In discussing the rise and fall of empires, Chris Hedges outlines the
American Corporate Empire's(ACE) own headlong dash into collapse.
Nonetheless, understanding the reasons and detailing them will not
begin a process that can "save" the Empire. ACE is doomed, as have
been all Empires through out history. Empire is a plague which, like
all cancers, consumes everything in its path until it has destroyed
all sources of sustenance, bringing about its demise. In a sense, the
more successful an empire is, the more certain it is to sow the seeds
of its own destruction.
Carl Jarvis
On 4/19/21, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Chris Hedges: The Unraveling of the American Empire
US leadership has stumbled from one military debacle to another, a
trajectory mirroring the sad finales of other historical imperial powers.
by Chris Hedges
April 19th, 2021
By Chris Hedges
Princeton, New Jersey (Scheerpost) — America’s defeat in Afghanistan is one
in a string of catastrophic military blunders that herald the death of the
American empire. With the exception of the first Gulf War, fought largely
by
mechanized units in the open desert that did not – wisely – attempt to
occupy Iraq, the United States political and military leadership has
stumbled from one military debacle to another. Korea. Vietnam. Lebanon.
Afghanistan. Iraq. Syria. Libya. The trajectory of military fiascos mirrors
the sad finales of the Chinese, Ottoman, Hapsburg, Russian, French,
British,
Dutch, Portuguese and Soviet empires. While each of these empires decayed
with their own peculiarities, they all exhibited patterns of dissolution
that characterize the American experiment.
Imperial ineptitude is matched by domestic ineptitude. The collapse of good
government at home, with legislative, executive and judicial systems all
seized by corporate power, ensures that the incompetent and the corrupt,
those dedicated not to the national interest but to swelling the profits of
the oligarchic elite, lead the country into a cul-de-sac. Rulers and
military leaders, driven by venal self-interest, are often buffoonish
characters in a grand comic operetta. How else to think of Allen Dulles,
Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, Donald Trump or the hapless Joe Biden? While
their intellectual and moral vacuity is often darkly amusing, it is
murderous and savage when directed towards their victims.
There is not a single case since 1941 when the coups, political
assassinations, election fraud, black propaganda, blackmail, kidnapping,
brutal counter-insurgency campaigns, U.S. sanctioned massacres, torture in
global black sites, proxy wars or military interventions carried out by the
United States resulted in the establishment of a democratic government. The
two-decade-long wars in the Middle East, the greatest strategic blunder in
American history, have only left in their wake one failed state after
another. Yet, no one in the ruling class is held accountable.
War, when it is waged to serve utopian absurdities, such as implanting a
client government in Baghdad that will flip the region, including Iran,
into
U.S. protectorates, or when, as in Afghanistan, there is no vision at all,
descends into a quagmire. The massive allocation of money and resources to
the U.S. military, which includes Biden’s request for $715 billion for the
Defense Department in fiscal year 2022, a $11.3 billion, or 1.6 percent
increase, over 2021, is not in the end about national defense. The bloated
military budget is designed, as Seymour Melman explained in his book, “The
Permanent War Economy,” primarily to keep the American economy from
collapsing. All we really make anymore are weapons. Once this is
understood,
perpetual war makes sense, at least for those who profit from it.
The idea that America is a defender of democracy, liberty and human rights
would come as a huge surprise to those who saw their democratically elected
governments subverted and overthrown by the United States in Panama (1941),
Syria (1949), Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Congo (1960), Brazil (1964),
Chile (1973), Honduras (2009) and Egypt (2013). And this list does not
include a host of other governments that, however despotic, as was the case
in South Vietnam, Indonesia or Iraq, were viewed as inimical to American
interests and destroyed, in each case making life for the inhabitants of
these countries even more miserable.
I spent two decades on the outer reaches of empire as a foreign
correspondent. The flowery rhetoric used to justify the subjugation of
other
nations so corporations can plunder natural resources and exploit cheap
labor is solely for domestic consumption. The generals, intelligence
operatives, diplomats, bankers and corporate executives that manage empire
find this idealistic talk risible. They despise, with good reason, naïve
liberals who call for “humanitarian intervention” and believe the ideals
used to justify empire are real, that empire can be a force for good. These
liberal interventionists, the useful idiots of imperialism, attempt to
civilize a process that was created and designed to repress, intimidate,
plunder and dominate.
The Spook to Bellingcat Pipeline: How Bellingcat Launders National Security
State Talking Points into the Press
For a self-proclaimed citizen journalism outfit, an alarming number of
Bellingcat’s staff come from the military and intelligence agencies.
MintPress News | Alan Macleod | Apr 9
The liberal interventionists, because they wrap themselves in high ideals,
are responsible for numerous military and foreign policy debacles. The call
by liberal interventionists such as Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe
Biden, Susan Rice and Samantha Power to fund jihadists in Syria and depose
Muammar Gaddafi in Libya rent these countries — as in Afghanistan and Iraq
—
into warring fiefdoms. The liberal interventionists are also the tip of the
spear in the campaign to rachet up tensions with China and Russia.
Russia is blamed for interfering in the last two presidential elections on
behalf of Donald Trump. Russia, whose economy is roughly the size of
Italy’s, is also attacked for destabilizing the Ukraine, supporting Bashar
al-Assad in Syria, funding France’s National Front party and hacking into
German computers. Biden has imposed sanctions on Russia – including limits
on buying newly issued sovereign debt – in response to allegations that
Moscow was behind a hack on SolarWinds Corp. and worked to thwart his
candidacy.
At the same time, the liberal interventionists are orchestrating a new cold
war with China, justifying this cold war because the Chinese government is
carrying out genocide against its Uyghur minority, repressing the
pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong and stealing U.S. patents. As with
Russia, sanctions have been imposed targeting the country’s ruling elite.
The U.S. is also carrying out provocative military maneuvers along the
Russian border and in the South China Sea.
The core belief of imperialists, whether they come in the form of a Barack
Obama or a George W. Bush, is racism and ethnic chauvinism, the notion that
Americans are permitted, because of superior attributes, to impose their
“values” on lesser races and peoples by force. This racism, carried out in
the name of Western civilization and its corollary white supremacy, unites
the rabid imperialists and liberal interventionists in the Republican and
Democratic parties. It is the fatal disease of empire, captured in Graham
Greene’s novel “The Quiet American” and Michael Ondaatje’s “The English
Patient.”
Afghanistan War
A young boy watches a US Marine scan the area during a patrol south of
Kabul, Afghanistan, Nov. 3, 2010. Dusan Vranic | AP
The crimes of empire always spawn counter-violence that is then used to
justify harsher forms of imperial repression. For example, the United
States
routinely kidnapped Islamic jihadists fighting in the Balkans between 1995
and 1998. They were sent to Egypt — many were Egyptian — where they were
savagely tortured and usually executed. In 1998, the International Islamic
Front for Jihad said it would carry out a strike against the United States
after jihadists were kidnapped and transferred to black sites from Albania.
They made good on their threat igniting massive truck bombs at the U.S.
embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that left 224 dead. Of course, the
“extraordinary renditions” by the CIA did not end and neither did the
attacks by jihadists.
Our decades-long military fiascos, a feature of all late empires, are
called
“micro-militarism.” The Athenians engaged in micro-militarism during the
Peloponnesian War (431-404 B.C.) when they invaded Sicily, suffering the
loss of 200 ships and thousands of soldiers. The defeat triggered
successful
revolts throughout the Athenian empire. The Roman empire, which at its
height lasted for two centuries, created a military machine that, like the
Pentagon, was a state within a state. Rome’s military rulers, led by
Augustus, snuffed out the remnants of Rome’s anemic democracy and ushered
in
a period of despotism that saw the empire disintegrate under the weight of
extravagant military expenditures and corruption. The British empire, after
the suicidal military folly of World War I, was terminated in 1956 when it
attacked Egypt in a dispute over the nationalization of the Suez Canal.
Britain was forced to withdraw in humiliation, empowering Arab nationalist
leaders such as Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser and dooming British rule over
its
few remaining colonies. None of these empires recovered.
“While rising empires are often judicious, even rational in their
application of armed force for conquest and control of overseas dominions,
fading empires are inclined to ill-considered displays of power, dreaming
of
bold military masterstrokes that would somehow recoup lost prestige and
power,” the historian Alfred W. McCoy writes in his book “In the Shadows of
the American Century: The Rise and Decline of US Global Power”: “Often
irrational even from an imperial point of view, these micromilitary
operations can yield hemorrhaging expenditures or humiliating defeats that
only accelerate the process already under way.”
The worse it gets at home the more the empire needs to fabricate enemies
within and without. This is the real reason for the increase in tensions
with Russia and China. The poverty of half the nation and concentration of
wealth in the hands of a tiny oligarchic cabal, the wanton murder of
unarmed
civilians by militarized police, the rage at the ruling elites, expressed
with nearly half the electorate voting for a con artist and demagogue and a
mob of his supporters storming the capital, are the internal signs of
disintegration. The inability of the for-profit national health services to
cope with the pandemic, the passage of a Covid relief bill and the proposal
of an infrastructure bill that would hand the bulk of some $5 trillion
dollars to corporations while tossing crumbs — one-time checks of $1,400 to
a citizenry in deep financial distress — will only fuel the decline.
From RussiaGate to UkraineGate: Route to Apocalypse
Within three months of the ascendancy of Joseph Biden to the presidency of
the United States, the world teeters on the edge of nuclear war.
MintPress News | Oliver Boyd | Apr 14
Because of the loss of unionized jobs, the real decline of wages,
de-industrialization, chronic underemployment and unemployment, and
punishing austerity programs, the country is plagued by a plethora of
diseases of despair including opioid addictions, alcoholism, suicides,
gambling, depression, morbid obesity and mass shootings — since March 16
the
United States has had at least 45 mass shootings, including eight people
killed in an Indiana FedEx facility on Friday, three dead and three injured
in a shooting in Wisconsin on Sunday, and another three dead in a shooting
in Austin on Sunday. These are the consequences of a deeply troubled
society.
The façade of empire is able to mask the rot within its foundations, often
for decades, until, as we saw with the Soviet Union, the empire appears to
suddenly disintegrate. The loss of the dollar as the global reserve
currency
will probably mark the final chapter of the American empire. In 2015, the
dollar accounted for 90 percent of bilateral transactions between China and
Russia, a percentage that has since fallen to about 50 percent. The use of
sanctions as a weapon against China and Russia pushes these countries to
replace the dollar with their own national currencies. Russia, as part of
this move away from the dollar, has begun accumulating yuan reserves.
The loss of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency will instantly raise
the cost of imports. It will result in unemployment of Depression-era
levels. It will force the empire to dramatically contract. It will, as the
economy worsens, fuel a hyper-nationalism that will most likely be
expressed
through a Christianized fascism. The mechanisms, already in place, for
total
social control, militarized police, a suspension of civil liberties,
wholesale government surveillance, enhanced “terrorism” laws that railroad
people into the world’s largest prison system and censorship overseen by
the
digital media monopolies will seamlessly cement into place a police state.
Nations that descend into crises these severe seek to deflect the rage of a
betrayed population on foreign scapegoats. China and Russia will be used to
fill these roles.
The defeat in Afghanistan is a familiar and sad story, one all those
blinded
by imperial hubris endure. The tragedy, however, is not the collapse of the
American empire, but that, lacking the ability to engage in self-critique
and self-correction, as it dies it will lash out in a blind, inchoate fury
at innocents at home and abroad.
