The Fall and Fall of the European Empire

BY Declan Hayes

Russia’s pending Ukrainian victory will reverberate globally as well as more locally. First off, once Odessa is secured, Zelensky’s landlocked rump Reich will become just another Bosnia, dependent upon NATO handouts and sordid criminal enterprises for its survival. Poland will be lumbered not only with the millions of Ukrainian welfare migrants who have already set up shop there but with tens of millions more Ukrainian free loaders, who view Poland as a gateway to richer pastures further west.

Although Poland, along with Romania, might well establish a U.S. dominated protectorate in Western Ukraine to contain these unwanted Nazi hordes, any such enterprise will heap further pressure on the Polish exchequer, which is already over-stretched by facilitating NATO’s giant bases in its south east. Although Poland’s prostitutes are coining big time, the ordinary Pole is being financially squeezed as their government’s Ukrainian adventurism becomes ever more burdensome.

The German nation, that Bismarck founded in January 1871, no longer exists. It is little more than a major NATO military base that makes good beer, that fires its astute military commanders, that gladly allows its American overseer spy on it and commit major acts of terrorism against it and that gets its police force to repeatedly batter its old age pensioners in orgies of state violence that were supposed to have ended there in the mid 1940s.

Though France is notorious for such barbarism and, in its role as Africa’s favorite gendarme, for continuing Europe’s nineteenth century Rape of Africa, that too might be running out of road as Africa knows Europe is on its last legs and a chance to break free from them and their American masters might finally be at hand.

With the recent passing of Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth, Albion has lost whatever gravitas she once possessed and King Charles, together with the Princes Harry and Andrew, are not going to give England’s pleasant pastures a second, revamped Camelot.

Or, for that matter, another Versailles where Louis XVI held court and France’s finest begged for the right to tie the buckle of his shoe. In between emptying their bowels wherever and whenever the fancy took them.

Were they to return, Louis XIV’s courtiers would recognize the same foul smells of untreated sewage as Paris, like much of Europe, is awash with the droppings of the Wretched of the Earth, Koestler’s Scum of the Earth, who have washed up not only there but all over Europe, just as the Huns, the Lombards, the Visigoths and the Vandals did in their day.

Europe resembles, in all of this, the last days of Rome, or Sodom and Gomorrah for that matter. Bread, circuses and puberty blockers for the children. Ronaldo, Portugal’s aging gladiator, is being paid $1.5 million a week by oil-rich Saudis, who are even leaving him live with his long-time girlfriend, an indication perhaps that Sodom has reached Saudi.

Ronaldo, together with all NATO’s other circus performers, is reminiscent of ancient Rome’s original prototype, where over half of the national budget was squandered on such rubbish but where over 70% of the population lived below the poverty line, even as Rome’s equivalent of the thugs of the U.S. Marine Corps conquered all before them.

Until they didn’t. Emperor Valerian ended up as a Persian slave and Emperor Elagabalus was even more perverted than Caligula, his better-known cousin. Rome, under them, was very much an empire in terminal decline. Although President Jack Kennedy, the CIA’s Public Enemy Number One, famously told us in Berlin that Civis Romanus Sum, Ich Bin Ein Römer, that was only a good deal if you were a Roman insider and were not being used as cat food for lions, tigers and leopards in Rome’s amphitheaters. The Roman dream, like the American dream, is only for the favored few, simpletons like Prince Harry, who gets paid to tell the world what size penis his brother, the heir to the British Crown, has.

Even as Prince Harry titillated tens of millions of America’s voyeurs with such rot, the evil American Empire inched ever Eastwards through Bohemia and towards Carpathia and Ruthenia, until, like the empires of Hitler and Napoleon, its missile batteries now stand within range of St Petersburg and Moscow. But, like Rome before it, it has overstretched and, though von der Leyen and Borrell, today’s Valerian and Elagabalus, can promise to build bigger und better autobahns to ship today’s Panzers Eastwards to conquer Russia, Europeans have no longer an appetite to man those Panzers. And they sure as hell won’t man themselves.

Borrell, von der Leyen and the billionaires, who keep the prostitutes of Davos busy, are in a pickle. Though they can fly about the world in their private jets and quaff their $15,000 a bottle Château Lafite-Rothschilds, as they tell us to tuck into snails and grasshoppers, their end is nigh.

Their dilema is this. Outside of doing a Unit 731 with Hunter Biden’s gain of function bio weapons on China and Russia or, indeed on those of us that are surplus to their requirements, they still need us to be their donkeys, their thank you Mr Atkins when there’s killing to be done. Because they are in the old Catch 22 that they can neither live with us nor live without us, our newly minted Caligulas, Valerians and Neros are on borrowed time and they know it.

The crass profit motive that has seen BlackRock’s arms and Big Pharma industries make record profits in recent years is running out of road. NATO has bogged itself down in quagmires it cannot extricate itself from. They have bombed Nordstream and think they got away with it, they have conducted genocidal wars the length and breadth of the planet and they think, as the Romans thought of the Visigoths, those who survived should forgive them. They have lectured China and Russia in particular on everything from human rights to the dangers to world peace performances of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake presents. And, being arrogant Americans, they forget that picking fights has consequences.

And, though the Americans, like the Visgoths before them, have sacked not only Rome but Paris and all of Europe, we have no Augustine’s City of God, no Loyolan flag to rally around, as crass America flushes Europe down the toilet.

They have, as Nietzsche’s madman told us, not only killed God but they also slayed Pythagoras, prophet to the Druze, Alalwi and early Christians and architect of Dante’s Paradiso. They have taken our myths, our creeds, our beliefs, our morals, our sciences, our fonts of knowledge and slain them, just as the Roman Marine Corp murdered the prophet Pythagoras himself. And, as Nietzsche tells us, they have replaced our inheritance not even with Esau’s mess of pottage but with the stench of decay that is now Paris’ preferred perfume that they package and market as some delicate fragrance of democracy that they lie is sweeter than the overflow of Parisian sewers and Davos bordellos that are its essence.

Although their incessant propaganda works well within their own Orwellian world, Russia and China in particular are not in that world. Their roots are elsewhere. They feed from other myths, deep wells untainted by the wet dreams of the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth or of the Teutonic Knights, wellsprings that NATO’s Parisian sewers cannot control, pollute or even tamper with. And the Russians, Chinese and Iranians are not stupid. They look at Europe in tatters and they see NATO’s carrots and sticks for what they are, the last pathetic throw of the dice of an empire in terminal decline, a dying, diseased donkey with nothing more than a forlorn bray to fend off its inevitable end.

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By Chris Hedges / Original to ScheerPost

The brutal murder of Tyre Nichols by five Black Memphis police officers should be enough to implode the fantasy that identity politics and diversity will solve the social, economic and political decay that besets the United States. Not only are the former officers Black, but the city’s police department is headed by Cerelyn Davis, a Black woman. None of this helped Nichols, another victim of a modern-day police lynching.

The militarists, corporatists, oligarchs, politicians, academics and media conglomerates champion identity politics and diversity because it does nothing to address the systemic injustices or the scourge of permanent war that plague the U.S. It is an advertising gimmick, a brand, used to mask mounting social inequality and imperial folly. It busies liberals and the educated with a boutique activism, which is not only ineffectual but exacerbates the divide between the privileged and a working class in deep economic distress. The haves scold the have-nots for their bad manners, racism, linguistic insensitivity and garishness, while ignoring the root causes of their economic distress. The oligarchs could not be happier.

Did the lives of Native Americans improve as a result of the legislation mandating assimilation and the revoking of tribal land titles pushed through by Charles Curtis, the first Native American Vice President? Are we better off with Clarence Thomas, who opposes affirmative action, on the Supreme Court, or Victoria Nuland, a war hawk in the State Department? Is our perpetuation of permanent war more palatable because Lloyd Austin, an African American, is the Secretary of Defense? Is the military more humane because it accepts transgender soldiers? Is social inequality, and the surveillance state that controls it, ameliorated because Sundar Pichai — who was born in India — is the CEO of Google and Alphabet? Has the weapons industry improved because Kathy J. Warden, a woman, is the CEO of Northop Grumman, and another woman, Phebe Novakovic, is the CEO of General Dynamics? Are working families better off with Janet Yellen, who promotes increasing unemployment and “job insecurity” to lower inflation, as Secretary of the Treasury? Is the movie industry enhanced when a female director, Kathryn Bigelow, makes “Zero Dark Thirty,” which is agitprop for the CIA? Take a look at this recruitment ad put out by the CIA. It sums up the absurdity of where we have ended up.

Colonial regimes find compliant indigenous leaders — “Papa Doc” François Duvalier in Haiti, Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua, Mobutu Sese Seko in the Congo, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in Iran — willing to do their dirty work while they exploit and loot the countries they control. To thwart popular aspirations for justice, colonial police forces routinely carried out atrocities on behalf of the oppressors. The indigenous freedom fighters who fight in support of the poor and the marginalized are usually forced out of power or assassinated, as was the case with Congolese independence leader Patrice Lumumba and Chilean president Salvador Allende. Lakota chief Sitting Bull was gunned down by members of his own tribe, who served in the reservation’s police force at Standing Rock. If you stand with the oppressed, you will almost always end up being treated like the oppressed. This is why the FBI, along with Chicago police, murdered Fred Hampton and was almost certainly involved in the murder of Malcolm X, who referred to impoverished urban neighborhoods as “internal colonies.” Militarized police forces in the U.S. function as armies of occupation. The police officers who killed Tyre Nichols are no different from those in reservation and colonial police forces.

We live under a species of corporate colonialism. The engines of white supremacy, which constructed the forms of institutional and economic racism that keep the poor poor, are obscured behind attractive political personalities such as Barack Obama, whom Cornel West called “a Black mascot for Wall Street.” These faces of diversity are vetted and selected by the ruling class. Obama was groomed and promoted by the Chicago political machine, one of the dirtiest and most corrupt in the country.

“It’s an insult to the organized movements of people these institutions claim to want to include,” Glen Ford, the late editor of The Black Agenda Report told me in 2018. “These institutions write the script. It’s their drama. They choose the actors, whatever black, brown, yellow, red faces they want.”

Ford called those who promote identity politics “representationalists” who “want to see some Black people represented in all sectors of leadership, in all sectors of society. They want Black scientists. They want Black movie stars. They want Black scholars at Harvard. They want Blacks on Wall Street. But it’s just representation. That’s it.”

The toll taken by corporate capitalism on the people these “representationalists” claim to represent exposes the con. African-Americans have lost 40 percent of their wealth since the financial collapse of 2008 from the disproportionate impact of the drop in home equity, predatory loans, foreclosures and job loss. They have the second highest rate of poverty at 21.7 percent, after Native Americans at 25.9 percent, followed by Hispanics at 17.6 percent and whites at 9.5 percent, according to the U.S. Census Bureau and the Department for Health and Human Services. As of 2021, Black and Native American children lived in poverty at 28 and 25 percent respectively, followed by Hispanic children at 25 percent and white children at 10 percent. Nearly 40 percent of the nation’s homeless are African-Americans although Black people make up about 14 percent of our population. This figure does not include people living in dilapidated, overcrowded dwellings or with family or friends due to financial difficulties.  African-Americans are incarcerated at nearly five times the rate of white people.

Identity politics and diversity allow liberals to wallow in a cloying moral superiority as they castigate, censor and deplatform those who do not linguistically conform to politically correct speech. They are the new Jacobins. This game disguises their passivity in the face of corporate abuse, neoliberalism, permanent war and the curtailment of civil liberties. They do not confront the institutions that orchestrate social and economic injustice. They seek to make the ruling class more palatable. With the support of the Democratic Party, the liberal media, academia and social media platforms in Silicon Valley, demonize the victims of the corporate coup d’etat and deindustrialization. They make their primary political alliances with those who embrace identity politics, whether they are on Wall Street or in the Pentagon. They are the useful idiots of the billionaire class, moral crusaders who widen the divisions within society that the ruling oligarchs foster to maintain control. 

Diversity is important. But diversity, when devoid of a political agenda that fights the oppressor on behalf of the oppressed, is window dressing. It is about  incorporating a tiny segment of those marginalized by society into unjust structures to perpetuate them. 

A class I taught in a maximum security prison in New Jersey wrote “Caged,” a play about their lives. The play ran for nearly a month at The Passage Theatre in Trenton, New Jersey, where it was sold out nearly every night. It was subsequently published by Haymarket Books. The 28 students in the class insisted that the corrections officer in the story not be white. That was too easy, they said. That was a feign that allows people to simplify and mask the oppressive apparatus of banks, corporations, police, courts and the prison system, all of which make diversity hires. These systems of internal exploitation and oppression must be targeted and dismantled, no matter whom they employ. 

My book, “Our Class: Trauma and Transformation in an American Prison,” uses the experience of writing the play to tell the stories of my students and impart their profound understanding of the repressive forces and institutions arrayed against them, their families and their communities. You can see my two-part interview with Hugh Hamilton about “Our Class” here and here.

August Wilson’s last play, “Radio Golf,” foretold where diversity and identity politics devoid of class consciousness were headed. In the play, Harmond Wilks, an Ivy League-educated real estate developer, is about to launch his campaign to become Pittsburgh’s first Black mayor. His wife, Meme, is angling to become the governor’s press secretary. Wilks, navigating the white man’s universe of privilege, business deals, status seeking and the country club game of golf, must sanitize and deny his identity. Roosevelt Hicks, who had been Wilk’s college roommate at Cornell and is a vice president at Mellon Bank, is his business partner. Sterling Johnson, whose neighborhood Wilks and Hicks are lobbying to get the city to declare blighted so they can raze it for their multimillion dollar development project, tells Hicks: 

You know what you are? It took me a while to figure it out. You a Negro. White people will get confused and call you a nigger but they don’t know like I know. I know the truth of it. I’m a nigger. Negroes are the worst thing in God’s creation. Niggers got style. Negroes got . A dog knows it’s a dog. A cat knows it’s a cat. But a Negro don’t know he’s a Negro. He thinks he’s a white man.

Terrible predatory forces are eating away at the country. The corporatists, militarists and political mandarins that serve them are the enemy. It is not our job to make them more appealing, but to destroy them. There are amongst us genuine freedom fighters of all ethnicities and backgrounds whose integrity does not permit them to serve the system of inverted totalitarianism that has destroyed our democracy, impoverished the nation and perpetuated endless wars. Diversity when it serves the oppressed is an asset, but a con when it serves the oppressors.

NOTE TO SCHEERPOST READERS FROM CHRIS HEDGES: There is now no way left for me to continue to write a weekly column for ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show without your help. The walls are closing in, with startling rapidity, on independent journalism, with the elites, including the Democratic Party elites, clamoring for more and more censorship. Bob Scheer, who runs ScheerPost on a shoestring budget, and I will not waver in our commitment to independent and honest journalism, and we will never put ScheerPost behind a paywall, charge a subscription for it, sell your data or accept advertising. Please, if you can, sign up at chrishedges.substack.com so I can continue to post my now weekly Monday column on ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show, The Chris Hedges Report.

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