Manifest destiny

This is the corollary of my previous email exchange about Latin America. Ever since I read Will Durant’s book on Greece, my opinion about Alexander the Great changed dramatically:


When, in 399 b. c, Socrates was put to death, the soul of Athens died with him, lingering only in his proud pupil, Plato. And when Philip of Macedon defeated the Athenians at Chaeronea in 338 b. c, and Alexander burned the great city of Thebes to the ground three years later, even the ostentatious sparing of Pindar’s home could not cover up the fact that Athenian independence, in government and in thought, was irrevocably destroyed.

The domination of Greek philosophy by the Macedonian Aristotle mirrored the political subjection of Greece by the virile and younger peoples of the north. The death of Alexander (323 b. c.) quickened this process of decay. The boy-emperor, barbarian though he remained after all of Aristotle’s tutoring, had yet learned to revere the rich culture of Greece, and had dreamed of spreading that culture through the Orient in the wake of his victorious armies. The development of Greek commerce, and the multiplication of Greek trading posts throughout Asia Minor, had provided an economic basis for the unification of this region as part of an Hellenic empire; and Alexander hoped that from these busy stations Greek thought, as well as Greek goods, would radiate and conquer.

But he had underrated the inertia and resistance of the Oriental mind, and the mass and depth of Oriental culture. It was only a youthful fancy, after all, to suppose that so immature and unstable a civilization as that of Greece could be imposed upon a civilization immeasurably more widespread, and rooted in the most venerable traditions.

The quantity of Asia proved too much for the quality of Greece. Alexander himself, in the hour of his triumph, was conquered by the soul of the East; he married (among several ladies) the daughter of Darius; he adopted the Persian diadem and robe of state; he introduced into Europe the Oriental notion of the divine right of kings; and at last he astonished a sceptic Greece by announcing, in magnificent Eastern style, that he was a god. Greece laughed; and Alexander drank himself to death.

This subtle infusion of an Asiatic soul into the wearied body of the master Greek was followed rapidly by the pouring of Oriental cults and faiths into Greece along those very lines of communication which the young conqueror had opened up; the broken dykes let in the ocean of Eastern thought upon the lowlands of the still adolescent European mind. The mystic and superstitious faiths which had taken root among the poorer people of Hellas were reinforced and spread about; and the Oriental spirit of apathy and resignation found a ready soil in decadent and despondent Greece.

In antiquity a change of the magnitude that we are living through is summarized also in The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity. Like Will Durant, James Russell claims that:

From whatever point of view Alexander’s campaigns are judged… their consequences were profound and irrevocable… The number of Greek settlers was, in absolute terms insignificant… Despite [these] intentions the ultimate result was not cultural conformity but… cultural confusion, and the loss of cultural identity by native and immigrant alike… Native Greek culture was gradually transformed and “de-Hellenized.”

Going back to the American continent.

The right way to conquer land was the way the English did in the New World, emigrating with their whole families instead of bachelor soldiers conquering the Aztecs and marrying Indian women, as the Catholic Spaniards did. If an adolescent, proto-nation like New Spain absorbs what it conquers it becomes what it colonizes.

If a future Northwest Republic is ever created later in this century, let’s not repeat the mistakes that my Spaniard ancestors committed. Only ethnically cleansing the whole land (as the English did from the 17th through the 19th centuries), whether Aztlán or still further down the South to the border of Antarctica—sparing Iberian white countries like Uruguay or Argentina—, would prevent the blunders of Alexander and Cortés that eventually overwhelmed both the Hellenic and the Iberian empires.

My dream is that Kendall’s communication to Andrew Jackson telling him that someday Anglo-Saxons will be majority in Mexico becomes a reality after the Holy Race Wars that are coming ahead in this century.

I am curious though: Why do I love your race more than you do…?