408 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biographybut the method of the Illinois Combine, an ongoing criminal organization of racketeers who are also
elected officials. As for the alleged noble qualities of Pétain and Obama, it is hard to see what they
might be.
THE OBAMA PROJECT AND IMPERIAL DECLINE: A ROMAN PARALLEL
Contemporary American opinion seems to regard the prospect of a member of a minority group
assuming state power as president as a totally unmixed blessing. But a glance at the history of
prominent world empires suggests that this turn to minority rule may be fraught with many dangers,
and may indeed represent a symptom of Imperial decline, especially when the aspiring candidate
has no significant reform agenda, but rather intends to increase the virulence of the self-destructive
tendencies already present in the system. The general pattern is that when the core imperial ethnic
group begins to lose vitality and to veer into decadence and lethargy, the expedient of bringing in
foreign adventurers as imperial bureaucrats is tried, quite often with very unsatisfactory results.
Sometimes the ethnic group which dominates the imperial oligarchy (i.e., the senatorial class) is
also so discredited that it needs to hide behind the mask of some other ethnicity. The Chinese
Empire had a very long history of absorbing foreign conquerors, and the details of this are far too
complex to be even mentioned here, but it is true that the last Chinese dynasty, the Manchu, was
founded by a peripheral minority people who were not identical with the mainline Han Chinese.
The Ottoman Turkish empire always had a tendency to give key administrative jobs to Greeks,
Venetians, and Armenians, but there is some indication that this tendency increased as the empire
declined.
The British Empire paid a great deal of attention to the Copts, Greeks, Armenians, and Jews of
the Ottoman Empire, since it sought to mobilize these ethnic minorities against the Ottoman Central
Government. The Copts, for example, were a favorite choice of the British when it came to
appointing the governments of their Egyptian protectorate, as we can see in the case of the Boutros-
Ghali family. In the last half-century of the British Empire, some of the same ethnic groups began
to take over important administrative functions in the court, the foreign office, and the city of
London, and we are doubtless on firm ground in a surfing that this increased ethnic diversity did
nothing to slow the collapse of the empire. The Prussian ruling class of the German Empire was
more interested in cultural uniformity and less willing to tolerate ethnic diversity than most imperial
ruling classes, and therefore the coming of a ruler in 1933 who was Austrian and not Prussian or
even German (based on the map of the time) was a radical departure, and it was of course followed
are the most catastrophic results. We have already noted that when the foreign policy of the
Russian Empire began to be managed by people like Pozzo di Borgo, Nesselrode, and Kapodistrias,
who were not Russians, but a Corsican, a German, and a Venetian Greek, that empire was in serious
decline. Therefore, the fatuous and superficial optimism of many US observers about the notion of a
president for the first time from the Afro-American minority group may be completely unjustified.
THE BANKRUPTCY OF COLLECTIVE GUILT
St. Thomas Aquinas was on the right track when he declared that no guilt can attach to any
person for the actions of others not under his or her control. After 1945, it became fashionable to
argue in some quarters to argue that there was a German collective guilt for the crimes of the Hitler
regime – meaning that the German housewife or factory worker somehow just as responsible for the
Nazi crimes as bankers like Schacht and Thyssen, or politicians like von Papen. It is necessary
vigorously to reject any notion of German collective guilt (Sippenhaft or Kollektivschuld) for