MILITARISM APHORISM

Militarism is the prism that focuses this unsightly vision of our beloved republic languishing in its imperial prison. 

At the turn of the 19th and twentieth centuries, Mark Twain painted a picture of the militarist and corporatist prison in which our sovereignty languishes today when, in a futurist essay titled “Passage from ‘Outlines of History’”, he lamented with visionary precision and derision that (and here I quote that wise sage):

“it was impossible to save the Great Republic.  She was rotten to the heart.  Lust of conquest had long ago done its work; trampling upon the helpless abroad had taught her, by natural process, to endure with apathy the like at home; multitudes who had applauded the crushing of other people’s liberties, lived to suffer for their mistake in their own persons.”

This vision of conquest abroad combined with apathy at home underscores the extent to which Twain conceived of American imperial militarism as a force that would, if it went unchecked, eventually strip away all of America’s celebrated liberties and spread tyranny both across the globe and at home.

In the 1930s, in the aftermath of the “Business Plot”, which was a purported plan advanced by fascist-minded US oligarchs and military veterans, to overthrow the U.S. government of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Major General Smedley Butler –who had been invited to conspire in this plot and lord over America as a dictator—not only denounced the conspirators but also dedicated himself to criticizing the imperial militarism of US corporations:

“I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902–1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.”

1962.  Governments everywhere throughout Latin America continue to be powerless against the militarism born of collusion between of US multinational corporations and the Pentagon.  Salvador de Madariaga, a Spanish liberal who has been living in exile ever since Franco rose to power in Spain, has this to say on the subject:

“Today the United States wields more sovereignty over a number of Latin American nations than it does over some of its own capitalist enterprises.  These multinationals are strong enough to usurp the national sovereignty of the United States and force the State to serve their own private or restricted interests, alleging all the while that these are the interests of the nation.”

Always the same story:  The material interests of a number of American citizens prosper, and the moral authority of the United States declines.  Who are, then, the real patriots?

An impossibly dastardly question to pose.  An equally impossible question to answer.  So I will quote Mark Eitzel, who in 2004, after the US invasion of Iraq, spun it out this way:

You can see him fade with the dawn and a pile of washingtons

His head in a spin, he's happy to pass out again
He would rather fade into the static than hear the violins
That whine like old lovers who whine that they love him
He would rather laugh alone in the dark with the soft hands of heaven
Because they'd leave him alone with his entertainment system
He does it for the money but he gives more than he's given
He does it for the money but he gives more than he's given
And it's only when he's naked that he feels his heart
In the whorehouse desert of the patriot's heart
We all want a patriot's heart
We all want a patriot's heart

A Modern Translatio imperii

A Modern Translatio imperii

The idea that the executive branch of the U.S. government should have a legitimate power to wage an imperial war of conquest and colonization, and to do so with only a modicum of congressional approval and oversight, was first tested at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when the U.S., taking full advantage of Spain’s definitive collapse as an empire, conquered and colonized Spain’s erstwhile colonies in the Caribbean and the Pacific.  What occurred on a grand scale at this juncture was a translatio imperii or imperial transfer of power from Spain to the United States of America.  But if the medieval concept of the translatio imperii construed such transfers of power from one emperor or empire to the next as a linear continuum that was destined, according to the prophecies of Daniel, to reach the end of times, in the modern era this apocalyptic vision of imperial decline is turned back on itself.  Rather than a continuum of successive transfers of power destined for eventual collapse, the modern understanding of the translatio imperii is optimistic; it sees this transfer of power as a modernizing and enlightening advance.

According to the positivistic logic of this modern view, American imperialism is superior in kind and quality to Spanish imperialism because the American brand of imperialism, as conceived originally by the nation’s Founding Fathers, seeks to spread liberty and Enlightenment, while the tyranny inherent to the Spanish brand of imperialism only served as an impediment to Enlightenment.  It was in such cheerful terms that American imperialists of the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries would defend the expansion of U.S. dominion over Spain’s ex-colonies in the Caribbean and the Pacific.  America, they claimed, was a liberating and civilizing empire.  There is, of course, a much less flattering interpretation of this imperial transition of power from Spain to the United States of America.  According to the anti-imperialists, this transition rather marked a regression of the American republic toward the unenlightened and tyrannical forms of a pre-modern Spanish imperium.  Instead of a modernizing advancement destined to spread enlightenment around the globe, anti-imperialists viewed U.S. imperial expansion as evidence of the republic’s decline into a sinister state of political and cultural decadence.

Considered in this darker light, the U.S. conquest and colonization of the Philippines was just as savage and cruel as Spain’s conquests in the Americas at the start of the sixteenth century.  But the similarities between U.S. and Spanish imperialism that this anti-imperialist perspective identifies were not limited to cruelty alone.  The connection, as both the apologists for U.S. imperial expansion and their critics made clear, ran much deeper.  U.S. imperialism was a continuation of Spanish imperialism in that, like the Spanish before them, U.S. imperialists, such as Josiah Strong, imagined and justified U.S. imperial expansion as an evangelical crusade; and much as the Spanish conquistadores had done, imperialists like Theodore Roosevelt glorified as heroic, acts of conquest and colonization that would have been more accurately depicted as acts of brutality.  By defending American imperialism in these terms, American imperialists in effect eliminated the liberating dimension of Enlightenment from their would-be civilizing mission and they essentially reverted to primitive forms of authority.  American anti-imperialists like Mark Twain and William James did not sit idly by; they rather attacked the imperialists and their ideas in open and public debate.  At issue in this debate was America’s legacy of Enlightenment: the legacy, that is, that ambiguously combines republican with imperial virtues.