Guest Post by Dmitry Orlov
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| Jakub Rozalski |
The story is the same every time: some nation, due to a confluence of lucky circumstances, becomes powerful—much more powerful than the rest—and, for a time, is dominant. But the lucky circumstances, which often amount to no more than a few advantageous quirks of geology, be it Welsh coal or West Texas oil, in due course come to an end. In the meantime, the erstwhile superpower becomes corrupted by its own power.
As the endgame approaches, those still nominally in charge of the collapsing empire resort to all sorts of desperate measures—all except one: they will refuse to ever consider the fact that their imperial superpower is at an end, and that they should change their ways accordingly. George Orwell once offered an excellent explanation for this phenomenon: as the imperial end-game approaches, it becomes a matter of imperial self-preservation to breed a special-purpose ruling class—one that is incapable of understanding that the end-game is approaching. Because, you see, if they had an inkling of what’s going on, they wouldn’t take their jobs seriously enough to keep the game going for as long as possible.
The approaching imperial collapse can be seen in the ever worsening results the empire gets for its imperial efforts. After World War II, the US was able to do a respectable job helping to rebuild Germany, along with the rest of western Europe. Japan also did rather well under US tutelage, as did South Korea after the end of fighting on the Korean peninsula. With Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, all of which were badly damaged by the US, the results were significantly worse: Vietnam was an outright defeat, Cambodia lived through a period of genocide, while amazingly resilient Laos—the most heavily bombed country on the planet—recovered on its own.
The first Gulf War went even more badly: fearful of undertaking a ground offensive in Iraq, the US stopped short of its regular practice of toppling the government and installing a puppet regime there, and left it in limbo for a decade. When the US did eventually invade, it succeeded—after killing countless civilians and destroying much of the infrastructure—in leaving behind a dismembered corpse of a country.
Similar results have been achieved in other places where the US saw it fit to get involved: Somalia, Libya and, most recently, Yemen. Let’s not even mention Afghanistan, since all empires have failed to achieve good results there. So the trend is unmistakable: whereas at its height the empire destroyed in order to rebuild the world in its own image, as it nears its end it destroys simply for the sake of destruction, leaving piles of corpses and smoldering ruins in its wake.
Another unmistakeable trend has to do with the efficacy of spending money on “defense” (which, in the case of the US, should be redefined as “offense”). Having a lavishly endowed military can sometimes lead to success, but here too something has shifted over time. The famous American can-do spirit that was evident to all during World War II, when the US dwarfed the rest of the world with its industrial might, is no more. Now, more and more, military spending itself is the goal—never mind what it achieves.
And what it achieves is the latest F-35 jet fighter that can’t fly; the latest aircraft carrier that can’t launch planes without destroying them if they are fitted with the auxiliary tanks they need to fly combat missions; the most technologically advanced AEGIS destroyer that can be taken out of commission by a single unarmed Russian jet carrying a basket of electronic warfare equipment, and another aircraft carrier that can be frightened out of deep water and forced to anchor by a few Russian submarines out on routine patrol.
But the Americans like their weapons, and they like handing them out as a show of support. But more often than not these weapons end up in the wrong hands: the ones they gave to Iraq are now in the hands of ISIS; the ones they gave to the Ukrainian nationalists have been sold to the Syrian government; the ones they gave to the government in Yemen is now in the hands of the Houthis who recently overthrew it. And so the efficacy of lavish military spending has dwindled too. At some point it may become more efficient to modify the US Treasury printing presses to blast bundles of US dollars in the general direction of the enemy.
With the strategy of “destroying in order to create” no longer viable, but with the blind ambition to still try to prevail everywhere in the world somehow still part of the political culture, all that remains is murder. The main tool of foreign policy becomes political assassination: be it Saddam Hussein, or Muammar Qaddafi, or Slobodan Milošević, or Osama bin Laden, or any number of lesser targets, the idea is to simply kill them.
While aiming for the head of an organization is a favorite technique, the general populace gets is share of murder too. How many funerals and wedding parties have been taken out by drone strikes? I don’t know that anyone in the US really knows, but I am sure that those whose relatives were killed do remember, and will remember for the next few centuries at least. This tactic is generally not conducive to creating a durable peace, but it is a good tactic for perpetuating and escalating conflict. But that’s now an acceptable goal, because it creates the rationale for increased military spending, making it possible to breed more chaos.
Recently a retired US general went on television to declare that what’s needed to turn around the situation in the Ukraine is to simply “start killing Russians.” The Russians listened to that, marveled at his idiocy, and then went ahead and opened a criminal case against him. Now this general will be unable to travel to an ever-increasing number of countries around the world for fear of getting arrested and deported to Russia to stand trial.
This is largely a symbolic gesture, but non-symbolic non-gestures of a preventive nature are sure to follow. You see, my fellow space travelers, murder happens to be illegal. In most jurisdictions, inciting others to murder also happens to be illegal. Americans have granted themselves the license to kill without checking to see whether perhaps they might be exceeding their authority. We should expect, then, that as their power trickles away, their license to kill will be revoked, and they find themselves reclassified from global hegemons to mere murderers.
As empires collapse, they turn inward, and subject their own populations to the same ill treatment to which they subjected others. Here, America is unexceptional: the number of Americans being murdered by their own police, with minimal repercussions for those doing the killing, is quite stunning. When Americans wonder who their enemy really is, they need look no further.
But that is only the beginning: the precedent has already been set for deploying US troops on US soil. As law and order break down in more and more places, we will see more and more US troops on the streets of cities in the US, spreading death and destruction just like they did in Iraq or in Afghanistan. The last license to kill to be revoked will be the license to kill ourselves.
Hey! You curs who have disagreed with me previously. You still think American soldiers won’t fire on Americans? HA!!!!
Stuck , give a impressionable I-pwnd addled 19 year old male , full of testosterone and 13 weeks of combat drill conditioning a rifle and the authority to kill and the crazy fuckers will shoot their grandmothers thinking as they’ve been taught that they’re doing the job of pertecting ‘ our freedum’,
I wonder how many of the flag waving jingoist fools will still considered these young indoctrinated killers “heroes'” when they’re kicking their doors down at 3 in the morning …Dominate the Human Domain, indeed.
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Love that picture of one of Monsanto’s new genetically modified consumers, Flash.
It’s demonstrably so the Empire forces possess will to fight against any opponent other than the near defenseless .
“For several decades now, Western armed forces—which keep preening themselves as the best-trained, best organized, best equipped best led, in history—have been turned into pussycats. Being pussycats, they went from one defeat to the next. True, in 1999 they did succeed in imposing their will on Serbia. But only because the opponent was a small, weak state (at the time, the Serb armed forces, exhausted by a prolonged civil war, were rated 35th in the world); and even then only because that state was practically defenseless in the air. The same applies to Libya in 2011. Over there, indigenous bands on the ground did most of the fighting and took all the casualties. In both cases, when it came to engaging in ground combat, man against man, the West, with the U.S at its head, simply did not have what it takes.
On other occasions things were worse still. Western armies tried to create order in Somalia and were kicked out by the “Skinnies,” as they called their lean but mean opponents. They tried to beat the Taliban in Afghanistan, and were kicked out. They tried to impose democracy (and get their hands on oil) in Iraq, and ended up leaving with their tails between their legs. The cost of these foolish adventures to the U.S alone is said to have been around 1 trillion—1,000,000,000,000—dollars. With one defeat following another, is it any wonder that, when those forces were called upon to put an end to the civil war in Syria, they and the societies they serve preferred to let the atrocities go on?
By far the most important single reason behind the repeated failures is the fact that, one and all, these were luxury wars. With nuclear weapons deterring large-scale attack, for seven decades now no Western country has waged anything like a serious, let alone existential, struggle against a more or less equal opponent. As the troops took on opponents much weaker than themselves—often in places they had never heard about, often for reasons nobody but a few politicians understood—they saw no reason why they should get themselves killed. Given the circumstances, indeed, doing so would have been the height of stupidity on their part. Yet from the time the Persians at Marathon in 490 B.C were defeated by the outnumbered Greeks right down to the present, troops whose primary concern is not to get themselves killed have never be able to fight, let alone win.” Martin van Creveld, the author of The Transformation of War, Technology and War,
http://www.voxday.blogspot.com/2015/03/why-western-troops-cant-win.html
When a standing army no longer has an external enemy to fight, it will turn on its own population… always.
I have always believed that 50% (at least) of the reason we involve ourselves in one foreign war after an other is to channel the aggression of all the testosterone-crazed young men who would otherwise be cluttering up our street corners and swelling our prison population even larger than it already is. My boyfriend, a big believer in the military draft (which I am not), said “better to have them fighting and killing over there than over here”.
And what the ef WILL we do with all these young, largely unintelligent young men in the military if we cease our destructive wars and bring them home?
War is a racket. If you think about it that way,It makes the most sense. Consider that we have weapons that could level city’s and end any war in one day. The military/industrial machine makes such an insane amount of money that it is hard to stop. Once our government starts using the military against the civilian population.That will be the end of our system,
I mentioned elsewhere that i hope that our military members would remember their oath and defend civilians from what is coming.People thought i was crazy to even question it. TBP is one of the few places where people seem willing to question what will happen.
The western world is ruled by an elite group of psychopaths who own the banks that control the governments and media. They fund both sides of war for profit and they manufacture the consent of the public through the never ending propaganda of the media.
Is it even possible for the ignorant, celebrity enamored, twerked out, super size me, Kardashian watching, populace of America to organize an effective opposition to their ruling oligarchy?
Don’t think so. Good luck with that!
Standing armies can be viewed as another result of too many economically marginal (lower middle class as well as poor) people having too many damn kids. A boy of average or less intelligence from an ordinary struggling, uneducated family has fewer options all the time.
And our ownership class likes it that way. Governments from ancient times down to the present have pressured women to have evermore kids, the better to swell the hordes of economically desperate people so desperate for a meal and a roof over their heads, that they will happily join the military or the low-wage work force on whatever terms.
Greetings,
I’ve commented here numerous times that the final crime of our military will be committed here at home. The good news is that our military is so enamored with technology that, minus that technology, the common US fighting soldier is little better than worthless.
The US military needs fuel and batteries to do what it does. The Pentagon, the largest user of fuel in the world, couldn’t conduct any operations minus that fuel. Think about it for a moment. Our “hero” warriors were spending more money on air-conditioning per year than NASA had for its entire budget. Make those clowns live in a hole in the ground and walk from place to place and these ‘hero” kids will drop their plastic weapons and go home. I’m convinced of it.
When was the last time soldiers marched a few hundred miles so as to engage the enemy? It has been a long time.
Stucky- ” You still think American soldiers won’t fire on Americans? ”
Oh they will, and just like the last time there will be plenty perfectly willing to fire back….just like the last time.
Nickel- “the common US fighting soldier is little better than worthless. ” This is a very dangerous underestimation.
There needs to be a lot more push-back on this Jade Helm martial law event than what I’m seeing, which is pretty much zero. Is anyone seeing anything substantial?