The Empire, The People, and Israel

“Rich Man's War Poor Man’s Fight” isn’t a new perception; it didn’t start with Iraq, nor Vietnam, nor the Civil War. For as long as wars have been a thing, people have perceived the rich as the instigators and the poor as the victims. There was never a point in history when this was totally true. Even when lords were raising peasant levies, they risked their own lives in the wars they started. Nor were the poor totally without agency. The famous princes of the 1st crusade were preceded by a peasants' crusade, whereupon Pope Urban’s call, the eccentric preacher Peter the Hermit led thousands of peasants to attack the Jews of Metz, and then to proceed to the Holy Land. Kings, Presidents, and Billionaires may be the ones who make the cut for the history books, but peasants, workers, and veterans leave their mark for better, and more than most would like to admit, for worse.

On Whig History

Most people have their own Whig History, that is, a story of progress from a backwards past to an enlightened present. The Enlightenment, the French Revolution, WW2, or MLK’s March on Washington can all be the points where we went from backwardness to some form of imperfect enlightenment. It’s fair to critique Whig History, portraying history as an evolution from superstition and backwardness to rationalism and enlightenment, but it isn’t accurate. People were capable of acting intelligently before John Lennon’s Imagine, and people are capable of acting stupidly after it. That being said, this style of history remains so popular despite all of the refutations against it because there is a part of it that is true. The world is significantly different from how it was in the past, and in many ways, for the better. We no longer die from the flu, we don’t starve if it doesn’t rain, and we can all communicate with anyone else on earth through cell phones. We dream about the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the peak of Rome, and Al Andalus, and these places were impressive, but the world changed significantly with the onset of modernity. So then, how did we get from there to here? What changed to create our modern world?

Modernity

Historiography tends to put the start of Modernity at some time between the 1453 Fall of Constantinople and Martin Luther’s 95 theses in 1517, usually settling on Columbus’s 1492 discovery of America. The Early Modern Period isn’t the focus of this article, but understanding it is important for understanding what happened thereafter.

The Portuguese developed a kind of vessel called the Caravel, which shifted sailing from a mostly coastal affair to a global one. This means that instead of accessing the lucrative Markets of India and China through a series of intermediaries from Persia to the Ottomans to Venice, they could interact with India and China directly. The Portuguese established a series of trading outposts across the Indian Ocean, along with Brazil, and the Spanish conquered most of modern-day Latin America.

Spain and Portugal were the first to create world-spanning colonial Empires, and they exemplified the contrasting aspects of TikTok Edit Empire and Modern Empire. Spain had the flair of massive (though overstated) casualty ratios and massive territories in Latin America; this all looked very impressive on a map, and the Cortez and Pizarro edits make themselves. But what goes unstated is Spain's limited penetration of the territories it claimed, and what remains of the Spanish Empire. With Columbus's establishment of the encomienda system, Spain established a servile labor system that would be exported to all of its Latin American colonies. This established a class of largely hereditary landowners and later industrialists that would dominate Latin American colonies up until the current day. Whether they be encomiendas, haciendas, latifundias, or maquiladoras, there remains an almost feudal arrangement of labor where a wealthy, mostly European elite dominates a largely indigenous underclass. Spain certainly had influence, but in the way of exporting a worse form of feudalism to its colonies. Contrast this with Portugal, which was more concerned with profiting from the Indian Ocean trade than establishing massive empires. Unfortunately for them, their empire was seized by the Dutch, who the British subsequently robbed. The British created the first world system, which went on to dominate the financial affairs of the then-independent former Spanish colonies. Portuguese power wasn’t even close to that of the British, or even the Dutch, but their prioritization of trade over conquest set the stage for the powers that would go on to dominate the globe. All empires fall in time; in my opinion, it’s better to be the predecessor of the modern world than of Mexico.

I couldn’t even attempt to summarize the 16th and 17th centuries. They marked the beginning of globalization and the start of the Reformation. It featured a last Hurrah of old-school territorial empires, with a struggle between the Habsburg superstate, which included Germany, Central Europe, Spain, and Latin America under Charles V, and the Ottoman Empire at its peak under Suleiman the Magnificent, and the scientific revolution. People often talk of “multipolarity” and “great power competition”. Here is one of the only periods in Modern history where it existed in earnest. The Spanish enriched and then ruined themselves with the silver mining in the Americas, the English attempted to recreate their empire in France, and the French developed into the most centralized and powerful country on the continent. The Dutch, French, and English followed the Spanish and Portuguese into the game of colonization. Long story short, Britain and France emerged as the most powerful countries in Europe by the 18th century.

The Second 100 Years' War

The era from 1689 to 1815 is often periodized as the “Second Hundred Years' War”. This is where France and England, later Britain, fought over control of the world, to make it simple. Britain had a significant advantage in that it had devised modern finance with the founding of the Bank of England. This, along with its greater financial transparency, enabled it to borrow more and at a lower interest rate than other European countries (except for the Dutch), and most importantly, this allowed it to send money to its allies efficiently. Wars could be fought for British interests, but without British blood.

I hope this isn’t the audience where I have to refute the myth of French military incompetence, but I’ll do it anyway. French and quasi-French nobles had wreaked havoc across Europe and abroad for decades. The Normans conquered England in 1066 and Sicily and Southern Italy in 1137. French Nobles won the Holy Land in the 1st crusade and Constantinople in 1204. It wasn’t until relatively recently that French military power was discredited in popular opinion. Mostly because of WW2 and lingering butthurt about their refusal to join the Americans in Iraq. Throughout most of the past 1000 years, France was the military power of Europe. They had a large population, the most effective standing army in Europe, and something of a colonial empire themselves. Earlier, this essay criticized the Spanish Empire for being a TikTok edit empire, which wasn’t entirely fair. Strong armies and valiant generals, as depicted in TikTok edits, were made more powerful by modernity. The French State’s capacity to organize the men and money of the country increased drastically as the state centralized, and unlike the overblown Victorian era “threats” against Britain, France was truly a competitor to the British.

The 3 conflicts which best summarize the Second 100 years war are the 7 years' War, where England double-crossed its European allies to establish the supremacy of its world Empire over France’s, the American Revolution, where those European allies stood still as the French helped America gain independence, and the Napoleonic Wars, where France used its massive military and revolutionary ideals to dominate Europe, and Britain managed to defeat them by dominating the rest of the world. The Napoleonic Wars are the most important of this period, so it’s the only one we will dig deeper into.

Napoleon came to prominence at the end of the War of the First Coalition, where he won the war by defeating the Austrians in Northern Italy with a smaller force and threatening the Imperial Core of Austria. It was perhaps the finest campaign of his career; however, we shouldn’t buy unreservedly into the Great Man History of his reign. As Kamala Harris said, “we exist in a context”. Napoleon, a low noble from the periphery of the French State, would not have had the opportunity to rise to command an army if it weren’t for the upheaval and meritocratic promotion of the nascent French Republic. France already had the best military in Europe before the revolution, but the revolution enabled France to draw from a much larger pool of people for its military officer corps and civil administration. If it were the Revolutionary ideology that Napoleon was the purveyor of, which defeated the aristocratic powers of Europe time and time again, then that would delegitimize those powers after the Congress of Vienna reinstated them. So instead, it’s that a single genius ran a train in Europe. And he was a genius, but geniuses exist in a context. Either way, this marked the end of the great power competition of the modern era. From the end of the Hundred Days in 1815 to the beginning of World War I in 1914, there was only one Power, Great Britain.

The World Empire

The conception of 19th-century history in the Anglosphere is that it was a period of Great Power Competition. European powers agreed to peace in Europe and decided to take their frustrations out on each other abroad. This, frankly, is bullshit. It's a convenient lie that was created in a pact between Britain and France to up the prestige of France’s pathetic colonial empire, and absolve Britain of the disastrous wars and catastrophic end of its empire. There wasn’t any serious competition between Great Britain and anyone else after the Napoleonic Wars. France is so unserious that it doesn’t even bear mentioning, but their weakness is exemplified by the Fashoda Incident: After having sent a 30,000-strong Anglo-Egyptian force to confront the Mahdi of Sudan, who had martyred Gordon of Khartoum. During this fiasco, the French claimed the city of Fashoda in modern-day South Sudan. General Herbert Kitchener sent about 1,500 to confront the French force, which numbered 132—30,000 for shrieking natives, 1,500 for your great imperial rival. Let’s be serious here. Russia was more serious, but the “Great Game” was basically Russia taking land that hadn’t been relevant since the Silk Road and Britain taking land that would become the modern nation of Pakistan. There was a British anxiety about Russian designs to conquer India, but long story short, they were being dramatic. The Russians were a threat to the Ottomans, but the British ran the Ottomans. Russia could lead a victorious army to Constantinople, but the British, along with their usually pliant French sidekicks, could always stop them. Meanwhile, the British took control of the Ottomans, gaining control of industries and finances. In 1881, the long informal British influence was formalized with the establishment of the Ottoman Public Debt Administration, which essentially granted Britain the right to collect taxes in the Ottoman Empire. Russia was too late. The 19th century wasn’t the era of just victorious armies marching through the gates; it was an era of finance and diplomacy.

Two countries were on the rise and could eventually challenge Britain. Those being The United States and Germany. But it should be understood that these countries rose in the context of a British economic domination of the world. Nearly every economic phenomenon in the world affected Britain, usually in a positive way. The Great Cotton Kingdom of the Lower South, which empowered a class of Planters and tore America in Half, enriched the Cotton Mills of Manchester. Chicago became rich off of Westward Expansion, though much of the best investments went to New York, the most lucrative investments and profits went to London. Germany was more independent of British investment, but still, Great Britain was the largest foreign investor in Germany. The 1871 Franco-Prussian War made it evident that Germany (then Prussia) didn’t have any serious continental rivals, and America was a continent in itself. These were massive countries with mighty armies, and unlike the British, they could draw on their resources, whereas Britain was dependent on its colony, India. Again, these countries were on the come-up, but Britain was still far ahead of them.

So in short, there weren’t any rivals to Britain. The second part of the lie we are taught about the 19th century is that the Congress of Vienna guaranteed a mostly peaceful 19th century in Europe. This one is even more sinister than the first. And as Americans, we should all be offended by it and ashamed of ourselves for taking it at face value when we learned it in school. The Congress of Vienna was not an agreement to maintain the balance of powers of Europe so as to blah blah blah. The Congress of Vienna was the installation of the old Aristocratic powers of Europe by the British to crush the potential of any Revolutionary European power to dominate Europe. When this was revolted against in 1848, old Europe crushed the revolutionaries, many of whom would find a new home in America and fight in America’s Civil War. When Britain, out of bourgeois stupidity, alienated a guarantor of this order, Russia, in the Crimean War, only then could a European country gain enough power to challenge the British Order. By any measure, the 19th century was far from peaceful in Europe. More importantly, it was a period when kings and aristocrats essentially crushed the right of people to self-determination, contradicting the very ideas Americans are supposed to uphold.

The Indigenous European Revolts

In 1901, at the death of Queen Victoria, the British Empire was well set for decades more of world supremacy, and at least a century more of prominence. If they couldn’t rule the world forever, they could at least hand it off to their American cousins. But in 1919, though their empire had reached its greatest territorial extent, it was done. Not for the millions still living it, but for those who mattered, Great Britain was one amongst many debt-ridden, declining European states. How then did the century-long era of British hegemony end? Put simply, they turned their ire towards white people. First, with the genocidal war against the Boers. No one cared about the brutality against black people in the British Empire, but seeing white women and children being held in the world's first concentration camps, where many of them died of malnutrition and disease, turned European sentiments against Britain. The second, and much more calamitous to the Empire, was the Great War.

World War I falls into a similar misreading of the history of the Congress of Vienna. It was a failure to maintain the “Balance of Powers” of European nations that led to the war. But as previously stated, there wasn’t a balance of power in Europe or the world. There was one power, Great Britain, and its vassals, with varying degrees of autonomy. The Great War was a failure of the British to manage their European Empire. The British could bribe princes and crush peasant armies in their colonies. Still, when the literate and nationalist masses of Europe agitated for their desires of self-determination, their options were far fewer. When the British decided to send expeditionary armies to invade Russia during the Crimean War, they broke the Russo-Austrian pact to maintain the conservative order in Europe, that order which had served Britain so well in stifling any Revolutionary continental forces. You can say these European Princely States were more autonomous than the Indian ones, but princely states they were. When a European state acted up, they brought in a spare Habsburg to sort them out; when an Indian state acted up, they brought in another family to sort it out. Nation-states were much more pesky.

And so, when Britain failed to maintain order in the Congress of Vienna and allowed Germany to get too powerful for its liking, it then created a system of alliances to prevent its rise. After this, you know the story: an Archduke gets shot, and millions of men die. There is one more notable detail about the First World War, however. Britain was not treaty-bound to protect France. Britain entered WW1 because Germany invaded Belgium to bypass French defenses, which Britain was obligated to defend. What is Belgium, though? Well, it’s a fake country that the British created in 1830 to prevent the French and the Dutch from gaining too much continental power. Even Europe wasn’t immune to the good old “carving out territories: style of Empire.

“But”, you may say, “If the British world system collapsed during WW1, then why did Great Britain grow after the war?”. And I’ll answer that for you, my dumbass paradox interactive addicted child. The British Empire did not derive its strength only from the red parts on the map. This kind of thinking leads people to believe that the French, Russians, and Spanish were competitors to the British in the 1800s. Britain’s strength was derived from its domination of world finance. It controlled the profits of much of the world's most lucrative investments, but WW1 was so expensive for the British that it turned it from a creditor nation to a debtor nation; they had to sell off most of their lucrative assets and incur debt to the Americans. British public debt rose 10 fold during the war. At the infamous Treaty of Versailles, where France and Britain raped Germany (why people make “peace without victory” Woodrow Wilson the villain of this arrangement, I don’t know), they didn’t only do it because they were petty. They did it because they needed to. Both of the countries were dependent on German Reparations, and both partially defaulted on their debts to America when Germany stopped paying them. At the end of the war, Britain was in the same boat as France had been for the last century, a meme empire propped up by a serious country for nostalgia’s sake

An Obituary to the British Empire

We blame the British Empire for many current-day conflicts, India-Pakistan, Israel-Palestine, the various Levantine Wars fought over the arbitrary Sykes-Picot borders, and much of the conflict in Africa, but we don’t go far enough. The British didn’t just run the red parts we see on the map; they ran the whole world for a century. For nearly everything in the modern world, we have the British to thank or blame. From the existence of the wealth gap between “1st” and “3rd” world, which the British fostered due to their creation of a world economy centered in London, to the social condition of black people in America; the institution of slavery would not have survived as long as it did without British demand for cotton, to the world wars. The World Wars weren’t a failure of the ‘balance of power in Europe”, they were the result of a collapsed world system. In a way, we are all Indians; we all have to contend with the British in one way or another.

When Britain is portrayed as a “Gentlemanly” Empire, that isn’t necessarily wrong. In relation to their power, there was barely any straight-up rape and plunder as compared to, say, the Mongols or the Ottomans. Unfortunately for British gooners, they couldn’t hope to go to some far-off land and take a poor girl from a far-off land at the edge of the world, and keep her in his basement, and maybe sell her to some other gooner if he got bored. The British banned slavery in 1833, but it profited from the slave societies of the American South, Brazil, and Zanzibar for decades afterwards. The British didn’t break into granaries and steal the grain of poor Irish and Bengali children, but they created a global economic system that made famine a minor PR cost. The British eventually did work to abolish slavery in most of the world, and this is a genuinely positive thing about the empire. It would fall to the Americans to mostly end famine. However, they finally figured out how to systematize sexual exploitation without literally bringing back the sex slave trade, so I guess you can’t win 'em all. I would argue that the modernity the British created, despite the world wars and global wealth inequality, has been largely positive so far. But there is a force multiplier applied to both good and bad, more so in the much more powerful American Empire we all live under today.

The Middle Class

Throughout this paper, I’ve been saying “Britain did X”, “France did Y”, and so on. Obviously, countries aren’t people; they are comprised of people. For shorthand, we describe the actions of states as such, but people within them make their decisions. External politics is a reflection of internal politics. Contrary to what some may believe, the Petite Bourgeoisie, what we call the “Middle Class” in America, was more aggressively imperialist than either the aristocratic or capitalist classes. As the Petite Bourgeoisie became more prevalent in the country’s politics, Britain became less and less content to reap the windfall of its informal financial empire and more eager to engage in its famous conquests. They were enamoured by the stories of Britain's great colonial heroes like Gordon of Khartoum and Horatio Nelson. Imperialist poets like Rudyard Kipling banged the drums for British wars all over the globe (and, curiously, an American one. The Poem “The White Man’s Burden” implores America to take the white man’s burden of civilizing the Philippines). The American justification for the Iraq War as a “crusade to free women” can be traced to the Anti-Muslim and Anti-Orthodox Crusades of the Greek War of Independence and the Crimean War. However, the British petite bourgeoisie didn’t only support the Formal empire because it was romantic, they also supported it because it genuinely gave many of them opportunities. Through the expanding bureaucracy of a larger formal empire, many of the Petite Bourgeoisie could get opportunities they wouldn’t have had otherwise. The British Capitalist and Aristocratic classes gained legendary wealth through their control of finance, but the petite bourgeoisie had much more to gain from the empire when it was a Paradox Map Painting affair.

This wasn’t only a phenomenon in Britain, either. “Nationalism” is somewhat of a dirty word among progressive-minded people nowadays, but during the 19th century, nationalism was a progressive force that the forces of reaction attempted brutally to crush. Though the forces of reaction succeeded in 1848, the Literate Masses were too powerful to ignore, and eventually most of the rights that the revolutionaries had agitated for were attained by the late 19th century. Germany and Italy were unified, and most European countries had some form of parliamentary representation and mass suffrage. The Whig history reading of this is that this is a triumph of humanity, and I believe it was. But what was WW1 if it wasn’t the nationalist aspirations of the petite bourgeoisie of nearly every European country, resulting in the deaths of millions? There’s an odd retelling of history where WW1 is portrayed as a tragedy that the European powers reluctantly engaged in. If Gavrilo Princip hadn’t shot down the archduke, then none of this would have happened. Unfortunately, that wasn’t true; in 1914, everyone in Europe was ready for war. World War I wouldn’t have happened in the same way if the Archduke hadn’t been shot, but some kind of cataclysm was going to happen, not because of the elites, but because of the people.

Those people, whom the post-1815 order fought, mostly successfully, to stifle the powers of. But Revolutionary Republicanism and nationalism would have a life outside of Europe in the 19th century.

The Empire of Liberty

Close your eyes and think of America. What do you see? Obese Walmart customers falling out of their rascals? 80s beach bunnies running in slow motion? A Manifest Destiny Edit? I see Randy Fine, but we’ll save that for later. America isn’t much of a tangible entity, as it is a concept. It is an unsophisticated consumerist nightmare subsuming Evropa, it is the White Empire which genocided the natives and enslaved the African Americans, it is the righteous hand of god coming to bring justice to the world. Whatever it is in your head, let’s discuss what it was.

In the 1962 movie Lawrence of Arabia, an American journalist interviews the figurehead of the British-designed Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire in World War 1, Prince Faisal. He proclaims, “We Americans were once a colonial people, and we naturally feel sympathetic to any people anywhere who are struggling for their freedom”. This sentiment was convenient for the American journalist, both because the Prince was acting in Anglo-American interests at the time, and also because painting the Arab struggle as part and parcel with the American one would be profitable for his newspaper. Consequently, Faisal brushes it off. Still, though cynical, his statement wasn’t totally without merit. America gained its independence by fighting and defeating a colonial empire. The revolution was mainly an intra-elite clash between Anglo-Protestants on either side of the Atlantic. However, it was the first successful anti-colonial and Republican revolution in history. It would be dumb to pretend that the American Revolution was the first hope of all oppressed peoples in the world. The genocide of the Indians was endemic to the American project, and the Americans revolted partially because they weren’t allowed to genocide the Indians at the rate they wanted to. Still, you have to start somewhere, and the revolution of 1776 wasn’t the only revolution.

Terrible Swift Sword

The most famous image of the American Civil War is of Ulysses S Grant shaking hands with Robert E Lee at Appomattox. Why is this? Pickett's Charge during Gettysburg more accurately represents the doomed valor of the Confederacy; Sherman’s March to the Sea is a terrifying exemplification of the might of the American War Machine. Or better yet, why not the capture of Richmond? After 4 years of slaughter across Northern Virginia, why isn’t the city that the Union was after the most famous image? It’s because the key story of the war came to be reconciliation between the white North and the white South. This mythos only developed in the decades after the war. Blossoming in the Spanish-American War propaganda displayed the sons of men in blue and grey fighting together against Spain. What changed from the end of the Civil War to the beginning of the Spanish-American War

After John Wilkes Booth assassinated Abraham Lincoln, his Vice President, Andrew Johnson, a Southern Unionist and ex slave holder, cynically put on the ticket to court the War Democrat vote, said, “Treason must be made odious; traitors must be punished and impoverished.” Johnson expressed the sentiment of the North in that statement. I know white American people pretend that after a million men are killed and the rebels are subdued, you’re supposed to say “good fight sir” and then move on. Otherwise, you’re brown or something, but men did believe in the things they fought and died for, and it would take more than some “founding stock” nonsense for the leaders of the rebellion to be reincorporated.

Though the war itself was won mainly in the West (Donelson, Vicksburg, Franklin), and by Westerners (Grant, Sherman, Sheridan), the fever for retribution was an expression across the North of the initially fringe abolitionist fervor of New England. Even Lincoln, a moderate border state Republican, had trouble subduing the Radical faction of the Republican Party towards the end of his life. The American Civil War, though a war to reincorporate wayward states in its inception, became a revolution, and a much larger and more consequential one than the Revolution of 1776.

The Republican Party appeared to a Southern newspaper as a "Mostly Throng of Sans Cullotes… infidels and freelovers … interspersed by bloomer women, fugitive slaves, and amalgomationists”. This excessively expresses the sexual anxiety of the writer, but it isn’t wrong in sentiment. The South perceived the North as a revolutionary entity, and they weren’t wrong. The Civil War was in some sense the 1848 Revolution in reverse. Where the forces of liberalism, democracy, and Nationalism had superior organization and military prowess to the forces of Aristocracy, this isn’t even a hot take; this is something which was thought and acted on by people of the time. Franz Sigel, a (not very good) Union Major General, formerly participated in the failed Baden Revolution, and Carl Schurz, another Union Major General who then became Secretary of the Interior, had also fought in the ‘48 Revolutions. The Red Scare and reconciliatory narrative of the Civil War have made everyone forget this, but Revolutionary Republicanism was the specter that was haunting the world in the 19th century. And America, unlike the Soviet Union a century later, lent credibility to the ideals to profess. Even with the Gilded Age Corruption and the broken promises to the freed slaves in the subsequent decades, America was truly a beacon of liberty in the world. Nowadays, America isn’t really a beacon of anything. No one comes to this country except to make money or to agitate for the US government to bomb their political enemies in their home country. Which, of course, brings us to Israel.

World War 2 and the Foundation of Israel

The Zionist Project, though decades old at the end of WW2, received its greatest boon then and thereafter with the liberation of Auschwitz and Treblinka. Though most people, whether openly or not, are tired of the repeated invocation of the Holocaust a lifetime after the fact, it should be acknowledged that during the time, the victorious were genuinely moved by the plight of the Jews. Jews could say, with credibility, that European countries could not be trusted to keep them safe and that they needed their own country. The Jews, of course, did not let this sympathy go to waste, and in ‘48 presented a plan to the civilized nations of the world for their statehood. Put bluntly, the plan was a sham. It would be a humiliation for the Arabs to let their land go without fighting for it, and for Jews, a state with such borders would be perpetually vulnerable to Arab aggression. War was inevitable. One could say the Jews started it with the pen or the Arabs started it with the sword, but what mattered was which armies could drive the other from the field.

The ‘48 War

Looking at a map, one would think that the Israelis stood no chance in the ‘48 War. Not only did the Palestinians revolt against the Jewish state, but so did Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen. The nascent Jewish state had about half of a 10,000 square kilometer territory. The Arabs not only had the other half, but also an additional 1 million square kilometers. By population, it wasn’t much better; Israel had fewer than 1 million people, and Egypt had about 20 million. The Israelis not only managed to defeat the Palestinian element of the country, but also defeated the Arabs on all fronts to achieve the famous “‘67 borders”. Was this truly as it looks on the surface? Well, one cannot deny that it is impressive. Still, there were inherent weaknesses in the Arab states, some of which would hamper it in future wars, such as their recent independence, Arab disunity (exemplified by Jordan’s clandestine dealings with Israel, netting it the West Bank, and the only thing resembling Arab victory), and superior Israeli organization, and support from American and European Jewry. The humiliation of the war would result in the overthrow of Egypt’s conservative monarchy and the rise of Nasser. The Arabs were down, but not out, and the Israelis knew it. Both sides licked their wounds and readied for the next confrontation.

The Apogee of Arab Nationalism and the End of Empire

The wider world was, in effect, indifferent to the first Israeli-Arab War. Israel got the partition plan of ‘48, but it was by and large the responsibility of future Israelis, American, and European Jewry to secure the state. During the Suez Crisis, the Israelis attempted to fulfill Balfour’s wish for Israel, which was to be a forward base for European colonial powers. Unfortunately for them, the world of the 1950s was much different from the world of the 1910s. The Israelis again triumphed militarily with British and French support; however, all had misjudged the world America envisioned after the end of the Second World War. They didn’t create a world system to protect the European Empires, at least not initially; they, like the Soviets, saw the European Empires as a dying relic of the 19th century, and the British, French, and Israeli armies were approaching Cairo, the Americans stopped them. America had, in effect, given Arab Nationalism its first and last true victory. However, when all was said and done, there weren’t any winners from the Suez Crisis. It caused Egypt to forget the lessons of the ‘48 war, which would bear catastrophic consequences in ‘67. But we’ll get to that later. Israel had to give up its gains in the Sinai, but had demonstrated again its capacity to fight. France and Britain were perhaps the biggest losers, as both had to contend with the realization that they were irrelevant meme countries. And America, though taking a genuinely principled stance against empire, never bore any fruit from its involvement, and would eventually replace Britain and France as the benefactors of Israel. Was there something of America in the 1860s when they did this, maybe? Either way, it didn’t last for long

America’s Support for Israel

The ascendency of American Jewry is undoubtedly a part of America’s increasing support for Israel. In the ‘48 War, it was Jewish gangsters in America who smuggled weapons for their independence war. In 2025, Jewish American billionaires donate hundreds of millions to American electoral candidates, and Jewish Billionaires can lean on Ivy League schools to suppress protests. It’s undeniable that Jewish power is directly correlated with the rise of US support for Israel. However, it isn’t everything. Countries still seek legitimacy from their people, and throughout most of Israel’s history, it has been exceedingly popular. Even now, America has a fanatically pro-Israel president, who is a cult leader for at least ⅓ of the country.

And Trump isn’t far off from what Israel is for the American people, a manifestation of everything they want to be. Americans, and I mean white Americans, don’t care about whatever ideals America is built on. This isn’t a place where people believe in Freedom of Speech, or an adversarial press, or Universal Suffrage. They don’t care about Lincoln, or Washington, or Jefferson. As a marble pantheon, sure, but not for who they were. Israel is an underdog in a neighborhood of brown savages, which regularly defeats and brutalizes them, and that’s what your Average Joe wants America to be. For all the “regret” about the Iraq war, Americans don’t care about all of the lives they ruined; they’re mad that they lost. The Gulf War and subsequent sanctions killed hundreds of thousands, but it’s one of the brightest moments in the eyes of Most Americans, because America won. There’s been an overcorrection after Me Too and BLM, where we all pretend that White American men are small lil babs who can’t do anything wrong. Still, they really are, if not the architects, then the engines behind America’s disastrous foreign policy, and we aren’t going to get anywhere better than we are now by playing to their egos.

The International Nationalist and the Future for America

The throughline here is that the Peasants during the 1st Crusade, the French Revolutionaries, the ‘48 nationalists, the American Civil War Generation, the WW1 generation, and modern Americans aren’t that different. The way we interface with each other and the world has changed drastically with literacy, mass communications, and the internet. Still, many, if not most, of the people can express their own will, even in seemingly unequal societies. And that the “people's will” isn’t always the toiling masses storming the gates. It’s more often the masses agitating for the massacre of some other group of toiling masses.

The syncretism of backwater Islamism and Modern Nationalism in Turkey, Hindu Nationalism in India, and Jewish Supremacism in Israel are expressions of this as well. Now other people are literate and internet savvy, and despite Marxist wishes, they aren’t developing class consciousness and becoming international proletariats. Rather, what is happening for them is the same as what happened for Europeans and Americans. They are all petty provincial nationalists.

I would be dishonest if I claimed that people today are the same as they were in the past. They’re worse. When we said people were literate in the 19th and early 20th centuries, it meant that they could read the King James Bible and maybe even Ancient Greek and/or Latin. Now, people straight up can’t read; they’re illiterate, but since they know a stop sign means stop, they’re considered literate. If you have any friends who are high school teachers, ask them for 3-4 essays from their students. Maybe one of them will know English, and that kid will usually be Asian or Indian. Our politics look so retarded compared to the past because we are stupider. Even the selfish, murderous tendencies of the middle class, which led Europe into the World Wars, had some nationalist intellectual justification. Now, across the world, it’s all the same. And I’m not counting Jews out of this, by the way. The reason why Israel is committing a genocide with popular support is not only because of the hypernationalist Middle Eastern Jews. It’s because the Ashkis are completely dogwalked by them and allow themselves to be shamed with the most basic bitch shit like “they’re coming for us first”.

I planned to end this essay with the British involvement in the Greek War of Independence. Where the misguided presumptions of the middle class ultimately did lead to something good. But I’d just be being dishonest if I brought that up. Honestly, the people are too stupid to be redeemed at this point, and we should probably just pack it up for humanity. Literacy and popular government were triumphs, I still believe that. But there just isn’t a class of people that exists to make it work in this world currently. Sorry :/