Introduction

   The first universities were actually run by the students, they picked the teachers they wanted to hear lecture. One day as I was watching a lecture online, I was struck by the sheer possibilities lectures dating back to at least the 80's whistleblowers like Philip Agee, renegade academics like Michael Parenti,  or up to the minute reports by the always amusing Pepe Escobar.

   That's when i got the idea to create an online anti-imperialist university. Overly ambitious I know but that's my nature. Whether it ever lives up to it's name will depend on you my fellow students. The truth is study of imperialism is probably best conducted outside of academia. In this day and age respectability always entails lies and half truths. While there are many alternative news sites this is more of a radical history site. My goal is to put things more into context.

One  of the flaws of the mainstream media that is often replicated in the alternative media is to jump to the latest hot spot and search out the immediate roots of the crisis. Take Somalia for instance people will discuss the drone war there. Rarely do they discuss the Bush Intervention rarer still do they mention the  war between Ethiopia and Somalia in the 70's. A proxy war between the U.S. and the Soviets. It wasn't until last year that I learned about it.

    In our postmodern world this pre-programmed amnesia plays a major part in helping to justify the continuation of this endless war. Thus western leaders can talk about the superior humanitarian values of America or Europe while simultaneously continuing and ignoring their war on the planet which has been waged for the past 500 years. It began around then most infamously in 1492 in the Americas. It was around then that the pirate Vasco de Gama began the assault on India. In  southeast Africa thriving civilizations were destroyed and then enslaved by the Portuguese.

 500 years the global war has waged giving birth to capitalism, slavery, genocide culturcide and untold poverty for the vast majority of earths population. Unless of course you want to start with the Crusades. Nearly a thousand years ago. In the 90's when i first became concerned it was common to start with the birth of the national security state in the 40's. This was when America went bad. This ignored slavery, the genocide of American Indians, the aggressive Mexican American war, the Spanish American war and numerous now forgotten interventions in the 3rd world prior to world war 2. (Google  William walker Nicaragua or  general  smedley butler war is a racket to learn about some of this forgotten history.)

Today doubtless people will date when America went bad with September 11. But as I've  studied the war on terror it's become clear that the dynamics are very similar to the cold war. The real aims are containing Russia and China. And that the battlefields are often old cold war ones ie Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen, the Congo. The targets old cold war enemies like Syria and Libya. Also obviously it was during the cold war that America, NATO Saudi Arabia and Pakistan created America's eternally useful   frenemies  al qaeda.

But the cold war at the same time could be better understood if one understood the colonialist imperialism of the 19th  and early 20th century. After all much of the cold war revolved around newly independent nations like Vietnam or Angola.

So I'll  be unearthing some forgotten history. I welcome your help write your own histories, recommend books or articles (especially on pre cold war imperialism) point out when I am wrong or have accepted the phony mainstream narrative.  And yell at me when I stop writing remember in this university we are all students together.
Death to imperialism! long live the revolution!
Hugo Turner