The American people, even if they think about it and have even a slight inkling of world history, are having a hard time figuring out what is happening to their own country today.

The time of universal surveillance has come. There is the militarization of the police, who act as if they are in a war zone in dealing with problems in neighborhoods. A bloated military and “defense” budget has brought the country (for a sizable percentage of our people) to a time of rampant poverty, hunger, and conversion to a nation much of which is ill-housed. There is a thrust by the current administration to privatize every governmental agency and for what is not privatized, there is the attempt to destroy its effectiveness. There is the debasement of education at every level, pointing students in the direction, not of knowledge for its sake, but toward fitting as a cog into the works. The U.S. has become a nation that sees black and other minority Americans as yet another enemy to be feared and the military atmosphere promoted by the Trump Administration acts in accordance with that vision.

The U.S. has become an empire that has no vision for the welfare of the most vulnerable among us, that has come to accept so-called “sacrifice zones,” where citizens are left to fend for themselves in places that are bereft of jobs and development and where environmental racism that pollutes the communities and their human bodies are acceptable to those who rule. Worse than the lack of vision is that not many individual members of Congress have said a word to begin the discussion about the solution to the problems of poverty, hunger, indecent housing and neighborhoods, lack of a jobs program, equalization of the money spent on education across the board in every community, the end to racism, and lack of health care, to mention a few.

In the matter of the latter, Republicans who are in charge of all three branches of government at the federal level, have been busy at work destroying what little protection there is for health care for the children, the elderly, the disabled, and those who are firmly planted by the powers-that-be in dead-end jobs, in dead-end industries. As it has been repeated over and over, all the other developed nations of the world have universal health care, which take care of the health needs of their citizens from birth to the nursing home. In this, America is not exceptional at all, as it is not exceptional in so many other ways.

There have been some voices crying in the wilderness for generations, but there seems to have been no one to hear and, as always, those voices not heard have allowed the nation to plunge headlong into the abyss. One such voice belongs to a German who was granted a fellowship at Wesleyan University in Connecticut in 1968. Hans Magnus Enzensberger was a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Studies at Wesleyan and, after three months, had seen enough of conditions in the U.S. to be alarmed and his letter of resignation to the president of Wesleyan, Edwin D. Etherington, expressed his gratitude for “the hospitality which you have shown,” but also diagnosed the sickness that he saw pervading America. It was printed in the New York Review of Books.

It is appropriate in 2017 to have another look at the lengthy 1968 letter that Enzenberger wrote and ponder his charges. Even though written in a most civilized way, a way that is not commonly found in today’s America, the letter lays out a thorough list of the things that he saw were wrong and that he saw develop in his own native land in the early part of the 20th Century.

He wrote: “Let me begin with a few elementary considerations. I believe the class which rules the United States of America, and the government which implements its policies, to be the most dangerous body of men on earth. In one way or another, and to a different degree, this class is a threat to anybody who is not part of it. It is waging an undeclared war against more than a billion people; its weapons range from saturation bombing to the most delicate techniques of persuasion; its aim is to establish its political, economic, and military predominance over every other power in the world. Its mortal enemy is revolutionary change.”

Even to this day, it is only a small percentage of the people who think in terms of conquest and empire, but that’s what America had become in 1968 and, in the nearly half-century since then, the U.S. has only increased its power throughout the world, mostly by coercion and war and it has used the power of technological weaponry (including nuclear) to bring much of the world to heel. It was further emboldened by the collapse of the Soviet Union, which the U.S. ruling class took as confirmation that capitalism had won out over other economic forms. The current condition of its working class has proven otherwise.

He went on: “Many Americans are deeply troubled by the state of their nation. They reject the war which is being waged in their name against the people of Vietnam. They look for ways and means to end the latent civil war in the ghettos of American cities. But most of them still hold on to the idea that these crises are unfortunate accidents, due to faulty management and lack of understanding: tragical errors on the part of an otherwise peaceful, sane, and well-intentioned world power.

“To this interpretation I cannot agree. The Vietnam war is not an isolated phenomenon. It is the most visible outcome and, at the same time, the bloodiest test case of a coherent international policy which applies to five continents. The ruling class of the United States has taken sides in the armed struggles of Guatemala and Indonesia, of Laos and Bolivia, of Korea and Colombia, of the Philippines and of Venezuela, of the Congo and of the Dominican Republic. This is not an exhaustive list. Many other countries are governed, with American support, by oppression, corruption, and starvation. Nobody can feel safe and secure any more, not in Europe, and not even in the United States itself.”

The quagmire that the Vietnam War became for the U.S. did not become a lesson learned, because the nation continued its interventions throughout the past 49 years and doubled down on its ways by its interventions (war crimes) in the Middle East, especially the invasion of Iraq and the chaos in that region that is ongoing today, the destruction of Libya, and the devastation of so many countries in that region.

American policy was summed up by a singular quote by one politician. Even when confronted with the criminal nature of U.S. intervention in countries around the world to gain possession of their resources, especially oil, Dick Cheney, vice president in the George W. Bush Administration, declared in a television interview, “The American way of life is not negotiable.” In other words, even though the U.S. is only about 5 percent of the world’s population, yet uses about 25-35 percent of the world’s resources, the aggression is not about to stop.

Since then, the aggression has only increased…exponentially. Enzenberger noted that some even deny that there is such a thing as a ruling class, but he wrote: “I do not imagine a conspiracy, since there is no need for such a thing. A social class, and especially a ruling class, is not held together by secret bonds, but by common and glaringly evident self-interest. I do not fabricate monsters. Everybody knows that bank presidents, generals, and military industrialists do not look like comic strip demons: they are well-mannered, nice gentlemen, possibly lovers of chamber music with a philanthropic bent of mind. There was no lack of such kind people even in the Germany of the Thirties. Their moral insanity does not derive from their individual character, but from their social function.”

In 2017 America, the nightmare that Enzenberger outlined so long ago not only stands out before all the world to fear, but the weapons that are used are so much more sophisticated and destructive and there are so many more nuclear weapons in so many more national arsenals, each being honed to perfection, so that the madness of “tactical nuclear weapons use” is not a forbidden thought.

And, worst of all, the U.S. has an unhinged commander-in-chief who has the mind and exhibits the behavior of a 12-year-old, who can’t carry a thought to a rational conclusion for more than a minute or so, and who thinks that he can make the world obey his every whim because he once could do it on a mindless reality television show. His schoolyard bully approach to life is what can bring the world to the brink of a thermonuclear war and he seems oblivious to the consequences of his actions, even as his administration and his Republican Congress collapses before his eyes. Only concerted action on the part of the people can change this deadly dynamic. The people must wake up and act before Donald Trump brings the toxic clouds down on everyone.