Educate Yourself
*Robert Kaplan--minus intellectualism--equals
FEAR
This man...
Robert Kaplan...pulls no punches. He gives it to you straight as an arrow.
No moral ambiguity. He has apparently been able to put the sense of morality completely aside
when explaining the U.S. standing in the world. The frightening thing is, he is representing a bitter
truth.
It's what the President doen't tell you, but it's there...silent and sturdy...undereath every word he spins.
America as Empire.
America is Empire.
Robert Kaplan seems to forget something important here....we are still a democracy. American democracy is still breathing.
We, as citizens, have a right and responsibility to watch over the actions of our leader and call him on his lies.
He is not entitled to be Emperor.
We American citizens are responsible for the behavior of George W. Bush in ways that the people of Iraq were never responsible for Saddam Hussein. There is now good reason to believe that GW Bush, in his highly dishonest, personal, irrational, and thoroughly Manichaean campaign against
Hussein, has set the very world on a course toward disaster.
The frightening thing about Robert Kaplan is this:
He sets aside moral clarity to shore up what he considers to be the "necessary Empire"...only to serve a dystopian vision later on:
Robert Kaplan: "....
I foresee a global system in a few decades that will very roughly resemble the Han Empire that emerged in China in around the second or third century BC. The Han Empire, which governed much of today's China, was not a dictatorship ruled from a central capital. In the beginning, at least, it represented a grand harmony of diverse peoples and systems that despite all their power struggles found out that it was in their self interest to limit their own power for the sake of the greater whole..."
I would suggest to Mr. Kaplan that he study history with a closer eye on the effects of power upon human nature.
When you start with "ugly", it only gets uglier.....
To his intellectual credit, Kaplan is a proponent of the emulation of 2nd-Century Rome..not that I share his opinion.
Kaplan's Machiavellian idea that armed prophets are the only prophets who truly succeed run counter to my thoughts on
the practice of non-violence. Peace will never be established through violence. Violence will be a cycle that never ends.
You need not be religious to understand the requisite role love plays in the attainment of peace.
When contemplating Rome and considering the direction of the leadership of George W. Bush, I am reminded of Constantine.
My mind turns to the emperor Constantine who, in 313, issued the Edict of Milan, and in my mind, set the stage for Rome's eventual fall.
I am reminded Of George W Bush in his "unifying" us through actions (such as the decision to preemptively strike Iraq) which he admits are "divine" interventions...his attempting to "unite" us in troubled times by giving us a prescribed axis of "evil" (knowing the Empire requires the
political conquering of these countries)....and especially Bush's pandering to the Christian fundamentalists in this country.
Constantine, seeking complete political unification of the Roman Empire, set about bringing the religious and ethnic groups who lived under Roman rule into unification. He accomplished this by instilling in Roman citizens a common sense of brotherhood,
namely by identifying
common enemies of the state. He also claimed he was halting religious persecution, issuing the Edict of Milan. (While at the same time he was was preparing to stamp out religious diversity within Christianity..dividing....and hoping to conquer... through a new and united political "religion").
I see Bush's efforts to unite Americans against a common enemy, which he calls "terror"---a vague description which he is deliberately blurring and blanketing into Iraq, Iran, Syria, and most other unAmericanized desert lands---as glaringly similar to Constantine attempting to unite the divided Church against a common enemy "outside" Christendom (as per Nicea--which watered down true Christianity forever). Bush is a replay of Constantine's efforts to unify the divided Roman Empire by identifying and condemning its common "enemies".
You're either "with us" or "against us".
Long after Constantine helped to politicize what was once a beautiful and pure Christianity, many saw the violent and brutal Crusades as a morally sound effort...
or they simply
set aside the moral ambiguity.
*This sounds like the ideological lovechild of Robert Kaplan's philosophy and George W Bush's actual leadership.
We are no better off than Rome in 395, when
severe financial problems began to face the Empire.
Let us not forget what happened to Rome.
Study the fall of Rome.
Beware.
Last, a quote from Robert Kaplan:
"Foreign policy, though, operates in a lawless realm. The kind of morality we apply overseas in dealing with our adversaries is a more limited, sadder morality than we apply at home. Realism also means that all moral questions of human rights, democracy, etc. are ultimately questions of power. Realism assumes that sometimes you have to perpetrate a certain amount of evil in order to do a greater amount of good. These are all aspects of realism in foreign affairs. I think the United States, right now, under President Bush, is what I would call a classically realist foreign policy."
For all his talk about the importance of the pagan warrior, Mr Kaplan certainly talks a blue streak about "good" and "evil".
I believe that Mr Kaplan, like many of us, is
afraid, plain and simple.
He realizes capitalism is flawed, and populism is his sworn enemy...it scares him to death.
His "realism" stems from his subjective "reality"....and in his world, there is great fear and mistrust of his fellow man.
To Mr Kaplan, the world-at-large is scary and "evil".
Power is the panacea in his dystopian dreams.
This is the same fear that won the election for the GOP in 2002.
The same fear that has afforded Bush popularity in public polls.
The further we play into our fears, the sooner we will destroy ourselves from
within.
Resources:
SOCIETY FOR LATE ANTIQUITY
http://www.sc.edu./ltantsoc/
INTERNATIONAL ANCIENT HISTORY SOURCEBOOK
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/ancient/asbook.html
INTERNATIONAL MEDIEVAL SOURCEBOOK
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/sbook.html
BYZANTINE STUDIES
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/byzantium/index.html
ORB ENCYCLOPAEDIA: scroll down to: 'Early Medieval „ Antecedents': several useful essays on aspects of 'the Fall of Rome'
http://orb.rhodes.edu/index.html
DE IMPERATORIBUS ROMANIS: lengthy, scholarly essays on each of the emperors, to 476 for the West and to 1453 for the East.
http://www.roman-emperors.org/impindex.htm
LACUS CURTIUS: contains an Atlas of the Roman world
http://www.ukans.edu/history/index/europe/ancient_rome/E/Roman/home.html
JOHN VANDERSPOEL HOME PAGE:
http://www.ucalgary.ca/~vandersp/
