The Failed Empire...

[marmar]

Too Late for Empire
By Jonathan Schell



Repetition

Anyone who wants to write about the constitutional crisis unfolding in the United States today faces a peculiar problem at the outset. There is a large body of observations that at one and the same time have been made too often and yet not often enough -- too often because they have been repeated to the point of tedium for a minority ready to listen but not often enough because the general public has yet to consider them seriously enough. The problem for a self-respecting writer is that the act of writing almost in its nature promises something new. Repetition is not really writing but propaganda -- not illumination for the mind but a mental beating. Here are some examples of the sort of observations I have in mind, at once over-familiar and unheard:

President George W. Bush sent American troops into Iraq to find weapons of mass destruction, but they weren't there.

He said that Saddam Hussein's regime had given help to Al Qaeda, but it had not.

He therefore took the nation to war on the basis of falsehoods.

His administration says that the torture at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere has been the work of a few bad apples in the military, whereas in fact abuses were sanctioned at the highest levels of the executive branch in secret memos.


The rest is at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=105894
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EDIT COPYRIGHT. PLEASE POST ONLY 4 OR 5 PARAGRAPHS
FROM THE COPYRIGHTED NEWS SOURCE PER DU RULES.

[Octafish]

1. Der Smirkelgrüber

"If this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck of a lot easier - just so long I'm the dictator." -- George Bush, December 18, 2000

Video

[marmar]

2. And people thought he was just joking when he said that!

:scared: :scared:

[Octafish]

3. That's a heck of an article, marmar. Don't know why there aren't 20 K&Rs.

I imagine it has to do with this thing called "reading."

From your article, "(U)ncannily similar comgination of war abroad and constitutional crisis at home" is no coincidence:

A Persistent Pathology

As the mere mention of Vietnam suggests, the repetition dilemma also has causes that go deeper into the past. I embarked on journalism in 1966 as a reporter in Vietnam. The experience led, naturally and seamlessly, to a decade of writing about the war, the opposition to the war and, finally, when the war "came home," to the constitutional crisis of the Nixon years and its resolution via Nixon's resignation under threat of impeachment. The war and the impeachment were connected at every point. It wasn't just that Nixon's wiretapping was directed against Daniel Ellsberg, war critic and leaker of the Vietnam-era Pentagon Papers; or that the "plumbers" outfit that carried out the Watergate break-in was founded to spy on, disrupt and attack war critics; or that Nixon's persistence in trying to win the war even as he withdrew American troops from it drove him into the paranoia that led him to draw up an "enemies list" and sponsor subversions of the electoral process -- it was that his entire go-it-alone, imperial conception of the presidency originated in his pursuit of his war policy in secrecy and without Congressional involvement.

And now, thirty years later, we find ourselves facing an uncannily similar combination of misconceived war abroad and constitutional crisis at home. Again a global crusade (then it was the Cold War, now it is the "war on terror") has given birth to a disastrous war (then Vietnam, now Iraq); again a President has responded by breaking the law; and again it falls to citizens, journalists, judges, justices and others to trace the connections between the overreaching abroad and the overreaching at home. In consequence, not only are we condemned to repeat ourselves for the duration of the current crisis but a remarkable number of those repetitions are already repetitions of what was said thirty years ago

CONTINUED...

Knowledge keeps us from making mistakes.

Ergo, the expression: "Readers are leaders."

CAIN'T READ A LICK

[marmar]

5. "I imagine it has to do with this thing called "reading."

LOL. So true. I'm sure people see the length of the article and eyes glaze over.

[bemildred]

9. Brilliant. Thanks for posting. nt

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

4. The Empire has very restive subjects.

Even, here in the apathetic, disinterested, American part of it.

[malaise]

6. A very thoughtful article

Thanks.

[marmar]

7. You bet.

Requires a bit of commitment, but a worthwhile read.

[malaise]

8. Well worth it

I saved it and will give my students to read.

[bvar22]

10. Good synopsis.

K&R
:dem:

[Greyhound]

11. Nice. K & R

I hope this message resonates with all that read it.

It was the peculiar trajectory of the United States, born in opposition to empire, to wind up making its own bid for empire only after the age of imperialism was over.

:patriot: :kick:

[marmar]

12. That was very well said....

And sadly, it's a lesson that seems to have been forgotten.

[Greyhound]

13. Rise, damn you, rise! n/t