ABSTRACT
In a 1967 speech, “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence,” Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. boldly stated that he could never again raise his voice “against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today – my own government” (Washington, 1991, p. 233). Following Dr. King, this chapter argues that criminologists cannot adequately address the issue of curbing international state crime without first taking into account the fact that, primarily for reasons of empire, the United States is still the greatest purveyor of state crime and violence in the world. As Iadicola (2010) observes, “The largest, most powerful, violent, and rarely defined ‘criminal’ organization in the world today is the empire of the United States of America” (p. 31). Not only does the United States continue to engage in the most state violence in the world, but also its attempted imperial domination of the globe creates or supports conditions that lead to state crimes on the part of other nations (structural violence, the illegal use of military force, political repression and human rights violations, torture and other war crimes). Furthermore, the strong and distorting American influence on the international political community and international legal organizations (e.g. the United Nations and the International Criminal Court) not only provides “sovereign impunity” for the United States (Welch, 2009), but also renders the international community and its organizations incapable of exercising much formal social control over the state crimes of other nations, except in specific circumstances that do not impinge on the interests of the U.S. empire.
