Such a pity that the late, great American Republic should be buried without at least the formality of a funeral. It was unceremoniously covered with loose dirt as it lay in a shallow hole last week, partly by the Little Emperor’s announcement that we are in Iraq to stay, at least as long as he’s in office, and also by the earlier “signing statement” he appended to the new version of the “Patriot” Act, a stern warning to Congress that it could bugger off if it seriously thought it might impose any conditions on its implementation, or on the sacrosanct person of the Commander-in-Chief. Executive usurpation of the legislative function is part of the New World Order, and only those of us unreasonably and sentimentally attached to the Constitution of our departed republic object to it.
But if there was no memorial service, there is at least a beautifully done post-mortem in Chalmers Johnson’s “The Sorrows of Empire,” subtitled “Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic.” This book is above all a history lesson, and anybody who thinks that the military dictatorship under which we find ourselves suddenly embarked was an overnight development, or that George Bush, Jr. was born out of Ronald Reagan’s thigh, needs to read it. The Empire of – what should we call it? Pentagonia? – has been a long time coming, was born decades ago, and matured under our noses as we slept and dreamed of democracy and our humanitarian ideals.
Johnson’s thesis centers on 9/11 as a turning point because that catastrophe and the Iraq War which followed caused “a growing number (of Americans to) finally (begin) to grasp what most non-Americans already knew and had experienced over the previous half century – namely, that the United States was something other than what it professed to be, that it was, in fact, a military juggernaut intent on world domination.” (p. 4)
While he devotes one chapter to exploring the roots of militarism and the American Empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, most of Johnson’s 300-plus page book is a detailed examination of the changes in our government and foreign policy that began with the advent of the cold war and have now culminated in our quest for global hegemony. He concentrates on recounting details of the $300- to $400-billion annual military expenditures (in 2002 dollars) that have dominated our annual budgets since 1950, the growth of our empire of military bases which now span every continent except Antarctica, and the detailed history of every intervention our military has undertaken since the end of World War II. The work is overwhelmingly factual rather than rhetorical, and draws on literally thousands of carefully footnoted sources.
Two themes run through this harsh and depressing history. One is the gradual erosion of Congressional power and influence and the corresponding usurpation of what were formerly legislative functions – deciding whether to go to war, for example – by the executive. The other is the necessary theme of habitual military and security apparatus secrecy, which enabled the embryonic corporo-military dictatorship to maintain a façade of normalcy as it consolidated its grip on the governmental and appropriations processes.
As I read through the details of the money spent, of the metastasizing chain of super-bases, many of them miniature American cities, all around the world, of the excuses and public relations campaigns the Pentagon and its executive department spokesmen mounted to cover our naked aggression against helpless countries like Nicaragua, I became angry not only at what had been and was being done in our name, but at my own ignorance. Why, for example, had I never heard of the immense American installation in Kosovo called Camp Bondsteel? Why had I not known that we were in the former Yugoslavia to stay, and that our permanent presence there was obviously part of our Middle Eastern master plan? Apparently secrecy in a media-intensive world needs consist of nothing more than prudently abstaining from publicity.
Where is all this leading? Johnson’s conclusion leaves no room for optimism. “From the moment we took on a role that included the permanent military domination of the world,” he concludes, “we were on our own – feared, hated, corrupt and corrupting, maintaining ‘order’ through state terrorism and bribery, and given to megalomaniac rhetoric and sophistries that virtually invited the rest of the world to unite against us.” (p. 284) He sees nothing ahead for us except perpetual war, the erosion of democracy, truthfulness and candor supplanted by propaganda and the glorification of war, and bankruptcy.
Is there any hope we might avoid such a fate? “There is one development,” Johnson says in his final paragraph, “that could conceivably stop this process of overreaching: the people could retake control of Congress, reform it along with the corrupted elections laws that have made it into a forum for special interests, turn it into a genuine assembly of democratic representatives, and cut off the supply of money to the Pentagon and the secret intelligence agencies.” However, he admits the prospects for such a turn of events are dim, and that “Failing such a reform, Nemesis, the goddess of retribution and vengeance, the punisher of pride and hubris, waits impatiently for her meeting with us.”
The title of Chalmers Johnson’s next book, of course, is “Nemesis.”
Despite the complexity of the subject, “The Sorrows of Empire” is an easy read. Johnson is a university professor, but his unvarnished and straight-ahead style is free of academic and technical jargon. Anyone, even someone with little knowledge of history, can read and understand “Sorrows.” It was published in 2004, is possibly the most important book of the last ten years, and certainly one of the most important of the last half century.
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