Imperial Me

When Dr. King warned about "racism, extreme materialism and militarism," I was three years old.

That speech titled “Beyond Vietnam” was a battle cry announcing that imperialism had consumed the elite of our country. My generation, Generation X, grew up in the shadow of that day and in the shadow of those imperialists.

Dr. King’s words were spoken in the context of the Vietnam War and other U.S. military “interventions,” and they hold true today in almost any context.

In his speech, King exposed the underlying oppressive systems of racism, materialism, and militarism, and called for courage and action. He was assassinated months later.

Perhaps more than any other American, Martin Luther King, Jr., prompted us to think, in profoundly human terms, of the passage of time.

Since his passing, over the last fifty years the American imperialists have gone around the world “spreading democracy,” the very oppression he warned us about. As Americans we don’t hear about it, because those oppressed overseas are left without a voice.

Thus, finding your voice and asserting yourself peacefully as such is the key to resisting imperialist oppression.

This is front and center in our minds today, because this year the imperialists returned to the U.S. to do the same to Americans because the 45th American president did not want to continue their wicked imperialist foreign policy.
The imperialists are largely Baby Boomers (and their younger protégés). The generation that has overshadowed my generation. The generation that was groomed for American imperialism in the shadow of WWII.

Since my generation, Gen X, grew up in the shadow of the Baby Boomers, I am well aware of their imperialist proclivities when it comes to foreign affairs. I worked for them. I wrote their speeches, I created their press releases, I compiled their reports.

Through the promotion of worldwide capitalism and democracy, these American imperialists have, in fact, been promoting a world based on imperialistic values and imperialistic ideas. This was as true in World War II as it was in the 2003 so-called “war on Iraq.”

When you first recognize that America has been run as an empire since WWII, then, you can better understand how these big players use the law to enable their oppression of everyday Americans.

Here is another way to think about it. How has George Soros (acting as an arm of U.S. government) been able to cause so much trouble abroad and now at home? He goes after a country’s legal system. Look at the states he corrupted in the recent election, you’ll see I am right.

Remember, the worst imaginable things like segregation, slavery, war and genocide were only possible because of laws and lawyers. Because the elite in America are protected by those laws and those lawyers.

We’ll speak further about America’s wretched legal system another time.

A public awareness of the problems of materialism and militarism and the subsequent imperialist policies of “interventionism” that by 2016 had produced the “endless wars” gave a platform to Donald Trump to become President. In the end, his presidency was shut down by imperialism.

Today is an interesting marker for those who are paying attention. Where do we go from here? We had believed in certain things, like democracy, freedom of speech, and freedom of religion, and those certainties have disappeared, because the Trump era taught us America is an empire.
In a sense, it is blue water imperialism. It never went away. The dominant 17th- and 18th-century British ideology of blue water imperialism was founded on the values of commerce and freedom—for some.

It turns out that the American “language of liberty” which refers to individuals’ right to life, liberty, and property, and the duty to participate in civic affairs, applies only to the elite quarters of America. The ordinary American is denied both civic and political rights.

The elite in America are protected by law. That is what distinguishes them from the ordinary American. 

The central issue then becomes civil war. Not in the manner that the media has been yammering about, but akin to the 1960s Civil Rights Movement or better yet the gilets jaunes movement in France —peaceful civil disobedience.

By 2012, more than 100 million users posted 340 million tweets a day, and the service handled an average of 1.6 billion search queries per day. Trump came into office in 2016. The last few years were big years in the education of the ordinary American. The word got out.

I have had respect for American historian Andrew J. Bacevich since the first time I read one of his things. However, I never really took his work on the “American Empire” to heart, deeply, because I’d no reason to do so, no reason to think that it was more than academic discourse. Academia is, well, academic, after all. I thought it was a nice theory, not an awful reality.

Imperialism is today a reality. The U.S. President’s 1st Amendment right has been violated by the imperialists. The imperialists silenced his voice. Where do we go from here?

In 2020, we learned that “elite” means imperialist. That is a good place to start.

Next, we ought to acknowledge that American foreign policy is imperialistic, policies of globalization and openness enable and promote this policy of empire, and the long-term effects and impacts of empire and American foreign policies are disastrous for the ordinary American.

We absolutely must refuse to entertain any dystopian ideas (including white supremacy) or other distractive nonsense, this is purely about economics and the conversation should keep to economics.

This is about economics, because American empire is primarily about economic expansion. A silent and deadly killer.

In the expansion of the American Empire, “rule of law" campaigns are intended to guarantee Western enterprises can extract wealth from non-Western peoples. A continuation of the colonialism of the past, and especially the British colonialism of the 19th and 20th centuries. 

The so-called “rule of law” is straight up imperialism. It is a colonial relic, having been developed at a time of colonialism, with roots in the Greek and Roman Empires.

We see this now applied at home in America. Don’t blame the big tech companies, blame imperialism. Blame the imperialist laws.

In economics, producing order and economic expansion intrinsically must reduce the freedoms of the ordinary American, and oppress sections of society (like blacks) even further. America’s imperialistic laws are the cause, they enable the big players. Don’t blame the players, blame the game —imperialism. America is being run like an empire.

The empire did not happen over night. It only came of age in 1945. In 2001, it got a shot in the arm with 9/11. That fateful year, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld initiated a study on Ancient Empires' and how they maintained dominance. It signalled a policy change in DC. Thus, despite our anti-imperial traditions, and despite no public support, an imperial reality dominates America’s foreign policy.

When Trump said let’s “make America great again,” he meant let’s get rid of the hidden imperialism.

America was a republic (not a nation state) before 1945. That means that this empire thing is still young. And while America has flirted with French democracy, it has never been a democracy. This is more of the word that needs to get out.

Repeat, America is not a democracy. America is not a nation state. America is not even a republic. America is being run like an empire.

There is no way to overstate the significance of this moment, no way to ignore the power of the message.

Once again, the main job of empires is to keep their subjects stupid. The American Empire pretty much exceeded at that until unmonitored social media came along. Then, Trump provided us with a vocabulary and the U.S. government was hemorrhaging truths about its imperialistic crimes.

The American Empire is theatre. Like how movies of the 20th century were able to take over minds for a few hours: a new experience for audiences previous generations had never known. In the 21st century, empires are the equivalent of movie studios and the production never stops at the major media outlets, the think tanks, Hollywood, of course, and the churches in America. —It is a bitter pill to swallow when you discover your father’s church has been covertly manipulated by these imperialists. That is why I write. They are manufacturing ignorance. 

The five elements of imperialism are: 1) economic, 2) political, 3) military, 4) cultural, and 5) religious. Thus, “American imperialism” is a term that refers to those spheres influence of the U.S. internationally. But these influences start at home, domestically, with citizens.

Throughout the Cold War, the CIA served the interests of the financial elite by artificially inflating estimates of Soviet military strength. When the Cold War ended and the CIA was without an adversary, it quickly turned to transnational corporate covert action via the Five Eyes global alliance.

Since most Americans haven’t a clue that the U.S. is run like an empire, they’re also completely unaware of the psychological manipulation that runs throughout these spheres of influence. What is especially disconcerting is the religion aspect. The other four are straightforward.

Religion and culture as a means of control is what interests me the most because they are the least discussed in public and ignored in academia today. There are other means of imperialist control, of course, like taxation and violence, but here we need to address the so-called “intelligence community” and subversive influence.

To cut to the chase, the so-called “intelligence community” is manufacturing hatred between the religions (especially against Islam) and within the religions themselves, not to mention general racism and homophobia.

The government is tapping directly into people’s religious belief systems. That means that ultimately government bureaucrats are shaping people’s opinions about big ticket items like law and medicine through American churches, synagogues and mosques.

This is simply one example to show why people need to change their mindset about the U.S. and apply the fact that America is run like an empire.

The Empire keeps Americans from seeing beyond the next news cycle. We’ve been too busy worrying about “Russian disinformation” to see the real culprit, American imperialism.

The folks at the Stratcom Centre of Excellence are the best in the business of information operations. All those years ago, I took to heart what Jānis Sārts said, that we need to be honest with ourselves, first. I even wrote about it back then.

A year ago, unknowingly I began to record the elements of the American Empire. I knew there was something wrong, very wrong, with America. I started by internalizing it and after months started to see the light a bit.

I’d been around the world and I saw it in action but I did not have the specific education to identify it as such, nearly nobody does, only 1%. Now, I have the international experience, the self taught education and the vocabulary to talk intelligently about empire.

U.S. President Trump has no less than given the oppressed both an education and a language, critically necessary for a voice to reject oppression.

A historical education can foster intellectual humility, act as a panacea for ignorance, and impact our views and beliefs. As such, empires are an important phenomenon in history, so we ought to have some understanding of what empires are, and what effect they have on our lives.

In general, schools don’t teach appropriate to the concerns of today about the British Empire, and subsequently don’t even mention the American Empire. It only gets worse after this. Americans, broadly, have no reason to believe the topic might even be important in the slightest.

By failing to teach the Cold War as imperialism, we also miss an opportunity to highlight the resistance that was at its heart: Many of the movements the U.S. deemed “communist” were anti-colonial efforts to take back land, resources, and power from ruling elites.
Over the course of the past century, empires have been transformed in form and nature, and in recent times, empires have become transnational in terms of the ways in which influence and power are exercised beyond sovereign boundaries. Empires never went away.

Empires today take many forms, cultural, economic and ideological, they are no longer national phenomena, and they cannot be easily visualized or presented on a conventional map, as was the case with earlier empires. Even then, those were more easily charted after they ended.

If we think of empire as the exercise of extending power and influence beyond one’ s own territorial boundaries, in the 21st Century, empires are often transnational rather than national in nature. Thus, what I refer to as the “American Empire” is hardly American at all. The American Empire is transnational.

The American Empire is not in decline. Quite the contrary. It just got a pocket full of Viagra pills and a red Corvette. It's the decline of America for its citizens that we ought to be talking about. It is corporatism.

The American Empire remains the single strongest power on the globe, and also remains the least understood at home in the United States. Until today.

The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light.

We have seen that when we don’t take responsibility for the inner discord we feel, it manifests out in the world.

I am old enough to remember when we got our news from four state-controlled networks. Empire is nothing new to somebody my age.

Now that the U.S. government has shut off the information valves because the incriminating truth about the American Empire was hemorrhaging on social media, where do we go from here?

I have been honest with myself, I am ready for what is next.

En français: Les États-Unis sont dirigés comme un empire