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=> Dangerous Delusion: American Exceptionalism

Dangerous Delusion: American Exceptionalism

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By Gary McKinley Aug. 26, 2011 Throughout American history our political parties have used so-called litmus tests to assure the ideological acceptability of candidates for office: abortion, gay rights, defense of social programs, opposition to raising taxes. One litmus tests that has crossed party lines, and is particularly dangerous as a result, is an avowed belief in what is euphemistically called American exceptionalism: the chauvinistic belief that Americans and American society are in some ill-defined way inherently superior to all others. Both Democratic and Republican candidates must affirm a strong belief in the exceptionality of American ways and American people if they are to win any government office. Many campaigns consist in substantial part of each candidate trying to out flag wave the other. An obvious comparison suggests itself here, though politicians and political organizations are quick to pounce on any who use it, even while some are employing it themselves. That is the striking similarity of this attitude to the doctrine of Aryan superiority which Hitler preached to the Germans in the 1930’s. I suspect that some in the political arena, particularly those on the right, vehemently denounce any comparisons to Hitler or Nazi Germany, even while drawing such comparisons themselves, usually without justification, with their own political enemies because they are secretly aware of the similarities and are afraid that others might draw such comparisons to considerable effect unless a firewall is built around the entire subject. Nevertheless, I will breach that firewall and make the comparison because it is so obvious and because the fact that similarities exist should serve as a warning of the inherent possibilities. When similar paths are chosen, similar consequences may result. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language defines fascism, of which Nazism is merely a brand, as “a system of government that advocates or exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with an ideology of extreme nationalism.” The right wing in America would probably argue that they haven’t advocated dictatorship, but their history of suppression of dissent and of workers’ and voters’ rights are certainly moves in that direction. The establishment of a dictatorship is merely the final move in the sequence. No one publicly advocates a dictatorship, even within one that already exists, but the concentration of power and wealth in the hands of a few is clearly a step in that direction. In America we have taken several steps in that direction in recent years. With the Supreme Court ruling in the Citizens United case essentially putting our government at all levels up for sale to the highest bidder, we have seen a marked acceleration of those steps in the past two years as Republican governors and legislatures in several states have dramatically suppressed the rights of workers, voters, minorities and women. The last part of the definition of fascism, particularly that which notes the merging of state and business interests and combines it with an ideology of extreme nationalism, is a fairly accurate description of the Tea Party. Alongside this surge toward fascism by the Republican right, the growth of the doctrine of American exceptionalism as a dogma required of all political candidates clearly mirrors the use of Aryan superiority by Hitler both as a defense against the perceived hostility of the outside world and a mitigation of policy decisions that were arrogant, aggressive, dismissive and mistaken. Our leaders have employed and continue to employ a similar doctrine to exculpate themselves from responsibility for policies that have been equally arrogant, aggressive, dismissive and mistaken. Before we examine the destructive consequences of the doctrine of American exceptionalism, it might be useful to review just how delusional that doctrine is. Our self-congratulatory history as a nation begins with the “discovery” of the New World by Christopher Columbus in 1492. Though Columbus never set foot in what is now the continental United States, we set aside the second Monday in October to celebrate his first voyage and honor him as the discoverer of the Americas. Though Columbus was Genoese and sailing under the flag of Spain, Americans today honor him as if he were one of us. He also serves as the template for a pattern of selective amnesia with regard to our own history and those we consider heroes. Our history books don’t tell of the genocide of the Arawak Indians which Columbus initiated, perhaps as many as eight million of them over a period a fifty years. Though Columbus did not preside over the murder or enslavement of all of the Arawaks, he began the systematic destruction of their society. The Spaniards, under Columbus’ authority, enslaved the Arawaks, who were peaceful and friendly, murdered those who tried to escape, cut off the hands of those who did not meet their gold or silver quotas, drove untold thousands to commit suicide by jumping off cliffs and to suffocate or drown their own babies to spare them the horrors of slavery under the Spanish. Columbus’ expedition to the Caribbean was but one of countless episodes in our national history which we have either sanitized or invented to make ourselves seem exceptional. From the moment Europeans first established colonies along the eastern seaboard of the United States in the early 17th century, their treatment of American Indians was unrelentingly disgraceful. Probably 90% of the Native Americans were wiped out over a period of 250 years by disease introduced, sometimes intentionally, by Europeans. The history of the United States of America after 1776 with regard to the Indians was replete with wars of conquest and dispossession in the pursuit of land. In our entire history not one treaty signed with Indians was ever honored by whites. Meanwhile, thousands of books, magazines and pamphlets portrayed the Indians as murderous savages and whites as their heroic victims. With the sole exception of military technology, the Indian civilization “discovered” by our European ancestors was culturally superior to European civilization. Their treatment of whites and their own people was more honorable and solicitous than whites ever treated them or even each other. Slavery in America from 1619 until 1863 was unique, though hardly exceptional in the sense that we now refer to ourselves. African tribes of that era also enslaved one another, as did Indian tribes in the Americas, but the institutions were qualitatively different. African and Indian slaves were treated as family members; in fact, they often did become members of the families who owned them, usually through marriage to a family member. Only in the United States of that era was slavery cruel and brutal, and only in America was the institution entirely based on color. The rationales we teach our students for the many wars we’ve fought usually support the idea of exceptionalism: we always went to war to correct a wrong. What we omit from that history are the motives rooted in self-interest, greed or imperialism. The War of 1812, portrayed in our histories as a war of survival against the villainous British, was actually a war of westward expansion which necessitated displacing Indians, most of whom had fought for the British during the Revolutionary War. The Mexican War was a naked land grab and a means of surreptitiously expanding slave-holding territory. The American government supported the Texan declaration of independence from Mexico and sent troops into disputed territory with the express purpose of instigating hostilities. For months prior to the war, American newspapers had been beating the drum of “manifest destiny,” a contrived belief that the United States was destined by God to span the continent to the Pacific, never mind that Mexico owned most of that territory. The “states’ rights” justification for Southern secession in 1861 glosses over the fact that Southern states seceded over slavery. South Carolina’s declaration of secession makes clear that maintaining the institution of slavery was the only states’ right the South was concerned with. Our histories attempt to portray the causes of both North and South in the Civil War as noble, each side willing to defend principles it believed in. When the lofty principle of state autonomy is replaced by a desire to protect and spread the brutal, inhuman practice of enslaving fellow human beings, the Southern cause seems not so noble. The Spanish-American War was another land grab dressed up to look like a retaliation for Spanish aggression: the destruction of the battleship Maine in Havana harbor, an explosion whose cause was never actually determined. The war resulted in the American annexation of Guam, Puerto Rico, the Hawaiian Islands and the Philippines. The United States supplanted Spain as the oppressor of Cuba and the Philippines, denying Cubans the freedom we claimed to be fighting for. In the Philippines a three year war of insurrection ensued during which the United States suffered thousands of casualties and the Filipinos tens of thousands. In A People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn describes the testimony of a Major Littletown Waller, accused of shooting eleven defenseless Filipinos: “The major said that General Smith instructed him to kill and burn, and said that the more he killed and burned the better pleased he would be; that it was no time to take prisoners, and that he was to make Samar a howling wilderness. Major Waller asked General Smith to define the age limit for killing, and he replied, ‘Everything over ten.’” Zinn also refers to a letter from a captain from Kansas in which he described the complete elimination of a Filipino town of 17,000 inhabitants. References by American soldiers to the Filipinos as “niggers” makes clear that a strong element of racism motivated the barbarous treatment of the Filipinos. The seeds of Fidel Castro’s successful revolution in Cuba more than half a century later were sown by the subjugation of the Cuban people by the American military after the Spanish-American War and by the government-backed rape of the Cuban economy by American corporations like Bethlehem Steel and The American Tobacco Company. Even our involvement in the two world wars, depicted in our history books as the definitive acts of self-sacrifice, were largely motivated by factors ignored by the histories. We entered World War I primarily in response to a deep recession that began in 1914. Politicians of that era understood very well that the most efficient remedy for recession was war. Woodrow Wilson offered as an excuse the torpedoing of the British liner Lusitania, with the resulting deaths of 124 Americans, which he falsely claimed carried no armaments. The war had more to do with protecting American markets in England and with war profiteering by financiers and Wilson supporters, like J.P. Morgan and Bernard Baruch. World War II was rendered inevitable by Allied appeasement of Hitler in which the United States concurred. After Mussolini invaded Ethiopia in 1935, American oil companies continued to sell oil to Italy in large quantities. When the Roosevelt Administration embargoed oil and iron to Japan, they knew the action could precipitate war. There were rumors at the time that Roosevelt knew Pearl Harbor would be attacked and did nothing to prevent it. Though no evidence supports that view, it is reasonable to conclude that Roosevelt should have anticipated the attack. Indeed, records of a White House conference at that time show that Roosevelt did expect war and that justifications for it were discussed. Perhaps the most damning indictment of our alleged exceptionalism at the time was the fact that Roosevelt’s State Department was riddled with anti-Semites and knew of the beginning of the extermination of the Jews in Germany and Poland and did not consider the matter a high priority. Our history, were it honest, would probably record the Vietnam War as the strongest single argument against the belief that Americans have somehow been better than other peoples, exceptional in our integrity and ethical treatment of others. During that war we dropped twice as many bombs on a tiny country that posed no threat to us as we had on all of Europe and Asia during World War II. We created an estimated 20 million bomb craters, killed tens of thousands of innocent people, massacred women and children, denied the Vietnamese people the opportunity to unite North and South though we knew large majorities in both areas wanted it, propped up a corrupt, oppressive South Vietnamese government of our own creation in order to bolster the claim that we were defending their freedom, and lied to the American people consistently and frequently about the causes of the war, our purpose there, and the way the war was being conducted. The incidents in the Gulf of Tonkin, involving the Mayaguez, used by Lyndon Johnson to justify the initiation of full scale war, were fictitious. Three Republican presidents and two Democratic ones fought a war of aggression, largely because American businesses saw golden opportunities in Southeast Asia, senselessly killed tens of thousands in the name of preserving “freedom,” and lied about every aspect of it to the American people. Lest we console ourselves with the self-delusion that at least we learned valuable lessons from that experience, remember that, 25 years later, we did virtually the same thing again in Iraq. The rationale offered by George H. W. Bush for the Gulf War invasion of Iraq made little sense. Supposedly we were there to repel the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, but many nations have sent their militaries across their neighbor’s borders in recent years without our intervention. George W. Bush offered three rationales for the second invasion of Iraq, all of which proved false. The true reason in both cases was the one neither Bush ever mentioned: oil. When the American people learned in late spring of 2004 that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, that Iraq had never been a threat to the United States, they did not march in the streets in protest. They did not condemn George Bush and demand his trial for war crimes. Instead, they re-elected him. One must wonder just what category of exceptionalism that reaction falls into. We haven’t treated our own people much better than we have our enemies. Besides the genocide of Native Americans and the brutality of slavery, for nearly two-thirds of our history we did not even allow women to vote. They still earn only three-quarters for every dollar a man makes. Prior to the World Wars, American corporations routinely forced workers to labor 12-16 hours a day in hot, disease-ridden, stultifying environments for wages insufficient to avert poverty; they beat and murdered workers who dared to object, often with the cooperation of the government. The reforms initiated by Teddy Roosevelt did not reflect his compassion for working people so much as a realization that the growing popularity of socialism and communism threated the privileged status of the rich and the hegemony of big corporations. Today the treatment of working people by government and big business is actually sliding backward toward the suffocating mire of the Gilded Age. In states controlled by Republicans, workers are being stripped of the right to collective bargaining, and voters who tend to vote Democratic are being disenfranchised. The only outrage at these events comes from their victims. The federal government has remained silent, and elements within the business community have financially supported the Republican politicians responsible for the assault on the middle class. Suppression of a peoples’ freedoms by its government with the cooperation of big business is an act of fascism, not a democracy that is in any way superior to other cultures. George W. Bush recently admitted publicly to sanctioning torture; he even expressed pride in the fact, yet few called for any accounting from him for what is unquestionably a war crime, and the Obama Administration has declined even to investigate the matter. That may be because Obama himself is guilty of the same war crime. He has continued Bush’s policy of rendition: the kidnapping of people, often innocent and sometimes American citizens, and the transporting of those people to a third country. The only conceivable reason for doing that is to torture those individuals in a location where the government condones it or looks the other way. Any of our allies will detain for cause individuals in their countries for interrogation by the FBI or CIA, but not if those people are to be tortured. If Obama is continuing rendition, then he is torturing people, too. [ Jeremy Scahill, reporting for The Nation, recently observed that the only substantive difference between the Bush rendition policy and Obama’s has been the upgrading of the facilities used. ] There has been no outrage in America over the fact that our government has done what it executed Japanese soldiers for doing in the Second World War. Whatever American exceptionalism is supposed to refer to, it isn’t a collective conscience. When Newsweek recently published a ranking of the best places in the world to live, based on income, quality of health care, leisure time, the level of individual freedom and other factors, all four Scandinavian countries made the top ten. The United States did not. Our country’s health care system has been ranked 25th or 37th compared to other industrialized countries, depending on which survey you look at. Our students routinely rank at or near the bottom of math and science tests compared to other Western and Asian countries. We are the world’s largest debtor nation, and a popular sentiment among conservatives in recent months would have us renege on those obligations. Few people were outraged by that suggestion. When one examines the actual record of how our government, acting in our name, has treated other countries, how our majority has treated our minorities, the way our businesses and our government have treated and continue to treat our working families and how poorly our government is serving the best interests of all of our people, the very concept of American exceptionalism begins to seem absurd. When our actual past and present, not the sanitized mythology presented in school texts, are compared to the bloody march of empires across the face of history, there is no objective evidence that we are better. Hell, we aren’t even different. The danger of continuing the self-delusion of American exceptionalism is implied in the comparison to Hitler’s myth of Aryan superiority. Using that concept, he united most of the German people in a conviction of national victimization, a shared hostility toward all who were not German, and an implicit acceptance of the frightening idea that innate superiority excuses all manner of deplorable behavior. The delusion of American exceptionalism unites us in excusing unjustified wars, ignoring the unpunished commission of war crimes, tolerating the exclusion of our own citizens from the unfettered exercise of democratic and human rights, and permitting without meaningful dissent the continued transfer of wealth from those who have little to those who already have a great deal. Belief in American exceptionalism does not make us better; it merely blinds us to the fact that we are not. ------------ About the author: Gary McKinley spent 25 years counseling and teaching, English, psychology, biology, chemistry and physics to students from junior high through college. He retired in 2006 to writing novels (Micromurder and Knights of the Harvest Moon) and nonfiction commentary on American society (The Fish Stinks from the Head Down, The Stupidest People on Earth, The 28th Amendment to the Constitution, The Divine Entitlement and What Baseball Forgot) Email: winmax@yhti.net --------------------- - BACK TO INDEX - REPLY - QUOTE - EDIT - DELETE -

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