Hey there. Over the next week, I am going to be talking a lot about Empires and responsibility. In this new series I am going to be arguing that the world we live in is largely the product of two empires, the British one that ran the world between 1815 and 1914, and the US empire that runs the world today. I am super excited to get this series out there, and I can’t wait to dive in to the discussion in the comments. But there is one category of comment I want to talk about today that I am not looking forward to…
“Wow, so everything is our fault now huh”
“Oh you’re just one of those Blame America First types”
“Why do you hate your country, love it or leave it man”
I have a pretty thick skin, I have been on YouTube for like 8 years now after all, but this kind of comment legitimately irritates me. I find these comments personally insulting, because I consider this channel, and what I have done with the past five years of my life to be one big love letter to the principles of my country. If the United States is about anything, it’s about being free to call it like you see it. Also, I think this instinct to treat the biggest toughest country in the history of the world like a delicate flower kinda makes us weak and stupid.
If you take the position that the United States is just another country, dealing with other countries as equals, and one that should be desperately concerned about the machinations of Russia, Syria, Iran, and various jihadist ne’er do wells, then yes I suppose my videos could be construed as unpatriotic.
But that is not what the world actually looks like. We pretend it looks like that to keep US defense budgets high. The truth is that the United States is a lot more powerful than our government or media will tell you.
It’s polite to hide this, but the fact is that the US runs the world. As of 2019, the United States is a whale in a world of sharks. I do believe in potential threats. China, India, and European instability are all things to look out for but all of those threats are decades off, possibly centuries off if we play our cards right. Our duty now is to use the power we still have to delay worldwide disaster as long as we can.
So far this century we have not been responsible. As we will get into this week, The history of the British Empire shows quite clearly that nothing is worse for the country on top than war, yet the United States has spent the past two decades pursuing war with great enthusiasm. Accusing people of being unpatriotic is a big part of that process.
These accusations help Washington DC to take action on ridiculously paranoid definitions of national interest that do much more damage to US interests than the threats they were imagining. Oh you don’t think Assad is enough of a threat to justify creating ISIS? You must hate America. Oh you don’t think threatening to invade Venezuela is worth throwing out 3 decades of better behavior and reminding every Latin American of how much they hate US intervention? That’s unpatriotic! These accusations make us dumber, and the paranoid actions they protect make the fall of the US system more likely rather than less likely.
I am not undertaking this project out of the idea that the United States or the British Empire represent some unique evil. This series is rooted in the conviction that all of human history has been one of ceaseless horror, and it would be very easy to slip right back into it. As the most powerful country in human history, the United States has the most responsibility for determining where we go from here. That makes constant criticism absolutely essential. I think that at this point in history, looking at our foreign policy apparatus, taking a stand and yelling stop is the most patriotic thing an American can do.