Tariq Ali, born in Lahore, based in London, an internationally renowned writer, an editor of the New Left Review and author of the recent bestseller The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity, has been a consistent critic of global imperialism since the 1960s. In conversation with David Barsamian at Porto Alegre, Brazil, he elaborated on the nature of contemporary imperialism, the complicity of the US media, the erosion of national sovereignty through the creation of dictatorial client regimes, and the nature of the Anglo-American imperial alliance and the war in Iraq.
David Barsamian: Imperialism is not a word that is often used in polite discourse in the United States.
Tariq Ali: It is a word they do not like, though it is a word they used a lot when the British empire was dominant. Liberal magazines were constantly attacking the British empire. On the eve of the second world war, a series of articles in The New Republic argued that there was very little to choose between the British empire and Hitler. They always had this hostility to the British empire because of the origins of the American state itself, and therefore they were very reluctant to accept the fact that they themselves had all the makings of an empire from very early on. They assumed that an empire consisted of colonies abroad which were ruled and staffed by people sent from the imperial country. And they said, "Well, we don't do it like that".
It is true that the United States did not do it like that. Look at its internal expansion. First, it conquered and destroyed the indigenous population. Then it fought a big civil war to unite its own country. Then it gobbled up bits of Mexico and incorporated them into the United States. It did something very similar to what czarist Russia did in the old days of the Russian empire.