Listen Live on KKFI
Every Wednesday at 7:00 pmAbout the Show
Alternative Radio
A weekly one-hour public affairs radio program that provides analyses and views that are ignored or distorted in most media. Guests have included Dar Jamail, Michael Pollan, Noam Chomsky, Antonia Jusef, Naomi Klein, Vandana Shiva, Jeff Cohen, David Zirin, Bill Moyers and Howard Zinn.
What’s the shelf life of empires? Decades, maybe centuries.
All things come to an end. Recall Shelley’s great poem Ozymandias about the Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses the Great and his seemingly invincible kingdom. Ozymandias was Greek for Ramses.
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. And on the pedestal, these words appear
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
It is difficult to discuss imperialism because there is virtually uniform elite opinion that the U.S. is not an empire. Washington will not willingly concede its global superpower position. But remember the omnipotent British Empire? Where is it today?
Alfred McCoy is professor of history at the University of Wisconsin. He is the author of the classic The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade. For Closer than Brothers, his pioneering book on the impact of CIA torture on the Philippine military, he was awarded the Goodman Prize. He is also the author of A Question of Torture and Policing America’s Empire.
