>>86594>Implying that the USA is any worse than the British Empire is chauvinism and finger pointing.It is not. It is a material fact. If I am a British chauvinist for saying that the British empire was not as harmful as the American one has been, I must surely be a Lithuanian chauvinist first and foremost for my views on the Couronian empire.
We can demonstrate that it is worse in two simple and objective ways:
The first, that the harm it does can quickly be calculated and demonstrated numerically.
The second, that their propaganda has been much more effective and insidious, making it much harder for people to identify imperialism as the root issue.
>Who did the American imperialists learn everything they do from? The British imperialists.Did the Americans learn a lot from the British? Undoubtedly. But it takes some level of chauvinism to imagine that they are incapable of their own incremental alterations to the formula. As indeed they have done: Had they not innovated and merely copied the British playbook wholesale we would see 80% of the world decked out in American flags and find US Gunboats in the Thames.
>They cloak their tyranny in flowery tales of "liberal democracy", and it's more beneficial to them this way. Everything now has a "woke" alibi.This is the precise point I am trying to make in cut-down form. For all the pomp and bombast about documenting and exposing the crimes of imperialism, they have rarely been
stopped. So-called "decolonization" has been more of a rebranding exercise than a genuine abandonment of imperial control. Certainly, many of the movements in that direction had correct intentions - many were socialist lead, some even socialist governed for a time. But the vast bulk were subsequently subverted and recolonised by the United States. The US just never felt it necessary to say as much directly.
And so instead of the British Imperial Outpost of Ruritania, a colony kept mainly for oil, we find ourselves with the Free and Independent Republic of Ruritania, a shining beacon of liberal-democracy and host to the largest ExxonMobil refinery in the region.
>Pointless defeatism. Yes, Britain is a vassal to AmericaThe country in the given example was not intended to be Britain (we do not have a presidential palace) and you appear to have misinterpreted it. The point was not that the shackles of colonialism cannot be thrown off, but that the fact countries are colonized at all is one that is obfuscated. That is to say, if you seize the presidential palace and leave the US business interests alone (as the nice man from the CIA will advise you to do as soon as you take power, and the nice men from the world bank, IMF, etc, will advise you to do shortly after.) then you will achieve nothing. The actors change but the play remains the same. This, surely, is a familiar tale in a world as coup-ridden as ours.
Britain is closer to a US vassal than a US colony. (Although post ~1970s I would make a strong case that US capital's grubby fingerprints are all over the murder scene. One must recall that it is a matter of some public record that many in the US saw the 1976 IMF Loan affair as an excuse to wreck the UK's """socialist""" Labour government, as well as that of Portugal.)
None of which is to say that Britain cannot break out of this - but that is a secondary point to the one I wish to drive home: That the US presently runs the largest empire the world has ever known, that some quick calculations can demonstrate the untold harm it does, and it does a damn good job obfuscating that down to "merely" sending the CIA to coup any government that looks a bit socialist and starting an oil war here or there.
>By any measure the British Empire killed at least 150 million worldwide.9 million die of hunger each year. Within the lifetime of the average poster of this board we can easily draw up a figure greater than that. The disbelief you feel at this sort of figure is precisely the intention of US propaganda: how could it possibly be that America, with so few documented massacres, has accumulated more bloodshed than a British empire which spilled enough blood to dye its every uniform red? The answer, of course, is that the Americans are the ones writing the documentation.
(I do not make the claim that quite literally every death from hunger is the fault of the Americans - but equally, this simple calculation leaves out the wars, the coups, the premature deaths, the anti-union death squads… The point is purely illustrative.)
The British Empire is dead, fascist Germany is dead, but the US Empire lives on.