Status Updates From The American Empire

The additional fact that it enabled American banks to create dollars in foreign countries not only allowed American corporations to buy up huge slices of these countries’ industries but also compelled their governments to fight the inflationary pressures that flowed inevitably from this additional creation of unwanted dollars

In the long run, it always boils down to a matter of control, that is of sheer, unadorned power—quite justified nowadays on strictly technical grounds since it is evident that gold does not provide the flexibility required by modern economic structures

this erosion of legislative power everywhere is leading to direct confrontations between bureaucracies, bypassing Congresses and Parliaments, leading in turn to either conflict or subordination and virtual integration of bureaucracies serving, ostensibly, different countries. For instance, the direct gearing of a particular American department, agency, or even private company, to their European counterparts

Harold Macmillan had stated his belief that “These Americans represent the new Roman Empire and we Britons, like the Greeks of old, must teach them how to make it go.” Macmillan, the wily, self-styled “Greek,” was determined to beat the other European “Greeks” in the race to become the prime adviser to the Roman-Americans.

even de Gaulle joined the Europeanists in opposition to the Morgenthau plan to destroy Germany’s heavy industry; before the war was even over, he had spoken of Germany as a “great, and certainly a guilty, people, but nevertheless a people whose destruction the higher insight of Europe cannot permit.”

empires crumbled throughout the world, the same Balkanization took place, with increasingly disastrous and eventually ridiculous results, until the world’s map began to look like an incomprehensible crazy-quilt in which such microscopic states as Honduras and Lesotho are presumed to have the same sovereign rights as the United States or Soviet Russia

in the name of the United Nations and world morality, followed by a rising chorus of anti-South African incantations throughout the world—inevitably followed by a steady white emigration out of South Africa, thus weakening the very basis of white supremacy. In addition, it should be expected that some form of Bantu guerilla organization, encouraged by these developments, would begin effective operations

Being unfettered by a permanent body of officials and civil servants endowed with statutory protection, all his appointments are perforce “political”; everything is politicized. The conquest of power, by legitimate or illegitimate means, changes over completely the administrative apparatus of the land according to the most venerable spoils system.

perhaps the major difference between the North American and the Latin American political temper in practice is that, whereas the road to political power in the United States usually lies through financial success, the easiest road to financial success in Latin America lies even more frequently through political power

Racial consciousness (in the United States and wherever it exists) derives from a cohesive society’s collective psychology and strong sense of social solidarity which establishes group-distances between well-defined racial clusters.

The belief that American-style democracy must spread around the world, by missionary persuasion if possible, by force if necessary, is far more ancient than the relatively recent appearance of international Communism

American presence in the Far East had been acquired by military and commercial force, and had no greater moral justification than that of any European colonial power—however sincere the belief of the Americans in their national mythology and however genuine their idealism. But this mythology had, and still has, great hold over the American imagination and is largely responsible for the repeated collisions

Providing the Vietnamese Communists with a considerable amount of weapons and supplies, associating with them in their guerilla warfare against the Japanese, the Americans naively thought that they had recruited genuine allies in the war. In fact, the Vietminh played its own game with consummate skill, preparing its takeover of the country in the anticipation that Japanese rule would, in any case, come to a quick end

Many Americans felt that they had “lost” China; but what can one lose that one has never “had”? In fact, all that the Americans had was a “Pearl Buck view” of China and the Chinese which had little to do with the “real” China that came through brutally when the Red Army conquered the mainland. The sentimental link through the missionaries had made them feel that the Chinese were amiable wards who should be grateful

In an emotional sense, the metamorphosis of China into a xenophobic Power filled with hatred for the West was resented in the United States as a personal insult; for sentimental reasons, which had, for a while, little to do with power politics, the Communization of the former Middle Kingdom was a stunning blow—whereas the October Revolution in Russia a generation before had triggered no such emotional outburst.

reduced from the rank of a star to that of a planet, albeit the weightiest of them all, post-Suez Britain herself is beginning to revolve around Washington in the same company as her former Commonwealth daughters.
All at once, the British Commonwealth is dying and being transfigured into an essential component of the emerging American empire

The end result is not a willing but a reluctant imperialism because it is essentially a by-product of the clash between two contending missionary spirits attempting to fill power vacuums.
The fact that empire-building begins unconsciously and becomes reluctant as the builders begin to realize what they are doing is clearly demonstrated in history.Rome did not really want to build an empire but eventually found ..

Non-Western people were struggling to take advantage of the collapse of European colonialism in order to achieve two incompatible results: modernize themselves as fast as possible in order to acquire the sinews of modern industrial power—and revive their dying civilizations, submerged by the triumph of industrialization and of the Western culture of which it was an essential component

all the seeds of the collapse of Europe’s worldwide power and influence were, more or less consciously, sown by the Americans, and opened power vacuums which some of them were longing to fill.
The founding of the United Nations was partly designed to irretrievably embroil the Americans in world affairs and make it impossible for them to withdraw into a neo-isolationism at the last minute

The coming peace would be an American peace, and the world would enter the American Century—all in the name of democracy, of course.
That Roosevelt, for all his beliefs in democracy, was in fact an unconscious imperialist, there is hardly any doubt; as de Gaulle stated it, “Comme cela est humain, l’idéalisme y habille la volonté de puissance [How human it is that idealism cloaks the will-to-power].”

the American President had promptly accepted the British priority on victory in Europe; a bold and clever decision since—and it is worth repeating—whereas all Americans were united in their desire to crush Japan, they were more divided by old national loyalties and by the feeling that their vital interests were not so much at stake in the Old World

Having become de facto an American protectorate implied that the whole British Empire and Commonwealth came under the protective umbrella of the United States—and nowhere more so than in the Far East and Southeast Asia

Hitler began to speak “with admiration of the British Empire, of the necessity for its existence and of the civilization that Britain had brought into the world. He compared the British Empire with the Catholic Church—saying they were both essential elements of stability in the world.” And Liddell Hart records that he concluded by saying “that his aim was to make peace with Britain ...

Europe where overpopulation had become the root cause of bitter national and social conflicts; the structure of European society itself was being challenged from within—whereas the United States, focusing on the twin ideas of service and profit, enjoyed both social flexibility and political stability. His thesis: in the age of the revolt of the masses, to which the United States had already become fully adapted