[This letter, c. 1,900 words long, gives an overview of why the Expansionist Party of the United States believes it is important that the U.S. work to promote its civilization worldwide, and issues caveats on immigration. It was sent to the host of the popular nighttime talk show Politically Incorrect shortly after the show premiered, and has been only slightly edited for this forum.] [Go to end of this page.]
August 1, 1993
Dear Mr. Maher:
I was disappointed with the first edition of your show that I managed to catch, tonight's. The discussion was neither focused nor, in general, funny. But I did agree with the thrust of your Commentary.
Edgar Allan Poe wrote a short story, The Masque of the Red Death, which dealt with the attempt to shut out the bad things of the world behind a high wall. In his story, the wall enclosed a partying, healthy community surrounded by a plague. At end, the plague jumped the wall, because there are some things no wall can be built high nor strong enough to keep out.
We live on a nightmare planet in which 40,000 people a day, mostly children, die of the effects of starvation. That's 14,600,000 a year. Shiploads of illegal Chinese immigrants steer for our shores, along with pitiful boatloads of Haitians and raftfuls of Cubans. But Clinton, hypocrite supreme, views these tragic hordes of refugees with a stone cold heart and intercepts them at sea, to deny them even a hearing before immigration authorities to see if they qualify for admission under U.S. law. The Supreme Court astoundingly rules that such interdiction is legal, even though it presupposes guilt, in direct contravention of our legal tradition that a person is innocent until proved guilty, and smiles upon excluding refugees that international law says all nations have an obligation to accept. So much for international law. So much for the Constitution. It's all meaningless words on paper. Meanwhile, something like a million and a half immigrants from and thru Mexico are deported each year, many to return within days, even hours, to be deported again, and again, until they finally slip thru for a few months or years — to be exploited in sweatshops and fields devoid of the barest sanitary conveniences; to be denied the protections of the law, denied education and the chance to advance themselves, and our society with them.
We have built walls of imaginary lines (borders) and Coast Guard cutters to keep us safe from the barbarians. But as you point out, the walls of the Roman Empire did not preserve Rome.
There is, however, another group of lessons in the story of Rome's 'fall'.
The walls around the Roman Empire did preserve that Empire for centuries, long enough to Romanize the barbarians of Gaul and Hispania and thus secure Roman civilization — ours — beyond the time when the walls were eventually breached. Toward the end of the Roman political state, the Empire recruited partially-civilized barbarian mercenaries to man the army, and allowed some groups of more-Romanized barbarians into the Empire to make up for old Roman populations lost to civil and foreign wars.
At first, the barbarians wanted only to be safe behind the fortresses of the Empire from more-savage peoples pressing them, and to enjoy some of the benefits of civilization. Many gave themselves to Roman civilization and became loyal subjects of the Emperor. But others clustered among themselves, clinging to their own language and culture, and gaining military, economic, and political influence. Over time, their numbers grew so large and their power so great, that they thought it absurd to leave a Roman on the throne when they held the real power. So they put an end to the Empire and erected their own political realms.
We saw that as "the fall of Rome". To the partially-Romanized barbarians of the time, however, it was only adjusting the political forms to the power realities. Most of the barbarians may not even have seen that they were destroying the Empire, only modifying it.
They thought they were speaking Latin. They were actually speaking proto-Italian, proto-French, proto-Spanish, etc. As the political and commercial ties of the Empire atrophied, the different dialects grew into full-fledged languages ("Language: a dialect with a flag and army"), some of which were eventually to become mutually unintelligible. (Surprisingly, 1,517 years after the Fall of Rome, over 500 million people who speak Romance languages can understand each other if they pay really careful attention, across the boundaries of Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian, as though they really were just speaking different varieties of a common language, Latin.)
All the while the barbarian states were developing separate languages and institutions, according to some historians the barbarian successors to the Empire did not see themselves as having irretrievably destroyed the Empire at all. As far as they could see, they were still Romans. They just lived in different local jurisdictions within the Roman world, much as Charlestonians and Manhattanites in 1813 saw themselves as South Carolinians and New Yorkers first, of course, but also as all being Americans. (One political institution from the Empire, Roman law, prevailed for centuries across the remnants of the Western Empire, even into today. It's as though the 50 U.S. states split into separate countries but maintained the basic concepts and procedures of the U.S. Code in their separate legal systems for 1500 years.)
The Bishop of Rome was their spiritual leader, and the Eastern Emperor in Constantinople was their nominal overlord, the unchallenged head of the Roman state, entitled to the highest honors the world had to offer a temporal leader. "Romania" meant "the Roman world", and was the term everyone used for the Empire in its last years. When one successor state called itself "Romania", it was on the understanding that it was an integral part of the latter-day Empire.
Even 324 years after the "Fall of Rome", when Charlemagne politically and militarily reunited most of the former Western Empire, he declared that he had restored the Western Empire and had himself crowned Emperor in 800 A.D., the first ruler of what was to be called the Holy Roman Empire, which lasted until 1806: a thousand years. Thru modern eyes, the Empire was little more than a golden thought, a noble aspiration to universality and unity overarching petty states — sort of like the United States Constitution today. What reality that idea had in the minds of the Emperors, their vassals and subjects is between hard and impossible for us to know. But until the rise of unified nation-states in the 15th and 16th centuries, the idea that all Western Europeans were Romans had a hold on the imagination that was bolstered by the use of Latin in the Church, universities, literature, and commerce. Under Charles V, the Empire embraced even Spain's colonies in the New World and Philippines: outlying reaches of the Roman Empire!
To this day, the West can be defined as that area of the world which speaks a Roman(ce) language or practices the state religion of the Roman Empire, Christianity. The heart of the West does both. English, for instance, shares 65% of its vocabulary with French, and French in turn is almost wholly Roman (no pun intended), there being only a few hundred words of Frankish (Germanic) origin in all of French. Plants and animals discovered today are given Latin names. The International Scientific Vocabulary comprises new words formed of Greco-Roman elements (telo-phase, para-sym-pathetic). One could readily argue that the Roman Empire fell only politically, but culturally is everywhere evident today: that we are Romans.
All of which is to say what?
(1) Walls against barbarians have their uses.
(2) The ultimate security of our civilization rests upon aggressively civilizing the barbarians, once they are permitted within our borders and even when they reside outside — for the moment. We need to promote our standards of conduct, our aspirations around the world. Those aspirations may best be summarized by the motto of (if I remember correctly) our shared native state, New Jersey: "Liberty and Prosperity". That summarizes succinctly what almost everybody in the Third World wants.
(3) Immigration must serve our interests and the world's, both. It is insane for us simultaneously to worry about health in the Third World and to steal doctors trained in the Third World to work in U.S. hospitals. It is equally insane to just drop immigrants into society, without acculturation or language training, and let them sink or swim on their own efforts. If they go down, we go down. And if they cannot learn the language, but can nonetheless survive here, they may decide not to bother to learn our language and invest themselves in our civilization but instead to transplant their culture here, even though if they thought about it, they would realize that they left their country of birth to get away from a culture that impoverished and oppressed them. We don't want such cultures to flourish here, nor any of the multitudinous foreign cultures of intolerance and fanaticism. Immigrant communities can enrich us by infusing new blood into the cultural mainstream, or they can form unassimilable tumors that may turn cancerous and destroy us.
(4) There is no long-term safety behind walls of escapist refusal to look beyond the stadium dome or movie screen or TV set, and there are only so many channels even on cable to turn to, to avoid the stare of starving children brought to us in living color not just by the news but also by ads for Save the Children and its peers. Personal charity is not going to make any significant contribution to curing a catastrophe of the scale we face on this planet today. Worse, efforts like the Christian Children's Fund, which campaigns to save little girls in the cataclysmically overcrowded Third World, may actually make things horrendously worse twenty years from now, when all those fertile young women misguided Americans saved have children of their own. And
(5) At end, there is no hiding from a plague. It will find us. So it is better to send out armies of doctors and nurses to cure the world than to let it die, and take us with it. That's why I'm an Expansionist. The solutions are not personal but national and transnational. Salvaging this endangered planet will be accomplished not by sentimental charity but by massive national devotion, a Peace Corps the size of the war corps — or larger.
The world is united in some regards already. Environmental pollution (air, water) respects no border. An increasingly integrated world economy can be controlled by no one country of the world's 180-some. Transnational corporations, high culture, pop culture, technology, and instantaneous news coverage all work to make us a single world community.
Eventually, this planet is going to be united, somehow, by someone; peacefully or by conquest. Better sooner than later, and better by us than by the Butchers of Beijing or generals of a revived militarist Japan or fanatics of resurgent Islam. And it would be far better if the organic instrument of eventual world union were the Constitution of the United States (as appropriately reformed, as to eliminate the Second Amendment [which has given rise to massive spread of guns], the self-incrimination provision of the Fifth Amendment, and the whole of the Eighth Amendment [which forbids "cruel and unusual punishment" even for cruel and unusual crimes, and was for decades misinterpreted as banning all executions, even tho the Fifth Amendment expressly permits executions], and to provide a way to override the Supreme Court, among other things) than the Communist Manifesto or the rantings of the mullahs of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Not very funny, but responsive to your points.
Cheers, L. Craig Schoonmaker, Chairman
P.S. You are naive on AIDS. See the enclosed one-page flyer ["Everything Government says about AIDS is false"].