America's Invisible Empire

by David Ludden

The American imperial empire has remained largely invisible: only
very recently have Americans just begun to learn about their imperial
history. But information about empire is fragmented and extensively
filtered and the American public remains by and large unaware of the
reality and costs of empire. Until empire is placed on the public
agenda, it can never be effectively criticised or made an object of
basic policy change.
David Ludden


In the old days of imperialism, before 1945, citizens of imperial
nations learned about their empires in school; they imbibed imperial
anxiety and pride, and discussed and debated empire publicly. It was
never thus in America, where US empire remains mostly invisible.
Americans are just now starting to learn about their imperial
history, amidst its current crisis, but there is pervasive resistance
to such learning, which contradicts patriotic truths about American
national character. Resistance to learning supports a national denial
of reality that keeps Americans ignorant of the empire built,
maintained, and defended in their name. This ignorance helps explain
the cognitive shock - as distinct from the emotional and ethical
horror - of events on September 11, 2001. For most Americans, the
animosity in those planes appeared literally out of nowhere.

National ideology only begins to explain the gap between America's
identity in the world and its self-understanding. In the world of
national states that emerged after 1945, the old meaning of 'empire'
became archaic, because no country could then legitimately administer
another country. In addition, America itself emerged from an
anti-imperial struggle; and it supported national movements
elsewhere, from 19th century Latin America to 20th century Africa,
Asia, and west Asia. Support for nationalist struggles could not
be offered to communists, however; they had to be constructed as
aliens in their own lands, no matter how indigenous their roots, most
notably, in Vietnam, where France and America drew a line between
north and south that made liberation forces in the north seem alien
invaders, while Americans backed 'native' nationalists in the south.
Embracing this kind of ideological history, Americans can never admit
to being imperialists.

After 1945, imperialism acquired a new format under American
leadership. First, the cold war allowed the US to expand military,
economic, and political power around the world, posing as a crusader
against communism, committed to liberal modernisation. In 1989, the
cold war ended; then economic globalisation, global security, and a
war on terrorism came to justify more US expansion. Since 1945, US
power has expanded steadily and dramatically; it now covers the world
of nations, but does not deploy the formal discourse of imperialism.
Rather, the US sees itself as the world's leader. Americans lead
global progress, facing enemies and obstacles everywhere. In this
guise, America uses its power inside international institutions, like
the UN, but strikes on its own when necessary. America refuses to
allow international laws to operate inside US borders unless they
conform to US law. Thus, US power projects itself onto the world, but
the world cannot respond; this imbalance is typical of the imperial
settings, but Americans think of it instead as a natural state for
the 'world's only superpower'.

A flurry of books has appeared recently in America using the term
'empire' to describe US power. The term is beginning to appear
flattering in some circles. The growth of an American empire built on
the old repertoire of 'indirect rule' had been obvious outside
America for decades before 'empire' began to appear in US public
discourse, after the conquest of Iraq without international
legitimacy. Nevertheless, the idea that the US is an imperial power
is not popular among Americans. Journalists, scholars, teachers,
students, analysts, and politicians prefer to depict the US as a
nation pursuing its own interests and ideals. The phrase 'American
empire' will not appear in 2004 election debates, where voters will
focus on domestic and foreign policy issues. The war in Iraq is a
bigger issue with each passing day, not because of Iraqi suffering,
but because of American deaths. Wars come home when bright young
people return dead; and to make matters worse, people do not
understand the war in Iraq, which most people supported out of
patriotic fervour, trusting their president to lead. Now, US
'intelligence' is under scrutiny. Everyone knows Bush lied about
'weapons of mass destruction.' The war in Iraq appears now to have
been a mistake, but the US cannot simply back out, and Kerry along
with all but one US Senator voted for the war, and Kerry says the US
must stay to see the job done.

Living conditions in Iraq are not a political issue in America. Few
people even know what they are. Only bombing and death are in the
news, sometimes called features of 'resistance' to a US occupation
that must seem to most Americans not as popular in Iraq as US
propaganda once portrayed it. No one in the US could now believe that
ordinary Iraqis want Americans there, based on reading or watching
the news. US voters will never see in the news the vast suffering in
Iraq caused by American empire; instead they will see security
threats and policy options. The cost of empire at home is not open
for discussion. The war budget is called a 'defence budget' and
continues to soar, without protest. The empire continues to operate
out of public view. A tiny proportion of decisions that sustain the
empire ever come under public scrutiny.

Fears, Then and Now

This imperial condition contrasts sharply with that of Britain in the
old days. US taxpayers and voters pay the entire cost of the America
empire, and so must be kept in the dark about its operations. The
British people never paid for the empire that so many loved because
it was funded by Asians and Africans. If Americans ever engaged in a
cost-benefit analysis of the US empire, who knows what would happen.
But you can be sure, that will not happen soon, because Americans do
not see their empire; what they see is an ever-more-pressing,
ever-more-expensive need for national security. Global threats to
America must be magnified as much as possible to keep the empire
going despite its rapidly rising cost and surely diminishing returns.
Bill Clinton began scaring Americans about terrorism. But 9/11 was
the biggest gift imaginable for American imperialists: it buried the
empire out of sight under the iconic rubble and dust of the Twin
Towers.

Once upon a time, Americans believed that Soviets would attack them
with nuclear missiles. In the 1950s, we as school children hid under
our desks for air raid drills once a week. Families built bomb
shelters in their basements. In classrooms, cinema halls, and TV
cartoons, Americans learned that a 'communist menace' roamed the
world and that only strong, brave American soldiers could defend the
world against the 'Soviet threat'. America was like Superman, called
to duty when evil reared its head, and otherwise living as a
'mild-mannered reporter', Clark Kent. The idea that America is
essentially good, caring, innocent, even naïve, like Clark Kent, has
managed to survive inside US popular culture despite virtually
continuous US imperial warfare since 1945.

Not only do Americans wear ideological blinders, they daily imbibe
information filtered and fed by media barons, politicians, scholars,
and educators who collaborate in imperialism for different reasons,
typically unknowingly. Individualism combined with expert
specialisation creates incoherently fragmented images of an imperial
reality that looks like an elephant groped by four blind men: one
feels the feet and calls it a tree; another feels the trunk and calls
it a snake; and each in turn is convinced by his own palpable facts,
but as a group they cannot describe what is there. In the same way,
some Americans focus on Islamic ideology; some, on nuclear threats;
some, on evil rulers; some, on the ghostly al-Qaeda; some, on
military options; and others, on civilian and economic issues. Many
Americans are humanitarians concerned with suffering. But each group
having gathered its own data on its specialised topic, and each
struggling daily with work and family - 'just making a living,' as we
say - their understandings do not add up to a coherent picture.
Empire appears to be a piecemeal scattering of individual facts and
events, never a coherent product of a democratic political system
where many people might oppose empire, if they could, but where
voting against it is not an option.

The ideological composition of American knowledge also leads
Americans into raging debates among blind men, instead of into a
serious search for better information. Foreign information and
opinions are discounted, as in other countries. Non-nationals are
always kept away from the levers of public opinion. Because the US
has such a heavy impact on so many countries, this nationalist
resistance to foreign opinion might be usefully compared to a father
discounting cries of pain from his family and neighbours. A US
national structure of intellectual work and debate sets firm limits
on factual input and applies appropriate filters. Most Americans
never learn anything about any other country except what is deemed
relevant to the American national context by American experts and
defenders. Americans learn a lot about the world, but not what people
in other countries want Americans to learn. Rather, Americans learn
how every country fits into the American scheme. Some fit better than
others, and those that do not fit need fixing. The world appears to
be a collection of countries where people emulate America, and where
people who can migrate come to America to thrive inside an absorbent
American culture that seems to provide a workable model of the world,
a much better model, indeed, than the United Nations. In the American
model, all cultural diversity fits neatly inside a politics of
identity that revolves around the white elites who prescribed the US
constitution, assay US values, and dominate all major US
institutions. Most Americans believe that people everywhere would be
better off adopting the American model of cultural and political
stability and economic progress.

The confidence with which American feminists promoted the
criminalisation of the Taliban and conquest of Afghanistan is a good
indication of how liberal Americans support imperial expansion.
Liberal democrats led the fight against communism at home and abroad.
Liberals and conservatives equally support the US empire, whose name
they dare not speak in public. The empire will not be undone until
its reality and costs become visible to Americans who might think
about dismantling it, if they could only see it. Until empire is on
the public agenda in America, it can never be effectively criticised
or made an object of basic policy change. Effective challenges will
not appear on the battlefield, let alone among the rubble of suicide
bombers; they will begin in newspapers, magazines, books, schools,
email, blogs, chat rooms, drinking halls, churches, and dinner
parties; then they will move into the streets and finally into
election campaigns.

Americans can eventually imbibe the wisdom of the world and engage in
dialogue with people who experience US empire from the other side. It
is critically important to write books based on experience outside
America to sell in America; to get citizens of the world and foreign
students in America to bear witness in public to the US empire at
work in the world at large; and to organise programmes for action
around the world that make sense in America yet change the way
Americans think. Obstacles to all these critical endeavours are
formidable and mounting under the paranoid national security regime
in America today.

© Copyright 2001