Myth-Making in the Pursuit of Empire

By Chilton Williamston, Jr.

n an address to the International Republican Institute (is the GOP metastasizing abroad?-a dreadful prospect if true), President Bush offered yet another of his seemingly endless pleas from patience of his countrymen, and the world, in the face of the catastrophe he and his administration have created in Iraq.

"No nation in history has made the transition from tyranny to a free society without setbacks and false starts," the President informed his audience. And he offered an example: The United States itself, whose own revolution was alllegedly followed by "years of chaos" during which the country's first attempt at establishing a government charter, the Articles of Confederation, "failed miserably." For Mr. Bush, the historical lesson is plain. "What separates those nations that succeed from those that falter is their progress in establishing free institutions." Its application is, that what worked for the thirteenth British North American banana colonies, tyrannized by an oriental-style despot sitting in London, can work for Iraq, Iran, North Korea, the world, the galaxy, the Empire, the universe itself.

The neoconservatives' misapprehension of American history has to do with their inability--or refusal--to understand that American civilization did not commence with its political reorganization under the United States Constitution, but instead preceded it by nearly two centuries. A country's social structure and culture not only are vastly more significant than any installed political system could be, it is they-not the system-that are crucially definitive of it as well. Nations are living organisms; governments are inanimate machines. Contrary to what Sam Francis would have called the mental belches from the current product of the American educational establishment resident in the White House, the Articles of Confederation did not "fail miserably." (Indeed, had they been left in place, they probably would have worked better, in the long run, than the failed, violated, and finally deconstructed Constitution that replaced them has done.) Nor were they the first fruit of "years of chaos" following the American Revolution, the ensuing war, and Cornwallis's surrender at Yorktown. George Bush's comparison of the complexion of the early American republic with the barbaric character of Iraq post-Saddam is a vile slander, as well as a gross insult to his countrymen (in particular, those of them descended from America's colonial stock). No one bombed Ben Franklin's carriage in the streets of Philadelphia, Thomas Jefferson did not form his own militia and send it out to fight Alexander Hamilton's, the American Tories did not dig mass graves and fill them with the corpses of former Minutemen and members of the Continental Army; churches were not blown up and burned, and the streets set running with the blood of women and children. (One explanation for the difference could be that British Americans were not forcibly "liberated" at the whim of another country, including France, but took the initiative themselves and bore the brunt of the long war that followed-with eventual assistance, indeed, from the French.)

George W. Bush's myth of America as a congeries of Third World colonies transformed by the Federalists' Constitution into the crusading avatar of global democratic-capitalism is only the latest of a long train of American myths, including, alternatively or in conjunction with each other, the myth of the revolutionary nature of the "Revolution" itself; of the socialistic roots of the American republic; of America as the realization of a liberal blueprint drafted by the Founders; of a "colorblind America"; of the United States as a "proposition" nation, defined by a set of abstract axioms rather than by its unique civilization; of a "land of equality," "land of opportunity," "land of the free," "nation of immigrants," "beacon to the world," and "land of diversity." Finally, since 1865, the myth of "Union" has lain upon the country, a heavy smothering blanket richly embroidered with its attendent myths, most notably those surrounding and attached to the demigod Lincoln, who in recent years has been elevated to the status of supreme god in the pantheon created by the post-Christian state religion. Taken together, these myths are at best in each other's way, at worst in flagrant contradiction of one another. Hardly any has a solid historical basis, the large majority being traceable to campaign slogans, boosterism, jingoism, the nationalist propanda machine, and the deliberate antihistoricism of intellectually dishonest special interest groups (a large proportion of them ethnic in nature) whose interest is in re-presenting America and its history for the purpose of staking out a claim to them. From the early republican era, and increasingly since then, these myths have been laid down in obfuscating sedimental layers--confusingly discontinuous and faulted strata-that, by the start of the third millenium, have accumulated to the extent that American history nowadays is unrecognizable and incoherent, like America itself. The increasing disfunctionality apparent in this country today is a direct reflection of the fact that our history has been made disfunctional. The reason for this state of affairs is the "social complexity" of the New America that has allowed one alien, resentful, aggressive, and subversive interest after the other to put itself forward as the inheritor of the American tradition.

The political danger inherent in the historical error of dating "America" from the ratification of the U.S. Constitution ought by now to be obvious. Government making is not nation building, no matter how often or how loudly George W. Bush insists they are one and the same thing. In the history of the United States, at least, the conflation of the two has lead inexorably to the success of late-coming or late-arising interests determined to wield the tool of reinterpretation as a weapon in the struggle to steal the historical soul of the nation and replace it with an ersatz one. The process, which in fact is discoverable almost as early as 1789, was galvanized after 1865 by triumphant unionist ideology, the rise of mass democracy, and the untrammeled ascendancy of the great industrial coporations, all of them accompanied by wave upon wave of alien immigration.

In praising what he calls the covenant of the spirit at the expense of the spirit of written letters, St. Paul explains that "the written letters bring death, but the Spirit gives life." This passage, it seems to me, may have a political application, as well as a theological one. The British Constitution, as every school boy used to know, is, unlike its American counterpart, an unwritten document. And so it is interesting to note in this connection that neither Britain's native demolitionists nor its colored immigrant ones have attempted to use historical revisionism or deconstructionism as the principal means of destroying Great Britain, whose history they attack frontally, for the most part, rather than by reinterpretation. Destruction, of course, is destruction, no matter the means employed to achieve it. And yet the Mayor of London's proposal to knock down the Nelson Tower in Trafalgar Square, or remove the public statue honoring General Gordon, is fundamentally a more honest (though no less hostile) act than commissioning a "scholarly" study to prove that Lord Nelson had a black great-grandfather, or that the hero of Khartoum was a closet homosexual, or that the Magna Carta was a blueprint for socialism and multiculturalism, would be.

What President Bush sorely needs to understand is that no nation in history has ever made the transition from a free society to tyranny without lies.