{"id":42039,"date":"2018-12-28T08:50:22","date_gmt":"2018-12-28T13:50:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=42039"},"modified":"2018-12-28T08:50:22","modified_gmt":"2018-12-28T13:50:22","slug":"fuck-you-dying-american-empire-reflections-of-an-aging-anti-imperialist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=42039","title":{"rendered":"Fuck You, Dying American Empire: Reflections of an Aging Anti-Imperialist"},"content":{"rendered":"

Fuck You, Dying American Empire: Reflections of an Aging Anti-Imperialist<\/a><\/h3>\n
\n

Last year at Jamia Millia Islamia Central University in New Delhi, India I met students and teachers who thought that it was cool that I\u2019d written an anti-imperialist book and that it was still in print nearly fifty years after it was first published. It was easy to be an anti-imperialist at Jamia Millia. After all, the students and the teachers were anti-imperialists and all worked-up about U.S. drones, U.S. air strikes and about the Syrians on the ground who had been battered and bombed.<\/p>\n

It was also relatively easy to be an anti-imperialist in the late 1960s and early 1970s when anti-imperialism was a red badge of courage in SDS, the Venceremos Brigade, in anti-war circles and even among the Yippies, who were far more internationalist in their outlook than many on the Left assumed. Once upon a time, Jerry Rubin went to Cuba to check out the revolution, and later to Chile with singer and songwriter, Phil Ochs, to see what Salvador Allende was doing.<\/p>\n

But here in the U.S. in 2018, is it still possible to be an authentic anti-imperialist, an anti-imperialist in more than name? I thought about that question recently when a former comrade explained that he<\/em> was still an anti-imperialist and wondered if I was one, too.<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t the first time that my politics were questioned. In 1980, soon after Reagan was elected president, Professor Edward Said asked me if I was still on the Left and hadn\u2019t drifted to the right like that former radical, David Horowitz, whom Alexander Cockburn dismissed as a \u201cwhiner.\u201d A plain \u201cYes,\u201d or a \u201cNo\u201d answer wouldn\u2019t do, nor a \u201cMaybe.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Fuck You, Dying American Empire: Reflections of an Aging Anti-Imperialist Last year at Jamia Millia Islamia Central University in New Delhi, India I met students and teachers who thought that it was cool that I\u2019d written an anti-imperialist book and that it was still in print nearly fifty years after it was first published. It […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,6],"tags":[23642,5493,23643,259,10956,3520,23641,827],"class_list":["post-42039","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geopolitics","category-liberty","tag-anti-imperialism","tag-counterpunch","tag-dying-empire","tag-empire","tag-imperial-collapse","tag-imperialism","tag-jonah-raskin","tag-united-states"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42039","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=42039"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42039\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42040,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42039\/revisions\/42040"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=42039"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=42039"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=42039"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}