empire

so far gone

antarchi's picture

A horrible, shocking documentary:

Ghosts of Abu Ghraib

How on earth can we pull back from where we are, and how did we manage to get so far. By turning away, compartmentalising what is happening, by allocating it to 'politics' or 'war' or something else towards which we can look or not look and for which we bear no share of blame - by doing all of that we let it happen, on and on, worse and worse, and more and more impossible to halt.

police state cyprus

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To bring the island [of Cyprus] to heel, London dispatched no less a figure than the chief of the Imperial General Staff, Field Marshal Sir John Harding. Within a month of his arrival in 1955, he told the cabinet with brutal candour that if self-determination was ruled out, ‘a regime of military government must be established and the country run indefinitely as a police state.’ He was as good as his word. The standard repertoire of repression was applied. Makarios was deported. Demonstrations were banned, schools closed, trade-unions outlawed. Communists were locked up, EOKA suspects hanged. Curfews, raids, beatings, executions were the background against which, a year later, Cyprus supplied the air-deck for the Suez expedition.

no cyprus, no oil

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No Cyprus, no certain facilities to protect our supply of oil. No oil, unemployment and hunger in Britain. It is as simple as that.

the owners of oil

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We must become the owners, or at any rate the controllers at the source, of at least a proportion of the supply (of oil) which we require....and obtain our oil supply, so far as possible, from sources under British control, or British influence.

— Winston Churchill

16 square mile fortress

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The U.S. military base in Balad, about 60 miles north of Baghdad, is rapidly becoming one of the largest American military installations on foreign soil. About 40,000 troops, contractors and Defense Department civilian employees live there.

The base is one giant construction project, with new roads, sidewalks, and structures going up across this 16-square-mile fortress in the center of Iraq, all with an eye toward the next few decades... The base is so big that there is a regular bus service within its perimeter to ferry around the tens of thousands of troops and contractors who live here.

— Guy Raz

the US garrisons the globe

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It's estimated that 95% of all foreign bases on this planet are ours! That's no small boast. Just consider Okinawa, a Japanese island smaller than the Hawaian island of Kauai. The United States has 38 bases there that cover 19% of the island's prime real estate. That has to be a record.

...We Americans garrison the globe in a way no people has ever done - not the ancient Romans with their garrisons stretched from North Africa to distant Britain; not even the nineteenth century British with their far-flung naval coaling stations. Our garrisons around the world are our versions of "gunboat diplomacy" and colonialism all wrapped in one. They are functionally our modus operandi on the planet. Everyone out there knows about them, but few Americans are particularly aware of them.

— Tom Engelhardt

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