"We are not here concerned with directly political attitudes, but rather with the ideology underlying [the] artists' presentation of reality…What matters is whether [the artist's] view of the world, as expressed in his writings, connives at that modern nihilism from which both Fascism and Cold War ideology draw their strength."
- George Lukacs

The American Empire: Critical Reflections on Change

- by Aaron Greenberg

There are at least two words people in America are afraid to introduce into the discourse. Fascism is the first; empire, the second. The former seems worthy of only the cruelest authoritarian regimes - the kind whose power is obviously illegitimate, who show no respect for human rights; whose political enemies "disappear"; the kind that exploit fear to no end and whose grand scheme aims to concentrate the wealth and power to the ruling class.

The latter is the stuff of colonial Britain, France and Germany, which launch adventures in exotic locales, intermarry with natives, and promote cultural and economic homogeneity. Empire recalls the spoils of Rome - a status quo of hedonists and despots - unwise, unseasoned and decadent. Needless to say, fascism and empire carry associations that require qualifications before even suggesting that the current American regime can be considered either. Qualification is necessary, because it would be patently incorrect to compare the Bush Administration to the fascism of Mussolini, Hitler or Franco or the empire-building of England, France, Germany or Rome; it would be incorrect in the same way it is incorrect to call dachshunds "poodles."

The New Nationalism of which I have written recently is new to America, but this country has flirted with both imperialism and fascist movements before. America's experiences with both explain our ambivalence to the words; we're still too close to Theodore Roosevelt or the pro-Nazi American corporatists of the 1930s to come to terms with either. Thus, the stigma remains.

I will save a full discussion of "fascist" tendencies for a different essay.

But in this essay, I will use both words ("empire" and "fascism") because, while they fail to completely capture the phenomenon of the Bush clan's foreign and domestic policies, they come as close as any words can to describing it, and I think it is about time that Americans started reconsidering the linguistic mores that militate against their use. In other words, there has never been a better time than now to use these words.

Three elements make empire: subjects, geography and complacency.

In talking about empire it is essential to define subjects and subjugators. The Bush milieu promotes a worldview similar to that of Athens at its height: there are citizens of Athens and "everyone else," generally referred to as "barbarians." The binaries as they now exist: America and terrorists. Responding to the attacks of 9/11 George Bush defined America's enemies as terrorists and the nations that harbor them; "Ya know what?" he said, "Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists."

Bush's post-911 press conferences are the thick with bureaucratic lingo of empires, the platitudes and space for interpretation - the euphemism "terrorist" has been employed since the rise of anarchism in the nineteenth century West to describe in a morally objectionable way the activities of political enemies. By the Bush clan's own admission, 9/11 was an act of war, therefore a political event. Thus its exploitation (like Hitler's exploitation of the Reichstag bombing - also committed by "terrorists") needs no justification.

We can now redefine subjects as "terrorists" or alternately, "political enemies." Political enemies are treated like subjects - the brown, faceless proletariat which has always suffered at the hands of the West. "Terrorists" detained secretly, indefinitely and allowed only kangaroo courts; their lawyers (representatives of the ACLU and Center for Constitutional Rights) can gain access to their clients only through high court rulings.

What is patently obvious to the "subjects" is of course unclear to even the most perceptive subjugators. Empire requires geography. Space is what separates imperialism from expansionism - what makes American genocide of natives in California different from that of natives in the Philippines two hundred years later.

Complacency on the part of the citizens of empire (Britons, Romans, etc.) has historically kept imperialism alive. As Betrand Russell mused, "It is in the nature of imperialism that citizens of the imperial power are always among the last to know - or care - about circumstances in the colonies."

This makes sense: empire controls information, it clamps and co-opts culture and media. Subjects (who at home are oblivious and abroad, oppressed) resist, but because they are subjects, their resistance is not seen as heroic or reasonable, but terroristic, insurgent, malcontent. The prevalent double standard ("you can't do that!") attitude tolerates, even codifies the state terrorism of Israel and America but condemns responses to that terror; subjects of empire are expected to take "it" and not complain - or, recalling Russell's point, the citizens of empire do not even know what the "it" is to which "terrorists" respond.

Empire always wears a benevolent veil: Hitler "liberated" Poland and Czechoslovakia; Britain did the same to India and South Africa; France to Algeria, etc. To resist "liberation" is to commit the gravest sin. The West takes umbrage with those nations and peoples who resist its hegemony, who give forced assimilation a hard stare, who oppose invasion and co-optation.

Today's American Empire is similar and dissimilar to past empires - similar because empire's ingredients (geography, subjects and complacency) are present, dissimilar because the empire was unplanned and procured thoughtlessly and does not enrich or serve the interests of the status quo. In short, America's Empire is weak.

The American Empire of late differs from Theodore Roosevelt's empire in that the former is improvised and lacks vision. In the Bush cabal no ideology rules: the cynicism of neo-Conservatives and Struassians, the zeal and irrationality of messianic, evangelical Christians and the venality of industrial capitalists and oilmen clash. Their empire is schizophrenic and ineffectual - and for that reason - harmful and dangerous to every person on the planet.

America maintains a military presence in most major nation-states, and its profiteers know no borders - "rogue states" or European allies are all the same to the undiscriminating multinational corporation. Domination and imperialism, when not powered by the military industrial complex, come in the form of information and "idea-trading" masked as "globalization" and from semi-official bodies like the National Endowment for Democracy, which funds candidates and parties who toe the American line.

"Sphere of influence" has been an official American mindset since at least the end of the Second World War, when the threat of spreading international communism and other non-Western, anti-capitalist movements threatened the dominance of the Western, industrialized, capitalist nation-states, and necessitated a return to Machiavellian equations of "ends" and "means."

The colonial adventures of Iraq and Afghanistan - which, both being former colonies, certainly qualify as remote and exotic destinations - are releases of a repressed sexual urge that the right wing has been tending for decades. (The National Security Strategy of the United States pushed by leading neo-conservatives, including Paul Wolfowitz, new head of the World Bank, in the late 1990s call for some of the policies currently being implemented in Iraq and Afghanistan.)

In talking about empire it is hard to separate the colonial power from its authoritarian methods, because at its core, empire is about supremacy, which, by definition, is about denial.

Power of the kind empires possess denies the raison d'être of everyone and everything that is not familiar. In America, the indigenous peoples were called "savages," and so it remains. Human rights and empires have always converged, partly because empires do no recognize their subjects as human, but as subjects alone - as means to an end or obstructions to an end. In this context, Abu Grahib, "Camp X-Ray" and the abuses in Afghani prisons make sense. These acts are not aberrations; they are empire's trademarks.

The relationship between empire and fascism is more complex than it might appear. Perhaps because both words have taken on a strangely synonymous meaning - because both refer to something "bad" in which "bad" governments take part and because often, as in America now, governments can be described as both fascist and imperialist. The line is not so clear: authoritarian states can be protectionist and conservative, but under no circumstances can an empire practice democracy. We can even go so far as to say that empires cannot escape authoritarian rule. If we see authoritarianism as a response to inefficient government (it usually is not a choice) then in the current technocracy, empire cannot thrive without an iron fist.

The greatest irony of the American Empire is that just when it becomes appropriate to describe the milieu in terms of fascism and empire, there is virtually no one writing brave enough to use those words. Novelists, who are in positions of great power despite dwindling readership, have abandoned the political consciousness that once defined American fiction writing.

"Political purpose," listed among reasons for writing in George Orwell's much-read essay Why I Write, has all but vanished from American letters. (Britain is doing slightly better.) In describing how he creates "political books" Orwell took down the process in words that should guide 21st century authors in their writing. "What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art. My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice. When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, "I am going to produce a work of art." I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing."

Mainstream American fiction is split today between the Grisham/Crichton and the Oates/Updike strains. There is harmless trash and harmless literature. There are exceptions to this rule (i.e., Roth's The Plot Against America, T.C. Boyle's Tortilla Curtain or Russell Banks' Cloudsplitter) but Oates and Updike are generally the rule.

The political and social novels of Sinclair Lewis, Upton Sinclair and John Dos Passos have been all but forgotten by American writers. Instead of resisting censorship, American novelists (perhaps under pressure from publishers) have bypassed controversy altogether. Political opinions are now kept to oneself. American writers can wax poetic on religion, sex or coming-of-age, but the radical politics of Henry Miller and Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer and Arthur Miller are relics, things of a past generation, the privileges of "tumultuous times." The atmospherics of peace and quiet pervade American novelists' consciousness.

To use the Nobel Prize for Literature as a barometer of political consciousness: an America hasn't won the prize in more than a decade (Toni Morrison, 1993). Most of the "great American writers" (Hemingway, Faulkner, and Steinbeck included) won the prize; all three of them wrote provocatively about politics in their own work and contributed to the nation's consciousness. The "great writers" of the past decade have not lived up to their predecessors' examples.

Chinese dissident turned American novelist Ha Jin articulated the position of the established community of American Letters. The setting was a March interview with Deborah Solomon from the New York Times Magazine. A portion from the conversation follows:

Do you feel any obligation to speak out on politics these days?

No. Very rarely is a novelist a public intellectual. I don't think I should have a public role. I teach my writing class at Boston University, and that for me is public enough.

We don't really have public intellectuals in this country anymore. We now have talking heads.

Yes. I would be happy to hear from novelists like Toni Morrison or Saul Bellow, but you don't see them on talk shows. No one asks them for their opinions.

Jin speaks as if opinions must be forced out by an infantile medium like the talk show. As an exiled artist he seems to be in the perfect situation to wax elegant on politics, and indeed he has written about China - in English, of course. If international-turned-American novelists feel no responsibility to "politics" then imagine the apathy of American-born novelists.

The dearth of consciousness among the American novelist embodies a larger "business-as-usual" mentality that started years before the Bush Administration took power. This mentality was born from the Left's disillusionment with communism and the resulting disorganization of the new "progressive" movement, conflated with the tools of Western and American hegemony and empire becoming "part of the landscape" and immovable. Institutions whose entire goal was to Westernize and subvert the Third World came into being after the Second World War - 1944 marked the establishment of both the World Bank and IMF.

Marxist critic and member of the Frankfurt School for Social Research, Georg Lukacs recognized something similar in his groundbreaking 1947, essay Franz Kafka or Thomas Mann? "Traditional bourgeois culture proceeded on the assumption that ideas were not relevant to social or political problems." The disconnect remains and allows those who procure Big Ideas (novelists) to ignore politics without consequence.

The American capitalist economy married the Third World industrializing economies, and vice versa. The tools of economic, cultural and political dominance turned into furniture with free trade agreements and the ascendance of "neo-liberal" economics; these agreements entrenched American interests to a point where extraction is impossible.

Capitalist alternatives thus became moot and irrelevant.

"The Left" lost the kind of worldview that had both popular appeal and a serious, clear agenda. On what big problems should novelists work now that capitalism is "here to stay"? They have retired to their proverbial laurels, dumbfounded, directionless and politically flaccid. "[The writer's] life is part of the life of his time; no matter whether he is conscious of this, approves of it or disapproves. He is part of a larger social and historical whole." The Kafka's and Thomas Mann's of today fundamentally deny their place in the Present; the issues their writings tackle are admirably of the "human nature" but as a result lack urgency, some might say relevance, to the dilemmas facing the subjects and citizens who inhabit this, our post-industrial Empire.

Cultural and economic imperialism after the Vietnam War transcended a need for any obviously political empire building that was the rule in America for the first half of the 20th Century. The "sphere of influence" policies in Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, Chile, Angola, Iran, etc. were not large-scale military interventions, no aerial bombardment or troop invasions were necessary to assassinate leaders and overthrow inconvenient administrations. Funneling money to paramilitary forces and fascist movements was all that was necessary to wreak havoc on the Third World and make it more suitable for Western economic interests. For all of America's capitalist "efficiency," homogenization remains a many-step process - coup d'état, American puppet, restructuring of the economy, colonization (privatization) etc. All this under the auspices and euphemisms of "democracy-building" or "liberation."

Forty years ago, the threat of spreading Soviet communism was enough to grant a carte blanche to the CIA to conduct the secret missions that reshaped and colonized the Third World; now, "terrorism" and "9/11" are the buzz words that purchase resignation. With the former there was somewhat of a legitimate threat: Russia was a powerful nuclear state; Al-Quaeda is not a state. So neo-conservative policy-makers and spin-doctors eager for a World War Four (World War Three being the Cold War) have replaced Soviet Communism with Islamist terrorism as America's first and worst enemy, but this is not a clean replacement: the former was a powerful nuclear threat, the latter is disorganized and state-less.

Lukacs, in the same essay, gave a deft and relevant account of the forces (psychological, political and social) that shaped the crusade not only against Communist Authoritarianism but Leftist thought. "The opposition to socialism gathered momentum and was soon transformed into an ideological crusade which, though nominally concerned with the preservation of democracy, was really nourished by a growing fear of the threat, which mass society poses to the ruling elite. If we add to this the dark shadows cast by the nuclear bomb, it will easily be understood how the fear thus engendered could be yoked to acquiescence in, or active support for, Cold War policies." Self-perpetuating fear still buys acquiescence. Both responses to the difficulties of life in the post-industrial, hyper-capitalist West divert attention from the real problems facing everyone in the world - the problems that may lie at the foot of that fear.

In his introduction to Rudyard Kipling's Kim (a celebration of the benevolent English empire in savage India) the late Edward Said wrote, "...no one with any power to influence discussion or policy demurred as to the basic superiority of the white European male…" Replace "white European male" with "Western/American style democracy" - welcome to the current milieu where no one questions either the excellence of "American democracy" or the transportability to places where democracy is as foreign as Islamic theocracy is in America; "Most Iraqis don't know what democracy means," a man in Basra said after he voted…"Is it sweet, is it bitter?...We don't know"

The ruin of empire falls on the shoulders of two groups: subjects and artists.

The Iraqi resistance seems like a mirror of its subjugators: disorganized, misdirected, and a victim of circumstance. The Afghani Mujahidin who - with the help of American tax dollars and the State Department - fended off the incursions of Soviet troops, ultimately contributing to the fall of the USSR, were state sponsored and faced a rational enemy who knew when it was time to quit. America is no such enemy. Resistance attacks only fuel its fire. Empire thrives on violence.

Terrorism - the kind 19th Century Anarchist Mikhail Bakunin advocated as the way to create solidarity in an industrial, capitalist society - cannot work in a culture where violence and confrontation are the currency of discourse. 9/11 is evidence of this: solidarity was co-opted by political opportunists and under the iron grip of an irresponsible media and a manipulative regime, the fickle American people turned genuine unity into fractionalization and racist subjugation. When violence is the only means of communication and the only way the State solves problems, extra-State violence (what is called "terrorism") is looked down upon by the subjects of empire and of course, damned by the State.

The duplicity of "developed" nations has been present since Athens - where the "superior" Athenians were held up to a different standard than the non-Greek "barbarians." Athens' transgressions were policy; the barbarians' were crimes.

Artists (actors, sculptors, poets, musicians) have been vocal critics of American policy. Rendered irrelevant by an inane, venal mass culture more interested in pacification than art and sound bytes than serious reportage, these groups are subjected minorities. The opinions of public artists (actors and musicians) are devalued and scoffed at because they come from the mouths of "pop culture," because they are actors and musicians, and not Rush Limbaugh (what are his credentials again?). Art is not taken seriously enough by enough people for the opinions or the actions of artists to effect change. See Michael Moore, whose artful propaganda was blamed by some for the defeat of John Kerry.

Civil disobedience on a massive scale and passive resistance (both the tools of Dr. Martin Luther King whose civil rights movement obliterated America's official state-sponsored racist policies) remain the only option for subjects and citizens of the empire. The American people, the Iraqi people and the Afghani people must outdo Dr. King if they have any chance of stopping empire. To do so, they must find a leader with the same charisma, creativity and moral urgency.

They will not find this leader among novelists. Or activists. Or the academy. (Certainly not among career politicians). Anyone too entrenched in these institutions will be unsuitable for the very reason that they are part of institutions. America needs someone who straddles or rejects institutions, someone to whom everyone can relate, someone who is educated and uneducated, fine and rough, elite and populist - in short, an anti-Bush.

Resisting empire is not an activity in which only American citizens or subjects of the empire should partake. The American Empire is the new problem of every human being living today. Donald Rumsfeld's reckless nuclear policy should be enough convince anyone who knows about it that stopping America is the world's first priority. The effects of the Bush Administration's obsession with widening the gap between the haves and have-nots, and further concentrating wealth and power (doing more than Clinton's free trade agreements ever could about hurting the world's populations) will soon be felt by every working person in America and the world.

Today, every policy passed or supported by America seems to be in opposition to the rest of the world. Positions on global warming (which along with America, is the world’s number one problem), women’s rights, children’s rights, AIDS and a whole host of other serious issues seem designed to spite the world – as if “McDonalization” (as the colloquialism goes) entitles America to run the world as it does itself - that is, with only a semblance of democracy but a surplus of cruelty.

It is past the time for everyone - novelists, artists, citizens, and subjects - to realize that nothing is going to change unless everyone starts to change it.