Mark Steyn has an Excellent article in the New Criterion today that is spot on in its analysis of the Decline of both the British Empire, America, and the parallels between the two. It is a bit lengthy, but some highlights:
According to the cbo’s 2010 long-term budget outlook, by 2020 the U.S. government will be paying between 15 and 20 percent of its revenues in debt interest—whereas defense spending will be down to between 14 and 16 percent. America will be spending more on debt interest than China, Britain, France, Russia, Japan, Germany, Saudi Arabia, India, Italy, South Korea, Brazil, Canada, Australia, Spain, Turkey, and Israel spend on their militaries combined. The superpower will have advanced from a nation of aircraft carriers to a nation of debt carriers.
What does that mean? In 2009, the United States spent about $665 billion on its military, the Chinese about $99 billion. If Beijing continues to buy American debt at the rate it has in recent years, then within a half-decade or so U.S. interest payments on that debt will be covering the entire cost of the Chinese military. This year, the Pentagon issued an alarming report to Congress on Beijing’s massive military build-up, including new missiles, upgraded bombers, and an aircraft-carrier R&D program intended to challenge American dominance in the Pacific. What the report didn’t mention is who’s paying for it. Answer: Mr. and Mrs. America.
Within the next five years, the People’s Liberation Army, which is the largest employer on the planet, bigger even than the U.S. Department of Community-Organizer Grant Applications, will be entirely funded by U.S. taxpayers. When they take Taiwan, suburban families in Connecticut and small businesses in Idaho will have paid for it. The existential questions for America loom now, not decades hence. What we face is not merely the decline and fall of a powerful nation but the collapse of the highly specific cultural tradition that built the modern world. It starts with the money—it always does. But the money is only the symptom. We wouldn’t be this broke if we hadn’t squandered our inheritance in a more profound sense.
That is a terribly frightening thought. China has invested wisely in American securities to the point that in a mere ten years (which is nothing as Chinese Dynasties think of time) our interest payments will be paying for their entire military budget. Would that we were getting that kind of return for our Foreign Aid. We have borrowed billions from the Chinese to give to the Palestinians, the Egyptians, the Iraqis, Pakistanis, and Afghans. What kind of return have we gotten on that investment? It is amazing how quickly this has happened. The National Debt, accumulated for over two hundred years through Civil War, two World Wars, about a dozen smaller wars, and even boondogles like the “War on Poverty” and the “War on Drugs” was only two-thirds of what we owe now a scant four years later. If the Democrats were trying deliberately to bankrupt the Country, what, exactly, would they be doing differently? We turned out the Republicans in 2006 because they were too free with America’s money, but we went from the fryingpan into the Inferno, as measured by our accumulated debt.
It gets worse:
Somewhere along the way a quintessentially British sense of self-deprecation curdled into a psychologically unhealthy self-loathing. A typical foot-of-the-page news item from The Daily Telegraph:
A leading college at Cambridge University has renamed its controversial colonial-themed Empire Ball after accusations that it was “distasteful.” The £136-a-head Emmanuel College ball was advertised as a celebration of “the Victorian commonwealth and all of its decadences.
Students were urged to “party like it’s 1899” and organisers promised a trip through the Indian Raj, Australia, the West Indies, and 19th century Hong Kong.
But anti-fascist groups said the theme was “distasteful and insensitive” because of the British Empire’s historical association with slavery, repression and exploitation.
The Empire Ball Committee, led by presidents Richard Hilton and Jenny Unwin, has announced the word “empire” will be removed from all promotional material.
The way things are going in Britain, it would make more sense to remove the word “balls.”
It’s interesting to learn that “anti-fascism” now means attacking the British Empire, which stood alone against fascism in that critical year between the fall of France and Germany’s invasion of Russia. And it’s even sadder to have to point out the most obvious fatuity in those “anti-fascist groups” litany of evil—“the British Empire’s association with slavery.” The British Empire’s principal association with slavery is that it abolished it. Before William Wilberforce, the British Parliament, and the brave men of the Royal Navy took up the issue, slavery was an institution regarded by all cultures around the planet as as permanent a feature of life as the earth and sky. Britain expunged it from most of the globe.
It is pathetic but unsurprising how ignorant all these brave “anti-fascists” are. But there is a lesson here not just for Britain but for the rest of us, too: When a society loses its memory, it descends inevitably into dementia.
That is essential to understand. When we stop celebrating America’s Exceptionalism, we inevitably turn to condemning America for every flaw real or imagined, to the exclusion of seeing the flaws of other nations and cultures around the world. Thus, Obama bizarre impulse to go around the world, bowing to foreign potentates as though he were their slave, and apologizing to all and sundry for the very existence of America is explained. We could expect no better of Obama. He was raised and educated into this self-loathing at every turn. He would have had to have been quite an exceptional person not to turn out to be what he is. That does not excuse him. He sought the office of the Presidency, and the President should be the strongest proponent of American Exceptionalism in view. He is failing in an essential duty of the Presidency when he condemns us abroad.
There are consequences for this. Consider the following:
This has consequences. To go back to Cambridge University’s now non-imperial Empire Ball, if the cream of British education so willingly prostrates itself before ahistorical balderdash, what then of the school system’s more typical charges? In cutting off two generations of students from their cultural inheritance, the British state has engaged in what we will one day come to see as a form of child abuse, one that puts a huge question mark over the future. Why be surprised that legions of British Muslims sign up for the Taliban? These are young men who went to school in Luton and West Bromwich and learned nothing of their country of nominal citizenship other than that it’s responsible for racism, imperialism, colonialism, and all the other bad -isms of the world. If that’s all you knew of Britain, why would you feel any allegiance to Queen and country? And what if you don’t have Islam to turn to? The transformation of the British people is, in its own malign way, a remarkable achievement. Raised in schools that teach them nothing, they nevertheless pick up the gist of the matter, which is that their society is a racket founded on various historical injustices. The virtues Hayek admired? Ha! Strictly for suckers.
How are American schoolchildren to react when the President, as one of his first official acts, undertakes a multi-national Apology Tour in which he routinely condemns America for all manner of evils real and imagined? And how will schoolchildren, mis-educated as they are in Union schools that have done nothing but drop in quality over the last three generations, to distinguish between which evils America stands accused of are real and which are imagined? When America is condemned for standing with Israel, how ar they to respond? When America is called “The Great Satan” by our enemies, and the Commander in Chief agrees with that assessment, what is a fifth-grader to do?
These are important questions. America is in a mess, and that is no lie. Forty years of Liberal rule broken only by the bright light of the Reagan Administration has brought us to this. We failed to react appropriately to the outrage of 9-11, and we are paying the price in lost honor and lost lives, even as we speak. We have elected an inferior man as Leader of the Free World, a man who doesn’t even believe in the Free World, and he is selling our patrimony of freedom to the Chinese for “free stuff” with which to buy votes for his Party. As they say, read the whole thing. Steyn, as usual, is spot on.
