed poles in the ground, and then impaled the rebels on them.  As some soldiers burned down the city, others led away the captives into resettlement.  Overall, it was a pretty plain picture of Assyrian warfare, ferociously cruel and bloodthirsty.

SUPERIOR MILITARY TECHNOLOGY

Military and civilian powers in the Assyrian economy were moulded into one “military industrial complex.”  Assyrians were quick to develop or adopt new military technology, such as iron with all its superiority over bronze.  They developed offensive weapons such as the iron chariot and large cavalry bodies, offensive weapons equivalent in their day to tanks and helicopters.  Rather than precision guided bombs, Assyrians developed sophisticated siege engines and tactics.  By perfecting military organisation they were able to control and supply hundreds of thousands of troops in the field.  For the first time among empires Assyria organised administrative districts and appointed governors over them.

AS THE PAST, SO THE FUTURE

Unless our study of the past offers us at least some glimpse of the future, it remains a fascinating but futile antiquarianism.  What do Assyria and past commercial empires tell us about the course of the American Empire? 

If it follows the trajectory of other empires,  the pax americana will degenerate into the pox americana.  As empires grow, their need to control larger areas and more people necessarily makes them more militaristic and more brutal.  Reviewing history back to the earliest Sumerian Empire we discern a pattern of increasing trade flows east and west, a peak, and then a collapse and long sleep. Although few people today realise it, international trade has only recently reached the levels of 1900 – 1910.  With that in mind, what might the future look like?

Resources, even imperial resources, always have limits.  America would not be the first empire felled by imperial over-reach.  With Iraq barely in the bag, the Rumsfeldites are already threatening Syria and Iran.  Assuming that they don’t blunder into World War III, they are still guaranteeing that the US will be mired in the Middle East for decades to come.  Expect US garrisons and puppet states expanding around the Iraqi beachhead. 

Expect the regime’s brutality and intransigence to increase over the years.  The more territory an empire tries to control, the less opposition it can allow, both internal and external.  Nothing discourages opposition like brutal repression. 

Of course, “reconstruction” follows repression.  Increasingly the “religion” of the American empire is “freedom” and “democracy,” both subject to very special definitions.  Bush injects these with religious overtones.  In one of his speeches leading up to the invasion, I heard him talk about take “God’s gift of freedom” to the Iraqi people.  However, any specifically Christian content has been carefully combed out of the gift.  This “freedom” follows the definition of the French revolution, not the common law and Christian theology.  Likewise “democracy” has a peculiar latter day meaning, which translates as “rule by an elite decorated by elections.”  (The most disturbing aspect of the Iraqi incursion is the way that evangelical Christians have unconditionally lined up to support and bless it.  Whenever the church enters into a slavish alliance with the state as its flatterer and justifier, catastrophe always results.)

I was amused to read Newsweek commentator Fareed Zakaria prescriptions in “How to Wage the Peace.”  What should the US do first to impose freedom, democracy, and prosperity on Iraq?  “Order, then liberty.  In Iraq today, first establish a stable security environment and create the institutions of limited government – a constitution with a bill of rights, an independent judiciary, a sound central bank.  Then and only then, move to full-fledged democracy.”

He might as well have described a sound marriage as “good sex, good food, and regular adultery.”  A central bank creates money out of thin air, for the benefit of the ruling elite, and robs from the people.  In other words, Zakaria, whose last name makes me suspect his ancestors did not come over with the refugees from the Irish Potato Famine, understands that the necessary foundation of “democracy” and the rule of law includes an institution for efficiently defrauding and robbing the nation.  Zakaria, by the way, has written a new book, “The Future of Freedom.”[16]

If these pieces don’t all fit together so close and fine into an imperial puzzle that it makes you laugh out loud, I’m a monkey’s uncle.

SELF PROTECTION

An empire is so big and its reach so long that it’s hard to stay out of its way.  You can hardly name a nation in the world today outside the reach of US power --- friends today, nuke ‘em tomorrow.  To me it seems more practical to live quietly in the shadow of the empire, on the Celtic Fringe.  The more luxury you require, the closer you have to live to cities, the more you place yourself in danger from internal violence or terrorism. 

But more is at stake here.  Remember that trade flows east to west, and back again.  Both power and commerce ruse and fall in very long cycles.  In the 20^th century the cycle peaked with World War I and did not recover the equivalent level until late in the century.  Today economic earthquakes – beginning with disorder in the US dollar and economy (the engine of world consumption) and spreading out to the rest of the world – may point to a peal in international trade.  History shows that the empires dominating that trade rise and fall with its cycles, and with their own decisions.  In the 17^th and 18^th centuries, the Dutch aimed to control world trade by controlling the spice trade, but the English outmaneuvered them when the spice trade dwindled.  We may be witnessing not the consummation and expansion of globalisation, but its peak and demise.  Already the Japanese commercial empire wallows in a deep ditch, threatened on all sides by lower cost competitors and strangled today by institutions that yesterday guaranteed success. 

Trade fosters interdependence but that is a tow-edged sword.  When partners flounder, it cuts against prosperity.  The American empire has staked all on globalisation and a hegemony governed in part by consensus.  Having thrown aside consensus, will globalisation fail?  Will it take the American empire with it, along with its European and Asian partners?

The American empire swims upstream against yet another current in human affairs.  The trend toward centralisation that has ruled three centuries has turned.  Even as the American empire has grown, decentralisation has weakened synthetic nations and drained power away from centers and back to localities and ethnic groups.  Who would have dreamed in 1950 that nations long swallowed up and digested by empires would fifty years later be disgorged?  Yet we have seen the Soviet empire break apart, Yugoslavia disintegrated, eastern Europe freed, and nations like Scotland and Catalonia enjoying their own parliaments after centuries of suppression.  While on one hand world empire seems assured, how does anyone account for Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Croatia, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and scores of ethnic independence movements around the world?  In the face of this flight from the center, the empire’s most powerful glue – prosperity, seems about to crumble under the weight of its own governmental, monetary, debt, and financial excesses.

I with I had some slick answer that could neatly tie all together all the hints of events and furnish you a list of “Things-to-do-to-survive-upheaval.”  Whether the American empire emerges totally victorious over every opponent and sets up a 1,000 year reign, or the centrifugal forces of human nature and bad economic theory blow it all sky high, the social and economic turmoil has only begun.  In some form, I expect it to last for the rest of my life.

Where can we find security in such an uncertain world?  I have pointed you toward safety, toward values that have endured across centuries – gold, silver, land, family, the peace of a contented heart – and I think those things will bring a measure of security.  Still, in the turmoil of my own mind I keep reaching past that for a greater security. 

To my question, only another question answers, the simple words of the Shorter Catechism.  “What is the chief end of man?  To glorify God and enjoy him forever.” 

Empires rise and fall, but this endures.

-- F. Sanders

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