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Article Excerpt
People sometimes say to me--and not just in the United States--'Don't you think using the word "imperialism" is rather old-fashioned?' To which my response always is: 'Perhaps, but then, invading and occupying countries is also old-fashioned and if that's what the United States does, then we have to call what it does by its name'.
This not to say that the United States has always preferred the option of taking over countries; in fact, historically speaking, it's very rare for it to actually occupy a country and run it--occupying them, running them, trying to hang on to them for as long as possible, provoking a resistance of various sorts that finally levers them out like what happened to the European empires in the late-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries.
The United States, on the contrary, preferred to rule large swathes of the world, especially Latin America, by organising a set of relays that would do their bidding. In most cases these were oligarchs of one sort or another. The oligarchs they usually preferred were uniformed, and we had a set of military dictatorships.
When the Cold War came to an end, many people automatically assumed that because communism had disappeared, socialism had been wiped off the map, and that whole set of countries--post-capitalist, call them what you will--had gone, disappeared like Atlantis, imperialism too must have disappeared. They forgot that the United States' empire predates the Russian revolution and the birth of communism and the creation of the all the states that followed 1917. It predates all that, as do the bulk of the European empires.
What we are living through today is a unique situation that has never existed before in the history of humankind. One dominant state--the United States--has come to occupy an unchallengeable position militarily in the globe. It is the only empire. Its military spending is larger than the next ten countries that follow it. Any thought that it can be challenged and defeated militarily by any other country is foolish. It cannot. Its plans can be stymied and it makes mistakes--such as occupying a country directly.
Such a mistake can be seen in present-day Iraq. What we have in Iraq today is a situation of savage chaos that is a direct result of the occupation of that country. Despite all the military power and technology, once you send ground troops in to a country you're as vulnerable as any other country. This is what we have been seeing in Iraq over the last few years where you have an extremely ugly occupation. Those who doubted this were soon to see photographs of it. We live, after all, in an age where torture can be digitally photographed and the photographs can be sent home to family and friends, like an obscene postcard, as if to say, 'Hi, we're having a good time!'
But of course when you send those photographs, some people do notice that not everyone in that photograph is having a good time. And some of the worst photographs have not been published.
It's nevertheless amazing, the capacity in the Western world to swallow almost anything. There's a two-day horror when the photograph comes out and then it's forgotten. And because the citizens of the Western world and the democracies in which they live have this amazing capacity to forget--or, to put it another way, not to be reminded by the media they read and watch--it is assumed that somehow, because they no longer think about it, it's not happening anymore.
The fact is, the torture has never stopped. It carries on to this day in the same prison. When they want to do more extreme versions of torture, the prisoners are taken to friendly states like Jordan, and, on one occasion, Syria, and on many occasions, Pakistan, where they can be tortured quite easily...
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