The basic fact that the United States is an empire is perhaps the most systematically taboo subject within mainstream American information systems and public discourse. U.S. imperialism is almost never discussed in depth, critically or intelligently, within corporate media or the educational system. It is never mentioned by candidates of the two dominant political parties, or brought up at presidential debates. It is rarely mentioned even within universities, outside of a few select courses or degree programs.
This deafening silence on this key subject is a form of unspoken propaganda. This ultimately manufactures an epidemic of deadly ignorance to arguably the most harmful institution in the world and sustains the mythology of a “benevolent U.S. government.” It also deprives Americans from core context that would enable correct comprehension of world events as they unfold. To debunk the mythology and expose American imperialism, it is crucial to first unravel its information-control methodology.
Within corporate-state media, there are various propaganda techniques; the most simple is outright lies like Iraq’s non-existent WMD and Saddam Hussein’s non-existent connections to the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center.
More recently, we witnessed the incessant media mantra that the Ukraine war was “unprovoked,” despite a mountain of evidence proving the opposite. The U.S. massively provoked the war via NATO expansion and by sponsoring the ultra-nationalist 2014 Ukraine coup that caused civil war. We also recently experienced abundant direct lies to justify U.S.-backed Israeli genocide, such as the debunked reports of 40 beheaded babies and Hamas mass rape.
There is also propaganda by distortion, such as twisting the framing of events so as to make the provocateur or aggressor look like the victim or defender, when the inverse is the reality. For example, Israelis are typically framed as retaliating and “defending” against Palestinian attacks and rarely the reverse, which is an inversion of causation if one objectively examines the last 75 years of history. The Palestinians have suffered for decades under constant Israeli brutalization, occupation, land theft, blockade, apartheid, restriction of movement, carpet bombings and too many other crimes to list. This form of information warfare and manipulation of American minds on this subject began long ago. Noam Chomsky and other media analyst experts demonstrate this with crystal clarity in the superb 2004 documentary Peace, Propaganda & the Promised Land, free online here.
Another example of distortion is the constant corporate media framing of China and North Korea acting “provocatively” near their coastlines. In reality, it is the U.S. that is the provocateur as it practices massive annual war games and places dozens of military bases near their borders.
This is in addition to oft-omitted historical context of former U.S. imperialism in China and genocidal extermination of 20% of the North Korean population. More than half a million tons of bombs were dropped on Koreans by the U.S., along with napalm and chemical weapons. Top U.S. Air Force General Curtis LeMay bragged that they “burned down every town in North Korea.” Corporate media never provide this context or allow this question: How would you feel if a previously genocidal military practiced annual war games on your borders?
A third technique is propaganda by Hollywood mythmaking. The 2022 documentary titled Theaters of War: How the Pentagon and CIA Took Hollywood gives great insight into this method. The filmmakers obtained thousands of pages of declassified documents via Freedom of Information Act requests, and found intimate relationships between Hollywood filmmakers, the CIA and the Pentagon.
These documents exposed that “the Pentagon and CIA have exercised direct editorial control over more than 2,500 film and television productions, most of them since 2001.” The result is that past wars, the CIA and U.S. military are sanitized and glorified, creating a false image. The U.S. military and CIA are consistently portrayed as a benevolent force that is extremely divergent from the reality of imperialism.
Lastly, there is propaganda by omission, which functions two ways: by purposefully excluding key historical context or avoiding a subject altogether. An example of context omission is how preceding historical causation triggers for the Ukraine War are excluded from reports. Moreover, mainstream media consistently omit the crucial contextual fact that Russia has repeatedly sought peace agreements to stop the war, such as the Minsk and Istanbul agreements, which were sabotaged by the West. Secondarily, omission propaganda can function by simply never discussing a subject entirely, as is precisely the case with U.S. imperialism.
These propaganda methods powerfully manipulate American minds, and much of the rest of the world too as U.S. information control is global.
U.S. mythology is spread all over the planet not just indirectly via mainstream media and Hollywood, but also more directly via what The New York Times once called the CIA’s “Worldwide Propaganda Network.”
Aggressively invasive U.S. state media networks, Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia, et al. broadcast information all across the globe in 48 foreign languages.
Interestingly, some of these programs were covertly funded by the CIA until 1972. This state media works to ensure foreign subservience by painting a false image of the United States and manifactures opposition movements against defiant nations targeted for regime change.
Due to the information void, most Americans have little to no clue that their own nation is certainly an empire. This causes the American public to be catastrophically uninformed about arguably the single most harmful institution on the planet, after decades of warfare and environmental harm are fully accounted. American ignorance to this core reality prohibits the population from fully understanding this transcendent, deeply bipartisan problem.
Consequently, this prevents them from contemplating solutions for opposing or dismantling the empire, or from intelligently adapting to its potential decline and preparing for its probable decline and potential collapse.
The cluelessness also inhibits Americans from fully understanding a vast amount of information reported in mainstream media, especially in terms of perpetual wars and imperial coups. For example, several nations have recently faced U.S. imperialist coups, such as Syria, Georgia and Romania, but mainstream reports do not convey this directly. This lack of contextualization makes Americans consistently vulnerable to the redundant deluge of propaganda, manufacturing of consent for imperial warfare. Without understanding what the coups and wars are really for, Americans remain gullible to the next round of lies, especially if the war party they prefer is the one whipping up the hysteria.
Even among the minority of Americans who acknowledge the empire, there is great misunderstanding. Most consequentially, there are numerous leading academics on this subject that fundamentally fail to fully grasp the deeper essence of American imperialism. This causes them to view the empire as positive or to improperly diagnose the full extent of the disease, which prevents them from presenting plausible cures or predictions. It also causes further misinterpretations of current events, as is standard among the broader public that knows nothing of empire.
Among the most lucid scholars of U.S. imperialism is Professor Michael Parenti. He points out in his book The Face of Imperialism that most historians have misleadingly painted a mythological, rosy picture of what imperialism really is. When writing about the Roman and British empires, they often give undeserved names of peace, such as Pax Romana and Pax Britannica. These terms disguise the brutal perpetual warfare and deep economic exploitation inherent to imperialism.
The same mythmaking also applies to academics writing on U.S. empire, such as military historian Max Boot composing this fiction: “U.S. imperialism has been the greatest force for good in the world during the past century.”
Parenti finds that, even among academics who write critically of U.S. empire, many fail to fully describe imperialism. For example, when author Chalmers Johnson uses the word “empire,” it is “divested of its full meaning…[using it] to mean simply dominion and power, most notably military power.” (Emphasis added.) Like many other scholars, Johnson criticizes the military dimension of empire, but fails to fully criticize the economic dimension.
This is a misrepresentation of what U.S. empire has always been about. As Parenti states, “While we hear a lot about empire and militarism, we hear very little about imperialism…The very activity of empire.” (Emphasis added.) This comparatively shallow analysis devoid of “political-economic content” or critique of capitalist class interests is representative of the broader public discourse.
At its heart, imperialism has always centered on commerce, authoritarian economic extraction of natural and human resource wealth from far-off lands to enrich an elite investor class. It typically entails mass misery, exploitation, dehumanization, pollution, poverty and slaughter to whichever people live near valuable resources. This is known as the “resource curse,” which is the reason oil-rich nations, such as Iraq, Iran, Libya and Venezuela, have repeatedly been prime subjects for imperialist warfare, regime-change efforts and sanctions.
Another reason most Americans have difficulty fully recognizing U.S. imperialism is that it is not structured like previous colonial powers; hence, the more precise term neo-imperialism. For example, previous empires had explicit colonial territories they controlled using imperial vice-royalties, direct administrations that extracted vast resource wealth. Conversely, neo-imperialism does not overtly control the nations from which it expropriates wealth and does not have obvious viceroy administrators.
Instead, neo-imperialism functions using subservient vassal governments with puppet leaders, which can be either democratically elected leaders or dictators of various sorts. There is the superficial façade of independent sovereign nations, but underneath is the same imperialist extraction of wealth and exploitation of people.
One of the supreme insider accounts of U.S. neo-imperialism was provided by the highly decorated Marine Corps General Smedley Butler in 1933:
“I spent thirty-three years…[in] the Marine Corps…[as] a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism…I helped make Mexico…safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys…I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street…I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested….I had…a swell racket. Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.”
To make nations safe for capitalism as Butler describes, there are numerous mechanisms neo-imperialists use to establish and sustain vassal states, often called U.S. “allies.” Likewise, there are numerous methods they use to overthrow governments that resist their agenda. As William Blum wrote in his seminal work Killing Hope, “In virtually every case involving the Third World [that brought down the wrath of U.S. intervention], it has been…a policy of ‘self-determination’: [pursuing] a path of development independent of U.S. foreign policy objectives.”
A nation becomes a target for regime change the moment it starts enacting independent economic-nationalist laws and policies that run counter to U.S. imperial interests. These policies often include nationalizing resources and kicking out U.S. corporations, and forming socialistic and anti-imperialist governments. It also includes even milder reforms like spending “too much” of a nation’s wealth on social policies and programs that help the broader public, the poorer supermajority.
The imperialist interventions include overthrowing many democratically elected leaders, such as Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala (1954), Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran (1953), Salvador Allende in Chile (1973), Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine (2014), and many others. These coups are supreme assaults against the institution of democracy itself, obliterating the lie that the U.S. government is in the business of spreading freedom and democracy.
A second body blow to that blatant lie is the fact that the U.S. sells weapons to 73 percent of the world’s dictators. The only “democracy” acceptable under U.S. corporate imperialism is one that is subservient to dictatorial Western capitalist interests.
Once neo-imperialists have marked a nation as a target for regime change, their methods can take many forms and with varying time schedules. We have witnessed dozens of successful regime changes and coup attempts, documented well in Killing Hope. There are four primary mechanisms neo-imperialists use to overthrow nations targeted for coups, which include economic warfare, information warfare, lawfare and military intervention.
The first regime change method is destabilzing economic warfare to manufacture popular discontent. Perhaps the most egregious example is the six decades long U.S. embargo on Cuba, which almost every nation on earth has repeatedly voted to end.
We also recently witnessed this method of warfare for Russian regime change, but the sanctions ended up backfiring and harming European economies more than Russia. Coercive U.S. sanctions can also ultimately cause mass suffering and death of a nation’s people as we saw in Iraq, Venezuela, Afghanistan and elsewhere, which is typically the intention to incite uprisings.
Another coup methodology entails information warfare, election meddling, and funding subversive nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and US-funded “independent” media outlets. These organizations produce propaganda and organize Astroturf movements, in conjunction with economic warfare, to destabilize societies and incite public unrest for regime change, often called “color revolutions.”
This type of coup has been ongoing in Georgia for most of last year.
The US State Department, US Agency for International Development (USAID) and National Endowment for Democracy (NED) are the principle agents that organize this type of imperialism activity. Notably, the largest private actor in these top-down “revolutions” in Georgia, Ukraine and many other nations is the billionaire hedge fund manager George Soros. Interestingly, this type of clandestine action was formerly done by the CIA before scandals erupted in the early 1980s.
The third type of regime change technique is lawfare, or overthrow via a nation’s courts and legal system. We recently witnessed this in the ouster of Imran Khan, the popular elected leader of Pakistan. A second example also occurred recently in Romania, when their top court cancelled the presidential election after it appeared independent candidate Călin Georgescu appeared to be winning.
Yes, Georgescu is a right wing politician with objectionable views, but that is not the stated or unstated reason his election was cancelled, nor does it justify cancelling Romanian democracy. The stated reason is questionable allegations of “Russian election interference” that smell similar to the now debunked Russiagate scandal in the 2016 US election.
The unstated likely reason was that Georgescu wanted to end Romania’s involvement in the US-led NATO proxy war with Russia in Ukraine. This posed a massive threat to U.S.-NATO war objectives because Romania shares a large border with Ukraine, and is strategically important for numerous reasons. Although direct U.S. pressure on Romania’s court has not been reported, it is highly likely given the stakes, and the U.S. has provided support for the court’s decision.
Military intervention is the final method for regime change, once it is acknowledged that the other methods will not work. This coup technique includes overt direct invasions as we saw with Iraq and Libya to remove Saddam Hussein (2003) and Muammar Gaddafi (2011), respectively. Other forms of lower intensity military intervention include covert action and CIA-backed coups. This entails arming and training paramilitary groups, such as Latin American death squads trained at Fort Benning, Georgia.
It also includes the CIA arming and training Middle East religious extremist terrorist groups, such as the mujahedeen and Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan. We also just witnessed a momentous US-backed coup in Syria led by Al-Qaeda-linked “rebels” that “love Israel,” led by “former” Al-Qaeda and ISIS commander Abu Mohammed al-Jolani. Additionally, covert action coups can entail the CIA working with foreign military leaders to overthrow their own governments, as we saw with General Augusto Pinochet in Chile.
Typically, after neo-imperialist coups in the Third World succeed, various sorts of dictators are installed or sham elections are held to install a “democratically” elected puppet. Shortly thereafter, various neo-liberal economic reforms are established, resources and markets are “liberated” or opened up to foreign corporate exploitation, including by a weakening of labor or environmental laws. State assets are privatized and sold off at undervalued prices, including public utilities and infrastructure. Austerity measures are instituted to slash or eliminate social programs for the poorer working class, such as pensions, health care, education, etc.
These “reforms” also come in packages called “structural adjustments,” and as stipulations for large loans from the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. Once a nation takes out these loans, they are not only required to institute the reforms, but enter into financial subjugation. These structural adjustments ensure most of the nation’s wealth and profits go to wealthy foreign capitalist investors, instead of being kept in the nation to help the nation’s people.
The many millions of impoverished people in the Third World would not be poor if they were able to fully benefit from their nation’s riches, as Michael Parenti points out in this speech:
“The Third World is not poor! [Ruling-class capitalists] don’t go to poor countries to make money. There are very few poor countries in this world. Most countries are rich! The Philippines is rich! Brazil is rich! Mexico is rich! Chile is rich! Only the people are poor, but there’s billions to be made there, to be carved out and taken…For 400 years the capitalist European and North American powers have carved out and taken [these nations’ natural resources and cheap labor…These countries are not underdeveloped; they’re over-exploited.”
These are some of the key ways that U.S. imperialism functions. This is a small taste of what is hidden from American minds, and much of the rest of the world too as U.S. information control and propaganda is global. This subject is perhaps the biggest elephant in the room, the highest voltage third rail of political discourse. Neither major party will touch it in a serious way. It is also the institution that causes the most mass death and misery to millions of people all around the planet.
The cost of empire also ultimately harms Americans at home as domestic social programs are cut to pay for vast imperialism budgets. For example, the U.S. could have become a world leader in high-speed rail like China if it had not prioritized wasting more than $8 trillion on its recent “War on Terror.” The vast military empire is also the single largest institutional consumer of fossil fuel petroleum on the planet, among other massive environmental harms.
The anti-democratic nature of imperialism abroad also breeds anti-democratic domestic policy. When Democrats and Republicans work with the CIA and State Department to meddle in foreign elections, manipulate foreign populations with propaganda and wage endless coups, that became their institutional culture.
This helps to explain why they wage information warfare on and censor us domestically, and why undemocratic rule by the richest oligarchs remains firmly entrenched. A “democratic imperialist” or “republican imperialist” are blatant oxymorons, considering imperialism is inherently anti-democratic and anti-republican. Genuine democracy is impossible without an end to U.S. imperialist oligarchy.
All but the most privileged and sheltered Americans surely understand that something is very wrong with American culture, economy, media and politics. The immense obstacle of U.S. imperialism is at the very epicenter of our national and international political and economic disease, and omission propaganda obscures the diagnosis.
Once a critical mass of Americans learns to see through the propaganda and begins showing others the way, we will have the ability to end this extremely harmful institution. Only when enough people wake up and reject imperialism will the world be able to know genuine democracy, justice and peace.
Incinerating US Neo-imperialist Propaganda
This very article is an effort toward burning the carefully constructed web of lies that upholds the disease of U.S. Empire. However, it appears something far more powerful toward this end is on the horizon. For all the horrors promised by incoming president Donald Trump, there may be a couple silver linings.
With mind-boggling myopic hubris, Trump seems to be setting ablaze the core architecture of US imperialism propaganda. The imperial establishment of both corporate war parties and their media partners worked tirelessly for decades to create the fictional narrative and false image of what USA is and does. According to their fairy tales, “USA is the good guys spreading freedom and democracy all over the globe,” and that is what U.S. foreign policy is all about. They invested vast human and financial resources toward manufacturing and repeating a constant deluge of lies that hide the reality of U.S. neo-imperialism, obscuring its record of coups, war crimes, genocide and mass murder.
In one fell swoop, Trump appears to be incinerating their many years of hard work. Obviously, he is not doing this because he is anti-imperialist. By making it a centerpiece of his agenda to take over Canada, Greenland, and Panama Canal, Trump is shifting the US image back to classical imperialism.
By threatening to annex NATO member Canada and take Greenland from EU/NATO member Denmark, Trump is pushing for what neo-imperialists claimed Russia was wanting do: to take European/NATO territory. This is certainly corrosive to NATO unity, and European subservience to U.S. Empire. If the U.S. loses European allies and NATO falls apart, there will be virtually nobody left. If Europe awakens to how they were scammed over the backfiring US economic war on Russia and costly U.S. proxy war in Ukraine, it will further spell the end of NATO and American Empire.
Whether Trump succeeds in seizing Canada and Greenland or not, he may be inadvertently causing severe damage to the empire. He is endangering the key propaganda mythology of USA as the “good guys,” and is pushing away the most important allies that give political legitimacy to U.S. neo-imperialist policies. He is exposing American Empire for everyone to more easily see. The emperor was already barely clothed, and now he is removing the last shred of clothing, the thong if you will.
Once a critical mass of humans learns to see clearly through the propaganda, we will have the ability to end this extremely harmful institution. When enough people wake up and reject US imperialism, the world will have greater potential to know genuine democracy, justice and peace. This anti-imperialist awakening began long ago, and this train has recently been gaining steam. More and more of us are throwing fuel on the fire. Please join us.
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About the Author
Abel Tomlinson is an organic gardener, antiwar activist organizer and former Congressional Candidate for U.S. Congress, Arkansas 3rd District.
Abel can be reached at abeltomlinson@gmail.com.
