Imperial Perspectives (Part I)

by Jim Miles

2005

This is the first in a series of articles that looks at the American empire from its inception to modern times. It is neither a comprehensive nor linear history but is intended to highlight themes and attitudes that have pervaded the actions and rhetoric of American imperial ideology at home and abroad. The ultimate view is not new, nor is it a ‘conspiracy’ theory. It is a well-documented history – transferred from and continuing alongside British imperial history – that weaves the wealthy, the government, large corporations, religion, and the military into a cloak of imperial hubris over-riding the rights and freedoms of others, at home and around the globe.

After the attacks on the World Trade Center of September 11, 2001 and the subsequent wild west rhetoric from George Bush about “Either you are with us, or you are against us” and the “bring ‘em on” attitude towards the then undefined terrorists, I decided it was time to hone my knowledge of this entity called the American Empire. I was not ignorant of the passage of events and knew the basic outline of the various military activities that had passed – Kosovo, Ethiopia, the ‘no fly’ zones of Iraq, the attack on the Cole and the American Embassies in eastern Africa, the lack of intervention in Rwanda, the many interventions in Latin American countries – and I knew more than the basic outlines of the corporate thrust of America concerning NAFTA, the MAI, and the various trade negotiations, but I had never put forth a concerted effort to get behind all the material.

The term itself – empire – incorporating visions of the scores of military civilizations that had preceded it, including the British, French, and Spanish empires of more modern times, back through to the ancient and equally military empires of Rome, Greece, and Mesoamerica – took a while to become accepted and then, ultimately, flaunted by various academics and pundits across the United States. I set myself a personal project, my own American Empire project, or more correctly, my own anti-American Empire project, to try to understand the whole spectrum of this supposedly benign but highly malignant neighbour to the south.

Resources

The project touched on material from the extreme right, the Christian fundamentalist Armageddon bound beliefs that are the ultimate extension of the Puritanical roots the country was founded on, to the anarchist left, with anarchy here not having the connotation of disorder and chaos, but the denial of establishment and formal governmental procedures to control the global environment, be it natural resources, world trade and commerce, or cultural identity. Most of the materials I looked at are American materials, with a few exceptions from Canada (which except for a few cultural aspects, is highly integrated into the American empire) , and the range of ideas is immense. There is no need to go to external sources for information concerning any aspect of the American Empire, as most American actions are well documented and archived within its own libraries and repositories, although much transcribed anecdotal material obviously comes from the histories of affected peoples around the globe.

But a significantly different perspective on all these materials, a very up to date interpretation of events, is readily available to anyone with an internet connection. I have access to any and all information that is on the web and a lot of my current events and news report reading takes place on the web, using, again, a wide range of sources from the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and other American newspapers, through other mainstream global press like the Guardian and Asia Times, finally including the truly free press of the world, the many websites like Counterpunch, Palestine Chronicles, Double Standards, al-Jazeera and others now listed under my “Favorites” tag. I use these materials so freely and easily that they tend to all become mainstream for my usage, but there is a real difference.

That difference is that “five conglomerates collectively control 90 per cent of the information flow within the United States” [1] , and large corporations are subject to investor and corporate agendas to maximize profit and maintain the status quo as well as not upset the establishment that controls them. This is all too evident when comparing the establishment media coverage from the United States with that of its peers around the world – Asia Times certainly has a different point of view, and a much more critical and analytical one, than that of the New York Times. Al-Jazeera, for all the American suggestions of its bias, is surprisingly even handed, with a good portion of its material obtained from the regular wire services of Reuters and Associated Press.

Transcendent Perfection

From all that, from the American press, the global news networks, and the smaller web magazines, the American Empire can be summed up in a single catch-phrase, “what you do speaks so loud that I can’t hear what you are saying.” This extends from the very core of the founding experience of the American Empire, from the revolution that followed the Declaration of Independence promising “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” (soon to read “life, liberty, and property”, an important mutation as shall be seen later) and has continued to the current world situation. It covers all aspects of history in North America from its inception, and with the advent of its overseas empire claimed from the defeated Spanish empire, covers all aspects of the world history from then on. The empire is evident in business, cultural, military, ecological, and religious constructs and its main purpose, in spite of other rhetoric speaking so loudly, is the growth and maintenance of the corporate structures into corporate empires that now are truly empires beyond the control of national governments.

The empire reaches its penultimate in statements such as Robert Kagan’s wonderful iteration that “The proof of the transcendent importance of the American experiment would be found not only in the continual perfection of American institutions at home but also in the spread of American influence in the world.” [2] Not only does the empire reach perfection, but it does so divinely as a God given right, it has transcended human variables. It is a fully legitimate empire because so many Americans believe “that by advancing their own interests they advance the interests of humanity. As Benjamin Franklin put it, America’s “cause is the cause of all mankind.” [3]

That is a hard sell to the indigenous people of the fourth world, comprising most of North America and all of Central and South America, all of who have been subject to genocide, repression, and removal. It is a hard sell to the descendants of the slaves who laboured another one hundred years after the “right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” made it into the cultural lexicon of America, and then another one hundred years before it exploded in the streets of Philadelphia and New York and Chicago and Detroit and Los Angeles in the summer of 1967 when the streets of inner city America exploded.

It is a hard sell to the Philippinos who died trying to defend against the new empire that usurped the Spanish empire, some dozens of thousands. It is a hard sell to the citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki who had two of the first weapons of mass terror used on them even when the government had already signalled it would surrender if they could keep the emperor, a condition the Americans met anyway after they dropped the bombs. And it goes on, and it follows the trail of political influence peddling and economic resource extraction around the globe.

Wealth Creation

Unfortunately it is an empire based on private property such that “The primary tendency in this legal history is to legitimize the transformation of the earths vital elements into material commodities susceptible of being bought and sold as private property.” [4] Once corporations became legal as “persons”, they too could find their pursuit of happiness in property to the extent that, with modern scientific knowledge about genetics, “the genetic blueprints of living beings are being made the subject of individual and corporate ownership through the intervention of a global regime of patent and copyright law covered under the rubric of “intellectual property”.” [5] Not only do corporations control the dissemination of food stocks through genetic copyright, they are now extending that to the peoples of the world, so that the human genome is no longer public property. Scary enough when considering Monsanto’s ever broadening grip on food stock genetics, it leads to strange speculations as to what is in store for the human genetic information.

This transcendent empire, this perfect institution is everywhere today. It includes: the obvious military expeditions to control resource extractions as in Iraq; the corporate control of resources and the flow of wealth beyond the structures of national governments; the impoverishment of the world’s indigenous people as a direct result of that extraction; the cultural domination involving food, clothing, and media transmission; and finally the control of knowledge inclusive of the very makeup of the genetic structures of a wide variety of global species. It is all done, as with any empire, for the control of resources and the extraction of the wealth from the rest of the world to enrich the corporate headquarters of the homeland.

These perspectives on the American Empire are a mixture, a weaving of thematic ideas as they pass through the loom of history. While generally presented chronologically, the themes jump back and forth, and change their accents according to the place and time, according to the needs of the empire at any particular time. It is not a textbook historical perspective, not the listing of dates and events, but the positioning of ideas and thoughts from history and current events that should show the consistency of the empirical ideals of American leaders. These leaders represent the political world, the world of large corporate business, the military world, and the world of religion. They are all the warp and weft of the same cloth, the American flag that flies globally on land, sea, and in the air.

Notes:

[1] Clark, William, R. Petrodollar Warfare – Oil, Iraq and the Future of the Dollar. New Society Publishers, Gabriola Island, B.C. Canada. 2005. p. 32.
[2] Kagan, Robert. Of Paradise and Power – America and Europe in the New World Order. Alfred a. Knopf, New York, 2003. p. 88.
[3] Ibid, p.88.
[4] Hall, Anthony J. The American Empire and the Fourth World – The Bowl with One Spoon Volume I. McGill-Queens University Press, Montreal, 2003. p. 123.
[5] Ibid, p.73.

© Jim Miles. Used with permission.