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Empires Then and Now
Great empires, such as the Roman and British, were extractive.
The empires succeeded, because the value of the resources and wealth extracted from conquered lands exceeded the value of conquest and governance.
(The British in India used brute force and starvation as a means of controlling the population from 1757--1947, along with de-industrialization, and de-urbanization....and a local military which ranged in size from 340,000 in 1857 to 230,000 in 1940, and an aggressive brutal colonial police force, and an Intelligence Service to back up their power. Allied to this were a local elite of Maharajahs (500) and Zamindars (4--5000) with their own private militias. Propaganda, through a strictly control press, missionary work and British education also played their part in the controlling mechanism.
The USA by contrast in the modern sense in Afghanistan and Iraq relied too much on military power, without developing the other essential requirements of empire. The USA's occupation of Afghanistan is a military security operation where 99% of the expenditure goes, instead of focusing on other things such as schools, hospitals roads, infrastructure......and their Afghan clients are too shady....Ahmed Karzai and the like.....perhaps the influence of Israel has "distracted" the Americans from pursuing a purely colonial wars which have long term goals in mind. South Vietnam is an example of where a corrupt client regime loses a whole war for the USA, intentionally it seems)
The reason Rome did not extend its empire further east into Germany was not the military prowess of Germanic tribes but Rome’s calculation that the cost of conquest exceeded the value of extractable resources.
The Roman empire failed, because Romans exhausted manpower and resources in civil wars fighting amongst themselves for power.
(The military grew too huge from about 25 legions or 130,000 men to about 600,000 fighting men and auxiliaries by the 3rd century AD.....and the empire became too big and unmanageable which is the reason it was divided.....and YES constant wars with other peoples such as the Germans and Persians in particular had a significant impact....the German tribes eventually ransacked a much weakened Rome, and the Eastern Roman Empire was engaged in prolonged unnecessary wars with the Persians and eventually the victorious expanding Arab empire)
The British empire failed, because the British exhausted themselves fighting Germany in two world wars.
(3 Cheers to Germany........ and the Rothschilds for creating and organizing them...Hip hip hooray! Hip hip hooray! Hip hip hooray!)
In his book, The Rule of Empires (2010), Timothy H. Parsons replaces the myth of the civilizing empire with the truth of the extractive empire. He describes the successes of the Romans, the Umayyad Caliphate, the Spanish in Peru, Napoleon in Italy, and the British in India and Kenya in extracting resources. To lower the cost of governing Kenya, the British instigated tribal consciousness and invented tribal customs that worked to British advantage.
(This may seen an academic "revelation" to Western readers, but not to Third World people to a great extent----empires mostly, save those of the Persians, Indian Mauryan and Chinese empires are destructive and exploitative of the peoples they conquer)
Parsons does not examine the American empire, but in his introduction to the book he wonders whether America’s empire is really an empire as the American (people) don’t seem to get any extractive benefits from it.
After eight years of war and attempted occupation of Iraq, all Washington has for its efforts is several trillion dollars of additional debt and no Iraqi oil.
After ten years of trillion dollar struggle against the Taliban in Afghanistan, Washington has nothing to show for it except possibly some part of the drug trade that can be used to fund covert CIA operations.
America’s wars are very expensive.
(Modern mechanized wars are very expensive......in the 19th century colonial wars you used poorly paid infantry recruited from the margins of society.......Scottish Highlanders and poor poverty stricken Irish...themselves also the victims of London and the South East seat of power, and not much artillery....required in the case of the evil British empire)
Bush and Obama have doubled the national debt, and the American people have no benefits from it.
No riches, no bread and circuses flow to Americans from Washington’s wars.
So what is it all about?
The answer is that Washington’s empire extracts resources from the American people for the benefit of the few powerful interest groups that rule America. The military-security complex, Wall Street, agri-business and the Israel Lobby use the government to extract resources from Americans to serve their profits and power. The US Constitution has been extracted in the interests of the Security State, and Americans’ incomes have been redirected to the pockets of the 1 percent. That is how the American Empire functions.
The New Empire is different. It happens without achieving conquest. The American military did not conquer Iraq and has been forced out politically by the puppet government that Washington established. There is no victory in Afghanistan, and after a decade the American military does not control the country.
(To repeat for the umpteenth time the Taliban with their all white official flag is a CIA manufactured "Controlled Opposition" who fight very poorly, but justify the American presence in Afghanistan)
In the New Empire success at war no longer matters.
The extraction takes place by being at war.
Huge sums of American taxpayers’ money have flowed into the American armaments industries and huge amounts of power into Homeland Security. The American empire works by stripping Americans of wealth and liberty.
This is why the wars cannot end, or if one does end another starts. Remember when Obama came into office and was asked what the US mission was in Afghanistan? He replied that he did not know what the mission was and that the mission needed to be defined.
Obama never defined the mission. He renewed the Afghan war without telling us its purpose. Obama cannot tell Americans that the purpose of the war is to build the power and profit of the military/security complex at the expense of American citizens.
(......and continue the Opium operation that wreaks havoc on Iran, Pakistan, India, Central Asia, Ukraine, Russia, Europe and North America....affecting millions of vulnerable poor, lower stratum of society in such countries mostly.....this specific area is the biggest crime of the occupation in Afghanistan, and the one MSM people don't talk about.)
This truth doesn’t mean that the objects of American military aggression have escaped without cost.
Large numbers of Muslims have been bombed and murdered and their economies and infrastructure ruined, but not in order to extract resources from them.
It is ironic that under the New Empire the citizens of the empire are extracted of their wealth and liberty in order to extract lives from the targeted foreign populations.Just like the bombed and murdered Muslims, the American people are victims of the American empire.
