Wot Empire?

DOUBTLESS I am wasting what remains of my precious life by reading the mass-circulation media, but I constantly come across the suggestion that there is today a United States empire comparable to those of the United Kingdom and the United Provinces (the Netherlands.) However, this is true neither de jure nor de facto.

It is false de jure, because the U. S.A. rejected dominion when it could easily have seized it, and freely accepted equality with the U.K., U.S.S.R., France and China in the United Nations.

What do we know about de facto empires? We all – or, rather, we Jews and Christians – know something about the Roman empire. Jesus of Nazareth challenged the Pharisees, the collaborators, “Show me the tax money.” The Romans demanded that taxes be paid in their own coins; because those coins were regularly being shipped back to Rome, they were valued at least 20% higher than the Greek currency. (TO "show" the coin was a challenge to the Pharisees, because the coins bore the image of Caesar, and to a Jew, any image of a living thing, created by God, was anathema.)

And we know something about the British empire; the early settlers in America objected to paying taxes to the king, because they had no representation in Parliament. (The Americans who are forced to pay the Alternative Minimum Tax today need to bear this in mind . . . equal representation, equal taxation!)

And it is fairly widely known what the Spanish empire in America was about; the Spaniards shipped great loads of gold home from South America – but, because Spain was on a gold standard, the result was that coins suddenly became more plentiful, a phenomenon for which we today have a word; INFLATION. Debtors were relieved, creditors were ruined, the social order collapsed – and Spain has never again been a world power.

But, in acute contrast, the U. S. A. taxes its own creators and then – if what we are told by the media is true – lavishes “foreign aid” upon Israel, Egypt, North Korea and countless other nations which declare their independence by both word and deed.

In addition, the U. S. A. perfects automobiles and moving pictures and mass production and sky-scrapers and aircraft and computers and semi-conductors and telecommunications and space exploration and the global positioning system and all the symbols of modern times, thus saving the other nations the cost and delay involved in developing these things for themselves. (It is amusing to notice how often the others do not dare even to tread in our footsteps; the Chinese boosters still do not use liquid hydrogen, which is incomparably the most efficient, but dangerous and intractable, of fuels.)

The role of the U. S. A. is not that of Zeus, the angry and self-centered dominator, but that of Atlas, carrying the world on his shoulders. The nations of the world should be asking themselves, what would befall if ever Atlas …?