The Dark Ages

A couple days ago I started reading Morris Berman's "Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire." I'm about halfway through it.

The most interesting chapter so far, called "Pax Americana," explodes a lot of the assumptions most Americans, including those of us holding more liberal persuasions, have held onto over the years. Chief among these has been the notion that the advent of the Bush regime and its policy of pre-emptive warfare is a radical and alarming departure from the benevolent American foreign policy approaches of the past.

Berman argues that developments under the Cheney government (fronted by Bush) are a continuation and extension of the policies of the last 55-plus years, starting in 1950 with the appearance of the secret National Security Council document known as NSC-68, authored by Paul Nitze, which stated that "a defeat of free institutions anywhere is a defeat everywhere."

This statement and others like it underlay the Cold War foreign policies which followed, and led us directly into conflicts in peripheral, remote and unimportant places such as Vietnam, Nicaragua, and Afghanistan. As General MacArthur said, the objectives of such a policy were as much domestic as foreign, designed to keep the American people in "a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor" and fear of the enemy.

The policy of continuous warfare, of always being at war or preparing for war, as described by George Orwell, did not begin with Bush versus "the terrorists."

Berman concludes that "(T)he pax americana is not an accidental empire; indeed, I doubt if there is such a thing, historically speaking. We have arived at this point in our history as a result of an inexorable momentum..." He goes on to say that at this point, there is no possibility that the Republic can be restored, that we actually lost the Republic with the establishment of the national security state in its place in 1949-50, that there's too much water under the bridge, and at this point the only way America can and will go is down.