“[Unless] the economic essence of imperialism … is studied,
it will be impossible to understand
and appraise modern war and modern politics.”
—Lenin1
Koreans were victims of Japanese colonialism, as well as of a higher-level process: imperialism. Imperialism is the activity, enterprise and methodology of building empires. There are a number of ways empires can be built. One is by establishing colonies. But there are other ways, as well.
Empires can be declared and formal, or undeclared and informal, or both. Whatever form they take, empires are structures predicated on systems of domination, of one country or nation over another. The British, French and Japanese empires were declared and formal but parts of them were also undeclared and informal. The US empire is mainly undeclared and informal, but there are declared parts as well. The US empire incorporates five inhabited “territories”—Puerto Rico, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, United States Virgin Islands and American Samoa (and 11 uninhabited ones)—which are effectively colonies. The people who live on these territories have no meaningful political representation in Washington. But for the most part, the US empire is informal and undeclared.
There are multiple possible ways a metropole—the empire’s home country—can incorporate other people into its empire. By stationing its troops on the soil of other countries, the United States can directly, though informally, dominate these countries. If the governments of countries that accept a US military presence enact policies the US government dislikes, Washington can use its military to either intimidate the foreign government into altering its policies, or directly intervene to overthrow it, or persuade the host country’s military to do so. Typically, where US troops are deployed abroad, the Pentagon has (usually) decisive influence over the host country’s armed forces. This is often achieved through the integration of the foreign military into the US command structure, either formally or informally, directly or indirectly. South Korea offers a good example. ROK forces are integrated as an auxiliary military force into the US command. Currently, there exists a formal agreement giving the United States operational control of the South Korean armed forces during war. But even if Seoul had formal control of its military, de facto control would remain with the United States, so long as the US military is present on the Korean peninsula. The Pentagon will never cede operational control of its forces to an allied military. Some in South Korea—embarrassed by the observation of North Korea that the ROK’s military dependency on the United States reveals its status as a US puppet—have pressed for Seoul to assume formal wartime operational control of South Korean military forces. But it is unrealistic to believe that, in the event of war, the Pentagon, which has close to 30,000 troops permanently stationed in South Korea, would place its East Asian-based military assets under the control of a South Korean general. US national security strategy, as we’ll see, is predicated on the notion of US leadership. The United States does not cede military leadership to subordinate parts of its empire.
A stark illustration of one of the ways in which the United States uses its military to enforce its domination may be conveyed in three points, related to a comment Alexander Haig made to United Press International in 2002 about the reasons why the United States stations tens of thousands of troops in Europe,22 and continues to do so, long after their ostensible purpose for being there—to defend Europe against the (wholly unrealistic) threat that the Soviet Union would attempt to spread socialism to Western Europe by force—had dissolved.
The first point concerns the position Haig once held, before becoming secretary of state in the Reagan Administration. From 1975 to 1979 Haig was Supreme Commander of NATO forces in Europe—which is to say that he, as a US general, had under his command the combined military forces of NATO’s European members. By design, a US flag officer always commands NATO’s combined forces. Additionally, in “war NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander has the power to suspend Europe’s civilian rules”3—in other words, to exercise a dictatorship over the greater part of Europe. The second point is that Haig explained that the Pentagon had 70,000 US troops in Germany because US troops kept “European markets open to [the United States]. If those troops weren’t there,” explained Haig, “those markets would probably be more difficult to access.”4 The third point is that imperialism is a process of domination guided by economic interests (for example, keeping European markets open to US investment and exports.)
In 2015, the United States had 52,000 troops in Japan, 38,000 in Germany, nearly 30,000 in South Korea, 11,000 in Italy, and 9,000 in Britain.5 Three of these countries, Germany, Japan, and Italy, are former Axis powers that, in the 1930s and early 1940s, established, or tried to establish, closed economic zones, which had the effect of excluding US foreign investment and exports. During the great global capitalist crisis of the 1930s (one of many economic crises in the history of perpetually crisis-prone capitalism), Great Britain also created a closed economic zone, through an imperial preference system of high tariff walls which encircled the empire. This had the effect of severely attenuating the global profit-making opportunities available to US (and other non-British Empire) businesses and investors. Today, the US military footprint is strongest in countries in which US fears of closed markets have historical resonance. Equally important, the significant US troop deployments to Great Britain and the former Axis countries are manifestations of a US commitment to safeguard the security of former imperial rivals. By taking on the role of guardian, the United States relieves its former competitors of the necessity and expense of building militaries which could be used to rebuild rival empires to challenge the United States. This benefits US foreign policy by eliminating former imperialist adversaries as potential military threats to US hegemony and keeps their markets open to US businesses.
While the degree of US military ubiquity is open to debate, there’s no doubt that the US military is ubiquitous. The five countries named above aren’t the only ones in which the United States has a military presence. Depending on how a military installation is defined, the United States has at least 662 bases in 36 foreign countries,6 or as many as 800 bases in 160 foreign countries and territories.7 By any measure, the Pentagon’s tentacles reach far beyond the frontiers of the US “homeland” (a word which, itself, is redolent of the stench of empire). According to David Vine, the “United States probably has more foreign military bases than any other people, nation, or empire in history.”8 Such a nation could deny that it has built an empire, but to do so would require the construction of a special reality, a folie en masse, or the creation of something tantamount to the “epistemology of ignorance” Charles Mills argued was necessary, to fail to see that the “liberal” political system of the Western world is, and has always been, white supremacist (i.e., illiberal.)9
Mills’ view, while related to liberalism and race, also illuminates the divergence between the idea of the equality of nations, codified in the United Nations Charter, and the reality of imperialism. The “officially sanctioned reality is divergent from actual reality.” Therefore, one “has to learn to see the world wrongly, but with the assurance that this set of mistaken perceptions will be validated by” the official “epistemic authority,”10 namely, corporate-funded think-tanks, corporate-endowed universities, corporate-owned mass media, and corporate-dominated governments. Thus, on matters related to foreign relations, the official ideology prescribes an inverted epistemology, an epistemology of ignorance, which produces the ironic outcome that the denizens of imperialist countries will in general be unable to understand the world their countries have made.11
The epistemology of ignorance relies on a lexicon of equivocation. Journalists who write for the US empire’s most distinguished newspapers—the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal—routinely employ language that acknowledges the United States’ imperialist nature, while at the same time never directly acknowledging the existence of a US empire, and therefore, denying it. For example, the Wall Street Journal’s Michael M. Phillips has written about “new ways the U.S. projects power around the globe,” pointing out that the “U.S. has come to rely on elite military units [special-operations forces] to maintain its global dominance,” and that “America’s special-operations forces have landed in 81 countries, most of them training local commandos to fight so American troops don’t have to.”12 In a few brief sentences Phillips shows that the United States is globally dominant and that one of the ways it maintains its dominance is through special operations forces which project US power in over four score countries. He also reveals one of the indirect mechanisms by which the United States produces and reproduces its empire: by training local commandos to fight as US surrogates. Phillips nowhere uses the words “empire,” “imperialism,” or “system of domination,” although the words British Empire, French Empire, German Empire, Russian Empire, Ottoman Empire, Austro-Hungarian Empire and even Soviet Empire are all considered acceptable constructions. The United States—which began as 13 former British colonies on the Atlantic coast of North America pursuing a “manifest destiny” of continental expansion, (the inspiration for Nazi Germany’s lebensraum policy); which fought a war with Spain for colonies; which promulgated the Monroe Doctrine asserting a sphere of influence in the Americas; which stole Panama to create a canal; whose special operations forces project US power in 81 countries; whose generals control the militaries of the combined NATO members in Europe and the military forces of South Korea; whose military command stations one hundred thousand troops on the territories of former imperialist rivals, manifestly has an empire.
And yet this reality is denied, as assuredly as is the reality that the United States, built on the genocide of Native Americans and the slave labor of Africans, overtly white supremacist until the mid-1960s, and covertly white supremacist since, is unequivocally not a beacon of Enlightenment values, unless liberalism is defined as equality and liberty assigned exclusively to white men who own productive property. Indeed, so antithetical is the United States to the liberal values of the equality of all peoples and nations, freedom from exploitation and oppression, and the absence of discrimination on the bases of class, race, and sex, that it’s difficult to apprehend in what sense the United States has ever been liberal or has in any way had a legitimate claim to being the repository of the values of the Enlightenment.
Zbigniew Brzezinski, US president Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser, and a central figure in the US foreign policy establishment, could compare the United States to the Roman, Manchu, and European empires but could not bring himself to speak of a US empire. Instead, he spoke of a “hegemony of a new type” and described the United States as a “global power,” which has “primacy,” and exercises “supremacy.”13 The philosopher and historian Domenico Losurdo, eschewing euphemism and rejecting the epistemology of ignorance, uses a more fitting and descriptive term for Brzezinski’s equivocations: the international dictatorship of the United States.14
Helpfully, however, Brzezinski enumerates some of the direct and indirect mechanisms by which the United States exercises “global power” with a “scope and pervasiveness” that is “unique” in world history15—that is, creates and reproduces its international dictatorship.
First, the United States has a “peerless military establishment, the only one with effective global reach,” allowing it to “project forces over long distances in order to impose” its “political will.”16 Second, it “emphasizes the technique of co-optation (as in the case of defeated rivals—Germany, Japan …) to a much greater extent than the earlier imperial systems did.”17 Third, graduates of US “universities are to be found in almost every Cabinet on every continent.”18 US universities recruit talented individuals from abroad, instill in them US imperialist ideology and values, and equip them with academic credentials and prestige which conduce to their landing important political positions at home. In this way, US imperial goals indirectly structure the political decision-making of other countries. Fourth, the “International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank can be said to represent ‘global’ interests, and their constituency may be construed as the world. In reality, however, they are heavily American dominated and their origins are traceable to American initiative.”19 Bruce Cumings describes the so-called Bretton Woods institutions in similar terms: the United States, he writes, has “a very active foreign economic policy seeking to enmesh developing countries in Asia and Latin America into a host of [US]-influenced multilateral organizations,” including the World Bank and IMF, which are little more than instruments of the US Treasury Department.20 Hence, through a mixture of military, economic, and ideological instruments, the United States has created a globe-spanning system of domination—an empire.
Before the Great War, the war now known as WWI, most of the world was partitioned among eight great powers. The very fact that the world was partitioned implied empire and imperialism, even if one of the great powers, the United States, shunned the terms. The most powerful of the great powers—those which controlled the greatest territory—were Britain, France, Russia and the United States. A second tier included Germany, Austria-Hungary, Japan, and Italy. Germany, Japan, and Italy would become known as “have not” powers, indicating that their colonial possessions were limited by comparison with the Big Four. The Big Four had colonies—continental and mainly internal in the case of Russia and the United States, and overseas in the case of Britain and France. The “have-not” powers were new industrial powers without the large continental expanse of the United States and Russia or the globe-girding network of colonies and protectorates of Britain and France. The Big Four could rely on their vast empires to furnish them with the raw materials they needed to run their factories, the crops they needed to feed their people, and the land they needed to settle their surplus populations.
As their industrial economies grew, the have-not powers found themselves pressed to secure sources of raw materials, as well as markets for their finished products. Land on which to settle their teeming populations also became important. Industrialization—including the mechanization of agriculture—had engendered sudden and massive population shifts, as displaced subsistence farmers migrated from the countryside to the city. Germany, for example, was in the early twentieth century a vast warren of urban slums, teeming with people without “living space.” The inability of the industrial capitalist economies of the have-not powers to furnish all their citizens with employment meant that large parts of their populations were “surplus.” This created a potential for unrest and possibly revolution.
The continual westward expansion of the United States through conquest of Native American territory defused potential revolutionary movements by providing immigrants of European origin with land (that of the indigenous peoples) to settle—a process of turning proletarians into landowners. Likewise, angry Britons without prospects who might take a militant revolutionary path could immigrate to Canada, Australia, New Zealand, or South Africa to settle on the land of the aboriginal peoples of the British dominions. Their French counterparts also had outlets in the French colonial domain, particularly Algeria. Hence, the problem (from the perspective of the great powers’ ruling classes) of social revolution was solved through the dispossession of indigenous peoples. Cecil Rhodes, the notorious British imperialist—our Hitler, as one black South African aptly described him—told the British ruling class that “Empire, as I have always said, is a bread and butter question. If you want to avoid [social revolution], you must become imperialists.”21
There were five important drivers of capitalist imperialism: the need for (1) raw materials, (2) markets, and (3) investment opportunities; the need (4) to hold territory for strategic reasons to protect supply and shipping routes; and the need for (5) outlets to settle surplus populations, made redundant by the mechanization-driven displacement of subsistence farming. Raw materials, markets, and investment opportunities could be freely obtained in an open international trade and investment system, but any great power could deny its rivals access to these necessities as a means of strengthening its own position. This made the up-and-coming powers—Germany, Japan, and Italy—extremely vulnerable. Without vast territorial possessions, they could thrive only in a global economic system that was open to international trade and investment.
But who, or what, was to guarantee it would remain open? There were obvious incentives for the Big Four to create advantages for their own financiers, industrialists, and commercial concerns by securing for them as much economic space as possible while restricting the space open to their international competitors. With the world already largely divided among the four great powers, Britain, France, the United States, and Russia were thus in a position to stifle the emerging powers by impeding their access to the world’s raw materials, markets, and investment opportunities.
The Great War did nothing to ameliorate the situation of the three have-not powers. On the contrary, the war made Great Britain and France stronger. The two imperial behemoths divided up the defeated Ottoman Empire and helped themselves to the colonies of the vanquished Germany. Their wartime allies, Italy and Japan, who had been promised territorial gains, were denied them after the war.22 The upshot of the great global conflagration, then, was that Britain and France enlarged their economic space, while Japan and Italy made no gains, and Germany fell behind.
Japan, whose mountainous topography afforded little room for agriculture, lacked almost all the natural resources a modern industrial economy needed. It was almost entirely dependent on imports of foodstuffs and raw materials, making it extremely vulnerable to naval blockade and placing it at the mercy of the countries and great powers that controlled its industrial economy’s desiderata. Iron ore—necessary for the production of steel—had to be imported from China and Malaya. Japan had virtually no internal source of oil. It relied almost exclusively on foreign sources, and in the first decades of the twentieth century Britain and the United States controlled almost all the world’s supply. The solution to Japan’s vulnerability, as far as the country’s rulers could figure, was to secure control of territory that would provide the inputs Japan’s industrialists needed.23
Japan’s delegate to the Versailles conference, at which matters pertaining to the settlement of the war were decided, urged a rejection of what he termed “the Anglo-American centered peace.” “No doubt the condition before the war was satisfactory from the viewpoint of Great Britain and America,” wrote Prince Konoe Fumimaro, a future prime minister (1940-1941), “but it cannot be said so, when considered from the viewpoint of justice and humanity. As may be seen in their history of colonization, England and France occupied most of the less civilized countries long ago and made them their colonies. In consequence, Germany and other latecomers could hardly find any land to secure for their expansion. This state of things was contrary to the fundamental principle of equal opportunity and a right to the equal existence of different countries.”24
Echoing Konoe, the Japanese journalist Kiyoshi Kawakami observed:
Here is Japan, struggling to resolve, partly at least, her population problem by becoming an industrial and trading nation, and yet harassed by a lack of three essential materials of industry—oil, iron, and coal. If she steps an inch out of her narrow precincts and tries to obtain, say in Siberia or China, the privilege of working such mineral resources, down comes the sword of Damocles in the shape of protest, official or otherwise, from the Western nations. … [The] question is, is the existing world order right, allowing a few nations to monopolize vast territories and enormous resources, and compelling others to eke an existence out of their limited lands and scanty resources.25
The Great Depression spurred Britain, the United States, and France to step up protectionist measures. This intensified the dissatisfaction of the have-not powers, who wondered how they could flourish in a world in which their access to raw materials and markets was severely restricted. At the best of times, Germany, Japan, and Italy were dependent on the imperial titans to grant them access to the markets and territories the titans controlled. Now, with the global capitalist system in crisis, the doors to the economic spaces dominated by the great powers were slamming shut. The problem facing the emerging industrial powers was now bigger than mere dependency; they could be starved of raw materials and export markets altogether. Thus, efforts to acquire economic space would have to be redoubled, and force used if necessary.26
Having already acquired Taiwan, Korea, the southern half of Sakhalin, and a string of Pacific islands, Japan now undertook to bring Manchuria and Mongolia into its empire, in order to solve the “critical problems of population and foodstuffs,” as one Japanese officer put it in 1931.27 Japan’s captains of finance, industry, and commerce looked greedily upon China as a new frontier. Its size exercised a magnetic appeal to Japanese business people and investors spellbound by the East Asian giant’s immense market,28 an attraction that has lost none of its power since. Investors worldwide continue to lust after China as a vast reserve of potential customers. At the same time, Manchuria, like Palestine and the American West, was imagined by its colonizers as a terra nullius, that is, an empty space—an almost limitless frontier awaiting Japanese settlement,29 or, making a slight alteration to the words with which white European Zionists justified their theft of Palestinian land for Jewish settlement, a land without people for a people with too little land.
In September 1931, conspirators in the Japanese army instigated a “false flag” operation in Manchuria to create a pretext to launch a military occupation of the territory. Six months later, a new state was created on the occupied territory.30 Nominally under Chinese control, but actually under Japanese direction, the new state was called Manchukuo, literally “state of Manchuria.” The state is almost invariably described as a puppet state for three reasons. First, it was created by Tokyo on foreign territory Japan occupied militarily. Without Japanese intervention, Manchukuo would never have existed. The state was not of Chinese origin, proclaimed by Chinese for Chinese reasons, but was of Japanese provenance, created for Japanese reasons. Second, while the heads of Manchukuo’s government ministries and departments were Chinese, vice-ministers and advisers were Japanese. Third, Japan and Manchukuo signed a mutual defense treaty making the Kwantung Army, the Japanese garrison in Manchuria, responsible for its national security.31 For these reasons, Manchukuo is so routinely referred to as “the puppet state of Manchukuo” that one might think that “the puppet state of” should be capitalized and made part of Manchukuo’s official name, as in The Japanese Puppet State of Manchukuo.
In the absence of a theory of the epistemology of ignorance it would be difficult to understand why South Korea isn’t also called a puppet state (except by the North Korean media). There are striking parallels between South Korea and Manchukuo. Both states were created by empires on foreign territory which armies of the empires occupied for reasons related to imperial expansion. While the political offices of the empire-created states were occupied by local actors, fostering the appearance of local sovereignty, imperial advisers played a large role behind the scenes. And in both cases, responsibility for national security was ceded through “mutual agreement” to the empire, whose military remained as an occupying force on the states’ territories.
Like Brzezinski, who could talk of the US empire, not as an empire, but as a hegemony of a new type, the furthest Western scholars, journalists, and commentators seem to be willing to go to acknowledge that there exists on the Korean peninsula an entity which ought to be rightfully called “the US puppet state of South Korea,” is to acknowledge that South Korea exists “in the soft soil of semi-sovereignty,” and that it has “a weak state vis-à-vis the United States.”32 These are the words of the leading US historian of modern Korea, an acknowledgement, without actually saying it, that the ROK has a status fundamentally equivalent to that of Manchukuo.
Emboldened by the example of Japan extending its economic space in the face of the imperial titans erecting protectionist walls around the vast territory they controlled, Italy invaded Abyssinia (today’s Ethiopia) on the ground that it “needed the area for its economic survival”33—which is to say, it was driven by the expansionary logic its industrial capitalist economy created. Ethiopia occupied the intervening space between Somalia and Eritrea, which Italy already held as colonies. By acquiring Ethiopia, Italy could control a large contiguous space on the Horn of Africa, which it would call Italian East Africa.
The Italian position was clear. Britain … was to blame. Its empire spanned the world and hogged the lion’s share of resources without regard to the rights of others. A propaganda leaflet showing John Bull bestriding the globe declared that “England has in its hands or controls almost all the raw materials produced in the world: from cotton to wool, from petroleum to diamonds, from coal to gold.” Because it was aware that without its empire it would be a third-rate power, “England has used the great riches in its possession to impede in every way those who, less favored by nature, have attempted, as is their right, to find new sources of riches and work.” This was not fair, and it could not be tolerated. “At the base of every war and especially those which are being fought nowadays, there is an economic claim. Peoples less rich in raw materials, or densely populated nations, need to procure all that is indispensable for their existence, or to seek in less inhabited territories an outlet for their always growing population. … No one can deny to any people the right to life. … We Italians in particular do not wish to be exposed forever to every possible form of economic suffocation because we lack oil or coal or iron or rubber or wool.”34
For its part, Germany launched a series of aggressions in Europe in the late 1930s, beginning with the annexation of Austria in 1938, and culminating in Operation Barbarossa, the June 22, 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union, initiating the greatest war of colonial expansion in history. Hitler boasted that Germany’s Drang nach Osten, its push to the east, an objective that had long characterized German foreign policy, would secure for the Reich the economic self-sufficiency Germany had craved. “We shall become the most self-supporting State, in every respect … in the world,” the Führer promised. “Timber we shall have in abundance, iron in limitless quantity, the greatest manganese-ore mines in the world.” As for oil, Germany would “swim in it.”35 Under Hitler’s direction, the Third Reich set out to build (by force) a Grossraumwirtschaft, a “greater economic zone,” over most of Europe.
In a January 1937 article in Foreign Affairs, the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Wall Street-funded and -directed foreign policy think-tank, Hjalmar Schacht, Hitler’s minister of economics and president of the Reichsbank, adumbrated the causes of Germany’s forthcoming aggressive expansion.36 He titled his article “Germany’s Colonial Demands.”
Before WWI, Schacht explained, Germany bought industrial inputs all over the world. “The markets where raw materials were procured were completely free.” Additionally, emigration and immigration “was open and was looked on with favor.” But with the collapse of the world (capitalist) economy, all “these elementary principles of international trade and intercourse” had disappeared. Strict regulations governing “immigration into almost all countries where formerly immigrants were welcome” now impeded the outward migration of Germany’s surplus population. In the place of free trade had arisen “quotas and restrictions, to say nothing of constant increases in the more effective tariffs. German investments abroad,” Schacht complained, had “been taken away without compensation, and the markets where raw materials” had been previously obtained were now almost impossible to access.
For these reasons, and with no other choice, Germany had embarked on a project of autarky, that is, self-sufficiency. The great power critics of Germany’s drive to economic self-sufficiency were hypocritical, Schacht said. “People entirely forget” that autarky has “long since been achieved by such countries as France and Great Britain, not to mention Russia and the United States.” So “vast is the geographical expanse of the United States of America, so enormous its wealth, that it is much less dependent than other countries on an exchange of goods with the outside world.” Similarly, Russia contains “all kinds of raw materials.” What’s more, the British Empire had “more than a quarter of the earth’s surface at its disposal” containing “one-quarter of the world’s wheat, one-half of the world’s wool and rubber, one-quarter of the world’s coal, one-third of the world’s copper, and almost all of the world’s nickel.” Of twenty-five raw materials vital to a modern industrial economy, “the British Empire was amply supplied in its own territory with no less than eighteen, was supplied to a certain extent in two cases, and was deficient in only five.” Germany, in contrast, “was sufficiently supplied by its own production in only four cases, was more or less adequately supplied in two, and was completely without supplies in nineteen.” In Italy and Japan, wrote Schacht, “conditions are equally unfavorable.”
Returning to the world economic crisis, Schacht pointed out that the quantity of raw materials Germany could procure on the world market was now “far below what Germany” needed “to keep her industries going and maintain the standard of living for her people.” Ominously, he warned, “There will be no peace in Europe until this problem is solved. No great nation willingly allows its standard of life and culture to be lowered and no great nation accepts the risk that it will go hungry.”
To strengthen his case, Schacht cited the analysis of Colonel Edward M. House, a US diplomat who had been an adviser to Woodrow Wilson. House had written in Liberty magazine that,
Germany, Italy and Japan need reservoirs into which to pour their manpower and from which to draw those necessities and raw materials which nature denied them. But the greatest possessing nations—Great Britain, France, the United States and Russia—are unwilling to grant to their less fortunate fellows more than the crumbs that fall from their colonial table. … Great Britain, France, Russia and the United States must receive Italy, Germany and Japan on terms adjusted to present world conditions and recognize their insistence upon being given their proper part of the colonial resources of the world. Chaos and catastrophe will be upon us unless those that have among the Powers are willing to share in some way with those that have not.
Here, then, was the situation that confronted the world: an “insignificant minority of the richest advanced capitalist countries” had divided up the globe into economic spheres. Central to the relations among these countries was conflict over “the territorial division of the world, of the struggle for colonies, of the ‘struggle for economic territory.’” The world had been partitioned. In the future, only redivision was possible. Japan, Italy, and Germany could not meet the demand for raw materials, markets, and outlets for emigration that their industrial capitalist economies had created, except by conquering new territory. But there was no new territory to conquer. Therefore, only two possible outcomes remained: the great powers in possession of vast territorial extent would either have to voluntarily cede some of their territory to the have-not powers, or the have-not powers would have to take the territory by force.37
From the point of view of Japan, Italy, and Germany, the division of the world among the great powers was unfair. The emerging industrial nations were denied access to colonies and territory. But what of the overwhelming majority of the world’s people who lived and worked in the territories the great powers coveted? Where were the voices of the people living in the colonies and semi-colonies, who vastly outnumbered the denizens of the industrialized world? The caterwauling of Japan, Italy, and Germany about the denial of their place in the sun was simply a plea to be brought into the club of a few powerful world marauders armed to the teeth, who would exploit the vast majority of humanity.38 After all, “less than one-tenth of the inhabitants of the globe; less than one-fifth, if the most generous and liberal calculations were made, of very rich and very powerful states” were bickering over how much of the plunder of the remaining 80 percent of humanity they each should receive.39
Lenin had written in 1917 that rivalry among the advanced industrialized countries had “become very keen because Germany has only a restricted area and few colonies,”40 an observation which could have been made with equal validity about Italy and Japan. Without recognizing the economic roots of empire-building, Lenin wrote, it would “be impossible to understand and appraise modern war and modern politics.”41 The cogency of Lenin’s analysis was tacitly acknowledged at the end of World War II by the Allies. Their initial plan (subsequently abandoned) was to de-industrialize Germany and Japan. These two advanced capitalist industrialist powers, which had threatened the economic space of the United States, France, and Britain, in an effort to enlarge their own, would be transformed into agricultural societies, shorn of the drive and the means to launch aggressive wars. This was an acknowledgement that industrial capitalism reposed at the root of the Axis’s aggressive, expansionary, foreign policies.
For Lenin, the solution to the problem of “powerful world marauders” embroiling “the whole world in their” wars “over the sharing of their booty,” was neither more war nor bringing Germany, Italy, and Japan more fully into the world system of imperial domination as charter members. His solution was to eliminate the world system of imperial domination altogether, and with it, other relationships of domination as well, including those of class and gender.
Lenin had founded a new organization in 1919, the Third International, which dedicated itself to “the struggle of the working class and the oppressed nations of the whole world to free themselves.”42 The Bolshevik leader had denounced Japan’s “savage tortures of the Korean patriots and barbaric exploitation of Korea.”43 This contrasted sharply with the US position of conniving with Japan to divide up the Philippines and Korea between the two empires. Where the United States and Britain had facilitated Japan’s oppression of the Koreans, Lenin and the Bolsheviks denounced it, and urged Koreans to free themselves. This would inspire patriots in Korea, including Kim Il-sung.
1 V.I. Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. (New York: International Publishers, 2000), 8.
3 Julian E. Barnes, “Nato plans to create two new commands amid Russian tensions,” The Wall Street Journal, October 24, 2017.
4 De Borchgrave.
5 Carol E. Lee, “On final Asia trip, Obama faces tests to U.S. power,” The Wall Street Journal, September 7, 2016; The Wall Street Journal, June 23, 2015.
6 Jeffrey D. Sachs, “The fatal expense of American imperialism,” The Boston Globe, October 30, 2016.
7 David Vine, “The United States probably has more foreign military bases than any other people, nation, or empire in history,” The Nation (New York, NY), September 14, 2015.
8 Ibid.
9 Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 18-19.
10 Ibid., 18.
11 Ibid.
12 Michael M. Phillips, “New ways the U.S. projects power around the globe: Commandoes,” The Wall Street Journal, April 24, 2015.
13 Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives. (New York: Basic Books, 1997). See Chapter 1, titled “A Hegemony of a New Type.”
14 Domenico Losurdo, “Uri Avnery between US international dictatorship and Israel’s extrajudicial killings,” Voltairenet.org, November 18, 2011.
15 Brzezinski, 23.
16 Ibid., 23-24.
17 Ibid., 25.
18 Ibid., 25.
19 Ibid., 27.
20 Bruce Cumings. Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2005, 332.
21 Quoted in Lenin, Imperialism, 79.
22 Macdonald, p. 97.
23 Ibid., 124.
24 Ibid., 98.
25 Ibid., 98.
26 Ibid., 113.
27 Ibid., 114.
28 Young, 26.
29 Ibid., 15.
30 Macdonald, 114.
31 Young, 40.
32 Cumings, 332.
33 Macdonald, 114.
34 Ibid., 114-115.
35 Ibid., 130.
36 Hjalmar Schacht, “Germany’s Colonial Demands, Foreign Affairs 15, no. 2, (1937).
37 This is the thesis propounded by Lenin in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism.
38 Lenin, Imperialism, 11.
39 Ibid., 13.
40 Ibid., 96.
41 Ibid., 8.
42 Kim, With the Century.
43 Ibid.