The Last Empire (47 page)

I did not report on my country’s disastrous imperial activities with much amusement. All I wanted to do was tell a story never told before on our television—and never to be told again as long as the likes of GE and Disney are allowed to be media owners and manipulators of opinion.

What to do? Break up the conglomerates. That’s a start. And then—well, why not go whole hog—what about a free press, representative government and . . . Well, you get the picture.

The Nation

30 September 1996

* 
U.S.
OUT OF
UN—UN
OUT OF
U.S.

The first American Secretary of Defense, James V. Forrestal, on July 15, 1949, in the name of NATO, the Four Freedoms, and the pursuit of happiness, accomplished the first successful invasion of England since the Normans when he sent two groups of B-29s to the U.K., observing privately to President Truman that it would be a good idea “to accustom the English” to the ongoing presence of the American air force. Less than a year later, suffering from nervous exhaustion, he put down his copy of Sophocles’
Ajax
and jumped out of a hospital window, leaving behind not only his annotated
Ajax
but the outward visible sign of American occupation, our English bases.

A busy half-century now draws to a close. Along the way, in 1989, the Evil Soviet Empire surrendered to our goodness. Now, as the self-styled Sole Global Nuclear Power, we fire commands rapidly at friend and foe alike. President Clinton, responding gleefully to Congress’s targeting of “terrorist nations,” has warned the entire world that if any foe or ally dares do business with Libya and Iran and Iraq, much less leprous Cuba, we shall . . . well, like Lear, we’ll do something or other. Don’t worry. Are we not the SGNP?

Currently American conservatives (whatever that word now means) are calling for a
new
imperialism. In the pages of the latest
Foreign Affairs
William Kristol and Robert Kagan (aesthetically, one wants a third “K”) tell us that “today’s lukewarm consensus about America’s reduced role in a post–Cold War world is wrong.” They like simple declarative sentences. So here’s one for them. The largest debtor nation on earth has no choice but to reduce its imperial role. No money. The Ks are Reaganites and see the former President as a sort of American Bismarck, although it was as General Custer that he made his mark in movie history, which seems to be their only history, too. The Ks are in the grip of a most unseemly megalomania. “American hegemony is the only reliable defense against a breakdown of peace and international order.” Tell that to the Asians.

The Ks also say that as we have never been so well off, we can afford to spend an additional $60–80 billion a year on war. This is nonsense. (The style is contagious.) They want a Reaganesque military buildup of great profit to aerospace industries and no one else. Their high-minded line is that there are bound to be many, many more exciting wars for us to fight and win. They seem to believe that our Declaration of Independence was not just for us but a blueprint for the whole world, which is longing to be American. The truth seems otherwise. Hearken to the howls from our allies as the radiant Oval One, from his ever more Byzantine capital, tells others with whom they may not trade.

One must at least give the “conservatives,” as represented by the Ks, a mark for trying to find something for the United States to do now that the world has settled down to its usual mess of tribal rivalries and trade wars. The British, after the Suez debacle, were given to quoting Dean Acheson—a creator of the Global Empire—to the effect that Britain had lost an empire but had yet to find a role. In answer, J. B. Priestley wrote a wise meditation on the royal coat-of-arms—suggesting that now that the days of the lion were done, why not turn to the unicorn, a mythical elegant beast suggestive of magic and art? And so a considerable flowering in the arts lasted for at least a generation. We have no comparable heraldic lineage, only the bald-headed American eagle, so reminiscent of General Eisenhower when he tried to give up smoking.

The Ks want the eagle to be brought back to life, claws clutching thunderbolts, the odd olive branch. Apparently, earth is American and we must govern all of it for the good of the human race. But the other nations did not elect us leader post-1989. Rather, Western Europe comes slowly together. Japan prepares for a new metamorphosis while China, “the sleeping giant” that Napoleon said only a fool would awaken, is already an American creditor. The old order is gone forever and the brief hegemony of the white race is drawing to an unmourned close.

The Ks seem to be living in a world that never really existed outside the movies or American political rhetoric. They find “the Europeans and the Japanese supportive of [our] world leadership role.” Not this week nor, indeed, for some years now has the United States been looked to as an upholder of international law and order. When requested to go before the tribunal at The Hague to explain alleged crimes against Nicaragua, the U.S. refused to accept the jurisdiction of a court that we had helped set up. Also, whenever the fit is upon the Oval One, he feels perfectly free to bomb Gaddafi’s family or invade Panama killing quite a few Panamanians as he kidnaps their leader and then puts him on trial in an American court that has no jurisdiction over him. Such a model of international roguery is hardly eligible to fill the Ks’ notion of a benign world hegemon. What they actually hanker after is Caesarism, no bad option if you are really stronger militarily and economically than everyone else
but, alas, aside from the power to nuclearize the planet, Uncle Sam, he dead.

The Declaration of Independence is sometimes thought by old-fashioned European conservatives to be a liberal document. Here, I think, they mix it up with the French Rights of Man, a truly radical and always—to some of us—heartening trumpet blast. Our own declaration was a more modest affair. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness were the set goals. But liberty hardly means the leveling of classes to those rich white conservative men who fancifully called the forcible separation of colonies from British Crown a revolution when it was simply an inevitable devolution. England was too small and too far away to govern so many people, so much territory.

Pursuit of happiness was an exceptional thought and, like the Holy Ghost for serious Christians, something to brood upon. In any case, the American day has pretty much run out. The Ks speak for no one except energetic political hustlers within the Washington Beltway. But as the U.S. grows shakier at home and abroad, accidents can still happen. That is why, in the light of the current uproar over President Clinton’s boycotting of entire countries, it might be a good idea to start, as tactfully as possible, the removal of the United Nations from the United States and then of the United States from the United Nations (unless, of course, a billion dollars of dues owing are paid).

This sign of world solidarity would clear the air, to riot in understatement, and serve notice that no house in such economic and domestic disarray as that of the very last global power can exercise hegemony over anything other than itself. Such was the intention of our truly conservative founders two centuries ago when they adjured us to follow our own course toward some more perfect—if ungrammatical—union, making true in the process Ajax’s hope: “Ah, boy, may’st thou prove happier than thy sire.” And not, dementedly, slaughter sheep.

The Sunday Telegraph

11 August 1996

* 
RACE
A
GAINST
T
IME

Immigration, emigration. Race. Let them in. Keep them out. Should we do the jobs that they do that we don’t want to do? Last month an American poll showed that for the first time immigration is the number one anxiety of our stout, sugar-fed people as they restlessly switch channels and ponder the fate of dinosaurs and the nation state.

Recently I toured seven German cities, and spoke at various meetings. The German press was full of anxious reports on the neo-Nazi racists in its midst. It was even more upset by the
non
-neo-Nazi racists. The unemployed in particular were attacking Turks and East Europeans and other foreigners. What did it all mean?

There is no longer enough work to go around. That is, proper work as opposed to part-time labor with no future, the sort of work that ill-paid foreigners now do. Every day we read how another great industry has let go yet another 30,000 or 40,000 workers. Automation and reduced demand have made them redundant. What will these people do? Is the state to support them? If so, how? This basic question is generally avoided, particularly by professional politicians, so I shall, for the moment, sidestep it too.

Racism. The fear of otherness is an unattractive but constant human trait, and one that we social meliorists like to say education and peaceful commingling will do away with in, as always, time. There is some truth in this. There is also some truth in the saying that all men are brothers, as Abel must have reminded Cain, who replied as he lifted his club, “Yes, and all brothers are men.”

In Germany I used a line that I often use in the United States when I think that the audience is unaware of the world outside its own national and ethnic bubble. I noted that at the start of the next millennium the white race will make up about 13 percent of the world’s population. This statistic makes white Americans look even whiter, while the dusky faces in the audience begin to beam. The German reaction was hysteria. Race, declared a tense young man, is a myth. I said, no, race is a fact, but the prejudices that people have about races are often mythical.

Also, even if everyone was all the same gray-pink shade, the myths of difference would still be invoked, and myths are very potent. For me, God is a myth, but I am quite aware that millions of people have died nonmythical deaths in his name. In Britain, cavaliers and roundheads went into battle, each side shouting “Kill for Jesus.”

Always accommodating, I said that if I could not use the word “race”—an everyday sort of word in my country with no built-in resonance—would “tribalism” do? No, that was unacceptable. People who spoke of races and tribes in Germany were almost always neo-Nazis. What word
could
I use?

“Multiculturalism” was the consensus in Stuttgart. But, I said, an American white and an American black will often be prejudiced against one another, and each shares exactly the same culture, or its absence. We left the subject in the air. But I remember thinking that if one does not have the words to discuss a matter objectively, emotions will ensure that it then becomes dangerously subjective.

Due to poverty in other sections of the world and a declining standard of living for most people in our part of it, emotions are getting pretty raw. The time is overripe for dialogue as opposed to the monologues of demagogues. I see this, curiously, more in Europe today than in the United States. We have had a race war between black and white for over a century now. It is like a low-grade fever that, from time to time, flares up and puts the patient at risk. On the other hand, we are used to it. We take or give our quinine, which is known as welfare, a bribe that we pay to the black underclass in order to exclude them from white society. Meanwhile, we never cease to boast that we are a nation of immigrants.

Racial stereotypes are irresistible, particularly in wartime. I know. I was an American soldier in the great race war against Japan. I served in the Pacific. Our indoctrination was crude and hilarious. In early 1941 the government assured us that should war come, we would easily win it through air power. Apparently, because of the weird configuration of the Japanese eye, they could not see well enough to be able to manage modern aircraft. Not long after, they sank our fleet at Pearl Harbor.

Before I left to go to the Pacific—I was first mate of an army freight supply ship—we were given an indoctrination course on how to tell our exquisite allies, the Chinese, from our brutish enemy, the Japanese. On a stage there was a life-sized cutout of a naked Chinese youth and another one of a Japanese. The Chinese was tall, slim, and well proportioned. The Japanese was bandy-legged, buck-toothed, subhuman.

These details were shown to us by an information officer with a pointer. “But the principal difference,” he announced, “is the pubic hair. The Japanese is thick and wiry while the Chinese is straight and silky.” I fear that I alone raised my hand to ask what sly strategies we were to use to determine friend from foe.

Our war with Japan was deeply ideological. They had the idea that the Pacific Ocean should be theirs, while we had the idea that it should be ours. This is known as a
conflict
of ideologies. As it turned out, our war of conquest was more successful than theirs. In fact, our hegemony in the Pacific and over Japan was the last great military victory that the white race will probably ever know. Now
they
have the technology and the wealth. And
we
decline.

In the fifteenth century it was as if there was a sudden big bang. The white race in Western Europe—itself a sort of Wild West to the Asian landmass—burst its cage. Like a plague, we infected the western hemisphere, Africa, Asia. We were also, literally, a plague, carrying with us so many new diseases that indigenous populations often died out. Though our numbers were relatively few, we colonized. The great goal for our race was China: specifically the north-central Shansi province, the world’s largest coalfield.

By the start of the century the European powers and the United States were already established on the China coast. But we now had a rival in Japan. They too wanted the Middle Kingdom. So the struggle between our two races over the division of China has been pretty much the history of the century now ending. Yet, through all this, China has endured and is now set to prevail while Japan is finally
a
—as opposed to
the
—master race.

The loss of identity—not to mention wealth, power, and empire—makes for melancholy, or worse. As Dean Acheson famously put it, Britain has lost an empire but not yet found a role. Fifty years later the United States is in much the same situation. So, too, is Western Europe. In the fourteenth century our race was more than decimated in Europe by the plague. In the fifteenth century population revived—too much so. What were we to do with so many people? We broke loose and conquered most of the world.