The following are the remarks delivered to the 62nd weekly International Peace Coalition meeting, August 9, 2024, by Col. (ret.) Lawrence Wilkerson, retired United States Army Colonel and former chief of staff of Secretary of State Colin Powell.
Col. Lawrence Wilkerson: Thank you for having me. It’s a pleasure—I guess that’s the right word—to be here with such a distinguished forum today, and on such a day as today.
I think, Anastasia, you and Helga have covered the granular situations we confront today quite well. I want to kind of take it up a little bit and talk about what I think is the principal existential threat in the world today. I want to talk a little bit about how I think we got here, and how we could get out of it.
In these times of insane overseas wars, which Helga enumerated quite well, sponsored and supported to the hilt by America, of a troubled U.S. domestic scene not rivaled since 1860, of extremely poor leadership from all three branches of our government, I think it behooves us to stop a moment and take some stock. Indeed, it might be our very existence that is at stake, as the two previous speakers have hinted at, and Helga did more than hint at.
The sweep of human empires is well recorded for at least 3,000 years, and at least in sketches, for about 2,000 more. In that sweep of time—minimal in a geological sense; after all, humans have been here, we think, for 300,000 years, and appreciably so for at least 50,000 years. But in that sweep of 5,000 years, hundreds of empires—hundreds of them, large and small—have come and gone. That’s an important point: All of them are gone—vanished, disappeared!—save the most recent one, the American—in historical terms, a very young one—arguably, 1945 to the present day, or roughly 75 years.
All previous empires—the mighty Mongol, the even mightier Mogul, the Eastern and Western Roman, the Persian, the Muslim, the British (upon which it was said the Sun never set), the Soviet, and hundreds of lesser ones—are gone! Vanished like smoke! All had their day in the Sun, as well as the darkness of their collapse, in many cases. Some went out on fairly gradual glide slopes, like the British; others catastrophically, like the militarily forged empire of the Third Reich, Adolf Hitler. But all of those many previous empires, among them, none, zero, nada, had developed the technology to destroy both themselves and the rest of humanity—none of them! Yes, many had prescient prophets, who conjured the wrath of their various divine providences, conjured it to predict the utter destruction of the empire, which they preached and prophesied. But like all such religious or quasi-religious prognostication, their various deities never seemed to have the power to do much more than aid their political powers, to strengthen their hold on the masses—until came the American Empire. “Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds,” a phrase sometimes attributed to Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atom bomb, which of course came from Vishnu of the Bhagavad Gita. Apocryphal or not with regard to Oppenheimer, the words sum quite well what the Manhattan Project and Oppenheimer had accomplished. And what we live with and perhaps will die with today: A single ballistic missile submarine carries sufficient weapons to destroy the world as we know it—a single submarine. If the blast and resultant radiation did not complete the job, the induced nuclear winter would. Saints forbid, we even contemplate a nuclear exchange, where all or nearly all of the thousands upon thousands of nuclear weapons—10,000 in two countries—are employed among the now nine nuclear-weapons states, ranging from the huge stockpiles those two countries, the United States and Russia, to the small but lethal one of North Korea.
And what has your country, America—my country, America—done in the past 22 years to multiply tenfold the dangers of such an exchange of weapons? Not even talking about the instantaneous problems we have right now in the Middle East and in Ukraine, the heart of Europe. We, America, have almost singlehandedly destroyed every one of the treaty regimes from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty to the Intermediate Nuclear Force Treaty—a very important treaty, very applicable to Ukraine—to the New START Treaty. They gave at least the tentative, precarious balance and restraint to this horrific and now proliferated creation of the American Empire: nuclear weapons.
I repeat: No empire in all of human history ever developed the means to eliminate itself and the human race, none, until America. Oh, of course others would have done so in time, no doubt. But that hardly erases the reality that we did it! In fact, we did it! Worse, there is no way even to ameliorate the clear fact that we now are responsible for eliminating all the nuclear weapons treaties.
So, where does that leave us? As I began my remarks, it leaves us in the most dangerous world imperial power has ever managed to create, bar none. Far worse, it leaves us there with the principal imperial power in the world, America, sponsoring horrific and pointless wars. A country bereft of leadership and lacking domestic tranquility, and even basic common sense: That’s where we are today. It would be the subject of an exquisite Shakespearean comedy—or maybe, tragedy—if not so existentially serious.
Now, after hearing my dismal picture of the situation with regard to these deadly weapons, I probably should stop and offer some hope. It’s difficult for me to do, because I have been exposed—personally exposed—to the stupidity of Washington’s leadership in a way that stays with me, and will be with me until I enter the grave. The George W. Bush administration was ripe with the problems I have only just now generally and briefly described. But in the name of optimism, I’ll offer some hope, I hope, myself: The answer is democracy; that weary, heavily fatigued, much embattled concept of government our founders so relished and cherished, no matter how, in the beginning, they might have contaminated it with slavery and landed gentry. The people of this country must object to their imminent suicide! The people must object and object and object, and protest and protest, and vote lousy leaders into the streets, breed and elect new leaders to take their place, and then protest some more! They must reject cultish political movements for what they are: no different in their modern ways from the dismal prophets of old, who at day’s end, were doing nothing but reinforcing the imperial writ, and had their billionaires, too. We must find decent, caring men and women to substitute for the “useful idiots” (Bibi Netanyahu’s phrase)—the only “useful idiots” were sitting in front of him in the United States Congress, and they’re useful to the empire’s most disgusting, devious, and dangerous motives and actions: Men like Lindsey Graham, and women like Marjorie Taylor Greene, and we must replace them with far better people! Mark Twain once said in a moment of humor, which he was wont to, “There’s really no distinctly American criminal class—save the U.S. Congress.” Twain would double down, maybe triple down, on that remark today.
We must campaign for change and campaign constantly, and directly, in the ugly face of empire. And we must work diligently in every way possible, on every level in the empire’s home, here in the so-called land of the free, to change the trajectory of empire! Even to end the empire on as gentle and little damaging a glide slope as possible, if we can. {We must end these stupid, endless wars, each one of which has the potential to expand to the use of nuclear weapons! As has just been said, we have military officers in our armed forces, now, discussing—as they did in the early 1950s, when they didn’t know any better—they’re discussing the use, the utility, of nuclear weapons.
One way to do so in spades, is to agitate constantly for the reduction of the incredible 700-800 overseas bases of this empire, which enable, and even in some ways start these wars! We sprawl all over the Earth! The British never could hold a candle to us. And it’s contaminating the very fabric of our nation to be out there in such a way. Another vital effort, as I have suggested I hope by my remarks, must be to agitate strongly for new nuclear treaty regimes, and this time, with all the nuclear weapons states included, meaning that world pariah state, the one engaged in genocide in Gaza today: Israel. They must be brought kicking and screaming into the new nuclear weapons regime!
I hope you get the picture. We all of us who care, and we are many, need to reclaim our republic and our democracy, and end our damn empire! And swiftly, not slowly. Thank you.
