America’s military and economic empire could collapse at any time, but predicting the precise day, week or month of its potential demise is unattainable, according to a former New York Times war correspondent who spoke with Raw Story.
“The when and how is very dangerous to predict because there’s always some factor that blindsides you that you didn’t expect,” Pulitzer-winning journalist Chris Hedges said in an exclusive interview. “It doesn’t look good. But exactly how it plays out and when it plays out, having covered disintegrating societies, it’s impossible to tell.”
He explained that he learned this lesson as events unfolded around him in the fall of 1989. Then, members of the opposition to the Soviet Empire told him that they predicted travel across the Berlin Wall separating East from West Germany would open within the year.
“Within a few hours, the wall didn’t exist,” he said.
Hedges was one of roughly 135 activists who participated in an act of civil disobedience that resulted in their arrests outside the White House yesterday, even as Obama was unveiling a new report on progress of the war in Afghanistan.
Speaking to Raw Story on Wednesday night, he said the signs of US collapse are plain to see and compared the country’s course through Afghanistan to Soviet Russia’s.
“We’re losing [the war in Afghanistan] in the same way the Red Army lost it,” he said. “It’s exactly the same configuration where we sort of control the urban centers where 20 percent of the population lives. The rest of the country where 80 percent of the Afghans live is either in the hands of the Taliban or disputed.”
One day after this interview was conducted, reports hit the global media noting the CIA’s warning to President Obama, that the Pakistan-supported Taliban could still regain control of the country.
Hedges predicted that President Obama’s war report released Thursday would “contradict not only [US] intelligence reports but everything else that is coming out of Afghanistan.”
His prediction came startlingly true: the CIA’s own assessment was said to stand in striking contrast with President Obama’s report. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, however, insisted that the US controlled more territory in Afghanistan than it did a year ago.
“Foreigners will not walk the streets of Kabul because of kidnapping, and journalists regularly meet Taliban officials in Kabul because the whole apparatus is so porous and corrupt,” he said.
‘A corporate coup d’état in slow motion’
Hedges said he attended the protest and planned to get arrested because he is against the corporate powers that have enveloped the nation.
“We’ve undergone a corporate coup d’état in slow motion,” he said. “Our public education system has been gutted. Our infrastructure is corroding and collapsing. Unless we begin to physically resist, they are going to solidify neo-feudalism in this country.”
“If we think that Obama is bad, watch the next two years because these corporate forces have turned their back on him,” Hedges warned.
Hedges, author of “Death of the Liberal Class,” said that his vision of America is one with a functioning social democracy, which stands in stark contrast to the nihilism of the corporate state.
“American workers, as they are repeatedly told, will have to become competitive with prison labor in China,” he said. “That’s where we’re headed, and all the pillars of the liberal establishment are complicit in this.”
“At least if you get sick in the UK, you don’t go bankrupt or die,” he added.
Hedges said that another pressure point is the US dollar, which he pointed Russia and China has dropped in favor of modified ruble/renminbi exchanges.
“A few more deals like that, and our currency becomes junk,” he said.
Hedges continued, “As long as we have relative stability, these lunatic fringe movements can be held at bay, but if we don’t undertake serious structural reform, which we’re not doing, then it is inevitable that we will come to a tremendous crisis – economic and political as well as environmental.”
With editing by Stephen C. Webster.
I would concur 99% with Chris Hedges except that in my opinion it is more than the US Empire that is disintegrating.The US being the leader of the social Darwinism ala
Herbert Spencer,it really is the end of the Anglo Saxon domination. Imponderables are always lurking in the background,so timing and specifics are out.
Roger, I’d agree. And I’d also point out that the rising powers — China and India — come out of historical systems that could afford to treat ordinary people as expendable because, in those two countries, there are so many of them. Western traditions of civil rights and the modern view of rule by law only took firm hold after the wars and (especially) plagues of the late Middle Ages made live people, especially skilled live people, scarce, and therefore more individually economically valuable.
The societies in which those historians will be writing in 50 years’ time are highly likely to be feudal in the historical Chinese/Indian sense: even more than today. A rounding-error-sized fraction of the population controlling all the resources and wealth except for a “rounding-error-sized fraction” for the serfs (us). And their technological, sociopolitical and economic control over ordinary people will be greater than at any time in history. This will make the odds against any successful rebellion or forced redistribution of wealth and power supremely daunting. Oh, and need I mention that both societies are historically profoundly racist and classist, to degrees that would have been unthinkable to the staunchest Jim Crow advocate in the Old South?
We’re at the end of the historical blip where who you were and what you could do was even possibly more important than what you are and who you know.
Values professed and values applied
not exactly the same. Western values resulted in 60 million people being murdered in ww2,civil rights are not a tradition,they where gained by the struggle of the oppressed,power never gives one inch! women right to vote, child labor,slavery etc.. none of these things where eliminated because of our superior values. As a young white male I saw first hand
these values applied in the colony’s
because of