Who should the US invade next?

I would vote for Canada . . .

It's high time we finally invade a country that more than 10% of our population can find on a map.

Mexico would be my second choice, only because I am so envious of their beaches and dive sites.  (I'd strongly support any treaty that would trade Texas for Cozumel.)

---

by: Diogenesdemar @ Sat Aug 21, 2010 at 03:07:14 AM UTC

I think we're long overdue

to conquer Magna Grecia and the Cisalpine Gauls, and finally unite the entire Italian peninsula under Ro..., uh, I mean, American rule!

We're all in this story together; let's write it well.

---

by: Steve Harvey @ Sat Aug 21, 2010 at 16:15:28 PM UTC

Besides, There Are the Tin Mines in Iberian Gaul and the Treasures of the Druids

We could bring them all under our protection and control and they would become citizens.

---

by: saindenver @ Sat Aug 21, 2010 at 17:26:26 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

Oddly enough,

I'm not completely anti-imperialistic. There were some people lining up to belong to the Roman Empire, and some who resisted it who could arguably be said to have objectively benefited once conquered. Certainly, some Celtic tribes were happy to ally with the Romans against rival Celtic tribes, just as some Mexican Indian tribes were happy to ally with the Spaniards against the (at least equally brutal) Aztecs.

The Irish, at the time of their revolution against British rule in the early 20th century, were largely reconciled to British political governance, and not for the most part riled up about it. When a group of idealistic intellectuals were arrested for plotting a rebellion, the Irish people jeered at them on the streets, not at all sympathetic to their cause. It was only when the British mishandled the situation, executing the plotters for what most other Irishmen saw as mere folly, did it incite a popular revolution.

Don't get me wrong: The more democratic and participatory the processes (up to a point of diminishing returns) that we utilize for forming our polities, the better. Confederation is far preferable to conquest, but not quite as qualitatively removed as we sometimes imagine: Power still plays a role in the nature of the institutions established, and secession is still frowned upon (see: American Civil War). My real point is that it's a more coplex and subtle world than we usually acknowledge, and that distributions of social institutional power, in various forms, are an inevitable reality that we must navigate in our attempts to progress, rather than simply an evil that we should repudiate.

Marx, to the great chagrin of my late Marxist Mexican father-in-law, once said that it would have been better had America simply anexed Mexico in the wake of the Mexican-American War, accelerating the maturation of a capitalist world order that he saw as a necessary requisite to socialist revolution. And though we are rightly uneasy with that notion, I'm not sure that all of the Hispanic residents of the territory that was anexed in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo would necessarily rather be scrapping together a living in Chihuaha right now.

On the old 80's TV show "Northern Exposure," the Inuit woman who was the New York doctor's nurse in his rural Alaskan town, describing the relationship between the local Inuits and the local whites, said, expressing her ambivalence, "On the one hand, they conquered us and stole our land. On the other hand, they brought us power tools."

I know there is a powerful ideological "strange attractor" that gravitates to the absolutes that eliminate that ambivalence and side unequivocally with self-determination. And, while the express will of people at any given time has to be a dominant theme in how, and by whom, they are governed, in the end there is always some articulation between the will of individuals and the imposition of social institutional power by others, to disproportionately but often, in the long run, widely distributed benefit. It's a far more complex set of challenges we face than simply having a few oversimplistic slogans which define right and wrong, good and bad, with a moral clarity that does not exist except in some human minds, and that does much mischief when overly enthusiastically embraced.

Just some (undoubtedly controversial) musings on a Saturday morning....

We're all in this story together; let's write it well.

---

by: Steve Harvey @ Sat Aug 21, 2010 at 18:00:29 PM UTC

[ Parent ]