University Times

One International Week lecturer had some stern words for Americans: They need to be more aware of what the U.S. is doing around the world, and they need to share the wealth of the United States with other countries.

Robert Jensen, who teaches courses in media law, ethics and politics at the University of Texas at Austin, also is a former journalist and author of “Citizens of Empire, the Struggle to Reclaim our Humanity.” The global studies program, Muslim Student Association and the Islamic Center of Pittsburgh co-sponsored Jensen’s Sept. 23 lecture in the William Pitt Union.

Jensen built his argument by first defining the United States as an empire, briefly retracing and defining empire-building from the European settlement of America to covert CIA activities to dispose of governments in the Third World. He pointed out that post-World War II military activities led the nation “to unparalleled power around the world.” Jensen said that depending on how military presence is defined, the American military is present in as much as 75 percent of countries worldwide.

Taking military might and pairing it with economic dominance, Jensen talked about the U.S. cultural power. He noted that the United States accounts for only 5 percent of the world’s population but consumes about 25 percent of the world’s petroleum. “This is a country wealthy by any standard and wealthier than any country that has ever been in the world,” he said. “And the rest of the world is not doing quite as well.”

Jensen noted: Approximately 3 billion people in the world live on less than $2 a day per person, and that means that roughly half of those people don’t have the resources to access minimal standards of living. “While we are 5 percent of the world population consuming 30 percent of the world, half of the world is living in poverty,” he said.

And what of American values? Jensen questioned the United States’ integrity, particularly in light of the religions of its people. “Given some of the tenets of the dominant religion of Christianity — justice and love — one might think that this disparity of wealth around the world might raise certain questions. One might think the when one has a born-again Christian president this would be high on the agenda. Of course you know perfectly well, it’s nowhere on the agenda.” Jensen noted President George Bush’s belief that the American way of life is a “blessed” life. Bush is advancing a “divine right theory of affluence.” Jensen insisted.

Jensen went on to explain how the “empire” moves forward and how it can be derailed by activities in the U.S. He started off by explaining what he called “American stupidity.” During his visits outside the country, Jensen said he kept getting the same question: “Why are Americans so damn stupid?” Specifically, he said, foreigners wanted to know why the American people are ignorant about what the U.S. government does around the world. “Not to be insulting,” Jensen said, “but why is it that in the U.S. you can find so many people who know so little about the rest of the world and more importantly know so little about U.S. policy in the rest of the world?

Lack of knowledge helps the “empire” to prosper, Jensen said, as does the country’s affluence. “The empire goes forward in the world to create and protect that affluence,” he said. “American dominance has a purpose: It’s to subordinate a region of the world to the U.S. system. That’s why the empire goes forward.” He went on to argue that affluence makes it less likely that American citizens will attempt to dismantle the current system. “Affluence keeps the empire safe from internal dissent because people are essentially bought off.”

Jensen encouraged people to dismantle what he terms the United States as empire. “There is a moral obligation. I want to argue that for people who live in the empire and have the greatest capacity to access the resources need to challenge that. Dismantling the empire from within is the primary political process of our time,” Jensen said. He suggests that people should make it their business to know what the U.S. is doing abroad. “Willed ignorance is not a justifiable excuse to inaction,” he said. Americans need to reclaim their values, he concluded.

-Mary Ann Thomas