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

by Daniel Immerwahr

Old World diseases such as smallpox, typhus, and measles burned through the land like firestorms, moving farther and faster than the Europeans themselves.

i hate when authors skirt around the pox blankets…likeeew say the things bestie

“God has given us this Pacific empire for civilization,” said Senator Albert Beveridge. “A hundred wildernesses are to be subdued. Unpenetrated regions must be explored. Unviolated valleys must be tilled. Unmastered forests must be felled.”

[pocahontas voice] these white men are dangerous

“Where tyranny is law, revolution is order,”

“Manila hemp” from the Philippines (used to make rope and sturdy paper, hence “manila envelopes” and “manila folders”).

a latter-day Lear.

Together with innovations in chemistry and industrial engineering, the U.S. mastery of logistics would diminish the value of colonies and inaugurate a new pattern of global power, based less on claiming large swaths of land and more on controlling small points.

The Philippines needed “a language of her own,” he insisted. It must be indigenous to the Philippines and taught nationally. Without such a language, Quezon continued, “a national soul cannot exist.”

I. A. Richards watched all this with alarm. Third World nationalism, he warned, could “wreck all hopes for English.”

Fuck you

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).

The resulting scenario was surreal, half Heart of Darkness, half Salvador Dalí. At the very least, it would make a striking diorama: four Hawaiians eating out of crates, waiting for a famous aviator who would never arrive on a tiny, poisoned island that was littered with guano, crab vomit, and dead rats. And the Stars and Stripes flapping crisply in the breeze.

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?”

You didnt die soon enough mf

“They are outsourcing torture because they know it is illegal” is how one victim of the system put it.

USA! USA!