CONSCIENCE, EMPIRE & DEMOCRACY

“As long as you have the wisdom to keep this country as the sanctuary of liberty, wherever [people] worship freedom they will turn their faces towards you.” Edmund Burke

Yes, now I’m beginning a third post with that quotation. And why?
The reasons for that will likely prove to be long and involved. Beginning with how fashionable it now is to excoriate not only the European ‘white’ empires but also the whole notion of empire.
As to the second excoriation, I’ll say, well and good, accompanied with questions about what may take the place of current unitary or corporate empires. You can, and I would, bet my bottom dollar that they’re not about to be replaced by peaceable confederations and still less by pristine forests with innocent human creatures prancing like fauns in Arcady. As to the first, I’ll observe how much of the excoriations come from other current or former Great Powers (China, Arabia and Turkey, I’m looking at you) and throw some words which basically amount to, ‘Can it, sore loser!’
I hope none of my readers need reminders that the sequence of formation, zenith, decline and fall of empires is as old, almost, as civilization itself. It has been nearly unheard-of for any empire to have internal critics who will tell the rulers of said empire that they are behaving in a way which will prove the undoing of that empire in time because said empire is betraying the best in itself.
Virgil may have come close to such a thing, but in a more upbeat way when, after admitting all the talents of the recently-conquered-by-Rome Greeks, he wrote these lines: