I'm surprised you see Chomsky, the other guy Charles A. Kupchan and all the others on the same page as simply exuding disdain for America. You know America's brutal history. Both at home and abroad. Being true in acknowledgement and discussion of that should hardly simply be seen as anti-American. Too many staunch conservatives see such honesty around history of America history as anti-American. i'd agree with you if you said that. As for Chomsky, you're right, he is old. just not that old. At 93 he is getting on. Personally i see him as more objective than anti-American. Also, i honestly don't see where or how you see either of those two, or others who share there opinions, as "war mongering alarmists." That said i have no interest in debating this stuff any further. I don't think you particularly want to either. It's al sort of OT to present day current affairs, eh. Just in conclusion though i'll say i wouldn't have thought you would deny any of America's history. It's all old, so have only included a couple below.
"chomsky is 98 and is a product of the cold war. And it shows. I'm free to disdain someone who has such disdain for America. I guess I don't have much interest what fear war mongering alarmists think."
‘How to Hide an Empire’ Shines Light on America’s Expansionist Side
By Jennifer Szalai Feb. 13, 2019
Patricia Wall/The New York Times
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The word “empire” has a distinct place in the American lexicon: readily applicable to other countries but rarely, if ever, to the United States itself.
The tone of aggrieved incredulity may have been laid on a little thick, but Rumsfeld’s sentiment neatly aligned with how many Americans prefer to see their country — as a republic that was born from revolution and necessarily hostile to imperial rule.
This self-image is “consoling, but it’s also costly,” Daniel Immerwahr writes in “How to Hide an Empire.” “At various times, the inhabitants of the U.S. Empire have been shot, shelled, starved, interned, dispossessed, tortured and experimented on. What they haven’t been, by and large, is seen.” Even today, barely half of mainland Americans know that Puerto Ricans are fellow citizens.
Critics of American foreign policy have long accused the country of imperialism in a general sense — of meddling and bullying, starting wars and inciting coups — but Immerwahr, a historian at Northwestern University, wants to draw attention to actual territory, to those islands and archipelagos too often sidelined in the national imagination. For decades, scholars have researched American colonialism in places like the Philippines and Puerto Rico; Immerwahr builds on their work to encourage a shift in the typical “mainland” perspective of American history, showing that “territorial empire” hasn’t been just an aberration but an inextricable part of the country’s fabric, woven throughout.
To call this standout book a corrective would make it sound earnest and dutiful, when in fact it is wry, readable and often astonishing. Immerwahr knows that the material he presents is serious, laden with exploitation and violence, but he also knows how to tell a story, highlighting the often absurd space that opened up between expansionist ambitions and ingenuous self-regard.
Daniel Immerwahr Pamela Krayenbuhl
He divides the history into three phases. The first was the 19th-century period of westward expansion, including President Andrew Jackson’s forcible expulsion of Native Americans from their land. By the middle of the century the second phase was also beginning, as the United States started to notice enticing bits of territory outside the continent, including small islands in the Caribbean and the Pacific.
These places were rocky, barren and devoid of people; what they offered was plenty of nitrogen-rich bird droppings, the better to remedy the “soil exhaustion” of a rapidly industrializing United States. The Guano Islands Act of 1856 decreed that whenever an American citizen found guano on an uninhabited, unclaimed island, “such island, rock or key may, at the discretion of the president, be considered as appertaining to the United States.”
“It was an obscure word, ‘appertaining,’” Immerwahr writes, “as if the law’s writers were mumbling their way through the important bit.” It seemed to signal a discomfort, or at least the semblance of it. Soon enough, such official compunction was decidedly on the wane. Theodore Roosevelt, serving as William McKinley’s assistant secretary of the navy, pursued the Spanish-American War of 1898 with the zeal you would expect of someone who toted around a book called “Anglo-Saxon Superiority.”
Immerwahr devotes several chapters to the ensuing five decades, as the United States annexed Puerto Rico and the Philippines, brutally crushing independence movements, torturing Filipino insurgents with “the water cure” and giving mainland doctors veritable carte blanche to treat Puerto Rico as a medical laboratory. Seen through Immerwahr’s lens, even the most familiar historical events can take on a startling cast. Take World War II in the Philippines:Pointing to the murderous combination of American shelling and Japanese slaughter of civilians, he calls the war “by far the most destructive event ever to take place on U.S. soil.”
The role that racism played in the country’s colonial acquisitions was palpable but sometimes counterintuitive. While imperialists often spoke about “civilizing” the “savages,” some of the most ardent anti-imperialists in the 19th century were white supremacists like John C. Calhoun, the senator from South Carolina, who was wary of letting “any but the Caucasian race” into the Union. The 1867 purchase of Alaska from the Russians encountered similar resistance, with The Nation complaining about the prospect of “Exquimaux fellow citizens.” As Immerwahr tartly observes, “The deal went through only because, in the end, there weren’t that many ‘Exquimaux,’ and there was quite a lot of Alaska.”
Immerwahr brings the narrative up to the present day, exploring the American decision to give up territory after World War II, which he calls “virtually unprecedented” — after all, victorious countries tended to do the opposite. But this “twilight of formal empire” wasn’t simply the result of American selflessness. Technological advances eroded the connection between power and land. Securing access to a raw material like rubber mattered less when you could manufacture a synthetic version of it. The big exception, of course, has been oil — “the one raw material that has most reliably tempted politicians back into the old logic of empire.”
What the United States has now is a “pointillist empire”: specks of land scattered around the world that have served as military bases, staging grounds, detention facilities, torture sites .. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/09/world/cia-torture-guantanamo-bay.html . (The United States has 800 overseas bases, whereas Russia has nine; most countries have zero.) If Theodore Roosevelt was the swashbuckling emblem of the country’s formal empire, Herbert Hoover — “an astonishingly capable bureaucrat” before he became a not-very-capable president — represented the turn toward globalization, standardization and logistics.
It’s a testament to Immerwahr’s considerable storytelling skills that I found myself riveted by his sections on Hoover’s quest for standardized screw threads, wondering what might happen next. But beyond its collection of anecdotes and arcana, this humane book offers something bigger and more profound. “How to Hide an Empire” nimbly combines breadth and sweep with fine-grained attention to detail. The result is a provocative and absorbing history of the United States — “not as it appears in its fantasies, but as it actually is.”
In order to understand the brutality of American capitalism, you have to start on the plantation.
Lyle Ashton Harris for The New York Times
By Matthew Desmond AUG. 14, 2019
A couple of years before he was convicted of securities fraud, Martin Shkreli was the chief executive of a pharmaceutical company that acquired the rights to Daraprim, a lifesaving antiparasitic drug. Previously the drug cost $13.50 a pill, but in Shkreli’s hands, the price quickly increased by a factor of 56, to $750 a pill. At a health care conference, Shkreli told the audience that he should have raised the price even higher. “No one wants to say it, no one’s proud of it,” he explained. “But this is a capitalist society, a capitalist system and capitalist rules.”
This is a capitalist society. It’s a fatalistic mantra that seems to get repeated to anyone who questions why America can’t be more fair or equal. But around the world, there are many types of capitalist societies, ranging from liberating to exploitative, protective to abusive, democratic to unregulated. When Americans declare that “we live in a capitalist society” — as a real estate mogul told The Miami Herald last year when explaining his feelings about small-business owners being evicted from their Little Haiti storefronts — what they’re often defending is our nation’s peculiarly brutal economy. “Low-road capitalism,” the University of Wisconsin-Madison sociologist Joel Rogers has called it. In a capitalist society that goes low, wages are depressed as businesses compete over the price, not the quality, of goods; so-called unskilled workers are typically incentivized through punishments, not promotions; inequality reigns and poverty spreads. In the United States, the richest 1 percent of Americans own 40 percent of the country’s wealth, while a larger share of working-age people (18-65) live in poverty than in any other nation belonging to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (O.E.C.D.).
Or consider worker rights in different capitalist nations. In Iceland, 90 percent of wage and salaried workers belong to trade unions authorized to fight for living wages and fair working conditions. Thirty-four percent of Italian workers are unionized, as are 26 percent of Canadian workers. Only 10 percent of American wage and salaried workers carry union cards. The O.E.C.D. scores nations along a number of indicators, such as how countries regulate temporary work arrangements. Scores run from 5 (“very strict”) to 1 (“very loose”). Brazil scores 4.1 and Thailand, 3.7, signaling toothy regulations on temp work. Further down the list are Norway (3.4), India (2.5) and Japan (1.3). The United States scored 0.3, tied for second to last place with Malaysia. How easy is it to fire workers? Countries like Indonesia (4.1) and Portugal (3) have strong rules about severance pay and reasons for dismissal. Those rules relax somewhat in places like Denmark (2.1) and Mexico (1.9). They virtually disappear in the United States, ranked dead last out of 71 nations with a score of 0.5.
-- The 1619 Project is an ongoing initiative from The New York Times Magazine that began in August 2019, the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative. Read all the stories. --
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