THE IMPERIAL NIGHTMARE

How Bush junior converts the plans of his father for the US as a “new Roman Empire” and how the republic falls by the wayside with the birth of the world empire

By Mumia Abu-Jamal

[This article published in: Junge Welt, 10/15/2005 is translated from the German on the World Wide Web, http://www.jungewelt.de/2005/10-15/009.php.]




The Bush administration and its neoliberal protégés have brought the US to the edge of the abyss. Whoever is the next president in 2008 and which of the two parties controls Congress will be incidental. It hardly makes any difference today.

The US empire that does not face a single equal rival any more has told the rest of the world to go to hell. In an article in the New York Review of Books (July 14, 2005), Tony Judt quotes a leading “and rather conservative” Spanish diplomat: “When we grew up under Franco, we had a dream of America. This dream encouraged us to imagine and later build a different, better Spain. Dreams fade but they need not necessarily be transformed into nightmares. We Spaniards have some experience with nightmares. What is happening in the US? How can we explain Guantanamo?

In view of the present era of the imperial policy of the US, Tony Judt is very critical with historians, politicians and the media: “Historians and scholars who leap on the train of the US empire that is underway quickly forget that a republic must first die as a prerequisite for the birth of a world empire. On a long view, no country can act in an imperial way toward other countries – brutally, contemptuously and lawlessly – and simultaneously uphold republican values within the country.

How drunkenly Americans stagger from hope to hope, agenda to agenda and illusion to illusion! They always take one step forward and stumble two steps backward. The best that the “loyal opposition” can accomplish is the insane call to send more troops to Iraq. Some time or other the war there will return to the US, inflict devastation and demand casualties among those who send violence casually and blindly into other countries. The war already has immediate consequences for the poorest among us, for whom fewer and fewer resources are available to eke out their miserable existence in the city or countryside. The everyday struggle to raise and educate children and successfully lead tem into jobs is becoming more and more hopeless for millions of parents.

The new “Roman Empire” rises in power and greatness. The corporations buy Congress and the good names of the representatives to whip through laws. With these laws, the rights of the working population are cut while the rights of owners and profiteers are strengthened. Does anyone remember the North American Free trade Agreement (NAFTA) and its noble promises? What does the reality look like? Unemployment for some and starvation wages for the others dominate reality. Where is there a worldwide free trade agreement in labor rights protecting the interests of wage earners?

Fifteen years ago George Walker Bush senior threatened to establish a “new world order”. George W. Bush junior is working untiringly at its realization. The present state of the world suggests what can be expected in the future.