Symptoms of Empire U.S.A.

[struggle4progress]

<snip>
We should recognize then that torture and wanton destruction in places like Fallujah are not so much reflections of Americans, but symptoms of empire. Surprisingly, it was the conservative columnist George Will who made the link between torture and empire. He said, “Americans must not flinch from absorbing the photographs of what some Americans did in that prison. And they should not flinch from this fact: that pornography is almost inevitably part of what empire looks like ... empire is always about domination.”

What shocks many is that commentators like Will and too much of the American corporate press have been enthusiastic proponents of American power for over 40 years. An imperial power, be it Spain, Britain, France or in this case, the United States will do anything it has to do to keep its relentless appetite for consumer goods flowing, whether it is 30 per cent of the world's energy or strawberries in winter. And the attitude will always be: I don't want to know where it comes from or why it is so cheap.
<snip>

It is this stunning hubristic blindness which the “ideological institutions — the schools, the media and much of scholarship,” as Noam Chomsky keeps repeating — a worn-out mantra extolling U.S virtues, all facts to the contrary, one of which is that that the U.S. has a profound concern for human rights and the raising of living standards and democratization.

Why would anybody be amazed at American torture when hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans have been tortured, mutilated and murdered in record numbers by thugs trained at the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia, a scandalous insult to true American values and which tens of thousands of brave Americans have been trying to close in the past decades. Guatemala alone has been a charnel house since the U.S. government subverted the Arbenz government in 1954 at the request of the United Fruit Company.
<more>

http://www.rabble.ca/in_his_own_words.shtml?x=32545

[donhakman]

1. The School of the Americas

is a university for dictators.