A Taste for Empire

[chlamor]

A Taste for EMPIRE

by Valdas Anelauskas

The capitalist logic of expansionism led U.S. elites to seek not just a continental but a global empire. Hence, even before the smoke had cleared at places like Wounded Knee, greedy eyes were being cast across the waters of the world as the country's business and governmental leaders contemplated the acquisition of colonies in a variety of strategic locales. Given the climate, it was no overstatement when in 1898, on the eve of the Spanish-American war, the editors of the Washington Post opined that, "We are face-to-face with a strange destiny. The taste of Empire is in the mouth." Or, as Massachusetts Senator Henry Cabot Lodge more accurately framed the matter about three years earlier, "We have a record of conquest, colonization and expansion unequaled by any people in the Nineteenth century. We are not about to be curbed now."

Invasion, Occupation and Colonization

During the third week of January, 1893, a group of well-armed EuroAmerican insurgents, backed by troops landed from the U.S.S. Boston, overthrew the constitutional monarchy of Hawai'i, with which the United States had entered into several still-binding treaties of peace, friendship and commerce. Although President Grover Cleveland quickly denounced the whole affair as an undeclared "act of war," and thus a crime against both the U.S. constitution and international law, Congress proceeded to bestow recognition upon what the usurpers had already announced was now an "independent republic." This proved to be a transitional ruse, however, as the new government spent the next several years arranging for the annexation of the archipelago as a U.S. "trust territory" (colony), an effort consummated on June 15, 1898.

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In Hawai'i, things are in some ways even worse. So vital did policymakers consider these islands to American interests that, in the face of a requirement in the United Nations Charter that all overseas trusts and other such "non-selfgoverning territories" be scheduled for timely decolonization, 61 the U.S. moved to incorporate them directly into itself. This maneuver was accomplished in 1959 by way of an invalid referendum, the option of the indigenous people resuming an independent existence was not presented on the ballot, providing the pretext for Hawai'i to be admitted as a state of the Union. Since then. U.S diplomats have argued, quite transparently, that this utterly rigged process satisfied all rights of the Kanaka Maoli to self-determination, thus nullifying further questions concerning the islands' ultimate disposition.

Such subterfuge, in combination with the dire conditions under which the Kanaka Maoli have been forced to live, has given rise to an increasingly visible Hawaiian sovereignty movement. In 1993, largely because the movement had succeeded in bringing its case before the U.N., Congress took the unusual step of issuing a formal apology for crimes committed by its predecessor body against the monarchy a century earlier. The gesture has proved essentially cosmetic, however, since the U.S. has undertaken to meet none of the international legal obligations to effect restitution which attend such admissions of wrongdoing.

http://www.pnews.org/PhpWiki/index.php/AmericanEmpire