The American Empire:

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

So let's face facts. The United States, whether or not it wishes to use the term is an Empire. To refresh on what an Empire actually is and is not, an Empire is a core area extending tentacles of deadly force with intent to loot, maim, pillage, rape, and burn for profit. T

his is the textbook definition of what the USA has been since the British landed colonies on the Eastern seaboard and they landed to steal and loot Indian crops while whining about how backwards and uncivilized the people looted were. Which is of course the devil's dilemma of Empire. Conquest grants prestige, but if people are conquered they are weak and uncivilized by definition (because nothing says civilization like punctured human flesh and maimed bodies oozing blood, entrails, and shit all over the place, natch).

The USA is an Empire, to be sure, in the course of establishing what is sadly mislabeled its heartland. Nothing of the USA has been maintained peacefully, save perhaps the territory 'purchased' and even then that was held by soldiers at the end of the day. Florida and at least a quarter of the USA were grabbed in land grabs as blatant, sordid, and disgraceful as anything Russia does, with the added and odious reality that the USA was doing this directly to impose slavery where it had been abolished or to prevent fugitive slaves using Second Amendment Remedies for their freedom.

It is still more an empire following the grand and utterly fucking stupid exercises in self-destruction that were colonialism, where European powers rampaged at will across large parts of the world, forcibly redrawing places on maps and forming curious lacunae in the memories of those states. That so many of France's most odious immigrants are Algerians, a country where Algerian Arabs were nearly self-destructed by the French in pursuit of the Mission Civilatrice, this is an unspeakable truth. That Germany's first genocide was in Africa, directed at black Africans, still more unfeasible. That Belgium killed ten million Africans under Leopold II and many more after him, still more unthinkable as Belgians are forever invaded, not invaders for conquest.

That Europeans invaded the Middle East and made it into what it is and that the most common invaders of areas are quite content to bomb them (France in Syria and Lebanon, the UK in Iraq and Afghanistan) is as mute as the wisdom of the US Empire in tolerating rivals trying to retain their old spheres of influence it so mercilessly destroyed. Following this and two world wars bloated by that same colonialism where all the other Great Powers merrily blew themselves to red rags and the USA moseyed along rigging the situation to freeze the world in early 1950s military-industrial complex prosperity, the seeds of the present US Empire were sown.

In the name of democracy the United States has laid waste pitilessly to such societies as Haiti, where US occupation by soldiers can last for more than decades, for no real gain and arguably making it much, much worse. At a whim the USA proposes and disposes of rulers across the world, and entire governments in Central America, Cuba, Chile, and of course Kennedy's murder of Ngo Dinh Diem, one which liberals are conspicious in forgetting lest their sacred martyr of Dallas be punctured by gauging how he actually did things not as they'd like to remember him.

Yes, the USA is an Empire, which is why it matters not if there are Democrats or Republicans in the Oval Office. Empire is a force of evil and destruction, it finds marble and leaves ashes and blood and shit, it loots without pity to fatten a few greedy parasites in high places and provides high moral reasons for the most savage and barbarous deeds. Empire's very evil means that no matter whosoever wields the whip hand, the same phenomena will appear. If as current trends indicate China is at last extending the Middle Kingdom across oceans, China will soon start acting much the same or even worse, perhaps, as the United States.

As with the UK before it, the USA marries to bloodthirsty and savage and cruel imperialism the pious fraud that such a thing is in the service of supposedly egalitarian democracy. The Chinese, run by a one-party dictatorship perfectly happy to drown its own people in blood if it has to with nary a tear shed, will be still more brutal because as long as their cities are happy, they've not even a pretense of accountability to be said as crocodile tears are said over the horrors unleashed and nothing actually changing.

Yes, US influence in the world iis an evil thing, ensuring that the best lack all conviction while the worst burn in fires of passionate intensity, that a blood-dimmed tide of barbarism should consume the world in pursuit of greed and avarice. Such is the nature of Empires. But how, short of reverting to the none too stable definition of multi-polar worlds, a process already much in the way of progress, is there to be a change?

A multi-polar system need not be more stable. 100 years ago was a gruesome proof of that. But is it really that worse to have multiple independent power centers acting according to brute Machiavellian self-interest to a bloated tick reliant on its nuclear arsenal, decaying from laziness in assumptions unexamined that something 'gained' by mere existence was really desired to be exported in the first place? I do not think so. The US Empire is in relative decline, and I for one welcome a world where as it declines, other imperial power centers will begin to act independently in full once more, and then things will really get interesting. My only fear is that as Rome did 2,000 years ago, the decline of an empire won by overmighty soldiers in a republic will lead to a new kind of Emperor that as with the old masqueraded within adhering to republican form but long since dead in practice.

After all, as the Clintons and Bushes and Roosevelts and Kennedys and Tafts show, dynasty is already here. And an American Empire with American Emperors would do no one any good, least of all the United States.