Now here’s an anti-war argument I hadn’t heard before, courtesy of conservative blogger/journalist Andrew Sullivan (on NBC‘s Chris Matthews Show, 3/18/12): 
SULLIVAN: Again, it just shows that America colonizes without any real colonial talent because this is a country built on escaping colonialism, not actually imposing it.
MATTHEWS: Yeah. Well…
SULLIVAN: You’re doing something against the DNA of the United States.
While the idea idea that the United States is not and has apparently never been a colonial power struck Matthews as a reasonable one, it might strike other people as rather odd. The Spanish-American War would seem to qualify as a colonial endeavor, since it resulted in the United States having colonial authority over Guam, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. And the subsequent war and occupation in the Philippines would certainly qualify as a colonial endeavor. The same could be said for Hawaii. And it might be difficult to argue that the U.S. treatment of Native Americans would not qualify, at the very least, as colonialism.
When Barack Obama claimed the U.S. was “not born as a colonial power,” the Institute for Public Accuracy (1/28/09) got historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz to respond :
The United States was founded as a European settler state, with maps and plans already prepared to colonize the continent coast to coast, expanding from the 13 colonies of the founding state. Indeed the U.S. was the first state born as a colonial power, unique in the vast territories it brutally conquered, occupied, and administered, crushing over 300 indigenous nations, force-marching hundreds of thousands east of the Mississippi out of their homelands, crowding them into “Indian Territory” (Oklahoma), along the way annexing half the Republic of Mexico. Plantation agriculture, worked by enslaved Africans, drove U.S. territorial conquests during the first century, creating the economic base for industrial capitalism that would soon dominate the world.
Perhaps the better question is whether the United States developed “colonial talent” over time–or whether the country was born that way.
Did we lose the comments with the new page style?
The US has no “colonial talent”
And Michael Jordan has no game
The Revolutionary War was a conflict over the distribution of the spoils of the colonial enterprise, not the end of the colonial enterprise.
The British disputed the right of the US colonies to a full share of the spoils as full British citizens came to expect.
I never realized that all of those of the people in what was once Indian territory willingly and eagerly surrendered their lands and their sovereignty to the United States. Nor was I aware that all of the people in what used to be northern Mexico, Puerto Rico, the Phillipines, Hawaii, etc. had done the same thing. It’s refreshing to learn something new about American history after all of these years. Manifest Destiny wasn’t some ugly colonial project brutally imposed on unwilling people at gun point. They actually wanted it. It just took a few bloody wars, invasions, battles, skirmishes, and massacres to get them to admit it.
Hmm I think we Occupied Germany, Italy, and Japan after the big one and didn’t lave until the job was done. Heck we’re still there!
NOT a colonial power my A..
The problem with Iraq and Afghan,.. is that we are planning to leave instead of take over and stay awhile. MaCArthur dictated the Japanese constitution. Germany did the war crimes trials. Let’s do the same in our new occupations?
Sounds like a back ended PR ad for the MIC…. as if they needed one….
Let’s not forget Aaron Burr’s aborted attempt to invade Florida, and Andrew Jackson’s actual accomplishment of the same.
BTW, the Trail of Tears that led to Oklahoma starts in (variously) Florida, North Carolina and Florida, all originally parts of the autonomous nations of the Choctaw confederation. This removal of native Americans was the culmination of a cultural “assimilation” plan originally proposed by George Washington.
colonialists, or colonialists manque, we’ve splashed our way in blood across the pages
of history, with glances neither at prior stained pages nor at any mirror. even if it is
never too late to learn, it is very late in our hateful march, and we are very far from
home.
USA has mostly graduated from physical to corporate colonialism. Such control works better if the troops on the ground wield contracts rather than firearms. The MidEast invasions were major f*ckups by retrograde thinkers who didn’t understand this — and the cost is unbearably high. We need to return to Byzantine policy, where others are coerced to pay the price.
As for USA’s colonial past: Don’t forget how it came about. USA 19th century growth was mostly fueled by British investors who saw the States’ expansion as a good deal, since they didn’t have to pay for an army to manage the expansion — we colonials did that ourselves. So even after independence and civil war, USA remained a British colony, with profits flowing back to London. Compare this with the Empire in India.
PS: Some will argue that USA was itself the victim of Byzantine thinking, that the MidEast invasions were induced by [your favorite bogeyman here] for their benefit. I reject this. Afghanistan, the Gulf, these are purely the result of USA NeoCon fantasies.
Andrew Sullivan and Chris (“we’re all neocons now”: 2002) are Ameriks’s versions of progressives…and such jokes. The progrssive movement in Amerika is dead.
leftbank
Title: THE DRAFT IN TIMES OF PEACE AND WAR
Link: http://deyanbrashich.com/home/2012/3/23/the-draft-in-times-of-peace-and-war.html
Excerpt: The attendant horrors of war were brought home once again by the cold blooded murder of seventeen Afghan civilians by Staff Sergeant Robert Bales last week. The poor bastard was on his 1,195 th day of his four long deployments in a war against an ill-defined enemy armed with improvised explosive devices doing its best to kill you. No wonder he snapped, but it wouldn’t have happened had we had reinstated the draft.
When war was raging in Vietnam, I dodged the draft. Unlike George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, who gamed the system by finding safe harbor in the National Guard or using multiple questionable deferments, my dodge was based on the luck of the draw, the lottery. But I did not skate home totally scot free. I participated in a small way: I served as the Chairman of a local Selective Service Board so the burden and danger of service was always before me, while I safely sat the war out.
Once we “won” the Vietnam War, the draft fell victim to peace. In 1981 the Joint Chiefs of Staff convinced the President to reverse an earlier decision reinstituting the draft. The all-volunteer peacetime force was all that America needed in the absence of war. What a crock of shit. I invite you to access Timeline of United States Military Operations compiled by the Committee on Foreign Affairs @
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_United_States_military_operations#1980.E2.80.931989 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_United_States_military_operations#1980.E2.80.931989)
You jest dond get it.None of you.You dispareribs the grate usa and idrael all the time becuz your all stupid liberrals!
Yep, Roxanne Dunbar nails it: colonial exploitation dominates our DNA but she skips over our most egregious offenses: the Philippines, the Caribbean, Central America, and a few others.
The US may (emphasis on “may”) not be a Colonial power, however, it sure as heck is an imperialist one. Does that matter? Does it make a difference? And does the one trump the other or can they both live side by side in perfect harmony?
By the way…….I did not write what is attributed to my name in the comments above.
P.s I would ask FAIR s editorial staff to look into who wrote something under the pen name Michael e.Troubling
http://dalyspace.com/?p=72
Romanus Pontifex to Globalization.
This piece shows that the root of colonialism goes to an old but active Papal Bull.
Excertp:
“They were white, young, land hungry commercialist pirate-types on the isolated high seas, racist and emanating from a small town called Kenebec near Boston. They were founding fathers of the USA Republican Party or associated with them (ref The Nation Within by Tom Coffman). They had rifles, hatred, lust for profit, self righteousness and no sense of law, so they just took the Monarch and `Iolani Palace like an animal alpha takes a female. And this is the savage example at play today in the world theatre where the parents (in this case Britain/Europe) don’t have the will to take away the keys nor the whiskey from a rampaging adolescent son at the wheel.”
But at least those people probably weren’t that concerned about dying! Life is cheap!
It must be nice for the administration to have someone appear to move to “the left” in such a controlled fashion. To him, the whole loss of ideology is a positive (keeping with the new “pragmatism”). as he seems to agree with the delusion that pleasant words like “liberty” are only aesthetic choices.
That should hint to you that he is like someone out of 1984, he does not to think from evidence, only Newspeak. In fact, to him, democracy is made easier only by “the constant reference to a Wikileaks nugget in countless news stories since, especially in the Arab Spring.” If he really wanted to talk critically of state power, he would note that Bush has yet to publicly realize the war in Iraq has made democracy impossible, at least until they have enough security and infrastructure to travel and organize. Yet he finds himself describing some fantasy figure, “George W. Bush… who famously despised the anti-democratic Middle East status quo.” He is so indoctrinated that he is endlessly discussing things from this Obama-ism.
This goes a long way to explaining why he does not discuss corporatist neocolonialism outside of a hyperbolic insult to the DC police, or look at dehumanizing effects of ultra-nationalism, or question colonialism as an imperative at all.
Further, it’s obvious to anyone who looks that the only reason the word colonialism is coming to his mind at all is there is a Republican fantasy that Obama opposes it, and this his is odd little rationalizing dance to protect Obama’s “failure” from ideological scrutiny. He knows when to cheer and when to boo, and his intent as a writer is keeping the state religion pure of illegitimate mockery (chaos, disorder, foreigners) and he doesn’t question the basic premises. This is what Freud called “condensation” — ideas doubling up with each other. Past and present, experience and practice, the President and his predecessor, they’re all the same to the post-structuralist. It’s perhaps also why he cannot effectively interrogate Bush, whose Iraq War he now regrets supporting.
But let’s make it easy on him. If he admits to a fallacy, he should be held to that standard, if he doesn’t, he shouldn’t. In religious school he “found it far easier to believe that Mary was born without sin than that my parents had done *that* to conceive me.” Similarly, America’s “conception” to him, must resemble the Christ of the world (bringing morality to foreigners, with NATO control). His delusion is exactly the same. Sullivan does not have some sincere desire to look at what colonialism means, only to see it as a kind of foreign attitude from the pure and noble state, and the traditional dogma that Obama parrots so well. Rhetorically, it’s ridiculous, as the DNA lives on quite obviously in the state name Maryland and overall fear of democracy and revolt (Occupy), which he himself had to “learn to love” and still seems to believe needs a leader.
Sources:
http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2011/09/the-limits-of-political-philosophy.html
http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2011/07/more-anti-colonialism.html
http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2006/06/immaculate_misc.html
http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2011/04/wikileaks-non-existent-pulitzer.html
To the Editor: What happened to my comment about neo-colonialism: Did it get dropped deliberately? What’s great about this blog is it very open and all sorts of opinions get expressed.
I just have to guess that the US is after a location in Afghanistan, as in Iraq as well, to flank Iran in dealing with them.
I don’t agree with the way the wars have been managed, but in the long run this will be a good thing. Iran’s regime needs to fall to send the message to the remaining tyrannies in the world that when the US sets its sight on you, you better start packing and put on your negotiation hat and take it seriously.
Somehow in order to conquer global problems like global warming, labor, natural resources, maybe even labor fairness, human rights, environmentalism, the world has got to be at peace and on the same page. It is only the US that can do this, and sadly it can or must be done at least partially by force.