{"id":42520,"date":"2019-01-10T07:43:06","date_gmt":"2019-01-10T12:43:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=42520"},"modified":"2019-01-10T07:43:06","modified_gmt":"2019-01-10T12:43:06","slug":"slip-of-the-imperial-mask","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=42520","title":{"rendered":"Slip of the Imperial Mask"},"content":{"rendered":"

Slip of the Imperial Mask<\/a><\/h3>\n
\n

O\u2019Reilly then said about Putin: \u201cBut he\u2019s a killer, though. Putin\u2019s a killer.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump responded: \u201cThere are a lot of killers. We\u2019ve got a lot of killers. What do you think? Our country\u2019s so innocent?\u201d\u2013Feb 4, 2017<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I remember the day well. It was the day when the leader \u201cof the free world\u201d gave a hint of the true state of affairs in that allegedly \u201cfree\u201d world.<\/p>\n

To this day I\u2019m not sure why he said it. Why would Trump give free ideological ammunition against his own empire? Certainly not out of a feeling of remorse or some sense of historical justice. More likely then it was perhaps as a thinly veiled threat to those, worldwide, who would seek to oppose him? Something like: \u201cYou know what we are and we\u2019re so powerful that we no longer even fear publicly telling you up front about it\u201d.<\/p>\n

Yes, on that day President Trump punctured the still pervasive \u201cmyth of American innocence\u201d.A topic which has been profusely written about by Noam Chomsky among others.<\/p>\n

American hands are dirty. They drip with blood. They are an Orwellian power continuously existing through totalitarian contradictions. Their carefully constructed mask of freedom, hides the most insidious forms of slavery.<\/p>\n

But they are not alone. To maintain an Empire one needs allies. And these they have in abundance. They are not\u00a0just the globalized elites who rule the world but any who manage to benefit and prosper through their rule.\u00a0<\/em>Thus American Empire is not just an elite phenomenon but, crucially, a class cutting one. Witness the recent election and massive support for Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, a cliched American puppet that doesn\u2019t even seek to hide that fact egoistically\u00a0<\/em>trumpeting<\/em>\u00a0his facsimile to Trump. Even here in once radicalized Brazil, Empire is no longer afraid to proudly speak its name.<\/p>\n

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

Slip of the Imperial Mask O\u2019Reilly then said about Putin: \u201cBut he\u2019s a killer, though. Putin\u2019s a killer.\u201d Trump responded: \u201cThere are a lot of killers. We\u2019ve got a lot of killers. What do you think? Our country\u2019s so innocent?\u201d\u2013Feb 4, 2017 I remember the day well. It was the day when the leader \u201cof […]<\/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],"tags":[5493,15909,7844,259,23828,643,1213,827],"class_list":["post-42520","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geopolitics","tag-counterpunch","tag-dan-corjescu","tag-donald-trump","tag-empire","tag-orwellian-power","tag-power","tag-totalitarianism","tag-united-states"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42520","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=42520"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42520\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42521,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42520\/revisions\/42521"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=42520"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=42520"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=42520"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}