Tooth thief George Washington in Roman style, by Horatio Greenough (1841). Originally in the Capitol rotunda, now in the Smithsonian Museum. Photo: Smithsonian Institution.
By Indrajit Samarajiva – Mar 14, 2025
America posits that its imperialism is not imperialism (just helping out by bombing your village, aw shucks) but it’s remarkably similar to the Roman Empire. It’s literally the same architecture. The historian Mary Beard (et al) said something in passing which reflects how I’ve been trying to define White Empire for ages. She said,
Military conquest and the imposition of foreign control (whether in the form of taxation, puppet government or military occupation) inevitably impacts on cultural life — both in the imperial centre and in the provincial territories. No one can be culturally unaffected by imperialism.
Or in context, if you prefer.
I’ll focus on the first part of this statement, the methods of control, which are still the basic operating system of imperial power. Today America practices all these forms, financial, political, military and cultural imperialism.
Financial
President Donald Trump openly refers to tariffs as a tax on foreigners, which they aren’t really, but he expresses the id of America as always. America—meaning the corporations who actually run America—do tax the world, but they do it through debt. The real tax is debt servicing in USD, which eats up the majority of many nation’s budgets (like mine) and can never really be paid off (it compounds endlessly, and if that doesn’t work they just coup you). America accuses China of laying debt traps, but remember that every accusation is a confession.
As a recent study of over 1,000 loans to Africa from China found, “We found no “asset seizures” and despite contract clauses requiring arbitration, no evidence of the use of courts to enforce payments, or application of penalty interest rates.”America does all of these things through the World Bank and IMF, always headed by an American and a European, because imperialism. The wool changes, but the wolf stays the same.
It’s important to understand that debt and slavery were synonymous for most of history (read Michael Hudson’s, And Forgive Them Their Debts). If you were in debt you gave your wives, children, or yourself up for slavery. We decry such slavery today, but look at people slaving away. Names change, but ways stay the same. Today Sri Lankan wives toil away as housemaids in the Middle East, effectively and often actually slaves. Today convoys of people march themselves into hostile America to labor away, from both rights and their families. Slaves then, illegal immigrants today, same thing. National debt and personal wage slavery are just the slavery of our times, ask Tolstoy (The Slavery Of Our Times).
America keeps countries in chaos to make the slaves march themselves out, and to get tribute vis-à-vis natural resources for cheap. The places with the most gold, cobalt, and resources often find themselves in the most debt, because they’re the most enslaved. Remember that America is still a colony and that mass migration is just colonization. Even the reaction from the last wave of colonizers is the same (and note my Sri Lankan relatives today, complaining about immigrants).
Tim Cornell (in his book The Roman World) said, “Peasant families were driven out in large numbers by rich investors and were replaced on the land by slave labor. Slaves were in plentiful supply thanks to military victories and the resulting mass enslavement of defeated populations.” This is still the crux of the ‘illegal immigrant’ debate, with ‘illegal immigrant’ being the just modern word for an exploitable and expendable class of labor, ie slaves.
Today, America destabilizes the rest of the world so the slaves walk themselves in, or uses outsourcing to tap the same labor at a distance. It’s the same financial sucking sound that characterizes empire, just played using more sophisticated financial instrumentation. As the latter-day Roman Antonio Soprano said, “this thing is a pyramid, since time immemorial. Shit runs downhill, money goes up. It’s that simple.”
US Intelligence Contradicts Trump’s Narrative About Venezuela Government & Tren de Aragua
Political
America has long setup up ‘democratic’ puppets, and tears the whole show down when things don’t go their way. Anyone witnessing the twisting of Zelensky in the wind can see the exposed hand of American puppetry, flipping off all and sundry. When Henry Kissinger said ‘it’s dangerous to be America’s enemy but fatal to be America’s friend’, he was describing what people might think if two South Vietnamese puppets fell, but that shit happened, over and over again. It’s been 60 years of reruns and reboots, hyping up some despot like the second coming of democracy and then crucifying them.
If anyone thinks America has friends and not interests at this point, they’re on the blink. America installs puppet governments all over, letting them dance enough to be entertaining, but pulling the curtain on them if they ever get independent, or simply when there’s no more blood money to squeeze. Besides the complete destruction of Ukraine, America helped coup Peru and Pakistan, and places like Egypt and Jordan have long been this way. Hell, even Australia got couped in the 1970s, and has been reliably suicidal and genocidal ever since.
As the reanimated corpse of liberalism, Joe Biden was a sincere puppeteer, talking about ‘shared values’ (genocide, torture, and theft, mainly), but under Trump, the ventriloquist doesn’t even attempt to still his lips. Trump just made the eunuch of Jordan sit there and eat shit while facially glitching out and made Zelensky sit there while he mocked him for not wearing a suit. He also made Poland’s dimwit Duda wait for an hour to get dismissed in 10 minutes and has disrespected the heads of the UK, France, etc, letting them know that they’re just puppets on longer strings. A shared sense of hubris has now been replaced with humiliation. The puppeteer isn’t even trying anymore, and is petulantly throwing his toys away.
But I digress. The point here is that Empire, be it Roman or American, proceeds the same way. Overt political control is ungainly and unnecessary when you can find local puppets quite willing to humiliate themselves, kill your enemies, and give their own population and resources away.
Military Occupation
Military occupation goes without saying, America has circa 800 military bases around the world. If you showed anyone from the ancient world, they’d be like ‘nice empire you got there’. Only myopic moderns deny this, like bugs getting squashed in a rug and calling it massage therapy. Playing spoiler in World War II, America militarily occupied the UK, Germany, and Japan, etc, and they’re still there. America never drew down after World War II, because the war never stopped for colored people, and even delusional Europe is still occupied. No country is independent when they have foreign troops on their soil and these are not real countries.
I call it all one White Empire because, to those on the bottom, what’s the difference? In places like Sri Lanka we’ve just seen white people like the Dutch, British, and now Americans exploiting us under different flags, but always doing the same thing. Today brown people like me can become white and participate in our own colonization, yay! Like the diversification of the Roman Empire, we’ll do the dirty work just in time to be left with the steaming pile of dog shit that is late-stage empire (DEI did it!).
The present collapse of America, however, is rewriting their triumphal post WWII history. The fact, increasingly plain, is that America did not win World War II and has not really won a war since. They, in fact, went impotent after Vietnam, unable to conscript a mass army ever since. Now they can’t even field a professional (re: debt slave) army without knowing they’d get blown away in weeks, so they increasingly rely on conscript colonies like ‘Israel’, Ukraine, and South Korea. This is just another form of military occupation, nations so occupied that they sacrifice generations of their own children to fight their own neighbors. Each ‘conflict’ may be cloaked in local ideology and current events, but why are Slavs fighting Slavs, Semites genociding actual Semites, and Koreans pointing guns at Koreans? Divide and conquer is as old as unified empire and it still works a devil’s treat. Conquest using the conquered, the same infernal recipe. The only American innovation has been figuring out that there’s more money in losing wars than winning them, but it’s the same old imperialism.
Conclusion
I glide over these points because to people living today it goes without saying. Biden did it and Trump comes out and saying. Biden just committed a whole-assed genocide in Palestine and a military-industrial pump-and-dump in Ukraine, and Trump continues the same policies with less hypocrisy. Biden and Trump are just good cop/bad cop of the same police state. America is a two-headed monster, but both heads consume lives and resources and shit US treasuries. The financial instruments may change, but the tune stays the same. As Mary Beard said, the definition of imperialism is “Military conquest and the imposition of foreign control (whether in the form of taxation, puppet government or military occupation).” And so it remains.
The only difference is our indifference. Whereas the Roman Empire demanded fealty, Americans laugh at the idea that they’re an empire at all. They’ve discovered that the best place to hide an imperial elephant is in plain sight, covered with newspapers. American Empire relies on sleight of hand like debt, democracy™, and ‘defense’ to accomplish even greater imperialism largely by changing names. As Keyzer Soze said, the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist. But American Empire does exist. We can see as it goes out of existence, like a song can only be heard as it’s going away.
(indi.ca)
