History of Imperialism
When have the poor folk, you know the ones who work at the flour mill or the lumber yard or those who clean-up after the rich folk in hotels, and the lowest paid workers in a society ever mounted a campaign for imperial empire through invasion and war?
Not in recent memory.
The whole idea of “imperialism”, “Any instance of aggressive extension of authority” (from one dictionary) wherein “empire” exists in the form of an oligarchical state with all the dissentious stratification in the social organizing principle that notion establishes and encourages becomes the established “norm” has undergone significant change. Significant change in the process and machinations employed but little different in expression.
We were (perhaps) amused as Conrad Black tried to buy a peerage from the now defunct British Empire…. but he really wasn’t all that far off the mark.
The notion of “royalty” is no longer associated with lineage and membership in state court senate or familial aristocracy, but in the aristocracy of greed.
“Empire” although as historical concept, associated with families and rank afforded the champions of royalty’s-will through prominence and demonstration of facility at killing the enemies of empire is a faded ‘romantic’ construct.
No, today the aristocracy of greed are the weapons merchants and CEOs of mega-multinationals, petroleum Hydra who practice the arts of deception and guile facilitated in their imperial quest by advertising and media moguls working misdirection and miss/dis-information coerced through the promise of wealth and power to spin the lies and deceptions for their “piece-of-the-pie”.
While enormously wealthy banking institutions and retail marketing engines pillage the landscapes of not only the domestic population and proximal “friends and “trading-partners” they’re busy promulgating a discrete off-shore slavery to amass their fortunes while the distance involved provides insulation and “deniability” as “democracy” is reduced to a troublesome inconvenience.
Amassing political and monetary sway and hence the facility to manipulate both domestic social institutions as well as the social fabric of distant lands, “democracy” is the pap fed to status-quo enthusiasts, eager to pet the unicorn and assuage the dragon. The only “peerage” offered is special consideration and favored position under the skillfully micro-managed “legal-system”. A sub-culture of “lawyers” kept on retainer to obfuscate and frustrate a system of laws that ultimately establishes one rule for the wealthy and another for the poor.
These aren’t the sneaker-clad police-scanner-embedded- in-forehead variety of domestic ambulance chasers, no these are cultured nabobs wearing five thousand dollar suits and skipping from office tower in New York to yacht anchored off Dubai in their corporate-supplied G-4’s.
Lexicologists and prestidigitators of semantics, taking the simple language of “right” and “wrong” and artfully rendering it into nonsensical jabberwocky then supplied to corporate defense teams to illustrate and convince that toxic contamination is in fact a good thing and re-working ideas like torture and invasion into the far more palatable “aggressive interrogation” and “pre-emptive defense….”
Babbling Blackberries and Internet Innuendo are the mating call of the corporate legal paladins who make the world safe for the jackbooted excesses of corporate greed. Imperialism is alive and well in our modern world, you have but to wonder at the fortunes being “earned” by con-men at the gasoline pumps and the no-bid contracts afforded construction companies and pipeline contactors wherever in the world the bombs have most recently rendered that population safe and secure from the ravages of evil-doers and “bad-guys”…..
It is the age and the climate of econo-imperialism and the capital of this new court of ultimate power isn’t located where masses of poor scavenge for their daily existence. It is the Bay Streets and Wall Streets of America and Canada.
