Striding to empire, strides for the emperor
by Noel Rooney
[ politics | bookreviews ]
A thriving market has appeared for dissident literature of a particular kind. This ad-hoc genre is concerned almost exclusively with American imperialism. It includes writers such as Chomsky and Vidal, who have been writing about US foreign policy for some years; but largely the genre is new (or treated as new by its proponents) and the imperialism they educe is, apparently, similarly novel. I am curious about the point and purpose of this literature.
What concerns me here is not the rights or wrongs of the dissident position. American hegemony, and its current foreign policy, is militaristic, intrusive and self-serving, and much of the world is unfortunately under its dominion; little wonder many people classify this arrangement as empire. But timing is the secret of good comedy, even black farce. As dissidents write, so do the putative imperialists; and the foundation myth which is emerging for the "new" "empire" is a collective enterprise.
The shared nub of this dialectic is that the empire is just embarking on its absolutist mission; and, more alarmingly, that its reign will end only in Armageddon. Naturally this prospect is taken rather differently by both sides, but its currency is mutual, an article of faith posing as a bone of contention. As this myth-making accelerates, the reality of American hegemony (the empirical empire) is in danger of disappearing under the constructed version of it. Ultimately, we will build the empire out of this myth, and that surely benefits the imperialists more than the dissidents.
The present reality of US dominance is not an issue, but its stability and future prospects? Some have argued (for instance Umberto Eco) that the US resembles the Roman empire in its late, decadent, crumbling stage; others (notably Emmanuel Todd) that the US is too weak, and the rest of the world too diversely powerful, for imperial arrangements, and thus the empire is on the wane before it gets going. Little of this point of view appears in the dissident/imperialist canons.
The terms of the debate (much like the theological dispute over the absurd myth of globalisation) is set in the US, by the eager proponents of empire; although, ironically, it is possible they took their initial cue from the few, like Chomsky, who were ahead of the herd. In this respect, the attempt to forge a prospective imperial narrative resembles the early rhetorical history of Christianity, irony included.
But it's hard to tell if you're in the world of politics or high strangeness when the emperor's naked bottom is trousered by the very people who you'd expect to be pointing and laughing, and customising seaside postcard captions. Why are we confirming the megalomaniacal dreamings of the hardcore republican right? Is it just possible that a large constituency of opponents (what Todd calls - sweepingly and not altogether accurately - "structural anti-Americans") have a surreptitious need for the empire too?
Mythical empires are perfectly capable of killing real people in very large numbers. The casualties of America's wars, direct and proxy, run to millions. Much US justification for this carnage is couched in a larger mythic morality, one that employs the constitution as scripture - a scripture whose exegesis is nothing if not flexible (and whose virtue is held up equally by the opposition). Carnage is justified because it is in accordance with scripture, properly interpreted; Julio Godoy's observation is chillingly apt here: "one is tempted to believe that some people in the White House worship Aztec gods".
Apt not just in its precision, but also for placing the killing in a dimly-understood theological context, which it seems is the proper forum for talking about America.
All apologists for the US position couch their arguments in theological/moral terms. Huntington's injudicious phrase might be adapted for adoption here: a clash of religions, engineered for the nascent imperium as good versus evil. Curiously, this rigged rhetoric is accepted by the opposition, albeit with the place-markers inverted on the continuum. The fact is that the two religions clashing here are both in crisis - their overall numbers are falling, and the agenda is increasingly set by fundamentalists - and both are being used by adherents and unbelievers alike as an ideological patina for an increasingly murderous realpolitik.
Islamism, for instance, is used by both sides as a synechdoche for Islam. This both demonises and privileges the Islamist position, but rarely explains it. The same is true for fundamentalists Christianity. Consequently, the crisis of nationalisms and the nation state, responsible for much of the confused violence (and violent confusion) which is the actuality for millions, is occluded by a spurious distillation. John Gray has written that nationalism is the dominant ideology if our times; I tend to agree, although it's a nostalgic form of nationalism for my money (Gray might counter that all nationalism is nostalgic).
The mythmakers are unlikely to accept Gray's observation; they are, after all, humanists, and their concern is with worldview (a high-minded humanist conceit) which subordinates real violence under a noetic framework - a visceral comfort for the privileged (Gray has also said "real war [..] is like smoking, a habit of the poor").
A fundamental weakness of the imperial project as widely stated is that the US has exhausted its economic resources before embarking on its "micro-militarism". Empires driven by desperate need for resources are vehicles running on empty. And the US is unable to engage any but the weakest of enemies, it seems. For those enemies (who are likely to be in the dark about why they were chosen) the consequences are devastating; and it's no comfort to their decimated populations and ruined infrastructures that the rich world is kept safe and warm by the capricious lottery of their arbitrary destruction. We are the direct beneficiaries of this playground bully approach to geo-politics; it allows us space and leisure to interpret events (as always, meaning is more important than action in this arena) in accordance with our narrow, post-Enlightenment prejudices, and to produce an oddly acquiescent oppositional framework, formally at least.
Oil is the Spanish gold of the new imperial myth. Everywhere America leans heaviest, oil spurts. An oligarchy of oil barons is certainly an odd role model for emerging democracies (though some have taken to it pretty well); but it doesn't constitute a new empire, and if a very large number of oil analysts are to be believed, the pay-off is extremely short-term - monopolising a dwindled and soon outmoded fuel base is just as likely to leave the US an isolated dinosaur in a world that has moved on to newer technologies.
In fact, none of the economic or realpolitik analyses from either side bear much scrutiny. In either context, American foreign policy is counter-intuitive at best, incoherent at worst. Only the theology is sound, even in its more exotic variants (fervent neo-cons rebuilding Solomon's temple for instance). But if the American empire is built on petro-chemicals (and oil does point duty for the butler in almost every version of this whodunit) then by definition it is in decline.
There are writers (Chomsky, notably) who I'd like to honourably exempt from the category of myth-makers. When a more abstract (if compromised) dialectic of right and left was occupying most political writers, Chomsky was charting US hegemony, and its disastrous effects, in Latin America, the Caribbean, and south-east Asia,during the 50 "post-war" years when the imperial tag was perhaps more appropriate.
Chomsky was also the first to broadcast the role of corporate interest in US foreign policy (well before the spurious invention of globalisation - think of Coca Cola in Guatemala) and he was clear that the economic project was political rather than vice versa. Today, when the inverse is taken as the fact of recent history, this view of his looks superficially reactionary; but the structure of US policy, and the actions flowing from it, have been consistent at a deeper level for most of the twentieth century and the dizzy micro-apocalypse of the twenty-first.
Chomsky, with his characteristically meticulous tenacity, has catalogued this process in some detail, and we should be grateful to him for doing so. But, equally consistent in his view is the reality, and to some extent the permanence, of US power; he studies the monster close up, so may not be the first to notice if it shrinks or flails. Chomsky's work is plainly not myth-making; but its presence and sheer authority contribute to the scriptural lore of both sides of the mythic dialectic.
I hope it's clear by now that I have no intention of denying US power, or the hegemony of US interests, or the criminal destruction which regularly ensues. My question is simply: what sort of America is being constructed through the imperial myth-making, and what sort of world? Perhaps the question is moot (certainly the people of Afghanistan and Iraq might consider it so) in light of the very real effects of the foreign policy of Chomsky's "rogue state"; perhaps Todd is right (or the Colin Mason school of disaster almanacs) and a generation from now, oil-less, we'll look on the shattered remains of the empire that never quite was with no more than a "tsk" of Ozymandian nostalgia.
But the foundation myth bears a theological, and thus oblique, relation to the visceral world of falling ordnance. And the people who are busy constructing it are concerned with meaning before action; this is a solidly Manichean project, replete with pestering spirits. And the edifice of empire is not so much resident in the mind (of the neo-con chicken hawks, for instance) as between the minds of the intellectual partisans; perhaps this is what gives the emperor's new trousers such a beguiling weave.
The books I read
This is not an exhaustive list by any means, and does not include countless articles from a variety of sources.
Noam Chomsky: Hegemony and Survival, 9/11, World Orders Old and New
Gore Vidal: Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, Dreaming War
Michael Mann: Incoherent Empire
Fareed Zakaria: The Future of Freedom
John Gray: Al Qaeda and What it Means to be Modern
Mark Curtis: Web of Deceit
Michael Moore: Stupid White Men, Dude Where's My Country?
John Pilger: Hidden Agendas
Goldberg, Goldberg and Greenvale: It's a Free Country: Personal Freedom in America After 9/11
Chalmers Johnson: Blowback
Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber: Weapons of Mass Deception
Arundhati Roy: the Algebra of Infinite Justice
Scott Ritter and William Rivers-Pitt: War on Iraq
Samuel Huntington: The Clash of Civilisations
Tariq Ali: Bush in Babylon
Benjamin Barber: Jihad Vs McWorld
Ziauddin Sardar, Merryl Wyn Davies: Why do People Hate America?
