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Notes -
US military offers immigrants fast track to citizenship in effort to boost recruiting
I have some thoughts about this.
First, this looks suspiciously like textbook "How to lose your empire in five easy steps" guide:
Have your citizens grow fat, lazy and unwilling to risk their lives, especially in far away wars that they see no benefit from anyway
Hire strong and hungry barbarians to serve in the imperial military
Have the barbarians realize they are now doing most of the work holding up the empire together, while not getting commensurate benefits, which go to the fat and lazy citizens instead
Have the barbarians take over the reigns of power
The empire suffers bouts of "bad luck"
The historians write "Decline and fall of the $EMPIRE"
(Side note: since we live in the clown world, I feel compelled to add a disclaimer that the word "barbarian" is used in purely descriptive, not pejorative, meaning - as "somebody who is not part of the imperial culture" - and, in fact, for the purposes of this definition, I am a barbarian myself and many of my friends are Barbarian-Americans)
Second, we have been actively sold the notion that DIE efforts in the military are vital if we want to keep the recruiting targets and the strength of the military. I do not see this idea being empirically confirmed, and what is even worse - I am not seeing anybody even interested in empirically confirming or disproving it. I expect that from the left - you don't seek an empirical confirmation of your religion, you already know it's the true faith. But I would expect people on the right - and I mean all those talking heads, think tanks and high-flying politicians - be interested in figuring out whether DIE actually makes the army stronger - and if not, pushing that fact hard. I don't think I am seeing this. For the most of the 20th century, The Right sleep-walked into giving up almost every major societal institution to The Left's takeover, but I'd expect at least they'd put up some fight for the military. Doesn't seem to be the case. Is it that the only thing that can get people really caring nowdays is when a piss water manufacturer offends them? I'd say the military going woke is a bigger deal than piss water going woke, but I don't see the red tribe treating it this way.
As a Hegelian synthesis of the above, the third thought is that the barbarians should be, at least at the start, the least woke part of the society. Thus, them joining the army in large numbers (provided that indeed happens) should constitute at least a temporary impediment to the further assimilation of the military into the woke collective. However, again, I see very little interest - at least where I could observe it, maybe I'm not looking in correct places? - in the red-tribe thought to exploring this opportunity and building some kind of "welcome wagon" track to ensure these people will join the Right Side and vote accordingly once they become citizens. I am not sure how it should look like, but that's what these "think tanks" are for, aren't they? Do the thinking thing and figure it out. Or at least try - I don't see the trying, really. Am I wrong here?
It has nothing to do with "clown world", you are straight up analogizing the US to older empires that were far more explicitly formulated on a racial or ethnic basis, likewise analogizing illegal immigrants as less-civilized. You are free, of course, to idiosyncratically define "barbarian" as those who don't belong to the culture of the US (insofar as such a thing exists). But let's not pretend that this is some "clown world" shit, and that everyone in a "saner" world would understand that you weren't trying to insult those who are the "barbarians" here. It was an insult long before the advent of the "clown world".
Were they really? As far as I know, Romans didn't have the racial hangups Americans do, and in general most empires were quite tolerant to who they include. That's kinda the point of the empire - to assimilate as much of the other people and territory, and it's easier to do if you don't have weird hangups about skin colors. Of course, xenophobia and kinship existed since forever, but in somewhat different form than now - scientific racism with all its theories is quite recent invention and couldn't exist before the modern era.
It is true that in some empires, there were limitations (including ethnic) on who could be in the topmost levels of power - e.g. among Mongols, only a direct descendant of Temujin could be a ruler - but I think if you go down the pyramid a bit, it was much less restrictive.
So, after I explicitly told you I am not trying to insult, you are saying "no, I know better than you, you actually are!". Of course, you are much better expert on my intentions and thoughts than I am, so I must defer to you. For you personally - please feel free to be as insulted as you like. This post is not for you anyway - you already know what I think, and intend to ignore my actual words about it, so it is a waste of time for you to actually consider anything I say, you can move on directly to being insulted and not bother to actually try to understand what I meant. Too much work, I understand completely.
Rome was kind of the exception, though, most empires had a clearly dominant ethnic group or small number of groups- Greeks in the diadochi states, white English and Scottish people in the British empire, Japanmen in the Japanese empire, ethnic Russians in modern Russia, Shiite Persians in Iran, etc.
I suspect mixing English and Scottish here as if they were the same thing would be met with significant opposition from both sides at many periods, but in Victorian times, excepting the political issues, I don't see how a person of Spanish or French or German descent would be excluded from British society because of their ethnic origin. Of course, it would be hard for them to become Lord or Prime Minister, possibly, but not harder than for an English commoner without necessary connections, I think.
Ethnic Russian in modern Russia do not have any noticeable benefits compared to ethnic Belorussians or ethnic Tuvanians, for example (or ethnic Ukrainians, before the current catastrophe started, or, in fact, ethnic Jews). With all the horrors that the current fascist regime inflicted on Russia, and while Russian culture by itself is pretty xenophobic, the official imperial bureaucracy is pretty ethnicity-blind, and operates on principles which assign very little importance to genetic traits. It helps that there's no racial division in Russia similar to one characteristic to the US, but in general they have completely different issues.
There were two pre-eminent Prime Ministers during the era when the British Empire was at its height. Gladstone was ethnically British. Benjamin Disraeli, as his name suggests, was not. He came from a Sephardi Jewish background, although his father converted to Anglican Christianity (taking the family with him) when Benjamin was a teenager.
Amusingly, the first and second ethnic minority prime ministers (Disraeli and Sunak) as well as the first, second, and third women (Thatcher, May and Truss) were all Conservatives.
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