It should come as no surprise that the Empire of Liberty has, to a large degree, followed the path of “liberal imperialism” that was the basis of the earlier Anglo empire, that of Great Britain. In the edited version of a post by Caroline Elkins below, it would be possible to change a few names and dates and have an adequate description of the history of the US empire.
It is worth noting that in the first couple of years of WWII,
the US foreign policy elite contemplated how the US and Great Britain might
divide up the world following the neutralization, or defeat, of Germany. They
started with the US as a junior partner, moved quickly to the US being the
senior partner and then, as it became obvious that the declining power of Great
Britain as a result of the war would leave the US as the dominant economic,
political and military power in the world, the foreign policy planners decided
that the US had to assume sole responsibility to “organize” the postwar world
and to accomplish that, it was necessary to have the most powerful “peacetime”
military the world had ever known.
To put it succinctly after 1945, the US “took up the white
man’s burden” with the same ideology of white supremacy, the same resort to violence and the same goals of empire as their British predecessors. History does repeat.
Edited from a post by Caroline Elkins, author of the
recently released “Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire.”
For well over a century, Britain’s claims to global
greatness were rooted in its empire, thought to be unique among all others.
Sprawling over a quarter of the world’s landmass, the British Empire was the
largest in history. In the late 18th century Britain emerged
the purveyor of a liberal imperialism, or “civilizing mission,” extending
developmentalist policies, which cleaved to racial hierarchies, to its 700
million colonized subjects, purporting to usher them into the modern world.
In few other countries does imperial nationalism endure with
such explicit social, political and economic consequences. Chafing against
movements to “decolonize” Britain, Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his
Conservative Party’s Brexit campaign touted a “Global Britain” vision, an
Empire 2.0. “I cannot help remembering that this country over the last 200
years has directed the invasion or conquest of 178 countries — that is most of
the members of the U.N.,” he declared. “I believe that Global Britain is a soft power
superpower and that we can be immensely proud of what we are achieving.”
For generations, the monarchy derived healthy doses of its
power from empire, just as imperial nationalism has drawn legitimacy from the
monarchy. This phenomenon stretches back to King Henry VIII, who first declared
England as an empire in 1532, while his successors granted royal charters
facilitating the trans-Atlantic trade in enslaved people and the conquest,
occupation and exploitation of the Indian subcontinent and vast swaths of
Africa.
It was the Victorian era, with the queen as empire’s
anointed matriarch, that laid the groundwork for the civilizing mission. After
Britain waged some 250 wars in the 19th century to “pacify” colonial subjects,
a contested though coherent ideology of liberal imperialism emerged that integrated
sovereign imperial claims with a huge undertaking to reform colonial subjects,
often called “children.” Britain’s discerning eye judged when the “uncivilized”
were fully evolved.
If Britain’s civilizing mission was reformist in its claims,
it was brutal nonetheless. Violence was not just the British Empire’s midwife,
it was endemic to the structures and systems of British rule. Nationalists and
freedom fighters were often cast as criminals or terrorists and their actions —
including vandalism, labor strikes, riots and full-blown rebellions — as
political threats. Coercion would not just subdue these so-called recalcitrant
children. Colonial officials and security forces wanted their infantilized
subjects to see and feel their own suffering, to know that it was deliberate
and purposeful. British officials had a term for this: the “moral effect” of
violence.
British officials also obsessed over the rule of law,
insisting this was the basis of good government. But in the empire, rule of
law codified difference, curtailed freedoms, expropriated land and property and
ensured a steady stream of labor for empire’s mines and plantations, the
profits from which helped fuel Britain’s economy. (my emphasis)
By the 20th century, the empire was replete with legal
exceptionalism in the form of martial law and states of emergency needed to
maintain control. While lawful, these states of exception granted extraordinary
powers of repression. When security forces needed more discretion, or when
their actions constituted unsanctioned violence, British officials rendered
their behavior legal by amending old regulations and creating new ones.
This recurring phenomenon turned the exceptions into norms.
British security forces deployed ever-intensifying forms of systematic
violence, making empire look like a recurring conquest state. A well-oiled
repressive machinery emerged, directed from London and transferred from one
imperial location to the next by colonial officials and security forces.
Five years after her famous BBC radio address, Princess
Elizabeth inherited this empire when she ascended to the throne. For most of
the first three decades of her reign, Britain was embroiled in recurring
end-of-empire conflicts as Labour and Conservative governments alike largely
jettisoned wartime guarantees of self-determination. The nation’s future, like
its past, depended on empire’s real and imagined benefits. As George Orwell
famously wrote, “The alternative is to throw the Empire overboard
and reduce England to a cold and unimportant little island where we should all
have to work very hard and live mainly on herrings and potatoes.”
The task the British undertook, meant suppressing an
anticolonial, communist insurgency, included mass detention without trial,
illegal deportations and one of the empire’s largest forced migrations, moving
hundreds of thousands of colonial subjects into barbed-wire villages. Many
lived in semi-starvation, under 24-hour guard, and were forced to labor and
abused.
Liberal imperialism endured, however, its elasticity giving
rise to new lexicons for reform. Colonial subjects were being “rehabilitated”
in an unprecedented “hearts and minds” campaign. Updated postwar humanitarian
laws and new human rights conventions — legally and politically problematic,
particularly on Britain’s widespread use of torture — partly prompted such
doublespeak while British governments repeatedly denied repressive
measures, secretly ordering wide-scale destruction of incriminating
evidence.
Reformist fictions laundered Britain’s past, watermarking
official narratives of end-of-empire conflicts in Kenya, Cyprus, Aden, Northern
Ireland and elsewhere. Fragments of damning evidence remain, however.
Historians, myself included, have spent years reassembling them, demonstrating
liberal imperialism’s perfidy and the ways in which successive monarchs
manifestly performed the empire and its myths, drawing symbolic power from
their sublime in loco parentis role civilizing colonial
subjects while — perhaps unwittingly given their governments’ cover-ups —
honoring the dishonorable with speeches, titles and medals.
Scapegoating tactics and royal affirmations of empire’s
nefarious agents were long part of Britain’s modus operandi, as was
developmentalist language masquerading as benign reform. When independence
swept through the empire in the 1960s, colonies were “growing up,” according to
Macmillan. Britain declared its civilizing mission a triumph, and the
Commonwealth of Nations, today comprising 54 countries, most of which are former
British colonies, the logical coda.
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