Counter-Currents Radio Podcast No. 581
Fourth Meeting of the Counter-Currents Book Club
Greg Johnson’s Against Imperialism

4 comments

1. ThroughPaleObfuscation says:

   April 11, 2024 at 3:24 pm

   I guess blacks do have systemic power in the United States after all, so they’ve won the fact to be racist.

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2. Scott says:

   April 12, 2024 at 12:00 am

   Yes, British imperialists literally thought of themselves as “Hellenic” civilizers. Like the British Empire, Athens was a seaborne concept after all, contrasting with a Spartan land-based military totalitarianism.

   Franklin Delano Roosevelt may have certainly enjoyed Peloponnesian history from Thucydides and sought to appropriate the British Empire in exchange for pulling Albion’s chestnuts out of the fire in the course of fighting World War II. Franklin saw himself unironically as a Jeffersonian Democrat rather than a Persian demagogue.

   I think the idea that the 13 colonies were each sovereign countries is a bit overstated. They were all English crown colonies, and very much part of the Anglosphere.

   The civic mythology usually teaches that the colonies were unhappy about taxes on tea and on stamps, and just wanted they freedoms. But the reality is a little more nuanced.

   What really stirred up the colonists was that after the French and Indian War, the Treaty of Paris (1763) tried to reserve Indian lands West of Appalachia in order to preserve the lucrative French fur trade.

   But no power on Earth was going to prevent American Westward settlements into the continental frontier. White populations were coming from England and NW Europe to settle in America after all. Who was King George to prevent that?

   Attempting to stop American settlers migrating West is a key reason why the colonists revolted in 1776.

   The 13 original states were less sovereign entities than is usually proclaimed. In reality, they were territorial and administrative units of the USA, whose rights, however, were guaranteed by the Constitution and often specifically enumerated. And most of this governance was expected to be only as centralized as was deemed absolutely necessary.

   In a recent podcast, Pox Populi asked whether Illegal aliens have 2nd Amendment rights. Well, Citizens do and Nationals do. Illegal aliens, probably not.

   A National is a resident subject of the state who is probably not a citizen; an example would be an alien with a “green card,” or as they would call them elsewhere such as Canada, a “landed immigrant.” Police in Arizona on the radio usually specify that they are looking for a “Mexican National” (i.e., a subject of Mexico) and not just an ethnic Mexican or someone swarthy in color and wearing a Pancho Villa costume.

   So, yes, the Bill of Rights and other laws do apply to subjects and not just to citizens ─ or even prominent citizens only. This is called “Equality Before the Law.” That is why the symbol of justice is Lady Liberty holding a set of scales while wearing a blindfold. Presumably some Lord Baron is culpable for rape and murder just the same as would be any village blacksmith. The law is to be no respecter of persons.

   “Propositional” Nationalism refers to President Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, where he declared that the American Independence in 1776 was “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men were created equal.”

   Really?

   During Reconstruction (1865-77), when many Southern Whites were disfranchised for having defended their lands in the recent war between the states, the Radical Republicans rammed the 14th Amendment down with sketchy legitimacy. This makes amends for some of the original oversights of the Founding Fathers, but unfortunately it also gives “GPS citizenship” to anybody born on U.S. soil. They then passed the 15th Amendment, making Negroes citizens.

   But when the Constitution was ratified and the Washington Administration commenced, the 1790 Naturalization Act limited citizenship to “free White persons of good character.” It was inconceivable in those days that this would have had to be spelled out in gilded letters.

   The fact is that the Abolitionists before the American Civil War and the Radical Republicans during Reconstruction used freed Negroes as a battering ram against Whites in the South. We are faced with the same subversion tactic today, which is nothing new. Diversified chaos destroys nations.

   I agree with Mr. Parrott that “America First” is not about “my country right or wrong,” but simply that nations do best by themselves and by their neighbors when they are minding their own business. We should take care of our own business and needs first.

   Call it Manifest Destiny if you want, but I don’t see how any regime could have prevented American Westward continental expansion, “from sea to shining sea.”

   Where we went wrong was after our frontiers were secure by the 1890 census and around the time of the McKinley Administration, then we started seeking out global “monsters to destroy” ─ to borrow the diplomatic phrase from John Quincy Adams.

   Many would be happy if “American Power” were reduced so that this could no longer happen. I submit that this was never American Nationalism in the first place. And it is not in our authentic National interests now. I would be happy if America once again pursued its traditional Isolationist foreign policy.

   As far as NATO, well it is a defense pact that fundamentally says that an attack upon one is considered to be an attack upon all. That made sense during the Cold War. With the demise of the Soviet Union, I am not sure what purpose such a pact now serves. At his Farewell Address, President Washington warned against “entangling alliances.”

   The United States has to reorient its priorities, for sure. Do we really need so many global military bases to defend a few trade routes? Let’s scale the colossus back!

   However, I don’t see how an objectively weaker or less capable and competent America is going to change things for the better. Be careful what you wish for.

   I am extrmely skeptical about balkanization. What good comes out of that?

   I am even more skeptical about balkanization without ending the systemic danger of the stultifying subversion in the first place.

   Hitler was never more frustrated with Germans than when pompous provincials started carrying on that they were not Germans because they were Prussians or Bavarians or whatever.

   This petty sentiment was incredibly misguided because Bismark’s Germany was an organic Nation-State and not a hodge-podge of ethnicities and languages and races like certain other countries in the Balkans ─ or satrapies that were created by international committees or by punitive Allied powers.

   The mystery-meat countries are always centrifugal and inherently unstable; organic Nation-States, however, are not like that. Hitler understood this very well having been born in Hapsburg Austria and laughing at the cacaphony of their legislative body in session.

   This to me is the difference between a Nation and an Empire: Germany in 1871 until 1939 when the Entente declared World War ─ and the United States in 1789 and until the Globaloney of the 20th century.

   🙂

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   • DarkPlato

   1. Munken Vent says:

      April 12, 2024 at 9:03 am

      The comparison between British and Greek imperialism brought to mind this quote from George Santayana on the British Empire:

       

      “Never since the heroic days of Greece has the world had such a sweet, just, boyish master. It will be a black day for the human race when scientific blackguards, conspirators, churls, and fanatics manage to supplant him.”

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      • Traddles
      • DarkPlato

      1. DarkPlato says:

         April 12, 2024 at 2:32 pm

         Heh, do you understand to whom he was referring in the second part?  Great show as usual.  Brilliant remarks from Matt parrot.  The podcast is truly what makes cc worth the money!

         
         

         hmm, actually I read more into that Santayana quote.  This sounds weird, but if one reads in terms of the IT, or one of the guys “they” are after, Santayana refers to “sweet” and “boy,” and British.  Then he makes some unkind remarks which are a clearly reference to Jews.  He’s actually reproaching them about one of the “guys” they are after.  I have a suspicion that the referent was Alfred Douglas.  “They” appear to have been after one or more of the British nobility around that time, and the physical description of one of the people fits Douglas very well.  That would also explain the odd controversies that always surrounded him.  Refer to the poem Runnable Stag, which would seem kabbalistic and clearly refers to an aristocrat, either the same or another.

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