We Are the Barbarians

Colonized peoples typically adopt the systems and to some extent the mentality of the colonizing power even after they have achieved independence. At least their middle classes do, the ones who carried out the will of the colonizing power and are now in power themselves. They do the opposite of "going native." They, the natives, imitate their colonizers, send their children to the colonizers' schools, speak the colonizers' language, and integrate or substitute it for their own.

The British empire is the classic example of this, though the French, Dutch, or American are just as applicable. British India was not a settler colonial enterprise like the Americas or Australia. But the long-term presence of the British there as well as in the West Indies altered those cultures profoundly. Today's India, under colonial rule an amalgam of many different indigenous peoples, is unimaginable without its British component. Shakespeare is as familiar to an educated Indian as he is to an Englishman, probably more so. India's political structure is an imitation of the British parliamentary system. Its judges wear wigs just like the judges do at the Old Bailey. Indian English, like American or Nigerian English, is as legitimate a form of the language as are the dialects of Liverpool or Edinburgh. The same is true for the British West Indies. The last I checked, students in Trinidad take exams graded not in its capital, Port of Spain, but in London.

But Great Britain, France, and indirectly, the US and the other colonizing powers, did not spring out of thin air. They may be sovereign nations now, but they were themselves former colonies of another empire—the Roman. So is all of western Europe and beyond. Our history books tell us we in the West are rooted in something called "Greco-Roman" culture. Our laws are based on Roman law. In the US we call our most senior legislative body "the Senate." Slavery in the South was justified, even celebrated, because the Romans had a slave economy. In fact, there is little in our culture that doesn't derive from Roman "civilization" and through its successor, the Christian church, whether it is the inferiority of women or the idea that we have a responsibility to bring the blessings of democracy (Western rule) to the rest of the world. The colonized have become colonizers.

The civilizations overcome by Roman military might (Rome had the only standing, professionalized army in the world, which required 80 percent of the budget) have disappeared. Celtic cities flourishing along the Atlantic coast from the Netherlands to Portugal were wiped out and built over. They were "Gauls," "Germanic tribes," barbarians. Romans like Julius Caesar came not to civilize but to plunder. There was gold in Gaul in those days. The Celts had a metal currency, including small change, centuries before the Romans did. Rome stole culturally and scientifically from those "barbarian" cultures even as it was exterminating them. But all our written records of that time, "history" as we know it, were written by Romans.

Rome, in fact, produced little that was original and despised everything not Roman unless it could be useful militarily. And the wealth for that purpose was obtained by plunder and tribute. Rome was also a deeply anti-intellectual society. They looked upon Greek thought, what today we would call "pure"or theoretical science, as the product of egghead fairies. Whatever actually made Rome "great" apart from its army was taken from the peoples it conquered. Just as Britain suppressed Indian industry (when the Brits arrived, India was producing more iron ore than any place else on the planet) and reduced its economy to serfdom. India was also the leading producer of textiles when the East India Company arrived. The Brits suppressed that industry and made the Indians buy only British textiles. And let's not get into the opium the British empire forced upon the Chinese at the point of a gun.

Rome saw the world as there for the taking, Rome's manifest destiny. As did the British. Sound familiar? Those earlier empires are gone, but their offspring, the US, is alive, if not so well.

The quintessential exemplar of Roman culture is, ironically, Israel. What the Israelis have been doing in Palestine, especially since October 7th, 2023, but also before and now in Iran, is Rome writ large. They treat the indigenous "barbarians" as the Romans did the Celts and the Germanic peoples. Julius Caesar killed one million Gauls and enslaved a million more, out of a population of 11 million. His PR was that he was going there as Gaul's "Protector," not as a career move on his way to becoming emperor. Israel is not an anomaly in Western civilization (Israel has always thought of itself as part of Europe, not of Asia). Israel is Europe's—and as such Rome's—mirror image. The current slaughter of Gazans, Iranians, and Lebanese is of a piece with the British (or French, German, American) slaughter of indigenous peoples under the guise of civilizing but in actuality to expropriate their wealth.

The lion's share of the budget of the US also goes to the military. Where does that money come from? Not from taxing the rich or even from directly taxing the middle class. It comes from the same places Rome's did: conquest and plunder. The US offers potential client countries two options: voluntarily make your resources available to us on terms we set, or suffer regime change through military means. Outright war is also an option. War is good for the US economy, perhaps even essential given how much we depend on the arms industry as an engine of wealth. It's the largest industry in the world, bigger even than the fossil-fuel industry, which used to be number one.

The attacks by the US Navy on Venezuelan fishing boats, ostensibly because they were engaged in drug trafficking, is a good starting point for understanding the US empire. The attack on those boats was not about drugs. It's about assimilating the nation of Venezuela into the US empire. The game plan is to effect regime change, meaning to install a government who will allow US companies to have control of Venezuela's vast energy reserves. The US has all the oil and gas it needs right here below US soil. What we're after is the wealth that can be generated by the sale of those commodities to other nations (we already sell our own excess that way). After President Biden in 2022 blew up the Nordstream pipeline supplying cheap natural gas to Germany, the US began selling liquefied natural gas—to Germany—at three or four times the price Russia had been charging. That's looting in the same way the Romans kept expanding their empire because they needed the wealth of those conquered lands to pay its bills.

This has been the US strategy toward Latin America since the early 19th century: We make sure the government of a targeted nation is subservient to us. Then we send in US corporations to extract their wealth. It's only recently that Mexico recovered control over its resources (oil in particular). When in the early part of the 20th century the Mexicans kicked out US corporations and nationalized vast tracts of land previously ceded to those corporations, the new government distributed the land to peasant farmers, many of whom had been evicted to make room for US corporations. The corporations are back, though. Our hegemony over Mexico goes back to the war we started with them in 1848. One third of the land mass of the US today was stolen from them. The US has always been appropriating other nations' resources for its own use or for resale and profit. Its plunder of Native peoples began with the Pilgrims and Jamestown, and it continues to this day.

This year, 2026, three trillion dollars of interest comes due on US government bonds. Our total debt is 13 trillion dollars. Where will the US find the money to pay that interest so the value of the American dollar doesn't drop drastically and the US is unable to sell new bonds to meet its budget? Plunder is the answer. Venezuelan oil and other commodities obtained from other parts of the world, by force if necessary. The US economy is based on the world's faith in the dollar, which is manipulated by Wall Street to generate more dollars, all of which are worth no more than what they're believed it to be. It's like having a roll-over loan based on non-existent collateral. If the loan is called in, the jig is up.

The current administration in Washington is not a deviation from the less obvious style of administrations preceding it. Barrack Obama had a chance to take the economy out of the hands of the casino banks that caused the financial crisis of 2008-2009. Instead he poured cash into them and held no one accountable (during the Savings-and-Loan crisis of the 1980s hundreds of people were indicted and many went to prison). There is no daylight between Donald Trump and prededing administrations in these matters. He is just a butt-naked version of them.

Our foreign policy is another example of US belief that the rest of the planet is ours for the taking. We believe, or pretend to believe, we are not just a "light unto the nations" but the only light. We also believe that any other nation, if it had the power to do so, would behave the same way we do. The pivot to viewing China as a threat is based on this assumption. China has not made war in 500 years on any other nation, including Japan and Korea, which are in their "backyard" just as Venezuela or Canada is in ours. But it is literally inconceivable to us that China would not do so when it is strong enough. The idea that human beings may not be as rapacious as we, the progeny of Rome and Calvin, never occurs to us. Human nature, we believe, is structurally evil (we are the exception by Divine favor... some of us). It's an attitude no different from the so-called Pilgrims' who came over on the Mayflower: humankind is born sinful, a belief applicable to the Chinese just as much as to residents of Tuscaloosa.

We are all the descendants of witch-burning Salem, Massachusetts. We are the elect of God and have a divine right to impose ourselves on the rest of humanity by any means necessary, including cluster bombs that look like toys to the children we drop them on. The US is a convenient marriage of greed and religious fervor, whether we are Christian, Jewish, or non-believer. We are not just Romans in pants and dresses; we are the elect of God. Only, our light comes from incendiaries, and our God is the one who ordered the ancient Israelites to kill "everything that breathes" in the land promised to them. We are Christianity without Jesus, Judaism without Isaiah. We are everything the Romans ascribed to the Celts, Germanics, Vandals, and Huns. We are the barbarians.