Far from promoting democracy and freedom abroad, the United States has been perpetuating exploitation and subversion as a global empire. A new, second edition of The Racket: A Rogue Reporter vs The American Empire, a groundbreaking expose by former Financial Times reporter Matt Kennard, lays bare Washington’s imperialism that has long been cynically hidden behind claims of “noble” principles like “freedom”, “democracy” or “development” in the author’s words, and propagandized by a pervasive and compliant media industry.

That’s the same message from world-famous linguistics professor and political commentator Noam Chomsky, who has written for over half a century against the iniquities of the “US empire”.

In a new book, The Myth of American Idealism, Chomsky and his co-author, Nathan Robinson, again show how America’s global domination has wreaked havoc in country after country, for example, with its devastating wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and its support for Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians.

All the while, the US ruling elites and their media empire spread self-serving myths about the country’s commitment to “spreading democracy”.

Foreign wars, intervention and subversion are all justified by appealing to noble intentions regarding humanitarian missions and benevolent purposes.

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In a similar vein, Kennard said in a recent interview on The Chris Hedges Report: “The propaganda we’re fed from the moment we’re born, effectively, in the US — and the UK as well — is that the United States is unlike all previous empires, which did operate on exploitative terms, but the US is different.

“It operates on noble principles like freedom, democracy, development, whatever these words are, and it’s pervasive. … It really opened my eyes to the nefarious nature of the US empire, the fact that it is the biggest enemy of human progress, I believe, around the world, because it smashes any leader, any movement that wants to do things differently.”

Unlike the old empires, the US domination relies less on territorial conquest and occupation and more on economic domination, control and ideological manipulation; however, when push comes to shove, as when local leaders try to reform their own countries and work toward the betterment of their own people rather than Western corporations and the global market, subversion, invasions, occupations and proxy wars become the order of the day.

Kennard calls the US “the empire of acronyms”. “When you go to these countries (being targeted)”, he said, “you see NED (National Endowment for Democracy), USAID (United States Agency for International Development), DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration), CIA (Central Intelligence Agency), if you look hard enough. All these institutions have huge ideologies bolted onto them to justify them as benevolent organizations.

“That kind of works OK in that ideology and that propaganda … as they should, which is you have some client ruler who basically just does whatever he’s told by Washington and by corporations which want to ransack the country for resources.”

But these organizations quickly resort to political subversion and media manipulation as soon as local leaders try to pursue independent action and policy not dictated by Washington. Kennard cites the examples of Evo Morales, the first indigenous president of Bolivia, and Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. Generally, countries around the world become targets as soon as they go against the interests of multinationals and the 1 percent oligarchy in the US.

He said: “I started looking into the National Endowment for Democracy and their programs in Bolivia. And you realize it had nothing to do with promoting democracy. What was it? They were funding groups opposing Morales and trying to bring him down. USAID is the same thing. … There was a wide-ranging effort to destroy this really promising development, not just for Bolivia, not just for Latin America, but for the whole world.”

As a Hong Kong resident, I have had experience with the subversive and propaganda work of the NED and other US government-supported groups under the US Agency for Global Media against the local government in the city and the central government in Beijing.

Under the guise of democracy promotion, they funded or trained virtually all the opposition groups, especially those with representatives within the Hong Kong legislature, to the tune of tens of millions of dollars over many years.

Their work bore fruit with the so-called “Umbrella Revolution”, or “Occupy Central”, of 2014 and the unprecedented anti-government riots of 2019, which brought the city to a standstill.

Once national security laws were introduced and made it impossible for those subversive US agencies to continue operations in Hong Kong, Washington and its Western allies had to resort to sanctions while maligning security laws that they have long had and frequently used against alleged subversive groups and their activities.

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Hong Kong has been just another excuse for the US to interfere with China.

As Australian historian and YouTuber Jeff Rich has argued, “When Joe Biden or Donald Trump, or countless think tanks and journalists in the Western media, summon the threat of China, … they talk of pacing challenges, strategic competition, autocracies, or the slogans like ‘Red Threat’ and ‘Take down the Communist Party of China’. But they are driven mad by the same fear. The rebuke to their genius spurs a fear that a rival will displace them from their stools. They are engulfed in madness because they cannot admit that they have wronged China.”

There is a clear and unmistakable pattern that Asians and others worldwide have long realized and an increasing number of Westerners, specifically Americans. “The Americans scrambled for power in the 20th century over the dead bodies of tens of millions of Eurasians. Its greatness rose on the backs of its betrayed ally,” Rich wrote.

The author has worked as a senior political writer for several leading publications in Hong Kong.

The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.