Merci à tous
Thanks to everybody I have turned an important corner in my writing. I had been too focused on the theatre of it all, of American politics. And, like everybody else, for the last twenty years almost entirely unaware of American imperialism.
Now, I'm expiated from the mistakes I made along the way. And I’ve the moral high ground. It’s a good day for me. It’s a good day for America.
Everything that is going on today in politics can be found in history. The majority of Americans have not been educated in history adequately. I know I wasn’t, because American historians write PR (public relations) for the Empire.
It then really becomes a matter of putting blinders on in public. We’re flashed non-stop images of dystopian propaganda from the media and Hollywood, when the reality is really quite classical and certainly far more interesting.
At the same time, widely reproduced discourses and theories about globalization elide American dominance. We suffer delusions about the degree of influence scholars typically have on contemporary policy debates and don’t acknowledge when a dog is, in fact, a wolf.
We have a blind spot when it comes to American imperialism.
Meanwhile, the U.S. under the Bush Doctrine has been furiously driving foreign policy toward expanded empire. And the domestic political fuel being fed into the engine is that of conflict, chaos and division. A U.S. policy of terrorism both abroad and at home.
History informs us that there is the U.S. and then there is the American Empire. They are two entirely different big beasts. Imperialism is the political divide. That is our touchstone, or as the French say, pierre de touche.
We Americans ought to speak more often about France in a brotherly manner. The French comprehend this political divide, they always have.
Merci, Monsieur Trump
The UK, Germany, Spain and Italy have all been at war with the U.S. at one time or another. France, no. However, France is the place where anti-Americanism has been and had remained, at least until the staged 9/11 terror attacks blamed on Islam, the most strident. This is worth opining as a sort of familial or brotherly relationship.
In 1968, there were uprisings in France, with student protests against against capitalism, bureaucratic institutions and mostly importantly American imperialism. Strikes across France were met with forceful confrontation by police and university administration. Sound familiar?
I am old enough to vividly recall French anti-American sentiment. In fact, I was raised on it. This is my territory. Anti-Americanism in France spans my lifetime.
The sentiment is in direct relation to the U.S.’s imperialistic foreign polices which persisted into the year 2000. Anti-Americanism had revived during the 1960s with Charles de Gaulle. And I am proudly a Gaullist. We’ll come back to him.
I was well aware of American imperialism when I was young in 1970s with the Vietnam War and that irreconcilable political divide at home in America. Then, in the 1980s with some pretty intense French anti-Americanism, and in the 1990s with my work and travel abroad, particularly in Rwanda, I knew quite well that anti-Americanism was still a palpable thing.
In fact, I used to pretend not to be American when I traveled abroad, it was easier that way. Mainly because I have never supported imperialism and I did not want to be a spokesperson for American imperialism.
Somehow in the 2000s, I lost awareness of it, until 2008 with the global financial crisis. At the time, I was an American working in The Netherlands and daggers were out among the Dutch for America, let me tell you. At least for a year. It did not last as long as it should have. And it was not associated with sentiments of anti-war as it should have been.
Remarkably, it turns out that most Americans did not see that our imperialist foreign policy never went away, uncharged during the last 20 years. Only our perceptions changed. The American Empire’s bloodthirsty pursuit of foreign conquests did not falter.
After all, the first job of an empire is to keep its subjects stupid. All the talk has been about globalism. But what is globalism? Is it American capitalism? Is it American imperialism?
This has left the everyday American beholden to the media and Hollywood that effectively erase that American patriotism and American imperialism are at odds. The majority of Americans are partisans, like myself, and unbeknownst to us a minority of imperialists are concentrated in Washington, DC and the big cites.
Recently, my awareness of American imperialism returned with a vengeance. I thank U.S. President Trump for this. Bigly, a word popularized by him. Because here at home our freedoms, particularly freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want, and freedom from fear, are in danger and have been for a while.
This cannot be overemphasized. American imperialism (abroad) is invariably causing the oppression at home, among the citizens of our country today.
An empire defends and promotes the foreign economic and political interests of the empire. The domestic agenda of an empire is maintaining order, not promoting the general welfare of citizens. When imperialism goes into full gear, our four freedoms are ditched by the wayside, as the military vehicles drive away. As they are today.
Either knowingly or unknowingly, when Donald Trump was U.S. President he brought all of this to the surface, like a boil festering on the skin.
Here’s the thing. The Neoconservative campaign to reverse the Civil Rights Movement is well documented. Neoconservatives are virulently racist. Oppression in America starts with blacks. Neoconservatism is American imperialism.
Whether or not Donald Trump was a good president is not the issue at hand. As a change agent he was phenomenally effective, in historic proportions. Intentionally, or probably more likely, unintentionally, he brought us to witness the American Empire at home in the United States.
Bigly.
I personally took it as an opportunity to educate myself and just recently I turned the education Monsieur Trump gave me into a thesis:
The United States is not a nation. The U.S. 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.
Merci, France
Yes, this is a big moment in the history of America. Yes, I am using the word “big” and variations of it a lot, on purpose.
As a demure president-for-a-minute once said, “A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.”
The big issue for us now becomes civil war. Not in the manner that the media has been yammering about, but akin to the gilets jaunes movement in France. That is exactly where we are at as Americans.
I had written in the last year about the gilets jaunes and the movement against globalism. Only recently, did it click in my mind that France has been responding to American imperialism.
The same, only much worse, anti-Americanism of my youth, particularly during the Reagan years, has resurfaced in my adulthood. Let me tell you, it is not a pleasant feeling recognizing this.
The parallels are plenty.
Joe Biden stole the primary from Bernie Saunders and stole the presidential election from Donald Trump. Joe Biden without any real base of support. And these priorities he chose look intended to cause even more oppression of the majority of Americans.
Emmanuel Macron was installed as president of France in the same false manner as Biden in the U.S. recently. Thus, Macron has no legitimate public support.
Now, the Élysée must result to violence after over two years of gilet jaunes protests. This is where America has been heading. Civil disobedience, not civil war.
In both countries, France and America, the media only tells lies and the courtiers in the media work to create more conflict in the countries. This is the face of American imperialism in both places —France and America.
What is going on in social media and the internet, in general, is already like France. The U.S. government is shutting down anybody opposed to its imperialist foreign policy, namely wars and so-called “interventions.” They’ve given up with the niceties and have resorted to the violence technology offers. Now corporations and the “intelligence community” control the internet with surveillance, censorship, coercion, bullying and psychological abuse.
The American imperialists have been trying to seduce France my whole lifetime and it seemed to have finally worked in 2001 with 9/11 and then with a disco bump in November 2015 with a series of coordinated “Islamist terrorist attacks” in Paris in my exact stomping ground in that city.
When do the French people truly consider that the police suppression of the gilets jaunes movement is an American effort? When does France recognize that the America Empire was behind the 2015 Paris attacks?
Listen, don’t go hating on America, leave us Americans out of it. This is about NATO.
Merci, Charles de Gaulle
No one challenged NATO rules during the Cold War except France. Charles de Gaulle and France pulled the plug on a crucial part of NATO. The country intended to stop putting its military forces at NATO’s disposal and intended to kick NATO military forces —and those of NATO members— off of its land.
Thus, the NATO people despise the common sense and intelligence of this kind of clear thinking, Gaullism, while I myself admire the legacy more than any other international relations concept in modern history.
Gaullism was a political movement during World War II led by Charles de Gaulle in opposition to the Vichy (Nazi) regime. But Gaullism cannot be considered as either a doctrine or a political ideology and is not left or right. It’s also timeless. Gaullist idea is chiefly based on world history and a pragmatic observation of world power.
A Gaullist Europe would have encompassed economic, political, and defense strategy and permitted Europe to mute the tension and right the imbalance in the allegedly dangerous bipolar system. Europe with its own defense, that is, one pivoting on the French force de frappe.
Gaullism is a peculiarly French phenomenon and is greatly misrepresented and therefore greatly misunderstood outside of France. Gaullism is the political verification of national sovereignty and unity and completely against any divisiveness within the country.
Instead, the American Empire covertly took over Europe with a series of actual, although still dishonest, doctrines starting with the Monroe Doctrine. This can now be honestly viewed.
Merci, gilets jaunes
We have been only just begun to understand that history and that we are now living in the gilets jaunes era in the United States.
American imperialism has a big boot-print in France and in Europe. We just were unaware of this. In many ways the French response today is no different from the protests in 1968.
Recall, French citizens of the gilets jaunes were the first and most significant movement to date to stand up as a nation, France, and uprise against the cruelty of American imperialism.
After all, France is the birthplace of the concepts of freedom of speech, liberty, equality and democracy.
Under Emmanuel Macron, France quickly became a place where freedom of speech is a crime, equality is a lost cause, and democracy has been replaced by the theological, yes, theological, hatred of the American imperialists now occupying France as the Nazis had.
Today in France, the American imperialists are behind the agitation of racism, the church burnings, the police brutality and the cuts to the French social model. The same threats to democracy all these centuries. And it is the American imperialists against whom the French gilets jaunes protest.
Now that the Trump administration is gone, we are allowed to say America is run like an empire.
Now that Biden looks hellbent on taking that American imperialism to the next level, I see it only getting worse.
What is going on today boils down to one thing. The War Lobby wants to freely engage in wars.
But please remember, and do not forget, there is the United States and then there is the American Empire. They are two entirely different big beasts.
When you consider everything above, you have to then ask yourself, well, which beast was U.S. President Trump really representing?
That is almost an existential question.
The Trump era revealed the hidden American Empire. I am now pretty sure that this was unintentional. The American Empire was founded by war and has to maintain itself by war. It was exposed as such.
Donald Trump’s first official state visit to France was November 9–11, 2018, and the country started to fall into chaos not shortly thereafter.
The gilets jaunes protests began on November 17, 2018 across all of France.
Along with the American media, U.S. President Trump completely ignored the gilets jaunes. For years. Years.
I am in solidarity with the gilets jaunes in France who have protested every Saturday for years against their président marionnette américain Emmanuel Macron, either completely ignored or smeared by the American media.
Anti-Americanism and American imperialism are simultaneously big, bigly, once again in France. This is no longer hidden. "Bigly" can mean "with great force.” Like the police state France has become.
The United States has never been at war with brotherly France.
This is the part where you feel as though you are caught in a black and while film from the French Nouvelle Vague cinema of the 1960s. One with a tough yet vulnerable, laconic but intense, Jean-Paul Belmondo.
With that, here’s a very French cinema ending to this short essay.
A platinum blond lady, who is holding a cigarette with a very precise French finger grip, asks, “Perhaps American imperialism has invented today’s material world?
Now, one of Godard’s jump cut —where time passes with each successive cut— the space between the cuts suggests a wealth of information.
A man in dark sunglasses replies to the lady, “Oui, cherie. There’s a Bolshevik’s embalmed corpse in a mausoleum in Moscow’s Square Red. He said, ‘Imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism.’”
The lady takes a deep drag from the cigarette while nodding with raised eyebrows.
Fin.
