Page 2 of 4 DISPATCHES
FROM AMERICA Why Nemesis is at the US's
door By Chalmers Johnson
attempt to adjust to and defend themselves
against Bush's preventive wars, while our own
already staggering nuclear arsenal expands toward
first-strike primacy and we expend unimaginable
billions of dollars on futuristic ideas for
warfare in outer space.
The choice
ahead By the time I came to write
Nemesis, I no longer doubted that
maintaining America's empire abroad required
resources and
commitments that would
inevitably undercut, or simply skirt, what was
left of our domestic democracy and that might, in
the end, produce a military dictatorship or - far
more likely - its civilian equivalent.
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.
History is instructive on this
dilemma. If we choose to keep our empire, as the
Roman republic did, we will certainly lose our
democracy and grimly await the eventual blowback
that imperialism generates. There is an
alternative, however.
We could, like the
British Empire after World War II, keep our
democracy by giving up our empire. The British did
not do a particularly brilliant job of liquidating
their empire and there were several clear cases
where British imperialists defied their nation's
commitment to democracy to hang on to foreign
privileges. The war against the Kikuyu in Kenya in
the 1950s and the Anglo-French-Israeli invasion of
Egypt in 1956 are particularly savage examples of
that. But the overall thrust of postwar British
history is clear: the people of the British Isles
chose democracy over imperialism.
In her
book The Origins of Totalitarianism,
political philosopher Hannah Arendt offered the
following summary of British imperialism and its
fate:
On the whole it was a failure
because of the dichotomy between the
nation-state's legal principles and the methods
needed to oppress other people permanently. This
failure was neither necessary nor due to
ignorance or incompetence. British imperialists
knew very well that "administrative massacres"
could keep India in bondage, but they also knew
that public opinion at home would not stand for
such measures. Imperialism could have been a
success if the nation-state had been willing to
pay the price, to commit suicide and transform
itself into a tyranny. It is one of the glories
of Europe, and especially of Great Britain, that
she preferred to liquidate the
empire.
I agree with this judgment.
When one looks at British Prime Minister Tony
Blair's unnecessary and futile support of Bush's
invasion and occupation of Iraq, one can only
conclude that it was an atavistic response, that
it represented a British longing to relive the
glories - and cruelties - of a past that should
have been ancient history.
As a form of
government, imperialism does not seek or require
the consent of the governed. It is a pure form of
tyranny. The US attempt to combine domestic
democracy with such tyrannical control over
foreigners is hopelessly contradictory and
hypocritical. A country can be democratic or it
can be imperialistic, but it cannot be both.
The road to imperial bankruptcy
The US political system failed to prevent
this combination from developing - and may now be
incapable of correcting it. The evidence strongly
suggests that the legislative and judicial
branches of the US government have become so
servile in the presence of the imperial presidency
that they have largely lost the ability to respond
in a principled and independent manner. Even in
the present moment of congressional stirring,
there seems to be a deep sense of helplessness.
Various members of Congress have
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