But what happens if this consent is suddenly withdrawn? Now the big problems confronting the empire at the moment are economic, the state of the economy at home, and military overstretch. Iraq is a disastrous war. Afghanistan is turning out to be the same thing. The empire’s “backyard,” as it has traditionally been known since the time of the Monroe Doctrine, is totally out of control, with a wave of radical politicians, the Bolivarian politicians, led by Hugo Chávez, backed by Evo Morales, and Rafael Correa, and the Cubans, and Bishop Lugo of Paraguay, and backed less strongly but also with the support of Lula in Brazil and Bachelet in Chile and Kirchner in Argentina, saying to the United States, we’re not going to let you isolate us any longer. We’re going to collaborate with each other. We won’t let you use a single country to destroy another, as we’ve done in the past. And the leaders of the United States are now being compelled to look at this new face of Latin America.
Now it’s a long way to go from here to say that this is going to break up the United States. I think people who talk about the automatic breakup of empires are wrong. It doesn’t happen automatically. But the economic crisis, if it carries on like this, if the billions given to save the banks fail, then I think you could have unpleasant surprises in store for the rulers. They may not be surprises that people on the left particularly like, but they will be surprises. There will be a new mood, which asks, why are we spending so much abroad? Why should we bolster up these regimes and countries? What has it got to do with us? Let’s improve our own country. And how such a movement develops remains to be seen. But I think one thing we have to say is that the triumphalism and euphoria that existed after the collapse of the Soviet Union has virtually gone. Everyone knows that it’s a more difficult world that they have to confront.
It’s not “the end of history”?
Far from the end of history, and far from simply being “the clash of civilizations.” I mean, I think even Francis Fukuyama has acknowledged that the world has changed beyond what he’d imagined, and Samuel Huntington, in his last public work, moved beyond the clash of civilizations to warning of a clash within Christianity, saying that the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant elite in the United States faced a real challenge from the Hispanics, who he said are threatening our way of life. These are sort of Catholic Christians from South America who are threatening our way of life. He was wrong in that sense, but he was indirectly right in that the size of the Hispanic population in the United States is now larger than it’s ever been. Their growth rates as a population in terms of demography are much, much higher than that of the non-Catholic sections of the population. And the new migrants from South America act as a bridge with South America. They’re concerned about what happens in Chiapas in Mexico. They’re concerned about Central America. They’re concerned about the Bolivarians, concerned in a good way in many cases. And the young generation of Cubans in Florida don’t want the United States to attack Cuba. So things are not the same as when Florida and other places were just nests of reaction, with old counterrevolutionaries coming to find a nice home. It’s moved a lot beyond that. The interesting question, which in my more utopian moods I sometimes ponder, is whether the changes in South America might travel across this bridge via the Hispanic populations in the United States to produce something that none of us can foresee. Certainly the hegemony of the English language is being challenged in many American towns in the south.
I’d love for you to talk about Rudyard Kipling, who lost his son in World War I.
Kipling forced his young son to go and fight in the First World War. The boy couldn’t see properly. He couldn’t have passed any military board. But Kipling used his influence with the British government of the day, and the generals who knew him well, and said, my son is desperate to fight, you must take him into the army. So the boy went to fight in World War I, died fairly early on. And Kipling never really got over that. He wrote one poem in which said he said,
And in “A Dead Statesman,” he wrote,
And these beautiful lines are so applicable to Iraq, to Afghanistan, and to numerous other wars that are being fought in the twenty-first century, a hundred years after Kipling wrote those lines.
In your writings, you also cite Joseph Conrad, a Pole living in London.
Joseph Conrad was a great Polish writer who moved to London, learned English as a second language, and became one of its finest practitioners. He was very hostile to Belgian colonialism, and many European ones, but was very soft on the British because they had given him refuge. In his famous novel, Heart of Darkness, which is a description of King Leopold’s horrors in the Congo, he wrote:
They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force—nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others. They grabbed what they could get for the sake of what was to be got. It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale, and men going at it blind—as is very proper for those who tackle a darkness. The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only.
And when you think about this, it really does apply to what has been going on in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. And what Conrad and Kipling demonstrate is the continuities of history. You know, this is nothing new. It has been going on. And the more people that know that these mistakes were made by previous rulers, the better. They should be learned from—and not repeated. If politicians are only destined to repeat themselves historically, the world has a very sad fate ahead for it.
You quote an Iraqi poem, “On the Bird.”
The history of poetry in Iraq is very interesting. The major poets of Iraq happen to be communists. Most of them were exiled by Saddam Hussein when he first came to power. And then soon, just before the first Iraq war, Saddam Hussein realized that the population was missing them, and he sent a message to all three of them, who were in different exiles, and said, why don’t you come and give one big poetry reading in Baghdad? There will be a million people to listen to you. The Iraqi ambassador went to London and said this to Saadi Youssef, the greatest amongst them. And Saadi Youssef asked, who will guarantee our lives? When the ambassador took the message back to Iraq, Saddam Hussein said, tell them the blood on my neck will guarantee their lives. But they said that’s not good enough, and didn’t go. One of them, Mudhafar al-Nawab, who lived in exile in Damascus, wrote this poem: