Guilty Dreams of Glory

What is this fascination with having America be an empire? Crisis magazine has been beating the drums for an American Empire for a couple years now.

H.W. Crocker III wrote in Crisis (May 2003): “[Cecil] Rhodes saw that the British people were ‘the first race in the world, and the more of the world we inhabit, the better it is for the human race.'” Crocker, who is of British heritage, concludes, “We should honor the achievements of the Pax Britannica and pray for the success of the Pax Americana.”

In Crisis (Jul./Aug. 2004), Crocker endorses an American foreign policy of “unilateralism and hegemony.”

Then in Crisis (Oct. 2004), Crocker makes “The Case for an American Empire” (his title). Calling for an American imperialism, he exclaims, “The choice of…Amsterdam or Riyadh is an easy choice. Give me liberty or give me death.” So we’re going to impose Amsterdam on the world? Crocker loves America’s war on Iraq and thinks it’s a model for U.S. foreign policy, calling for America to take up “the white man’s burden” and impose an “American Leviathan” on the globe. Crocker takes the same approach to marriage. In an article in Crisis (Dec. 2004) trashing Natural Family Planning (NFP), he says: “To hell with improving ‘communication’ as a dogmatic defense of NFP. For men, the whole point of marriage is to avoid communicating…. Married communication, as successful husbands know, it best limited to grunts and hand signals — one upraised finger meaning, ‘I need a beer’; two upraised fingers meaning, ‘You need to change the brat’s diapers’…. No words are more doom-laden than a wife’s sitting down and saying, ‘Let’s talk.'” Crocker boasts that he’s “excessively virile”; little does he know that he’s excessively puerile.

Now for the main event: Next we get in Crisis (Jan. 2005) a call for a military draft by Francis X. Maier. To sustain an American Empire, which Maier obviously supports, we need a draft — including females.

Dreams of glory.

But Maier is willing to admit: “I avoided the draft in 1970 through a medical deferment. Was it legitimate? Yes. Did I do everything I could to enhance my case in getting it? You bet. Looking back over the decades, do I feel good about not serving? No. Nothing in my medical record would have finally barred me from joining the military if I’d wanted to. I didn’t. I never really believed that the Vietnam War was — at its roots — immoral. I just didn’t want to fight in it.”