But what are their plans now that they have transformed the world into a financial and geopolitical shipwreck? Our personal understanding of the present dilemma starts with another shipwreck, this one off the coast of Ireland in the year 1577. That was the year a notorious English pirate and slave trader named Martin Frobisher ran aground with a cargo of "gold" off the isolated, rocky, western coast of Ireland at a place known as Smerwick. According to one account, Frobisher's mission was intended to find the fabled Northwest Passage to China as part of a "Protestant adventure that would rival the Catholic quest as well as enrich the queen's [Elizabeth I] treasury." Unfortunately for Frobisher and the queen, the gold was soon revealed to be nothing more than iron pyrites (fool's gold).
An Irish rebel-captain by the name of James Fitzmaurice raised a fort at the summit of the cliffs and named it Fort Del Oro, (Fort of Gold) to mock Queen Elizabeth for her vain challenge to Rome for wealth and power. At the time Britain was not yet an Empire but with the capture and beheading of the last Fitzgerald Earl of Desmond in 1583 that would quickly change. The next four centuries saw Britain expand both east and west, to India and America and dominate the world.
In America, Strongbow's descendants established dynasties of their own and continued on through the political process; in the modern era through the Bush family and the Fitzgerald branch of the Kennedy clan.
As a Fitzgerald it came as a shock when I learned that my ancestors had once invoked the "Just War Doctrine" to justify their role in a suicidal conflict with Queen Elizabeth I. When in 1980 Colin Gray and Keith Payne attempted to stretch the concept to justify nuclear war-fighting, it came as a cruel awakening that despite the gulf of four hundred years little had changed in the need to bend reality to justify war.
Thirty six years later the medieval nature of America's political system is more obvious than ever. The ambitions of the Fitzgerald/Kennedy dynasty were thwarted by World War II, assassinations and then by the death of John Fitzgerald Kennedy's son John Junior. George W. Bush's legacy still smolders in the ashes of Iraq and the collapse of the world economy while brother Jeb has been lost in the stampede for Donald Trump. The newcomer-Clintons have been dubbed heirs to the throne in the hope of extending the legacy to at least one more generation. But despite the saber rattling and the constant demonizations, the nuclear upgrades and the media disinformation, it's becoming clear they cannot avoid the bloody handwriting on the wall.
The United States crossed through the mirror with the creation of the national security state in 1947 and never came back. By embracing the Wolfowitz doctrine and defining everyone as the enemy after 9/11 it proudly completed its long journey into the darkness and has since become lost in it. Whatever justification Strongbow and his fellow knights had when crusading to Jerusalem in the 12thcentury the true meaning of "Just War" has now finally disappeared into "the dark matter" that can't be seen".
No one less than the ancient founders of civilization, the Sumerians experienced a similar fall from the heights as their obsession with victory, superiority and prestige consumed everything they stood for. "Sumer became a 'sick society' with deplorable failings and distressing shortcomings," writes Samuel Noah Kramer, in Inanna: Queen of Heaven and Earth. "It yearned for peace but was constantly at war; it professed such ideals as justice, equity and compassion but abounded in injustice, inequality and oppression; materialistic and short sighted, it unbalanced the ecology essential to its economy" And so Sumer came to a cruel, tragic end."
When the smoke clears following the presidential election of 2016, Americans will at last see through the cover of darkness and realize that we have been witnessing an empire in the midst of its death throes.
Regardless of what the election brings we must now rid ourselves of the delusions of empire that have been driving our leadership toward self-annihilation for millennia and build, from the ground up, a democracy we can be proud of.
Copyright 2016 Fitzgerald & Gould All rights reserved
America, an Empire in Twilight Series
PART I: When America Became the Dark Force
PART II: How Guilt, Innocence & Facts Have Been Rendered Irrelevant
PART III: Neoconizing the Just War Doctrine in the service of American Empire
PART IV: America's Late Stage Imperial Dementia
Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould are the authors of Invisible History: Afghanistan's Untold Story , Crossing Zero The AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire and The Voice . For more information visit their websites at invisiblehistory and grailwerk
(Article changed on November 3, 2016 at 13:33)
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