The Last Empire

by Gore Vidal

  The Ks want the eagle to be brought back to life, claws clutching thunderbolts, the odd olive branch. Apparently, earth is American and we must govern all of it for the good of the human race. But the other nations did not elect us leader post-1989. Rather, Western Europe comes slowly together. Japan prepares for a new metamorphosis while China, “the sleeping giant” that Napoleon said only a fool would awaken, is already an American creditor. The old order is gone forever and the brief hegemony of the white race is drawing to an unmourned close.

  The Ks seem to be living in a world that never really existed outside the movies or American political rhetoric. They find “the Europeans and the Japanese supportive of [our] world leadership role.” Not this week nor, indeed, for some years now has the United States been looked to as an upholder of international law and order. When requested to go before the tribunal at The Hague to explain alleged crimes against Nicaragua, the U.S. refused to accept the jurisdiction of a court that we had helped set up. Also, whenever the fit is upon the Oval One, he feels perfectly free to bomb Gaddafi’s family or invade Panama killing quite a few Panamanians as he kidnaps their leader and then puts him on trial in an American court that has no jurisdiction over him. Such a model of international roguery is hardly eligible to fill the Ks’ notion of a benign world hegemon. What they actually hanker after is Caesarism, no bad option if you are really stronger militarily and economically than everyone else but, alas, aside from the power to nuclearize the planet, Uncle Sam, he dead.

  The Declaration of Independence is sometimes thought by old-fashioned European conservatives to be a liberal document. Here, I think, they mix it up with the French Rights of Man, a truly radical and always—to some of us—heartening trumpet blast. Our own declaration was a more modest affair. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness were the set goals. But liberty hardly means the leveling of classes to those rich white conservative men who fancifully called the forcible separation of colonies from British Crown a revolution when it was simply an inevitable devolution. England was too small and too far away to govern so many people, so much territory.

  Pursuit of happiness was an exceptional thought and, like the Holy Ghost for serious Christians, something to brood upon. In any case, the American day has pretty much run out. The Ks speak for no one except energetic political hustlers within the Washington Beltway. But as the U.S. grows shakier at home and abroad, accidents can still happen. That is why, in the light of the current uproar over President Clinton’s boycotting of entire countries, it might be a good idea to start, as tactfully as possible, the removal of the United Nations from the United States and then of the United States from the United Nations (unless, of course, a billion dollars of dues owing are paid).

  This sign of world solidarity would clear the air, to riot in understatement, and serve notice that no house in such economic and domestic disarray as that of the very last global power can exercise hegemony over anything other than itself. Such was the intention of our truly conservative founders two centuries ago when they adjured us to follow our own course toward some more perfect—if ungrammatical—union, making true in the process Ajax’s hope: “Ah, boy, may’st thou prove happier than thy sire.” And not, dementedly, slaughter sheep.

  The Sunday Telegraph

  11 August 1996

  * RACE AGAINST TIME

  Immigration, emigration. Race. Let them in. Keep them out. Should we do the jobs that they do that we don’t want to do? Last month an American poll showed that for the first time immigration is the number one anxiety of our stout, sugar-fed people as they restlessly switch channels and ponder the fate of dinosaurs and the nation state.

  Recently I toured seven German cities, and spoke at various meetings. The German press was full of anxious reports on the neo-Nazi racists in its midst. It was even more upset by the non-neo-Nazi racists. The unemployed in particular were attacking Turks and East Europeans and other foreigners. What did it all mean?

  There is no longer enough work to go around. That is, proper work as opposed to part-time labor with no future, the sort of work that ill-paid foreigners now do. Every day we read how another great industry has let go yet another 30,000 or 40,000 workers. Automation and reduced demand have made them redundant. What will these people do? Is the state to support them? If so, how? This basic question is generally avoided, particularly by professional politicians, so I shall, for the moment, sidestep it too.

  Racism. The fear of otherness is an unattractive but constant human trait, and one that we social meliorists like to say education and peaceful commingling will do away with in, as always, time. There is some truth in this. There is also some truth in the saying that all men are brothers, as Abel must have reminded Cain, who replied as he lifted his club, “Yes, and all brothers are men.”

  In Germany I used a line that I often use in the United States when I think that the audience is unaware of the world outside its own national and ethnic bubble. I noted that at the start of the next millennium the white race will make up about 13 percent of the world’s population. This statistic makes white Americans look even whiter, while the dusky faces in the audience begin to beam. The German reaction was hysteria. Race, declared a tense young man, is a myth. I said, no, race is a fact, but the prejudices that people have about races are often mythical.

  Also, even if everyone was all the same gray-pink shade, the myths of difference would still be invoked, and myths are very potent. For me, God is a myth, but I am quite aware that millions of people have died nonmythical deaths in his name. In Britain, cavaliers and roundheads went into battle, each side shouting “Kill for Jesus.”

  Always accommodating, I said that if I could not use the word “race”—an everyday sort of word in my country with no built-in resonance—would “tribalism” do? No, that was unacceptable. People who spoke of races and tribes in Germany were almost always neo-Nazis. What word could I use?

  “Multiculturalism” was the consensus in Stuttgart. But, I said, an American white and an American black will often be prejudiced against one another, and each shares exactly the same culture, or its absence. We left the subject in the air. But I remember thinking that if one does not have the words to discuss a matter objectively, emotions will ensure that it then becomes dangerously subjective.

  Due to poverty in other sections of the world and a declining standard of living for most people in our part of it, emotions are getting pretty raw. The time is overripe for dialogue as opposed to the monologues of demagogues. I see this, curiously, more in Europe today than in the United States. We have had a race war between black and white for over a century now. It is like a low-grade fever that, from time to time, flares up and puts the patient at risk. On the other hand, we are used to it. We take or give our quinine, which is known as welfare, a bribe that we pay to the black underclass in order to exclude them from white society. Meanwhile, we never cease to boast that we are a nation of immigrants.

  Racial stereotypes are irresistible, particularly in wartime. I know. I was an American soldier in the great race war against Japan. I served in the Pacific. Our indoctrination was crude and hilarious. In early 1941 the government assured us that should war come, we would easily win it through air power. Apparently, because of the weird configuration of the Japanese eye, they could not see well enough to be able to manage modern aircraft. Not long after, they sank our fleet at Pearl Harbor.

  Before I left to go to the Pacific—I was first mate of an army freight supply ship—we were given an indoctrination course on how to tell our exquisite allies, the Chinese, from our brutish enemy, the Japanese. On a stage there was a life-sized cutout of a naked Chinese youth and another one of a Japanese. The Chinese was tall, slim, and well proportioned. The Japanese was bandy-legged, buck-toothed, subhuman.

  These details were shown to us by an information officer with a pointer. “But the principal difference,” he announced, “is the pubic hair. The Japanese is thick and wiry while the Chinese is straight and s
ilky.” I fear that I alone raised my hand to ask what sly strategies we were to use to determine friend from foe.

  Our war with Japan was deeply ideological. They had the idea that the Pacific Ocean should be theirs, while we had the idea that it should be ours. This is known as a conflict of ideologies. As it turned out, our war of conquest was more successful than theirs. In fact, our hegemony in the Pacific and over Japan was the last great military victory that the white race will probably ever know. Now they have the technology and the wealth. And we decline.

  In the fifteenth century it was as if there was a sudden big bang. The white race in Western Europe—itself a sort of Wild West to the Asian landmass—burst its cage. Like a plague, we infected the western hemisphere, Africa, Asia. We were also, literally, a plague, carrying with us so many new diseases that indigenous populations often died out. Though our numbers were relatively few, we colonized. The great goal for our race was China: specifically the north-central Shansi province, the world’s largest coalfield.

  By the start of the century the European powers and the United States were already established on the China coast. But we now had a rival in Japan. They too wanted the Middle Kingdom. So the struggle between our two races over the division of China has been pretty much the history of the century now ending. Yet, through all this, China has endured and is now set to prevail while Japan is finally a—as opposed to the—master race.

  The loss of identity—not to mention wealth, power, and empire—makes for melancholy, or worse. As Dean Acheson famously put it, Britain has lost an empire but not yet found a role. Fifty years later the United States is in much the same situation. So, too, is Western Europe. In the fourteenth century our race was more than decimated in Europe by the plague. In the fifteenth century population revived—too much so. What were we to do with so many people? We broke loose and conquered most of the world.

  The wealth of the western hemisphere paid for the Renaissance in Europe. The wealth of India fueled the industrial revolution in England. We colonized almost every part of the world, imposing, in the process, our peculiar version of monotheism, one that is crude, savage, and hostile to life. For most of the world, particularly those with older and subtler civilizations, we were an unmitigated curse. But we never suspected that we were anything but good, as we went about stealing and converting others to our primitive ways.

  What is human history but the migration of tribes? The so-called Aryans swept down into Europe and Persia and India in about 1500 B.C. They settled and were absorbed. Then came Huns, Mongols, Arabs. They seldom stayed for long, nor did they, by and large, colonize. By the time our race got busy, we had somehow moved ahead in the applied sciences, particularly those relating to warfare. Incas, Mayans, Hindus, Chinese were no match for us.

  Now as the twentieth century draws to a close, we seem to have run out of petrol. We still have the power to atomize the globe but then, with a bit of hard work, so can the Pakistanis. We are no longer unique, even in our destructive powers. We have entered a period of uneasy stasis. What are we to do next, if indeed we still are “we” at all, rather than just an element in a rainbow mix as is the case in many parts of the United States and, here and there, in Britain.

  At the moment “we” are defensive, even paranoid. Are we to lose what’s left of our identity? Are we to lose our traditional countries to immigrants of different races? There is much moaning in the West.

  Since we have our countries, the desire to keep them reasonably homogeneous is reflexive and hardly extraordinary. Yet minor immigration has been the rule ever since native whites discovered that poorly paid other-tinted people would do work that whites find untouchable. But now major population shifts threaten. Everywhere the tribes are on the move. From south and east they converge on Europe; from south and west on North America.

  Meanwhile, internal pressures are building up in all the nation states. In fact, a case can be made that the nation state, as redesigned by Bismarck and Lincoln, is obsolete. Certainly no one likes an expensive bureaucratic centralism, indifferent to the needs of the ethnic components that make it up. You cannot, in the name of the Holy Roman Emperor or even the higher capitalism, shove together and try to standardize a number of tribes that do not want to be together. We witness daily the explosions in what were once the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. Might it not be wise simply to go with the centrifugal forces now at work and not try to oppose them anywhere?

  The European aim should be a mosaic of autonomous ethnic groups—each as much on its own as possible, whether it be Basques or Scots or Armenians. This distresses old-fashioned statesmen. They want as many people as possible under their control, not a mere fraction of a multitribal whole. We shall lose, they say, our power in the world if we are fragmented. This was the Bismarckian, the Lincolnian line. Well, they have little to fear in the long run because the newly independent neighbors will come back together again in new, less confining arrangements.

  In February 1987 Gorbachev invited to the Kremlin some 700 non-Communist worthies in the arts, sciences and business, to discuss a nonnuclear world. It was the first unveiling of what, he told us, would be a revolution in the Soviet Union. I was called upon to improvise a speech. A Japanese Minister of Trade had just announced that in the next century Japan would still be number one, economically, in the world. “No one can surpass us,” he said. Then, in an expansive mood, he said, “The United States will be our farm and Western Europe will be our boutique.”

  Something must be done in order for us to survive economically in what looks to be, irresistibly, an Asian world. I would propose that, as our numbers are so few relative to those of China and India, say, we come together in a northern confederacy of Europe, Russia, Canada, the United States. The fact that the small nation states of Western Europe are having difficulty federalizing their relatively small common market means that federalism, at this stage, is a mistake, while a loose confederation for the general economic good is a more achievable business.

  It is also just as easy—or vexing—to include Russia and the heartland states of the old Soviet Union as it is to agree, let us say, about the price of milk at Brussels. In other words, much strain in the short run but, in the long run, the creation of a large prosperous entity based upon geographical latitude and the pale, lonely 13 percent of the world’s population.

  It does not matter whether a large goal will ever be achieved. Rather, it is the fact that such a goal exists in order to give shape and symmetry to policies; and meaning, perhaps, to societies that otherwise are adrift. Motivate your football louts, continental skinheads, overwrought white American racists.

  I realize that the nation state has accustomed us to the idea of conquest by force. It is hard not to think along those lines. In Germany some critics actually thought that my proposal was a white declaration of war on Asia. It is no such suicidal thing. It is a means of economic survival through union. Without links to us, Russia will break up; Europe will decline; lonely little England will drift off along with Ireland and Greenland and Iceland and Newfoundland and all the other Arctic islands; while the United States will take its place somewhere between hypertense Brazil and lachrymose Argentina.

  Alexander Hamilton was by far the cleverest of America’s founding fathers; he was also the most realistic. Instead of going on about the brotherhood of man, he said, in effect, let us take into account man’s essential greed and will to dominate, and let us allow for these traits in our constitution so that self-interest, reasonably harnessed, can become the engine of the state and thus contribute to the common good. So why not extend this insight to our present dilemma, and make new world arrangements?

  I regard race as nonsense, but most of the world feels passionately otherwise. In the unlikely event that the human race survives another millennium, there will be no white or black races but combinations of the two, and of every other race as well. But for now, let us use this negative force for a positive end, and create a great northern peaceful
economic alliance dedicated*—if I may end on a chauvinist American note—to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

  The Sunday Telegraph

  10 October 1993

  * CHAOS

  On November 4, 1994, three days before the election that produced a congressional majority for the duller half of the American single-party system, I addressed the National Press Club in Washington. I do this at least once a year not because writer-journalists are present, wise and fearless as they are, but because cable television carries one’s speech without editing or editorializing. This useful service, known as C-Span, specializes in covering such eccentricities as myself and the British House of Commons.

  I reflected upon the confusion that each of us is feeling as this unlamented century and failed millennium draw, simultaneously, to a close, and there is no hint of order in the world—and is that such a bad thing? As for my own country, I said that there is now a whiff of Weimar in the air. Three days later, to no one’s surprise, only a third of the electorate bothered to vote. The two-thirds that abstained now realize that there is no longer a government which even pretends to represent them. The great—often international and so unaccountable—cartels that finance our peculiar political system are the only entities represented at Washington. Therefore, in lieu of representative government, we have call-in radio programs, where the unrepresented can feel that, for a minute or two, their voices are heard, if not heeded. In any case, a system like ours cannot last much longer and, quite plainly, something is about to happen. I should note that one Rush Limbaugh, a powerful radio demagogue, greeted November’s Republican landslide as a final victory over what he called the age of Lenin and Gore Vidal. It was not clear whether he meant Moscow’s Lenin or Liverpool’s Lennon. Then, to my amazement, The Wall Street Journal, where I lack admirers, took seriously my warning about Weimar, and “What is going to happen?” is a question now being asked among that 2 or 3 percent of the population who are interested in politics or indeed in anything other than personal survival in a deteriorating society.