Imperialism is in severe decay, self-destruction from sharpening of internal contradictions .
1. Trump is destroying the finance monopoly capitalist Republican fascist party from inside.
2. Trump is undermining the current and planned future of imperialist free trade regime by establishing anti-Free Trade tariffs and dropping the planned T.P.P.
3. Trump is undermining the imperialist military alliance , NATO.
4. Britain is undermining the junior partner free trade regime , the E.U.
Monday, May 6, 2019
Thoughts on 2020 campaign , Democrats and "politician" as a pejorative, et al.
I love the Democrats . They've had a difficult task since Reagan when a big majority of Americans became heavy duty rightwingers-anti-Liberals. Democrats have had to tiptoe around for 40 years
I'm an Obama Democrat !
Our stage one of our ideals, our ideology is substantially written in _Dreams from My Father_ by Barack Obama . It is a very old American Dream really; Martin Luther King's Dream . .. Even Langston Hughes's dreams .
Obama the true Constitutionalist, uses Executive Power to make a more perfect union, as in the Preamble.
Paul Robeson's imaginings in Ballad for Americans
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik
True (not phony ) Leftists are Obamaists in this period of American history. Obama achieved the first and only reversals of Reaganism that could be won in a Reaganite dominated polity. Reversal of Reaganism is the main task of Leftists in this period. Biden is a continuation of Obamism. True Leftist means for the best interest of the working class , the 99% that are winnable now. The number one task of Leftists today is to defeat the fascist Republicans . Biden is not only a continuation of Obamaism , he can win Michigan, Wisconsin , Pennsylvania and maybe Ohio with the recent plantclosings , the states we have to flip back Democrat to beat Trump
Dogmatically attributing a bad connotation to politics and politicians or "politicizing an issue by appealing to voters" is a major flaw in Americans thinking and major media framing . Most issues are supposed to be politically appealed to the masses of voters in a democracy.
https://take10charles.
Dems have to work on universal healthcare and other bread and butter bills , but they can't pass them into law until We win Democratic President and majority Senate in 2020.
Campaign for Democratic votes everyday some kinda way .
Doing impeachment deliberately , prudently will win votes for Dems in 2020.
In a criminal conspiracy , the conspirators do not have to succeed at their crime. The Nixon Watergate burglars were caught ( by a Black security guard ). They failed to steal documents from the Democratic Party headquarters . But they were still guilty because they had taken at least one act in furtherance of the conspiracy.
Similarly , Trumpy's conspiracy does not have to succeed for him to be guilty of criminal conspiracy .
Furthermore , Nixon's conspiracy did not influence the result of the 1972 election , because it failed and Nixon was way ahead anyway .
Similarly , Trump's conspiracy with the Russians
does not have to have made the difference in the election of 2016 in Trump's favor for his conspiracy crime to be a High Crime or Misdemeanor.
https://www.theatlantic.com/id
That's what I've been saying for months. All the indictments and convictions of Trumpy's agents and employees are circumstantial evidence that a jury could find prove Trump was in a criminal conspiracy with Russia. Trump saying Russia I hope you get the emails is _direct_ evidence along with the circumstantial evidence really could be found as proof beyond a reasonable doubt . And certainly the House could find that Trump is guilty of a High Crime or Misdemeanor .
CB: They were investigating conspiracy which means they had to have at least probable cause evidence of conspiracy to even investigate . "Collusion " is not a crime , so they weren't investigating collusion. The indictments and conviction of Trumpy's co-conspirators is evidence that Trump conspired .
Judge Nap (of Foc News !): There’s ‘Undoubtedly Some Evidence of Conspiracy and Some Evidence of Obstruction’
https://lawandcrime.com/high-p
think the CIA has a prohibition on the media acknowledging any government conspiracies .
They're all "conspiracy theories " , that is supposed crazy ideas.
Through the whole Trumpy Saga there has been an ongoing struggle to even call what is being investigated a conspiracy . Most commentators are disciplined to use "collusion" which is not a crime so wouldn't be the basis for in investigation .
Race and sex of candidates matter some. It was very important that such a large minority of whites people voted for a Black liberal person , brown skinned ,Barack Obama for President . It was a
major blow against racism , for the end of racism is a change in White peoples behavior toward Black and Brown people; and voting for a Black President was White people making Black history.
It's still important to get majorities voting for Women and People of Color from now on.
Ethics is how we treat each other which can be can be discussed concretely. Ethics is in the form of rules of behavior , custom , tradition , law, culture in the anthropological sense ( speaking of anthropological psychology ). Do's and don'ts of how we treat each other , morality . Ethics is what is to be done socially
Barry : "Socrates predicted this kind of a disaster."
https://www.theschooloflife.co
CB : This is minority -oligarchic rule by Republicans, not majority-democratic rule.
Barry : "Did you know that the citizens of Athens voted to convict Socrates of the crime of teaching the youth of Athens how to think? They literally voted him off the island."
CB : Think what ? How can somebody who is self-proclaimed not wise teach youth how to think good thoughts ?
Barry : "How to think critically."
CB: Asking questions is only a beginning of thinking . Answering your own questions is where thought becomes whole and truth finding.
Margareta "Barry Kort it’s true. Misinformation is the problem. There should always be a fact checker on those podiums so that people know the true facts of any issue or all details to make an intelligent decision. (For those who think)"
Margareta : "self proclaimed doesn’t mean he was stupid.
But the other guys also figured out how to keep people dumb by kicking the thinker out."
CB : I know all about how smart Socrates ( Plato) was -a real slickster for the Greek ruling class, Margarita Pacheco. His "Republic " had a philosopher King . Smart Dictator
Margarita : "im not sure what you are trying to tell me. Could you word it a little differently? I can be dense sometimes."
"Socrates " as we know him is a character in Plato's writings . We have little or nothing directly from Socrates. So , "Socrates" is really Plato. We know Plato's politics because he wrote "The Republic", revealing himself as a mouthpiece of the Greek ruling class of his time . The head of state in the book is a "philosopher -King" philosopher like Plato; smart propagandized of the masses expropriating some legendary do gooder philosopher against the rulers; Plato is a real wolf in sheep's clothing .
Anyway a philosopher-King is smart -dictators. Kings are dictators .
Clinton won NY as expected . Mich, Penn, Wisconsin were supposed to go blue but didn't . If we flip them back blue , we win , because none of the states that went for Clinton will go for Trumpy in 2020.
Michigan , Pennsylvania and Wisconsin were in the anti-Trump blue wave in 2018 ; Biden is ahead of Trump in a Michigan poll; Detroit will be turning out bigger against Trump in 2020 than in 2016, and we're a big part of Michigan vote . Biden is lunch bucket Joe that should appeal to some autoworkers and steelworkers . Etc.
Study on fake news making the difference against Clinton
Inbox
| x |
Sun, Apr 7, 7:08 PM
|  | |||
| ||||
Clayton Hill: A study from researchers at Ohio State University found that fake news probably played a significant role in depressing Hillary Clinton's support on Election Day. The study suggests that about 4 percent of President Barack Obama's 2012 supporters were dissuaded from voting for Clinton in 2016 by belief in fake news stories.
Three popular fake news stories from the 2016 campaign into a 281-question YouGov survey were given to a sample that included 585 Obama supporters — 23 percent of whom didn't vote for Clinton, either by abstaining or picking another candidate (10 percent voted Trump, which is in line with other estimates).
Here are the false stories, along with the percentages of Obama supporters who believed they were at least “probably” true (in parenthesis):
1. Clinton was in “very poor health due to a serious illness” (12 percent)
2. Pope Francis endorsed Trump (8 percent)
3. Clinton approved weapons sales to Islamic jihadists, “including ISIS” (20 percent)
Overall about one-quarter of 2012 Obama voters believed at least one of these stories, and of that group 45 percent voted for Clinton. Of those who believed none of the fake news stories, 89 percent voted for Clinton.
The result: Clinton lost 4.2 percent more of Obama's votes in the race with fake news vs. a hypothetical race without it.
Multiply that 4.2 percent drop-off by Obama's 2012 vote share in the three key states that delivered the presidency to Trump, it suggests that fake news cost Clinton about 2.2 or 2.3 points apiece in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. And Clinton lost Michigan by just 0.2 points and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin by 0.72 and 0.76 points, respectively.
The survey also notably doesn't measure what effect fake news might have had on increasing Trump's support, instead only focusing on how it depressed Clinton's. That could increase the shift. But even with this limited purview, it suggests it made a significant difference.
And it suggests it may well have cost Clinton the presidency.
Tя☭mp's reelection will depend on again winning the formerly Democratic states in the Upper Midwest that he surprisingly captured in 2016.
Unfortunately for Trump, the economic news in two of those states isn’t as good as in the nation as a whole.
Michigan and Pennsylvania are not sharing in the national gains quite so much. Their unemployment rates are above the national average, and rates are even higher in the regions that propelled Trump to victory.
In Pennsylvania, for example, that’s the regions of Scranton-Wilkes Barre, Johnstown and Williamsport. Their unemployment rates all remain at or above 5 percent as of February.
That’s down a point or so from when Trump took office, but it’s not “great again” either. It’s probably not a surprise, then, that Republicans didn’t mount a serious challenge for either major statewide race, lost four House seats in the midterms, and won another three seats with less than 52 percent of the vote.
A recent Emerson poll also shows that Trump would lose Pennsylvania by 10 points to either former vice president Joe Biden or Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).
In Michigan, his margin was large swings in blue-collar areas such as Flint, Saginaw and Bay City. He was the first Republican presidential candidate to carry either Saginaw County or Bay County since President Ronald Reagan in 1984.
But these counties’ economies have barely improved from January 2017 to this year, with unemployment rates dropping only about a point from a shade higher than 6 percent to a bit more than 5 percent. Again, an improvement, but not a boom.
The situation is much worse in non-metropolitan Michigan. These areas, mainly in the northern “thumb” and the Upper Peninsula, gave Trump his largest swings over Mitt Romney’s percentages in 2012.
These areas more than anywhere fueled his narrow 11,000-vote victory. But their economies have gotten worse, not better, since Trump took office.
In January 2017, non-metro Michigan had a 6.8 percent unemployment rate. In February 2019, that rate is now at 7 percent.
https://www.washingtonpost.com
Three popular fake news stories from the 2016 campaign into a 281-question YouGov survey were given to a sample that included 585 Obama supporters — 23 percent of whom didn't vote for Clinton, either by abstaining or picking another candidate (10 percent voted Trump, which is in line with other estimates).
Here are the false stories, along with the percentages of Obama supporters who believed they were at least “probably” true (in parenthesis):
1. Clinton was in “very poor health due to a serious illness” (12 percent)
2. Pope Francis endorsed Trump (8 percent)
3. Clinton approved weapons sales to Islamic jihadists, “including ISIS” (20 percent)
Overall about one-quarter of 2012 Obama voters believed at least one of these stories, and of that group 45 percent voted for Clinton. Of those who believed none of the fake news stories, 89 percent voted for Clinton.
The result: Clinton lost 4.2 percent more of Obama's votes in the race with fake news vs. a hypothetical race without it.
Multiply that 4.2 percent drop-off by Obama's 2012 vote share in the three key states that delivered the presidency to Trump, it suggests that fake news cost Clinton about 2.2 or 2.3 points apiece in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. And Clinton lost Michigan by just 0.2 points and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin by 0.72 and 0.76 points, respectively.
The survey also notably doesn't measure what effect fake news might have had on increasing Trump's support, instead only focusing on how it depressed Clinton's. That could increase the shift. But even with this limited purview, it suggests it made a significant difference.
And it suggests it may well have cost Clinton the presidency.
Tя☭mp's reelection will depend on again winning the formerly Democratic states in the Upper Midwest that he surprisingly captured in 2016.
Unfortunately for Trump, the economic news in two of those states isn’t as good as in the nation as a whole.
Michigan and Pennsylvania are not sharing in the national gains quite so much. Their unemployment rates are above the national average, and rates are even higher in the regions that propelled Trump to victory.
In Pennsylvania, for example, that’s the regions of Scranton-Wilkes Barre, Johnstown and Williamsport. Their unemployment rates all remain at or above 5 percent as of February.
That’s down a point or so from when Trump took office, but it’s not “great again” either. It’s probably not a surprise, then, that Republicans didn’t mount a serious challenge for either major statewide race, lost four House seats in the midterms, and won another three seats with less than 52 percent of the vote.
A recent Emerson poll also shows that Trump would lose Pennsylvania by 10 points to either former vice president Joe Biden or Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).
In Michigan, his margin was large swings in blue-collar areas such as Flint, Saginaw and Bay City. He was the first Republican presidential candidate to carry either Saginaw County or Bay County since President Ronald Reagan in 1984.
But these counties’ economies have barely improved from January 2017 to this year, with unemployment rates dropping only about a point from a shade higher than 6 percent to a bit more than 5 percent. Again, an improvement, but not a boom.
The situation is much worse in non-metropolitan Michigan. These areas, mainly in the northern “thumb” and the Upper Peninsula, gave Trump his largest swings over Mitt Romney’s percentages in 2012.
These areas more than anywhere fueled his narrow 11,000-vote victory. But their economies have gotten worse, not better, since Trump took office.
In January 2017, non-metro Michigan had a 6.8 percent unemployment rate. In February 2019, that rate is now at 7 percent.
https://www.washingtonpost.com
Imperialism is in severe decay, self-destruction from sharpening of internal contradictions .
1. Trump is destroying the finance monopoly capitalist Republican fascist party from inside.
2. Trump is undermining the current and planned future of imperialist free trade regime by establishing anti-Free Trade tariffs and dropping the planned T.P.P.
3. Trump is undermining the imperialist military alliance , NATO.
4. Britain is undermining the junior partner free trade regime , the E.U.
1. Trump is destroying the finance monopoly capitalist Republican fascist party from inside.
2. Trump is undermining the current and planned future of imperialist free trade regime by establishing anti-Free Trade tariffs and dropping the planned T.P.P.
3. Trump is undermining the imperialist military alliance , NATO.
4. Britain is undermining the junior partner free trade regime , the E.U.
Thursday, May 2, 2019
The Holier than thou Left
The Holier than thou left has crude tactics for getting votes for their candidate . They confront with the saying they are holier than Obama supporters , Clinton supporters , Biden supporters and so you should vote for our candidate not yours . They demand that Democratic Party veterans turn over the party to them because they are holier .
They can't count very well because they don't realize that they need the votes from other candidates for their candidate to win the general election . They have an exaggerated idea of what their candidate's support is . They're sophomoric campaigners. They rely overly on crying foul, whining.
http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2022/03/infantile-leftism-lenin.html
They can't count very well because they don't realize that they need the votes from other candidates for their candidate to win the general election . They have an exaggerated idea of what their candidate's support is . They're sophomoric campaigners. They rely overly on crying foul, whining.
http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2022/03/infantile-leftism-lenin.html
Gender as social objective reality
All human societies , not just capitalism , have gender starting with the first humans 100,000's of years ago. It is a defining characteristic of our species.
Engels , in _The Origin of the (male supremacist) Family , Private Property and the State_, correctly says that before civilization in the Stone Age there was no male supremacy but equality between women and men. Modern anthropology confirms this.
Marxists are for abolition of male supremacy , not binary gender. Binary gender assigned based on sex , which is absolutely binary , is a fundamental human right and universal human culture.
Gender is assigned _by society_ , not based on subjective feelings of individuals , but based on objective biological characteristics .
Social constructs are materialist . Individual subjective constructs , constructs based on subjective feelings are subjective idealist . Designating ones own gender based on subjective feelings is subjective idealism .
Most of humans' material environment is socially constructed.
Engels , in _The Origin of the (male supremacist) Family , Private Property and the State_, correctly says that before civilization in the Stone Age there was no male supremacy but equality between women and men. Modern anthropology confirms this.
Marxists are for abolition of male supremacy , not binary gender. Binary gender assigned based on sex , which is absolutely binary , is a fundamental human right and universal human culture.
Gender is assigned _by society_ , not based on subjective feelings of individuals , but based on objective biological characteristics .
Social constructs are materialist . Individual subjective constructs , constructs based on subjective feelings are subjective idealist . Designating ones own gender based on subjective feelings is subjective idealism .
Most of humans' material environment is socially constructed.
Thursday, April 11, 2019
America has an Authoritarian Government
US has conservative ( not liberal ) and authoritarian democracy . All state powers , including bourgeois democratic republic states , are authoritarian . Bourgeois states have giant repressive apparatuses , giant standing bodies of armed personnel , authoritatively ruling their working classes . The fact that they elect their governments doesn't make them non-authoritarian . The US elections give $1 -1 vote not 1 person -1 vote, or oligarchy not democratic majority rule.
The US authoritarian system has the largest prison population rate in the world.
Furthermore , the US arrogates to itself the power as an authoritarian power over the whole world (!) with standing bodies of armed personnel in 900 military bases around the world where they are not elected. US is the most authoritarian state in the whole world. It is a world authoritarian state.
On Apr 11, 2019, at 8:59 AM, Bill Totten wrote:
... if it doesn't tear itself apart, says End of History author
by Laura Zhou
https://www.scmp.com (March 27 2019)
Francis Fukuyama says Beijing challenged the expectations he had when he published his book in 1992, but the Chinese system must evolve to flourish.
https://cdn.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/styles/1200x800/public/d8/images/methode/2019/03/27/894d28ec-507e-11e9-8617-6babbcfb60eb_image_hires_223445.JPG
Fukuyama says the model of Chinese government shaped during the presidency of Xi Jinping may come to rival Western liberal democracy. Photo: EPA
China's model of authoritarian government could be an alternative to Western-style liberal democracy but only if Beijing manages to control social stresses and maintain economic stability, according to American political scientist Francis Fukuyama.
The Stanford University academic's assessment was published on the website of the Asia Global Institute at the University of Hong Kong this week.
Academics have not agreed on the definition of a Chinese model but debate has intensified over the past decade over whether a mix of a market economy and authoritarian government along Chinese lines could be a viable alternative to Western liberal democracy.
The assessment by Fukuyama - who in a 1989 essay forecast the triumph of political and economic liberalism after the collapse of Soviet Union and in 1992 wrote bestseller The End of History - was made public by Yoshikazu Kato, an adjunct associate professor at the Asia Global Institute, in a document that summarised email exchanges between the two from 2014 until last year.
In the document, Fukuyama said his idea of the end of history had been challenged by China, which, with its authoritarian semi-capitalist system, might become the world's most powerful country.
"The issue is whether the system is sustainable over the long run", Fukuyama wrote to Kato. "There are a number of reasons for thinking that is not [the case], beginning with the challenges of dealing with the enormous social stresses that have appeared as a result of modernisation.
"But if China manages these stresses and remains strong and stable for another generation, then I think there is, in fact, a real alternative to liberal democracy".
After three decades of economic expansion, China has emerged as the world's biggest economy after the United States, as well as a powerhouse of global investment and trade.
Chinese President Xi Jinping, who took the power in 2012, promised to achieve the "great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation" and restore the country to the status of a great power by 2049, the centenary of the founding of the People's Republic.
Chinese leaders rejected the idea of Western-style democracy and were determined to stick to their political model.
Fukuyama explained to Kato that it was unlikely that countries could fully recreate the Chinese model, especially its authoritarianism, as some aspects of Communist society could not be replicated.
https://cdn.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/d8/images/methode/2019/03/27/69cfa1c4-507f-11e9-8617-6babbcfb60eb_972x_223445.jpg
Francis Fukuyama says China has challenged his idea of the end of history.
Those included "meritocracy, a disciplined party hierarchy, respect for education, and above all, a sense among the rulers that they have a certain responsibility to act in the public interest", Fukuyama said, referring to measures the Communist Party has taken over the past six years under Xi.
Xi's controversial anti-corruption campaign has ensnared dozens of high-level officials within the party and the military was one, although it was unclear how well corruption had been eliminated.
China's rule of law, where the party was paramount, differed greatly from the West, Fukuyama wrote. In his 2015 meeting with Wang Qishan, who was secretary of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection spearheading the anti-corruption campaign and is now vice-president, Fukuyama asked if Beijing could establish a rule of law independent of the party.
The answer, Fukuyama went on to tell the US Council on Foreign Relations later that year, was "absolutely not".
Without the ability to keep strong leaders in check, Fukuyama told Kato, China could never escape the "good emperor-bad emperor" scenario, even when it damaged China.
"In a system with a strong state but no rule of law or democracy, a good emperor can move quickly to implement policies, more quickly than in a liberal democracy", Fukuyama said. "A bad emperor can do much more damage in such a system than in one with checks and balances".
In an opinion piece in The Washington Post in March last year, Fukuyama warned that Xi could be a "bad emperor" after China decided to removed term limits on the presidency.
"As such, China under Xi may end up showing the world the unimagined forms that a 21st-century totalitarian state can take", Fukuyama wrote.
https://cdn.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/d8/images/methode/2019/03/27/46a0e272-507e-11e9-8617-6babbcfb60eb_1320x770_223445.JPG
Fukuyama urges Chinese President Xi Jinping, Vice-President Wang Qishan and the Communist Party hierarchy to reassess the rule of law in China.
He said that while in many Western countries the middle class was a force for stability, China's large and burgeoning middle class seemed to care more about economic development rather than democracy. This, he told Kato, could pose a threat to the leadership in Beijing.
"It is very hard to move from middle- to high-income status, and the question you have to ask is: how will the [Chinese] middle class feel in the face of economic stagnation, or even a setback that lowers incomes and employment?" Fukuyama said.
China's economy, which is growing at its slowest pace since 1990, is struggling with its high debt-to-GDP model and a months-long trade stand-off with the US, raising great fears for social instability among policymakers in Beijing.
At the same time, competition between China and the US has intensified on several fronts, from trade to technological supremacy to the South China Sea, where Beijing's territorial claims and its military build-up in the disputed waters are threatening to become one of the biggest flashpoints between the two powers.
Fukuyama said the fact that authoritarian systems such as China seemed to be doing better economically than democracies such as the US, the European Union, and Japan was the real danger to the world order, but that China could do better if it moved its rule of law away from the party and gave greater freedom to the people.
"And on an international level, China should work with other regional powers to turn down the rhetoric on the issues that are dividing them", Fukuyama told Kato.
This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as Beijing way ‘could rival democracy'.
Also See:
* https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3002866/china-risks-legitimacy-communist-partys-regime-without
* https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3002243/xi-jinping-tells-chinese-teachers-help-nurture-support-communist
* https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/3003354/chinas-weak-economic-data-likely-prompt-more-stimulus
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3003547/chinas-authoritarian-way-can-rival-liberal-democracy-if-it
---
The US authoritarian system has the largest prison population rate in the world.
Furthermore , the US arrogates to itself the power as an authoritarian power over the whole world (!) with standing bodies of armed personnel in 900 military bases around the world where they are not elected. US is the most authoritarian state in the whole world. It is a world authoritarian state.
On Apr 11, 2019, at 8:59 AM, Bill Totten
... if it doesn't tear itself apart, says End of History author
by Laura Zhou
https://www.scmp.com (March 27 2019)
Francis Fukuyama says Beijing challenged the expectations he had when he published his book in 1992, but the Chinese system must evolve to flourish.
https://cdn.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/styles/1200x800/public/d8/images/methode/2019/03/27/894d28ec-507e-11e9-8617-6babbcfb60eb_image_hires_223445.JPG
Fukuyama says the model of Chinese government shaped during the presidency of Xi Jinping may come to rival Western liberal democracy. Photo: EPA
China's model of authoritarian government could be an alternative to Western-style liberal democracy but only if Beijing manages to control social stresses and maintain economic stability, according to American political scientist Francis Fukuyama.
The Stanford University academic's assessment was published on the website of the Asia Global Institute at the University of Hong Kong this week.
Academics have not agreed on the definition of a Chinese model but debate has intensified over the past decade over whether a mix of a market economy and authoritarian government along Chinese lines could be a viable alternative to Western liberal democracy.
The assessment by Fukuyama - who in a 1989 essay forecast the triumph of political and economic liberalism after the collapse of Soviet Union and in 1992 wrote bestseller The End of History - was made public by Yoshikazu Kato, an adjunct associate professor at the Asia Global Institute, in a document that summarised email exchanges between the two from 2014 until last year.
In the document, Fukuyama said his idea of the end of history had been challenged by China, which, with its authoritarian semi-capitalist system, might become the world's most powerful country.
"The issue is whether the system is sustainable over the long run", Fukuyama wrote to Kato. "There are a number of reasons for thinking that is not [the case], beginning with the challenges of dealing with the enormous social stresses that have appeared as a result of modernisation.
"But if China manages these stresses and remains strong and stable for another generation, then I think there is, in fact, a real alternative to liberal democracy".
After three decades of economic expansion, China has emerged as the world's biggest economy after the United States, as well as a powerhouse of global investment and trade.
Chinese President Xi Jinping, who took the power in 2012, promised to achieve the "great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation" and restore the country to the status of a great power by 2049, the centenary of the founding of the People's Republic.
Chinese leaders rejected the idea of Western-style democracy and were determined to stick to their political model.
Fukuyama explained to Kato that it was unlikely that countries could fully recreate the Chinese model, especially its authoritarianism, as some aspects of Communist society could not be replicated.
https://cdn.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/d8/images/methode/2019/03/27/69cfa1c4-507f-11e9-8617-6babbcfb60eb_972x_223445.jpg
Francis Fukuyama says China has challenged his idea of the end of history.
Those included "meritocracy, a disciplined party hierarchy, respect for education, and above all, a sense among the rulers that they have a certain responsibility to act in the public interest", Fukuyama said, referring to measures the Communist Party has taken over the past six years under Xi.
Xi's controversial anti-corruption campaign has ensnared dozens of high-level officials within the party and the military was one, although it was unclear how well corruption had been eliminated.
China's rule of law, where the party was paramount, differed greatly from the West, Fukuyama wrote. In his 2015 meeting with Wang Qishan, who was secretary of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection spearheading the anti-corruption campaign and is now vice-president, Fukuyama asked if Beijing could establish a rule of law independent of the party.
The answer, Fukuyama went on to tell the US Council on Foreign Relations later that year, was "absolutely not".
Without the ability to keep strong leaders in check, Fukuyama told Kato, China could never escape the "good emperor-bad emperor" scenario, even when it damaged China.
"In a system with a strong state but no rule of law or democracy, a good emperor can move quickly to implement policies, more quickly than in a liberal democracy", Fukuyama said. "A bad emperor can do much more damage in such a system than in one with checks and balances".
In an opinion piece in The Washington Post in March last year, Fukuyama warned that Xi could be a "bad emperor" after China decided to removed term limits on the presidency.
"As such, China under Xi may end up showing the world the unimagined forms that a 21st-century totalitarian state can take", Fukuyama wrote.
https://cdn.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/d8/images/methode/2019/03/27/46a0e272-507e-11e9-8617-6babbcfb60eb_1320x770_223445.JPG
Fukuyama urges Chinese President Xi Jinping, Vice-President Wang Qishan and the Communist Party hierarchy to reassess the rule of law in China.
He said that while in many Western countries the middle class was a force for stability, China's large and burgeoning middle class seemed to care more about economic development rather than democracy. This, he told Kato, could pose a threat to the leadership in Beijing.
"It is very hard to move from middle- to high-income status, and the question you have to ask is: how will the [Chinese] middle class feel in the face of economic stagnation, or even a setback that lowers incomes and employment?" Fukuyama said.
China's economy, which is growing at its slowest pace since 1990, is struggling with its high debt-to-GDP model and a months-long trade stand-off with the US, raising great fears for social instability among policymakers in Beijing.
At the same time, competition between China and the US has intensified on several fronts, from trade to technological supremacy to the South China Sea, where Beijing's territorial claims and its military build-up in the disputed waters are threatening to become one of the biggest flashpoints between the two powers.
Fukuyama said the fact that authoritarian systems such as China seemed to be doing better economically than democracies such as the US, the European Union, and Japan was the real danger to the world order, but that China could do better if it moved its rule of law away from the party and gave greater freedom to the people.
"And on an international level, China should work with other regional powers to turn down the rhetoric on the issues that are dividing them", Fukuyama told Kato.
This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as Beijing way ‘could rival democracy'.
Also See:
* https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3002866/china-risks-legitimacy-communist-partys-regime-without
* https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3002243/xi-jinping-tells-chinese-teachers-help-nurture-support-communist
* https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/3003354/chinas-weak-economic-data-likely-prompt-more-stimulus
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3003547/chinas-authoritarian-way-can-rival-liberal-democracy-if-it
---
Monday, March 18, 2019
Genus Homo"s Darwinian Adaptive advantage from symboling (language and culture)
With the origin of the Genus homo with symbolic communication , symbolic inheritance and symbolic creativity - language and culture in the anthropological sense, our Genus has an adaptive mechanism that gives a certain inheritance of created characteristics that is more efficient adapting than relying on genetic mutations that occur randomly relative to the adaptive problem that they solve.
The United States likes to think of itself as a republic, but it holds territories all over the world
The United States likes to think of itself as a republic, but it holds territories all over the world - the map you always see doesn't tell the whole story.
by Daniel Immerwahr
The Guardian (February 15 2019)
https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media
Main image: The Greater United States as it was in 1941
There aren't many historical episodes more firmly lodged in the United States's national memory than the attack on Pearl Harbor. It is one of only a few events that many people in the country can put a date to, 7 December 1941, the "date which will live in infamy", as Franklin D Roosevelt put it. Hundreds of books have been written about it - the Library of Congress holds more than 350. And Hollywood has made movies, from the critically acclaimed From Here to Eternity (1953), starring Burt Lancaster, to the critically derided Pearl Harbor (2001), starring Ben Affleck.
But what those films don't show is what happened next. Nine hours after Japan attacked the territory of Hawaii, another set of Japanese planes came into view over another US territory, the Philippines. As at Pearl Harbor, they dropped their bombs, hitting several air bases, to devastating effect.
The attack on Pearl Harbor was just that - an attack. Japan's bombers struck, retreated and never returned. Not so in the Philippines. There, the initial air raids were followed by more raids, then by invasion and conquest. Sixteen million Filipinos - US nationals who saluted the stars and stripes and looked to FDR as their commander in chief - fell under a foreign power.
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. They also attacked the British colonies of Malaya, Singapore, and Hong Kong, and they invaded Thailand.
At first, "Pearl Harbor" was not the way most people referred to the bombings. "Japs bomb Manila, Hawaii" was the headline in one New Mexico paper; "Japanese Planes Bomb Honolulu, Island of Guam" in another in South Carolina. Sumner Welles, FDR's undersecretary of state, described the event as "an attack upon Hawaii and upon the Philippines". Eleanor Roosevelt used a similar formulation in her radio address on the night of 7 December, when she spoke of Japan "bombing our citizens in Hawaii and the Philippines".
That was how the first draft of FDR's speech went, too: it presented the event as a "bombing in Hawaii and the Philippines". Yet Roosevelt toyed with that draft all day, adding things in pencil, crossing other bits out. At some point, he deleted the prominent references to the Philippines.
Why did Roosevelt demote the Philippines? We don't know, but it's not hard to guess. Roosevelt was trying to tell a clear story: Japan had attacked the US. But he faced a problem. Were Japan's targets considered "the United States"? Legally, they were indisputably US territory. But would the public see them that way? What if Roosevelt's audience didn't care that Japan had attacked the Philippines or Guam? Polls taken slightly before the attack show that few in the continental US supported a military defense of those remote territories.
Roosevelt no doubt noted that the Philippines and Guam, although technically part of the US, seemed foreign to many. Hawaii, by contrast, was more plausibly "American". Although it was a territory rather than a state, it was closer to North America and significantly whiter than the others.
Yet even when it came to Hawaii, Roosevelt felt a need to massage the point. So, on the morning of his speech, he made another edit. He changed it so that the Japanese squadrons had bombed not the "island of Oahu", but the "American island of Oahu". Damage there, Roosevelt continued, had been done to "American naval and military forces", and "very many American lives" had been lost.
An American island, where American lives were lost - that was the point he was trying to make. If the Philippines was being rounded down to foreign, Hawaii was being rounded up to "American".
One reporter in the Philippines described the scene in Manila as the crowds listened to Roosevelt's speech on the radio. The president spoke of Hawaii and the many lives lost there. Yet he only mentioned the Philippines, the reporter noted, "very much in passing". Roosevelt made the war "seem to be something close to Washington and far from Manila".
This was not how it looked from the Philippines, where air-raid sirens continued to wail. "To Manilans the war was here, now, happening to us", the reporter wrote. "And we have no air-raid shelters."
Hawaii, the Philippines, Guam - it wasn't easy to know how to think about such places, or even what to call them. At the turn of the twentieth century, when many were acquired (Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Guam, American Samoa, Hawaii, Wake), their status was clear. They were, as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson unabashedly called them, colonies.
That spirit of forthright imperialism didn't last. Within a decade or two, after passions had cooled, the c-word became taboo. "The word colony must not be used to express the relationship which exists between our government and its dependent peoples", an official admonished in 1914. Better to stick with a gentler term, used for them all: territories.
Yet a striking feature of the overseas territories was how rarely they were even discussed. The maps of the country that most people had in their heads didn't include places such as the Philippines. Those mental maps imagined the US to be contiguous: a union of states bounded by the Atlantic, the Pacific, Mexico, and Canada.
That is how most people envision the US today, possibly with the addition of Alaska and Hawaii. The political scientist Benedict Anderson called it the "logo map", meaning that if the country had a logo, this shape would be it:
https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media
The US logo map - conterminous lower 48 states
The problem with the logo map, however, is that it isn't right. Its shape does not match the country's legal borders. Most obviously, the logo map excludes Hawaii and Alaska, which became states in 1959 and now appear on virtually all published maps of the country. But it is also missing Puerto Rico, which, although not a state, has been part of the country since 1899. When have you ever seen a map of the US that had Puerto Rico on it? Or American Samoa, Guam, the US Virgin Islands, the Northern Marianas, or any of the other smaller islands that the US has annexed over the years?
In 1941, the year Japan attacked, a more accurate picture would have been this:
https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media
A map of the "Greater United States" as it was in 1941
What this map shows is the country's full territorial extent: the "Greater United States", as some at the turn of the twentieth century called it. In this view, the place normally referred to as the US - the logo map - forms only a part of the country. A large and privileged part, to be sure, yet still only a part. Residents of the territories often call it the "mainland".
On this to-scale map, Alaska isn't shrunken down to fit into a small inset, as it is on most maps. It is the right size - that is, huge. The Philippines, too, looms large, and the Hawaiian island chain - the whole chain, not just the eight main islands shown on most maps - if superimposed on the mainland would stretch almost from Florida to California.
This map also shows territory at the other end of the size scale. In the century before 1940, the US claimed nearly 100 uninhabited islands in the Caribbean and the Pacific. Some claims were forgotten in time - Washington could be surprisingly lax about keeping tabs. The 22 islands included here are the ones that appeared in official tallies (the census or other governmental reports) in the 1940s. I have represented them as clusters of dots in the bottom left and right corners, although they are so small that they would be invisible if they were drawn to scale.
The logo map is not only misleading because it excludes large colonies and pinprick islands alike. It also suggests that the US is a politically uniform space: a union, voluntarily entered into, of states standing on equal footing with one another. But that is not true, and it has never been true. From its founding until the present day, the US has contained a union of American states, as its name suggests. But it has also contained another part: not a union, not states and (for most of its history) not wholly in the Americas - its territories.
What is more, a lot of people have lived in that other part. According to the census count for the inhabited territories in 1940, the year before Pearl Harbor, nearly nineteen million people lived in the colonies, the great bulk of them in the Philippines. That meant slightly more than one in eight of the people in the US lived outside of the states. For perspective, consider that only about one in twelve was African American. If you lived in the US on the eve of the second world war, in other words, you were more likely to be colonised than black.
My point here is not to weigh forms of oppression against one another. In fact, the histories of African Americans and colonised peoples are tightly connected (and sometimes overlapping, as for the African-Caribbeans in Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands). The racism that had pervaded the country since slavery also engulfed the territories. Like African Americans, colonial subjects were denied the vote, deprived of the rights of full citizens, called racial epithets, subjected to dangerous medical experiments and used as sacrificial pawns in war. They, too, had to make their way in a country where some lives mattered and others did not.
What getting the Greater United States in view reveals is that race has been even more central to US history than is usually supposed. It hasn't just been about black and white, but about Filipino, Hawaiian, Samoan, and Chamoru (from Guam), too, among other identities. Race has not only shaped lives, but also the country itself - where the borders went, who has counted as "American". Once you look beyond the logo map, you see a whole new set of struggles over what it means to inhabit the US.
Looking beyond the logo map, however, could be hard for mainlanders. The national maps they used rarely showed the territories. Even the world atlases were confusing. During the second world war, Rand McNally's Ready Reference Atlas of the World - like many other atlases at the time - listed Hawaii, Alaska, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines as "foreign".
A class of seventh-grade girls at the Western Michigan College Training School in Kalamazoo scratched their heads over this. They had been trying to follow the war on their maps. How, they wondered, could the attack on Pearl Harbor have been an attack on the US if Hawaii was foreign? They wrote to Rand McNally to inquire.
"Although Hawaii belongs to the United States, it is not an integral part of this country", the publisher replied. "It is foreign to our continental shores, and therefore cannot logically be shown in the United States proper".
The girls were not satisfied. Hawaii is not an integral part of this country? "We believe this statement is not true", they wrote. It is "an alibi instead of an explanation". Further, they continued, "we feel that the Rand McNally atlas is misleading and a good cause for the people of outlying possessions to be embarrassed and disturbed". The girls forwarded the correspondence to the Department of the Interior and asked for adjudication. Of course, the seventh-graders were right. As an official clarified, Hawaii was, indeed, part of the US.
Yet the government could be just as misleading as Rand McNally on this score. Consider the census: according to the constitution, census takers were required to count only the states, but they had always counted the territories, too. Or, at least, they had counted the continental territories. The overseas territories were handled differently. Their populations were noted, but they were otherwise excluded from demographic calculations. Basic facts about how long people lived, how many children they had, what races they were - these were given for the mainland alone.
The maps and census reports that mainlanders saw presented them with a selectively cropped portrait of their country. The result was profound confusion. "Most people in this country, including educated people, know little or nothing about our overseas possessions", concluded a governmental report written during the second world war.
As a matter of fact, a lot of people do not know that we have overseas possessions. They are convinced that only "foreigners", such as the British, have an "empire". Americans are sometimes amazed to hear that we, too, have an "empire".
The proposition that the US is an empire is less controversial today. The case can be made in a number of ways. The dispossession of Native Americans and relegation of many to reservations was pretty transparently imperialist. Then, in the 1840s, the US fought a war with Mexico and seized a third of it. Fifty years later, it fought a war with Spain and claimed the bulk of Spain's overseas territories.
Empire isn't just landgrabs, though. What do you call the subordination of African Americans? Starting in the interwar period, the celebrated US intellectual WEB Du Bois argued that black people in the US looked more like colonised subjects than like citizens. Many other black thinkers, including Malcolm X and the leaders of the Black Panthers, have agreed.
Or what about the spread of US economic power abroad? The US might not have physically conquered western Europe after the second world war, but that didn't stop the French from complaining of "coca-colonisation". Critics there felt swamped by US commerce. Today, with the world's business denominated in dollars, and McDonald's in more than 100 countries, you can see they might have had a point.
https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media
Flags on top of the fortress in Old San Juan in Puerto Rico. Photograph: Anton Gorbov/Alamy
Then there are the military interventions. The years since the second world war have brought the US military to country after country. The big wars are well-known: Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan. But there has also been a constant stream of smaller engagements. Since 1945, US armed forces have been deployed abroad for conflicts or potential conflicts 211 times in 67 countries. Call it peacekeeping if you want, or call it imperialism. But clearly, this is not a country that has kept its hands to itself.
Yet among all the talk of empire, one thing that often slips from view is actual territory. Yes, many would agree that the US is or has been an empire, for all the reasons above. But how much can most people say about the colonies themselves? Not, I would wager, very much.
It is not as if the information isn't out there. Scholars, many working from the sites of empire themselves, have assiduously researched this topic for decades. The problem is that their works have been sidelined - filed, so to speak, on the wrong shelves. They are there, but as long as we have the logo map in our heads, they will seem irrelevant. They will seem like books about foreign countries. The confusion and shoulder-shrugging indifference that mainlanders displayed at the time of Pearl Harbor hasn't changed much at all.
I will confess to having made this conceptual filing error myself. Although I studied US foreign relations as a doctoral student and read countless books about "American empire" - the wars, the coups, the meddling in foreign affairs - nobody ever expected me to know even the most elementary facts about the territories. They just didn't feel important.
It wasn't until I travelled to Manila, researching something else entirely, that it clicked. To get to the archives, I would travel by "jeepney", a transit system originally based on repurposed US army jeeps. I boarded in a section of Metro Manila where the streets are named after US colleges (Yale, Columbia, Stanford, Notre Dame), states and cities (Chicago, Detroit, New York, Brooklyn, Denver), and presidents (Jefferson, Van Buren, Roosevelt, Eisenhower). When I would arrive at my destination, the Ateneo de Manila University, one of the country's most prestigious schools, I would hear students speaking what sounded to my Pennsylvanian ears to be virtually unaccented English. Empire might be hard to make out from the mainland, but from the sites of colonial rule themselves, it is impossible to miss.
The Philippines is not a US territory anymore; it got its independence after the second world war. Other territories, although they were not granted independence, received new statuses. Puerto Rico became a "commonwealth", which ostensibly replaced a coercive relationship with a consenting one. Hawaii and Alaska, after some delay, became states, overcoming decades of racist determination to keep them out of the union.
Yet today, the US continues to hold overseas territory. 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.
None of this, however - not the large colonies, small islands, or military bases - has made much of a dent on the mainland mind. One of the truly distinctive features of the US's empire is how persistently ignored it has been. This is, it is worth emphasising, unique. The British weren't confused as to whether there was a British empire. They had a holiday, Empire Day, to celebrate it. France didn't forget that Algeria was French. It is only the US that has suffered from chronic confusion about its own borders.
The reason is not hard to guess. The country perceives itself to be a republic, not an empire. It was born in an anti-imperialist revolt and has fought empires ever since, from Hitler's Thousand-Year Reich and the Japanese empire to the "evil empire" of the Soviet Union. It even fights empires in its dreams. Star Wars (1977~), a saga that started with a rebellion against the Galactic Empire, is one of the highest-grossing film franchises of all time.
This self-image of the US as a republic is consoling, but it is also costly. Most of the cost has been paid by those living in the colonies and around the military bases. The logo map has relegated them to the shadows, which are a dangerous place to live. At various times, the inhabitants of the US empire have been shot, shelled, starved, interned, dispossessed, tortured and experimented on. What they haven't been, by and large, is seen.
The logo map carries a cost for mainlanders, too. It gives them a truncated view of their own history, one that excludes part of their country. It is an important part. The overseas parts of the US have triggered wars, brought forth inventions, raised up presidents, and helped define what it means to be "American". Only by including them in the picture do we see a full portrait of the country - not as it appears in its fantasies, but as it actually is.
_____
How to Hide an Empire: A Short History of the Greater United States (2019) by Daniel Immerwahr is published by Bodley Head. Buy it at https://guardianbookshop.com/h
Read More: https://www.theguardian.com/us
Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, or sign up to the long read weekly email at https://www.theguardian.com/in
Since you're here ...
... we're asking readers to make a contribution in support of The Guardian's independent journalism. More people are reading and supporting our independent, investigative reporting than ever before. And unlike many news organisations, we have chosen an approach that allows us to keep our journalism open and accessible to all, regardless of where they live or what they can afford. But this is only possible thanks to voluntary support from our readers - something we have to maintain and build on for every year to come.
The Guardian is editorially independent, meaning we set our own agenda. Our journalism is free from commercial bias and not influenced by billionaire owners, politicians or shareholders. No one edits our editor. No one steers our opinion. This is important as it enables us to give a voice to those less heard, challenge the powerful and hold them to account. It's what makes us different to so many others in the media, at a time when factual, honest reporting is critical.
Please make a contribution today to help us deliver the independent journalism the world needs. Support The Guardian from as little as $1 - and it only takes a minute. Thank you.
https://www.theguardian.com/ne
by Daniel Immerwahr
The Guardian (February 15 2019)
https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media
Main image: The Greater United States as it was in 1941
There aren't many historical episodes more firmly lodged in the United States's national memory than the attack on Pearl Harbor. It is one of only a few events that many people in the country can put a date to, 7 December 1941, the "date which will live in infamy", as Franklin D Roosevelt put it. Hundreds of books have been written about it - the Library of Congress holds more than 350. And Hollywood has made movies, from the critically acclaimed From Here to Eternity (1953), starring Burt Lancaster, to the critically derided Pearl Harbor (2001), starring Ben Affleck.
But what those films don't show is what happened next. Nine hours after Japan attacked the territory of Hawaii, another set of Japanese planes came into view over another US territory, the Philippines. As at Pearl Harbor, they dropped their bombs, hitting several air bases, to devastating effect.
The attack on Pearl Harbor was just that - an attack. Japan's bombers struck, retreated and never returned. Not so in the Philippines. There, the initial air raids were followed by more raids, then by invasion and conquest. Sixteen million Filipinos - US nationals who saluted the stars and stripes and looked to FDR as their commander in chief - fell under a foreign power.
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. They also attacked the British colonies of Malaya, Singapore, and Hong Kong, and they invaded Thailand.
At first, "Pearl Harbor" was not the way most people referred to the bombings. "Japs bomb Manila, Hawaii" was the headline in one New Mexico paper; "Japanese Planes Bomb Honolulu, Island of Guam" in another in South Carolina. Sumner Welles, FDR's undersecretary of state, described the event as "an attack upon Hawaii and upon the Philippines". Eleanor Roosevelt used a similar formulation in her radio address on the night of 7 December, when she spoke of Japan "bombing our citizens in Hawaii and the Philippines".
That was how the first draft of FDR's speech went, too: it presented the event as a "bombing in Hawaii and the Philippines". Yet Roosevelt toyed with that draft all day, adding things in pencil, crossing other bits out. At some point, he deleted the prominent references to the Philippines.
Why did Roosevelt demote the Philippines? We don't know, but it's not hard to guess. Roosevelt was trying to tell a clear story: Japan had attacked the US. But he faced a problem. Were Japan's targets considered "the United States"? Legally, they were indisputably US territory. But would the public see them that way? What if Roosevelt's audience didn't care that Japan had attacked the Philippines or Guam? Polls taken slightly before the attack show that few in the continental US supported a military defense of those remote territories.
Roosevelt no doubt noted that the Philippines and Guam, although technically part of the US, seemed foreign to many. Hawaii, by contrast, was more plausibly "American". Although it was a territory rather than a state, it was closer to North America and significantly whiter than the others.
Yet even when it came to Hawaii, Roosevelt felt a need to massage the point. So, on the morning of his speech, he made another edit. He changed it so that the Japanese squadrons had bombed not the "island of Oahu", but the "American island of Oahu". Damage there, Roosevelt continued, had been done to "American naval and military forces", and "very many American lives" had been lost.
An American island, where American lives were lost - that was the point he was trying to make. If the Philippines was being rounded down to foreign, Hawaii was being rounded up to "American".
One reporter in the Philippines described the scene in Manila as the crowds listened to Roosevelt's speech on the radio. The president spoke of Hawaii and the many lives lost there. Yet he only mentioned the Philippines, the reporter noted, "very much in passing". Roosevelt made the war "seem to be something close to Washington and far from Manila".
This was not how it looked from the Philippines, where air-raid sirens continued to wail. "To Manilans the war was here, now, happening to us", the reporter wrote. "And we have no air-raid shelters."
Hawaii, the Philippines, Guam - it wasn't easy to know how to think about such places, or even what to call them. At the turn of the twentieth century, when many were acquired (Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Guam, American Samoa, Hawaii, Wake), their status was clear. They were, as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson unabashedly called them, colonies.
That spirit of forthright imperialism didn't last. Within a decade or two, after passions had cooled, the c-word became taboo. "The word colony must not be used to express the relationship which exists between our government and its dependent peoples", an official admonished in 1914. Better to stick with a gentler term, used for them all: territories.
Yet a striking feature of the overseas territories was how rarely they were even discussed. The maps of the country that most people had in their heads didn't include places such as the Philippines. Those mental maps imagined the US to be contiguous: a union of states bounded by the Atlantic, the Pacific, Mexico, and Canada.
That is how most people envision the US today, possibly with the addition of Alaska and Hawaii. The political scientist Benedict Anderson called it the "logo map", meaning that if the country had a logo, this shape would be it:
https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media
The US logo map - conterminous lower 48 states
The problem with the logo map, however, is that it isn't right. Its shape does not match the country's legal borders. Most obviously, the logo map excludes Hawaii and Alaska, which became states in 1959 and now appear on virtually all published maps of the country. But it is also missing Puerto Rico, which, although not a state, has been part of the country since 1899. When have you ever seen a map of the US that had Puerto Rico on it? Or American Samoa, Guam, the US Virgin Islands, the Northern Marianas, or any of the other smaller islands that the US has annexed over the years?
In 1941, the year Japan attacked, a more accurate picture would have been this:
https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media
A map of the "Greater United States" as it was in 1941
What this map shows is the country's full territorial extent: the "Greater United States", as some at the turn of the twentieth century called it. In this view, the place normally referred to as the US - the logo map - forms only a part of the country. A large and privileged part, to be sure, yet still only a part. Residents of the territories often call it the "mainland".
On this to-scale map, Alaska isn't shrunken down to fit into a small inset, as it is on most maps. It is the right size - that is, huge. The Philippines, too, looms large, and the Hawaiian island chain - the whole chain, not just the eight main islands shown on most maps - if superimposed on the mainland would stretch almost from Florida to California.
This map also shows territory at the other end of the size scale. In the century before 1940, the US claimed nearly 100 uninhabited islands in the Caribbean and the Pacific. Some claims were forgotten in time - Washington could be surprisingly lax about keeping tabs. The 22 islands included here are the ones that appeared in official tallies (the census or other governmental reports) in the 1940s. I have represented them as clusters of dots in the bottom left and right corners, although they are so small that they would be invisible if they were drawn to scale.
The logo map is not only misleading because it excludes large colonies and pinprick islands alike. It also suggests that the US is a politically uniform space: a union, voluntarily entered into, of states standing on equal footing with one another. But that is not true, and it has never been true. From its founding until the present day, the US has contained a union of American states, as its name suggests. But it has also contained another part: not a union, not states and (for most of its history) not wholly in the Americas - its territories.
What is more, a lot of people have lived in that other part. According to the census count for the inhabited territories in 1940, the year before Pearl Harbor, nearly nineteen million people lived in the colonies, the great bulk of them in the Philippines. That meant slightly more than one in eight of the people in the US lived outside of the states. For perspective, consider that only about one in twelve was African American. If you lived in the US on the eve of the second world war, in other words, you were more likely to be colonised than black.
My point here is not to weigh forms of oppression against one another. In fact, the histories of African Americans and colonised peoples are tightly connected (and sometimes overlapping, as for the African-Caribbeans in Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands). The racism that had pervaded the country since slavery also engulfed the territories. Like African Americans, colonial subjects were denied the vote, deprived of the rights of full citizens, called racial epithets, subjected to dangerous medical experiments and used as sacrificial pawns in war. They, too, had to make their way in a country where some lives mattered and others did not.
What getting the Greater United States in view reveals is that race has been even more central to US history than is usually supposed. It hasn't just been about black and white, but about Filipino, Hawaiian, Samoan, and Chamoru (from Guam), too, among other identities. Race has not only shaped lives, but also the country itself - where the borders went, who has counted as "American". Once you look beyond the logo map, you see a whole new set of struggles over what it means to inhabit the US.
Looking beyond the logo map, however, could be hard for mainlanders. The national maps they used rarely showed the territories. Even the world atlases were confusing. During the second world war, Rand McNally's Ready Reference Atlas of the World - like many other atlases at the time - listed Hawaii, Alaska, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines as "foreign".
A class of seventh-grade girls at the Western Michigan College Training School in Kalamazoo scratched their heads over this. They had been trying to follow the war on their maps. How, they wondered, could the attack on Pearl Harbor have been an attack on the US if Hawaii was foreign? They wrote to Rand McNally to inquire.
"Although Hawaii belongs to the United States, it is not an integral part of this country", the publisher replied. "It is foreign to our continental shores, and therefore cannot logically be shown in the United States proper".
The girls were not satisfied. Hawaii is not an integral part of this country? "We believe this statement is not true", they wrote. It is "an alibi instead of an explanation". Further, they continued, "we feel that the Rand McNally atlas is misleading and a good cause for the people of outlying possessions to be embarrassed and disturbed". The girls forwarded the correspondence to the Department of the Interior and asked for adjudication. Of course, the seventh-graders were right. As an official clarified, Hawaii was, indeed, part of the US.
Yet the government could be just as misleading as Rand McNally on this score. Consider the census: according to the constitution, census takers were required to count only the states, but they had always counted the territories, too. Or, at least, they had counted the continental territories. The overseas territories were handled differently. Their populations were noted, but they were otherwise excluded from demographic calculations. Basic facts about how long people lived, how many children they had, what races they were - these were given for the mainland alone.
The maps and census reports that mainlanders saw presented them with a selectively cropped portrait of their country. The result was profound confusion. "Most people in this country, including educated people, know little or nothing about our overseas possessions", concluded a governmental report written during the second world war.
As a matter of fact, a lot of people do not know that we have overseas possessions. They are convinced that only "foreigners", such as the British, have an "empire". Americans are sometimes amazed to hear that we, too, have an "empire".
The proposition that the US is an empire is less controversial today. The case can be made in a number of ways. The dispossession of Native Americans and relegation of many to reservations was pretty transparently imperialist. Then, in the 1840s, the US fought a war with Mexico and seized a third of it. Fifty years later, it fought a war with Spain and claimed the bulk of Spain's overseas territories.
Empire isn't just landgrabs, though. What do you call the subordination of African Americans? Starting in the interwar period, the celebrated US intellectual WEB Du Bois argued that black people in the US looked more like colonised subjects than like citizens. Many other black thinkers, including Malcolm X and the leaders of the Black Panthers, have agreed.
Or what about the spread of US economic power abroad? The US might not have physically conquered western Europe after the second world war, but that didn't stop the French from complaining of "coca-colonisation". Critics there felt swamped by US commerce. Today, with the world's business denominated in dollars, and McDonald's in more than 100 countries, you can see they might have had a point.
https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media
Flags on top of the fortress in Old San Juan in Puerto Rico. Photograph: Anton Gorbov/Alamy
Then there are the military interventions. The years since the second world war have brought the US military to country after country. The big wars are well-known: Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan. But there has also been a constant stream of smaller engagements. Since 1945, US armed forces have been deployed abroad for conflicts or potential conflicts 211 times in 67 countries. Call it peacekeeping if you want, or call it imperialism. But clearly, this is not a country that has kept its hands to itself.
Yet among all the talk of empire, one thing that often slips from view is actual territory. Yes, many would agree that the US is or has been an empire, for all the reasons above. But how much can most people say about the colonies themselves? Not, I would wager, very much.
It is not as if the information isn't out there. Scholars, many working from the sites of empire themselves, have assiduously researched this topic for decades. The problem is that their works have been sidelined - filed, so to speak, on the wrong shelves. They are there, but as long as we have the logo map in our heads, they will seem irrelevant. They will seem like books about foreign countries. The confusion and shoulder-shrugging indifference that mainlanders displayed at the time of Pearl Harbor hasn't changed much at all.
I will confess to having made this conceptual filing error myself. Although I studied US foreign relations as a doctoral student and read countless books about "American empire" - the wars, the coups, the meddling in foreign affairs - nobody ever expected me to know even the most elementary facts about the territories. They just didn't feel important.
It wasn't until I travelled to Manila, researching something else entirely, that it clicked. To get to the archives, I would travel by "jeepney", a transit system originally based on repurposed US army jeeps. I boarded in a section of Metro Manila where the streets are named after US colleges (Yale, Columbia, Stanford, Notre Dame), states and cities (Chicago, Detroit, New York, Brooklyn, Denver), and presidents (Jefferson, Van Buren, Roosevelt, Eisenhower). When I would arrive at my destination, the Ateneo de Manila University, one of the country's most prestigious schools, I would hear students speaking what sounded to my Pennsylvanian ears to be virtually unaccented English. Empire might be hard to make out from the mainland, but from the sites of colonial rule themselves, it is impossible to miss.
The Philippines is not a US territory anymore; it got its independence after the second world war. Other territories, although they were not granted independence, received new statuses. Puerto Rico became a "commonwealth", which ostensibly replaced a coercive relationship with a consenting one. Hawaii and Alaska, after some delay, became states, overcoming decades of racist determination to keep them out of the union.
Yet today, the US continues to hold overseas territory. 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.
None of this, however - not the large colonies, small islands, or military bases - has made much of a dent on the mainland mind. One of the truly distinctive features of the US's empire is how persistently ignored it has been. This is, it is worth emphasising, unique. The British weren't confused as to whether there was a British empire. They had a holiday, Empire Day, to celebrate it. France didn't forget that Algeria was French. It is only the US that has suffered from chronic confusion about its own borders.
The reason is not hard to guess. The country perceives itself to be a republic, not an empire. It was born in an anti-imperialist revolt and has fought empires ever since, from Hitler's Thousand-Year Reich and the Japanese empire to the "evil empire" of the Soviet Union. It even fights empires in its dreams. Star Wars (1977~), a saga that started with a rebellion against the Galactic Empire, is one of the highest-grossing film franchises of all time.
This self-image of the US as a republic is consoling, but it is also costly. Most of the cost has been paid by those living in the colonies and around the military bases. The logo map has relegated them to the shadows, which are a dangerous place to live. At various times, the inhabitants of the US empire have been shot, shelled, starved, interned, dispossessed, tortured and experimented on. What they haven't been, by and large, is seen.
The logo map carries a cost for mainlanders, too. It gives them a truncated view of their own history, one that excludes part of their country. It is an important part. The overseas parts of the US have triggered wars, brought forth inventions, raised up presidents, and helped define what it means to be "American". Only by including them in the picture do we see a full portrait of the country - not as it appears in its fantasies, but as it actually is.
_____
How to Hide an Empire: A Short History of the Greater United States (2019) by Daniel Immerwahr is published by Bodley Head. Buy it at https://guardianbookshop.com/h
Read More: https://www.theguardian.com/us
Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, or sign up to the long read weekly email at https://www.theguardian.com/in
Since you're here ...
... we're asking readers to make a contribution in support of The Guardian's independent journalism. More people are reading and supporting our independent, investigative reporting than ever before. And unlike many news organisations, we have chosen an approach that allows us to keep our journalism open and accessible to all, regardless of where they live or what they can afford. But this is only possible thanks to voluntary support from our readers - something we have to maintain and build on for every year to come.
The Guardian is editorially independent, meaning we set our own agenda. Our journalism is free from commercial bias and not influenced by billionaire owners, politicians or shareholders. No one edits our editor. No one steers our opinion. This is important as it enables us to give a voice to those less heard, challenge the powerful and hold them to account. It's what makes us different to so many others in the media, at a time when factual, honest reporting is critical.
Please make a contribution today to help us deliver the independent journalism the world needs. Support The Guardian from as little as $1 - and it only takes a minute. Thank you.
https://www.theguardian.com/ne