How the world for the naive is created so the creation of narrative. neo imperialism or neo colonialism. Did you ask yourself how America really became an Empire?

8:05

“…the year 2003. The Economist a conservative British publication, no author: “Empires are born in funny ways and sometimes via the law of unintended consequences by accident and so with the American Empire”. I mean it’s really interesting isn’t it. We hear that today also in a slightly different idiom, We hear that in terms of the United States, the first one right where I found the absent-mindedness thing used again but generally there’s another way of saying say the United States was thrusted onto the world stage or after World War two we found ourselves having to take up the mantle of world leader but we just trusted into this thing. They never say who did the thrusting you know. So was that the Canadians and the Mexicans kind of pushed us to: come on and rule the world, maybe leave us alone for a while or something.

In fact ladies and gentlemen I think a moment’s reflection would tell you that empires are products of deliberate contrivance of deliberate confection, planning calculation and manipulation. No social order can maintain itself in the long run, no social order can maintain itself without conscious human agency. In fact that’s why you have a state, the state is the conscious human agency of coercion to maintain a particular set of interests in order which doesn’t necessarily always look out for our interests. Americans have been taught that empires and imperialism are something that other countries do. When I was in the sixth grade my teacher said to us: “the United States is the only advanced country that does not have colonies”. We do not have colonies and we look on this, but we have this big map and there’ll be the United States and then these box inserts all around its sides. They’d be Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Philippines, I’m really dating myself. These were not independent or were they even States, in fact Puerto Rico is still “gone” by the US. So we’d say to her: “Miss Myers what are these  blocks here, what are these aren’t these our colonies?” She said: “the United States does not have colonies. It has territories or possessions.“. So see that’s the magic of words, you wish away or you define a way all sorts of brutal histories and realities by just using a different word. You got the administration today in Washington saying that the Geneva Convention does not apply to the people who are being held in captivity under very bad conditions at Guantanamo by the United States. Because they’re not prisoners of war they’re enemy combatants. But you know an enemy combatant incarcerated by your military that’s the definition of a prisoner of war, that’s what a prisoner of war is. You get the enemy’s combatant and you make prisoners out of them. It’s interesting how terms are now just being used to wish away things in situations and this has happened with Empire as with any of these other deceptions. The denial of the Empire in the U.S. was made easier by the rather early innovation of what’s called neo imperialism or neo colonialism. Imperialism is the thing that empires do so all those years when the Communists were saying the U.S. is a capitalist imperialist nation and we say oh a lot of commie rhetoric, turns out it’s true. The American Empire in the very early stage was neo-colonial or neo imperialist and neo imperialism was practiced for instance with Cuba. In 1905 after controlling Cuba for about seven years through direct military occupation with US troops, the Americans turned around to the Cubans and said look we stole you fair and square from the Spaniards in a war which the Spaniards didn’t even want to fight, they’re willing to negotiate and leave Cuba and all that. But we really didn’t want them to leave because then we’d have no excuse to invade you and invade the Philippines and take that from Spain and invade Puerto Rico, invade Guam, annex the Hawaiian islands, all these things that we did. So we stole you fair and square but it doesn’t look so good, we being a republic and a democracy doesn’t look so good to have a colony. Miss Myers sixth grade wouldn’t approve of it, no they didn’t say that. But they said we’re going to give you your independence and you’re going to have your own flag, it’s going to be red white and blue but you get only one star because you’re just a little island you know and you’ll have your own money. You won’t have to use US dollars, you can use pesos or whatever you want and you can put your own leaders on your money, you don’t have to have George Washington. We are flexible on this, you could have that. You have your Garde Civil who will take care to make sure that people stay in line and crack heads and it they cannot do that, we have a little clause here in this treaty which says the US Marines can come in any time to clean the house for you. So you got your own independence, you can continue to speak Spanish, how’s that and the only thing you will do for us is to let us control your tobacco industry, your sugar industry and control all your imports and exports and your nickel mine, your oil refineries and all your relationships with third nations. You know other nations other than us, we will have a final say and all that. So you’re independent, enjoy, go out there and enjoy.

17:00

It gets wearisome to read the Roman imperialist themselves what they say. So let me give you a Roman Imperial of Sallust writing at the time of Julius Caesar. This is what he says about Rome: “Avarice was a thing almost unknown, justice and righteousness were upheld not so much by law but by natural instinct. They have governed by conferring benefits on their subjects not by intimidation”. That’s what he said about the Roman Empire. I mean it’s mind boggling, you know.  Is he talking about the Romans who went into Egypt and plundered and stripped that entire rich kingdom and tore up everything, then turned it into a granary which they plundered. If you want to know why so many countries in the third world are so poor just look at the history of imperialism. They weren’t naturally and inevitably poor. They were made poor under development was something that was imposed on them as they were developing. They had wealth, many of them had very advanced civilizations. They were forced back and plundered and impoverished. Going back to Rome, King Mithridates said to the Romans when they came in to his small kingdom: “the Romans have constantly had the same cause, a cause for making war upon all nations peoples and kings. The insatiable desire for Empire and wealth” and wealth, there is another word and wealth, he put those together empires and wealth. A Caledonian chief (Caledonia is an area part of what we now call Scotland) Kyle Gekas: “You find in the Romans an arrogance which no reasonable submission can elude. Brigands of the world they have exhausted the land by their indiscriminate plunder. They create a desolation and call it peace. Our goods and money are consumed by taxation, our land is stripped of its harvest to fill their granaries”. Now we’re getting a little closer to things aren’t? we, now we can see what it is. Empires are enormously profitable mostly for the ruling class. Empires are also enormously costly mostly for the common populace. The people of Rome didn’t do well on the empire, they got grain and that was it. They often paid the price in blood, they were piled up in tenements and like and that’s the truth of every Empire. The Empire feeds off the resources of the Republic and that was true for the Roman Empire in its days and that was true of the British Empire and that’s true today…”