Pax Imperator

Pax Imperator

Are the “democratic” and “defensive” arguments presented to justify more than a century of continuous war actually believable? Or is domination of the peoples and resources of the world what is really involved? What is the truth about the “peace” of the “American Centuries? ”

The U.S. ruling class mistakenly believed they’d won the Cold War when the Soviet Union imploded some quarter century ago. They launched wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Middle East and Central Asia. These wars have dragged on and on for years and are now the longest in American history. They remain unresolved . . . and possibly unresolvable!

What has been wrought so far is untold death and destruction for millions of ordinary working popele. Washington’s course has also brought casualties and ruined lives for tens of thousands of U.S. workers and farmers deployed to fight and die for the interests of the ruling moneied families.

Sources: “Apocalypse Now” (1979) and “Restrepo.” (2010)

Additional Comments

The title of this piece is a take-off on that of an 1881 poem, “Ave Imperatrix,” by Oscar Wilde about the British Empire’s wars in Afghanistan, India, and Pakistan shortly after the empire suffered a costly defeat in the Second Anglo-Afghan War. Is the Wilde poem as crudely and naively jingoist as it appears? Or is it a satirical mockery of the dominant justisfication for imperialist expansionism as “the white man's burden” for “civilizing” the world. With Wilde one is never quite sure. In the final stanza he opines that a new and more just world under British rule would arise by sacrificing English blood for the plunder of the world by Victorian imperialism. Where have we heard that refrain repeated so many times since?

This argument in defense of colonial policy was put forward by the pro-imperialist wing of the Socialist International in the early years of the Twentieth Century as it became an apologist for Euro-American world domination – “the International of the white race,” in the words of the delegates to the

1919 Congress of the Peoples of the East in Baku, Azerbaijan.

These pro-war “socialists“ provided ideological cover to justify two world wars and the endless conflicts in faraway lands.

With breath-taking scenery and heart-pounding action, Apocalyse Now uses surrealistic and symbolic sequences detailing the confusion, violence, fear to tell the story of nightmarish madness of the Vietnam War. While hardly an antiwar screed, the movie raised important questions about the true American goals and counter-insurgency warfare. Restrepo is a documentary shot by a film crew embedded with a unit in a remote area of Afghanistan, but it is no less disturbing, dark, and surrealist.

The resulting imagery should give us pause to ask questions.

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