Support 247 Google News
By William J. Astore, at TomDispatch. Automatic translation of consortium messages
Things are collapsing all over the US. Overall, Americans are experiencing national and imperial decline. Can America save itself? Is it worth saving the country in its current state?
For me, this last question is really radical. From an early age, I firmly believed in the idea of America. I knew, of course, that this country wasn’t perfect, not even close. Long before Project 1619, I was aware of the “original sin” of slavery and its central importance to our history. I also knew about the genocide of Native Americans. (As a teenager, my favorite movie was and still is Little Big Man, which cut no corners when it came to the white man and his insatiable murderous greed.)
However, America still showed promise, at least I thought so in the 1970s and 1980s. Life here was undoubtedly better than in countries like the Soviet Union and Mao Zedong’s China. That’s why we had to “contain” Communism to keep it there, lest it ever invade our country and extinguish our lamp of freedom.
And that’s why I joined the US Army during the Cold War and served in the Air Force from the presidency of Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. And believe me, it was quite a ride. It taught this retired lieutenant colonel that the sky is anything but the limit.
In the end, 20 years in the Air Force led me to break away from empire, militarism and nationalism. Instead, I sought an antidote to the mainstream media’s celebration of American exceptionalism and the exaggerated version of victory culture that went with it (long after victory itself was in short supply).
I began writing against the Empire and its disastrous wars and found likeminded people on TomDispatch former Imperial agents turned harsh critics like Chalmers Johnson and Andrew Bacevich, along with insightful journalist Nick Turse and of course the irreplaceable Tom Engelhardt The founder of these ” Tomgrams wanted to alert the United States and the world to the dangerous folly of repeated US global military interventions.
However, this is not a plugin for TomDispatch. It is a means for Americans to free their minds as much as possible from the fully militarized matrix that pervades America. This matrix drives imperialism, waste, war and global instability to such an extent that, in the context of the conflict in Ukraine, the threat of nuclear Armageddon approaches the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.
As wars continue whether by proxy or not America’s global network of over 750 military bases never seems to dwindle. Despite the upcoming cuts in domestic spending, few in Washington can imagine that Pentagon budgets will exceed growth and even reach the trillion dollar mark, with militarized programs accounting for 62% of discretionary federal spending in 2023.
A bloated Pentagon — its 2024 budget slated to rise to $886 billion within the bipartisan debt ceiling agreed by President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy — guarantees one thing: an accelerated demise of the American empire. Chalmers Johnson predicted it; Andrew Bacevich analyzed it.
The main reason is quite simple: Ceaseless, repetitive, catastrophic wars and costly preparations for more wars have drained America’s physical and spiritual reserves, just as past wars throughout history have sapped the reserves of previous empires. (Think of the shortlived Napoleonic Empire, for example.)
Known as “the arsenal of democracy” during World War II, the United States today is just an arsenal with a militaryindustrialcongress complex designed to start and fuel wars rather than attempt to starve and kill them . Stop them.
The result: a precipitous decline in the country’s image worldwide, while Americans pay a heavy price at home for increased violence (2023 will easily set a record for mass shootings) and “slaughter” (Donald Trump’s word) in a proud, but now a lot damn “home”.
Lessons from history about the fall of the empire
I’m a historian, so allow myself to share some fundamental lessons I’ve learned. When I taught World War I to cadets at the Air Force Academy, I explained how the terrible cost of that war contributed to the collapse of four empires: Tsarist Russia, the Second German Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and the AustroHungarian Empire and the Habsburgs.
But even the “winners,” like the French and British empires, were weakened by the enormity of a particularly brutal European civil war that raged in Africa, Asia, and even the Americas.
And yet, after the war ended in 1918, despite the Treaty of Versailles and other failed agreements, peace proved unattainable. There was much unfinished business and a great belief in the power of militarism, particularly in the nascent Third Reich of Germany and Japan, which had adopted ruthless European military methods to create its own Asian sphere of domination. The scores had to be settled, the Germans and Japanese believed, and military offensives were the way to go.
As a result, civil war in Europe continued into World War II, although Japan showed that Asian powers could also embrace and employ the ruthlessness of rampant militarism and warfare. The result: 75 million dead and more empires shattered, including Mussolini’s “New Rome,” a “thousandyear” German Reich that barely survived 12 of them before being utterly destroyed, and an Imperial Japan that starved, burned, and burned. eventually nuclear. China, devastated by the war with Japan, was also torn by power struggles between nationalists and communists.
As with its predecessor, most of the “winners” of the Second World War emerged weakened from the film. By defeating Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union had lost 25 to 30 million people. Their response was to erect, in the words of Winston Churchill, an “iron curtain” behind which they could exploit the peoples of Eastern Europe in a militarized empire that eventually collapsed because of its wars and its own internal divisions.
However, the USSR outlasted the postwar French and British empires. France, humiliated by its quick surrender to the Germans in 1940, struggled to regain wealth and glory in “French” Indochina but was badly humiliated at Dien Bien Phu. Britain, exhausted from victory, quickly lost India, that “jewel” of its imperial crown, and then Egypt in the Suez debacle.
In fact, there was only one country, one empire, that truly “won” World War II: the United States, which was least affected by the war and all its horrors (pearl harbor aside). This seemingly endless European civil war from 1914 to 1945, as well as Japan’s selfimmolation and China’s implosion, left the US virtually unchallenged in the world.
The United States emerged from these wars as a superpower because its government wisely twice backed the winning side and made the difference while paying a relatively low price in blood and treasure compared to allies like the Soviet Union, France, etc. Russia. Great Britain.
History’s lesson for American leaders should have been crystal clear: when you’re waging a long war, especially when you’re devoting significant amounts of your financial, material, and most importantly personal resources to it, you’re waging it the wrong way. No wonder war is depicted in the Bible as one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse.
France had lost its empire in World War II; The later military catastrophes in Algeria and Indochina made this clear. The same was true of Britain’s humiliations in India, Egypt and elsewhere, while the Soviet Union, having lost much of its imperial power in that war, took decades of slow decay and overexpansion in countries like Afghanistan to unravel.
Meanwhile, the United States babbled on and denied being an empire, even though it adopted many of the characteristics of an empire. Indeed, following the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991, Washington leaders proclaimed America the extraordinary “superpower,” a new and far more enlightened Rome, and “the indispensable nation” on planet Earth.
After the September 11 attacks, their leaders confidently launched the socalled “Global War on Terror” and began waging wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere as they had done in Vietnam in the previous century. (Apparently there is no learning curve.) In doing so, their leaders envisioned a country that would be spared the ravages of war that we now know—or were they? the pinnacle of arrogance and imperial madness.
For whether you call it fascism as in Nazi Germany, communism as in Stalin’s Soviet Union, or democracy as in the United States, empires based on the dominance of a powerful expanding army are bound to become increasingly authoritarian, corrupt and dysfunctional. .
Ultimately, they are doomed to fail. No wonder, for whatever such empires may serve, they do not serve their own people. Its agents protect themselves at all costs while attacking containment or demilitarization efforts as dangerously misguided, if not seditiously disloyal.
Because of this, the likes of Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, and Daniel Hale, who exposed the Empire’s militarized crimes and corruption, have been arrested, exiled, or otherwise silenced.
Even foreign journalists like Julian Assange can be trawled by the empire and imprisoned if they dare expose their war crimes. The empire knows how to fight back and will willingly betray its own justice system (particularly in the case of Assange), including the sacred principles of freedom of speech and freedom of the press, to do so.
Maybe he’ll be released eventually, likely when the Empire realizes he’s on the brink of death. His imprisonment and torture have served their purpose. Journalists know that exposing the bloody tools of the American Empire carries only severe penalties, not lavish rewards. Better to look the other way or mince words than risk arrest or worse.
However, one cannot entirely hide the reality that this country’s failed wars have added trillions of dollars to its national debt, even as military spending continues to explode in the most wasteful ways imaginable while social infrastructure collapses.
I cling bitterly to guns and religion
America today is becoming more and more attached to guns and religion. If this phrase sounds familiar, it may be because Barack Obama used it during the 2008 presidential campaign to describe the reactionary conservatism of most rural Pennsylvania voters. Disillusioned with politics, betrayed by their perceived superiors, these voters claimed the thenpresidential candidate as their own, clinging to their guns and to religion for solace.
Living in rural Pennsylvania at the time, I remember a roommate’s response who fundamentally agreed with Obama, because what else was there to hold on to in an empire that had abandoned its own rural, workingclass citizens?
The same applies to America on a grand scale today. As an imperial power, it clings bitterly to arms and religion. By “guns” I mean all the guns that America’s dealers in death sell to the Pentagon and the world at large. In fact, defense equipment is perhaps this country’s most influential global export, and devastatingly so.
From 2018 to 2022, the US alone was responsible for 40% of global arms exports, a number that has only increased dramatically with military aid to Ukraine. And by “religion” I mean an abiding belief in American exceptionalism (despite all evidence to the contrary), increasingly supported by a militant Christianity that denies the spirit of Christ and His teachings.
But history seems to confirm that empires in their dying state do just that: they extol violence, continue to wage war, and cling to their own greatness until their demise can neither be denied nor reversed. It’s a tragic reality that journalist Chris Hedges has written about with great poignancy.
The problem suggests its own solution (not that a powerful figure in Washington would seek it). America needs to stop holding on to its guns—and I’m not even talking about the nearly 400 million privately owned guns in this country, including all those AR15 semiautomatic rifles.
By “weapons” I mean all of the militarized features of the empire, including America’s vast structure of foreign military bases and its impressive commitment to weapons of all kinds, including worlddestroying nuclear weapons. The fierce adherence to religion and by “religion” I mean the belief in America’s own righteousness, notwithstanding the millions it has killed around the world since the Vietnam era to the present day must also end.
The lessons of history can be brutal. Empires rarely die well. Once an empire, Rome never became a republic again and eventually succumbed to barbarian invasions. The collapse of the Second Reich in Germany produced a virulence that was a third greater, albeit of shorter duration. Only their total defeat in 1945 finally convinced the Germans that God would not let his soldiers be sent into battle.
What will it take to convince Americans to turn their backs on empire and on war before it’s too late? When do we conclude that Christ was not joking when he blessed peacemakers instead of warmongers?
As an iron curtain descends on a crumbling imperial US state, one thing Americans can’t say is that they weren’t warned.
William J. Astore, a retired USAF lieutenant colonel and history professor, is a member regularly from TomDispatch and a senior member of the Eisenhower Media Network (EMN), an organization of critical military veterans and national security experts. His personal blog is “ Exciting views “.
Sign the 247, support by pix, Subscribe to TV 247in the canal Cuts 247 and look:
knowledge liberates. I want to become a member. Follow us on Telegram.
For you who made it this far Thank you for appreciating our content. Unlike corporate media, Brasil 247 and TV 247 are funded by their own community of readers and viewers. You can support TV 247 and the Brasil 247 website in a number of ways. See how at brasil247.com/apoio
Support the 247