Chalmers Johnson warns that the United States is replicating the terminal trajectories of both the Roman and Soviet empires through imperial overstretch, systemic corruption, and institutional inability to reform. (7:49)
Roughly 40% of the U.S. defense budget and the entirety of the intelligence budget consist of classified black budget items concealed from the public and most lawmakers. (5:42)
The American empire faces an inevitable hard limit in financial bankruptcy, running historic current account deficits around 5% of GDP while relying on East Asian central banks to finance its debt. (46:35)
The Pentagon operates over 700 acknowledged foreign military bases and roughly 300 secret installations globally, creating widespread anti-American sentiment and blowback. (14:14)
Detailed notes
## Background
Published on YouTube by eon3 on January 23, 2008, this presentation features Chalmers Johnson, author of 'Blowback', 'The Sorrows of Empire', and 'Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic' and president of the Japan Policy Research Institute. The program explores how the United States exhibits the same classic symptoms of imperial decay that brought down the Roman and Soviet empires: overextension, corruption, and systemic resistance to reform.
## TL;DR
Scholar Chalmers Johnson traces the parallels between the fall of the Roman Republic, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the contemporary decline of the American democratic republic. He argues that the abdication of congressional war powers, runaway military spending, and a network of hundreds of foreign bases have turned the United States into a militaristic empire prone to global blowback. Inside the country, this imperial trajectory fosters the four 'sorrows' of empire: perpetual warfare, the loss of constitutional liberties, systemic official deceit, and ultimate financial insolvency. Johnson concludes that spiraling trade deficits, offshored manufacturing, and reliance on foreign capital make an acute economic crisis the most probable catalyst for imperial unraveling.
## Atmosphere & style
The presentation carries the grave, unhurried weight of a scholarly post-mortem delivered by a seasoned insider who sees disaster looming in plain sight. Johnson speaks with dry, biting wit and historical precision, contrasting cool academic detachment with fierce indignation at institutional deceit and constitutional erosion. The atmosphere feels prophetic yet somber, leaving listeners with the unsettling sensation of watching an arrogant superpower march blindly toward inevitable collapse.
## Bulletin
- [07:49](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=469s) Chalmers Johnson warns that the United States is replicating the terminal trajectories of both the Roman and Soviet empires through imperial overstretch, systemic corruption, and institutional inability to reform.
- [05:42](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=342s) Roughly 40% of the U.S. defense budget and the entirety of the intelligence budget consist of classified black budget items concealed from the public and most lawmakers.
- [46:35](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=2795s) The American empire faces an inevitable hard limit in financial bankruptcy, running historic current account deficits around 5% of GDP while relying on East Asian central banks to finance its debt.
- [14:14](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=854s) The Pentagon operates over 700 acknowledged foreign military bases and roughly 300 secret installations globally, creating widespread anti-American sentiment and blowback.
## Key takeaways
- [00:18](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=18s) The transition from the Roman Republic to military dictatorship was driven by overseas expansion, 20-year standing legions, and senatorial refusal to enact land reforms.
- [05:42](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=342s) Congress surrendered its constitutional Article I war powers to the executive branch, transforming into a wealthy rubber stamp reminiscent of the late Roman Senate.
- [07:49](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=469s) The Soviet collapse was not caused by Ronald Reagan or the Strategic Defense Initiative, but by internal economic rigidity, overstretch, and institutional paralysis.
- [11:53](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=713s) Imperial collapse is triggered by three shared catalysts: economic rigidity driven by ideology, overextension provoking blowback, and entrenched domestic vested interests.
- [16:46](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=1006s) Domestic base closures and defense cuts are routinely blocked by bipartisan lawmakers seeking to protect military manufacturing jobs in their districts.
- [23:16](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=1396s) Profligate domestic petroleum consumption and single-occupancy automotive culture reinforce aggressive foreign energy wars and structural policy gridlock.
- [25:29](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=1529s) The $28 billion CIA completely failed to foresee the rapid dissolution of the Soviet Union, having systematically overstated Soviet economic and military strength.
- [28:08](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=1688s) Major U.S. media outlets operate like Soviet state propaganda organs, while Pentagon embedding programs reduce warfare reporting to sentimental public relations vignettes.
- [39:03](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=2343s) The modern all-volunteer military relies on a 'poverty draft' of economically desperate recruits escaping dead-end domestic circumstances rather than republican civic duty.
- [41:39](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=2499s) Johnson outlines the four terminal sorrows of empire: perpetual warfare, loss of civil liberties, pervasive institutional lying, and inevitable financial bankruptcy.
- [41:39](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=2499s) The creation of Northern Command (NORTHCOM) threatens the historic protections of the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act against domestic military policing.
- [53:15](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=3195s) The military-industrial complex operates as state socialism for private defense contractors who receive billions in unmonitored funding without statutory oversight.
- [56:43](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=3403s) Intelligence agencies act as executive private armies engaging in covert destabilization rather than delivering objective analysis.
- [01:00:07](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=3607s) Through global arms sales, troop deployments, and institutions like the School of the Americas, U.S. foreign policy functions as an international protection racket.
## Detailed walkthrough
### [00:18](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=18s) From Citizen Soldiers to Standing Armies: The Roman Republic's Slide into Empire
The discussion opens with an interviewer asking Chalmers Johnson about parallels between modern American hegemony and ancient Rome, noting three elements Johnson previously outlined regarding imperial decline: internal corruption, military overreach, and the inability to reform. Johnson clarifies that those three specific points were his characterization of the Soviet Union, but eagerly dives into the Roman Republic comparison. He explains that the Roman Republic is fundamentally important to the United States because so many core American political concepts were borrowed directly from it. The Republic lasted until 31 BC, when Octavian—Julius Caesar’s grandnephew—consolidated power to become Augustus Caesar, the first Roman emperor and military dictator. Augustus was subsequently followed by Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and Nero, whom Johnson characterizes as among the most awful figures imaginable. As Johnson puts it: “No one in his right mind should ever conceive that the Roman Empire produced good government. Uh it produced uh military dictatorship.”
Johnson recalls that the Founders embedded Rome directly into the foundational fabric of the United States. James Madison, John Jay, and Alexander Hamilton signed their *Federalist Papers* essays defending the Constitution under the collective pseudonym "Publius," after Publius Valerius Publicola, a consul of the early Roman Republic. From Rome, America drew ideas of representative governance, separation of powers, and term limits—as well as the darker accommodation of slavery. In its first two centuries, Roman citizens exercised significant civil rights under elected officials with term limits and strong institutional checks. Crucially, the early Roman legions were citizen-soldiers made up of landowning farmers rather than society's poorest; a citizen could not even be conscripted unless he owned a horse. These men went off to war, returned to march in their triumph through the Roman Forum, and immediately returned to their family farms.
This agrarian republican model broke down as Rome acquired overseas territories across Gaul, Iberia, North Africa, Asia Minor, Greece, and Sicily. Administering and policing this vast territorial expanse necessitated permanent standing armies whose service lasted two decades or more. When these long-serving soldiers demobilized, Italy faced a critical land shortage, and the Roman Senate—dominated by wealthy, conservative landowners—staunchly refused to enact land reform. As a result, the primary loyalty of the troops migrated away from the state and toward their field commanders. These ambitious generals pioneered military populism, epitomized by Julius Caesar, who offered to champion the soldiers' economic interests against conservative elites in exchange for absolute authority. Caesar's trajectory matched later autocrats like Napoleon Bonaparte and Juan Perón, concluding in his assassination on the Ides of March, 44 BC. Johnson marvels at the irony that the American neoconservatives launched the invasion of Iraq around the Ides of March in 2003, seemingly oblivious to the classical warning: "Beware the Ides of March."
```mermaid
flowchart TD
accTitle: The Roman Republic's Imperial Transition
accDescr: Flowchart illustrating how territorial expansion transformed citizen militias into standing armies and led to military dictatorship.
subgraph Republic["Early Roman Republic"]
A["Citizen Militia / Farmers"] --> B["Equites Property Qualifications"]
B --> C["Triumph and Return to the Farm"]
end
subgraph Expansion["Imperial Overreach"]
C --> D["Acquisition of Gaul, Iberia, N. Africa & Greece"]
D --> E["Need for 20-Year Standing Armies"]
end
subgraph Collapse["Institutional Decay"]
E --> F["Demobilization & Land Shortages"]
F --> G["Senate Landowners Block Reform"]
G --> H["Troops Shift Loyalty to Generals"]
H --> I["Military Populism & Caesarism"]
I --> J["Augustus: Dictatorship & Empire (31 BC)"]
end
```
[05:42](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=342s) The Imperial Presidency, Secrecy, and the Abdication of Congress
Looking at contemporary American politics, Johnson argues that the United States is rapidly recreating the systemic failures that doomed the Roman Republic. While the George W. Bush administration might eventually end through electoral defeat or self-inflicted quagmires reminiscent of Lyndon Johnson’s collapse over the Vietnam War, Johnson questions whether any future president from either party can challenge the entrenched power of the Pentagon and intelligence apparatus. Real congressional oversight has become practically impossible because roughly 40 percent of the defense budget, alongside the entirety of the intelligence community budget, is classified black budget material concealed from the public and virtually all lawmakers except one or two senior figures.
Johnson traces a direct parallel between the toothless late Roman Senate and the modern U.S. Congress. In Rome, the Senate devolved into a social club of wealthy patricians who functioned as a rubber stamp for the autocrat. In the United States, a catastrophic abdication occurred in October 2002, when both houses of Congress passed the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq, granting the executive unilateral discretion to wage war, including the potential use of nuclear weapons. Drawing on founding philosophy, Johnson emphasizes: “James Madison, easily the most important author of our Constitution, said that the clause in the Constitution reserving the right to go to war to the elected representatives of the people is the single most important clause in the Constitution. Never ever should such a power be entrusted to a single man.” By surrendering that prerogative, both political parties discarded core constitutional architecture.
- Over 40% of the U.S. defense budget and all intelligence agency budgets are completely classified, rendering meaningful legislative oversight impossible.
- In October 2002, Congress formally surrendered its Article I constitutional war powers to President George W. Bush on a bipartisan basis.
- Late Roman senators retained personal wealth and status while functioning strictly to rubber-stamp the decrees of military rulers.
[07:49](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=469s) Military Populism and the Warnings of Washington, Eisenhower, and Arendt
In his book *The Sorrows of Empire*, Johnson posited that historical precedent pointed toward the emergence of an American military populist. He envisioned a figure stepping forward to champion the interests of the patriotic, undercompensated service members deployed across America's 725 foreign military bases—demanding dictatorial authority in return for protecting their families against entrenched domestic interests. Just two weeks after committing this hypothesis to paper, retired General Wesley Clark entered the 2004 presidential race, prompting Johnson to worry that the shift from republic to empire was moving at "the speed of FedEx." Whereas the Roman Republic took roughly 25 years to fall between the assassination of Julius Caesar and Octavian's victory at Actium, modern communications and institutions accelerate political decay.
Invoking political theorist Hannah Arendt's *The Origins of Totalitarianism*, Johnson observes that tyranny easily outmaneuvers free societies because it operates without obtaining domestic consent, though its ultimate price is the destruction of its own host society. This domestic erosion is precisely what unrestrained American militarism is inflicting upon constitutional norms. Johnson points out that the two most celebrated generals to become president—George Washington and Dwight D. Eisenhower—issued stark warnings about this dynamic in their farewell addresses. Washington warned that large standing armies pose mortal dangers to republican liberty, while Eisenhower famously coined the concept of the "military-industrial complex" in 1961. Johnson notes that Eisenhower originally drafted the phrase as the "military-industrial-congressional complex," but advisers persuaded him to drop the reference to Congress to avoid political blowback. Eisenhower’s central alarm concerned the grave potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power distorting republican self-governance.
Addressing where this institutional distortion leads, Johnson likens himself to Cassandra, joking: “I’m not Cassandra, though the important thing about Cassandra is that she was right. There was something funny in that horse. Uh and Greeks bearing gifts should be looked at very closely. Uh the uh she's one of the few social scientists that ever got it right.” He states that the United States is retracing the exact fatal missteps of the Soviet Union. Drawing on verified insider documents and Russian testimonies, Johnson dismisses the popular myth that the USSR collapsed because of Ronald Reagan or the Strategic Defense Initiative ("Star Wars"). Soviet military planners had thoroughly investigated missile defense and understood that decoys and countermeasures could easily defeat such a shield. The actual causes of Soviet implosion—overreach, systemic corruption, and an inability to reform—are the very crises facing the American republic today.
[11:53](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=713s) The Three Catalysts of Imperial Collapse: Ideology and Overstretch
Chalmers Johnson recalls that Andrei Sakharov was brought out of internal exile in Gorky specifically to address the Soviet Politburo on the Strategic Defense Initiative, delivering blunt advice: “Don't spend a nickel on it.” Reflecting on the end of the Cold War, Johnson argues that the Soviet Union was ultimately destroyed by three fatal dynamics, each of which has a direct parallel in early 21st-century America.
The first cause is extreme economic rigidity driven by ideology—an entrenched inability to reform economic institutions because dogma stands in the way. Whereas Marxism-Leninism prevented Mikhail Gorbachev from improving Russian economic efficiency, the United States is crippled by free-market ideology and unchecked corporate corruption. Johnson points to an economic landscape where the stock exchange operates less as an honest market and more as a syndicate of crooks, where worker pension funds are looted, and where corporate executives plunder profits, citing scandals such as Enron, Tyco, and WorldCom.
The second cause is imperial overstretch. Just as the Roman Republic discovered, an empire that continuously expands accumulates too many commitments, makes too many enemies, and invites blowback. Recalling September 11, 2001, Johnson shares a personal story: shortly after the planes hit the towers, his publisher in New York phoned him from West 18th Street—close enough to Ground Zero to see the chaos unfolding. She told him, “Blowback big time just hit. And I'm getting out of here, but you want to turn on the TV.” Johnson observes that when the attacks first occurred, it was by no means obvious that the perpetrators were from the Islamic world. Given the sheer scale of American covert and overt violence across decades, retribution could just as easily have come from Latin America due to Operation Condor in Chile, Argentina, Brazil, or Ecuador; from East Timor or Indonesia; from Okinawa; or from Greece.
```mermaid
flowchart TD
accTitle: The Cycle of Imperial Decline
accDescr: Diagram illustrating Chalmers Johnson's three parallels of imperial collapse linking commitments, economic rigidity, and institutional paralysis.
subgraph IdeologicalRigidity["1. Economic Rigidity"]
A["Doctrinal Rigidity<br/>(Marxism-Leninism / Free-Market Dogma)"]
B["Corruption & Decay<br/>(Enron, WorldCom, Looted Pensions)"]
A --> B
end
subgraph ImperialOverstretch["2. Imperial Overstretch"]
C["Global Commitments<br/>(700+ Foreign Bases)"]
D["Blowback & Insolvency<br/>(Enemies Created Worldwide)"]
C --> D
end
subgraph InabilityToReform["3. Inability to Reform"]
E["Vested Domestic Interests<br/>(Military-Industrial Complex)"]
F["Paralysis / Collapse<br/>(Arrival of Nemesis)"]
E --> F
end
B --> D
D --> E
```
[14:14](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=854s) Anti-American Sentiment and the Geography of the Base Empire
Expanding on the sheer breadth of global resentment, Johnson highlights Greece and South Korea as arguably the two most anti-American democracies on earth. In the Greek case, the public has never forgotten the period between 1967 and 1974, when the CIA installed and backed the brutal regime of the Greek colonels—one of the most repressive Cold War client regimes supported by either superpower. With the 2004 Summer Olympics scheduled for Athens the following year, Johnson half-jokingly warns American travelers:
> “If I were an American tourist, I'd think about it, too. We'll see if you have an alternative passport, it wouldn't be bad to use it. If you happen to have a Mexican one or a Brazilian one or something like that.”
This animosity is driven directly by the military footprint that pushes empires toward fiscal insolvency. The U.S. Department of Defense openly acknowledges over 700 military bases on foreign soil, but Johnson points out there are roughly 300 additional installations kept completely secret. These unacknowledged or obscured outposts include intelligence installations, sprawling hubs like Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo, and facilities in the United Kingdom deliberately disguised as Royal Air Force (RAF) stations to hide that they are functioning U.S. military bases.
Johnson likens imperialism to the saber-toothed tiger: evolutionary overspecialization cannot simply run backward. He invokes an anecdote from the Watergate scandal, when Richard Nixon’s chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, chastised White House counsel John Dean for cooperating with congressional investigators:
> “Nixon's chief of staff Haldeman one day denounced John Dean for speaking too freely about the felonies committed by the president in Congress, and he said, 'John, you know, once you squeezed all the toothpaste out of the tube, it's very hard to get it back in.'”
Applying this metaphor to American foreign policy, Johnson contends that the empire has pushed commitments so far out across the globe that it cannot pull them back.
[16:46](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=1006s) The Inability to Reform and Domestic Vested Interests
The third factor sealing an empire’s fate is institutional paralysis—the utter inability to reform. As an international relations scholar, Johnson notes that history offers virtually no examples of empires that stepped down gracefully without fighting to preserve their dominion. Gorbachev’s Soviet Union was a rare partial exception: Gorbachev was willing to dismantle the satellite system in Eastern Europe—letting East Germany and other Warsaw Pact nations go in hopes of integrating Russia into Europe alongside France and Germany—only to be thwarted by hardline vested interests embedded within the Cold War Soviet apparatus.
The United States suffers from the exact same institutional lock-in. Anyone attempting serious structural reform collides immediately with immense domestic vested interests. While Johnson notes his personal disdain for Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, he admits agreeing with Rumsfeld's stated intention to shut down unneeded military installations:
> “We have 6,000 military bases in the United States alone. He has said he'd like to close a quarter of the Army bases and a third of the Air bases. I tell you, every time he even opens his mouth like that, you get a firestorm on Capitol Hill from extremely liberal senators.”
Lawmakers from progressive states like California and Washington aggressively fight base closures because their constituents depend on defense manufacturing for their livelihoods. In Johnson's caustic phrasing, politicians insist their communities must keep the “lovely little jobs” of producing depleted uranium munitions and multi-megaton nuclear warheads.
- The Pentagon acknowledges over 700 foreign bases, while roughly 300 additional intelligence and allied-disguised installations remain hidden.
- The domestic U.S. military infrastructure comprises approximately 6,000 bases nationwide.
- Attempts to close domestic bases face entrenched bipartisan congressional resistance due to local economic dependence on weapons production.
[18:54](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=1134s) Grassroots Resistance, Global Dissent, and the Looming Nemesis
Johnson argues that these vested interests cannot easily be overcome unless the American public experiences an unprecedented renaissance in civic consciousness and reclaims control of governance. He points to the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle as an unexpected proof of civic power. Despite mainstream media dismissals of the demonstrators as mere hooligans and anarchists, the movement unmasked the core deception of corporate globalization: institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization (WTO) are fundamentally undemocratic fronts. Headquartered at 1818 H Street in Washington, D.C., within hailing distance of the U.S. Department of the Treasury, they operate as covert arms of American state policy disguised as neutral international bodies.
This civic resistance quickly crossed borders. In the lead-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, polling revealed that roughly 80 percent of the population across democratic nations stood opposed to the United States. While political leaders such as José María Aznar in Spain, Silvio Berlusconi in Italy, and Tony Blair in the United Kingdom ignored their electorates—Johnson dismissively refers to Blair as a “poodle”—the public worldwide had become educated, mobilized, and distrustful of imperial policy. Should the public continue educating itself via the internet and independent media, a democratic restoration remains possible; without it, Johnson warns that retribution is guaranteed:
> “Barring that, I fear, like the Soviet Union from 1989 to 1991, we are—Nemesis, the goddess of vengeance, the goddess of the punisher of hubris and arrogance awaits her meeting with us and awaits rather impatiently.”
[21:29](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=1289s) What a Democratic Rescue Plan Would Require
Speculating on what an aroused, enlightened populace would need to accomplish if a last-minute democratic rescue were still possible, Johnson details the fundamental institutional repairs required:
- **Electoral and Structural Overhaul:** Overhauling corrupted campaign and election laws, and confronting structural inequities like the Electoral College and constitutional seat apportionments where low-population states wield disproportionate senate power (noting that North Dakota contains fewer residents than the city of Chula Vista, California).
- **Legislative Reassertion:** Reclaiming the Congress as an authentic representative body and using its constitutional power of the purse to systematically defund runaway national security institutions.
- **Dismantling the Defense State:** Slashing funding to covert intelligence agencies and the Department of Defense, which Johnson describes not as a genuine defense agency, but as an unchecked rival government operating on the south bank of the Potomac River that has steadily invaded domestic life.
- **Confronting the Military-Petroleum Complex:** Reining in the corporate-military alliance that dictates foreign energy wars and resource grabs.
[23:16](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=1396s) Resource Exhaustion and the Vested Interests of Empire
Chalmers Johnson warns that the current imperial trajectory will collide directly with the finite reality of world petroleum, which American society consumes with reckless abandon. Pointing to everyday culture, he highlights how figures like the governor of California take open pride in driving vehicles that burn fuel at the rate of a military tank, specifically the General Motors Hummer. Beyond absolute depletion, Johnson stresses that rising global competitors intend to use petroleum far more efficiently than North America does, but will adamantly demand their rightful share rather than standing by while it is squandered into greenhouse gases.
```mermaid
flowchart TD
accTitle: Resource Depletion and Imperial Inertia
accDescr: Flow showing how excessive petroleum consumption meets vested domestic interests, blocking reform and accelerating imperial collapse.
subgraph Resource_Crisis["Ecological & Economic Wall"]
A["Profligate Petroleum Consumption<br/>(e.g., GM Hummers, solo commutes)"] --> B["Finite World Supply &<br/>Global Competitor Demands"]
B --> C["Greenhouse Gas Emissions & Conflict"]
end
subgraph Domestic_Gridlock["Structural Resistance"]
D["Vested Corporate Interests<br/>(Profits, Jobs, Infrastructure)"] --> E["Cultural Attachment to the Car"]
E --> F["Inability to Reform Internally"]
end
C & F --> G["Imperial Decline & Vulnerability to Loss"]
```
Drawing an explicit parallel to the demise of the Soviet Union, Johnson warns that attempting to pivot away from this arrangement will provoke intense resistance from domestic vested interests. Enormous corporate profits, millions of jobs, and deeply ingrained cultural habits—such as viewing the automobile as an essential component of individual identity—bind the public to an unsustainable status quo. He remarks that Southern California freeways are congested every evening with single-occupancy vehicles capable of seating ten passengers. While this pattern could theoretically be reformed, history shows that such deep-seated structural friction typically culminates in systemic conflict that the United States is ill-prepared to survive. As Johnson reflects:
> “There's nowhere written that the United States must go on forever as the hegemon dominating the rest of the world.”
[25:29](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=1529s) The Speed of Soviet Collapse and the CIA’s Blindness
Johnson points out that historical collapse often unfolds with shocking speed. Had an analyst in 1985 predicted that the Soviet Union would vanish within five years, listeners would have dismissed them as being high on marijuana grown around the UC Berkeley campus. Yet, quoting Vladimir Nabokov’s remark on Nikolai Gogol, Johnson declares: “It's gone.” The Russian Federation that replaced it is fundamentally diminished, holding a gross national product comparable to that of the Netherlands. The empire shattered rapidly between 1989 and 1991, triggered by the decision not to oppose the fall of the Berlin Wall and Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of *glasnost*.
When the Soviet archives were flung open and the true horrors of the Stalinist gulags were laid bare, the domestic population was sickened, tearing the union apart as constituent republics raced for independence—a process Johnson dryly muses would be akin to Texas seceding today. Crucially, the $28 billion Central Intelligence Agency, tasked above all with studying the Soviet threat throughout the 1980s, completely missed the economic disintegration. Johnson aligns himself with the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan's assessment that the CIA should have been dismantled:
> “I would have thought it would have been better not to have had it than to listen to their lunatic overstatements of the threat of the Soviet Navy, the threat of Soviet weapons of strategic weapons, of how we were going to break their back economically with money, baby Star Wars, and things of this sort.”
- **The Myth of Reagan’s Victory**: Johnson argues that the Soviet Union did not collapse because the U.S. outspent it on initiatives like "Star Wars"; it collapsed under its own internal rot, as historical empires routinely do.
- **Speed of Ruin**: The dissolution happened over barely two years (1989–1991), proving that superpower collapse is sudden rather than gradual.
- **Economic Diminution**: Post-Soviet Russia emerged with an economy merely the size of the Netherlands, underscoring how drastically its reach had shriveled.
[28:08](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=1688s) Constitutional Decay, Imperial Hubris, and Media Control
Turning to the domestic scene, Johnson refutes critics who ask whether he views American collapse as strictly inevitable, retorting that he cannot fathom what evidence exists for the opposing view. He rejects the Apollo-like assumption of American exceptionalism that claims immunity from the historical laws of hubris, overstretch, and decay. Under Attorney General John Ashcroft and the Bush administration, Johnson asserts that the Fourth and Sixth Amendments have been rendered dead letters. The executive branch has arrogated the power to designate any person a "bad guy" and lock them indefinitely in the Charleston, South Carolina naval brig without formal charges, legal counsel, or the right to confront witnesses.
Johnson attributes the public's acquiescence to a consolidated commercial entertainment apparatus that functions like state propaganda, comparing major networks—CBS owned by Westinghouse/Viacom-era corporate ties, NBC by General Electric, ABC by Disney, and Fox News—to the Soviet newspaper *Pravda*. Recalling his extensive travels in the Soviet Union during the Brezhnev era in 1978, Johnson notes that ordinary citizens learned to treat official media purely as an index of party dogma:
> “And as the Russians used to say, 'No one reads Pravda to get the news. You read Pravda to get the line. You get the news from people you trust, from your own little radio, from samizdat, from messages that friends transmit to you.' I no longer read the New York Times for the news. I read it for the line.”
[31:33](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=1893s) The 70/30 Public Split, Independent Information, and Pentagon Psyops
According to contemporary polling cited by Johnson, the American public is split roughly 70/30. While about 70 percent back the president, the imperial posture, and the armed forces—despite misgivings about soldiers dying for corporate oil or George W. Bush’s political fortunes—the remaining 30 percent recognize that the country is racing in the wrong direction. That dissenting minority relies on alternative channels: the internet, British newspapers like *The Guardian* and *The Independent*, *The Nation* magazine, and columnists like Paul Krugman. While 30 percent represents a potent political base, challenging imperial trajectory would demand a total overhaul of the country's information architecture.
Johnson underscores the immense geopolitical power of media concentration by citing the April 2002 coup attempt against Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, where five out of six television stations were private entities fiercely dedicated to toppling the government. In the United States, commercial conformity reigns across the major broadcast networks, alongside the unapologetic political agenda pushed by Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News. When an audience member interjects that contemporary journalism reflects a blending of psychological operations (psyops) and public media relations, Johnson agrees completely. He argues that the Pentagon’s invention of "embedding" reporters within frontline combat units was designed to manipulate coverage, reducing journalists to producing sympathetic human-interest sketches about terrified soldiers while insulating them from the broader, brutal truths of the military campaigns.
[34:58](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=2098s) Media Control, the Pentagon, and the Heritage of Symbolic Manipulation
Reflecting on the lessons the military establishment took away from the Vietnam War, Chalmers Johnson argues that the Pentagon’s foremost conclusion was the necessity of tightly controlling journalistic coverage. This management of the press evolved sequentially: beginning with the 1983 invasion of Grenada, the military instituted the "pool system," where independent reporters were barred from entering conflict zones and could only observe what an escorting lieutenant colonel permitted them to see. By the 2003 invasion of Iraq, this strategy matured into "embedding," culminating in the Pentagon’s efforts to establish its own dedicated television apparatus to broadcast an sanitized version of the war—showing troops from the 4th Infantry Division benevolently patting Iraqi children on the head to depict American forces as benevolent missionaries.
For Johnson, this choreography of public perception echoes the totalitarian techniques pioneered by Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, and filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl. Recalling Riefenstahl’s documentary of the 1934 Nuremberg Rally, Johnson describes the chilling pageantry of Rudolf Hess standing before an ocean of swastikas declaring *"Mein Führer, Sieg Heil"* before Hitler stepped forward to deliver his address. Johnson warns that modern American governance has embraced this heritage of manufactured perception, pointing out: “This was when we really did begin to discover the world of not propaganda, the world of manipulation of the public through symbols and in symbolic control, which I think we suffer from it in the United States today in an extremely advanced manner.”
- **The Evolution of War Coverage**: From unhindered reporting in Vietnam to the pool system in Grenada, to embedded reporters, to direct Pentagon-produced television programming.
- **The Propaganda Paradigm**: The deliberate shift from traditional propaganda to the sophisticated manipulation of mass sentiment through orchestrated visual symbols.
[36:52](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=2212s) Senator Robert Byrd as the American Cicero
Johnson identifies Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia as the closest modern counterpart to Cicero, the ancient champion of the Roman Senate who defended republican institutions against Caesarism. Like Cicero, who stood on the Senate floor invoking ancient republican virtues, Byrd routinely delivers speeches marked by classical rhetoric and deep constitutional fidelity, articulating the institutional checks designed by the American founders to prevent militarism and autocracy. Yet Johnson observes that Byrd’s warnings go unheeded because he is an aging legislator from an impoverished state. Whenever Byrd speaks, C-SPAN cameras regularly pan to reveal an utterly deserted Senate chamber.
Beyond Byrd’s isolation, Johnson identifies a fundamental philosophical disagreement between them regarding whether the public will ever awaken to this crisis. Byrd maintains faith that the American populace simply needs exposure to the truth to rise up and restore the republic. Johnson does not share this optimism: “But Byrd, differing from me, believes that the American public simply awaits its moment of revelation of what's been going on. That once the citizen becomes well informed, begins to gather information on the degree to which he is being sabotaged by our ersatz political leaders, that they will then the citizen will rise up, retake the government, will purify the place. I would like to think he's right. I don't myself actually believe so.”
```mermaid
flowchart TD
accTitle: Senator Byrd versus Chalmers Johnson on Republican Renewal
accDescr: A comparison showing Byrd's optimistic view of citizen awakening versus Johnson's skeptical view of imperial decline.
subgraph Byrd ["Senator Robert Byrd's View"]
B1["Constitutional Warnings"] --> B2["Information Reaches Public"]
B2 --> B3["Citizen Awakening"]
B3 --> B4["Purification of the Republic"]
end
subgraph Johnson ["Chalmers Johnson's Realism"]
J1["Deserted Senate Floor"] --> J2["Symbolic Manipulation & Secrecy"]
J2 --> J3["Public Inertia & Propaganda"]
J3 --> J4["Irreversible Imperial Decay"]
end
```
[39:03](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=2343s) A Feline Interlude and the Reality of the "Poverty Draft"
The discussion pauses briefly when Johnson’s cat, Sheila, wanders onto the set. Picking up the cat, he affectionately notes that she is an experienced television guest and identifies the breed as a Russian Blue—explaining that despite the name, they are English cats historically kept as rat-catchers on merchant ships sailing to Murmansk. Johnson then transitions into the core themes of his book *The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic*, examining military overstretch and the fundamental transformation of the armed forces since the abolition of the draft.
Johnson contrasts the modern all-volunteer military with the citizen-soldier armies of World War II, the Korean War, and Vietnam, where military service was an inescapable civic obligation. Today, enlistees are driven primarily by economic desperation—a dynamic widely characterized as a "poverty draft." Young recruits enlist not anticipating combat, but to escape economic dead ends or secure prerequisites for civil service careers. For instance, aspiring police officers in Atlanta who lack college credits often discover that veteran status waives the requirement; consequently, units like the 2nd Infantry Division stationed along the Korean Demilitarized Zone are filled with recruits using service merely to take the police exam. Johnson underscores this with the candid testimony of Private Jessica Lynch, who was captured near Nasiriyah: “When she was asked why did you join the army? She says, 'I couldn't even get a job at Walmart in Palestine, West Virginia. I joined the army to get the hell out of Palestine, West Virginia.' I thought, ah here comes the voice of the genuine ranks telling us what's going on in these things.”
[41:39](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=2499s) The Four Sorrows of Empire
In the concluding portion of *The Sorrows of Empire*, Johnson details the four structural crises confronting an overextended American republic. The first sorrow is perpetual warfare, spawned by the doctrine of preventive war and the systematic abandonment of multilateral treaties; conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq delivered swift tactical victories that immediately disintegrated into open-ended, bloody insurgencies. The second sorrow is the erosion of civil liberties, as governments exploit internally manufactured crises to persuade citizens to surrender constitutional protections in exchange for an illusion of security, exemplified by the domestic measures championed by Attorney General John Ashcroft.
```mermaid
flowchart LR
accTitle: The Four Sorrows of Empire
accDescr: Flowchart illustrating Chalmers Johnson's four structural crises of American imperial decline.
A["1. Perpetual Warfare<br/>(Preventive wars, insurgencies)"] --> B["2. Loss of Civil Liberties<br/>(Crisis manipulation, Ashcroft)"]
B --> C["3. Institutional Lying<br/>(Secrecy, NORTHCOM, Posse Comitatus)"]
C --> D["4. Bankruptcy<br/>(Economic collapse, terminal decline)"]
```
The third sorrow is the institutionalization of government deception backed by state secrecy, which destroys all democratic credibility. Johnson cites Secretary of State Colin Powell’s February 5, 2003 address to the United Nations Security Council, where Powell presented fabricated intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction with CIA Director George Tenet seated prominently behind him. This erosion of truth extends into the domestic sphere, where the Department of Justice claims to defend constitutional rights while expanding clandestine surveillance. Johnson highlights the establishment of Northern Command (NORTHCOM) under General Ralph Eberhart, marking the first domestic military command in American history—a development intentionally avoided during World War II to prevent military rule. When military officials suggested modifying the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act to expand domestic policing powers, Johnson responded sharply: “I want to say, General Eberhart, you don't really realize that that law was enacted to protect us not from civil disorder, but from you, from people like you in this country.”
The fourth and most decisive sorrow is impending bankruptcy. While the first three sorrows unravel republican institutions and transform the United States into an autocratic garrison state reminiscent of the late Roman Empire, fiscal ruin represents an unavoidable, hard physical limit that an overextended empire cannot evade.
- **The Four Sorrows**:
1. *Perpetual Warfare*: Preventive military interventions yielding endless insurgencies.
2. *Loss of Civil Liberties*: Exploitation of security crises to dismantle domestic legal rights.
3. *Institutionalized Lying and Secrecy*: Total loss of public trust in official statements and domestic militarization via NORTHCOM.
4. *Bankruptcy*: Uncontainable financial insolvency resulting from overseas military overstretch.
- **The Posse Comitatus Act (1878)**: Post-Reconstruction statute designed explicitly to bar the federal military from exercising domestic law-enforcement powers.
[46:35](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=2795s) The Looming Bankruptcy and Global Currency Vulnerabilities
Chalmers Johnson points out that the Roman Empire eventually collapsed due to external enemies and an internal Christian transformation, but the collapse facing the contemporary United States will stem directly from financial insolvency. Bankruptcy instantly creates a severe crisis that nobody can control, regardless of whether citizens care about or have even heard of the Bill of Rights. To illustrate the scale of this danger, Johnson contrasts the United States with the British Empire prior to World War I. Great Britain held a current account surplus of roughly 7% of GDP, meaning it was extraordinarily wealthy and could easily afford costly blunders like the Boer War. The United States, by contrast, is running the greatest trade deficits in recorded economic history, reaching several percentage points of GDP.
Because America consumes vastly more than it produces, it relies entirely on foreign savers—primarily in East Asia, including Japan, Southeast Asia, and China—to finance its deficits. These countries have traditionally treated the dollar as a safe haven due to its imperial status as the global reserve currency. However, that safety is evaporating rapidly as the euro strengthens. Noting that the exchange rate recently hit 1.25 dollars per euro, Johnson jokes that while he is delighted to receive book royalties in euros, he would dread converting dollars to pay hotel bills in Bologna or Milan.
Should global savers conclude that the American economy is fundamentally mismanaged and move their capital to the euro, the consequences would be catastrophic. Johnson warns that global investors have plenty of reasons to lose faith, pointing out that corruption has shaken the mutual fund industry and that CalPERS (the California Public Employees' Retirement System)—one of the largest public pension funds in the world—is suing the New York Stock Exchange over corrupt practices. If foreign creditors divert their funds to euros or withhold them, the American stock market would collapse into a brutal recession, forcing the United States to fund its massive external debts entirely through domestic savings.
“To do that, the interest rates would have to go up to Jimmy Carter levels, 21, 22%.”
[50:15](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=3015s) Finance Capitalism and Unsustainable Military Deficits
Johnson stresses that the United States is running trade deficits around 5% of GDP, driven in large part by its heavy dependence on foreign oil imported from Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, and elsewhere. At the same time, federal spending has spiraled out of control. In November 2003, the president signed a record-setting defense budget of $401 billion, which did not even incorporate the additional $150 billion appropriated separately for the war in Iraq. Denouncing the administration's leaders as profligate rather than fiscally conservative, Johnson observes that America has abandoned basic production in favor of financial manipulation:
“What we do is we manipulate money these days. We don't manufacture very much stuff.”
American companies have shifted their manufacturing overseas to Puebla in Mexico, China, Bangladesh, Malaysia, and Taiwan; practically no computers are manufactured in the United States today. Quoting Herbert Stein, the former Republican chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, who famously stated that “things that can't go on forever don't,” Johnson warns that the current debt trajectory must inevitably crack. When the nation is fully bled dry, it risks the fate of an indebted gambler in Las Vegas who tells a casino boss he cannot pay—a blunder that leaves people buried in the desert.
- The official U.S. defense budget reached $401 billion in late 2003, excluding $150 billion in supplemental funding for Iraq.
- U.S. manufacturing has been broadly offshored to Mexico, China, Malaysia, Taiwan, and Bangladesh.
- Renouncing sovereign debt is an irreversible move that turns an empire into an international pauper unable to borrow again.
[53:15](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=3195s) The Military-Industrial Complex as State Socialism
Militarism and imperialism produce no economic wealth; they represent sheer expenditure and expansion without profit. Johnson characterizes the military-industrial complex as a form of state socialism that has nothing in common with genuine free enterprise. It operates with a single customer—the federal government—which prioritizes product effectiveness rather than cost efficiency or getting its money's worth. For example, Congress allocates an unmonitored $8 billion to $9 billion budget for missile defense directly to the Department of Defense, which then convenes with contractors like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Teledyne to decide how to disburse the funds without any strict statutory oversight.
This arrangement violates the constitutional requirement of regular, transparent accounting for public expenditures—the very mechanism designed to maintain the separation of powers by allowing citizens, through their representatives, to oversee the executive branch. Johnson traces the death of this accountability back to World War II, when the Manhattan Project created the precedent for a completely secret "black budget." Although post-Watergate congressional reforms created oversight committees where trusted senators could inspect certain programs, the Secretary of Defense can still unilaterally declare any project classified on national security grounds. This executive secrecy is beyond the jurisdiction of any court and is determined solely by uniformed officers inside the Pentagon.
```mermaid
flowchart TD
accTitle: U.S. Imperial Economic Breakdown
accDescr: Flowchart showing how unchecked military spending, offshoring, and secrecy lead to dollar vulnerability and systemic crisis.
subgraph Domestic["Domestic Economic Realities"]
A["Offshored Manufacturing & Finance Capitalism"]
B["Massive Trade Deficit (5% of GDP)"]
C["Skyrocketing Pentagon & War Budgets"]
end
subgraph Crisis["Financial Tipping Point"]
F["Foreign Savers (East Asia) Subsidize Deficits"]
G["Loss of Faith in Mismanaged Dollar / Shift to Euro"]
H["Stock Market Collapse, Soaring Interest Rates (20%+) & Crisis"]
end
A --> B
C --> D
D --> E
B --> F
F --> G
G --> H
```
“It is more than likely that the American empire will... its unraveling will begin as a result of an economic crisis rather than over any of the things that actually concern me more.”
[56:43](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=3403s) The Deep State: Militaries, Intelligence Agencies, and Covert Power
An audience member asks Johnson about the conventional model of the world—which views civil society, business, and government as the three legs of a global stool—suggesting instead that the transnational military establishment, the intelligence community, and organized crime act as equal or even more powerful players. Johnson strongly agrees, noting that this dynamic is precisely what he explores in *The Sorrows of Empire*.
Drawing on his personal experience as a former consultant to the CIA's Office of National Estimates, Johnson demystifies the popular conception of what spy agencies actually do. He argues that the public misunderstands the fundamental nature of these organizations, emphasizing that their primary role is not providing objective analysis, but serving as covert instruments of executive power:
“Intelligence organizations don't do intelligence. They're private armies of executives.”
[57:49](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=3469s) Covert Operations and the Overlap with Organized Crime
In the Central Intelligence Agency, clandestine operations completely dominate genuine intelligence gathering. Chalmers Johnson emphasizes that the tail wags the dog: although the intelligence provided by the agency has repeatedly proven worthless in numerous cases, that failure does not stop government funds from continuing to flow into covert budgets. This dynamic seamlessly intersects with the realm of organized crime. The agency's core clandestine repertoire—overthrowing sovereign governments, planting agents provocateurs to incite riots, having snipers kill participants, and subsequently blaming the targeted regime for murdering innocent bystanders—is standard operating procedure.
Johnson points out that this deceptive tactic has been deployed repeatedly throughout modern history, from Jakarta to the 2002 coup attempt in Caracas, Venezuela. He highlights the absurdity of media figures like Dan Rather taking such propaganda at face value and broadcasting that innocent bystanders were gunned down by thugs of Hugo Chávez's regime. This same playbook was executed against Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973. It directly mirrors John F. Kennedy's administration recruiting known mobsters to assassinate Fidel Castro, an arrangement engineered not to avoid the moral stain of political murder, but simply to avoid pulling the trigger directly.
```mermaid
flowchart TD
accTitle: Clandestine Operations Playbook
accDescr: Flowchart illustrating the recurring CIA strategy of proxy violence and plausible deniability.
subgraph DirectMethods ["Plausible Deniability Architecture"]
A["CIA Directives & Funding"] --> B["Local Proxies / Military Assets"]
B --> C["Covert Violence & Provocations"]
end
subgraph ExecutionExamples ["Historical Precedents"]
C --> D["Snipers Incite Riots / Kill Bystanders<br/>(Jakarta, Caracas, Chile 1973)"]
C --> E["Proxy Strikes<br/>(Peruvian Air Force shootdown)"]
C --> F["Targeted Killings<br/>(Mob contracts, Phoenix Program)"]
end
subgraph MediaEcho ["Official Narrative"]
D --> G["Blame Targeted Host Government"]
G --> H["Domestic Media Amplification"]
end
```
Another recurring American mechanism is operating through a foreign, complicit military service where American handlers issue the orders while local personnel perform the dirty work. Johnson cites the incident in Peru where a missionary plane carrying American Baptists was interdicted by a CIA-directed surveillance craft, which then summoned the Peruvian Air Force to shoot the aircraft down. He links this model directly to the Phoenix Program during the Vietnam War, under which thousands of suspected targets were systematically assassinated through similar proxy structures.
- The intelligence produced by the CIA is routinely worthless, yet funding for clandestine programs remains uninterrupted.
- Staged provocations involving sniper fire have been used to manufacture pretexts against targeted governments from Indonesia to Latin America.
- Collaborations between intelligence agencies and organized crime syndicates allow the state to dodge the direct onus of pulling the trigger.
- The shootdown of the Baptist missionary plane in Peru exemplifies the practice of utilizing local military forces as proxies for CIA commands.
---
[01:00:07](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=3607s) The School of the Americas and Global Protection Rackets
Johnson turns to what he describes as one of the country's most flagrant scandals: the School of the Americas (located at Fort Benning, Georgia), where for decades the United States has trained thousands of Latin American military personnel in methods of state-sponsored terrorism. Recommending the watchdog organization School of the Americas Watch (SOAW), he notes that citizens can research notorious figures like Vladimiro Montesinos, the deposed Peruvian intelligence chief. Montesinos was not just an attendee; he was invited back to instruct twice because of his proficiency in orchestrating state terror during the brutal conflicts in Guatemala, Nicaragua, and El Salvador throughout the 1980s.
Looking at these global activities, Johnson observes that the US government has essentially displaced traditional organized crime:
> “So, that one begins to wonder what is left for organized crime since we're we've taken it over with arm sales with the intimidation of population the protection racket.”
Just as Chicago mobsters once coerced businesses into paying for protection from the mobsters themselves, modern American foreign policy in approximately 130 of the 170 United Nations member states functions as a global protection racket. When populations overseas encounter the United States today, they do not meet diplomats from the State Department, representatives from the Agency for International Development (AID), or even commercial businesspeople. Instead, they encounter uniformed Special Forces troops. Ordinary people inevitably deduce that the United States relies on military coercion rather than diplomacy or persuasion to achieve its aims.
This disconnect captures the essence of "blowback"—the profound gulf between what Americans imagine they are accomplishing abroad and what people on the receiving end actually experience. In his closing judgment, Johnson offers a bleak assessment of how the empire is regarded internationally:
> “I think today the demise of the American empire would be no more regretted in the world than was the demise of the Soviet empire which was not regretted anywhere.”
- The School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia, has spent decades schooling Latin American security personnel in torture and state-terror tactics.
- Vladimiro Montesinos, the former Peruvian intelligence chief, served as an instructor at the School of the Americas on two separate occasions.
- United States operations across roughly 130 sovereign states operate on the logic of a mob protection racket enforced by arms sales and military threats.
- Visible American foreign presence has shifted almost entirely from diplomatic and development personnel to uniformed Special Forces soldiers.
## Notable quotes
> [56:43](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=3403s) Intelligence organizations don't do intelligence. They're private armies of executives. — Chalmers Johnson
> [01:00:07](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=3607s) I think today the demise of the American empire would be no more regretted in the world than was the demise of the Soviet empire which was not regretted anywhere. — Chalmers Johnson
> [23:16](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=1396s) There's nowhere written that the United States must go on forever as the hegemon dominating the rest of the world. — Chalmers Johnson
> [28:08](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=1688s) I no longer read the New York Times for the news. I read it for the line. — Chalmers Johnson
## Mentioned
Chalmers Johnson, Augustus Caesar, Julius Caesar, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero, Publius Valerius Publicola, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, Federalist Papers, Napoleon Bonaparte, Juan Perón, George W. Bush, Lyndon Johnson, Pentagon, Wesley Clark, Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, The Sorrows of Empire, George Washington, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan, Strategic Defense Initiative, Andrei Sakharov, Mikhail Gorbachev, Enron, Tyco, WorldCom, Operation Condor, Camp Bondsteel, H.R. Haldeman, John Dean, Richard Nixon, Donald Rumsfeld, International Monetary Fund, World Bank, World Trade Organization, José María Aznar, Silvio Berlusconi, Tony Blair, General Motors, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Central Intelligence Agency, John Ashcroft, Pravda, The New York Times, The Guardian, The Independent, The Nation, Paul Krugman, Hugo Chávez, Fox News, Rupert Murdoch, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, Leni Riefenstahl, Rudolf Hess, Robert Byrd, Cicero, C-SPAN, Jessica Lynch, Colin Powell, United Nations Security Council, George Tenet, Northern Command (NORTHCOM), Ralph Eberhart, Posse Comitatus Act, CalPERS, New York Stock Exchange, Jimmy Carter, Herbert Stein, Council of Economic Advisers, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Teledyne, Manhattan Project, Office of National Estimates, Dan Rather, Salvador Allende, John F. Kennedy, Fidel Castro, Phoenix Program, School of the Americas, School of the Americas Watch (SOAW), Vladimiro Montesinos, United States Agency for International Development (AID)
## Video description
Chalmers Johnson, author of Blowback, Sorrows of Empire and Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic , talks about the similarities in the decline of the Roman and Soviet empires and the signs that the U.S. empire is exhibiting the same symptoms: overextension, corruption and the inability to reform.
Chalmers Johnson is president of the Japan Policy Research Institute, a non-profit research and public affairs organization devoted to public education concerning Japan and international relations in the Pacific. http://www.jpri.org/
Chalmers Johnson argues that the United States is replicating the systemic decline of both the Roman Republic and the Soviet Union, driven by overseas military overstretch, institutional secrecy, and mounting financial deficits that threaten terminal economic collapse.
Imperial Precedents: Rome, the USSR, and Caesarism (0:18)
Johnson traces American decline to historical precursors, specifically the transition of the Roman Republic into an autocratic empire. Rome's initial republican model relied on citizen-soldiers who farmed land and served temporary enlistments under elected officials. As Rome conquered expansive territories in Gaul, Iberia, and Greece, maintaining control required standing legions serving 20-year terms. When the patrician Senate refused land reform for returning veterans, soldiers transferred their allegiance to populist field commanders such as Julius Caesar, culminating in Augustus establishing a military dictatorship in 31 BC. Johnson warns that the United States risks generating its own military populism as political decay accelerates.
Johnson also rejects the conventional narrative that the Soviet Union collapsed because of Ronald Reagan or the Strategic Defense Initiative. Citing Soviet archival records and figures like Andrei Sakharov, Johnson contends that Soviet planners easily devised countermeasures against missile shields. Instead, the USSR imploded rapidly between 1989 and 1991 due to ideological economic rigidity, imperial overstretch, and domestic inability to reform—flaws Johnson insists the United States now shares.
Constitutional Abdication, Secrecy, and Domestic Control (5:42)
American republican governance is being systematically hollowed out by executive expansion and legislative surrender. Johnson argues that Congress committed a catastrophic abdication of its core Article I responsibilities in October 2002 by granting President George W. Bush unilateral discretion to wage war. Real legislative oversight has vanished because approximately 40 percent of the defense budget and all intelligence spending are classified black budgets concealed from lawmakers and the public.
Domestically, Johnson contends that constitutional protections are unraveling under national security rationales. He notes that the Fourth and Sixth Amendments have been severely compromised through indefinite detentions without counsel or formal charges. Concurrently, the establishment of Northern Command (NORTHCOM) threatens the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act's historic prohibition on domestic military policing. Johnson asserts that public resistance is dulled by consolidated commercial media networks that function like the Soviet newspaper Pravda, using embedded reporting and orchestrated symbolic manipulation to shape public perception.
Global Base Networks, Covert Power, and Blowback (14:14)
The United States maintains a sprawling garrison presence that Johnson categorizes as an empire of bases. Beyond more than 700 publicly acknowledged foreign military installations, Johnson highlights roughly 300 secret or obscured facilities, alongside approximately 6,000 domestic bases. Attempts to close domestic facilities routinely face bipartisan resistance from lawmakers defending local weapons manufacturing and defense jobs.
Abroad, Johnson characterizes modern American foreign policy as a coercive global protection racket operating across roughly 130 countries. Drawing on his past work as a CIA consultant, he asserts that intelligence agencies function primarily as private executive armies rather than analytical bodies. Johnson points to covert proxy violence, sniper provocations used to discredit foreign regimes, and state-terror training at the School of the Americas (such as the instruction of Peru's Vladimiro Montesinos) as drivers of profound international anti-Americanism, or blowback.
Financial Insolvency and the Vulnerable Dollar (46:35)
Johnson identifies bankruptcy as the fourth and most lethal "sorrow of empire," noting that while republican erosion creates an autocratic garrison state, financial insolvency imposes an inescapable physical limit. Unlike the British Empire before World War I, which held a current account surplus of roughly 7 percent of GDP, the United States runs historic trade deficits near 5 percent of GDP and has offshored its core manufacturing base to regions like East Asia and Latin America.
The American empire operates through finance capitalism and state-socialist military expenditures—exemplified by a $401 billion defense budget in late 2003, separate from $150 billion in Iraq war supplementals. Johnson stresses that this spending depends entirely on foreign central banks and savers in East Asia absorbing dollar debt. If foreign creditors lose confidence in U.S. corporate governance and switch reserves to the euro, Johnson forecasts that the domestic stock market would plunge and domestic interest rates would be forced upward to 21 or 22 percent, triggering severe economic collapse.
Johnson remains deeply skeptical of an automatic democratic restoration, differing from figures like Senator Robert Byrd who believe an informed public will spontaneously purify the government. While Johnson outlines theoretical remedies—such as campaign finance overhauls, the reassertion of congressional power of the purse, and slashing covert defense state budgets—he concludes that entrenched domestic corporate, military, and energy interests will resist voluntary reform until forced by external financial collapse.
精炼阅读摘要
学者Chalmers Johnson认为，美国正重蹈罗马共和国与苏联的覆辙，因军国主义扩张、制度性僵化与巨额财政赤字而走向帝国衰落，最终可能不是毁于外敌，而是被自身的经济破产所瓦解。
从公民共和国到军国主义的制度蜕变 (0:18)
Johnson指出，罗马共和国曾以拥有土地的公民兵为基石，但向高卢、伊比利亚与近东的海外扩张催生了服役期长达二十年的常备军。退伍士兵面临土地短缺，而元老院权贵拒绝土地改革，导致军队效忠对象从国家转向将领，最终促成恺撒式的军事民粹主义与帝国独裁。美国建国先父虽直接借鉴了罗马的制衡理念与宪政设计，但如今却在重演相同的衰败轨迹。
Johnson认为，当代美国国会已在实质上放弃了宪法赋予的制约权力。2002年10月，国会跨党派通过针对伊拉克的军事授权，违背了James Madison关于不可将宣战权托付给单一元首的宪政核心原则。加之国防预算中约40%为绝密的“黑预算”，且情报机构预算完全对外隐匿，使立法监督沦为空谈，国会退化为如同罗马晚期元老院般只负责走过场的橡皮图章。
苏联解体的真正教训与三大崩溃诱因 (11:53)
Johnson驳斥了里根的“星球大战”计划拖垮苏联的流行观点，引用解密档案与物理学家Andrei Sakharov等人的证词，指出苏联军方早就明晰反导盾牌容易被假目标与对抗手段瓦解。苏联真正崩溃的诱因是经济僵化、帝国过度扩张与体制自我改革能力的丧失，而这三大诱因如今正全部呈现在美国身上。
在意识形态层面，教条式的自由市场理论掩盖了华尔街的企业掠夺、做假账与养老金洗劫（如Enron、WorldCom与Tyco等丑闻）。在扩张层面，美国在海外拥有逾700个公开基地及约300个隐秘据点，庞大驻军引来全球性反弹，9·11事件正是这种“反冲”（blowback）的体现。在改革层面，本土既得利益严重锁死了任何收缩意图，即使是国防部长Donald Rumsfeld试图关闭部分国内外基地的构想，也会遭到依赖军工制造与就业机会的国会议员坚决阻挠。
信息操控、宪法侵蚀与四大帝国之悲
在其著作《帝国的悲哀》（The Sorrows of Empire）中，Johnson归纳了帝国过度扩张带来的四项结构性危机：一是基于“预防性战争”教条引发的永续战争与血腥治安战；二是在所谓安全危机下借由John Ashcroft等官员推动的国内公民自由遭到剥夺；三是政府谎言与秘密体系制度化，包括设立北方司令部（NORTHCOM）挑战《地方治安官法》（Posse Comitatus Act）对军队介入本土执法的限制；四是不可逆转的财政破产。
伴随宪政倒退的是对公众认知的精细化控制。Johnson分析指出，五角大楼吸取越南战争教训后，从格林纳达的“采访池”制度逐步发展为伊拉克战争时期的随军“嵌入式”报道，利用象征性符号操纵舆论，将主流媒体驯化为传递官方口径的渠道。尽管参议员Robert Byrd等少数人如同当代的西塞罗般在近乎空无一人的议事厅发出宪政警告，但多数民众仍处于被动或被误导的状态。
金融资本主义、全球黑幕与破产终局 (46:35)
Johnson强调，不同于一战前拥有相当于GDP 7%经常账户盈余的大英帝国，当代美国不仅制造业大规模外流至墨西哥与亚洲国家，还长期依赖每年约占GDP 5%的庞大贸易逆差运营。2003年末美国国防预算达到4010亿美元，且未计入伊拉克战争专项追加的1500亿美元。这种以金融操控掩盖生产性空心化的模式，完全依赖东亚等海外债权人对美元作为储备货币的信任来维持。
然而，随着欧元走强与对美国经济管理信任的动摇，一旦外国债权人撤出，美国或将被迫将利率推高至20%以上以吸引本土储蓄，从而引爆股市崩盘与深度经济衰退。与此同时，五角大楼将每年数十亿美元导弹防御预算毫无制约地交付Lockheed Martin、Boeing等承包商，形成一种免于宪法审计与民选监督的“国家社会主义”。在海外，从美洲学校（School of the Americas）培训拉美军官实施国家恐怖主义，到中情局勾结犯罪集团、策划政变与建立代理人暗杀网络，美国外交政策已退化为向全球130多个国家推销军火与军事恐吓的“黑帮保护伞”。
Johnson总结认为，帝国的过度扩张犹如剑齿虎的特化进化，历史上一旦开启便难以主动逆转。由于国内既得利益集团对改革的顽固抵抗，美国霸权最终难免遭遇类似苏联1989至1991年间的断崖式崩溃；而真正引爆帝国内爆的终极推手，极可能并非宪法争议或外部军事冲突，而是无法偿还的债务危机与不可持续的财政破产。
Detailed notes — zh
## Background
该视频由 YouTube 频道 eon3 于 2008 年 1 月 23 日发布。根据页面简介，日本政策研究所总裁、《反弹》（Blowback）、《帝国的悲痛》（Sorrows of Empire）及《涅墨西斯：美利坚共和国的最后日子》（Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic）的作者查尔默斯·约翰逊（Chalmers Johnson），在节目中深入探讨了罗马帝国与苏联衰亡的历史相似性，并指出当今美帝国同样显露出了过度扩张、内部腐败以及丧失自我改革能力等衰亡征兆。
## TL;DR
查尔默斯·约翰逊通过对比古罗马共和国向军事独裁蜕变以及苏联在 1989 至 1991 年间轰然解体的历史教训，系统论证了美帝国正深陷不可逆的系统性危机。他指出，以全球数百个军事基地和巨额“黑预算”为代表的军国主义，不仅架空了宪政体制中的权力制衡与民权保护，还诱发了广泛的体制性谎言与媒体控制。更致命的是，深陷制造业空心化、双赤字以及对海外储蓄过度依赖的美国，正面临着国家财政破产的终极清算；而中央情报局与军工利益集团形同跨国有组织犯罪的“黑帮保护费”运作模式，也注定将招致全球不可阻挡的政治与地缘“反弹”。
## Atmosphere & style
整场访谈散发着一种冷静、深刻而又令人不寒而栗的历史宿命感，约翰逊学者式的严密论证与辛辣讥讽交替呈现，将复杂的帝国地缘政治剖析得鞭辟入里。他膝上卧着蓝猫的日常书斋景象，与他口中关于宪政崩塌、国家破产和跨国暗杀的严酷现实形成了极具冲击力的反差。聆听这场对话，既能感受到一位资深政治学者目睹共和国不可逆地走向寡头专制时的痛心疾首，也能切身体会到在复仇女神涅墨西斯的历史审判降临前，那份沉重而压抑的警世窒息感。
## Bulletin
- [00:18](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=18s) 查尔默斯·约翰逊指出，美帝国正在重蹈罗马与苏联衰落的覆辙，表现为经济意识形态僵化、帝国过度扩张（海外驻军基地超700个）以及深层既得利益阻碍体制自我改革。
- [46:35](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=2795s) 美国的海外过度扩张与国内去工业化形成恶性循环，巨额贸易与财政赤字完全依赖东亚储蓄支撑，一旦外国资本抛弃美元转向欧元，可能引致类似卡特时期的恶性加息与国家破产危机。
- [04:20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=260s) 美国国防与情报体系已蜕化为不受宪政约束的“国家社会主义”怪物，高达40%的军费及全部情报开销归入完全不透明的“黑预算”，国会监督机制事实上瓦解。
- [31:33](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=1893s) 五角大楼通过“嵌入式记者”制度实现对大众传媒的深度心理战操纵，同时中央情报局（CIA）沦为行政首脑的私人军队，甚至通过本宁堡的“美洲学校”向拉美输出国家恐怖主义。
## Key takeaways
- [00:18](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=18s) 罗马共和国在向帝国扩张的过程中将农民公民兵转变为长期服役的常备军，最终打破内部制衡并催生了恺撒式的军事民粹主义与独裁统治。
- [04:20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=260s) 2002年美国国会通过决议将战争决定权全权移交总统一人，背离了麦迪逊等宪法先驱关于宣战权必须属于民选代表的核心设计。
- [09:21](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=561s) 苏联解体的根本原因并非罗纳德·里根或“星球大战”计划，而是意识形态造成的经济僵化、过度的帝国扩张以及无法打破体制内既得利益阻力的全面停滞。
- [13:02](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=782s) 美国在海外拥有数百个公开与秘密军事基地，其在拉美秃鹰行动、希腊军政府等历史事件中的恶劣干预，导致了必然爆发的国际“反弹”（Blowback）。
- [16:46](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=1006s) 关闭冗余军事基地的提议遭到国会两党议员的普遍阻挠，军工复合体通过地方就业和选区利益绑架了国家政策，使体制丧失了自上而下的自我改革能力。
- [23:16](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=1396s) 北美社会建立在极度挥霍有限石油资源的生活方式之上，这种不可持续的高能耗模式遭遇新兴经济体竞争与物理极限时极易引发地缘冲突并走向失败。
- [28:08](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=1688s) 在狂热爱国主义氛围与司法部滥权下，宪法第四和第六修正案关于免受非法搜查及公正审判的权利遭到严重侵蚀，总统擅自设立单方面关押“坏人”的法外空间。
- [28:08](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=1688s) 各大商业垄断财团操纵的主流广播网络退化为苏联《真理报》式的宣传喉舌，民众阅读主流大报仅能用来了解官方“口径”而非探寻事实真相。
- [34:58](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=2098s) 五角大楼从越战中汲取新闻管控教训，在后续战争中推行“战地随军记者”（embedding）制度，将独立战地报道异化为军方主导的心理战与符号操纵。
- [39:03](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=2343s) 当今的美军志愿兵役制演变为一种“贫困征兵制”（poverty draft），底层士兵参军往往是出于逃避现实经济死胡同并换取大学学分或就业门槛。
- [41:39](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=2499s) 帝国过度扩张必将带来“四大悲歌”：连绵不断的永久战争、国内民权沦丧、基于保密制度的政府欺瞒文化，以及最终无可避免的财政大破产。
- [49:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=2940s) 美国经济已由实体制造业转变为金融资本主义与玩弄金钱的游戏，本土电脑制造几乎全部外包，关键产品与能源极度依赖外部输入。
- [53:23](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=3203s) 军工复合体本质上是不计成本的“国家社会主义”，泰勒达因、波音等承包商通过密室协商瓜分巨额国家导弹防御资金，缺乏真正的市场竞标与民意问责。
- [57:49](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=3469s) 中央情报局等情报机构的真实职能并非单纯搜集情报，而是充当行政首脑的私人军队，在海外使用便衣狙击、挑衅煽动与虚假指控推翻别国民选政权。
- [01:00:07](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=3607s) 位于佐治亚州本宁堡的美洲学校长期充当美国输出国家恐怖主义的培训基地，曾为拉美各国独裁政权培养了大批实施政治暗杀与人身迫害的骨干。
- [01:01:08](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=3668s) 美军在全球130多个国家的驻军安保行动本质上如同芝加哥黑帮收“保护费”，其对武力的迷信激化了全球反美情绪，最终美帝国的崩溃将如同苏联解体一样无人惋惜。
## Detailed walkthrough
### [00:18](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=18s) 罗马共和国的遗产与帝国扩张的陷阱
提问者首先提到查尔默斯·约翰逊（Chalmers Johnson）此前谈及的美国霸权具有“古罗马式”特征，并询问其著作中分析古代罗马以及苏联衰落时的三个核心要素：内部腐败、帝国的过度扩张（军事过度扩张）以及体制无法自我改革的能力。约翰逊随之将讨论重点引向美国与罗马共和国之间的深厚渊源。
约翰逊指出，罗马共和国对美国具有极其深远的影响，美国建国者的诸多制度设想均源自公元前31年终结的罗马共和国。当时屋大维（Octavian，儒略·恺撒的曾侄孙）夺权登基，成为“神圣的奥古斯都”并建立军事独裁统治；随后的继任者提比略、卡里古拉、克劳狄一世和尼禄，无一不是糟糕透顶的历史人物。正如约翰逊所言：“任何头脑清醒的人都不应该认为罗马帝国产生了良好的治理，它产生的是军事独裁统治。”（“No one in his right mind should ever conceive that the Roman Empire produced good government. It produced military dictatorship.”）相比之下，美国的《联邦党人文集》（The Federalist Papers）中麦迪逊、汉密尔顿与约翰·杰伊的文章均署名“普布利乌斯”（Publius），正是取自罗马共和国第一任执政官之名。罗马共和国奠定了三权分立、任期限制等核心原则（尽管也包含了容忍奴隶制等历史局限）。罗马公民当时享有相当广泛的公民权利，构成了代议制政府的早期雏形，并在前两百年间由受任期限制、内部竞争和强大分权机制制约的民选官员统治。
然而，罗马人在无意识之中开始建立横跨高卢、伊比利亚半岛、整个北非、小亚细亚、希腊本土及西西里希腊殖民地的庞大帝国。这一扩张彻底击碎了原有的社会基石：
- **兵源结构的变化**：早期的罗马军团全部征召自拥有马匹和土地的农民，兵源属于在社会中有切身利益的人群；士兵在凯旋仪式穿过广场后便回家务农。
- **常备军与警察帝国**：帝国的维持需要长达20年服役期的庞大常备军来执行全球帝国警戒，导致士兵复员后无地可分，而由保守大地主把持的元老院坚决拒绝推行土地改革。
- **权力向统帅倾斜**：真正的权力逐渐从文官机构转移至掌握兵权的军事将领手中，军事将领通过迎合基层军人利益掀起了军事民粹主义（Military Populism）。
```mermaid
flowchart TD
accTitle: 罗马共和国向军事独裁蜕变的机制
accDescr: 展示公民兵制度因海外扩张转变为职业常备军，最终催生军事民粹主义与独裁统治的连锁反应。
subgraph Republic["共和国基石"]
A["自耕农公民兵制<br/>（拥有土地与资产）"]
B["严格分权与民选官员<br/>（任期限制）"]
end
subgraph Expansion["帝国扩张"]
C["海外疆土无限延伸<br/>（高卢、北非、小亚细亚等）"]
D["职业常备军形成<br/>（服役期长达20年）"]
end
subgraph Collapse["体制瓦解"]
E["退伍军人无地可分<br/>元老院地主阶级拒绝土改"]
F["军事统帅夺权<br/>（军事民粹主义兴起）"]
G["帝国军事独裁<br/>（恺撒与屋大维建立专制）"]
end
A --> C
B --> C
C --> D
D --> E
E --> F
F --> G
```
---
### [04:20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=260s) 军事民粹主义的崛起与美国宪政秩序的瓦解
权力向军事将领集中的现象，最典型的代表便是儒略·恺撒。约翰逊将这种军事民粹主义者的逻辑概括为：“恺撒无疑是一位军事天才，但他向士兵们宣称：‘我将代表你们的利益对抗这个社会的保守派，唯一的代价是我成为独裁者。’”（“Julius Caesar, without question a military genius, but who said, 'I will serve your interests against the conservatives of this society. The only price is I become dictator.'”）这种权力模式随后在拿破仑·波拿巴、胡安·庇隆等人身上屡屡重现。尽管恺撒最终于公元前44年3月15日（弑弑恺撒之日，Ides of March）在元老院遇刺，但约翰逊十分惊诧于美国新保守主义者竟然在2003年春天的同一时期（3月中旬）发动伊拉克战争，全然无视“谨防3月15日”（Beware the Ides of March）这句西方文明古训。
在罗马，恺撒之死并未挽救共和国，反而引来了年轻而近乎狂乱的屋大维，最终确立了绝对的军事独裁。约翰逊对当今美国的政治走向深感忧虑：即便乔治·W·布什政府通过选举败选或像当年林登·约翰逊因海外战争失利而自我瓦解，无论是哪一个政党的接任者，都难以抵御五角大楼和情报机构的庞大利益。更严重的是，当国防预算有40%属于对公众乃至绝大多数国会议员完全保密的“黑预算”（Secret Budget），所有的情报机构预算也均不公开时，国会监督已沦为空谈，行政分支对权力的集中程度前所未见。
如同罗马元老院在共和国末期沦为专为独裁者盖章的富人俱乐部，美国国会也走向了自我放弃：
- **战争权力的让渡**：2002年10月，美国国会两党以压倒性多数投票将发动战争的权力全权授予总统一人，允许其单方面决定动武时机，甚至包括使用核武器。
- **背离宪政初衷**：宪法主要起草人詹姆斯·麦迪逊曾明确强调，将宣战权保留给民选代表是宪法中最重要的条款，绝不能将这种生死大权托付给单一个人；而2002年两党国会的决议无异于“彻底抛弃了宪法”。
- **全球驻军与独裁潜流**：美国在海外拥有725个军事基地，驻扎前线的士兵待遇不高、家庭生活窘迫，却拥有极高的爱国认同。约翰逊在写作《帝国的悲痛》（*The Sorrows of Empire*）时就预警，美国可能会出现代表这些士兵利益对抗既得利益集团的“军事民粹主义者”，代价同样是独裁；而就在他成书两周后，韦斯利·克拉克（Wesley Clark）将军便宣布参选总统。
- **历史进程的加速**：从恺撒遇刺到亚克兴战役及屋大维独裁花了约25年，而当代美国的帝国异化正以“联邦快递般的速度”（the speed of FedEx）快速推进。
---
### [09:21](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=561s) 军国主义的制度腐蚀与美苏衰落的警示
约翰逊援引二战后著名政治哲学家汉娜·阿伦特在《极权主义的起源》中的经典论断，指出暴政之所以总是能够征服他人，是因为它不需要获得同意，而其唯一的代价就是摧毁自身社会的内部肌理。美国当下的军国主义虽然打着对外扩张与保卫国家的旗号，其意想不到的后果恰恰是摧毁自身的宪政秩序。
回顾美国历史，军人出身的两位开国与建国元勋总统早就发出了严厉警告：
- **乔治·华盛顿**：在告别演说中深刻告诫国民，常备军是对“共和自由”（Republican liberty）的极大威胁。
- **德怀特·艾森豪威尔**：在1961年的告别演说中创造了“军工复合体”（Military-Industrial Complex）一词。约翰逊补充了一个细节：艾森豪威尔原本打算将其称为“军工国会复合体”（Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex），但在顾问的劝阻下删去了“国会”，以避免招致麻烦。艾森豪威尔明确警示了未经授权的权力在社会中崛起并扭曲共和体制的危险。
约翰逊沉痛地表示：“我认为这种扭曲现在已经发展得如此严重，以至于在任何情况下是否还能将其逆转，确实成了一个悬而未决的问题。”（“I believe this distortion is now so far advanced that it is truly an open question whether you could reverse under any such circumstances.”）
这种反思让约翰逊联想到苏联的解体。他自嘲道，虽然自己并非特洛伊城中发出预言的卡珊德拉（Cassandra）——尽管卡珊德拉关于木马和希腊人礼物的警告全部应验，是极少数预言完全命中的“社会科学家”——但他极度担忧美国正在重蹈前苏联的覆辙。随着俄罗斯内部档案和大量一手资料的公开，历史已经明确证实，苏联的崩溃与罗纳德·里根或“星球大战”计划毫无关系；苏联领导层早就明白所谓的导弹防御系统极易被诱饵等手段破解，导致苏联轰然倒塌的真正根源是完全不同的体制性病灶。
### [11:53](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=713s) 苏联崩溃的镜鉴：意识形态僵化与经济制度败坏
查尔默斯·约翰逊（Chalmers Johnson）谈到，安德烈·萨哈罗夫（Andrei Sakharov）当年被从高尔基市的流放中召回，直接向苏共中央政治局建言时，对“星球大战”等军备竞赛项目直截了当地告诫：“别在上面花哪怕一分钱。”约翰逊指出，正是三大致命因素最终拖垮了苏联，而这三点在21世纪初的美国身上呈现出惊人的一致与重合。
第一个核心原因是“由意识形态驱使的极端经济僵化”。这体现为整个体制因深陷意识形态泥潭，彻底丧失了对经济机构推行必要改革的能力。当年苏联正是因为马克思列宁主义教条的束缚，导致米哈伊尔·戈尔巴乔夫（Mikhail Gorbachev）根本无法提升俄罗斯本土的生产效率。反观当今美国，同样的僵化体现在全面泛滥的企业腐败之中：股票交易所不再是一个运转正常的公平市场，而是退化成了“骗子俱乐部”；工人的养老金账户被肆意洗劫；以安然（Enron）、泰科（Tyco）、世通（WorldCom）为代表的大企业内部高管，毫无底线地侵吞掠夺原本属于企业的利润。
“苏联是被三件事拖垮的，而这三件事在我看来，与21世纪最初几年的美国存在着完全的平行对应。”查尔默斯·约翰逊在此尖锐地定性了两国衰落机制的同源性。
### [13:02](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=782s) 帝国过度扩张与“反弹”恶果：无法收回的牙膏
拖垮大国的第二个因素是“帝国过度扩张”（Imperial overstretch）。这与当年的罗马共和国如出一辙：随着时间推移，国家过度沉溺于扮演帝国角色，承担了远超极限的对外承诺，在世界各地树敌无数，最终引来不可收拾的“反弹”（Blowback）。约翰逊回忆，在2001年“9·11”恐怖袭击发生后不久，他身处纽约西18街出版社（距离归零地相当近）的女编辑立即打电话给他，惊呼道：“重磅反弹刚刚发生了，我得赶紧撤离，你快打开电视！”
当时大家甚至无法断定袭击者来自伊斯兰世界。约翰逊指出，鉴于美国曾经犯下的罪行，袭击者完全可能来自拉美——因“秃鹰行动”（Operation Condor）而遭殃的智利、阿根廷、巴西或厄瓜多尔；也可能来自东帝汶、印度尼西亚，或是饱受美军基地困扰的冲绳；甚至可能来自希腊。约翰逊特别提到，希腊与韩国堪称当今地球上反美情绪最强烈的两个民主国家。希腊人永远忘不了1967年至1974年间，由美国中情局（CIA）扶植上台的“上校军政府”，那是冷战时期美苏两大阵营支持过的最残暴政权之一。正因2004年夏季奥运会即将在雅典举行，约翰逊半开玩笑地告诫美国公民，去雅典旅游前最好三思，要是有墨西哥或巴西护照，最好揣着别国护照出门。
过度扩张正将美国推向财政破产的悬崖。仅美国国防部公开承认的海外驻军基地就超过700个，此外还有至少300个完全对外保密的间谍与情报基地（例如位于科索沃的邦德斯蒂尔基地、伪装成英国皇家空军基地的设施等）。约翰逊借用水门事件中理查德·尼克松的幕僚长H·R·霍尔德曼（H. R. Haldeman）训斥约翰·迪恩（John Dean）的粗俗比喻来形容帝国扩张的不可逆：
“约翰，你要明白，一旦你把牙膏从管子里全挤了出来，就很难再把它塞回去了。”
```mermaid
flowchart TD
accTitle: 帝国过度扩张的发展逻辑
accDescr: 展示帝国过度扩张如何通过全球驻军与干涉导致财政透支和反弹，并最终陷入不可逆的衰退困境。
subgraph Expansion ["过度承诺与全球扩张"]
A["设立大量海外基地与干预<br>(公开700+，秘密300+)"] --> B["在全球树敌与干涉内政<br>(秃鹰行动、希腊军政府等)"]
end
subgraph Consequences ["反噬与财政困境"]
B --> C["遭遇多方反弹<br>(9/11 袭击与全球反美潮)"]
A --> D["财政陷入资不抵债边缘<br>(类似苏联晚期)"]
end
subgraph Deadlock ["体制死局"]
C --> E["'牙膏挤出不可复原'<br>深陷过度扩张无法撤出"]
D --> E
end
```
### [16:46](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=1006s) 缺乏自我纠错机制与强大的既得利益集团
第三个让超级大国崩溃的要素，是体制彻底丧失了改革能力。国际关系学者通常会告诉学生：历史上没有任何一个帝国在走向灭亡时会平静离场而不作殊死挣扎。唯一勉强算作例外的只有苏联——戈尔巴乔夫在末期曾极力扭转大局，甚至愿意放手东欧卫星国（包括东德），因为他渴望改善与德、法的关系，并将俄罗斯定位为一个欧洲国家，试图以此瓦解帝国卫星体系。然而，即便如此，他依然被冷战体系与苏联体制内盘根错节的既得利益彻底阻截。
如今的美国同样深陷在不可撼动的既得利益泥潭中。约翰逊以时任国防部长唐纳德·拉姆斯菲尔德（Donald Rumsfeld）为例：尽管约翰逊极不认可其人，但他赞成拉姆斯菲尔德关于关闭多余军事基地的提议。仅在美国本土，就有多达6,000个军事基地。当拉姆斯菲尔德提出关闭四分之一的陆军基地和三分之一的空军基地时，国会山立即炸开了锅。来自加利福尼亚州、华盛顿州等地的极度自由派参议员纷纷抗议，叫嚷着绝不能关闭自己选区的基地，理由是选民需要依靠生产贫铀弹、多兆吨级氢弹来维持生计，称这些杀戮工业是“我们想极力保留的美好工作”。
“那些是既得利益。那些是极其深厚的既得利益，除了美国公众自发出现一场完全不可预见的公民意识复苏、重新夺回国家控制权之外，我很难看出它们怎么可能被打破。”
### [18:54](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=1134s) 民众觉醒的微光与复仇女神涅墨西斯的审判
约翰逊指出，打破僵局的唯一希望在于公众的公民意识觉醒。这种抗争初露微光的最显著例证，是1999年11月在西雅图爆发的反世界贸易组织（WTO）、国际货币基金组织（IMF）和世界银行的大规模抗议。尽管主流媒体极尽抹黑，将示威者描绘为暴徒和无政府主义者，但民众已经看清了全球化的本质：这些设立在华盛顿特区H街1818号、距离美国财政部仅几步之遥的机构，实质上是极不民主的虚假国际组织，完全由美国财政部在暗中操控。
这一反抗火种随后蔓延全球。在美军入侵伊拉克前夕，全球所有拥有言论自由的民主国家中，民众反战民意高达80%左右。尽管西班牙的阿斯纳尔（José María Aznar）、意大利的贝卢斯科尼（Silvio Berlusconi）或英国的“哈巴狗”托尼·布莱尔（Tony Blair）对民意置若罔闻，但公众已被彻底动员起来。约翰逊警告，如果民众无法借助互联网等工具实现广泛的自我启蒙并掀起体制复兴，美国必将重蹈苏联1989至1991年崩溃的覆辙：
“专门惩罚狂妄自大与傲慢的复仇女神涅墨西斯（Nemesis），正等待着与我们清算，而且她已经等得相当不耐烦了。天色已经很晚了。”
### [21:29](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=1289s) 挽救共和国的艰难路径：国会改革与拆解五角大楼
假设美国在最后关头仍有一线生机，一个觉醒的公众必须采取雷霆手段重构政治秩序：
- **改革国会与选举制度**：根除彻底腐败的金钱选举法律，纠正严重的选区选票失衡问题（例如北达科他州的人口甚至比加州丘拉维斯塔一座城市的人口还少，却在选举人团中拥有畸形的话语权）。
- **行使宪法权力卡死军费预算**：民众必须夺回国会，充分利用宪法赋予的权力，坚决切断流向情报机构和国防部的资金链。
- **解构波托马克河南岸的“第二政府”**：国防部早已不再是单纯的国防部门，而是盘踞在波托马克河南岸的一个替代性权力中心，其触角正肆意扩张到传统军事领域之外的方方面面。
- **斩断“军事-石油复合体”的枷锁**：彻底清算并控制绑架国家战略的军工石油集团，终止其为追求特权与资源掠夺而绑架国家命运的行为。
### [23:16](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=1396s) 石油挥霍、既得利益与不可逆的帝国脆弱性
查尔默斯·约翰逊（Chalmers Johnson）指出，全球石油资源的耗竭是无可回避的物理现实。北美社会目前正以极度挥霍的方式消耗化石燃料，加利福尼亚州州长甚至以开着耗油量堪比坦克的通用悍马（General Motors Hummer）为荣。石油是有限的，而全球其他崛起中的经济体既希望分得合理的份额，也准备以远比美国高效的方式利用能源，它们绝不愿坐视北美无节制地挥霍石油并排放巨量温室气体。约翰逊借由苏联解体的历史警告道，当帝国试图对这种生活模式做出根本变革时，必将遭遇体制内既得利益集团的顽强抵抗，因为背后牵扯到庞大的资本、就业岗位，以及一套被塑造成“不可或缺的生活方式”。在南加州，无数人每天独自驾驶着足以容纳十人的庞大车辆，在望不到头的堵车长龙中艰难挪动，汽车文化早已深深绑定了民众的身份认同。历史经验表明，对资源的争夺和内部结构的固化极易引发冲突，而美国很可能会输掉这些冲突。
```mermaid
flowchart TD
accTitle: 资源挥霍与帝国危机的演变路径
accDescr: 展示北美过度消耗石油引发内部僵化并最终走向帝国解体的因果链条
subgraph Resource["资源枯竭与外部压力"]
A["高耗能生活方式<br/>(悍马/单人驾车)"] --> B["全球石油枯竭与温室气体"]
C["新兴竞争利益方崛起"] --> B
end
subgraph Internal["内部既得利益阻力"]
B --> D["既得利益集团顽固抵抗<br/>(资金/就业/汽车文化)"]
D --> E["无法推进制度性改革"]
end
subgraph Collapse["地缘冲突与解体"]
E --> F["引发外部冲突并走向失败"]
F --> G["帝国骤然瓦解<br/>(如1989-1991苏联)"]
end
```
苏联在1989至1991年间的崩溃为美国的命运提供了镜鉴。约翰逊调侃道，如果有人在1985年预言苏联会在五年内瓦解，听众一定会认为“这个人肯定是在伯克利校园附近抽了什么致幻植物吸得太深了”，然而事实就是如此戏剧性。如今的俄罗斯已经不再是苏联，其国民生产总值（GNP）不过相当于荷兰的规模。苏联在1989年决定不对德国人拆毁柏林墙进行武力干涉，随后戈尔巴乔夫（Mikhail Gorbachev）推行公开化政策（glasnost），释放囚犯、公开古拉格档案。当斯大林主义体制的真相公之于众，民众彻底抛弃了该体制，加盟共和国纷纷宣布独立。约翰逊风趣地补充，如果美国也走到这一步，得克萨斯州搞独立“也未必是件坏事”。更具讽刺意味的是，一个每年耗资280亿美元、核心使命就是研究苏联的中央情报局（CIA），在整个1980年代居然对其经济崩溃的征兆视而不见，反而一味向公众兜售苏联海军和战略武器威胁的夸大言论。约翰逊非常赞同已故参议员丹尼尔·帕特里克·莫伊尼汉（Daniel Patrick Moynihan）的观点，认为解散这种盲目的情报机构反倒能省下280亿美元。
- 通用悍马（Hummer）被视为北美能源挥霍的标志性符号，甚至受到政客推崇。
- 俄罗斯解体后的经济体量迅速萎缩，国民生产总值仅与荷兰相当。
- 中央情报局每年耗费280亿美元专职监控苏联，却对其即将分崩离析的经济现实毫无察觉。
- 约翰逊强调：“没有任何地方明文规定，美国必须永远作为统治世界其他地方的霸权而存在下去。”（“There's nowhere written that the United States must go on forever as the hegemon dominating the rest of the world.”）
---
### [28:08](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=1688s) 宪政崩塌、信息操控与真理报式的媒体生态
当被问及美国的衰落是否不可避免时，约翰逊澄清自己并非在做宿命论式的武断断言，但他反问道：“我无法想象有任何证据能支持截然相反的观点。”美国并非超然物外的阿波罗神，无法免疫于帝国过度扩张（overstretch）、狂妄自大（hubris）与制度衰变的自然周期。更严重的是，美国公众在狂热的爱国主义旗号下，对自身宪法的基本原则茫然无知。在司法部长约翰·阿什克罗夫特（John Ashcroft）任内，《权利法案》中的第四条（免于无理搜查与扣押）和第六条（人身保护令、获得公正审判与律师协助的权利）几乎沦为具文。总统擅自揽权，仅凭单方面认定某人是“坏人”，就能将其无限期关押在南卡罗来纳州查尔斯顿的海军禁闭所且剥夺其法律救济途径，而美国公众对此竟表现出令人心惊的麻木与顺从。
约翰逊指出，公众之所以无法纠偏，核心原因在于社会深陷商业娱乐化宣传机器的蒙蔽。从默多克旗下的福克斯新闻（Fox News），到威瑞森（Verizon）对哥伦比亚广播公司（CBS）、通用电气（GE）对全国广播公司（NBC）、迪士尼（Disney）对美国广播公司（ABC）的资本控制，主流网络传递的内容充斥着商业利益与政治粉饰。约翰逊回忆自己在1978年勃列日涅夫时代走访苏联的经历，直言当今美国主流媒体就像苏联的《真理报》（Pravda）——在前15分钟充斥着审查过的宣传，随后便是歌舞升平的虚假乐观。苏联民众心知肚明不能靠《真理报》获取真实新闻，看报只是为了了解官方“路线”，真正的新闻只能通过值得信赖的朋友、地下出版物（samizdat）或短波收音机获取。约翰逊坦言自己如今读《纽约时报》也是同样的心态，完全是“为了掌握官方路线”而非探寻事实真相。
- 在约翰·阿什克罗夫特掌管司法部期间，宪法第四和第六修正案的核心权利遭到事实上的架空。
- 总统单方面设立的“坏人”拘留模式，直接践踏了第六修正案关于出示控罪、直面证人和获取辩护律师的规定。
- 企业财团对四大电视网的垄断（如通用电气控制NBC、迪士尼控制ABC），让大众传媒退化为兜售意识形态的滤网。
- 约翰逊剖析苏联经验与当下现状时强调：“苏联人过去常说：‘没人读《真理报》是为了看新闻，你读《真理报》是为了摸清官方口径。’”（“And as the Russians used to say, 'No one reads Pravda to get the news. You read Pravda to get the line.'”）
---
### [31:33](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=1893s) 舆论分裂与五角大楼的“嵌入式”新闻操纵
根据当时的民调，美国社会在对外扩张问题上呈现出70%对30%的极化格局。约70%的公众依然支持总统、帝国野心与军队行动；尽管这部分人对伊拉克战争、为了小布什的连任或掠夺石油而牺牲美国士兵感到担忧，但他们并不准备改变立场。相反，另外30%的民众清醒地认识到国家正疾速滑向灾难。这30%的群体主要依靠互联网获取替代信息，阅读英国的《独立报》（The Independent）与《卫报》（The Guardian），翻阅《国家》（The Nation）杂志，或是追踪保罗·克鲁格曼（Paul Krugman）的专栏文章。虽然这部分人的信息源在五角大楼看来属于“异端”，但30%的异见人群在美国社会依然是一股不可小觑的力量。
约翰逊指出，控制大众传媒已成为统治权力最核心的支柱。他以2002年4月委内瑞拉反对乌戈·查韦斯（Hugo Chávez）的政变为例：该国六家电视台中有五家由私人寡头掌控并全力煽动颠覆，仅有一家由政府运营，媒体在政治动荡中发挥了决定性破坏力。而在美国，主流广播网络步调高度一致，福克斯新闻更是被默多克（Rupert Murdoch）当成了推行其极右翼政治企图的个人工具。此时，一位现场听众插话指出，当下的趋势是“心理战（psyops）与新闻及媒体公关的全面融合”。约翰逊随即表示强烈赞同，并指出五角大楼正是这套操纵体系的始作俑者。军方发明了“嵌入式记者”（embedding）这一动听的修辞代名词，将原本声誉良好的记者直接安插在部队战斗编队中；记者不仅被切断了独立的新闻来源，而且在战争恐惧与人身捆绑下，每天只能发出“士兵们都是惊恐万状但本质善良的伙计”这类同质化的战地故事，彻底沦为军方新闻管制与心理战的传声筒。
- 民意测验显示，美国公众约按70比30的比例分裂，多数人仍受困于帝国主义与沙文主义宣传。
- 30%的清醒少数派通过海外媒体（如《独立报》、《卫报》）及非主流专栏（如克鲁格曼）对抗信息封锁。
- 2002年委内瑞拉政变展现了私人资本垄断传媒对政局构成的颠覆性威胁。
- 五角大楼推行的“嵌入式报道”机制成功规避了媒体监督，将战地记者重塑为心理战话语体系的一部分。
### [34:58](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=2098s) 媒体控制、符号操纵与当代的西塞罗
查尔默斯·约翰逊（Chalmers Johnson）指出，美国军方从越南战争中汲取的最核心教训，就是必须严格控制新闻报道。这种媒体控制机制始于格林纳达入侵行动中发明的新闻“记者团轮候制度”（pool system）：记者根本无法自由进入现场，而是由一名中校带队，军方允许看什么才能看什么。这一机制演变至今，其最新形式就是“战地随军报道”（embedding）。约翰逊透露，五角大楼当时甚至在着手建立自己的专属电视网络，专门向外界转播军方视角的伊拉克战况——镜头里尽是第四步兵师的年轻士兵亲切抚摸当地儿童脑袋的温馨画面，仿佛在向世界展示美国的“传教士正在大展宏图”。
这种通过影像与符号来操纵大众的手段，让约翰逊联想到了阿道夫·希特勒、莱尼·里芬斯塔尔（Leni Riefenstahl）和约瑟夫·戈培尔的黑暗世界。无论刚刚去世的里芬斯塔尔本人究竟算不算纳粹，希特勒都极其清楚她的影像天赋能够产生多大的威力。里芬斯塔尔在1934年纽伦堡纳粹党代会纪录片中留下的画面令人难忘：鲁道夫·赫斯置身于一片卐字旗的海洋中，转身高呼“我的元首，胜利万岁！”，随后希特勒登台发表震撼性的演讲。约翰逊感叹，人类正是从那时起见识到了超越普通政治宣传的威力：通过符号进行心理操纵与控制。约翰逊严厉地批评道：“我认为我们今天的美国正以一种极度恶化的形式遭受着这种操纵。”
随后，约翰逊将目光转向美国国内的政治体制，寻找能够抵抗帝国倾向的良心代表。他认为当今美国社会最杰出的爱国者、最接近古罗马共和国参议院坚定卫士西塞罗（Cicero）的人物，是来自西弗吉尼亚州的资深参议员罗伯特·伯德（Robert Byrd）。正如西塞罗曾默许卡西乌斯和布鲁图刺杀企图称帝的恺撒一样，伯德参议员在国会发表了极其雄辩有力的演讲。他的修辞既继承了古罗马的传统，也熔铸了美国开国元勋的宪政思想，竭力捍卫防止军国主义与独裁专制滋生的制度屏障。然而，约翰逊痛惜于伯德年事已高、来自贫困小州，在体制内孤立无援；C-SPAN 电视转播伯德慷慨陈词时，摄像机镜头一摇过去，整个参议院大厅空无一人。伯德始终乐观地坚信，美国公众只是在等待真相被揭露的时刻，一旦认清自己正被那些虚伪劣质的政客暗中出卖，公民就会奋起夺回政府、荡涤污垢；但约翰逊坦言自己无法抱有这种希望。
- 军方对战地报道的管制脉络：从越战的反省，到格林纳达的“记者团制度”，再到伊拉克战争的“随军采访”与军方专属电视网络。
- 纳粹德国的历史对照：莱尼·里芬斯塔尔在1934年纽伦堡集会拍摄的影像展示了符号操控大众的极致威力。
- 罗伯特·伯德参议员的角色：被比作当代的西塞罗，但在空荡的参议院大厅中孤掌难鸣，其对“民众觉醒重塑政府”的信念与约翰逊的悲观预期形成鲜明对比。
---
### [39:03](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=2343s) 俄罗斯蓝猫与“贫困征兵制”
访谈期间出现了一段温馨插曲，约翰逊将一只名叫希拉（Sheila）的猫抱到膝前。他笑着打趣这只猫并非第一次上电视，并向观众解释说，这虽然是一只“俄罗斯蓝猫”，但其实是英国繁育的品种；由于它们是全世界最顶尖的捕鼠能手，过去常被水手带上开往摩尔曼斯克的货船。
回归正题后，约翰逊谈到了他的新书《帝国的悲歌》（The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic）。该书末章重点探讨了美国的军事过度扩张以及“志愿兵役制”带来的严重扭曲。约翰逊指出，今天的军队与经历过二战、朝鲜战争（他本人曾服役）或越南战争的公民军队完全不同；那时服兵役是公民神圣的普遍义务，而当今的士兵往往是出于个人生计考虑才选择入伍，通常是为了逃离美国社会的某种生活死胡同。这批士兵压根没想过自己真的会面临枪林弹雨；一旦战火燃起、伤亡出现，军队的再入伍率必将一落千丈。
访谈者提到了“贫困征兵制”（poverty draft）的概念，约翰逊给出了具体的佐证：如果一个年轻人想去佐治亚州亚特兰大当警察，通过警察学院考试的硬性条件是拥有两年的大学学分，而绕过这一门槛的唯一捷径就是成为退伍军人。目前驻扎在朝韩非军事区（DMZ）的美军第二步兵师中，挤满了为了混够退伍学分去考警察而参军的士兵。这种人生规划决策，性质上就像普通年轻人借贷10万美元去斯坦福大学念书一样。约翰逊援引了在纳西里耶遇袭受伤的女兵杰西卡·林奇（Jessica Lynch）的真实经历：当被问及为何参军时，林奇直言自己在西弗吉尼亚州巴勒斯坦连沃尔玛的工作都找不到，参军只是为了彻底逃离那个穷地方。约翰逊感叹，这才是底层士兵最真实的心声。
- 俄罗斯蓝猫历史细节：常年在通往摩尔曼斯克的航船上充当捕鼠能手。
- 公民义务兵役制 vs 志愿兵役制：过去的普遍兵役制代表公民对国家的义务，如今的职业军队演化为逃避经济困境的避难所。
- 经济驱动的服役案例：美军第二步兵师官兵借服役换取考警察资格；杰西卡·林奇因在家乡找不到沃尔玛职位而入伍。
---
### [41:39](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=2499s) 帝国的四大悲歌：永久战争、自由沦丧、制度谎言与破产危机
约翰逊在《帝国的悲歌》结尾处，系统归纳了帝国过度扩张所必然带来的四重灾难性后果：
```mermaid
flowchart TD
accTitle: 帝国的四大悲歌
accDescr: 展示约翰逊提出的帝国走向衰落的四重悲歌及其内在递进联系
subgraph Sorrows["帝国的四大悲歌 (The Sorrows of Empire)"]
S1["第一重：永久战争<br>(Perpetual Warfare)"]
S2["第二重：民权沦丧<br>(Loss of Civil Liberties)"]
S3["第三重：制度性谎言<br>(Institutional Lying)"]
S4["第四重：经济破产<br>(Bankruptcy)"]
end
S1 -->|"制造危机状态"| S2
S2 -->|"借助保密机制脱责"| S3
S1 & S2 & S3 -->|"过度扩张与巨额消耗"| S4
```
第一重悲歌是“永久战争”（perpetual warfare）。美国当下的外交政策，尤其是先发制人的预防性战争战略，以及单方面撕毁一系列维护和平与应对气候变化等复杂全球议题的国际多边协定，其必然结果就是战争连绵不断。21世纪才刚刚拉开序幕，美国就在阿富汗和伊拉克打了两场大战；五角大楼起初宣扬这都是轻而易举的军事速胜，但转瞬间两地都陷入了血腥残酷、旷日持久且望不到头的反叛乱游击战。
第二重悲歌是“民权沦丧”（loss of civil liberties）。统治集团中的知情者和操盘手往往刻意制造乃至凭空炮制危机状态，利用民众在恐慌中为换取眼前短期安全而甘愿放弃权利的心理，逐步蚕食公民自由。司法部长阿什克罗夫特（John Ashcroft）等专制官僚的崛起正是这一趋势的象征。
第三重悲歌是“因保密制度下的制度性谎言导致政府丧失公信力”（loss of confidence in the government because of institutional lying based on secrecy）。约翰逊以国务卿科林·鲍威尔（Colin Powell）为例：鲍威尔曾作为陆军上将立下赫赫战功，历任里根的国家安全顾问及老布什时期的参谋长联席会议主席，却在2003年2月5日彻底葬送了自己的声誉。那一天，鲍威尔在联合国安理会就伊拉克威胁公然撒谎，而中情局局长乔治·特尼特（George Tenet）就端坐在他身后充当人形背书。约翰逊严词抨击道：“由于你再也无法相信他，地球上再也没有一个人愿意听我们的国务卿就任何议题发表讲话了。”撒谎已经演变为美国的政治文化，明智之士已不再相信官方口径。当司法部发言人宣称保护宪法权利是首要任务时，过去两年的事实证明当局正在挖空心思架空宪法，把 FBI、CIA 和军方的权力无限放大并渗透到国内社会。约翰逊警告，美国本土如今甚至设立了北方司令部（NORTHCOM）；二战时期美军坚决杜绝在本土设立统一战区司令部，正是为了防范军方接管文官政府。而北方司令部司令拉尔夫·埃伯哈特上将（Ralph Eberhart）却频繁放话，声称为了国家安全可能必须修改内战后确立的《地方保安队法》（Posse Comitatus Act，禁止军队介入国内治安）。约翰逊对此隔空斥责：“埃伯哈特将军，你根本没有意识到，制定那项法律不是为了保护我们免受内乱之害，而是为了保护我们免受你的侵害，免受像你这样的人在这个国家的侵害。”
第四重悲歌也是最严峻、最不可避免的危机——“国家破产”（bankruptcy）。前三重悲歌宣告了传统意义上自由美国的消亡，使美国沦为类似古罗马帝国那样的军事独裁政权，不得不将所有精力用于维系摇摇欲坠的霸权版图；而接踵而至的财政彻底破产，将是敲响帝国丧钟的致命一击。
- 鲍威尔联合国演讲事件：2003年2月5日关于伊拉克大规模杀伤性武器的陈述彻底摧毁了其个人威望与美国的外交公信力。
- 北方司令部（NORTHCOM）与《地方保安队法》：打破了二战确立的本土不设战区司令部的防政变禁忌；军方将领公开谋求修改限制军队介入国内司法的法律。
- 四重危机的递进结构：对外连绵用兵（阿富汗、伊拉克）与撕毁国际条约，对内剥夺民权、系统撒谎，最终在军事过度扩张中走向财政破产。
### [46:35](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=2795s) 帝国衰落的先例与美国不可避免的破产危机
查默斯·约翰逊（Chalmers Johnson）指出，历史上的罗马在征服无数疆土后，不仅遭遇外敌的入侵，其内部体系也被基督教等力量所重塑并最终瓦解。转向当代，约翰逊直言美国当下所面临的破产已经变得几乎不可避免，而破产将瞬间引爆一场无人能够控制的总体危机。他犀利地指出，到了那个时刻，公众是否在乎《权利法案》（Bill of Rights）、是否容忍现状、甚至是否听说过宪法权利都已无关紧要，因为“破产会立刻让你切身体会到这一现实”（“bankruptcy brings it home to you at once”）。
为了说明危机的严峻性，约翰逊提供了一组宏观对比数据。在第一次世界大战爆发前，鼎盛时期的大英帝国拥有约占其国内生产总值（GDP）7%的经常账户盈余，极度富裕的国力让英国即使犯下像布尔战争（Boer War）这样严重的战略错误也能承受。相反，今天的美国却背负着人类有经济记录以来规模最大的贸易赤字，占 GDP 的比重高达数个百分点。美国过度消费、生产不足的亏空，完全依赖东亚储蓄者（如日本、中国及东南亚各国的资金）来支撑。这些海外投资者之所以投资美元，仅仅是因为美元具有全球硬通货的“帝国属性”，被视为避风港。但约翰逊警告称，这种避风港地位正在动摇，欧元兑美元汇率已经攀升到了1.25的高位；虽然他打趣说自己的版税是以欧元结算因而乐见其成，但对于普通美国人来说，现在去意大利博洛尼亚或米兰旅行，光是把美元换成欧元来付酒店账单都会变成一场噩梦。
```mermaid
flowchart TD
accTitle: 帝国经济崩溃机制
accDescr: 展示海外储蓄流入终止如何导致美债危机、利率暴涨及国内经济硬着陆的过程。
subgraph ExternalDep ["外部依赖与失衡"]
A["美国巨额双赤字<br/>贸易赤字达 GDP 5%"] --> B["依赖海外储蓄资助<br/>（日本、中国等东亚买家）"]
end
subgraph TriggerPoint ["信任崩塌与资金撤离"]
B --> C{"海外储蓄者失去信心<br/>（转向欧元或抽逃资金）"}
C -->|"触发机制"| D["美元暴跌与美股崩盘"]
end
subgraph DomesticShock ["国内经济灾难"]
D --> E["被迫依赖国内储蓄<br/>填补巨额外部债务"]
E --> F["利率飙升至 Carter 时代水平<br/>（21% - 22%）"]
F --> G["恶性衰退与帝国瓦解"]
end
```
---
### [49:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=2940s) 美元霸权的脆弱性与制造业空心化
约翰逊进一步分析，如果全球储蓄者认定由于美国经济管理不善，欧元是比美元更安全的资产，他们随时可能撤资。引发这种信贷危机的导火索已随处可见：美国共同基金行业因高层腐败而动荡不堪，全球规模名列前茅的加州公共雇员退休基金（CalPERS）甚至直接起诉纽约证券交易所存在腐败行为。一旦外国资本决定转投欧元或抽身自保，美国股市将瞬间崩盘，陷入剧烈衰退，美国将被迫完全依靠国内储蓄来填补其全部外债。届时，联邦政府为了吸引美国人存钱借债，必须将基准利率大幅提高到吉米·卡特（Jimmy Carter）时期的 21% 至 22%。
雪上加霜的是，美国的实体产业根基早已被掏空。美国正严重依赖进口包括石油在内的关键资源，源源不断地向委内瑞拉、沙特阿拉伯和印度尼西亚等国输送美元。不仅如此，约翰逊指出：
> “随着制造业工人所发现的那样，这个国家正在转向金融资本主义。我们如今所做的就是玩弄金钱，我们并不生产太多东西，而是从其他人那里获取。”
> （“Meanwhile, the country, as workers in manufacturing discover, the country is turning into finance capitalism. What we do is we manipulate money these days. We don't manufacture very much stuff. We get it from somebody else.” —— Chalmers Johnson）
美国本土企业纷纷把制造厂搬迁到中国、墨西哥普埃布拉、孟加拉国或马来西亚；如今全美甚至没有一台电脑是在本土制造的，绝大多数都产自马来西亚或台湾。约翰逊援引共和党籍总统经济顾问委员会前主席赫伯·斯坦（Herb Stein）的名言发出警示：“凡是无法永远持续下去的事情，终究不会持续”（“things that can't go on forever don't”）。他断言，美国的破产清算只是时间问题，一旦借贷被彻底榨干，美国的下场就如同拉斯维加斯赌场里宣告无力偿债的赌徒，最终只会被无情抛弃在内华达的荒漠之中。
- 2003年11月布什总统签署的国防预算高达4010亿美元，创下历史新高。
- 上述4010亿美元预算完全未包含伊拉克战争的开销，伊拉克战费需额外追加1500亿美元。
- 约翰逊批评表面上“财政保守”的领导阶层实则极度挥霍财富，导致赤字深重，若选择债务违约，美国将沦为彻底借不到一分钱的国际乞丐。
---
### [53:23](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=3203s) 军国主义的“国家社会主义”本质与宪政监督的消失
约翰逊剖析了帝国的核心死结：军国主义和帝国主义本身不产生任何经济效益，完全是纯粹的资源消耗。针对这套机制，他直言不讳地指出：“军队就是国家社会主义，军工复合体与我们像德国人那样喜欢挂在嘴边的自由企业制度毫无关系。”（“That the military is state socialism. The military-industrial complex has absolutely nothing to do with what we like in an almost German-like way to talk about free enterprise.”）在这套体系里，军工企业唯一的客户就是联邦政府，而政府并不在乎物有所值，军方只追求所谓的作战效能。例如规模达八九十亿美元的国家导弹防御系统预算，国会拨款给国防部后，国防部便与泰勒达因（Teledyne）、波音（Boeing）和洛克希德·马丁（Lockheed Martin）等承包商闭门瓜分，商讨如何把钱花掉，根本缺乏实质性竞标与严密的预算监督。
约翰逊强调，美国宪法明确规定必须定期向公民提供诚实的税款开支报告，这一条款原本是维系三权分立与民主问责的核心基石，使人民能通过代表监督行政部门。然而，这种透明监督自二战研制原子弹的“曼哈顿计划”（Manhattan Project）确立高度保密先例后便不复存在。巨额情报预算与暗箱支出被长期藏匿于国防预算之中，形成了所谓的“黑预算”（black budget）。尽管水门事件后国会成立了专门委员会，允许少数经过甄选的资深参议员审阅部分机密，但体系内布满了信息防火墙（cutouts）。国防部长只要扣上一顶“国家安全”的帽子，就能单方面将其定为绝对机密，任何法院均无权过问，权力彻底被阿灵顿五角大楼内的职业军官所垄断。
基于上述现实，约翰逊预测，美帝国的土崩瓦解最有可能始于一场无法收拾的经济危机，而非他个人更为关切的持续战争、公民自由剥夺或官方谎言与欺骗文化。在经济上如履薄冰、看不到复苏迹象已是绝大多数经济学家的共识。
---
### [56:43](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=3403s) 跨国权力暗网与情报机构的真实职能
对话最后，提问者向约翰逊提出一个全球权力结构的假说：传统观点认为公民社会、商业部门和政府是构成全球秩序的“三条腿”，但现实中跨越国界的职业军方集团、所谓的情报界以及跨国有组织犯罪集团，似乎构成了三条更加关键且平行的权力支柱，彼此紧密交织。
约翰逊对此表示完全赞同，并指出这正是他在著作《帝国的悲哀》（*The Sorrows of Empire*）中重点阐述的主题。结合自己早年曾担任中央情报局（CIA）国家评估办公室（Office of National Estimates）顾问的亲身经历，约翰逊毫不掩饰地揭露了情报界的真实运作逻辑：
> “情报机构并不搞情报，它们是行政长官的私人军队，那就是其秘密行动的一面。”
> （“Intelligence organizations don't do intelligence. They're private armies of executives. That's the clandestine side.” —— Chalmers Johnson）
### [57:49](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=3469s) 中央情报局的秘密行动模式与有组织犯罪的交集
查尔默斯·约翰逊（Chalmers Johnson）直言不讳地指出，中央情报局（CIA）内部早已本末倒置，陷入了“尾巴摇狗”（wag the dog）的荒谬局面。即使众多案例已经证明其情报毫无价值，但流向该机构的庞大资金却丝毫未受影响。更严重的是，这些秘密行动（clandestine activities）与有组织犯罪的运作手段产生了高度交集。为了颠覆别国政权，美国情报机构频繁采用挑衅者策略（agent provocateur）：在目标国家煽动群体骚乱，安插己方狙击手打死部分示威者，随后嫁祸给企图颠覆的当届政府，声称是后者残害了无辜群众。约翰逊愤怒地指出，从印度尼西亚雅加达，到近期委内瑞拉加拉加斯的政变企图，这种把戏已被反复使用了无数次。
```mermaid
flowchart TD
accTitle: CIA秘密政变策略流程
accDescr: 展示CIA通过挑衅煽动、黑枪杀人、媒体造势再到推翻政权的经典运作链条。
A["煽动民间骚乱"] --> B["部署暗中狙击手射杀平民"]
B --> C["操纵媒体（指责现政权残杀无辜）"]
C --> D["制造道义借口推翻民选政府"]
```
约翰逊批评美国主流媒体不加核实地沦为宣传机器，例如知名主播丹·拉瑟（Dan Rather）在报道委内瑞拉局势时，照单全收并宣称“乌戈·查韦斯（Hugo Chávez）政权的暴徒枪杀了无辜旁观者”。事实上，这完全是自1973年智利颠覆萨尔瓦多·阿连德（Salvador Allende）以来一贯的标准作业程序（SOP）。这种行事方式甚至可以追溯到约翰·肯尼迪（John F. Kennedy）对菲德尔·卡斯特罗（Fidel Castro）的敌意，当时白宫甚至不惜动用黑帮暴徒来执行暗杀企图——其目的并非为了摆脱暗杀的恶名，而仅仅是为了避免亲自扣动扳机的法律与政治责任。
- “中央情报局的尾巴在摇狗。也就是说，我们现在在无数案例中都知道其情报毫无价值，但这丝毫不能阻止资金流向那里。”（“It wags the tail wags the dog in in the CIA. That is, the intelligence is worthless, as we now know in numerous cases, but that it doesn't for a moment stop the funds flowing there.”）
- 美国的另一项标准伎俩是让中央情报局物色同谋的当地军方，由中情局发号施令，借别国之手执行脏活。例如秘鲁领空曾发生一架载满美国浸信会传教士的民航客机被击落的事件，当时正是由中央情报局控制的侦察机锁定目标，随后引导秘鲁空军实施击落。这种模式与越战期间杀害数千人的“凤凰计划”（Phoenix Program）如出一辙。
### [01:00:07](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=3607s) 美洲学校与国家恐怖主义的培训
谈到美国对外干涉中最严重的丑闻之一，约翰逊特别点名了位于佐治亚州本宁堡（Fort Benning）陆军基地的“美洲学校”（School of the Americas，现西半球安全合作学院）。数十年间，美军在该基地为整个拉丁美洲培训了成千上万名推行国家恐怖主义（state terrorism）的刽子手与暴徒。约翰逊极力向观众推荐反战监督组织“美洲学校观察”（School of the Americas Watch，官网 www.soaw.org），呼吁公众亲自去查阅该网站记录的档案名录。
任何拉丁美洲独裁军政头目的名字几乎都能在这些名单中找到。例如前不久倒台的秘鲁情报头子弗拉基米罗·蒙特西诺斯（Vladimiro Montesinos），不仅曾在美洲学校受训，甚至两度获邀前往执教。约翰逊讽刺道，蒙特西诺斯“干得太出色了，以至于被再次请回去”，专门传授如何在20世纪80年代的危地马拉、尼加拉瓜和萨尔瓦多等国实施国家恐怖主义。这种官方主导的暴力输出让人不得不质疑：当美国国家机器全面接管了军火贩卖、人口恐吓与政治暗杀后，真正的有组织犯罪集团还能剩下什么生存空间？
- “他在那里教书，不仅在美洲学校任教，他还教过两次。他太优秀了，以至于被再次邀请回去讲授如何在20世纪80年代的危地马拉、尼加拉瓜、萨尔瓦多等地基本上制造国家恐怖主义。”（“He not only taught at the School of Americas, he taught there twice. He was so good he was invited back on how to to basically produce state terrorism in places like Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador during the 1980s.”）
### [01:01:08](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=3668s) 全球保护费敲诈与美帝国的终结命运
约翰逊进一步剖析了美帝国在国际舞台上的运作本质，将其定性为赤裸裸的“黑帮保护费保护伞”（protection racket）。当年芝加哥的黑帮分子总是对商家威胁说“你们得付钱买平安以获得保护”，当被问及“防范谁的保护”时，黑帮的回答是“防范我们自己”。如今，美国在联合国大约170个成员国中的130个国家所开展的所谓安保行动，本质上也是同一种套路。
```mermaid
flowchart LR
accTitle: 保护费敲诈机制对比
accDescr: 展示芝加哥黑帮向商家收取保护费与美军在全球驻军收保护费的逻辑一致性。
subgraph Mob ["芝加哥黑帮逻辑"]
M1["威胁制造暴力"] --> M2["强收保护费"] --> M3["保护受害者免遭自己伤害"]
end
subgraph Empire ["美帝国运作逻辑"]
E1["全球军事部署威慑"] --> E2["索取政治与安全依附"] --> E3["保护驻在国免遭美国打击"]
end
```
这种军事帝国主义给全球受众留下了极度恶劣的形象。这些国家的普通民众所见到的美国人，不是国务院的外交官，不是国际开发署（AID）的人道援助人员，甚至也不是商务人士；他们在日常生活中最频繁撞见的，是身着制服的美军特种部队士兵。任何具备基本逻辑的人都会由此得出必然结论：美国根本不考虑通过外交与说服来推行政策，而只迷信军事武力。
约翰逊总结指出，这就是他所谓“反冲”（blowback）的根本含义——美国公众以为自己在世界上所扮演的角色，与身处受害端的世界各国人民清醒目睹的美国行径之间，存在着巨大的脱节。正是这种脱节在全世界激化了强烈的反美情绪。约翰逊在演讲最后发出了沉重的历史警示：
- “很遗憾，但这是事实：我认为在今天，美帝国的灭亡在世界上所引起的惋惜，绝不会超过当年苏联帝国的灭亡——而苏联的瓦解在任何地方都没有引起一丝惋惜。”（“I'm sorry to say, but it is true. I think today the demise of the American empire would be no more regretted in the world than was the demise of the Soviet empire which was not regretted anywhere.”）
## Notable quotes
> [01:01:08](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=3668s) 很遗憾，但这是事实：我认为在今天，美帝国的灭亡在世界上所引起的惋惜，绝不会超过当年苏联帝国的灭亡——而苏联的瓦解在任何地方都没有引起一丝惋惜。 — Chalmers Johnson
> [53:23](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=3203s) 军队就是国家社会主义，军工复合体与我们像德国人那样喜欢挂在嘴边的自由企业制度毫无关系。 — Chalmers Johnson
> [56:43](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=3403s) 情报机构并不搞情报，它们是行政长官的私人军队，那就是其秘密行动的一面。 — Chalmers Johnson
> [00:18](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=18s) 任何头脑清醒的人都不应该认为罗马帝国产生了良好的治理，它产生的是军事独裁统治。 — Chalmers Johnson
> [23:16](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U&t=1396s) 没有任何地方明文规定，美国必须永远作为统治世界其他地方的霸权而存在下去。 — Chalmers Johnson
## Mentioned
Chalmers Johnson, Octavian (Augustus), Julius Caesar, Publius, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, Hannah Arendt, George Washington, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan, Andrei Sakharov, Mikhail Gorbachev, H. R. Haldeman, John Dean, Donald Rumsfeld, José María Aznar, Silvio Berlusconi, Tony Blair, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, John Ashcroft, Rupert Murdoch, Hugo Chávez, Paul Krugman, Leni Riefenstahl, Robert Byrd, Jessica Lynch, Colin Powell, George Tenet, Ralph Eberhart, Jimmy Carter, Herb Stein, Dan Rather, Salvador Allende, John F. Kennedy, Fidel Castro, Vladimiro Montesinos, The Federalist Papers, Blowback, The Sorrows of Empire, Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Pentagon, Enron, Tyco, WorldCom, Fox News, CBS, NBC, ABC, The New York Times, The Independent, The Guardian, The Nation, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Teledyne, School of the Americas (WHINSEC), School of the Americas Watch (SOAW), CalPERS, New York Stock Exchange, NORTHCOM
## Video description
Chalmers Johnson, author of Blowback, Sorrows of Empire and Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic , talks about the similarities in the decline of the Roman and Soviet empires and the signs that the U.S. empire is exhibiting the same symptoms: overextension, corruption and the inability to reform.
Chalmers Johnson is president of the Japan Policy Research Institute, a non-profit research and public affairs organization devoted to public education concerning Japan and international relations in the Pacific. http://www.jpri.org/
[Source](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9U)
[56:43] Chalmers Johnson: Intelligence organizations don't do intelligence. They're private armies of executives.
[60:07] Chalmers Johnson: I think today the demise of the American empire would be no more regretted in the world than was the demise of the Soviet empire which was not regretted anywhere.
[23:16] Chalmers Johnson: There's nowhere written that the United States must go on forever as the hegemon dominating the rest of the world.
[28:08] Chalmers Johnson: I no longer read the New York Times for the news. I read it for the line.
Original transcript
[0:18] You earlier mentioned the the kind of uh
[0:22] Romanesque uh Yeah, that's what I wanted
[0:24] to
[0:24] character of
[0:26] you know, our hegemony, the US hegemony.
[0:29] And you mentioned in uh in Blowback, I
[0:32] think there were three elements that you
[0:35] saw that are analogous in our situations
[0:39] with ancient Rome, that the internal
[0:41] corruption and uh
[0:43] uh the imperial overreach or the
[0:45] military overreach and uh the inability
[0:48] to reform.
[0:49] Would you talk about that?
[0:50] the USSR. That was the Soviet Union.
[0:53] Yeah. Well, let me talk about the Roman
[0:54] comparison a little bit.
[0:57] The Roman Republic is extremely
[0:59] important to the United States. Many of
[1:02] our ideas come from the Roman Republic,
[1:05] which ended in 31 BC uh with the coming
[1:08] to power of Octavian, the
[1:11] uh
[1:12] grandnephew of Julius Caesar, who then
[1:15] became the god Augustus Caesar, the
[1:17] first Roman emperor, a military
[1:19] dictator, who was then succeeded, if I
[1:22] can remember them accurately, by
[1:25] Tiberius, Caligula,
[1:28] uh Claudius, and Nero, about
[1:32] as awful
[1:34] characters as one could ever imagine. No
[1:36] one in his right mind should ever
[1:38] conceive that the Roman Empire produced
[1:41] good government. Uh it produced uh
[1:44] military dictatorship.
[1:46] In the first two centuries, but again,
[1:48] just to go back to the influence of Rome
[1:50] on the United States, you'll recall that
[1:51] the great articles by uh
[1:54] uh Madison, uh Hay, and I can't remember
[1:58] who the third was. The great articles
[1:59] defending the Constitution in the
[2:00] Federalist Papers are all signed
[2:02] Publius.
[2:04] Well, who was Publius? He was the first
[2:06] Roman consul in the in the Roman
[2:08] Republic. That's where we get separation
[2:10] of powers, um term limits,
[2:14] toleration of slavery, uh
[2:16] and other such things. But the Roman
[2:18] Republic, people exercised very
[2:21] considerable civil rights if you were a
[2:23] Roman citizen. It was a
[2:25] It was a
[2:27] an early approximation of a um
[2:31] uh of representative government. It was
[2:33] a republic
[2:34] that in its first two centuries, about
[2:36] the same time as our first, about the
[2:38] same length of time as our first two
[2:40] centuries,
[2:41] was ruled by
[2:43] elected officials
[2:45] uh
[2:46] who had term limits, their internal
[2:49] competition, a genuine and most powerful
[2:52] uh division of power, separation of
[2:54] powers, that ever came along.
[2:56] But they began, without thinking about
[2:59] it, to acquire an empire
[3:01] in uh in Gaul, that is in southern
[3:03] France, in Iberia, all of North Africa,
[3:07] in Asia Minor,
[3:09] in Greece itself, in the Greek colonies
[3:11] in Sicily.
[3:13] And until that time, the Roman legions
[3:16] were raised entirely from farmers.
[3:20] Uh the one of the things I always
[3:22] admired about Rome, the Roman Republic,
[3:24] is that conscription was not of the
[3:26] poorest people in the society, it was of
[3:28] people with a stake in the society. They
[3:30] were farmers. You couldn't get
[3:31] conscripted unless you owned a horse. Uh
[3:34] and you went off and you fought and then
[3:35] you came back and you had your famous
[3:37] triumph through the forum. And then you
[3:40] went right back to the farm.
[3:42] With the development of the empire, they
[3:44] began to need standing armies.
[3:47] Big armies that lasted for 20 years or
[3:50] so in order to
[3:52] do imperial policing all over the world.
[3:54] Uh and
[3:56] these people, after a while, when they
[3:59] the chief problem began to develop is
[4:00] what do you do as you begin to
[4:02] demobilize the armies? There wasn't that
[4:04] much land left in Italy anymore.
[4:07] Uh the Senate was filled full of
[4:09] conservative landowners who were not
[4:11] about to do a land reform.
[4:13] Ever so slowly, the real power in the
[4:16] country shifted to military commanders
[4:20] who now began to take an interest in the
[4:23] interests of their troops, i.e.,
[4:25] military populism, associated above all
[4:29] with Julius Caesar,
[4:30] without question a military genius, but
[4:33] who said, "I will serve your interests
[4:35] against the conservatives of this
[4:37] society. The only price is I become
[4:40] dictator." This is Napoleon Bonaparte,
[4:43] Juan Peron,
[4:45] uh over then, of course, Caesar himself
[4:47] was uh was assassinated in the Senate on
[4:51] the Ides of March, 44 BC. It is, to me,
[4:56] astonishing that
[4:57] our neocons went to war
[5:00] uh this in the spring of 2003 on
[5:02] basically the Ides of March, and they
[5:05] don't seem to realize why the the oldest
[5:08] oldest slogan I can think of of Western
[5:10] civilization is beware the Ides of
[5:13] March. Uh it is not a good time to
[5:15] launch a new project anywhere
[5:17] uh as Julius Caesar himself was warned
[5:20] as he entered the Senate on that day.
[5:23] The result, however, was a shift of
[5:25] power to uh military populists, of which
[5:29] then a much more serious one came along,
[5:32] the young uh youthful uh almost maniac
[5:36] uh Octavian, who became Augustus Caesar
[5:39] and led into military dictatorship. It
[5:42] is one of the things that worries me in
[5:43] the United States today. I think it's
[5:46] fairly easy to imagine the end of the
[5:50] George Bush administration, either
[5:53] because he is defeated by a Democrat or
[5:55] he defeats himself in almost the way
[5:57] Lyndon Johnson did over uh over uh uh
[6:01] poorly planned wars abroad.
[6:04] I still am not certain that whoever
[6:05] replaces him, of either party, can stand
[6:09] up to the interests of
[6:11] the Pentagon and the intelligence
[6:12] agencies. After all, if even if you had
[6:16] an honest Congress, they can't do
[6:18] oversight when 40% of the defense budget
[6:21] is secret. Secret from everybody.
[6:24] Ex- maybe one or two very senior members
[6:26] of Congress can get access to some of
[6:28] it. All the intelligence budgets are
[6:29] secret. Uh this is a concentration of
[6:32] power in the executive branch that is uh
[6:36] unprecedented. Then even more sort of
[6:38] slightly Roman in the way of
[6:42] of transfer of power. I mean, the
[6:43] Senate,
[6:44] by the by the end of the Republic, the
[6:47] Senate was worthless. It was a club of
[6:51] wealthy
[6:52] Romans, but who simply were there to
[6:54] rubber-stamp anything that uh
[6:57] Caesar did. Uh the
[7:00] uh we saw this, I think the most
[7:02] critical issue in our society,
[7:05] in October of 2002, our Congress
[7:08] overwhelmingly voted to give the
[7:10] president the right to go to war when he
[7:12] wanted to, on his and his decision
[7:15] alone, including the use of nuclear
[7:16] weapons.
[7:18] James Madison, easily the most important
[7:20] author of our Constitution, said that
[7:22] the clause in the Constitution reserving
[7:25] the right to go to war to the elected
[7:26] representatives of the people is the
[7:28] single most important clause in the
[7:30] Constitution. Never ever should such a
[7:33] power be entrusted to a single man.
[7:36] In October of
[7:38] 2002, our Congress, both parties, kissed
[7:42] off the Constitution. And that's the
[7:45] issue today,
[7:47] uh more almost more than anything else.
[7:49] I was when I I began to write this in my
[7:52] book called uh The Sorrows of Empire,
[7:55] I was
[7:56] I was saying that the history would
[7:58] suggest to us we may begin to see in
[8:00] America
[8:01] a military populist, one who comes along
[8:04] who begins to represent
[8:06] our legions
[8:09] deployed in our 725
[8:12] military bases around the world, but who
[8:15] are not very well paid, who are not very
[8:16] well taken care of, whose families are
[8:19] often destitute in terms of of trying to
[8:23] lead normal lives, uh but that who are
[8:26] intensely patriotic and and identified
[8:29] with the United States,
[8:30] that we're waiting for the militarist to
[8:33] come along and say, "I uh
[8:35] I will s-
[8:36] uh serve your interests against those of
[8:39] vested interests in the United States.
[8:41] All I require is dictatorship."
[8:44] Two weeks after I wrote that, General
[8:46] Clark entered the race, and I thought,
[8:48] "Oh my god, this is happening a lot
[8:50] faster than I thought it was going to."
[8:52] I thought that is, between the death of
[8:54] Julius Caesar and uh the and uh the
[8:57] Battle of Actium and and Octavian's
[9:00] emergence as the now unquestioned
[9:03] dictator of Rome, uh took about about 25
[9:07] years. Ours is coming along at the speed
[9:10] of FedEx, I'm afraid. Uh it's uh the
[9:13] history is a little bit faster today
[9:16] than it used to be. But that's to say uh
[9:19] that's what's at stake today.
[9:21] Perhaps our most prominent political
[9:23] philosopher in this country in the
[9:24] postwar period, Hannah Arendt, once made
[9:27] the case in Origins of Totalitarianism
[9:29] that tyranny can always prevail over
[9:32] others because it doesn't require
[9:33] consent. Its only cost is the
[9:35] destruction of its own society.
[9:38] That's, in many ways, what our
[9:40] militarism, the unintended consequence
[9:42] of what it's doing, is to destroy our
[9:45] constitutional order. Indeed, militarism
[9:48] is very highly advanced today, and we
[9:50] should bear in mind probably the two
[9:52] most famous generals who were ever
[9:54] presidents of the United States, namely
[9:57] George Washington and Dwight Eisenhower,
[9:59] both in their farewell addresses
[10:01] famously uh warned us about it. That is
[10:05] uh Washington warned of the uh the
[10:08] extreme dangers, as he said, to
[10:10] Republican liberty of standing armies
[10:13] and what these lead to. Eisenhower, even
[10:17] more famously, in his farewell address
[10:19] in 1961, invented the phrase
[10:22] military-industrial complex. We know
[10:24] today that he intended to say
[10:26] military-industrial-congressional
[10:28] complex, but was warned off by his
[10:30] advisers that that's asking for trouble.
[10:33] But he spoke of unauthorized rise of
[10:36] unauthorized power in our society uh and
[10:39] it's uh
[10:40] the uh
[10:41] the tendency to distort our uh our
[10:45] Republican form of government. I believe
[10:47] this distortion is now so far advanced
[10:50] that it is truly an open question
[10:53] whether you could reverse under any such
[10:55] circumstances, which is
[10:58] it's something that we were talking
[10:59] about earlier that leads to
[11:01] um
[11:03] This is speculation. It's not a
[11:04] prediction. I'm not I'm not Cassandra,
[11:07] though the important thing about
[11:09] Cassandra is that she was right.
[11:11] There was something funny in that horse.
[11:14] Uh
[11:14] and Greeks bearing gifts should be
[11:16] looked at very closely.
[11:18] Uh the uh she's one of the few social
[11:20] scientists that ever got it right.
[11:22] Uh but nonetheless, uh without being
[11:24] Cassandra,
[11:25] what fear I fear at times that we seem
[11:27] to be treading the same steps as the
[11:30] former Soviet Union.
[11:31] Uh we now know with precision and from
[11:35] ample sources inside Russia of the
[11:37] things that brought the Soviet Union
[11:39] down. It had absolutely nothing to do
[11:41] with Ronald Reagan or Star Wars. That
[11:43] they had been
[11:44] thoroughly warned off on that and
[11:47] understood how easily uh a so-called
[11:50] missile defense system can be defeated
[11:51] through decoys and things of this sort.
[11:53] Sakharov was brought out of internal
[11:55] exile in Gorky in order to address the
[11:57] Politburo on that subject, and he said,
[11:59] "Don't spend a nickel on it." The Soviet
[12:01] Union was brought down by three things,
[12:04] all three of which strike me as
[12:06] parallel in America at in the first
[12:10] years of the uh of the 21st century.
[12:13] First, uh
[12:15] extreme economic rigidity driven by
[12:18] ideology. That is, the inability to
[12:20] reform our economic institutions in ways
[12:22] that need to be done because of the
[12:25] power of ideology.
[12:27] It was Marxism-Leninism in the case of
[12:28] Russia that prevented uh Mikhail
[12:31] Gorbachev from being able to improve
[12:34] Russian efficiency. In our society, we
[12:37] see it in the whole world of corporate
[12:40] corruption. Uh the belief that the stock
[12:42] exchange is no longer a functioning
[12:45] market, but is in fact a club of crooks.
[12:48] Uh the ripping off of workers' pension
[12:51] funds. The uh
[12:54] savaging of corporate profits by inside
[12:57] executives, as in the case of Enron,
[12:59] Tyco, WorldCom. Uh whatever else you may
[13:02] want to say. The second, uh imperial
[13:05] overstretch. Now, this is where the
[13:07] issue that just came up. The fact that
[13:10] you get, over time, playing the imperial
[13:14] role,
[13:15] just as Rome does the Roman Republic
[13:17] did. You get too many commitments and
[13:19] you start making too many enemies. Uh
[13:21] there's too many cases of blowback out
[13:24] there. We I mean, I could begin to tick
[13:26] off for you, or put it a different way.
[13:28] On 9/11,
[13:30] my publisher in New York called me uh
[13:32] shortly after uh she had heard of the
[13:35] explosions. Her office is on West 18th
[13:37] Street, which is getting reasonably
[13:39] close to ground zero, and said,
[13:41] "Blowback big time just hit.
[13:43] And I'm getting out of here, but you
[13:45] want to turn on the TV." Uh one of the
[13:47] things we speculated on that was, well,
[13:49] who are the terrorists? We didn't
[13:51] automatically think that they were uh
[13:54] from the Islamic world. They could just
[13:56] as easily have been from Chile,
[13:58] Argentina, Brazil, uh Ecuador, as a
[14:02] result of Operation Condor and uh the
[14:05] things that we had done there. They
[14:07] could have been from East Timor. They
[14:09] could have been from Indonesia. They
[14:10] could have been from
[14:12] uh Okinawa. They could have been Greeks.
[14:14] After all, Greece, together with South
[14:17] Korea, are probably the two most
[14:19] anti-American democracies on Earth
[14:21] today. In the case of Greece, it's what
[14:23] they remember between 1967 and 1974,
[14:27] the Greek colonels put in power by the
[14:30] Central Intelligence Agency, and
[14:32] probably the most repressive government
[14:34] supported by either side in the Cold
[14:36] War.
[14:37] Uh something that no Greek is going to
[14:40] forget. I warn
[14:42] American citizens about that since the
[14:44] Olympic Games are going to be held in
[14:45] Athens next year.
[14:47] Uh I
[14:48] the Greeks are certainly thinking about
[14:50] it. If I were an American tourist, I'd
[14:52] think about it, too. Uh that uh
[14:55] We'll see if you have an alternative
[14:56] passport, it wouldn't be bad to use it.
[14:58] If you happen to have a Mexican one or a
[14:59] Brazilian one or something like that. Uh
[15:02] the
[15:03] uh but and then the third, it's it's
[15:05] just to say that imperial overstretch
[15:07] ex-
[15:09] put the Soviet Union in into a a
[15:12] situation approaching uh
[15:14] uh
[15:15] fiscal insolvency. There were simply too
[15:17] many commitments. We now have uh the
[15:20] Department of Defense acknowledges well
[15:22] over 700 American military bases in
[15:24] other people's countries. Uh this is
[15:26] This is at the same time, not to mention
[15:29] another 300 that are at least secret, uh
[15:31] that are kept totally secret, the
[15:33] intelligence bases.
[15:34] Uh many of the bases that we simply
[15:36] don't acknowledge we have, like
[15:38] Bondsteel in Kosovo and and places like
[15:40] that. Um
[15:42] the bases in Great Britain that are
[15:44] disguised as Royal Air Force bases. Any
[15:46] number of of installations that we don't
[15:49] want to publicly disclose are uh
[15:52] functioning American uh military bases.
[15:55] Uh imperial overstretch, that is, it's
[15:57] it imperialism is a little bit like the
[16:00] saber-tooth tiger. Evolution doesn't
[16:02] work backwards. When or
[16:06] I often think about many of you will
[16:08] remember in Watergate that um
[16:12] uh Nixon's chief of staff Haldeman one
[16:15] day denounced John Dean
[16:18] uh for speaking too freely about uh the
[16:21] felonies committed by the president in
[16:23] Congress, and he said, "John, you know,
[16:25] once you squeezed all the toothpaste out
[16:27] of the tube, it's very hard to get it
[16:29] back in." Well, that's it's a homely
[16:31] metaphor by a man who went to prison and
[16:34] a former advertising executive. But in a
[16:36] certain sense, that's the United States
[16:38] today. That's the imperial overstretch.
[16:39] You begin to squeeze too much out in too
[16:42] many commitments, too many other places,
[16:44] and you can't reverse it. The third the
[16:46] thing that brought down the Soviet Union
[16:48] was the inability to reform.
[16:50] Uh and there it is an interesting
[16:54] fact that as a professor of
[16:55] international relations, we normally
[16:57] teach our students there are no known
[16:59] cases of empires that uh
[17:03] that went quietly, that didn't resist
[17:05] their own demise, that that didn't fight
[17:08] at the end.
[17:09] One of the few exceptions you might make
[17:11] is probably the Soviet Empire in that
[17:13] Mikhail Gorbachev was trying very hard
[17:16] at the end
[17:17] to
[17:18] reverse the Russian Empire. He was quite
[17:21] ready to kiss off the the satellites in
[17:24] East Europe, including uh East Germany,
[17:26] because he wanted better relations with
[17:29] France and Germany, and he also he and
[17:31] his people had begun to identify Russia
[17:34] as a European country, and they wanted
[17:36] to dismantle the satellite system.
[17:38] Nonetheless, he was stopped by vested
[17:41] interests in the in the Cold War system,
[17:45] in the Soviet system as structured. Just
[17:47] as I believe today anyone in America who
[17:51] attempted serious reform will then run
[17:54] into unimaginable
[17:56] vested interests.
[17:58] I mean, we see it every time I mean, I
[18:00] don't really like Donald Rumsfeld as uh
[18:02] Secretary of Defense, but I agree with
[18:04] him on the need to close bases. We have
[18:06] 6,000 military bases in the United
[18:09] States alone. Uh he has said he'd like
[18:11] to close a quarter of the Army bases and
[18:13] a third of the Air bases.
[18:15] I tell you, every time he even opens his
[18:17] mouth like that, you get a firestorm on
[18:20] Capitol Hill from extremely liberal
[18:22] senators. I mean, the senators from
[18:24] California, from Washington, etc.,
[18:26] saying, "Oh my god, you can't close
[18:28] bases in my state. We our people work
[18:32] there. We They make a living making
[18:35] uh depleted uranium munitions,
[18:38] uh uh multiple megaton atom bombs. These
[18:41] are lovely little jobs that we'd like to
[18:43] keep."
[18:44] Those are vested interests. Those are
[18:46] serious vested interests that I don't
[18:49] easily see how they would be uh defeated
[18:53] ex-
[18:54] except by uh a totally unforeseen
[18:58] renaissance of the American public re-
[19:02] regaining their civic consciousness,
[19:04] retaking control of the country. There
[19:07] are the slightest signs of this. I mean,
[19:09] I I still believe I didn't anticipate, I
[19:13] don't know if anybody else who did, the
[19:15] remarkable power and influence of the
[19:18] coalition that came together in Seattle
[19:21] in November of 1999 against the World
[19:23] Trade Organization, the uh uh
[19:26] International Monetary Fund and the
[19:27] World Bank. This was an amazing
[19:30] development that, despite being
[19:32] absolutely savaged by the uh
[19:36] uh the mainstream press in America as
[19:38] hooligans, anarchists, and everything
[19:40] else, they had, of course, finally
[19:42] discovered that the uh
[19:45] the worm in globalization is that the
[19:47] IMF, the WTO,
[19:49] uh and the World Bank are probably the
[19:52] most undemocratic, fake institutions
[19:54] that exist on Earth. They are dominated
[19:57] by the US Treasury. They're located
[19:59] within hailing at 1818 H Street, within
[20:02] hailing distance of the Treasury. We run
[20:05] them, but that we run them in a covert
[20:08] way as if they were international
[20:10] organizations.
[20:11] Um that movement then spread around the
[20:13] world and is today enormously
[20:16] influential and led to just before the
[20:20] American invasion of Iraq evidence that
[20:22] in every democracy on Earth where people
[20:24] could express public opinion, public
[20:26] opinion was around 80% against the
[20:28] United States. That it didn't mean that
[20:30] the government, Mr. Aznar in Spain or or
[20:33] Berlusconi in Italy or uh the poodle uh
[20:36] Blair in England were going to listen to
[20:39] their people. They just talked
[20:41] democracy, but the public was aroused,
[20:44] was mobilized, was sensitized.
[20:47] Should that continue?
[20:49] Uh should the public continue to educate
[20:52] itself via the internet and things like
[20:54] that, one could imagine a a renaissance
[20:58] in America.
[20:59] Barring that, I fear, like the Soviet
[21:02] Union from 1989 to 1999 1991,
[21:06] uh we are uh
[21:09] Nemesis, the goddess of vengeance,
[21:13] the goddess of the punisher of uh
[21:16] of hubris and arrogance
[21:19] awaits her meeting with us
[21:21] uh and awaits rather impatiently. It's
[21:25] um
[21:26] and it is fairly late in the day.
[21:29] So, let's assume that there's still
[21:33] a last-minute rescue possible.
[21:36] What would the elements of that be?
[21:40] What would an enlightened populace
[21:42] taking charge do?
[21:45] One could speculate in many different
[21:47] ways on it, but the most obvious things
[21:49] are that would require
[21:51] a reform of Congress,
[21:54] uh
[21:55] a reform of the corrupted election laws.
[21:59] It would very possibly require almost a
[22:02] re
[22:03] a re-division of
[22:06] of the basic states which turned out to
[22:08] be gerrymanders. I mean, after all,
[22:10] North Dakota has fewer people in it than
[22:12] Chula Vista, California. Uh it's this is
[22:16] a uh
[22:16] it's an odd thing to live with to have
[22:19] to live with uh
[22:21] with the world of uh of electoral votes
[22:25] rather than
[22:26] rather than where the population
[22:27] actually lives and what the population
[22:30] actually thinks. They would then have to
[22:32] retake Congress
[22:34] and uh and use the powers given to
[22:38] Congress in the Constitution to begin to
[22:40] cut off money to the intelligence
[22:43] agencies and to the Department of
[22:45] Defense. The Department of Defense is
[22:47] not a Department of Defense. It's an
[22:49] alternative source of government on the
[22:51] South Bank of the Potomac River that is
[22:54] increasingly expanding into numerous
[22:57] activities well beyond what was ever
[22:59] imagined as uh
[23:01] as the the military. What would what
[23:04] would the people do about the the
[23:06] military petroleum complex? Well,
[23:09] obviously that needs to be brought under
[23:10] control. That is to say,
[23:13] I mean, in one sense, the problem of the
[23:15] military petroleum complex is going to
[23:16] solve itself because we're going to run
[23:18] out of world petroleum. I mean, that
[23:20] we're we're now using it in such a
[23:22] profligate manner. I mean, that we
[23:23] actually people in our society,
[23:25] including the governor of California,
[23:27] take pride in driving around in
[23:29] automobiles that use fuel the way a tank
[23:32] does, namely the the General Motors
[23:34] Hummer. Uh the
[23:37] uh
[23:37] we're going to run out of it. They're
[23:38] just
[23:39] it's a finite amount. Moreover, there
[23:42] are huge competitive interests today
[23:45] that are prepared to use petroleum in a
[23:47] much more efficient way than we do, but
[23:50] nonetheless want their share, do not
[23:52] wish to see it all destroyed by
[23:55] profligate uh use in North America, also
[23:58] with the uh
[24:00] huge uh uh
[24:02] production of greenhouse gases in North
[24:05] America as a result of this dependence
[24:07] on uh on uh
[24:10] uh fossil fuels. Uh but that in the
[24:13] meantime, I think the history of the
[24:15] Soviet Union and what happened after its
[24:17] demise should warn us that we will face
[24:21] remarkable resistance by vested
[24:24] interests in this system as constituted
[24:28] today uh because the money involved, the
[24:33] jobs involved, the uh uh structures of
[24:37] life that we have been led to believe
[24:39] are indispensable to our very identity,
[24:42] such as the automobile, uh the
[24:44] automobile as
[24:46] as we drive it here in Southern
[24:47] California where you drive home every
[24:49] night into imaginable traffic jams with
[24:51] a single person sitting in an automobile
[24:53] that could carry 10. Uh it and and you
[24:57] and that's I'm not exaggerating. That's
[24:59] right next to you everywhere you go. Uh
[25:01] the uh this could be changed, obviously,
[25:05] but what what is
[25:08] history would suggest that it was more
[25:11] likely to lead to conflict, but that
[25:14] conflicts that we are very likely now to
[25:17] lose. There's nowhere written that the
[25:20] United States must go on forever as uh
[25:24] the hegemon dominating the rest of the
[25:27] world. As it as I say, history does seem
[25:29] to be speeded up. If we were carrying on
[25:32] this conversation
[25:34] say in 1985 and I had said to you that
[25:37] within 5 years the Soviet Union will
[25:39] disappear,
[25:41] you would have thought
[25:42] this guy is inhaling too deeply on
[25:44] something grown around the Berkeley
[25:46] campus. Uh this is not a reliable source
[25:49] of information. I am here to tell you,
[25:52] like uh Nabokov talking about Gogol,
[25:56] it's gone. That is, Russia is not the
[25:59] Soviet Union. It's got a GNP about the
[26:01] size of the Netherlands. It the place
[26:04] came right apart between 1991 and I
[26:07] mean, 1989 and 1991 when they made the
[26:11] famous decision not to resist the
[26:14] Germans' desire to tear down the Berlin
[26:17] Wall and that then
[26:19] this led into something that we in the
[26:22] United States could not possibly stand,
[26:24] what uh Gorbachev uh instituted,
[26:27] glasnost,
[26:29] opening the prisons, letting everybody
[26:31] out of Guantanamo,
[26:33] uh and opening the archives,
[26:36] revealing all the black operations of
[26:38] the CIA.
[26:40] The Russian people became so horrified
[26:42] once the details of the gulags were
[26:45] brought home to them. I mean,
[26:47] Solzhenitsyn had already started to
[26:48] introduce it, but when they began to
[26:50] understand the horrors of the Stalinist
[26:52] system, they tore the place apart. And
[26:55] everybody who could got out, went
[26:57] independent, created an independent We'd
[26:58] have an independent Texas if you'd
[27:01] uh that would not necessarily be a bad
[27:03] thing. Uh but uh it's uh
[27:07] the the uh
[27:09] the point here is to say, these things
[27:12] happen suddenly,
[27:13] much more fast than you may believe.
[27:16] Uh that we are not well warned. That is,
[27:19] a 28 billion dollar Central Intelligence
[27:21] Agency whose primary function was to
[27:24] study the Soviet Union throughout the
[27:26] 1980s didn't notice that the place was
[27:29] coming apart economically. Now,
[27:33] I agree with Senator Moynihan there.
[27:35] This is a this is a place to save 28
[27:38] billion dollars. I would have thought it
[27:39] would have been better not to have had
[27:41] it than to listen to their lunatic
[27:43] overstatements
[27:45] of the threat of the Soviet Navy, the
[27:48] threat of uh uh Soviet weapons of
[27:50] strategic weapons,
[27:52] uh of how we were going to break their
[27:54] back economically with with money, baby
[27:57] Star Wars, and things of this sort. None
[27:59] of that happened. That the Soviet Union
[28:01] came apart because for the same reason
[28:03] that most empires do come apart.
[28:08] And I'm here to argue that we're not
[28:11] invulnerable. That is to say,
[28:15] Americans often argue with me things
[28:18] like, "Are you trying to say that our
[28:19] decline is inevitable?"
[28:22] I am not saying that. I am saying I
[28:24] cannot imagine the evidence for the
[28:26] opposite point of view.
[28:28] I cannot imagine what evidence one would
[28:30] produce to say,
[28:32] "We go on forever now. We are like
[28:35] Apollo. Uh we're no longer subject to uh
[28:39] to the cycles of decay and of
[28:43] overstretch and of hubris uh that are so
[28:47] palpably apparent in our
[28:50] ideology, in our people, in our
[28:53] uh flag-waving patriotism, uh and our
[28:57] lack of knowledge of as elemental things
[29:00] as the Constitution. I mean, under
[29:02] Attorney General Ashcroft, two articles
[29:06] of the Bill of Rights are now dead
[29:07] letters, four and six. That is, on uh
[29:11] uh
[29:12] uh freedom from intrusion into your home
[29:14] and habeas corpus. That is, the the the
[29:17] demand that the government must produce
[29:20] charges against you uh and allow you to
[29:23] defend yourself, give you expert legal
[29:26] advice in defending yourself, confront
[29:28] witnesses against you. Uh
[29:30] We have the president has now uh
[29:33] arrogated to himself the power to
[29:36] declare somebody to be, quote, a bad
[29:39] guy.
[29:40] And a bad guy he can throw into a naval
[29:42] prison in Charleston, South Carolina and
[29:45] throw the key away. Uh
[29:47] This is not what Article 6 says the
[29:50] president gets to do.
[29:52] And yet the American public
[29:55] tolerates it. That's one of the issues
[29:56] that would come up into this question of
[29:59] can you
[30:00] imagine a reversal? Because
[30:04] the what would be required in this
[30:07] reversal is a change in the level and
[30:10] quality of information available to the
[30:13] public. They clearly are wildly misled
[30:17] today
[30:18] by a propaganda apparatus that is
[30:21] associated with the entertainment
[30:23] industry. I mean that dominates it for
[30:25] commercial and commercial reasons,
[30:27] commercial profit
[30:29] from uh
[30:30] Fox News to
[30:33] Verizon's control of CBS, GE's control
[30:35] of NBC, Disney's control of ABC.
[30:39] There's hardly a word put out on it that
[30:41] you can believe. And if you actually
[30:43] know something about the subject before
[30:45] you hear it, you know what you just
[30:46] heard was not true. Uh the It happens
[30:49] all the time or the happy news that
[30:52] follows after the first 15 minutes. It's
[30:54] It's
[30:55] quite literally like listening to
[30:56] Pravda. I traveled in in Russia
[30:59] extensively at the height of the
[31:00] Brezhnev era in 1978 and it's it's uh
[31:04] uh it it is
[31:06] And as the Russians used to say, "No one
[31:08] reads Pravda to get the news. You read
[31:11] Pravda to get the line. You get the news
[31:14] from people you trust, from your own
[31:16] little radio,
[31:18] uh from samizdat, from messages that
[31:21] friends transmit to you." Uh I no longer
[31:24] read the New York Times for the news. I
[31:26] read it for the line.
[31:28] Uh it's and I think we've all sort of
[31:30] gotten used to that. Uh
[31:33] Now then, how could this What is
[31:35] changing? I mean the the public opinion
[31:36] polls tell us that in the United States
[31:38] it breaks down about 70/30. About 70% of
[31:41] the public is behind the president,
[31:43] behind imperialism, behind the army.
[31:45] They have some doubts. They're worried.
[31:47] They don't like their boys being killed
[31:50] for the sake of George Bush's reelection
[31:53] or for the oil in Iraq, but
[31:55] they're not ready to alter that. 30% of
[31:58] the public is on the other side. They
[32:01] believe we're heading in the wrong
[32:02] direction and heading there very rapidly
[32:04] and are worried about it. What do those
[32:06] 30% have? Well, they've got the
[32:08] internet, first of all. They're reading
[32:09] British newspapers,
[32:11] which They're reading The Independent
[32:13] and The Guardian. And that gives them a
[32:15] funny perspective on the world as far as
[32:18] the Pentagon is concerned.
[32:20] They've got The Nation magazine and
[32:22] they've got Paul Krugman. Uh that's
[32:24] about it. I mean
[32:26] that's that's about But that's enough.
[32:28] 30% is a is a very large number uh in
[32:32] for our society. Uh but one of the
[32:34] things that would be required
[32:37] would be a uh
[32:39] a vast change in the kind of information
[32:43] available. Since
[32:46] uh we now know that one of the most
[32:48] extraordinary sources of political power
[32:51] is control of the mass media in our
[32:53] society. That one of the things that
[32:55] that was used to bring about the revolt
[32:58] against uh Hugo Chavez in Venezuela in
[33:02] April of last year, April 2002, was
[33:05] there are
[33:06] something like a half a dozen television
[33:08] stations in in Venezuela. Five are owned
[33:12] by private interests that devoted
[33:14] themselves to the destruction of the
[33:16] government. And only one was in the
[33:18] hands of the president who was able to
[33:20] put out a different point of view. Uh I
[33:22] can't say that there's anything in the
[33:24] United States today that is putting out
[33:25] a different point of view in terms of
[33:27] the mass media
[33:29] from that of
[33:31] sort of the approved and copycat uh
[33:35] journalism of the uh
[33:37] of the uh
[33:39] networks, except of course for the Fox
[33:41] News, which represents an Australian
[33:42] fascist. And and they put out a line
[33:45] that is fairly consistently off over in
[33:48] one particular
[33:49] quarter. I mean Rupert Murdoch, of
[33:51] course, the owner of the News
[33:53] Corporation, the owner of the Fox
[33:56] network and a person who uses it for his
[33:59] own personal political purposes. Yeah, I
[34:02] I heard a a commentator say the other
[34:04] day that he what he's seeing now
[34:06] is the convergence of psyops Mhm. and
[34:10] news.
[34:11] Yes. Or media relations.
[34:13] Media relations.
[34:13] Yeah, so that they
[34:15] No. It's also a major issue in the
[34:17] Pentagon is to begin to develop our own
[34:19] news uh news management. I mean that is
[34:22] they've invented embedding, the lovely
[34:26] Pentagon euphemism, embedding otherwise
[34:29] reputable journalists
[34:31] with our military formations, more or
[34:33] less cutting them off in any real source
[34:35] of news, but having them report nothing
[34:38] but Well, these were basically decent
[34:39] guys who were scared to death that they
[34:41] were they were going into combat. Uh and
[34:44] once you read that story,
[34:46] but you don't need it every day.
[34:48] Together with the power to manipulate
[34:50] the news in in many many ways, I don't
[34:53] think there was any more serious
[34:55] military lesson discovered by our
[34:58] military from the Vietnam War than the
[35:00] need to control
[35:03] the journalistic reporting. It started
[35:05] in Grenada, where they invented the the
[35:08] pool system, where no journalists get to
[35:10] actually go in. They get to be taken in
[35:12] by a lieutenant colonel and shown what
[35:15] they're to be shown. Uh the latest
[35:17] manifestation of this is
[35:19] is embedding. We now understand that the
[35:22] Pentagon is in the process of creating
[35:24] their own
[35:26] television network that will broadcast
[35:28] their view of Iraq. That is
[35:31] pictures of of kindly
[35:34] young troops of the Fourth Infantry
[35:36] Division patting kids on the head and
[35:38] and things of this sort that would
[35:40] that would be signs that our
[35:42] missionaries are at work. Uh
[35:45] It of course takes us back and reminds
[35:47] us again of the world of Adolf Hitler,
[35:50] of Leni Riefenstahl, of
[35:52] Joseph Goebbels, of
[35:55] the uh
[35:57] I mean the enormous power
[35:59] Whether Riefenstahl, the now just
[36:01] recently died, late Leni Riefenstahl,
[36:03] was a Nazi or not, Lord knows Adolf
[36:06] Hitler knew what she was capable of
[36:08] doing. No one I think will ever forget
[36:10] her pictures of the Nuremberg Rally of
[36:13] 1934 with the Rudolf Hess in this sea of
[36:18] swastikas turning and saying, you know,
[36:22] "Mein Führer, Sieg Heil." And then comes
[36:25] forward Adolf Hitler to give one of his
[36:27] most incredible speeches ever. Uh this
[36:30] was when we really did begin to discover
[36:33] the world of not propaganda, the world
[36:37] of manipulation of of the public through
[36:40] symbols and in symbolic control, which
[36:44] is uh
[36:45] uh
[36:46] I think we suffer from it in the United
[36:48] States today in an extremely advanced
[36:51] manner.
[36:52] Uh and that is in my view I mean, let's
[36:55] put it another way.
[36:57] Probably one of the most extraordinary
[36:59] patriots in our society today and the
[37:01] closest thing to sort of our version of
[37:03] Cicero, the most Cicero, the the great
[37:06] defender of the old Republican Roman
[37:09] Senate, the believer in uh
[37:12] the way things that should be done, the
[37:14] uh the man who uh
[37:17] acquiesced in the killing by his fellow
[37:19] senators,
[37:21] Cassius and Brutus, of Julius Caesar, uh
[37:25] Cicero. Our Cicero is
[37:27] is Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia.
[37:30] He's out giving the most unbelievably
[37:34] powerful speeches in glorious rhetoric
[37:37] that you listen to it and of course we
[37:40] are reminded we it's it's Roman
[37:41] rhetoric, but it's also
[37:44] constitutional rhetoric. It's the
[37:45] rhetoric of the American founding
[37:47] fathers. It's it's a rhetoric of the
[37:50] kinds of devices built into our society
[37:53] in order to protect our liberty and to
[37:56] prevent the development of autocratic
[37:59] authoritarian governments associated
[38:01] with militarism, for example. Uh but of
[38:04] course uh
[38:05] Byrd has no power and he's an old man
[38:07] and he comes from a poor state.
[38:09] So he's hardly listened to. We the What
[38:12] you really want to do is to see C-SPAN
[38:14] to always
[38:15] pan away from him and show you the
[38:17] totally empty Senate quarters as he's
[38:20] delivering one of his brilliant
[38:21] speeches. But Byrd, differing from me,
[38:25] believes that the American public simply
[38:29] awaits its moment of revelation of
[38:32] what's been going on. That once the
[38:34] citizen becomes well informed, begins to
[38:38] gather information on the degree to
[38:40] which uh he is being sabotaged by our
[38:45] ersatz political leaders, that they will
[38:47] then the citizen will rise up, retake
[38:50] the government, will uh
[38:52] uh
[38:54] uh purify
[38:55] uh the place.
[38:57] I would like to think he's right. I
[38:59] don't myself actually believe so.
[39:03] Uh Sheila. Hello there, kitty cat. Come
[39:06] on. You're ready to get on to
[39:07] television?
[39:10] Come on. Come here.
[39:11] Don't run away.
[39:14] Come here.
[39:16] You've been on television before. This
[39:18] is not the most beautiful pickup you
[39:19] ever did. But there
[39:22] you are. You are a great beauty. Hello
[39:24] there, beauty.
[39:25] This is a Russian blue. If those are
[39:28] They're not Russian cats. They're
[39:29] English cats. Isn't he a fixed kitty?
[39:32] They used to be used on the ships to
[39:34] Murmansk because they're the world's
[39:36] greatest mousers.
[39:37] My new book is called The Sorrows of
[39:39] Empire. The subtitle is militarism,
[39:41] secrecy, and the end of the republic.
[39:44] In the last chapter, this book is mostly
[39:46] about our military overstretch and the
[39:51] complications of a volunteer army, of
[39:53] the fact that the military today bears
[39:56] no resemblance to people who remember
[39:59] service in the American military in
[40:00] World War II or in my case in the Korean
[40:03] War or in the Vietnam War when uh there
[40:06] was an obligation to serve in the armed
[40:09] forces uh as a citizen. Uh the uh Today,
[40:13] people serve in the armed forces for
[40:15] particular individual reasons.
[40:18] Normally to escape some dead end of
[40:20] American society. Uh they do not expect
[40:23] to be shot at either.
[40:25] Uh and once they start getting shot at
[40:28] you can expect the re-enlistment rate to
[40:31] uh to reflect it. You're talking about
[40:32] the poverty draft.
[40:34] Well, now I put it to you concretely. If
[40:36] you want to be a uh
[40:37] policeman in Atlanta, Georgia
[40:39] to take the police academy test, you've
[40:41] got to have uh a couple of years of
[40:44] college credits.
[40:45] One of the ways you can get around that
[40:46] is to be a veteran.
[40:48] Uh the uh the second infantry division
[40:51] up on the DMZ in uh Korea right now is
[40:54] actually filled full of people who
[40:56] joined the army in order to get those
[40:57] credits to go back and take the police
[40:59] exam.
[41:00] It's it's a career planning decision a
[41:03] little bit like a kid borrowing $100,000
[41:06] to get his way through Stanford. Uh
[41:09] it's I mean, it's
[41:11] This happens. I mean, when
[41:13] Private Jessica Lynch, uh who got shot
[41:15] up at Nasiriyah uh in uh the advance on
[41:18] Baghdad, when she was asked uh why did
[41:20] you join the army? She says, I couldn't
[41:22] even get a job at Walmart in Palestine,
[41:24] West Virginia. I joined the army to get
[41:27] the hell out of Palestine, West
[41:29] Virginia.
[41:30] I thought, ah
[41:31] here comes the voice of the genuine
[41:34] ranks telling us what's going on in in
[41:37] these things. But the
[41:39] I found that at the end of this uh book,
[41:41] I was obliged to say, well, what were
[41:44] the sorrows of empire? And I come up
[41:47] with four that I discuss in uh in some
[41:51] uh great length. The first, perpetual
[41:53] warfare. That is the very nature of our
[41:56] policies today, particularly preventive
[41:58] war.
[42:00] Uh and uh the breaking of virtually all
[42:04] international agreements and and
[42:07] reciprocal agreements that we have to
[42:08] try and maintain peace and deal with
[42:11] complex problems like global warming and
[42:13] things of this sort. As we break these
[42:15] things the obvious
[42:18] uh consequence is one war after I mean,
[42:21] after all, we've had
[42:22] two major wars and the century is hardly
[42:25] started uh in Afghanistan and in Iraq
[42:28] both of which resulted in
[42:31] what the Pentagon would like to call
[42:32] easy military victories, but
[42:34] instantaneously fell into unbelievably
[42:37] bloody insurgencies that can go on uh
[42:41] into the end of time. Uh the uh
[42:44] uh second uh um
[42:47] uh sorrow of empire that I identified
[42:49] was the loss of civil liberties, was the
[42:52] uh the use of these crisis conditions
[42:55] often generated I mean, quite literally
[42:58] created, produced as if you as you would
[43:01] by uh uh people with inside knowledge
[43:04] and the ability to manipulate them uh
[43:06] leads to the loss of civil liberties as
[43:08] the public
[43:10] with some understanding uh is willing to
[43:13] forego them for the sake of trying to
[43:15] guarantee at least in the short term
[43:18] their immediate security. But that the
[43:20] rise of people like Attorney General
[43:22] Ashcroft and others the uh the third
[43:25] sorrow that I identified was the uh loss
[43:29] of confidence in the government because
[43:31] of now institutional lying based on
[43:33] secrecy. That is to say
[43:36] Colin Powell's had a long and
[43:37] distinguished career as a general in the
[43:40] United States including National
[43:41] Security Advisor to Ronald Reagan,
[43:43] Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at
[43:45] the time of
[43:46] uh uh the first Bush presidency.
[43:48] He totally destroyed his credibility on
[43:51] February 5th of 2003 by openly lying to
[43:55] the Security Council of the United
[43:57] Nations about the nature of the threat
[43:59] posed in Iraq and he had sitting behind
[44:02] him unavoidable in every television
[44:05] picture, Mr. George Tenet, the Director
[44:08] of Central Intelligence as if to verify
[44:10] his views. He was lying and there's not
[44:14] a soul left on Earth who cares to hear
[44:17] our Secretary of State speak on any
[44:19] subject because you can no longer trust
[44:21] him.
[44:22] This
[44:23] becomes part of our political culture
[44:26] that we don't that prudent people no
[44:29] longer believe uh what they hear uh for
[44:33] I mean, that is the spokesman for the
[44:35] Department of Justice comes out and
[44:36] says, we have the our highest priority
[44:39] is to maintain constitutional liberties.
[44:42] Well
[44:44] obviously, anybody who's paid any
[44:45] attention to the United States for the
[44:46] last 2 years know that the direct
[44:48] opposite is true. We are trying to
[44:50] figure out how to get around
[44:51] constitutional liberties and to uh give
[44:54] greater power to the FBI and the CIA and
[44:57] the military
[44:58] uh and to move them into our own
[45:00] society. I mean, we now have a something
[45:02] called the Northern Command located in
[45:05] uh it's a command like CENTCOM or the
[45:08] Pacific Command or the European Command.
[45:10] We'd never created a command like that
[45:13] in the United States before. It was
[45:14] specifically avoided during the Second
[45:17] World War on grounds that it might
[45:19] become a basis for the military takeover
[45:21] of our government. Well, we have one now
[45:23] today uh and uh General Eberhart, the
[45:26] head of Northern Command, regularly
[45:28] talks about how the Posse Comitatus Act
[45:32] which prohibits the use of military
[45:33] force in uh
[45:35] policing powers in the United States. It
[45:37] was enacted after the Civil War. Uh how
[45:39] we might have to modify that act today
[45:42] in order to guarantee the security of
[45:43] the public. I want to say
[45:45] General Eberhart, you don't really
[45:47] realize that that law was enacted to
[45:49] protect us not from civil disorder, but
[45:51] from you, from people like you in this
[45:53] country. Um
[45:56] But the uh the fourth of these uh
[45:59] sorrows of empire is the one that's in
[46:01] some ways most acute and least
[46:03] avoidable. And that's bankruptcy.
[46:06] That is the first three
[46:09] are uh
[46:10] the demise of America as as the
[46:13] politicians say, as we know it. Uh they
[46:15] they are uh
[46:24] an uh
[46:25] we like to call the Roman Empire uh but
[46:29] that it as I say, was a military
[46:31] dictatorship that spent most of its time
[46:33] trying to hold on to the world that it
[46:35] had conquered. Uh and uh and slowly gave
[46:39] way to uh a
[46:42] Christian takeover uh if you will of the
[46:45] uh of the Roman uh
[46:47] republic, also of course a takeover by
[46:49] its outside enemies. Uh Roman Empire.
[46:52] The uh
[46:54] But that bankruptcy
[46:56] which is today getting to be almost
[46:59] inevitable instantaneously creates a
[47:02] crisis that nobody can control. I mean,
[47:05] that it that is it uh
[47:07] uh it's not now whether you want to
[47:08] tolerate it or not or whether you
[47:10] actually care about the Bill of Rights
[47:12] or not or whether you've ever even heard
[47:14] of it before. Uh bankruptcy brings it
[47:17] home to you at once. Right now, I mean,
[47:20] I offer you just
[47:22] one small statistic. Statistics are not
[47:25] things that are usually easily
[47:27] transmitted over television. Um
[47:30] At before the First World War the
[47:32] British Empire had a a trade surplus
[47:36] that was maybe
[47:37] uh its current account surplus is maybe
[47:39] 7% of GDP. They were an extremely rich
[47:42] country. Uh they could afford to make
[47:44] mistakes as in things like the Boer War
[47:47] and things like that. We have trade
[47:49] deficits that are the greatest in
[47:52] recorded economic history. Uh they're
[47:55] running up to uh uh several percentage
[47:58] point high percentage points of GDP.
[48:01] They're financed today, the fact that we
[48:04] consume so much more than we actually
[48:06] produce and we consume it from the rest
[48:08] of the world they're financed by savers
[48:11] around the world, usually people in East
[48:13] Asia, Japanese, Southeast Asians,
[48:16] Chinese
[48:17] who uh want to invest in our currency
[48:20] since it has this imperial quality of
[48:22] being the global standard, want to
[48:25] invest in our currency as a safe haven.
[48:28] It's not that safe anymore. That the
[48:31] value of the euro against the dollar
[48:33] increases to the point that it's right
[48:35] now
[48:36] as I just I looked at it yesterday, 125
[48:39] euros to the dollar. That's getting to
[48:40] be
[48:41] quite up there. I I don't object. I
[48:44] mean, my royalties are paid in euros and
[48:46] I'm just utterly delighted. I On the
[48:48] other hand, I would not like to travel
[48:49] to uh Bologna or Milano right now. Uh it
[48:53] would be awful to have to convert
[48:55] dollars into uh euros in order to pay my
[48:58] hotel bill. Um
[49:00] If uh
[49:02] the savers of the world
[49:04] should decide, and they could almost at
[49:06] any moment at any moment
[49:08] that the euro was a safer place to
[49:11] invest than the dollar because the
[49:14] American economy was mismanaged. And
[49:17] what might lead them to think that? Well
[49:19] that the whole mutual fund industry is
[49:21] now up for grabs because of corruption
[49:24] at the top and that we uh
[49:26] and that we're uh
[49:28] uh the state of California, that the
[49:30] public employees uh pension fund, one of
[49:33] the largest on Earth, is in the process
[49:35] of suing the New York Stock Exchange for
[49:36] corruption.
[49:38] Uh
[49:38] should they decide to shift their funds
[49:41] to euros or to some other currency or
[49:44] just keep it themselves,
[49:46] the American Stock Exchange collapses,
[49:48] we have a howling recession, and the
[49:51] United States instantaneously has to uh
[49:55] to finance all of its external debts by
[49:59] domestic savings.
[50:01] To do that, the interest rates would
[50:03] have to go up to Jimmy Carter levels,
[50:05] 21, 22%. You'd have to really be
[50:08] valuable to you in America to save money
[50:11] and lend it to the government, and you
[50:13] would insist that they pay you a great
[50:14] deal. Now, we're not talking about
[50:15] something abstract here. We're talking
[50:18] about the fact that we have uh
[50:21] trade deficits that are running at uh at
[50:23] uh 5% of GDP.
[50:26] And one of those things that we import a
[50:27] great deal of is petroleum.
[50:29] Too. I mean, that we pay that to
[50:32] Venezuelans and to uh and to Saudi
[50:34] Arabians and to Indonesians and and
[50:36] others.
[50:37] The uh
[50:39] Then you add to that,
[50:41] in November of 2003, the president
[50:44] signed a defense budget of $401 billion.
[50:47] This
[50:48] This is the biggest ever done, and it
[50:50] doesn't include any of the money for
[50:52] Iraq. That's another 150 billion.
[50:55] This is we are going deeply into serious
[50:58] deficits that must sooner or later be
[51:02] paid back or lead to
[51:05] a one and only time, you only do it
[51:07] once, you could denounce your debts.
[51:09] Then once you denounce your debts, you
[51:10] never get to borrow a nickel again in
[51:12] your life. Uh you become a a pauper. Uh
[51:16] the uh
[51:17] uh that we have a allegedly fiscally
[51:19] conservative group of leaders who are
[51:22] anything but fiscally conservative. They
[51:25] are profligate about the the expending
[51:29] of uh
[51:30] of the wealth we have. Meanwhile, the
[51:32] country,
[51:33] as we're as workers in manufacturing
[51:36] discover, the country is turning into
[51:37] finance capitalism. What we do is we
[51:40] manipulate money these days. We don't
[51:42] manufacture very much stuff. We get it
[51:45] from somebody else. Uh
[51:47] the or we have our companies are
[51:50] manufacturing it in China or in uh
[51:53] uh Puebla, Mexico, or in uh uh
[51:57] uh
[51:58] Bangladesh, or
[52:00] uh or in Malaysia, or certainly there's
[52:03] not a computer in the country that's
[52:04] made in the United States today. They're
[52:06] easily most of them made in Malaysia or
[52:08] in Taiwan. Um
[52:11] When this happens, that's as
[52:14] Herb Stein, uh a Republican uh
[52:18] chairman of the Council of Economic
[52:19] Advisers once said,
[52:21] things that don't that can't go on
[52:23] forever don't.
[52:25] We are talking about something here that
[52:27] can't go on forever. And it's only now a
[52:30] matter of time. It's not a matter of a
[52:32] pundit sitting here and telling you that
[52:34] we are at a uh a crossroads. That's the
[52:38] stock in trade of what pundits do. It is
[52:40] say this is something that can't go on
[52:42] forever. It will crack at some point.
[52:46] And there's a lot of people, very smart
[52:48] people who know a lot about money, who
[52:50] are preparing for the crack. That is,
[52:53] when the United States is squeezed dry
[52:55] and can't pay anything more, the same
[52:57] thing happens that it happens to you at
[52:59] Las Vegas when you announce to the uh
[53:03] owner of the casino, "I can't afford my
[53:05] debts." Uh well, uh
[53:08] you could find yourself planted in the
[53:10] in the Las Vegas desert if you say that
[53:12] once too often. Uh that's
[53:15] what we face. It is an almost certain
[53:19] uh result of our militarism and
[53:21] imperialism because
[53:23] they don't produce anything.
[53:25] They are pure expenditure. They
[53:28] Who's they? Militarism, militarism and
[53:30] and and and imperialism are forever
[53:33] expanding, but they are not
[53:35] profit-making. That the military is
[53:38] state socialism. It has absolutely The
[53:40] military-industrial complex has
[53:41] absolutely nothing to do with what we
[53:44] like in an almost German-like way to
[53:46] talk about free enterprise. You have
[53:48] only one customer.
[53:50] Uh the federal government is not
[53:52] concerned with getting its money's
[53:54] worth. It's concerned The military is
[53:56] always concerned with effectiveness,
[53:57] whether you're getting the product that
[53:59] that does what you want wanted to do.
[54:01] That is, at best. The uh
[54:04] the missile defense budget right now,
[54:06] which is an 8 or 9 billion dollars, I
[54:08] can't remember the exact amount. This is
[54:10] simply allocated by Congress and given
[54:12] to the Department of Defense, which then
[54:14] goes to see the manufacturers, uh
[54:17] uh Teledyne and Boeing and Lockheed
[54:20] Martin, and they then sit down and
[54:21] decide how they might spend it. What
[54:24] might be a good way to spend it. But
[54:25] it's not allocated funds.
[54:28] The Constitution requires that the
[54:31] citizens be given in a I can't remember
[54:34] the quote exactly to you, but be given
[54:36] an honest accounting of how their tax
[54:38] tax dollars are spent on a regular
[54:41] basis. This clause is the clause that
[54:44] makes the United States a democracy
[54:47] because it says it makes the separation
[54:49] of powers work. It means that the
[54:51] people, through their representatives,
[54:53] can find out what the executive branch
[54:55] is doing.
[54:57] That has not existed in the United
[54:59] States since World War II. That is, the
[55:01] Manhattan Project that built the atom
[55:03] bombs was and remains to this day
[55:06] totally secret.
[55:07] Uh the uh and that's when the precedent
[55:10] began of all the intelligence budgets
[55:13] and anything you want to bury being put
[55:15] into the defense budget and kept black,
[55:17] so-called. Uh and and and it was
[55:20] thoroughly black until after Watergate,
[55:21] when we began to create committees that
[55:25] senior and safe senators would be given
[55:27] a peek at this stuff, but there are
[55:29] cutouts still in every one of those
[55:30] things. So, the Department Secretary of
[55:31] Defense can, if necessary, declare this
[55:34] simply black, and it's a matter of
[55:35] national security, and there's no way to
[55:37] appeal it. No court has anything to say
[55:39] about it. It's simply done by uniform
[55:42] officers inside that big building uh in
[55:46] Arlington. Um
[55:48] Under these circumstances,
[55:50] I think
[55:52] it is more than likely that the American
[55:54] empire will
[55:57] come uh that it's it's
[56:00] it's uh
[56:02] dismemberment, its uh unraveling will
[56:04] begin as a result of an economic crisis
[56:07] rather than over any of the things that
[56:09] actually concern me more. The the uh
[56:12] perpetual war, loss of civil liberties,
[56:15] uh a culture of of lying and propaganda
[56:19] in official statements of the
[56:20] government. Uh and that uh
[56:23] there I don't believe I'm in any way
[56:26] alone. I think it's the collected wisdom
[56:29] of virtually every economist in the
[56:31] country that we are treading on
[56:33] extremely thin ice uh economically uh
[56:36] and that uh
[56:38] one doesn't see any signs of recovery
[56:42] soon.
[56:43] People talk about
[56:45] civil society
[56:47] and business and government being the
[56:50] three main players, the three stools of
[56:52] the global I mean, the three legs of the
[56:55] global stool. But it's it
[56:58] seems to me that the military community,
[57:01] so-called,
[57:02] Yeah. the not establishment, yeah. Yeah,
[57:04] the establishment that transcends
[57:05] borders, you know, that have links
[57:07] between all themselves. The
[57:10] so-called intelligence community, same
[57:12] thing, the
[57:13] and then organized crime are equal if
[57:16] not even more important players and more
[57:19] important links to the stool. Would you
[57:21] comment?
[57:22] Well, this is what I'm trying to get at
[57:23] in the Sorrows of Empire is the
[57:24] professional military,
[57:26] organized crime, and uh and the
[57:28] intelligence community. Which again,
[57:29] intelligence community, one of the odd
[57:31] things about that, I talk about it at
[57:34] length in my book since I was at one
[57:36] time a consultant to the old Office of
[57:38] National Estimates of the CIA, and do
[57:40] know actually something about it.
[57:42] Intelligence organizations don't do
[57:44] intelligence. They're private armies of
[57:46] executives. That's the clandestine side
[57:49] of things dominates. It wags the tail
[57:52] wags the dog in in the CIA. That is, the
[57:56] intelligence is worthless, as we now
[57:57] know in numerous cases, but that it
[58:00] doesn't for a moment stop the funds
[58:02] flowing there. And that trails off and
[58:06] intersects quite easily with the world
[58:08] of organized crime in that the methods
[58:11] of clandestine activities, of overthrow
[58:14] of governments, of uh
[58:17] provocateurs in which you incite people
[58:19] to riot, have your own snipers kill a
[58:22] few of them, and then say that innocent
[58:25] bystanders were killed by the government
[58:26] you want overthrown. We've used that
[58:28] ploy so many times, from Jakarta to
[58:32] Caracas just recently,
[58:34] uh that it's almost
[58:36] insane to believe that you could see, uh
[58:38] you know, Dan Rather putting it out once
[58:41] again that innocent bystanders were were
[58:44] shot by thugs of the of the Chavez
[58:48] regime, uh which he said, you know, in
[58:50] the in uh
[58:51] uh just last year, when it's uh standard
[58:54] operating procedure in overthrowing a
[58:56] place like Salvador Allende in uh in
[59:00] Chile in 1973 or things of this sort, uh
[59:04] as well as of course even as we know in
[59:06] the case of John Kennedy and his
[59:08] animosity against Fidel Castro, the
[59:11] actual use of known mobsters in the
[59:14] attempt in proposed assassination
[59:16] attempts. Again, the purpose here not
[59:18] being to avoid the onus of
[59:20] assassination, but to avoid the onus of
[59:23] pulling the trigger yourself. It is a
[59:26] It is also another standard American
[59:28] ploy is to have the CIA up with a uh
[59:32] uh a
[59:34] uh a complicit military organization in
[59:37] which they're giving the orders, but the
[59:39] other people are doing it. This is For
[59:41] example, you'll recall just a couple of
[59:43] years ago the shooting down of an
[59:45] airplane over Peru that was filled full
[59:48] of American Baptist missionaries
[59:51] that was interdicted by a CIA controlled
[59:54] plane that sent in the Peruvian Air
[59:55] Force to shoot it down.
[59:57] Well, that's very similar to the Phoenix
[60:00] program throughout the Vietnam War where
[60:02] we killed thousands of people
[60:04] in in similar sorts of ways.
[60:07] So, that the other thing that I think is
[60:09] dangerous in all of this is the
[60:12] They just put in a to remind people once
[60:14] again of one of the greatest scandals in
[60:16] the country and that's something called
[60:18] the School of the Americas located on
[60:21] the base of Fort Benning, Georgia in
[60:23] which we have for now decades trained
[60:27] thousands of thugs in state terrorism
[60:31] throughout Latin America. I strongly
[60:33] recommend to all of your viewers to look
[60:35] up the brilliant School of the Americas
[60:37] watch www.soaw.org
[60:41] and well, there you can also look up any
[60:44] name
[60:45] of a Latin American leader, Mr.
[60:46] Montesinos say recently deposed in Peru
[60:50] and find out that he not only taught at
[60:52] the School of Americas, he taught there
[60:54] twice. He was so good he was invited
[60:56] back on
[60:58] how to
[61:00] to basically
[61:02] produce state terrorism in places like
[61:04] Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador during
[61:07] the 1980s.
[61:08] So, that one begins to wonder
[61:12] what is left for organized crime
[61:16] since
[61:17] we're we're we've taken it over with arm
[61:20] sales
[61:21] with
[61:23] the intimidation of population the
[61:24] protection racket. I mean, used to be
[61:27] that is the Chicago mobsters used to
[61:31] basically say we're going to you're
[61:33] going to pay us to be protected.
[61:34] Protected from whom? From us. Well,
[61:37] that's very largely what
[61:40] America's
[61:42] operations today in
[61:45] about 130 of 170 countries in the United
[61:48] Nations amount to is the protection
[61:50] racket and remember what
[61:53] the citizens of these countries see of
[61:55] the United States are uniformed special
[61:58] forces troops. Not State Department
[62:01] officials, not AID officials, not even
[62:04] businessmen. The ones they run into most
[62:07] commonly and inevitably as a matter of
[62:10] elementary logic have to conclude the
[62:12] Americans think in terms of enforcing
[62:14] their policies not through diplomacy,
[62:17] not through persuasion, but through the
[62:18] use of military force. That is that's
[62:22] that's what you see of the United States
[62:24] today. That's in a certain sense what
[62:26] one again means by blowback. The
[62:28] disjunction between what we think we're
[62:31] doing in the world and what people on
[62:33] the receiving end know that we are
[62:35] actually doing and the kinds of
[62:37] attitudes that they generate. I'm sorry
[62:40] to say, but it is true. I think today
[62:43] the demise of the American empire would
[62:45] be no more regretted in the world than
[62:47] was the demise of the Soviet empire
[62:50] which was not regretted anywhere.
