Later Empires
The Assyrians, a Semitic people from the upper Tigris, subdued Babylon in 721 B.C. and gained control of the Fertile Crescent (which extends northward from where the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers pour into the Persian Gulf, westward to the coast of the Mediterranean Sea, and southward to Palestine).

The offensive strategy of the Assyrian Empire in foreign conquests is important to note because similar steps were used both by earlier and subsequent empires:

1) The use of superior war-making technology to overwhelm the enemy; in the case of the Assyrians, the much-feared military chariots, mounted calvary, and sophisticated siege engines.

2) A policy of generating terror among the peoples they attacked.

3) A very efficient system of political administration.

4) Destruction of the national unity of conquered peoples by mass deportations.

5) Strong support of the empire's domestic commercial classes who would profit from trading over large areas that were united by political and economic stability.

Expansion of the Assyrian Empire was quite successful, but, around 650 B.C. the ethnic population of Assyria had been so decimated by continued wars that the rulers had to depend on hired mercenary troops and levies from the nations they conquered. This weakened the empire and enabled Egypt to regain its independence. Also the Medes, an Indo-European people who had established themselves on the Iranian plateau about 1000 B.C., east of Assyria, refused further tribute. By 625 B.C., the Chaldeans, who had gradually filtered into Babylonia, revolted; and by 612 B.C., the Chaldeans and Medes joined to destroy Nineveh, the capital. Thus, we see that empires are built through force and by inciting fear among the enemy, but are themselves eventually destroyed by force.

The Roman Empire was notorious for how members of its Senate conspired to expand Roman hegemony for their own personal benefit -- money and power -- to the eventual ruin of the Empire which reached its zenith about 180 A.D. The Roman soldiers, who wielded the notorious short sword, generated great fear and hate among the enemy by leaving battlefields strewn with decapitated heads, and arms and legs. Today, the same tactic is used via mass cluster-bombing and the use of depleted uranium (which causes deplorable birth malformations among the nations under attack).

Octavian Agustus (27 B.C.) attempted to restore the old Roman virtues of self reliance, personal integrity, discipline, and family cohesion; but the aristocracy, in its moral decadence, was generally unconcerned about the drift of their country. (Like our modern Congress?) In the cities, unemployed mobs, long degraded by government-provided free bread and circuses (similar to our modern welfare payments and TV?), had lost interest in hard work. Later, a steady debauchment of Rome's currency was a tell-tale sign of its moral, political, and economic corruption. (A comparable decline in purchasing power of the U.S. dollar has occurred since creation of the Federal Reserve Bank in 1913!)

Earlier empires (the Persian and that of Greece), and later empires (Byzantium, the Mongol and Ottoman, and those in India and China), all rose through the use of power and fear, and then declined. Generally the pertinent facts are similar: the lust for land, power, and riches at the expense of weaker nations; the greedy self-interests of those who benefit financially from imperial expansion; and the growth domestically of freedom-destroying statism.

The British Empire
During the 15th and 16th Centuries, Portugal, Spain, England, France, and the Dutch all expanded their hegemony internationally. Each used the rapidly developing technology of gunpowder (cannons and small arms) to conquer and enslave less-advanced nations and to dominate their cultures.

Britain's rise to become the pre-eminent world empire rested on the leading technology she had in arms manufacture and shipbuilding. This made her able to dominate less-advanced countries on both land and sea, thereby expanding her hegemony all over the world. Her boast was "the sun never sets" on her empire.

At home the common people were mentally conditioned, at great personal loss of life and limb, to serve as recruits in the imperial army and navy. This was accomplished through government propaganda and the willing participation of a compliant press that was largely controlled by commercial and financial special interest groups represented in Parliament. In this, note the similarity to the Senate of the Roman Empire. Blood flowed freely wherever Britain's hegemony was extended (India, China, Africa, and elsewhere); immense riches flowed into the coffers of The Crown and members of the ruling elite.

Queen Elizabeth had incorporated the English East India Company in 1600. This created a monopoly of trade, producing vast wealth for her and other stockholders. History textbooks downplay two main sources of the Queen's vast wealth (accumulated tax-free) and of the wealth of other empire elites in Britain and Europe:

1) The opium trade -- Tea and spices could not possibly generate the vast income needed to station British soldiers at the Khyber Pass, only one of many places where imperial troops were posted.

2) The African slave trade -- Britain joined it in 1503, first to supply cheap labor to her sugar plantations in the West Indies, then later (in the 1600-1700's) to supply cheap labor to the plantation owners in Colonial America.

Trade in opium and slaves provided the foundation for many family fortunes now enjoyed by descendants of the British and European royalty, as well as for elite families of New England in America today -- though much effort is made to conceal these dark facts of history.

The Bank of England was founded in 1694 to provide the king with funds to pay for foreign wars. The Bank's charter allowed it to charge 8% on monies loaned to the government and gave the Bank a monopoly for issuing credit-based banknotes on which it could collect interest. Credit financing made it easier to fund expansion of the Empire overseas. The Bank is still located in "The City" of London, an independent entity not under the British government.

British imperialism reached its zenith after World War I when Palestine, Iraq, and large parts of Africa were designated as her "protectorates" by the League of Nations, which Britain greatly influenced. This allowed Britain to gain effective control of the rich oil reserves of Arab countries. This set the stage for the volatile situation we see in the Mideast today. Britain also gained effective control of vast mineral reserves and other riches in Africa.

After World War II, the extensive British Empire quickly crumbled, going the way of all empires, as freedom-minded peoples demanded self-determination.

America's Path to Empire
In 1896 the U.S. Congress passed a resolution to intervene in a rebellion of Cubans against Spain, but President Grover Cleveland, an anti-imperialist, refused to get the U.S. involved. When pressured, he declared that, if Congress declared war, he would not, as Commander-in-Chief, issue the necessary order to mobilize the army. Thus, Cleveland courageously opposed public opinion which was being stirred up by special interests who had commercial ties to Cuba. Earlier, in 1893, Cleveland, against strong public opinion, had stopped the annexation of Hawaii which was being engineered by commercial interests in Hawaii who had wrongly deposed Queen Liliuokalani.

In contrast, when the U.S. battleship Maine blew up in Havana harbor on February 15, 1898, President William McKinley, who did not want hostilities, reluctantly yielded to public pressure stirred up by special interests and a cooperative press. So, America declared war against Spain, which ceded Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines to the United States, which thereby gained effective control of Cuba. This was America's great step toward building a foreign empire.

One immediate effect of our venture into empire-building was the rebellion of our prior allies in the war, the Philippine patriots, who demanded self determination. The resulting Philippine resistance was overcome by American military strength, but it took three years and the deployment of 60,000 American troops to put down the rebellion.

In subsequent years, America's foreign entanglements drew us into a long series of foreign wars, lasting more than a century. In each instance, there is sufficient evidence suggesting U.S. government deception of the American people in order to create support for war.

America's engagement in World War I came after the sinking of the Lusitania, which the Germans accused the British of causing in order to bring the United States of America into the war. Much has also been written about President Franklin D. Roosevelt's inducing the Japanese to attack the naval ships at Pearl Harbor. Also, President Truman is alleged to have tricked North Korea into attacking South Korea, thus launching an unconstitutional war for America. And it is now a documented fact that President Lyndon B. Johnson lied to the American public about the Gulf of Tonkin incident-- the alleged event that caused an immediate escalation of U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

In the 1991 war "Desert Storm," Iraq invaded Kuwait after being told that the U.S. "had no interest" in Iraq's territorial dispute with Kuwait. It is also now well established that many of the atrocities alleged to have been perpetrated by Iraqi forces in Kuwait are fraudulent. These false allegations were used to stir up a pro-war attitude among the American public.

And, finally, the pre-emptive attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq were based upon falsified intelligence regarding so-called "Weapons of Mass Destruction" and the very questionable events of September 11, 2001. Even today, as Bob Woodward recently revealed in his book, State of Denial ,the truth about the escalating violence in Iraq is being hid from Americans.

In each of these wars, the net result has been a sharply divided public; a sad waste of young lives; the centralization of more government power in Washington, D.C., especially in the hands of the Executive Branch (a shocking example of this is the recent passage by Congress early in October of the "Detainee Bill" which unconstitutionally gives President George W. Bush sole power to determine who is a "terrorist combatant" -- including even American citizens! -- and which, also unconstitutionally, provides President Bush retroactively with protection against being accused of the torture of prisoners under the Geneva Convention); tremendous increases in taxation and government regulation; persistent monetary inflation, which causes a steady depreciation in the purchasing value of the U.S. dollar; and a continued loss of individual freedom as citizens are persuaded by political leaders to surrender their God-ordained, self-responsibilities to the government. In short, a caretaker "Security/Police state" has developed in America as an inescapable and corresponding part of America's evolvement into an "empire State" internationally.

During each war, freedom of the people has suffered, never to be wholly restored, and taxes and government control of the population have continually increased.

End Part II