Michael Novick of, "People Against Racist Terror, " ( http://www.prisonactivist.org/pubs/ttt/review.html , "WHITE LIES, WHITE POWER: The Fight Against White Supremacy and Reactionary Violence by Michael Novick, Common Courage Press, Monroe ME, 1995.) jumps on Christian Parenti... http://inthesetimes.com/comments.php?id=289_0_4_0_M Parenti's interesting review of what sounds like a valuable book betrays a commonly-found blindness to the long existence of the U.S. Empire. When he says, "Save for a few actual colonies like Puerto Rico and the Philippines, the United States has always preferred the low overhead and 'plausible denial' offered by an informal, arm’s length empire of client states," Parenti is denying the conquest and settler colonization of half the north American land mass, the attempt to annex Canadian territory, the annexation of northern Mexico, of Alaska, of Hawaii, the failed attempts to add Cuba and Central America to the Confederacy, the separation of Panama from Colombia and the more recent re-installation of the US military there.
Long before "Friedrich Ratzel ...first coined the term Lebensraum," the founding fathers of the US invented the concept, embodied in the Monroe Doctrine, the notion of 'manifest destiny,' and in a Constitution unique in all the world in claiming the power to incorporate new territories into the state system it established. The US flag is a kind of map of that expansionism and conquest from 13 seaboard colonies to 50 states stretching into the Arctic and Pacific.
Before geography was geological, it was botanical and agrarian. It is not a coincidence that George Washington was a surveyor, nor that one of the mythic figures of Yankee empire-building was Johnny Appleseed, whose mission it was to lay the basis for charting a grid across native lands for subsequent private expropriation and colonization by planting non-native arbors.
The US left has rarely understood the significance and importance of land, perhaps because it is so much in denial of the vast acreage of land that was and is stolen to create the US.
Those who believe corporations are a new arrival on the scene, or that German or Italian fascism was the only practitioner of corporatism until the WTO should remember that the corporate form was created in the world to carry out conquest and settler colonialism. the first corporations were the Hudson's Bay Corporation, the British East India Corporation, and their like, chartered with limited liability to undertake the risks of colonialism and colonization.
The left needs to examine much more deeply its own absorption of the ruling ideas that help shape our world on-goingly toward empire. Posted by: Michael Novick on 7.30.03 | 1:02 am from Los Angeles CA