You Are the Enemy!

Democracy and Empire

By Rob Urie

July 12, 2013 "Information Clearing House - If NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden can find his way to political asylum in Venezuela, as current rumor has it, the local issue of an American democratic activist (Snowden) finding refuge in a democratic country is solved. But the larger problem of the citizens of the U.S. passively accepting the increasingly oppressive terms of empire remains. To the extent the peoples of South and Central America live in functioning democracies and we in the U.S. don’t, this has come at the cost of a century or more of blood, expropriation and humiliation at the hands of American empire. While Mr. Snowden’s refuge in Venezuela would serve as a potent symbol of the Venezuelan people’s victory against the oil mafia (CIA) and America’s political domination of South and Central America, at what point must Americans assume responsibility for our roles in the deprivations of empire?

For any who don’t yet understand our (American) circumstance, part of the value of Mr. Snowden’s disclosures is that the guardians of American empire increasingly see us, the American people, as ‘others’ from whom the social-historical construct ‘America’ must be protected. This has always been true in the social taxonomy by degree: indigenous peoples, kidnapped blacks forced into slavery, citizens of Japanese descent in WWII, and as reified history in current social relations. Self-defined ‘true’ Americans were those on the ‘giving’ end of empire. Marxists and nineteenth century populists even had clarity around the predator-prey relations of unfettered capitalism before the collective amnesia of recent decades set in. And the marketers of empire, well fed on psychological techniques of coercion and control, have convinced many– perhaps a majority, corporate state strategies of domination and control are the best ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ will ever offer.

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