This is such an excellent piece! And so needed! I am again and again reminded of the words of author, activist, poet bell hooks who framed what has permeated and been absorbed by so many for so very long: “Imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy.” And I reflect on the words of my teachers regarding the causes of suffering: hatred, greed, and delusions. This is what urgently must be recognized within ourselves individually and collectively and completely dismantled and transformed. — Molly
Americans grow up conditioned to believe that our government and our armed forces would never engage in hostilities for anything but noble, defensive purpose. We’re raised on the myth of the land of the free and the brave, convinced that we live inside a liberal democracy that cherishes human rights, basic freedoms, and moral clarity, and that our power in the world is used only to protect those ideals.
But the truth, the one everyone knows somewhere beneath the patriotic static, even the people who refuse to say it out loud, is that we are an advanced, hostile imperial force. We use our technological and economic dominance to secure more technological and economic dominance, at any cost—human or otherwise.
A glance at the last century of American conflict is enough. We claim moral authority while hiding motives that are older than democracy itself: access to natural resources, control of oil, extraction of minerals, leverage over markets. The rhetoric shifts, the branding improves, the flags get bigger, but the story doesn’t change.
Is it surprising? Not really. This is what empires do, and what they have always done. The only novelty is the depth of our delusion that we are anything else.
The question I put to everyone is this: will humanity ever break the cycle of imperial rise and imperial decline? Will we ever rise above the senseless brutality of killing our own so that a few can hoard what’s finite? Whether we will ever reach that point is yet to be seen.
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