07 December 2010

The cry for unity

Imperialism is the use of military power against another nation or state as a first rather than as a last resort. Imperialism is fundamentally a military matter. 
Imperialism favors the executive over the legislative, the cabinet (or the front row) over the Commons. Imperialist adventures of a great power's military against some weak potential colony is undertaken certainly not because of any clear and present danger facing the imperialist state but rather for the sake of the expansion of the powers of the imperialist economy's ruling elite. 
Imperialism introduces the military, which properly belongs only in foreign affairs and therefore commands the solidarity of all domestic parties, into the matter of domestic affairs; thereby giving the imperialist party an advantage in domestic affairs by allowing them to seem to be interested in the entire nation rather than merely in their own factional interests. Domestic opponents to imperialist policies can then be labelled as unpatriotic. The ‘party above all parties’ pushes the body politic away from the authentic processes of contention between loyal domestic opponents toward the rule of the single party that can marshall military power to the increase for all in the domestic commonwealth. 
"The cry for unity resembled exactly the battle cries which had always led peoples to war; and yet, nobody detected in the universal and permanent instrument of unity the germ of universal and permanent war." (The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt, 1994; page 153). 
At the very core of imperialism is the mechanism of extraction distraction, the use of putative foreign enemies to justify the elimination of domestic opposition and the replacement of internal dissension with strongman rule. To go the next step and to persuade the world that the contrived foreign enemy is itself a colonial power has the further advantage of disabling the interests of democracy from being able to accuse the strongman rulers of their essential imperialist character. 
In the biblical regime, the only ‘party above all parties’ is the party of God, and that party willingly disables itself from vying for direct secular rule. 

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