11 ms·

How the US has hidden its empire

224 points by unmole 8y ago

kaycebasques 8y ago
The historiography [1] of this article is interesting. The author talks about how the drafts of FDR's speech changed throughout the day after the bombings. Presumably this means that the author had access to the various drafts of the speech. Pretty clever way to try to glimpse into what he was thinking. [1] The study of the methods used when writing history.
- tanderson92 8y ago
  Not just the author has access; the drafts of the Infamy speech are public: https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2001/winter/crafting-day-of-infamy-speech.html https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2001/winter/c... You can view the handwritten edits by Roosevelt in the archival drafts.
- cjf4 8y ago
  Kind of curious that the author didn’t mention a primary motive of Roosevelt’s: making the case for entering the war. FDR had been trying to (rightly) sell it to a reluctant, isolationist public as a necessary evil. Thus emphasizing the loss of “American” life was critical, despite the fact that it may have been subject to a less inclusive view that the author would have preferred.
hanging 8y ago
"Contrary to popular memory, the event familiarly known as “Pearl Harbor” was in fact an all-out lightning strike on US and British holdings throughout the Pacific. On a single day, the Japanese attacked the US territories of Hawaii, the Philippines, Guam, Midway Island and Wake Island." This is horrendously sloppy journalism. The first attack on Wake was three days later and was repelled. The successful attack was another 12 days after that. And the Midway attack was six months after Pearl.
- NeedMoreTea 8y ago
  Wikipedia disagrees with you, and confirms that both Midway and Wake were attacked on the day of Pearl. In the case of Wake, 8 of the 12 Grumman F4F Wildcat fighters were destroyed. In the case of Midway, the attack that day was repulsed.
  - black_puppydog 8y ago
    Popular memory strikes again! It's interesting though that in this case both Wikipedia and "Joe H. N. Internet" could be called popular memory. :P
  - yellowapple 8y ago
    I'd argue that the Pearl Harbor attack specifically was the primary attack (at least on that front, i.e. excluding the Philippines), and that the Wake and Midway attacks that happened were incidental (or at most in support of) that attack. While I hate the idea of quantity of lives lost being any sort of metric for the "importance" of an attack (every American life lost matters), Pearl Harbor took the brunt of it. If anything, Pearl Harbor (and other surrounding targets) was the target specifically to tie up American efforts in the Northeast Pacific and keep them out of the way of the Japanese invasion of the Philippines. That much the article seems to get correctly, and is arguably the article's main point.
    - NeedMoreTea 8y ago
      It was definitely the primary attack. That's where First Air Fleet was going and they only had so many carriers. Spread them around and they might have all failed. Midway and Wake were much smaller attacks, but I'm not sure they were quite incidental, weren't they both significant oiling bases? They were certainly both part of Yamamoto's first phase strategy. So were the Philippines, Malaya, and Borneo. Malaya and Philippines were attacked and invaded the same day. Phase 2 would have turned south across territories toward Australia. His strategy was not too dissimilar to China's today. Loosely to create a huge space of Japanese air space by taking those far flung outposts to ensure any enemy was stretched across thousands of miles of hostile Pacific. The Battle of Midway, six months later, was one of the most famous and strategically important naval battles of the entire war. As they lost that naval battle it is never really called an attack on the islands, least not in what I've read. They didn't make it that far.
larrysalibra 8y ago
I’ve lived in Hong Kong for some time and even though I’ve been to Guam a few times, in my mind the US is a country that is a 12 to 16 hour flight away when in fact its really only a 4 hour flight away.
TomMckenny 8y ago
The US also had a practical reason for disliking traditional imperialism. By the time the US became substantial enough for real international trade, vast swathes of the planet were under other nation's empires leaving fewer trading partners than could be desired. Commodore Perry's somewhat invasive trip to Japan was to try and add a few trading partners from unclaimed nations. So I suppose it's not too surprising that the colonies gained in the pointless glory seeking of the Spanish American war led to a bit of schizophrenia.
WA 8y ago
> Besides Guam, American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands and a handful of minor outlying islands, the US maintains roughly 800 overseas military bases around the world. Germany has a few US military bases. It’s a bit of a micro cosmos. People pay in USD and can buy American products there. I think even the VAT is added on checkout to the price (whereas in Germany, prices in stores always show VAT included). I was on one a couple times when they played a theatre play (Christmas Charol or so). Quite interesting.
- rusk 8y ago
  I lived in Stuttgart a number of years ago, and used to drink with some guys who had a business exclusively selling American cars to American servicemen (in dollars; taxation deferred; big money). In fact, I spent a good bit of time drinking with American servicemen ... they were a large segment of the Anglophone community around there.
  - Tomte 8y ago
    Background: Stuttgart hosts EUCOM at Patch Barracks and AFRICOM at Kelley Barracks. The latter should have moved to Africa at least a decade ago, but America is still looking for an appropriate location (friendly, stable, infrastructure).
    - hudibras 8y ago
      AFRICOM headquarters will remain in Germany indefinitely. In addition to the infrastructure problems in Africa (for instance, there are vast areas of the continent, including entire countries, where routine travel is prohibited due to lack of American-level medical or medevac services), there are too many rivalries amongst the nations for a headquarters to be placed in one country. It's also not unprecedented: CENTCOM, SOUTHCOM, and arguable PACOM all have headquarters that are not in their respective areas of responsibility.
- acqq 8y ago
  2015: "Despite recently closing hundreds of bases in Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States still maintains nearly 800 military bases in more than 70 countries and territories abroad" https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/06/us-military-bases-around-the-world-119321 https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/06/us-military-... Additionally, I must admit haven't thought much about the actual status of the "territories" before.
forkLding 8y ago
I guess the interesting thing to note now is that Puerto Rico is likely going to become a state in 2021.
- thaumasiotes 8y ago
  Why 2021? Did something happen?
  - hudibras 8y ago
    If the Democrats win the presidency and both houses of Congress that year. D.C. will be first in line, then Puerto Rico.
    - skinnymuch 8y ago
      Is there any basis for DC gaining statehood? Where is it coming from besides random grumbling.
  - geofft 8y ago
    Wildly guessing: the federal government's response to Hurricane Maria hitting Puerto Rico was wildly insufficient, so if the opposition party takes control (which seems more likely than not), especially given that the opposition party prefers to err on the side of too much government aid/intervention than too little, statehood for Puerto Rico is a reasonably obvious priority. (And a goos strategy for shifting the balance of power in the Electoral College and the Senate, incidentally.)
    - jcranmer 8y ago
      Except Puerto Rico has to advance a state constitution that Congress has to accept, so the Puerto Rico government itself needs to accept statehood. Except there's not a clear majority in favor of statehood in Puerto Rico; the last two referendums were effectively sabotaged.
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golergka 8y ago
> On this to-scale map, Alaska isn’t shrunken down to fit into a small inset, as it is on most maps. I'm pretty sure it's usually "scaled down" because that's how map projection works. Does this writer also think that Greenland and Africa are of comparable size?
- nikbackm 8y ago
  Wouldn't Alaska be scaled up on maps being far to the north? Have only really seen maps using Mercator myself though.
  - badosu 8y ago
    If it's a shape preserving projection, the usual ones, the opposite happens. The closer to the focus of the map, the better it's area representation.
- SiempreViernes 8y ago
  One example map, and to me a pretty typical example of the genre, shows Alaska on a about half the scale of the contiguous states. Compare the by the scale markings: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/92/Map_of_USA_with_state_names_2.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/92/Map_of_U... This is not simply projection effects, this is explicit downscaling. Another comparison, Wikipedia lists the area of Alaska as 1,717,856 km^2 and that of the contiguous United States 8,080,400 km^2, so on a map with only projection correction Alaska should be around 1/4 of the size of the lower 48, this is clearly not true on the wikipedia example shown above, and for any other map in the same style. So no, Alaska is not scaled down for the sake of accurately depicting its size.
  - arcticfox 8y ago
    Great response. I was going to take a different tack because the Alaska issue seems so obvious, but then I remembered that some people out there don't have maps [1], at least not state maps of the United States. [1] Including many U.S. Americans
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dalbasal 8y ago
The problem with big hairy political words like "empire" is that meaningless semantics take over. From our perspective, in the post-colonial era, the term "empire" and "colonisation" are just inherently negative terms. The defining qualities (this article explicitly makes this argument) of empire are considered to be slavery, reservation systems and such. In some sense, empire can just mean "bad" and bad can be proof or empire. The postcolonial age is also the natiolist age, where nation states are the basis of the political system. That makes imperialism's defining quality "the subjegation of nations" because it denies nations ultimate authority. Marx associated empire with capitalism (surprise surprise), using the term "international capitalism" interchangeably with empire. Considering history, this has some logic to it. For example, the Royal Britsh East India Trading Company colonized India. The crown later confiscated it. 18th and 19th century empires were about controling trade, whether by a king, legal monopoly or otherwise. The article plays with a mundane territorial definition. Ff you control "overseas" land... All interesting discussion topics, but also a problem. "Is X an Empire" just depends on the definition. It's not a meaningful question in itself. Just because you conclude that "yes, it is" doesn't mean anything.
- coldtea 8y ago
  >"Is X an Empire" just depends on the definition. If X controls my local politics to its benefit, overthrows legitimate governments, and establishes dictatorships whenever it likes, and does that in tons of countries around the world, I'd call it an empire...
  - dalbasal 8y ago
    Case in point.
mbubb 8y ago
US citizenship and American Samoa will become an interesting topic if Tulsi Gabbard becomes a frontrunner as a presidential candidate. To become POTUS you need to be "native born" US Citizen which is a very nebulous idea.
- nick2 8y ago
  It won't be an issue. Her mother was born in Indiana so Tulsi is a natural born US citizen. Just like Ted Cruz who was born in Canada.
  - nkrisc 8y ago
    It would likely be an issue for our president, who had the same issue with his predecessor.
  - maxxxxx 8y ago
    I am sure this will be an issue with a lot of super partisans. My neighbor still believes that Obama was not eligible for being president. I have no idea what evidence could convince these people otherwise.
    - newen 8y ago
      Let's hope the opinion of your neighbor doesn't cause a constitutional crisis.
      - maxxxxx 8y ago
        I think the people who are spreading these rumors are playing a very dangerous game. There seems to be a trend to spread doubts about elections, FBI investigations, CIA findings and others without providing real evidence. This is a short term benefit for the people spreading the rumors but I wonder if they are starting something that may spin out of control at some point.
        balt_s 8y ago
lewilewilewi 8y ago
Killing Hope (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_Hope https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_Hope) is a write up of all major US efforts at controlling other countries. I don't know what Americans think of it, but it's fascinating as an outsider.
- stronglikedan 8y ago
  I haven't read that book, but on the topic of US foreign policy in general, most people I know here in America realize it's a lose-lose effort that we must continue to lose. When it comes to helping other countries, we go from "not enough" to "too much" seemingly overnight, but there never seems to be a "just right".
  - JeremyNT 8y ago
    So fundamental to American propaganda is the notion that imperialism is born of a desire to "help" other countries. It is true that it is often packaged and sold this way, and in some cases it may even be a contributing factor, but our adventurism is largely driven by the military industrial complex and capital looking for "new markets" or "cheap labor" or even just a desire to strangle competing ideologies in their infancy.
    - stronglikedan 8y ago
      That may sound like a good fit for a common narrative, but it's certainly not rooted in fact. Being a superpower, America is often asked to help, and other times forced to help. There's no desire to do any of that stuff you mentioned, for the reasons you seem to think. Unfortunately, it's impossible to please everybody all the time, which creates the propaganda that leads you to think the way you do, so I certainly don't fault you for being wrong.
  - toasterlovin 8y ago
    Indeed, it's really easy to criticize when you're not the one making the decisions. I think a comparison to most other global powers makes the U.S. look relatively benign.
porpoisely 8y ago
It's "hidden" to us by our propagandists. Our empire is visible and obvious to everyone else. Our news, history books, movies, etc all hide it by simply not labeling the US as an empire. It's just as easy as that. We use terms like "superpower" or "leader of the western" or "leader of democracies" or other euphemisms to hide and forgive conquests, brutality, genocide and empire. Empire is evil and it's something our enemies do, not what we do. It's the british, germans, japanese and most recently the evil soviets who create empires. We are not evil, we don't create empires.
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sonnyblarney 8y ago
Wait - so the special relationship with the Philippines then ... which was in mostly fairly autonomous? ... that's the big ole' 'Empire'? ... and a few mostly unpopulated dots in the Ocean? Oh, so scary! The power! And to consider that Filipinos, who are culturally distinct from Americans in every way, and who have almost nothing in common with Americans but a temporary geopolitical alignment should be considered 'Americans' in the same way as those from New Orleans and NYC? So that's 2018 intersectionalist history? Rubbish. America is quite fundamentally distinct from the Philippines and always has been, there's no fundamental reason that most Americans on the street should care enough to 'go to war' over foreign interdiction. Going to war for those with whom the US has a special arrangement, and going to war for the 'homeland' are indeed quite different questions. There's no 'hiding' here. Thanks for the history tidbits Graun, but as usually the headline is ridiculous.
- dade_ 8y ago
  I don't think this article characterizes the relationship with the Philippines accurately at all. No mention of Japan's horrific occupation that the Americans fought with the Filipinos to expel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippines_Campaign_(1944%E2%80%931945) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippines_Campaign_(1944%E2%...
- yazboo 8y ago
  What does this have to do with intersectionalism?
- gjm11 8y ago
  > 2018 intersectionalist history No version of the word "intersectional" appears in the article, nor (so far as I can tell) in anything else by its author. I agree that the word "empire" here seems overblown, but it seems like perhaps you're bringing your own pet hates into this for some reason? Also: The article, and the book it's based on, are from 2019 (though I'm sure much of the work was done in 2018 and indeed earlier). Not sure what the point of specifying "2018" is meant to be.
- SllX 8y ago
  1941 Philippines was as American as 1941 Hawaii which were both about as American as or 1848-1859 Oregon Territory was or 1941-present Puerto Rico is. So, American, if you consider territory where Americans live on American soil to be American. Where they fork off is the Philippines are now an independent nation, Hawaii is now a US State, Oregon Territory was eventually split into 3 entire US States and part of a couple of others, and Puerto Rico still has more or less the same status as it did in 1941, but a few more rights and privileges afforded to them along with present day Guam, present day Northern Marianas Islands, and present day US Virgin Islands. American Samoa is US Territory, but a Navy playground so while the people are American Nationals living under the US Constituton, they’re not American Citizens and their territory is considered to be on par with all those unpopulated guano Islands we once claimed. That’s the law, 2019. The Filipinos are culturally distinct but we still count large numbers of them as American Citizens, both as immigrants and as a people that have lived in the mainland since before the Philippines were granted independence. The Native Hawaiians were and still are considered culturally distinct but they are still American Citizens by birthright. Put another way, your defensive posture is simply out of place here. On December 7th 1941, the Japanese attacked the United States. That shouldn’t need qualification. If they had only attacked Manila but didn’t make it to Oahu, they still would have been attacking the United States and that was certainly the intent of their attack.
YUMad 8y ago
This is the reason why China finds it acceptable to act as they do in quite a few things, such as attempts to enlarge their EEZ. In their mind, they are just doing what USA did too, so it's a fair game. But they do not understand, refuse to understand, or simply hold irrelevant the narrative manipulation that is necessary to pull it off, and this is something US excels at. The 'spreading freedom' meme is just one example; another example is 'we do it, and after that we declare it illegal for others to do it' - US committed significant war crimes, such as fire bombing of Dresden and Kyoto, and was never held accountable for it.
- i_am_proteus 8y ago
  Please attend to your facts: -The fire bombing of Dresden was executed jointly by the United States and United Kingdom, with the UK flying more sorties. This occurred during a war when Germany was executing strategic bombing campaigns against the UK. -The United States of America did not fire bomb Kyoto. Nobody did.
  - DanBC 8y ago
    > This occurred during a war when Germany was executing strategic bombing campaigns against the UK. The wider point is interesting though. We started the war with the attitude that killing civilians would be a war crime, and then as the war went on that principle was eroded more and more until fire-bombing several civilian populations across Germany was allowed. There's a reason "Bombber Harris" was also known as Butcher Harris. Even Churchill disliked the area bombing tactics.
    - i_am_proteus 8y ago
      Indeed. Attitudes toward civilian casualties in warfare, at least in the West, are less tolerant today--- but the West hasn't been in an existentially-challenging shooting war since 1945.
      - kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
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eternalban 8y ago
Was that article written in close proximity to the 'City of London'? Now that is titular irony.
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224 points by unmole 8y ago

The historiography [1] of this article is interesting. The author talks about how the drafts of FDR's speech changed throughout the day after the bombings. Presumably this means that the author had access to the various drafts of the speech. Pretty clever way to try to glimpse into what he was thinking. [1] The study of the methods used when writing history.

tanderson92 8y ago
Not just the author has access; the drafts of the Infamy speech are public: https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2001/winter/crafting-day-of-infamy-speech.html https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2001/winter/c... You can view the handwritten edits by Roosevelt in the archival drafts.
cjf4 8y ago
Kind of curious that the author didn’t mention a primary motive of Roosevelt’s: making the case for entering the war. FDR had been trying to (rightly) sell it to a reluctant, isolationist public as a necessary evil. Thus emphasizing the loss of “American” life was critical, despite the fact that it may have been subject to a less inclusive view that the author would have preferred.

hanging 8y ago

"Contrary to popular memory, the event familiarly known as “Pearl Harbor” was in fact an all-out lightning strike on US and British holdings throughout the Pacific. On a single day, the Japanese attacked the US territories of Hawaii, the Philippines, Guam, Midway Island and Wake Island." This is horrendously sloppy journalism. The first attack on Wake was three days later and was repelled. The successful attack was another 12 days after that. And the Midway attack was six months after Pearl.

NeedMoreTea 8y ago
Wikipedia disagrees with you, and confirms that both Midway and Wake were attacked on the day of Pearl. In the case of Wake, 8 of the 12 Grumman F4F Wildcat fighters were destroyed. In the case of Midway, the attack that day was repulsed.
- black_puppydog 8y ago
  Popular memory strikes again! It's interesting though that in this case both Wikipedia and "Joe H. N. Internet" could be called popular memory. :P
- yellowapple 8y ago
  I'd argue that the Pearl Harbor attack specifically was the primary attack (at least on that front, i.e. excluding the Philippines), and that the Wake and Midway attacks that happened were incidental (or at most in support of) that attack. While I hate the idea of quantity of lives lost being any sort of metric for the "importance" of an attack (every American life lost matters), Pearl Harbor took the brunt of it. If anything, Pearl Harbor (and other surrounding targets) was the target specifically to tie up American efforts in the Northeast Pacific and keep them out of the way of the Japanese invasion of the Philippines. That much the article seems to get correctly, and is arguably the article's main point.
  - NeedMoreTea 8y ago
    It was definitely the primary attack. That's where First Air Fleet was going and they only had so many carriers. Spread them around and they might have all failed. Midway and Wake were much smaller attacks, but I'm not sure they were quite incidental, weren't they both significant oiling bases? They were certainly both part of Yamamoto's first phase strategy. So were the Philippines, Malaya, and Borneo. Malaya and Philippines were attacked and invaded the same day. Phase 2 would have turned south across territories toward Australia. His strategy was not too dissimilar to China's today. Loosely to create a huge space of Japanese air space by taking those far flung outposts to ensure any enemy was stretched across thousands of miles of hostile Pacific. The Battle of Midway, six months later, was one of the most famous and strategically important naval battles of the entire war. As they lost that naval battle it is never really called an attack on the islands, least not in what I've read. They didn't make it that far.

larrysalibra 8y ago

I’ve lived in Hong Kong for some time and even though I’ve been to Guam a few times, in my mind the US is a country that is a 12 to 16 hour flight away when in fact its really only a 4 hour flight away.

TomMckenny 8y ago

The US also had a practical reason for disliking traditional imperialism. By the time the US became substantial enough for real international trade, vast swathes of the planet were under other nation's empires leaving fewer trading partners than could be desired. Commodore Perry's somewhat invasive trip to Japan was to try and add a few trading partners from unclaimed nations. So I suppose it's not too surprising that the colonies gained in the pointless glory seeking of the Spanish American war led to a bit of schizophrenia.

WA 8y ago

> Besides Guam, American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands and a handful of minor outlying islands, the US maintains roughly 800 overseas military bases around the world. Germany has a few US military bases. It’s a bit of a micro cosmos. People pay in USD and can buy American products there. I think even the VAT is added on checkout to the price (whereas in Germany, prices in stores always show VAT included). I was on one a couple times when they played a theatre play (Christmas Charol or so). Quite interesting.

rusk 8y ago
I lived in Stuttgart a number of years ago, and used to drink with some guys who had a business exclusively selling American cars to American servicemen (in dollars; taxation deferred; big money). In fact, I spent a good bit of time drinking with American servicemen ... they were a large segment of the Anglophone community around there.
- Tomte 8y ago
  Background: Stuttgart hosts EUCOM at Patch Barracks and AFRICOM at Kelley Barracks. The latter should have moved to Africa at least a decade ago, but America is still looking for an appropriate location (friendly, stable, infrastructure).
  - hudibras 8y ago
    AFRICOM headquarters will remain in Germany indefinitely. In addition to the infrastructure problems in Africa (for instance, there are vast areas of the continent, including entire countries, where routine travel is prohibited due to lack of American-level medical or medevac services), there are too many rivalries amongst the nations for a headquarters to be placed in one country. It's also not unprecedented: CENTCOM, SOUTHCOM, and arguable PACOM all have headquarters that are not in their respective areas of responsibility.
acqq 8y ago
2015: "Despite recently closing hundreds of bases in Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States still maintains nearly 800 military bases in more than 70 countries and territories abroad" https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/06/us-military-bases-around-the-world-119321 https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/06/us-military-... Additionally, I must admit haven't thought much about the actual status of the "territories" before.

forkLding 8y ago

I guess the interesting thing to note now is that Puerto Rico is likely going to become a state in 2021.

thaumasiotes 8y ago
Why 2021? Did something happen?
- hudibras 8y ago
  If the Democrats win the presidency and both houses of Congress that year. D.C. will be first in line, then Puerto Rico.
  - skinnymuch 8y ago
    Is there any basis for DC gaining statehood? Where is it coming from besides random grumbling.
- geofft 8y ago
  Wildly guessing: the federal government's response to Hurricane Maria hitting Puerto Rico was wildly insufficient, so if the opposition party takes control (which seems more likely than not), especially given that the opposition party prefers to err on the side of too much government aid/intervention than too little, statehood for Puerto Rico is a reasonably obvious priority. (And a goos strategy for shifting the balance of power in the Electoral College and the Senate, incidentally.)
  - jcranmer 8y ago
    Except Puerto Rico has to advance a state constitution that Congress has to accept, so the Puerto Rico government itself needs to accept statehood. Except there's not a clear majority in favor of statehood in Puerto Rico; the last two referendums were effectively sabotaged.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

golergka 8y ago

> On this to-scale map, Alaska isn’t shrunken down to fit into a small inset, as it is on most maps. I'm pretty sure it's usually "scaled down" because that's how map projection works. Does this writer also think that Greenland and Africa are of comparable size?

nikbackm 8y ago
Wouldn't Alaska be scaled up on maps being far to the north? Have only really seen maps using Mercator myself though.
- badosu 8y ago
  If it's a shape preserving projection, the usual ones, the opposite happens. The closer to the focus of the map, the better it's area representation.
SiempreViernes 8y ago
One example map, and to me a pretty typical example of the genre, shows Alaska on a about half the scale of the contiguous states. Compare the by the scale markings: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/92/Map_of_USA_with_state_names_2.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/92/Map_of_U... This is not simply projection effects, this is explicit downscaling. Another comparison, Wikipedia lists the area of Alaska as 1,717,856 km^2 and that of the contiguous United States 8,080,400 km^2, so on a map with only projection correction Alaska should be around 1/4 of the size of the lower 48, this is clearly not true on the wikipedia example shown above, and for any other map in the same style. So no, Alaska is not scaled down for the sake of accurately depicting its size.
- arcticfox 8y ago
  Great response. I was going to take a different tack because the Alaska issue seems so obvious, but then I remembered that some people out there don't have maps [1], at least not state maps of the United States. [1] Including many U.S. Americans

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dalbasal 8y ago

The problem with big hairy political words like "empire" is that meaningless semantics take over. From our perspective, in the post-colonial era, the term "empire" and "colonisation" are just inherently negative terms. The defining qualities (this article explicitly makes this argument) of empire are considered to be slavery, reservation systems and such. In some sense, empire can just mean "bad" and bad can be proof or empire. The postcolonial age is also the natiolist age, where nation states are the basis of the political system. That makes imperialism's defining quality "the subjegation of nations" because it denies nations ultimate authority. Marx associated empire with capitalism (surprise surprise), using the term "international capitalism" interchangeably with empire. Considering history, this has some logic to it. For example, the Royal Britsh East India Trading Company colonized India. The crown later confiscated it. 18th and 19th century empires were about controling trade, whether by a king, legal monopoly or otherwise. The article plays with a mundane territorial definition. Ff you control "overseas" land... All interesting discussion topics, but also a problem. "Is X an Empire" just depends on the definition. It's not a meaningful question in itself. Just because you conclude that "yes, it is" doesn't mean anything.

coldtea 8y ago
>"Is X an Empire" just depends on the definition. If X controls my local politics to its benefit, overthrows legitimate governments, and establishes dictatorships whenever it likes, and does that in tons of countries around the world, I'd call it an empire...
- dalbasal 8y ago
  Case in point.

mbubb 8y ago

US citizenship and American Samoa will become an interesting topic if Tulsi Gabbard becomes a frontrunner as a presidential candidate. To become POTUS you need to be "native born" US Citizen which is a very nebulous idea.

nick2 8y ago
It won't be an issue. Her mother was born in Indiana so Tulsi is a natural born US citizen. Just like Ted Cruz who was born in Canada.
- nkrisc 8y ago
  It would likely be an issue for our president, who had the same issue with his predecessor.
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  I am sure this will be an issue with a lot of super partisans. My neighbor still believes that Obama was not eligible for being president. I have no idea what evidence could convince these people otherwise.
  - newen 8y ago
    Let's hope the opinion of your neighbor doesn't cause a constitutional crisis.
    - maxxxxx 8y ago
      I think the people who are spreading these rumors are playing a very dangerous game. There seems to be a trend to spread doubts about elections, FBI investigations, CIA findings and others without providing real evidence. This is a short term benefit for the people spreading the rumors but I wonder if they are starting something that may spin out of control at some point.
      - balt_s 8y ago

lewilewilewi 8y ago

Killing Hope (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_Hope https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_Hope) is a write up of all major US efforts at controlling other countries. I don't know what Americans think of it, but it's fascinating as an outsider.

stronglikedan 8y ago
I haven't read that book, but on the topic of US foreign policy in general, most people I know here in America realize it's a lose-lose effort that we must continue to lose. When it comes to helping other countries, we go from "not enough" to "too much" seemingly overnight, but there never seems to be a "just right".
- JeremyNT 8y ago
  So fundamental to American propaganda is the notion that imperialism is born of a desire to "help" other countries. It is true that it is often packaged and sold this way, and in some cases it may even be a contributing factor, but our adventurism is largely driven by the military industrial complex and capital looking for "new markets" or "cheap labor" or even just a desire to strangle competing ideologies in their infancy.
  - stronglikedan 8y ago
    That may sound like a good fit for a common narrative, but it's certainly not rooted in fact. Being a superpower, America is often asked to help, and other times forced to help. There's no desire to do any of that stuff you mentioned, for the reasons you seem to think. Unfortunately, it's impossible to please everybody all the time, which creates the propaganda that leads you to think the way you do, so I certainly don't fault you for being wrong.
- toasterlovin 8y ago
  Indeed, it's really easy to criticize when you're not the one making the decisions. I think a comparison to most other global powers makes the U.S. look relatively benign.

porpoisely 8y ago

It's "hidden" to us by our propagandists. Our empire is visible and obvious to everyone else. Our news, history books, movies, etc all hide it by simply not labeling the US as an empire. It's just as easy as that. We use terms like "superpower" or "leader of the western" or "leader of democracies" or other euphemisms to hide and forgive conquests, brutality, genocide and empire. Empire is evil and it's something our enemies do, not what we do. It's the british, germans, japanese and most recently the evil soviets who create empires. We are not evil, we don't create empires.

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sonnyblarney 8y ago

Wait - so the special relationship with the Philippines then ... which was in mostly fairly autonomous? ... that's the big ole' 'Empire'? ... and a few mostly unpopulated dots in the Ocean? Oh, so scary! The power! And to consider that Filipinos, who are culturally distinct from Americans in every way, and who have almost nothing in common with Americans but a temporary geopolitical alignment should be considered 'Americans' in the same way as those from New Orleans and NYC? So that's 2018 intersectionalist history? Rubbish. America is quite fundamentally distinct from the Philippines and always has been, there's no fundamental reason that most Americans on the street should care enough to 'go to war' over foreign interdiction. Going to war for those with whom the US has a special arrangement, and going to war for the 'homeland' are indeed quite different questions. There's no 'hiding' here. Thanks for the history tidbits Graun, but as usually the headline is ridiculous.

dade_ 8y ago
I don't think this article characterizes the relationship with the Philippines accurately at all. No mention of Japan's horrific occupation that the Americans fought with the Filipinos to expel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippines_Campaign_(1944%E2%80%931945) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippines_Campaign_(1944%E2%...
yazboo 8y ago
What does this have to do with intersectionalism?
gjm11 8y ago
> 2018 intersectionalist history No version of the word "intersectional" appears in the article, nor (so far as I can tell) in anything else by its author. I agree that the word "empire" here seems overblown, but it seems like perhaps you're bringing your own pet hates into this for some reason? Also: The article, and the book it's based on, are from 2019 (though I'm sure much of the work was done in 2018 and indeed earlier). Not sure what the point of specifying "2018" is meant to be.
SllX 8y ago
1941 Philippines was as American as 1941 Hawaii which were both about as American as or 1848-1859 Oregon Territory was or 1941-present Puerto Rico is. So, American, if you consider territory where Americans live on American soil to be American. Where they fork off is the Philippines are now an independent nation, Hawaii is now a US State, Oregon Territory was eventually split into 3 entire US States and part of a couple of others, and Puerto Rico still has more or less the same status as it did in 1941, but a few more rights and privileges afforded to them along with present day Guam, present day Northern Marianas Islands, and present day US Virgin Islands. American Samoa is US Territory, but a Navy playground so while the people are American Nationals living under the US Constituton, they’re not American Citizens and their territory is considered to be on par with all those unpopulated guano Islands we once claimed. That’s the law, 2019. The Filipinos are culturally distinct but we still count large numbers of them as American Citizens, both as immigrants and as a people that have lived in the mainland since before the Philippines were granted independence. The Native Hawaiians were and still are considered culturally distinct but they are still American Citizens by birthright. Put another way, your defensive posture is simply out of place here. On December 7th 1941, the Japanese attacked the United States. That shouldn’t need qualification. If they had only attacked Manila but didn’t make it to Oahu, they still would have been attacking the United States and that was certainly the intent of their attack.

YUMad 8y ago

This is the reason why China finds it acceptable to act as they do in quite a few things, such as attempts to enlarge their EEZ. In their mind, they are just doing what USA did too, so it's a fair game. But they do not understand, refuse to understand, or simply hold irrelevant the narrative manipulation that is necessary to pull it off, and this is something US excels at. The 'spreading freedom' meme is just one example; another example is 'we do it, and after that we declare it illegal for others to do it' - US committed significant war crimes, such as fire bombing of Dresden and Kyoto, and was never held accountable for it.

i_am_proteus 8y ago
Please attend to your facts: -The fire bombing of Dresden was executed jointly by the United States and United Kingdom, with the UK flying more sorties. This occurred during a war when Germany was executing strategic bombing campaigns against the UK. -The United States of America did not fire bomb Kyoto. Nobody did.
- DanBC 8y ago
  > This occurred during a war when Germany was executing strategic bombing campaigns against the UK. The wider point is interesting though. We started the war with the attitude that killing civilians would be a war crime, and then as the war went on that principle was eroded more and more until fire-bombing several civilian populations across Germany was allowed. There's a reason "Bombber Harris" was also known as Butcher Harris. Even Churchill disliked the area bombing tactics.
  - i_am_proteus 8y ago
    Indeed. Attitudes toward civilian casualties in warfare, at least in the West, are less tolerant today--- but the West hasn't been in an existentially-challenging shooting war since 1945.
    - kevin_thibedeau 8y ago

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eternalban 8y ago

Was that article written in close proximity to the 'City of London'? Now that is titular irony.

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