Simple Ideas, Robust Evidence, Part 3: The United States is an Empire

But it does not fit with our self-image as the light of the world.

I wrote my American Empire essay a generation ago. If I am fortunate enough to have the time to update it before I get too old to do it, it will receive a significant update. I have studied the rise and fall of dozens of empires over the years. They all operated similarly, with some elites who fought and schemed their way to the top of their societies, and when the opportunity arose, they conquered their neighbors to increase their economic base, which is always rooted in energy. Where today’s land-grabbing Israel sits has been the site of endless bouts of bloodshed over the past several thousand years, as empires fought over it. Today’s genocide in Gaza is the latest chapter in that tale of woe, and if that region did not have oil, this would not be happening.

Ever since bipedal apes began making stone tools, they drove species to extinction. My distant ancestors drove Neanderthals to extinction (along with all other human species), and it was likely only the latest population replacement. In Europe, after the Neanderthals were gone and Earth warmed into the Holocene, farmers displaced hunter-gatherers, who were in their turn displaced by herder societies. As Gore Vidal once said, history is nothing more than the bloody migrations of tribes.

The rise of Europe and its conquest of the world is the greatest demographic catastrophe in the human journey, and even imperial-apologist Steven Pinker called the “settling” of the Western Hemisphere by Europeans history’s greatest crime. The USA is just another settler-society that invaded and displaced the former inhabitants. But Europe did it on an unprecedented scale, as three continents were quickly shorn of their native populations to make way for the “settlers,” and the regions in Africa most like Europe were similarly “settled.” But the greatest death toll was inflicted by British rule in India, which led to nearly two billion shortened lives.

England industrialized in the midst of that conquest, which is a watershed moment in the human journey that led to the biggest event in the human journey so far: the elimination of childhood death, which was a side effect of the Industrial Revolution, with improvements in sanitation, nutrition, and hygiene. It had nothing to do with medical interventions. Instead of half of all offspring’s dying before adulthood, which was a trend that went back to gorillas, almost none do today in industrialized societies.

The “Father of Our Country,” George Washington, crafted the strategy to swindle the natives out of their land, which worked brilliantly, and Washington called his new nation an infant empire. The next century was devoted to stealing the rest of temperate North America (and Trump wants the rest of North America), and then the USA began a true imperial expansion, stealing Hawaii, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and it experimented with a novel form of imperialism called neocolonialism. It invented Panama that way, to steal the Panama Canal Zone (which Trump wants back, too).

After the World Wars, Europe lost its imperial holdings and the USA began displacing European empires with a cheap form of imperial policy during the Eisenhower years, of threatening nations with nuclear weapons and overthrowing disfavored governments with covert action. It was an empire on the cheap, and part of the strategy was to deny that the USA even was an empire, but was instead a self-appointed global policeman that spread freedom and democracy. The only people fooled by that were brainwashed Americans.

Today, the USA has hundreds of military bases that dot the globe, protecting the interests of the Fortune 500, but that admission will rarely be seen in the American media. Another brief exception was a Bush administration confession soon after the invasion of Iraq.

With Trump’s focus on securing the resources of North America, including Greenland, I regularly read that the American Empire is coming to an end, or is maybe just repositioning itself. But outside of the USA’s mainstream media, the fact that the USA is an empire is not lost on anybody. The USA specializes in brainwashing its citizens with history’s most sophisticated propaganda effort, and admitting that the USA is just another greedy empire does not sit well with our carefully crafted self-image.

For the people that I seek, if they are Americans, awakening to our imperial reality is a necessity. In the Fifth Epoch, there will not be nations or empires, as that benighted chapter of the human journey will have ended, and nobody will miss it, even those imperial potentates on thrones with their harems.