"The empire will collapse and the nation will consume itself
within our lifetimes if we do not wrest power from those who rule the
corporate state."
So writes Chris Hedges. But, as with many of us who see the writing
on the wall, the dire warning carries with it no solutions.
The bleak fact is that no Empire has turned itself around and rebuilt
its infra structure, created employment and promoted world peace.
It's just not in the nature of the Beast.
Carl Jarvis
On 10/5/17, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The End Of Empire
For-Money-Fish-1stOct2017-850x720
By Chris Hedges, www.truthdig.com
October 3rd, 2017
Above Photo: Mr. Fish
The American empire is coming to an end. The U.S. economy is being drained
by wars in the Middle East and vast military expansion around the globe. It
is burdened by growing deficits, along with the devastating effects of
deindustrialization and global trade agreements. Our democracy has been
captured and destroyed by corporations that steadily demand more tax cuts,
more deregulation and impunity from prosecution for massive acts of
financial fraud, all the while looting trillions from the U.S. treasury in
the form of bailouts. The nation has lost the power and respect needed to
induce allies in Europe, Latin America, Asia and Africa to do its bidding.
Add to this the mounting destruction caused by climate change and you have
a
recipe for an emerging dystopia. Overseeing this descent at the highest
levels of the federal and state governments is a motley collection of
imbeciles, con artists, thieves, opportunists and warmongering generals.
And
to be clear, I am speaking about Democrats, too.
The empire will limp along, steadily losing influence until the dollar is
dropped as the world’s reserve currency, plunging the United States into a
crippling depression and instantly forcing a massive contraction of its
military machine.
Short of a sudden and widespread popular revolt, which does not seem
likely,
the death spiral appears unstoppable, meaning the United States as we know
it will no longer exist within a decade or, at most, two. The global vacuum
we leave behind will be filled by China, already establishing itself as an
economic and military juggernaut, or perhaps there will be a multipolar
world carved up among Russia, China, India, Brazil, Turkey, South Africa
and
a few other states. Or maybe the void will be filled, as the historian
Alfred W. McCoy writes in his book “In the Shadows of the American Century:
The Rise and Decline of US Global Power,” by “a coalition of transnational
corporations, multilateral military forces like NATO, and an international
financial leadership self-selected at Davos and Bilderberg” that will
“forge
a supranational nexus to supersede any nation or empire.”
Under every measurement, from financial growth and infrastructure
investment
to advanced technology, including supercomputers, space weaponry and
cyberwarfare, we are being rapidly overtaken by the Chinese. “In April 2015
the U.S. Department of Agriculture suggested that the American economy
would
grow by nearly 50 percent over the next 15 years, while China’s would
triple
and come close to surpassing America’s in 2030,” McCoy noted. China became
the world’s second largest economy in 2010, the same year it became the
world’s leading manufacturing nation, pushing aside a United States that
had
dominated the world’s manufacturing for a century. The Department of
Defense
issued a sober report titled “At Our Own Peril: DoD Risk Assessment in a
Post-Primacy World.” It found that the U.S. military “no longer enjoys an
unassailable position versus state competitors,” and “it no longer can …
automatically generate consistent and sustained local military superiority
at range.” McCoy predicts the collapse will come by 2030.
Empires in decay embrace an almost willful suicide. Blinded by their hubris
and unable to face the reality of their diminishing power, they retreat
into
a fantasy world where hard and unpleasant facts no longer intrude. They
replace diplomacy, multilateralism and politics with unilateral threats and
the blunt instrument of war.
This collective self-delusion saw the United States make the greatest
strategic blunder in its history, one that sounded the death knell of the
empire—the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. The architects of the war in
the George W. Bush White House, and the array of useful idiots in the press
and academia who were cheerleaders for it, knew very little about the
countries being invaded, were stunningly naive about the effects of
industrial warfare and were blindsided by the ferocious blowback. They
stated, and probably believed, that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass
destruction, although they had no valid evidence to support this claim.
They
insisted that democracy would be implanted in Baghdad and spread across the
Middle East. They assured the public that U.S. troops would be greeted by
grateful Iraqis and Afghans as liberators. They promised that oil revenues
would cover the cost of reconstruction. They insisted that the bold and
quick military strike—“shock and awe”—would restore American hegemony in
the
region and dominance in the world. It did the opposite. As Zbigniew
Brzezinski noted, this “unilateral war of choice against Iraq precipitated
a
widespread delegitimation of U.S. foreign policy.”
Historians of empire call these military fiascos, a feature of all late
empires, examples of “micro-militarism.” The Athenians engaged in
micro-militarism when during the Peloponnesian War (431-404 B.C.) they
invaded Sicily, suffering the loss of 200 ships and thousands of soldiers
and triggering revolts throughout the empire. Britain did so in 1956 when
it
attacked Egypt in a dispute over the nationalization of the Suez Canal and
then quickly had to withdraw in humiliation, empowering a string of Arab
nationalist leaders such as Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser and dooming British
rule over the nation’s few remaining colonies. Neither 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,” McCoy writes. “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.”
Empires need more than force to dominate other nations. They need a
mystique. This mystique—a mask for imperial plunder, repression and
exploitation—seduces some native elites, who become willing to do the
bidding of the imperial power or at least remain passive. And it provides a
patina of civility and even nobility to justify to those at home the costs
in blood and money needed to maintain empire. The parliamentary system of
government that Britain replicated in appearance in the colonies, and the
introduction of British sports such as polo, cricket and horse racing,
along
with elaborately uniformed viceroys and the pageantry of royalty, were
buttressed by what the colonialists said was the invincibility of their
navy
and army. England was able to hold its empire together from 1815 to 1914
before being forced into a steady retreat. America’s high-blown rhetoric
about democracy, liberty and equality, along with basketball, baseball and
Hollywood, as well as our own deification of the military, entranced and
cowed much of the globe in the wake of World War II. Behind the scenes, of
course, the CIA used its bag of dirty tricks to orchestrate coups, fix
elections and carry out assassinations, black propaganda campaigns,
bribery,
blackmail, intimidation and torture. But none of this works anymore.
The loss of the mystique is crippling. It makes it hard to find pliant
surrogates to administer the empire, as we have seen in Iraq and
Afghanistan. The photographs of physical abuse and sexual humiliation
imposed on Arab prisoners at Abu Ghraib inflamed the Muslim world and fed
al-Qaida and later Islamic State with new recruits. The assassination of
Osama bin Laden and a host of other jihadist leaders, including the U.S.
citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, openly mocked the concept of the rule of law. The
hundreds of thousands of dead and millions of refugees fleeing our debacles
in the Middle East, along with the near-constant threat from militarized
aerial drones, exposed us as state terrorists. We have exercised in the
Middle East the U.S. military’s penchant for widespread atrocities,
indiscriminate violence, lies and blundering miscalculations, actions that
led to our defeat in Vietnam.
The brutality abroad is matched by a growing brutality at home. Militarized
police gun down mostly unarmed, poor people of color and fill a system of
penitentiaries and jails that hold a staggering 25 percent of the world’s
prisoners although Americans represent only 5 percent of global population.
Many of our cities are in ruins. Our public transportation system is a
shambles. Our educational system is in steep decline and being privatized.
Opioid addiction, suicide, mass shootings, depression and morbid obesity
plague a population that has fallen into profound despair. The deep
disillusionment and anger that led to Donald Trump’s election—a reaction to
the corporate coup d’état and the poverty afflicting at least half of the
country—have destroyed the myth of a functioning democracy. Presidential
tweets and rhetoric celebrate hate, racism and bigotry and taunt the weak
and the vulnerable. The president in an address before the United Nations
threatened to obliterate another nation in an act of genocide. We are
worldwide objects of ridicule and hatred. The foreboding for the future is
expressed in the rash of dystopian films, motion pictures that no longer
perpetuate American virtue and exceptionalism or the myth of human
progress.
“The demise of the United States as the preeminent global power could come
far more quickly than anyone imagines,” McCoy writes. “Despite the aura of
omnipotence empires often project, most are surprisingly fragile, lacking
the inherent strength of even a modest nation-state. Indeed, a glance at
their history should remind us that the greatest of them are susceptible to
collapse from diverse causes, with fiscal pressures usually a prime factor.
For the better part of two centuries, the security and prosperity of the
homeland has been the main objective for most stable states, making foreign
or imperial adventures an expendable option, usually allocated no more than
5 percent of the domestic budget. Without the financing that arises almost
organically inside a sovereign nation, empires are famously predatory in
their relentless hunt for plunder or profit—witness the Atlantic slave
trade, Belgium’s rubber lust in the Congo, British India’s opium commerce,
the Third Reich’s rape of Europe, or the Soviet exploitation of Eastern
Europe.”
When revenues shrink or collapse, McCoy points out, “empires become
brittle.”
“So delicate is their ecology of power that, when things start to go truly
wrong, empires regularly unravel with unholy speed: just a year for
Portugal, two years for the Soviet Union, eight years for France, eleven
years for the Ottomans, seventeen for Great Britain, and, in all
likelihood,
just twenty-seven years for the United States, counting from the crucial
year 2003 [when the U.S. invaded Iraq],” he writes.
Many of the estimated 69 empires that have existed throughout history
lacked
competent leadership in their decline, having ceded power to monstrosities
such as the Roman emperors Caligula and Nero. In the United States, the
reins of authority may be in the grasp of the first in a line of depraved
demagogues.
“For the majority of Americans, the 2020s will likely be remembered as a
demoralizing decade of rising prices, stagnant wages, and fading
international competitiveness,” McCoy writes. The loss of the dollar as the
global reserve currency will see the U.S. unable to pay for its huge
deficits by selling Treasury bonds, which will be drastically devalued at
that point. There will be a massive rise in the cost of imports.
Unemployment will explode. Domestic clashes over what McCoy calls
“insubstantial issues” will fuel a dangerous hypernationalism that could
morph into an American fascism.
A discredited elite, suspicious and even paranoid in an age of decline,
will
see enemies everywhere. The array of instruments created for global
dominance—wholesale surveillance, the evisceration of civil liberties,
sophisticated torture techniques, militarized police, the massive prison
system, the thousands of militarized drones and satellites—will be employed
in the homeland. The empire will collapse and the nation will consume
itself
within our lifetimes if we do not wrest power from those who rule the
corporate state.
