I just finished Chalmers Johnson's "Dismantling The Empire". It was written in 2010 and it's more relevant now than it was then.
I'd never heard of Chalmers Johnson until a few weeks ago. Someone on Twitter recommended I read his works. She suggested I start with this book.
I will now be looking to read 3 other of his books: "Blowback"; "The Sorrows of Empire"; and "Nemesis; The Last Days of the American Republic". These books are known as "The Blowback Trilogy" despite the fact they weren't written as a trilogy.
Chalmers is to non-fiction what Aldus Huxley is to fiction. For me that's saying a mouthful - high praise indeed.
The dystopian society Chalmers is writing about is the United States. It's real. It's showing signs of wear. It's on the verge of bankruptcy. It's descending into fascism.
I can reduce this book to a simple message. That being, Imperialism and Democracy are mutually exclusive.
I believe this. It may seem obvious, but the truth of it was never as clear to me as it is now. Chalmers presents facts - powerful facts.
The United States emerged from the Cold War as the planet's only superpower. We did that by shifting our manufacturing from one supporting a peace time economy to one based upon producing military goods while politically supporting our own global military expansion.
President Eisenhower tried to warn us about this in his farewell address.
Our military bases now form a web around the planet. Building, sustaining and supporting them requires us to go into more and more debt.
We spend more on our military than any other country. In fact, we now spend more that the next nine countries spending the most on their militaries combined.
The post World War II rise of our intelligence gathering agency - the CIA - coupled with the increasing privatization of our military and intelligence gathering services has weakened our Legislative branch while strengthening our Executive branch.
By spreading our military manufacturing across our states, we have created a national workforce dependent upon manufacturing for the military.
By spreading our network of bases around the world, we have caused mortal harm to many peoples. We are reaping, and will continue to reap, "blowback" - the unintended consequences of our military expansion and aggression.
It's clear to me, as a result of reading this book, that we're headed toward economic collapse and authoritarian government - a government that has no alternative but to fail.
The title for this book is derived from the "10 Steps Toward Liquidating The Empire" that Chalmers outlines at the end of the book in Chapter 15, "Dismantling The Empire" an essay he wrote on 7/30/2009.
The book is actually a compendium of Chalmers' essays - each chapter being one essay - 15 in all.
During the 13 years since this book was published, our politicians have clearly ignored the perils Chalmers has been ever so eloquently, for ever so long, trying to warn us about.
We have clearly not heeded his message and the consequences are all too apparent now.
Chalmers died on November 20, 2010. He didn't live to see Donald Trump assume the Presidency. He didn't live to see the degree to which our people have become politically polarized. He didn't live to see the January 6th Insurrection, but he did his darndest to warn us of where we were headed.
Chalmers writings are not driven by partisan political concerns. He's uniquely apolitical. His concern is for us/U.S.
Holy Moly!
