cursedby11 wrote:right but we are a superpower.
How did the USA (or "you," in your chosen parlance) come to be a superpower?
What is your theory on that?
And now that you are a superpower, how is your power maintained?
If, for whatever reason, you'd care to learn what some "actually existing" American socialists might sound like when discussing such matters, I have excerpted an interview from the
International Socialist Review below (I increased the font size of the text for the passage concerning apologists of empire. This makes the words really big and thus easier to
read).
If you cared to learn what a bunch of socialists make of China, South Korea, Cuba, etc, you might read some of the articles and interviews in the ISR.
This would, however, involve "reading." I can't help you there.
TALK ABOUT America and how we benefit from empire, if I can use the collective pronoun. William Appleman Williams was an historian who wrote a book called Empire as a Way of Life. In it he writes, "Very simply, Americans of the 20th century liked empire for the very same reasons their ancestors had favored it in the 18th and 19th century. It provided them with renewable opportunities, wealth and other benefits and satisfactions, including a psychological sense of well-being and power." What do you think of Williams’ analysis?
I THINK he’s correct about the United States, but remember that the United States was not a normal empire in the European style, so it wasn’t like the British Empire. The English colonists who came to the United States didn’t do what they did in India. They didn’t create a façade of the native population behind which they would rule. They largely wiped out the native population. That’s rather different. So the indigenous population of what’s now the United States was "exterminated," to use the word that the founding fathers used. Not totally, but that was what was considered the right thing to do. They replaced them and it became a kind of settler state, not an imperial state. And the expansion over the national territory was that way all along, including the taking over of large parts of Mexico.
Back in the 1820s, one of the earliest issues in U.S. foreign policy was the desire to take Cuba. It was assumed in the 1820s by Thomas Jefferson and John Quincy Adams and others that Cuba was the next step in expansion. But the British were in the way. The British fleet was much too powerful, and they couldn’t take Cuba at the time. John Quincy Adams made a famous statement, he was secretary of state at the time, in which he said: We should back off and Cuba will fall into our hands like a "ripe fruit" by the "laws of political gravitation." Meaning that sooner or later, we’ll become more powerful, the British will become weaker, the deterrent will be gone and we’ll be able to pluck the ripe fruit. Which happened in 1898 under the guise of liberation.
But every expansion up until the Second World War was not establishing traditional colonies. Hawaii was taken over from its own population at the same time, 1898, stolen by force and guile. But then the native population was pretty much replaced, they weren’t colonized. Again, not totally. They’re still there, but it became essentially taken over rather than colonized. The Philippines was different. The Philippines was more like a colony. So Williams’ comments are correct but I think they refer to a different sort of imperial system. If you look at the traditional empires, say, the British Empire, it’s not so clear that the population of Britain gained from it. It’s really a very difficult topic to study, a kind of cost-benefit analysis of empire. But there have been a couple of attempts to study it. And for what they’re worth, the general range of conclusions is that the costs and the benefits probably pretty much balanced out.
Empires are costly. Running Iraq is not cheap. Somebody’s paying. Somebody’s paying the corporations that destroyed Iraq and the corporations that are rebuilding it. They’re getting paid by the American taxpayer in both cases. So we pay them to destroy the country, and then we pay them to rebuild it. Those are gifts from U.S. taxpayer to U.S. corporations, indirectly, and happen to affect Iraq.
I DON’T understand. How did corporations like Halliburton and Bechtel contribute to the destruction of Iraq?
WHO PAYS Halliburton and Bechtel? The U.S. taxpayer. The military system that bombed Iraq destroyed it. Who paid for that? The same taxpayers. So first you destroy Iraq, then you rebuild it. It’s a transfer of wealth from the general population to narrow sectors of the population. Even if you look at the famous Marshall Plan, that’s pretty much what it was. It’s talked about as an act of "unimaginable benevolence." But whose benevolence? It’s the benevolence of the American taxpayer. Of the $13 billion of Marshall Plan aid, about $2 billion went right to the U.S. oil companies. That was part of the effort to shift Europe from a coal-based to an oil-based economy, and parts of it would be more dependent on the United States. It had plenty of coal. It didn’t have oil. So there’s two billion of the 13.
You look at the rest of it, very little of that money left the United States. It goes from one pocket to another. If you look more closely, the Marshall Plan aid to France just about covered the costs of the French effort to reconquer Indochina. So the U.S. taxpayer wasn’t rebuilding France. They were paying the French to buy American weapons to crush the Indochinese. Partially the same was true about the Marshall Plan aid to Holland, in the early stage, and what it was doing in Indonesia. It’s a complex flow of aid and benefits.
But, going back to the British Empire, the studies of it have suggested that the costs to the British people may have been about on a par with the benefits that the British people got from it. However, it’s a transfer internally. To the guys who were running the East India Company: fantastic wealth. To the British troops who were dying out in the wilderness somewhere: a serious cost. So it’s a part of class war internally. And to a large extent that’s the way empires work. A big element of it is internal class war.
[. . .]
YOU MENTIONED the Mafia Don earlier. Major General Smedley Butler of the U.S. Marine Corps was a highly-decorated officer, he won the Congressional Medal of Honor not once but twice. He said, "I’ve spent 33 years…being a high class muscleman for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for Capitalism…. I helped purify Nicaragua, I helped make Mexico…safe for American oil interests, I helped in the rape of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street…. I was rewarded with honors, medals, promotions…I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was operate a racket in three city districts. The Marines operated on three continents."
SMEDLEY BUTLER in his later years came out with some very honest and cutting comments. The honors stopped. He was also either threatened with being kicked out of the Marine Corps, or may have actually been expelled, for opposing U.S. support for Mussolini. I think Henry Stimson may have been responsible for that, because at the time, the U.S. loved Mussolini, thought he was great, but apparently Butler was opposed.
TRADITIONALLY IF you used the word "imperialism" and attached the word "American" in front of it, you were immediately dismissed as a member of some far left fringe. That has undergone a bit of a transformation in the last few years. Let’s just take Michael Ignatieff, for one. Son of a Canadian diplomat, he’s at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard where he is Carr Professor of Human Rights Policy. He writes in a New York Times Magazine cover story on July 28, 2002, "America’s entire war on terrorism is an exercise in imperialism." Then he adds, "Imperialism used to be the white man’s burden," echoing Kipling. "This gave it a bad reputation. But imperialism doesn’t stop being necessary just because it becomes politically incorrect." On January 5, 2003, in yet another cover story in the New York Times Magazine, he writes, "America’s empire is not like the empires of times past, built on colonies, conquests and the white man’s burden.... The 21st century imperium is a new invention in the annals of political science, an empire lite, a global hegemony whose grace notes are free markets, human rights, and democracy, enforced by the most awesome military power the world has ever known." And he has a new book out, called Empire Lite.
OF COURSE, the apologists for every other imperial power have said the same thing. So you can go back to John Stuart Mill, one of the most outstanding Western intellectuals, now we’re talking about the real peak of moral integrity and intelligence. He defended the British Empire in very much those words. John Stuart Mill wrote the classic essay on humanitarian intervention. Everyone studies it in law schools. What he says is, Britain is unique in the world. It’s unlike any country before it. Other countries have crass motives and seek gain and so on, but the British act only for the benefit of others. In fact, he said, Our motives are so pure that Europeans can’t understand us. They heap "obloquy" upon us and they seek to discover crass motives behind our benevolent actions. But everything we do is for the benefit of the natives, the barbarians. We want to bring them free markets and honest rule and freedom and all kinds of wonderful things. Today’s version is just illustrating Marx’s comment about tragedy being repeated as farce.
The timing of Mill’s comments is interesting. This was around 1859, and it was right after an event that in British terminology is called the "Indian Mutiny," meaning those barbarians raised their heads. It was a rebellion against British rule, and the British put it down with extreme violence and brutality. Mill certainly knew about this. It was all over England, it was all over the press. The old-fashioned conservatives like Richard Cobden condemned it harshly, just like Senator Robert Byrd condemns what’s going on today. The real conservatives are different from the ones that call themselves that. But Mill, right in the midst of that, wrote about this picture of Britain as an angelic power, and I think you’d find it hard to find an exception to that.
I’m surprised that Ignatieff is not aware that he’s just repeating a very familiar rhetoric. And it’s true, even in internal records, when people are talking to themselves. A lot of Soviet archives are coming out, basically being sold to the highest bidder like everything else in Russia. It’s kind of interesting to see that they talk to each other the same way they talk in public. So, for example, you go back to 1947 or so, and Gromyko and those guys are talking to each other and saying things like, We have to protect democracy. We have to intervene to protect democracy from the forces of fascism, which are everywhere, and democracy is surely the highest value, so we’ve got to intervene to protect it. And he’s talking about the "people’s democracies." Well, he believed it probably as much as Ignatieff believes what he is saying.
Cheers.