Agree or Disagree with the Following Statement:

"The point is that US imperialism is a deeply-rooted characteristic of our society, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with which party is in power. The US plays on the world stage to maximize its control - always has, always will. It's kidding oneself to think that this behavior is a feature of one party only. The style, rhetoric & faces change, but the drive for domination and control does not change."

ON EDIT: I encountered that statement on another thread here, and I vehemently disagree.

other countries had in America.

Every nation works for its own self-interest, and the US is no exception. It being as powerful as it is, this translates into a massive drive towards imperialism.

Though of course as far as they're concerned, they are. And as far as most of us have as class consciousness, they might as well be. (*sigh*)

in the back of my mind, I fear it may be true. That was one reason I had to quit visiting whatreallyhappened.com. Reading too much of that stuff will definitely lead one to believe the above statement.

But, although that site might contain some commentary, it links to real reports. I kinda feel like an ostrich for not visiting daily like I used to. There is a raw reality, and that site, for me, brings a lot of it to light.

And yeah, I believe a certain, constant force in our nation, one that may not be visible, is always pushing for world dominance.

On eidt: is it possible we, as a nation, have somehow become essentially the military arm of a now unseen Brittish empire? Or maybe the military arm of Israel? Questions I can't answer with certainty.

I got more and more depressed reading that stuff on a daily basis. My sister pointed me in that direction a couple of years ago. I don't know whether to be mad at her or thank her for opening my eyes. SHE sometimes borders on the extreme, IMO (but I love her to death). The Israel argument has some merit in my opinion. I just can't understand why we, as a nation, seem to protect them so fanatically at times. Not that I have a really strong opinion on the Israel-Palestine issue - I don't - even though some may feel that I should.

but they aren't 'our society'.

the US or out of it, decide to make their own survival a higher priority than the interests of US defense and energy industries.

I believe it would be preferable if the decision were made domestically, as opposed to being imposed externally.

because of 12 yrs of reagan/bush. Who knows what kind of hell bush* jr's foreign policy is bring upon us and our children! What foreign policy did Carter have that brought trouble to us? How about Clinton? I would say the republican congress are more responsible for the bin laden attacks than Clinton could ever be blamed for.

Eight years of sporadic bombing of Iraq?

Ignorance of Turkey's ethnic cleansing?

Ignorance of East Timor until it became politically untenable to ignore it?

What could he do regarding Turkey and East Timor? We can't go invading every country. The world is full of injustice and murder.

It eventually did succeed, in the case of East Timor.

thanks to his belligerant, insanely anti-communist NSA Bzrezinski, the original neo-con. In effect, it was the Carter administration that gave birth to al Qaeda.

should get credit for bring down the Soviet Union and not Reagan, simply because he had the forsight to draw the USSR into a Vietnam like war leading to their eventual implosion.

The US began its policy of funding the madrassas through the Pakistani intelligence service then, not caring much if poor Pakistani kids wound up being fodder in holy wars as long as leftist regimes were destabilized in the process. The Carter admin goaded the Soviets into invading Afghanistan. That's not a policy for Democrats or Americans to be proud of, in my opinion.

It was poorly cleaned up, afterwatd, but that is another matter. The Soviet Union was worth fighting, and that was an apt place to fight it: it remains, viewed as a whole, good that it was done.

He granted the Shah asylum. Huge mistake.

bastards who took over his country? Those insane animals would have kidnapped the American for a lesser deed than giving the Shah asylum for medical treatment! Carter did the moral thing by giving the Shah asylum.

He was a brutal thug and no better than Saddam. Those bastards, and they certainly are, didn't arise from a vaccum.

:eyes:

The Iranian Revolution and its leaders are not the nicest of people by any means, but the Shah was not much better, except he was 'our' monster

institutions like the World Bank and IMF. Neither party is going to screw around with the world economy and neither party will seek to diminish our power within it. Clinton facilitated NAFTA and the Balkans intervention while ignoring Rwanda, Rwanda had no meaning to multi-nationals.

This is why Kerry is getting the nomination, he will not rock the boat. I doubt Clark, Dean, Edwards and Gephardt would have either. You can promise all you want during the primaries, but once you get in, you had better dance to the global tune.

Bush* is an inept wielder of our power, concentrating exclusively on the military. This is why we're screwed.

The US has always been imperialistic.... it is just more imperialistic now.

"For globalization to work, America can't be afraid to act like the almighty superpower that it is. The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonald-Douglas, the designer of the F-15, and the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technology is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps."

Thomas Friedman, New York Times, March 28, 1999

Want to play dueling philosophers, Mr. Locke? Yes, I'm familiar with your namesake. He may have been liberal for the 17th century but now he's way out of date.

(snips from The Unconscious Civilization)

The acceptance of corporatism causes us to deny and undermine the legitimacy of the individual as citizen in a democracy. The result of such a denial is a growing imbalance which leads to our adoration of self-interest and our denial of the public good. The overall effects on the individual are passivity and conformity in those areas which matter and non-conformism in those which don't.

(snip from Chapter 5)

I have already mentioned a number of oppositions central to this daily effort. We can now add to the list such simple battles as that for consciousness versus the comfort of remaining in the unconscious; responsibility versus passivity; doubt versus certainty; delight in the human condition or sympathy for the condition of others versus self-loathing and cynicism regarding the qualities of others.

This idea that sympathy for others is the essential characteristic of the human condition was, incidentally, central to Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments, a treatise that is rarely mentioned by false disciples of his economic theories. They limit themselves to a narrow reading of The Wealth of Nations and then apply it to the general organization and conditions of society. There is no indication that that was what Smith intended.

(end snips)

John Ralston Saul
http://www.geocities.com/radiochomsky/unconscious-civilization.html

edit: cross link to the other thread where I said the same thing
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=132&topic_id=365089#365628

We have 50 per cent of the world's wealth, but only 6.3 per cent of its population. In this situation, our real job in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which permit us to maintain this position of disparity. To do so, we have to dispense with all sentimentality . . . we should cease thinking about human rights, the raising of living standards and democratisation.

George Kennan, US Cold War Planner, 1948 NSC-68 document
Source: Naval War College Review, Vol. XXVII (May-June, 1975), pp. 51-108. Also in U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States: 1950, Volume I.

or maybe the 1848 War with Mexico - the UNITED STATES has been following a manifest destiny course. Maybe in the context of the wars against the original native inhabitants we have always been no more or no less an imperial society than say the Ottoman Turks. Only there is much hypocracy at play. I see no end to it.

but I don't believe that characteristic is universal. I'm sure there are members of the democratic party whose mindset would allow them to pursue such a course,but I don't think that those people would represent true liberalism. I think there are many people who are very aware of the boundries that exist between their desires to further their own goals,and imposing on other peoples rights and freedoms,and would place a much higher value on living an honorable life then they would on attaining the goal at the expense of others.

Fear, Greed and Racism. Man cannot be stoped but by he alone. It's not really just the US, It would have happened to any country with power that was in the position.

It's History repeating really, only the stakes have changed.

We started out by killing Indians, then Mexicans then Philippinos. We killed a million Vietnamese and untold numbers of Nicaraguans, Salvadorans, Guatemalans. Often as not we set up cooperative dictators or juntas who did the killing for us. Now we're killing Arabs, all with the best of intentions. Call it manifest destiny, American exceptionalisn or the New American Century, from the point ot view of those we're civilizing it must all look pretty much the same.

Remember when S O N Y stood for "soon own New York?"

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!

One question, though.

You wrote:

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.

Do you consider World War II to be in this category?

What about World War I (which was really a battle between two imperial alliances with no real "right" or "wrong" side)?

My comment about the US always being on "the wrong side" was made with the many Third World interventions in mind, not the world wars between the imperialist powers.

I pretty much agree with your statement about WWI.

About WWII - there are 2 ways to look at this. On the one hand, the Nazis were a bona fide "evil" enemy. (One of the reasons WWII is such a beloved war, & such a popular Hollywood-beloved cultural industry, is that it was the one war where our enemy was indisputably worse than we were.) On the other hand, the purity of the US role has been absurdly exaggerated. We love to picture ourselves as "standing nobly against evil," and all the dirty truths about ourselves get air-brushed out of the picture.

For example, the US harbored hopes, in the early & mid '30's, that Germany might prove a useful mechanism for destroying the USSR. The US was not that hostile towards Germany until it became clear, in the late 30's, that they were so hyper-aggressive that something simply had to be done about them. In 1936, the US stood aside & allowed Germany & Italy to arm Franco while we refused to sell arms to the Spanish Republicans. IOW, this was an officially "neutral" policy that in effect guaranteed victory to the fascists, and defeat to Spanish democracy. These postures are not those of a country that "loves democracy" and "hates fascism." Rather, they are the policies of a country that doesn't really mind fascism at all - unless they get too big for their britches.

Anyway, we were basically on the right side of WWII. However, the USSR was ALSO on the right side of it - a little detail most Americans don't even know about, & which is systematically underemphasized here. Furthermore, we didn't try to save the Jews, even though (some) people here knew very well what was happening. We firebombed Dresden -- this was an unneccesary atrocity. And of course, the WWI Treaty of Versailles was so harsh & vengeful that all the Allied Powers were somewhat responsible for the fact that there even WAS a second world war. The whole picture is just far less clean and glorious, the more you look into it.

The thing to bear in mind about Wold War Two is that it really was several wars rolled into one, and so naturally it defies easy characterization.

and like Napoleon, the Romans, and the Soviets...America will not let go until it's too late! If the debts begin to mount domestic spending will be sliced and taxes will go up. If liberty and democracy are to give way because of an angry public and a bad economy, elections can always be suspended and marshal shall be enforced. Finally luxuries will go only to the very wealthy, while a few basic necessities may be rationed out to everyone else by the military.

All outlaws, rebels, and those without visible ID tags will be shot on sight as terrorists...no questions asked! :nopity:

Are you contesting the fact that US imperialism is deeply-rooted, or are you offended by my assertion that US imperialism has nothing to do with which party is in control?

position on the matter.

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

7 combined kicks for RichM and you over several days
vs.
1 kick for a day-old-thread
--------------------
No comparision.

support your naive viewpoint. Isn't that the real reason?

Certainly, it's not that you're uninterested in the historical questions posed here. You were plenty interested enough to take a quote from one of my posts a few days ago, rip it out of context, and place it at the top of this thread, hoping you'd get everyone to "disagree vehemently" with it, just as you did. Instead, the poll shows that more people agreed with it than disagreed -- and you're unable to even write a single cogent paragraph defending your viewpoint.

My, my. How embarrassing for you. My condolences.

statement, not a one-word answer. People who have some grasp of the relevant history should be able to do better than a terse one-word snappish answer. Of course, if you have no idea what you are talking about, or why you hold the position you do, I guess one word is just the right thing for you.

for good measure.

wordy

For someone who claims to be a member of the party of conservation and consideration, you're not doing a very good job.

You've just made the most cogent argument against the Green Party that I've ever seen here.

Are you going to follow up with Wonk and RichM?

Not that I care

Bush' error in Iraq was not an error in policy, but an error in application. It's no accident that the leading two candidates for the Democratic nomination supported the invasion and still support our presence there...even though the justifications for it have been stripped bare.

The statement attributes to the United States as a peculiarity what is in fact a universal characteristic.

All governments seek to expand to the limit of their ability to do so. These limits are found by technological constraints, of which forceful neighbors and geographical barriers, and even economic overstretch, are mere special cases.

The United States has been favorably situated for expansion through much of its history, and accordingly has been more successful at this universal aspiration than some others. It still has sway over less land than the old Mongols, and less predominance in capital and manufacturing than Victorian England. Nor does it show any likelihood of lasting recognizeably as long as the Celestial Kingdom, nor has it expanded so swiftly as did the Bolsheviks.

"There can be but one sun in the sky. There can be but one ruler of all men."

...tendencies, probably due to the fact that the US was clearly boxing them into a corner, and today, Russia is definitely behaving as an imperialist power vis the Chechens.

However, pre-79, and especially in Africa and SA, the USSR was anti-imperialist, while being a large power. But I guess, within their own borders, and in places like Yugoslavia, they were imperialists.

Any chance you could fill in the gaps in my appreciation of Soviet "imperialism"?

The U.S.S.R. was itself an utterly Imperialist power. The aim of the Bolsheviks was to take over the Czarist imperium, which included any number of once independent states and regions, ranging from the Ukraine to Poland to Finland, to the various Caucasian and Transoxianan emirates, to the formerly Ming territories north of the Amur in Siberia. All these things were held by force in the course of the Civil War, with the exception of Poland and Finland and the Baltic states, which fought free. During the twenties and thirties, Soviet policy in Mongolia and Manchuria was purely imperialist, leading to dominion over one, and maintaining extra-territoriality over capital investment in the other, at least until Japan took the place over. In the early stages of World War Two, while still allied with Hitler, the U.S.S.R. took over parts of Poland, the Baltic states, slices off Rumania, and seized portions of Finland. After that war, the Soviet Union imposed its rule on not only the formerly Czarist possession of Poland, but also over various other East European states, such as Rumania, Hungary, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and parts of Germany. All these were exploited economically and militarily in the classic style. Later the U.S.S.R., under the claim of "anti-imperialism", sought to replace Western imperialism with its own dominion in such venues as the Caribbean and the Near East, but its propagandas in this direction ought to be taken no more seriously then the "Free World" propagandas of the West. Nor is this list of Soviet imperial activities exhaustive: complexities such as Korea, Indo-China, and a variety of failed ventures, have been ommitted. The Soviets, Sir, were an imperium; make no mistake in that regard. Like all others, they expanded just as far as they could, until checked by constraints they could not over-come.

originated it and subsequent lack of substance in any of the "rebuttals" by said poster.

I actually think it's a deeply rooted charactaristic of our species in general. Any society that becomes very powerful will behave in essentially the same way. The U.S. is no exception.

But that isn't to say that the two parties approach it the same way.

both parties are guilty. History seems to be repeating itself. The difference to me is that the weapons can be smaller and more lethal.
Using them on us is not an unreasonable theory, there is documented evidence that the gov. does experiment on our own people and soldiers. The only difference to me anymore is that the left is some what less terrible to the poor and women.

but I'm actually a little ambivalent about the "always has, always will" part. Up until the US conquered most of North America, we didn't concern ourselves with affairs off-continent. And of course, the future is unknowable; but certainly the history of the late-19th century to the present is a story of imperialism for power and control.

...that is, before the late 19th century, the US was primarily concerned with exercising imperialist attacks against the various native american nations, and against mexico. the mexican-american war, which culminated in the Gadsden Purchase of my own home states, was a manufactured war much in the vein of the current one, the main difference being that polk waited for the provoked mexican people to actually attack the armies camped out on the rio grande waiting for provocation. probably the only reason why they weren't so concerned about affairs off-continent is that they were trying to subdue and, as you put it, conquer this continent first.

by the way, i voted yes, although i disagree with the "always will" part. i tend to view the course of history as a progressing struggle for greater and greater freedom, and i trust that history will prove fatalistic ideas such as those to be groundless.

--jim k.

Personally, I don't agree with the statement, but I wonder what sort of cognitive gymnastics must be undertaken to agree and still attribute Dean with his messianic virtues.

I imagine that most Dean supporters are aware of Dean's support for virtually every military conflict after Vietnam, and are comfortable with his brand of soft imperialism. But I may be wrong.

one is slightly worse than the other, but both engage in it

...but CERTAINLY not in practice. witness the phillipines, mexico, cuba, etc.

--jim k.

Bolivia, China, Russia, Samoa, The Native Americans Puerto Rico, Venezuela, and Columbia

not all Americans want empire, I'm not sure it would be voted down if ever put to a vote. And the fact that some of us oppose it intellectually doesn't make us superior, as I'm sure you can find intellectual opposition to any other empire within its own borders.

People have to have a pretty strong desire for survival, which is closely allied to a desire to win. We learn early to want our team to win, our school, our party. We want our country to kick butt from time to time. You see some of that sentiment in every war, in the beginning, when it's all heroic speeches, troops in pressed clean uniforms with brand spanking new war toys.

We all believe we're better than others and therefore we should run the show, and why NOT take all the marbles, too?

We might not live our lives that way today, but how noble would we be if we had real power? I know I don't want to be tested that way.

The Democratic Party has *always* been the Pro-War Party, until Vietnam I guess.

the "always has, always will" part.. We started as a very isolationist country because we were scared of foreign influence on our country. Around the end of the 19th century we began to look out for a greater influence on the world. Before that we did only to a small extent in asia mostly.. China and Japan to be specific. Im not really sure when that started, but at the very begining of the US we were very isolationist. A lot of it had to do with the lack of a navy I would guess. As we got more power, we used it. To start off we had didnt have the drive for domination and control because we had too much to focus on forming our own country.

And I.m amazed frankly that so mnay people voted against it.

Not to admit the basic and longstanding US policy of expansion of power, global dominance, and imposition of will by force, financial pressue, and/or intrique would be incredibly naive.

He snipped it out of another thread, & it was something I wrote in 20 seconds, not being particularly careful about the exact wording.

Both party's use the US's political capital abroad, they do it for different reasons.

Both tend to use it to advance US economic goals, however, the Democrats use it far less to advance corrupt (morally or otherwise) economic goals.

In terms of military force, I just saw Charles Rangel promoting force in Haiti. We like force for humanity reasons (why i supported the war in Iraq), while the Republicans do for economic and tactical/strategic reasons internationally.