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On US imperialism and Propaganda, Show Intro · Ending Empire

• 0:00
  Speaker: This is the Ending Empire podcast with Abel Tomlinson.
• 0:03
  Speaker: This is our first episode.
• 0:05
  Speaker: So, first, I want to start off by telling a little bit about myself and why I'm creating this podcast.
• 0:11
  Speaker: I've been an anti-war activist for over 20 years since the Iraq War started.
• 0:15
  Speaker: I saw the lies of the Iraq War and the mass murder at the hands of our government.
• 0:20
  Speaker: And I continually see these kinds of wars happening constantly my entire adult life.
• 0:25
  Speaker: And it made me want to be an activist.
• 0:27
  Speaker: And I've tried many forms of activism, and this podcast is the newest form I'm trying.
• 0:32
  Speaker: I've also been a candidate for U.S.
• 0:34
  Speaker: Congress in Northwest Arkansas.
• 0:36
  Speaker: I ran against John Bozeman, who's our current senator in 2008, and I got about 60,000 votes, about 21%, which is about half of what almost half of what I needed to win Congress.
• 0:46
  Speaker: Of course, I only spent $6,000 or only raised $6,000.
• 0:49
  Speaker: So usually you need to raise millions from big business and promise a bunch of rich people you'll do terrible things for them.
• 0:57
  Speaker: I'm also for a living, I'm a horticulturist.
• 0:59
  Speaker: I studied horticulture at the university and I'm an organic gardener.
• 1:03
  Speaker: So about this show, it's called Ending Empire.
• 1:06
  Speaker: I'm gonna kind of break down why I think the subject of empire is so crucial.
• 1:11
  Speaker: And partly this is gonna be based on an article I wrote for a really great journal called Covert Action Magazine.
• 1:17
  Speaker: I wrote this article at the beginning of last year when Trump was first taking office.
• 1:23
  Speaker: I'm gonna kind of select information from that article to help people understand why I'm focusing on empire and propaganda, essentially.
• 1:31
  Speaker: I've been a student of propaganda for the last 20-something years.
• 1:35
  Speaker: The basic fact that the United States is an empire is perhaps the most systematically taboo subject in mainstream American information systems and public discourse.
• 1:45
  Speaker: U.S.
• 1:46
  Speaker: imperialism is almost never discussed in depth critically or intelligently within corporate media or the educational system.
• 1:54
  Speaker: It's never mentioned by candidates of the two dominant political parties or brought up in presidential debates.
• 2:00
  Speaker: And it's rarely mentioned even within universities, outside a few select courses or degree programs.
• 2:07
  Speaker: This deafening silence on this key subject is a form of unspoken propaganda.
• 2:11
  Speaker: This ultimately manufactures an epidemic of deadly ignorance to arguably the most harmful institution in the world and sustains the mythology of the benevolent US government.It also deprives Americans from core context that would enable correct comprehension of world events as they unfold.
• 2:30
  Speaker: To debunk this mythology and expose American imperialism, it's crucial to first unravel its information control methodology.
• 2:38
  Speaker: Within corporate state media, there's various propaganda techniques.
• 2:42
  Speaker: The most simple is outright lies, like Iraq's non-existent weapons of mass destruction and Saddam's nonexistent connections to terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center.
• 2:52
  Speaker: More recently, we witnessed the incessant media mantra that the Ukraine war was unprovoked, despite a mountain of evidence proving the opposite.
• 3:01
  Speaker: The US massively provoked the war via NATO expansion and by sponsoring the ultra ultra-nationalist 2014 Ukraine coup that caused civil war.
• 3:10
  Speaker: Or more like the the West Ukrainian government that the US installed working with neo-Nazis began bombing the East Ukrainian ethnic Russians, and that war is really started in 2014.
• 3:21
  Speaker: And I'll make that a subject in my next podcast of really digging into the Ukraine war, which is one of the most catastrophic wars and potential for nuclear war and human extinction, and far too many in the Democratic Party accept waging war with Russia.
• 3:37
  Speaker: I want to tear that down next time.We also recently experienced many, many lies to justify the US-backed Israeli genocide, such as the debunked reports of 40 beheaded babies and Hamas mass rape.
• 3:48
  Speaker: There's also propaganda by distortion, such as the twisting and of framing of events, so as to make the provocateur or the aggressor look like the victim or defender, when the inverse is the reality.
• 4:00
  Speaker: For example, Israelis are typically framed as retaliating and defending against Palestinian attacks, and rarely the reverse, which is an inversion of causation if one objectively examines the last 75 plus years of history.
• 4:14
  Speaker: Palestinians have suffered for decades under the constant Israeli brutalization, occupation, land theft, blockade, apartheid, restriction of movement, carpet bombings, and too many other crimes to list.
• 4:27
  Speaker: This form of information warfare and manipulation of American minds on this subject began long ago.
• 4:33
  Speaker: Many media analysts and experts demonstrated this with crystal clarity in the superb 2004 documentary called Peace Propaganda in the Promised Land, which you can find free online.
• 4:44
  Speaker: Another example of distortion is the constant corporate media framing of China and North Korea acting provocatively near their coastlines.
• 4:53
  Speaker: In reality, it's the U.S.
• 4:54
  Speaker: that is the provocateur as it practices massive annual war games and places dozens of military bases near their borders.
• 5:01
  Speaker: This is in addition to the often omitted historical context of the former U.S.
• 5:06
  Speaker: imperialism in China and genocidal extermination of 20% of North Korea's population.
• 5:11
  Speaker: More than half a million tons of bombs were dropped on Koreans by the U.S., along with napalm and chemical weapons.
• 5:18
  Speaker: Top U.S.
• 5:19
  Speaker: Air Force General Curtis LeMay bragged that they burned down every town in North Korea.
• 5:24
  Speaker: Corporate media never provides this context or allows this question: how would you feel if a previously genocidal military practiced annual war games on your borders?
• 5:34
  Speaker: The third technique is propaganda by Hollywood mythmaking.
• 5:38
  Speaker: The 2022 documentary, Theaters of War, How the Pentagon and CIA Took Hollywood, gives great insight into this method.
• 5:45
  Speaker: The filmmakers obtained thousands of pages of declassified documents via the Freedom of Information Act and found intimate relationships between Hollywood filmmakers, the CIA, and the Pentagon.
• 5:57
  Speaker: These documents expose the Pentagon and CIA have exercised direct editorial control, and this is a quote.
• 6:04
  Speaker: The Pentagon and CIA exercised direct editorial control over more than 2,500 film and television productions, most of them since 2001.
• 6:12
  Speaker: The result is that past wars the CIA and U.S.
• 6:15
  Speaker: military are sanitized and glorified, creating a false image.
• 6:18
  Speaker: U.S.
• 6:19
  Speaker: military and CIA are constant consistently portrayed as a benevolent force that is extremely divergent from the reality of imperialism.
• 6:27
  Speaker: Lastly, there is propaganda by omission, which functions two ways, by purposefully excluding key historical context or avoiding a subject altogether.
• 6:37
  Speaker: An example of context omission is how preceding historical causation triggers for the Ukraine war excluded from reports.
• 6:44
  Speaker: Moreover, mainstream media consistently omits crucial contextual fact that Russia repeatedly sought peace agreements to stop the war, such as the Minsk and Istanbul agreements, which were sabotaged by the West.
• 6:57
  Speaker: Secondarily, omission propaganda can function by simply never discussing a subject entirely, as is precisely the case with U.S.
• 7:05
  Speaker: imperialism altogether.
• 7:07
  Speaker: These propaganda methods powerfully manipulate American minds and much of the rest of the world too, as U.S.
• 7:13
  Speaker: information control is global.
• 7:15
  Speaker: U.S.
• 7:15
  Speaker: mythology is spread all over the planet, not just indirectly via mainstream media in Hollywood, but also more directly via what the New York Times once called the CIA's quote worldwide propaganda network.
• 7:28
  Speaker: Aggressively invasive U.S.
• 7:30
  Speaker: state media networks like Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia et al.
• 7:35
  Speaker: broadcast information all across the globe in 48 foreign languages.
• 7:39
  Speaker: Some of these programs were covertly funded by the CIA directly until 1972.
• 7:43
  Speaker: The state media network, these media works to ensure foreign subservience by painting a false image of the United States and manufactures opposition movements against defiant nations targeted for regime change.
• 7:57
  Speaker: Due to the information void, most Americans have little to no clue that their own nation is certainly an empire.
• 8:04
  Speaker: This causes the American public to be catastrophically uninformed about arguably the single most harmful institution on the planet.
• 8:12
  Speaker: After decades of warfare and environmental harm are fully accounted for.
• 8:16
  Speaker: American ignorance to this core reality prohibits the population from fully understanding this transcendent, deeply bipartisan problem.
• 8:25
  Speaker: Consequently, this prevents them from contemplating solutions for opposing or dismantling the empire, or from intelligently adapting to its potential decline or potential collapse.
• 8:37
  Speaker: The cluelessness also inhibits Americans from fully understanding a vast amount of information reported in mainstream media, especially in terms of perpetual wars and imperial coups.
• 8:48
  Speaker: For example, several nations have recently faced U.S.
• 8:51
  Speaker: imperialist coups, and this is before Trump, as Trump was taking office, the coup in Syria, Georgia, Romania, but mainstream media reports don't convey this directly.
• 9:01
  Speaker: This lack of contextualization makes Americans consistently vulnerable to the redundant deluge of propaganda, manufacturing consent for imperial warfare.
• 9:11
  Speaker: Without understanding what the coups and wars are really for, Americans remain gullible to the next round of lies.
• 9:18
  Speaker: Especially if the war party they the war party they prefer is the one whipping up the hysteria.
• 9:24
  Speaker: Even among the minority of Americans who acknowledge the empire, there's a great misunderstanding.
• 9:30
  Speaker: Most consequentially, there are numerous academics on this subject that fundamentally fail to fully grasp the deeper essence of American imperialism.
• 9:40
  Speaker: This causes them to view the empire as positive or to improperly diagnose the full extent of the disease, which prevents them from presenting plausible cures or predictions.
• 9:50
  Speaker: It also causes further misinterpretations of current events as is standard among the broader public that knows nothing of empire.
• 9:59
  Speaker: Among the most lucid scholars of U.S.
• 10:01
  Speaker: imperialism is Professor Michael Parenti.
• 10:03
  Speaker: He points out in his book The Face of Imperialism that most historians have misleadingly painted a mythologically rosy picture of what imperialism really is.
• 10:13
  Speaker: When writing about Roman and British empires, they often give undeserved names of peace, such as Pax Romana and Pax Britannica.
• 10:21
  Speaker: These terms disguise the perpetual warfare and deep economic exploitation inherent to imperialism.
• 10:27
  Speaker: Same mythmaking also applies to academics writing on U.S.
• 10:31
  Speaker: Empire, such as military historian Max Boot composing this fiction.
• 10:35
  Speaker: U.S.
• 10:35
  Speaker: imperialism has been the greatest force for good in the world during the past century.
• 10:40
  Speaker: No mention of the fact that U.S.
• 10:42
  Speaker: imperial sanctions have killed 38 million people in the last several decades.
• 10:47
  Speaker: Parenti finds that, even among academics who write critically of U.S.
• 10:51
  Speaker: Empire, many fail to fully describe imperialism.
• 10:54
  Speaker: For example, when author Chalmers Johnson uses the word empire, it's divested of its full meaning to simply mean dominion and power, most notably military power.
• 11:04
  Speaker: Like many other scholars, Johnson criticizes the military dimension of empire, but fails to fully criticize the economic dimension.
• 11:12
  Speaker: This is a misrepresent misrepresentation of what U.S.
• 11:16
  Speaker: Empire has always been about.
• 11:17
  Speaker: As Parenti states, quote, while we hear a lot about empire and militarism, we hear very little about imperialism.
• 11:24
  Speaker: The very activity of empire.
• 11:26
  Speaker: This comparatively shallow analysis, devoid of political economic content, or critique of capitalist class interests is representative of the broader public discourse.
• 11:37
  Speaker: At its heart, imperialism is always centered on commerce, authoritarian economic extraction of natural and human resources, wealth from far-off lands to enrich and elite investor class.
• 11:48
  Speaker: It typically entails mass misery, exploitation, dehumanization, pollution, poverty, and slaughter to whichever people live near valuable resources.
• 11:57
  Speaker: This is known as the resource curse, which is the reason oil-rich nations such as Iraq, Iran, Libya, and Venezuela have repeatedly been prime subjects for imperialist warfare, regime change efforts, and sanctions.
• 12:10
  Speaker: Another reason most Americans have difficulty fully recognizing U.S.
• 12:14
  Speaker: imperialism is that it is not structured like previous colonial powers.
• 12:19
  Speaker: The more precise term is neoimperialism.
• 12:22
  Speaker: For example, previous empires had explicit colonial territories.
• 12:26
  Speaker: They controlled using imperial viceroyalties, direct administrations that extracted vast resource wealth.
• 12:32
  Speaker: Conversely, neo-imperialism does not overtly control the nations from which it expropriates wealth.
• 12:39
  Speaker: It does not have obvious viceroy administrators.
• 12:42
  Speaker: Instead, neo-imperialism functions using subservient vassal governments with puppet leaders, which can be either democratically elected leaders or dictators of various sorts.
• 12:53
  Speaker: There is the superficial facade of independent sovereign nations, but underneath is the same imperialist extraction of wealth and exploitation of people.
• 13:03
  Speaker: One of the supreme insider accounts of U.S.
• 13:05
  Speaker: neo-imperialism was provided by the highly decorated Marine Corps General Smedley Butler in 1933, and he said, and quote, I quote, I spent 33 years in the Marine Corps as a high-class muscle man for big business, for Wall Street, and for the bankers.
• 13:20
  Speaker: In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.
• 13:23
  Speaker: I helped make Mexico safe for American oil interests in 1914.
• 13:27
  Speaker: I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank Boys.
• 13:31
  Speaker: I helped in the raping of half a cent dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street.
• 13:38
  Speaker: I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909 and 1912.
• 13:44
  Speaker: I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916.
• 13:49
  Speaker: In China, I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.
• 13:53
  Speaker: I had a swell racket.
• 13:54
  Speaker: Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints.
• 13:58
  Speaker: The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts.
• 14:02
  Speaker: I operated on three continents.
• 14:04
  Speaker: End quote.
• 14:05
  Speaker: To make safe nations safe for capitalism, as Butler describes, there are numerous mechanisms neoimperialists use to establish and sustain vassal states, often called U.S.
• 14:15
  Speaker: allies.
• 14:16
  Speaker: Likewise, there are numerous methods they use to overthrow governments that resist their agenda.
• 14:22
  Speaker: As William Bloom wrote in his seminal work, Killing Hope, in virtually every case involving the Third World that brought down the wrath of U.S.
• 14:30
  Speaker: intervention, it has been the policy of self-determination, pursuing a path of development independent of U.S.
• 14:37
  Speaker: foreign policy objectives.
• 14:39
  Speaker: A nation becomes a target for regime change the moment it starts enacting independent economic nationalist laws and policies that run counter to U.S.
• 14:48
  Speaker: imperial interests.
• 14:49
  Speaker: These policies often include nationalizing resources and kicking out U.S.
• 14:54
  Speaker: corporations and forming socialistic and anti-imperialist governments.
• 14:59
  Speaker: It also includes even milder reforms like spending too much of a nation's wealth on social policies and programs that help the broader public, the poorer supermajority.
• 15:09
  Speaker: The imperialist interventions include overthrowing many democratically elected leaders, such as Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala, 1954, Mohamed Mossadegh in Iran, 1953, Salvador Allende in Chile, 1973, Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine, 2014, and many others.
• 15:24
  Speaker: These coups are supreme assaults against the institution of democracy itself, obliterating the lie that the U.S.
• 15:31
  Speaker: government is in the business of spreading freedom and democracy.
• 15:35
  Speaker: Second body blow to that blatant lie is the fact that the U.S.
• 15:39
  Speaker: sells weapons to 73% of the world's dictators.
• 15:41
  Speaker: The only democracy acceptable under U.S.
• 15:44
  Speaker: corporate imperialism is one that's subservient to dictatorial Western capitalist interests.
• 15:50
  Speaker: Once neo-imperialists have marked a nation as a target for regime change, their methods can take many forms and with varying time schedules.
• 15:59
  Speaker: We've witnessed dozens of successful regime change and coup attempts documented well in Killing Hope.
• 16:05
  Speaker: There are four primary mechanisms neoimperialists use to overthrow nations targeted for coups, which include economic warfare, information warfare, lawfare, and military intervention.
• 16:16
  Speaker: The first regime change method is destabilizing economic warfare to manufacture popular discontent.
• 16:23
  Speaker: Perhaps the most egregious example is the six decades-long U.S.
• 16:27
  Speaker: embargo on Cuba, which almost every nation on earth has repeatedly voted to end.
• 16:32
  Speaker: We also recently witnessed this method of warfare for Russian regime change, but the sanctions ended up backfiring and harming European economies more than Russia.
• 16:42
  Speaker: Coercive U.S.
• 16:43
  Speaker: sanctions can also ultimately cause mass suffering and death of a nation's peoples, as we saw in Iraq, Venezuela, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, which is typically the intention to incite uprisings.
• 16:54
  Speaker: And speaking of the Iraq sanctions, we know that Madeline Albright gave one of the most, she's the Secretary of State under Bill Clinton, gave one of the most genocidal admissions about U.S.
• 17:06
  Speaker: Empire on a 60 minutes interview.
• 17:08
  Speaker: She was asked by, I think it's Leslie Stahl, so the sanctions in Iraq killed half a million children.
• 17:14
  Speaker: Do you think the price is worth it?
• 17:16
  Speaker: And Madeline Albright said, yes, we think the price is worth it.
• 17:19
  Speaker: And yeah, now and again, we now have a report saying 38 million people have been killed by U.S.
• 17:25
  Speaker: sanctions over the last several decades.
• 17:27
  Speaker: And those sanctions are intended to hurt the population, to try to get them to rise up and overthrow their government.
• 17:35
  Speaker: Another coup methodology entails information warfare, election meddling, and funding subversive non-governmental organizations, NGOs, and U.S.
• 17:44
  Speaker: funded independent media outlets.
• 17:46
  Speaker: So they call them independent media outlets, but they're funded by the U.S.
• 17:50
  Speaker: government.
• 17:51
  Speaker: These organizations produce propaganda and organize astroturf movements in conjunction with economic warfare to destabilize societies and incite public unrest for regime change, often called color revolutions.
• 18:04
  Speaker: And we saw an example of this in Iran, right before Trump started the war on Iran.
• 18:09
  Speaker: There was a there's a bunch of media reports saying tens of thousands of protesters were killed by the Iranian government, which turned out to be false.
• 18:18
  Speaker: That that was kind of manufactured by CIA-linked or media organization in the U.S.
• 18:23
  Speaker: And yeah, the Iranian government reported that about 3,000 people were killed, and they were a lot of the protesters ended up being violent rioters that burned down a bunch of police stations, killed lots of police, and killed other security forces, and were burning down churches and synagogues, and it turns out that some of these violent protesters were armed by Mossad and the CIA.
• 18:46
  Speaker: And you had Mossad and other, you had Mike Pompeo, top-ranking former U.S.
• 18:51
  Speaker: CIA director, I believe.
• 18:52
  Speaker: They were all talking about how Mossad was involved.
• 18:55
  Speaker: So there was a public admission of it.
• 18:58
  Speaker: You know, you have people using that as a justification for the war.
• 19:02
  Speaker: Well, look how brutal the Iranian government is.
• 19:05
  Speaker: They killed all these protesters, but they were manufacturing this unrest and arming the violent protesters.
• 19:11
  Speaker: Another coup methodology is information warfare.
• 19:14
  Speaker: The U.S.
• 19:15
  Speaker: State Department, U.S.
• 19:16
  Speaker: Agency for International Development, USAID, and National Endowment for Democracy, NED, are the principal agents that organize this type of imperialism activity.
• 19:26
  Speaker: Notably, the largest private actor in these top-down revolutions in Georgia, Ukraine, and many other nations is the billionaire hedge fund manager George Soros.
• 19:36
  Speaker: Interestingly, this type of clandestine action was formerly done by the CIA before scandals erupted in the early 1980s.
• 19:43
  Speaker: The third type of regime changed warfare is lawfare, or overthrow via nation's courts and legal system.
• 19:50
  Speaker: We recently witnessed this in the ouster of Imran Khan, the popular elected leader of Pakistan.
• 19:56
  Speaker: And a second example occurred in Romania when the top court canceled the presidential election after it appeared independent candidate.
• 20:04
  Speaker: Kalin Georgescu appeared to be winning.
• 20:07
  Speaker: And a big reason for that is that Georgescu was wanting to make peace with Russia and to make Romania more independent.
• 20:14
  Speaker: and the yeah, that like I said, the unstated reason was Georgescu wanted to end Romania's involvement in the US-led NATO proxy war with Russia and Ukraine.
• 20:23
  Speaker: This posed a massive threat to the U.S.
• 20:25
  Speaker: NATO war objectives because Romania shares a large border with Ukraine and is strategically important for numerous reasons.
• 20:33
  Speaker: Military intervention is the final method for regime change.
• 20:37
  Speaker: Once it's acknowledged that the other methods will not work.
• 20:41
  Speaker: This coup technique involves overt direct invasions, as we saw in Iraq and Libya, to remove Saddam and Gaddafi.
• 20:47
  Speaker: Other forms of lower intensity military intervention include covert action and CIA-backed coups.
• 20:53
  Speaker: This entails arming and training paramilitary groups such as Latin American death squads trained at Port Bidding, Georgia.
• 21:01
  Speaker: It also includes the CIA arming and training Middle East religious extremist terrorist groups such as the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, which Osama bin Laden was linked to.
• 21:12
  Speaker: We also just witness a momentous U.S.-backed coup in Syria, led by Al-Qaeda and ISIS-linked rebels that say they love Israel, led by a former Al-Qaeda and ISIS commander, Abu Mohamed Al-Jolani.
• 21:23
  Speaker: Interestingly, Jolani has recently been whitewashed by the mainstream media.
• 21:28
  Speaker: He came to the U.S., he even came to New York City where the Twin Towers were knocked down, and Trump invited him to the White House and sprayed perfume on him.
• 21:37
  Speaker: And he played basketball with top military commanders.
• 21:40
  Speaker: It was really Orwellian.
• 21:42
  Speaker: And then also this covert action coups can also entail the CIA working with foreign military leaders to overthrow their governments.
• 21:50
  Speaker: And we saw that with General Augusto Pinochet in Chile.
• 21:54
  Speaker: Typically, after these imperialist coups in the Third World succeed, various sorts of dictators.
• 22:00
  Speaker: Are installed or sham elections are held to install a quote unquote democratically elected puppet.
• 22:06
  Speaker: Shortly thereafter, various neoliberal economic reforms are established.
• 22:10
  Speaker: Resources and markets are, quote, liberated or opened up to foreign corporate exploitation, including by weakening of labor and environmental laws.
• 22:20
  Speaker: State assets are privatized and sold off at undervalued prices, including public utilities and infrastructure.
• 22:27
  Speaker: Austerity measures are instituted to slash and eliminate social programs for the poor working class, such as pensions, health care, education, etc., even public school milk programs under Pinochet.
• 22:39
  Speaker: These reforms are also come in packages called structural adjustments and as stipulations for large loans from the IMF or the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
• 22:50
  Speaker: Once a nation takes out these loans, they are not only required to institute the reforms and pay back these large sums, but also enter into financial subjugation.
• 22:59
  Speaker: These structural adjustments ensure that most of the nation's wealth and profits go to wealthy foreign capitalist investors instead of being kept in the nation to help the nation's people.
• 23:11
  Speaker: The many millions of impoverished people in the Third World World would not be poor if they were able to fully benefit from their nation's riches, as Michael Parenti points out in this speech.
• 23:23
  Speaker: Ruling class capitalists don't go to poor countries to make money.
• 23:27
  Speaker: There are very few poor countries in the world.
• 23:30
  Speaker: Most countries are rich.
• 23:31
  Speaker: The Philippines is rich.
• 23:33
  Speaker: Brazil is rich.
• 23:33
  Speaker: Mexico is rich.
• 23:34
  Speaker: Chile is rich.
• 23:35
  Speaker: Only the people are poor, but there's billions to be made there to be carved out and taken.
• 23:40
  Speaker: For 400 years the capitalist European and North American powers have carved out and taken these nations' natural resources and cheap labor.
• 23:49
  Speaker: These countries are not underdeveloped, they're overexploited.
• 23:53
  Speaker: These are some of the key ways that US imperialism functions.
• 23:57
  Speaker: This is a small taste of what is hidden from American minds and much of the rest of the world too, as U.S.
• 24:03
  Speaker: information control and propaganda is global.
• 24:06
  Speaker: This subject is perhaps the biggest elephant in the room, the highest voltage third rail of political discourse.
• 24:13
  Speaker: Neither major party will touch it in a serious way.
• 24:16
  Speaker: It is also the institution that causes the most mass death and misery to millions of people all across the planet.
• 24:23
  Speaker: The cost of empire also ultimately harms Americans as at home as domestic social programs are cut to pay for vast imperialism budgets.
• 24:31
  Speaker: For example, the U.S.
• 24:32
  Speaker: could have become a world leader in high-speed rail like China if it had not prioritized wasting more than $8 trillion on its recent war on terror.
• 24:41
  Speaker: Quote unquote war on terror.
• 24:43
  Speaker: The vast military empire is also the single largest institutional consumer of fossil fuel petroleum on the planet, among other massive environmental harms.
• 24:52
  Speaker: And I urge people to watch the great documentary by Abby Martin, Earth's Greatest Enemy.
• 24:58
  Speaker: It really hammers this home that the U.S.
• 25:00
  Speaker: military imperial war machine is the greatest environmental harm on the planet.
• 25:05
  Speaker: And great activist, I think her name was Margaret Flowers, she once said, any talk of climate change without including the Pentagon and the military is nothing but hot air.
• 25:15
  Speaker: The anti-democratic nature of imperialism abroad also breeds anti-democratic domestic policy.
• 25:21
  Speaker: When Democrats and Republicans work with the CIA and State Department to meddle in foreign elections and manipulate foreign populations with propaganda and wage endless coups, that became their institutional culture.
• 25:35
  Speaker: This helps to explain why they wage information warfare on and censor us domestically, and why under democratic rule by the richest oligarchs remains firmly entrenched.
• 25:46
  Speaker: And make no mistake, we are an oligarchy.
• 25:48
  Speaker: Princeton, I think it was Princeton, university study said that we are an oligarchy if you scientifically look at the data.
• 25:56
  Speaker: A democratic imperialist or republican imperialist are blatant oxymorons, considering imperialism is inherently anti-democratic and anti-republican.
• 26:05
  Speaker: Genuine democracy or representative democracy is impossible without an end to U.S.
• 26:10
  Speaker: imperialist oligarchy.
• 26:12
  Speaker: All but the most privileged and shelter Americans surely understand something's very wrong with American culture, economy, media, and politics.
• 26:21
  Speaker: The immense obstacle of U.S.
• 26:22
  Speaker: imperialism is at the very epicenter of our national and international political and economic disease, and omission propaganda obscures the diagnosis.
• 26:32
  Speaker: Once a critical mass of Americans learn to see through the propaganda and begin showing others the way, we'll have the ability to end this extremely harmful institution.
• 26:42
  Speaker: Only when enough people wake up and reject imperialism will the world be able to know genuine democracy, justice, and peace.
• 26:50
  Speaker: This very, what I'm doing right here, is an effort towards burning this carefully constructed web of lies that upholds the disease of U.S.
• 26:58
  Speaker: Empire.
• 26:58
  Speaker: However, it appears something else is on the horizon.
• 27:02
  Speaker: And you know, for all of Donald Trump's faults, and he's a horrible person, he's doing horrible things, but at the same time, he's doing something accidentally beneficial.
• 27:12
  Speaker: He's setting ablaze the core architecture of U.S.
• 27:15
  Speaker: imperialism propaganda.
• 27:16
  Speaker: The imperial establishment of both corporate war parties and their media partners worked tirelessly for decades to create the fictional narrative and false image of what USA is and does.
• 27:28
  Speaker: According to their fairy tales, USA is the good guys, spreading freedom and democracy all over the globe.
• 27:34
  Speaker: And that is what U.S.
• 27:35
  Speaker: foreign policy is all about.
• 27:37
  Speaker: They invest vast sums and financial resources towards manufacturing and repeating constant deluge of lies that hide the reality of U.S.
• 27:45
  Speaker: neo-imperialism, obscuring its record of coups, war crimes, genocide, and mass murder.
• 27:51
  Speaker: And well, one fell swoop, Trump is incinerating much of their hard work.
• 27:55
  Speaker: He's not doing this because he's anti-imperialist, but he's turning America back into a classic imperialism.
• 28:01
  Speaker: By saying he wants to take Canada, Greenland, the Panama Canal, and now he's like, you know, taking over Venezuela, he's making imperialism more obvious to the average American.
• 28:12
  Speaker: This is certainly corrosive also to NATO unity, which NATO is a big arm of the US Empire, and European subservience to the US Empire.
• 28:20
  Speaker: If the US loses European allies and NATO falls apart, there will be virtually nobody left.
• 28:25
  Speaker: If Europe awakens to how they were scammed over, the backfiring US economic war US economic war on Russia and the costly US proxy war in Ukraine, it will further spell the end of NATO and American Empire.
• 28:37
  Speaker: Once a critical mass of humans learn to see clearly through this propaganda, we'll have the ability to end this extremely harmful institution.
• 28:46
  Speaker: When enough people wake up and reject U.S.
• 28:48
  Speaker: imperialism, the world will have a greater potential to know genuine democracy, justice, and peace.
• 28:55
  Speaker: This anti-imperialist awakening began long ago, and this train is recently gaining steam.
• 29:00
  Speaker: More and more of us are throwing fuel on the fire.
• 29:03
  Speaker: Please join us.
• 29:04
  Speaker: Thank you for listening.
• 29:05
  Speaker: This is Abel Tomlinson with Ending Empire Podcast.
• 29:08
  Speaker: I hope to improve my my skills with this system.
• 29:11
  Speaker: I'm just now starting, and I hope to be able to have guests in the future to talk with, and I hope to have a more lively discussion and not me just giving a monologue but thank you for listening.
• 29:23
  Speaker: Hope to see you next time.
• 29:24
  Speaker: Bye.