Erik Prince has been many things in his 54 years on Earth: the wealthy heir to an auto supply company; a Navy SEAL; the founder of the mercenary firm Blackwater, which conducted a notorious 2007 massacre in the middle of Baghdad; the brother of Betsy DeVos, Donald Trump’s secretary of education; a shadow adviser to Trump; and the plaintiff in a lawsuit against The Intercept.
Last November, Prince started a podcast called “Off LeashOpens in a new tab,” which in its promotional copy says he “brings a unique and invaluable perspective to today’s increasingly volatile world.” On an episode last Tuesday, his unique and invaluable perspective turned out to be that the U.S. should “put the imperial hat back on” and take over and directly run huge swaths of the globe.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Erik Prince has been many things in his 54 years on Earth: the wealthy heir to an auto supply company; a Navy SEAL; the founder of the mercenary firm Blackwater, which conducted a notorious 2007 massacre in the middle of Baghdad; the brother of Betsy DeVos, Donald Trump’s secretary of education; a shadow adviser to Trump; and the plaintiff in a lawsuit against The Intercept.
Prince and Serrano either do not know or do not care that previous bouts of the European flavor of colonialism led to the deaths of tens of millions of people around the world.
The book’s narrator, Charles Marlow, describes his voyage up a river into the interior of an unnamed African country that is obviously Congo in the process of being colonized by Belgium.
March 27: “I ask Mississippians of all faiths to pray for all our coalition forces and the Iraqi people as they engage in an intense but noble battle against what is nothing but sheer evil.”
Serrano at least is more in touch with the grimy reality of what they’re talking about, and he excitedly mentions how America could bring lesser nations “the professionalism they need to capitalize on their natural resources.”
In any case, Prince’s words illustrate that we are living in a time in which many of humanity’s worst ideas, ones we thought were long dead and buried, have risen from the grave and are now staggering about again.
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