Jose Ortega y Gasset points out that the term “emperor’ means “the one who goes to where the border begins”. The Latin word is related to the Spanish verb empezar (to begin). An Imperator was a general who kept whole the edges and maybe even expanded them outward.
In the Society of Control, I am not entirely sure there is a border at which an American Empire “begins.” I am not even sure that it is even the right descriptor for it, “American.” If the article below is attempting to serve the “public good” by making us more aware of the who’s who engineering this empire, maybe we would be better served in also recognizing how non-national that empire really is.
I put forward this notion: with the constanst expansion of the Net, we have entered fully into the Society of Control. In that Society, Nation-States are no more hard, fast, and certain than any other provincial demarcation. There is definitely a concentration of power lines through the USA because the de facto military for this Society is headquartered at the Pentagon, directed by the President, legitimated by Congress, and underwritten by Wall Street. But all of this is for the sake of a global plutocracy that seeks to dominate a physical and virtual space-time called “the Market” through the manipulations of ever more complicated instruments of indebtedness.
Let us give a name to this new kind of Global Empire: COSMOPOLIS.
And let us recall that while power currents flow through the hands of those highlighted in the article below, they do not HAVE nor HOLD power.
Taking this into account, a great deal can be learned by reading this…
Educating yourself about empire can be a challenging endeavor, especially since so much of the educational system is dedicated to avoiding the topic or justifying the actions of imperialism in the modern era. If one studies political science or economics, the subject might be discussed in a historical context, but rarely as a modern reality; media and government voices rarely speak on the subject, and even more rarely speak of it with direct and honest language. Instead, we exist in a society where institutions and individuals of power speak in coded language, using deceptive rhetoric with abstract meaning. We hear about ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’ and ‘security,’ but so rarely about imperialism, domination, and exploitation.
The objective of this report is to provide an introduction to the institutional and social structure of American imperialism. The material is detailed, but should not be considered complete or even comprehensive; its purpose is to function as a resource or reference for those seeking to educate themselves about the modern imperial system.
- Engineering Empire: An Introduction to the Intellectuals and Institutions of American Imperialism (stateofglobe.com)
- Engineering Empire: An Introduction to the Intellectuals and Institutions of American Imperialism by Andrew Gavin Marshall (rolandrjs.wordpress.com)
- Henry Farrell vs. David Graeber on American “Imperialism” (delong.typepad.com)
- Globalization, Love, Moderismo and Cannibalism (daisyrodriguez210.wordpress.com)
- American Military Imperialism (lukevivolo.wordpress.com)
- Imperial Overreach: America by Proxy? (stratrisks.com)
- Cultural Imperialism (thedailyomnivore.net)