Tom Engelhardt: The Invasion of America
The American century is ending decisively with a pyromaniac in the White House
Hey, what the hell else is there to do as the president of these disunited states, except tweet, watch Fox News, and disunite them further?.. So take my word for it, more or less 75 years after it began, the American Century is over. So long! Au revoir! Arrivederci! Zaijian!
see also
Hey, what the hell else is there to do as the president of these disunited states, except tweet, watch Fox News, and disunite them further?.. So take my word for it, more or less 75 years after it began, the American Century is over. So long! Au revoir! Arrivederci! Zaijian!
From the second the
Soviet Union imploded in 1991 to the spread of Covid-19, developments on this
planet have been remarkably inconceivable and yet strangely predictable. Can
you even remember that distant moment, almost three decades ago, when a stunned
Washington political establishment (since its members had never imagined a
world without the other Cold War superpower) suddenly found themselves alone on
Planet Earth, freed to do their damnedest in a world lacking enemies of any
sort? The globe seemed to be there for the taking, lock, stock, and barrel.
Their promised
post-Cold War “peace dividend,” however, would involve arming the U.S. military
to the teeth, expanding the country’s “intelligence” agencies until there were
(count ’em!) 17 of them, bolstering an already vast national
security state, and dispatching this country’s generals to fight “forever wars”
that would unsettle the planet, while conquering nothing at all. The folly of
this in such a moment on such a planet should have been obvious.
And in fact,
it was. In early 2003, facing only one small terrorist group and a completely
concocted three-nation “axis of evil,” President George W. Bush decided to order
the invasion of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Sensing what was coming, millions of people poured into the streets of cities
worldwide to tell him the obvious: don’t do it! (“How did USA’s oil get under
Iraq’s sand?” a typical
protest sign of that moment read.) Of those millions, however, not one
dreamed that, 13 years later, as a result of Bush’s decision to ignore them,
this country, or at least its Electoral College, would put in the White House a
president who would essentially launch the invasion of America.
What else do you need
to know about our mad moment than that the president of the land that had, for
so long, fought a “war on terror” would call the all-American protesters once
again turning out in the streets of hundreds of cities and towns in vast
numbers “terrorists”? He would then label a 75-year-old white man shoved over by two cops
in Buffalo, New York, and left bleeding on the ground as they walked away an
“ANTIFA provocateur.” (He’s still in the hospital.) In this fashion, with the
police armed to the teeth with weaponry and equipment off the
battlefields of America’s forever wars and George Floyd literally breathless thanks
to one of those policemen, the war on terror would come home big time.
And it tells you
something about this white boy that it wasn’t the Civil Rights Movement that
truly brought that home to me (though it should have been, of course) but an
all-American conflict and slaughter taking place thousands of miles away. Called the Vietnam
War, it was a brutal American folly in the divided Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia
in which millions would die and it would unsettle my mind, my
life, my being. Somehow, in those years, as I’ve also written elsewhere, it came to seem as if Vietnamese were
being killed right outside my window in peaceful Cambridge, Massachusetts.
While I would never end up in the U.S. military - my draft files were destroyed at the time by an activist group that called
itself Women Against Daddy Warbucks - I would be mobilized into an
anti-military, antiwar movement filled in a fashion unimaginable today with
dissenting soldiers, many of whom had fought in Vietnam. I was swept up by the
idea of a better world that I began to imagine might actually come to pass. How
naïve I was!
Had you told me at
that moment that everything we then dreamt of beyond the ending of that
terrible set of American wars would essentially go down in flames; that the
U.S. would, in the ensuing nearly half-century, fight two endless conflicts in
another Asian land, Afghanistan -- one in a kind of open secrecy, the second (now nearly two decades old) in
plain sight even as it turns into a pandemic war; that, in this century, my country would
invade not only Afghanistan but Iraq and fight a war on “terror” across much of
what once would have been known as the Third World; and that all of this would
happen without -- except for one brief moment -- anyone out in the streets
protesting or paying much attention at all (except to eternally “thank” the non-conscripted soldiers
fighting in those wars), I would have thought you were nuts.
If you had told me
that the president of the United States, a man of my generation, would be a
narcissistic, autocratic-leaning, utterly self-obsessed version of whatever
anyone who mattered to him wanted him to be, a man ready, even eager, to call troops from those distant wars onto American
streets to put down a sudden surge of protest amid a viral pandemic and an
economic collapse similar to the Great Depression, only to find himself opposed by the very generals, each whiter than the next, who fought the disastrous
forever wars that paved his way to power (and that they would be greeted
as saviors in the liberal media), I would have thought
you mad as a hatter.
And here’s the saddest
thing of all from my perspective: if those young people now in the streets
can’t perform genuine miracles -- and not just when it comes to racism -- if
they can’t sooner or later turn
their mobilized attention to the planet-destroying side of the
American ruling class, then forget about it. This world will be heading into a
heat hell.... read more:
https://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176715/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_the_invasion_of_america/#moresee also
