The US Will Never Civilize

Iranians have a national myth that their culture is so powerful that it civilizes its conquerors. This will not happen to the United States.

(Note: "Persia" is the name given to the region and peoples of Iran by those who do not live there but they have always called themselves "Iran" and "Iranians", even in ancient times. In this piece, the two terms are used interchangeably, though I am not a historian and do not fully understand the nuances.)

After Alexander the Great finished conquering the Persian Empire, members of his royal court were discomforted when he began dressing in fashions from the region and began following some the former empire's customs before his premature death.

Similarly, when Islamic conquerors from the Arabian peninsula swept over the Sasanian Empire that had ruled Iran for centuries, Persian culture once again did its thing, effectively Persian-izing Islam. For good analysis of this time period, I recommend this recent episode of the Gone Medieval podcast.

This civilizational push-pull, where the people of Iran alternate between conquering and then being conquered only to turn around and "Persianize" their conquerors, is core to Iran's self image as a nation. It is their founding myth, if you will.

Flash forward to today, where US President Donald Trump has launched a foolish, hastily thrown together war against Iran. He has thrown out a mish mash of reasonings, justifications, and goals for the war, but none of them are really believable.

First he said Iran was a week away from having a nuclear weapon.

They weren't.

This one was even too much for turbo dink Ted Cruz.

Next it was "we've been at war with Iran for 47 years."

We weren't.

Then it was "we're liberating the people from a tyrannical government."

We're not.

Then it was "we're going to take out their leader and replace him with a pro-US guy."

We didn't.

Now the president is flirting with sending ground troops in to invade one of the most mountainous countries on Earth. A place where our our technological advances in mobility, communications, and air superiority are not so effective. Think Afghanistan but even larger, against a country with more formal defenses, a larger military, and knowledge of the defensive terrain.

This wouldn't be Iraq with its vast swathes of flat, desert land. There's a reason the old adage warns against launching a ground war in Asia.

The US has a founding myth of its own. We tell ourselves that we are the world's great experiment in democracy. That we are all entitled to, as the Declaration of Independence states, "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

We style ourselves as the shining beacon on the hill, an example for the world over to follow. But the truth is much, much darker. If you've seen the recent Ken Burns documentary series about the American Revolution, you'll see just how false this founding myth is.

Not only was this country born on the back of slavery as an institution, but many of our founding fathers were primarily motivated to by a desire to expand westward on the North American continent, a practice banned by our British overlords.

George Washington himself, who many consider to be the greatest American in history, was the largest colonial land claimant west of the Appalachian Mountains. He was the richest man in the colonies thanks to his land-holdings and slave operations, and no one stood to profit from the nation shucking off European interference than he did.

To this day, adjusting for inflation, George Washington remains the richest president in the nation's history.

Almost immediately after winning our independence, speculators and investors, along with an experienced group of hired guns, rushed westward to claim land and resources, systematically driving off the natives who already occupied those lands. On the eastern seaboard, early white Americans forced the Black people who fought for the Republic back into slavery, and drove off those belonging to native tribes who fought on our side in the war.

This was a birth by blood, a nation founded on profit-seeking and expansion. Our drive west didn't stop until we hit the Pacific ocean, and even after then we launched into wars against Mexicans, and in the Caribbean. Then came the Monroe Doctrine and near constant interventions on behalf of the American capitalist class into South America.

Flash forward to today and we are the world's preeminent exporter of violence. We make the most weapons of any country on the planet. Our military spending far outstrips every other country. We are constantly sticking our noses in other countries' business, never far from drone striking some poor soul in some country that most of our dipshit population couldn't pick out on a map.

The American way is the way of blood and destruction.

Now if you're still reading this far, it may appear that I'm excusing the atrocities of the Iranian government. I am not. Their willingness to just flat out murder their own people is deplorable and worthy of condemnation. But their people can't revolt when it's literally raining oil in Tehran right now.

You may also think that expressing these things means I am anti-American. Quite the contrary, I love this country enough to be able to look at and analyze its myths, and strive to make it better in the long run.

This piece is meant to explore this clash of founding myths. The nation of death vs the civilizing nation. It's a reversal of the typical narrative found in predominantly white countries like the US. We are not the great civilizers that we imagine ourselves to be. We instead spread death across the globe.

The reality is that Trump fashions himself a great conqueror in this Iranian conflict. He tried the other day to claim victory, saying that he had defeated Iran "for the first time in thousands of years" (lol).

If you're to believe the myths, conquering Iran should result in a great cultural exchange with Iranian culture and the US should civilize ourselves with it. Nothing of the sort will happen here. We are too arrogant and self absorbed (and plenty racist) to think that we could possibly ever learn anything from the Iranians as Alexander the Great once did.

Eventually this conflict will resolve, with everyone involved ending up worse than when we started. And soon after another American president will start another set of war-not-war military operations in yet another foreign country in which American capitalists have opportunities in. It's just what we do as a country.

The US is incapable of becoming civilized. We are one of the most pernicious savage states in world history.

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