Omission Creep
Invisibility is fundamental to the construction of empire. If citizens of the imperial center—the metropole, the “homeland”—could see how their nation’s wealth and power were really made and guarded, there would be few volunteers to fight in and administer the periphery. This has been seen throughout history: in the British people’s studied ignorance of their foreign service’s operations in Kenya or India; the quiet French acceptance “each time a head [was] cut off or an eye put out in Vietnam,” as Aimé Césaire wrote; the walls of official silence that surround the Chinese mass internment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang. The Swedish essayist Sven Lindqvist put it succinctly in his book Exterminate All the Brutes: “The men representing civilization out in the colonies were ‘invisible’ not only in the sense that their guns killed at a distance but also in that no one at home really knew what they were doing.” (In his 2021 television series of the same name, Haitian documentarian Raoul Peck read that line over a clip from Apocalypse Now, followed by archival footage of real American violence in the Vietnam War.)
Americans tend to recoil at the description of our country as an empire—or more precisely, the seat of one. It clashes with our self-image as a republic, “conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” and so on. But under any common definition—“a large territory or set of disparate territories encompassing many different peoples ruled by a single power, and without the consent of all those governed,” says the Oxford Dictionary of Human Geography—the United States has been an empire since at least the early twentieth century, if not throughout the conquest and resettlement of native lands in the centuries before.
A crucial turn came in 1901. That year, the U.S. Supreme Court began ruling that the territories the United States had recently seized from Spain were neither states nor foreign countries, but rather “foreign to the United States in a domestic sense.” In other words, they were colonies, ruled by but not entitled to representation in Washington. This arrangement still holds in Puerto Rico and Guam, as well as the U.S. Virgin Islands, American Samoa, and Northern Mariana Islands.