When slaves are freed, the paradox is that oftentimes they don't want to go, because they've grown too accustomed to being told how to live. So it is now as the "free world" clings to the mythology of Pax Americana. In the land of the free, there is tremendous fear of freedom.
When the Soviet Union final collapsed "no one saw it coming". Why? Because they did a much better job of hiding their dirty laundry than the U.S. is currently doing. Globalization IS the American empire, and yet despite the fact that it's collapsing in real-time, no one is clinging to American mythology more than America's erstwhile allies.
The incongruity of this pivotal juncture finds Trump right about many things, notwithstanding his methods. He's right on trade, he's right on NATO, he's right on immigration. These are all unsustainable relics of an empire built first upon global slavery and refinanced in its latter phases upon American slavery. The U.S. empire never stopped being a slave state. It merely substituted zero wages for nominal wages to provide the patina of civility that is all important to today's rentier class - the same people who've used Globalization's surfeit of capital to turn the planet into an human and environmental wasteland.
Despite the fact that the U.S. imploded the entire Middle East and sparked the largest mass migration in human history, still somehow Europe looks to the U.S. to protect them from Russia. They seem to forget that was the easy part, now they need someone to protect them from the U.S., because the E.U. is imploding under the burden of non-stop refugee immigration. What do they think Brexit is all about? Trying to get cut off from refugee flow. Meanwhile, there is no greater threat to world peace than a failed hegemon blundering around in Eastern Europe and the South China Sea. The hypocrisy is overwhelming - putting missiles in Cuba? World War III begins tomorrow. However, if we are forced to surrender our vaunted "way of life", we'll turn the entire planet into radioactive dust in order to preserve it.
And yet you can't prove any of this rampant hypocrisy to people who've been told their entire lives that "we are the good guys". Carpet bomb Vietnam for ten years, no problem. Invade Iraq on false pretense, re-election. America's allies may not have created this problem, but they've certainly helped it to survive well past its shelf life.
When the Berlin Wall of the Dow Jones perpetual growth machine final collapses like a cheap tent, the Potemkin Empire will be over. It is the Chinese Wall separating fantasy from reality.
And no, they don't see this ending, in real-time. Because they don't know how to live outside of the Matrix.
In the land of the free, there is a tremendous fear of freedom.
