Alternatives to Empire » decline

Three Good Reasons To Liquidate Our Empire

andrew — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 07:33:23 +0000

By Chalmers Johnson

However ambitious United States President Barack Obama’s domestic plans, one unacknowledged issue has the potential to destroy any reform efforts he might launch. Think of it as the 800-pound gorilla in the American living room: our longstanding reliance on imperialism and militarism in our relations with other countries and the vast, potentially ruinous global empire of bases that goes with it. The failure to begin to deal with our bloated military establishment and the profligate use of it in missions for which it is hopelessly inappropriate will, sooner rather than later, condemn the United States to a devastating trio of consequences: imperial overstretch, perpetual war and insolvency, leading to a likely collapse similar to that of the former Soviet Union.

Chalmers Johnson is the author of Blowback (2000), The Sorrows of Empire (2004) and Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (2006), and editor of Okinawa: Cold War Island (1999).

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Is America Hooked on War? by Tom Engelhardt

andrew — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 07:04:15 +0000

“War is peace” was one of the memorable slogans on the facade of the Ministry of Truth, Minitrue in “Newspeak,” the language invented by George Orwell in 1948 for his dystopian novel 1984. Some 60 years later, a quarter-century after Orwell’s imagined future bit the dust, the phrase is, in a number of ways, eerily applicable to the United States.

Alternatives to Empire – Part 1: The Decline of the American Empire

andrew — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 23:24:29 +0000

Alternatives to Empire: The Decline of the American Empire from digital birdy video on Vimeo

The Decline of the American Empire is Part One of a four part series of interviews conducted by Larry Marshall with Professor Joseph Camilleri and Reverend David Pargeter, two of the founders of The Alternatives to Empire Project.