Empire building has led to the end of our own democracy

Soup Of The Evening, Beautiful Soup

by Michael Doliner

In the long run, the existence of this intensely elitist society in the ancient Near East was of enormous importance to the history of Western civilization. As late as 1700, the prevailing European social system was still one in which vast power, the greater part of landed wealth, and the prime control of political life belonged to the hereditary landed aristocracy.

– Norman F. Cantor, The Civilization of the Middle Ages

(Swans - October 24, 2005) In the history of Western civilization democracy has prevailed for only a few slivers of time and even then only in a few places, most notably the shining example of the fifth century in Athens and the last 300 years on and off, more or less, here and there. The complacency with which most Americans assume our democracy will continue is unjustified given democracy’s brief tenure in what we can see of the last 5000 years. The democracy of fifth century Athens and all its shining achievements ended with Athenian defeat in the Peloponnesian War. At the start of the war Pericles warned his fellow citizens not to try to expand their empire, but a defeat in the expansionist Sicilian Expedition destroyed the Athenian navy and led eventually to the end of the democracy.

Empire seems to be a hard temptation for democracies to resist. American history is a history of aggressive expansion and empire building. Now empire building has led to the end of our own democracy. Paul Craig Roberts has eloquently demonstrated the point in a recent article. Here is a quote.
Two and one-half years after the March 2003 invasion, the U.S. Congress and the American people still do not know the reason Iraq was invaded. The U.S. is bogged down in an expensive and deadly combat, and no one outside the small circle of neoconservatives who orchestrated the war knows the reason why. Many guesses are rendered - oil, removal of Israel’s enemy - but the Bush administration has never disclosed its real agenda, which it cloaked with the WMD deception.

This itself is a powerful indication that American democracy is dead...

In the U.S. today nothing stands in the way of the arbitrary exercise of power by government. Federal courts have acquiesced in unconstitutional detention policies. There is no opposition party, and there is no media, merely huge conglomerates or collections of federal broadcasting licenses, the owners of which are afraid to displease the government.

The collapse of the institutions that confine government to law and bind it with the Constitution was sudden. (1)

For anyone who knows the plans of the Leo Strauss educated "philosophers" now in control of national policy, the end of democracy is not surprising. Their hope is to erase the Enlightenment and its subsequent history of liberal democracy and restore the Middle Ages, albeit with some modern conveniences. (2) Their hatred of liberal democracy is the impetus for their program, and their plan is to gain control of the United States and transform it from a liberal democracy into a Straussian state they and their successors can rule in perpetuity. Given the long history of elitist government in the West they have good chances.

But if we read on in Cantor’s The Civilization of the Middle Ages we discover a tale of one elite after another gaining power and then losing it through arrogance or moronic incompetence. According to Cantor, when the Visigoths menaced Rome a general named Stilicho held them back until jealous Roman aristocrats, with the connivance of the emperor, murdered him. (3) The Visigoths had no interest in conquering Rome. They were just trying to escape from the Huns. But two years after Stilicho’s death the Visigoths under Alaric stumbled almost unimpeded into the city. Here is another good example.
The Merovingian rulers did nothing for the people except to lead an occasional military expedition. They spent their time satisfying their gross desires and enriching their relatives and dependents. When there was more than one king, as was frequent in the century following Clovis’s death, the rulers’ chief interest was in fighting and killing each other, so the history of the Merovingian family in the sixth and early seventh centuries is mostly a bewildering tale of carnage and dishonor. (4)

The Merovingian power quickly waned as the Frankish and Gallo-Roman nobility coalesced to oppose them.

The incompetence of the Merovingians is not nearly as surprising as the even more stunning incompetence of the Straussian cabal in charge of the Bush administration. Iraq, Katrina, the economy, peak oil, the huge federal deficit, and looming ecological disaster all come to mind immediately when thinking of their accomplishments. They too seem preoccupied with enriching their friends, leading military expeditions, and doing nothing for the people. Apparently they count on maintaining their power through propaganda, Evangelical Christianity, and military repression. They rely on the public’s mindless acceptance of free-market ideology and docile obedience to the cronies the philosophers have managed to insinuate into the husk of the structure of what was the American democracy.

Technology is democracy’s art, so it is only natural for a child of democracy to ask, "Will it work?" Can the philosophers hold power after they get it? The average American is going to be in hot water. Of the 207,000 jobs created in July not a single one provides a tradable good or service. (5) The United States of America is rapidly entering third-world economic status. Neo-liberal free market ideology has allowed American corporations to export most good jobs to China or to some other low labor-cost site. At the same time steadily growing oil depletion will increase prices of food, fuel, and just about everything else. Americans simply won’t be able to afford their suburban lives much longer. But what better way to force the population back into serfdom or even slavery than to impoverish them. The well-educated philosophers surely know that poverty, already here for many, is just over the horizon for many more. Clearly, it is part of the plan. The architects of our new order do not fear a disillusioned population, for there is really nothing that the mass of helpless citizens can do. On the contrary, a population in reduced and perhaps desperate circumstances, will, they hope, accept a new role as servants for the band of bookworms now in control. Indeed, impoverishment of the population is, from their point of view, a good.

The picture doesn’t look rosy for the America’s traditional rich masters either. Industrialists and international financiers who until so recently have had everything their own way are now finding things going inexplicably wrong. Four airlines are in bankruptcy and Ford and General Motors are deadbeats, their debt reduced to junk status. (6) Leftist leanings are knocking down what were once easy pickings in Latin America. Instead of owning a gusher in Iraq, oil companies are threatened with eviction from the entire Middle East. Public exposure has stripped the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, once ideal tools for plunder, of their rhetorical altruistic cloaks. Peasants in the boonies who were supposed to give up their loot without a fight are questioning the wisdom of the free trade agreements, NAFTA and GATT. CEO’s like Ken Lay have supplied big business with a criminal mug. Massive foreign debt threatens to incinerate the value of the dollar in a holocaust of hyperinflation. The philosophers have tried to help the poor rich, but have enriched only a small number of them, putting others at risk of losing fortunes. However, life is still very good and the rich are not inclined to do much about the philosophers. Although a number of the members of Bush père’s entourage objected to the war on Iraq on practical grounds, Bush fils ignored them. Sure that the younger Bush is one of them, they can’t bring themselves to turn against him. They don’t seem to have any way to deflect the philosophers from their career before the end of the presidential term, and they really don’t want to. The philosophers can count on the rich; there will just be ever fewer of them.

What about a military coup? Controlling the military poses a far greater problem. In the history of the West most of the leaders have been barbarian thugs or their progeny. Savagery was their game. What is to prevent some Colonel, annoyed at the philosophers’ destruction of the military, from launching a coup d’état with a little help from his friends? Impossible in America? Why? It is unlikely that the smoke the philosophers blow intoxicates military men as it does civilians. The draft-evading philosophers must infuriate generals who have to obey their absurd orders. There have been grumblings in the military about the incredible bungling of the Iraq War that they never wanted. Surely it gave other generals pause when Rumsfeld fired General Shinseki for offering reasonable advice. When the Army, in a highly unusual move, also relieved General Kevin Byrnes of his command for adultery just before war games at his post at Fort Monroe, some thought they fired him for more political reasons. (7) Until now the democratic architecture of the United States of America has restrained the military. According to the Constitution the military is, after all, subordinate to the civilian administration. But as it becomes more and more apparent that the American democracy is ritual gesture, the restraining writ of the Constitution will pale. The philosophers might ask themselves why the generals would continue to obey them when the philosophers have no more right to power than the generals do.

continued

http://www.swans.com/library/art11/mdolin11.html