US Person wants to leave his readers with these thoughts over the holidaze. A nation must have a central legend that functions as an organizing principle, a means of binding people, often of diverse ethnic origins and cultures, into a cohesive whole. Countries without unifying myths can fall apart. This lack of mythos is experienced in those unfortunate countries formed on a map by other powers usually in the settlement of a great war or the end of a colonial era. Yugoslavia, Iraq, Syria and several African states are examples. The necessity of mythos to nation-building was recognized by Joseph Geobbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, who set about creating a new mythos for the new greater Germany, The Third Reich. His creation was a heady brew of Germanic and Nordic folklore, eugenics, and Nazi Party predilections towards mystical occultism*. History can testify to its effectiveness in mobilizing an entire ethnic population at home and abroad. It can be a force for good, or as in the case of Hitler's Germany very bad.America has a mythos made of several intertwined themes derived from its history of national formation. In a nation founded by immigrants to an undeveloped continent, any stories that could bind a diverse population where important for national cohesion. They have been elaborated, reformulated and retold by America's own version of Geobbel's Reich Ministry of Propaganda & Enlightenment, Hollywood. The mythos need not be historically accurate but should be related to the experience of the people and appeal to their sentiments, not to their limited logicality. As such it is a sort of propaganda. As Hitler explained in Mein Kampf, "the art of propaganda consists precisely in being able to awaken the imagination of the public though an appeal to their feelings, in finding the appropriate form that will arrest the attention and appeal to the hearts of the national masses." A mythos, if too unrelated to reality, can be destructive to a nation's collective psyche. As one rock singer put it, we can "be poisoned by these fairy tales". There are three themes in the American mythos that are particularly pernicious.
Nature is forever exploitable. The opening of the frontier and migration westward was based on the exploitation of nature. Forest and prairie were cut and cultivated for agriculture after the indigenous people and large animals were forcibly and ruthlessly removed. Later, nature was exploited for timber and mineral wealth regardless of its effects on the land health or beauty. The process still continues today, enabled by the idea that natural resources are there for man's taking in perpetuity without social cost. Without this enabling myth, American capitalism is a dead end because it requires the expansion of capital based on the consumption of materials and labor. It is becoming increasingly apparent that this myth is not related to reality. Global climate change, species extinction, and desertification are just some symptoms of overexploitation of the planet's resources. However, it is more convenient to deny the symptoms than admit the falsity of such a central organizing principle, thus the corporatist propaganda and influence-peddling of climate change denial.
There is righteous war. This theme was fully developed in World War II when the United States went to war against racist and militarist governments bent on world domination. Its roots go back to the colonial rebellion against the British Crown, seen in the eyes of patriots as the oppressor of free citizens. The theme also permeated the Civil War in which the devastation of the South was justified on the grounds of ending slavery: "mine eyes have seen the Glory of the coming of the Lord". The idea of war being a righteous undertaking suffered dissolution in Vietnam. That war was a traumatic national experience which divided the nation. Young people, who were expected to fight the war, did not see what was essentially a war of Vietnamese liberation from colonialism as being righteous or morally defensible when America was fighting on the side of the old regime. The same disillusionment is present in the latest American wars that are purely chosen wars of empire. The Iraq War, supposedly a righteous war of liberation against a totalitarian regime, was an imperial expedition which degraded into a sectarian civil war that still smolders in a nation suffering from a lack of mythos, formed as it was by drawing lines on a map at the end of World War I. In Afghanistan America is supposed bring the benefits of a modern nation to a benighted land of tribalism in the best tradition of Teddy Roosevelt and his "rough riders" in Cuba. America will leave Afghanistan after the longest war in its history having accomplished little besides killing one man blamed for a singularly spectacular terrorist attack thirteen years ago. What improbable conflict will be pushed upon a weary populace using the disingenuous rhetoric of moral rectitude and noble virtue? Understandably, the political elite has to resort to mercenary or robotic means to accomplish its exploitation of foreign resources by force.
The gun is the guarantor of liberty. The revolver was known as "the equalizer" on the western frontier. With a repeating firearm designed for human killing in his hand a man could alter the balance of power between himself and his antagonists be they savages or thieves. It made the slave owner the equal of twelve slaves. The idea that a gun makes a person equal and keep him free is perhaps the most dangerous myth in American society. It totally misapprehends the fact that the United States is a nation of laws flowing down from its founding charter which included a provision for raising an armed militia to protect the state. The Second Amendment is not a license to create private arsenals. What a gun does is protect a person's privilege. As long as you are armed, your will be done until another comes along with more powerful guns or more skill in using them. Armed insurrection may be enticing to some deranged, supercilious, or shallow-thinking people, but one thing they can be sure of--the government has more guns than they do and our laws allow the state to use them in protection of itself.
*Henirch Himmler, head of the Gestapo and SS, was the Nazi leader with the most interest and belief in the occult and German paganism. Himmler founded the Ahnenerbe research institute dedicated to finding 'scholarly' evidence of the fictional Aryan race from which pure Germans were supposed to be descended. It reality it was in the business of myth making for propaganda purposes. Himmler also ordered established, at considerable cost, an extensive archive of documents related to witch trials. The archive contained over 140,000 items stored at Wewelsburg Castle. The Hexenforschung Sonndercomando within his Reich Ministry for Security was responsible for the library. Brigadeführer Franz Alfred Six was assigned to head the project which lasted from September 1935 until January 1944. Witches (hexen in German) were viewed by Himmler and his mystical colleagues to be repositories of esoteric knowledge for which they were persecuted by the Christian church. Hitler, who himself had a mystical experience as he recovered from blindness after a gas attack a Ypres, is said to have been alienated by his subordinate's outlandish attachment to esoterica. Albert Speer quotes Hitler as saying, "To think I may some day be turned into an SS saint! I would turn over in my grave!"