In all the media’s coverage of NATO’s bombing of
Yugoslavia, there was hardly a mention of the word
“imperialism.” Since the last European empires dismembered
themselves in the 1960s and 1970s, the media mind, addicted to the
short-term view, has come to believe that a part of human
history for as long as there has been any human history has
become merely démodé. Perhaps influenced by Lenin’s
characterization of imperialism as “the final stage of
capitalism,” journalists have been disposed to believe it a
mere contingency of international relations, the product of
the greed and power-hunger of the usual suspects (those ol’
debbil white males) among the ruling classes in the old
European capitals. The rare consensus on this subject,
foreshadowed in Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points and League of
Nations and enshrined in today’s United Nations, was owing
to the harmony between America’s anti-imperial national
mythology and Marxist-Leninist theory.

Of course, when the United States engineered a coup
in Guatemala or Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest or
Prague, the act was often visible as imperial only to the
anti-imperialists on the other side, but the media were
naturally quick to rise above such merely national
partisanship and anathematize all the world’s residue of
imperialism as the result of America’s conduct of the Cold
War. With this new war
—actually, as I write, it is still
only a half-war, since the combatants on our side are
almost all machines—new categories are obviously
necessary. Not that there is