Renouncing Empire

The means that we use in our empire are evil in themselves. Using evil means, we encourage and reward evil motives among us. Using evil means to accomplish what we think are good ends invariably gives rise to more evils in many forms when we practice the evil methods.
Stopping terrorists looks like a good end. Stopping every terrorist anywhere on earth looks even better. Nevertheless, this pursuit, even if it were done with the best of intentions, produces numerous evils. The evidence of this result is plain in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is plain within America where the abridgment of freedoms is ongoing. It is plain in the use of torture, kidnappings, and indefinite imprisonment of persons without any kind of judicial proceedings. It is plain in an FBI that continually seduces persons into “terrorist” conspiracies.
The war on drugs has produced the same kind of situation. In pursuit of what seems to be a good thing to many people, we have filled the prisons with an enormous number of people. We have created stronger and stronger gangs who batten on the illegality of drugs. We have created police corruption.

The lesson is that we cannot use the collective force of the state to organize our society into a massive pursuit of any supposed good without producing evils. To drive this point home, consider a domestic case. Suppose we attempted to rid our country of all crimes of any sort. This too would produce many evils. We’d be under constant observation. We’d be spied on. We’d lose privacy. We’d face indoctrination and control by those who are anxious to stop crime before it takes root in our minds. We’d be under the thumb of police. We’d be seeing police and monitoring devices everywhere we looked. Our movements and activities would be constantly tracked. Life would become intolerable under such conditions. Freedom of thought, speech, and activity would become risky activities.
The law would become an institution of oppression. The police would have to enforce laws. New laws create new crimes. In our society where laws can be passed to regulate almost any behavior, the attempt to enforce laws and wipe out crime becomes totalitarian oppression. Laws and their ironclad enforcement using our typical methods of punishment do not make for justice, and more so when the laws are bad laws. Indeed they undermine justice because justice requires attention to the details of every individual case and it requires methods other than enforcing arbitrary laws and then locking people up who disobey them.
Here too, in this hypothetical case which is actually becoming less and less hypothetical in modern America, we’d find that, in not acting like loving exponents of Jesus and in propounding Pharisaism, we are creating evils in a misguided attempt to wipe out crime.
Thus, after recognizing that we have an empire, we have to acknowledge that we are not acting in a Christ-like fashion, no matter how good we think our ends are. We have to understand that the more intensely and systematically that we attempt to achieve some supposedly good end by using force, and this is what the state at best hopes to accomplish through its collective might, the more evilly we are ourselves behaving and the more evils we are causing.
That’s the best case. That’s the case in which our aims are good ones. But in reality this is not what is happening. For, in the second place, empire, rather than being an honorable and pure pursuit of good ends via the state, arises from all sorts of questionable motives of the people and interest groups that promote empire. Although our leaders constantly disclaim any ambitions related to empire and the educational establishment propagates this myth, it is simply another one of the falsities upon which the social structure is built.
The American empire is not a purely humanitarian endeavor. It advances the interests of specific persons and groups. Americans are only dimly aware of the special interest groups, such as the armaments companies, that lie behind the empire. They are only dimly aware of the Halliburtons and Bechtels that profit from war. They are only dimly aware of the panoply of institutions, such as central banking, that support the empire. They are only dimly aware of the foreign policy establishment and its intellectual offshoots that basically own and run foreign policy and the empire. The size and strength of the military are, in their minds, causes for celebration and pride. The absence of a military draft and the suppression of battlefield information by the press support a careless attitude toward the military and its overseas engagements.
The awareness of the empire’s feet of clay is changing. The reality of many strange foreign entanglements is helping to change this perception. The huge national debt and the huge government deficits are helping to make people uneasy and question the unimaginably expensive military adventures of the empire. Numerous exposures of corruption and specific crimes and misdemeanors of government figures help.
But Americans tend to forget too or never learn the lessons they should have learned. The society and state constantly press forward with their myths and this too counteracts what people might otherwise realize are the truths of empire.
Vietnam is a distant memory, if that. It is well to recollect the Vietnam War and its aftermath in order to understand the futility of the empire’s wars and the potential for peace that opens up when America withdraws from such fields of combat and acts peacefully. The last American soldier was killed in Vietnam on April 29, 1975. The total number of American military deaths due to hostilities in that war was 47, 413. The total costs of the Vietnam War run far in excess of that.
But within 15-20 years of the war’s conclusion, America and Vietnam were conducting friendly business and trade relations. On July 28, 2000, this communist nation opened a stock market in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon).

In sum, if Americans want to regain their dignity and radiate the beams of liberty once again, they have to start thinking in several new directions. They have to realize that the pursuit of good by evil means creates more evil. They have to realize that they cannot eliminate all the world’s evils and shouldn’t attempt to do so by force or force-related means. They have to realize that their motives have not been pure, but mixed in with interests pursuing gains for themselves, no matter what the consequences for others. Falsity has to be bared.
To shift away from empire, Americans have to disavow it. They have to go directly against the powerful interest groups that favor it. If they really want to end the empire, they can find the ways to do it. They can stop electing pro-war and pro-military politicians. They can end the central bank. They can end the income tax. They can dismantle the worldwide American structure.
Renouncing empire means articulating a new global foreign policy. Americans can go back to the historic American policy of neutrality to all nations and non-intervention.
The existing policies of empire wouldn’t be with us if the promoters of empire had not made them sound good, even if they are dreadfully bad. The neoconservatives promoted and still are promoting benevolent hegemony. This includes the idea that America is exceptionally good and so are Americans, so that if we have to break a few heads (that is, kill and maim people) while spreading our goodness to the benighted of this world, we are justified in doing so. An omelet, we are told, cannot be made without breaking eggs.