WHO DIED AND MADE AMERICA KING?
- Jan Writer
- Nov 7, 2024
- 5 min read
When did America claim a monopoly over influence? When did it become the celestial body we orbit, subserviently, bound to its gravitational force? Have we truly consented, or are we just too gutless to resist?
“The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.” Karl Marx, in his Theses on Feuerbach, didn’t mince words, and nor should we. Somewhere along the way, nations around the world came to believe that the American model—capitalism, democracy, its brand of freedom—was synonymous with modernity itself.
Did we choose this? Did the Philippines, or any other country, opt for this arrangement with a fully aware populace, with a debate that reached down to the poorest and most disenfranchised?
Or was it a sly indoctrination? Just as the frog sits unbothered in a pan, only to find the water boiling around him.
We went from our own heritage, our own damn sovereignty, to wearing American values like a fucking badge of honor, without once stopping to ask: what does it cost to play their game?
Perhaps you think it doesn’t matter, this influence. Perhaps you’re comforted by the steady flow of American pop culture, Netflix shows, Hollywood blockbusters, the entire web of American thingamajigs wrapping themselves around our daily lives.
But it’s more than movies, more than music. It’s a virus that seeps into the very marrow of our political framework.
When our officials on the floor of Congress are grandstanding with references to American leaders and ideals—when our educational institutions hold up the U.S. Constitution as the ultimate model of democracy—don’t pretend that’s just “cultural exchange.” That's mimicry, that's acquiescence, that’s bending a knee to an empire that grins as we do.
Are we so mentally impoverished that we need to parrot their ideals just to feel significant? The subtle, insidious imperialism of American politics is not the kind that marches in with a rifle. No. It’s the velvet-gloved kind, smiling, and goddamn it, they’ve taught us to smile back.
The post-colonial theorist Edward Said, in his work Orientalism, described how the West constructed the “Orient” to suit its narrative, casting it as exotic, backward, needing the West’s enlightened touch.
Look at us now. We’ve turned ourselves into that stereotype, bowing to a new colonial gaze, scrambling for American approval like some needy lapdog.
Some of you might say, “Why make a fuss? America has the best of science, technology, democracy.”
But tell me, does that give it the right to drench us all in its ideals? The United States is riddled with corruption, gun violence, systemic racism, mass incarceration—oh, don’t even get me started on that prison-industrial complex.
They can’t fix their own damn problems, yet we treat them as our moral and political North Star?
If Thomas Hobbes were alive, he’d slap us upside the head and tell us we’re sheep in the truest sense. In Leviathan, he warned about the dangers of handing power over to a sovereign without question, but isn’t that exactly what we’ve done? Not to our leaders, but to America itself. We’ve built our little institutions, our policies, and even our dissent within the boundaries they set. Their democracy isn’t even functional at home—hell, it’s broken—but we’re expected to model ourselves after it? To join in their idiotic theater of partisanship and call it progress?
I’m not suggesting some isolationist fantasy where we ignore the rest of the world. No, we’re global creatures, whether we like it or not. But there’s a difference between engagement and servitude. There’s a damn chasm between exchanging ideas and surrendering to them.
You think the truly sovereign nations see American politics and bow with the same servility? Absolutely not. And yet, here we are, across countless nations, reading the tea leaves of American elections as if it’s our fate being decided. What happened to sovereignty? What happened to minding our own damn business?
Power isn’t just wielded with a whip. It’s woven into the systems that shape our lives. America’s dominance, in that sense, is woven into the fabric of international discourse, threading through our politics, our media, our identity itself. And it doesn’t need to lift a finger anymore; we keep ourselves in line just fine.
The “Panopticon” that Michel Foucault describes? We’ve built it around ourselves, with America sitting smugly in the control room.
Maybe you think I’m exaggerating. Fine, think that. But let’s test it.
Look at how nations adjust their policies based on who’s sitting in the White House, as if their economy, their healthcare, their environment hinges on a president 10,000 miles away.
Look at how quickly leaders grovel for an endorsement, or fear sanctions, or quake at the idea of a U.S.-led embargo.
Consider how wars, civil wars, hell—genocides have raged on under the complicit silence of the American state, all while they lecture the rest of us about “human rights.”
Look at the Arab Spring, at Vietnam, at Chile. How many places have burned while America did fuck-all? And yet, we allow it to stand as some paragon, some golden calf we must appease.
And let’s talk about NATO, that vaunted protector of “democracy.” How often does the alliance actually benefit the people of Europe, or is it a proxy for American interests, a long leash for keeping everyone just a few paces behind Uncle Sam?
Even when European nations dissent, they face American scorn. They’re branded ungrateful or cowardly if they don’t sign on to Washington’s next folly. Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam—the blood of countless nations spills, yet only one name lingers at the center of it all.
“What is it that is particularly inhuman about tyranny?” Hannah Arendt asked in The Origins of Totalitarianism. And in answering her, maybe we find a reflection of our dilemma. She believed that tyranny dehumanized not only by inflicting violence but by robbing the very capacity to think freely, to act without coercion.
And yet, we sit here, watching American politics unfold on our screens, believing—somehow—that these events define us too. That their leaders are our leaders, that their future is our future.
The lie they’ve sold us is this: You need us.
No, we fucking don’t. The fallacy of American indispensability is nothing but another brick in the wall of soft tyranny, one that encourages not chains, but complacency, not beatings, but assimilation. And like any power left unchecked, it won’t stop until it takes all it can get.
In the end, we must remember what Arendt said: “The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.”
America was once the revolutionary, throwing off the shackles of British rule, preaching liberty for all. But now it is the old guard, the entrenched power that fears dissent, that cannot tolerate autonomy from those under its sway. The revolutionary has become the tyrant, and we are its reluctant subjects.
So here’s my question to you, to all of us, really: how much longer will we entertain this farce? How much longer will we let America be the puppeteer of our aspirations and fears, our laws and our identities?
The time for excuses is over. Our sovereignty deserves more than this. Our people deserve more. And if we can’t demand that respect, then we damn well don’t deserve to be free.
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