[lbo-talk] US Imperialism

Yoshie Furuhashi critical.montages at gmail.com
Wed Feb 7 05:59:38 PST 2007


On 2/7/07, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> On Feb 7, 2007, at 1:16 AM, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
> > One thing that I always wondered about Doug's curious notion of US
> > imperialism is that he seems to think it's a good deal for Japan and
> > Europe but a bad enough deal for a wing of the US ruling class to
> > create a "major division" among the US ruling class.
>
> No part of the US ruling class is opposed to imperialism. I think, or
> hope, that there's a wing of the US ruling class that thinks we
> should get out of Iraq and forego an attack on Iran.

That looks like a small powerless wing. Sometimes, it looks as if it were a wing of one: George Soros. And even Soros hasn't sought to foment a "Color Revolution" against the Bush administration, though that -- or more than that, and certainly not the Obama candidacy -- is what it takes. :->


> By the way, how'd the Brit ruling class come to understand that the
> empire was cooked?

The Lend-Lease Act of 1941. In 1942, Winston Churchill came to stay at the White House. One morning, FDR went into Churchill's room. FDR, finding him (coming out of the bathroom) stark naked, tried to back out of the room. Churchill said, "The Prime Minister of Great Britain has nothing to conceal from the President of the United States." Britain tried only one war independent of the American opinion after that: the Suez war of 1956 (against Egypt, with France and Israel). But Eisenhower immediately reminded it of who's the boss: he threatened to stop supporting the pound.

Michael T. Klare writes that "American wells supplied six out of every seven barrels of the oil the Allied powers consumed over the course of the war" (Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America's Growing Petroleum Dependency, p. 10), the indispensable commodity crucial to win the war. That must have left a lasting impression on Washington as well as the North (Washington + its former imperial rivals and enemies): those who control oil control the world, supplying it to friends and denying it to enemies. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>



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