/ Authoritarianism and Totalitarianism / Diversity, Tolerance, and Pluralism / Dominionism /
/ Europe and the European Expansion / Federalism, Globalization, Decentralization, Regionalism, Internationalism /
/ Imperialism, Colonialism, Neo-Colonialism (Page 2) / (Page 3) / (Page 4) / (Page 5) /
/ (Page 6) / (Page 7) / (Page 8) / (Page 9) / (Page 10) /
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/ Monarchy, Aristocracy, Feudalism / "The West" / Thymos, Dignity, and Self-Esteem /
"Imperialism has been the most powerful force in world history over the last four or five centuries, carving up whole continents while oppressing indigenous peoples and obliterating entire civilizations. Yet, it is seldom accorded any serious attention by our academics, media commentators, and political leaders. When not ignored outright, the subject of imperialism has been sanitized ...Would you like to see a magic trick?
By "imperialism" I mean the process whereby the dominant politico-economic interests of one nation expropriate for their own enrichment the land, labor, raw materials, and markets of another people.
The earliest victims of Western European imperialism were other Europeans. ...
Of the various notions about imperialism circulating today in the United States, the dominant view is that it does not exist. Imperialism is not recognized as a legitimate concept, certainly not in regard to the United States. ...
Imperialism is older than capitalism. The Persian, Macedonian, Roman, and Mongol empires all existed centuries before the Rothschilds and Rockefellers. ... Capitalist imperialism differs from these earlier forms in the way it systematically accumulates capital through the organized exploitation of labor and the penetration of overseas markets."
"BS: How about any comparison between the old-fashioned imperialism of William McKinley and the questions surrounding the WTO today? Are they comparable?
Zinn: Well, they're generally comparable, although they look different. Under McKinley, we were engaging in blatant military occupation of foreign territories and blatant imperialism. Under McKinley, we go into Cuba in 1898, drive the Spaniards out, and put ourselves in -- including our banks, our railroads, our corporations. We take Puerto Rico, Hawaii, we send an army to take the Philippines. It's blatant imperialism at its height in those years.
What we have in our time with the WTO and the power of the World Bank and the power of the IMF and the reach of American corporationsaround the world is a more sophisticated kind of imperialism in which we don't have to send armies into other countries. We send corporations instead. We send Disney and McDonalds into other countries. When we think we have to, we're certainly ready to send a military force abroad. The elder Bush sent a military force into Iraq ten years ago in 1991. I would call that 'imperialism'.
Imperialism always has an excuse. The elder Bush's excuse was that the Iraqis had invaded Kuwait. And we had the excuse with Cuba -- if not us, then it's the Spaniards. We had an excuse in the Philippines. If we don't take it, somebody else will. We had an excuse in the Persian Gulf in 1991 with Kuwait, but it was oil. President Bush was not weeping tears over the Kuwaitis. He didn't weep tears over the fate of any other countries which were invaded by other powers. ...
What we have is a more sophisticated form of imperialism, which is economic. But lurking in the background, always ready to go, is an armed force. That's why, even though the Soviet Union is gone, the politicos -- not just the Republicans, but the Democrats -- wanted a military budget as huge as it was during the Cold War. Why did they want it? So they could use our military power, if necessary, to reach into far corners of the world and extend our political and economic power through military bases.
(Also, in all probability, because there is a great deal of money to be made in the arms industry.)
Imperialism is the factor in American policy, not just since 1898, but in fact long before it when we were expanding across this continent and taking away Indian lands in order to enlarge the territory of the United States. We have been an imperial power and an expansionist power for a very long time. It will continue regardless of whether we have Republican or Democratic administrations in power. In fact, it's hard to tell who would be more likely to further the ends of imperialism. The Democrats or the Republicans, Bush or Gore? I mean yes, in domestic policy you can find some differences among them. Look at the appointments to the Attorney General, environmental affairs, and so on.... but in foreign policy, it's very hard to find a difference."
-- My links -- ed.
"Modern European imperialism itself is a constitutively and a radically different type of overseas domination from all earlier forms. Sheer scale and scope are only part of the difference. ... By the beginning of World War I Europe and America held 85 percent of the earth's surface in some sort of colonial subjugation.Ellipsis in original -- ed.
This, I hasten to add, did not happen in a fit of absentminded whimsy or as a result of a distracted shopping spree. ...
My own theory is that culture played a very important, indeed indispensable role. At the heart of European culture during the many decades of imperial expansion lay what could be called an undeterred and unrelenting Eurocentrism. This accumulated experiences, territories, peoples, histories; it studied them, classified them, verified them; but above all, it subordinated them to the culture and indeed the very idea of white Christian Europe. ... All of the subjugated peoples had it in common that they were considered to be naturally subservient to a superior, advanced, developed, and morally mature Europe, whose role in the non-European world was to rule, instruct, legislate, develop, and at the proper times, to discipline, war against, and occasionally exterminate non-Europeans."
"The English liberal John A. Hobson wrote in 1902:'The economic taproot of Imperialism is the desire of strong organized industrial and financial interests (e.g., corporations)to secure and develop at the public expense and by the public force (military and police)private markets for their surplus goods and their surplus capital. War, militarism, and a "spirited foreign policy" (aggression and inteventionism)are the necessary means to this end.' "
"Why do people shop at these behemoths, when they know full well that they are driving out of existence small businesses owned and operated by their neighbors, employing other neighbors?
They shop because of price, and they are forced to do so by the declining standard of living we have offered working people for more than a generation. People who work for minimum wage, with little or no benefits, who cannot afford to fix their car or their kids' teeth have no choice but to search out the lowest price.
Wal-Mart buys offshore, without apology and for the cheapest possible prices, from companies paying the lowest-possible wages.
As jobs in America are lost to foreign sweatshops to feed the Wal-Mart engine, American workers are forced to accept jobs at lower pay, with bad working conditions. They are funneled to Wal-Mart's promise of cheap goods, in effect patronizing the very companies that caused their economic misery."
"Leopold is chiefly remembered as the founder and sole owner of the Congo Free State, a private project undertaken by the King. He used Henry Morton Stanley to help him lay claim to the Congo, an area now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The Powers at the Berlin Conference agreed to set up the Free State in 1885, on the condition that the inhabitants were to be brought into the modern world and that all nations be allowed to trade freely. From the beginning, however, Leopold essentially ignored these conditions and ran the Congo brutally, by proxy through a mercenary force, for his own personal gain. He extracted a personal fortune from the Congo, initially by the collection of ivory, and after a rise in the price of rubber in the 1890s by forcing the native population to collect sap from rubber plants. His harsh regime was directly or indirectly responsible for the death of millions of people. The Congo became one of the most infamous international scandals of the early 20th century, and Leopold was ultimately forced to relinquish control of it to the government of Belgium. ...
The first economic focus of the colony was ivory, but this did not yield the expected levels of revenue. When the global demand for rubber exploded, attention shifted to the labor-intensive collection of sap from rubber plants. Abandoning the promises of the Berlin Conference in the late 1890s, the Free State government restricted foreign access and extorted forced labor from the natives. The abuses suffered were horrific, especially in the rubber industry, and included the effective enslavement of the native population, savage beatings, widespread killing, and frequent mutilation when the unrealistic quotas were not met. Missionary John Harris of Baringa, for example, was so shocked by what he had come across that he wrote to Leopold's chief agent in the Congo saying: 'I have just returned from a journey inland to the village of Insongo Mboyo. The abject misery and utter abandon is positively indescribable. I was so moved, Your Excellency, by the people's stories that I took the liberty of promising them that in future you will only kill them for crimes they commit.'
Estimates of the death toll range from two million to fifteen million. Determining precisely how many people died is next to impossible as accurate records were not kept. Louis and Stengers state that population figures at the start of Leopold's control are only "wild guesses", while E.D. Morel's attempt and others at coming to a figure for population losses were "but figments of the imagination".
Adam Hochschild devotes a chapter of his book, King Leopold's Ghost, to the problem of estimating the death toll. He cites several recent lines of investigation, by anthropologist Jan Vansina and others, examining local sources from police records, religious records, oral traditions, genealogies, personal diaries, and "many others", which generally agree with the assessment of the 1919 Belgian government commission: roughly half the population perished during the Free State period. Since the first official census by the Belgian authorities in 1924 put the population at about 10 million, that implies a rough estimate of 10 million dead."
"It had been raining heavily for one whole month -- raining on a camp of thirty thousand men and thousands of camels, elephants, horses, bullocks, and mules all gathered together at a place called Rawal Pindi, to be reviewed by the Viceroy of India. He was receiving a visit from the Amir of Afghanistan -- a wild king of a very wild country. The Amir had brought with him for a bodyguard eight hundred men and horses who had never seen a camp or a locomotive before in their lives -- savage men and savage horses from somewhere at the back of Central Asia. ...
The big parade of all the thirty thousand men was held that afternoon.... The first part of the review was all sunshine, and the regiments went by in wave upon wave of legs all moving together, and guns all in a line, till our eyes grew dizzy. Then the cavalry came up, to the beautiful cavalry canter of "Bonnie Dundee" .... Then the big guns came by (with the) elephants harnessed in line to a forty-pounder siege gun, while twenty yoke of oxen walked behind. ... Last came the screw guns (small cannons for use in mountainous terrain) ....
The rain began to fall again, and for a while it was too misty to see what the troops were doing. They had made a big half circle across the plain, and were spreading out into a line. That line grew and grew and grew till it was three-quarters of a mile long from wing to wing -- one solid wall of men, horses, and guns. Then it came on straight toward the Viceroy and the Amir, and as it got nearer the ground began to shake, like the deck of a steamer when the engines are going fast.
Unless you have been there you cannot imagine what a frightening effect this steady come-down of troops has on the spectators, even when they know it is only a review. I looked at the Amir. Up till then he had not shown the shadow of a sign of astonishment or anything else. But now his eyes began to get bigger and bigger, and he picked up the reins on his horse's neck and looked behind him. For a minute it seemed as though he were going to draw his sword and slash his way out through the English men and women in the carriages at the back. Then the advance stopped dead, the ground stood still, the whole line saluted, and thirty bands began to play all together. That was the end of the review, and the regiments went off to their camps in the rain, and an infantry band (began to play). ...
Then I heard an old grizzled, long-haired Central Asian chief, who had come down with the Amir, asking questions of a native officer.
'Now,' said he, 'in what manner was this wonderful thing done?'
And the officer answered, 'An order was given, and they obeyed.'
'But are the beasts as wise as the men?' said the chief.
'They obey, as the men do. Mule, horse, elephant, or bullock, he obeys his driver, and the driver his sergeant, and the sergeant his lieutenant, and the lieutenant his captain, and the captain his major, and the major his colonel, and the colonel his brigadier commanding three regiments, and the brigadier the general, who obeys the Viceroy, who is the servant of the Empress. Thus it is done.'
'Would it were so in Afghanistan!' said the chief, 'for there we obey only our own wills.'
'And for that reason,' said the native officer, twirling his mustache, 'your Amir whom you do not obey must come here and take orders from our Viceroy.'"
"Is America really in any sense an empire like Ancient Rome or Victorian Britain? ...
It is a question I put to virtually everyone I spoke to.
The answers differed dramatically.
For ... Michael Mandelbaum of the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies, America's current position is unique -- there simply is not an adequate word to describe it.
As he put it: 'Empire is not quite right but it seems to be closer than anything else we have in common usage, so we employ it'. "
