Should It Matter America Recognizes Independence Day Instead of Empire Day?

Although the idea that the United States as an empire is missing from America’s vocabulary, it didn’t’ stop Howard Zinn, in his immensely controversial “A People’s History of the Unites States,” to write the “global American empire.” Neither did it stop others. Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and others, to be sure, used the phrase “Empire of liberty” when describing the young Republic. Years later, in 1896, the Washington Post editorialized, “The taste of Empire is in the mouth of the people even as the taste of blood is in the jungle. It means an imperial policy, the Republic, renascent., taking her place with the armed nation.” In 2001, the Bush Administration boasted: “We’re and empire now, we make our own reality.”-minus the “Republic.” But nobody noticed.

The case can further be made that America IS an empire instead of an independent republic, that America should call it Empire Day instead of Independence Day, by the dispossession of Native Americans. Not only was this act to forcibly remove and relegate them to reservations (what they called prisoner of war camps) imperialistic but so was the war fought against Mexico. This, since Mexico lost half its country. Fifty years later in its war a with Spain, the U.S. seized the bulk of Spain’s overseas territories and then did the same with other parts of the Pacific and Caribbean, even China. Since 1945, U.S. armed forces have been deployed abroad for conflicts or to overthrow governments some 211 times in 67 countries. If this isn’t a trait of “Empire,” what is?

Empires “R” Us
Empires aren’t only just about landgrabs, though. Indeed, what do you call the subordination of African Americans? In W.E.B. Dubois’s eyes, black people in America looked more like colonized subjects than the citizens. Many other black thinkers, including Malcolm X and the leaders of the Black Panthers agreed. (1) And then there were women and other minorities like Latinos. Women too were banned from the right to vote and other civil rights for the first 145 years of the young empire. Meanwhile, there were also Latino lynchings and massacres. This was then followed by decades of segregation, poll taxes, literacy tests, and even more hurtful forms of institutional violence. Ultimately, the problem of empire isn’t a lack of history but knowledge and vocabulary.

It’s also a problem of “recognition.” Along with “prior knowledge”, bisecting the word means to rethink, reconsider, and reconceive other possible forms of empire. Consequently, poor workers were kept from voting and civil liberties. With increasing strikes and riots, President Woodrow Wilson admitted, “The government, which was designed for the people, has got into the hands of the corporate bosses …, the special interests. An invisible empire has been set up above the forms of democracy.” He decided, however, to retool America’s corporate-wartime propaganda into a social experiment: persuading Americans to behave as an empire without imaging one, and to convince academic institutions the fate of empire depends on the educations of youth.

Military Supremacy and Economics of Empire
Or what about the spread of U.S. economic power abroad? The American Empire might not have conquered Western Europe after World War II except for its foreign colonies scattered around the world. Today, with the world’s businesses dominated in dollars and by McDonald’s in more than a hundred countries, it’s no wonder many Indigenous and locals complain they feel swamped by U.S. commerce. Neither does this account for the many overthrows like the one in Santo Domingo. After Dominicans rose-up against President Lyndon B. Johnson’s hand-picked dictator and the misery wrought by U.S.-led IMF austerity, he sent the Marines. Meanwhile, as more Dominicans bled to death, he told Americans “we are neutral. “We have attacked no one.”

There were military interventions as well. The years since World War II have brought the U.S. military to country after country. Major conflicts like Korea, Vietnam, Granada, Panama, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iraq have overshadowed lesser ones. Still, hundreds of thousands were killed by imperialistic policies in Iran, Guatemala, Laos, Cambodia, Chile, Honduras, El Salvador, Haiti, Nicaragua, Libya, and Yemen. It included a concerted effort by a corporate and state-sponsored media to use history in the service of forgetting. Indeed, historical memory was abused in order to provide U.S. perpetrators with impunity for their earlier actions. In this way, the past became key to interpreting the present and future. And it was a past absent of empire and genocide.

Unmasking Imperial Illusions
Until George W. Bush, every President since Harry S. Truman has been told to never mention empire. What they have used is fear to extract their corporate and military polices. It’s a fear that has led to a preemptive and permanent war policy as a defensive reaction to the drive for world domination. Whether Communism or Radical Islam, each president has called for a Holy War against the Godless hordes. But the idea the U.S. was required by these same exigencies to protect power beyond its border ignores the fact that each one dealt more with independence and nationalism. Both of which threatened the American Empire and its global hegemony. In the meantime, the absence of a collective empire works since there’s no collective guilt.

“For our impressions as to what is real in matters of society and history,” wrote Michael K. Smith in “Portraits of Empire: Unmasking Imperial Illusions from the ‘American Century’ to the ‘War on Terror,” are precisely that-impressions.” July 4th, or Independence Day, is no different. It too has been passed through ideological filters which yield only endless elaboration of the grand romance-America as free and independent and greatest country on earth-perhaps in history. From the American Revolution to V-J Day and Afghanistan or Venezuela, official American history consequently depicts only a glorious march from democratic triumph over fascism to the defeat-or at least containment-of communism. It now includes Islam, Socialism and immigration.

New Form of Empire Regulates Global Exchange
For now, the American Empire tries to overlook its wealth creation for the very elite and military-industrial-scientific-academic complex. It includes more unseemly matters, like death squad training at the U.S. School of the Americans in Fort Benning, GA, Agent Orange babies in Vietnam, and the ongoing torture in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen and Honduras. It also tries to overlook the scars of empire. Primarily, the pitiless and brutality millions suffer from by living under the weight of the world’s last declining superpower. It’s a superpower that’s not only satisfied its industrial hunger by seizing the raw materials and future of others, but one which has left a memory of exploitation, slavery and extermination-at least for those who’ve had to endure or resist.

In the meantime, nobody is trying to defeat or destroy the American Empire per se. Most of the world wants it to go away. They want it to recede from their shores, their political and cultural lives, even their posterity. This probably won’t happen. To be sure, and in the wake of more Sept. 11 inspired attacks like the latest ISIS threats against New York’s Manhattan Bridge and fleeing U.S. soldiers, Americans have allowed their government to create (not in the interests of its citizenry) a monopoly of interests of the largest corporations which double as its defense contractors. Along with the same directors and CEO’s who revolve in and out of the American Empire, it entails a new form of empire which is located in the regulation of global exchange.

What Must Follow Empires
Should It matter America recognizes, even celebrates, Independence Day Instead of Empire Day? Consequently, some scholars and human rights activists do believe it matters. Maybe then, they say, the American Empire and its citizens would finally be forced to recognize what Baron de Montesquieu warned: “An empire founded by war has to maintain itself by war.” Wars, that is, which are always imperial and require too great of sacrifices.

Dallas Darling is the author of Politics 501: An A-Z Reading on Conscientious Political Thought and Action, Some Nations Above God: 52 Weekly Reflections On Modern-Day Imperialism, Militarism, And Consumerism in the Context of John’s Apocalyptic Vision, and The Other Side Of Christianity: Reflections on Faith, Politics, Spirituality, History, and Peace. He is a correspondent for www.WN.com. You can read more of Dallas’ writings at www.beverlydarling.com and www.WN.com/dallasdarling.

(1) Immerwahr, Daniel. How To Hide An Empire: A History Of The Greater United States.” New York, New York: Straus and Giroux, 2019., p. 14.