January 9
Eli and Fred spend part of the hour on the US Empire: what it has done to other countries since WW II, why both political parties can't really oppose it, and why most Americans can't even conceive of it. Confronted by the good possibility of another war in the Middle East, it is time to be honest about what empire means in the "Land of the Free."World Beyond War
Yes, we spent a good deal of time exploring the way we felt about our country. Each new war crime makes us realize how far away we are from the country we had grown up believing in. Even after the Vietnam War, I held onto the convenient assumption that my country just made some mistakes in judgment. The Land of the Free just got confused, and we didn't really mean to kill two or three million Vietnamese.
Living with that assumption is hard enough. It became even more difficult when I saw my country doing the same things in Latin America in the 1980s. This time, I couldn't avoid seeing the structural problems of my beloved homeland. There was racism at home, and imperialism abroad, all fed by the never ending lust for profit. A blood lust really, since those elites at the very top have always known that empire requires brutal and savage behavior.
Most good Americans are much better than that. If they knew what went on in the Third World, they would be horrified. It helps to have been in the US Army stationed in Korea. Racism and brutality are always part of a military occupation. And when a country has 800 military bases in the rest of the world, it ends up spilling blood in so many places.
Savage capitalism is the religion of the empire, and its sacrificial victims are always black or brown.
