The Sorrows of Empire: Signs of Decay
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The Sorrows of Empire: Signs of Decay
A Prescient EON Interview with the Iate Chalmers Johnson
“The Soviet Union came apart for the same reason that most empires do come apart, and I'm here to argue that we're not invulnerable. That is to say, Americans often argue with me - things like, "Are you trying to say that our decline is inevitable?" I am not saying that. I am saying I cannot imagine the evidence for the opposite point of view. I cannot imagine what evidence one would produce to say we go on forever….”
by James Heddle, by Mary Beth Brangan
The still most viewed post on our popular EON3 YouTube channel is our 2007 interview with the late, great Chalmers Johnson, DECLINE of EMPIRES: The Signs of Decay - with over 605K views so far - which remains startlingly relevant after all these years.
Here - in addition to the original video post - is a slightly edited selection of the main highlights.
EON interview with Chalmers Johnson 2007 - Excerpts
War, Economics and the Rule of Vested Interests
EON:
As you mentioned in your book Blowback, there were three elements that you saw that are analogous in our situation with those in Ancient Rome, the internal corruption and the imperial overreach, or the military overreach, and the inability to reform. Would you talk about those three?
Chalmers Johnson:
One of the things that worries me in the United States today - I think it's fairly easy to imagine the end of the George Bush administration, either because he is defeated by a Democrat or he defeats himself, in almost the way Lyndon Johnson did, over poorly planned wars abroad. I still am not certain that whoever replaces him of either party can stand up to the interests of the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies. After all, even if you had an honest Congress, they can't do oversight when 40% of the defense budget is secret - secret from everybody. Maybe one or two very senior members of Congress can get access to some of it. All the intelligence budgets are secret. This is a concentration of power in the executive branch that is unprecedented, then even more sort of slightly Roman in the way of transfer of power.
I mean, the Senate, by the end of the [Roman] Republic, the Senate was worthless. It was a club of wealthy Romans, but who simply were there to rubber stamp anything that Caesar did. We saw this, I think the most critical issue in our society, in October of 2002, our Congress overwhelmingly voted to give the President the right to go to war when he wanted to on his and his decision alone, including the use of nuclear weapons. James Madison, easily the most important author of our Constitution, said that the clause in the Constitution reserving the right to go to war to the elected representatives, the people, is the single most important clause in the Constitution. Never, ever should such a power be entrusted to a single man. In October of 2002, our Congress, both parties, kissed off the Constitution, and that's the issue today, almost more than anything else.
When I began to write this in my book called The Sorrows of Empire, I was saying that history would suggest to us we may begin to see in America a military populist, one who comes along who begins to represent our legions, deployed on our 725 military bases around the world, but who are not very well paid, who are not very well taken care of, whose families are often destitute in terms of trying to lead normal lives, but that who are intensely patriotic and identified with the United States. That we are waiting for the militarist to come along and say, "I will serve your interests against those of vested interests in the United States. All I require is dictatorship."
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Perhaps our most prominent political philosopher in this country in the post-war period, Hannah Arendt, once made the case in Origins of Totalitarianism that tyranny can always prevail over others [forms of government] because it doesn't require consent. Its only cost is the destruction of its own society.
That's in many ways what our militarism, the unintended consequence of what it's doing is to destroy our constitutional order. Indeed, militarism is very highly advanced today, and we should bear in mind probably the two most famous generals who were ever presidents of the United States, namely George Washington and Dwight Eisenhower, both in their farewell addresses famously warned us about it. That is, Washington warned of the extreme dangers, as he said, to republican liberty of standing armies, and what these lead to.
Eisenhower, even more famously, in his farewell address in 1961, invented the phrase military-industrial complex. We know today that he intended to say military-industrial-congressional complex, but was warned off by his advisors that that's asking for trouble. But he spoke of the rise of unauthorized power in our society, and the tendency to distort our republican form of government. I believe this distortion is now so far advanced that it is truly an open question whether you could reverse it under any such circumstances, which is, it's something that we were talking about earlier that leads to...
This is speculation. It's not a prediction….
But nonetheless, without being Cassandra, what I fear at times is that we seem to be treading the same steps as the former Soviet Union. We now know with precision and from ample sources inside Russia of the things that brought the Soviet Union down.
It had absolutely nothing to do with Ronald Reagan or Star Wars, that they had been thoroughly warned off on that and understood how easily a so-called missile defense system can be defeated through decoys and things of this sort. Sakharov was brought out of internal exile in Gorky in order to address the Politburo on that subject, and he said, "Don't spend a nickel on it."
The Soviet Union was brought down by three things, all three of which strike me as parallel in America in the first years of the 21st century. First, extreme economic rigidity driven by ideology. That is, the inability to reform our economic institutions in ways that need to be done because of the power of ideology. It was Marxism-Leninism in the case of Russia that prevented Mikhail Gorbachev from being able to improve Russian efficiency. In our society, we see it in the whole world of corporate corruption, the belief that the stock exchange is no longer a functioning market, but is in fact a club of crooks. The ripping off of workers' pension funds, the savaging of corporate profits by inside executives, as in the case of Enron, Tyco, WorldCom, whatever else you may want to say.
The second, imperial overstretch. Now, this is where the issue that just came up, the fact that you get, over time, playing the imperial role just as the Roman Republic did. You get too many commitments, and you start making too many enemies. There's too many cases of blowback out there….
And then the third... It's just to say though, imperial overstretch put the Soviet Union into a situation approaching fiscal insolvency. There were simply too many commitments.
We now have, the Department of Defense acknowledges, well over 700 American military bases in other people's countries. This is at the same time, not to mention another 300 that are at least secret, that are kept totally secret. The intelligence bases, many of the bases that we simply don't acknowledge we have like Bon Steele and Kosovo and places like that, the bases in Great Britain that are disguised as Royal Air Force bases, any number of installations that we don't want to publicly disclose are functioning American military bases. Imperial overstretch, that is, it's... Imperialism is a little bit like the sabertooth tiger. Evolution doesn't work backwards…
The third, the thing that brought down the Soviet Soviet Union was the inability to reform, and there it is an interesting fact that as a professor of international relations, we normally teach our students there are no known cases of empires that went quietly, that didn't resist their own demise, that didn't fight at the end. One of the few exceptions you might make is probably the Soviet Empire, in that Mikhail Gorbachev was trying very hard at the end to reverse the Russian Empire. He was quite ready to kiss off the satellites in East Europe, including East Germany, because he wanted better relations with France and Germany, and he also, he and his people had begun to identify Russia as a European country, and they wanted to dismantle this Stalinist system.
Nonetheless, he was stopped by vested interests in the Cold War system, in the Soviet system as structured, just as I believe today anyone in America who attempted serious reform will then run into unimaginable vested interests….
I don't particularly like Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense, but I agree with him on the need to close bases. We have 6,000 military bases in the United States alone. He has said he'd like to close a quarter of the Army bases and a third of the air bases. I tell you, every time he even opens his mouth like that, you get a firestorm on Capitol Hill from extremely liberal senators. I mean, the senators from California, from Washington, et cetera, saying, "Oh my god, you can't close bases in my state. Our people work there. They make a living making depleted uranium munitions, multiple-megaton atom bombs. These are lovely little jobs that we'd like to keep."
Those are vested interests. Those are serious vested interest that I don't easily see how they would be defeated, except by a totally unforeseen renaissance of the American public regaining their civic consciousness, retaking control of the country. There are the slightest signs of this. I mean, I still believe... I didn't anticipate, I don't know of anybody else who did, the remarkable power and influence of the coalition that came together in Seattle in November of 1999 against the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank.
This was an amazing development, that despite being absolutely savaged by the mainstream press in America as hooligans, anarchists, and everything else, they had of course finally discovered that the worm in globalization is that the IMF, the WTO, and the World Bank are probably the most undemocratic, fake institutions that exist on Earth. They are dominated by the US Treasury. They're located at 1818 H Street within inhaling distance of the Treasury. We run them, but we run them in a covert way as if they were international organizations.
That movement then spread around the world and is today enormously influential, and led to, just before the American invasion of Iraq, evidence that in every democracy on Earth where people could express public opinion, public opinion was around 80% against the United States….
…should the public continue to educate itself via the internet and things like that, one could imagine a renaissance in America. Barring that, I fear, like the Soviet Union from 1989 to 1991, we are... Nemesis, the goddess of vengeance, the goddess of the punisher of hubris and arrogance, awaits her meeting with us, and awaits rather impatiently. And it is fairly late in the day.
EON:
So let's assume that there's still a last-minute rescue possible. What would the elements of that be? What would an enlightened populace taking charge do?
Chalmers Johnson:
One could speculate in many different ways on it, but the most obvious things are that it would require a reform of Congress, a reform of the corrupted election laws. It would very possibly require almost a re-division of the basic states, which turned out to be gerrymanders. I mean, after all, North Dakota has fewer people in it than Chula Vista, California. It's an odd thing to live with, to have to live with the world of electoral votes rather than where the population actually lives and what the population actually thinks.
They would then have to retake Congress and use the powers given to Congress in the Constitution to begin to cut off money to the intelligence agencies and to the Department of Defense. The Department of Defense is not a Department of Defense. It's an alternative source of government on the south bank of the Potomac River that is increasingly expanding into numerous activities well beyond what was ever imagined as the military.
I think the history of the Soviet Union and what happened after its demise should warn us that we will face remarkable resistance by vested interests in this system as constituted today, because the money involved, the jobs involved, the structures of life that we have been led to believe are indispensable to our very identity,…
… It's nowhere written that the United States must go on forever as the hegemon dominating the rest of the world.
… As I say, history does seem to be speeded up. If we were carrying on this conversation, say, in 1985, and I had said to you that within five years, the Soviet Union will disappear, you would've thought this guy is inhaling too deeply on something grown around the Berkeley campus. This is not a reliable source of information. I am here to tell you, like Nabokov talking about Gogol, it's gone. That is, Russia is not the Soviet Union. It's got a GNP about the size of the Netherlands. The place came right apart between 1989 and 1991 when they made the famous decision not to resist the German's desire to tear down the Berlin Wall, and that then this led into something that we in the United States could not possibly stand, what Gorbachev instituted, glasnost. Opening the prisons, letting everybody out of Guantanamo, and opening the archives, revealing all the black operations of the CIA.
The Russian people became so horrified once the details of the gulags were brought home to them. I mean, Solzhenitsyn had already started to introduce it, but when they began to understand the horrors of the Stalinist system, they tore the place apart, and everybody who could got out, went independent, created an independent... We'd have an independent Texas if you'd... That would not necessarily be a bad thing. But the point here is to say these things happen suddenly, much more fast than you may believe, that we are not well warned. That is, a $28 billion Central Intelligence Agency whose primary function was to study the Soviet Union throughout the 1980s didn't notice that the place was coming apart economically.
… The Soviet Union came apart for the same reason that most empires do come apart, and I'm here to argue that we're not invulnerable. That is to say, Americans often argue with me - things like, "Are you trying to say that our decline is inevitable?" I am not saying that. I am saying I cannot imagine the evidence for the opposite point of view. I cannot imagine what evidence one would produce to say we go on forever now. We are like Apollo. We are no longer subject to the cycles of decay and of overstretch and of hubris that are so palpably apparent in our ideology, in our people, in our flag-waving patriotism, and our lack of knowledge of as elemental things as the Constitution. I mean, under Attorney General Ashcroft, two articles of the Bill of Rights are now dead letters, four and six. That is, on freedom from intrusion into your home and habeas corpus. That is, the demand that the government must produce charges against you and allow you to defend yourself, give you expert legal advice in defending yourself, confront witnesses against you.
The president has now arrogated to himself the power to declare somebody to be, quote, a bad guy, and a bad guy he can throw into a naval prison in Charleston, South Carolina, and throw the key away. This is not what Article Six says the president gets to do, and yet the American public tolerates it. That's one of the issues that would come up into this question of can you imagine a reversal, because what would be required in this reversal is a change in the level and quality of information available to the public.
They clearly are wildly misled today by a propaganda apparatus that is associated with the entertainment industry, I mean, that dominates it for commercial and commercial reasons, commercial profit. From Fox News to Verizon's control of CBS, GE's control of NBC, Disney's control of ABC, there's hardly a word put out on it that you can believe, and if you actually know something about the subject before you hear it, you know what you just heard was not true. It happens all the time, or the happy news that follows after the first 15 minutes. It's quite literally like listening to Pravda.
I traveled in Russia extensively at the height of the Brezhnev era in 1978, and it is. And as the Russians used to say, no one reads Pravda to get the news. You read Pravda to get the line. You get the news from people you trust, from your own little radio, from samizdat, from messages that friends transmit to you. I no longer read the New York Times for the news. I read it for the line, and I think we've all sort of gotten used to that.
… But one of the things that would be required would be a vast change in the kind of information available, since we now know that one of the most extraordinary sources of political power is control of the mass media in our society, that one of the things that was used to bring about the revolt against Hugo Chavez in Venezuela in April of last year, April 2002, was there are something like a half a dozen television stations in Venezuela. Five are owned by private interests that devoted themselves to the destruction of the government, and only one was in the hands of the president, who was able to put out a different point of view.
I can't say that there's anything in the United States today that is putting out a different point of view, in terms of the mass media, from that of sort of the approved and copycat journalism of the networks. Except, of course, for the Fox News, which represents an Australian fascist, and they put out a line that is fairly consistently off over in one particular corner. I mean Rupert Murdoch, of course, the owner of the News Corporation, the owner of the Fox Network, and a person who uses it for his own personal political purposes.
EON:
I heard a commentator say the other day that what he is seeing now is the convergence of PSYOPs and news.
Chalmers Johnson:
Yes….It's also a major issue in the Pentagon, is to begin to develop our own news management. I mean, that is, they've invented embedding, the lovely Pentagon euphemism, embedding otherwise reputable journalists with our military formations, more or less cutting them off any real source of news, but having to report nothing but, "Well, these are basically decent guys who were scared to death that they were going into combat," and once you've read that story, but you don't need it every day, together with the power to manipulate the news in many, many ways.
I don't think there was any more serious military lesson discovered by our militarists from the Vietnam War than the need to control the journalistic reporting. It started in Grenada where they invented the pool system, where no journalists get to actually go in. They get taken in by a lieutenant colonel and shown what they're to be shown. The latest manifestation of this is embedding. We now understand that the Pentagon is in the process of creating their own television network that will broadcast their view of Iraq. That is, pictures of kindly young troops of the 4th Infantry Division patting kids on the head and things of this sort that would be signs that our missionaries are at work.
It of course takes us back and reminds us again of the world of Adolf Hitler…
… Chalmers Johnson:
My new book is called The Sorrows of Empire. The subtitle is Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic. In the last chapter... This book is mostly about our military overstretch and the complications of a volunteer army, of the fact that the military today bears no resemblance to people who remember service in the American military in World War II, or in my case, in the Korean War, or in the Vietnam War, when there was an obligation to serve in the armed forces as a citizen.
Today, people serve in the armed forces for particular individual reasons, normally to escape some dead end of American society. They do not expect to be shot at either, and once they start getting shot at, you can expect the reenlistment rate to reflect it.
… But I felt at the end of this book, I was obliged to say, well, what were the sorrows of empire? And I come up with four that I discuss in some great length.
The first, perpetual warfare. That is, the very nature of our policies today, particularly preventative war, and the breaking of virtually all international agreements and reciprocal agreements that we have to try and maintain peace and deal with complex problems like global warming and things of this sort. As we break these things, the obvious consequence is one war after... I mean, after all, we've had two major wars and the century has hardly started, in Afghanistan and in Iraq, both of which resulted in what the Pentagon would like to call easy military victories, but instantaneously fell into unbelievably bloody insurgencies that can go on into the end of time.
The second sorrow of empire that I identified was the loss of civil liberties, was the use of these crisis conditions, often generated, I mean, quite literally created, produced, as you would, by people with inside knowledge and the ability to manipulate them, leads to the loss of civil liberties, as the public, with some understanding, is willing to forego them for the sake of trying to guarantee, at least in the short term, their immediate security, led to the rise of people like Attorney General Ashcroft and others.
The third sorrow that I identified was the loss of confidence in the government because of now institutional lying based on secrecy.
… But the fourth of these sorrows of empire is the one that's in some ways most acute and least avoidable, and that's bankruptcy. That is, the first three are the demise of America, as the politicians say, as we know it. They are an alteration, and it's a little bit like bringing the end of the Roman Republic. That didn't end Rome. It led to what we like to call the Roman Empire, but as I say, it was a military dictatorship that spent most of its time trying to hold on to the world that it had conquered, and slowly gave away to a Christian takeover, if you will, of the Roman Republic. Also, of course, a takeover by its outside enemies, Roman Empire.
But the bankruptcy, which is today getting to be almost inevitable, instantaneously creates a crisis that nobody can control. I mean, that is, it's not now whether you want to tolerate it or not, or whether you actually care about the Bill of Rights or not, or have you ever even heard of it before. Bankruptcy brings it home to you at once. Right now... I mean, I offer you just one small statistics. Statistics are not things that are usually easily transmitted over television.
Before the First World War, the British Empire had a trade surplus that was maybe, its current account surplus was maybe 7% of GDP. They were an extremely rich country. They could afford to make mistakes, as in things like the Boer War and things like that. We have trade deficits that are the greatest in recorded economic history. They're running up to several percentage point, high percentage points of GDP. They're financed today, the fact that we consume so much more than we actually produce, and we consume it from the rest of the world, they're financed by savers around the world, usually people in East Asia, Japanese, Southeast Asians, Chinese, who want to invest in our currency, since it has this imperial quality of being the global standard, want to invest in our currency as a safe haven.
It's not that safe anymore that the value of the euro against the dollar increases to the point it's right now, just I looked at it yesterday, 125 euros to the dollar. That's getting to be quite up there….
… the whole mutual fund industry is now up for grabs because of corruption at the top, and the State of California, the public employees' pension fund, one of the largest on Earth, is in the process of suing the New York Stock Exchange for corruption. Should they decide to shift their funds to euros or to some other currency, or just keep it themselves, the American Stock Exchange collapses, we have a howling recession, and the United States instantaneously has to finance all of its external debts by domestic savings. To do that, the interest rates would have to go up to Jimmy Carter levels, 21, 22%.
… We are going deeply into serious deficits that must, sooner or later, be paid back, or lead to a one and only time, you only do it once, you can denounce your debts. But then once you denounce your debts, you never get to borrow a nickel again in your life. You become a pauper. We have a allegedly fiscally conservative group of leaders who are anything but fiscally conservative. They are profligate about the expending of the wealth we have.
Meanwhile, the country, as workers in manufacturing discovered, the country is turning into finance capitalism. What we do is we manipulate money these days, we don't manufacture very much stuff. We get it from somebody else, or we have... Our companies are manufacturing it in China or in Puebla, Mexico, or in Bangladesh or in Malaysia. Certainly, there's not a computer in the country that's made in the United States today. They're, easily, most of them are made in Malaysia or in Taiwan.
… When this happens, as Herb Stein, a Republican chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors once said, "Things that can't go on forever, don't." Well, we are talking about something here that can't go on forever, and it's only now a matter of time. It's not a matter of a pundit sitting here and telling you that we are at a crossroads. That's the stock-in-trade of what pundits do. It is to say, this is something that can't go on forever. It will crack at some point, and there's a lot of people, very smart people who know a lot about money, who are preparing for the crack. That is, when the United States is squeezed dry and can't pay anything more, the same thing happens, and it happens to you at Las Vegas when you announce to the owner of the casino, "I can't afford my debts." Well, you could find yourself planted in the Las Vegas desert if you say that once too often. That's what we face. It is an almost certain result of our militarism and imperialism, because they don't produce anything. They are pure expenditure….
… Militarism and imperialism are forever expanding, but they are not profit making. The military is state socialism. The military-industrial complex has absolutely nothing to do with what we like, in an almost German-like way, to talk about free enterprise. You have only one customer. The federal government is not concerned with getting its money's worth. It's concerned, the military is always concerned with effectiveness, whether you're getting the product that does what you want it to do, that is at best. The missile defense budget right now, which is at eight or $9 billion, I can't remember the exact amount, this is simply allocated by Congress and given to the Department of Defense, which then goes to see the manufacturers, Teledyne and Boeing and Lockheed Martin, and they then sit down and decide how they might spend it, what might be a good way to spend it, but it's not allocated funds.
The Constitution requires that the citizens be given in a, I can't remember to quote it exactly to you, but be given an honest accounting of how their tax dollars are spent on a regular basis. This clause is the clause that makes the United States a democracy, because it makes the separation of powers work. It means that the people, through their representatives, can find out what the executive branch is doing.
That has not existed in the United States since World War II. That is, the Manhattan Project that built the atom bombs was, and remains to this day, totally secret. And that's when the precedent began of all the intelligence budgets and anything you want to bury being put into the defense budget and kept black, so-called. And it was thoroughly black until after Watergate, when we began to create committees that senior and safe senators would be given a peek at this stuff, but there are cutouts still in every one of those things. So the Secretary of Defense can, if necessary, declare this simply black, and it's a matter of national security, and there's no way to appeal it. No court has anything to say about it. It's simply done by uniformed officers inside that big building in Arlington.
Under these circumstances, I think it is more than likely that the American Empire will come, that its dismemberment, its unraveling, will begin as a result of an economic crisis, rather than over any of the things that actually concern me more, the perpetual war, loss of civil liberties, a culture of lying and propaganda in official statements of the government, and there, I don't believe I'm in any way alone. I think it's the collective wisdom of virtually every economist in the country that we are treading on extremely thin ice economically, and that one doesn't see any signs of recovery soon.
EON:
People talk about civil society, business, and government being the three main players, the three stools of the global... I mean, the three legs of the global stool. But it seems to me that the military community, so-called, not-
Chalmers Johnson:
Establishment, yeah.
EON:
Yeah, the establishment that transcends borders, that have links between all themselves, the so-called intelligence community, same thing, and then organized crime, are equal, if not even more important players and more important legs to the stool. Would you comment on that?
Chalmers Johnson:
This is what I'm trying to get at in the Sorrows of Empire is that the professional military, organized crime, and the intelligence community, which again, intelligence community, one of the odd things about that, I talk about it at good length in my book, since I was at one time a consultant to the old Office of National Estimates at the CIA and do know actually something about it, intelligence organizations don't do intelligence. They're private armies of executives. The clandestine side of things dominates. The tail wags the dog in the CIA. That is, the intelligence is worthless, as we now know, in numerous cases, but that doesn't for a moment stop the funds flowing there.
And that trails off and intersects quite easily with the world of organized crime, in the methods of clandestine activities, of overthrow of governments, of provocateurs, in which you incite people to riot, have your own snipers, kill a few of them, and then say that innocent bystanders were killed by the government you want overthrown. We've used that ploy so many times, from Jakarta to Caracas just recently, that it's almost insane to believe that you could see Dan Rather putting it out, once again, that innocent bystanders were shocked by thugs of the Chavez regime, which he said just last year, when it's standard operating procedure in overthrowing a place like Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973 or things of this sort. As well as, of course, even as we know in the case of John Kennedy and his animosity against Fidel Castro, the actual use of known mobsters in proposed assassination attempts. Again, the purpose here not being to avoid the onus of assassination, but to avoid the onus of pulling the trigger yourself.
It is also another standard American ploy is to have the CIA up with a complicit military organization in which they're giving the orders, but the other people are doing it. For example, you'll recall just a couple of years ago the shooting down of an airplane over Peru that was filled full of American Baptist missionaries, that was interdicted by a CIA control plane that sent in the Peruvian Air Force to shoot it down. Well, that's very similar to the Phoenix program throughout the Vietnam War, where we killed thousands of people in similar sorts of ways.
.. One begins to wonder what is left for organized crime, since we've taken it over with arms sales, with the intimidation of the population... the protection racket. I mean, …, the Chicago mobsters used to basically say, "You've got to pay us to be protected. Protected from whom? From us." Well, that's very largely what America's operations today in about 130 of 170 countries in the United Nations amount to, is the protection racket. And remember, what the citizens of these countries see of the United States are uniformed special forces troops, not State Department officials, not AID officials, not even businessmen. The ones they run into most commonly, and inevitably, as a matter of elementary logic, have to conclude, the Americans think in terms of enforcing their policies not through diplomacy, not through persuasion, but through the use of military force.
That's what you see of the United States today. That's, in a certain sense, what one again means by blowback, the disjunction between what we think we're doing in the world and what people on the receiving end know that we are actually doing, and the kinds of attitudes that they generate. I'm sorry to say, but it is true. I think today the demise of the American Empire would be no more regretted in the world than was the demise of the Soviet Empire, which was not regretted anywhere.