From The Ramparts

Imperialistic Karma

Imperialistic Karma

“One of the severe side effects of imperialism in its advanced stages seems to be that it rots the brains of the imperialists. They start believing that they are the bearers of civilization, the bringers of light to "primitives" and "savages" (largely so identified because of their resistance to being "liberated" by us), the carriers of science and modernity to backward peoples, beacons and guides for citizens of the "underdeveloped world." Such attitudes are normally accompanied by a racist ideology that proclaims the intrinsic superiority and right to rule of "white" Caucasians. Innumerable European colonialists saw the hand of God in Darwin's discovery of evolution, so long as it was understood that He had programmed the outcome of evolution in favor of late Victorian Englishmen.” Chalmers Johnson

Most AmeriKKKans having been brainwashed and dummied down by an educational system that promotes white supremacist ideology, who live a deluded lives actually believing AmeriKKKa is a “free” and “democratic” nation. While it is true that up until recently some AmeriKKKans could travel without hassle, could take advantage of a higher standard of living and a consumer culture second to none, they were content not to know about the horrors their government and its corporate puppeteers were perpetrating around the globe in their names. These AmeriKKKans, would argue to the death AmeriKKKa is not an empire nor is it a predatory imperialist nation. They maintain this inaccurate point of view despite the fact the AmeriKKKan government has since day one been engaged in genocidal, extraterritorial encroachment and intrigue. The infant government's first campaigns were against the indigenous inhabitants of this land. Subsequently their covetousness spread to the rest of the hemisphere, into the Pacific (the Philippines and Hawaii) and then the world.
The AmeriKKKan plutocracy shouldered the mentality and mantle of European imperialism which was inherent in the founding of this nation. They steadily built upon it to the point they coveted recognition as an imperial equal amongst their European brethren. Their avarice was the root cause of the Mexican and Spanish American Wars and was the main reason AmeriKKKa was invited to the Berlin Conference where whites carved up Africa in 1884.
The Europeans’ blood lust caused incessant wars and violence amongst themselves and the non-Europeans they encountered around the world in the modern era from the fifteenth century onward. The twentieth century saw the dawn of global warfare which caused the deaths of millions and massive devastation on a global scale. European barbarism during that war culminated in the dropping of two atomic bombs on a non white civilian population by the United States. Following the second World War and the devastating drain on the Western imperialists’ coffers due to that war, AmeriKKKa took the baton of Western hubris and continued the quest for global domination.
The AmeriKKKan empire distinguished itself by the use of economic coercion as well as military force. But like all empires, AmeriKKKa now finds itself standing at the inevitable moral and fiscal precipice leading to destruction and decay. AmeriKKKa has arrived at this point in a much shorter time span than its Spanish, Dutch, Anglo and French predecessors. But unlike empires that exacted tribute from their conquered vassals that enriched the nobles, the imperial class with a few benefits trickling down to the lower classes in the form of higher standards of living, new and exotic foodstuffs and material goods; the bulk of the benefits of the AmeriKKKan empire are going to the corporations and super rich.
Today all we have to show for our empire status is a few new electronic gizmos and gadgets and a sinking standard of living. As many historians, social critics and astute person have/are pointing out AmeriKKKa has sunk into a deep moral abyss and we may have passed the point of no return. “Under President Clinton, the U.S. empire expanded far beyond the frontiers of any president since Harry Truman. From the Baltic countries to the Balkans and then onward toward the southern tier of what was formerly the USSR, the U.S. has established a series of client states, which are either new NATO members or ‘peace associates’ (clients-in-waiting). In Asia, the U.S. military has incurred in China’s airspace, modernized Taiwan’s military, bought into South Korea’s major industries, and challenged the stagnant Japanese economy for supremacy in the region. Today, the U.S. has military bases on the frontiers of Russia, its missiles only five minutes from Moscow. Washington bombs Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Somalia with impunity, and organizes international ‘Show trials’ in the Hague where it parades its defeated rivals. Washington has military bases in its new satellite states—Albania, Macedonia, Kosovo and via NATO in Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, etc.
Euro-American empires have succeeded in imposing neo-liberalism on five continents, opening the door to takeovers of lucrative national enterprises (both public and private), and penetration of markets, thus extending and deepening imperial control over the economies of the Third World. The Clinton legacy with regard to the domestic economy, revealed a 'two- faced' reality: on the surface an expansive economy covering nine years in which U.S. corporations were able to accrue enormous profits, in part based on the paper earnings of wild speculation on the stock market, the laundering by leading U.S. banks of hundreds of billions of ‘dirty money’ annually, highly indebted consumer spending and huge trade deficits. Clinton’s further deregulation of the financial system and economy led to the highest level of inequalities and concentration of wealth on Wall Street of any U.S. president since the turn of the 19th century.” Managing empire in a time of crisis By James Petras http://www.zmag.org/ZMag/articles/jul01petras.htm
The Clinton and Bu$h II administrations have exacerbated the widening income gap between the super rich and working classes in AmeriKKKa. Both contributed to a rapid whittling away of Constitutional rights and security under the guise of an external threat of terrorism that their own policies have helped create. Under the pretext of fighting a bogus “global war on terrorism”, Bu$h and his puppeteers have ramped up the military aspect of the empire; to the displeasure of much of the world and the people at home. “The US has suffered a significant loss of power and prestige around the world in the years since George W. Bush came to power, limiting its ability to influence international crises, an annual survey from a well regarded British security think-tank concluded on Tuesday. The 2007 Strategic Survey of the non-partisan International Institute for Strategic Studies picked the decline of US authority as one of the most important security developments of the past year – but suggested the fading of American prestige began earlier, largely due to its failings in Iraq.” http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/da91e5ce-615e-11
It should come as no surprise that the Bu$h administration’s lies and blatant imperialism in Haiti, Iraq, in Afghanistan and in proxy resource wars in Africa and Latin America have cost the US support around the world. The uncovering of (despite attempts by the Bu$h administration and the US corporate media to suppress and trivialize) wide scale torture, atrocities and heavy handed tactics by the US military in Iraq have damaged the veneer of respectability the US constructed for itself around the world.
The arrogance and hubris of elements within the US plutocracy have come back to haunt them. The ongoing imperialist wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are taking a heavy toll on the fiscal stability of the country. Bu$h’s reintroduction of Reaganomics has decimated the US treasury and threatens to further erode and undermine the “social safety net” of the socialistic New Deal and “Great Society” programs. The US populous is beginning to see the class warfare being waged against it and opposes the elites’ imperialism. They want change but the politicians are dancing to the tune of their special interest, lobbyist and corporate puppeteers rather than the people's wishes.
The consequences (Karma) of decades of imperialistic machinations is now becoming increasingly evident. Wall Street has been one beneficiary (along with the Military Industrial Complex and other “special interests groups”) of these machinations and policies which were planned with their direct input. (See a synopsis of Wall Street influence on US foreign policy by reading Wall Street, Banks, and American Foreign Policy by Murray N. Rothbard at http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard66.html ) The cunning and conniving business and political relationships revealed in Rothbard’s piece should awaken readers to the role class interests play in domestic politics and international affairs. For a military perspective read, War Is A Racket by Major General Smedley Butler at http://lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm .
The problem for the bankers and plutocrats is much of the world isn’t buying their entitlement to rule attitudes. At home Joe and Jane Sixpack are alarmed by the increasing drift towards fascism and are becoming more antagonistic towards the business as usual politicians as witnessed in the recent Iowa caucus voting results. Whether what we are seeing is a real movement towards independence or an anomaly the plutocrats will eventually co-op and exploit to their own advantage remains to be seen. Whatever happens, the inevitable Karma inherent in the actions and policies of the ruling elites must be paid. If the masses don’t wake up and assert their will and their right to alter the government as articulated in the US Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.” the impending Karma will be all the more painful and devastating.

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posted by Junious Ricardo Stanton @ 2:27 PM