In all the media’s coverage of NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia, there was hardly a mention of the word “imperialism.” Since the last European empires dismembered themselves in the 1960s and 1970s, the media mind, addicted to the short-term view, has come to believe that a part of human history for as long as there has been any human history has become merely démodé. Perhaps influenced by Lenin’s characterization of imperialism as “the final stage of capitalism,” journalists have been disposed to believe it a mere contingency of international relations, the product of the greed and power-hunger of the usual suspects (those ol’ debbil white males) among the ruling classes in the old European capitals. The rare consensus on this subject, foreshadowed in Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points and League of Nations and enshrined in today’s United Nations, was owing to the harmony between America&# ...

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