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How the US has hidden its empire
21–30 of 106 posts
Re: How the US has hidden its empire
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wikipedia disagrees with you, and confirms that both Midway and Wake were attacked on the day of Pearl. In the case of Wake, 8 of the 12 Grumman F4F Wildcat fighters were destroyed. In the case of Midway, the attack that day was repulsed.
I'd argue that the Pearl Harbor attack specifically was the primary attack (at least on that front, i.e. excluding the Philippines), and that the Wake and Midway attacks that happened were incidental (or at most in support of) that attack. While I hate the idea of quantity of lives lost being any sort of metric for the "importance" of an attack (every American life lost matters), Pearl Harbor took the brunt of it. If…
> (every American life lost matters)
Are non-American lives somehow worth less? (Or just worthless?)
That's the kind of ethno-centric mindset that doesn't even bother to count the civilian "collateral damage" as long as our guys are safe in their body armor or -- better -- thousands of miles away directing drones from behind a desk.
It doesn't help much with building intercultural trust and understanding, though, or "winning hearts and minds".
Re: How the US has hidden its empire
#23The problem with big hairy political words like "empire" is that meaningless semantics take over.
From our perspective, in the post-colonial era, the term "empire" and "colonisation" are just inherently negative terms. The defining qualities (this article explicitly makes this argument) of empire are considered to be slavery, reservation systems and such. In some sense, empire can just mean "bad" and bad can be proof or empire.
The postcolonial age is also the natiolist age, where nation states are the basis of the political system. That makes imperialism's defining quality "the subjegation of nations" because it denies nations ultimate authority.
Marx associated empire with capitalism (surprise surprise), using the term "international capitalism" interchangeably with empire. Considering history, this has some logic to it. For example, the Royal Britsh East India Trading Company colonized India. The crown later confiscated it. 18th and 19th century empires were about controling trade, whether by a king, legal monopoly or otherwise.
The article plays with a mundane territorial definition. Ff you control "overseas" land...
All interesting discussion topics, but also a problem.
"Is X an Empire" just depends on the definition. It's not a meaningful question in itself. Just because you conclude that "yes, it is" doesn't mean anything.
Re: How the US has hidden its empire
#24US citizenship and American Samoa will become an interesting topic if Tulsi Gabbard becomes a frontrunner as a presidential candidate. To become POTUS you need to be "native born" US Citizen which is a very nebulous idea.
Re: How the US has hidden its empire
#25> On this to-scale map, Alaska isn’t shrunken down to fit into a small inset, as it is on most maps. I'm pretty sure it's usually "scaled down" because that's how map projection works. Does this writer also think that Greenland and Africa are of comparable size?
One example map, and to me a pretty typical example of the genre, shows Alaska on a about half the scale of the contiguous states. Compare the by the scale markings: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/92/Map_of_U... This is not simply projection effects, this is explicit downscaling. Another comparison, Wikipedia lists the area of Alaska as 1,717,856 km^2 and that of the contiguous United States 8,080,4…
Great response. I was going to take a different tack because the Alaska issue seems so obvious, but then I remembered that some people out there don't have maps [1], at least not state maps of the United States.
[1] Including many U.S. Americans
Re: How the US has hidden its empire
#26The problem with big hairy political words like "empire" is that meaningless semantics take over. From our perspective, in the post-colonial era, the term "empire" and "colonisation" are just inherently negative terms. The defining qualities (this article explicitly makes this argument) of empire are considered to be slavery, reservation systems and such. In some sense, empire can just mean "bad" and bad can be proof…
>"Is X an Empire" just depends on the definition.
If X controls my local politics to its benefit, overthrows legitimate governments, and establishes dictatorships whenever it likes, and does that in tons of countries around the world, I'd call it an empire...
Re: How the US has hidden its empire
#27The problem with big hairy political words like "empire" is that meaningless semantics take over. From our perspective, in the post-colonial era, the term "empire" and "colonisation" are just inherently negative terms. The defining qualities (this article explicitly makes this argument) of empire are considered to be slavery, reservation systems and such. In some sense, empire can just mean "bad" and bad can be proof…
> "Is X an Empire" just depends on the definition. If X controls my local politics to its benefit, overthrows legitimate governments, and establishes dictatorships whenever it likes, and does that in tons of countries around the world, I'd call it an empire...
Case in point.
Re: How the US has hidden its empire
#28Killing Hope (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_Hope) is a write up of all major US efforts at controlling other countries. I don't know what Americans think of it, but it's fascinating as an outsider.
Re: How the US has hidden its empire
#29The historiography [1] of this article is interesting. The author talks about how the drafts of FDR's speech changed throughout the day after the bombings. Presumably this means that the author had access to the various drafts of the speech. Pretty clever way to try to glimpse into what he was thinking. [1] The study of the methods used when writing history.
Kind of curious that the author didn’t mention a primary motive of Roosevelt’s: making the case for entering the war. FDR had been trying to (rightly) sell it to a reluctant, isolationist public as a necessary evil. Thus emphasizing the loss of “American” life was critical, despite the fact that it may have been subject to a less inclusive view that the author would have preferred.
Re: How the US has hidden its empire
#30> Besides Guam, American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands and a handful of minor outlying islands, the US maintains roughly 800 overseas military bases around the world. Germany has a few US military bases. It’s a bit of a micro cosmos. People pay in USD and can buy American products there. I think even the VAT is added on checkout to the price (whereas in Germany, prices in sto…
I lived in Stuttgart a number of years ago, and used to drink with some guys who had a business exclusively selling American cars to American servicemen (in dollars; taxation deferred; big money). In fact, I spent a good bit of time drinking with American servicemen ... they were a large segment of the Anglophone community around there.
Background: Stuttgart hosts EUCOM at Patch Barracks and AFRICOM at Kelley Barracks.
The latter should have moved to Africa at least a decade ago, but America is still looking for an appropriate location (friendly, stable, infrastructure).