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Modern Empire?
Former Member
Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
Funny Sort of Empire
Are Americans really so imperial?
Victor Davis Hanson
It is popular now to talk of the American "empire." In Europe particularly there are comparisons of Mr. Bush to Caesar — and worse — and invocations all sorts of pretentious poli-sci jargon like "hegemon," "imperium," and "subject states," along with neologisms like "hyperpower" and "overdogs." But if we really are imperial, we rule over a very funny sort of empire.
We do not send out proconsuls to reside over client states, which in turn impose taxes on coerced subjects to pay for the legions. Instead, American bases are predicated on contractual obligations — costly to us and profitable to their hosts. We do not see any profits in Korea, but instead accept the risk of losing almost 40,000 of our youth to ensure that Kias can flood our shores and that shaggy students can protest outside our embassy in Seoul.
Athenians, Romans, Ottomans, and the British wanted land and treasure and grabbed all they could get when they could. The United States hasn't annexed anyone's soil since the Spanish-American War — a checkered period in American history that still makes us, not them, out as villains in our own history books. Most Americans are far more interested in carving up the Nevada desert for monster homes than in getting their hands on Karachi or the Amazon basin. Puerto Ricans are free to vote themselves independence anytime they wish.
Imperial powers order and subjects obey. But in our case, we offer the Turks strategic guarantees, political support — and money — for their allegiance. France and Russia go along in the U.N. — but only after we ensure them the traffic of oil and security for outstanding accounts. Pakistan gets debt relief that ruined dot-coms could only dream of; Jordan reels in more aid than our own bankrupt municipalities.
If acrimony and invective arise, it's usually one-way: the Europeans, the Arabs, and the South Americans all say worse things about us than we do about them, not privately and in hurt, but publicly and proudly. Boasting that you hate Americans — or calling our supposed imperator "moron" or "Hitler" — won't get you censured by our Senate or earn a tongue-lashing from our president, but is more likely to get you ten minutes on CNN. We are considered haughty by Berlin not because we send a Germanicus with four legions across the Rhine, but because Mr. Bush snubs Mr. Schroeder by not phoning him as frequently as the German press would like.
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"Our overriding purpose, from the beginning through to the present day, has been world domination - that is, to build and maintain the capacity to coerce everybody else on the planet; nonviolently, if possible; and violently, if necessary. But the purpose of US foreign policy is not to make the rest of the world jump through hoops; the purpose is to facilitate our exploitation of resources"
- Ramsey Clark, former US Attorney General
Sure we dont send proconsuls, lol. what a ludicrous claim. We simply set up puppet governments or ally with repressive dictators as long as it gives our industry the greenlight to extract far more economic value than the meagre comparative costs of establishing our bases in whatever countries they may be.
For the Yanks to even start to compare September the 11th to the holocaust is absurd and disgraceful when they've been allowing other similar things to go on without stopping them unless it suits them.
Ever read John Locke? Try.
Maybe you should recheck where that article appeared and who wrote it.
Not a bad article I suppose, especially when I see it was written by Tony Parsons. Although I think his link to the Holocaust is an exagerration...to say the least.
Just for reference though the Daily Mirror is a downmarket tabloid. When Tony Parsons talks about the outcry regarding Camp X-ray, it's worth noting that the Mirror was one of the main protagonists is creating anti-american feeling. Its also worth noting that they had to apologise to the US Embassy for some of their reporting recently.
I remember one article in perticular, in the express, which mentioned that there was a rise in crack use in Brighton and these evil 'yardie' gangsters were looking around for places to push it on our children. The hieght of the article though was the suggestion that children were swapping from the sweet hard candy to the deathly addiction of crack.
Careful - there's one or two polysyllabic words in there.
The longest period of peace and advances came under the Roman Empire. The writer has some good points (and some that are questionable as to if they are actually representative of Empires). Of course, comparing military bases to colonies ignores the purpose of the colonies, or the reasons that the troops were there under Rome vs. under the USA.
They'll have to think again about the Quiet American
By Mark Steyn
(Filed: 12/01/2002)
The brand new film of The Quiet American is at least as much a travesty of Graham Greene's novel as the old 1958 film was. Back then, the book was too anti-American. Forty years on, it's not anti-American enough. So Greene's ambiguous naif blundering around colonial Vietnam has been oomphed up: the eponymously quiet American played by Brendan Fraser is now, as Peter Bradshaw puts it in The Guardian, "a CIA kingpin whose fresh-faced Ivy League mask falls away at the end to reveal a coldly ideological functionary".
Hmm. A genial Ivy League mask hiding a coldly ideological kingpin. Who does that remind you of? Of all the strains of anti-Americanism available these days, the new Quiet American at least takes the view that the blundering naivety is an artful pose. Off-screen, most anti-Americans won't even go that far. On Tuesday, Franoise Ducros, the Communications Director for the Prime Minister of Canada, was forced out of her job because she'd been overheard at the Nato summit disparaging the intelligence of President Bush. This is not quite the official position of Her Majesty's Government in Ottawa.
It's fine for the French Foreign Minister to accuse the White House of "simplisme", because those idiot Americans are far too simplistic to know what simplisme means. It's safe for "senior British civil servants", in this newspaper, to dismiss Bush as "a bear of little brain", because those frightful Yanks are too ill-educated to recognize such a subtle intellectual literary allusion. It's okay to sneer at the President, as is done routinely at dinner parties in London, Paris, Winnipeg, all the great cities, as "not the brightest bulb in the chandelier", because such concepts as metaphor and analogy are almost certainly unknown to the birdbrain.
Had she done any of the above, Franoise Ducros would still have her job. But instead she cut to the chase. "What a moron!" she scoffed, speaking in Prague to a CBC reporter. The CBC guy barely noticed the remark: I mean, what's the big deal? Everyone knows Bush is a moron, don't they? But Miss Ducros happened to be overheard, and the Canadian government was concerned that, moronic as Bush might be, even a moron knows the term isn't a compliment. Miss Ducros' job is to get her boss press coverage, no easy thing when your boss is the Prime Minister of Canada, and the only coverage she got out of the Nato meeting came when Saddam Hussein publicly endorsed her opinion of Mr Bush and she temporarily displaced Celine Dion as the most famous Canadian in Baghdad. Granted that, on the question of war with Iraq, Canada's doing its usual routine of insisting the sidelines are the moral high ground, the government's not yet ready to be Saddam's PR agency. So Francie Ducros bit the dust.
There's something apt about the way Miss Ducros' remark was seized on by Saddam, one delusional superiority complex reaching out to another. I was in the Gulf six months ago, and I came to the conclusion that a majority of the people I met - somewhere between 55 and 70 per cent - were, to use the technical term, nuts. That's to say, they believed things that no rational person could believe. You'd be talking to an attractive, westernised, educated Bahraini lady doctor and she'd suddenly start babbling on about how there was no plane that crashed into the Pentagon on September 11, all the footage had been faked by the government. "But I know someone who saw it from his office window," I said. "He just thinks he saw it," she replied. "The Americans know how to do these things."
John Derbyshire of America's National Review thinks the Middle East needs a massive invasion of psychiatrists. Well, about halfway through this last week in Canada, I realized I was beginning to feel about my homeland exactly the way I'd felt in Araby: these guys are nuts. Quebec's biggest English-language radio station, CJAD, conducted a listener poll on the question "Is George W Bush a moron?" Every single person said yes, he's definitely a moron, except for two who thought he was merely an idiot. On the letters pages, it was the same, except for Art Peel of Hamilton, Ontario, who complained that calling Bush a moron "does a disservice to the mentally challenged, most of whom are kind, gentle people".
Exactly. Most Canadians and most Europeans are kind, gentle people but, Bush-wise, they're the ones who are mentally challenged. The "moron" line is simply inadequate: no rational person can believe a twice-elected Texas Governor, successful US President and overthrower of the Taliban is a moron unless a majority of Americans are morons, too. And in that case how come the morons have a global dominance unparalleled in history? As with those wacky Arabs and their Zionist conspiracies, Euro-Canadian anti-Americanism is a psychosis.
In fairness to the late Ayatollah Khomeini, when he dubbed the US the Great Satan he at least understood that America is a tempter, a seducer: his slur attempts to explain its appeal. Calling America the Great Moron, by contrast, is just feeble. I happen to like moral clarity myself, but I can appreciate that for some tastes Bush's habit of dividing the world into "good" and "evil" and using these terms non-ironically might seem a little simplistic. But it's nowhere near as simplistic as dividing the world into "I'm right" and "you're stupid".
For Republicans, this is an old song. "President Reagan's library burned down. Both books," drawled Gore Vidal from his exile in Italy. "The tragedy was he had not finished colouring the books." This is the guy who won the Cold War. In the 1950s, Eisenhower was a smiling dummy who cared most about his golf. This is the fellow who won the Second World War. But long after everything else has crumbled away the intellectual arrogance of the anti-Americans is indestructible. "A man like George W Bush is simply not possible in our politics," I was told by an elegant, cultured Parisian this spring. "For a creature of such crude, simplistic and extreme views to be one of the two principal candidates in a presidential election would be inconceivable here. Inconceivable!" Two weeks later, Jean Marie Le Pen made it into the final round of the French election.
In The Quiet American, Graham Greene treated these cliches more fairly than most: the American may not understand the Vietnamese, but the worldly Englishman is mired in his jaded passivity. Whether these stereotypes were ever true, today they've been subtly modified. The Rest of the West is more mired in jaded passivity than ever, but it's no longer worldly, just hopelessly parochial: George Monbiot, The Guardian's unreliable predictor of mass devastation in the Hindu Kush, doesn't have a clue about the Afghans nor the Anglican bishops about the Iraqis; all they're doing is projecting their sad little Left-wing salon chit-chat halfway around the globe in a kind of sissy-boy cultural imperialism.
The American is still quiet but the Euro-Canadians get noisier in proportion to their impotence. American naivety transformed Japan and Germany. Anglo-French worldliness gave us Iraq, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and thereby September 11. If it takes centuries of "experience" in the region to invent Pakistan, then how much worse can a blundering Yank moron do?
Well actually, I hadn't, but that's not the point... :cool:
It was posted in a restricted access forum. :cool: