[lbo-talk] Did You Say Empire? You're Joking Right?

Dwayne Monroe idoru345 at yahoo.com
Fri Jan 23 16:06:13 PST 2004


Striding to empire, strides for the emperor

by Noel Rooney

A thriving market has appeared for dissident literature of a particular kind. This ad-hoc genre is concerned almost exclusively with American imperialism. It includes writers such as Chomsky and Vidal, who have been writing about US foreign policy for some years; but largely the genre is new (or treated as new by its proponents) and the imperialism they educe is, apparently, similarly novel. I am curious about the point and purpose of this literature.

What concerns me here is not the rights or wrongs of the dissident position. American hegemony, and its current foreign policy, is militaristic, intrusive and self-serving, and much of the world is unfortunately under its dominion; little wonder many people classify this arrangement as empire. But timing is the secret of good comedy, even black farce. As dissidents write, so do the putative imperialists; and the foundation myth which is emerging for the "new" "empire" is a collective enterprise.

The shared nub of this dialectic is that the empire is just embarking on its absolutist mission; and, more alarmingly, that its reign will end only in Armageddon. Naturally this prospect is taken rather differently by both sides, but its currency is mutual, an article of faith posing as a bone of contention. As this myth-making accelerates, the reality of American hegemony (the empirical empire) is in danger of disappearing under the constructed version of it. Ultimately, we will build the empire out of this myth, and that surely benefits the imperialists more than the dissidents.

The present reality of US dominance is not an issue, but its stability and future prospects? Some have argued (for instance Umberto Eco) that the US resembles the Roman empire in its late, decadent, crumbling stage; others (notably Emmanuel Todd) that the US is too weak, and the rest of the world too diversely powerful, for imperial arrangements, and thus the empire is on the wane before it gets going. Little of this point of view appears in the dissident/imperialist canons.

[...]

full at

http://nthposition.com/stridingtoempirestrides.php



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