Every dying Empire has its truth telling prophet and America had
its own with Chalmers Johnson. Johnson correctly compared the decay of the
American empire, with its well over 600 overseas military bases, with the fall
of the Roman Empire whereas the Senate becomes a wealthy corporate club and
irrelevant compared to the ruling Military Industrial Congressional Complex:
Allen L Roland
Chalmers
Johnson was a truth teller and prophet in a political environment where few
would stand up to the interests and secrecy of the Pentagon and the
intelligence community ~ and since his passing in November of 2010, many of
his prophetic fears have been realized in the Obama administration.
Johnson'
s main points were;The United States is treading the same three steps as the former Soviet Union;
· Inability
to deal with corporate corruption.
·
Imperial
over-stretch is leading to fiscal insolvency ( 600 plus bases throughout the
world )
·
Inability
to reform, thus accelerating the inevitable fall.
Chalmers
offered the solution but suspected that it was already too late for America; ( with my inserts )
1.
Reform Congress ( Good luck )
2.
Reform corrupt election laws ( good luck )
3.
Re-division of electoral college ( good luck )
4.
Cutback funding of intelligence agencies and department of the defense and
take steps to break up the Military Industrial Congressional Complex. ( more
good luck )
Chalmers
expected considerable resistance but also said that only the truth could avoid
the inevitable fall of the American empire ~
as it did in bringing down the Soviet Union.
Thus,
only the role of the alternative media in exposing the truth can rescue a
crumbling Republic that has rapidly become a corrupt plutocracy.
It
is my opinion, that there is one central truth that can bring down America's
Berlin wall of denial along with the deceit of the War on Terror ~ it's the big, big lie and America's greatest
act of treason, it's the rationale for the cloak of secrecy, torture,
Guantanamo and illegal spying that now erodes our Republic ~ it's the
monstrous lie of 9/11 along with its unchallenged official story.
America's present day prophet for our
dying empire is Chris Hedges (America
In the Time of Empire) who wrote in 2007 that all great empires or
nations decay from within ~ "By the time they hobble
off the world stage, overrun by the hordes at the gates or vanishing quietly
into the pages of history books, what made them successful and powerful no
longer has relevance. This rot takes place over decades, as with the Soviet
Union, or, even longer, as with the Roman, Ottoman or Austro-Hungarian empires.
It is often imperceptible…. and it all amounts to
a tacit complicity on the part of a passive population. This permits the oligarchy to squander capital and lives. It
creates a world where we speak exclusively in the language of violence. It
has plunged us into an endless cycle of war and conflict that is draining away
the vitality, resources and promise of the nation … It signals the twilight
of our empire."
Tom Engelhardt (tomdispatch.com)
who
knew Chalmers well and featured almost all of Johnson's essays offered a
fitting eulogy to Chalmers shortly after he died; "In the introduction to his final book, Dismantling the Empire, America’s
Last Best Hope
(just out in paperback), he took up a recurring topic of interest to him: “the
choice between republic and empire,” and the way “our imperial dreams
stretch our means to the breaking point and threaten our future.”
Among “the alternatives available to us as a nation,” he wrote, “we are
choosing what I call the suicide option.” He added that " it
might not have to be this way ~ that we could still move in a different
direction." Those were, in a sense, his last words. How true
they remain three and a half months after his death."
But that was two years ago and it is
obvious that we are still choosing the suicide option ~ especially
now as we escalate our proxy war to oust Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and put
the world on the brink of a major international war.
It is also obvious that in an Empire the
people are not only considered 'Barbarians' and not to be
trusted with the truth ~ but they are also expendable and secondary to the
aims of the Empire.
Chalmers's wife,
Sheila Johnson, eulogized this true rebel and his work in early 2011 ~ "In
going through my husband’s files, books, and papers after his death, I’ve been
forcibly struck by two things. First, contrary to what many of
his obituaries said, his writings and thoughts were remarkably consistent
throughout his life. In other words, he was not a right-winger who became more
liberal and outspoken as he got older. More than most people suspected, he
was a radical all along, whose intellectual impulses were tempered only by his
birth in the Depression year of
1931 and his determination to make a
decent living without "joining the establishment" See article ~
Chalmers Johnson
summarized the true intent of his The Sorrows of Empire in the
final chapter of Nemesis;
"The Sorrows of Empire was written
during the American preparations for and launching of the invasions and
occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. I began to study
our continuous military buildup since World War II and the 737 military bases
we currently maintain in other people's countries. This empire of bases is
the concrete manifestation of our global hegemony, and
many of the blowback-inducing wars we have conducted had as their true purpose
the sustaining and expanding of this network. We do not think of these overseas
deployments as a form of empire; in fact, most Americans do not give them any
thought at all until something truly shocking, such as the treatment of
prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, brings them to
our attention. But the people living next door to these bases and dealing
with the swaggering soldiers who brawl and sometimes rape their women certainly
think of them as imperial enclaves, just as the people of ancient Iberia or
nineteenth-century India
knew that they were victims of foreign colonization."
In other words,
Chalmers Johnson was one of those crazy truth tellers
who thought they could change the world ~ and guess what, I'm also one of
them and quite often they do change the world and maybe even save a dying
Empire. 3 Minute video ~
"It was luxuries like air conditioning that brought down
the Roman Empire. With air conditioning their windows were shut, they couldn't
hear the barbarians coming." Garrison Keillor
Allen L Roland
Freelance Alternative
Press Online columnist and psychotherapist Allen L
Roland is available for comments, interviews, speaking engagements and private Skype consultations
(allen@allenroland.com )
Allen
L Roland is a practicing psychotherapist, author and
lecturer who also shares a daily political and social commentary on his web log and website allenroland.com He also guest hosts a
monthly national radio show TRUTHTALK on www.conscioustalk.net
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