[ SECRET POST #2352 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2352 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 04 pages, 091 secrets from Secret Submission Post #336.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I agree with you that USian is kind of dumb, but I don't agree with you that America isn't an empire. I think, in a lot of ways, it is - and I definitely think that whether or not it fits with a narrow, dictionary definition is not at all a significant measure of whether America is an empire, and it's kind of pedantic to think it is. I think that definition is kind of flawed - not only is there no particular reason to think that empire should be limited to that definition, that definition does not even do particularly well in characterizing historically existing empires.

Does the United States exert political dominion over diverse colonial states? No. Of course not. But the United States does play a dominant role in politics around the world. The United States does prop up client states, and go to war against or otherwise attempt to influence states or regimes that propose its interests in diverse parts of the world. The United States does include as many countries as it can in its economic sphere, as its corporate interests do business throughout the world. It goes to poor states and attempts to induce them to maintain policies that are friendly to it through the power of development loans and international finance - it attempts to maintain the Washington Consensus. It does do all these things. You can argue about the motives of this sort of behavior (as you could have done with the British Empire in its early stages - remember the old saw that the British Empire was acquired "in a fit of absence of mind") but the fact is that the United States does go around to many countries in the world, especially poor countries and resource-rich companies, and do many things to attempt to include them in its political and economic sphere, to ensure that governments and policies they consider suitable are in place, and in general to exert economic and political dominion over them.

Definitions are only meaningful insofar as they're useful. The fact that America looks in some respects different from previous imperial states - the fact that it does not actually take possession of territory, or the fact that it is not ruled by a monarch - is far less important than the fact that it goes around doing the kinds of things that empires have always done, following the same logic that empire has always followed. Saying that because of those things it's not an empire makes as much sense as saying there was no British empire in India before 1857 because the British East India Company ruled India, not the British crown.

We are an empire. For better or worse. We behave as an empire; our foreign policy is imperial. Whatever a dictionary says. Our whole mindset and our assumptions about the world are imperial. We should probably face up to that fact, at some point, when we're going around the world assassinating people with drones, when we're overthrowing regimes as we please, when we're remaking economic policy in our own image and using the poor populations of foreign countries for cheap labor and cheap consumer goods at home, when we take upon ourselves the right to pass judgment on the government of any country we want.