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GUEST: Glen Ford is a writer and radio commentator, formerly with the Black Commentator. He is now affiliated with ‘The Black Agenda Report.’

This week’s commentary is called:

The U.S. Against the World

Let us return to the United Nations forum, a place where the United States has felt above inhabiting since shortly after the U.S. and its war-time allies created the global institution, right after World War Two. Back in that day, the United States was the undisputed military power in the world, the only one with nuclear weapons, which it had used on the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan – incinerating hundreds of thousands. The U.S. was also by far the biggest economic force on the planet. Fully half the finished products produced by the people of the world – like frigerators and cars and clocks – were made here, in the United States. That level of supremacy gave the U.S. a great deal of diplomatic clout. The Americans could dictate to the declining colonial powers, like the British, French and other Europeans, how they should hand their empires over to American corporations. And so they did, and a moribund system of raw colonialism was moved out of the way, to be replaced by a more modern regime of exploitation of what we used to call the Third World.

We then witnessed the birth of new nations, built along colonial lines drawn in the sands of European imaginations, but which real Africans and Asians and Latin Americans had to live with. They built countries along those lines imposed by the oppressive Europeans and Americans. They made do with what they had. For awhile.

But what they had is not enough. And the old order is intolerable. It strangles the people of these newer nations just as surely as it strangled us, here in the metropolis of imperial power. Yes, imperial power. Built on the backs of African slaves, who served the empire with every ounce of sweat, and never got paid for hundreds of years of toil. Built on the backs of un-named people that were called “coolies” in China, who rode the Europeans around to places they wanted to buy, cheap. And if these Third Worlders would not sell at the designated price – if they would not sell their patrimony to the European masters – then the gunboats would arrive on the shores of their city.

One by one, what we now call the Third Word, succumbed, until the whole planet seemed painted white, in shades of European hues: Dutch, French, English, Spanish. We have a world made over. And it made white folks feel good. They had imposed their culture and language and legitimacy on the planet. But now it is being called into question. And do it should be.

Let us return to the United Nations forum. It’s not like the old forum. Now the imperial power is the United States, demanding that Iran, a country that was defined in lines of sand – that people never-the-less made the most of, of course, because they had to. They elected a President, Mr. Mossadegh, in 1954. The U.S. promptly overthrew him, and put in the Shah, who proceeded to torture his citizens for the benefit of U.S. corporations. That regime was overthrown in 1979. Ever since, Iran has been an “outlaw” nation in the eyes and mouths of the imperialists.

Are we supposed to speak this language of imperialism? Are we supposed to accept this discourse that is based on the debasement of most of the people of the world? How can a people who have been buked and scorned ever since we were born – Black people – join in the chorus of white imperial rhetoric that leads us into war with Iran. No, we cannot. For Black Agenda Radio, I’m Glen Ford.