Life as an Imperial Citizen
In an Empire that Pretends that It Is Not One
I was raised in a military family in a military community in an empire that pretends that it is not one, and I nearly became a soldier myself, while all the men in my immediate family, going up my family tree for a century (1, 2), did. Mass-murdering thieves were presented to me as saints, heroes, and fathers of my nation. I was also raised in a racist and bigoted household in a racist and bigoted nation. In scale, intensity, and duration, the USA is history’s most racist nation. Growing up, I drank the Kool-Aid that was force-fed me from the cradle. I had awakening moments while growing up, which were important (1, 2), but I clearly recall in my freshman year of college, when a friend carried a book on campus on how American Indians in the Wild West were subjected to genocide, as part of a class that she was taking. I remember being somewhat startled and I had a negative emotional reaction when seeing that book, thinking that it was grinding some kind of political ax that may have had a tenuous connection to the truth. What a brainwashed rube I was!
A college roommate began calling out my racism, and it took years to put that behind me, as I gradually realized what a barn I had been raised in. After graduation, I rather gently began questioning what I had been taught, such as my question about my profession. Around the same time, I subscribed to Christian Science Monitor, trying to broaden my horizons beyond the daily newspaper. As I have stated plenty, if I had not met Dennis Lee, I would probably not have much worth saying. Over the next three years, I had the kind of education that can’t be bought. I have met people who reminded me of how I might have turned out if I had not met Dennis: well-meaning but naïve.
By 1990, I am not sure that I had any cherished beliefs left, especially about my society. It was only then that I began to learn at the scholarly knees of people such as Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman. Nearly 30 years later, I became Herman’s biographer. I studied everything in those days, partly to see if anything taught to me while growing up was true, and not much survived my radicalized scrutiny.
I slowly realized that the lies that I was raised with were really no different, in kind, from the lies that all people are raised with, as they are socialized into their in-groups. I eventually realized what made the USA different from other empires. Previous empires were more honest in ways, but that is relative. Until industrialization, plundering other societies was the noblest of professions. The genocidal destruction of imperial rivals was normal. Industrialization happened when Europe was conquering the world. Anglo-Americans stole a resource-rich continent just as the West was industrializing, which led to history’s greatest empire. Even an imperial apologist such as Steven Pinker called Europe’s “settling” of the Western Hemisphere history’s greatest crime. Hitler tried to reproduce the Anglo-American “success” in Eastern Europe.
When Spain conquered the New World, it was obsessed with “treasure,” which ignorant Spaniards literally thought was the ticket to heaven, as they inflicted history’s greatest genocide. At least Spain had some priests who protested the entire affair, unlike England. When the British eventually won the imperial contest through their industrialization, the United Kingdom became history’s first global empire. The British had a conceit of bringing the light of civilization to the world’s benighted masses, but they inflicted history’s largest death toll. That is what empires do, all of them, and the USA is no different in kind.
Like the British did, the USA conjures many conceits for its imperial behavior, and with few exceptions, the American people swallow the propaganda hook, line, and sinker. Few Americans really care what happens beyond our borders, as long as the cheap imports keep rolling in. My experiences and studies poked holes in all of the dominant ideologies, and almost nobody in my life wanted to hear about it. It was a kind of secondary loss of naïveté for me. The first loss was coming to understand how American society really operated, and the second was seeing how everybody played along, with no awareness or caring beyond their immediate self-interest, even when it meant certain death, paradoxically.
If Ed was active today, his writings would include these imperial topics and the media’s role in them:
1. The situation in Ukraine, as the USA goads Russia toward nuclear war;
2. The genocide in Gaza that the USA is abetting.
In his last years, Ed wrote about the USA’s efforts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and Libya, among others. His two greatest writing projects in his later years were about the USA’s imperial behavior in Yugoslavia and Rwanda. There is no lack of imperial subjects to write about.
Life as an American citizen is to be brainwashed daily, as the most egregious imperial atrocities are framed as humanitarian undertakings, and the resources that come under imperial control are somehow unintended side effects of our heroic efforts. As Noam often said, the USA is not “exceptional” in these behaviors, and it took many years of study before I realized what he meant. All empires basically act the same, with the same goals. The only differences are how they go about it.
As I often write, these imperial outrages are just what a world of scarcity and fear looks like. Only when abundance reigns will such activities end.