By Michael Massing
LOS ANGELES - "A few bad apples" is Washington's message to the rest of the world in trying to explain the appalling images out of Abu Ghraib prison. But the rest of the world is not having it. From Paris to Riyadh to New Delhi, commentators are insisting that these acts are not exceptions but part of a pattern of American arrogance and brutishness.
"The torture is not the work of a few American soldiers," a columnist in the London-based Al-Quds Al-Arabi newspaper wrote. "It is the result of an official American culture that deliberately insults and humiliates Muslims." Over and over, American acts in Iraq have been equated with those of Saddam Hussein - a comparison Americans find absurd.
How to explain this discrepancy? Is the rest of the world deluded, or are we? Have others been propagandized, or have we? The Bush administration and its backers have frequently pointed the finger at Arab satellite networks such as Al-Jazeera, charging them with casting all U.S. actions in the worst possible light. Any fair-minded viewer of these networks would have to acknowledge the merit in these complaints. Although resourceful and enterprising, these networks appeal to an Arab nationalism and pride that views the U.S. occupation as inherently illegitimate, and their broadcasts reflect this. Hour upon hour, they beam images of U.S. soldiers ransacking homes; of men and boys being marched off in handcuffs; of hospital beds full of children missing limbs, eyes and hope. So when photos of Americans abusing Iraqi prisoners are released, they're seen as part of a pattern.
But Americans have been fed their own highly skewed version of reality. It's rooted in the idea of American "exceptionalism," of our unique mission to inspire and transform the world. This vision goes back to Abraham Lincoln, who spoke of the United States as the "last best hope of Earth." John F. Kennedy urged us to "pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship" to promote liberty. And George W. Bush has repeatedly proclaimed his belief that the United States has "an obligation to unleash freedom in the world," as he put it in a recent speech.
Such rhetoric can have benevolent results. It has spawned the Peace Corps, moved mountains of food aid and promoted the spread of human rights.
But such talk can also be dangerous. It has led us into the swamps of Vietnam, the jungles of Central America, the deserts of Iraq. Mesmerized by our idealism, we have averted our gaze from war's realities - the razed villages, the death squads, the barbarities of occupation.
During the war itself, while Arab and European news organizations unflinchingly presented images of the dead and injured, the American networks - worried, as always, about viewer sensibilities - scrubbed their broadcasts of all signs of blood. The decision of some newspapers to publish photos of flag-draped coffins caused an uproar. So did Ted Koppel's decision to read the names of the fallen on "Nightline." When the Sinclair Broadcast Group announced that its stations would not air the program, it fell to war-hardened veteran Sen. John McCain to note the need for the public "to be reminded of war's terrible costs, in all their heartbreaking detail."
At least U.S. casualties are finally getting some attention. Iraqi casualties are not. The U.S. military does not track them, and U.S. news organizations rarely report on them. The recent fighting in Fallujah is a good example. After four American security contractors were killed and their bodies mutilated, the U.S. military pounded the city with warplanes and gunships. By most accounts, hundreds of people died, many of them civilians.
Al-Jazeera showed nonstop footage of these victims, searing them into the Arab psyche. On American TV, they were barely a blip, and, two weeks later, we still have no idea how many civilians died. And we don't seem to care.
The photos out of Abu Ghraib have finally pierced the screen of our complacency and self-regard. They have forced us to confront the fact that war brutalizes - and not only the vanquished. The guards who shackled and stripped the Iraqi prisoners may be bad apples, but they are the predictable fruit of an expanding American imperium. We must recognize that those smirking grins and sadistic leers are not simply expressions of some alien breed - they are the face of America at war.
Massing is a contributing editor of the Columbia Journalism Review and a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books.
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
Eliding the Truth:Proud to Be an American?
By Jay Moore
I spent a recent weekend in Plymouth, Massachusetts. Plymouth, to remind you, is the place where American folklore, if not necessarily American history, got its first start. It is the location where a small group of English exiles arrived in 1620 seeking freedom for their form of Christian religion. They were almost totally inept when it came to living in the new land, and many of them perished in the cold and hunger of that first long hard winter. But the new colony was rescued from oblivion by some kindhearted members of the Wampanoags who brought them gifts of food and then taught them how to grow the local crops, corn, beans and squashes. Every American school child out of kindergarten can recite back their teacher's parable of Thanksgiving in which the newcomers and the local people sat down in cheerful amity to share an abundant harvest meal together.
Plymouth is full of Pilgrim memorabilia and some Pilgrim kitsch. There are statues of the Pilgrim leaders, for whom the hotels and motor inns are named today, in their dark capes and peaked hats along the street near the waterfront. There is the famous Plymouth Rock, surrounded by a marble colonnade, where the Pilgrims supposedly first stepped ashore long ago. Among other attractions for today's visitors, there is the inevitable Pilgrim Wax Museum and there is the "Mayflower II", a replica of the Pilgrims' ship, floating in the harbor and, in the summertime, taking aboard crowds of tourists. No doubt one of the odder places in this town is at an inn named for an early Pilgrim governor. This inn advertizes a Pilgrim-themed recreation room with a hot tub that surmounts a plastic-molded Plymouth Rock and the wooden bow of Mayfloweresque ship housing a water slide and spouting warm bilge water into the swimming pool. It must truly be seen to be believed.
On a hill overlooking the whole downtown waterfront scene is a statue of Massasoit, the friendly Wampanoag chief, with his hand raised high in greeting. Yet, try as one might, there is nothing to be found in Plymouth's downtown public spaces that acknowledges what subsequently happened to the Wampanoags, or other Indians, with the "first settlement" of America. For all their essential early help, the Wampanoags by the later seventeenth century had gotten in the way of the white newcomers' avid land hunger. When Indians around New England united to resist further losses of their territory and rose up in 1675 in what the Pilgrims and Puritans called "King Philip's War" -- "King Philip" was the current Wampanoag leader, Metacom - hundreds of Indian men, women and children alike were slaughtered without mercy or were cruelly allowed to starve to death or were rounded up and shipped off into slavery. This was justified in the whites' minds by their conviction that they were a chosen people of God and that the Indians were uncivilized heathen.
How many school children are taught about these facts, too? Very few. Plymouth is a standing metaphor for how the inconvenient facts are so often elided in the retelling of American history in favor of comforting, simpleminded folk tales. A couple of year ago, a group of American Indians and their supporters from around New England assembled in Plymouth on Thanksgiving Day and tried to march through the town to remind the tourists and the townies about the real history of American genocide against the original inhabitants. Tellingly, they were beset before they could go very far by the local constabulary; some of them were beaten and then arrested for trying to be heard with their unwanted story amidst the town's other self-congratulatory events. No doubt, as with other dissidents, the Indian marchers were labeled, without any irony, as "un-American".
Today Plymouth, like many other parts of the U.S. in the aftermath of 911, is replete with displays of flags and other overt signs of patriotism, including all those expensive gas-guzzling SUV's sporting their "United We Stand" and "Proud to be an American" stickers. Yet, there seems not much of a clue among most persons in Plymouth, or elsewhere, about why somebody somewhere might have gotten so very angry as to have perpetrated such an atrocity against the United States. Little wonder that this might be the case when the nation's history, if it is taught much at all, is put over in such a fashion, as at Plymouth, as a form of indoctrination in a sort of national mythology in which Americans are a special breed with God on their side who can basically do no wrong.
Yes, there is much to be proud of and celebrate in American history. In particular, there are all the inspiring experiences and stories of the various groups of immigrants coming to these shores, one after another, and continuing right up to the present day. Like the Pilgrims, many of them struggled so very hard to overcome adversities and to better themselves and their descendants. There are also all the great stories of the often-persecuted and imprisoned American dissidents, free-thinkers and activists, of one sort or another, from the seventeenth century's Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams to the Dave Dellingers and Mumia Abu-Jamals of today, who have had the courage to challenge the prevailing power-structures and conventional ways of thinking.
When I teach American history, I delight in telling these kinds of stories -- although it needs to be pointed out that these kind of stories do not constitute some kind of American exceptionalism that sets the U.S. apart from, and above, other peoples. Such stories can be located throughout the histories of peoples all over our complex and lovely Planet Earth.
However, at the same time, interwoven with this positive history in ways that are often very hard to take apart from it and to treat as separate entities, there exists in American history an equally long, terribly shameful history of exploitation, racism and violence directed against other peoples both inside and outside the U.S. I cannot be proud of these things. I cannot forget that these things have taken place and help to whitewash the history of this country. Nor can I close my eyes to the fact that similar, indeed often uncannily similar, things continue to be happening today. The wrongful history that also began back in the seventeenth century has not come to an end.
Much as it did with the Indians and enslaved Africans in earlier centuries on this continent, the U.S. is exploiting the labors and resources from people all around the world, most notably as a pertinent background to the present conflict, the oil wealth in the Middle East. Nowadays, this foreign imperialism helps to explain our relative prosperity in the U.S. -- and all those SUV's on the highways -- as much or more than any hard, diligent work performed by the descendants of the Pilgrims or of the others seeking freedom and a better life who came and settled here next.
The U.S. is supporting Israel. Very much in the mold of our own earlier history, this is another settler colony which, believing itself entitled by God, is stealing land from the native inhabitants, the Palestinians, and is driving those who are left onto impoverished apartheid-style reservations.
Repression and torture techniques are taught at places like the infamous School of the Americas. Billions of our tax dollars are being spent on weapons systems to intimidate and put down Third World rebel groups and nationalistic leaders who might want to retain for their own populations some fairer proportion of what ought to be humanity's common bounty of nature and to enjoy some greater control over their own national destinies. We end up paying for this spending on violence in more ways then one. The horrible "blowback" of September 11th is another one of them.
Now, even huger allotments of this kind of mistaken spending are being sold to us by our leaders in the ostensible name of our "national interests"overseas and for the sake of protecting "national security" here on the home front. The truth is quite different: This is actually about protecting U.S. corporate investments overseas and enabling the even further enrichment in this country of the Military-Industrial Complex, which Wall Street indicators show, while much of the rest of the domestic economy tanks, is set to benefit immensely from America's new war that is seemingly without end and from the Bush administration's enormous largesse. Another excuse was needed after the ending of the Cold War to keep military spending at high levels and to make further cuts into human services. "Terrorism" has become the answer, the new anti-communism bogeyman.
This is not meant to justify scalping (which some historians think the Indians actually picked up from the white settlers who put bounties on Indian scalps) or any modern-day acts of terrorism against civilians (which certainly were taught to the likes of Osama bin Laden by the CIA in the previous Afghan War against the Soviets). But, let's be frank, why shouldn't Metacom and the Wampanoags and other Indians have been angry at the English invaders who showed up uninvited, took what they could take with their superior weapons, and wouldn't go away? Why shouldn't Arabs and people in many other parts of the Third World today be considerably incensed likewise at the U.S.?
Above all, shouldn't we ourselves be angry at the unjust things being done to other human beings in our names, and with our tax dollars, by those in the corporate boardrooms and in the halls of political power -- often one and the same -- who actually call the shots in this country?
Telling the full truth, including all the less-palatable facts about America's historical past, might help to illuminate the present. Events like 911 might be better understood - indeed, prevented. At least, if American citizens would get a more complete understanding of our history, we wouldn't be so much at loss in making sense out of why we are not always perceived in much of the rest of the world as being the "good guys". The Germans and the Japanese have begun to come to grips with the heavily mixed bags of their own respective histories, and they have become somewhat better and more humble countries for it, I think. It is full time for us in the U.S. to do the same.
Maybe then I can feel right about putting a "Proud to Be an American" sticker on my vehicle, along with the ones that say "Thinking Globally, Acting Locally" and "Justice Not War".
I spent a recent weekend in Plymouth, Massachusetts. Plymouth, to remind you, is the place where American folklore, if not necessarily American history, got its first start. It is the location where a small group of English exiles arrived in 1620 seeking freedom for their form of Christian religion. They were almost totally inept when it came to living in the new land, and many of them perished in the cold and hunger of that first long hard winter. But the new colony was rescued from oblivion by some kindhearted members of the Wampanoags who brought them gifts of food and then taught them how to grow the local crops, corn, beans and squashes. Every American school child out of kindergarten can recite back their teacher's parable of Thanksgiving in which the newcomers and the local people sat down in cheerful amity to share an abundant harvest meal together.
Plymouth is full of Pilgrim memorabilia and some Pilgrim kitsch. There are statues of the Pilgrim leaders, for whom the hotels and motor inns are named today, in their dark capes and peaked hats along the street near the waterfront. There is the famous Plymouth Rock, surrounded by a marble colonnade, where the Pilgrims supposedly first stepped ashore long ago. Among other attractions for today's visitors, there is the inevitable Pilgrim Wax Museum and there is the "Mayflower II", a replica of the Pilgrims' ship, floating in the harbor and, in the summertime, taking aboard crowds of tourists. No doubt one of the odder places in this town is at an inn named for an early Pilgrim governor. This inn advertizes a Pilgrim-themed recreation room with a hot tub that surmounts a plastic-molded Plymouth Rock and the wooden bow of Mayfloweresque ship housing a water slide and spouting warm bilge water into the swimming pool. It must truly be seen to be believed.
On a hill overlooking the whole downtown waterfront scene is a statue of Massasoit, the friendly Wampanoag chief, with his hand raised high in greeting. Yet, try as one might, there is nothing to be found in Plymouth's downtown public spaces that acknowledges what subsequently happened to the Wampanoags, or other Indians, with the "first settlement" of America. For all their essential early help, the Wampanoags by the later seventeenth century had gotten in the way of the white newcomers' avid land hunger. When Indians around New England united to resist further losses of their territory and rose up in 1675 in what the Pilgrims and Puritans called "King Philip's War" -- "King Philip" was the current Wampanoag leader, Metacom - hundreds of Indian men, women and children alike were slaughtered without mercy or were cruelly allowed to starve to death or were rounded up and shipped off into slavery. This was justified in the whites' minds by their conviction that they were a chosen people of God and that the Indians were uncivilized heathen.
How many school children are taught about these facts, too? Very few. Plymouth is a standing metaphor for how the inconvenient facts are so often elided in the retelling of American history in favor of comforting, simpleminded folk tales. A couple of year ago, a group of American Indians and their supporters from around New England assembled in Plymouth on Thanksgiving Day and tried to march through the town to remind the tourists and the townies about the real history of American genocide against the original inhabitants. Tellingly, they were beset before they could go very far by the local constabulary; some of them were beaten and then arrested for trying to be heard with their unwanted story amidst the town's other self-congratulatory events. No doubt, as with other dissidents, the Indian marchers were labeled, without any irony, as "un-American".
Today Plymouth, like many other parts of the U.S. in the aftermath of 911, is replete with displays of flags and other overt signs of patriotism, including all those expensive gas-guzzling SUV's sporting their "United We Stand" and "Proud to be an American" stickers. Yet, there seems not much of a clue among most persons in Plymouth, or elsewhere, about why somebody somewhere might have gotten so very angry as to have perpetrated such an atrocity against the United States. Little wonder that this might be the case when the nation's history, if it is taught much at all, is put over in such a fashion, as at Plymouth, as a form of indoctrination in a sort of national mythology in which Americans are a special breed with God on their side who can basically do no wrong.
Yes, there is much to be proud of and celebrate in American history. In particular, there are all the inspiring experiences and stories of the various groups of immigrants coming to these shores, one after another, and continuing right up to the present day. Like the Pilgrims, many of them struggled so very hard to overcome adversities and to better themselves and their descendants. There are also all the great stories of the often-persecuted and imprisoned American dissidents, free-thinkers and activists, of one sort or another, from the seventeenth century's Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams to the Dave Dellingers and Mumia Abu-Jamals of today, who have had the courage to challenge the prevailing power-structures and conventional ways of thinking.
When I teach American history, I delight in telling these kinds of stories -- although it needs to be pointed out that these kind of stories do not constitute some kind of American exceptionalism that sets the U.S. apart from, and above, other peoples. Such stories can be located throughout the histories of peoples all over our complex and lovely Planet Earth.
However, at the same time, interwoven with this positive history in ways that are often very hard to take apart from it and to treat as separate entities, there exists in American history an equally long, terribly shameful history of exploitation, racism and violence directed against other peoples both inside and outside the U.S. I cannot be proud of these things. I cannot forget that these things have taken place and help to whitewash the history of this country. Nor can I close my eyes to the fact that similar, indeed often uncannily similar, things continue to be happening today. The wrongful history that also began back in the seventeenth century has not come to an end.
Much as it did with the Indians and enslaved Africans in earlier centuries on this continent, the U.S. is exploiting the labors and resources from people all around the world, most notably as a pertinent background to the present conflict, the oil wealth in the Middle East. Nowadays, this foreign imperialism helps to explain our relative prosperity in the U.S. -- and all those SUV's on the highways -- as much or more than any hard, diligent work performed by the descendants of the Pilgrims or of the others seeking freedom and a better life who came and settled here next.
The U.S. is supporting Israel. Very much in the mold of our own earlier history, this is another settler colony which, believing itself entitled by God, is stealing land from the native inhabitants, the Palestinians, and is driving those who are left onto impoverished apartheid-style reservations.
Repression and torture techniques are taught at places like the infamous School of the Americas. Billions of our tax dollars are being spent on weapons systems to intimidate and put down Third World rebel groups and nationalistic leaders who might want to retain for their own populations some fairer proportion of what ought to be humanity's common bounty of nature and to enjoy some greater control over their own national destinies. We end up paying for this spending on violence in more ways then one. The horrible "blowback" of September 11th is another one of them.
Now, even huger allotments of this kind of mistaken spending are being sold to us by our leaders in the ostensible name of our "national interests"overseas and for the sake of protecting "national security" here on the home front. The truth is quite different: This is actually about protecting U.S. corporate investments overseas and enabling the even further enrichment in this country of the Military-Industrial Complex, which Wall Street indicators show, while much of the rest of the domestic economy tanks, is set to benefit immensely from America's new war that is seemingly without end and from the Bush administration's enormous largesse. Another excuse was needed after the ending of the Cold War to keep military spending at high levels and to make further cuts into human services. "Terrorism" has become the answer, the new anti-communism bogeyman.
This is not meant to justify scalping (which some historians think the Indians actually picked up from the white settlers who put bounties on Indian scalps) or any modern-day acts of terrorism against civilians (which certainly were taught to the likes of Osama bin Laden by the CIA in the previous Afghan War against the Soviets). But, let's be frank, why shouldn't Metacom and the Wampanoags and other Indians have been angry at the English invaders who showed up uninvited, took what they could take with their superior weapons, and wouldn't go away? Why shouldn't Arabs and people in many other parts of the Third World today be considerably incensed likewise at the U.S.?
Above all, shouldn't we ourselves be angry at the unjust things being done to other human beings in our names, and with our tax dollars, by those in the corporate boardrooms and in the halls of political power -- often one and the same -- who actually call the shots in this country?
Telling the full truth, including all the less-palatable facts about America's historical past, might help to illuminate the present. Events like 911 might be better understood - indeed, prevented. At least, if American citizens would get a more complete understanding of our history, we wouldn't be so much at loss in making sense out of why we are not always perceived in much of the rest of the world as being the "good guys". The Germans and the Japanese have begun to come to grips with the heavily mixed bags of their own respective histories, and they have become somewhat better and more humble countries for it, I think. It is full time for us in the U.S. to do the same.
Maybe then I can feel right about putting a "Proud to Be an American" sticker on my vehicle, along with the ones that say "Thinking Globally, Acting Locally" and "Justice Not War".
The myth of Manifest Destiny, Take Two
"In the field of world policy I would dedicate this nation to the
policy of the good neighbor--the neighbor who resolutely respects himself and,
because he does so, respects the right of others."
President
Franklin D. Roosevelt, 32nd US president, Inaugural Address, March 4, 1933
"Politically speaking, tribal nationalism always insists that its
own people is surrounded by "a world of enemies", "one against
all", that a fundamental difference exists between this people and all
others. It claims its people to be unique, individual, incompatible with all
others, and denies theoretically the very possibility of a common mankind long
before it is used to destroy the humanity of man."
Hannah Arendt,
The Origins of Totalitarianism
"Where you have a concentration of power in a few hands, all too
frequently men with the mentality of gangsters get control."
Lord Acton
(1834-1902)
In March 1885, John Fiske wrote an essay
for the magazine Harper's, called "Manifest Destiny", in which
he contended that the so-called "English race" was destined to dominate
the entire world during the coming 20th Century. Then, according to this
hubristic theory, there would be a millennium of peace and prosperity. However,
it is the expansionist editor John L. O'Sullivan, who in 1845 coined the famous
expression when he wrote of "our manifest destiny to overspread the
continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly
multiplying millions."
Such scary thinking was echoed half a century later by
German fascists who thought their fascist Reich would last a millennium and
that they could control the world. It would seem that delusional imperialists
often think they have discovered the "millennium" magic recipe for
dominance. They cloak their insane ambitions in notions of German or American Exceptionalism.
Fundamentally, any 'Exceptionalism' among peoples is deeply rooted in racism
and the self-serving hatred of "the other". Imperial nazi Germany was
race-conscious and it went on extermining people because they were of the
'wrong' race and were declared "Untermensch" (undermen). More than
fifty million people died to dispel these dangerous myths.
When religious excesses reinforce ideology and imperialist
instincts, things can get even more hallucinatory. For some, the "divine
doctrine" of Manifest Destiny originates in the sanctimonious conviction that the
Christian 'God' intended the world to be under the control of white European or
American Christians. It is the old colonialist idea that dark-skinned people in
foreign lands are unable to govern themselves and need external intervention.
For example, according to Puritan millennialism, or the theory of Anglo-Saxon
or Teutonic racial superiority, some religious Americans, in the 19th Century,
saw themselves in their delusion as some sort of a "New Israel", and
they persuaded themselves that they should fight savages for the sake of a
higher Christian civilization. According to this racial theory of history,
popular in late 19th Century America and in early 20th Century Germany, the
Teutonic nations [are destined] "to carry the political civilization of
the modern world into those parts of the world inhabited by unpolitical and
barbaric races",
as explained by historian John Burgess.
In 1886, a period fertile with delusional authors, Josiah
Strong published a book titled "Our Country", in which he opined that
the English speaking peoples have the "mission" of evangelizing the
world. A few years later, Brooks Adams published a similar ethno-centric theory
of history in a book titled "The Law of Civilization and Decay",
whose main thesis was that nations oscillate historically between barbarism and
civilization. In a surprising development, the author then went on to extoll
barbarism, arguing that barbarism was necessary to develop empires and
subjugate colonies. Adams went on to envisage the emergence of an Anglo-Saxon
alliance between the U.S. and Great Britain that would dominate the world.
Such eccentric ideas are not inconsequential, for sooner or
later opportunistic politicians think of using them as stepping-stones to
power. For instance, an imperialist American politician, Theodore Roosevelt, wrote a book in 1889 titled
"The Winning of the West" in which he said: (The 1864 slaying of
several hundred Cheyenne women and children was) "on the whole as
righteous and beneficial a deed as ever took place on the frontier." For this politician drunk with
millennium ideas, the extermination or genocide of the Indians was done to
advance "civilization".
When he became president after the assassination of William
McKinley, in 1901, Theodore Roosevelt applied his racial theories of
civilization in the Philippines, where the United States fought a nationalist
insurgency for fourteen years, not unlike what mission-bound George W. Bush is
doing today in Iraq. Maybe not surprisingly, the American Protestant missionary
press was most supportive of the brutal Philippines war
(1899–1913), a war that resulted in hundreds of
thousands of deaths. Of course, in the realm of genocide, Adolf Hitler outdid
all millennium imperialists when he undertook, in the 1930's, to exterminate
the Jews and Gypsies in Germany, and in many parts of Europe. It took a world
war to stop this insane fool.
At the beginning of the 21st Century, a similar wind of folly blows in
certain quarters.
In Israel, for instance, religion-based "manifest
destiny" thinking is widespread. For instance, the popularly accepted theory of Zionism
is based, to a large extent, on the self-serving myth of the "chosen"
people. The judaist Bible is supposed to have given present day Israelis a
godly right to all of Arab territory in Palestine. This myth is then used to
justify the building and expansion of illegal Israeli settlements on Arab
lands, in Gaza and the West Bank.
One can also better understand the causes of perpetual war
in the Middle East when it is known that according to Halacha (Jewish religious law), the term
"human beings" according to Halacha refers solely to Jews. Indeed, a
decisive majority of Talmudic sages view goyim (the derogatory Hebrew term for non-Jews)
as either animals or sub-humans. With such extremist views, it is
understandable that some Orthodox rabbis in Israel consider that international
conventions, such as the 4th Geneva Convention which outlaws the deliberate
killing of civilians and the destruction of civilian homes and property, are
part of "Christian morality" and are not binding on Israel.
In the U.S., the powerful neo-conservative
movement is also driven by a sense of moral superiority and by an
apology of imperialism for the "good cause".
The cause this time that conceals more down to earth
interests is the spread of democratic universalism, especially in the oil-rich
Middle East. Irving Kristol, one of the original neocons, advanced the idea
that America needs a 21st century version of democratic Manifest Destiny. For
him and his cohort of Neocons,
just as it was Manifest Destiny for the United States to reach the Pacific
Ocean in the 19th Century, so it is today's American Manifest Destiny to
control oil-rich regions like the Middle East, under the pretexts of spreading
'democracy' or fighting terrorism around the world. Thus is constructed the
intellectual foundation for building a ruthless and plutocratic empire under
the guise of spreading a 'one-size-fits-all' democracy.
The shaky assumption behind such thinking is that
people, and especially Americans, will not see the fundamental contradiction of
wanting to impose democracy through undemocratic means (i.e. using military
power to spread democracy). Nevertheless, for neocon missionaries, it is
legitimate to use force to convert the world to some sort of American
supervised 'democracy'. —This is the new religion. This is, of course, a
hoax; in a democracy, power originates from the people, not from armed foreign
invaders, and the law, not force, regulates the interactions between individuals
and between nations. In fact, imperialism is the very antithesis of democracy.
Nevertheless, with such open-ended patronizing and
condescending hubris, there lies the seeds of many imperialistic wars to come,
—wars that may suit the agendas of some powerful special interests.
Indeed, the new neocon theological version of Manifest Destiny is also a
theology of permanent war. As such, these old theories in new clothes represent
the gravest danger to world peace. And since George W. Bush
subscribes to this flawed ancient geopolitical theory, the world should pay
special attention.
As for Bush Jr. himself, indeed, while protesting that the
U.S. has no plan to stay long in Iraq, after the so-called
"liberation" he illegally engineered on his own in the spring of
2003, he takes great care to stress that the decision of when to remove US
troops from Iraq will rest with ''future presidents and future governments
in Iraq",
not with him. This is understandable since his administration is currently busy
building a Middle Ages-type fortress in Baghdad, disguised as an embassy.
This new Carcassonne fort will have a 15-foot thick perimeter wall and will
be spread over a 104-acre site. The Pentagon is also busy building 14 permanent
American military bases
in occupied Iraq, capable of hosting 50,000 American soldiers and their
families. Some temporary expedition! —As General Anthony Zinni, former US
Middle East commander, has put it, there could not be a more ''stupid"
provocation to the Muslim world than building permanent military American bases
in a Middle East Arab country. This is a sure guarantee of decades of war and
unrest. —In a repetition, one hundred years apart, of the Philippine
invasion, U.S. war commanders now think some level of American forces will be
'needed' in Iraq until 2016.
"Plus ça change, plus c'est pareil."
Such duplicity does not escape the attention of the world,
even though many Americans keep their heads buried deep in the sand, and refuse
to face the reality and consequences of their "imperial" government.
A recent poll taken in Great Britain,
for example, found that Britons have never had a lower opinion of the
leadership of the United States than presently. Indeed, a June 26-28, 2006 survey
found that only 12 per cent of Britons trust the Bush-Cheney administration to
act wisely on the global stage. This is half the number who had faith in the
post-Nixon Vietnam-scarred White House of 1975. Today, a large majority of the
British see America as "a cruel, vulgar, arrogant society, riven by
class and racism, crime-ridden, obsessed with money and led by an incompetent
hypocrite." —Let's
keep in mind that Tony Blair's Britain is supposed to be George W. Bush's
staunchest ally. It is therefore reasonable to believe that America's
reputation in other countries, under Bush II, is probably much lower.
Also See:
Against The Grain: Exceptionalism (audio)
American Exceptionalism
Broadcast #26 "American Exceptionalism"
This week on the program: an attempt at understanding American Exceptionalism. TOE's Chris Beck reports on a "recess appointment party", Howard Zinn tells us that American Exceptionalism is a Myth, Dennis Madalone sings us an exceptional new American Anthem - and yours truly checks out the right wing blogosphere and comes up EMPTY.
The Myth of U.S. Cultural, Religious, Political, and Social Superiority
Manifest Destiny - 21st Century Style
By Kristina M. Gronquist
04/25/05 "ICH - - The concept of Manifest Destiny describes the 19th century conviction that God intended the continent of North America to be under the control of Christian, European Americans. The ideology of Manifest Destiny was the backbone of U.S. government efforts to colonize land inhabited by indigenous people in North America and expand the United States into Mexican territory.
Believers in Manifest Destiny asserted that U.S. rulers were predestined to spread their proclaimed superior values near and far. Propaganda, armed interventions, occupations, and terror were used in various insidious combinations. Indigenous people whose country we reside in can best attest to the results of Manifest Destiny policy, as they survived centuries of unspeakable injustices and lost millions, but courageously, have survived.
Ulysses S. Grant, that era’s most prominent military man, and himself a participant in the Mexican-American War, wrote in his memoirs, “I do not think there ever was a more wicked war than that waged by the United States in Mexico. I thought so at the time, when I was a youngster, only I had not moral courage enough to resign.”
Although the shameful concept of Manifest Destiny should be confined to history books, it has reared its ugly head, as reflected in our government’s 21st century mission to reshape the Middle East. Of course, the psychology of Manifest Destiny – the projection of Anglo-Saxon supremacy - never really went away, it has always been used to justify America’s expansionist adventures. Losing the Vietnam War drove it toward covert action, i.e., U.S. attempts in the 1980’s to undo the Nicaraguan revolution and support for death squads in El Salvador and Guatemala. But U.S. foreign policy has consistently been based on an arrogant and racist view that “America knows best.”
For most Americans, the myth of U.S. cultural, religious, political, and social superiority has been so strongly reinforced over the years that it is taken a given, it is assumed. In the language of political science, this is called “reification,” when myths become accepted as reality. Public debate is often vacuous, because we are unable to question 1) whether or not the U.S. system of governance is desired by non-Americans, or 2) whether or not the “one size fits all” U.S. model will offer people in other lands true solutions. Without such debate, the reification process becomes frightening: If it is a given that our system and values are superior, it follows that remaking others in our image will always be the worthy “end.” Any means can be used to reach the agreed-upon (but unquestioned) worthy end.
This is why the U.S. invaded and devastated Iraq, and why our leaders and a majority of Americans can ignore 100,000 Iraqi civilian casualties. If it is a given that a Western-style, capitalist Iraq is the proper end, then the means by which that is achieved can be illegal, ruthless, bloody, inhumane, or whatever. The means are open-ended. We see that glazed, slightly out-of-reality look constantly in this administration’s eyes as they talk about “democracy” in Iraq. Their fixed eyes look up towards the ends, but they are never cast seriously downward to look over and evaluate the terrible means by which they are trying to reach those ends.
Of course, this “remaking Iraq” project isn’t genuinely guided by the true lofty goal of implementing democracy. Instead, its focus is synchronizing Middle Eastern social and cultural values with Western capitalist values, because that will better facilitate a global world order that revolves around the U.S. economic interests of elites.
We all recall and recoil when we remember the days shortly after the invading troops reached Baghdad, when widespread looting destroyed Iraq’s museums and libraries. The U.S. troops stood idly by as Iraq’s cultural history was being erased. There are Iraqis who now say that this was deliberate, an attempt to erase the records of Iraq’s cultural and historical achievements, to wipe the slate clean, so that Western values could be more easily imposed.
Hundreds of Iraqi youth recently came out into the streets to protest a new government order that makes Saturday an official holiday in Iraq, officially aligning Iraq’s weekend with the Western weekend. The holy day for Muslims is Friday, and most Muslim countries take off Thursday and Friday or just Friday. At Baghdad’s University of Mustansariyah, a statement read, “We declare a general strike in the University of Mustansariyah to reject this decision and any decision aimed at depriving Iraqis of their identity.”
Since the invasion, there have been scores of such changes. The CPA (Coalition Provisional Authority) under L. Paul Bremer, and the interim government that followed, both gutted and reworked Iraqi legislation in many areas. The CPA’s meddling with Iraq law violates the Hague Regulations of 1907 and the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, governing the treatment of the inhabitants of militarily occupied territories. Occupiers are prohibited from making major alterations to the character of the occupied society.
The press hasn’t covered the extent of the many changes. We only hear about them occasionally, as in this (2/27/05) Associated Press article that pokes fun at the protesters, portraying the Iraq students as silly for not wanting Saturday off. This patronizing and condescending tone is prevalent throughout U.S. reporting on Iraq society. The Western press resurrects and reinforces the colonialist idea that dark-skinned people in foreign lands are unable to do anything right. Their customs, religion, and culture are not properly “modern” or advanced enough, like ours, and, by God, they have to get with the program!
But many Muslims in the Middle East don’t want to get with “the program” because they have been subject to this colonial program before. Like indigenous people, who also reject attempts to assimilate them and dismantle their identity, Muslims in the Middle East don’t want to be shoved on to reservations either, left to watch the rich cities of their countries gleam and hum with U.S. oil money. Fast food joints on every corner, hotel chains, and big box stores offering lousy wages and products may be the American dream, but they are many a Muslim’s nightmare.
On February 25, a Qatar-hosted conference called for disseminating the culture of peaceful resistance to aggressive policies adopted by world powers towards Muslim countries. It was attended by a cohort of senior Muslim scientists, intellectuals, and dignitaries. Dr. Abdael Rahman al-Nuaimi, the chairman of the Arab Center for Studies and Research, said that Muslims are facing fierce campaigns from world parties attempting to impose their hegemony over Muslim people and destroy their social systems. He told the opening session of the three-day conference that the goal of such campaigns is to tarnish the image of Islam and mock Islamic values. “In response to such aggressive campaigns, the conference calls for the adoption of all peaceful means as well as the economic, media, and legal tools, to stand up to these aggressions.”
There were scant, if any, reports of this conference in the Western press. Why? Because it calls into question the “end” of making other people adapt to the assumed perfect U.S. model of governance, and it speaks to the failed psychology of Manifest Destiny that still guides U.S. thinking - that the U.S. government has a right to spread its values by any means. We cannot hear news that Muslim people en masse reject and plan to resist Western values, which are part and parcel of a specific economic system. That reality (gosh, they don’t want to be like us?) uncomfortably clashes with the reified language of Manifest Destiny, which U.S. leaders again spit forth, to convince citizens that their self-serving violent Middle East policies are worthy.
Kristina Gronquist is a freelance writer based in Minneapolis. She specializes in foreign policy analysis and holds a BA in Political Science from the University of Minnesota. She can be reached at
kgronquist@aol.com.
By Kristina M. Gronquist
04/25/05 "ICH - - The concept of Manifest Destiny describes the 19th century conviction that God intended the continent of North America to be under the control of Christian, European Americans. The ideology of Manifest Destiny was the backbone of U.S. government efforts to colonize land inhabited by indigenous people in North America and expand the United States into Mexican territory.
Believers in Manifest Destiny asserted that U.S. rulers were predestined to spread their proclaimed superior values near and far. Propaganda, armed interventions, occupations, and terror were used in various insidious combinations. Indigenous people whose country we reside in can best attest to the results of Manifest Destiny policy, as they survived centuries of unspeakable injustices and lost millions, but courageously, have survived.
Ulysses S. Grant, that era’s most prominent military man, and himself a participant in the Mexican-American War, wrote in his memoirs, “I do not think there ever was a more wicked war than that waged by the United States in Mexico. I thought so at the time, when I was a youngster, only I had not moral courage enough to resign.”
Although the shameful concept of Manifest Destiny should be confined to history books, it has reared its ugly head, as reflected in our government’s 21st century mission to reshape the Middle East. Of course, the psychology of Manifest Destiny – the projection of Anglo-Saxon supremacy - never really went away, it has always been used to justify America’s expansionist adventures. Losing the Vietnam War drove it toward covert action, i.e., U.S. attempts in the 1980’s to undo the Nicaraguan revolution and support for death squads in El Salvador and Guatemala. But U.S. foreign policy has consistently been based on an arrogant and racist view that “America knows best.”
For most Americans, the myth of U.S. cultural, religious, political, and social superiority has been so strongly reinforced over the years that it is taken a given, it is assumed. In the language of political science, this is called “reification,” when myths become accepted as reality. Public debate is often vacuous, because we are unable to question 1) whether or not the U.S. system of governance is desired by non-Americans, or 2) whether or not the “one size fits all” U.S. model will offer people in other lands true solutions. Without such debate, the reification process becomes frightening: If it is a given that our system and values are superior, it follows that remaking others in our image will always be the worthy “end.” Any means can be used to reach the agreed-upon (but unquestioned) worthy end.
This is why the U.S. invaded and devastated Iraq, and why our leaders and a majority of Americans can ignore 100,000 Iraqi civilian casualties. If it is a given that a Western-style, capitalist Iraq is the proper end, then the means by which that is achieved can be illegal, ruthless, bloody, inhumane, or whatever. The means are open-ended. We see that glazed, slightly out-of-reality look constantly in this administration’s eyes as they talk about “democracy” in Iraq. Their fixed eyes look up towards the ends, but they are never cast seriously downward to look over and evaluate the terrible means by which they are trying to reach those ends.
Of course, this “remaking Iraq” project isn’t genuinely guided by the true lofty goal of implementing democracy. Instead, its focus is synchronizing Middle Eastern social and cultural values with Western capitalist values, because that will better facilitate a global world order that revolves around the U.S. economic interests of elites.
We all recall and recoil when we remember the days shortly after the invading troops reached Baghdad, when widespread looting destroyed Iraq’s museums and libraries. The U.S. troops stood idly by as Iraq’s cultural history was being erased. There are Iraqis who now say that this was deliberate, an attempt to erase the records of Iraq’s cultural and historical achievements, to wipe the slate clean, so that Western values could be more easily imposed.
Hundreds of Iraqi youth recently came out into the streets to protest a new government order that makes Saturday an official holiday in Iraq, officially aligning Iraq’s weekend with the Western weekend. The holy day for Muslims is Friday, and most Muslim countries take off Thursday and Friday or just Friday. At Baghdad’s University of Mustansariyah, a statement read, “We declare a general strike in the University of Mustansariyah to reject this decision and any decision aimed at depriving Iraqis of their identity.”
Since the invasion, there have been scores of such changes. The CPA (Coalition Provisional Authority) under L. Paul Bremer, and the interim government that followed, both gutted and reworked Iraqi legislation in many areas. The CPA’s meddling with Iraq law violates the Hague Regulations of 1907 and the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, governing the treatment of the inhabitants of militarily occupied territories. Occupiers are prohibited from making major alterations to the character of the occupied society.
The press hasn’t covered the extent of the many changes. We only hear about them occasionally, as in this (2/27/05) Associated Press article that pokes fun at the protesters, portraying the Iraq students as silly for not wanting Saturday off. This patronizing and condescending tone is prevalent throughout U.S. reporting on Iraq society. The Western press resurrects and reinforces the colonialist idea that dark-skinned people in foreign lands are unable to do anything right. Their customs, religion, and culture are not properly “modern” or advanced enough, like ours, and, by God, they have to get with the program!
But many Muslims in the Middle East don’t want to get with “the program” because they have been subject to this colonial program before. Like indigenous people, who also reject attempts to assimilate them and dismantle their identity, Muslims in the Middle East don’t want to be shoved on to reservations either, left to watch the rich cities of their countries gleam and hum with U.S. oil money. Fast food joints on every corner, hotel chains, and big box stores offering lousy wages and products may be the American dream, but they are many a Muslim’s nightmare.
On February 25, a Qatar-hosted conference called for disseminating the culture of peaceful resistance to aggressive policies adopted by world powers towards Muslim countries. It was attended by a cohort of senior Muslim scientists, intellectuals, and dignitaries. Dr. Abdael Rahman al-Nuaimi, the chairman of the Arab Center for Studies and Research, said that Muslims are facing fierce campaigns from world parties attempting to impose their hegemony over Muslim people and destroy their social systems. He told the opening session of the three-day conference that the goal of such campaigns is to tarnish the image of Islam and mock Islamic values. “In response to such aggressive campaigns, the conference calls for the adoption of all peaceful means as well as the economic, media, and legal tools, to stand up to these aggressions.”
There were scant, if any, reports of this conference in the Western press. Why? Because it calls into question the “end” of making other people adapt to the assumed perfect U.S. model of governance, and it speaks to the failed psychology of Manifest Destiny that still guides U.S. thinking - that the U.S. government has a right to spread its values by any means. We cannot hear news that Muslim people en masse reject and plan to resist Western values, which are part and parcel of a specific economic system. That reality (gosh, they don’t want to be like us?) uncomfortably clashes with the reified language of Manifest Destiny, which U.S. leaders again spit forth, to convince citizens that their self-serving violent Middle East policies are worthy.
Kristina Gronquist is a freelance writer based in Minneapolis. She specializes in foreign policy analysis and holds a BA in Political Science from the University of Minnesota. She can be reached at
kgronquist@aol.com.
Copyright © Kristina Gronquist. All rights reserved. You may republish under
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publication must be provided. You must not alter, edit or remove
any text within the article, including this copyright notice.
(In accordance with Title 17
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Against The Grain: Myth Of American Exceptionalism
Against the Grain
Monday, November 20th, 2006
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About this program:
At a recent conference, author and scholar Ella Shohat gave a talk about US exceptionalism. Also, C.S. interviews geographer Joel Wainwright about the relationship between capitalism and development.
American Exceptionalism:A Disease of Conceit
American Exceptionalism
A Disease of Conceit
By RON JACOBS
Any person who is honestly opposed to the US presence in Iraq and Afghanistan has got to wonder why the movement that developed against the US war on Iraq before the March 2003 invasion has faltered so badly and now seems to be caught up in the movement to electorally defeat George Bush, even though that means supporting John Kerry-a politician who not only supported the invasion and occupation, but talks openly about widening the war to include the NATO countries and tens of thousands more US troops. One could place the blame on the failure of the movement's politics, always more liberal than anti-imperialist. Or, one could place the blame on the leadership. In both cases, one would find some basis for their argument.
When it comes to the bottom line, though, the underlying cause for the US antiwar movement's current stasis is that most of its adherents believe in one of this country's basic tenets-a tenet that is ultimately religious in nature. For lack of a more descriptive phrase, we'll call this phenomenon American exceptionalism. On a basic political level, this phenomenon is the belief that, for some reason (America's system of democracy, or maybe its economic superiority), the United States system is not subject to the same contradictions and influences as those of the rest of the world. This belief in American superiority finds its foundation in some of our culture's basic religious and cultural constructs. It's there in the first settlers' belief that they were conducting a special errand into the wilderness to construct a city on a hill in the name of their heavenly father and every single president and wannabe always implores this same heavenly father to "bless America" at the end of every one of his speeches. This is no accident.
It is this belief that gave the Pilgrims their heavenly go-ahead to murder Pequot women and children and it was this belief that gave General Custer his approval to kill as many Sioux as he could. It made the mass murder of Korean and Vietnamese civilians acceptable to the soldiers at No Gun Ri and My Lai and exonerated the officers who tried to hide those and many other war crimes from the world. It gives George Bush the only rationale he needs to continue his crusade against the part of the world that stands in the way of the more mercenary men and women behind his throne as they pursue their project for a new American century. And, most importantly for us, it informs a goodly number of decent Americans in their tentative opposition to those men and women. Consequently, while they may oppose George Bush's approach to Washington's war on the world, they do not necessarily disagree with its goals.
Therefore, they find themselves making the argument that somehow some way; the United States must repair what it has so ruthlessly destroyed in Iraq. If our friends in the movement did not believe in America's essential goodness, its exception to the rules that govern power and the desire for power, than how could they believe that the very same agents that destroyed the country of Iraq would be able to repair it? Indeed, why would such a good country have destroyed another in the first place? These questions raise two of the most obvious contradictions governing the major part of the US antiwar forces. In fact, the antiwar movement is only one of the many places in the US cultural and political arena where such exceptionalism occurs.
It can be found in the struggle for equal rights for women, gays and lesbians; and it can be found in the struggle against racism. It is present in the mindset that refuses to support the right to armed struggle by oppressed peoples and it is present in the mindset that perceives other cultures less advanced than that which we have in the United States. . It's even present in the approach progressives take towards our national elections-it's as if our electoral system is beyond reproach, fair beyond criticism and impossible to taint. Because of this misconception, we allow our government to force its version of democracy on people around the world. Then, when these folks either reject our high-minded attempts to enlighten them or, even worse, actually use the electoral processes foisted upon them to elect someone who they want but who opposes US designs, the progressives find themselves as offended by this slight as the neocons.
How to change the movement to a movement that is capable of continuing its pursuit of justice once its right flank is co-opted by the system? At the risk of sounding redundant, study the world, not just the US. Develop an understanding of how capital works and forget the idea that capital ever has good intentions. Capitalism is an economic and political system that has no morals. It is not immoral, nor is it moral. It is amoral. In order to survive, it must expand, either by moving its operations into new regions or by taking over other capitalist ventures and their markets. Usually, the most successful capitalists employ both means. In recent history, the most successful capitalists have been mostly American. The fact that the US spends more money on weaponry and war is directly related to that phenomenon.
America is not a better country than any other. Its citizens and residents are as venal and as great as any others in any other part of the world. The only thing that sets us apart is our wealth. The only reason we have that wealth is because we stole it. God didn't give it to us, nor did any greater American intelligence or know-how. Robbery is what our foreign policy is based on, just like our racial policies. It's not the policies that need to change, but the foundation upon which those policies flourish. Until US activists accept this and give up their conscious and unconscious acceptance of the myth of American exceptionalism, any movement against war, racism, and other ills of our world is bound to fail. Not because it doesn't have the right motivation, but because it doesn't have a radical enough conception of itself and the world it exists in.
Ron Jacobs is author of The Way the Wind Blew: a history of the Weather Underground, which is just republished by Verso. Jacobs' essay on Big Bill Broonzy is featured in CounterPunch's new collection on music, art and sex, Serpents in the Garden. He can be reached at: rjacobs@zoo.uvm.edu
A Disease of Conceit
By RON JACOBS
Any person who is honestly opposed to the US presence in Iraq and Afghanistan has got to wonder why the movement that developed against the US war on Iraq before the March 2003 invasion has faltered so badly and now seems to be caught up in the movement to electorally defeat George Bush, even though that means supporting John Kerry-a politician who not only supported the invasion and occupation, but talks openly about widening the war to include the NATO countries and tens of thousands more US troops. One could place the blame on the failure of the movement's politics, always more liberal than anti-imperialist. Or, one could place the blame on the leadership. In both cases, one would find some basis for their argument.
When it comes to the bottom line, though, the underlying cause for the US antiwar movement's current stasis is that most of its adherents believe in one of this country's basic tenets-a tenet that is ultimately religious in nature. For lack of a more descriptive phrase, we'll call this phenomenon American exceptionalism. On a basic political level, this phenomenon is the belief that, for some reason (America's system of democracy, or maybe its economic superiority), the United States system is not subject to the same contradictions and influences as those of the rest of the world. This belief in American superiority finds its foundation in some of our culture's basic religious and cultural constructs. It's there in the first settlers' belief that they were conducting a special errand into the wilderness to construct a city on a hill in the name of their heavenly father and every single president and wannabe always implores this same heavenly father to "bless America" at the end of every one of his speeches. This is no accident.
It is this belief that gave the Pilgrims their heavenly go-ahead to murder Pequot women and children and it was this belief that gave General Custer his approval to kill as many Sioux as he could. It made the mass murder of Korean and Vietnamese civilians acceptable to the soldiers at No Gun Ri and My Lai and exonerated the officers who tried to hide those and many other war crimes from the world. It gives George Bush the only rationale he needs to continue his crusade against the part of the world that stands in the way of the more mercenary men and women behind his throne as they pursue their project for a new American century. And, most importantly for us, it informs a goodly number of decent Americans in their tentative opposition to those men and women. Consequently, while they may oppose George Bush's approach to Washington's war on the world, they do not necessarily disagree with its goals.
Therefore, they find themselves making the argument that somehow some way; the United States must repair what it has so ruthlessly destroyed in Iraq. If our friends in the movement did not believe in America's essential goodness, its exception to the rules that govern power and the desire for power, than how could they believe that the very same agents that destroyed the country of Iraq would be able to repair it? Indeed, why would such a good country have destroyed another in the first place? These questions raise two of the most obvious contradictions governing the major part of the US antiwar forces. In fact, the antiwar movement is only one of the many places in the US cultural and political arena where such exceptionalism occurs.
It can be found in the struggle for equal rights for women, gays and lesbians; and it can be found in the struggle against racism. It is present in the mindset that refuses to support the right to armed struggle by oppressed peoples and it is present in the mindset that perceives other cultures less advanced than that which we have in the United States. . It's even present in the approach progressives take towards our national elections-it's as if our electoral system is beyond reproach, fair beyond criticism and impossible to taint. Because of this misconception, we allow our government to force its version of democracy on people around the world. Then, when these folks either reject our high-minded attempts to enlighten them or, even worse, actually use the electoral processes foisted upon them to elect someone who they want but who opposes US designs, the progressives find themselves as offended by this slight as the neocons.
How to change the movement to a movement that is capable of continuing its pursuit of justice once its right flank is co-opted by the system? At the risk of sounding redundant, study the world, not just the US. Develop an understanding of how capital works and forget the idea that capital ever has good intentions. Capitalism is an economic and political system that has no morals. It is not immoral, nor is it moral. It is amoral. In order to survive, it must expand, either by moving its operations into new regions or by taking over other capitalist ventures and their markets. Usually, the most successful capitalists employ both means. In recent history, the most successful capitalists have been mostly American. The fact that the US spends more money on weaponry and war is directly related to that phenomenon.
America is not a better country than any other. Its citizens and residents are as venal and as great as any others in any other part of the world. The only thing that sets us apart is our wealth. The only reason we have that wealth is because we stole it. God didn't give it to us, nor did any greater American intelligence or know-how. Robbery is what our foreign policy is based on, just like our racial policies. It's not the policies that need to change, but the foundation upon which those policies flourish. Until US activists accept this and give up their conscious and unconscious acceptance of the myth of American exceptionalism, any movement against war, racism, and other ills of our world is bound to fail. Not because it doesn't have the right motivation, but because it doesn't have a radical enough conception of itself and the world it exists in.
Ron Jacobs is author of The Way the Wind Blew: a history of the Weather Underground, which is just republished by Verso. Jacobs' essay on Big Bill Broonzy is featured in CounterPunch's new collection on music, art and sex, Serpents in the Garden. He can be reached at: rjacobs@zoo.uvm.edu
The Power and the Glory
by Howard Zinn
8 The notion of American exceptionalism—that the United
States alone has the right, whether by divine sanction or moral
obligation, to bring civilization, or democracy, or liberty to
the rest of the world, by violence if necessary—is not new.
It started as early as 1630 in the Massachusetts Bay Colony when
Governor John Winthrop uttered the words that centuries later
would be quoted by Ronald Reagan. Winthrop called the Massachusetts
Bay Colony a “city upon a hill.” Reagan embellished
a little, calling it a “shining city on a hill.”
The idea of a city on a hill is heartwarming. It suggests
what George Bush has spoken of: that the United States is a beacon
of liberty and democracy. People can look to us and learn from
and emulate us.
In reality,
we have never been just a city on a
hill. A few years after Governor Winthrop uttered his famous words,
the people in the city on a hill moved out to massacre the Pequot
Indians. Here’s a description by William Bradford, an early
settler, of Captain John Mason’s attack on a Pequot
village.
Those that escaped the fire were slain with the
sword, some hewed to pieces, others run through with their rapiers,
so as they were quickly dispatched and very few escaped. It was
conceived that they thus destroyed about 400 at this time. It was a
fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fire and the streams of
blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stink and scent
thereof; but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they gave the
praise thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully for them, thus
to enclose their enemies in their hands and give them so speedy a
victory over so proud and insulting an
enemy.
The
kind of
massacre described by Bradford occurs again and again as Americans
march west to the Pacific and south to the Gulf of Mexico. (In fact
our celebrated war of liberation, the American Revolution, was
disastrous for the Indians. Colonists had been restrained from
encroaching on the Indian territory by the British and the boundary
set up in their Proclamation of 1763. American independence wiped out
that boundary.)
Expanding into
another territory, occupying
that territory, and dealing harshly with people who resist occupation
has been a persistent fact of American history from the first
settlements to the present day. And this was often accompanied from
very early on with a particular form of American exceptionalism: the
idea that American expansion is divinely ordained. On the eve of the
war with Mexico in the middle of the 19th century, just after the
United States annexed Texas, the editor and writer John O’Sullivan
coined the famous phrase “manifest destiny.” He said it was
“the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the
continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our
yearly multiplying millions.” At the beginning of the 20th century,
when the United States invaded the Philippines, President McKinley
said that the decision to take the Philippines came to him one night
when he got down on his knees and prayed, and God told him to take
the Philippines.
Invoking God
has been a habit for American
presidents throughout the nation’s history, but George W. Bush has
made a specialty of it. For an article in the Israeli newspaper
Ha’aretz, the reporter talked with Palestinian leaders
who had met
with Bush. One of them reported that Bush told him, “God told me to
strike at al Qaeda. And I struck them. And then he instructed me to
strike at Saddam, which I did. And now I am determined to solve the
problem in the Middle East.” It’s hard to know if the quote is
authentic, especially because it is so literate. But it certainly is
consistent with Bush’s oft-expressed claims. A more credible story
comes from a Bush supporter, Richard Lamb, the president of the
Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist
Convention, who says that during the election campaign Bush told him,
“I believe God wants me to be president. But if that doesn’t
happen, that’s okay.”
Divine ordination is a very
dangerous idea, especially when combined with military power (the
United States has 10,000 nuclear weapons, with military bases in a
hundred different countries and warships on every sea). With God’s
approval, you need no human standard of morality. Anyone today who
claims the support of God might be embarrassed to recall that the
Nazi storm troopers had inscribed on their belts, “Gott mit uns”
(“God with us”).
Not every American leader claimed
divine sanction, but the idea persisted that the United States
was uniquely justified in using its power to expand throughout
the world. In 1945, at the end of World War II, Henry Luce, the
owner of a vast chain of media enterprises—Time,
Life, Fortune—declared that this would
be “the American Century,” that victory in the war gave
the United States the right “to exert upon the world the
full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit
and by such means as we see fit.”
This confident
prophecy was acted out all through the
rest of the 20th century. Almost immediately after World War II the
United States penetrated the oil regions of the Middle East by
special arrangement with Saudi Arabia. It established military bases
in Japan, Korea, the Philippines, and a number of Pacific islands. In
the next decades it orchestrated right-wing coups in Iran, Guatemala,
and Chile, and gave military aid to various dictatorships in the
Caribbean. In an attempt to establish a foothold in Southeast Asia it
invaded Vietnam and bombed Laos and Cambodia.
The existence of the
Soviet Union, even with its acquisition of nuclear weapons, did not
block this expansion. In fact, the exaggerated threat of “world
communism” gave the United States a powerful justification for
expanding all over the globe, and soon it had military bases in a
hundred countries. Presumably, only the United States stood in the
way of the Soviet conquest of the world.
Can we believe that it was
the existence of the Soviet Union that brought about the aggressive
militarism of the United States? If so, how do we explain all the
violent expansion before 1917? A hundred years before the Bolshevik
Revolution, American armies were annihilating Indian tribes, clearing
the great expanse of the West in an early example of what we now call
“ethnic cleansing.” And with the continent conquered, the nation
began to look overseas.
On the
eve of the 20th century, as American
armies moved into Cuba and the Philippines, American exceptionalism
did not always mean that the United States wanted to go it alone. The
nation was willing—indeed, eager—to join the small group of
Western imperial powers that it would one day supersede. Senator
Henry Cabot Lodge wrote at the time, “The great nations are rapidly
absorbing for their future expansion, and their present defense all
the waste places of the earth. . . . As one of the great nations of
the world the United States must not fall out of the line of
march.” Surely, the nationalistic spirit in other countries has
often led them to see their expansion as uniquely moral, but this
country has carried the claim farthest.
American exceptionalism was
never more clearly expressed than by Secretary of War Elihu Root, who
in 1899 declared, “The American soldier is different from all other
soldiers of all other countries since the world began. He is the
advance guard of liberty and justice, of law and order, and of peace
and happiness.” At the time he was saying this, American soldiers
in the Philippines were starting a bloodbath which would take the
lives of 600,000 Filipinos.
The idea that America is different
because its military actions are for the benefit of others becomes
particularly persuasive when it is put forth by leaders presumed to
be liberals, orprogressives. For instance, Woodrow Wilson, always
high on the list of “liberal” presidents, labeled both by
scholars and the popular culture as an “idealist,” was ruthless
in his use of military power against weaker nations. He sent the navy
to bombard and occupy the Mexican port of Vera Cruz in 1914 because
the Mexicans had arrested some American sailors. He sent the marines
into Haiti in 1915, and when the Haitians resisted, thousands were
killed.
The following year
American marines occupied the Dominican
Republic. The occupations of Haiti and the Dominican Republic lasted
many years. And Wilson, who had been elected in 1916 saying, “There
is such a thing as a nation being too proud to fight,” soon sent
young Americans into the slaughterhouse of the European
war.
Theodore Roosevelt was
considered a “progressive” and
indeed ran for president on the Progressive Party ticket in 1912. But
he was a lover of war and a supporter of the conquest of the
Philippines—he had congratulated the general who wiped out a
Filipino village of 600 people in 1906. He had promulgated the 1904
“Roosevelt Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, which justified the
occupation of small countries in the Caribbean as bringing them
“stability.”
During
the Cold War, many American
“liberals” became caught up in a kind of hysteria about the
Soviet expansion, which was certainly real in Eastern Europe but was
greatly exaggerated as a threat to western Europe and the United
States. During the period of McCarthyism the Senate’s
quintessential liberal, Hubert Humphrey, proposed detention camps for
suspected subversives who in times of “national emergency” could
be held without trial.
After
the disintegration of the
Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, terrorism replaced
communism as the justification for expansion. Terrorism was real, but
its threat was magnified to the point of hysteria, permitting
excessive military action abroad and the curtailment of civil
liberties at home.
The idea of
American exceptionalism persisted as
the first President Bush declared, extending Henry Luce’s
prediction, that the nation was about to embark on a “new American
Century.” Though the Soviet Union was gone, the policy of military
intervention abroad did not end. The elder Bush invaded Panama and
then went to war against Iraq.
The terrible attacks of September 11
gave a new impetus to the idea that the United States was uniquely
responsible for the security of the world, defending us all against
terrorism as it once did against communism. President George W. Bush
carried the idea of American exceptionalism to its limits by putting
forth in his national-security strategy the principles of unilateral
war.
This was a repudiation of
the United Nations charter, which is
based on the idea that security is a collective matter, and that war
could only be justified in self-defense. We might note that the Bush
doctrine also violates the principles laid out at Nuremberg, when
Nazi leaders were convicted and hanged for aggressive war, preventive
war, far from self-defense.
Bush’s national-security strategy and
its bold statement that the United States is uniquely responsible for
peace and democracy in the world has been shocking to many
Americans.
But it is not
really a dramatic departure from the
historical practice of the United States, which for a long time has
acted as an aggressor, bombing and invading other countries (Vietnam,
Cambodia, Laos, Grenada, Panama, Iraq) and insisting on maintaining
nuclear and non-nuclear supremacy. Unilateral military action, under
the guise of prevention, is a familiar part of American foreign
policy.
Sometimes bombings and
invasions have been cloaked as
international action by bringing in the United Nations, as in Korea,
or NATO, as in Serbia, but basically our wars have been American
enterprises. It was Bill Clinton’s secretary of state, Madeleine
Albright, who said at one point, “If possible we will act in the
world multilaterally, but if necessary, we will act unilaterally.”
Henry Kissinger, hearing this, responded with his customary solemnity
that this principle “should not be universalized.” Exceptionalism
was never clearer.
Some
liberals in this country, opposed to Bush,
nevertheless are closer to his principles on foreign affairs than
they want to acknowledge. It is clear that 9/11 had a powerful
psychological effect on everybody in America, and for certain liberal
intellectuals a kind of hysterical reaction has distorted their
ability to think clearly about our nation’s role in the
world.
In
a recent issue of the liberal magazine The American Prospect, the
editors write, “Today Islamist terrorists with global reach pose
the greatest immediate threat to our lives and liberties. . . . When
facing a substantial, immediate, and provable threat, the United
States has both the right and the obligation to strike preemptively
and, if need be, unilaterally against terrorists or states that
support them.”
Preemptively and, if need be, unilaterally; and
against “states that support” terrorists, not just terrorists
themselves. Those are large steps in the direction of the Bush
doctrine, though the editors do qualify their support for preemption
by adding that the threat must be “substantial, immediate, and
provable.” But when intellectuals endorse abstract principles, even
with qualifications, they need to keep in mind that the principles
will be applied by the people who run the U.S. government. This is
all the more important to keep in mind when the abstract principle is
about the use of violence by the state—in fact, about preemptively
initiating the use of violence.
There may be an acceptable case for
initiating military action in the face of an immediate threat, but
only if the action is limited and focused directly on the threatening
party—just as we might accept the squelching of someone falsely
shouting “fire” in a crowded theater if that really were the
situation and not some guy distributing anti-war leaflets on the
street. But accepting action not just against “terrorists” (can
we identify them as we do the person shouting “fire”?) but
against “states that support them” invites unfocused and
indiscriminate violence, as in Afghanistan, where our government
killed at least 3,000 civilians in a claimed pursuit of
terrorists.
It seems that the
idea of American exceptionalism is
pervasive across the political spectrum.
The idea is not challenged
because the history of American expansion in the world is not a
history that is taught very much in our educational system. A couple
of years ago Bush addressed the Philippine National Assembly and
said, “America is proud of its part in the great story of the
Filipino people. Together our soldiers liberated the Philippines from
colonial rule.” The president apparently never learned the story of
the bloody conquest of the Philippines.
And last year, when the
Mexican ambassador to the UN said something undiplomatic about how
the United States has been treating Mexico as its “backyard” he
was immediately reprimanded by then–Secretary of State Colin
Powell. Powell, denying the accusation, said, “We have too much of
a history that we have gone through together.” (Had he not learned
about the Mexican War or the military forays into Mexico?) The
ambassador was soon removed from his post.
The major newspapers,
television news shows, and radio talk shows appear not to know
history, or prefer to forget it. There was an outpouring of praise
for Bush’s second inaugural speech in the press, including the
so-called liberal press (The Washington Post, The New
York Times).
The editorial writers eagerly embraced Bush’s words about spreading
liberty in the world, as if they were ignorant of the history of such
claims, as if the past two years’ worth of news from Iraq were
meaningless.
Only a couple of
days before Bush uttered those words
about spreading liberty in the world, The New York Times published a
photo of a crouching, bleeding Iraqi girl. She was screaming. Her
parents, taking her somewhere in their car, had just been shot to
death by nervous American soldiers.
One of the consequences of
American exceptionalism is that the U.S. government considers itself
exempt from legal and moral standards accepted by other nations in
the world. There is a long list of such self-exemptions: the refusal
to sign the Kyoto Treaty regulating the pollution of the environment,
the refusal to strengthen the convention on biological weapons. The
United States has failed to join the hundred-plus nations that have
agreed to ban land mines, in spite of the appalling statistics about
amputations performed on children mutilated by those mines. It
refuses to ban the use of napalm and cluster bombs. It insists that
it must not be subject, as are other countries, to the jurisdiction
of the International Criminal Court.
What is the answer to the
insistence on American exceptionalism? Those of us in the United
States and in the world who do not accept it must declare forcibly
that the ethical norms concerning peace and human rights should be
observed. It should be understood that the children of Iraq, of
China, and of Africa, children everywhere in the world, have the same
right to life as American children.
These are fundamental moral
principles. If our government doesn’t uphold them, the citizenry
must. At certain times in recent history, imperial powers—the
British in India and East Africa, the Belgians in the Congo, the
French in Algeria, the Dutch and French in Southeast Asia, the
Portuguese in Angola—have reluctantly surrendered their possessions
and swallowed their pride when they were forced to by massive
resistance.
Fortunately, there
are people all over the world who
believe that human beings everywhere deserve the same rights to life
and liberty. On February 15, 2003, on the eve of the invasion of
Iraq, more than ten million people in more than 60 countries around
the world demonstrated against that war.
There is a growing refusal to accept U.S. domination and the idea
of American exceptionalism. Recently, when the State Department
issued its annual report listing countries guilty of torture and
other human-rights abuses, there were indignant responses from
around the world commenting on the absence of the United States
from that list. A Turkish newspaper said, “There’s not
even mention of the incidents in Abu Ghraib prison, no mention
of Guantánamo.” A newspaper in Sydney pointed out
that the United States sends suspects—people who have not
been tried or found guilty of anything—to prisons in Morocco,
Egypt, Libya, and Uzbekistan, countries that the State Department
itself says use torture.
Here in the United
States, despite the media’s failure
to report it, there is a growing resistance to the war in Iraq.
Public-opinion polls show that at least half the citizenry no longer
believe in the war. Perhaps most significant is that among the armed
forces, and families of those in the armed forces, there is more and
more opposition to it.
After
the horrors of the first World War,
Albert Einstein said, “Wars will stop when men refuse to fight.”
We are now seeing the refusal of soldiers to fight, the refusal of
families to let their loved ones go to war, the insistence of the
parents of high-school kids that recruiters stay away from their
schools. These incidents, occurring more and more frequently, may
finally, as happened in the case of Vietnam, make it impossible for
the government to continue the war, and it will come to an end.
The true heroes of our history
are those Americans who refused to accept that we have a special
claim to morality and the right to exert our force on the rest
of the world. I think of William Lloyd Garrison, the abolitionist.
On the masthead of his antislavery newspaper, The Liberator,
were the words, “My country is the world. My countrymen are
mankind.” <
Howard Zinn, the
author of A People's History of the United States, is
a historian and playwright. His essay is adapted from a lecture
he gave for MIT's Special Program for Urban and Regional Studies.
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