Bow low ye heavens, and all ye lands draw near,
The voice prophetic of Great Anarch hear,
From eastern climes, by light and order driven,
To me, by fate, this western world was given,
My standard rear?d the realm imperial rules,
The last asylum for my knaves and fools.
Here shall my best and brightest empire rise,
Wild riots reign, and discord greet the skies.
This was the prophetic portrait of America painted by an anonymous American poet of the 19th century. No words were more aptly said of America'sdestiny. The Great Anarch has indeed raised the ?brightest empire? of the world and brought universal riots and discord around the world.
America is the most powerful nation today. But it is also the deafest. Its government is deaf by design and its people are deaf by ignorance. America listens no more, not even to the sanest of words. And a large part of the world has grown dumb before this giant, some out of fear, some for favours. You cannot reason with America, just as you cannot reason with a tiger. You can only wait and watch in deathly fear to escape its killing leap.
Thus, a great silence has descended upon the world, paralysing its will and its moral conscience, and drying up its creative urge. The world is in utter spiritual confusion today. No one seems to have anything to say to this age, though heaven knows one could cry hoarse over the iniquities of this world. This is the Dead Sea fruit of American hegemony over the world. The world stands petrified before every American excess because it is living as if in the manor of the great American Lord by his grace and like a servitor runs to Washington to take orders of the Lord. America is buying up the silence of the world, if not its acquiescence, when the world ought to be crying out its heart of justice.
And yet America could have released men from their physical and mental fetters with its immeasurable resources and power. But, like that of Rappaccini'sdaughter, America'svery breath means the death of nations.
The worse is yet to come and that is what we all dread?the final catastrophe. And men are too feeble to even raise their protests. Here comes the death-wish of the winter of a civilisation under American dispensation, which has lost its will to live and fight.
America has been at the head of a huge empire for a century or so?an empire which it has held by bluff, bluster and blackmail. But it did not have the commonsense to understand that empires flourish and decay, by turns command, by turns obey, as Ovid said.
But what has the American Empire contributed to mankind? Certainly no higher human value. How can it, when it is the source of all corruptions! The soul of America has decayed by its excesses?of greed and commercialism, and justice has fled from its brutish society. Dear reader, do you want to copy this society?
And though it has lost its own soul, America talks today of its mission to save the soul of the world! The soul of the world was sound and good before the American advent, and was moving in the right direction. But America stood in the way and diverted it along a perilous path. But change, like a burst dam, threatens to overwhelm everything.
Here comes the peculiar aspect of American character. Persecution comes just as easily to America as the persecution mania. America refuses to see the world as it is today. A Negro writer bemoans: ?I am an invisible man!? (in America) because the Americans refuse to see the Negro and his problems. Nor do they see the evil their government is creating all over the world. They have put more nations under fetter than the worst empires of men.
American power is an instrument for world domination. It has a law of its own and is no more amenable to those nice constitutional safeguards of which Americans were once proud. American Presidents today are no more than proxies of the dark forces behind the pomp and show you see in Washington.
Thus is the conscience of America stilled?of the rich because they have none, of the poor because they are drugged and of the thinking few because their silence has been bought.
Today, it is true, the Great Anarch is on the run. Its huge arsenal of destruction is of no avail to save it. It runs from pillar to post and to Beijing in the hope of forging new alliances to maintain its supremacy. But for how long can this game go on? Not for very long, I believe.
Today America and China are planning a condominium to run the world. They have found a common ground to work together. To create a better world? No, only to serve their mutual interests.
American power is on the wane. Its power is based on parenthetic props, that are even less enduring. The world shall neither cry ?Ah!? when American power passes away, nor say ?Hail!? to its living power. There is no residual worth in America that can form its legacy to mankind. Nor can it claim, as Thycydides claimed for the Greeks that ?We shall be the wonder of the world not only of the men today, but of after times.? The Americans could have aspired, like the Greeks, for a greater legacy.
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