Killing for the Sake of It: The Grisly Reality of the Failing US Empire
Mired in financial collapse, moral decay, and lack of leadership & direction, the last sole superpower is lashing out in every direction, spreading brutal destruction throughout the world for nothing more than its own depraved sake


This article originally appeared at Club Orlov

The story is the same every time: some nation, due to a confluence of lucky circumstances, becomes powerful — much more powerful than the rest — and, for a time, is dominant. But the lucky circumstances, which often amount to no more than a few advantageous quirks of geology, be it Welsh coal or West Texas oil, in due course come to an end. In the meantime, the erstwhile superpower becomes corrupted by its own power.

As the endgame approaches, those still nominally in charge of the collapsing empire resort to all sorts of desperate measures — all except one: they will refuse to ever consider the fact that their imperial superpower is at an end and that they should change their ways accordingly. George Orwell once offered an excellent explanation for this phenomenon: as the imperial end-game approaches, it becomes a matter of imperial self-preservation to breed a special-purpose ruling class — one that is incapable of understanding that the end-game is approaching. Because, you see, if they had an inkling of what’s going on, they wouldn’t take their jobs seriously enough to keep the game going for as long as possible.

The approaching imperial collapse can be seen in the ever-worsening results the empire gets for its imperial efforts. After World War II, the U.S. was able to do a respectable job helping to rebuild Germany, along with the rest of Western Europe. Japan also did rather well under U.S. tutelage, as did South Korea after the end of fighting on the Korean peninsula. With Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, all of which were badly damaged by the U.S., the results were significantly worse: Vietnam was an outright defeat, Cambodia lived through a period of genocide, while amazingly resilient Laos — the most heavily bombed country on the planet — recovered on its own.

The first Gulf War went even more badly: fearful of undertaking a ground offensive in Iraq, the U.S. stopped short of its regular practice of toppling the government and installing a puppet regime there and left it in limbo for a decade. When the U.S. did eventually invade, it succeeded — after killing countless civilians and destroying much of the infrastructure — in leaving behind a dismembered corpse of a country.

Similar results have been achieved in other places where the U.S. saw fit to get involved: Somalia, Libya and, most recently, Yemen. Let’s not even mention Afghanistan, since all empires have failed to achieve good results there. So the trend is unmistakable: whereas at its height the empire destroyed in order to rebuild the world in its own image, as it nears its end it destroys simply for the sake of destruction, leaving piles of corpses and smoldering ruins in its wake.

Another unmistakable trend has to do with the efficacy of spending money on “defense” (which, in the case of the U.S., should be redefined as “offense”). Having a lavishly endowed military can sometimes lead to success, but here too something has shifted over time. The famous American can-do spirit that was evident to all during World War II, when the U.S. dwarfed the rest of the world with its industrial might, is no more. Now, more and more, military spending itself is the goal — never mind what it achieves.

And what it achieves is the latest F-35 jet fighter that can’t fly; the latest aircraft carrier that can’t launch planes without destroying them if they are fitted with the auxiliary tanks they need to fly combat missions; the most technologically advanced AEGIS destroyer that can be taken out of commission by a single unarmed Russian jet carrying a basket of electronic warfare equipment; and another aircraft carrier that can be frightened out of deep water and forced to anchor by a few Russian submarines out on routine patrol.

But the Americans like their weapons, and they like handing them out as a show of support. But more often than not these weapons end up in the wrong hands: the ones they gave to Iraq are now in the hands of ISIS; the ones they gave to the Ukrainian nationalists have been sold to the Syrian government; the ones they gave to the government in Yemen is now in the hands of the Houthis who recently overthrew it. And so the efficacy of lavish military spending has dwindled too. At some point it may become more efficient to modify the U.S. Treasury printing presses to blast bundles of U.S. dollars in the general direction of the enemy.

With the strategy of “destroying in order to create” no longer viable, but with the blind ambition to still try to prevail everywhere in the world somehow still part of the political culture, all that remains is murder. The main tool of foreign policy becomes political assassination: be it Saddam Hussein, or Muammar Qaddafi, or Slobodan Milošević, or Osama bin Laden, or any number of lesser targets, the idea is to simply kill them.

While aiming for the head of an organization is a favorite technique, the general populace gets its share of murder too. How many funerals and wedding parties have been taken out by drone strikes? I don’t know that anyone in the U.S. really knows, but I am sure that those whose relatives were killed do remember, and will remember for the next few centuries at least. This tactic is generally not conducive to creating a durable peace, but it is a good tactic for perpetuating and escalating conflict. But that’s now an acceptable goal, because it creates the rationale for increased military spending, making it possible to breed more chaos.

Recently a retired U.S. general went on television to declare that what’s needed to turn around the situation in the Ukraine is to simply “start killing Russians.” The Russians listened to that, marveled at his idiocy, and then went ahead and opened a criminal case against him. Now this general will be unable to travel to an ever-increasing number of countries around the world for fear of getting arrested and deported to Russia to stand trial.

This is largely a symbolic gesture, but non-symbolic non-gestures of a preventive nature are sure to follow. You see, my fellow space travelers, murder happens to be illegal. In most jurisdictions, inciting others to murder also happens to be illegal. Americans have granted themselves the license to kill without checking to see whether perhaps they might be exceeding their authority. We should expect, then, that as their power trickles away, their license to kill will be revoked, and they will find themselves reclassified from global hegemons to mere murderers.

As empires collapse, they turn inward, and subject their own populations to the same ill treatment to which they subjected others. Here, America is unexceptional: the number of Americans being murdered by their own police, with minimal repercussions for those doing the killing, is quite stunning. When Americans wonder who their enemy really is, they need look no further.

But that is only the beginning: the precedent has already been set for deploying U.S. troops on U.S. soil. As law and order break down in more and more places, we will see more and more U.S. troops on the streets of cities in the U.S., spreading death and destruction just like they did in Iraq or in Afghanistan. The last license to kill to be revoked will be the license to kill ourselves.

What a marvellous and powerful piece of writing.

Yeah, its no longer news that the USA as we know it, is, like every other empire, slumping to its knees. And how can you tell? Well, this could help:

thirty-six sure-fire indicators that your empire is falling apart:

You know your empire’s crumbling when the folks who are gearing up their empire to replace yours start blowing up satellites in space. And then they don’t bother to return your phone calls when you ring up to ask why.

You know your empire’s crumbling when those same folks are cutting deals left, right and center across Asia, Latin America and Africa, while you, your lousy terms, and your arrogant attitude are no longer welcome.

You know your empire’s crumbling when you’re spending your grandchildren’s money like a drunken sailor, and letting your soon-to-be rivals finance your little splurge (i.e., letting them own your country).

You know your empire’s crumbling when it’s considered an achievement to pretend that you’ve halved the rate at which you’re adding to the massive mountain of debt you’ve already accumulated.

You know your empire’s crumbling when you weaken your currency until it looks as anemic as a Paris runway model, and you’re still setting record trade deficits. (Hint: Because you’re not making anything anymore.)

You know your empire’s crumbling when “the little brown ones” (thank you George H.W. Bush – certainly not me – for that lovely expression) in country after country of “your backyard” blow you off and proudly elect anti-imperialist leftist governments.

You know your empire’s crumbling when you can’t topple those governments and replace them with nice puppet regimes – like in the good old days – even if you wanted to. And you badly want to.

You know your empire’s crumbling when one of their leaders comes to the United Nations and makes fun of your emperor, calling him the devil, and joking about smelling sulphur where he just stood. And though a few folks cringe, everybody laughs.

You know your empire’s crumbling when just about your entire military land force is tied up in a worse-than-useless war launched on the basis of complete fabrications, that every day is actually making you less – not more – secure from external threat.

You know your empire’s crumbling when almost half the soldiers in that war are high-paid mercenaries, and you don’t dare institute a draft.

You know your empire’s crumbling when you send soldiers into war with two weeks training and a lack of armor, and then you keep them there for three, four and five rotations.

You know your empire’s crumbling when a member of the Axis of Evil can test missiles and explode nuclear warheads, and all you can do about it is mumble some pathetic warnings about how they better not do that again or there will be consequences.

You know your empire’s crumbling when you even think that there is an Axis of Evil.

You know your empire’s crumbling when a rag-tag military hodge-podge of irregulars has you pinned down in an endless fight you can’t win, but also can’t lose.

You know your empire’s crumbling when you’re too dumb to even ban Humvees as a first step toward ending your dependency on a foreign-owned crucial resource.

You know your empire’s crumbling when you trade your prior moral leadership on human rights issues for global disgust at your torture, ‘extraordinary rendition’ (a.k.a. kidnaping for torture) and the dismantling of nine centuries worth of civil liberties progress.
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You know your empire’s crumbling when you blow off international law that you once helped create, and undermine the institutions of international governance that you once helped build.

You know your empire’s crumbling when opinion polls confirm that every month you’re more and more despised throughout the world.

You know your empire’s crumbling when you can’t even pull off the hanging of a tin-pot murderous former dictator without turning him into a hero.

You know your empire’s crumbling when you’re the richest country in the world, but nearly 50 million of your people don’t have basic health care coverage.

You know your empire’s crumbling when the World Health Organization ranks your healthcare system 37th ‘best’ in the world, just above Slovenia, and just below Costa Rica. (And far below Colombia, Cyprus, Saudi Arabia and Morocco.)

You know your empire’s crumbling when instead of making it easier for citizens to obtain a higher education, you’re making it harder and more expensive.

You know your empire’s crumbling when your government gives tax breaks to industries as a reward for exporting your jobs elsewhere.

How many now? Ok, to be continued...

......continuation...

You know your empire’s crumbling when the so-called ‘opposition’ party can’t even turn that obscenity into a viable campaign theme and use it to clobber the worst emperor in your history.

You know your empire’s crumbling when your middle class has been stagnant for three decades, while the wealth of the hyper-rich continues to climb through the roof.

You know your empire’s crumbling when your reaction to that is to exacerbate the problem by enacting tax policies that massively increase further still the gap between the rich and the rest.

You know your empire’s crumbling when the predatory class has taken over your government and is stripping the country of everything not bolted down to the floor. And then it sells the floor itself, as well, to your rivals.

You know your empire’s crumbling when you’re spending tens of billions of dollars you don’t own on new nuclear warheads and space weapons that don’t work, to be used against an enemy you don’t have.

You know your empire’s crumbling when one of your cities drowns and your government does next to nothing before, during and after.

You know your empire’s crumbling when a massive environmental nightmare is looming around the corner, and your emperor not only ignores it, but claims it isn’t real while taking steps to exacerbate it.

You know your empire’s crumbling when your emperor is warned by a CIA briefer of an imminent terrorist attack of vast proportions, and responds by remaining on vacation and dismissing the briefer with the words: “All right. You’ve covered your ass, now.”

You know your empire’s crumbling when the same emperor drops everything to fly across the country from his vacation home in order to sign a bill intervening on the wrong side of a personal medical drama involving a single family.

You know your empire’s crumbling when gays and immigrants are used as diversionary issues to keep people from thinking about the pillaging of their country and their wallets actually taking place. And it works.

You know your empire’s crumbling when people are getting more religious and less scientific, not the other way around.

You know your empire’s crumbling when your political leaders start to be chosen by dynastic rules of succession.
And you especially know your empire’s crumbling when the most idiotic child of one of the least accomplished leaders in its history is not only crowned as the next emperor, but is even revered for a time by most of the public as a great one.

So mych more to follow. But maybe you wana contribute. You are welcome.

Rome? Britain? Spain?
At this rate, yankees will be lucky to end up like Belgium..

Poignant and apt. This article pierces straight through the hyperbole that is US propaganda of world supremecy, and it was done with salient reasoning.

Do Americans really care ? There is the first place I saw people living on the streets like mad people when they are not actually mad, such sights are still to be seen in my country, the first I heard someone went to Jail for collecting rain water from his roof, cus a certain Company has PRIVATIZED ALL THE RAIN !!

they don't really care .

thoth:
Do Americans really care ? There is the first place I saw people living on the streets like mad people when they are not actually mad, such sights are still to be seen in my country, the first I heard someone went to Jail for collecting rain water from his roof, cus a certain Company has PRIVATIZED ALL THE RAIN !!

they don't really care .

Exactly! They dont realy care. The heigtht of insanity!

Glen Ford talks about this here.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckkl3DYL6dk

Lol, incredibly disproportioned/biased. This article does a pretty good job painting the US as some kind of squalid hell-hole.

thoth:
the first I heard someone went to Jail for collecting rain water from his roof, cus a certain Company has PRIVATIZED ALL THE RAIN

indeed this one bothers me till today. i have no idea how such a law ever even passed. greed

Bre:
Poignant and apt. This article pierces straight through the hyperbole that is US propaganda of world supremecy, and it was done with salient reasoning.

It is obvious the US role on the world stage is changing, but this article is anything but salient. It is obviously biased. Think about it. The F35 program is a drop in the bucket to the US Navy presence worldwide. Google it and see how ridiculously massive it is.

If China does attain supremacy, it is going to to take another 25 to 30 years easily. The US is slowing down, but it has mass. An economy with half a trillion people is not going to slow down appreciably in less than a decade. For the same reason, China's mass means it is not going to achieve the economic clout it wants for another 2 decades. Already it is much harder to maintain the growth they had earlier on, and they may very well be cooking the books (just like the US lol)

The most likely scenario - USA's 20th century domination is done. Instead we will have regional powers. Question is who controls Africa... I think we actually need democratic strongmen in Africa...strong willed presidents who can marshall African countries to fend for themselves as the world powers realign themselves. Personally, this is one of my reasons for preferring a Buhari over GEJ, but lets not bring that here

birdman:



indeed this one bothers me till today. i have no idea how such a law ever even passed. greed

Don't let it bother you, because such laws are not far from Nigeria. APC is a neoliberal capitalist dredging machine. check out their marriage with world financial institutions, they propensity to borrow in large sums, the Massive privatization that goes on in every state they govern, their blatant preference to foreign exploitative institutions both in the sphere of Policies(advisors) and Infrastructure(projects, implementations ,taxation etc).

thoth:

Don't let it bother you, because such laws are not far from Nigeria. APC is a neoliberal capitalist dredging machine. check out their marriage with world financial institutions, they propensity to borrow in large sums, the Massive privatization that goes on in every state they govern, their blatant preference to foreign exploitative institutions both in the sphere of Policies(advisors) and Infrastructure(projects, implementations ,taxation etc).

nope. its not going to happen. if you really think that kind of law can pass in Nigeria, lol. you need to step back from your theories brother, and see the reality on the ground.

and just to add, there is nothing wrong with borrowing..its the amount you borrow compared to your ability to repay. Do you have proof that LAogs has borrowed anywhere near its GDP?

birdman:


nope. its not going to happen. if you really think that kind of law can pass in Nigeria, lol. you need to step back from your theories brother, and see the reality on the ground.

and just to add, there is nothing wrong with borrowing..its the amount you borrow compared to your ability to repay. Do you have proof that LAogs has borrowed anywhere near its GDP?

and Lagos can repay what it has borrowed ?
don't even bring that misleading GDP to lending ratio in this discussion.

thoth:

and Lagos can repay what it has borrowed ?
don't even bring that misleading GDP to lending ratio in this discussion.

you have proof that it cant? i want to see it. GDP based or not.

birdman:


you have proof that it cant? i want to see it. GDP based or not.

Can Lagos pay it's civil servants if it starts paying off its debt by 20% per year, hoping to clear it off within 5 years during which it stops borrowing ?

Can it pay off both at the same time, ? I don't know how these institution disabled common sense and let those nonsense fly.

Let me rephrase, If Lagos decides to pay of it's debt within 5 years by paying 20% of it per year will it still be able to pay off it's civil servants without borrowing ?

thoth:

Can Lagos pay it's civil servants if it starts paying off its debt by 20% per year, hoping to clear it off within 5 years during which it stops borrowing ?

Can it pay off both at the same time, ? I don't know how these institution disabled common sense and let those nonsense fly.

Let me rephrase, If Lagos decides to pay of it's debt within 5 years by paying 20% of it per year will it still be able to pay off it's civil servants without borrowing ?

i dont know. but do you? you are the one who brought it up. I assume you would then have numbers to prove LASG wrong. And I assume you have some reasonas to why 5 years is the golden timeto pay off a loan. It seems you do not have those numbers. So then, what was your basis for making those assertions?

birdman:


i dont know. but do you? you are the one who brought it up. I assume you would then have numbers to prove LASG wrong. And I assume you have some reasonas to why 5 years is the golden timeto pay off a loan. It seems you do not have those numbers. So then, what was your basis for making those assertions?

Why are blacks always attracted to Economic Shamans ? Because you guys always throw away your common sense and gets befuddled by economic hitmen with numbers, fancy words like GDP,gini etc, why can we as a people get enlightened and use the knowledge we got to solve our malady .
My statement is very simple that any one can understand it, having the backdrop that those foreign institutions has be siphoning Lagos state funds in the name of interest, money which should be used for development instead, coupled with that the debt Lagos state government owes has given the foreigners leverage over Lagos state policies, they decide which contracts gets awarded, to which company, which development policy gets carried out , keep all that in mind and know that these greedy institutions are stunting the growth of the state with the highest Internal Revenue and GDP ....... now in order to remove the chains of debt and be truly sovereign the states has to be pay up it's debt , it is widely know as a fact that if you can't pay off these vampires within five years then you can't pay them off at all because they use the interest rate to strangle the nations, to make sure that the debt never gets paid and the nation ends up paying more than 20 times what it bborrowed, infact if you were a good reader you would be aware of this from countless studies performed in Africa and South America.

Divide the amount owed by Lagos by 7 and keeping in mind the cost of civil salaries and pretending that the debt has no interest, tell me if the state can pay off it's debt and fulfill it's civil obligations at the same time ?

Note: excluding the interest rate from debt calculation is absurd but i believe it helps to get your head around the ideas and also show how deep in this mess we have jumped.

thoth:

Why are blacks always attracted to Economic Shamans ? Because you guys always throw away your common sense and gets befuddled by economic hitmen with numbers, fancy words like GDP,gini etc, why can we as a people get enlightened and use the knowledge we got to solve our malady .
My statement is very simple that any one can understand it, having the backdrop that those foreign institutions has be siphoning Lagos state funds in the name of interest, money which should be used for development instead, coupled with that the debt Lagos state government owes has given the foreigners leverage over Lagos state policies, they decide which contracts gets awarded, to which company, which development policy gets carried out , keep all that in mind and know that these greedy institutions are stunting the growth of the state with the highest Internal Revenue and GDP ....... now in order to remove the chains of debt and be truly sovereign the states has to be pay up it's debt , it is widely know as a fact that if you can't pay off these vampires within five years then you can't pay them off at all because they use the interest rate to strangle the nations, to make sure that the debt never gets paid and the nation ends up paying more than 20 times what it bborrowed, infact if you were a good reader you would be aware of this from countless studies performed in Africa and South America.

Divide the amount owed by Lagos by 7 and keeping in mind the cost of civil salaries and pretending that the debt has no interest, tell me if the state can pay off it's debt and fulfill it's civil obligations at the same time ?

Note: excluding the interest rate from debt calculation is absurd but i believe it helps to get your head around the ideas and also show how deep in this mess we have jumped.

funny thing about numbers is, you actually have to mention them. I dont see you quoting any above. why are you dividing by 7. Why not 20. Even buying a private house, 15-30 years is standard. All what you are saying boils down to you think we are borrowing too much. But you are not giving us any reason why this is so.

If you could pay back a loan for a capital project in 5 years, you wouldnt need to get the loan in the first place. Based on this, I dont think that you fully understand what a state/national budget is, and why you need to borrow for capital intensive projects in lieu of cutting of existing social services