Empire and the

Dream-Work of
America

Vinay Lal

Dissenting Knowledges Pamphlet Series (no. 4)

Vinay Lal, Founding Editor

Penang
Multiversity & Citizens International
2004

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 Published by

MULTIVERSITY
and
CITIZENS INTERNATIONAL
22 Taylor Road
11600 Penang
Malaysia

2004

Printed by
Jutaprint
2 Solok Sungai Pinang 3
Sungai Pinang
11600 Penang
Malaysia

ISBN 983-41938-8-2

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 Foreword to the
Dissenting Knowledges Pamphlet Series

Vinay Lal
Founding Editor

T
he world as we know it today is understood almost
entirely through categories that are largely the product
of Western knowledge systems and the academic
disciplines that have been charged with codifying,
disciplining, organizing, institutionalizing and transmitting
knowledge not only about the physical and material world,
but about the various social, political, cultural, religious, and
legal institutions and practices found among diverse human
communities. This pamphlet series is thus built on the twin
recognition that there is today no more urgent task than
understanding the political and epistemological consequences
of the imposition of the West upon the entire world, and at
the same time endeavoring to work, in myriad ways, towards
the decolonization of academic disciplines. It seeks to furnish
intellectuals, scholars, and activists who are committed to
harvesting theories of knowledge, livelihoods and lifestyles,
and forms of political awareness that are calculated to create
more genuine forms of equality, justice, and plurality with a
more public forum of informed and dissenting opinion than
is customarily available through scholarly monographs and
learned journals.

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The age of exploration and navigation, which commenced in
Europe a little over 500 years old, eventually paved the way
for the colonization of the Americas, South and Southeast
Asia, the Near East, Polynesia, Africa, and other parts of the
world over the course of the next 200-300 years. The
comparative study of colonialism points to numerous ways
in which the European impact was experienced differently
across colonies. Historians have drawn distinctions between
plantation colonies, settler colonies, and other colonies with
varying degrees of direct and indirect rule. In the Americas
and Australia, the indigenous populations were wiped out;
in South Africa, black and colored people were confronted
with stern subjugation under the Boers; and in the Congo,
the same results, that is the extreme brutalization of the native
people by the Europeans, were achieved in European-owned
rubber plantations. The British in India out-Brahmined the
Brahmins, refusing after the late eighteenth century to consort
with the local populations.

One of the many idioms in which the great game of colonialism

survives today is in those numerous discussions which seek
to distinguish between “good” and “bad” colonialisms.
British imperial historians, such as P. J. Marshall, Denis Judd,
and Niall Ferguson, still engage with unbridled enthusiasm
in this puerile exercise. Nonetheless, it is an indisputable fact
that Europe’s colonization of the world, when it did not lead
to the outright decimation or extermination of native peoples,
resulted in the extinction of lifestyles, cultural life forms, and
the biological, cultural, and social inheritance of colonized
societies. It is imperative to recognize that everywhere the
colonizers sought to impose upon the colonized their

4
worldview. Nothing should be allowed to obscure the
fundamental fact of colonialism and the post-colonial era:
every conquest is a conquest of knowledge. The
epistemological imperatives of the colonial state have only in
the last few decades begun to receive the critical scrutiny of
scholars and commentators. The British in India, to take one
well-known example, devoted themselves to an exhaustive
study of India’s social and intellectual traditions: grammars
of Indian languages were created, translations of scriptural
texts were authorized, the legal texts of Hindus and Muslims
were codified, the land was mapped and its inhabitants
counted, measured, and classified; “communities” were
enumerated, marked, and named; and so on. What is true of
India is also, to a greater or lesser degree, characteristic of
British, French, and Dutch colonies in other parts of the world.

The “conquest of knowledge” entailed, however, a great deal

more than what was wrought under colonial rule itself, and
under conditions of globalization Western knowledge
systems have sought, largely with success, to gain complete
dominance across the globe in nearly all spheres of life. The
economists’ conceptions of growth, poverty, scarcity, and
development, marketed by all the social sciences, have come
to predominate everywhere, and the sum total of Western
social science has not only been to mire the so-called
developing world in ever more acute levels of poverty, but to
forestall the possibility of worldviews and lifestyles that do
not synchronize with the conception of the “good life” that
prevails in the “developed” West. The entire theory of
development is predicated on a time-lag: countries that are
under-developed or part of the developing world seek to

5
emulate the developed countries, but by the time they have
seemingly caught up, the developed countries have gone well
beyond to another plane of development. The native, to speak
in a different tongue, always arrives late at the destination;
indeed, the theory of development condemns the
underdeveloped to live not their own lives, but rather to fulfill
someone else’s conception of life. Development doesn’t merely
assure us that the past of the native must be entirely
jettisoned; it also hijacks the native’s future. If the native’s
present is the European’s past, the native’s future is the
European’s present.

Nearly every academic discipline is compromised. In all of

the voluminous literature on globalization that has emerged
in recent years, there is scarcely the recognition that what
has been most effectively globalized are the knowledge
systems of the West. Paul Samuelson’s wretched economics
textbook is used in dozens of countries — dictatorships,
monarchies, and so-called democracies alike. Despite the
pretensions of the social sciences, nowhere more on display
than in the bankrupt disciplines of political science and
economics, their methodologies and findings are far from
being universal; indeed, considering the widening economic
disparities in the US itself, and the nakedly criminal and self-
aggrandizing policies of one American administration after
another, one might say that economists and political scientists
have contributed not a little towards wrecking their own
home. If freedom is indivisible, it is important to recognize
not only that the South has to free itself from that albatross
around its neck that goes by the name of the ‘West’, but that

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the so-called developed countries have to be liberated from
themselves.

This pamphlet series is one of many enterprises to have

emerged out of the desire of some scholars, academics,
activists, and public intellectuals, who first convened together
in Penang, Malaysia in early 2002, to create a new forum,
which has been termed “Multiversity”, that will at once
enable a wholesale but rigorous and searching critique of the
frameworks of modern knowledge as well as more ecumenical
political and cultural futures. Multiversity’s members are
committed to the proposition that there needs to be less
conversation with the West and more conversation between
peoples of the South. Long before India, China, Southeast Asia,
and Africa interacted with Europe, they interacted with each
other; indeed, the Indian Ocean was a global world, a
crossroads, but part of the effect of colonialism has been to
obscure these earlier histories. The conception of what
constitutes the “world” has narrowed so considerably that
everywhere outside Europe it means a knowledge only of one’s
own country and of the Euro-American world. These,
apparently, are the borders of our supposed cosmopolitanism.

There can be no intercultural dialogue or genuine exchange of

ideas so long as the terms of the conversation are set
exclusively by the West. It is necessary to add that the “multi”
in multiversity and multiworld ought to be distinguished
from the “multi” in multiculturalism. Having ruthlessly
homogenized itself, the United States, the leader of the West,
has now had to embrace “multiculturalism” and relentlessly
peddles its multiculturalism to the world as a sign of its

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openness and tolerance. Multiculturalism of the American
variety, which is synonymous with consumer choice and
white domination (sometimes appearing in the relatively
more “benign” form of primus inter pares), is now ironically
poised to become a template for societies where the ground
reality has always been plural. Multiversity aims at resisting
such insidious forms of resurgent colonialism and creating
the conditions that would permit dissenting knowledges to
flourish. This pamphlet series is a step in that direction.

This initiative is one of several commenced by Multiversity.

Pamphlets have long had an association with revolutions
and movements for social reform, and they played an
instrumental role in creating the conditions for change at
a time when, though literacy rates were low and education
was the privilege of the few, politics had not been reduced
to something as farcical as electoral democracy where one
must choose between indistinguishable candidates. The
art of pamphleteering suffered a precipitous decline in the
twentieth century, at least in the modern West, and its
revival may be one of the many necessary steps that have
to be taken to generate a renewed sense of political urgency.
Readers are invited to learn more about Multiversity by
accessing its website at http://www.multiworld.org.

University of California, Los Angeles

September 2004

8
 Empire and the
Dream-Work of
America
Vinay Lal

T
he one brutal and ineluctable fact that confronts all
humankind at the present juncture of history is the
overwhelming and irrepressible power of the United
States in nearly all domains of life. Doubtless, there are
prominent social theorists who hold an opinion to the
contrary, or are inclined to nuance their view with the
observation that American power, while still uncontested,
has been on the decline since the end of the Vietnam War.1
But now, as at the time of the Vietnam War, the overwhelming
superiority of the American military is not a matter of debate.2
This assessment may be read mistakenly as echoing the
language thought to be deployed by terrorists, “communists”
(a fading breed), iconoclasts in the mold of the chess genius
and anti-American baiter Bobby Fisher, and others who, as
George W. Bush is wont to say, “hate America” and the
multiple freedoms — to worship without fear, to embrace
openly the sanctity of private wealth and property, to rubbish
the entire world if the occasion should demand, to consume
and waste with abandon — it offers. However, the warrant
and inspiration for viewing the United States as a country

9
which unmistakably commands the attention of the world,
evoking mixed feelings of awe, resignation, fear, loathing,
admiration, and devotion derives strikingly enough from the
country’s own National Security Strategy to which the
present American administration is beholden. The “United
States enjoys”, the document candidly admits, “a position of
unparalleled military strength and great economic and
political influence”, and it unabashedly takes the view,
commonly held by American politicians and other purveyors
of the ‘idea of America’, that the United States is the single
greatest force for good in the world. George W. Bush is, of
course, scarcely the first American president to think that
what is good for America is necessarily good for the world.
Since anything that diminishes the power of the United States
diminishes the world, the National Security Strategy avers
that defenses must be built and maintained “beyond
challenge”; moreover, the might of the American military
should be such as to “dissuade potential adversaries from
pursuing a military build-up in hopes of surpassing, or
equaling, the power of the United States.”3
Since the spectacular demise of the Soviet Union and
the crumbling of the Berlin Wall turned the United States
into the world’s only superpower, the world has increasingly
witnessed naked displays of American military might, the
frequent transformation of the Security Council of the UN
into an arm of the State Department (much as the IMF has
served as the overseas offices of the Treasury Department for
close to two decades), the “opening up” of developing
countries and regions to enhanced free trade regimes, and an
embellished vocabulary of governance — rogue states, zero
tolerance, weapons of mass destruction, sanctions, the

10
international community, the war on terror, and most
recently the “coalition of the willing” — by means of which
the US has sought to cajole, bribe, or otherwise enlist every
country to cooperate in the fulfillment of its own crusading
ambitions. Baghdad has often been terrorized in its long
history by invading forces, the present sacking of the city
somewhat calling to mind the terrible encroachments of the
Mongols in the thirteenth century,4 but before the Americans
set to pulverize it from the air, a huge show was made of
gaining the consent of the “international community”. No
one familiar with the National Security Strategy of the United
States should have been surprised that, having encountered
unusual resistance in the Security Council in its quest for a
resolution that would authorize military action against Iraq,
the US would nonetheless doggedly act out the dictum, set
forth in the National Security Strategy, that the country will
“not hesitate to act alone, if necessary,” to exercise the right of
self-defense “by acting preemptively” against terrorists. Nor,
perhaps, should it have been at all shocking that the blazing
fires from the massive explosions over Baghdad had not even
died out before many voices were raised in asking the
question, ‘Who next after Iraq?’ Large armed forces, the
Americans have understood since the end of the Cold War,
should not be allowed to sit idle.
It is now somewhat over a decade since Iraq was, in the
words of a UN report, bombed back to the pre-industrial
age.5 This assessment, true as it was, now seems strange, if
not surreal. If unprecedented air power was deployed to
evict Iraq from Kuwait and crush Saddam Hussein’s armed
forces in 1991, how shall we characterize the carpet bombings
over Yugoslavia in 1999, in which the US joined its European

11
allies, or the “shock and awe” sound-and-light show over
Baghdad in 2003? It may seem inexcusable to use the language
of the entertainment industry to describe absolute terror, but
this is one of the numerous barbarisms gifted by the United
States to civilization. Though the infliction of terror from air
has a history stretching back to the bombing of Mesopotamia
and the Northwest Frontier Province of then-undivided India
in the early part of the twentieth century, and from thence to
the sustained bombardment of Britain by the Luftwaffe, the
incendiary bombings of Tokyo and other Japanese cities, and
the wanton destruction of Dresden by air, it is now clear that
in every succeeding air campaign the limits of what is
considered acceptable have risen.6 More tonnage is said to
have been let loose upon Iraq in 1991 than was dropped during
the entire period of World War II; and, yet, the “shock and
awe” campaign appears to have crossed a new threshold.
What, then, truly marks the singularity of the Gulf War of
1991 is that it was the first conflict of the post-Cold War era,
and the first President Bush, while determined to free Kuwait
from the thralldom of Iraqi oppression and deliver a decisive
blow to Saddam Hussein’s military capability, was also keen
to inaugurate a “New World Order”. The whole world was
to be put on notice that the United States would not negotiate
with “rogue states”; just as significantly, the exercise of brute
military power would be leavened with a “thousand points
of light”. Exploding bombs and missiles streaking through
the night skies create dazzling displays of fireworks, but Bush
Senior had, as he thought, a rather nobler conception of the
“points of light” illuminating the world. Throughout the 1990s,
as the United States pounded its enemies and evil-doers, the
impression was widely sought to be disseminated that the

12
warmth, goodness, and unbounded charity of America would
radiate outward even among its most determined foes and
critics. Though the ugly phrase “collateral damage” was used
to designate the loss of civilian lives, the world was given
assurance that the United States, as a nation supremely
dedicated to the notion that every human life is sacrosanct,7
was only engaged in precision bombing. Untold billions of
dollars had been expended on developing arms and delivery
systems designed to protect life. To follow this narrative,
even in war, a human activity dedicated to death and
destruction, the United States was committed to the
preservation of life.
A decade after the first Gulf War,8 planes guided into the
World Trade Center and the Pentagon as missiles shattered
the peace of America. Bush Senior had invoked “the
international community”; Bush Junior would chant the
mantra of the “coalition against terror”. Since America itself
had been attacked, the younger Bush felt emboldened to
deploy language of stark simplicity that, for all the diplomatic
finesse that the United States has been capable of commanding
since the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, is at the heart of
the American imaginary: “Either you are with us,” he intoned,
“or you are with the terrorists.”9 Four weeks later, as Bush
came on national television to announce the commencement
of military action against bin Laden, the Al-Qaeda network,
and the Taliban, he again elaborated on this point: “Every
nation has a choice to make. In this conflict, there is no neutral
ground. If any government sponsors the outlaws and killers
of innocents, they have become outlaws and murderers,
themselves. And they will take that lonely path at their own
peril.”10 Those who are familiar with the United States’ long

13
and unmatched record of sponsorship of military
dictatorships, totalitarian and authoritarian states, and
military interventions to prop up failing regimes, and ponder
on the “lonely path” that the US has so often taken, whether
in its repudiation of the new international court (here joined
by Iraq and Syria), the Kyoto Treaty on global warming, or
the worldwide ban on landmines, or in its solitary support of
Israeli intransigence (as demonstrated by the frequent exercise
of the American veto in the Security Council), might have
wondered whether Bush was describing his own native
country. Indeed, in its refusal to abolish capital punishment
for juveniles, or to ratify the Convention on the Rights of the
Child, the United States has the sole company of another one
of its favorite states, Somalia. Irony and self-reflection,
however, have never been Bush’s strong suit. As 15,000 pound
bombs (nicknamed “Daisy Cutters”) were being unloaded
upon Afghanistan, one of the world’s poorest countries,
decimated by war over the last two decades, American
reporters, whose conception of their duty to the state is equaled
only by their naivete and proverbial parochialism, were
noting with evident pride that hundreds of thousands of food
packets, whose contents had been determined to meet the
strict nutritional requirements mandated by experts, had
been dropped alongside the bombs. The refrain has always
been that America can magically if not effortlessly conjoin
ferocious military prowess with unexampled kindness. Little
items, such as the fact that the US Congress set aside $300
million for the reconstruction of Afghanistan when Bush, who
had repeatedly pledged himself to that task, “forgot” to include
any money for this purpose in his budget requisition are not
allowed to tarnish the grand narrative of American

14
munificence. In more ways than the world could then have
foreseen, the Marshall Plan, the paradigmatic example of
American largesse, and an extraordinary earner of “cultural
capital”, continues to work for America.
The argument that war is the last recourse to maintain
peace is scarcely new. Addressing the nation on September
11, 2001,11 Bush described it as a day “when all Americans
from every walk of life unite in our resolve for justice and
peace.” In a nation addicted to war, even one day set aside for
the contemplation of peace would be an achievement; though
anyone familiar with contemporary political discourses
would at once recognize that “9/11” has now become the
license to persist, into the indefinite future, with a “war on
terror” whose enemies are largely unknown, undefined, often
an inchoate mass. Peace is the farthest thing from the mind of
those who still burn with rage at the mention of September
the 11th. Moreover, to every observer of American politics the
inescapable impression must remain that “peace” is not
generally part of the fabric of public discourse: thus the
National Security Strategy’s “single sustainable model for
national success” enumerates only “freedom, democracy and
free enterprise”, and the scourge of “terrorism” is listed
alongside “slavery, piracy, [and] genocide”. If war is not
among the evils that we must strive to banish, then what
ontological and political place can there be for peace? It is not
for this reason alone that the self-representation of the United
States as a country only reluctantly at war has been viewed
by many critics as an affront to history, as a denial of the fact
that the notion of “manifest destiny” was not merely a call to
the rest of the world to leave America to its own devices but
a charter for expansion.

15
 The renegade historian William Appleman Williams
devoted the greater part of his academic labors to document
the enormous appetite for “empire” encountered in the
writings of the Founding Fathers themselves, not to mention
their successors, such as Theodore Roosevelt, who took it as
their moral obligation to wield the big stick.12 The story of
the present American invasion of Iraq is sometimes etched as
a narrative of hawks in power — Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld,
Wolfowitz, Perle — who had long ago, in the idio(ma)tic
expressions preferred by the President, decided to “take out
Saddam Hussein”, but it is useful to recall that a cabal of men
have, on other occasions in American history as well, openly
expressed America’s imperial ambitions. Warren
Zimmerman’s recent study of the end of the nineteenth
century, a ‘productive’ time when the Philippines, Puerto Rico,
Guam, and Cuba came into American hands, reminds us of
how the quintet of Teddy Roosevelt, Senator Cabot Lodge,
Secretary of State John Hay, the naval strategist Alfred Thayer
Mahan, and Secretary of War Elihu Root engineered to give
America an empire as its own frontier was closing. Those
were, at least, more crude, perhaps honest, times: war-making
fell to the appropriately titled Department of War, and Mahan
had not the slightest hesitation in declaring, “I am frankly an
imperialist.”13 The Department of Defense, whatever its claims
about defending the homeland, prosecutes offensive wars as
the examples of Vietnam and Iraq indubitably suggest.
“Homeland”, one should say, is a word with insidious intent
— it may contain within it the history of lebensraum, carrying
that infamous concept to the next stage.14
Against those who would suggest that war-making has
been the soul of the American enterprise and that the very

16
documents of freedom furnish as well the charter for an
American empire, against those who would, in the bluntest
terms, characterize the US as the preeminent “rogue state” of
our times,15 two arguments are frequently put forth by those
who are prepared to be charitable to the US even when, as at
the present moment, world opinion is substantially turned
against the brutal exercise of American power. It is suggested
that the US cannot be viewed as a traditional imperialist
power and that, barring exceptions for relatively short
periods of time, the US never really acquired colonies. The
contrast is drawn most sharply with the histories of Britain
and France as imperial powers. If at all America has an empire,
it is submitted, then it would be more apposite to speak of
American cultural imperialism, and the proliferation of mass
consumer goods and American cultural products throughout
much of the world. The United States is declared by the
proponents of this view to be an anomaly in world affairs,
the only, in the words of Harvard’s President and former
high-level functionary of the Clinton government, Lawrence
Summers, nonimperialist superpower in history.16 Last year,
to take one example, McDonalds was operating close to 30,000
outlets in 121 countries and serving 45 million customers
every day. However, those trumpeting this argument appear
to have forgotten that, following the attacks upon the Twin
Towers and the initiation of the bombing campaign against
Afghanistan, American troops were stationed in 140
countries. Could any empire have done more? With the entire
world ringed by American military bases, do we have the
vocabulary to describe the global presence, and reach, of the
American military?

17
 The more compelling argument, perhaps, is that there
is no “one America”, and that far from being the monolith
that it appears to be as the American juggernaut rolls over
one weak country after another, the United States is a country
deeply enmeshed in vigorous disputes over its relations with
foreign countries and the treatment of its own minorities.17
Unforgiving critics of American foreign policy such as the
late Edward Said, Noam Chomsky, and Arundhati Roy have
been united in holding to the view that it is not America that
the world hates but rather the arrogance, sanctimoniousness,
hypocrisy, and bellicosity of its political elites and the
American repudiation of international organizations and
treaties.18 Chomsky has for well over three decades been a
persistent advocate of the position that the American people
are largely unaware of the foreign policies of the US
government, and a sharp gulf separates the American
government from the majority of well-meaning Americans.
Following the attacks of 9/11, Arundhati Roy declaimed that
while American foreign policies are hated, the American
people should know that their movies, poets, and musicians
are loved the world over, and she pondered over the
significance of the fact that terrorists targeted the World Trade
Center and the Pentagon rather than the Statue of Liberty.19
(She may have overlooked the simple fact that though both
the WTC and the Statue of Liberty denote varying conceptions
of symbolic capital, the terrorists were astute in realizing
that the WTC also, so to speak, packed an economic punch.)
Her more recent political commentary, while unsparing in
its denunciation of the barbarians at the door of Baghdad,
urges everyone to think of the protests against the war across
America and concludes with the affirmation that “the most

18
scholarly, scathing, hilarious critiques of the US government
and the “American way of life” comes from American
citizens.”20
Eloquence, moral fervor, and the ethical imperative to
believe in the goodwill of people cannot, however, substitute
for reasoned argument. Is any country ever monolithic? If the
rest of the world must needs be persuaded that the US, which
arrogates to itself the role of spokesperson for the free world,
has more political diversity than we imagine, then something
is seriously amiss. It may make sense, furthermore, to argue
for an immense gulf between the government and the people
in all those political regimes where representative democracy
has been disavowed, but what salience can any such view
have in a country which has been peddling “free elections” to
the rest of the world as the sure sign of popular democracy at
work? There is, admittedly, some merit in suggesting that
the American government or even state no more stands for
American society than did the Taliban stand for the Afghan
people, but surely the American people must be held
accountable to a greater degree for the governments that they
elect to power than the Afghan people must be held
accountable for the thugs foisted upon them? And why, at a
time when academic work has nearly sanctified the notion of
people’s agency as a holy concept, should Chomsky, Roy, and
others be prepared to advocate that the American people are
easily led astray like sheep, and that the fundamental
goodness of Americans should not be doubted? What does it
mean to effortlessly rely on such cliched formulations when
one is speaking of the most well-connected country in the
world, and where no one can plead ignorance? If the American
people are not complicit in varying degrees with the policies

19
carried out in their name by their representatives, how can
we possibly understand that one poll after another has
shown, in the present war with Iraq in its early days when
victory appeared to be nearly effortless, swift, and complete
as with previous American exercises in militaristic
adventurism — the first Gulf War, the missile attacks on
Afghanistan and Sudan in Clinton’s presidency, the assault
on Yugoslavia, the bombing of Afghanistan — extraordinarily
high levels of support for policies of successive American
administrations?
In their own way, it is my submission, the well-
intentioned critics of America from Noam Chomsky and
Arundhati Roy to the more rambunctious Michael Moore
unwittingly do the work of empire. Chomsky can be allowed
to rant and rage at American racism and imperialism since,
as is well known in the United States, his laborious and
meticulously documented efforts make not an iota of
difference to the conduct of American foreign policy. Only in
America could Michael Moore’s much acclaimed film,
“Fahrenheit 911”, be viewed as a radical expression of dissent,
even though there is scarcely any critique of the institutions
of civil society, and even though, in a film which rightly probes
the inanities and mendacities of American foreign policy,
America’s extraordinary role in propping up the Israeli state
is not mentioned once. But now that the film has had a wildly
successful theatrical release, everyone can rejoice in the
thought that American democracy is flourishing. Still, Moore
offers a less complicated case than Chomsky of how non-
establishment and dissenting views become part of the
arsenal of those committed to the proposition that America
bears an unusual role in being the mouthpiece of freedom.

20
Chomsky can, and has been, always held up as an example of
the country’s tolerance for dissenting views — and since the
goodness of America, the America of mom’s apple pie and of
the President’s pet dog coming down the steps of Air Force
One, is never far from Chomsky’s heart, his pointed criticism
can even be received with gratitude, as the most perfect
expression of the distance separating American democracy
from totalitarianism. In the last analysis, whatever criticism
anyone levies, the cash registers continue to ring and SUV
sales register phenomenal growth. William Appleman
Williams may have been much closer to a genuine insight
when he remarked that “empire as a way of life is predicated
upon having more than one needs.”21 The early ideologues of
the idea of America as a “Republican Empire” came to the
awareness that so long as the bulk of the population were
allowed a latitude of freedom in the exercise of their economic
pursuits and religious feelings, they would remain indifferent
to, and even tolerate, the expansion of empire overseas. If the
protection of American freedoms at home “required” — and
since the notion of “required” cannot be scientifically falsified,
and can conversely always be tethered with appropriate
manipulation to the ideology of the National Security State
— intervention overseas, the military machine was rapidly
set into motion and the President was given a free hand.
No one who has contemplated the course of American
history can cease to wonder how America, where less
substantive dissent exists than in any other democracy, where
politics for decades has been reduced to an electoral
competition between two parties that are all but
indistinguishable except in some domestic matters,
nonetheless continues to convey the impression that it is, in

21
Jefferson’s phrase, “the world’s best hope”. ‘Empire’, rather
than ‘imperialism’, has done the dream-work of America.
Many will imagine that this characterization takes us no
further than the commonplace argument about Hollywood
and its hegemony throughout much of the world; at most,
some people might insist that Hollywood should be read to
mean not only the big studio productions with glamorous
stars, but also the American media networks and the
gargantuan entertainment industry with their global reach.
But least of all do I wish to convey merely this by the phrase
“dream-work”, though there is no gainsaying the fact that
Hollywood has been an immensely successful factory of
dreams, that the conception of America held in many
countries is shaped to a very great extent by American
movies, the news outlets, and TV shows, and even that
diverse cinematic traditions around the world owe much to
the fecundity of Hollywood and independent American
filmmakers. I mean, by “dream-work”, something far more,
something richer even than the promise of the American
dream and the invitation, etched so prominently in the lines
that adorn the Statue of Liberty, etched indeed in the very
figure of Liberty with her flaming torch, to all the dispossessed,
wretched, weak, miserable, and oppressed of the world to
make America their home. Indeed, if the policies of the
Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) over the last
two decades are any guide, and the militarization of the US-
Mexico border and the hounding of young Muslim males by
the FBI and the INS furnish demonstrable evidence of the
country closing in upon itself, the poor, oppressed, desolate,
and mere aspirants to economic well-being have been told in

22
no uncertain terms that they must seek other dreams in other
places.
Though the “American dream” may now only be
available to an infinitely smaller number of immigrants,
many — such as Indians, Hong Kong Chinese, Iranians —
already drawn from relatively wealthier segments of their
own society, the dream-work of America shows
extraordinary tenacity. The secret bombing of Cambodia,
and an unjust and brutal war conducted upon a peasant
society which resulted in the loss of three million lives, should
have embittered the Vietnamese and Cambodians. The spectre
of Vietnam that looms large over American politics, as the
row kicked up by conservative commentators over John
Kerry’s service record in Vietnam that won him several
medals and his public denunciation at that time of American
atrocities in the war suggests, has nothing to do with the
Vietnamese themselves. The American obsession with
Vietnam, or their commemoration of the war dead, has no
place for the three million Vietnamese killed in the conflict.
The discussion always hovers around what the Vietnam war
‘did’ to the Americans rather than what it did to the
Vietnamese. And, yet, despite all that, how are Americans
received in Vietnam today? One can understand that those
who fled South Vietnam and wound up in the United States
might feel grateful to a country that, as they imagine, rescued
them from a dreary, often dangerous, life under communism,
but the return of American investment to Vietnam, and the
increasingly warm embrace of American cultural institutions
and business practices suggests that the Vietnamese have to
a considerable extent buried the memory of the brutalization

23
of their country. However pragmatic the Vietnamese response
to the global presence of the United States, only an ancient
civilization can be so magnificently forgiving and so
capacious in its generosity.
How many of the immigrants who speak so warmly of
the freedom of opportunity and expression that they have
experienced in the land of plenty are at all acquainted with
the history of European encounters with native Americans,
the Indian wars, the slave trade, plantation slavery, the Jim
Crow South, and the extraordinary fact that at the present
juncture of history nearly one out of every three black
American males will, in his lifetime, have spent some time
within the confines of a prison? One has to ask how the vast
bulk of Americans, who are themselves immigrants or
descendants of immigrants, barring those native Americans
whose decimation was rendered nearly complete, have
overlooked the long history of American atrocities in central
and South America, the Philippines, and Indochina? No one
who contemplates the history of Germany can do so without
remembering as well the holocaust perpetrated upon millions
of Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, and other people viewed as
retards, deviants, or undesirables. In Germany itself it is a
criminal offense to deny that the Holocaust took place, and
the anti-militarist sentiments prevailing in Germany are
sometimes construed as originating from the conviction that
war must be renounced except where an absolutely
unequivocal case can be made for the resort to force as a means
of self-defense. Yet the countless admirers of America, those
craving to reach its shores on an immigrant visa as much as
those armed with all the advantages that American
citizenship confers, would never link the United States to the

24
atrocities that mar its history in the manner in which they
inextricably link Germany to the holocaust.
To hear Americans, politicians and common people alike,
expound on the Founding Fathers and their gift of freedom to
the people of the thirteen colonies, a gift that, as Americans
believe, was then extended to as much of the world as was
willing to accept it, is to come away with the impression that
the white colonists alone labored under the oppressive regime
of the English. There is never any hint in all the moralizing
that is on witness on nearly every occasion when the
American President addresses “the American people” and
invokes the “Founding Fathers” that extermination of the
native Americans and the continued subjugation of black
people were viewed by the colonists as taking place at the
will of God. “I am very clear in my opinion,” we find George
Washington writing on 7 September 1783, “that policy and
oeconomy point very strongly to the expediency of being upon
good terms with the Indians, and the propriety of purchasing
their lands in preference to attempting to drive them by force
of arms out of their Country; which . . . is like driving the wild
Beasts of ye forest . . . when the gradual extension of our
settlements will as certainly cause the savage, as the wolf, to
retire; both being beasts of prey, tho’ they differ in shape.” 22
The Constitution of the United States, a document that has
often been described as a miraculous example of human
ingenuity and the ultimate expression of the aspiration of a
free people to govern themselves, permitted states to count
3/5ths of their slave populations to determine their
representation in the House of Representatives and the
Electoral College.23 In plain English, the Founding Fathers
agreed, a slave was only 3/5ths a human being; nor is there

25
any evidence to suggest that this munificent bestowal of
dignity to the slave provoked outrage among lovers of
freedom.
Yet these are no mere “contradictions” that one might
explain away with the observation that nothing has ever
precluded the oppressed from oppressing those over whom
they are capable of exercising their power. Not every nation
claims to be the torch-bearer of freedom for the entire world,
not only its own people; not every nation appears to think, as
indeed it should, that freedom is indivisible, but then follows
policies calculated to deprive some people of their freedom
and achieve results exactly contrary to the ringing
endorsements of freedom and democracy. “This nation has
defeated tyrants and liberated death camps, raised this lamp
of liberty to every captive land”, Bush reminded Americans
in a televised address, adding, in these signature lines, the
platitudes that one has come to expect of politicians of his ilk:
“This ideal of America is the hope of all mankind. That hope
drew millions to this harbor. That hope still lights our way.
And the light shines in the darkness. And the darkness will
not overcome it.”24 Some have thought that the apocalyptic
language — for example, the warning to the Iraqi regime that
“the day of reckoning” is nearly at hand — in which Bush
speaks arises from the evangelical Christianity which he has
embraced, but more sustained scholarship in American
history suggests both the longevity of apocalyptic discourse
in American history and the widespread prevalence of the
notion that America has been especially chosen to lead the
world to a new mountain-top of freedom and prosperity. If
the United States claims for itself a distinct and wholly
unparalleled place in the story of the human drive towards

26
freedom, guided moreover by the hand of divine dispensation
in its affairs, then it must correspondingly be held to higher
standards. It cannot be enough to say that the intentions of
the United States have always or largely been noble, but that
the logic of the nation-state system, which operates on the
zero-sum politics principle, has resigned the US to a full (even
macabre) acceptance of realpolitik. Good intentions, we are
aware, belong largely to the dustbin of history.
The notion that America is divinely favored is
encountered in the writings of the early Puritans who saw
themselves as carrying out, in Perry Miller’s phrase, an
‘errand into the wilderness’,25 and has shown remarkable
tenacity ever since. The Puritans established a sacred
geography of America, giving no thought to the consideration
that, in numerous native American cosmologies, every stone,
tree, mountain, and body of water is imbued with sacred
meaning. John Cotton, Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards and
other framers of what would culminate in ‘the American way
of life’ were firmly persuaded that in the settlement of America
by European Christians lay the fulfillment of sacred history;
here, in America, which encompassed “the ends of the earth”,
prophecy would itself come to an end. John Cotton explained
in 1630 that “other peoples have their land by providence;
we have it by promise.”26 The settlement of America by white
Christians was no accident of history, indeed it was far more
than the design of history; it was the redemption of God’s
promise to make every place productive. Where the utopias
previously envisioned by European thinkers looked to the
past, here Christ’s kingdom on earth took on an entirely new
meaning since, as it was imagined, neither history nor
tradition encumbered the Puritans as they sought individual

27
and corporate spiritual and material uplift. From the multiple
perspectives of geography, time, and history, Sacvan
Bercovitch has remarked, “America was ‘pulcherrima inter
mulieres, the youngest and loveliest of Christ’s brides,’ the last,
best hope of mankind, whether mankind knew it or not.”27
The sociologist Robert Bellah, a perceptive scholar of
the religious sensibility of Americans, has commented on the
widespread acceptance of the view that God is “actively
interested and involved in history, with a special concern for
America.”28 Nowhere in the world do political leaders so
routinely conclude their speeches and exhortations with an
invocation to God to bless their own nation-state, as if God
took cognizance of this modern arrangement of political
communities and was especially pleased to grant America
an extraordinary place in human affairs. Many writers,
myself included, have accommodated this self-perception of
Americans as a people over whom God watches closely under
the rubric of “American exceptionalism”, an exceptionalism
that manifests itself in myriad and often unusual ways. The
country’s characterization of the pitched battles fought in its
own sporting leagues as “World Series”, the abundance of
food, water, and natural resources that is taken for granted,
the view that access to unlimited oil is a constitutional right,
the gargantuan portions served in restaurants, the penchant
for the big in nearly every aspect of life — all this and much
more point to a country that cannot be assimilated into known
cultural and political histories of human societies. What the
rest of the world understands as “nationalism” is recast in
America as “patriotism”, and perhaps not accidentally: love
of the idea of America must supersede the love of the nation-
state, even if nowhere else do the flags and yellow ribbons

28
come out as quickly as they do in America. Nothing that
America embraces must be susceptible to accusations of
meanness, wrong-doing, and evil, but nationalism lends itself
to all these charges. Whatever theorists might make of “good”
and “bad” nationalisms, American self-representation
necessitates the rejection of all nationalism. Patriotism
engenders a more politically satisfying idea of transcendence:
thus the evils perpetrated under the name of the American
nation-state can ultimately be overlooked on the assumption
that they do not violate the core idea of America as the
repository of social and cultural goods. Whatever America
may do, howsoever much its actions may shock the world
into resignation, despair, and bitterness, the idea of America
cannot be irrevocably tarnished.
Perhaps even the idea of “American exceptionalism”
cannot fully convey what I have termed the dream-work of
America. When the conservative commentator, Francis
Fukuyama, adverted not so long ago to “the end of history”,29
he appeared to strike a chord among many who, having just
witnessed the end of the Cold War and the heady embrace of
“free trade” in eastern Europe and other parts of the world
where political regimes sympathetic to liberalization were
being installed, were jubilant at the prospect that nation states
were gravitating towards the acceptance of capitalist
democracy as the ideal standard. He would have been far
more accurate if he had suggested that America seeks to
capture all our futures and consequently represents the end
of prophecy. To have arrived in America is to obviate any
need for prophecy; it is to have become the prophecy. No
imperial power ever colonized its subjects as effectively and
as deeply as has America; none has done so with as much

29
conviction in its own innocence and with such unctuous
arrogance as to believe that, whatever the deeds of America,
“the world trusts us [America] with power, and the world is
right.”30
Even as the present war in Iraq continues, it provides a
vivid demonstration of my argument that empire is
ultimately not so much about oil and lucrative contracts, not
that those are ever insignificant or overlooked in the American
scheme of things, as it is about the dream-work of America.
That is one of the supreme failings of “Fahrenheit 9/11”, which
is in all respects a necessary film: its director, while clearly
supportive of conspiracy theories that etch the blood ties
which bond oil men as well as of theories — some will call
them facts, perhaps with entire justification — that link figures
in the Bush administration to the companies which have
received lucrative contracts for reconstruction work in Iraq,
is himself imprisoned by America’s dream-work. As Michael
Moore stands in the kitchen of a woman who has lost her son
in Iraq, he remarks: “This is a great country, isn’t it?” The
long silence before and after his observation accentuates its
gravity; it is not an observation that demands corroboration
from the viewer or listener, as it apparently belongs to the
realm of truths which are self-evident.
There is at least one immensely riveting story to have
emerged from this war which demands our attention. African-
Americans and Hispanics are disproportionately represented
in the armed forces of the United States; the two most
underprivileged minorities have an assurance that the gates
of the prison and the military are always open to them. Not
only do they thereby keep out of trouble and thin their own
ranks, but this frees white America to get on with the more

30
important work of raising productivity, making money, and
opening up worldwide markets. As it transpires, Permanent
Residents of the United States, whose fortunate status as
“green card” holders turns the faces of would-be “Resident
Aliens” the world over green with envy, may not vote in
American elections, but they are absolutely free in giving
their lives for the nation. The political elites must have enough
contempt for minorities to act on the assumption that casting
a vote is a reasoned decision that must not be entrusted to
minorities with immigrant status, but that service in the
military, where brawn is prized more than brains, should
never be denied to those so inclined. It now also emerges that
among those marines killed in action in the early days of the
war, at least two were green card-holding Hispanics, Lance
Corporal Jose Gutierrez and Corporal Jose Garibay, and that
posthumous American citizenship was at once conferred on
them.31 In having become Americans, they have, we must
believe, become liberated from their past and achieved the
highest end of life. Who can say whether God welcomes
Americans more than Iraqis to heaven, but cannot one at
least aver that many more would prefer to go to heaven as
Americans rather than as Iraqis, Mexicans, or Guatemalans?
In death, as in life, it must feel good to be an American.

31
ENDNOTES

1
Immanuel Wallerstein, The Decline of American Power (New York: The
New Press, 2003).

2
The only effective check against the American military machine is
domestic opinion, which, sadly, is rarely heard. Notwithstanding the
relatively heavy casualties inflicted on American forces during the
Vietnam war, it is opinion at home, which eventually turned against the
war, that compelled the withdrawal of American forces. The present
insurgents in Iraq, similarly, cannot hope to inflict a military defeat on
American forces; all they can hope to do is to wage a war of attrition, keep
Iraq on or near the front page, and eventually turn a significant section of
the American public against the occupation.

3
“Bush’s National Security Strategy”, full text in New York Times (20
September 2002), online at wysiwyg://3//http://www.nytimes.com/2002

4
The American marines who swarmed into Baghdad were, of course,
blissfully unaware of the history of this great city. The sermon delivered
at the al Hanif al Naaman Mosque in Baghdad’s Adhimiya district on 18
April 2003 likened them to the Mongols who ravaged the city in 1258.
See Nir Rosen, “Marines Cast as ‘Mongols’ in Baghdad”, online at: <http:/
/www.veteransforpeace.org/Marines_cast_as_041903.htm> Hulagu
Khan’s soldiers are said to have killed 800,000 people, but they spared the
Christians; widespread looting took place under the Americans, whose
forces were utilized in safeguarding oil wells and pipelines.

5
United Nations, Economic and Social Council, Commission on Human
Rights, Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection
of Minorities, “Forth-third session: Summary Record of the 10th Meeting”,
E/CN.4/Sub.2/1991/SR.10 (20 August 1991), p. 10.

6
David E. Omissi, Air Power and Colonial Control: The Royal Air Force
1919-1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990); Peter
Calvocoressi and Guy Wint, Total War: Causes and Courses of the Second

32
World War (New York: Penguin Books, 1979), pp. 132-44, 489-508; and
Michael S. Sherry, The Rise of American Air Power: The Creation of
Armageddon (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987).

7
See, for example, George W. Bush’s “Remarks to the Nation” on 11
September 2002, the first anniversary of the attacks upon the WTC and
Pentagon: “Our deepest national conviction is that every life is precious,
because every life is the gift of a Creator who intended us to live in liberty
and equality. More than anything else, this separates us from the enemy
we fight. We value every life; our enemies value none — not even the
innocent, not even their own.”On-line at :http://www.whitehouse.gov/
news/releases/2002/09/20020911-3.html

8
Though by no means do I wish to overlook the eight-year war between
Iran and Iraq, I am following conventional usage in describing the US-led
assault on Iraq in 1991 as the first Gulf War.

9
Speech to the US Congress, 20 September 2001: http://www.white
house.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010920-8.html

10
Address to the Nation, 7 October 2001: http://www.white house.gov/
news/releases/2001/10/20011007-8.html

11
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010911-16.html

12
See, in particular, his Empire as a Way of Life: An Essay on the Causes and
Character of America’s Present Predicament Along with a Few Thoughts About
an Alternative (New York: Oxford UP, 1980). “I am persuaded”, wrote
Jefferson to James Madison on 27 April 1809, “no constitution was never
before as well calculated as ours for extensive empire and self-
government.” Cited in ibid., p. vii.

13
See Warren Zimmerman, First Great Triumph: How Five Americans Made
Their Country a World Power (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002).

14
The idea of lebensraum, the notion that the German race could not be
confined within Germany, or that Germany was too small to hold a noble

33
people with greater sense of entitlement, is sometimes mistakenly viewed
as originating with Hitler. It was already prevalent in Germany before
World War I; moreover, small European nations moving out into the
world can be viewed as enacting their own form of lebensraum. The
widespread American military presence around the world, which post-
World War II administrations are accustomed to viewing as not only
desirable but part of the natural order of things, should be written into the
history of lebensraum. The newly created “Department of Homeland
Defense” in the US is ominous for more than the usual reasons, and one
should also note how far the characterization of the US as a nation or
country has yielded to the description of the US as ‘homeland’.

15
William Blum, Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower, new
updated ed. (London: Zed Books, 2002).

16
See Sebastian Mallaby, “The Reluctant Imperialism: Terrorism, Failed
States, and the Case for American Empire”, Foreign Affairs (March-April
2002). No one is less qualified than Summers to speak about the democratic
propensities of the United States, as he has deservedly earned notoriety
on more than one occasion for his autocratic conduct and czar-like
demeanor. In his person, he represents the lethal combination of one
blinded by an obdurate and insular discipline (economics), susceptible to
racism, ambitious to the hilt, and supremely contemptuous of worldviews
outside his framework of knowledge. See the discussion in Vinay Lal,
Empire of Knowledge: Culture and Plurality in the Global Economy (London:
Pluto Press, 2002), pp. 115-16, 202n.3, 221n.23, as well as numerous
accounts of his altercation with the African-American philosopher and
political radical, Cornel West.

17
Edward Said, “The other America”, Al-Ahram Weekly Online, no. 630
(20-26 March 2003), online at: http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/print/2003/
630/focus.htm

18
For a contrasting view, see Ziauddin Sardar and Merryl Wyn Davies,
Why Do People Hate America? (London: Icon Books, 2002).

34
19
Arundhati Roy, “The Algebra of Infinite Justice”, Outlook (8 October
2001), and “War is Peace”, Outlook (18 October 2001), both online at:
http://www.outlookindia.com/author.asp?name =Arundhati%20Roy

20
Arundhati Roy, “Mesopotamia. Babylon. The Tigris and Euphrates”,
Guardian (2 April 2003).

21
Williams, Empire as a Way of Life, p. 31.

22
Cited by Richard Drinnon, Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating
and Empire-Building (New York: New American Library, 1980), p. 65.

23
Eric Foner, The Story of American Freedom (New York: W. W. Norton,
1998), p. 35.

24
George W. Bush, “Remarks to the Nation”, 11 September 2002 (see
note).

25
Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap
Press of Harvard UP, 1975).

26
Cited by Sacvan Bercovitch, The Rites of Assent: Transformations in the
Symbolic Construction of America (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 81.

27
Ibid., p. 82.

28
Cited by Barbara Ehrenreich, Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions
of War (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1997), pp. 219-20.

29
Francis Fukuyama, The End of the History and the Last Man (New York:
Free Press, 1992).

30
From a speech by President George H.W. Bush, as cited by
New York Times (29 January 1992), p. 16.

31
Robert J. Lopez and Rich Connell, “Marines Win Posthumous
Citizenship”, Los Angeles Times (3 April 2003), p. B1, B10.

35
 Dissenting Knowledges Pamphlet Series

Multiversity (Penang/Goa)
and Citizens International (Penang)
Founding Editor, Vinay Lal

No. 1 Gustavo Esteva Celebration of Zapatismo

No. 2 Frédérique Apffel-Marglin & Margaret Bruchac
Exorcising Anthropology’s Demons
No. 3 Ashis Nandy The Twentieth Century: The
Ambivalent Homecoming of Homo Psychologicus
No. 4 Vinay Lal Empire and the Dream-Work of America
No. 5 Roby Rajan The Tyranny of Economics: Global
Governance and the Dismal Science

Citizens International (CITIZENS) is a global people’s network

based in Penang, Malaysia which works on issues of peace, anti-
militarism, cultural co-operation, environmental protection, sus-
tainable development and traditional knowledge systems.

CITIZENS believes that peoples activism on these issues globally

is essential to arrest the world's rapid slide towards increased
militarisation of land, seas, space; wasteful production of arma-
ments; irreparable destruction of our environment and ecology;
war, poverty and pestilence for the global majority.

CITIZENS is managed by a Board of Trustees of experienced NGO

activists. The Chairman of the Board is S.M. Mohamed Idris, the
President of Consumers Association of Penang (CAP) and Sahabat
Alam Malaysia (Friends of the Earth, Malaysia) (SAM) and Co-
ordinator of Third World Network (TWN).

36
 VINAY LAL was brought up
in Delhi, Tokyo, Jakarta, and
Washington, and educated, as
much as he cared to be, at
Johns Hopkins and the Uni-
versity of Chicago. He now
teaches in the Department of
History at the University of
California, Los Angeles,
though some of his colleagues wonder why he was ever
called to the profession. Ahistoricity is one of the principal
subjects of his most recent book, The History of History:
Politics and Scholarship in Modern India (Delhi: Oxford, 2003).
Some of the perils of becoming a nation-state, and the
often overlooked phenomena of everyday life, are explored
in Of Cricket, Guinness and Gandhi: Essays on Indian History
and Culture (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2003). But his
interests extend well beyond India to the seductions of
America and the global politics of knowledge, the subject
of Empire of Knowledge: Culture and Plurality in the Global
Economy (London: Pluto, 2002) and the Future of Kowledge
and Culture: A Dictionary for the Twenty-first Century, co-edited
with Ashis Nandy (Delhi: Viking/Penguin, 2004).
Introducing Hinduism (with Borin van Loon) will be released
in early 2005 (Icon Books, London).

37