We have a blind spot, or lack knowledge and understanding in a specific and important area, about American imperialism, and that is actually a tremendous problem. How do we view that blind spot?
The U.S. has promoted democracy in its religions and popular culture, especially Hollywood. America has entire government bureaus devoted to spreading democracy abroad. Yet, here’s the thing, America is not a democracy. It never has been. Since 1945 the republic has been run like an empire.
The America we everyday Americans think we know only exists in the contours of our minds and so does the pernicious blind spot.
In particular, the U.S. government has a blind spot, a highly officious institutional one, when it comes to American imperialism. Because the imperialists in power in government either work covertly or unknowingly to push imperialist policy.
Of course, you don’t need to twist the arm of corporate America and those who have no issues about making boat loads of money abroad in any way possible, often at the expense of innocent lives and livelihoods. They love American imperialism, tremendously. Imperialism is big business these days.
Thus, it comes down to us in the American public. The everyday American. Especially those of us who are American partisans. We’ve the blind spot. Our field of vision is ever so tightly obstructed.
How did I myself finally see the blind spot? It was not easy, and not purposeful, I will tell you that. I was slowly, over several years, taken there through the incompetence of covert American imperial agents in Ukraine, Canada and Britain and the so-called “intelligence community” of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance, on social media, but there are much better ways to go about it, believe me.
Viewing the doctrines of American imperialism
Evidence of the American Empire can be viewed in a number of different ways. In a cheeky nod to the Roman Empire, “doctrines” is one of them.
The purpose of a foreign policy doctrine is to provide general rules for the conduct of foreign policy through decisions on international relations. These rules allow the political leadership of a nation to deal with a situation and to explain the actions of a nation to other nations.
U.S. economic, military, and political influence has long extended far beyond those internationally recognized possessions and various presidents have enunciated a series of “doctrines” to legitimate such an imperial reach. You could say that over time the various doctrines comprise the “U.S. Imperial Doctrine” in the 21st Century. And Donald Rumsfeld would agree.
The first of these was the Monroe Doctrine, introduced in 1823 in Monroe’s penultimate State of the Union address. He warned the nations of Europe that, while the U.S. recognized existing colonial possessions in the Americas, it would not permit the establishment of any new ones.
President Theodore Roosevelt would later add a corollary to Monroe’s doctrine by establishing Washington’s right to intercede in any country in the Americas that, in the view of its leaders, was not being properly run.
One of the American partisans or anti-imperialists, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, publicly renounced the Monroe Doctrine and promised a hands-off attitude towards Latin America. But in 1947, Harry Truman laid out his doctrine which would underlie the country’s foreign policy at least until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. I was working in international development then, the history becomes personal for me.
When I was young, I was mildly obsessed with Joseph Conrad, especially when the Polish-British writer wrote in 1899 about colonialism, imperialism and greed in Heart of Darkness. Although imperialism and colonialism focus on the suppression of another, if imperialism refers to the political and monetary dominance, either formally or informally, colonialism refers to the process of a country taking physical control of another.
The post-World War II turn to rabid anticommunism rang in a new kind of colonialism. Rather than directly annexing territories to extract cheap labor and cheaper natural resources, the U.S., the World Bank, and the IMF, gained control over the economies of poor nations.
In return for aid —or loans often pocketed by local elites and repaid by the poor— those nations agreed to privatization of public services like water and utilities and the defunding of human services like health and education, usually by American or multinational corporations.
The American Empire basically thieved countries at gun point. We just saw this in Ukraine. Such “adjustments,” in turn, allowed the recipients to service the loans, extracting scarce hard currency from already deeply impoverished nations. I have first hand professional experience here.
You might have thought that the fall of the Soviet empire and the end of the Cold War would have presented the imperialists with a road block from continuing their global corporate raiding and the endless military and CIA interventions that were part of it. You would be wrong.
After the Cold War, and just in time to prevent even the faint possibility of an end to American imperialism, the imperialists staged 9/11. Oh, yes they did, the French know by way of a bestselling book, a must read. This gave president George W. Bush his very own doctrine outlining lunatic Neoconservative ideology.
The “Bush Doctrine,” the security strategy response to 9/11, the legitimating device that enabled the Bush Administration to sanction a security policy designed to maintain U.S. global supremacy has resulted in almost 20 years of disastrous “forever wars” and a military-industrial complex deeply embedded in our national economy.
Every President after Bush kept to the doctrine until Trump. And now he has been ousted by imperialists, namely the War Lobby. The story of the American Empire. Donald Trump, or at least his base of support, understands that everyday Americans are not imperialist grunts.
Viewing the political divide
The debate about American imperialism traditionally has a left/right split, with liberal support and conservative opposition.
No, really. It is as simple as that. It should not be hard then to organize civil disobedience against imperialism if we address the baseline of our misunderstanding and their deceit.
When do liberals finally realize that imperialism ultimately undermines the nation? I ask, because this is happening right now. Bigly.
And in the wake of the highly staged “Capitol riots,” when do conservatives realize that they have been silenced because of their opposition to imperialism?
In an empire, the emperor’s duty is to defend and promote the foreign economic and political interests of the empire. The national legislature of an empire’s only role is to support and approve the edicts and whims of the emperor. The domestic agenda of an empire is maintaining order, not promoting the general welfare of citizens.
What this means is we’re really no longer citizens of a republic but subjects of an empire.
Fixing the problems today in America can only occur if we first understand what is causing the damage is the imperialism itself, and the damage can only be repaired if it is truly acknowledged and addressed in the right context of that imperialism.
If people understand that the so-called “political divide” is, in fact, imperialism, that would certainly be a start, too. The story of the American Empire. The only thing dividing people is whether or not they truly support war. Not the wars as they are either hidden or promoted by the media and Hollywood. What is really going on in places like Syria, Ethiopia and Palestine.
And, of course, the best way to rule over a large body of people is to divide or partition them.
It’s really a matter of Americans saying “no more wars.” Period. The media-entertainment industry is devoted to keeping us convinced that war is not only OK, it is a normal aspect of this American life.
Thus, it becomes a matter of not digesting or not believing the media and Hollywood. Ever. Those princes and peasants service the empire, the War Lobby. They, quite literally, construct the empire in our minds.
And hear this. The American Empire is most certainly not crumbling. It had started to fall because Donald Trump was the first president in modern history who did not start a new war. But the empire just successfully removed that anti-imperialist president as it had done with John F. Kennedy all those years ago.
Both presidents, JFK and Trump, challenged the empire. And the new president, Biden came out publicly as a Zionist, and had his son’s butthole flashed all over the internet, and that still didn’t stop him from ascending to the throne. So here we are, Zionists, buttholes, and thrones.
Once again, if it were not for some imperialist morons in Canada and Britain, I would have never figured any of this out. The important point here is that British and Canadian morons, not Americans, of the “American Empire” exposed it. And my deepest gratitude to the “American” journalist Anne Applebaum.
The good news is that, in general, the American Imperialists continue to operate under the same principles that have been failing them since Ukraine. The Nazis were also dumb as bricks.
The empire of the Third Reich fell after not very long because the Nazis were morons. Though depicted as ruthlessly efficient jackboots, the actual Nazis were by and large idiot stooges who proved as incapable of administering a government as they were of running a war.
Most importantly, Frau or Comrade Applebaum and the other morons unintentionally helped me to understand that the American Empire is not American. Just as the Soviet Empire was not Russian. The American Empire has got some Nazi and Bolshevik parts, but it is mostly just bloated and senseless.
This was all no less than a revelation. Remember Russia and the Churchill quote about enigma?
Famously, Winston Churchill defined Russia as "a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma," and his words in 1939. We’re talking about enigma, in general, though, in the same way, but about America. We’re taking about empire.
While I am an American partisan I am being treated like a dissident of the American Empire in my own country by imperialists. There’s a sentence.
Imperialists and colonialists make my blood boil, they always have. As an American I know that I am not alone. Therefore, we need to go beyond the form of the political world as presented by the media and Hollywood and look at the substance of people’s lives, our personal stories.
I am an American by birth, a life long registered Democrat, but also an anti-imperialist. Whereas my writing previously would have found a home at a good niche liberal place in America, I have found myself only able to publish my work on French and other foreign websites. The imperialists have now taken over the entire American media complex.
We’re talking about empire. Change your field of vision and the enigma of the crystalline empire shines bright like a diamond. I will continue to help you do so. I do love a sparkling diamond, but I am not impressed by it because I know the psychology of it, not to mention the bloody imperialism and colonialism, which made it so desirable.
The diamond has many facets, such as the U.S. imperial doctrine which we started to discuss here, the work of The Project for the New American Century and the Neoconservative agenda and, of course, the military-intelligence reach of the 900 U.S. bases around the world and the web of multilateral institutions, not to mention just history (actual history that is not taught in schools) and the cycle of empires.
Diamonds are made under pressure, and so are empires. Diamonds are intrinsically worthless, except for the deep psychological need they fill. It all comes down to psychology and what inevitability fills the contours of our minds.
Just like in the Roman Empire, the elites in the American Empire employ psychology as intellectual ammunition to justify violence, oppression of others, incarceration, segregation, slavery, terrorism, war, genocide, and all manner of crimes against humanity —imperialism.
When everyday Americans view the empire, we ought to be talking about empire in an everyday manner.
In the words of Malcolm Forbes, “diamonds are nothing more than chunks of coal that stuck to their jobs.”
Millionaire Malcolm Forbes was the publisher of Forbes magazine from 1957 to 1990. He was a man known for his business sense and his lavish lifestyle. He spoke of empire in an everyday manner.
Empire was pretty personal for Forbes. He viewed the American Empire as real, not imagined, defined by the things everyday Americans would never see.
After all, the political divide is divided, but not how you thought.
Viewing the art and culture of the American Empire
Jasper Johns was an artist that came onto the scene in the 1950s. Eventually he would lead the American public away from the American Abstract Expressionism that was being covertly exported abroad, the movement he was part of. He ended up painting lots of American flags.
For decades, in art circles it was either a rumor or a joke, but now it is confirmed as a fact. The CIA used American modern art as a weapon in the Cold War. In the manner of a covert Renaissance prince the CIA fostered and promoted American Abstract Expressionist painting around the world for more than 20 years.
This was a period, in the 1950s and 1960s, when the great majority of Americans disliked or even hated modern art. Together with Rauschenberg and several Abstract Expressionist painters of the previous generation, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Mark Rothko, Jasper Johns is considered one of most significant and influential American painters of the 20th century by the people who are paid by the CIA to write about such things.
In diplomatic terms, the school of painting known as Abstract Expressionism “served as an expression of American soft power” and was a creation of the CIA. In reality, this was a covert action of imperialism.
We everyday Americans now have proof that this was not imagined. I pat myself on the back because I have instinctively always known so-called “Abstract Expressionism” to be pure rubbish. Now knowing that it was a CIA production, I can see that it was connected to empire-building, and it all makes perfect sense.
Once you personally internalize that America is not a nation state, not even a republic, but is run like an empire, your whole consciousness will expand appropriately.
The so-called “political divide” is, in fact, imperialism.
When everyday Americans view the U.S. as the American Empire, we will do so in an everyday manner. Meaning, we will view art and culture as a potential weapon of imperialism —the blind spot. It will then not be out of view for us to organize civil disobedience against that imperialism, by building public consciousness of that blind spot:
America is not a nation. American was a republic and has been run as an empire since 1945. Neoconservatism is American Imperialism. But the American Empire is not American, just as the Soviet Empire was not Russian.
