How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States

by Daniel Immerwahr

The result was total linguistic annihilation. Although traces of African idioms can be found in today’s black speech, not a single African language made it over on the slave ships and survived.

“The empires of the future are empires of the mind,” Winston Churchill announced in 1943 in a speech at Harvard. The key to that mental colonization, he believed, was linguistic.

The result was, after hundreds of years of colonial rule (counting Spain), the Philippines had no indigenous language spoken throughout the archipelago.

By the 1960s, at least forty U.S. government agencies sponsored English teaching abroad, most notably the Peace Corps (an instrument of “Western psychological warfare,” charged the president of Ghana).

But ultimately the language wasn’t imposed from the top down. It emerged from the bottom up.

Standards reflect power, but the real compulsion rarely comes from the state. It comes, rather, from the community.

The first group to fully go in for English was the air traffic controllers.

The next group to go in for English was the scientists.

Air traffic control and scientific research turned out to be mere preludes. The most powerful force for anglicization has been the internet.

“It is the ultimate act of intellectual colonialism,” sighed the director of an internet provider in Russia. “The product comes from America so we must either adapt to English or stop using it. That is the right of business. But if you are talking about a technology that is supposed to open the world to hundreds of millions of people you are joking. This just makes the world into new sorts of haves and have nots.” The president of France, Jacques Chirac, deemed the English-dominant internet “a major risk for humanity.”

India had, at its independence, temporarily allowed English to remain a “subsidiary official” language, with the understanding that the government would switch entirely to Hindi in 1965. But not only did English persist, it grew. Today, advertisements are in English, higher education is in English, and Bollywood movies feature generous helpings of English. The language remains in official use and is heard in parliamentary debates at roughly the same frequency as Hindi. The “bitter truth,” reported The New York Times recently, is that “English is the de facto national language of India.”

“If the Chinese … rule the world some day,” the linguist John McWhorter has written, “I suspect they will do it in English.”

English is not the language with the most native speakers today. Mandarin Chinese is, followed by Spanish. There are many people in the United States itself who struggle with English. But what’s remarkable about English is that it’s the language with the most nonnative speakers. Estimates vary widely, but it seems that roughly one in four humans on the planet can now speak it. That number appears to be growing.

A study commissioned by the British Council of five poorer countries (Pakistan, Bangladesh, Cameroon, Nigeria, and Rwanda) found that professionals who spoke English earned 20 to 30 percent more than those who didn’t.

In South Korea, parents alert to this dynamic have sent their young children, usually under the age of five, to clinics for lingual frenectomies, surgery to cut the thin band of tissue under the tongue. The operation ostensibly gives children nimbler tongues, making it easier for them to pronounce the difficult l and r sounds. If masters once cut slaves’ tongues out to prohibit native languages, today people do the cutting themselves. And they do it to enable English.

As a professor at a Seoul university put it, “English is now becoming a means of survival.”

In other words, U.S. students have responded to globalization by learning half as many languages.

World domination from an island, though—that’s different. As far as I can tell, it’s a more recent literary phenomenon. As far as I can tell, it begins with Bond.

Jamaica was, for Fleming, one of those “blessed corners of the British empire,” a place where brown-skin natives still served drinks at the club and the fantasies of colonial life could be indulged for just a while longer.

The plan, undertaken in secret starting in 1935, was to visit the Pacific guano islands, raise a flag, install a plaque, and drop off “colonies” of four or more Hawaiians on each.

The pointillist empire today: Known U.S. bases beyond the mainland

Gruening’s Gilbert and Sullivan–style adventures in the Pacific in the 1930s marked the turn toward pointillism. The Second World War locked the trajectory in. That war gave the United States more than two thousand overseas base sites.

On Guam, increased rights and citizenship came at the cost of a massive military buildup—today, more than a quarter of the island is military bases.

This was Barber’s “strategic island concept,” and it gave a name to what the United States was already doing. It underscored the point that in this new pointillist empire, colonialism was a liability, not an asset. The best bases were those that didn’t enmesh large populations. They were places where, in the words of Doctor No, the United States would have to “account to no one.” Or, as Albizu put it, “The Yankees are interested in the cage but not the birds.”

The test made the once-obscure atoll a household name. Four days after it, the French fashion designer Louis Réard debuted a two-piece bathing suit. He dubbed it the “bikini,” on the grounds that the sight of a woman’s mostly unclothed body was as sensational as the bomb.

Henry Kissinger, the country’s most esteemed civilian nuclear expert, voiced the prevailing attitude in blunter fashion. “There are only 90,000 people out there,” he said, referring to Micronesia. “Who gives a damn?”

Gojira was remixed for the United States, using much of the original footage but splicing in a white, English-speaking protagonist played by Raymond Burr. What got cut out was the antinuclear politics. The Hollywood version contains only two muted references to radiation. And it ends on a much happier note: “The menace was gone,” the narrator concludes. “The world could wake up and live again.” The Japanese Gojira was a protest film, hammering away at the dangers of the U.S. testing in the Pacific. The English-language Godzilla, by contrast, was just another monster flick.

Yet while nukes on bases protected the mainland, they imperiled the territories and host nations. Flying nuclear weapons around the bases—something the military did routinely—risked catastrophic accident. Even when the weapons stayed put, their presence turned the bases into tempting targets, especially since overseas bases were easier for Moscow to hit than the mainland was. Arming the bases was essentially painting bright red bull’s-eyes on them.

The Beatles and the peace symbol, in other words, debuted within four months and a day’s train ride of each other. And both were side effects of the U.S. basing system.

In the face of the protests, the United States returned Okinawa to Japan in 1972. But it kept the bases. Today, 20 percent of the island is used by the U.S. military.

The longer the race, the less meaningful a head start is.

The Saudi royals worried how it might look to let a U.S. flag fly over the land of Mecca and Medina. So nervous was the king that he forbade the U.S. consulate at Dhahran from physically planting a flag. Instead, the Stars and Stripes was attached to the side of the building to prevent its touching Saudi soil. And the site was to be called an “airfield,” never a base.

In 1988 he formed a small organization to direct the jihad. It was called, fittingly, al-Qaeda al-Askariya (“the Military Base”). Or just al-Qaeda (“the Base”), for short.

“The myth of the superpower was destroyed not only in my mind but also in the minds of all Muslims,” Bin Laden reflected. And if one superpower could collapse easily, why not another?

It was a disaster. Not only was Bin Laden not at the Afghan base, no other al-Qaeda leader was killed. The Sudanese pharmaceutical plant was destroyed, but it is doubtful that it had any role in making chemical weapons. The United States had thus expended nearly three-quarters of a billion dollars’ worth of missiles to kill a dozen or two low-level al-Qaeda members and destroy the factory that made more than half of Sudan’s medicine, including vital antimalarials. Since sanctions against Sudan made importing medicine difficult, this caused an uncounted number of needless deaths—Germany’s ambassador to Sudan guessed “several tens of thousands”—in one of the world’s poorest countries.

Bin Laden’s list of grievances against the United States was long, ranging from its support of Israel to Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky.

This is worth emphasizing. After the 9/11 attacks, “Why do they hate us?” was the constant question. Yet Bin Laden’s motives were neither unknowable nor obscure. September 11 was, in large part, retaliation against the United States for its empire of bases.

Al-Qaeda’s planes operation seems to have been guided by a larger strategy: provoke the United States, draw it into a war in the Middle East, force infidel governments there into crisis (they would have to either accommodate the unpopular occupiers or fight them), and then defeat the United States on the ground, just as the mujahidin had defeated the Soviet Union. But for this to work, Bin Laden needed Washington to send troops, not just shoot a few Tomahawk missiles.

Bush could have treated the 9/11 attacks as a crime, arrested the perpetrators, and brought them to justice. Instead, he declared a “war on terror” of global expanse and promised to “rid the world of evil-doers.”

Yet despite his grand ambitions, Bush had little interest in the sort of ground campaign typical of the age of colonialism, the sort Bin Laden was banking on. As a presidential candidate, he’d come out strongly against occupations: “I just don’t think it’s the role of the United States to walk into a country and say, we do it this way, so should you.” Instead, he called for an agile military, able to strike quickly and then leave. It was the revolution in military affairs.

But the war on terror wasn’t ultimately a fight between countries, as the Gulf War had been. It was a “very new type of conflict,” Rumsfeld told the press a week after 9/11. “We’ll have to deal with the networks.” This metaphor of the network—a set of connected points—became ubiquitous, acquiring the same sort of buzzword cachet that quagmire had possessed in the Vietnam War. The connotation pointed in another direction, though. If quagmire described a fight on the ground, network suggested that the space of the battlefield would be different, or that it might not even make sense to speak of battle as taking place on a field.

What is more, by patiently stalking their prey, drones could target not just buildings but individuals—they could put “warheads on foreheads,” as the military vernacular had it.

Thanks to drones, battles could be replaced by the targeted killing of individuals. With this, the lines of war blurred. What was a combat zone and what wasn’t could be confusing. The most conspicuous use of armed drones has been, in fact, in “friendly” nations. Drones have killed (by the CIA’s estimate) more than two thousand people in Pakistan, including Osama bin Laden’s son Saad. Drone warfare has crept into Somalia, Yemen, Libya, and Syria, too.

“We’re not an imperial power,” Bush insisted. “We’re a liberating power.”

“We covet no one’s land”—it was a line Rumsfeld and his colleagues repeated over and over. And it was right. However often the Bush administration was accused of imperialism, it exhibited very little interest in colonizing. “If we were a true empire, we would currently preside over a much greater piece of the earth’s surface,” noted Vice President Dick Cheney, not without warrant.

Whether Guamanians supported the move was irrelevant, as a graduate student who secured an interview with a surprisingly candid air force analyst discovered. People on Guam were forgetting that “they are a possession, and not an equal partner,” the analyst explained. “If California says they want to do this or that, it is like my wife saying that she wants to move here or there: I’ll have to respect her wish and at least discuss it with her. If Guam says they want to do this or that, it is as if this cup here,” he continued, pointing to his coffee mug, “expresses a wish: the answer will be, you belong to me and I can do with you as best I please.”

Guam may be a small island, but it matters tremendously that there is this one spot, far into the Pacific, that the U.S. military can use without asking anyone’s permission.

The Sunday after the 9/11 attacks, Dick Cheney went on television and announced that the government would have to work “the dark side.” “It’s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal,” Cheney explained. In practice, this meant indefinitely detaining and forcefully interrogating suspected terrorists.

Through a process known as “extraordinary rendition,” the CIA used a secret air fleet to fly more than a hundred and possibly thousands of detainees to foreign countries, particularly Egypt, Morocco, Syria, Uzbekistan, and Jordan. “They are outsourcing torture because they know it is illegal” is how one victim of the system put it.

The government also made use of what it called “black sites.” In these, detainees were held in CIA custody, but covertly and on foreign soil, where they could be dealt with more harshly.