Can we get rid of imperialism?

[eridani]

Imperialism has been a dominant form of social organization for 5000 years. Can we end it? I think that this may well be humanity's final exam, as it may end the world if we don't end it first. There are factors for and against us here. For the sake of the terminally perky, I'll leave the optimism for last.

Empires are all about transferring wealth from the periphery to the center. Roman citizens could not be questioned under torture, but torture was the order of the day for peons in Judea. Lancastershire was to have developed mills; those of India were to be destroyed. At the center of the American empire, we can have all the steel tariffs and agricultural subsidies we feel like having, but "free" markets will be imposed at gunpoint on poor countries.

It is worthy of note that the two countries to escape from European imperialism, Japan and the US, are much better off than those places unable to do so.

Following are some revealing quotes from people at the imperial centers. Ipse dixit.

For in the Romans is an arrogance which no submission or good behaviour can escape. Pillagers of the world, they have exhausted the land by their indiscriminate plunder, and now they ransack the sea. A rich enemy excites their cupidity; a poor one, their lust for power. East and West alike have failed to satisfy them. They are the only people on earth to whose covetousness both riches and poverty are equally tempting. To robbery, butchery, and rapine, they give the lying name of `government'; they create a desolation and call it peace.

--Tacitus ,The Agricola and the Germania, London: Penguin, 1970 pp. 80-81

.. we are not a young people with an innocent record and a scanty inheritance. We have engrossed to ourselves an altogether disproportionateshare of the wealth and traffic of the world. We have got all we want in territory, and our claim to be left in the unmolested enjoyment of vast and splendid possessions, mainly acquired by violence, largely maintained by force, often seems less reasonable to others than to us.

--Winston Churchill , "The World Crisis", released in the 1920s. Bolded words deleted before original publication


We have 50 per cent of the world's wealth, but only 6.3 per cent of its population. In this situation, our real job in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which permit us to maintain this position of disparity. To do so, we have to dispense with all sentimentality . . . we should cease thinking about human rights, the raising of living standards and democratisation.

--George Kennan, US Cold War planner, 1948 NSC-68 document
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/nsc-68/nsc68-1.htm
--Source: Naval War College Review, Vol. XXVII (May-June, 1975), pp. 51-108. Also in U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States: > 1950, Volume I.


The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist -McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the builder of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.

--Thomas Friedman, "A Manifesto for the Fast World," The New York Times Magazine, March 28, 1999

And one last comment about what eventually happens to the non-elite within empires. Think of the joke that the Roman Senate became after empire. Can you say "Patriot Act II"? I knew you could.

We assert that no nation can long endure half republic and half empire, and we warn the American people that imperialism abroad will lead quickly and inevitably to despotism at home.

--Democratic National Platform, 1900