{"id":311806,"date":"2026-01-12T12:01:52","date_gmt":"2026-01-12T12:01:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=311806"},"modified":"2026-01-12T09:04:45","modified_gmt":"2026-01-12T09:04:45","slug":"grand-illusion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2026\/01\/grand-illusion\/","title":{"rendered":"Grand Illusion"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Made in the USSA – by Mr. Fish<\/p><\/div>\n

8 Jan 2026 – We are cursed by what the historian Barbara Tuchman calls the \u201cbellicose frivolity of senile empires.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cWe live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.\u201d<\/em> \u2014 Stephen Miller to Jake Tapper on CNN, Jan. 5, 2026.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe who would live must fight. He who does not wish to fight in this world, where permanent struggle is the law of life, has not the right to exist. Such a saying may sound hard; but, after all, that\u2019s how it is.\u201d<\/em> \u2014 Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Fascist State expresses the will to exercise power and to command. Here the Roman tradition is embodied in a conception of strength. Imperial power, as understood by the Fascist doctrine, is not only territorial, or military, or commercial; it is also spiritual and ethical… Fascism sees in the imperialistic spirit \u2014 i.e., in the tendency of nations to expand \u2014 a manifestation of their vitality.\u201d <\/em>\u2014 Benito Mussolini in The Doctrine of Fascism<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

All empires, when they are dying, worship the idol of war. War will save the empire. War will resurrect past glory. War will teach an unruly world to obey. But those who bow down before the idol of war, blinded by hypermasculinity and hubris, are unaware that while idols begin by calling for the sacrifice of others, they end by demanding self-sacrifice. Ekpyrosis, the inevitable conflagration that destroys the world according to<\/a> the ancient Stoics, is part of the cyclical nature of time. There is no escape. Fortuna<\/em>. There is a time for individual death. There is a time for collective death. In the end, with weary citizens yearning for extinction, empires light their own funeral pyre.<\/p>\n

Our high priests of war, Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, Pete Hegseth, Stephen Miller and the Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Dan \u201cRazin\u201d Caine, are no different from the fools and charlatans who snuffed out empires of the past \u2014 the haughty leaders of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the militarists in imperial Germany and the hapless court of Tsarist Russia in World War I. They were followed by the fascists in Italy under Benito Mussolini, Germany under Adolf Hitler and the military rulers of imperial Japan in World War II.<\/p>\n

These political entities committed collective suicide.<\/p>\n

They drank the same fatal elixir Miller and those in the Trump White House imbibe. They too tried to use industrial violence to reshape the universe. They too considered themselves to be omnipotent. They too saw themselves in the face of the idol of war. They too demanded to be obeyed and worshiped.<\/p>\n

Destruction to them is creation. Dissent is sedition. The world is one-dimensional. The strong versus the weak. Only our nation is great. Other nations, even allies, are dismissed with contempt.<\/p>\n

These architects of imperial folly are buffoons and killer clowns. They are ridiculed and hated by those rooted in a reality-based world. They are followed slavishly by the desperate and the disenfranchised. The simplicity of the message is its appeal. A magic incantation will bring back the lost world, the golden age, however mythic. Reality is viewed exclusively through the lens of ultranationalism. The flip side of ultranationalism is racism.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe nationalist is by definition an ignoramus,\u201d wrote<\/a> Yugoslav-Serbian novelist Danilo Ki\u0161. \u201cNationalism is the line of least resistance, the easy way. The nationalist is untroubled, he knows or thinks he knows what his values are, his, that\u2019s to say national, that\u2019s to say the values of the nation he belongs to, ethical and political; he is not interested in others, they are no concern of his, hell \u2014 it\u2019s other people (other nations, other tribes). They don\u2019t even need investigating. The nationalist sees other people in his own image \u2014 as nationalists.\u201d<\/p>\n

These stunted human beings are unable to read others. They threaten<\/a>. They terrorize<\/a>. They kill<\/a>. The art of power politics between nations or individuals is far beyond their tiny imaginations. They lack the intelligence \u2014 emotional and intellectual \u2014 to cope with the complex, ever-shifting sands of old and new alliances. They cannot see themselves as the world sees them.<\/p>\n

Diplomacy is often a dark and deceptive art. It is by its nature manipulative. But it requires an understanding of other cultures and traditions. It requires getting inside the heads of adversaries and allies. For Trump and his minions, this is an impossibility.<\/p>\n

Skillful diplomats, such as Prince Klemens von Metternich<\/a>, the Austrian Empire\u2019s foreign minister who dominated European politics after the defeat of Napoleon, do so by crafting agreements and treaties such as the Concert of Europe<\/a> and the Congress of Vienna<\/a>. Metternich, no friend of liberalism, adroitly kept Europe stable until the revolutions of 1848.<\/p>\n

I reported on Richard Holbrooke, the assistant secretary of state, as he negotiated an end to the war in Bosnia. He was bombastic and enthralled with his own celebrity. But he played the Balkan warlords off each other in the former Yugoslavia until they acquiesced to stop the fighting \u2014 with some help from NATO warplanes that pounded Serb positions on the hills around Sarajevo \u2014 and signed the Dayton Peace Accords.<\/p>\n

Holbrooke had little regard for the diplomats who diddled in conference halls in Geneva while 100,000 people died or disappeared<\/a> in Bosnia, an estimated<\/a> 900,000 became refugees and 1.3 million were internally displaced. He had a loathing for military commanders who refused to take risks. He detested the Croatian, Serbian and Muslim leaders he had to corral into signing the peace accord.<\/p>\n

Holbrooke, whose blustering style and volcanic eruptions were legendary, left bruised egos and slighted, embittered colleagues in his wake. But he knew how to cajole and mold his adversaries to his will. He was likened, in a not very flattering comparison, to Jules Cardinal Mazarin<\/a>, the crafty 17th-century prelate and statesman who solidified France\u2019s supremacy among the European powers. \u201cHe flatters, he lies, he humiliates: he is a sort of brutal and schizophrenic Mazarin,\u201d a French diplomat told Le Figaro, of Holbrooke, during the Dayton talks.<\/p>\n

True.<\/p>\n

But Holbrooke, however mercurial, understood the interplay between force and diplomacy. This understanding is essential. It is why nations have diplomats. It is why great diplomats are as important as great generals.<\/p>\n

Gangster states have no need of diplomacy. Trump and Rubio, for this reason, have gutted the State Department, along with other forms of \u201csoft\u201d power that achieve influence without resorting to force, including the U.S. role in the United Nations, the U.S. Agency of International Development, the U.S. Institute for Peace \u2014 renamed Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace after most of the board and staff were fired \u2014 and Voice of America.<\/p>\n

Diplomats in gangster states are reduced to the role of errand boys. Hitler\u2019s Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop,<\/strong> whose primary experience in foreign affairs before 1933 was selling fake German champagne in Britain, appointed party hacks from the SA<\/a> or Brownshirts \u2014 the paramilitary wing of the party \u2014 to diplomatic posts abroad. Benito Mussolini\u2019s Foreign Minister was his son-in-law, Galeazzo Ciano. Mussolini \u2014 who believed that \u201cwar is to man what maternity is to woman\u201d \u2014 later executed Ciano for disloyalty. Trump\u2019s Special Envoy to the Middle East, Steven Charles Witkoff, is a real estate developer<\/a>, often accompanied<\/a> on diplomatic missions by Trump\u2019s feckless son-in-law Jared Kushner.<\/p>\n

The Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce<\/a> quipped that fascism had created a fourth form of government, \u201conagrocracy,\u201d a government by braying asses, to add to Aristotle\u2019s traditional triumvirate of tyranny, oligarchy and democracy.<\/p>\n

Our ruling class, Democrats and Republicans, piece by piece, dismantled democracy. In Germany and Italy, the constitutional state, as well, collapsed long before the arrival of fascism. Trump, who is the symptom, not the disease, inherited the corpse. He is making good use of it.<\/p>\n

\u201cI believe that to maintain our empire abroad requires resources and commitments that will inevitably undercut our domestic democracy and in the end produce a military dictatorship or its civilian equivalent,\u201d Chalmers Johnson wrote<\/a> two decades ago in his book, \u201cNemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

He warned:<\/p>\n

The founders of our nation understood this well and tried to create a form of government \u2014 a republic \u2014 that would prevent this from occurring. But the combination of huge standing armies, almost continuous wars, military Keynesianism, and ruinous military expenses have destroyed our republican structure in favor of an imperial presidency. We are on the cusp of losing our democracy for the sake of keeping our empire. Once a nation is started down that path, the dynamics that apply to all empires come into play \u2014 isolation, overstretch, the uniting of forces opposed to imperialism, and bankruptcy. Nemesis stalks our life as a free nation.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The American Empire, defeated in Iraq and Afghanistan \u2014 as it was at the Bay of Pigs and in Vietnam \u2014 learns nothing. It leaps into each new military fiasco as if the previous military fiascos did not happen. It believes it needs no allies. It will rule the world.<\/p>\n

If occupying Greenland blows up NATO, so what? If funding and arming Israel to carry out genocide<\/a> and bombing Iran and Yemen alienates huge swaths of the Global South and enrages the Muslim world, who cares? If invading and kidnapping the president of Venezuela stinks of Yankee imperialism, tough! No one else matters.<\/p>\n

Nations that stomp around the globe like King Kong infect themselves with a fatal virus.<\/p>\n

Johnson warned that if we continue to cling to our empire, as the Roman Republic did, we will \u201close our democracy and grimly await the eventual blowback that imperialism generates.\u201d<\/p>\n

Blowback is next and with it the collapse of the crumbling edifice of the American Empire. It is an old story. Although to us, and the cabal of misfits ensconced in our version of Ubu Roi\u2019s court<\/a>, it will come as a terrible shock.<\/p>\n

______________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize\u2013winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for\u00a0<\/em>The New York Times,\u00a0where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief. He previously worked overseas for\u00a0<\/em>The Dallas Morning News,\u00a0The Christian Science Monitor, and<\/em> NPR. He used to be the host of the Emmy Award-nominated <\/em>RT America show\u00a0<\/em>On Contact.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Go to Original – chrishedges.substack.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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