BTW you do realise that colonialism was ended by the
US?
Secretary of War Henry
Stimson in May 1945 when he was explaining how we must eliminate
and dismantle regional systems dominated by any other power,
particularly the British, while maintaining and extending our own
system.
But they reimposed a hegemonic and neo-colonial system, using
world bank, IMF, WTO, NATO etc to enforce their dictates.
News stories and academic studies often focus on
the options chosen by a president and his officials during a
crisis. Central to such decisions, however, are the forces that
determine what options show up on the agenda and what options do
not even make it to the table. Imperial Brain Trust, published in
1977, is the classic study of the Council on Foreign Relations, an
organization that has, for decades, played a central behind the
scenes role is shaping such foreign policy choices.
This private club and think tank, bringing
together the New York establishment and the Washington foreign
policy elite as well as other powerful forces, took the lead in
laying out the plans for post-World II international
order.
The Council also traced the key guidelines for
Cold War intervention and vetted and advised generations of White
House officials. Rival think tanks, such as the far-right Heritage
Foundation, now have a higher profile.
But the Council on Foreign Relations continues to
mark the boundaries of what insiders consider to be respectable
foreign policy discussion, helping aspirants to policy influence
test out their schemes for establishment approval.
Shoup & Minter's devastating research on the
planning behind the U.S. Empire is finally back in print 27 years
after its 1977 publication by Monthly Review Press!
The
CFR, the Council on Foreign Relations, was formed by the
international wing of U.S. capital after the League of Nations fell
apart and inter-imperialist collaboration proved ineffective,
leading to WWII.
The farsighted few took measures to see that such
a debacle did not recur. The CFR, the "imperial brain trust" of the
title, carried out research concerning the optimal strategy for the
U.S. in the war.
They identified a minimum and maximum "Grand
Area" that the U.S. needed to control, based on an assessment of
factors including raw materials, and decided long before Pearl
Harbor that the U.S. would need to control the Pacific Basin. War
with Japan was the plan, with or without Pearl Harbor. Everything
that happened in Europe was secondary to this
consideration.
The CFR
Grand Area planning team was imported wholesale into FDR's State
Department -- it became the State Department and directed the war
strategy. So the U.S. was not in the war to
defend itself, or to fight for Freedom, or to liberate anyone,
cherished propaganda to the contrary.
The
goal was to seize as big a chunk of the globe as possible along
with its raw materials and
markets.
This
proved quite successful, of course, and with a few pesky holdouts
that were encircled and attacked with variations on containment and
rollback over the years, the U.S.
Empire replaced the 19th century
British Empire, with an unprecedented military reach and military
bases everywhere. Since 1945 the sun has never set on the American
Empire.
http://avaxhome.ws/ebooks/history_military/0595324266_ImperialBrain.html
From 1939 to 1945, extensive studies were
conducted by the Council on Foreign Relations and the State
Department. One group was called the
War-Peace Studies Group, which met for six years and produced
extensive geopolitical analyses and plans. The Council on Foreign
Relations is essentially the business input to foreign policy
plainning. These groups also involved every top planner in the
State Department, with the exception of the Secretary of State.
The conception that they developed is what they called "Grand Area"
planning. The Grand Area was a region that was to be subordinated
to the needs of the American economy. As one planner put it, it was
to be the region that is "strategically necessary for world
control." The geopolitical analysis held that the Grand Area had to
include at least the Western Hemisphere, the Far East, and the
former British Empire, which we were then in the process of
dismantling and taking over ourselves. This is what is called
"anti-imperialism" in American scholariship. The Grand Area was
also to include western and southern Europe and the oil-producing
regions of the Middle East; in fact, it was to include everything,
if that were possible. Detailed plans were laid for particular
regions of the Grand Area and also for international institutions
that were to organize and police it, essentially in the interests
of this subordination to U.S. domestic needs.
Of course, when we talk about the domestic economy, we don't
necessarily mean the people of the United
States; we mean whoever dominates and controls, owns and manages
the American economy. In fact, the planners recognized that other
arrangements, other forms of organization, involving much less
extensive control over the world would indeed be possible, but only
at what from their point of view was the "cost" of internal
rearrangements toward a more egalitarian society in the United
States, and obviously that is not contemplated.
With respect to the Far East, the plans were roughly as follows:
Japan, it was understood, would sooner or later be the industrial
heartland of Asia once again. Since Japan is a resource-poor area,
it would need Southeast Asia and South Asia for resources and
markets. All of this, of course, would be incorporated within the
global system dominated by the United States.
With regard to Latin America, the matter was put most plainly by
Secretary of War
Henry Stimson in May 1945 when he was explaining how we must
eliminate and dismantle regional systems dominated by any other
power, particularly the British, while maintaining and extending
our own system. He explained with regard to Latin
America as follows: "I think that it's not asking too much to have
our little region over here which never has bothered anybody."
The basic thinking behind all of this has been explained quite
lucidly on a number of occasions. (This is a very open society and
if one wants to learn what's going on, you can do it; it takes a
little work, but the documents are there and the history is also
there.) One of the clearest and most lucid accounts of the planning
behind this was by George Kennan, who was one of the most
thoughtful, humane, and liberal of the planners, and in fact was
eliminated from the State Depatment largely for that reason. Kennan
was the head of the State Department policy planning staff in the
late 1940s. In the following document, PPS23, February 1948, he
outlined the basic thinking:
We have about 50 percent of the world's wealth, but only 6.3
percent of its population.... In this situation, we cannot fail to
be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming
period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us
to maintain this position of disparity.... We need not deceive
ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and
world-benefaction.... We should cease to talk about vague and...,
unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living
standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are
going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are
then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.
http://www.chomsky.info/talks/19850319.htm
AMY GOODMAN: It’s good to have you with
us. Okay, explain
this term, "economic hit man," e.h.m., as you call
it.
PERKINS: Basically
what we were trained to do and what our job is to do is to build up
the American empire. To bring — to create situations where as many
resources as possible flow into this country, to our corporations,
and our government, and in fact we’ve been very successful.
We’ve built the
largest empire in the history of the world. It’s been done over the
last 50 years since World War II with very little military might,
actually. It’s only in rare instances like Iraq
where the military comes in as a last resort. This empire, unlike
any other in the history of the world, has been built primarily
through economic manipulation, through cheating, through fraud,
through seducing people into our way of life, through the economic
hit men. I was very much a part of that...
http://www.democracynow.org/2004/11/9/confessions_of_an_economic_hit_man
One of the crucial pillars of support for
today's Dollar System is Washington's control of the International
Monetary Fund, the IMF.
The way this actually works is carefully
disguised, behind
a facade of technocrats and economic theory of free market
ideology.
In reality, the IMF is a modern era collection
agency for the Dollar Empire.
It collects its tribute, through major
international banks, who use the dollars to further extend the
power of American financial and corporate hegemony, in effect the
driving motor of what is globalization....
...
Globalization is a word used today, often without
precision.
If we use the word globalization to refer to the
entire process of IMF and WTO-led neo-colonialism under the Dollar
System, then it is a descriptive term. It describes the creation of a global
dollar imperium, a Pax Americana.
Establishment critics of the IMF system such as
Joseph Stiglitz, himself a former Clinton adviser and World Bank
official, make accurate charges against the IMF. They assume,
however, that it is merely misguided policy that leads to the
problems.
The entire IMF institution, along
with the World Bank and WTO, however, have been deliberately
developed to advance this globalization of the Dollar System, the
second pillar of Pax Americana after the military
power.
It is no mistaken policy, no result of
bureaucratic blunders.
That is the crucial point to be
understood. The IMF exists to support the Dollar
System.
http://www.serendipity.li/hr/imf_and_dollar_system.htm
