The Three Legs on which the American Empire Stands

    The American empire is like a three-legged stool: to remain standing it needs all three legs. These three legs are:
    1. concentration of wealth (the reason for slavery)
    This is the primary purpose of the American empire, and an important factor that shapes the details of American culture (several of the remaining sections in this essay give specific examples of American culture that can be seen as resulting from this prime directive to concentrate wealth into fewer hands).
    2. directed violence (capturing slaves and holding them physically)    To achieve its primary purpose, violence (or a credible threat of violence) is needed to turn a given state into a plantation; then violence (or a credible threat of violence) is needed to keep that state's population (the slaves) from changing anything.
    Given a choice, men want freedom, not slavery. The American empire knows this, and, as a result, carries a very big stick (the American military), with which to beat the slaves as needed.
    3. false propaganda (controlling what a slave thinks)
    As I have said elsewhere regarding empires:
    It is worth noting that, in general, an empire, being based on the enslavement of other nations, is especially likely to be hostile to anything that can give its slaves any insight into a bigger reality. And just as an empire wants to falsify the history of its enslaved peoples so that they cannot remember when they were free, so does an empire want to falsify reality so that its enslaved peoples cannot find their way to freedom.
    The Americans have a saying: garbage in, garbage out. Once the American empire has physical control over a given population, it proceeds to control their minds by filling their minds with garbage, thru the schools and the media. A major part of that garbage is various fictional histories.