The US Empire has such a horrible post-WWII record of imperialism that has been sold to ordinary Americans as humanitarian interventions by an "exceptional" nation. Corporate media has so distorted the perceptions and sense of reality for ordinary Americans that more astute writers are resorting to ridicule and sarcasm in addressing the policies and actions of Empire. We see this sort of treatment illustrated in this piece and we have seen it many times in articles by the Brazilian journalist Pepe Escobar. Thus Perry writes:
I fear that the threat of another world war might be too good an offer for the United States government to pass up. “What?! We could have another world war?! Why, that would be swell! We haven’t gone out and had a world war in a long time! It’s always been having to settle for wars that end up in cease-fires and we’re hungry for another war an hour later! Gosh, we haven’t had a world war since 1945! Honey, do you know where my good tie is? I want to look nice! I’ll call the UN and make reservations.”The problem is that our ruling directors and propagandists seem to believe their own propaganda as expressed recently in an essay published at Brookings, a major ruling class think tank, entitled "Enough is enough—U.S. abdication on Syria must end". As the title suggests the writers are calling for an aggressive military intervention in Syria.
Evidence of another major Empire intervention appears to be brewing in Libya. Canadian Professor Maximilian Forte views such interventions and covering propaganda as so bizarre that he compares it to themes used in science fiction in a very clever piece entitled "The Shape of Things to Come in Libya (Part 1 of 2)".
Here we are dealing with a particular type of science fiction: social science fiction. I think it is an important subject of study, especially because in the US it seems that the only time that imperialism is conceptually grasped, is when it is deflected into films about alien invasions. In other words, the aliens shown in the standard alien invasion/abduction film, are a symbolic representation of US imperialists—it will be denied that Good Americans are anything like that, and the overt denial mixed with tacit agreement becomes science fiction. As a non-US cinema spectator, when I see films about aliens, I see them as coming from the US, I see reenactments of everything US troops have done in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, and so on....
