Imperialism persists under new justifications while its vocabulary shifts.

Evidence

The initiative for overseas expansion has shifted westward from England and Western Europe to America, and the initiative for continental expansion in close geographic continuity no longer comes from Central and Eastern Europe but is exclusively located in Russia. Imperialist policies, more than any other single factor, have brought about the decline of Europe … No one justifies expansion any longer by “the white man’s burden” on one side and an “enlarged tribal consciousness” to unite people of similar ethnic origin on the other; instead we hear of “commitments” to client states, of the responsibilities of power, and of solidarity with revolutionary national liberation movements. The very word “expansion” has disappeared from our political vocabulary, which now uses the words “extension” or, critically, “overextension” to cover a very similar meaning. Politically more important, private investments in distant lands, originally the prime mover of imperialist developments, are today surpassed by foreign aid, economic and military, provided directly by governments. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 29

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to Orientalism’s critique of how the West re-narrates domination, and to the Islamophobia field’s analysis of ‘commitments’ and ‘responsibilities of power’ as euphemisms. — connects to: Forms, capacities and habits remain unchanged while their substrate changes. — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 497; The binding sacred-land slogan gets revised and redeployed as contexts and wars change — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized:…, 1510
• SEED: Angle: how euphemism constantly renovates the vocabulary of domination — today’s ‘overseas contingency operations’ and ‘kinetic military action’ are the same shift from ‘expansion’ to ‘extension’.