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Ed Webb

The American Empire Is the Sick Man of the 21st Century - Foreign Policy - 0 views

foreignpolicy.com/...e-sick-man-of-the-21st-century

US USA history politics empire opinion analysis sci-fi sciencefiction

shared by Ed Webb on 23 Jun 19 - No Cached
  • classic Foundation series, Isaac Asimov imagines a Galactic Empire, governed from the city-world of Trantor, that has maintained peace and prosperity for thousands of years but that is teetering on the brink of decline. The only person who sees this clearly is the psychohistorian Hari Seldon, who has mathematically determined that the core conditions for the Empire are unsustainable and will crumble over the course of centuries. As Trantor “becomes more and more the administrative center of Empire, it becomes a greater prize,” a disciple says as he absorbs Seldon’s calculations. “As the Imperial succession becomes more and more uncertain, and the feuds among the great families more rampant, social responsibility disappears.” Asimov published these words in 1951, at the peak of U.S. global power. But they might as well be describing Washington in 2019, an imperial capital whose elite have transformed it into a great prize to be feuded over as surely as Asimov’s future empire did—and as other empires have done in the past.
  • much of the United States has experienced a steady decline while a handful of major cities, including Washington, have become hyperwealthy and almost unaffordable through the concentration of financial, tech, and media monopolies and their affiliated lobbyists. By now, many Americans know this story—but few think about what it means for their place in the world
  • Although Foundation drew its direct inspiration from Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, history is replete with examples of seemingly powerful empires run by weak, divided elites and picked apart by outside powers
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  • The near-universal understanding of the United States as a powerful, unified global actor is flawed and in need of revision. The United States is less a great power exerting its will and more an open-air market for global corruption, in which outside powers can purchase influence, shape political outcomes, and play factions against each other in the service of their own competing agendas.
  • Trump’s administration is openly bought by foreign governments via his international network of hotels and resorts, including the one located directly between the White House and the U.S. Capitol, where a Saudi-funded lobbyist rented 500 rooms in the month after the 2016 election. His political party, which still controls the Senate and increasingly dominates the judiciary, has no interest in holding him accountable for any of this. And of course there’s the small matter of Russian interference in the 2016 election; as the limited information known so far from special counsel Robert Mueller’s report confirms, Trump and the Republicans were at the very least the passive and willing beneficiaries of efforts by a foreign power to influence the election outcome.
  • the influence of outside money in Washington has become routine over the past generation. From the pervasive influence of the United Arab Emirates and other Gulf monarchies over think tanks and media organizations to virtually the entire U.S. government kowtowing before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee to China’s warm relationship with the Chamber of Commerce and with the heads of some of the most powerful U.S. companies to the funneling of foreign money through the real estate industries of the country’s largest and wealthiest cities—the U.S. government is for sale.
  • The complete deregulation of campaign finance and the subsequent legalization of corruption in Washington, on a scale unheard of in other developed countries, have resulted in a capital where the distinction between foreign and domestic monied interests is harder and harder to parse. The U.S. government, in other words, does not exist to serve the interests of Americans through either its foreign or its domestic policies; rather, it exists to perpetuate the interests of the globalized oligarchy.
  • While Rhodes and Obama also faced pressure from within the Washington establishment, they found their agenda for the Middle East repeatedly hijacked by foreign allies—the same governments that also lobbied, with varying success, for U.S. military operations from Syria to Yemen. American power, however mighty, means nothing if it’s being used for the ends of the highest bidders
  • what we’re seeing is neither a considered, responsible withdrawal from empire in order to invest in urgent needs at home nor a revolt against empire by the world’s wretched. Rather, it’s a drawn-out, decadent collapse recognizable to any student of Rome or Constantinople. America is the sick man of the 21st century, and anyone who has watched its president bumble through a gathering of bemused, pitying world leaders knows it.
Ed Webb

Ghosts of the Future: A Conversation with Larry Achiampong | The Current | The Criterio... - 0 views

www.criterion.com/...ersation-with-larry-achiampong

film race empire colonialism UK Britain Ghana Brexit sci-fi sciencefiction

shared by Ed Webb on 14 Apr 21 - Cached
  • Relic Traveller is set in a moment in the future where the global West is coming to a point of decline because of nationalism, while the African Union has come into prosperity, harmony, and independence. And it’s quite important that I say this: the project isn’t about a utopia. This point in time brings with it responsibility. During this shift, the African Union creates a range of initiatives, one of which is the Relic Travellers’ Alliance. Relic Travellers are people who are sent around the planet to pick up clues and, in particular, vocal testimonies from people who have been oppressed by the ghosts of colonization. These are stories and experiences of people who have not yet been allowed to be healed or learned from. These stories help to govern the future and create a space for healing, from a bottom-up rather than a top-down perspective.
  • in the past few years, particularly in the UK, there’s been a real resurgence of empire fetishism, and seemingly more reluctance than ever among the media and ruling classes to address the reality of this history
  • the films represent a warning to the West about its negligence, ignorance, mythical approach to history, omission of the histories and legacies of empire, slavery and colonization, and how those things affect the way that we live today: the way that Black people are still disenfranchised. They’re a stark warning that the West will undo itself as a result of the lies it has celebrated, taught, and disseminated for a while
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  • Something like Brexit is only possible because the UK, the powers that be, and the media have propagated myths for so long regarding the idea of the “other,” the foreigner, and the so-called independence and strength of the United Kingdom or the West, without recognizing the resources and contributions [of colonized and oppressed people]—voluntary and otherwise—that make these nations so apparently great.
  • I have my own terminology for my work: “Sanko-Time.” It brings together two words. “Sankofa” is a Twi word from Ghana, meaning to go back and retrieve something that may have been lost or forgotten, or something that is known but needs to be revisited in order to make sense of the present or pave the way for the future. The future does not become possible without the past. The word “time” represents my interest in ideas of science fiction and time travel.
  • For the Relic Traveller films, I was thinking about creating heroes who looked like myself—our heroes, who are African and Black, are exploring these mostly Western environments, where the West becomes exotic.
  • I’ve created a film that connects with the main quadrilogy, called Reliquary 2, which was commissioned by John Hansard Gallery and released online last year. It utilizes film footage from my own archive as well as new animation, and illustrations by Wumi “Wumzum” Olaosebikan, who has worked with me on creating the vectors on the Pan-African flags. What’s different this time is that the voice-over—the vocal testimony—is my own. It’s set during the pandemic, and it’s something of a letter to my children, talking about my hopes, my concerns and fears about the future and their place in it, and how the world—in particular the Western world—has viewed and may continue to treat them. It’s in a similar vein as Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, which he wrote for and to his son.
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