Michael Parenti is a virtuoso of argumentation in lecture form. I believe he’s retired for good at this point, but he was damn good at his craft. The video presented below, is an animation of one of Michael Parenti’s lectures discussing imperialism of western power, both militarily and financially.
The US has been long meddling in the affairs of others which is all part of a long pattern throughout Western Civilization. In modernity, entities like nation states, corporations, and the rule by corporate law known as neoliberalism have little to no regard for the values they tout to the public, rather they are ravenously opportunistic and will frame their aggressive tactics like they are serving some kind of good domestically or act like they are improving the lives of people in the countries they invade for resources and say they are bringing democracy. And they inevitably fail to live up to their empty promises, since what they were really doing was self serving and considering we don’t have much a real democracy ourselves it doesn’t quite seem reasonable they’d be able democratize some far off place when they don’t offer much of a semblance of a democracy here. Of course, any negative blow-back they’ll simply feign ineptitude or some systemic issue to blame the problem on, or bad intel, or a miscalculation of sorts.
As Parenti will explain in greater detail in the video below:
As Parenti notes at the beginning of the video:
“U.S Global policy around the world is not inept, it’s not bungling, it’s not Messianic. It’s not driven by mistaken presumptions and the like. U.S foreign policy is rational, it’s successful, and it’s very consistent. It just does not serve the interests of the people in the in the countries that it goes to and it does not serve the interests of the American people.”
I dig this quote because it does seem there’s a widespread belief our politicians and institutions are somehow inept or are just haplessly screwing things up. When they have very clear agendas and are willing to accept heaps of collateral damage to get what they want, which is a euphemistic way of saying they are willing to murder anyone to get their hands on that which they desire, which is total control.
It’s all a couched in PR messaging that’s just some version of Margaret Thatcher’s infamous line “There is no alternative.” Like they’d really like to do something else but…you know, it’s just all unfortunately out of their hands because what else are they supposed to do? Not occupy Iraq for well over a decade? Not overthrow Libya? And sure, they might accidentally kill lots of civilians and generally destroy lives, but that was just an unforeseeable problem. Ooops! Our bad.