Recently released secret documents from Chinese company Huawei provide insights into how the U.S. Empire rules the world. According to the Washington Post, the documents reveal that Huawei secretly helped North Korea “build and maintain the country’s commercial wireless network.”
What’s wrong with that? you ask.
It violates U.S. sanctions against North Korea!
What do U.S. sanctions have to do with commercial relations between a Chinese company and North Korea?
Well, as the ruler of the world — or, in common parlance, as the world’s sole remaining empire — the U.S. Empire’s rules and regulations apply to everyone in the world. If anyone anywhere in the world is caught violating them, he will be summoned to the United States to face criminal and civil prosecution.
What about President Trump’s lovefest with North Korean communist dictator Kim Jong-Un?
Irrelevant! Just because the president of the United States has fallen in love with North Korea’s communist dictator and salutes his communist generals, that still does not relieve foreigners from complying with the Empire’s edicts prohibiting commercial ties with North Korea without the official permission of U.S. officials.
That’s how the Empire works — its rulers are free to fall in love with anyone they want but that still doesn’t relieve foreign governments and foreign companies of their duty to comply with and obey the rules and regulations of the U.S. Empire.
Anyway, everyone is supposed to know that North Korea is a communist regime and that communism is bad. That’s in fact why the Empire has maintained a harsh economic embargo against the Cuban people for more than 50 years. Since the Cuban people have refused to oust their communist regime with a coup or a violent revolution, the U.S. Empire has continued to target them with impoverishment and death through economic sanctions, the same thing they are doing to the North Korean people and, well, for that matter, the Iranian people.
Like Huawei’s helping North Korea to build and maintain a wireless commercial network, woe to the foreigner who does business with communist Cuba in violation of the U.S. embargo. He will be prosecuted, fined, and imprisoned for daring to violate the rules and regulations of the Empire.
In fact, woe to the American citizen who travels to Cuba and spends money there without the official permission of his rulers. He too will be viciously prosecuted, fined, and imprisoned by the Empire.
Notice the operative words: “without the official permission of his rulers.” You see, apparently trading with the Cuban Reds is not bad per se because U.S. officials do grant official permission to some Americans — the privileged ones — to travel to Cuba and spend money there. That’s how the Empire works — if you approach it, show respect, bend the knee, and plead for permission to trade with others, they might (or might not) let you. What’s important is that you ask permission. That’s how “freedom” works under an Empire.
Of course, there is a big exception when it comes to trading with the communists. That exception is North Vietnam or, excuse me, Vietnam, a country that is headed by a communist regime that killed more than 58,000 American men who were sacrificed by the U.S. Empire in a violent war against communism. Apparently Vietnam’s communism is not so bad anymore because U.S. Empire officials have granted Americans official permission to trade with the Vietnamese Reds.
In his Fourth of July, 1821, address to Congress, entitled “In Search of Monsters to Destroy,” U.S. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams accurately predicted what would happen if the U.S. government were ever to abandon its founding principle of non-interventionism in favor of a worldwide interventionist empire:
The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force. The frontlet upon her brows would no longer beam with the ineffable splendor of freedom and independence; but in its stead would soon be substituted an imperial diadem, flashing in false and tarnished lustre the murky radiance of dominion and power. She might become the dictatress of the world.