22 August 2005

Why does everyone hate America?

They don't. They hate what America is, not America.

America are the self-appointed Rulers of The World and, as such, see it as "a matter of national security" to intervene in the internal workings of other countries. I'm not pointing the finger here; the British Empire once covered a quarter of the globe because, to paraphrase Eddie Izzard "we had a big old navy and a bunch of flags......we'd land on a beach, stick a flag in it and say 'I claim this land, and everything attached to it, for Britain! Where the fuck are we?'".

Since the time for Empires is past, America are just doing this century's equivalent of sticking flags in beaches. They're on top and, understandably, they want to stay there. This, however, does rather annoy the people whose beach it is. Britain was lucky because the people who owned the beaches into which we stuck our flags were primarily clad in dead animals and brandishing nothing more troubling than "viciously sharp slices of mango" ('Blackadder goes Forth').

America's foreign 'policy' appears to be mainly a smoke screen for the fact that they have an awful lot of bullets and nowhere to store them. All the deserts are full of surplus airplanes and all the underground bunkers full of stuff they're probably not meant to have, so it's cheaper to go abroad and fire a load off at whomever they encounter, friendly or otherwise. And if abroad happens to have oil and someone nasty in charge then, bonus, we'll call it liberation. Everyone's happy and we can be home in time for tea and medals.

However, progress being what it is, the people who own the beaches now all have AK-47s and were trained by the Soviets, which makes for unattractive scenes on the news.

Britain had her time and is still trying to shake off the remnants of her Imperial past. America is still at the peak of her powers, but the beaches are getting rockier by the day. As Britain's Empire declined, so will America's, although not in the timeframe that people might like.

The universal truth is that nature abhors a vacuum. Someone else will come along to fill the gap. So be careful what you wish for - you might just get it.

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