****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
Morris Berman's Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of American Empire is a grim documentation of the events that led the US on a trajectory towards spiritual, moral, ethical, social and political decline and the economic depreciation of the American people as a whole of which, he argues, there is no return. Throughout the book he juxtaposes the American Empire with that of the Roman Empire and introduces a variety of similar traits including four pertinent characteristics: 1) the supremacy of religion over reason, 2) the disintegration of education and critical thinking, 3) the legalization of torture and 4) the marginalization of the US on the world/global stage.He asserts that America's decline initiated in the 1960s, but specifically in the early 1970s through two major events. The first one was the apparent US imperialist war in Vietnam and the exorbitant cost of that conflict, not to mention the even more significant element of that war-the death and maiming/injuring of hundreds of thousands to millions of Vietnamese people and the homelessness and hopelessness of millions of more. The second event that Berman attributes to the decline of the US is Nixon's repeal of the Bretton Woods system which abolished the social safety net, not only of social welfare programs across the world, and the protection against unemployment, but just as importantly, it did away with the safeguards against "predatory" fiscal monetary policies of which the wealthy have exploited and policies that have been in existence ever since. The nullification of the Bretton Woods system also allowed for a greater economic disparity between the rich and the poor and the consuming of the "democratic" elements of America's political system (and elsewhere throughout the world) and brought together Wall Street, the IMF, the World Bank and the Treasury Department.He also discusses (the very real) and observant effects of economic and technological supremacy and sophistication on our society and how it's shaped us into lonely and hollow, money-worshiping pseudo-humans (all of which are utterly accurate depictions of Americans and American society).He completely blew my mind when he provided the insightful perspective that the US has ALWAYS been imperialist in nature. When it expanded westward usurping Native American lands under the banner of "Manifest Destiny," it was picking fights with the Mexicans over their territories (which were also taken away from Native Americans). And when the US completed its confiscation of North American territories, it sought to continue this imperialist policy internationally in places like the Philippines and elsewhere. He even perceptively noted that America picked up the imperialist mantle where the UK and European imperialist powers of the 19th century left off, after WWII with their decline and with America's ascendancy-"a two-hundred-year-long Anglo-American Empire" (pg 159).This book is an awesome book because it uses statistical and historical facts and empirical evidence to make conclusions and assertions that seem so out of the norm because in the norm we've all been lied to and had our heads filled with red, white and blue propaganda filth, for so long, myself included. He even puts Samuel Huntington and especially Bernard Lewis' disingenuous, biased, and distorted book "Clash of Civilizations" and "What went wrong?" to shame and discredits them, almost without effort. With "What went wrong," Morris Berman delegitimizes and destroys the entire pompous mess that is Lewis' book, with one sole sentence, "The actions of the United States as heir to the British Empire in the Muslim world, are what went wrong." Bam. Over. All of the work that Bernard Lewis dedicated to that tendentious and crooked book, over in one single sentence.This book is NOT for the many jingoistic nutjob Americans and the false patriots who cover their ear drums with their index fingers and drown out criticisms against America with, "lalalalala....we're #1, we're #1, lalalala...IIIIIII caaaaaan't hearrrrrr yooooooooou." He says it very clearly, "this book was written for those individuals, American or not, who are more interested in reality than illusion, more committed to understanding America as it is than in being comforted by a fantasy of what it is, or of what it might supposedly become (pg. 10)." He continues on the next page. "There are, in short, readers who find reality-whether "good" or "bad"-finally more fulfilling than fairy tales, and it is to this audience that Dark Ages America is addressed (pg. 11).I don't agree with 100% of everything he says, but overall, I'd definitely recommend this book.
