Tag: empire

Colonialism: a cancer on the planet

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30 December 2021 — MROnline

by Paul Buhl

| The Cancer of Colonialism W Alphaeus Hunton Black Liberation and the Daily Worker 194446 Edited with an Introduction by Tony Pecinovsky Foreword by Vijay Prashad New York International Publishers 2021 353pp 99 | MR OnlineThe Cancer of Colonialism: W. Alphaeus Hunton, Black Liberation and the Daily Worker 1944-46. Edited with an Introduction by Tony Pecinovsky. Foreword by Vijay Prashad. New York: International Publishers, 2021. 353pp, $19.99.

This highly unusual book highlights a forgotten journalist and thinker, but just as much, the assiduous research and interpretations by Tony Pecinovsky, a St. Louis activist and non-academic scholar, on the history of the U.S. Left. W.A. Hunton, to quote W.E.B. Du Bois, was “the kind of absolutely honest and unselfish scholar who is apt to be trampled on and neglected in the present American world.” (p.177) Thanks to Pecinovsky, Hunton is rediscovered.

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Will the United States finally decolonize Puerto Rico?

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11 May 2021 — MROnline

Puerto Rican flag outside the Capitol, San Juan, Puerto Rico, 2 March, 2008

by

On April 14, 2021 the House Committee on Natural Resources held hearings on two competing bills to end Puerto Rico’s colonial status. The different bills reflect the changing political dynamics in the archipelago, as well as the Puerto Rican diaspora’s growing political clout. H.R.1522, the Puerto Rican State Admission Act, binds Congress to admit Puerto Rico into the Union if a majority vote in favor of doing so in a special referendum. H.R. 2070, the Puerto Rico Self-Determination Act, authorizes the insular legislature to convene a semi-permanent status convention where elected delegates decide on alternative self-determination options that are “outside the territorial clause of the constitution.” The bill creates a bilateral negotiating commission of U.S. government officials and the convention delegates. In a referendum, voters will select a territorial option, which may include statehood, independence and sovereign free association. The bill requires that Congress “approve a joint resolution to ratify the preferred self-determination option” approved in a referendum. Commonwealth (or Estado Libre Asociado–ELA in Spanish) is not included as an option in this status bill.

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Germany: Surprise on the left

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Berlin Bulletin No. 186 March 2, 2021 — MRonline

Surprise, surprise! Things worked out quite differently than expected at the congress of the LINKE, the left-wing party. The surprise was not that it took place at all, after the pandemic forced postponements from June to October and from October to last weekend, with most of the 580 delegates at home in front of a screen, microphone and camera; only the socially-distanced, masked leaders sat in a sparsely occupied hall in Berlin. But other parties are meeting that way too.

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How the U.S. failed at its foreign policy toward Venezuela

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9 August 2020 — MRonline

Elliott Abrams official photo (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

by and

This article was produced by Globetrotter, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

On August 4, 2020, the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee held a hearing on Venezuela. Appearing before the committee was U.S. State Department Special Representative Elliott Abrams. Abrams, who has had a long—and controversial—career in the formation of U.S. foreign policy, was assaulted by almost all the members of the Senate committee. The senators, almost without exception, suggested that Abrams had been—since 2019—responsible for a failed U.S. attempt to overthrow the Venezuelan government of President Nicolás Maduro.

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The Siren Call of a ‘System Leader’

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11 February 2020 — Global Research

The United States may be destined for a shorter historical existence than the Mongol era established by Genghis Khan

By Pepe Escobar

Anouk Aimee and Marcello Mastroianni in Fellini’s ‘La Dolce Vita’

A considerable spectrum of the liberal West takes the American interpretation of what civilization consists of to be something like an immutable law of nature. But what if this interpretation is on the verge of an irreparable breakdown?

Michael Vlahos has argued that the US is not a mere nation-state but a “system leader” – “a civilizational power like Rome, Byzantium, and the Ottoman Empire.” And, we should add, China – which he did not mention. The system leader is “a universalistic identity framework tied to a state. This vantage is helpful because the United States clearly owns this identity framework today.”

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Brexit trade delusions show why Britain needs to confront its history of empire By Rahul Verma

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15 June 2019 — Global Justice Now

Edward Duncan’s painting of the East India Company iron steam ship Nemesis destroying Chinese war junks in Anson’s Bay, 1843 | Credit: National Maritime Museum, London

On 7 December, 2016, nearly six months after the referendum, Prime Minister Theresa May gave a speech to the Gulf Cooperation Council in Bahrain. She said: “As Britain leaves the European Union so we intend to take a leap forward, to look outwards and seek to become the most committed and most passionate advocate of free trade in the world.”

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Britain is More of a Fake State than Anything Else By Grete Mautner

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11 October 2018 — NEO

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Blatant lies have been a feature of the British political system for a long while. Whitehall’s tried and tested ways of manipulating the general public are used to distract attention from crucial topics. But what’s even more curious is that inside the Whitehall bunkers where they come up with their own definitions for such manipulations, there is even a term for this kind of propaganda. They call it a ‘term of art’.

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Empire Under Obama, Part 1: Political Language and the ‘Mafia Principles’ of International Relations By Andrew Gavin Marshall

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7 October 2013 — The Hampton Institute

Barack ObamaIn the first part of this essay series on ‘Empire Under Obama,’ I will aim to establish some fundamental premises of modern imperialism, or what is often referred to as ‘international relations,’ ‘geopolitics’, or ‘foreign policy.’ Specifically, I will refer to George Orwell’s writing on ‘political language’ in order to provide a context in which the discourse of imperialism may take place out in the open with very little comprehension on the part of the public which consumes the information; and further, to draw upon Noam Chomsky’s suggestion of understanding international relations as the application of ‘Mafia Principles’ to foreign policy. This part provides some background on these issues, and future parts to this essay series will be examining the manifestation of empire in recent years.

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The Unnatural Death of Dr David Kelly: The Illusions of the Illicit Hutton Inquiry – the ‘Forensics’ By Dr. David Halpin

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9 August 2013 — Global Research

Subversion of Due Process: The Death of Dr. David Kelly

If Albion is perfidious in foreign lands is it not likely its cunning and its lying will be strong suits on the home front? The trappings of Crown, ancient ceremony, and red empire stamp authority and apparent integrity on the British state. These, and much else, are the coinage of a supine and incestuous media and especially of the BBC, the state broadcaster and supreme propagandist. ‘Nation shall speak peace unto nation’ is its most ironic motto. The whole works in terrible concert.

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The Hero’s Reward and the Judgment of History By Andrew Levine

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6 July 2013 — The Greanville Post

A political class transparently and unapologetically at the service of the superrich

Governments abhor transparency, and governments lie.  To keep them (comparatively) honest, an engaged and informed citizenry is indispensable. That requires media that are aggressive and probing, and that are not afraid to speak the truth.  We have precious little of that in the United States today.

Postcard from the End of America: Cheyenne By Linh Dinh

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11 April 2013 — Dissident Voice

Of all the words uttered by a person, only a few remain unforgettable to any listener, for these can charm, haunt, humiliate, annoy or terrify even decades later. My friend Lan, for example, is reduced in my mind to a single joking sentence, “This time I’ll probably have to sell my body,” and I’ll never forgive X for sneering, “I ain’t got none!” With a public figure, the lingering words can even be misquoted, or conjured up out of malice or adoration, as likely the case with the incipiently subterranean Margaret Thatcher (the Milk Snatcher). Though there’s no record of it, she’s repeatedly cited as having intoned, “A man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself as a failure.” The public likes this faux quotation because it neatly sums up Thatcher’s disdain for the bottom half, for “losers,” so to speak, and also because it sounds pretty funny.

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The Return of Empires (VII) By Dmitry MININ

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21 March 2013 — Strategic Culture Foundation

Why does the United States need an empire?

Historian Niall Ferguson states that the majority of modern-day academics see an entirely appropriate parallel between the “imperial rule” of the USA and the British Empire as it was 100 years ago.[1] Joseph Nye, meanwhile, believes that “not since Rome has one nation loomed so large above the others… Respected analysts on both the left and the right are beginning to refer to “American empire” approvingly as the dominant narrative of the twenty-first century.”[2]

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The Return of Empires (III) By Dmitry MININ

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28 February 2013 — Strategic Culture Foundation

«Smart power» in the service of the American empire

The dissociation of the United States from a number of international problems by shifting these problems onto allies and delegating authority to them, a result of the United States‘ «imperial overheating», is based on the currently popular concept of «smart power», the very emergence of which suggests that America‘s former sources of power have been exhausted… The time when America‘s leadership went unquestioned has passed. Nowadays, maintaining leadership demands considerable intellectual and political efforts from the rulers of the American empire. 

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The Return of Empires (II) By Dmitry MININ

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26 February 2013 — Strategic Culture Foundation

A World of Postmodernism or the Newest Middle Ages?

The process already taking shape in the world of consolidating «larger spaces», and the return of the empires of by-gone eras may not, at first glance, seem to respond to the spirit of the times. However, we are living in an age which, in view of its uncertainty in people’s minds, is indiscriminate to such an extent that it is no stranger to the most improbable policy prescriptions. 

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