Wednesday, August 20, 2008

On Georgia, The Empire, and Apotheosis

Pace Joshua at the Western Confucian, and my heroes at Antiwar.com and LewRockwell, the present conflict in the Caucasus is a continued unravelling of the post-cold war geostrategy of the United States, which was in itself merely the apotheosis of the Whig politics born of the historical dialectics of Hegel. With the dissolution of its adversary, the American polity could not resist the temptation to secure a sort of political immortality. Indeed, "apothesosis" is an apt term to describe the dialectics of American foreign policy, for it seeks not to secure from probable harms, to limit risks, and to promote conditions amenable to desirable outcomes, understanding the inherent limits of both knowledge and control, but rather seeks to impose "full spectrum dominance", "prevent the emergence of a peer competitor", and "maintain the geopolitical status quo" in perpetuity. This drive to create an American-led global order that will endure and perdure not merely now, or for the immediate future, but in saecula saeculorum, is nothing less than an attempt at the "deification" of the American state, an arrogant project worthy of Babel, and foreordained to a similarly catastrophic end.

Wednesday, August 6, 2008

I am Born

It was in 1967, November 10, that I entered into this world. And what sort of world was it that I entered into? Not one unlike any other time in history, and yet quite unlike any other. As indeed history does not repeat, but rather rhymes. It is for this reason that I shall limit the thrust of my discourses to such times as I lived, and abjure delving too deeply into the causistry of prior events, lest we should end up with talk of gardens, snakes, and apples.
In 1967
  • My land was locked in a cold war with the USSR, now gone.
  • Its armies, and my father, were engaged in a hot war in Vietnam, a land that endures to this day
  • The Ceasar, the Senate, and all the Wise, save a few, were engaged in the syssyphean task of of robbing the land of its wealth on the promise to make all wealthy.
  • The mores of the people collapsed.
  • Art was ugly.
  • Japan grew, in a passion of economic ambition, and a great fruitfulness of births, so great was their hope. But to the Empire, there were seen somewhat as one would see a beloved dog.
  • China heaved under the agony of the Cultural Revolution. Everything was poore, nasty, brutish, and uglie, as Hobbes would say. To the eyes of Ceasar they were also as dogs, albeit rabid. Not of great import so long as chains and cages remained in effect.
  • And the Church was sorely put to test, with wholesale abandonment of tradition, discipline, doctrine, and orthopraxy, while always clothed in a shoddy burlap carapace of authority, all the while mocking the apostolic authorities, both living and dead. It became as a vacillating army, were even as the general issued clear orders, many of the ranks laid down their standards, switched sides, and marched against that which they "loved", and all that was beautiful was nearly destroyed.