How to Hide an Empire

Daniel Immerwahr

USA States that never made it

“But the operative word was could. None of this was automatic, for Congress retained the power to advance or impede territories, both of which it did. Sometimes it denied, ignored, or deflected statehood petitions. That is why Lincoln, West Dakota, Deseret, Cimarron, and Montezuma—all of which sought admission to the union—did not become states.”

Oklahoma: originally two of the townsfolk in the source play ‘Green Grow The Lilacs’ identify themselves as being one quarter Native. This is left out.

“Riggs’s play was well received when it debuted in 1931. Today, however, it is remembered less on its own merits than as the basis for the musical Oklahoma! by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein. “I kept most of the lines of the original play without making any changes in them, for the simple reason that they could not be improved upon—at least not by me,” Hammerstein told the press.

Yet there was one noticeable change. Though the musical concludes with a confrontation with a marshal (it ends happily), the characters in Oklahoma! say nothing about having “Indian blood.” Indeed, the word Indian is not uttered once in the production. Oklahoma! presents its characters as whites enchanted by available land and brought to spasms of ecstasy by the thought that they might soon “be livin’ in a brand-new state!” “We know we belong to the land,” they sing, “And the land we belong to is grand.”

It is the jubilant refrain of the white settler.”

USA went to great lengths to secure ‘Guano Islands’ and fertilizer (human and otherwise) was a hot topic before fertilizer could be produced industrially.

“Poudrette,” a polite name for human feces sold commercially, was of special interest. Even Victor Hugo couldn’t run his harried hero Jean Valjean through the sewers of Paris in Les Misérables (1862) without pausing—pausing, indeed, for a whole chapter—to remark that it really would be better if some use could be found for Paris’s waste. In a section regrettably cut from the musical, Hugo outlined his plan for “a double tubular apparatus, provided with valves and sluices,” to carry it back to the fields.”

Looking Backard: American Socialist Science Fiction.

“One of the blockbusters of the age was a work of science fiction, Looking Backward (1888) by Edward Bellamy. It imagined a man falling asleep in Boston in 1887 and awakening in the year 2000 to a luminously bright future, a future where everything worked.

Bellamy’s prophecies were exhilarating. Consumers, he predicted, would no longer buy goods in stores. They’d place orders into pneumatic tubes, using what he called “credit cards,” and their purchases would come whooshing back via the same tubes. For a small fee, they could even have music piped into their homes as if it were water.

“It appears to me,” Bellamy’s time traveler marveled in a retrospectively hilarious passage, “that if we could have devised an arrangement for providing everybody with music in their homes, perfect in quality, unlimited in quantity, suited to every mood, and beginning and ceasing at will, we should have considered the limits of human felicity already attained, and ceased to strive for further improvements.”

The real showstopper was the city itself. Bellamy’s sleeper could barely recognize Boston in 2000. He gaped at its “miles of broad streets,” its “large open squares filled with trees,” and its “public buildings of a colossal size and architectural grandeur unparalleled in my day.” Clean, spacious, and carefully planned—it was the very opposite of the Gilded Age city.”

Cuba

“For more than thirty years the Cuban constitution contained an astonishing clause granting the United States the right to invade Cuba (which it did, four times).”

American Samoa

“Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) by the anthropologist Margaret Mead, a wildly popular ethnography that featured frank discussions of Samoan sexuality and launched Mead’s career as one of the most famous scholars in the country. Yet Mead wrote of “Samoa,” not “American Samoa” (the colony’s legal name), and avoided mention of colonies, territories, and empires altogether. It is entirely possible to read Coming of Age without realizing that the “brown Polynesian people” she describes encountering on “a South Sea island” are U.S. nationals.”

The Philippines: like Cuba taken from Spain, administered by the USA.

“General J. Franklin Bell, the architect of the reconcentration strategy, estimated that on Luzon alone the war had killed one-sixth of the population, roughly 600,000. Textbooks usually offer an estimate of 250,000 for the whole archipelago, though there is no hard evidence behind that figure. The most careful study, made by the historian Ken De Bevoise, found that in the years 1899–1903, about 775,000 Filipinos died because of the war.

“Of course, we do want military glory,” wrote Twain, noting the death toll, “but this is getting it by avalanche.”

On July 4, 1902, Roosevelt proclaimed the Philippine War over. If De Bevoise’s calculations are right, it had claimed more lives than the Civil War.”

“What the military would do with Moroland, however, was an open question. This was the first time the United States was governing Muslims, and attitudes among officials varied enormously.

One approach was championed by Captain John Pershing, who held a post on the shore of Lake Lanao, a large body of water in Mindanao, around which nearly half the Muslim population of Moroland lived. Pershing made the news during the 2016 presidential campaign when Donald Trump described, with relish, how Pershing (“rough guy, rough guy”) had captured fifty “terrorists,” dipped fifty bullets in pig’s blood, lined up his captives, and then shot forty-nine of them, letting the last go to report what happened. “And for twenty-five years there wasn’t a problem, okay?” Trump concluded.”

Origin of ‘Manila’ Envelopes

“It did take a few useful goods from its tropical colonies, such as coconut oil from the Philippines and Guam and “Manila hemp” from the Philippines (used to make rope and sturdy paper, hence “manila envelopes” and “manila folders”).”

Empires standardized people, too. Take nursing in the Philippines.

The United States’ top supplier of foreign nurses since the 1960s, is not the consequence of markets alone. The Philippines has a competitive advantage because of the generations of nurses who learned their craft precisely to U.S. standards.”

“Aligning nursing practices in the Philippines with those of the mainland made the empire run smoother. But it has also had a profound unintended consequence. Once standards are firmly established, they are hard to dislodge, and the Philippines has remained, even after independence, extraordinarily U.S.-centric in its nursing practices. So, as the U.S. population has aged, requiring more health care, and as the Philippine economy has faltered, more and more nurses from the Philippines have left to work in the United States. Today, a massive pipeline carries tens of thousands of Filipino nurses to jobs in U.S. health centers.

At this point, not only are Filipino nurses training in preparation for emigration, but Filipino doctors are retraining as nurses so that they too can find work abroad.”

Aleuts in World War II

“The long internment wasn’t born of any animosity toward the Aleuts. They weren’t the “enemy.” It just seems that officials found it easier to keep the Aleuts where they were—far away—than to bring them home. Plus, the military had taken over many of their homes. And because censorship was watertight, there was no public pressure. Nobody knew.”

Australia in World War II pragmatically aligned itself with USA

“Australia’s military planners, expecting invasion, prepared to sacrifice the north of the continent. MacArthur lacked the resources to roll back the Japanese and retake all the territory the Allies had lost.”

“Australian farmers often worked small plots, weeding by hand and selling to local markets. Machines played a small role in crop cultivation, and safety measures such as milk pasteurization were costly luxuries, ill suiting the farmer’s-market milieu of Australian agriculture.

All that would have to change. The United States sent over experts, agricultural missionaries bearing machines, herbicides, and fungicides. Their charge? Transform a continent.

They bombarded farmers with lectures, radio broadcasts, educational films, leaflets, and field demonstrations, all to teach the U.S. way of farming. Australian manufacturers were given models of U.S. tractors, mowers, harvesters, and dusters and taught how to make them. Australian canners learned to can the army way. Dairy farmers were ordered to pasteurize their milk and test their cows for tuberculin. Given the sheer size of MacArthur’s purchase orders, to resist would have been economic suicide.”

“the realm of standards, that was an unavoidable truth. Politically, Australia remained British. But materially, it looked a lot like a U.S. colony.”

Visual Culture

“ubiquitous graffiti tag: a cartoon face peering over a wall, accompanied by the words KILROY WAS HERE.

Kilroy, in fact, was everywhere.”

Modern Maps

“More popular was the “polar azimuthal projection” perfected by the dean of wartime cartography, Richard Edes Harrison. It showed the continents huddled around the North Pole, a jarring angle of view that highlighted aviation routes and showed how dangerously close North America was to Germany’s European empire.

Richard Edes Harrison’s polar azimuthal projection, first published by Fortune in July 1941 and copied widely thereafter (this is a 1942 version). The original accompanying text explained how “the entire conflict pivots around the U.S.” Arrows extending out from New York and San Francisco show the global flow of lend-lease aid.”

“The map was an enormous hit, reprinted and copied frequently. Joseph Goebbels waved it in reporters’ faces as proof of the United States’ world-conquering ambitions. The U.S. Army ordered eighteen thousand copies, and the map became the basis for the United Nations logo, designed in 1945.”

USA WWII Influence on UK

“The 1.65 million U.S. servicemen swarming around Britain, building bases and running jeeps down English country roads, were preparing for the invasion of Normandy of 1944. Yet the British could be forgiven if the sight of so many foreign troops parking their heels on English soil called to mind the Norman invasion of 1066. There were only three things wrong with the GIs, the British quip went. They were “overpaid, over-sexed, and over here.”

World War II Demobilization: resistance in the Armed Forces

“There is a word for it when tens of thousands of uniformed men march in the streets, heckle their commanders, declare solidarity with guerrilla forces, and burn the secretary of war in effigy. It was, as Truman privately put it, “plain mutiny.”

Puerto Rico

“In 1950 about one in seven Puerto Ricans lived not on the island, but on the mainland. By 1955, it was closer to one in four.”

Puerto Rico nationalists:

“Yet the mainland public made surprisingly little of the “scrape.” A seven-city revolt in the United States’ largest colony that included an assassination attempt on its governor, that required suppression by airpower, and that nearly killed the U.S. president made brief headlines, but rarely were the dots connected. The New York Times shrugged it off as “one of those mad adventures that make no sense to outsiders.” It was, as one journalist put it, the “news of a day and quickly over, to be forgotten by the average American.”

Oscar Collazo, the surviving assassin, insisted to whoever would listen that this wasn’t a “mad adventure,” but a determined attempt to draw attention to Puerto Rico’s plight.”

“On March 1, 1954, shortly after the UN’s decision, four nationalists entered the House of Representatives in Washington. They made their way to the upstairs gallery, unfurled a Puerto Rican flag, and shouted “¡Viva Puerto Rico Libre!” Then they pulled out pistols and fired twenty-nine rounds into the body politic below. It was, the Speaker of the House remembered, “the wildest scene in the entire history of Congress.” Splinters flew as the bullets sprayed over the chamber.

In all, five congressmen were shot. One, Alvin Bentley from Michigan, took a bullet in the chest and went gray. His doctor gave him a fifty-fifty chance of living. He did survive, as did the other four, but a colleague judged that he was never really the same.

To this day, the drawer in the mahogany table used by the Republican leadership has a jagged bullet hole in it.”

“Sondheim was nervous. “I can’t do this show,” he protested at first. “I’ve never even known a Puerto Rican.”

His lyrics bore that out. In one draft, the characters fantasize, like the farmers and cowmen of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!, about statehood. “When we’re a state in America, then we migrate to America!” they sing excitedly in broken English. Of course, Puerto Ricans were already citizens with the right to move anywhere in the country they chose. And, the commonwealth constitution having just passed, statehood was a dim prospect.

Sondheim cut those verses but left in a portrait of island life, offered in the song “America,” that managed to capture nearly every stereotype about Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico was, in the song, an “ugly island” of “tropic diseases,” with “hurricanes blowing” and its “population growing.”

Undersea Cables

“The transcendence of surface-hugging technologies in transportation had a direct analogue in communication. Since 1844, when Samuel Morse had tapped out the question WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT in the world’s first telegram, wires had been a vital instrument of politics. Cables crossed the seas, acting as the nervous systems of large empires. The British, champions of the cable game, had by the early twentieth century gained control of more than half the world’s cables. They also, through Malaya, possessed the world’s sole supply of the natural latex gutta-percha—the only material until plastic that could effectively insulate deep-sea submarine cables.

Yet mere preponderance wasn’t enough. The British obsessed over acquiring an “all red” network, red being the color of the British Empire on the map. Such a network, passing only through British territory, would offer protection from foreign powers that might cut or tap Britain’s cables.

Britain achieved its all-red network and, with it, invulnerability. Everyone else, meanwhile, learned the cost of not having a secure network.”

IT development

“Before the invasion of Normandy, George Marshall in Washington used a similar system to confer for more than an hour with Dwight Eisenhower in Europe, Douglas MacArthur in the Southwest Pacific, and John Deane in Moscow. The generals communicated by sending short typed messages, which appeared on a screen. In other words, they texted.”

Herbert Hoover

“Perhaps the only thing you need to know about Herbert Hoover is that he wore a jacket and tie to fish.”

“1920, Hoover instead became secretary of commerce. He’d been told by a predecessor that the job required merely turning the lighthouses out at night and putting the fish to bed, but for Hoover it was more than that. It was a calling.”

“He and his wife, Lou, used Mandarin (learned while living in China) when they wished to speak privately. The polyglot presidency was a reaction to a world teeming with languages, a world where English got you only so far.”

Development of international standard “weights and measures”

In “faraway lands, the colonizers’ practices would be adhered to. Empires imprinted colonies with new laws, ideas, languages, sports, military conventions, fashions, weights and measures, rules of etiquette, money, and industrial practices. In fact, that’s what colonial officials spent much of their time doing.

There’s a reason, in other words, that the British measurement system (feet, yards, gallons, pounds, tons) is called the imperial system. Those weights and measures were promulgated to secure commensurability throughout Britain’s realm, far beyond the British Isles. Even where local measures were used, they were defined in British terms, such as the Indian measure of mass called the maund, standardized in the nineteenth century to equal a hundred pounds.

“Today, except for those playing period instruments such as baroque flutes or older church organs, A440 is the law of the land.”

“Worldwide uniformity. Had this been the ambition of a transportation official from, say, Thailand, it would have been laughable. Yet from the United States it was wholly feasible. That year, the international Convention on a Uniform System of Road Signs and Signals reproduced the U.S. practices with remarkable fidelity. Traffic light colors, pavement striping rules, and even to a large degree road signs followed the U.S. system, including the well-known yellow octagon with the word STOP printed on it.

Wait—yellow? Yes. The octagonal stop sign came from Michigan, born when a Detroit police sergeant clipped the corners off a square sign to give it a more distinctive shape. But the early signs were yellow, not red. The first national agreement of U.S. state highway professionals rejected the use of red on any sign, since it was hard to see at night. So the U.S. stop sign, adopted as an international standard in 1953, was yellow.”

“Yet just a year later, in 1954, the United States changed its mind about the yellow. Experts thought that red better signified danger, and new developments in industrial chemistry allowed for durable, reflective red finishes. So, to what I can only imagine was the apoplectic fury of traffic engineers worldwide, the United States abandoned the global standard—its own standard, designed in Michigan and foisted on the world—and began to replace its yellow signs with red ones.

This, more than anything, showed the stupefying privilege the United States enjoyed in the realm of standards. It could force other countries to adopt its screw thread angle in the name of international cooperation.”

Standardization of English

“Churchill took these concerns seriously. In his Harvard speech, he declared his support for Basic, a drastically reduced version of English containing 850 words, only 18 of them verbs (come, get, give, go, keep, let, make, put, seem, take, be, do, have, see, say, send, may, and will). Basic was English for foreigners. The entire system—grammar and vocabulary—could be printed legibly on one side of a sheet of paper, with space left over for sample sentences.”

“The next group to go in for English was the scientists. Modern science has always been international, and scientists were accustomed to having to learn one another’s languages to read the latest research. In the twentieth cen“tury, they seriously considered adopting invented languages to speed their work. They were particularly interested in a postwar bridge language called Interlingua, designed especially for science. The prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association printed abstracts in it (“Velocitates de conduction esseva determinate in 126 patientes qui presentava con disordines neurologic”). A journal of molecular spectroscopy appeared entirely in the language.

Such internationalist ambition, though laudable, couldn’t overcome the gravitational force of the United States. In the first decade and a half following the Second World War, 55 percent of the Nobel Prizes in science went to scholars at U.S. universities, and 76 percent of laureates were at Anglophone ones. By the 1960s, more than half of publications on natural science in the world were in English.”

“The Philippines has more call-center workers than any other country. It’s also an international center for teaching English, a place where aspiring speakers can learn the language cheaply, with a clear mainland accent.”

“It would be hard to find a place further removed, culturally or politically, from Washington and London than Mongolia. But in 2004 its prime minister, a Harvard graduate, announced that English would replace Russian as the first foreign language in Mongolian schools. He hoped to turn Mongolia’s capital, Ulaanbaatar, into a hub for call centers.”

“Today the top Chinese universities offer hundreds of degree programs in subjects ranging from history to nuclear physics taught in English. Some hundred thousand native speakers of English have found work as teachers in China.

“If the Chinese … rule the world some day,” the linguist John McWhorter has written, “I suspect they will do it in English.”

“A study commissioned by the British Council of five poorer countries (Pakistan, Bangladesh, Cameroon, Nigeria, and Rwanda) found that professionals who spoke English earned 20 to 30 percent more than those who didn’t.

In South Korea, parents alert to this dynamic have sent their young children, usually under the age of five, to clinics for lingual frenectomies, surgery to cut the thin band of tissue under the tongue. The operation ostensibly gives children nimbler tongues, making it easier for them to pronounce the difficult l and r sounds. If masters once cut slaves’ tongues out to prohibit native languages, today people do the cutting themselves. And they do it to enable English.

Lingual frenectomies, it should be said, aren’t common. Nevertheless, their mere existence speaks to a widely felt hunger for English.”

“Perhaps the most extraordinary privilege, though, is that people from the United States don’t have to struggle with foreign languages. While everyone else pays the cognitive tax of learning English, English speakers can dispense with language classes entirely. In 2013 the Modern Language Association found that college and university enrollments in foreign languages were half what they had been fifty years earlier. In other words, U.S. students have responded to globalization by learning half as many languages.”

Islands as fantasy land + origin of James Bond stories

“Islands as: “desirable vacation spots—their distance from population centers, their relaxed pace of life—would ill suit them as launchpads for global conquest. After all, Napoleon’s adversaries sent him to Elba to exile him, not to encourage him to have another go.

It’s true that there has long been an association with islands and malfeasance, at least in Western fiction. It’s not hard to think of examples of islands as lawless and dangerous spaces, such as Treasure Island (1883), H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), or Skull Island in King Kong (1933).

World domination from an island, though—that’s different. As far as I can tell, it’s a more recent literary phenomenon. As far as I can tell, it begins with Bond.”

“Wenner-Gren’s ties to Göring threw a pall of suspicion over him. “I have not a shred of evidence, but I have a very strong feeling that this man acts as a spy for the German government,” the U.S. undersecretary of state reported. The FBI put Wenner-Gren under surveillance, the U.S. government froze his accounts, and wild accusations flew. It was said that he was helping Nazis transfer wealth, that Göring had sneaked a mysterious bundle onto Wenner-Gren’s yacht, or that every member of the yacht’s crew was a spy.

It surely didn’t help that the FBI was aggressively investigating a member of Wenner-Gren’s coterie, Inga Arvad, a Danish beauty queen sometimes mistaken for his mistress. Arvad was a favorite of the Nazi leadership; Hitler had judged her to be the most “perfect example of Nordic beauty” he’d ever seen, and he had hosted her in his private box during the 1936 Olympics. Whether that meant she was spying was hard to say. The main revelation from the FBI’s round-the-clock surveillance was not that Arvad was collaborating with the Nazis, but that Arvad was conducting a torrid, involved affair—one the FBI recorded on tape—with a young naval ensign named John F. Kennedy. (When Kennedy was elected president, J. Edgar Hoover used the FBI’s dossier on Arvad as blackmail to ensure his reappointment as FBI director.)

This was the hotbed of international intrigue Ian Fleming encountered in 1943.

The accusations that Wenner-Gren had built a secret harbor for German U-boats proved false. Still, Fleming found the whole rum-soaked milieu irresistible. “When we have won this blasted war,” Fleming told his friend, “I am going to live in Jamaica. Just live in Jamaica and lap it up, and swim in the sea and write books.”

“If there was one moment in literature when the switch was thrown, this was it. Fictional islands before Doctor No were the godforsaken outskirts of civilization. After it, they were centers of global power.”

“In 1935 the State Department announced that it was annexing Baker, Howland, and Jarvis Islands in the central Pacific. Two days later, it hastily rescinded the announcement. The United States didn’t need to annex those islands, officials clarified with embarrassment. A consultation of the records had revealed that it already owned them.

It was a telling oversight, one that captured well the shambolic character of U.S. imperial administration. But it changed nothing from a strategic perspective.”

“The United States, in other words, did not abandon empire after the Second World War. Rather, it reshuffled its imperial portfolio, divesting itself of large colonies and investing in military bases, tiny specks of semi-sovereignty strewn around the globe. Today there are roughly eight hundred such bases, some of the most important of them on islands.

“The pointillist empire today: Known U.S. bases beyond the mainland”

“What, specifically, could the United States do with an island base? A good example is the Swan Islands, a small cluster of three islands in an isolated patch of the Caribbean, “not far from the fictional location of Doctor No’s island. The Swans were in the first batch of guano islands the United States had claimed.

The guano ran dry, but after the Second World War, Washington found other uses for the Swans. The USDA used them to quarantine imported livestock suspected of carrying foot-and-mouth disease. In the 1950s the CIA secretly took over Great Swan and built a landing strip and a fifty-thousand-watt radio transmitter. That extremely powerful transmitter could reach South America, allowing the United States to cover with its radio beams territory inaccessible by ground.

Soon after the CIA built its radio station, a mission of armed Honduran students traveled to Great Swan to liberate the islands and claim them for Honduras. They had no idea of the CIA’s presence, and the agency was determined to keep them in the dark. GIVE THEM PLENTY OF BEER AND PROTECT THE FAMILY JEWELS was the frantic cable from Washington (i.e., don’t let them discover the broadcast “o the island to repel the invasion.

The episode that followed is best appreciated by reading the cable traffic from Swan to Washington:

Swan to HQ: HONDURAN SHIP ON HORIZON. BEER ON ICE. TALKED TO STUDENTS. THEY CONFABING. HAVE ACCEPTED BEER.

Swan to HQ: STUDENTS MIXING CEMENT IN WHICH THEY INTEND TO WRITE “THIS ISLAND BELONGS TO HONDURAS.” ONE GROUP MALINGERING, LISTENING TO EARTHA KITT RECORDS AND DRINKING FIFTH BEER.

Swan to HQ: STUDENTS HAVE JUST RAISED HONDURAN FLAG. I SALUTED.

Swan to HQ: BEER SUPPLIES RUNNING LOW. NOW BREAKING OUT THE RUM. THESE KIDS ARE GREAT.

Swan to HQ: STUDENTS HAVE EMBARKED FOR HONDURAS. LIQUOR SUPPLY EXHAUSTED. FAMILY JEWELS INTACT.

In the end, the students were permitted to sing the Honduran national “take a census, and raise their flag (on a CIA-supplied pole). The students left, never realizing who their drinking buddies were. Or that a contingent of marines had been waiting, ready to start shooting if the beer didn’t work.”

“The CIA island was in fact a central node in the vast and distinctly not-legal plot to overthrow the Nicaraguan government. That plot in its fullness incorporated arms dealers, drug traffickers, Middle Eastern governments, religious organizations, Cuban exiles, retired generals, and Rambo-style soldiers of fortune. Had such a multifarious scheme appeared in one of Fleming’s novels, it might have strained his readers’ patience. It is a victory for the forces of concision that today we know it simply by two words, albeit incongruous ones: the Iran-Contra affair.”

“Doctor No’s base is powered by a nuclear reactor, and Bond triumphs in the end by triggering a meltdown, drowning Doctor No in the pool containing the overheating reactor and wrecking the island. (That Bond’s action would quite likely have turned Jamaica and its environs into a Chernobyl-style fallout zone goes narratively unexplored.)

The film’s introduction of the nuclear theme was not a random choice. There is a special connection between nuclear weapons and islands, one that has placed the world’s greatest instruments of destruction on some of its most remote locales. The very distance of small islands from large populations has made them ideal sites to test and store nuclear devices.”

“The Bikini Marshallese, removed from their home, were placed on the atoll of Rongerik. Within two months, their food and water started running out. They asked to return home to Bikini.

Of course, they couldn’t. Not only was their homeland radioactive, but the military had no intention of abandoning its valuable testing site. Between 1946 and 1958, the United States detonated sixty-six more nuclear weapons on or near Bikini and the next-door atoll of Enewetak. To the proverbial Martian looking on from space, it must have appeared that humanity was for some indiscernible reason waging furious, unrelenting war on a string of sandbars in the middle of the Pacific.”

Anti-war anti-nuclear origins of Godzilla franchise

“Gojira, the phenomenally popular film Tanaka and Honda made, was about an ancient dinosaur awakened by U.S. hydrogen bomb testing. Gojira first destroys a Japanese fishing boat—a thinly veiled Lucky Dragon—before attacking and irradiating a Bikini-like island called Odo. Gojira, who is said to be “emitting high levels of H-bomb radiation,” then turns on Tokyo, breathing fire and laying waste to the city.

As films go, Gojira isn’t subtle. It’s full of talk of bombs and radiation. “If nuclear testing continues, then someday, somewhere in the world, another Gojira may appear” are its somber final words.

That message, however, got lost in translation. Gojira was remixed for the United States, using much of the original footage but splicing in a white, English-speaking protagonist played by Raymond Burr. What got cut out was the antinuclear politics. The Hollywood version contains only two muted references to radiation.”

“The Japanese Gojira was a protest film, hammering away at the dangers of the U.S. testing in the Pacific. The English-language Godzilla, by contrast, was just another monster flick.”

USA nuclear placement and testing

“Despite all the duck-and-cover warnings about Soviet strikes on Cincinnati and Dubuque, the real front lines of nuclear confrontation were the overseas bases and territories. Hundreds of nuclear weapons, we now know, were placed in South Korea, the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico. Throughout most of the sixties, there were more than a thousand on Okinawa. Johnston Island, one of the guano islands Ernest Gruening had recolonized, bristled with nuclear-armed Thor missiles. An unknown number of nuclear weapons were stored in Hawai‘i, Alaska (including on the Aleutian Islands), and Midway.”

“From there, they marched for four days to a nuclear weapons facility in Aldermaston. By the time they reached it, the crowd had grown to around ten thousand.

These numbers weren’t enormous. But the fact that people had turned out at all, in the 1950s, in the heart of NATO country, to protest the logic of the Cold War was impressive. NUCLEAR DISARMAMENT and NO MISSILE BASES HERE, their banners read in sober black and white.

An artist named Gerald Holtom designed a symbol for the Aldermaston march. “I was in despair,” he remembered. He sketched himself “with hands palm out stretched outwards and downwards in the manner of Goya’s peasant before the firing squad. I formalized the drawing into a line and put a circle around it.”

The lone individual standing helpless in the face of world-annihilating military might—it was “such a puny thing,” thought Holtom. But his creation, the peace symbol,”

USA ‘Burtonwood’ base & its relationship to The Beatles

“The thousands of U.S. servicemen who came through were like millionaires. Teenage girls charged at them at the train station (The Daily Mirror, suspecting prostitution, judged this “shoddy, shameful, and shocking”).

In its official contracts alone, Burtonwood plowed more than $75,000 into the local economy per day. And that doesn’t count the money for entertainment. Musicians did especially well. They could get gigs on the base, or they could catch the troops who, pockets bulging with dollars, made their way to the Merseyside clubs at night.”

“The first side that John, Paul, and George recorded was “That’ll Be the Day,” a Buddy Holly number performed with remarkable fidelity to the original. They weren’t trying to dislodge Holly, just to establish themselves as recording artists in his style. There was only one copy pressed, which the bandmates passed around—today it’s the most valuable record in existence.

They cut it in 1958, the same year the antinuclear marchers moved on Aldermaston. The Beatles and the peace symbol, in other words, debuted within four months and a day’s train ride of each other. And both were side effects of the U.S. basing system.”

USA exempting territories from Trade Law:

“Like Puerto Rico, the Northern Marianas were subject to some U.S. laws but not others. The federal minimum wage and much of immigration law were waived. The nearest Occupational Safety and Health Administration office was thousands of miles away. At the same time, for the purposes of trade, the Northern Marianas counted as part of the country. The combination was potent: a legal environment where foreign workers could toil for paltry wages with little oversight to stitch garments labeled MADE IN THE USA.

Saipan functioned as a sort of standing loophole. Starting in 1995, as stories of its exploited workers made their way to the mainland, members of Congress sought to close it. Over the next decade or so, they would submit at least twenty-nine bills to change some part of the relevant law.”

“For the top-earning lobbyist in Washington, Abramoff had an odd portfolio. He didn’t represent Fortune 500 companies. Instead, he worked the loopholes. His next victory after the Northern Marianas was for the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, who were fighting off a gaming tax. He used the same strategy as in Saipan, exploiting the fact that an Indian tribal government could give politicians unreported gifts. He took on more Indian tribes and nations as clients. He started representing a Puerto Rican business group. He organized junkets to the Republic of the Marshall Islands, and he got involved in Guam’s gubernatorial race.

What Jack Abramoff had discovered in Saipan was the same thing the Bush administration lawyer John Yoo had discovered in Guantánamo Bay: empire is still around, and places with anomalous legal statuses can be extremely useful.”

John McCain

“McCain was born in the Panama Canal Zone, a Guantánamo-like space under exclusive U.S. jurisdiction.

In the 1930s, Congress addressed this issue. As a House report put it, “the citizenship of persons born in the Canal Zone of American parents, has never been defined either by the Constitution, treaty or congressional enactment.” After debate, Congress passed a statute making them citizens. It applied not only to future children but, retroactively, to anyone who’d been born in the Canal Zone to a citizen parent in the past. The law passed in 1937.

John McCain was born in 1936.

Had this been litigated, it would have made for fascinating case law. McCain was, per the 1937 statute, a citizen by virtue of his birth. But he wasn’t born a citizen, as no law made him a citizen at the time of his birth. Arguably, then, he was not a “natural born citizen” and thus not eligible for the presidency.”

“There are about four million people living in the territories today, in Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the Northern Marianas. They’re subject to the whims of Congress and the president, but they can’t vote for either. More than fifty years after the Voting Rights Act, they remain disenfranchised.”

“Britain and France have some thirteen overseas bases between them, Russia has nine, and various other countries have one—in all, there are probably thirty overseas bases owned by non-U.S. countries. The United States, by contrast, has roughly eight hundred, plus agreements granting it access to still other foreign sites. Dozens of countries host U.S. bases. Those that refuse are nevertheless surrounded by them. The Greater United States, in other words, is in everyone’s backyard.”