09/24/10 – Dilip Hiro – The Scott Horton Show

Alright y'all, welcome back to the show, it's Anti-War Radio, I'm Scott Horton, websites to look at www.antiwar.com, www.chaosradioaustin.org, www.lrn.fm, www.anomalyradio.com, and www.tomdispatch.com where our friend Tom Englehart keeps a lot of great written material from all over the place about a lot of great things.
We run almost all of it at www.antiwar.com under Tom Englehart's name and his method is to write sort of a little introductory mini-essay to introduce the rest of the piece written by whoever it is.
So if you look at Tom Englehart's archive at www.antiwar.com, you'll see many, many articles by many, many different authors and one of those who's appeared quite a few times at Tom Dispatch and in his archive at www.antiwar.com is Dilip Hero and he's joining us on the phone right now from England, I believe it is.
Welcome to the show, sir.
Thank you.
It says here at Tom Dispatch, you're the author of 32 books.
The latest is After Empire, The Birth of a Multipolar World and of course I know that you're also the author of War Without End, The Rise of Islamist Terrorism and The Global Response which got a great little review on my Facebook page by a friend who read it this morning when I announced that you were going to be on the show.
So that's very impressive, 32 books, I didn't realize that.
But anyway, so let's focus on your most recent article here for TomDispatch.com and I guess your latest book here, After Empire, The Birth of a Multipolar World, the kind of macro view of the future of the balance of power of the nation states after George Bush and Dick Cheney have successfully smashed the American Empire to bits in the rocks of Iraq, or drowned it in the sands of Iraq, I don't know.
That's the last book you mentioned, of course it's all about empires and you must remember that my name, Dilip, D-I-L-I-P, is an Indian name and Hero, H-I-R-O, which sounds Japanese but actually in my language, H-I-R-O, Hero means diamond.
So you can call me Dilip Diamond.
Anyway, the thing is that the whole idea about empire, in a way I'm a part of the empire because I was born before India became independent.
So I was born in the British Empire.
And as we all know, that Britain was the number one power before World War II, you know, it was a power like this for 100 years.
And of course, since the World War II, America has been a superpower, but all empires come to an end.
And most of them, I should say, all of them end by shooting themselves in the foot.
That is, they overextend themselves and are not able to sustain the domain which they are controlling.
And in the case of the United States, one can see very clearly that the credit for extending American empire goes to the gentleman from Crawford, known as George W. Bush, because of starting out two wars, one against Afghanistan and secondly against Iraq.
And in Afghanistan, one could say he had a reason or excuse or whatever to do something in Iraq.
He had absolutely no reason, no rationale, no hard intelligence information that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
But he had this kind of itch and his surrounding aides like Cheney and Rumsfeld had the same itch to get this fellow Saddam Hussein.
Now, because of doing these two wars and on top of that, that's another thing where, shall I say, George W. Bush tried to defy gravity.
There are laws of gravity which you cannot defy.
And if you defy, you fall down.
That was, if you're fighting a war and war is a very wasteful activity.
And of course, I see, you know, your radio station is called anti-war, very nice, very sensible thing to say and to be anti-war, because war is a totally wasteful activity which takes so much of the resources of the society and does not produce anything.
It destroys, destroys, you know, kills people, destroys property and so on.
And normally when a war is fought by a country, the government of that country raises taxes to finance war.
What did George W. Bush do?
He reduced taxes and started two wars.
And then you know what happened exactly two years ago, I should say two years and eight days ago, Lehman Brothers went down the tube.
They went down and with that, the whole credit system worldwide froze up.
That means, you know, this was an example where the expansion of empire not only did something wrong or something disastrous politically, but also economically, because that fall of Lehman Brothers, which was, should I say, the tipping point, actually illustrated the complete inefficiency and, shall I say, the infeasibility of Reagan style capitalism.
It was Reagan in 1981 who started deregulation and free for all supply side capitalism.
It started in 81 and it ended with George W. Bush because he took this deregulation to the extent that even when there was law, there were regulatory laws about the Wall Street, about banking and so on, and in the stock market, those were not applied.
So you see, I'm just assuming the point that all empires come to an end.
And of course, they do not just overnight fall down.
It is a very interesting line in the article that you mentioned, published by Tom Dispatch, where I make a comparison of this power structure with the price of a share of a company.
When a company is going down, its share doesn't fall off a cliff in one free fall.
No, it goes down a little bit and at that lower price, it attracts some buyers and then it goes up a little bit and then it falls much further and does not rise up to the older level.
And that's the way it goes down.
And it is exactly the same thing that happened with empires.
The empire builders do not, shall I say, it's not a coup d'etat, overnight you are out of power, overnight you are no longer imperialist power.
It happens in stages that you have to look at the trend of that.
If you take Britain, now just again to go back to the financial side, the British sterling pound, as it is called, was the currency, worldwide currency like the US dollar is today.
And if it was in that position all the way until 1931, it was tied to the gold standard.
And at that point, things became so rough that it was taken off gold standard.
But even then, pound was a strong currency and going on.
And only to 1967, when the British economy came to the point where the government of the day had to go to the International Monetary Fund and say, please, please help us, help us.
We don't have enough foreign exchange, give us a loan and so on.
So I'm just illustrating how a British pound, which was the universal currency for more than 100 years, came down, not in one sweep, in the stages.
You can find the same thing now in the case of US dollar.
Of course, you can see in my article that you mentioned, I also discussed the relationship between US dollar and the Chinese Yuan.
So I think I'm just giving you this fundamental thesis, which is in my book, where I showed American power is declining.
That doesn't mean it will decline overnight.
You have to look at the trend, look at the trend of a share of a particular company.
All right.
Now, I'll ask you to hold it right there.
The music's playing.
We got to go out and take this break.
Everybody is still a hero.
He's got a new piece at TomDispatch.com.
America's suffering a power outage.
And when we get back, I want to ask you kind of a one more broad historical type question and then on to the specifics of your article, Where America is Now.
Right after this, y'all.
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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
ChaosRadioAustin.org, LRN.
FM, Antiwar.com, Slash Radio, AnomalyRadio.com.
I'm talking with Dilip Hero.
He's got a new piece at TomDispatch.com called America's Suffering a Power Outage.
You talk about the stages of the collapse of the empire.
That's not all at once like the Nazis.
Boy, they went out in a ball of fire.
But we're following much more on the model of the British Empire or maybe even the Romans before us in stages like this.
But you reminded me of the important 20th century historian, Carol Quigley, in his book, Tragedy and Hope, A History of the World in Our Time.
And it begins with kind of an overview of his view.
And I think he had written another book about the rise and fall of civilizations.
I forget exactly what it was called, but he goes through and he has his terms to define the different stages of a civilization.
And he says that Western civilization has been really lucky in a way where most civilizations are just tied to their local states empire.
The Western civilization for 2000 years or more has been able to evolve from Greek to Roman to Christendom to Renaissance and Enlightenment and and religious wars and post-religious wars and constitutionalism and law based government and all these things as evolution.
All the way through, we've been able, he says, in the West to reinvent our civilization in a way that was able to keep going and yet still stay the West.
And but he says that we're running out of options and ways to reinvent ourselves and that with the collapse of the American empire, this is the last stage of a civilization.
He says this world empire when it's when the society, as you described, is collapsing from within and then lashes out at everyone else in the world and actually makes things much worse and brings themselves down.
And then his concern, writing back in 1966, was that we were on the path to destruction.
He was saying, you know, if we don't abandon empire, if we don't learn from history and maintain our status as a republic, we will destroy the West forever, perhaps.
I wonder what you think of that.
No, I think you see, actually, I'm pretty, you see, this is what I call the uni-thinking, you know, like one center, one power, either Britain or it's Rome or it's America.
But I'm afraid that's not where we're going.
Let me just give you another model which has actually existed in history and which we have forgotten.
Now, you have to go back to Europe and look at Europe in the days of Napoleon.
Now, as you know, Napoleon was so strong, he conquered almost all of Europe.
And then, of course, he overextended himself, went to Russia and got clobbered.
And of course, you know what happened then.
Now, because of Napoleon becoming so strong and almost becoming the supreme lord of all of Europe, which is a very important part of the world, the remaining six powers, including the Ottoman Turkish Empire, they said never again.
Will we allow any one of us to become supreme lord as Napoleon was briefly or had he tried to be?
Right.
That is what is called a multipolar world as a multipolar Europe.
And that particular model of multipolar Europe existed from 18, roughly 1815 or 1817-18 up to 1918 World War One.
And then it broke down.
And then, you know what happened?
Now, that is the kind of a model which is already emerging, not on a European scale, on a world scale.
I.E., now we find three or four major powers rising up.
Of course, China is in the stage of becoming a global power.
But the Chinese have constantly said, we do not want to become G2.
Like, you know, there are the G20 or G8 that ourselves and America, we decide the fate of the world.
No, no, no, no, no.
We want a multipolar world in which power is, shall I say, fractured and power is distributed.
Now, if you really if you are, of course, anybody, listeners, anybody else want to imagine here is an image.
If you keep in mind, and that image I actually mentioned in the preface of my book, After Empire, imagine a hall in which there are these old aristocrats.
They have their armor, they have their swords, and they are fighting each other one to one.
And then if somebody wins, then he goes to the other one to fight on.
Yes, they keep fighting each other.
They have a rule.
It's OK, you can fight one to one.
But none of us will become the supreme lord.
So that if we find that one of us is beating three or four others and is going to become the overlord, then we will all gather together and confront him, make sure that he doesn't become the supreme lord.
That is a situation already existing.
Already, if you can go back, if you look, even if America, you said about America's civilization and so on and so forth.
If you take the trade, international trade, as you know, there is a stalemate at the World Trade Organization about agricultural products of the developing and developed world.
They are called Doha Talks.
They have been going on since 2002.
No revolution has been made because of four important countries like China, Russia, Brazil, and India.
They are not prepared to bow to the authority of America and Europe.
So I'm just saying here is an example where, you know, four rising powers are able to block the major powers like European Union and USA.
OK, then you go back to remember only last December in Copenhagen, the climate conference, climate warming conference.
There again, you saw that America was not able to get its way.
And again, there was a stalemate.
Now, most importantly, of course, that means non-security is fears of world politics, world affairs, not politics, world affairs.
Already, there is this particular model of making sure that no one country, maybe USA or maybe China, becomes the supreme lord.
That already exists.
Now, in May of this year, you have the 17th of May of this year.
OK, now Dilip, Dilip, I'm sorry to interrupt you, but the music's playing.
We've got to go after this break.
Can I keep you for another segment or maybe even two more?
If I can keep you 10 more minutes.
If you got to go, I understand.
But I sure would like to continue the conversation.
OK, great.
Thank you.