Caribbean Project: Crucible of Empire

Cuba

Here’s a two hour documentary on the Spanish-American War:

Note: While some antebellum Southerners fantasized about creating a Golden Circle slave empire in the Caribbean, it was the postwar Northern-dominated Union from Ulysses S. Grant’s attempt to acquire the Dominican Republic in 1870 to the Spanish-American War in 1898 to “Dollar Diplomacy” to Wilson’s occupation of Haiti in 1915 to FDR’s “Good Neighbor Policy” and forward to JFK’s botched Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 and Reagan’s invasion of Grenada in 1983 that has constantly inferred in the region.

Southerners fantasized about expanding slavery through the tropics or creating an alliance of slave states to resist abolition. OTOH, Yankees have spent the past 150 years trying to physically impose their own system of liberal capitalist democracy on the Caribbean and elsewhere in Central America.

About Hunter Wallace 12390 Articles
Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Occidental Dissent

13 Comments

  1. Thanks for the history lessons. As someone who has always been interested in history, I find your blog most informative.

    The “history” taught in our government schools today is mostly leftist propaganda. I graduated from high school in 1965 so I escaped all the PC propaganda force fed to today’s students. Although I ran into it when I tried to return to college in the early 70s big time after coming home from Viet Nam.

    Thank God for the internet!

  2. Yankees opposed Caribbean expansion solely because the addition of new slave states to the Union would have augmented the power of the South in Congress and the Electoral College.

    After destroying the Confederacy and abolishing slavery (for the noblest humanitarian reasons, of course), the Yankee Empire turned immediately to conquering the Plains Indians, driving the French out of Mexico, and attempting to acquire the Dominican Republic as their launching pad for expanding their own social system to the Caribbean.

    By 1898, they had started a war with Spain for the explicit purpose of expanding the Yankee Empire into the Caribbean. From 1898 until 1932, the U.S. invaded almost every country in Central America and the Caribbean to spread free market capitalism.

  3. Interesting take. A combination of undertow and freakish northern egalitarianism is the worst possible combination of biological material and ideology. Once the union won it attempts to impose a thoroughly pointless economic system.

  4. Where’s Tamer of Savages? Haven’t heard from him for awhile. I hope nothing bad happened to him, like maybe the meztizo Dominicans captured Tamer and sold him into white slavery in Haiti? I’d be broken-hearted.

    The Caribbean is kinda/sorta like Africa that way. What, with all the Africans the big-shot Whites just absolutley had to drag over to the “New World” and all.

    Too lazy, and too incapable to do their own work, and all : No! I’m not talking about the blacks, I’m talking about the Crackers.

  5. “By 1898, they had started a war with Spain for the explicit purpose of expanding the Yankee Empire into the Caribbean. From 1898 until 1932, the U.S. invaded almost every country in Central America and the Caribbean to spread free market capitalism.”

    The “banana republic” is a Yankee invention, after all.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_republic

    Deo Vindice

  6. “The “banana republic” is a Yankee invention, after all.”

    “In practice, a banana republic is a country operated as a commercial enterprise for private profit, effected by the collusion between the State and favoured monopolies, whereby the profits derived from private exploitation of public lands is private property, and the debts incurred are public responsibility.”

    If we generalize from your Wiki link I think it is entirely appropriate to also consider more recent neo-colonialist states such as Nigeria (Shell, Chevron etc.) and original colonial possessions such as Indonesia (The Dutch East Indies) under the generalized rubric of “banana republics” also. The Chinese are actively supporting tyrannical regimes in Africa in order to exploit various mineral resources while keeping the local economies dependent upon Chinese manufactured goods.

    John Perkins Confessions of an Economic Hit Man documents the process quite well. Colonialism is still very much alive and well throughout the world!

  7. Empires are always involved in colonial endeavors. It is the nature of the beast. The Yankee empire is no different from any other empire. No colonies=no empire.

    “In practice, a banana republic is a country operated as a commercial enterprise for private profit, effected by the collusion between the State and favoured monopolies, whereby the profits derived from private exploitation of public lands is private property, and the debts incurred are public responsibility.”

    Sounds a lot like our current “too big to fail” bailout economy, doesn’t it? Maybe Amurrica is itself already a banana republic? I would say so.

    “Colonialism is still very much alive and well throughout the world!”

    Did you ever think it wasn’t? Exactly what is a “superpower” other than a euphemism for an empire? Either way, empires are inimicable to the liberty of their subjects. In this the Yankee empire is no different from any other empire as well.

    The constitutional republic died in 1860. We have had an empire ever since. Makes the whole Tea Party/Ron Paul “Campaign for Liberty” seem kind of quixotic and silly when you realize that, doesn’t it?

    Deo Vindice

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