The Big Picture – 
By Glynn Wilson – 

Hey, I’m as big a science geek and science fiction fan as anyone else. The announcement by NASA of a plan to go back to the moon and on to Mars should be a moment for excitement and an occasion for national and human pride.

So why is there a growing knot in the pit of my stomach and a sense of foreboding in my brain about this? It reminds me of Mark Twain’s opposition to America’s military expansion and imperialism in the last century.

Perhaps it’s because of this administration’s handling of not just the plan for American military expansion into space, but also because of Trump’s dealings with the other countries right here on planet earth. We all now know about Trump’s rhetoric of creating a new “space force.”

At the same time NASA was announcing that it is asking for a $1.6 billion as a down payment to go back to the moon with a manned mission in partnership with private companies to establish a permanent base and push on to Mars, Trump was taking the advice of neocons like National Security Advisor John Bolton to put us in a position to get into at least two wars at once, with Iran and Venezuela, as well as a trade war with China.

As a writer for The New Yorker put it: “The problem, as U.S. history proves, is that the momentum of confrontation is harder to reverse with each escalatory step.”

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As as a former New York Times Latin American correspondent put in a recent piece on the growing war in Venezuela: “Is a foreign policy based on inflicting widespread human misery justifiable?”

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Then, as a writer for Vox put it, “As the Romans learned, if you build an empire, sooner or later you’ll get a paranoid crackpot for emperor.”

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I gagged and choked on my coffee when I read and watched the words of Vice President Mike Pence, which made the official NASA press release on the moon-mars shot.

“Under President Trump’s leadership, America will lead in space once again on all fronts,” Pence said.

This is a bit odd, considering that Pence is not known for his knowledge of science but his religious fundamentalism, which should also give the people of the U.S. and the world pause.

“As the President has said, space is the ‘next great American frontier’ – and it is our duty – and our destiny – to settle that frontier with American leadership, courage, and values,” Pence said. “The signing of this new directive is yet another promise kept by President Trump.”

Is this all about military domination of space and more American imperialism?

New Space Policy Directive Calls for Human Expansion Across Solar System

This sounds way too much like a throwback to America’s 19th century policy of Manifest Destiney, which has now been discredited by scholars as a policy that resulted in and justified genocide for Native Americans.

So I went back and looked up the “we choose to go to the moon” speech by then President John F. Kennedy in Houston from 1962 to see if this new mission is comparable.

“We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people,” Kennedy said, and not just for the people of the United States of America.

“For space science, like nuclear science and all technology, has no conscience of its own,” Kennedy said. “Whether it will become a force for good or ill depends on man, and only if the United States occupies a position of pre-eminence can we help decide whether this new ocean will be a sea of peace or a new terrifying theater of war. I do not say that we should or will go unprotected against the hostile misuse of space any more than we go unprotected against the hostile use of land or sea, but I do say that space can be explored and mastered without feeding the fires of war, without repeating the mistakes that man has made in extending his writ around this globe of ours.”

So even though the motivation for the first moon shot was U.S. competition with the Soviet Union during the Cold War, there is a stark contrast between the vision Kennedy had to the one now being put forth by Trump.

“There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet,” Kennedy said. “Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation may never come again.”

The problem is Trump’s motivation for proposing this new plan. He has made it clear that he is not in this to help “humankind” in the name of science. He wants to dominate space for the purposes of making war. That is a major problem.

Even before the news came out officially from NASA, I had been conducting research on the whole concept of American empire, since it is clearly in play again by this administration.

As the news broke about this, I said on social media: “The world is breaking, our information system is totally broken down, and now we are going to the moon and mars as privatized, capitalist, Christian space warriors? Something is definitely wrong with this picture. Tell you what. We’ll get back to you on this.”

Mark Twain on Anti-Imperialism

In 1900, after he returned to New York from a trip to the Philippines, Mark Twain became the chief protagonist against Teddy Roosevelt’s expansionist politics abroad in the early days of what historians call America’s first major push to become a global empire in a war with Spain.

“I left these shores, at Vancouver, a red-hot imperialist. I wanted the American eagle to go screaming into the Pacific. It seemed tiresome and tame for it to content itself with the Rockies. Why not spread its wings over the Philippines, I asked myself? And I thought it would be a real good thing to do,” Twain was quoted as saying in the New York Herald Tribune.

“I said to myself, here are a people who have suffered for three centuries. We can make them as free as ourselves, give them a government and country of their own, put a miniature of the American constitution afloat in the Pacific, start a brand new republic to take its place among the free nations of the world. It seemed to me a great task to which we had addressed ourselves,” Twain said. “But I have thought some more, since then, and I have read carefully the treaty of Paris, and I have seen that we do not intend to free, but to subjugate the people of the Philippines. We have gone there to conquer, not to redeem.”

He also disagreed with U.S. siding with the church so blatantly, putting it like this.

“We have also pledged the power of this country to maintain and protect the abominable system established in the Philippines by the Friars,” Twain complained. “It should, it seems to me, be our pleasure and duty to make those people free, and let them deal with their own domestic questions in their own way. And so I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land.”

If you want to know more about this concept of American empire and imperialism and militarism, start with Google and Wikipedia.

American Imperialism

Anti-imperialism

In addition to Twain, John Hobson strongly influenced the anti-imperialism of both Marxists and liberals around the world through his 1902 book on Imperialism. He argued that the “taproot of imperialism” is not in nationalist pride, but in capitalism.

“As a form of economic organization, imperialism is unnecessary and immoral, the result of the mis-distribution of wealth in a capitalist society,” he wrote. “That created an irresistible desire to extend the national markets into foreign lands, in search of profits greater than those available in the Mother Country. In the capitalist economy, rich capitalists received a disproportionately higher income than did the working class. If the owners invested their incomes to their factories, the greatly increased productive capacity would exceed the growth in demand for the products and services of said factories.”

The anti-imperialists opposed the expansion because they believed imperialism violated the credo of republicanism, especially the need for “consent of the governed.” Appalled by American imperialism, the Anti-Imperialist League, which included famous citizens such as Andrew Carnegie, Henry James, William James and Mark Twain, formed a platform which stated:

“We hold that the policy known as imperialism is hostile to liberty and tends toward militarism, an evil from which it has been our glory to be free. We regret that it has become necessary in the land of Washington and Lincoln to reaffirm that all men, of whatever race or color, are entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We maintain that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. We insist that the subjugation of any people is ‘criminal aggression’ and open disloyalty to the distinctive principles of our Government …

“We cordially invite the cooperation of all men and women who remain loyal to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States,” they concluded.

Right Wing Nationalism Now

Right-wing nationalists and religious fundamentalist movements that emerged in reaction to alleged imperialism once fell into the anti-imperialist camp. Trump seemed to side with them during his campaign for president, but now he has been accosted by the neocons who are influencing him to take up the American Empire cause again, and to push it into space, most notably John Bolton.

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While doing this research, I also learned that William Blum died recently, one of the most prolific of American writers on the subject of anti-imperialism.

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Of course that was tongue in cheek.

While many American presidents have spoken of promoting democracy when they really meant promoting capitalism around the globe through war, including two presidents with the last name of Bush, Trump is ramping this movement up to a whole new level of absurdity.

And he is doing it by totally changing the framing of the arguments in a way that is successfully fooling a large minority of Americans into abandoning their previous positions to follow him into this hell fire of war and empire.

If the Democrats in Congress and the presidential candidates running against Trump in 2020 want to have any chance of stopping Trump and beating him next year, they should step up a vigorous debate about this billion dollar plan. What if we went after a billion to start fighting climate change due to global warming from the burning of fossil fuels instead?

We can still go to the moon again and Mars. But we should do it for the purpose of saving this planet and to bring the people of earth together, not for the purpose of waging war here — or to escape earth after we destroy it. This plan needs a higher purpose and leadership from someone who understands these things, not the likes of Trump, Pence and Bolton.