The most effective way to show the falsity of these views--that American has no empire or that, if it does, its empire is an accidental, benign empire--would be to rehearse the story of US imperialism. But this would be a very long story. It would need to begin with the displacement of the Native Americans, which involved the extermination of about 10,000,000 of them. It would need to include the institution of slavery, which, besides all the other evils, probably involved the deaths of another 10,000,000 human beings. This story would need to explain why in 1829 the South American hero Simon Bolivar said: "It seems to be the destiny of the United States to impoverish [the rest of] America." This story would need to deal with the theft of what is now the American Southwest from Mexico. It would need to deal with the increasing number of invasions after the American Civil War in countries such as Guatemala, El Salvador, Chile, Brazil, and Venezuela. It would need to deal with so-called Spanish-American Wars of 1898-1902, during which America took control of Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Hawaii, and Guam.

It would need to explain why the war to deny independence to the Filipinos led to the formation of the Anti-Imperialist League, with one of its members, William James, saying: "God damn the U.S. for its vile conduct in the Philippine Isles." This story of American imperialism would also need to tell of America's interventions further abroad--in Japan in 1854, China in 1900, Russia in 1918, and Hungary in 1919. Back in this hemisphere, this story would need to address America's theft of Panama from Colombia in 1903, then its repeated interventions in the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Guatemala, and El Salvador, with lengthy occupations of some of those countries. It would need to explain its imperial aims in World War II, which led it to install right-wing postwar governments in Greece, France, Italy, Japan, Korea, and the Philippines, even though this meant turning against the Resistance movements, which had fought alongside the Allies against the Fascist powers against deeply entrenched mythology, how the Cold War was far more the result of the imperial ambitions of the United States than those of the Soviet Union. It would also need to tell of the great number of countries in which the United States overthrew constitutional governments, such as Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Brazil (1961-1964) [all have citations in text].