Imperialism is Not the Answer
On the Need for the Right Thing at the Right Time
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A large swath of the radical right sees BASTE EVROPA IMPERIVM as the answer to our problems.1 This produces such different outcomes as Richard Spencer, Bronze Age Pervert, and Jason Jorjani, but the common denominator is the same: a love for all things Odinic and ambivalence, sometimes outright disdain, for the Tyrrhic. And one understands why—empire is attractive. But this love of empire grows out of an aesthetic preference that can at times border on a fetish. The Roman and the British Empire were impressive. Alexander was based. Napoleon was a great man. Why can’t we have that all the time?
When someone says they have The Answer Everywhere And For All Time, unless their answer is something as trivial as “obey real authority” or “do your duty”, this is a cause for skepticism. Empire, like everything else with any moral content, is situational—it makes sense here, at this time, for this agent, but not universally.
Empire is a good thing—until it isn’t. As nationalists we can accept the reality and necessity of power blocs.2 Not every province can be sovereign, nor, if it knew what was good for it, would it want to be. But power blocs are only a pragmatic necessity, and there’s a limit to them—they can only get so big before they become unwieldy. We’ve seen this with the return of multipolarity after only one generation of world hegemony, where nations and folkhoods turn out to be far more robust in the long term than great, continent-spanning empires with no real unity except mutual protection. The trend today is toward devolution, and this is a good thing. History is a graveyard of empires, because empires are only useful until they aren’t.
This is also the case for Axial worldviews. Philosophy is attractive because it seems to provide an Archimedean lever that can “move the world” by simply getting your priors in order and reasoning soundly. When we look under the hood though, philosophy has a function and a use-by date, which is why it disappears from time to time in the historical record. In Greece, philosophy was a late efflorescence of structural conflict between the eupatrids and the thetes by way of the tyrants and merchant class. The idea of a transcendent and singular natural law is a repudiation of traditional Indo-European theology, but this repudiation is precisely what the doctor ordered in an age where the aristocracy’s religious authority needed to be challenged. In the age of “Enlightenment”, philosophy served a similar purpose albeit against a radically different theology.
But I have written at length about the Axial acquisitions in the West. Let us turn to the East instead to see the same mechanisms in action there.