Imperial Decay ClassWarFilms

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLG5Hx1eceY

All empires are evil; they are certainly undemocratic. Can the U.S. un-imperialize itself, or must it go the way of all empires? Collapse.

There is a characteristic stink that empires exude as they slip and stumble from the apex of their power, when the arrogant brute monster that had a cowed and conquered world under its boots is shuddering in systemic failure. We recognize it in our time, from Nazi Germany, Banzai Japan, and the titan Soviet Union. But the odor of imperial rot was the same in Persia, Athens, and Rome, and when Babylon's king shook to see the handwriting on his wall. This necrotic feeder has many causes. One is the shock an empire suffers at its first stunning inability to impose its mighty will. Another is the sheer awe at repeated failure to impose ordained outcomes. And then there is the sick secret suspicion that the era of its easy dominion is over. That nauseating stink is strong in our air again, this time the aroma of super-rating decease that offends the world as that of a floundering, moribund imperial America. When the Soviet Union's internally rotten zombie colossus crumbled and collapsed, it left America as the unrivaled hegemon in a totally subservient world. America had always been imperialist, but selectively so. When the USSR tanked, all restraints were gone. The fantasy of sole overlordship of the world suddenly seemed to America's owners not just possible, but irresistible. Overreach is the beginning of the end for empires. With the 21st century, the terminal phase of America's began. There had been a long preview. To an objective observer uninfected by the myth of American exceptionalism, the indicators of coming catastrophe were strong and clear. First was Korea, where the world's sole atomic power, triumphant after World War II, failed to crush a tiny, poor, and backwards semi-country. The no-win Korean truce was the first indication that American might could be stalemated. Second was the monumental failure of Vietnam. Having brutalized that tiny land with more bomb tonnage than was dropped in World War II, killing a million civilians, the empire was run out with its tail between its legs. That raw humiliation of our hubristic rulers goaded them to yet greater reliance on military force. Under Reagan, ego-bruised America only attacked states with no armies at all. Raids on Grenada and Panama were touted as victories instead of the ugly muggings they were. What they clearly showed, though, was that the empire's managers had doubled down on the hard-power imperial path. The high point of the empire redux was the sham war with Saddam's Iraq over Kuwait. Again, the US military's power to devastate a third world nation without naval or air defenses was boasted as proof that America, vaunted by our overlords as the indispensable nation, was number one. Empires do not crash, they rot, both inside and out. They do not fail from military impotence, they are often near their maximum destructive power when they implode. Blind to their inner pathology, and totally reliant on military force, they put their all into war to sustain their insatiable exploitation, and inevitably reach a tipping point, and fall. The endgame for imperial America began with what were peddled as more heroic victories, Afghanistan and Iraq. The world was advised after their invasions that the US mission was accomplished. A shameful, bloody, and bankrupting decade later, worn out and worsted by both enemies, America's military has been frog-marched out of Iraq, and is baffled, lost, and directionless in Afghanistan. It would seem that rational rulers might absorb a message written in the blood and money of their nation, but that is to misunderstand the function of empire. It is by violence abroad, and deception and repression at home, to enrich the ruling class at the cost of the utter ruin of its society. No government begins as an empire. Empires emerge when a power elite captures the mechanisms of control, and runs the engine of governance solely for its own ends. In America's case, this occurred early, easily, and utterly unknown to its naive and propagandized people. The process of an alien agent taking control of a host body is parasitism. The parasite, in nature, is indifferent to the health of its victim, and will feed on it and bleed it till it dies. This is what empires have always done to their societies. It has been done in America for generations with impunity, because the expanding empire had no need to swiftly devour its own. From the native west, into Latin America, then beyond, it spread its power like a plague. First with a military mailed fist, then with the velvet glove of gangster finance, creating crises of disaster capitalism, it has raped, robbed, and ruined nations all over the world. What then has changed? Why is it over now? Though it is fiercely denied by the empire's rulers, the dull sneering 1% who own America, it has overreached. The whole of its vast technologically superior military might was loosed on two poor, weak, disorganized third-world countries, and failed. All its fabulous and diabolical weaponry has not sufficed to enforce its control, and the world knows it. Now baffled by both military and moral vulnerability, the empire is reduced to paying mercenary jihadi killers to make the fight it can't make itself in Syria, while blustering and dithering toward Iran in clumsy, insecure intimidation. The effort is pathetic. The bluff has been called, and it must either back down now or go all-in, an insane act of national ego defense that could trigger world war last. It is astonishing hubris for a country to declare itself the indispensable nation, because as all history shows, there are none, and there never have been. Like so many empires before it, America bid too high for world dominion. Loss. The decline is now irreversible. Fall of the empire may come soon, or it may not, but it will come. All that is uncertain, especially to the helmsman of this imperial titanic, is whether it is to end with a bang, or a whimper.