The Greatest Nation in the World!

From an early age we are taught that this is the greatest country in the world. It's ingrained in us that you're either number one or you're nothing. There are certainly a number of great qualities about this country, but I'm not going to make the case that we are number one. Rather I'd you to consider the possibility that even if this were the greatest nation on earth that isn't necessarily a good thing.

To make an anachronistic analogy imagine if I told you Thomas Jefferson was the world's greatest slave owner. You wouldn't be very impressed, would you? After all, the very nature of slavery is bad, so no matter how nice you were as a slave owner you were still inherently bad. I think it's important to understand that the state--even at its very best--is inherently a tool of oppression. As James Madison so eloquently put it during the Constitutional Convention, the primary aim of the government is to protect the minority of the opulent from the majority. The state is used to protect that fraction of 1% that live in obscene wealth from those of us who see them for the parasites they are.

A commenter to an earlier post told me that if this country is so bad I should move somewhere else. But moving to another state doesn't change anything. The state itself must be smashed. None of the redeeming and wonderful qualities of our society are products of the state; they exist in spite of the state. The freedoms we cherish are the direct result of generations of organizing and agitating for change. Men women and children died, not in foreign lands , but here at home fighting for our rights and freedoms.

I don't know which nation is the greatest. That would largely depend on how you defined it. We certainly have the largest and most powerful empire the world has ever seen. But at what cost? Thirty thousand people perished today due to malnutrition in a world with plenty of food. Thousands more died of preventable disease. How great can the greatest nation in the world be if such things are going on?

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