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Lessons of Empire, Sorrows of Today
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by Patty Guerrero, W A M M
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The Sorrows of Empire by Chalmers Johnson was WAMM’s book club selection of the month for August. We found it depressing but at the same time somewhat hopeful. Johnson writes this book with a sense of despair and a sense of urgency. The U.S. military-industrial complex has grown vast, with hundreds of bases in every continent except Antarctica. Johnson believes we are becoming much like the Roman Empire, deciding when and where to wage war with Congress rubber-stamping the orders. The Roman senate, much like our Congress, worked well enough for two centuries. But by the 1st century BC, the size of the empire and the armies it had to maintain were too overwhelming. When Julius Caesar, in 49 BC, crossed the river, the Rubicon, the country was plunged into civil war. As the Roman republic mostly acquiesced in the loss of their democratic rights, not all of its citizens quietly did so. In Shakespeare’s version of the politics of those days, one citizen, Cassius, asks Brutus, “Upon what meat doth this our Caesar feed that he is grown so great?” Johnson says that, in a sense, his book is an attempt to answer that question in the context of an American imperium.
The first militarist tendencies of the U.S. came at the end of the 19th century before and during the Spanish American War of 1898. The press helped whip up war fever while atrocities and war crimes were committed by American forces in the Philippines. This is when the government began to build the military machine. In 1903, the secretary of war under President McKinley was able to set up the president for today’s Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Army War College. This was diabolically opposite to what our constitution intended. James Madison, its primary author, wrote: “Of all enemies to public liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. ” George Washington said, in his farewell address, “Overgrown military establishments are under any form of government inauspicious to liberty, and are to be regarded as particularly hostile to Republican liberty.” Washington’s name is still sacrosanct in the U.S., but the content of his advice is today dismissed as “isolationism.”
Woodrow Wilson was president in 1910 when he justified the Mexican Revolution, and he became the patron saint of the “crusades” that characterized foreign policy from intervention in WWI through the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Wilson strongly believed in the notion of “exceptionalism” of the U.S. and its destiny to bring about the “ultimate peace of the world.” Since the end of the Cold War and particularly since 9/11, the idea of empire has gained momentum. Andrew Bacevich, a professor of international studies, has said, “In all of American public life there is now hardly a single prominent figure who finds fault with the notion of the U.S. remaining the world’s sole military superpower until the end of time.”
Humanitarian intervention is now a euphemism for imperialism. Every president since Wilson has played a part in America’s militarism and empire. Roman imperial sorrows mounted up over hundreds of years. Today’s sorrows are likely to arrive with the speed of FedEx. If present trends continue, there are four sorrows that, according to Johnson, are certain to happen here: First, there will be a state of perpetual war, leading to more terrorism against Americans, and a growing reliance on weapons of mass destruction among smaller nations. Second, there will be a loss of democracy and constitutional rights as the presidency fully eclipses Congress. Third, an already well-shredded principle of truthfulness will increasingly be replaced by a system of propaganda, disinformation, and glorification of war, power, and the military legions. Fourth, there will be bankruptcy, as we pour our economic resources into ever more grandiose military projects and shortchange education.
Johnson says that empires don’t last and their ends are usually unpleasant. At least six empires have collapsed in some of our lifetimes: Nazi Germany, France, the Netherlands, the Soviet Union, and the Chinese, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman empires. A combination of imperial overstretch, rigid economic institutions, and an inability to reform weakened all these empires, leaving them fatally vulnerable in the face of disastrous wars, many of which the nations started themselves. It is very likely that our American empire will go the same way for the same reasons.
But we are a work in progress and one development that could, perhaps, stop this process of overreaching is that the people could retake control of Congress, turning it into a genuine assembly of democratic representatives while cutting off the supply of money to the Pentagon. During our book debate, there were some who thought that Chalmers Johnson’s writing of the Sorrows of Empire provided reason for optimism. Hope is also found in efforts to educate ourselves. We still possess the Constitution and people who are willing to march and protest, to challenge the entrenched military-industrial complex in whatever manner their conscience tells them to. Failing this, the author says, Nemesis, the goddess of retribution and vengeance, the punisher of pride and hubris, waits impatiently for her meeting with us. |
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Word UP!
Rumsfeld in his own words:
On intelligence: “There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”
—February 2002
On insecurity in Afghanistan: “Because it’s reasonably democratic, it’s kind of untidy. And one looks at the untidiness and says, ‘Oh my goodness, it’s untidy.’ Well, my goodness, democracy is untidy. Freedom is untidy. Liberation is untidy.”
—August 2002
On being defense secretary: “Once in a while, I’m standing here, doing something. And I think: ‘What in the world am I doing here?’ It’s a big surprise.”
—May 2001
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© 2006 Women Against Military Madness. All rights reserved.
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Complete October 2006 Index - click here
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