QUOTES OF THE DAY

“Four sorrows are certain to be visited on the United States.

  • First, there will be a state of perpetual war.
  • Second is a loss of democracy and Constitutional rights as the presidency eclipses Congress and is itself transformed from a co-equal ‘executive branch’ of government into a military junta.
  • Third is the replacement of truth by propaganda, disinformation, and the glorification of war, power, and the military legions.
  • Lastly, there is bankruptcy, as the United States pours its economic resources into ever more grandiose military projects and shortchanges the education, health, and safety of its citizens.”

Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire, 2005

“Seneca had made the bargain that many good men have made when agreeing to aid bad regimes. On the one hand, their presence strengthens the regime and helps it endure. But their moral influence may also improve the regime’s behavior or save the lives of its enemies. For many, this has been a bargain worth making, even if it has cost them—as it may have cost Seneca—their immortal soul.”

James Romm, Dying Every Day: Seneca at the Court of Nero

“If you are wise and understand God’s ways, prove it by living an honorable life, doing good works with the humility that comes from wisdom. But if you are bitterly jealous and there is selfish ambition in your heart, don’t hide the truth with boasting and lying. For jealousy and selfishness are not God’s kind of wisdom. Such things are worldly, carnal, and demonic. For wherever there is jealousy and selfish ambition, there you will find disorder and evil of every kind.”

James 3:13-15

Click to visit the TBP Store for Great TBP Merchandise

QUOTE OF THE DAY

“Four sorrows are certain to be visited on the United States.

  • First, there will be a state of perpetual war.
  • Second is a loss of democracy and Constitutional rights as the presidency eclipses Congress and is itself transformed from a co-equal ‘executive branch’ of government into a military junta.
  • Third is the replacement of truth by propaganda, disinformation, and the glorification of war, power, and the military legions.
  • Lastly, there is bankruptcy, as the United States pours its economic resources into ever more grandiose military projects and shortchanges the education, health, and safety of its citizens.”

Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire, 2005

Domestic Democracy or Foreign Imperialism, But Not Both

Guest Post by Jesse

“Once you go down the path of empire, you inevitably start a process of overstretch, of tendencies toward bankruptcy, and, in the rest of the world, a tendency toward the uniting of people who are opposed to your imperialism simply on grounds that it’s yours, but maybe also on the grounds that you’re incompetent at it.
Indeed, one wonders whether we have already crossed our Rubicon, whether we can go back. I don’t know.
The Department of Defense is not, today, a department of defense. It’s an alternative seat of government on the south bank of the Potomac River. And, typical of militarism, it’s expanding into many, many other areas in our life that we have, in our traditional political philosophy, reserved for civilians. Domestic policing: they’re slowly expanding into that.
So, what do I suggest probably will happen? I think we will stagger along under a façade of constitutional government, as we are now, until we’re overcome by bankruptcy.”
Chalmers Johnson
That bankruptcy will not only be financial, but moral and spiritual.  It will be a fiat culture, that is, reality will be defined as whatever power says it will be.
Below is a talk given by Chalmers Johnson in April, 2007
This was before the financial crisis and bailouts.
And before the Reform President Obama largely ratified the abuses of his predecessor and given over the welfare of the people to the corporations and the moneyed interests, finance and militarism, the pen and the gun, the bullet and the bribe.

DECLINE of EMPIRES: The Signs of Decay

Signs of Decay

  1. Internal corruption
  2. Imperial overreach
  3. Inability to reform.

Chalmers Johnson, author of Blowback, Sorrows of Empire and Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic , talks about the similarities in the decline of the Roman and Soviet empires and the signs that the U.S. empire is exhibiting the same symptoms: overextension, corruption and the inability to reform.

Chalmers Johnson is president of the Japan Policy Research Institute, a non-profit research and public affairs organization devoted to public education concerning Japan and international relations in the Pacific. http://www.jpri.org/