A 250-Year-Old-Death Machine Is Nothing To Celebrate
Millions of Americans will today celebrate 250 years since the United States declared independence from the British crown.
But what is there to celebrate?
The US has been the most violent and murderous state-building experiment in history.
Built from the bones of slaves atop the bodies of the indigenous, fuelled by the blood of the poor, it has created the most deeply unequal society in the west ruled by a new class of billionaire kings.
The sickly violent ethnic cleansing the country was birthed from has become the blueprint and justification for colonial crimes around the world, best reflected today by its disgusting, genocidal, illegitimate proxy in occupied Palestine.
The only country to use a nuclear weapon, the marauding, murderous invader of dozens of sovereign nations, and the single greatest cause of instability in the modern world.
There is nothing to celebrate.
The US is also the single biggest polluter in the history of the world whose military murder machine pumps out more planet-heating gases than entire countries, grim facts which are particularly apt given the record-breaking temperatures that have just pummelled Europe.
None of this is personal. All of us with a conscience born in the imperial core are creatures of circumstance, born where we’re born, grappling with our histories, desperate for change, but trying and so often failing to do anything to advance that change.
And while we might be creatures of circumstance, we are not victims of it.
The victims are the native of the land, the Lakota, the Cherokee, the Muskogee, the Seminole, the Chickasaw, the Choctaw, the Cheyenne, the Arapaho. The hundreds of thousands murdered, forcibly displaced and diseased to death by civilising European whites because their presence got in the way of greed, extraction and ownership. The victims are the non-natives of other lands, the 390,000 Africans imported as indentured slaves, a population which grew to nearly 4 million by 1860, the slaves who literally built the US, from the White House down.
The victims are the Koreans, Vietnamese, Afghans, and Iraqis slaughtered at the hands of invading forces, the collective body count due to direct violence is unknown, but runs into the millions. Iraq alone likely gave up one million bodies to the forces of American freedom.
And as I wrote in my last article, the US regularly kills with bombs, missiles and guns, but also murders more passively in huge quantities as a secondary effect of its savage imperial sanctions.
The victims of US independence are those genocided by empire’s proxies to maintain hegemonic regional control, including, but not limited to, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, one million Indonesian leftists, two hundred thousand Maya people in Guatemala, 75,000 anti-fascists in El Salvador, and tens of thousands of communists and leftists who were tortured, disappeared and murdered in Brazil, Chile and Argentina through the 1960s and 70s. American support for domestic fascism, genocide and mass murder has been a historical constant.
The victims are the bison, slaughtered down from 70 million to just a few thousand in only 30 years by European settlers as a genocidal tactic to starve native Americans and force them onto reservations, or the passenger pigeon, whose brash song once filled North American skies, hunted from 5 billion to extinction.
The victims are the American working classes, white, brown and black, sold out for a globalisation which built the socio-economic pyramid which hollowed middle America and consolidated wealth at the top in ever greater concentrations.
But nationalism is a hell of a drug, and through a carefully calibrated educational curriculum designed to perpetuate empire, Americans have been successfully indoctrinated to celebrate this history.
Today’s firework displays will mark a shameful, regressive, bloodstained history few are even aware of.
Again, this is less a judgment on Americans than a judgment on the quality of the system those individuals constitute, and especially the quality of leaders who control and rule that system. And the US, having taken on empire status, and having seeded financialised capitalism around the world, is not just an objectively negative force in the world, but the greatest obstacle to true human flourishing in existence today.
At home, the US system of hyper, trillionaire-producing capitalism is objectively a failure for the majority, producing the greatest inequality in the western world.
Abroad, from the torture chambers of Guantanamo, to the highway of death in Iraq, to rape and murder of civilians by US forces, to the school children of Minab, the US commits acts of such wanton evil that its position as the head of the global international order is surely a sick joke. In Vietnam, interviews with US soldiers found that the rape and murder of children and women “was so common that American soldiers had a special term for the soldiers who committed the acts in conjunction: a double veteran.” The rape of Iraqi women and children was also routine, with only a few high profile cases ever prosecuted, including the gang rape of 14 year-old Abeer Qassim al-Janabi whose father, mother and sister were slaughtered in front of her by US soldiers, before she was then murdered.
Abroad, where, after the 2002 invasion, the US military and the CIA turned Afghanistan into the world’s largest heroin-trafficking cartel, sparking the opioid crisis on its own shores.
The USA is death, it carries death like a mascot everywhere it goes, and everything it touches dies.
On July 4th, there is nothing to celebrate, only millions to mourn.
Save your celebrations for when justice is served and this grotesque empire finally ends.
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Yes, I am one of Empires dwellers. I see the 4th of July not as a celebration, but a commemoration. This bill of particulars presented is sadly factual. Those particulars are what I commemorate. If I find it tough to read, and my cynicism of the concept of American Exceptionalism has steadily grown over five (yes, 5) decades, then as stated in the essay opening, "None of this is personal." Take all the time you need to read, absorb, and start thinking of what needs to happen in our land.
One suggestion: American elections are always portrayed as pocketbook elections. The siphoning of our hard earned tribute into the maws of billionaire revenue streams does create an image that resonates in our minds. But forget the pocket book part!
We are in a large, very, very large class. Our class is being pummeled. We need to start administrating beatings on that small, small, small billionaire class.
We must insist and in fact show that our votes for public officials are conditioned upon legislation that clips billionaires wings. Example: throwing out the DMCA. Another: 75% or any number up to 100, percent tax on private equity. Also, severely limit the types of services that private equity can infest.
And we simply must eliminate the predation of our poor. We need them to join our fight. Right now they cannot.
In the interest of brevity, I wish you a commemorative Fourth.
Massacre is an acquired taste. The United States is arguably the only country on the planet whose national personality and self-image is rooted in centuries of unremitting expansion through race wars punctuated by massacre. There have always been “free-fire zones” all along the coveted, ever moving peripheries of white American power, from the “Indian country” surrounding the settler beachheads of Plymouth Rock and Jamestown to the “Sunni Triangle” of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan. Whole peoples – millions – have been erased in the glorious march of American Manifest Destiny.
It is true that the globe-ravaging European colonial powers certainly killed more human beings in the course of their imperial careers than their settler sons in North America. However, the national characters of Britain, Spain, France, Holland and Belgium were already formed when the Great European Breakout and Worldwide Pillage commenced. Although their wealth was later built on the blood and bones of faraway “natives” and slaves, European civil societies were already shaped by long histories of conflict among themselves, between classes and nations on their small sub-continent. Britain and France stretched forth their naval and army tentacles to ensure that wealth arrived in Liverpool and Marseilles, but the colonized peoples did not effectively intrude on the evolution of European society.
Nobody had to invent the historical personalities of the Frenchman in France, the Englishman in England. Their civil societies were deeply impacted – and some sectors greatly enriched – by the existence of the colonies, but not (until very recently) by the foreign peoples who died for European prosperity.
The English settler colonies in North America were different – unique. Masses of armed migrants came to steal, and stay, and keep stealing. Theirs was an enterprise of aggrandizement at the native’s expense, and unlimited expansion. Less than a century and a half after the massacre and near-erasure of the Pequots – in celebration of which the Governor of Massachusetts proclaimed the first day of Pilgrim Thanksgiving – the white colonists decided that they were a distinct people, no longer Europeans.
They were right. American colonial society was shaped by constant depredations against non-whites, close up and brutal. By 1776, one out of five non-Indian residents of the colonies were Black slaves, the control and dehumanization of which had become a daily collective duty of much of the white population. Across the Alleghenies lay unconquered Indian lands that, once cleansed, could usher into being a white empire that would dwarf Europe. The English King and his treaties with the Indians stood in the way; he had to go.
The “American” mission was clear, manifest: to endlessly expand through the elimination of impediments posed by the External Other (“savage” Indians), while keeping white society safe and separate from the “debauchery” of the valuable, Internal Other (Black slaves). This is the foundation on which the American iconography and celebration is based. Lacking any other, it is the template of white American identity and purported “civilization.”