America was born through violence. Tea thrown into a harbor. Open fire when you see the “whites of their eyes.” The Confederacy fighting to leave the Union. The Union fighting to force them to stay. In Iraq, we killed more than 300,000 civilians. In Iran, we yawn at losing the lives of 13 soldiers and we barely flinch at some 100+ children killed when our bombs blow up a girl’s school.

Even our National Anthem is a song about violence, despite America the Beautiful being the MUCH better tune and message.

We love believing that our ability to commit violence can make the world a safer place.

But, America does not just celebrate and re-live our “successful” violence. America does not merely use violence.

We celebrate domination so thoroughly that we often mistake it for leadership itself. Our mythology is built around conquest, military superiority, “strength,” and the ability to force outcomes through overwhelming power.

The strongest nation.
The biggest bombs.
The most feared military.

This obsession with domination shapes everything. Our foreign policy. How boys are taught to pursue “masculinity”. It shapes race relations. It shapes religion. It shapes how power itself is imagined.

The Empire Survives on Violence and Enforced “masculinity” Influence

The American Empire operates on a simple assumption: those with the greatest capacity for destruction deserve to rule. That logic has followed Western expansion for centuries.

Indigenous populations were displaced or exterminated because colonial powers possessed superior weapons and believed conquest justified ownership. African nations were exploited and impoverished through extraction systems enforced by military and economic violence. The Middle East became less a collection of human beings than a geopolitical chessboard for resource control, proxy wars, and strategic dominance.

And then Americans act shocked when other nations distrust us or seek weapons powerful enough to deter us.

Libya gave up its nuclear program in exchange for normalization with the West. Muammar Gaddafi was later overthrown and killed during NATO-backed intervention. Ukraine surrendered the Soviet nuclear arsenal on its territory in exchange for security assurances that ultimately failed to protect it from invasion.

The lesson the world keeps learning is brutally simple:
power protects itself.

Meanwhile, domination logic operates domestically too.

Patriarchy teaches many men that control is proof of worth. Masculinity becomes performance through intimidation, conquest, emotional suppression, and hierarchy. Women become objects to manage. Queer people become threats to the order. Trans existence becomes intolerable because it destabilizes rigid power structures built on domination and control.

The fear is not really about bathrooms, sports, or “family values.”

The fear is what happens when people stop believing power belongs naturally to strongmen.

That is why authoritarian politics and hypermasculinity so often travel together.

And underneath it all sits a culture unable to distinguish strength from cruelty.

Memorial Day, Veterans Day, patriotic flyovers, military spectacles, and endless war rhetoric all reinforce the same emotional script:
violence makes us important.

But truly strong societies do not need endless enemies to justify themselves. Truly strong people do not require domination to feel whole.

Only fragile people need constant reminders that they can overpower someone else.

Peace requires infinitely more courage than intimidation ever will.