What's the title going to be? "I Duh'd it My Way"?

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce

I can't give you an idea you can respect until you pull your head out of your ass and see what's really going on in the world. Imperialism is not the way to go.

Bruce, if you think the United States is imperialist, you've not understood very much of US history at all. We have a conspicuously anti-imperialist habit, we've had it all our nation's life, and about our only departure from it was the Philippines and this was a) quite light, and b) temporary; it seemed more our following fashion than trying for empire. We noticed early on just plain open trading worked a lot better than the mercantilist economic theory that led to empire-building, by conquest or by lesser violence. It can be said of our early nation that the thirteen colonies were the first modern anti-Imperialist league. Though empire was the foreign-policy fashion then and through the nineteenth century, viz., Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Russia, Germany, the Ottoman Empire, China, and later, Japan -- an empire pretty much defined a first-class power. We knocked Spain completely out of the empire business -- nobody else did. That one was ours. We finished them off after a lengthy imperial decline.

If you think I'm some kind of imperialist, all I can say is you're not paying any attention at all. That's not something I can respect either.

You've been pretty thoroughly misled by Communist rhetoric about "imperialism," whereby they dissed it while unabashedly practicing it. So, in the end, what is there for me to respect, again? Let's just put it this way: I'll look for respectable ideas from you. Now might be a good time for you to have them. I know you're not stupid, but the idea of "US Imperialism" should be buried by now, and not taken seriously by you. With you throwing ideas like that one around, are you quite certain you know what's going on in the world?