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Tune in every Sunday night from 8pm to 10pm for Dark Star Dead and Music A journey through the soundscapes of the Grateful Dead and beyond, Only on KPFK, 90.7 FM, Los Angeles. Psychedelia, soul and deep cuts that move the spirit can get lost in the music at KPFK 90.7 FM, Los Angeles. This is Chris Hedges and you're listening.
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To the Ralph Nader Radio Hour.
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Stand up. Stand up.
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You've been sitting way too long.
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Welcome to the Ralph Nader Radio Hour. My name is Steve Scrovan, along with my co host, David Feldman. Hello, David.
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Hello, Steve.
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And our trusty producer, Hannah Feldman. Hello, Hannah.
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Hello, Steve.
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And the man of the hour, Ralph Nader. Hello, Ralph.
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Hello, everybody.
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Donald Trump is a real estate developer. So I guess it shouldn't surprise us that as President of the United States, he focuses on acquiring more real estate. In this case, I'm specifically talking about Greenland, which he threatens to take by force if Denmark refuses to sell it to him.
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I would like to make a deal, you know, the easy way. But if we don't do it the easy way, we're going to do it the hard way.
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Okay, maybe more like a real estate developer with mob connections. Either way, you can also be sure he will try to slap his name on it. Get ready for Trumpland, which sounds like the worst amusement park in Atlantic City, and if history holds true, he'll bankrupt that place, too. At least Donald Trump is open about his ambitions. That normally hasn't been the case when the US has expanded its geographical footprint. We spent the entire hour today with Northwestern University Professor Daniel Imovar, whose book how to Hide an A History of the Greater United States chronicles the history of our overseas possessions and how unlike previous empires, we did not have to physically colonize them to take control of them and exploit them. We're talking from the Philippines to Puerto Rico to places you may not even have heard of, like the Guano Islands. After we're done with that, we'll check in with our indispensable corporate crime reporter, Russell Mokiver. But first, let's find out how to hide an empire.
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DAVID Daniel Imavar is a professor and historian at Northwestern University, is the author of Thinking the United States and the Lure of Community Development and How to Hide an Empire A History of the Greater United States. Welcome to the Ralph Nader Radio Hour. Daniel Immervar.
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Hi. Thanks for having me on.
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Welcome, Daniel. I gotta tell you how I came across your book a few days ago. I'm ashamed to say that I didn't catch it when Farrar Strauss published it in 2019. Because it's a book, listeners, that exposes the myths of American history and documents the reality. And, of course, the myths are what we learn in elementary school. You know, like Columbus discovered America, like there was nobody there. So how to Hide an Empire, A History of the Greater United States is the subject of our interview of Professor Immerraher today. So I want to start by saying how I found it. I found it at a Little Free Library kiosk in Washington, D.C. little Free Library was a civic innovation out of St. Paul, Minnesota, started in 2009, and they now have 200,000 kiosks all over the country where you can look at the books through a window. And if you want to take one free, you open it up, take one free honor roll. It's public trust. If you want to contribute some books you don't need anymore, you can put it in the kiosk. That's how I stumbled over this remarkable book, which was described by Andrew Bacevich, a retired colonel and one of the founders of the Quincy Institute and an author in his own right about militarism in the United States. Here's what he says. Quote, there are many histories of American expansionism. How to Hide an Empire renders them all obsolete. It is brilliantly conceived, utterly original, and immensely entertaining, simultaneously vivid, sardonic and deadly serious. End quote. And I must say that the reason why you could write a book like this is, is you went to the primary sources, the documents, to weave your narrative of American history. So I want to ask you a very fundamental question about this book. And it comes basically from the last two pages of your book. And you say, quote, There are about 4 million people living in the territories today in Puerto Rico, Guam, America, Samoa, the US Virgin Islands and the Northern Marianas. They're subject to the whims of Congress and the president, but they can't vote for either. More than 50 years after voting Rights act, they remain disenfranchised. And then your last paragraph is territory still matters. Today, colonialism hovers in the background of politics at the highest level. McCain, Palin, Obama and Trump have all been touched by it. That may seem like an odd and surprising fact, but we should get over our surprise. The history of the United States is the history of empire, end quote. Please elaborate.
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Yeah, thanks for that. I should say that the population of the territories is a little smaller than 4 million now because of depopulation, which has a lot to do with the economic conditions in Puerto Rico. But I'll just say this. What I wanted to do in the book was to look at the United States. I was trained as a US Historian and to take seriously the parts of the United States that don't always feature in the textbooks that are outside of the mainland, the contiguous blob. And what I discovered when I did that was that these places were often in the mainland mines, seen as peripheral places. But this was not a peripheral history. World War II is major topics. Just, it turns out that once you got the territories in view, you had a different understanding of them. And so a lot of US History is actually, and really important parts of US History has actually taken place outside of the part of the country that we normally think of as the United States. So the what I was hoping to do in the book was to bring the territories back in and show that when you actually take the Philippines as seriously as a part of the United States as It was for 50 years, you see a lot more of US history than you might have seen otherwise.
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C
Well, all this has great relevance today. We're trying to get to in terms of Trump's empire and the various bombings that he's been engaged in recently. Talk about prescience. Daniel, on page 95 of your book, you cite the Democratic party platform in 1900 which denounced, quote, greedy commercialism, end quote, sure to ruin the country. And then the prophetic words, quote, this is a Democratic party platform in 1900, quote, no nation can long endure half republic and half empire, end quote, quote, Imperialism abroad will lead quickly and inevitably to despotism at home, end quote. Bring us up to date with your reaction.
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Yeah, if you think about that dynamic, acts of overseas aggression have some kind of effect on the domestic polity. That seems right. Like a lot of the, quote, unquote, imperial presidency, the concentration of power, just the expansion of all of this sort of classified world where so much of governance happens behind closed doors and doors that most of us couldn't even get access to because we don't have security clearance. All of that is the result of the United States's wars and policing of the United States. But it's had, I think, a really corrosive effect on democracy within the country. And I mean, you just see it on the streets as police ride and vehicles that were our military vehicles, sometimes even tanks, as they police protests within the United States. So I think that dynamic has been prevalent and really continues up to today. One thing that Trump is eager to do is not just invade foreign places on his whims but to treat US Cities as subjects, fitting subjects for invasion, including the city where I live, Chicago.
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And he's positioned himself where, if there's a retaliation from these countries that are being bombed and, and attacked in the United States, whether lone wolf or drone attack or whatever, he sees that as an opportunity to further entrench his dictatorial powers, which is a vicious cycle. And before we get into that in larger dimensions, the way you wrote the book was really quite original. For example, tell us about the need for fertilizer and how that led to seizing islands, tiny islands in the Pacific and Caribbean loaded with bird excrement called guano.
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How many hours have you got, Ralph? So it turns out, so, okay, we normally think of the United States, we just envision it as that shape. We're all familiar with that familiar silhouette. And it turns out that those have only been the borders of the United States for three years of its history. So first, because, you know, when the United States started out, it was actually much smaller than it usually appears on maps now, and any grade school teacher can tell you that, but also because once it assumed its familiar shape, the United States three years later, just kept expanding. And the first form of expansion was to take a series of islands, ultimately nearly a hundred of them, uninhabited islands in the Caribbean and the Pacific known as the Guano Islands. And the idea was that these islands would be a vital source of fertilizer before the invention of chemical fertilizer. And it's kind of true that US Agriculture depended on, on these small bird inhabited overseas territories from which the United States was scraping feces and carrying it back to sprinkle on its farms.
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Well, the way you describe the conditions for the workers and the high mortality is pretty staggering. But more important, it shows how economics drive empire when the powerful country doesn't have what it needs. And then when World War II started, it didn't have enough rubber. And rubber was produced in Brazil and Indonesia and the military freaked out. You can't have vehicles, you can't have planes if they don't have rubber tires. And how did they react to that?
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Yeah, you're absolutely right. I mean, we don't think of it now because it doesn't feel like the crisis, the kind of crisis that we're used to, a rubber shortage. But it would be hard to overstate how scared in the early parts of World War II, U.S. leaders were about running out of rubber. Not just a collapse of their military effort, but a collapse of the domestic economy was the thing that they talked about. And so Were all these kinds of rubber conservation measures. And people would have to recycle tires and could only drive so fast because they weren't supposed to wear out their tires. The president's dog Falla donate its rubber bones to the war effort. The main reason for it was not just the United States was fighting a large war, but Japan had cut the United States off from many of its reliable rubber sources. And and it takes a while to plant new rubber plantations. What the United States ended up doing was not just trying to conserve its rubber, which it did. It's kind of the birth of recycling in a way, but it also invested heavily in chemical substitutes. Can we produce synthetic rubber? And by the end of the war got pretty good at producing synthetic rubber. Which might seem like a small thing, but in my mind that's actually a really important moment in world history. It's a moment when chemistry starts to replace colonies and the shape of the US Empire can change as a result because it doesn't feel a need to certainly in the case of rubber, lock down places like the Philippines or Indonesia.
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C
Daniel, give some examples of innovation during World War II, which arguably is by far the most innovative period in American history. I mean, the examples you give of chemical substitutes for natural materials, starting with plastic and rubber. Give some more examples.
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Yeah. So you realize when you start looking at the material history of World War II, where things come from just how utterly dependent the United States and the European and Asian industrial powers had been on colonies. And so for them, the kind of industrial world was a global scavenger hunt. You get this thing that can only grow in this part of the tropics, and then you get silk which can only be made here. And what the United States necessity started to get really good at was to find replacements for natural products that were sourced in hard to access areas. So synthetic rubber is a big example. But the replacement of silk with nylon meant the United States was no longer dependent on the Japanese silk industry. The replacements with opiates with methadone meant that the United States was no longer dependent on poppy fields from abroad. And the huge one is plastic. I mean, plastic can be and was in the United States made from petroleum byproducts. And plastic just came to substitute for everything, for ivory. Just like all the little and big things that go into our lives that used to be made of natural materials and are now made of plastic. World War II was the moment that where the United States became plasticized.
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C
Well, interesting. As you know better than I, the teaching of history in elementary and high school in the United States is really full of myths. And I remember the history of how we grabbed Hawaii. It was thought like the Hawaiians invited in the US Marines to embrace Hawaii into the United States orbit. What was the reality there?
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Well, so the reality is that that's wildly false. And the reason that we know that that is wildly false is it took a while for historians who were writing in English to to start using Hawaiian language documents and start reading Hawaiian language newspapers, of which there were many. But once we had historians who were doing that, it just became clear that at the moment there's this kind of a multi step process by which Hawaii's monarchy is deposed and then Hawaii becomes annexed to the United States. That Hawaiians were bombarding the United States government with anti annexation petitions. So it is just absolutely clear that the annexation of Hawaii was done over popular protest, not happy invitation of most.
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C
Hawaiians involving the planters, the American planters. Right, right.
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So the engineers of this were the white planters who owned a lot of property in Hawaii. That's right.
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And what about Puerto Rico? What can you tell us about that?
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Puerto Rico is sort of. I always feel like it's in like the shadows of the mainland United States. It's the longest colonized place on the map and the United States has held it since the end of the 19th century. And it just has this weird way of disappearing from consciousness from many people who are not Puerto Rican on the US mainland. But it is the United States largest colony and it's often been the source of some of its most stark anti imperialism. There's been numerous moments when Puerto Rican nationalists seeking independence have engaged in violence in Puerto Rico or on the US mainlands. Once you kind of get that whole story, which includes an assassination attempt on President Truman and a moment when Puerto Rican nationalists just opened fire on Congress in 1954, you kind of think, how did I not know this? Like how is this not part of the story of the United States? But it really isn't.
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C
Well, what do you think of your fellow historians over the decades engaging in slovenly perpetuation of myths?
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You know, that's not how I see it. So the problem, I see it is that we've actually had decades of historians, some people from the territories, some people from the mainland, who've written a lot of books about Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guam, et cetera, what's instead happened? So this is not a lack of information, like I'm not the person who discovered these facts at all. What has rather been the case is that as the Textbook authors have kind of decided what US History is like, what belongs under the subject of US History. They think of it as the sort of geographically contiguous part of the United States, not the whole part. And what's interesting is that this is not just a. You might think that this is a sort of denial of empire. This is for people who are trying to whitewash the US Legacy. Even people who are quite critical of the United States and quite happy to accuse it of being an empire when they think of places like Vietnam and Iraq, don't really have a place on their library shelves for the Philippines and Puerto Rico. So slovenly isn't quite the word I'd use. But there has been just this sort of inertia or momentum in how many of us were trained. And that's how I was trained to think of the United States, which is actually geographically inaccurate.
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Well, what reaction to your book from historians today? What was it, and was your book adopted in any college or high school coursework?
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Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's been the common read at one college. The thing that I'm most proud of, of the book, I mean, so it's won an academic award and done well in that way.
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But.
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But the thing that I'm most proud of is that it is a book that is both assigned in high schools and graduate seminars that really makes me pleased.
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How about the National War College or West Point Naval Academy? Air Force Academy?
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You know, weirdly, when I was researching my book, I thought, okay, well, a lot of people who live in the US Mainland don't really know much about Guam, et cetera, and Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands. And so this is going to feel, as I describe my research to them, it's going to feel like stunt history. And they're going to think, what are you doing in these places? The people who most got it were people with service backgrounds because they'd been in all of those places. They'd been in military. That was their world. So in some ways, the people who were least surprised, at least by the geography of my book, by my assertion that the United States is more than just the mainland, were folks in the military. Although we did have a lot of arguments about the politics of the book, and I got a lot of sort of retired officers accusing me of besmirching the honor of the United States.
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C
Maybe part of the blame goes on the backs of the publishers of these textbooks that want to avoid controversy and go to the lowest common denominator. So do you have any indication of the role of the Publishers in favoring massaging American history's worst moments against Native Americans, black Americans, Hispanic Americans, and abroad in the territories that you describe.
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Yeah, I would say that what I've seen and I've spoken to a lot of publishers of these kinds of books, my sense is that the real pressure comes from the states themselves because in order to effectively teach history, textbooks have to prepare students to meet a series of state standards. And so various states have just long descriptions of what we think it is to be adequately informed about US History in California. And so publishers are very interested in being viable in all those states. So they have to kind of conform to that. And so I would find this really interesting tension where I would talk to publishers and I would talk to teachers and they would say the stuff that you're writing about is really quite interesting to us and we think our students would be interested in it. But we don't have support from the textbooks and the textbooks don't really have support from the state standards. And if any textbook that doesn't conform to the state standards, that's teaching lessons that aren't going to be tested, it's kind of a less useful textbook if you regard the point of the textbook as to prepare students to pass the test. So it often feels like turning around an 18 wheel truck in terms of just how many different constituencies have to be more open minded about US History. And boy, that's been hard lately.
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C
Well, it has very concrete manifestations. It mobilizes public opinion to think the US is the greatest ever, that it never does anything wrong overseas, that it's a tribune of democracy under Woodrow Wilson. And you expose Woodrow Wilson's racism and other realities about his term in office. And the other manifestation, Daniel, is that it builds a base of ignorant opinion to support wars, unquestionably, such as recent wars overseas in Iraq and Afghanistan, in Libya. So it has very practical consequences radiating back on the White House and Congress where they think they can use public opinion to back up their incursions or invasions, as it's called. You talk about Teddy Roosevelt. You know, he has a great reputation as an environmentalist. Public lands, public parks, national forests. But you also call him, quote, as the single most bellicose and imperialistic president in American history, end quote. And here's the page that shows how deep you dug into this whole thing. Listen to this, listeners. This is on page 114. Quote, the United States seized the levers of finance and trade, but left sovereignty formerly intact. Quote, dollar diplomacy, quote, was a polite name for this though. Quote, Gunboat diplomacy, quote was the more accurate euphemism. To ensure political and financial stability, US troops enter Cuba 4 times, Nicaragua 3 times, Honduras 7 times, the Dominican Republic 4 times, Guatemala, Panama 6 times, Costa Rica, Mexico 3 times 80 twice Between 1933 and 1934, the United States helped to put down revolts, replace governments when necessary, and offer battleships in the harbor advice to others. But the only territory in annexed in that period was the US Virgin Islands, peacefully purchased from Denmark in 1917. End quote. So what you're really saying in part of this book is there was a time when the US preferred control and military threats to annexing territory. And you said after World War II, instead of keeping the Philippines, for example, where you have a lot of elaboration on that deadly situation, they gave up territory. How do you explain that?
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Yes, one of the most interesting things that happens over the course of the 20th century is the global revolt against empire. And it happens throughout the 20th century, but really particularly after World War II, such that by the 50s and 60s it just becomes really hard for powerful countries to see the upshot in taking new colonies. That doesn't mean that they've disavowed power. But about 1915, like one in three people on the planet is colonized. By 1965, it's like one in 50. So I mean, empire just comes crashing down in the middle of the 20th century. There are two reasons for it. One is the revolts of the colonized. And the other is that countries like the United States find ways to do the things that they would like to do without running someone else's flag down the flagpole and running theirs up it. And so you see a kind of move away from formal colonization as the preferred mode of power projection, to military bases, coups, control of customs houses, all kinds of other things that stop short of this is US territory now, although we may be seeing a recursion to that older form just right now.
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C
And another technique is using a regional empire like Israel to further the mission of the United States, which is a co belligerent under international law in the slaughter in Gaza, by the way. So that's another technique. They use a local power like Israel. How do you react?
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A
No, that's right. So the United States has sought to do many things in many places, and often it seeks to do that by acting through nation states rather than by taking over those nation states states and then controlling them. And that's always a kind of difficult dance, as we've seen in Israel, where the US has carrots and Sticks available to it. Carrots are often military aid. The stick is the threat of invasion or the threat of being cut off from aid. But it's not always the case that the United States can get its client states to behave exactly as it would like them to behave. And there's often a lot of tension around that relationship. But yeah, that's what the United States close relationship with Israel, which is where the adhesive, a lot of the adhesive there is the bond of military aid. That's not new. The United States has had many close relationships with many other client states through which it seeks to advance its interests in numerous regions.
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C
I was quite fascinated by comparing your book with Howard Zinn's book, the People's History of the United States. It's really quite different. Howard Zinn, if I remember correctly, focused a lot on domestic class warfare issues, labor struggles. He didn't ignore foreign empire. But how would you compare your book with Howard Zinn's book? And what do you have in it that he doesn't? And vice versa.
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So Zinn is a really good example of, I think, the kind of main thrust of US Leftist thought about US history. So he has this really important book that is for so many people, the gateway into seeing the United States differently. That just shows you both a lot of the sort of violence and oppression within the United States, but really a lot of what the United States has done to other countries. And Zinn is really comfortable calling the United States an empire. He's unabashed about that. But what is interesting is that Zinn is interested in the United States characterologically as an empire. This place behaves like an empire. And he's actually less interested in the administrative aspects of empire, like what is it to run a colony? And actually there's very little to say about the U.S. territories. And so what my book does is looks at. It's less of an indictment than Zinn's book. Zinn's book is really like the teachers told you this place was great. I'm telling you, it's terrible. My book, it's hard to produce a happy story of the United States when you read my book, but my book is just kind of interested in how power gets exerted and how territory gets used and what things substitute for it. So it's a book that's much more analytically interested in the sort of materiality of US power and then, of course, the consequences for the people who live under the US Shadow.
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C
Well, there are other manifestations of empire that in my judgment, you might have spent a little more time on. One is kidnapping millions of Africans in West Africa and taking them on ships with horrible, lethal conditions to southern plantations, which is a form of importing the results of empire. And the other one is you destroy the indigenous people that you replace with your advancing empire, namely first Native American tribes, which many were extinguished. Genocidal, which many were extinguished. Completely illuminate that. Educate us about that manifestation of empire.
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Yeah, right. And that's. Thank you for bringing those up. My book is not sort of exhaustive. Everything the United States has done. So the African slave trade is a really important, just foundational feature of U.S. history. Right. That's where the United States gets a lot of its labor force, including to build things like the White House. And then it is also really important to know that the United States is not only doing a lot of its early work in slave labor, but it's doing it on stolen land. And so this is not the focus of my book, but it's actually the focus of more of my writing. Now that there is a. I'm a little hesitant to overstate the degree to which the United States extinguished native nations, just because a lot of Native nations are still here. And it's really important to acknowledge that. But it is absolutely true that the United States dispossessed native nations that were controlling vast amounts of territory. It took a while to do that. And that was a violent process, a process that just was met with a sort of crashing of native populations. And it's kind of an ongoing process, too, as we're still arguing about treaties and frankly, treaties that the United States broke.
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C
You know, there was a time after World War II that using the word empire to describe the United States was not used, period.
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A
That's right.
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C
And I've noticed in the last 10 or 15 years after the crash of the Soviet empire that the word empire is being associated with the United States more and more. And of course, Trump is simply punctuating that every day. How do you view the love of Trump, of McKinley, who was an expansionist and grabbed territory? And apparently, somebody's brief Trump about McKinley. That's why he has praised him publicly when he says he wants to annex Greenland and Canada, et cetera. You want to give us your views on that?
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A
Yeah. Well, let's talk about the term first. It is true that for a long time, empire was regarded as a pejorative. So certain fringe intellectuals on the left would call the United States an empire. But that was a rare thing, and you felt like you were on the fringe when you did it. And that's changed. And it's changed, I think, for two reasons. One is there was this moment right as George W. Bush was invading Iraq, where you saw, on the right from conservatives, them saying, you know, we can say it out loud, the United States is an empire, should be an empire, should do imperialism. Well, let's just stop being evasive about this term. So there was a kind of like right wing enthusiasm for empire, and, boy, has Trump brought that back. I mean, Trump is. I actually think there was something imperialist about George W. Bush, but interestingly, he did not try, even in, like, secret meetings, was not talking about annexing Iraq, making it a 51st state. Trump is really taking us back to a pre1945 age. He fastens on these older figures like Lindbergh and McKinley or Monroe. And Trump is returning us to, or hopefully not, but seems to want to return us to, to an age where power is expressed through the physical growth of countries, and that for the United States to get more powerful, it will get larger. And that might include the annexation of Greenland, which I think is the most likely target. And then he has a list of other places he'd like as well.
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C
Well, you know, people who are observing Trump now are wondering whether the MAGA base is going to stay with them because they liked his attack on endless wars during the campaign. We're going to get rid of endless wars, and he's starting wars and continuing wars. How much of the MAGA support you think comes from the total lack of realistic understanding of the blowback and the quagmires that result from recent American imperial activities? If the MAGA crowd turns against Trump on this, he can't ignore it.
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A
Yeah, that's right now, I mean, there's been a kind of unbreakable bond between Trump and his voters that, you know, no matter what he does, it seems like he's still got their support. But it is really interesting how he seems to be sliding out of where he previously was when it came to the forever wars. I want to say this about Trump. He was a clear critic of the Iraq war. Not initially. He was for it initially, but by 2004, he was speaking more forthrightly against it, certainly than Hillary Clinton was. And, you know, he said, it's pointless. They lied. He had this incredible moment during the 2016 Republican primary debate where, like, as the audience started booing, he just said, look, the war was a big fat mistake and they lied us into it. I mean, he didn't win the audience in that the carefully selected audience in that moment. But I think he did win a lot of voters by being willing to break with the Republican line about the Iraq war, about the forever wars, and by being really skeptical of some forms of US Power. I think that's been a thing that made him popular and he was pretty clear eyed about nation builders are more often nation wreckers. That's something that he said recently. However, I think he's so also addicted to the like display of naked force that I think it is quite likely that he will find himself in a similar position to George W. Bush, of whom he was quite critical, where he starts with an airstrike and then just sort of ends up with an occupation. And I think if the more that happens he's going to I think that would be a real reason to have a split with his base. I think there's a kind of waning patience for that kind of thing.
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C
I've got to have you tell our listeners about the most stunning part of your book in terms of biographical narrative. Tell us the story of Fritz Haber.
- [32:22]
A
So we talked about two things already. We talked about the US Interest in guano and then we talked about this dynamic whereby sometimes colonial products and guano was one of them, you had to source it from faraway islands. Sometimes colonial products could be replaced by chemical products. And there's a kind of long history of the 20th century of doing that. And one of the most successful replacements of colonies by chemistry was, was the development of chemical fertilizers, which meant that you no longer had to kind of scramble around the map for some bird infested uninhabited island where you could scrape poop off and bring it back. And the key to this was finding a way to produce nitrates. Now the air is full of nitrogen, it's like 80% nitrogen. But it turns out that that does not in itself allow you to create plant edible nitrates. That requires a chemical process. And the guy who figured that out and indeed won the Nobel Prize for doing so as a man named Fritz Hamburg, who both, like the Germans, refer to him as creating bread from air because he figured out a way to take the nitrogen that is copious in the air and turn it into nitrates that could be spread on fields that could allow industrial agriculture to work, could allow you to plant the same crop over and over in the same field and just kind of use the nitrates to restore the soil. Now a really interesting thing about nitrates is that they are both the basis of fertilizer, but also and you might Know this. If you have heard people talk about fertilizer bombs, they can also be the basis for explosives. And so when Fritz Haber developed this kind of process for making nitrates, he not only allowed Germany, he kind of kept feeding Germany. And this is in the World War I era, but he also kept it fighting because the Haber Bosch process, as it was called, could be used to produce nitrates. So he's like this really ambivalent figure. And the ambivalence only became more acute when, During World War I, Haber basically went to the German High Command and said, I've completely solved your food problem and your explosives problem. I got another one in me. Give me scientists. And they did. And he, with a team, invented poison gas. So he is the original inventor of weapons of mass destruction. Not only invented it, but personally deployed it upwind of some French Algerian troops at the Battle of Ypres. And, you know, he thought this was a major success. It knocks people out without killing them and just kind of clears the battlefield. He was thrilled. His wife, however, he had a wife named Clara, who was also a chemical scientist, was not thrilled by this. She was a serious researching scientist at the same time. And she, as far as we can tell, came to feel like Fritz had perverted science. He returns home right after releasing poison gas for the first time, mustard gas. And they seem to get in an argument. And he's about to go to the Eastern Front to do more deployments of poison gas. He takes some sleeping pills and goes to sleep. She takes his service revolver and goes out into the courtyard and shoots herself in the heart. We don't have a note, so we don't know exactly why she did it. But the read that most people have, and I think this is totally plausible, is that she was deeply disturbed by what he had done and by how he had sort of taken the scientific spirit Dakota to this is. Next day, Fritz goes to the Eastern Front, drops more poison gas, the poison gas that his team then keeps working on, poison gas, and develops a kind of poison gas called Zyklon A, which then becomes a precursor to Zyklon B, which is used in the camps. This is highly relevant because Fritz was Jewish, Klara was Jewish. And their relatives, Fritz died before. Klara obviously died in World War I. But their relatives, many of their relatives, died in the camps. However, not all of their relatives did. Clara Haber, that's Fritz Haber, was her spouse. So she was known as Klara Haber. But because the Germans kind of regard her as like a dissenter from her husband. They often refer to her not as Clara Haber, but by her maiden name, Clara Immervar, which is also my last name because her cousin Max was my great grandfather and I am descendant from the branch that made it out.
- [36:14]
C
Listeners, this is the kind of history that you get in reading how to Hide an Empire History of the Greater United States by Daniel Immerwaher, a professor of history at Northwestern University and only in his mid-40s. Your next book, I hear, is going to be on fires. Tell me, what's the reaction to the way you teach history among the students at Northwestern?
- [36:38]
A
And the faculty seems to be going well. I'm just about to teach my big US Foreign relations class today. We're going to talk about the Founding fathers and the revolution and what kind of foreign policy they had. We have really great students at Northwestern, so they get very excited and they want to do research on it. And I think they are have a generation of students that is more comfortable with a critical view of U.S. foreign relations than I think we would have seen in past generations.
- [37:02]
C
Now, I want to ask you about what you called in your book one of the most boring subjects of all. But I've never seen histories of the United States talk about the function of standards, like screw threads, standards that allow international trade and exchange or domestic trade and exchange. And this will be a real revelation to a lot of our listeners, including myself. I've worked on who decides standards for auto companies, for example, but I never saw the interpretation and the importance you attribute to it. Can you give us a little tutorial on that?
- [37:38]
A
Yeah. I mean, it's so easy not to think about standards. And in fact, standards want you not to think about them. The world of standards is a world that which should just feel easy, right? You have a screw and there's a nut or a hole or something, and they just fit together. But it actually takes a lot of engineering to make a world where everything fits and a lot of arguing among engineers, right? Because one set of engineers will have one standard and, you know, the screw threads will be at this angle and the others have that and screw threads at the other angle. And so none of the screws go into any of the nuts and then it's chaos. So all the kind of goal of standardization is to get all the objects to play together. But like, that's hard. That's hard because for any one set of objects to win, another set of objects to lose. So imagine you, you have a screw factory, depends on or indeed manufactures screws, you're at one angle. Let's say your screw threads are like 60 degrees and someone else is at 55. None of your stuff will play with their stuff. And you both would like it that everything would play with everything. But the question of who's going to win is really important because if you lose, you have to repurpose all your machinery. All your existing stock is useless. It's a big loss. And so a lot of just sort of post 1945 and even throughout the 20th century industrial history is like figuring out whose standards are going to prevail. And one of the undiscussed, really important sources of US power is that it manages to create during and after World War II, a world that is built around it. A world where the objects play to its specifications and standard work to its specifications and standards. In that case, literally with the US screw thread comes to dominate industrial production. This is just a little example, but I love it. It used to be that there was also a clash in standards, in orchestral tunings. What is a concert? A like, what frequency is it? It was flatter in France and sharper in the United States. And then the United States started broadcasting its version of Concert A via all of its kind of radio stations and high powered radio stations and musicians tuned to it. And then the United States kind of like dominated. And now everyone tunes to the United States. That's literally true, but it's also metaphorically true. And so I got really interested in the book and how it came to be and why it mattered that US standards prevailed and how other countries dealt with that by either sort of jumping on the ship or trying to resist. And that became difficult for them. And just how emotionally hard it is for other parts of the world to this onslaught of not just the US Military, not just its planes, its bombs. I mean, we know all that stuff, and I don't want to diminish it, but just all the US stuff and ways of talking in the English language and the dollar, and each one of those comes as a kind of like challenge. Are you going to adopt this or not? Because life's going to be a little harder if you don't. But if you do, you're kind of a puppet. And I mean, everyone in the world has had to deal with that challenge just on a like daily basis. What screws they use, what language they speak, all that kind of stuff. And we don't talk about that a lot. But that's actually strikes me as a really important facet of US power.
- [40:30]
C
Tremendously important. It's the ultimate technical controlling process. There's an international group called the International Standards Organization that the US dominates, and they put out hundreds of ISO standards. You can look it up and educate yourself about it, but you see, it's below the radar. Almost nobody talks about it, even when they have conventions on foreign trade and so forth. But in the background, it is a constant presence. You know, if a foreign manufacturer can't, just use a metaphor, it cannot plug a socket into the wall because they don't have the right standard. They're out of business. Right?
- [41:05]
A
Yeah, yeah, that's right. And actually a lot of this happens through the military, too. I mean, the military is an incredible force for standardization, both because it a lot of stuff and then it buys a lot of stuff. And then if you're going to sell to the US Military, you got to do it on its specs. And one of the first things that happen when NATO is formed is that the United States says, okay, we're all these countries, that we're all kind of, you know, in a military alliance. Let's agree on what a rifle is. Let's agree on, like, how wide the barrel is, and then let's agree on any number of other things. Like, we want to make sure that our stretchers can, like, slide into your ambulance base. So we're going to have to talk about that. It's the railway gauge problem. But for everything that happens. And the military plays such. And the US Military plays such an important role in kind of remaking the industrial world in the US Image.
- [41:51]
C
That's why it's so hard. Once the European countries locked into NATO and bought US Weapons right up to Eastern Europe on the Russian border, it's so hard to cut out and develop a different weapon source. It's tremendous. And it's not just a financial issue.
- [42:07]
A
We normally think about US Military aid as like, the US Just sends a bunch of guns in a crate, and then the other nation just sends a thank you card. But any country that is the recipient of US Aid has to kind of be an ongoing recipient of US Aid because their guns break and then they need replacement parts. And those come from the United States. So, like, whose guns are you taking? It's not just a purchase, it's a subscription plan. And so that's in some ways why US Military aid is such a powerful bond between the United States and many of its client states, is that they have to keep coming back for the replacement parts.
- [42:39]
C
Isn't Silicon Valley's domination Instagram Meta all that doesn't that Fit into the standardization. It's called transaction costs to try to leave them.
- [42:50]
A
That's a really great example. So it's funny because a lot of the standards wars just either have already been resolved or happen, as you said, under the radar. And we're not thinking about them. But one place that we're really aware of them is the platform wars. As you know, Instagram battles with TikTok, and everyone senses that where you are, it doesn't really matter where we are, but we all have to kind of be in the same place. And each of these platforms is trying to get everyone using their standard, their system. And there's enormous profit to winning that war. And you can just see, like, how much energy the tech companies are putting into. Let's get everyone on our system rather than your system. Because once they're on their system, there's all kinds of ways to profit from it. But we also require everyone to be on the system to get a critical mass.
- [43:30]
C
Let's go to Steve.
- [43:32]
D
Daniel, you referred to it a bit obliquely earlier, but can you fit what has just happened in Venezuela where we've seized the president of Venezuela and spirited him back to the United States? How does that fit into your premise of global empire?
- [43:48]
A
I mean, it's happened before. This is not the first time the United States has done this. I mean, people are often now mentioning the 1989 invasion of Panama, which looked really similar in some respects to what's happening now. So this is not a departure. I do think that Trump's aspects of it are novel. One is the rhetorical aspect. Trump is not trying to provide pretexts that might fit with international law. I mean, he started by saying, okay, well, this is really about Maduro's breaking of the laws about narcotics. But then he just unbidden started talking about oil. And that is rare for US Presidents to be so brazen. And then I think Trump is also interested in seizing territory in a way that that's not just a kind of. He says it out loud. Other people didn't. But actually, I think other recent past presidents have not been interested in seizing territory at all. So I think that part is new about him as well.
- [44:39]
D
Well, he's a real estate guy, so that's his.
- [44:41]
A
That's his world as real estate. Yeah, that's exactly right.
- [44:44]
C
Yeah.
- [44:44]
D
Right.
- [44:45]
C
Also, he wants to get on Mount Rushmore by showing that he can expand the United States into Greenland the way Jefferson did with the Louisiana Purchase.
- [44:54]
A
Yeah. I have a view that the way to deal with Trump is just Symbolic capitulation, like, of the things that Trump wants, Rushmore, renaming the Kennedy center, redoing the White House, I was like, these are the least destructive things. These should be the focus of his administration. He should be allowed to do all of these things, and that should be his main thing. And then we can all rebuild after or whatever. It irritates us, of course, when he does these things, because it's symbolic war and we're the victims. But of all of the things Trump has done, these are the ones that bother me the least.
- [45:22]
C
David.
- [45:23]
B
So you're saying Trump is stupid. You give him an arm, he takes a finger.
- [45:27]
A
Wow, you just said that. Yeah. No, I mean, it's. Yeah, he's very invested in symbolism, and then he. Sometimes he does things that are really consequential and material. And I would be thrilled if all the battles around the Trump presidency could be limited to the symbolic arena. And I'd be happy to take losses in that arena if in order to get that.
- [45:44]
B
My question is to justify our behavior. Is it fair to say every nation on this planet is a mini empire with the same motivations as a global empire like the United States? And we just lucked out?
- [46:00]
A
Okay. So the fans of the United States like to say it is in the position of having the world's largest military being in sort of dominant position on the globe. Fans of it like to say that is because of its unusually benevolent character. It got such good ideas that everyone likes to follow along and it's a natural leader. So that's the usually the right wing version, and the left wing version sometimes is. No, the United States is actually unusually rapacious, and it just has such an appetite for destruction and taking other people's lands and lives that it got into this position. I don't think that the character of the United States is particularly distinctive. I think it is unusually lucky. And I think you could imagine a lot of other countries that if they had found themselves with the kind of material resources that would have allowed them to do this, would have also ended up in some kind of position of primacy, and then would have found the ideology to back it. For me, this isn't a story about how awful the US Character is or how good it is. It's just a story of the country that got really lucky and then has the privilege, in the sense of not just power, but of the blindness that comes with it, to essentially have been.
- [46:59]
B
Born on third base without manifest destiny. Didn't we run the risk of becoming Europe with all these individual wars for territory. Wasn't the purpose of Manifest Destiny to prevent Europe from happening here?
- [47:13]
A
There's two ways in which US Expansion was thought of. One is it's a way of clearing North America from rival European powers. And that is part of what happened, but also was a big part of it was clearing rival indigenous powers. So there's. In some of those two level games that are going on a lot of times, Manifest Destiny was about ethnically cleansing native nations. And that was. Their concern was less that the United States would be locked into a European system, but that it would just have a lot of kind of frontier resistance. And it's actually really worth emphasizing that it took centuries for the settlers from England and their descendants to gain effective control of even the part of North America that the United States controls.
- [47:51]
C
Part of the hubris of the US Empire, it seems to me, Daniel, is that it looks at the European powers and scoffs at how they tried to basically occupy whole areas of Africa and Asia with troops, and that we do it by propping up dictators who play ball with us and give us access to their extractive industries. Yeah, fair.
- [48:14]
A
I would say other things, too, but we call it American exceptionalism. The idea is that there have been many great powers in history, but the United States among them doesn't try to colonize, like, it's not trying to colonize the world. And this is the kind of thing that president after president up till Trump has said. I mean, I have, like, a list of, like, every president. We covet no territory, we've never wanted to be an empire, all that kind of stuff. And it's. It's just false. One thing that I saw when I looked at my book was I was like, well, the United States actually has overseas territories, and many of the presidents have been in support of that. But you're also right, there's another part to it which is that US Power. It's not just that the US has been innocent of ambition and designs on other countries. It's that often the form that that US Power has taken has not involved colonization, but it still involved other means of control. And propping up dictators is one of those.
- [48:57]
C
Another technique is, you know, a couple hundred bases all over the country and over a hundred nations. That's another technique that's used.
- [49:05]
A
We don't know how many military bases the United States has around the world, but we have, through journalists, we have a count. And so we think it's around 750 military bases out of the United States. In foreign country after foreign country, they don't show up on the map. And it's really easy for people from the United States never to think about those places unless they're in the military. But they are enormously important both in projecting US power and ing foreigners off. It's hard to overstate how much foreign politics in other countries has turned around those military bases.
- [49:34]
C
Let's go to Hannah.
- [49:36]
A
So one of the elements of the US exerting sort of more insidious control around the world. You touch on it briefly, but controlling the goods that other countries have. And I was wondering what if you could talk about the myth of the US rescuing the world from poverty and the control that that exerts and how that aids in our secret little empire. My first book was about U.S. foreign aid. And the sort of happy story is that the United States is helping other countries modernize and develop. And there is something real to say, which is that over the course of the 20th and the 21st century, a lot of humanity has gotten a lot less poor. That's real and that's huge. And a lot of that has to do with the rise of China and India. It's harder to show how the United States has been integral to that process, or at least not through its like foreign aid programs. And the critical version of that which I'm often been tempted toward is that US uses its foreign aid to buy political influence. And so fighting poverty is kind of a little part of it, but that's not really the purpose. And if you are the kind of suspicious person, as I sometimes am, who thinks that US foreign aid has not been always dedicated to fighting poverty, you might say things like, actually one of the most effective ways of dealing with poverty is letting people move. And so if the United States allowed more people to move to the United States, that is a really effective way of making people less poor. And the United States seems to be more interested in closing than opening its borders. You might also point out that one of the worst effects of poverty is clearly going to be climate change. And the United States has kind of been a rogue state with that regard. Not only just been consuming enormous amounts of fossil fuels, but defying a lot of the kind of attempts at international coordination in decarbonization. And so it's true that the United States has runs aid programs and I don't want to diminish sometimes life saving impact that they've made. But in my view, the United States has not been the kind of innocent force for poverty reduction all over the world as it may seem to be. If you're just focusing on the most effective of its aid programs.
- [51:38]
C
How does Trump's shutdown of the Agency for International Development, which is creating deaths every day in places like Africa, they're not getting the AIDS medicine and other medicines. They're not getting food, they're not getting clean drinking water. They're not getting all kinds of things that this small budget of aid provided. And we know that a lot of it goes back to provide contracts for US Companies, and there is bureaucracy and all, but by and large, it saved a lot of lives and it put the US In a good picture abroad. How does this fit in your narrative of empire? And why did Trump and Vance and Rubio go for this?
- [52:20]
A
Yeah, my sense is that a lot of US Power has kind of been wrapped around the model of so called liberal internationalism. So the idea is that the United States is a leader, not an imperialist, that other countries are happy followers, not forced into submission, and that the United States, yes, has a different role than other countries, but it won that role fairly and it exerts it impartially. So that's the story that US Leaders have often told. And aid has been part of that. And there has been a kind of, you know, it hasn't all been missile strikes. A lot of forms of US Power have been subtle, some might say insidious, if you're a critic, but have involved supporting other economies and trying to sort of get them as part of the US System. I mean, it's really relevant that the United States, after nuking and napalming Japan, put a lot of energy into rebuilding its economy. So that's kind of part of the, like, control the system that the United States has sought. Trump has been hostile to that from day one. I mean, his political debut in 1987 was taking out ads in several papers just complaining. Why is the United States spending so much on defense? An interesting complaint. And his concern was Saudi Arabia and Japan are benefiting from defense. They shouldn't benefit from our defense. We should just spend less on defense and screw them. That's always been Trump's attitude. So now you have this really weird moment where Trump is shutting down as many aspects of liberal internationalism as he can. And then you get these people in the United States saying in a way that I don't really know how to process, they're like, no, no, no, Trump. No, no, no, don't close those. Those are how we dominate other countries. Those are important parts of US Power. And Trump is like, well, I care about power, but not this form. So you have this argument between not like, I mean, yes, it's kind of poses an argument about what will benefit the world, but it's really an argument about what is the proper way for the United States to dominate the rest of the planet. Is it through these kind of subtle and diffuse means or the like naked force. And Trump is clearly a naked force guy.
- [54:09]
C
Let's say you're addressing a large convention of social studies teachers and concerned parents who belong to the PTA associations in their school districts. And given the weak state of civics education, civic skills, civic experience in elementary and high schools in our country and the teaching of history, which still is full of myths and lack of recognition of reality, what would you say to them if you were addressing them? What would you urge them to do when they go back home?
- [54:41]
A
You know, I don't regard our teachers as I'm not saying that you do, but I don't regard them as the perpetrators. I regard them as in a very uncomfortable way between what the state wants, what their school districts demand of them. And I've worked with a lot of teachers at elementary and middle and high school levels, and what I've seen is a lot of dedication and a lot of courage. And it's an incredibly difficult job. And this is now a time when the job is under attack. Not just public services in general, but their ability to teach what they think is a wise curriculum is more and more under attack as states try to sort of insist that the story of the United States can only be taught as the story of liberty. I mean, we have a teaching staff that I think is in this country that is not entirely down with that. So I would advise them to be courageous. And there might be moments when they have to make calls about what is going to help their students and what is going to be more interesting and useful to learn. And that might involve some resistance to what they're getting from on top. And I would encourage them to be as courageous as they can.
- [55:37]
C
On that note, I'm sorry, we have to conclude. We've been speaking with Professor Daniel Immerwar, professor of history at Northwestern University.
- [55:46]
A
It's been a pleasure to talk to you.
- [55:48]
D
We've been speaking with Daniel Immevar. We will link to his work@ralphnaderradiohour.com let's check in with our corporate crime reporter, Russell Mokhyber from the National Press building.
- [55:58]
E
In Washington, D.C. this is your corporate crime reporter Morning minute for Friday, January 23, 2026. I'm Russell Mokhiber since taking office, the Trump administration has canceled or halted a total of 159 enforcement actions against 166 six corporations. That's according to a report from Public Citizen. As a result of this retreat, at least 18 corporations accused of law breaking avoided paying a total of $3.1 billion in penalties for misconduct. The Trump administration is canceling accountability for corporate predators that cheat consumers, exploit workers, and illegally abuse their power at home and abroad, said Rick Claypool, the author of the report. Public Citizens Report found that corporations with close ties to Trump and the administration are benefiting from canceled and frozen enforcement. For the corporate crime reporter, I'm Russell Mulciber.
- [56:57]
D
Thank you, Russell. Welcome back to the Ralph Nader Radio Hour. I'm Steve Scrovin along with David Feldman and Hannah and hello, we must be going. I want to thank our guest again, Daniel Imovar. For those of you listening on the radio, that's our program for you podcast listeners. Stay tuned for bonus material we call the Wrap up featuring Francesco de Santis with in case you haven't heard, a transcript of this program will appear on the Ralph Nader Radio Hour substack site soon after the episode is posted.
- [57:25]
B
The producers of the Ralph Nader Radio Hour are Jimmy Lee Work, Hannah Feldman and Matthew Marin. Our executive producer is Alan Minsk.
- [57:34]
D
Our theme music, Stand up, Rise up was written and performed by Kemp Harris. Our proofreader is Elizabeth Solomon.
- [57:41]
B
Join us next week on the Ralph Nader Radio Hour. Thank you, Ralph.
- [57:45]
C
Thank you everybody.
- [57:48]
A
Stand up, step up.
- [57:51]
C
You ought to step up rise up, arise up I know you wanna rise up.
- [58:01]
A
This is John Crumshow with a special.
- [58:03]
D
Politics or Pedagogy education report. Please make Your contribution at 818-985-5735 or.
- [58:11]
A
Pledge online@kpfk.org on the line is Rose Huse. She has some important insights about technology and education. Welcome to Politics or Pedagogy.
- [58:22]
F
Thank you for having me.
- [58:23]
A
Tell me why technology is important in today's world as far as students are concerned.
- [58:28]
F
Well, technology is constantly evolving and changing at such a rapid pace nowadays. Having students to be involved in using the technological advances at a younger age and being able to know how to use them and are equipped to use them in the workplace can make them really advantageous on the job market, but also just in their personal life. I know even simple technologies like smart lights and things can make it easier when I'm at home with my dog to keep her from freaking out. Simple things that are surrounding technology can just make life much easier when used, you know, within the constructs of like, especially with children, limiting certain amounts of screen time so that they can have development elsewhere.
- [59:24]
A
How would a teacher deal with technology in the classroom?
- [59:28]
F
So some teachers, my aunt is a teacher. So some teachers refuse to have technology in the classroom unless it's absolutely necessary. Because students get so much screen time elsewhere, some teachers are much more open to using technology. So technology like Quizlet or Kahoot, different technology where you can use a game like environment to help them learn, almost like flashcards, but for the whole class. And so that type of technology is really cool. Also, just digital whiteboards can be made much more inclusive for disabled students. While there are limitations.