Customer Reviews

Dark Ages America

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In a carefully researched presentation, Dr. Morris Berman walks us carefully through the founding of the United States of America to the 21st century in 2006 and describes in painful detail what we have done to ourselves and others over that period of time. I am a frequent user of our library system and have the pleasure of rewarding myself with one to two hours of reading every day. Dark Ages America is the best written evaluation of our present circumstances that I have read to date. His work is interesting to read and his references display the breadth and depth of his scholarship. I strongly suggest everyone read this timely illumination of history.

In "Dark Ages America", Professor Berman provides an extensive review of American foreign policy throughout the second half of the twentieth century as it impacts the future US global standing. The book is full of interesting assessments of how America has evolved as a world hegemon through the clever and often sinister leveraging of financial and military resources. He uses the term 'empire' to describe what the US has become by wielding power and influence to effect regime change, conduct foreign wars, promote the greenback and help divide the world into ideological camps that either support or oppose American domination. While most of the history that Berman trots out here is well known and already picked over, how he uses it to forecast the nation's future going forward in the 21st century is, to say the least, interesting and thought-provoking. The George W. Bush administration efforts to push the American international agenda to the extreme in risky ventures like Iraq and Afghanistan is proof that the US is on a slippery downward slope. Economically, wars drain national treasuries, as well as diminishing moral stature. Added to which, the national culture has been shaped over the centuries to see itself on a meteoric path to historical greatness or 'Manifest Destiny". By buying into the various political doctrines such as corporate capitalism that evoke international supremacy, the majority of American leaders, especially of the conservative persuasion, cannot switch tracks fast enough to avoid the inevitable collapse of the dream. While the book lays out the path that America has followed to get to this precarious point in time, it does not provide any prjections into the future as to how Washington will handle a very reduced status in the club of world nations, especially with a new administration in the White House. As a final note, Berman includes a brief discussion as to how he sees Americans picking up on this national decline; words like ignorance, reactionaryism and ambivalence come to mind as he describes typical attiudes emerging from the ongoing national debate as to how to right the ship before it capsizes.