The Case of the Wrecked Republic

By Restless [Originally on goofyblog 5.24.07]

I’m part way into the 3rd in Chalmers Johnson’s trilogy about the U.S. Republic versus the U.S. military-industrial-congressional complex. Johnson is professor emeritus at U.C. San Diego and was an outside consultant to the CIA in the late 60s through the early 70s.

In 2000, his first, Blowback, was published. It’s a recounting of the incredible history of CIA covert dirty tricks and overt military actions by our Armed Forces during the last 60 years. His premise, that the things we’ve done to other governments and peoples of the world will “blowback” on us, predated the 9-11 attacks by a year. This book appears to be the basis for Ron Paul’s controversial statements during the recent Republican debates wherein he pointedly used the word “blowback” several times.

Professor Johnson takes the reader around the world, country by country (Korea, Okinawa, Afghanistan, Russia, Iran, Iraq, the nations of Central and South America) recounting events and facts commonly known to other countries but little-known in our own. It is crystal clear we’ve had an out of control intelligence apparatus that not only threatens the sovereignty of other nations but of our freedoms and our democratic form of government.

Chalmers goes back into our history relating what the Founding Fathers wrote and said about the dangers of a free-standing military and the dangers of foreign wars. He goes even further back to the roots of why the Founders came to those conclusions: the lessons they learned from the recent history of their times and their knowledge of the strengths and weakenesses of the Roman republic. Taking all of this knowledge and thought they constructed an intricate system made specifically to distribute power evenly so that no one person or branch or group could ever gain power.

In 2004, he published the 2nd, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic. A lot had happened since Blowback had come out: 9/11, the war in Afghanistan and the invasion of Iraq. Sorrows of Empire makes the case in thoroughly convincing, chilling terms: secret government and militarism in the populace and in political leaders is the end of republican government in the United States. Just his history of the CIA since its inception makes the book worth reading. But there is much more.

At the end of the book he says:

There is one development that could conceivably stop this process of overreaching: the people could retake control of Congress, reform it along with the corrupted elections laws that have made it into a forum for special interests, turn it into a genuine assembly of democratic representatives, and cut off the supply of money to the Pentagon and the secret intelligence agencies.

We have a strong civil society that could, in theory, overcome the entrenched interests of the armed forces and the military-industrial complex. At this late date, however, it is difficult to imagine how Congress, much like the Roman senate in the last days of the republic, could be brought back to life and cleansed of its endemic corruption. Failing such a reform, Nemesis, the goddess of retribution and vengeance, the punisher of pride and hubris, waits impatiently for her meeting with us.

I’ve just started the final book in his trilogy, Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, which came out late last year. He opens the book with this:

Empires do not last, and their ends are usually unpleasant. Americans like me, born before World War II, have personal knowledge – in some cases, personal experience – of the collapse of at least six empires: those of Nazi Germany, imperial Japan, Great Britain, France, the Netherlands, and the Soviet Union.

If one includes all of the twentieth century, three more major empires came tumbling down – the Chinese, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman. A combination of imperial overstretch, rigid economic institutions, and an inability to reform weakened all these empires, leaving them fatally vulnerable in the face of disastrous wars, many of which the empires themselves invited.

In Nemesis, he details the NSA wiretapping going on, the secret and not secret military bases around the world, the phantom military and intelligence spending budget completely removed from scrutiny and any oversight, and the history and now prevalence of the unitary Executive.

On May 15th, Johnson posted Is Imperial Liquidation Possible for America? on The American Empire Project blog (picked up as Can We End the American Empire Before It Ends Us? on AlterNet). He opens with the following:

In politics, as in medicine, a cure based on a false diagnosis is almost always worthless, often worsening the condition that is supposed to be healed. The United States, today, suffers from a plethora of public ills. Most of them can be traced to the militarism and imperialism that have led to the near-collapse of our Constitutional system of checks and balances. Unfortunately, none of the remedies proposed so far by American politicians or analysts addresses the root causes of the problem.

According to an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, released on April 26, 2007, some 78% of Americans believe their country to be headed in the wrong direction. Only 22% think the Bush administration’s policies make sense, the lowest number on this question since October 1992, when George H. W. Bush was running for a second term — and lost.

How did we get here? One reason is the state our “free” press is in:

Instead of uncovering administration lies and manipulations, the media actively promoted them. Yet the first amendment to the Constitution protects the press precisely so it can penetrate the secrecy that is the bureaucrat’s most powerful, self-protective weapon.

As a result of this failure, democratic oversight of the government by an actively engaged citizenry did not — and could not — occur. The people of the United States became mere spectators as an array of ideological extremists, vested interests, and foreign operatives — including domestic neoconservatives, Ahmed Chalabi and his Iraqi exiles, the Israeli Lobby, the petroleum and automobile industries, warmongers and profiteers allied with the military-industrial complex, and the entrenched interests of the professional military establishment — essentially hijacked the government.

The news and facts contained in these pieces make it clear the situation is dire: we are not headed away from empire, we are headed away from democracy.