Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic

by Chalmers Johnson

  In response to the demands of empire, the army had grown so large as to be close to unmanageable. It constituted a state within a state, not unlike the Pentagon today. Augustus reduced the army’s size, providing generous cash payments to those soldiers who had served more than twelve years. Of course, he made clear that this bounty came from him, not their military commanders. He also transferred all legions from Rome to the remote provinces and borders of the empire, to ensure that their leaders were not tempted to meddle in political affairs. Astutely, he created a Praetorian Guard, an elite force of nine thousand men whose task was to defend him personally and he stationed them in Rome. Their ranks were drawn from Italy, not from distant provinces, and they were paid more than soldiers in the regular legions. They began as Augustus’s personal bodyguards, but in the decades after his death became decisive players in their own right in the selection of new emperors. It was one of the first illustrations of an old conundrum of authoritarian politics. If a bureaucracy, such as the Praetorian Guard, is created to control another bureaucracy, the regular army, before long the question will arise: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (Who will watch the watchers?)

  Augustus is credited with forging the Roman Peace (Pax Romana), which historians like to say lasted more than two hundred years. It was, however, based on a military dictatorship and entirely dependent on the incumbent emperor. Therein lay the problem. Tiberius, who succeeded Augustus, reigning from 14-37 AD, retired to Capri with a covey of young boys who catered to his sexual tastes. His successor, Caligula, who held office from 37-41, was the darling of the army, but on January 24, 41 AD, the Praetorian Guard assassinated him and proceeded to loot the imperial palace. Modern archaeological evidence strongly suggests that Caligula was an eccentric maniac, just as history has always portrayed him.39

  The fourth emperor, Claudius, who reigned from 41 to 54, was put in power by the Praetorian Guard in a de facto military coup. Despite the basically favorable portrayal of him by Robert Graves in his novel /, Claudius of 1934, and decades later adapted for TV (and played by Derek Jacobi), Claudius, who was Caligula’s uncle, was addicted to gladiatorial games and fond of watching defeated opponents being put to death. As a child, Claudius limped, drooled, stuttered, and was constantly ill. He had his first wife killed so he could marry Agrippina, daughter of Caligula’s sister, after having the law changed to allow uncles to marry their nieces. On October 13, 54 AD, Claudius was killed with a poisoned mushroom, probably fed to him by his wife, and at noon that same day, the sixteen-year-old Nero, Agrippina’s son by a former husband, was acclaimed emperor in a carefully orchestrated piece of political theater. Nero, who reigned from 54 to 68 AD, was probably insane as well as a tyrant. He set fire to Rome in 64 and executed those famed early Christians Paul and Peter, although his reputation has been somewhat rehabilitated in recent years as a patron of the arts.40

  After Augustus, not much recommends the Roman empire as an example of enlightened government. The history of the Roman Republic from the time of Julius Caesar suggests that imperialism and militarism— poorly understood by all conservative political leaders at the time— brought down the republic. The professionalization of a large standing army in order to defend the empire created invincible new sources of power within the Roman polity and prepared the way for the rise of populist generals who understood the grievances of their troops and veterans as politicians could not.

  Service in the armed forces of the United States has not been a universal male obligation of citizenship since 1973. Our military today is a professional corps of men and women who commonly join up to advance themselves in the face of one or another cul-de-sac of American society. They normally do not expect to be shot at, but they do expect all the benefits of state employment—steady pay, good housing, free medical benefits, education, relief from racial discrimination, world travel, and gratitude from the rest of society for their “service.” They are well aware that the alternatives on offer today in civilian life include difficult job searches, little or no job security, regular pilfering of retirement funds by company executives and their accountants, “privatized” medical care, bad public elementary education, and insanely expensive higher education. They are ripe not for the rhetoric of a politician who followed the Andover-Yale-Harvard Business School route to riches and power but for a Julius Caesar, Napoleon Bonaparte, or Juan Peron—a revolutionary, military populist with little interest in republican niceties so long as some form of emperorship lies at the end of his rocky path.

  Regardless of who succeeds George W. Bush, the incumbent president will have to deal with an emboldened Pentagon, an engorged military-industrial complex, our empire of bases, and a fifty-year-old tradition of not revealing to the public what our military establishment costs or the kinds of devastation it can inflict. History teaches us that the capacity for things to get worse is limitless. Roman history suggests that the short, happy life of the American republic may be coming to its end—and that turning it into an openly military empire will not, to say the least, be the best solution to that problem.

  One common response to this view is that ours is actually a “good empire” like the one from which we gained our independence in 1776. Whatever its faults and flaws, contemporary America, like England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, is said to be a source of enlightenment for the rest of the world, a natural carrier of the seeds of “democracy” into benighted and oppressed regions, and the only possible military guarantor of “stability” on the planet. We are, therefore, the “cousins” and inheritors of the best traditions of the British Empire, which was, according to this highly ideological construct, a force for unalloyed good despite occasional unfortunate and unavoidable lapses.

  The expatriate Scot and Harvard historian Niall Ferguson typically argues that the British Empire was motivated by “a sincere belief that spreading commerce, Christianity, and civilization was as much in the interests of Britain’s colonial subjects as in the interests of the imperial metropole itself.”41 He insists that “no organization [other than the British Empire] has done more to impose Western norms of law, order and governance around the world” and that “America is heir to the empire in both senses: offspring of the colonial era, successor today. Perhaps the most burning contemporary question of American politics is: Should the United States seek to shed or to shoulder the imperial load it has inherited?”42 The Los Angeles Times’s right-wing columnist Max Boot thinks that “Afghanistan and other troubled lands today cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets.”43

  According to journalist Erik Tarloff, writing in the British newspaper Financial Times, “Claims that the British Raj redounded to the economic benefit of India as well as the mother country [are], I should think, irrefutable.”44 Given that for two centuries—between 1757 and 1947— there was no increase at all in India’s per capita income, that in the second half of Victoria’s reign between thirty and fifty million Indians perished in famines and plagues brought on by British misrule, and that from 1872 to 1921, the life expectancy of ordinary Indians fell by a staggering 20 percent, the idea that India benefited from British imperialism is at least open to question.45

  The rewriting of history to prettify the British Empire has long been commonplace in England but it became politically significant in the United States only after 9/11, when the thought—novel to most Americans—that their own country was actually an “empire” began to come out of the closet. Beginning in late 2001, approval of American imperialism became a prominent theme in the establishment and neoconservative press. “It was time for America unabashedly and unilaterally, to assert its supremacy and to maintain global order,” writes Joshua Micah Marshall, editor of an influential Washington Internet newsletter. “After September 11th, a left-wing accusation became a right-wing aspiration: conservatives increasingly began to espouse a world view that was unapologetically imperialist.”46


  Bernard Porter, a professor at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne and a recognized specialist on Britain’s imperial past, likes to argue that his country acquired its empire unintentionally. Apologists for American imperialism also contend that the United States acquired its continental girth as well as its Caribbean and Pacific colonies in a fit of innocent absentmindedness.47 Despite his tendency to minimize the importance of the British Empire, Porter is an acute observer of trends in the candor with which this history has been approached. In the twentieth century, he observes, “Imperialism—in the old, conventional sense—suddenly became unfashionable.... [New books] took an entirely different line on it from before: hugely downplaying the glorious military aspects of it; almost giving the impression that most colonies had asked to join the Empire; stressing Britain’s supposed ‘civilizing’ mission; and presenting the whole thing as simply a happy federation of countries at different stages of ‘development.’ ... A new word was coined for it, which was thought to express this sort of thing better: ‘Commonwealth.’ A popular metaphor was that of the ‘family.’ “48

  In Porter’s view, the ordinary Victorian Englishman was never much interested in the empire, which was always a plaything of the military classes and those who wanted (or had) to get out of the British Isles. But in America, the idea that the British Empire was really nice—totally unlike its French, German, Russian, and Japanese contemporaries—had long been well received by novel readers and latter-day fans of the long-running TV series Masterpiece Theater.

  During the post-9/11 period of American enthusiasm for imperialism, one of its most influential proselytizers was Michael Ignatieff, a Harvard professor and self-appointed spokesman for “humanitarian imperialism,” also known as “Empire Lite.” As the demand for his cheerleading faded in light of the Iraq war, Ignatieff decided to return to his native Canada and became a politician. Back in Toronto, he acknowledged to a journalist that his many essays and op-eds had all been written as if he were an American, and he apologized for having used “we” and “us” some forty-three times throughout his essay entitled “Lesser Evils,” which is a defense of official torture.49

  In the New York Times Magazine of January 5, 2003, Ignatieff proudly asserts, “Ever since George Washington warned his countrymen against foreign entanglements, empire abroad has been seen as the republic’s permanent temptation and its potential nemesis. Yet what word but ‘empire’ describes the awesome thing that America is becoming? It is the only nation that polices the world through five global military commands; maintains more than a million men and women at arms on four continents; deploys carrier battle groups on watch in every ocean; guarantees the survival of countries from Israel to South Korea; drives the wheels of global trade and commerce; and fills the hearts and minds of an entire planet with its dreams and desires.”

  In numerous one-liners, Ignatieff sings the praises of American imperialism: “Multilateral solutions to the world’s problems are all very well, but they have no teeth unless America bares its fangs.... Regime change is an imperial task par excellence, since it assumes that the empire’s interest has a right to trump the sovereignty of a state.... The question, then, is not whether America is too powerful but whether it is powerful enough. Does it have what it takes to be grandmaster of what Colin Powell has called the chessboard of the world’s most inflammable region? ... The case for empire is that it has become, in a place like Iraq, the last hope for democracy and stability alike.”50

  Ignatieff’s warlike prose comes from an essay entitled “The Burden,” an unmistakable reference to Rudyard Kipling’s 1899 poem “The White Man’s Burden,” written while he was living in Vermont and addressed to Americans as they prepared to subjugate the Philippines:

  Take up the White Mans Burden

  And reap his old reward

  The blame of those ye better,

  The hate of those ye guard.

  Michael Neumann, a professor of philosophy at Trent University in Ontario, compares Ignatieff’s epistles to the Americans to “a sprig of cilantro on the nouveau-imperialist bucket of KFC [Kentucky Fried Chicken], transforming Bush’s blunderings into a treat for liberal white folks the world over.”51

  Imperialism is, by definition, unpleasant for its victims. Even a supporter such as Niall Ferguson acknowledges that it is “the extension of one’s civilization, usually by military force, to rule over other peoples.”52 Regimes created by imperialists are never polities ruled with the consent of the governed. Evelyn Baring (later known as Lord Cromer), who was the British consul general and de facto overlord of Egypt from 1883 to 1907—officially he was merely an “adviser” to the formally ruling khedive—once commented, “We need not always enquire too closely what these people ... think is in their own interests.... It is essential that each special issue should be decided mainly with reference to what, by the light of Western knowledge and experience, ... we conscientiously think is best for the subject race.”53 Lord Salisbury, Britain’s conservative prime minister at the start of the twentieth century, put it more succinctly: “If our ancestors had cared for the rights of other people, the British empire would not have been made.”54

  Apologists for imperialism like Ferguson never consult the victims of the allegedly beneficent conquerors. As the American historian Kevin Baker points out, “The idea of Rome or the British empire as liberal institutions of any sort would have come as a surprise to, say, the Gauls or the Carthaginians, or the Jews of Masada; or, respectively, the Zulus or the Boers or the North American Indians or the Maoris of New Zealand.”55 Eric Foner, the historian of American race relations, similarly reminds us that “the benevolence of benevolent imperialism lies in the eye of the beholder.”56 What can be said, however, is that the British were exceptionally susceptible to believing in the “goodness” of their empire and, in this, the United States has indeed proved a worthy imperial successor. In his analysis of Jane Austens 1814 novel Mansfield Park, which depicted a wealthy English family whose comforts derived from a sugar plantation in Antigua built on slave labor, Edward Said observed, “European culture often, if not always, characterized itself in such a way as simultaneously to validate its own preferences while also advocating those preferences in conjunction with distant imperial rule.”57

  Actual, on-the-ground imperialists, as distinct from their political supporters and cheerleaders back home, know that they are hated; that is one of the reasons they traditionally detested imperial liberals, socialists, do-gooders, and other social critics remote from the killing fields, who criticized their methods or advocated the “reform” of some particular imperial project or other. Whether the imperial power is itself a democracy or a dictatorship makes a difference in the lives of the conquered, but only because that tends to determine how far the dominant country is willing to go in carrying out “administrative massacres,” to use Arendt’s potent term, when perpetuating its rule in the face of resistance.58 A split between those who support imperialism and those who enforce it is characteristic of all imperialist republics. Both groups, however, normally share extensive rationales for their inherent superiority over “subject races” and the reasons why they should dominate and impose their “civilization” on others.

  Those who supply such rationales of domination belong to what I call the “Jeane Kirkpatrick school of analysis.” As Reagan’s U.N. ambassador, Kirkpatrick once said, “Americans need to face the truth about themselves, no matter how pleasant it is.”59 Historians like Ferguson are of this persuasion, which particularly flourished in the first years after the attacks of September 11, 2001, in Anglo-American countries. That Britons and Americans have proven so comfortable with the idea of forcing thousands of people to be free by slaughtering them—with Maxim machine guns in the nineteenth century, with “precision-guided munitions” today—seems to reflect a deeply felt need as well as a striking inability to imagine the lives and viewpoints of others. While this, too, is typical of any imperial power, it has perhaps been heighten
ed in the cases of Great Britain and the United States by the fact that neither has ever been defeated and occupied by a foreign military power.

  On the other hand, even defeat in war did not cause the Japanese to give up their legends of racial, economic, and cultural superiority. Although the Japanese after World War II “embraced defeat,” in the historian John Dower’s memorable phrase, they never gave up their nationalist and racist convictions that in slaughtering over twenty million Chinese and enslaving the Koreans they were actually engaged in liberating East Asians from the grip of Western imperialism.60 All empires, it seems, require myths of divine right, racial preeminence, manifest destiny, or a “civilizing mission” to cover their often barbarous behavior in other people’s countries. As Foner points out, sixteenth-century Spaniards claimed to be “freeing” members of the Aztec, Mayan, and Incan civilizations from backwardness and superstition via Christian conversion, while Britons in the late nineteenth century liked to think that in massacring Africans they were actually helping to suppress the slave trade.61

  There is, in fact, nothing new about such self-enhancing American military campaign names as “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” “Infinite Justice” (as Centcom called the 2001 U.S. attack on Afghanistan until Muslim scholars and clerics objected that only God can dispense infinite justice), and “Just Cause” (Bush senior’s vicious 1989 assault on Panama).62 Such efforts reflect both justifications for imperialism and strategies for avoiding responsibility for its inevitable catastrophes. The first recourse in justification has long been racism—or at least a sense of superiority—in all of its forms, including the belief that victory over the “natives” (including their mass deaths due to diseases the imperialists introduce) is evidence that God or the gods have divinely sanctioned foreign conquest. As the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr taught, “The tendency to claim God as an ally for our partisan values is the source of all religious fanaticism.”63 Then there has been the long list of what writer Sven Lindqvist, in his book “Exterminate All the Brutes”] which is a gloss on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, usefully terms pseudo-scientific “ideologies of extermination”: eugenics, perversions of Darwinism, natural selection, survival of the fittest, Malthusian demography, and more.64