A very bleak assessment of things from Chalmers Johnson.
Here's an excerpt :
"History tells us that one of the most unstable political combinations is a country - like the United States today - that tries to be a domestic democracy and a foreign imperialist.
...
As the US occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq turned into major fiascoes, discrediting America's military leadership, ruining its public finances, and bringing death and destruction to hundreds of thousands of civilians in those countries, I continued to ponder the issue of empire. In these years, it became ever clearer that President George W Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and their supporters were claiming, and actively assuming, powers specifically denied to a president by the constitution. It became no less clear that the Congress had almost completely abdicated its responsibilities to balance the power of the executive branch. Despite the Democratic Party's sweep in last year's congressional election, it remains to be seen whether these tendencies can, in the long run, be controlled, let alone reversed.
...
The combination of huge standing armies, almost continuous wars, an ever growing economic dependence on the military-industrial complex and the making of weaponry, and ruinous military expenses as well as a vast, bloated "defense" budget, not to speak of the creation of a whole second Defense Department (known as the Department of Homeland Security) has been destroying our republican structure of governing in favor of an imperial presidency. By republican structure, of course, I mean the separation of powers and the elaborate checks and balances that the founders of the United States wrote into the constitution as the main bulwarks against dictatorship and tyranny, which they greatly feared.
We Americans are on the brink of losing our democracy for the sake of keeping our empire. Once a nation starts down that path, the dynamics that apply to all empires come into play - isolation, overstretch, the uniting of local and global forces opposed to imperialism, and in the end bankruptcy."
...
Xiao -- There's something else to be considered here that's not obvious. This critique seems really radical, but in fact many of these ideas were expressed in the early years of the Cold War by political conservatives and political liberals, for example Senator Taft and the historian Charles Beard. An odd set of bedfellows, to be sure.
In the last paragraph Johnson notes that Nemesis, a figure in Greek mythology, was the goddess of vengence and the scourge of arrogance and hubris.
There's something else here,and i wonder if Johnson kept this one to himself. The metor impact that is believed to have kicked off the extinction of the dinosaurs in appx 65 million BCE is referred to by some scientists as Nemesis.
You know, the dinosaurs. Creatures big and powerful who held swayover life on earth for millions of years [and co-starred with Raquel Welch no less!], but whose brains were far too small [according to accepted theory] to allow them to adapt to their changed environment. That's how and why the dinosaurs went the way of, well, the dinosaurs.
Is that it for the US? Our immense power not matched by adaptive intelligence, we're doomed to fail about stupidly and thrash around violently in a world we neither understand or can adapt to, in an environment [figuratively speaking] turned totally hostile to us?
Whew! Melodrama over.
