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In Germany and Japan, the general feeling is now one of contrition for the atrocities committed during brutal occupations, not one of innocence as grandparents professed claiming themselves co-victims. When all the U.S. troops, ships and planes have exited all the places they didn't belong, will Americans' sense of innocence be replaced by similar pangs of conscience, and shame for the disappointing behavior of their parents?

All imperial occupations eventually end (though usually not before a ghastly massive pound of indigenous flesh is exacted along with the plunder originally intended).

Modern history has seen the various empires come and go, each having been the dominant military of its particular time enabling it to conquer and occupy the lands of others.

The Ottoman Sultans and Austrian Emperors, proud of their military prowess and ability to put down revolts, probably had difficulty imagining the extinction of their empires and their being reduced to Turkey and Austria, two small nations among a thousand others.

The sun never set on the Portuguese, Dutch, French, Spanish and English empires' occupations as they successively replaced each other as number one overseas European military power.

None were able to sustain their occupations (the northern part of Ireland and the Malvinas or Faukland Islands being the two large exceptions, remnants that will surely soon be freed from British control naturally).

Czarist Russia had managed better, for its conquered and occupied peoples were not overseas but neighbors, as was the case of the nascent imperial United States occupying the lands of nations native to North America.

The British were forced to leave India and China and were driven out of Kenya by requited homicidal violence against its vulnerable live-in exploiters. They were driven out of their American colonies two centuries earlier. The end of the fading French empire's occupations, rescued temporarily by the U.S., came with Laotian, Vietnamese and Algerian wars of independence.


The Deutsches Reich, and its collaborating Japanese Empire risen to first rank world power occupiers (thanks to American capitalist investment) usually lost control of occupied nations to popular partisan guerilla forces before the actual arrival of Allied troops.

The American empire's claim, "We seek no territory beyond our own,'' though hardly a political deception ever taken seriously abroad, served well at home to hail American exceptionalism as its armies roamed the earth and its merchant based society gained control of half the world's wealth and natural resources.

Today's U.S. wars of occupation and its having put most nations under its doctrine of right to bomb are evidence of an unproclaimed but murderously real American Empire of banking institutions and far flung world wide net of a hundred and seventy-five military installations.

From the seed of the appallingly ignorant racist pseudo philosophy of Manifest Destiny "justifying' a belligerent and primitive use of its navy, (as when Commodore Perry sailed into a Yokohama harbor and threatening to open fire), and its gunboats (on Chinese rivers and elsewhere) to force trade agreements, a nascent American commercial empire grew and converted itself into a more planted and seemingly permanent form of foreign hegemony beyond its intermittent occupations.

With its powerful military, the United States has managed to occupy nations at will throughout its history, witness the dozens and dozens of invasions and both short and long (decades long, in the case of Cuba, Haiti and the Dominican Republic), in Latin America, in the Philippines and recently in other Far Eastern and Middle Eastern countries.

But limitations on its use of military cropped up early on and have continued to augment themselves.

In the 1920s, it felt obliged to withdraw two U.S. armies from revolutionary Russia, and found it too troublesome to continue its occupation of the Dominican Republic.

In the 1930s, Roosevelt felt it wise to withdraw the Marines from a nineteen year occupation of Haiti to herald in his defensive "Good Neighbor" policy;

In the 1940s, the newly forming empire American bankers and captains of industry helped build boldly attacked the U.S. navy in both the Pacific and the Atlantic.

In the 1950s, it was driven from North Korea;

In the 1960s, Eisenhower was unable to defeat a revolution against the French colonial backed Laotian government in spite of bombing that country more than any nation in the history of air attacks, and the quick defeat of a U.S. invasion of Cuba was its first in Latin America.

In the 1970s, came the defeat in Vietnam after thirty years of funding war and the death of fifty-eight thousand American warriors (the millions of Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians are not considered of consequence).

In the 1980s, Carter's failed Operation Eagle Claw air commando raid against the Iranian revolutionary government cost him the election, and after an early invasion of Lebanon, Reagan withdrew after losing nearly three hundred servicemen to two suicide truck bombers.

In the 1990s, after it ordered some wild shooting it up in Somalia, it was faced with deadly citizen rage, and Clinton withdrew U.S. forces.

In 2000 the destroyer USS Cole was disabled in Yemen, and later saw its forces continually under attack in occupied Afghanistan and Iraq.

As all empires, the United States of America has obedient satellites and pressured allies willing or forced to participate in its occupations, in its aggrandizing of wealth and resources, some earning imperial gratitude or remuneration for engaging in proxy wars of occupation or providing troops or tribute for the empire's own military initiatives.

Presently, Ethiopia in Somalia, NATO in Afghanistan and Columbia in South America and an "international community' arrayed ready to aid an another attack on Iran are are examples prominently lauded in imperial news media.

Dramatic instances of broad and compliant acquiescence to U.S. moves within nations are manifold: its taking over from the British in Greece; the colossus' roaring blitzes of Panama, tiny Grenada, the Dominica Republic; its CIA funding and participating in civil wars all over the former colonial Third World, as in Angola; its overthrowing of democratic governments in Guatemala, Iran, Congo, Chile and Haiti, handling of pan-nationalists like Cheddi, Jagan, Nassar and Nkruma, and seeing to the installation of proxy indigenous occupiers; its almost infantile lies to justify invasions and bombing of Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen to cite only a very few during which little or no formal disapproval was voiced - perhaps the most striking of which was Washington having Saddam Hussein invade and war for eight years against upstart and oil rich Iran.

Part of this in international "cooperation' scenario is the U.N. being designated to provide medical aid and other humanitarian services in U.S. occupied countries, and to clean up afterward. The Empire easily dominates the U.N. Security Council and uses the U.N. name and organization to its own purposes. The U.S., during the absence of the Soviet Union on the Council, bombed, invaded and occupied Korea under the U.N. flag.

American bombings, invasions, occupations and control of many peoples across the world by economic leverage and covert destabilization and promoting civil wars will end someday relatively soon. In the meantime how many Americans will continue to be well adjusted to living with it and ignoring their responsibility for the crimes against humanity of their government. A government which proclaims that killing its designated bad guys everywhere, huge collateral death notwithstanding, is useful and necessary to the protection of the Empire's home nation.

At best, empires are amoral in their treatment of occupied populations . There were a few notable exceptions in the ancient world - that of a reformed and repentant great emperor Ashoka turning to Buddhism comes to mind.

Though today Germany and Japan have their small neo-fascist fringe groups on the margin as elsewhere, the general feeling in the public at large is now one of contrition for the atrocities committed in the name of their nations during brutal occupations accepted by their forefathers, who failed to prevent their country from falling under fascist domination. German and Japanese citizens feel some national complicity, not the innocence that most of their grandparents professed as they proclaimed themselves simply co-victims. Pride in their nations history as been diminished for its violent occupations of other nations.

One supposes that one day, a generation after all the U.S. troops, ships and planes have exited all
the places they didn't belong doing things that imperial armed forces
do, children in America will have a similar feeling and pangs of conscience, a bit of shame for the disappointing behavior of Americans that went before them

Take action - contact your local newspaper or congress people:
Tell Congressmen and media commentators that we are ashamed of them and owrselves for listening to them regarding wars.