America’s enormous empire

Sunday www.barbadosadvocate.com Mar 16 2003 Web Posted - Sun Mar 16 2003

No, I don’t think that America actually tried to conquer her empire. She (empires are female) was only given, or over-ran, or poxed or measled, huge and fertile and ore-laden acres inhabited only by those (so-called red) Indians, who were luckily so susceptible to ordinary European diseases that they could be conquered by an unwashed blanket. Maybe muskets played a part too.

Then the British colonials in America heard about that great event at Oistins when our own Bajan ancestors proclaimed the immortal words “No taxation without representation” and the Americans later used that powerful idea (without attribution) inthe irritable American colonies, eventually clobbering those short, feeble, poor marksmen in the British troops. There was also some story about throwing tea very naughtily into the sea.

Anyway, the Americans finally won the match, achieving independence from the British Empire, and, very gradually, turning into the richest nation in the world, and perhaps one with the greatest religiosity.

Naturally, they became pious Christian democrats or even republicans, suspicious of their ancestral origins, hostile to the sensible European practice of balancing power against power, and addicted to grandiloquent, semi-religious ideas about turning the whole world into a law-abiding community of democratic nations, closely resembling their saintly selves.

It certainly was a pity that their own God (who made the world) deposited most of the valuable oil under distant places they didn’t know much about, instead of much more sensibly under their own churches and chapels and synagogues. The Americans generously forgave him.

Unlike the British, which the historian, J.R. Seeley, said, acquired their empire “in a fit of absence of mind”, the Americans got theirs by pompous notions proclaimed from the top of a mountain of gold. Not quite a proper empire either, just a nursery of naughty nations, in which America is the rich nanny of the world.

I think that living under an empire is the normal situation of our species. Look back at the Persian empire, the Roman, Spanish, British, Aztec, French, Mughal, Chinese and Russian empires. Empires turned up everywhere. Empires are normal, but never everlasting.

My preference, naturally, is for the British one, and after that for the American, followed by the Roman. You are allowed to have different preferences, even without apology. Very few wise people will vote for the Russian.

One of the present problems is whether every country should be allowed its own armoury of weapons, nuclear, biological, chemical etc. or whether (and why) there should be some system of licences so that Barbados can have one tiny warhead I suppose those towel-headed beards in Islamic Iran will have to be allowed a slightly bigger one. Will Venezuela’s Chavez have to get two?

What about Iraq, and the Palestinian Republic? Will Haiti get a blackish warhead named Field Marshal Henri Christophe? Or should the nuclear non-proliferation agreement be continued and enforced? Enforced by whom? And why? And how? I suppose the consent of the UN will be required, so no enforcement will actually ever occur. Anybody who’s got the pennies can join the game!

(Sir Aubrey “Jack” Leacock is a long- standing surgeon at the Barbados general Hospital and the Queen Elizabeth hospital.)