Reflection N° 161 - United States of America

Mao Tse-tung (Mao Zedong), the world’s smartest man according to political analysts, in his last years was recommending: “Continue digging tunnels and never seek hegemony”; it was his political testament. Thus has being happening until today; they are the wealthiest nation among all, not only by money but by production of goods, the first in steel, four times more than the United States, the first in coal, the first in vegetable and animal food, the first in population, with the largest army, the first in export, and with all-level education and health care, which are free of charge. In the United States, the passenger trains are going 120 kilometers (74 miles) per hour and in China they are going 130 kilometers (80 miles) per hour. The first world’s supercomputer is Chinese, the second is North American, and the third is Chinese too. The 2008 Olympiads have been a perfect example of imagination, order and sports records. The level of life is average and equalitarian, but they do not manifest it. And they continue building undergrounds (tubes or subways) in every city as means of transport and emergency shelters, like in Europe during the Second World War. They are the first indeed, but not hegemonic.

The international political hegemony is an excluding condition in the United States since their beginning. Even such attitude never has been disregarded in those critical days of the Cold War. The Soviet Union, as a superpower indeed, never competed about this matter. It defended its at-risk achievements but never left its frontiers. North America took its atomic rockets out of Turkey and Iran, did not attack Cuba, and led its armies to Vietnam, a remote agricultural country. It has to express the image of the first power at whatever cost: Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, et cetera. It has lost all wars, but to win them it is not indispensable whereas it holds press control around the world, and hegemonic will.

It is important for the readers of these Reflections to reflect on the North American attitude, marking the Christian Civilization destiny, and will end like that. They have created the atomic bomb and nuke bombing in Japan putting an end to the Second World War. Thus they have created a fatal karma to all mankind, the end of the Fifth Sub-race and next millennia –a theme that we have dealt with in these pages and other authors too. In our days, most of the literary and cinematic imaginary is dealing with the terminal catastrophe.

The United States political supremacy over the rest of capitalist nations is real and effective, not only over governments, but over citizens, millions who honestly accept the North American leadership. Such countries –Latin, African and of other continents, except Communists– aim at living the Mickey Mouse’s fatherland, going to Disney’s World and having supper on the top floor of the Empire Sate building. It is wonderful to work there among professionals with a Master degree from certain North American University. There is an amusing story of the Cold War after the Cuban missile crisis. Nikita Khrushchev had officially gone to the United States in order to pacify things. Those in charge of his attention offered him to visit whatever place he wanted, for instance steel mills, atomic facilities and space shuttles. But Nikita replied with his Russian humor: “I am not interested; we have better things in our country. But I would like to visit Disneyland; it is the best of the United States and we do not have it. Nikita was taken there and, funny as ever, embraced Mickey Mouse who welcomed him at the entrance and told the newspapermen: “It is the best you have of the North American people. You should export it”. Those newspapermen remained quiet and continued filming.

In the recent stages of the Christian Civilization, the world is capitalist in the North American way, not only through money but through human (business, family and individual) behavior. So as a family from the North of whatever financial level –high, average and very poor– acts and stays in one room like many Argentines do, or in a spacious apartment of New York City’s Central Park, or in a residential apartment of Puerto Madero (Buenos Aires City), or in intelligent buildings of luxury cars in their garages, the North American style is everywhere, being for some persons the everyday reality and for others an illusion. Over tin houses of the Argentina’s slums you can see satellite dishes replacing life for screen illusion, Mirtha Legrand’s lunches, Marcelo Tinelli’s pornographic TV shows, “football (soccer) for everybody”, the international Big Brother, and so on. In the United States, televiewers stay six hours a day watching TV and eating junk food, and are fatter and fatter; in Argentina and the rest of America, the average is the same. The North American hegemony does not come from useless aircraft carriers taking a ride through the Oceans but from a decadent way of life, blindly imitated by mankind.

The military political hegemony is the outcome of a capitalist society making of rivalry its way of living in every circumstance and level, from sports to playing the market. In modern life, the United States are the clearest and most categorical expression over the old European nations. The winner is the owner of truth in every rivalry, and the laws are in his service, as you can see in the daily routine, even in Courts. May a happy life aim exclusively at triumphalism, at being the number one in top brands, and at plentiful money and trips? If you look impartially at competitions, for each winner of the first post, there are hundreds, thousands of failures to fall by the wayside, with bitterness on their faces and low heads while directing their steps towards the dressing room and drugs (for instance, Diego Armando Maradona). We are aware of the end. In Argentina, we have a case remembered by all, José María Gatica, the boxer (whose ring nickname was “El Mono”). After winning several times, finally he died entirely drunk under the wheels of a bus. Thus one can see world renowned actors and actresses, capitalists like Bernard F. Madoff in jail, or politicians like Adolf Hitler with a shot on the head. Or Ronald Reagan entirely brain sick, or the Pope John Paul II on a wheel-chair and being unable to speak to multitudes. Could not the latter fulfill perfectly his vocation in a parish as a modest and simple priest, in Poland, advising peasants? In every activity, greed brings suffering to others and to oneself, and the highest is the ascension, most painful is the fall. One should imitate paradigmatic men who have lived humbly; they did not ascend to a self-sufficient pedestal but were raised high in all activities. And this is the subject of this Reflection; the United States are seeking hegemony in everything and everywhere, and they will fall dragging the world. The seekers of Truth, disciples of Renunciation, hide, disappear, work silently in a small circle, and live harmoniously with no rivalry.

Those who are seeking in excess eventually are most wrong, because we all know that the winner is only one: death, the inexorable end, both in men and institutions. Hitler promised a Reich of thousand years and lasted twelve years with the total ruin of Germany that was a world power; ancient civilizations vanished leaving behind dead cities, legends and nothing; even continents sink and none knows where Atlantis and Lemuria are. So, what can be expected from a simple mortal of no more than hundred years, gathering money and properties, and from others who are commanding armies and dictatorships, causing very much damage, believing themselves hegemonic at most for a presidential period, gathering money and power in their imagination, and ending as dead dogs? No! To resign on time is the best!

Dear reader of these Reflections and student of the Renunciation Teachings: if you have your own house, a permanent job and a balanced family, and are able to support it with dignity whatever be your socio-economic level and place in the world, for what should you venture your domestic tranquility for eventual rivalries when things that can be seen everywhere, here in this so greedy city of Mendoza or in an average city of the Russian Federation, are illusory projects thrown to the streets? Master Santiago has given this lesson: one should not change his own pattern, whatever it may be, –in economy, religion, countryside or city, whether above or below– but to perfect what we have at birth because such birth is the result of many centuries of a whole apprenticeship through the Saint Masters in schools of the astral plane. If you investigate the intimate life of those who wanted to stand over others, you will see blood stains: Marilyn Monroe, Carlos Monzón, Howard Hughes, Augusto J. P. Pinochet, and others. If you look at your acquaintances who unnecessarily wished to stand out, you will see failures and suffering, not only in them but in those whom you trusted. The best is to remain little and ignored, fulfilling those tasks imposed by the individual life, neither competing nor seeking to stand out among thousands who are in search of the same.

In the United States, the inhabitants are not the first but the greediest, directing their supremacy efforts towards the weak. After the Port-au-Prince earthquake destroyed everything, the United States sent ten thousand marines that nobody asked. It was a hegemonic action in a small Caribbean country that had been devastated. The same thing occurred elsewhere. Such policy is not born from the Central Intelligence Service (CIA), but from the hearts of the leaders. Those things that one can see in international politics are hidden. Those who are responsible for the Government in that country are millionaires who came to the top competing financially and economically, and things the press unveils are what they hid: their greed.

So as nations know nothing about friendship but their own concerns, even those individuals who compete do not know friendship; they fight to stand over trade opponents, even in small-scale: supermarkets, drugstores, fruit and vegetable stores, businessmen and taxi drivers on the streets; likewise, in primary schools with prizes and exams at the end of their courses, and likewise on soccer matches and on the streets.

The fact of competing to win brings suffering. Renunciation is the best.

José González Muñoz
July 2011