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It's happened before, and it will happen again.
In the Trinity Universe, Caldwell was arguably the first "national greatness" conservative, certainly the first to articulate the program in the terms that have become familiar to us. Previously, the proponents of the First American Empire had all, when making their excuses for it, talked the Blessings of Civilization Trust's standard line about the need to uplift the Person Sitting in Darkness.
Senator Ernest Warren Caldwell took the reverse view. He saw America as the last defense of Western civilization, besieged on all sides by the Cossack hordes of Red Asia, the rising fascism of Old Europe, etc. America must, he said, either build its own empire or be crushed under the "oppressive world regime" he saw arising. He preached this dysangel on the Senate floor and was laughed off it.
So he resolved to establish that American empire himself. Within a year of the MDI slaughtering Bikini's native leaders and planting the American flag, he had extended his empire south, apparently with an eye to reaching Antarctica. President Coolidge and the Congress called him a terrorist, but there were those in power, and in America's upper crust, who sympathized with his goals, including two Army generals who kept the MDI supplied.
1923
[Adventure!] "General" E.W. Caldwell's Manifest Destiny Infantry seizes Bikini Atoll, a small unremarkable Pacific island.
In the Trinity Universe, Caldwell was arguably the first "national greatness" conservative, certainly the first to articulate the program in the terms that have become familiar to us. Previously, the proponents of the First American Empire had all, when making their excuses for it, talked the Blessings of Civilization Trust's standard line about the need to uplift the Person Sitting in Darkness.
Senator Ernest Warren Caldwell took the reverse view. He saw America as the last defense of Western civilization, besieged on all sides by the Cossack hordes of Red Asia, the rising fascism of Old Europe, etc. America must, he said, either build its own empire or be crushed under the "oppressive world regime" he saw arising. He preached this dysangel on the Senate floor and was laughed off it.
So he resolved to establish that American empire himself. Within a year of the MDI slaughtering Bikini's native leaders and planting the American flag, he had extended his empire south, apparently with an eye to reaching Antarctica. President Coolidge and the Congress called him a terrorist, but there were those in power, and in America's upper crust, who sympathized with his goals, including two Army generals who kept the MDI supplied.