With most of my books packed away and not easily accessible, I’m going to let my sometimes misfiring memory have a partially free rein. I remember that Hannah Arendt had once asserted—I believe in Life of the Mind—that Americans (by circa 1970) had already made political decisions which would force us to a crisis point in a generation or so (which would be circa 2000-2005). We Americans would be forced to either voluntarily fall back to a state of relative impoverishment or become more openly an empire and start stealing what we could no longer produce by our own efforts. In her earlier analyses of Adolph Eichmann, the master-planner behind the Nazi work-camps and the round-ups of Jews and others, Professor Arendt had argued that he was a nice man without real moral character and then had claimed this was true of Americans. Yet, she thought that the American people would accept a partial collapse of American wealth and power rather than becoming a looting and marauding empire. I’m not sure why a hardheaded thinker would imagine “moral niceness” to be adequate for making such a difficult decision, but, as it turned out, there was no explicit decision of the sort made nor were the common folk of the United States involved in the decision which was made by our ruling class.
She was certainly right that the American Colossus of 1940-1970 was beginning to lose his power to shape events throughout the entire world—the United States has retained plenty of power to cause trouble throughout the world, sometimes to the benefit of our ruling class but sometimes not even to their benefit. Our leaders are Moe, Larry, and Curly pretending to be Alexander, Napoleon, and Bismarck.
Yet, how right Arendt was about the relative loss of American wealth and power even if she was somewhat wrong in thinking we would refuse to steal, for example, the portable wealth of the former Soviet countries or the oil of Iraq. We Americans might not be so good at this piracy business—the country as a whole doesn’t seem to benefit much from the rather inept efforts of the Three Stooges in Southwestern Asia nor from our bullying of countries all around the globe. At the same time, various parasitical creatures and institutions—politicians and bankers and think-tankers and aerospace executives—make out well in the short-run. The American people pay good money for the chance to damage their own country as well as other countries; the American people make sure the profits remain high at Lockheed and General Dynamics and the zoo of mercenary armies we’ve spawned while immense amounts of money and human blood—American and foreign—are poured out on the sands of Southwest Asia.
So, what happened? The American people didn’t exactly demand our country invade various countries around the world and commit miscellaneous acts of financial terrorism and thievery in still more countries, but some did and the rest mostly went along. Our leaders made it clear not too many years after our retreat from Vietnam that they would return to the struggle throughout the world and would fight to the last drop of blood of the last American soldier to maintain that ruling class’s power and wealth, though some of us only saw this in the rearview mirror and some still refuse to see it. (Some would claim that Nixon, when he took the dollar off the gold standard, was risking the prosperity of the common American citizen in a gamble to maintain the power and wealth of the American ruling class; I don’t know if he consciously did so, but the general suggestion would seem quite plausible.)
Of course, there are reasons for serious historians to write 900 page books about topics such as this. The desires of the individuals and more particular groups in the American ruling class to create a New World Order where American hegemony was to maintained forever was, so far as I can tell, the driving force in the construction of an imperialistic monster of sorts, a monster which spouts pious words about spreading democracy and respect for human rights as it wreaks havoc upon regions of dense civilian populations, using brutal attacks of modern weaponry such as bombs designed to suck the lungs out of nearby creatures and cluster bombs containing bomblets which are covered with brightly colored plastic, looking very attractive to children, and holding explosive charges intended to maim rather than kill so that the victims will remain burdens to their communities. But we’re too Christian to chop off heads. I don’t think God is fooled by our pious and antinomian pretensions. See my recent essay, In a Complex World, the Community Must be Smart for the Individual to Be Smart or my essay from 2013, Quietly Charitable or Quietly Murderous But Always Quietly American.
After destroying a country’s infrastructure, sanitary and medical systems and schools and many residences, the moral giants who rule the United States will often try to rebuild the country to their own needs; they haven’t quite gotten the part right even though they had mastered the arts and sciences of destruction.
There are many doctoral dissertations and many history books, academic and popular, to go before we can claim we have a good handle on exactly how this moral and political disaster has occurred, a disaster which probably will lead to a (perhaps) temporary end to the levels of American power and wealth necessary to support our accustomed standards of living. The activities of that giant juvenile delinquent known as the United States have certainly brought about millions of deaths and the destruction of vast amounts of infrastructures of countries struggling toward prosperity—and sometimes not doing so well in their strugglesWith most of my books packed away and not easily accessible, I’m going to let my sometimes misfiring memory have a partially free rein. I remember that Hannah Arendt had once asserted—I believe in Life of the Mind—that Americans (by circa 1970) had already made political decisions which would force us to a crisis point in a generation or so (which would be circa 2000-2005). We Americans would be forced to either voluntarily fall back to a state of relative impoverishment or become more openly an empire and start stealing what we could no longer produce by our own efforts. In her earlier analyses of Adolph Eichmann, the master-planner behind the Nazi work-camps and the round-ups of Jews and others, Professor Arendt had argued that he was a nice man without real moral character and then had claimed this was true of Americans. Yet, she thought that the American people would accept a partial collapse of American wealth and power rather than becoming a looting and marauding empire. I’m not sure why a hardheaded thinker would imagine “moral niceness” to be adequate for making such a difficult decision, but, as it turned out, there was no explicit decision of the sort made nor were the common folk of the United States involved in the decision which was made by our ruling class.
She was certainly right that the American Colossus of 1940-1970 was beginning to lose his power to shape events throughout the entire world—the United States has retained plenty of power to cause trouble throughout the world, sometimes to the benefit of our ruling class but sometimes not even to their benefit. Our leaders are Moe, Larry, and Curly pretending to be Alexander, Napoleon, and Bismarck.
Yet, how right Arendt was about the relative loss of American wealth and power even if she was in thinking we would refuse to steal, for example, the portable wealth of the former Soviet countries or the oil of Iraq. We Americans might not be so good at this piracy business—the country as a whole doesn’t seem to benefit much from the rather inept efforts of the Three Stooges in Southwestern Asia nor from our bullying of countries all around the globe. At the same time, various parasitical creatures and institutions—politicians and bankers and think-tankers and aerospace executives—make out well. The American people pay good money for the chance to damage their own country as well as other countries; the American people make sure the profits remain high at Lockheed and General Dynamics and the zoo of mercenary armies we’ve spawned while immense amounts of money and human blood—American and foreign—are poured out on the sands of Southwest Asia.
So, what happened? The American people didn’t exactly demand our country invade various countries around the world and commit miscellaneous acts of financial terrorism and thievery in still more countries, but some did and the rest mostly went along. Our leaders made it clear not too many years after our retreat from Vietnam that they would return to the struggle throughout the world and would fight to the last drop of blood of the last American soldier to maintain that ruling class’s power and wealth, though some of us only saw this in the rearview mirror and some still refuse to see it. (Some would claim that Nixon, when he took the dollar off the gold standard, was risking the prosperity of the common American citizen in a gamble to maintain the power and wealth of the American ruling class; I don’t know if he consciously did so, but the general suggestion would seem quite plausible.)
Of course, there are reasons for serious historians to write 900 page books about topics such as this. The desires of the individuals and more particular groups in the American ruling class to create a New World Order where American hegemony was to maintained forever was, so far as I can tell, the driving force in the construction of an imperialistic monster of sorts, a monster which spouts pious words about spreading democracy and respect for human rights as it wreaks havoc upon regions of dense civilian populations, using brutal attacks of modern weaponry such as bombs designed to suck the lungs out of nearby creatures and cluster bombs containing bomblets which are covered with brightly colored plastic, looking very attractive to children and holding explosive charges intended to maim rather than kill so that the victims will remain burdens to their communities. But we’re too Christian to chop off heads. I don’t think God is fooled by our pious and antinomian pretensions. See my recent essay, In a Complex World, the Community Must be Smart for the Individual to Be Smart or my essay from 2013, Quietly Charitable or Quietly Murderous But Always Quietly American.
After destroying a country’s infrastructure, sanitary and medical systems and schools and many residences, the moral giants who rule the United States will often, try to rebuild the country to their own needs; they haven’t quite gotten the part right even though they had mastered the arts and sciences of destruction.
There are many doctoral dissertations and many history books, academic and popular, to go before we can claim we have a good handle on exactly how this moral and political disaster has occurred, a disaster which probably will lead to a (perhaps) temporary end to the levels of American power and wealth necessary to support our accustomed standards of living. The activities of that giant juvenile delinquent known as the United States have certainly brought about millions of deaths and the destruction of vast amounts of infrastructures of countries struggling toward prosperity—and sometimes not doing so well in their struggles, especially when the American Colossus comes along to stomp on their collective faces.