Published in Intrepid Report on July 13, 2012
Republished in China Forum (bbs.chinadaily.com.cn) on July 17, 2012
“Imperialism leaves behind germs of rot which we must clinically detect and remove from our land but from our minds as well.”—Frantz Fanon
It is not Africa, Asia, or Europe that have died in the 21st century. It is the Empire of the United States that is dying and decaying.
As in the case of the once mighty British Empire, whose vast ill-gotten colonial possessions spanned the globe and upon whom it was said that the sun could never set, so it is with the crumbling, yet increasingly vicious, Empire of the United States.
The United States is incapable of spreading genuine ‘democracy,’ for it has itself no democracy to spread. Moreover, real democracy is home grown, and is not some kind of commodity that can be spread by outside force at the end of bayonets, gun barrels, bombs, or predator drone missiles. This is the stuff of Empires, not democracies. Empires can only subvert democracy, not spread it. And all Empires ultimately wither and fail.
The U.S. Empire has no moral or ethical basis or imperative. It has only disinformation, hollow platitudes, ugly threats and constant brute force. The more the U.S. Empire crumbles—the more brutally vicious it becomes.
Perhaps one of the most significant ironies pertaining to this crumbling Empire is that the majority of its people have yet to realize that the U.S. Empire is a walking zombie in a state of accelerating decay. Tell-tale and sure signs of the collapsing U.S. Empire is that now the United States government has become one that openly utilizes and rationalizes the use of torture, ‘kill list’ murders (i.e., “extrajudicial killings”), and coup d’états (i.e., “regime changes”). This is the stuff of a vicious and collapsing Empire, not a resilient, peace-loving democracy.
In a cynical attempt to breathe new life into a dying Empire, the U.S. corporate/military/Wall Street elite, together with its corporate-owned “news” media, in 2008, skillfully played on the emotions and hopes of an exhausted and bewildered national populace to ensure the installation of the first nominally black chief executive of the U.S. Empire. In so doing, the waning life of the Empire could be extended and the unsuspecting everyday Black, White, Brown, Red, and Yellow people of this nation kept on track as loyal subjects and cannon fodder to and for the dying Empire.
Meanwhile, this articulate first black chief executive of the U.S. Empire, armed with a wholly undeserved Nobel ‘Peace’ Prize, sets about the business of carrying out the designs of the the U.S. corporate/military/Wall Street elite. And who would dare challenge his supposedly good and noble intentions? For, after all, he is the first black president (i.e. chief executive) of the U.S. Empire, as if that absolves him of all responsibility, accountability and morality. In less than four years later, he has 1) adroitly facilitated trillions of dollars to the corporate Wall Street elite/robber barons, 2) removed the option of single payer health care, 3) intensified the use of predator drone missiles against sovereign nations, 4) kept the U.S. gulag and torture chamber of Guantanamo open and in operation, 5) extended and broadened the unconstitutional ‘Patriot’ Act, 6) signed into law the draconian NDAA, 7) bombed and increased the militarization of Africa, 8) further militarily destabilized the Middle East, 9) seeks to control and corral parts of eastern Europe and Asia (causing dangerous tensions with Russia and China), and 10) granted unto himself the amoral authority of a ‘kill list’—with the power to murder at will (and without trial, jury, or legal defense) any that he deems to be a threat (real or imagined) to the U.S. international imperialistic designs of the U.S. Empire. All of these actions are in fact signs not of strength but of weakness by a waning, vicious, and desperate U.S. Empire intent upon retaining, at any cost, its former ability to dominate the entire world, even if this means bringing about a nuclear war which will destroy all human life. Such is the desperation of the waning U.S. Empire.
Only the everyday ordinary people of the United States can internally rein in this U.S. Empire. But whether or not the people of this nation awaken en masse from their systemically induced and perpetuated state of political slumber, the peoples of the rest of Mother Earth are awakening and resisting the U.S. Empire. Nevertheless, if the ordinary people of this nation do not soon act to put a stop to this U.S. Empire’s insanity, there is the very real probability that this planet will be plunged into nuclear holocaust.
The U.S. Empire, controlled by the elite of the corporate/military apparatus, is not only driven by insatiable greed and the lust for power, it is utterly pathological and insane. If we are to save ourselves, our posterity, and our Mother Earth, we must act NOW, while there is yet time.
Yet, it is time that is running out. Think about it!
Each one, reach one. Each one, teach one. Agitate, educate, organize! Do it NOW while there is yet time. Onward, then, my sisters and brothers! Onward!
Larry Pinkney is a veteran of the Black Panther Party, the former Minister of Interior of the Republic of New Africa, a former political prisoner and the only American to have successfully self-authored his civil/political rights case to the United Nations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. In connection with his political organizing activities, Pinkney was interviewed in 1988 on the nationally televised PBS News Hour, formerly known as The MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour. Pinkney is a former university instructor of political science and international relations, and his writings have been published in various places, including The Boston Globe, San Francisco BayView newspaper, Black Commentator, Intrepid Report, Global Research (Canada), LINKE ZEITUNG (Germany), 107Cowgate (Ireland and Scotland), and Mayihlome News (Azania/South Africa). For more about Larry Pinkney see the book, Saying No to Power: Autobiography of a 20th Century Activist and Thinker, by William Mandel [Introduction by Howard Zinn]. (Click here to read excerpts from the book.)
If you enjoyed this article, please consider sharing it!
