Revolution #238, July 3, 2011
Thought Experiment for the 4th of July
Think: if someone were to tell you about a planet where an empire was waging wars on five nations that had not attacked them, killing over the course of these wars hundreds of thousands of people, and wrecking the lives of millions more... and that the rulers of this empire said it was doing this for peace and even managed to get their chief war-maker awarded that planet’s “peace prize”...
Where this same empire sent its soldiers and operatives into scores of other countries on this planet to carry out violence and sabotage against governments which displeased it, and to not just collaborate in but to finance, defend, and indeed supervise torture and suppression in countries where its allies and agents were facing resistance from their people...and that the empire’s rulers said it was doing this to ensure self-determination for these nations...
Where this same empire set up an elaborate legal mechanism to confine in prisons millions of the minority peoples within their home base... minorities whom this empire had violently suppressed and ruthlessly exploited for centuries, battening off their flesh and blood for the very foundation of its wealth and power, but whom the empire could no longer profitably exploit and now saw as a potential source of political resistance, upheaval and even revolution... and then the enforcers of this empire said they were doing this in the name of freedom and, yes, justice...
Where this empire dominated and plundered the economies of the other countries on the planet, making it impossible for people to survive, and then super-exploited those who were driven to the empire to seek work, denying them rights and turning them into scapegoats for the misery it was inflicting on other, formerly better-off but now increasingly dispossessed and dissatisfied, inhabitants of the empire...and then bragged about how it was a “nation of immigrants”...
Where this same empire carried out night-time raids of extreme brutality in the neighborhoods of both these kinds of peoples, breaking into and ransacking houses, violently rousting people out of their beds and humiliating them, taking scores off to jail and even frequently killing people... and then said it was doing all this to serve and protect society and indeed the very people they were brutalizing...
Where this very same empire controlled the lives of the women on this planet in myriad ways, including the figurative and often quite literal enslavement of some in a universe of sexual degradation, saturating the society with images of this degradation and putting the stamp of this perverse brutality and exploitation on every relation between the genders throughout society, while others were subordinated to the males in other, more “traditional” ways... and then the scholars and commentators said that all this was just the workings of human nature, or individual choice, and anybody who said differently was rendered voiceless or held up for scorn...
And where this same empire led all the other nations and powers on that beautiful, tortured planet in despoiling and raping and plundering and fouling the planet’s waters and skies and forests until the very existence of life itself was called into question...
What would you call such an empire?
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