The American Empire

Another Social Construct that Will End in the Fifth Epoch

I first published my medical racket and American Empire essays in 1999-2000, and in the 25 years since then, they are likely my most read essays.  My energy writings as a whole likely come in a distant third place, alas.  I think that the reasons why include the fact that to understand the energy issue, people need to be scientifically literate, and relatively few people are.  Issues such as Global Warming are rather distant from people’s immediate concerns, gasoline is still cheap, and like it or not, most of my readers have been Americans, although they are not really my target audience.  My target audience is disillusioned idealists, although the population of disillusioned Americans has been growing, arguably since the first oil crisis, when the American standard of living began declining, and certainly since the 9/11 terror attacks and subsequent the invasion of Iraq.

The medical racket also has had more intimate and obvious impact than the energy issue, and it was never more apparent than during the COVID pandemic, as people were forced into becoming subjects of medical experiments, in echoes of the Nazis.  My American Empire writings are probably my best-known, and over 80 posts into my Substack career, I guess that I need to devote at least one post to the American Empire, although I sketched aspects of it in a recent post and had a little ditty on the CIA.

Empires have risen and fallen since the first civilizations, and what made the USA unique was the invasion of a largely unexploited continent just as England made its rise to industrialization.  Temperate North America had intact soils and forests, which the invaders wasted no time in exploiting, as they inflicted history’s most spectacular deforestation while wiping out the wildlife and Indians, as part of arguably history’s greatest crime.  Then, as the USA copied England’s industrialization processes and completely deforested New England by the American Revolution, it began exploiting Appalachia’s rich coal deposits.  Less than a century later, it began exploiting North America’s vast oil and gas deposits, and “settlers” flooded North America in the millions.  The USA quickly became history’s richest and most powerful nation, long before World War II. 

George Washington is probably history’s most successful swindler (which Wikipedia still cannot bring itself to mention), and is aptly named the father of our country, as the new nation’s slave-owning richest man who called the USA an infant empire.  Stealing temperate North America took all of the USA’s attention for a century.  After the continent was secured, then the USA began acting like a true empire, stealing the last of Spain’s empire and Hawaii, which turned Mark Twain into an anti-imperialist (which the standard biographies often failed to mention). 

World War II, the USA’s “good war,” was a watershed moment for the American Empire, as it enjoyed unprecedented global hegemony and wealth when the war ended, and American planners intended to keep it that way.  Franklin Roosevelt was a neocolonialist himself, but made help to the European Allies in World War II contingent on the idea that Europe’s empires would be dismantled, and they were, over a generation or so.  But all too often, the USA simply became the new imperial overlords, and for that bloody reign, it is hard to do better than read Noam Chomsky’s and Edward Herman’s work.  I learned at their scholarly feet for nearly 30 years before I became Ed’s biographer.  While perhaps history’s greatest swindler has his achievement completely swept under the rug at Wikipedia, Ed’s biography is libelous, in standard imperial fashion.  Wikipedia’s treatment of Ed’s bio, as well as the New York Times’s obituary for Ed, actually demonstrates the validity of his Propaganda Model. 

Many times over the years, I have seen Noam say that the USA is not very exceptional, contrary to that ideological construct.  It was not until my studies over the past 20 years that I began to better understand what he meant.  The USA acts like all empires do, raping foreign peoples on behalf of the imperial class.  In that regard, the USA is no different from imperial Rome or the European empires. 

Rome’s transition to an empire from a republic was dramatic, and it is legitimate to wonder when the USA made that transition.  As Washington said, the USA always had imperial aspirations.  Events such as the Monroe Doctrine, the theft of half of Mexico, the invasion of Japan, the Civil War, the theft of Spain’s remaining empire, the USA’s raping of Latin America, the founding of the national security state, the wars in Korea or Vietnam, or the murder of JFK could all be contenders.  After JFK’s murder, all American presidents were puppets and knew it, like Roman emperors often were. 

As I wrote in my previous post, in the Fifth Epoch, nations and empires will end, and nobody will miss them.  Until then, however, the world has to deal with the bloody machinations of the decline of history’s greatest empire that pretends that it isn’t one, and we all hope that the crazed imperial class does not lead us into a nuclear war.