Non political memes: !memes@sopuli.xyz
what Americans can't seem to see is that the slave prison shit is also real on US soil too, except worse and more openly integrated into the culture
Star Wars is a pacification op to give an outlet to people with moral injury in the US empire. Watch other people fight some shitty empire, its fantasy, it is so unreasonable to actually take up arms, haha space wizard baby ๐
I wouldn't describe the USA as an empire.
Yet.
Bro come on, USA is like the very definition of an empire. Even people who like empires think the US is an empire. Like do you think we were born yesterday?
An Empire controls multiple territories. The USA does not.
Are you profoundly stupid or just lying?
The only territories that the USA controls are ones with US Citizens. Other territories under their protection are self-governing commonwealths, which are over a century old (or a result of lands formerly colonized by the WWII Japanese Empire), few, and far between.
Puerto Ricans have been US Citizens for over a hundred years and there has been a lot of support among Democrats for making them a state with senators and congressmen. The two most recent territories were Northern Mariana Islands in 1986 which was controlled by the UN following WWII during which they were controlled by the Dai Nippon Empire which attacked the USA, and before that U.S. Virgin Islands in 1917 which were sold to the USA by Denmark.
The USA does not own colonies. Commonwealth territories are self governing.
The dollar as the reserve currency does serve to extract wealth from other countries and bring it to America. Nato doctrine is explicit that in event of a war involving Nato every other member country's military falls under US command.
The US also has this agreement with South Korea. In event of war the South Korean military would take their orders from the US military.
I think America is an Empire but it is a much more benign form of empire than the British or French pre WW2, for now. Events like Iraq and now Venezuela are changing that.
The dollar as the reserve currency does serve to extract wealth from other countries and bring it to America. Nato doctrine is explicit that in event of a war involving Nato every other member countryโs military falls under US command.
Not how NATO works, exactly. When a NATO member is attacked all NATO members have the obligation to defend that nation, it's unlikely that they would start taking orders from the pentagon but rather the territory who was attacked and/or invoked the articles.
To describe the world's largest anti-war mutual defence pact as a Hostile Empire only proves that you're in favor of the actual Hostile Empires impeded by such an anti-war mutual defence pact.
Fun Fact: Donald Trump, who is the person responsible for the recent invasion of Venezuela, opposes NATO and has tried to withdraw from it multiple times.
Did I say hostile empire? You said that. I said more benign than previous empires.
I would rather live in the US than Russia or China, and If I didn't already live here, I would rather my country align with the US than Russia or China.
That doesn't mean there haven't been costs. Those cost might be worth paying. I don't think the UK, Canada, or Germany have been fools to align with the US, even if they may be rethinking that alignment now.
If only George Lucas had some interview where he exposes what inspired him to write the Emipire like such...
I can see how a scifi author taking notes from real life to adapt to fiction changes real life to perfectly match that fiction.
May George have mercy on our souls. /sarcasm
The first three movies are Vietnam. The Empire was America. He didn't change reality. He wrote about it.
The war in Vietnam started with French troops fighting alongside resistance to a dictatorship, the dictatorship which had launched all out war against south Vietnamese towns and villages in 1968, ultimately they failed and the US refused to withdraw from the war for many more years as a result of the incompetent Nixon administration.
Even if America had won that war, it's questionable whether you could consider it an Empire, because USA would have to then control Vietnam after liberating it from said dictatorship.
But back to your claim that the USA is the Empire in the Star Wars movies, what the fuck does that make the Viet Cong? Princess Leia?
Don't bother trying to prove Banjo wrong, he is in too deep in his own bubble of how America is good when it invaded countries.
From your source:
The Monroe Doctrine is a United States foreign policy position that opposes European colonialism in the Western Hemisphere. It holds that any intervention in the political affairs of the Americas by foreign powers is a potentially hostile act against the United States. The doctrine was central to American grand strategy in the 20th century.
President James Monroe first articulated the doctrine on December 2, 1823, during his seventh annual State of the Union Address to Congress (though it was not named after him until 1850). At the time, nearly all Spanish colonies in the Americas had either achieved or were close to independence. Monroe asserted that the New World and the Old World were to remain distinctly separate spheres of influence, and thus further efforts by European powers to control or influence sovereign states in the region would be viewed as a threat to U.S. security. In turn, the United States would recognize and not interfere with existing European colonies nor meddle in the internal affairs of European countries.
Honestly I think that is far too generous a description for Monroe, but it blatantly is Anti-Imperialist as described in that text.
I acknowledge the CIA have done horrible things in South America, but the USA has not forcefully consumed more land since the 1850s, ignoring small island nations caught in disputes such as the USA Guano Islands Act much of which was later reclaimed by the UK, and the lands taken control over during WWII after the Dai Nippon Empire had colonized them and then lost grounds during said war.
It might have originated as such, but in practice it defined a sphere of influence where America had a carte blanche to do whatever it wanted to enforce its interests. and would eventually become a form of unilateral vassalization, as seen from nonsense like the Olney interpretation and the Roosevelt corollary.
He extended the meaning of the Monroe Doctrine, which had previously stated merely that the Western Hemisphere was closed to additional European colonization: "Today the United States is practically sovereign on this continent and its fiat is law upon the subjects to which it confines its interposition...[1]
Sounds like an empire if I've ever seen one.
Except for the part where an Empire involves conquering foreign lands.
Haiti? Hawaii? Honduras? Philippines? All this shit? The US went from 37 states after the civil war to 50 less than a century later. Surely you could've thought of a few examples yourself.
Manifest Destiny...
That was over by 1850. Nobody from that time is alive today.
Because we committed genocide on their culture. Jesus Christ.
We ? I'm sorry, I didn't realize I was speaking with a 176+ Year Old Cavalryman.
Glad to know that if you die from Trump's brutalist fascism it won't matter because it was in the past.
That's odd, I had you pegged for a Tankie, the likes of which support Trump and worked hard to get him reelected as a way to irreparably harm the USA.
Fuck Tankies, I'm just not willing to ignore my countries horrors or praise another countries horrors because of a flag of a different color.
You can just admit you're wrong you know. Focusing on the territorial expansion, absolute laughable nonsense btw when talking about one of the largest nations to ever exist, instead of the absolute ruler that is technically required just makes you look willfully ignorant.
An empire is an empire and the USA is not currently, the majority in the USA want to keep it that way and are working hard to stop this madness.
The reason I feel the need to hardline on this issue is because those fucking Tankies have been calling the USA an empire for decades as an attempt to damage their reputation and normalize the actions of eastern autocrats.
As they say, fascism is imperialism turned inwards and the slow learners in the room are about to find out that conquered subjects don't particularly care about the technicalities of the power sharing arrangements of the oligarchs that own them when they talk about the sins of empire.
The USA does not have a history of Fascism and is not filled with Fascists, it's filled with people fighting against Fascism which very recently sprouted up in the USA with the help of eastern autocracies.
Look, if and when the USA tries to conquer Venezuela, then you can call that imperialism. But that has not happened. Maduro's VP is the new ruler of Venezuela according to Trump's cabinet and the pentagon.
It's history that proves him wrong, what did you expect from the man who thinks .world is now infected with Tankies on the admin level.
The United States has invaded more countries than anyone else. And he doesn't like that it's being called out.
The United States has invaded more countries than anyone else.
Britain would like a word...
(Or do you think the folks they invaded don't count because their societies weren't organized in the white definition of "countries?")
Haiti is not a US Territory. Philippines is not a US Territory. Honduras is not a US Territory.
Hawaii became a territory in 1900 and a state in 1959.
You see how if the US were an Empire, like China or the USSR, then they might have actually colonized somebody this century, right?
Natives, Mexico, Venezuela...
As of this moment, as I type this comment, none of Venezuelan land has been seized. It isn't chess where you can extract a leader and suddenly the war ends.
Ah, that makes it okay then. Good job. When we stole heads of state before that was cool too!
What Trump did was wrong, and my sincerest wish is that he gets flogged for it, but the USA is not currently an Empire.
