This map of USA and Mexico as of 1845 is eloquent. Note the map does not yet include Texas, which was also acquired from Mexico via internal Yankee agitation and subterfuge.
Originally posted on June 6, 2013 • Revised 29 June 2019
Ernesto "Che" Guevara, as a young medical student, in Argentina. "One Vietnam, Two Vietnams..Many Vietnams..."
By John Gerassi (first published in 1969)
A great deal is being written in America these days about Pax Americana and American hegemony in the underdeveloped world. No longer able to blot out the obvious, even calm, rational, conscientious academicians are publicly lamenting America’s increasingly bellicose policies from Vietnam to the Dominican Republic. Suddenly, as if awakened from a technicolor dream, intellectuals are discovering such words as “imperialism” and “expansionism.” And they are asking: Why? Who’s to blame? What can be done to stop all this?
The questions are childish, the assumptions false, the implications naïve. They reflect a liberal point of view, one that claims that there is a qualitative difference between U.S. policies today and yesterday. In fact, American foreign policy has varied only in degree, not in kind. It has been cohesive, coherent, and consistent. What has varied has been its strength—and its critics.
The basic difference between American imperialism today and American imperialism a century ago is that it is more violent, more far-reaching, and more carefully planned today. But American foreign policy, at least since 1823, has always been assertive, always expansionist, always imperialist. Of course, it has rarely been pushed beyond America’s capabilities. Thus, when the United States was weak, its interventions abroad were mild. When its strength grew, so did its daring. Today, as the most powerful nation on earth, with a technological advance over other countries of mammoth proportions, the United States can be imperialistic on all continents with relative security.
The main reason why we have not had the opportunity to discuss this imperialism frankly and openly within the United States—in its journals, in academia, and on other platforms—is because Americans’ interpretation of history has been dominated by liberal historians whose basic view of life is characterized by their inability or unwillingness to connect events. Thus, when viewing Latin America, where American policy has always been crystal clear, Americans historians will admit, indeed will detail, U.S. interventions in specific countries of Central America or the Caribbean, will sometimes even posit an imperialist explanation for a whole period of American history, but will never draw overall conclusions, will never connect events, economics, and politics to arrive at a basic tradition or characteristic. To such historians, for example, there is little if any correlation between the events and policies of 1823 and those of 1845, or between 1898 and 1961.
A word on James K. Polk, one of the earliest and most successful "internal imperialists" IMAGE: Gen. Santa Ana surrenders to a wounded Sam Houston after the battle of San Jacinto.  Texian leader Sam Houston's victory over Gen. Santa Anna at the battle of San Jacinto on April 21, 1836 sealed the dismemberment of Mexico and the acquisition of an enormous territory almost as large as Western Europe. In the immediate aftermath of the war, some prominent Mexicans wrote that the war had resulted in "the state of degradation and ruin" in Mexico, further claiming, for "the true origin of the war, it is sufficient to say that the insatiable ambition of the United States, favored by our weakness, caused it."
The story of the Mexico's loss of her original territory (if we accept the notion that what the Spaniards conquered was legitimate and not in itself also a land grab at sword and gun point) to the nascent American empire would not be complete without mention of Sam Houston, the signer of Texas' declaration of independence, a man with cultural roots in both Tennessee and Texas, and certainly one of the most charismatic and, in his own way, admirable and tragic political figures in US history. Like Polk, who often acted as his political mentor and protector, Houston was Scotch-Irish by descent, but his family traced its origins back to Scotland not to the kind of desperate poverty often defining the lives of most Scots-Irish immigrants, but to the benefits and privileges of landed gentry: Sam Houston was the fifth son of Major Samuel Houston and Elizabeth Paxton. Houston's paternal ancestry is often traced to his great-great grandfather Sir John Houston, who built a family estate in Scotland in the late seventeenth century. His second son John Houston emigrated to Ulster, Ireland, during the Ulster plantation period. A person of integrity and moral courage Houston also stood out among his peers by his friendly and respectful attitude toward native Americans, with whom he had lived several years in his youth: Young Sam was 14 when his family moved to Maryville (Tennessee), and he had received only a basic education on the Virginia frontier.[11] He ran away from home in 1809 at age 16 because he was dissatisfied working as a shop clerk in his older brothers' store. He went southwest and lived for a few years with the Cherokee tribe led by Ahuludegi (also spelled Oolooteka) on Hiwassee Island in the Hiwassee River, above its confluence with the Tennessee River. Ahuludegi had become hereditary chief after his brother moved west; American settlers in the area called him John Jolly. He became an adoptive father to Houston, giving him the Cherokee name of Colonneh, meaning "the Raven".[12] Houston became fluent in the Cherokee language while living with the tribe. He visited his family in Maryville every few months. (See Wikipedia, Sam Houston) The above is quite unusual for an American politician, to say the least, even a man from the so called "frontier". But there were many other things that made Houston a man clearly out of the ordinary, including, later, his refusal to see the young state of Texas embroiled in the Civil War on the side of Secession, for which he paid a heavy price:
—PG |
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