In the end, with weary citizens yearning for extinction, empires light their own funeral pyre.
Made in the USSA – by Mr. Fish.
“We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.”
— Stephen Miller to Jake Tapper on CNN, Jan. 5
“He who would live must fight. He who does not wish to fight in this world, where permanent struggle is the law of life, has not the right to exist. Such a saying may sound hard; but, after all, that’s how it is.”
— Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf
“The Fascist State expresses the will to exercise power and to command. Here the Roman tradition is embodied in a conception of strength. Imperial power, as understood by the Fascist doctrine, is not only territorial, or military, or commercial; it is also spiritual and ethical … Fascism sees in the imperialistic spirit — i.e., in the tendency of nations to expand — a manifestation of their vitality.”
— Benito Mussolini in The Doctrine of Fascism
All empires, when they are dying, worship the idol of war.
War will save the empire. War will resurrect past glory. War will teach an unruly world to obey.
But those who bow down before the idol of war, blinded by hypermasculinity and hubris, are unaware that while idols begin by calling for the sacrifice of others, they end by demanding self-sacrifice.
Ekpyrosis, the inevitable conflagration that destroys the world according to the ancient Stoics, is part of the cyclical nature of time. There is no escape.
Fortuna. There is a time for individual death. There is a time for collective death. In the end, with weary citizens yearning for extinction, empires light their own funeral pyre.
Our high priests of war, Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, Pete Hegseth, Stephen Miller and the Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Dan “Razin” Caine, are no different from the fools and charlatans who snuffed out empires of the past — the haughty leaders of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the militarists in imperial Germany and the hapless court of Tsarist Russia in World War I.
They were followed by the fascists in Italy under Benito Mussolini, Germany under Adolf Hitler and the military rulers of imperial Japan in World War II.
These political entities committed collective suicide.
They drank the same fatal elixir Miller and those in the Trump White House imbibe. They too tried to use industrial violence to reshape the universe.
They too considered themselves to be omnipotent. They too saw themselves in the face of the idol of war. They too demanded to be obeyed and worshiped.
Destruction to them is creation. Dissent is sedition. The world is one-dimensional. The strong versus the weak. Only our nation is great. Other nations, even allies, are dismissed with contempt.
These architects of imperial folly are buffoons and killer clowns. They are ridiculed and hated by those rooted in a reality-based world. They are followed slavishly by the desperate and the disenfranchised.
The simplicity of the message is its appeal. A magic incantation will bring back the lost world, the golden age, however mythic. Reality is viewed exclusively through the lens of ultranationalism.
The flip side of ultranationalism is racism.
“The nationalist is by definition an ignoramus,” wrote Yugoslav-Serbian novelist Danilo Kiš.
“Nationalism is the line of least resistance, the easy way. The nationalist is untroubled, he knows or thinks he knows what his values are, his, that’s to say national, that’s to say the values of the nation he belongs to, ethical and political; he is not interested in others, they are no concern of his, hell — it’s other people (other nations, other tribes). They don’t even need investigating. The nationalist sees other people in his own image — as nationalists.”
These stunted human beings are unable to read others. They threaten. They terrorize. They kill.
The art of power politics between nations or individuals is far beyond their tiny imaginations.
They lack the intelligence — emotional and intellectual — to cope with the complex, ever-shifting sands of old and new alliances. They cannot see themselves as the world sees them.
Diplomacy is often a dark and deceptive art. It is by its nature manipulative. But it requires an understanding of other cultures and traditions. It requires getting inside the heads of adversaries and allies.
For Trump and his minions, this is an impossibility.
C.I.A. Director John Ratcliffe, Trump, Rubio and Miller monitoring U.S. military operations in Venezuela, from Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida, on Jan. 3. (White House /Molly Riley)
Skillful diplomats, such as Prince Klemens von Metternich, the Austrian Empire’s foreign minister who dominated European politics after the defeat of Napoleon, do so by crafting agreements and treaties such as the Concert of Europe and the Congress of Vienna.
Metternich, no friend of liberalism, adroitly kept Europe stable until the revolutions of 1848.
I reported on Richard Holbrooke, the assistant secretary of state, as he negotiated an end to the war in Bosnia. He was bombastic and enthralled with his own celebrity.
But he played the Balkan warlords off each other in the former Yugoslavia until they acquiesced to stop the fighting — with some help from NATO warplanes that pounded Serb positions on the hills around Sarajevo — and signed the Dayton Peace Accords.
Holbrooke had little regard for the diplomats who diddled in conference halls in Geneva while 100,000 people died or disappeared in Bosnia, an estimated 900,000 became refugees and 1.3 million were internally displaced.
He had a loathing for military commanders who refused to take risks. He detested the Croatian, Serbian and Muslim leaders he had to corral into signing the peace accord.
Holbrooke, whose blustering style and volcanic eruptions were legendary, left bruised egos and slighted, embittered colleagues in his wake. But he knew how to cajole and mold his adversaries to his will.
He was likened, in a not very flattering comparison, to Jules Cardinal Mazarin, the crafty 17th-century prelate and statesman who solidified France’s supremacy among the European powers.
“He flatters, he lies, he humiliates: he is a sort of brutal and schizophrenic Mazarin,” a French diplomat told Le Figaro, of Holbrooke, during the Dayton talks.
True.
But Holbrooke, however mercurial, understood the interplay between force and diplomacy. This understanding is essential. It is why nations have diplomats. It is why great diplomats are as important as great generals.
Holbrooke, left, in Ancona, Italy, on the way to peace talks in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, March 10, 1995. (U.S. National Archives/No known restrictions)
Gangster states have no need of diplomacy.
Trump and Rubio, for this reason, have gutted the State Department, along with other forms of “soft” power that achieve influence without resorting to force, including the U.S. role in the United Nations, the U.S. Agency of International Development, the U.S. Institute for Peace — renamed Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace after most of the board and staff were fired — and Voice of America.
Diplomats in gangster states are reduced to the role of errand boys. Hitler’s Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, whose primary experience in foreign affairs before 1933 was selling fake German champagne in Britain, appointed party hacks from the SA or Brownshirts — the paramilitary wing of the party — to diplomatic posts abroad.
Benito Mussolini’s foreign minister was his son-in-law, Galeazzo Ciano. Mussolini — who believed that “war is to man what maternity is to woman” — later executed Ciano for disloyalty.
Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, Steven Charles Witkoff, is a real estate developer, often accompanied on diplomatic missions by Trump’s feckless son-in-law Jared Kushner.
The Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce quipped that fascism had created a fourth form of government, “onagrocracy,” a government by braying asses, to add to Aristotle’s traditional triumvirate of tyranny, oligarchy and democracy.
Our ruling class, Democrats and Republicans, piece by piece, dismantled democracy. In Germany and Italy, the constitutional state, as well, collapsed long before the arrival of fascism.
Trump, who is the symptom, not the disease, inherited the corpse. He is making good use of it.
“I believe that to maintain our empire abroad requires resources and commitments that will inevitably undercut our domestic democracy and in the end produce a military dictatorship or its civilian equivalent,” Chalmers Johnson wrote two decades ago in his book, Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic.
He warned:
“The founders of our nation understood this well and tried to create a form of government — a republic — that would prevent this from occurring. But the combination of huge standing armies, almost continuous wars, military Keynesianism, and ruinous military expenses have destroyed our republican structure in favor of an imperial presidency.
We are on the cusp of losing our democracy for the sake of keeping our empire. Once a nation is started down that path, the dynamics that apply to all empires come into play — isolation, overstretch, the uniting of forces opposed to imperialism, and bankruptcy. Nemesis stalks our life as a free nation.”
The American Empire, defeated in Iraq and Afghanistan — as it was at the Bay of Pigs and in Vietnam — learns nothing. It leaps into each new military fiasco as if the previous military fiascos did not happen. It believes it needs no allies. It will rule the world.
If occupying Greenland blows up NATO, so what?
If funding and arming Israel to carry out genocide and bombing Iran and Yemen alienates huge swaths of the Global South and enrages the Muslim world, who cares?
If invading and kidnapping the president of Venezuela stinks of Yankee imperialism, tough! No one else matters.
Nations that stomp around the globe like King Kong infect themselves with a fatal virus.
Johnson warned that if we continue to cling to our empire, as the Roman Republic did, we will “lose our democracy and grimly await the eventual blowback that imperialism generates.”
Blowback is next and with it the collapse of the crumbling edifice of the American Empire. It is an old story.
Although to us, and the cabal of misfits ensconced in our version of Ubu Roi’s court, it will come as a terrible shock.
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor and NPR. He is the host of show “The Chris Hedges Report.”
This article is from Scheerpost.
NOTE TO READERS: There is now no way left for me to continue to write a weekly column for ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show without your help. The walls are closing in, with startling rapidity, on independent journalism, with the elites, including the Democratic Party elites, clamoring for more and more censorship. Please, if you can, sign up at chrishedges.substack.com so I can continue to post my Monday column on ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show, “The Chris Hedges Report.”
Views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
Please Donate to CN‘s Winter Fund Drive 
The statement that: “We are on the cusp of losing our democracy for the sake of keeping our empire” … is only a half-truth. The reality is that our American republic was overthrown on November 22, 1963, by a CIA coup d’etat. What has existed since that time is a carefully-managed, post-WWII, form of fascism, which is covered by a facade of “democracy” to shield the public from understanding its true nature. This form of fascism has learned to mask itself in such a way that the public continues to believe that it has democratic rights, when the actual reality is that the interests of the rulers of the empire supersede those of the people. In any matter of significance to the rulers of the imperial empire, it is the interests of the empire that always take precedence. This is the reality.
Only now, in the latter days of the U.S. empire, is the mask falling away … revealing to us what has been there all along. The pretense of democracy is being abandoned, allowing for the naked power of the imperial system to show itself. In the final analysis, the last refuge of all empires is war and destruction. The last refuge of capitalism is fascism.
The power of ruling class propaganda and the gatekeeper media along with ruling class capture of all our institutions has brought us here. Might we not have done better in a world without capitalism?
It seems to me, humans were doing well when indigenous cultures were able to live free from the capitalist hordes who murdered them, stole their lands and enslaved those who remained. What a sorry state these greedy monsters have foisted onto humanity.
Lois, what you say is true as far as it goes, but the reality is that as our numbers increased (along with concomitant technologies) and the capacity to meet our primary needs directly by our own actions was removed from us as an option, as we came to depend on the skills snd productive activities of others largely unknown to us, economic and political systems were essential. These economic and political systems have all been dehumanizing, there is no option, though some are worse than others. Indigenous models just are no longer possible in the forms that they once existed. There is so much more to this story, but this is not the right forum.
I could not agree more ^^
And the dictators and tyrants all have another thing in common, they each think they can defy history by being the only one to succeed instead of the inevitable failure.
They never learn.
The new religion of this age symbiosis for biosphere of balance of nature not the male dominance for genetic superiority, it is thr yin-yang. It is exactly human cultural and biological diversity, equality, and inclusiveness.
The attempts to outlaw war in the 20th century produced history’s greatest reaction from the military protection racket and the military industrial technological complex to promote and protect its male dominance profit motives and reaction to women’s rights to ecological balance of nature and nurture.
I watched the news tonight and Trump seemed to be hinting that the next strike on Iran could be a nuke. If he goes down this road, I fear that the road might end with us all driving off a bridge that isn’t there into eternity. Ah well. Maybe the next go round, the dogs will create a better society than we did.
Voice of America was a CIA creation to bombard people with capitalist propaganda. It was never about peace.
And the same with US AID. It’s main purpose was US empire, theft and domination, not some food program or AIDS program.
Chris you made my day!
The prose is superb and well written in flawless English that even those dunderheads trying to lead the world into uncontrollable anarchy will understand the dangers we live in.
Reading you Chris I now believe that fascism is already with us sooner than expected!
Hedges always sets up a strawman regarding nationalism.
To me, a healthy nationalism means isolationism. Isolationism, NOT a pejorative word in my book. A friendly isolationism in which defense [sic] expenditures are funneled back into the domestic needs of the nation, not wasted on imperial ventures abroad.
A healthy nationalism means doing all you can for all the citizens (citizens!) of the polity – African American, Chicano, Native Am, Asian Am, whites, etc. It means very strict yet humane border enforcement not unlike Japan, Switzerland, Denmark and some other healthy democracies enforce.
Nationalism doesn’t have to be a dangerous buzzword.
Yes Drew, a humble nationalism without American exceptionalism, superiority and hubris. That seems unlikely, as those qualities are baked-in to the US consciousness. I’ve long held the opinion that US folk are US citizens first and human beings second. Their membership of a unique group is more significant than their humanity. It will take many generations – if it is possible at all – for a new balance to emerge. Once you’ve had an empire it’s a very hard thing to get over. The UK is a leading example. There are others.
I am opposed to nationalism and believe all borders should be open. Even tectonic plates move. I would not say that Switzerland is any longer a “healthy democracy”. It is going along with the persecution against its own citizen, Col. Jacques Baud.
Totally open borders is an absurd concept that has the support of about 5% of the American population.
Nationalism generally means you regards your nation as superior to others. This is what differentiates it to patriotism. I don’t think it has anything to do with isolationism.
Historically, nationalist nations are violent. They seek freedom from external interference through subjugation of inferior nationalities abroad, and through enforced conformity of anyone not reflecting their nationalist values at home. Hedges explains this well.
“Only our nation is great. Other nations, even allies, are dismissed with contempt.”
Nationalism IS a dangerous buzzword. Nations need to work together, a common future is unavoidable.
You’re falling for the fearmongering.
A healthy patriotic nationalism is the only way.
wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong!
Patriotism is the local anglos casting off the overseas anglos and then continuing to genocide the populace. That word patriot will never, ever have a positive meaning. EVER.
“You have a president that says the Fed should be cutting rates to lower rate payments on the federal debt… It is the road to banana republic.” Janet Yellen on investigation of Director Jerome Powell (BBC: “She suggested investors should be concerned”)
+ Trump and RFKjr. have gutted –>>CDC still has NO Director! Remarks from J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco this week from STAT:
SAN FRANCISCO — Noubar Afeyan, one of biotech’s top investors, warned in an annual letter that a backlash against science in the U.S. could endanger U.S. life expectancy, take “a sledgehammer” to biotech innovation, and give China a scientific and economic edge.
“For the first time since the Enlightenment, this raises the question of whether the scientific method is still a viable way to organize and resolve disagreements in science,” Afeyan wrote. “Do we look to the evidence? Or do we reach conclusions based on our personal opinions or beliefs, or what an ‘influencer’ said, or what is convenient, or what is politically or financially expedient?””Noubar Afeyan, one of biotech’s top investors,
“We are living simultaneously in the utopian age in which a baby born with a genetic death sentence is given a new lease on life thanks to the miracle of gene editing, and the dystopia in which a disease like measles is on the march in the United States,” he said.
‘Afeyan pointed out that the U.S. could lose its current status as the undisputed leader in biotechnology research. China, he wrote, is approving drugs quickly and funding large amounts of research. “Ironically, U.S. investors, who might have preferred to fund life-science innovators here at home, are now placing their bets on China.”
China ALREADY HAS scientific and technological edge.
For the informed ,the readers of history and for all those of us that dream of peace in the world ,the words of Chris Hedges in this article ring as as reminder that no one escapes accountability ,it will only be delayed .History will not record memorable thoughts on what the United States of America ,through its blusterous leadership is presently doing in efforts to remain relevant . The curtain has now gone up for the world to see .
I take as part of your meaning, to mangle the cliche: there are none of the erudite in foxholes. As I read this piece, I couldn’t shake the feeling of vast gulf between the historical and philosophical thought of Hedges and the reptile brained destructive ambitions of those who are presently empowered by….by what? By our failure to understand or act with resolution to the meanest of human motives? By being crippled by too much ‘understanding’ of the ethereal and not enough of the gutter?
Clarification: the gutter is a necessary part of any social construction of infrastructure, I do not intend the pejorative usage. I myself am of the gutter in the sense of being of that class and form of action that gathers and a moves along the effluence of this society.
A powerful piece by Chris Hedges—rich in insight, moral clarity, and unsettling foresight. He captures the American story not only as it stands today, but as it is likely to unfold if the country continues down this perilous imperial path.
I fear for humanity with Trump and his regime in charge.