Reply #21: Thank you for making me famous! I wrote the quoted remark - and defy [View All]

[RichM]

anyone here to seriously dispute it. I wrote it rapidly, in 20 seconds or so, so that the wording was not intended to be flawless. Thus, some may legitimately object, as did Mairead, that the word "society" was used rather than "ruling class." OK, I actually prefer that word choice myself.

But in the main, anyone who argues that the US is not an imperialist power is simply not familiar with the history. It's not a matter of opinion. The continental US exists because it exterminated the entire race of native Americans, then annexed the whole Southwest by armed aggression. After a brief interlude for some domestic unpleasantness in 1861-65, the beat picked up again with the Spanish-American war. Note that both this war & the Mexican war were just like Vietnam and the Iraq war of 2003 in this respect: the publicly-stated cassus belli was a bald-faced lie. // Virtually all of Latin America has been a private preserve of US capital for 150 years. Whenever a movement in that region has tried to chart an independent course, the US has come in to smash it down.

Since 1898, the US has never stopped trying to extend its global reach. There have been many scores of overt invasions and covert government destabilizations. Every single one of them was intended to make conditions more suitable for the foreign operations of US corporations. None of them had the slightest thing to do with morality -- in fact, in EVERY one of them, the US was on the wrong side. The US always takes the side of a tiny ruling class in its victim countries (typically the top fraction of a percent that owns 90% of the wealth), supplies them with arms, and helps them smash labor unions, community organizers, students, & all manner of progressive & independent thinkers.

What is most revealing about the naive Mr. JohnLocke is that my interchange with him arose while he was trying to say that this nasty stuff only happens with Republicans in control. I made the quoted remark in the context of pointing out to him that the Democrats have been every bit as bad; that this tendency towards imperialism & militarism has nothing to do with party. LBJ and Nixon had the same Vietnam policy, except for a few surface details. Truman was in office when the US backed neofascists in Greece. Carter backed the Shah and Somoza & the rightist government of El Salvador. Clinton enforced murderous sanctions on Iraq, bombing it weekly for 8 years, when he wasn't busy bombing Kosovo and the Sudan.

Imperialism is a natural and inevitable consequence of monopoly capitalism. By the time all major industries become dominated by one or a few enormous corporations, their interests control the government. There is no more democracy in such a state; there is only the facade of democracy. The corporate giants feel irresistibly drawn to reach for lucrative opportunities in the markets, cheap labor & natural resources of small defenseless countries all over the globe. This becomes "government policy." If anyone in those countries objects, the US smashes them. That's how it is; that's how it has been for over a century - under both of the 2 big business parties.

Of course, that's not how they teach it in high school or on the History Channel. I wonder why not!