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Can e-Americans be Anti-Imperialist?

Hi, yes, it's me PQ with another ponderous tome... Please enjoy, comment, vote, don't vote, agree, disagree, whatever. Just keep it clean and for the love of everything merciful and good, if it's too long for you to read, then just move along to the next article dude.

We're All Anti-Imperialists on This Bus


At least since the Indo-Russian invasion of North America, many, many e-American citizens -- including yours truly -- and lots of Brolliance/EDEN fans hither and yon have proclaimed themselves to be all-out super-champions of anti-imperialism within the New World.

For that matter, the original, now much-abused PEACE GC charter is based on anti-imperial claims too. Yep, it's true! And some wacky PEACE members -- notably Japan, and lately France -- even claim to want to rescue the noble principles of that charter from all the mud it's been dragged through.

Not to be outdone, a similar cry has arisen from critics of super-alliances in general (Hi, Arjay!) and from many leaders and citizens of neutral countries. Their take on it seems to be that super-alliances naturally lead to imperialism, so... the best way to be anti-imperialist is to be neutral and to oppose the formation of large blocs.

In other words, it seems we're (almost) all anti-imperialists on this bus.

Even when they were stomping through the cornfields of Kansas and Iowa, some e-Russian citizens insisted that the trail of tears they left behind was only done to punish the e-USA for past imperialistic bad behavior. It also wasn't unusual during those dark days -- and it's still not uncommon -- to hear anti-American sentiment spill over from RL into the game in the name of a generalized anti-imperialist sentiment.

Which kinda gets me to the question that's the excuse for this labored yet lissome blurb, i.e. can (e-)Americans be anti-imperialist? or are we just too darn imperialist by nature, or by nurture, or by some other weighty cause (maybe we eat too many Twinkies or something)?


Do Twinkies lead to imperialism?

In the e-USA, anti-imperialism and the liberation of occupied countries is official policy. Naturally, there's more than enough shades of opinion on what that means. Some smaller parties, like the Greens-in-Exile and the Socialist Freedom Party, plus a smattering of well-known luminaries, tend to be more vocal than others in opposing all forms of imperialism. And at the other end of the spectrum, the "patriotic war party", to coin a term, tends to make the equation of PEACE = imperialism, and therefore concludes that pretty much any and all actions taken against PEACE nations or regions held by PEACE nations are ipso facto justified on an anti-imperialist basis.

To be entirely fair, there's the occasional fervid voice for e-imperialism too. Just as there's a few parties here and there around the New World who openly proclaim that their goal is simply conquest for the sake of conquest. But it's probably fair to say that an anti-imperialist ethic of some kind is upheld by a large parcel, if not a majority of players in the gool ol' e-US of A.

So I thought it might be interesting, in light of this evidently infectious enthusisam for virtual anti-imperialism, to take a very brief stroll down memory lane and poke my nose just a little bit into America's contradictory real life encounter with imperialism and anti-imperialism...

American Anti-Imperialism -- the Early Days

Given the USA's dominant role in IRL since the conclusion of the Second World War, it may surprise some to learn that the USA has a long history of anti-imperialist sentiment and activism.

Judging from the never-ending boom market in revolutionary-era jpeg's, the American Revolution is perceived by many e-USAian players as the quintessential anti-imperialist uprising against foreign rule, despite the obviously ornery nature of its internal policies towards African and Native peoples.

As the new nation grew, so did its contrariety. Jefferson's "Empire of Liberty" was criticized often and in no uncertain terms from the very start by anti-slavery notables like President John and his wife, Abigail Adams. On the cultural side, the internal struggles of the American experiment were captured movingly, also starting from the earliest days, by people of letters like the 18th-century African-American poet Phillis Wheatley.

As the settlers and pioneers took their entrepreneurial spirit and Jefferson's dream into the West, they did so at the expense of Native American, Mexican and Spanish sovreignty. These acqusitions challenged the composure and identity of the US, creating existential discomfits that flowed from the longest war in US history (between the US Army and the native peoples) and which continue to echo through RL American domestic politics today.

It should also be remembered that tremendous revolutionary events occurred throughout the Americas and in Europe during those times. In the wake of the French Revolution, Toussaint L'Ouverture's revolutionary forces first expelled both the French and the English from Haiti and then fought bravely against Napolean. Liberal revolution swept Spain and Portugal out of Latin America, and included Simón Bolívar's founding (with help from revolutionary Haitian soldiers, by the way) of Gran Colombia, a grand republic that encompassed today's Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, Peru, and Bolivia.


Toussaint L'Ouverture at Bedourete by K Donkor, 2004, oil on linen

As the 19th century turned into the 20th, a number of eminent North Americans -- including Mark Twain -- were appalled by America's extra-territorial land grabs against the dwindling Spanish Empire in the Philippines and Cuba. So they joined or supported the Anti-Imperialist League. Twain's epic poem, The War Prayer (published after his death), comes from this period. A few of the other famous names amongst members of the Anti-Imperialist League include😛

* the publisher Dana Estes, who'd been wounded fighiting for the Union at the Battle of Bull Run
* chairman of the New England chapter, Albert Stevens Parsons who had fought for the Confederacy
* William Lloyd Garrison, son of the famous abolitionist and proponent of women's suffrage of the same name

As the 20th century progressed, US pacifists, anarchists, socialists and progressives were boisterous in their opposition to American imperialism, but some conservatives also spoke out againt "foreign entanglements". The terminology of "imperialism" and "anti-imperialism" became a more regular feature of foreign policy debates. The notion of what is imperialism began to expand beyond "mere" territorial conquest into realms like "cultural imperialism", "hegemony", "dependency theory" and "proxy imperialism".

Anti-Imperialism, Modern Revolution and the American Predicament

In 1917, Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin took the argument to a whole 'nother level with the publication what's become perhaps his most famous tract, "Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism". He argued that capitalist economic systems inevitably lead to monopoly, financial oligarchy and attempts by capitalist combines to divide the world amongst themselves. For the first time, revolutionary marxist theory linked together the struggle of workers in the industrialized and industrializing countries to the struggle of oppressed nations and countries.


They say that Lenin loved to play for hours with cats.

The Russian Revolution itself, followed quickly by the collapse of the centuries-old Ottoman Empire and the creation on its ruins of the modern states of the Arab world, Turkey, the Balkans, and North Africa, widened the range of the debate. Voices like those of Kemal Ataturk in Turkey and Mirzâ Kucak Xân in Persia moved anti-imperialist rhetoric in a new direction that broke away from both soviet marxist and western liberal traditions.

While Lenin's economic theory has been criticized by many, upheld by some (including by a few smart-asses on Wall Street), and refined and modified by many others, his clarion call to oppressed nations underscored much of what happened in the world throughout the late 20th century. Country after country, from India, to Indonesia, to China, to Algeria, to Cuba, to Kenya, to Congo, and on and on, stood up, and each in their own way threw out their former imperial occupiers.

The unfolding of the Cold War in the midst of these anti-imperialist upheavels exacerbated the US' befuddling encounters with its own nature as both a world capitalist and military power and an avowed defender of liberty and the common man. This became evident perhaps nowhere more clearly than in Vietnam. An unpopular war in every sense of the term, it occurred at the same time as profound upheavals rocked domestic politics.

At the same time that Paris and Prague were in revolt against their own imperial (or, if you like, social-imperial) elites, the late 60s and early 70s also saw some of the largest anti-war and most militant anti-imperialist movements in US domestic history. While Messrs. Reagan, Bush I and Bush II did all they could to squish the memory of those days, for the generation who're now the parents of many eRep players (and perhaps for a few old internet-game-addicted fogies lurking around eRep), the anti-war slogan "1-2-3-4, We don't want your [penguin bowling] war." defined their youth.



Despite the latter-day attempts at historical revisionism, that wasn't just a few disaffected acid-tripping hippies wearing those buttons. It was millions and millions of Americans, including, btw, the author's mom. She didn't march and protest back then. In fact, she was still a Republican in those days (since converted). But she knew imperialism when she smelled it, and she didn't mind letting people know she knew... even if she wasn't terribly fond of hippies.

The confuzzling story continues right up to the present day. Yesterday's anti-imperialists are criticized for neo-colonialist and neo-imperialist behavior today... in Iraq, in Tibet, in Georgia, in the Basque Country, in Chiapas, in Matabeleland, in Gaza, and so on.

Robert Kaplan's interesting 2005 book on the US military's role in the (real) world, "Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground", paints a picture of "reluctant imperialists" whose real strategic work, he argues, is not so much on the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq as it is in the "quiet work" of training and building up democratic sentiments amongst the mid-level officer corps in remote parts of Colombia, Philippines, Yemen, the Horn of Africa and elsewhere.

Traditional Leninists and modern-day Maoists and others would probably argue that Kaplan is simply descirbing a more technologically-sophisticated form of armed westerm capitalism "defending its turf". And maybe they're right about that. Or maybe America's "better nature" is asserting itself in these cases.

The Answer is In There

Conclusion: beats the f*** out of me. Figure it out for yourself!

Ha-ha. No, really...guess I'd have to say that imperialism and anti-imperialism -- especially, perhaps, in the American context -- have co-existed side-by-side in the American historical consciousness since the founding of the United States. So it's no big surprise that, here in our beloved and ever-changing virtual world, getting clarity on these terms continues to befuddle us.

And while the 20 thousand or so e-Americans no doubt have mixed notions of what e-anti-imperialism means, it appears there's some reason to believe that we can in fact distinguish what it means to oppose e-imperialism -- and find the best ways to live up to that realization.


Well. That's it. Have at it, and have a nice day.