"Four sorrows ... are certain to be visited on the United States..."

[indigobusiness]

"Four sorrows ... are certain to be visited on the United States. Their cumulative effect guarantees that the U.S. will cease to resemble the country outlined in the Constitution of 1787. First, there will be a state of perpetual war, leading to more terrorism against Americans wherever they may be and a spreading reliance on nuclear weapons among smaller nations as they try to ward off the imperial juggernaut. Second is a loss of democracy and Constitutional rights as the presidency eclipses Congress and is itself transformed from a co-equal 'executive branch' of government into a military junta. Third is the replacement of truth by propaganda, disinformation, and the glorification of war, power, and the military legions. Lastly, there is bankruptcy, as the United States pours its economic resources into ever more grandiose military projects and shortchanges the education, health, and safety of its citizens."

Chalmers Johnson, Sorrows of Empire

[bemildred]

1. Can I have it when you are finished? nt

[rman]

2. all four are well on their way

"Chalmers Johnson is the president of the Japan Policy Research Institute in California and author of "Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire". This essay is an excerpt from his forthcoming book "The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic".

<more>

www.presentdanger.org/papers/sorrows2003.html

[BrklynLiberal]

6. That is exactly what I was thinking...

As POGO said, "We have met the enemy, and they are us."

[indigobusiness]

9. The future is now.

It is upon us.

[Bluebear]

11. That struck me last night while trying to sleep

Things are going to change rapidly, I don't think the second half of my life will remotely resemble the first half.

[indigobusiness]

13. And you can't mark the halfway point

until it is over.

[indigobusiness]

12. Thanks for the link. Here are 4 scary paragraphs:

The paradoxical effect of this grand strategy is that it may prove more radically disruptive of world order than anything the terrorists of September 11, 2001, could have hoped to achieve on their own. Through its actions, the United States seems determined to bring about precisely the threats that it says it is trying to prevent. Its apparent acceptance of a "clash of civilizations"--wars to establish a moral truth that is the same in every culture--sounds remarkably like a jihad, even to its basis in Christian fundamentalism. Bush seems to equate himself with Jesus Christ in his repeated statements (notably on September 20, 2001) that those who are not with us are against us, which duplicates Matthew chapter 12, verse 30, "He that is not with me is against me."

Implementation of the National Security Strategy will be considerably more problematic than its promulgation and contains numerous unintended consequences. By mid-2003, the United States armed forces were already seriously overstretched, and the U.S. government was going deeply into debt to finance its war machine. The American budget dedicated to international affairs allocates 93% to the military and only 7% to the State Department, and does not have much flexibility left for further military adventures.3 The Pentagon has deployed a quarter of a million troops against Iraq, several thousand soldiers are engaged in daily skirmishes in Afghanistan, countless Navy and Air Force crews are manning strategic weapons in the waters off North Korea, a few thousand Marines have been dispatched to the southern Philippines to fight a century-old Islamic separatist movement, several hundred "advisers" are participating in the early stages of a Vietnam-like insurgency in Colombia and elsewhere in the Andean nations, and the U.S. currently maintains a military presence in 140 of the 189 member countries of the United Nations, including significant deployments in twenty-five. The U.S. has military treaties or binding security arrangements with at least thirty-six countries.4

Aside from the financial cost, there is another constraint. The American people are totally unwilling to accept large numbers of American casualties. In order to produce the "no-contact" or "painless dentistry" approach to warfare, the Pentagon has committed itself to a massive and very expensive effort to computerize battle.5 It has spent lavishly on smart bombs, battlefield sensors, computer-guided munitions, and extremely high performance aircraft and ships. The main reason for all this gadgetry is to keep troops out of the line of fire.

Unfortunately, as the conflicts in both Afghanistan and Iraq have demonstrated, ground troops follow in the wake of massive aerial bombing and missile attacks. The first Iraq War produced four classes of casualties--killed in action, wounded in action, killed in accidents (including "friendly fire"), and injuries and illnesses that appeared only after the end of hostilities. During 1990 and 1991, some 696,778 individuals served in the Persian Gulf as elements of Operation Desert Shield and Operation Desert Storm. Of these 148 were killed in battle, 467 were wounded in action, and 145 were killed in accidents, producing a total of 760 casualties, quite a low number given the scale of the operations.

http://www.presentdanger.org/papers/sorrows2003.html

[ET Awful]

3. Chalmers Johnson has succeeded in putting very succinctly exctly

what I've been telling people for the past 4 years. He did a much better job than I, and stated it much more eloquently.

[indepat]

16. And absolutely no one can offer any sensical/logical refutation of any

of the four.

[Bluebear]

4. It's a grand essay, but NASCAR is starting soon

And the Bachelorette.

America won't listen.

[Pam-Moby]

5. This is a scary statement

but the reality of what it says is becoming more truer everyday!! This administration has a mindset that it is their right to go into any country militarily that will not adopt a democratic type government. It can be seen even stronger now that Condi Lice has taken over the helm of the Secretary of the State office. Her mindset is as twisted as the Chimps and his fellow neo cons. This type of thought pattern is going to be our down fall not our securing of our nation!!!!

[grasswire]

7. important article, thanks

not a happy thing to read on a Saturday morning, but ......

[Cleita]

8. Seems like that other Republic Rome went through this phase and

more recently in the last century the Weimar Republic of Germany that gave us Hitler and one horror after the other. One doesn't need to be prophetic to predict this. You only need to read history to know how both empires ended up.

It doesn't have to be. I don't know who could have stopped the emergence of the Roman emperors but the Nazis could have been stopped except for a cowed populace, who did nothing, and a cadre of greedy corporatists who saw an opportunity to gain wealth and power, and an international community who kept trying to placate Hitler instead of putting up a firm resistance to his invasions.

Britain and the USA were also guilty of this. Britain almost handed Austria, Czecholslavakia and Poland to Hitler. When he didn't stop there but started invading other European countries they took their blinders off and said collective, "Du Oh, maybe we have underestimated this guy".

[indigobusiness]

10. The point you make is a good one, and apt. The parallel

is very real.

[Colorado Blue]

14. We don't even need to go that far back in history.

The British Empire - where is it today? You'd think people would learn but noooooooooooo.

Wish I had some good ideas to stop this catastrophe - the best hope is the 'net and people talking and talking and talking and not being afraid to look at the darkness. And meditating on the concept of kharma:)

[indigobusiness]

15. There lies our only hope.

And why the rode ahead appears so dark.

Karmic debt is a bitch on wheels.

[indigobusiness]

20. "rode" ahead? I really am hooked on phonics. ...sheesh.

We've got problems I didn't even realize we had.

"road" ahead...Am I redeemed?

It is dark, indeed. I'm going now, to light a candle...

[indigobusiness]

33. I hope this article

gets around.

[kk897]

17. my husband thinks we're going to end up like England,

a former world superpower brought low. If so, I don't think that's a bad thing. Instead of yelling, "we're Number One! Woo hoo!" we'd have to yell, "we're Number 13! Yeah!" or something.

[indigobusiness]

19. We will be yelling "Please don't kick our ass for being such assholes

while we were #1."

We've got some heavy dues to pay. My hope has always been we would snap out of it, come down from our high-horse, and implement the genuine potential we have for positive change in the world. We are fast running out of time for that.

[MountainLaurel]

29. Number one in what, I wonder?

I mean, there are parts of the U.S. that have infant mortality rates comparable to those of third-world nations. We probably have a higher percentage of people living in poverty than any other industrialized nation, due to economic inequalities in the workplce, the cost of education, and the lack of across-the-board medical care for all. Because of the poor social net, students aren't being properly educated because they're too worried about where their next meal is coming from or because they're suffering from PTSD after growing up in a war zone.

What GOOD things are we actually number one in? (The ratio between CEO salaries and those of line workers doesn't count.)

:wtf:

[indigobusiness]

31. #1 in mass exploitation

to fuel lifestyles grossly in excess of organic needs.

[indigobusiness]

42. self delete

[JoshK]

18. Yeah, that's the size of it, all right.

No argument from me!

[Bluebear]

21. A big kick

[indigobusiness]

22. Link----full article

http://www.presentdanger.org/papers/sorrows2003.html

For those who didn't catch it above.

[kineneb]

23. Excellent book-recommended reading for all

I bought it in hard cover right after it was published. The history of our "adventures" makes chilling reading. All in all, I have to agree with his pessimism. It isn't looking good for the US. "We" have dug our own grave. Santayana was right about folks (and nations) that fail to learn the lessons of history.

Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him well.

[Eric J in MN]

24. Hasn't the glorification of war been going on for at least 3 years? nt

nt

[indigobusiness]

28. It has been going on for a lot longer than that.

The jingoistic fervor spawned by the unifying impact of WW2 paved the way for the gung-ho militarism of today.

[autorank]

25. Sorrows of Empire...Great Book--Read It. Excellent Post.

[Hardrada]

26. I read this also and it should

be issued in PB so more could have access to it.

[autorank]

27. Good news. I saw it at Barnes/Noble in trade paperback.

You're right, it should be pushed. It was an eye opener and helped me see just how pathetic our public media is. Cheers.

[MountainLaurel]

30. Gonna have to order it for the library

We have the 2001 book he put out. Somehow, I missed this one.

[indigobusiness]

32. The Sorrows Of Empire : Militarism, Secrecy, And The End Of The Republic

Half.com has a good selection.

http://half.ebay.com/cat/buy/prod.cgi?cpid=1213811666&domain_id=1856&meta_id=1

[ottozen]

34. If the current regime is

visiting the four sorrows upon the United States, then they must do the only honorable thing. Anyone voluteering to be their second?

[indigobusiness]

35. The line forms

at the rear.

[indigobusiness]

36. One more frightening snippet

The key cases here concern two native-born American citizens--Yasir Esam Hamdi and Jose Padilla. Hamdi, age 22, was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, but raised in Saudi Arabia. The Pentagon claimed he was captured fighting for the Taliban in Afghanistan, although in a more detailed submission it acknowledged that he surrendered to the Northern Alliance forces, the warlords whom the U.S. had paid to fight on its side, before he engaged in any form of combat. Padilla is a Brooklyn-born American of Puerto Rican ancestry. He was arrested by federal agents on May 8, 2002, at O'Hare Airport, Chicago, after he arrived on a flight from Pakistan. He was held for a month without any charges being filed or contact with an attorney or the outside world. On the eve of his appearance in federal court in New York, he was hastily transferred to a military prison in Charleston, South Carolina; and President Bush designated him "a bad guy" and an "enemy combatant." No charges were brought against him, and attempts to force the government to make its case via writs of habeas corpus were routinely turned down on grounds that the courts have no jurisdiction over a military prisoner.

A year and a half after September 11, 2001, at least two articles of the Bill of Rights were dead letters--the fourth prohibiting unwarranted searches and seizures and the sixth guaranteeing a jury of peers, the assistance of an attorney in offering a defense, the right to confront one's accusers, protection against self-incrimination, and, most critically, the requirement that the government spell out its charges and make them public. The second half of Thomas Jefferson's old warning--"When the government fears the people, there is liberty; when the people fear the government, there is tyranny"--clearly applies.13

[H2O Man]

37. Fascinating

because it is exactly what we are witnessing. However, it is a roadmap, and as such, offers us the opportunity to move in another direction. In the process of the four sorrows, we see the corporate transformation of American life into a modern feudalism. Nothing implies this more than the concept of corporations being considered legal entities with individual rights, yet with limited responsibilities.

The only viable answer is, of course, the most ironic. We need to consider the risky yet potentially healing powers of tribalism. If we consider the Constitution in terms of group rights, rather than limited individual rights, then the United States might be visited by Four Sparrows.

[indigobusiness]

38. If we won't learn from our mistakes...

we won't last.

[H2O Man]

39. "Smart people

learn from other's mistakes; most people must learn from their own; and fools just don't learn at all!" -- Rubin "Hurricane" Carter

[Just Me]

40. Your post sums up my concerns. We are suffering those sorrows,...

,...and they are growing in depth and breadth. I sure hope that pendulum comes swinging back SOON!!!

[indigobusiness]

41. They are just hitting their stride

and their prime motivators are firmly entrenched.

It is going to take some serious undoing to turn the swing of the pendulum. But, it always swings back. What wreckage will it find this time as it retraces its wake? Scary prospects.

[Delphinus]

43. Wow!

Such truth in that one paragraph.

They're here.

[GOPBasher]

44. One thing Johnson forgot...

No more freedom of religion. We'll have a theocracy.