Mark Twain's Anti-Imperialism and the Boxer Uprising

My latest article for CounterPunch

I have a new article at CounterPunch today, “Twain’s Anti-Imperialism and the Boxer Uprising.”

Here’s a brief excerpt:

The Boxers were a genuinely decentralized, bottom-up, people’s uprising against a destructive, extractive economic system foisted upon Chinese people from without—a system that could not have been erected or maintained without war. The Boxers understood the connection between economic extraction and imperialistic wars better than most people do today, because they lived and observed that connection and its material consequences. Today’s war hawks and imperialists follow directly from the government elites of the major European powers of the nineteenth century and the turn of the century in pretending that there is an equivalence between high notions of free trade and gunboat diplomacy. The elites of the capitalist West believed it their clear and unquestionable prerogative to “open China,” and this they did through force, the language of “free trade” notwithstanding.

I hope you’ll check it out!

Thank you, as always, for your support,

Dave