The Chris Hedges Show Podcast with retired Army Colonel, Vietnam War veteran and former history professor at Boston University Andrew Bacevich on bidding farewell to the American century.
The Chris Hedges Show Podcast with retired Army Colonel, Vietnam War veteran and former history professor at Boston University Andrew Bacevich on bidding farewell to the American century.
At the end of any empire there are always a handful of chroniclers who, like Cicero in the Roman Republic, see clearly the looming disintegration of empire. They call out the bankruptcy of an inept and corrupt ruling class, blinded by hubris, as well as a populace that has checked out of civic life and is entranced by bread and circus spectacles. Chalmers Johnson in his trilogy “American Empire: Blowback,” “The Sorrows of Empire,” and “Nemesis” The Last Days of the American Republic,” does a masterful job of showing how and why we are disintegrating. So does Andrew Bacevich who in his newest book of essays, “On Shedding an Obsolete Past: Bidding Farewell to the American Century,” writes about the debacles that have beset the American empire since the Vietnam war, a conflict he fought in as a young army officer. He warns that our inability to be self-critical, to dissect and understand the litany of disasters that have followed on the heels of Vietnam, including the twenty-years of fruitless warfare in the Middle East, will have terrible consequences for us and much of the rest of the globe. Joining me to discuss his new book is Andrew Bacevich, the president and co-founder of the Quincey Institute for Responsible Statecraft. A West Point graduate and retired Army Colonel, he is also professor emeritus of history and international relations at Boston University. His other books include “The New American Militarism,” “The Limits of Power,” “America’s War for the Greater Middle East” and “After the Apocalypse: America’s Role in a World Transformed.”
The Chris Hedges Show Podcast with retired Army Colonel, Vietnam War veteran and former history professor at Boston University Andrew Bacevich on bidding farewell to the American century.
Well, you cannot save the system. The banks (Wall Street and its private army the CIA) and corporations control the government. The hard place is politics, the rock is the climate crisis. The system is devolving into a Mad Max, tripling down on burning carbon, fascist dystopia. Here's an orderly, radical, yet responsible solution that requires a left populist leader using executive power and leading all workers on a national general strike, and declaring under national emergency: Nationalize every bank, fossil fuel and weapons maker. Place their CEOs under house arrest pending trials for crimes against humanity. Slash the military budget in half. Tax the rich and corporations. Well, won't happen but nice to consider.
When I hear former military personnel who have seen the error of theirs and other's errors, I always feel a bit of rage and sadness.
Rage, at the system that psychologically lied for imperialism, and sadness at the fact those like Bacevich do not understand the problem.
The problem is global capitalism and imperialism.
Until we begin to understand this, the rest is kibble for commentators.
Why Americans accept the state of the world they both help to construct and subsidized can be answered by looking at what they 'eat' for news, entertainment and culture.
The Bread and Circus is certainly the problem.
Couple this with and educational system that fails to teach critical thinking, and you have a recipe for what we are seeing today.
As to the 1619 Project, Bacevich would do well to wrestle with the arguments of Gerald Horne, a frequent guest of Chris' who argues that the American Revolution was a counter revolution.
African Americans, unlike suggested, do not wish to become part of a narrative of war and capitalism.
Marx and Engels saw the events leading to the Civil War as momentous.
In a January 1861 letter to Engels, written after the election of Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln, but before his inauguration, Marx wrote,
“In my opinion, the biggest things that are happening in the world today are on the one hand the movement of the slaves in America started by the death of John Brown, and on the other the movement of the serfs in Russia.”
(Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 41 (New York: International Publishers, 1985), 4. John Brown was a leader of revolutionary abolitionists, both white and Black, who attacked and seized the military arsenal at Harpers Ferry in 1859).
Sadly, America is finished in terms of social mobility and too many are swaddled in despair.
As George Jackson noted from his cell at San Quentin before being murdered:
"The trappings of this pseudo mass society are empty, cheap, spectacular leisure sports; parades where strangers meet, shout each other down and often trample each other to death on the way home; mass consumption of worthless super-suds or aspirin; ritualistic, ultra-nationalistic events on days to glorify the idiots who died at war or other days to deify those who sent them out to die.
A mass society that is actually a mass jungle.
At its core, fascism is capitalistic and capitalism is international.
Beneath its nationalist ideological trappings, fascism is always ultimately an international movement.”
"Acceptance of enslavement is deeply buried in the pathogenic character types of capitalism. It is a result of the sense of dread and anxiety which is the lot of all men under capitalist rule. Compulsive behavior and disordered obsessional longings are actually made synonymous with “character” in our disordered society. But to emphasize these conditions before examining the institutions from which they spring is to confuse effect with cause and further cloud the point of attack. So far, cultural analysis has established that the psychosis is so ingrained, the institutions so centralized,
that what is needed is total revolution, the armed struggle between the have-nots with their vanguard and the haves with their hirelings or macabre freaks that live through them….”
George Jackson, Bood in my Eye, Classes at War
https://archive.org/stream/GeorgeJacksonBloodInMyEye_201512/George%20Jackson%20-%20Blood-in-My-Eye_djvu.txt
Any mythical appeals to FDR fail to resonate for capitalism is a criminal organization that cannot be regulated.
Military Keynsianism ushered in fascism under the moniker American Exceptionalism..
The Empire then ate the Republic.
And the fascists and imperialists put a military contractor in every state to assure the juice flows to the right people.
Many Americans think that the 850 so military bases abroad are a problem and they are.
But each state in the US is itself a military base.
Conquered long ago under the auspices of Peace and Prosperity.
The country was conquered by its own Praetorian guards.
America's only hope now is the success of the global south.
For if it is not successful the most irrational ruling class in human history will destroy us all.