Is America at risk of becoming Israel’s new Phalangist movement? Is America becoming the new Evil Empire? Or is it that America is possessed by an evil spirit that can be shaken off? The Phalangists were Israel’s Christian allies during its occupation of Southern Lebanon in the Nineteen Eighties and were responsible for the unspeakable atrocities which were committed against the Palestinian people at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps.
The Evil Empire was the name that a speechwriter of President Ronald Reagan gave the former Soviet Union. Both the Phalangists and the Soviet Union have now disappeared but their legacy may linger on for a time to come because someone seems determined to make America wear the mantle of these two movements. To see how and why this can be, I must begin with the definition of the words evil and empire.
There are probably as many definitions of evil as there are individuals in this world but a survey of the various philosophies that preceded our time shows there is agreement among them on one point, the worst of all evils is that which disguises itself as a do-gooder to infiltrate the good and turn it into a bad thing from within. In other words, the worse the evil the more it is careful not to be seen doing bad deeds but labors to tempt someone else to do them.
The question, therefore, should be posed like this: Does America tempt other nations or individuals to do evil? The answer is yes, America does that but there is a caveat. America commits evil not because there is something intrinsically evil about her but because she is possessed by an evil spirit that uses her as a tool. This makes America look like a partner to evil when in fact she has no say in what is decided. Who would have thought that the Lebanese, be they Christian or Muslim could have committed crimes such as those at Sabra and Shatila? They could never have done it were it not for the Israeli ruling class which used them as a tool in the same way that the evil spirit is using America today.
As for the definition of the word empire, to be an empire you must have a monolithic population whose members would be willing to settle in the lands you conquer. But America is the opposite of this in that people come from other countries to settle within her borders. Therefore, she could not be an empire in the traditional sense.
So then, what is this evil spirit which is in possession of America? It is a group of people with a deadly ideology. They have come to be known as the Neocons, and their ideology is the spirit which inspires the commission of bad deeds. In their eagerness to spread their influence everywhere, these people infested the politico-military establishment of America then infested and used the politico-journalistic establishment to promote the idea of a Pax Americana through which they aspired to bend the world to their will. Had Pax Americana succeeded as a scheme, the Neocons would have succeeded in turning America into an evil empire that would be doing to the World what Israel did to Sabra and Shatila in the Nineteen Eighties. However, lacking the fundamentals to become an empire, America never achieved the hoped for status.
What happened during the Neocon experiment was that America went on a rampage in the Middle East and elsewhere causing considerable damage to property and to institutions but failed in everything else. The evil was there to be sure because the Neocons did tempt other nations and individuals to follow their lead, but the empire was never there. Taking all that into account, the definition which best describes America today is that of a failed empire possessed by the evil ideology of the Neocons. The question now is whether or not this evil can be shaken off. To answer the question we need to understand how that evil relates to the rest of the nation.
As the name implies, the Neocons are new conservatives which means they are turncoat liberals. There are two reasons why these people converted from one political stripe to another. The first and foremost reason was that they wanted to control America’s might so as to implement a plan that was even more ambitious. The second reason was the advent of Ronald Reagan who talked derisively about card carrying liberal members of the ACLU, meaning the American Civil Liberties Union. This kind of talk greatly amused the American public but it scared the would-be Neocons out of their ACLU T-shirts. They replaced the T-shirts with a suit and a tie, turned their coats inside out, embraced the conservative ideology and defended it with the same fervor they wore when they defended the liberal ideology of the ACLU.
The question still stands: Can America get rid of these Neocons and erase their sick ideology? The answer is yes, this can happen because nothing stays the same. There is not, for example, one movement or one ideology that is more than a hundred years old. When something vanishes then returns, as it sometimes happens, that something returns in a different form. For example, there were the Nazis then came the neo-Nazis. But what would the neo-cons be called if they were to vanish then come back? Whatever name they choose for themselves, they will have mutated to suit a new environment.
What is certain to change is America’s ability to even contemplate being an empire. The days when America was considered a relevant superpower are gone forever thanks to the activities of the Neocons. They depleted America of every moral, military and economic standing it had in the World and left it as bankrupt as the Zionist ideology is today. The spirit of evil may still be there, however, and still at work in America. In fact, the worry is that the tendency to do evil will increase as America’s power declines further and the Neocons become increasingly more desperate.
A good question to ask now is this: What can we do as citizens of the World to make sure that America’s anticipated decline will not lead to other accusations of " Weapons of Mass Destruction," other Abu Ghraibs and other Guantanamos? The answer is that we must talk about the possibility of this happening, warn others about it and be eternally vigilant as we watch for developments that can lead to such outcomes.