Who Is the Evil Empire?

by Gerard Emershaw

I am a child of the Cold War. I was born during the late stages of the Vietnam War. During the month of my birth Nixon was visiting China—most likely in an attempt to prevent a robust Sino-Russian Communist Alliance against the West. My generation shivered in fear at the possibility of nuclear war as presented in films like The Day After and Threads. We hoped that Sting was correct in believing that nuclear war would not occur because the Russians loved their children, too. Despite dangerously close calls, NATO and the Warsaw Pact never engaged in global thermonuclear war.

Days after my high school graduation, the remnants of the Berlin Wall was demolished. By the end of my first sophomore semester at university, the Soviet Union officially ceased operation. The End of the Cold War brought with it so much possibility. With no more fear of World War III breaking out between the East and West, swords would be beaten into ploughshares. The American people would receive the “peace dividend” that they had earned. With war no longer a likely possibility, money would be spent for peaceful purposes instead of feeding the hunger of the greedy Military-Industrial Complex. The national debt would be tamed. Taxes would be reduced. But a funny thing happened on the way to the peace dividend. After a short period of “New World Order” where “humanitarian” military action was carried out in places such as the former Yugoslavia, the neoconservative War on Terror began after 9/11.

On March 8, 1983, President Ronald Reagan delivered his famous “Evil Empire” speech before an audience of Evangelical Christians in Orlando, Florida. While the speech was at times fascistic with its eerie theocratic flourishes, when the President spoke of the evil of the Soviet collectivist state, there was a power that can only emanate from truth:

Yes, let us pray for the salvation of all of those who live in that totalitarian darkness—pray they will discover the joy of knowing God. But until they do, let us be aware that while they preach the supremacy of the state, declare its omnipotence over individual man, and predict its eventual domination of all peoples on the Earth, they are the focus of evil in the modern world.

Make no mistake, the Soviet Union was an Evil Empire. It starved its people and tyrannized them by locking them in a police state behind the Iron Curtain. The Soviet leaders denied their people the most basic natural rights including freedom of speech and freedom of religion. Those who attempted to exercise such rights often found themselves tossed in Gulags in places such as Siberia.

Over twenty years after the Fall of the Berlin Wall, Russia is still essentially an evil collectivist nation. Vlad Putin is the head of corrupt and totalitarian government in a one-party state. Freedom House rates Russia as “not free.” While Russia has gradually moved from communism to fascism, its economy is still largely controlled. Heritage has ranked Russia's economy as the 139^th freest in the world and rated its economy as “mostly unfree.”

The United States still possesses more economic and social freedom than Russia ever has or likely ever will. However, that is not the point. The optimistic youth of my generation assumed that the end of the Cold War would mean that the United States would remain a beacon of freedom and the former Soviet Union and her former satellites would become more free. Perhaps Russia would never be as free as the United States, but it would be free.

Unfortunately, the opposite occurred. Despite having “won” the Cold War, the United States has become more totalitarian. The United States is looking more and more like the Soviet Union or Stasi East Germany during the Cold War. If the United States won the Cold War, then how did the American people begin to lose their freedom?

During the Cold War when the Soviets had countless nuclear missiles aimed at the United States—and posed a genuine existential threat to the nation—Americans were free. Constitutional rights were largely respected by the government. Today there is no similar existential threat to the United States. As bad as foreign terrorism is, it is a relatively minor threat. Increased vigilance since 9/11 also make such attacks less likely to succeed—even without totalitarian measures such as the PATRIOT Act in place.

The Soviet Union could have destroyed the United States within hours, yet the administrations of Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush I, and Clinton mostly respected the natural rights of Americans. Of course, the surveillance state of the NSA, FBI, CIA, and other federal spy agencies were already getting dangerous—as the Church Committee Report detailed—but there was no true sense that totalitarianism in the United States was just around the corner. There was no claim by the federal government that it could indefinitely detain American citizens or simply assassinate them without due process. Back in the 1980s if someone would have laid out a case in which a whistleblower—who revealed details of clandestine spying programs against the citizens of his own nation—had fled his country just ahead of criminal charges being filed against him and had been granted temporary asylum in another nation, just about everyone would have assumed that the whistleblower was Soviet and that the nation offering asylum was the United States. Strange how different the truth is in the Snowden case.

Every day it seems that the United States moves closer to totalitarianism. It feels like Americans are frogs being boiled slowly in one big oppressive soup. While many complain about this, nobody seems to be doing anything about it. As long as there are ample “bread and circuses”—pop culture, television, the cinema, social networks, the internet, professional sports, etc.—there will be no European-style demonstrations or violence in the streets. The sheeple will just continue to allow themselves to be herded by the collectivist wolves.

Aside from the occasional political champion of liberty—whether it be a Ron Paul, Rand Paul, Justin Amash, Ron Wyden, etc.—nobody in the political establishment dares speak out against the status quo of the single American welfare/warfare surveillance state party. And those who dare do so are labelled “whacko birds” or “unAmerican” or “isolationist.” They are accused of having a “pre-9/11”mentality that is no longer appropriate. In this “Post-Constitutional” World, the Constitution is viewed by the powers that be as an archaic curiosity at best and as a suicide pact at worst.

The brave and bold Americans who won independence from the British Crown, tamed the West, stormed the beaches at Normandy and at Iwo Jima to defeat fascism, and endured the long Cold War to prevail over communism were now nothing but trembling cowards. Wimps who needed to be protected from nameless, faceless, “Islamo-fascists” in caves in Pakistan. “Live free or die” and “better dead than red” became “whatever it takes” to protect us. Americans would give up any and all freedom to be protected from terrorists who probably did not even exist. Even if there were as many terrorists as the government claimed, the chances of being killed in a terrorist attack were so remote as to not even be worth thinking about.

The strongest and deepest roots of the new American “Evil Empire” are the progressive ideas of President Woodrow Wilson. Wilson was essentially a fascist before the fascists were. Many media sources have rightly compared the neo-progressive President Barack Obama to Woodrow Wilson. The neoconservatives themselves have compared their outlook to that of Woodrow Wilson. Neocon Max Boot has characterized the Neo-Trotskyite position of neoconservatism as “HardWilsonianism.”

As a result of essentially only having two wings of the same political war and police state party—who differ only on “wedge” issues such as abortion, gay marriage, etc.—the United States has gotten continuous war abroad and a growing Orwellian police state at home.

As long as the American people continue to be more Milquetoast than manly and more Dorris Day than John Wayne, they will live under the new American Evil Empire. As long as they are such wimps that they believe that martial law in a major formerly red blooded American city—one of the birth places of the American revolution—and house to house police searches are the proper response to find a single criminal suspect who had just barely passed puberty, then tyranny will prevail.

Allowing the United States to become totalitarian is to dishonor every American who fought bravely to keep Americans free and to preserve the Constitution. Not only accepting but demanding a police state as so many Americans have done is to spit in the faces of the Founders, the “doughboys,” the “dogfaces,” the “GI Joes,” etc. It is to do a grave disservice to Washington, Jefferson, Martin Luther King, Jr., and every other American who risked his or her life for freedom.

Perhaps in the end, freedom is only for the brave. Cowards are more likely to sit comfortably and ignore the growth of totalitarianism as long as they can update their Facebook profiles, watch reality television, drink beer, eat chicken wings, and cheer on their favorite sports teams without having to worry about being inconvenienced with another terrorist attack.

Nietzsche has famously warned:

Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster... for when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you.

 

 In fighting and defeating so many monsters, the United States government has itself become a monster. It has become an Evil Empire nearly as bad as many that it has fought. However, an Evil Empire is only possible in the United States as long as Americans allow it. Will we look up from our Twitter timelines, NFL games, “Real Housewives” episodes, or whatever else is stealing away our attention and do something about it? Or did so many patriots for so long act in vain? Is totalitarianism just the natural order of things?