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Empire and theDream-Work ofAmerica

Vinay Lal

Dissenting Knowledges Pamphlet Series (no. 4)Vinay Lal, Founding Editor

PenangMultiversity & Citizens International

2004

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Published by

MULTIVERSITYand

CITIZENS INTERNATIONAL22 Taylor Road11600 Penang

Malaysia

2004

Printed byJutaprint

2 Solok Sungai Pinang 3Sungai Pinang11600 Penang

Malaysia

ISBN 983-41938-8-2

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Foreword to theDissenting Knowledges Pamphlet Series

Vinay LalFounding Editor

The world as we know it today is understood almostentirely through categories that are largely the product

of Western knowledge systems and the academic

disciplines that have been charged with codifying,

disciplining, organizing, institutionalizing and transmitting

knowledge not only about the physical and material world,

but about the various social, political, cultural, religious, and

legal institutions and practices found among diverse human

communities. This pamphlet series is thus built on the twin

recognition that there is today no more urgent task than

understanding the political and epistemological consequences

of the imposition of the West upon the entire world, and at

the same time endeavoring to work, in myriad ways, towards

the decolonization of academic disciplines. It seeks to furnishintellectuals, scholars, and activists who are committed to

harvesting theories of knowledge, livelihoods and lifestyles,

and forms of political awareness that are calculated to create

more genuine forms of equality, justice, and plurality with a

more public forum of informed and dissenting opinion than

is customarily available through scholarly monographs and

learned journals.

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The age of exploration and navigation, which commenced in

Europe a little over 500 years old, eventually paved the way

for the colonization of the Americas, South and Southeast

Asia, the Near East, Polynesia, Africa, and other parts of the

world over the course of the next 200-300 years. The

comparative study of colonialism points to numerous ways

in which the European impact was experienced differently

across colonies. Historians have drawn distinctions between

plantation colonies, settler colonies, and other colonies with

varying degrees of direct and indirect rule. In the Americas

and Australia, the indigenous populations were wiped out;in South Africa, black and colored people were confronted

with stern subjugation under the Boers; and in the Congo,

the same results, that is the extreme brutalization of the native

people by the Europeans, were achieved in European-owned

rubber plantations. The British in India out-Brahmined the

Brahmins, refusing after the late eighteenth century to consort

with the local populations.

One of the many idioms in which the great game of colonialism

survives today is in those numerous discussions which seek

to distinguish between good and bad colonialisms.

British imperial historians, such as P. J. Marshall, Denis Judd,

and Niall Ferguson, still engage with unbridled enthusiasmin this puerile exercise. Nonetheless, it is an indisputable fact

that Europes colonization of the world, when it did not lead

to the outright decimation or extermination of native peoples,

resulted in the extinction of lifestyles, cultural life forms, and

the biological, cultural, and social inheritance of colonized

societies. It is imperative to recognize that everywhere the

colonizers sought to impose upon the colonized their

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worldview. Nothing should be allowed to obscure the

fundamental fact of colonialism and the post-colonial era:

every conquest is a conquest of knowledge. The

epistemological imperatives of the colonial state have only inthe last few decades begun to receive the critical scrutiny of

scholars and commentators. The British in India, to take one

well-known example, devoted themselves to an exhaustive

study of Indias social and intellectual traditions: grammars

of Indian languages were created, translations of scriptural

texts were authorized, the legal texts of Hindus and Muslims

were codified, the land was mapped and its inhabitantscounted, measured, and classified; communities were

enumerated, marked, and named; and so on. What is true of

India is also, to a greater or lesser degree, characteristic of

British, French, and Dutch colonies in other parts of the world.

The conquest of knowledge entailed, however, a great deal

more than what was wrought under colonial rule itself, and

under conditions of globalization Western knowledge

systems have sought, largely with success, to gain complete

dominance across the globe in nearly all spheres of life. The

economists conceptions of growth, poverty, scarcity, and

development, marketed by all the social sciences, have come

to predominate everywhere, and the sum total of Westernsocial science has not only been to mire the so-called

developing world in ever more acute levels of poverty, but to

forestall the possibility of worldviews and lifestyles that do

not synchronize with the conception of the good life that

prevails in the developed West. The entire theory of

development is predicated on a time-lag: countries that are

under-developed or part of the developing world seek to

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emulate the developed countries, but by the time they have

seemingly caught up, the developed countries have gone well

beyond to another plane of development. The native, to speak

in a different tongue, always arrives late at the destination;indeed, the theory of development condemns the

underdeveloped to live not their own lives, but rather to fulfill

someone elses conception of life. Development doesnt merely

assure us that the past of the native must be entirely

jettisoned; it also hijacks the natives future. If the natives

present is the Europeans past, the natives future is the

Europeans present.

Nearly every academic discipline is compromised. In all of

the voluminous literature on globalization that has emerged

in recent years, there is scarcely the recognition that what

has been most effectively globalized are the knowledge

systems of the West. Paul Samuelsons wretched economics

textbook is used in dozens of countries dictatorships,

monarchies, and so-called democracies alike. Despite the

pretensions of the social sciences, nowhere more on display

than in the bankrupt disciplines of political science and

economics, their methodologies and findings are far from

being universal; indeed, considering the widening economic

disparities in the US itself, and the nakedly criminal and self-aggrandizing policies of one American administration after

another, one might say that economists and political scientists

have contributed not a little towards wrecking their own

home. If freedom is indivisible, it is important to recognize

not only that the South has to free itself from that albatross

around its neck that goes by the name of the West, but that

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the so-called developed countries have to be liberated from

themselves.

This pamphlet series is one of many enterprises to haveemerged out of the desire of some scholars, academics,

activists, and public intellectuals, who first convened together

in Penang, Malaysia in early 2002, to create a new forum,

which has been termed Multiversity, that will at once

enable a wholesale but rigorous and searching critique of the

frameworks of modern knowledge as well as more ecumenical

political and cultural futures. Multiversitys members arecommitted to the proposition that there needs to be less

conversation with the West and more conversation between

peoples of the South. Long before India, China, Southeast Asia,

and Africa interacted with Europe, they interacted with each

other; indeed, the Indian Ocean was a global world, a

crossroads, but part of the effect of colonialism has been to

obscure these earlier histories. The conception of what

constitutes the world has narrowed so considerably that

everywhere outside Europe it means a knowledge only of ones

own country and of the Euro-American world. These,

apparently, are the borders of our supposed cosmopolitanism.

There can be no intercultural dialogue or genuine exchange ofideas so long as the terms of the conversation are set

exclusively by the West. It is necessary to add that the multi

in multiversity and multiworld ought to be distinguished

from the multi in multiculturalism. Having ruthlessly

homogenized itself, the United States, the leader of the West,

has now had to embrace multiculturalism and relentlessly

peddles its multiculturalism to the world as a sign of its

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openness and tolerance. Multiculturalism of the American

variety, which is synonymous with consumer choice and

white domination (sometimes appearing in the relatively

more benign form of primus inter pares), is now ironicallypoised to become a template for societies where the ground

reality has always been plural. Multiversity aims at resisting

such insidious forms of resurgent colonialism and creating

the conditions that would permit dissenting knowledges to

flourish. This pamphlet series is a step in that direction.

This initiative is one of several commenced by Multiversity.Pamphlets have long had an association with revolutionsand movements for social reform, and they played aninstrumental role in creating the conditions for change ata time when, though literacy rates were low and educationwas the privilege of the few, politics had not been reducedto something as farcical as electoral democracy where one

must choose between indistinguishable candidates. Theart of pamphleteering suffered a precipitous decline in thetwentieth century, at least in the modern West, and itsrevival may be one of the many necessary steps that haveto be taken to generate a renewed sense of political urgency.Readers are invited to learn more about Multiversity byaccessing its website at http://www.multiworld.org.

University of California, Los Angeles

September 2004

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Empire and the

Dream-Work ofAmerica

Vinay Lal

The one brutal and ineluctable fact that confronts all

humankind at the present juncture of history is the

overwhelming and irrepressible power of the United

States in nearly all domains of life. Doubtless, there are

prominent social theorists who hold an opinion to the

contrary, or are inclined to nuance their view with the

observation that American power, while still uncontested,has been on the decline since the end of the Vietnam War.1

But now, as at the time of the Vietnam War, the overwhelming

superiority of the American military is not a matter of debate.2

This assessment may be read mistakenly as echoing the

language thought to be deployed by terrorists, communists

(a fading breed), iconoclasts in the mold of the chess geniusand anti-American baiter Bobby Fisher, and others who, as

George W. Bush is wont to say, hate America and the

multiple freedoms to worship without fear, to embrace

openly the sanctity of private wealth and property, to rubbish

the entire world if the occasion should demand, to consume

and waste with abandon it offers. However, the warrant

and inspiration for viewing the United States as a country

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which unmistakably commands the attention of the world,

evoking mixed feelings of awe, resignation, fear, loathing,

admiration, and devotion derives strikingly enough from the

countrys own National Security Strategy to which thepresent American administration is beholden. The United

States enjoys, the document candidly admits, a position of

unparalleled military strength and great economic and

political influence, and it unabashedly takes the view,

commonly held by American politicians and other purveyors

of the idea of America, that the United States is the single

greatest force for good in the world. George W. Bush is, ofcourse, scarcely the first American president to think that

what is good for America is necessarily good for the world.

Since anything that diminishes the power of the United States

diminishes the world, the National Security Strategy avers

that defenses must be built and maintained beyond

challenge; moreover, the might of the American military

should be such as to dissuade potential adversaries from

pursuing a military build-up in hopes of surpassing, or

equaling, the power of the United States.3

Since the spectacular demise of the Soviet Union and

the crumbling of the Berlin Wall turned the United States

into the worlds only superpower, the world has increasingly

witnessed naked displays of American military might, thefrequent transformation of the Security Council of the UN

into an arm of the State Department (much as the IMF has

served as the overseas offices of the Treasury Department for

close to two decades), the opening up of developing

countries and regions to enhanced free trade regimes, and an

embellished vocabulary of governance rogue states, zero

tolerance, weapons of mass destruction, sanctions, the

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international community, the war on terror, and most

recently the coalition of the willing by means of which

the US has sought to cajole, bribe, or otherwise enlist every

country to cooperate in the fulfillment of its own crusadingambitions. Baghdad has often been terrorized in its long

history by invading forces, the present sacking of the city

somewhat calling to mind the terrible encroachments of the

Mongols in the thirteenth century,4 but before the Americans

set to pulverize it from the air, a huge show was made of

gaining the consent of the international community. No

one familiar with the National Security Strategy of the UnitedStates should have been surprised that, having encountered

unusual resistance in the Security Council in its quest for a

resolution that would authorize military action against Iraq,

the US would nonetheless doggedly act out the dictum, set

forth in the National Security Strategy, that the country will

not hesitate to act alone, if necessary, to exercise the right of

self-defense by acting preemptively against terrorists. Nor,

perhaps, should it have been at all shocking that the blazing

fires from the massive explosions over Baghdad had not even

died out before many voices were raised in asking the

question, Who next after Iraq? Large armed forces, the

Americans have understood since the end of the Cold War,

should not be allowed to sit idle.It is now somewhat over a decade since Iraq was, in the

words of a UN report, bombed back to the pre-industrial

age.5 This assessment, true as it was, now seems strange, if

not surreal. If unprecedented air power was deployed to

evict Iraq from Kuwait and crush Saddam Husseins armed

forces in 1991, how shall we characterize the carpet bombings

over Yugoslavia in 1999, in which the US joined its European

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allies, or the shock and awe sound-and-light show over

Baghdad in 2003? It may seem inexcusable to use the language

of the entertainment industry to describe absolute terror, but

this is one of the numerous barbarisms gifted by the UnitedStates to civilization. Though the infliction of terror from air

has a history stretching back to the bombing of Mesopotamia

and the Northwest Frontier Province of then-undivided India

in the early part of the twentieth century, and from thence to

the sustained bombardment of Britain by the Luftwaffe, the

incendiary bombings of Tokyo and other Japanese cities, and

the wanton destruction of Dresden by air, it is now clear thatin every succeeding air campaign the limits of what is

considered acceptable have risen.6 More tonnage is said to

have been let loose upon Iraq in 1991 than was dropped during

the entire period of World War II; and, yet, the shock and

awe campaign appears to have crossed a new threshold.

What, then, truly marks the singularity of the Gulf War of

1991 is that it was the first conflict of the post-Cold War era,

and the first President Bush, while determined to free Kuwait

from the thralldom of Iraqi oppression and deliver a decisive

blow to Saddam Husseins military capability, was also keen

to inaugurate a New World Order. The whole world was

to be put on notice that the United States would not negotiate

with rogue states; just as significantly, the exercise of brutemilitary power would be leavened with a thousand points

of light. Exploding bombs and missiles streaking through

the night skies create dazzling displays of fireworks, but Bush

Senior had, as he thought, a rather nobler conception of the

points of light illuminating the world. Throughout the 1990s,

as the United States pounded its enemies and evil-doers, the

impression was widely sought to be disseminated that the

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warmth, goodness, and unbounded charity of America would

radiate outward even among its most determined foes and

critics. Though the ugly phrase collateral damage was used

to designate the loss of civilian lives, the world was givenassurance that the United States, as a nation supremely

dedicated to the notion that every human life is sacrosanct,7

was only engaged in precision bombing. Untold billions of

dollars had been expended on developing arms and delivery

systems designed to protect life. To follow this narrative,

even in war, a human activity dedicated to death and

destruction, the United States was committed to thepreservation of life.

A decade after the first Gulf War,8 planes guided into the

World Trade Center and the Pentagon as missiles shattered

the peace of America. Bush Senior had invoked the

international community; Bush Junior would chant the

mantra of the coalition against terror. Since America itself

had been attacked, the younger Bush felt emboldened to

deploy language of stark simplicity that, for all the diplomatic

finesse that the United States has been capable of commanding

since the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, is at the heart of

the American imaginary: Either you are with us, he intoned,

or you are with the terrorists.9 Four weeks later, as Bush

came on national television to announce the commencementof military action against bin Laden, the Al-Qaeda network,

and the Taliban, he again elaborated on this point: Every

nation has a choice to make. In this conflict, there is no neutral

ground. If any government sponsors the outlaws and killers

of innocents, they have become outlaws and murderers,

themselves. And they will take that lonely path at their own

peril.10 Those who are familiar with the United States long

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and unmatched record of sponsorship of military

dictatorships, totalitarian and authoritarian states, and

military interventions to prop up failing regimes, and ponder

on the lonely path that the US has so often taken, whetherin its repudiation of the new international court (here joined

by Iraq and Syria), the Kyoto Treaty on global warming, or

the worldwide ban on landmines, or in its solitary support of

Israeli intransigence (as demonstrated by the frequent exercise

of the American veto in the Security Council), might have

wondered whether Bush was describing his own native

country. Indeed, in its refusal to abolish capital punishmentfor juveniles, or to ratify the Convention on the Rights of the

Child, the United States has the sole company of another one

of its favorite states, Somalia. Irony and self-reflection,

however, have never been Bushs strong suit. As 15,000 pound

bombs (nicknamed Daisy Cutters) were being unloaded

upon Afghanistan, one of the worlds poorest countries,

decimated by war over the last two decades, American

reporters, whose conception of their duty to the state is equaled

only by their naivete and proverbial parochialism, were

noting with evident pride that hundreds of thousands of food

packets, whose contents had been determined to meet the

strict nutritional requirements mandated by experts, had

been dropped alongside the bombs. The refrain has alwaysbeen that America can magically if not effortlessly conjoin

ferocious military prowess with unexampled kindness. Little

items, such as the fact that the US Congress set aside $300

million for the reconstruction of Afghanistan when Bush, who

had repeatedly pledged himself to that task, forgot to include

any money for this purpose in his budget requisition are not

allowed to tarnish the grand narrative of American

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munificence. In more ways than the world could then have

foreseen, the Marshall Plan, the paradigmatic example of

American largesse, and an extraordinary earner of cultural

capital, continues to work for America.The argument that war is the last recourse to maintain

peace is scarcely new. Addressing the nation on September

11, 2001,11 Bush described it as a day when all Americans

from every walk of life unite in our resolve for justice and

peace. In a nation addicted to war, even one day set aside for

the contemplation of peace would be an achievement; though

anyone familiar with contemporary political discourseswould at once recognize that 9/11 has now become the

license to persist, into the indefinite future, with a war on

terror whose enemies are largely unknown, undefined, often

an inchoate mass. Peace is the farthest thing from the mind of

those who still burn with rage at the mention of September

the 11th. Moreover, to every observer of American politics the

inescapable impression must remain that peace is not

generally part of the fabric of public discourse: thus the

National Security Strategys single sustainable model for

national success enumerates only freedom, democracy and

free enterprise, and the scourge of terrorism is listed

alongside slavery, piracy, [and] genocide. If war is not

among the evils that we must strive to banish, then whatontological and political place can there be for peace? It is not

for this reason alone that the self-representation of the United

States as a country only reluctantly at war has been viewed

by many critics as an affront to history, as a denial of the fact

that the notion of manifest destiny was not merely a call to

the rest of the world to leave America to its own devices but

a charter for expansion.

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The renegade historian William Appleman Williams

devoted the greater part of his academic labors to document

the enormous appetite for empire encountered in the

writings of the Founding Fathers themselves, not to mentiontheir successors, such as Theodore Roosevelt, who took it as

their moral obligation to wield the big stick.12 The story of

the present American invasion of Iraq is sometimes etched as

a narrative of hawks in power Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld,

Wolfowitz, Perle who had long ago, in the idio(ma)tic

expressions preferred by the President, decided to take out

Saddam Hussein, but it is useful to recall that a cabal of menhave, on other occasions in American history as well, openly

expressed Americas imperial ambitions. Warren

Zimmermans recent study of the end of the nineteenth

century, a productive time when the Philippines, Puerto Rico,

Guam, and Cuba came into American hands, reminds us of

how the quintet of Teddy Roosevelt, Senator Cabot Lodge,

Secretary of State John Hay, the naval strategist Alfred Thayer

Mahan, and Secretary of War Elihu Root engineered to give

America an empire as its own frontier was closing. Those

were, at least, more crude, perhaps honest, times: war-making

fell to the appropriately titled Department of War, and Mahan

had not the slightest hesitation in declaring, I am frankly an

imperialist.13 The Department of Defense, whatever its claimsabout defending the homeland, prosecutes offensive wars as

the examples of Vietnam and Iraq indubitably suggest.

Homeland, one should say, is a word with insidious intent

it may contain within it the history of lebensraum, carrying

that infamous concept to the next stage.14

Against those who would suggest that war-making has

been the soul of the American enterprise and that the very

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documents of freedom furnish as well the charter for an

American empire, against those who would, in the bluntest

terms, characterize the US as the preeminent rogue state of

our times,15

two arguments are frequently put forth by thosewho are prepared to be charitable to the US even when, as at

the present moment, world opinion is substantially turned

against the brutal exercise of American power. It is suggested

that the US cannot be viewed as a traditional imperialist

power and that, barring exceptions for relatively short

periods of time, the US never really acquired colonies. The

contrast is drawn most sharply with the histories of Britainand France as imperial powers. If at all America has an empire,

it is submitted, then it would be more apposite to speak of

American cultural imperialism, and the proliferation of mass

consumer goods and American cultural products throughout

much of the world. The United States is declared by the

proponents of this view to be an anomaly in world affairs,

the only, in the words of Harvards President and former

high-level functionary of the Clinton government, Lawrence

Summers, nonimperialist superpower in history.16 Last year,

to take one example, McDonalds was operating close to 30,000

outlets in 121 countries and serving 45 million customers

every day. However, those trumpeting this argument appear

to have forgotten that, following the attacks upon the TwinTowers and the initiation of the bombing campaign against

Afghanistan, American troops were stationed in 140

countries. Could any empire have done more? With the entire

world ringed by American military bases, do we have the

vocabulary to describe the global presence, and reach, of the

American military?

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The more compelling argument, perhaps, is that there

is no one America, and that far from being the monolith

that it appears to be as the American juggernaut rolls over

one weak country after another, the United States is a countrydeeply enmeshed in vigorous disputes over its relations with

foreign countries and the treatment of its own minorities.17

Unforgiving critics of American foreign policy such as the

late Edward Said, Noam Chomsky, and Arundhati Roy have

been united in holding to the view that it is not America that

the world hates but rather the arrogance, sanctimoniousness,

hypocrisy, and bellicosity of its political elites and theAmerican repudiation of international organizations and

treaties.18 Chomsky has for well over three decades been a

persistent advocate of the position that the American people

are largely unaware of the foreign policies of the US

government, and a sharp gulf separates the American

government from the majority of well-meaning Americans.

Following the attacks of 9/11, Arundhati Roy declaimed that

while American foreign policies are hated, the American

people should know that their movies, poets, and musicians

are loved the world over, and she pondered over the

significance of the fact that terrorists targeted the World Trade

Center and the Pentagon rather than the Statue of Liberty.19

(She may have overlooked the simple fact that though boththe WTC and the Statue of Liberty denote varying conceptions

of symbolic capital, the terrorists were astute in realizing

that the WTC also, so to speak, packed an economic punch.)

Her more recent political commentary, while unsparing in

its denunciation of the barbarians at the door of Baghdad,

urges everyone to think of the protests against the war across

America and concludes with the affirmation that the most

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scholarly, scathing, hilarious critiques of the US government

and the American way of life comes from American

citizens.20

Eloquence, moral fervor, and the ethical imperative tobelieve in the goodwill of people cannot, however, substitute

for reasoned argument. Is any country ever monolithic? If the

rest of the world must needs be persuaded that the US, which

arrogates to itself the role of spokesperson for the free world,

has more political diversity than we imagine, then something

is seriously amiss. It may make sense, furthermore, to argue

for an immense gulf between the government and the peoplein all those political regimes where representative democracy

has been disavowed, but what salience can any such view

have in a country which has been peddling free elections to

the rest of the world as the sure sign of popular democracy at

work? There is, admittedly, some merit in suggesting that

the American government or even state no more stands for

American society than did the Taliban stand for the Afghan

people, but surely the American people must be held

accountable to a greater degree for the governments that they

elect to power than the Afghan people must be held

accountable for the thugs foisted upon them? And why, at a

time when academic work has nearly sanctified the notion of

peoples agency as a holy concept, should Chomsky, Roy, andothers be prepared to advocate that the American people are

easily led astray like sheep, and that the fundamental

goodness of Americans should not be doubted? What does it

mean to effortlessly rely on such cliched formulations when

one is speaking of the most well-connected country in the

world, and where no one can plead ignorance? If the American

people are not complicit in varying degrees with the policies

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carried out in their name by their representatives, how can

we possibly understand that one poll after another has

shown, in the present war with Iraq in its early days when

victory appeared to be nearly effortless, swift, and completeas with previous American exercises in militaristic

adventurism the first Gulf War, the missile attacks on

Afghanistan and Sudan in Clintons presidency, the assault

on Yugoslavia, the bombing of Afghanistan extraordinarily

high levels of support for policies of successive American

administrations?

In their own way, it is my submission, the well-intentioned critics of America from Noam Chomsky and

Arundhati Roy to the more rambunctious Michael Moore

unwittingly do the work of empire. Chomsky can be allowed

to rant and rage at American racism and imperialism since,

as is well known in the United States, his laborious and

meticulously documented efforts make not an iota of

difference to the conduct of American foreign policy. Only in

America could Michael Moores much acclaimed film,

Fahrenheit 911, be viewed as a radical expression of dissent,

even though there is scarcely any critique of the institutions

of civil society, and even though, in a film which rightly probes

the inanities and mendacities of American foreign policy,

Americas extraordinary role in propping up the Israeli stateis not mentioned once. But now that the film has had a wildly

successful theatrical release, everyone can rejoice in the

thought that American democracy is flourishing. Still, Moore

offers a less complicated case than Chomsky of how non-

establishment and dissenting views become part of the

arsenal of those committed to the proposition that America

bears an unusual role in being the mouthpiece of freedom.

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Chomsky can, and has been, always held up as an example of

the countrys tolerance for dissenting views and since the

goodness of America, the America of moms apple pie and of

the Presidents pet dog coming down the steps of Air ForceOne, is never far from Chomskys heart, his pointed criticism

can even be received with gratitude, as the most perfect

expression of the distance separating American democracy

from totalitarianism. In the last analysis, whatever criticism

anyone levies, the cash registers continue to ring and SUV

sales register phenomenal growth. William Appleman

Williams may have been much closer to a genuine insightwhen he remarked that empire as a way of life is predicated

upon having more than one needs.21 The early ideologues of

the idea of America as a Republican Empire came to the

awareness that so long as the bulk of the population were

allowed a latitude of freedom in the exercise of their economic

pursuits and religious feelings, they would remain indifferent

to, and even tolerate, the expansion of empire overseas. If the

protection of American freedoms at home required and

since the notion of required cannot be scientifically falsified,

and can conversely always be tethered with appropriate

manipulation to the ideology of the National Security State

intervention overseas, the military machine was rapidly

set into motion and the President was given a free hand.No one who has contemplated the course of American

history can cease to wonder how America, where less

substantive dissent exists than in any other democracy, where

politics for decades has been reduced to an electoral

competition between two parties that are all but

indistinguishable except in some domestic matters,

nonetheless continues to convey the impression that it is, in

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Jeffersons phrase, the worlds best hope. Empire, rather

than imperialism, has done the dream-work of America.

Many will imagine that this characterization takes us no

further than the commonplace argument about Hollywoodand its hegemony throughout much of the world; at most,

some people might insist that Hollywood should be read to

mean not only the big studio productions with glamorous

stars, but also the American media networks and the

gargantuan entertainment industry with their global reach.

But least of all do I wish to convey merely this by the phrase

dream-work, though there is no gainsaying the fact thatHollywood has been an immensely successful factory of

dreams, that the conception of America held in many

countries is shaped to a very great extent by American

movies, the news outlets, and TV shows, and even that

diverse cinematic traditions around the world owe much to

the fecundity of Hollywood and independent American

filmmakers. I mean, by dream-work, something far more,

something richer even than the promise of the American

dream and the invitation, etched so prominently in the lines

that adorn the Statue of Liberty, etched indeed in the very

figure of Liberty with her flaming torch, to all the dispossessed,

wretched, weak, miserable, and oppressed of the world to

make America their home. Indeed, if the policies of theImmigration and Naturalization Service (INS) over the last

two decades are any guide, and the militarization of the US-

Mexico border and the hounding of young Muslim males by

the FBI and the INS furnish demonstrable evidence of the

country closing in upon itself, the poor, oppressed, desolate,

and mere aspirants to economic well-being have been told in

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no uncertain terms that they must seek other dreams in other

places.

Though the American dream may now only be

available to an infinitely smaller number of immigrants,many such as Indians, Hong Kong Chinese, Iranians

already drawn from relatively wealthier segments of their

own society, the dream-work of America shows

extraordinary tenacity. The secret bombing of Cambodia,

and an unjust and brutal war conducted upon a peasant

society which resulted in the loss of three million lives, should

have embittered the Vietnamese and Cambodians. The spectreof Vietnam that looms large over American politics, as the

row kicked up by conservative commentators over John

Kerrys service record in Vietnam that won him several

medals and his public denunciation at that time of American

atrocities in the war suggests, has nothing to do with the

Vietnamese themselves. The American obsession with

Vietnam, or their commemoration of the war dead, has no

place for the three million Vietnamese killed in the conflict.

The discussion always hovers around what the Vietnam war

did to the Americans rather than what it did to the

Vietnamese. And, yet, despite all that, how are Americans

received in Vietnam today? One can understand that those

who fled South Vietnam and wound up in the United Statesmight feel grateful to a country that, as they imagine, rescued

them from a dreary, often dangerous, life under communism,

but the return of American investment to Vietnam, and the

increasingly warm embrace of American cultural institutions

and business practices suggests that the Vietnamese have to

a considerable extent buried the memory of the brutalization

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of their country. However pragmatic the Vietnamese response

to the global presence of the United States, only an ancient

civilization can be so magnificently forgiving and so

capacious in its generosity.How many of the immigrants who speak so warmly of

the freedom of opportunity and expression that they have

experienced in the land of plenty are at all acquainted with

the history of European encounters with native Americans,

the Indian wars, the slave trade, plantation slavery, the Jim

Crow South, and the extraordinary fact that at the present

juncture of history nearly one out of every three blackAmerican males will, in his lifetime, have spent some time

within the confines of a prison? One has to ask how the vast

bulk of Americans, who are themselves immigrants or

descendants of immigrants, barring those native Americans

whose decimation was rendered nearly complete, have

overlooked the long history of American atrocities in central

and South America, the Philippines, and Indochina? No one

who contemplates the history of Germany can do so without

remembering as well the holocaust perpetrated upon millions

of Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, and other people viewed as

retards, deviants, or undesirables. In Germany itself it is a

criminal offense to deny that the Holocaust took place, and

the anti-militarist sentiments prevailing in Germany aresometimes construed as originating from the conviction that

war must be renounced except where an absolutely

unequivocal case can be made for the resort to force as a means

of self-defense. Yet the countless admirers of America, those

craving to reach its shores on an immigrant visa as much as

those armed with all the advantages that American

citizenship confers, would never link the United States to the

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atrocities that mar its history in the manner in which they

inextricably link Germany to the holocaust.

To hear Americans, politicians and common people alike,

expound on the Founding Fathers and their gift of freedom tothe people of the thirteen colonies, a gift that, as Americans

believe, was then extended to as much of the world as was

willing to accept it, is to come away with the impression that

the white colonists alone labored under the oppressive regime

of the English. There is never any hint in all the moralizing

that is on witness on nearly every occasion when the

American President addresses the American people andinvokes the Founding Fathers that extermination of the

native Americans and the continued subjugation of black

people were viewed by the colonists as taking place at the

will of God. I am very clear in my opinion, we find George

Washington writing on 7 September 1783, that policy and

oeconomy point very strongly to the expediency of being upon

good terms with the Indians, and the propriety of purchasing

their lands in preference to attempting to drive them by force

of arms out of their Country; which . . . is like driving the wild

Beasts of ye forest . . . when the gradual extension of our

settlements will as certainly cause the savage, as the wolf, to

retire; both being beasts of prey, tho they differ in shape. 22

The Constitution of the United States, a document that hasoften been described as a miraculous example of human

ingenuity and the ultimate expression of the aspiration of a

free people to govern themselves, permitted states to count

3/5ths of their slave populations to determine their

representation in the House of Representatives and the

Electoral College.23 In plain English, the Founding Fathers

agreed, a slave was only 3/5ths a human being; nor is there

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any evidence to suggest that this munificent bestowal of

dignity to the slave provoked outrage among lovers of

freedom.

Yet these are no mere contradictions that one mightexplain away with the observation that nothing has ever

precluded the oppressed from oppressing those over whom

they are capable of exercising their power. Not every nation

claims to be the torch-bearer of freedom for the entire world,

not only its own people; not every nation appears to think, as

indeed it should, that freedom is indivisible, but then follows

policies calculated to deprive some people of their freedomand achieve results exactly contrary to the ringing

endorsements of freedom and democracy. This nation has

defeated tyrants and liberated death camps, raised this lamp

of liberty to every captive land, Bush reminded Americans

in a televised address, adding, in these signature lines, the

platitudes that one has come to expect of politicians of his ilk:

This ideal of America is the hope of all mankind. That hope

drew millions to this harbor. That hope still lights our way.

And the light shines in the darkness. And the darkness will

not overcome it.24 Some have thought that the apocalyptic

language for example, the warning to the Iraqi regime that

the day of reckoning is nearly at hand in which Bush

speaks arises from the evangelical Christianity which he hasembraced, but more sustained scholarship in American

history suggests both the longevity of apocalyptic discourse

in American history and the widespread prevalence of the

notion that America has been especially chosen to lead the

world to a new mountain-top of freedom and prosperity. If

the United States claims for itself a distinct and wholly

unparalleled place in the story of the human drive towards

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freedom, guided moreover by the hand of divine dispensation

in its affairs, then it must correspondingly be held to higher

standards. It cannot be enough to say that the intentions of

the United States have always or largely been noble, but thatthe logic of the nation-state system, which operates on the

zero-sum politics principle, has resigned the US to a full (even

macabre) acceptance of realpolitik. Good intentions, we are

aware, belong largely to the dustbin of history.

The notion that America is divinely favored is

encountered in the writings of the early Puritans who saw

themselves as carrying out, in Perry Millers phrase, anerrand into the wilderness,25 and has shown remarkable

tenacity ever since. The Puritans established a sacred

geography of America, giving no thought to the consideration

that, in numerous native American cosmologies, every stone,

tree, mountain, and body of water is imbued with sacred

meaning. John Cotton, Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards and

other framers of what would culminate in the American way

of life were firmly persuaded that in the settlement of America

by European Christians lay the fulfillment of sacred history;

here, in America, which encompassed the ends of the earth,

prophecy would itself come to an end. John Cotton explained

in 1630 that other peoples have their land by providence;

we have it by promise.26 The settlement of America by whiteChristians was no accident of history, indeed it was far more

than the design of history; it was the redemption of Gods

promise to make every place productive. Where the utopias

previously envisioned by European thinkers looked to the

past, here Christs kingdom on earth took on an entirely new

meaning since, as it was imagined, neither history nor

tradition encumbered the Puritans as they sought individual

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and corporate spiritual and material uplift. From the multiple

perspectives of geography, time, and history, Sacvan

Bercovitch has remarked, America was pulcherrima inter

mulieres, the youngest and loveliest of Christs brides, the last,best hope of mankind, whether mankind knew it or not.27

The sociologist Robert Bellah, a perceptive scholar of

the religious sensibility of Americans, has commented on the

widespread acceptance of the view that God is actively

interested and involved in history, with a special concern for

America.28 Nowhere in the world do political leaders so

routinely conclude their speeches and exhortations with aninvocation to God to bless their own nation-state, as if God

took cognizance of this modern arrangement of political

communities and was especially pleased to grant America

an extraordinary place in human affairs. Many writers,

myself included, have accommodated this self-perception of

Americans as a people over whom God watches closely under

the rubric of American exceptionalism, an exceptionalism

that manifests itself in myriad and often unusual ways. The

countrys characterization of the pitched battles fought in its

own sporting leagues as World Series, the abundance of

food, water, and natural resources that is taken for granted,

the view that access to unlimited oil is a constitutional right,

the gargantuan portions served in restaurants, the penchantfor the big in nearly every aspect of life all this and much

more point to a country that cannot be assimilated into known

cultural and political histories of human societies. What the

rest of the world understands as nationalism is recast in

America as patriotism, and perhaps not accidentally: love

of the idea of America must supersede the love of the nation-

state, even if nowhere else do the flags and yellow ribbons

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come out as quickly as they do in America. Nothing that

America embraces must be susceptible to accusations of

meanness, wrong-doing, and evil, but nationalism lends itself

to all these charges. Whatever theorists might make of goodand bad nationalisms, American self-representation

necessitates the rejection of all nationalism. Patriotism

engenders a more politically satisfying idea of transcendence:

thus the evils perpetrated under the name of the American

nation-state can ultimately be overlooked on the assumption

that they do not violate the core idea of America as the

repository of social and cultural goods. Whatever Americamay do, howsoever much its actions may shock the world

into resignation, despair, and bitterness, the idea of America

cannot be irrevocably tarnished.

Perhaps even the idea of American exceptionalism

cannot fully convey what I have termed the dream-work of

America. When the conservative commentator, Francis

Fukuyama, adverted not so long ago to the end of history,29

he appeared to strike a chord among many who, having just

witnessed the end of the Cold War and the heady embrace of

free trade in eastern Europe and other parts of the world

where political regimes sympathetic to liberalization were

being installed, were jubilant at the prospect that nation states

were gravitating towards the acceptance of capitalistdemocracy as the ideal standard. He would have been far

more accurate if he had suggested that America seeks to

capture all our futures and consequently represents the end

of prophecy. To have arrived in America is to obviate any

need for prophecy; it is to have become the prophecy. No

imperial power ever colonized its subjects as effectively and

as deeply as has America; none has done so with as much

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conviction in its own innocence and with such unctuous

arrogance as to believe that, whatever the deeds of America,

the world trusts us [America] with power, and the world is

right.30

Even as the present war in Iraq continues, it provides a

vivid demonstration of my argument that empire is

ultimately not so much about oil and lucrative contracts, not

that those are ever insignificant or overlooked in the American

scheme of things, as it is about the dream-work of America.

That is one of the supreme failings of Fahrenheit 9/11, which

is in all respects a necessary film: its director, while clearlysupportive of conspiracy theories that etch the blood ties

which bond oil men as well as of theories some will call

them facts, perhaps with entire justification that link figures

in the Bush administration to the companies which have

received lucrative contracts for reconstruction work in Iraq,

is himself imprisoned by Americas dream-work. As Michael

Moore stands in the kitchen of a woman who has lost her son

in Iraq, he remarks: This is a great country, isnt it? The

long silence before and after his observation accentuates its

gravity; it is not an observation that demands corroboration

from the viewer or listener, as it apparently belongs to the

realm of truths which are self-evident.

There is at least one immensely riveting story to haveemerged from this war which demands our attention. African-

Americans and Hispanics are disproportionately represented

in the armed forces of the United States; the two most

underprivileged minorities have an assurance that the gates

of the prison and the military are always open to them. Not

only do they thereby keep out of trouble and thin their own

ranks, but this frees white America to get on with the more

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important work of raising productivity, making money, and

opening up worldwide markets. As it transpires, Permanent

Residents of the United States, whose fortunate status as

green card holders turns the faces of would-be ResidentAliens the world over green with envy, may not vote in

American elections, but they are absolutely free in giving

their lives for the nation. The political elites must have enough

contempt for minorities to act on the assumption that casting

a vote is a reasoned decision that must not be entrusted to

minorities with immigrant status, but that service in the

military, where brawn is prized more than brains, shouldnever be denied to those so inclined. It now also emerges that

among those marines killed in action in the early days of the

war, at least two were green card-holding Hispanics, Lance

Corporal Jose Gutierrez and Corporal Jose Garibay, and that

posthumous American citizenship was at once conferred on

them.31 In having become Americans, they have, we must

believe, become liberated from their past and achieved the

highest end of life. Who can say whether God welcomes

Americans more than Iraqis to heaven, but cannot one at

least aver that many more would prefer to go to heaven as

Americans rather than as Iraqis, Mexicans, or Guatemalans?

In death, as in life, it must feel good to be an American.

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ENDNOTES

1 Immanuel Wallerstein, The Decline of American Power (New York: The

New Press, 2003).

2 The only effective check against the American military machine is

domestic opinion, which, sadly, is rarely heard. Notwithstanding the

relatively heavy casualties inflicted on American forces during the

Vietnam war, it is opinion at home, which eventually turned against the

war, that compelled the withdrawal of American forces. The present

insurgents in Iraq, similarly, cannot hope to inflict a military defeat on

American forces; all they can hope to do is to wage a war of attrition, keep

Iraq on or near the front page, and eventually turn a significant section of

the American public against the occupation.

3 Bushs National Security Strategy, full text in New York Times (20

September 2002), online at wysiwyg://3//http://www.nytimes.com/2002

4 The American marines who swarmed into Baghdad were, of course,

blissfully unaware of the history of this great city. The sermon deliveredat the al Hanif al Naaman Mosque in Baghdads Adhimiya district on 18

April 2003 likened them to the Mongols who ravaged the city in 1258.

See Nir Rosen, Marines Cast as Mongols in Baghdad, online at: Hulagu

Khans soldiers are said to have killed 800,000 people, but they spared the

Christians; widespread looting took place under the Americans, whose

forces were utilized in safeguarding oil wells and pipelines.

5 United Nations, Economic and Social Council, Commission on Human

Rights, Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection

of Minorities, Forth-third session: Summary Record of the 10th Meeting,

E/CN.4/Sub.2/1991/SR.10 (20 August 1991), p. 10.

6 David E. Omissi, Air Power and Colonial Control: The Royal Air Force

1919-1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990); Peter

Calvocoressi and Guy Wint, Total War: Causes and Courses of the Second

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World War (New York: Penguin Books, 1979), pp. 132-44, 489-508; and

Michael S. Sherry, The Rise of American Air Power : The Creation of

Armageddon (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987).

7 See, for example, George W. Bushs Remarks to the Nation on 11September 2002, the first anniversary of the attacks upon the WTC and

Pentagon: Our deepest national conviction is that every life is precious,

because every life is the gift of a Creator who intended us to live in liberty

and equality. More than anything else, this separates us from the enemy

we fight. We value every life; our enemies value none not even the

innocent, not even their own.On-line at :http://www.whitehouse.gov/

news/releases/2002/09/20020911-3.html

8 Though by no means do I wish to overlook the eight-year war between

Iran and Iraq, I am following conventional usage in describing the US-led

assault on Iraq in 1991 as the first Gulf War.

9 Speech to the US Congress, 20 September 2001: http://www.white

house.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010920-8.html

10 Address to the Nation, 7 October 2001: http://www.white house.gov/

news/releases/2001/10/20011007-8.html

11 http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010911-16.html

12 See, in particular, his Empire as a Way of Life: An Essay on the Causes and

Character of Americas Present Predicament Along with a Few Thoughts About

an Alternative (New York: Oxford UP, 1980). I am persuaded, wroteJefferson to James Madison on 27 April 1809, no constitution was never

before as well calculated as ours for extensive empire and self-

government. Cited in ibid., p. vii.

13 See Warren Zimmerman, First Great Triumph: How Five Americans Made

Their Country a World Power (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002).

14

The idea of lebensraum, the notion that the German race could not beconfined within Germany, or that Germany was too small to hold a noble

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people with greater sense of entitlement, is sometimes mistakenly viewed

as originating with Hitler. It was already prevalent in Germany before

World War I; moreover, small European nations moving out into the

world can be viewed as enacting their own form of lebensraum. The

widespread American military presence around the world, which post-World War II administrations are accustomed to viewing as not only

desirable but part of the natural order of things, should be written into the

history of lebensraum. The newly created Department of Homeland

Defense in the US is ominous for more than the usual reasons, and one

should also note how far the characterization of the US as a nation or

country has yielded to the description of the US as homeland.

15 William Blum, Rogue State: A Guide to the Worlds Only Superpower, newupdated ed. (London: Zed Books, 2002).

16 See Sebastian Mallaby, The Reluctant Imperialism: Terrorism, Failed

States, and the Case for American Empire, Foreign Affairs (March-April

2002). No one is less qualified than Summers to speak about the democratic

propensities of the United States, as he has deservedly earned notoriety

on more than one occasion for his autocratic conduct and czar-like

demeanor. In his person, he represents the lethal combination of one

blinded by an obdurate and insular discipline (economics), susceptible to

racism, ambitious to the hilt, and supremely contemptuous of worldviews

outside his framework of knowledge. See the discussion in Vinay Lal,

Empire of Knowledge: Culture and Plurality in the Global Economy (London:

Pluto Press, 2002), pp. 115-16, 202n.3, 221n.23, as well as numerous

accounts of his altercation with the African-American philosopher and

political radical, Cornel West.

17 Edward Said, The other America, Al-Ahram Weekly Online, no. 630

(20-26 March 2003), online at: http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/print/2003/

630/focus.htm

18 For a contrasting view, see Ziauddin Sardar and Merryl Wyn Davies,

Why Do People Hate America? (London: Icon Books, 2002).

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19 Arundhati Roy, The Algebra of Infinite Justice, Outlook (8 October

2001), and War is Peace, Outlook (18 October 2001), both online at:

http://www.outlookindia.com/author.asp?name =Arundhati%20Roy

20 Arundhati Roy, Mesopotamia. Babylon. The Tigris and Euphrates,Guardian (2 April 2003).

21 Williams, Empire as a Way of Life, p. 31.

22 Cited by Richard Drinnon, Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating

and Empire-Building (New York: New American Library, 1980), p. 65.

23 Eric Foner, The Story of American Freedom (New York: W. W. Norton,1998), p. 35.

24 George W. Bush, Remarks to the Nation, 11 September 2002 (see

note).

25 Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap

Press of Harvard UP, 1975).

26 Cited by Sacvan Bercovitch, The Rites of Assent: Transformations in the

Symbolic Construction of America (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 81.

27 Ibid., p. 82.

28 Cited by Barbara Ehrenreich, Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions

of War (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1997), pp. 219-20.

29 Francis Fukuyama, The End of the History and the Last Man (New York:

Free Press, 1992).

30 From a speech by President George H.W. Bush, as cited by

New York Times (29 January 1992), p. 16.

31

Robert J. Lopez and Rich Connell, Marines Win PosthumousCitizenship, Los Angeles Times (3 April 2003), p. B1, B10.

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VINAY LAL was brought upin Delhi, Tokyo, Jakarta, and

Washington, and educated, asmuch as he cared to be, atJohns Hopkins and the Uni-versity of Chicago. He nowteaches in the Department ofHistory at the University ofCalifornia, Los Angeles,

though some of his colleagues wonder why he was evercalled to the profession. Ahistoricity is one of the principalsubjects of his most recent book, The History of History:Politics and Scholarship in Modern India (Delhi: Oxford, 2003).Some of the perils of becoming a nation-state, and theoften overlooked phenomena of everyday life, are explored

in Of Cricket, Guinness and Gandhi: Essays on Indian Historyand Culture (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2003). But hisinterests extend well beyond India to the seductions ofAmerica and the global politics of knowledge, the subjectof Empire of Knowledge: Culture and Plurality in the GlobalEconomy (London: Pluto, 2002) and the Future of Kowledgeand Culture: A Dictionary for the Twenty-first Century, co-edited

with Ashis Nandy (Delhi: Viking/Penguin, 2004).Introducing Hinduism (with Borin van Loon) will be releasedin early 2005 (Icon Books, London).

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