The proclamation that founded the United States of America in 1776 boldly espoused some of the most liberal sentiments of its day.

First and foremost, it held that since “all men are created equal” they are therefore entitled to certain inalienable rights, including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Furthermore, it stipulated that government derives its legitimacy from the consent of the governed, and therefore it is the primary purpose of government to secure its peoples’ inalienable rights. And therefore, whenever a government becomes destructive of those ends it is the right of its people to alter or abolish their government.

Yet at the same time, the white inhabitants of the then British colonies widely accepted some ideas that belied the idealistic principles of the document that proclaimed their independence.

For one thing it was widely accepted among the white colonists that people with black skin had no right to the “inalienable rights” proclaimed in their Declaration of Independence. Weren’t black people people too? Not according to a good many of the colonists, especially those who required the free labor of black people for their own economic purposes. To many, black people were vastly “inferior” to white people, or they were not people at all, but rather were property. Such beliefs were absolutely necessary to assuage the consciences of those who made their living off the backs of black people.

And then there were the Native Americans, who had lived on the continent for many centuries prior to the arrival of white people. Many or most white people thought of them in a similar manner to how they thought of black people. They were deemed “savages”. Again, it was necessary to think of them in this light in order to justify the use of violence against them, which was necessary in order to take their land from them.

So it was that the new government created by the former British colonists, following their victory over the British Army at Yorktown in 1781, did little or nothing to ensure that the liberal idealistic principles espoused in its five year old Declaration of Independence applied to anyone but white people. Indeed, the constitution created at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 not only failed to abolish or even ameliorate slavery in the United States, but it actually enshrined it in some ways, for example by prohibiting Congress from prohibiting even the importation of new slaves until 1808, and by requiring states to return fugitive slaves to the slaves’ “owner”.

Nevertheless, it must be said that the U.S. Declaration of Independence was only partly hypocritical on that score. In fact, it would be more accurate to say that it was an unavoidable compromise.


Slavery and the Founding Fathers

Many of the Founders were adamantly against slavery. John Jay, co-author of the Federalist Papers, and the first Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, wrote:


Patrick Henry wrote: “I believe a time will come when an opportunity will be offered to abolish this lamentable evil…. If not, let us transmit to our descendants, together with our slaves, a pity for their unhappy lot and an abhorrence of slavery.”

But the problem was that there would have been no successful Revolution, no U.S. Constitution, and no United States of America if the anti-slavery Founders had insisted on abolishing slavery. The Southern states would never have agreed to it in a hundred years – maybe not in a thousand years. In fact, Thomas Jefferson, the primary author of the Declaration of Independence, and a slave owner, included a condemnation of slavery in his first draft of the Declaration. But he was persuaded to drop the condemnation because the South never would have participated in the Revolutionary War had it stayed in. Many have condemned Jefferson as hypocritical for owning slaves while writing the Declaration of Independence, but I have to given him credit for trying to condemn slavery nonetheless – unlike so many others who owned slaves and tried to justify slavery throughout all of their lives. Condemnation would be the first step to abolition.

Would the slaves have been better off with no United States at all, rather than a United States with a Constitution that condoned slavery. That seems very doubtful. Without a United States of America, the South would have gone its own way. It is likely that slavery never would have been abolished in the 19th Century without a bloody Civil War. Those of our Founding Fathers who abhorred slavery – and there were plenty of them – did not then have the capability of abolishing it.

In 1807 Congress enacted legislation to abolish the slave trade, which was signed by President Jefferson. But it wasn’t until the 1830s that the anti-slavery movement in the United States began to gather momentum. It is worth commenting that during that time the most forceful opponent of slavery in the U.S. government was Rep. John Quincy Adams (W-MA), son of our second President (and first Vice President) and former U.S. President himself (1825-1829), who made many forceful speeches for the anti-slavery cause on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives. Here is a quote from his diary:



The end of slavery

It took a long and bloody Civil War to end slavery in the United States. There are many who say that the Civil War was fought not to end slavery, but to “save the Union”. But that line of thinking neglects many things. In the first place, the main reason that the South seceded from the Union was that they feared what the newly elected President would mean for the future of slavery in the United States. Indeed, Lincoln had voiced strong anti-slavery thoughts all through his career. I think he hit the nail on the head with this quote:


Lincoln dealt the institution of slavery a near fatal blow with his Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, which ordered the end of slavery in the rebellious states (which included the vast majority of slaves in the U.S.). The Union victory in the Civil War was the first nail in the coffin for slavery. Three more nails were added to the coffin with the 13th through 15th Amendments to our Constitution in the five years following the Civil War: The 13th Amendment in 1865 abolished slavery; the 14th Amendment in 1868 granted citizenship to and provided basic civil rights for the former slaves; and the 15th Amendment in 1870 gave them the right to vote.

Nevertheless, following the end of Reconstruction in 1877, widespread discrimination and violence against the former slaves raised its ugly head and persisted in severe form for nearly another century. The former slave Frederick Douglass described the situation:


It was only with the great reforms of the middle of the 20th Century that progress was made: The Brown v. Board of Education U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1954 prohibited segregation in public schools. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 added much needed additional protection.

But we are still a very long way from where we should to be. For example, in the 1990s, one of every 20 black men in the U.S. was in prison – a rate of imprisonment almost ten times as great as that for white men. Today the situation is even worse.


The Indian Wars

Some date the first hostile encounter between the European colonists and the Native North Americans to 1636. Much of the period between then and December 1890 was characterized by intermittent warfare and lesser hostilities, as the European-Americans spread throughout the continent and the population of Native Americans was pushed Westwards, confined to reservations, and decimated – due to their inferior weaponry and high susceptibility to European diseases, especially smallpox. This history is summed up on the book jacket of “North American Indian Wars”, by Richard H. Dillon:


It almost goes without saying that the major motivation for these wars on the part of the European-American colonists prior to 1776, and the United States of America after 1776 was the desire for land. And it also goes without saying that the new Americans had to put favorable spin on their actions. They did so mainly by justifying their aggression on the basis that the Native Americans were “savages”, “uncivilized”, etc. Guenter Lewy describes what happened in similar terms, using somewhat different language:


I would highly recommend “Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee – An Indian History of the American West”, by Dee Brown. In the last chapter of her book, Brown describes the last major battle of the Indian wars. In late December 1890, the Indians surrendered at Wounded Knee, and the American Colonel told them to disarm. They did so, but the Americans demanded a weapons search. There may have been some miscommunication, and then there followed an altercation between one of the Indian Chiefs and the soldiers. A gun went off, and then a massacre followed:



More wars and hostile actions – 1846-1912

It is widely recognized today in the United States that our nation’s exploitation of slaves and it conquest of Native Americans and their land was immoral. But that was long long ago. Today a persistent and toxic myth pervades our nation – a myth known as American Exceptionalism. That myth says that our country would never do anything immoral.

The myth is embodied in Barack Obama’s repeated explanations as to why he was against our 2003 invasion of Iraq from the beginning. It turns my stomach every times I hear “I am not opposed to ALL wars. I’m opposed to dumb wars”. The problem with our invasion of Iraq was not that it was a “dumb war”. It was an immoral war and an illegal war. We attacked a defenseless nation that posed no threat to us and killed hundreds of thousands of its civilians, created millions of refugees, and ruined its infrastructure. That is immoral, pure and simple. But no politician with presidential aspirations could say such a thing without risking their political future. Most Americans simply don’t like to hear that there country has committed immoral acts. It’s ok to admit “mistakes”. But admitting immorality is considered beyond the pale.

President Obama contributed mightily to the myth of American exceptionalism when he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize, for which he gave a speech that in large part was used to justify his current war in Afghanistan:


What the President does here, in the first paragraph above, is attack a straw man, by implying that large numbers of people disagree with the statement that force is sometimes necessary. That implication is ridiculous. Very few people think that force is never necessary. It’s not the use of force per se that the vast majority of peace activists object to. It’s the use of force for immoral purposes.

Then in the second sentence he complains about what he terms a “reflexive suspicion of America”. So let’s consider some of the wars and other hostile and violent actions that our country participated in during the later 19th and early 20th Centuries:

The Mexican War
Like the Indian wars, the Mexican-American War was all about land. President James K. Polk used a border dispute with Mexico to justify sending U.S. troops into the disputed territory. Not surprisingly, the troops were attacked by Mexican forces on April 25, 1846, resulting in the deaths of 11 U.S. soldiers. Polk used that attack as justification to request a declaration of war from Congress, and Congress complied.

As a result of its victory in the war, 1.2 million square miles, which today make up a large portion of our Southwest, were added to U.S. territory.

Hawaii – the first of many overseas conquests by the United States
In January 1993 word got out that Queen Liliuokalani of Hawaii was planning to proclaim a new constitution, one that would place more power in the hands of the Hawaiian people and weaken the power of the wealthy White American landowners who essentially ruled Hawaii. The ruling clique was not pleased about that, and they conspired to overthrow the Queen. They prevailed upon John L. Stevens, the American Minister to Hawaii, to officially proclaim a provisional government for Hawaii, knowing that he had the support of U.S. President Benjamin Harrison, as well as an American gunboat waiting in the harbor and 162 armed American soldiers. Queen Liliuokalani, recognizing the futility of challenging American military power, wrote and signed a document that ceded her country to the United States.

In a rare exception to the doctrine of American exceptionalism, President Clinton apologized for that action in 1993.

The Spanish-American War – 1898-1902
In an action eerily similar to President Polk’s sending of U.S. troops to the territory disputed with Mexico, President William McKinley sent the Battleship Maine to Havana, Cuba, in the midst of the Cuban rebellion against Spain.

The principal excuse for the U.S. declaration of war against Spain, on April 19, 1998, was the blowing up of the Maine on February 15, 1898, which killed 250 American sailors. The incident was blamed on Spain, though the cause of the explosion was never determined. The other excuse for war was to bring “freedom” to Cuba, though Cuba did not want and was very suspicious of our “help” – with very good reason.

Cuba
American forces landed in Cuba in July 1898, and by August 12th the war was over. As a result of that victory, the “Treaty of Paris” was signed on December 10th, 1898, thereby ceding Spain’s three former colonies, Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines, to the United States.

Our relationship with Cuba was finalized for the next several decades on May 22, 1903, with the Platt Amendment treaty. Essentially, it gave Cubans permission to govern themselves as long as they allowed the United States to veto any decision that it so chose.

Puerto Rico
Puerto Rico declared independence from Spain and elected themselves a new government, which began to operate on July 17th, 1898. Eight days later the U.S. marines landed in Puerto Rico and raised the American flag. Before “freeing” the Puerto Ricans from Spanish “oppression”, the American commander made clear the good intentions of his country:


The Philippines
Taking over Cuba and Puerto Rico was easy. The Filipinos proved much more difficult.
To justify taking the Philippines, President McKinley spoke of the need to civilize and Christianize the Filipinos. (Most Filipinos were Catholic, but few Americans knew that.)
He proclaimed sovereignty over the Philippines on December 11, 1998, the day after the Treaty of Paris was signed. But the Filipinos had declared independence on June 12th. Desiring American imperialistic control over their nation no more than Spanish imperialistic control, the Republic of the Philippines was proclaimed on January 23rd, 1899, and it declared war on the United States occupiers twelve days later.

A vicious guerilla war ensued, lasting three and a half years, from February 1899 until the middle of 1902. It was characterized by widespread torture, rape, pillage, and the frequent refusal of the American military to make a distinction between civilians and the Filipino military. Rationalizations provided for this behavior included the brutal behavior by the Filipino “savages” (true, but who was invading whose country?) and the claim that the American atrocities were the work of a few “bad apples” (not true at all). By the time that the U.S. had “pacified” the Philippines, the dead included 4,374 American soldiers, 16 thousand Filipino guerillas, and 20 thousand Filipino civilians.

Regime change in Nicaragua
The complaints of American business interests against the new nationalist President of Nicaragua, Jose Santos Zelaya, increased when Zelaya began to borrow money from European rather than American banks. That led President Taft to declare that the United States would no longer “tolerate and deal with such a medieval despot”. Consequently, American businessmen formed a conspiracy to overthrow Zelaya. Secretary of State Knox excoriated Zelaya for his attempts to suppress the “rebellion”, and Taft responded by ordering warships to Nicaragua. Zelaya resigned in order to stave off an American attack on his country. But the new Nicaraguan president tried to suppress the “rebellion”, which caused the United States Marines to intervene “to protect American lives”. The “rebellion” was consequently successful, and the United States installed its own puppet president. Thus began American rule over Nicaragua.

Regime change in Honduras
President Taft and Secretary of State Knox disapproved of the President of Honduras in 1911, Miguel Davila. They considered him too liberal and independent, and he borrowed from European banks. So they asked him to transfer his country’s debt to J.P. Morgan, who would then oversee the Honduran treasury.

The banana tycoon, Samuel Zemurray, who owned a good deal of land in Honduras, hired himself four men to organize an insurgency, including Manuel Bonilla, whom Zemurray intended for insertion as his puppet President of Honduras. Zemurray’s mercenary insurgents invaded Honduras in December 1911. With the U.S. military standing by to inhibit retaliation by the Honduran government, by January 25th, 1912, the “rebels” had won some big battles. Continued U.S. military intervention led to the replacement of the Honduran president by Bonilla in February, 1912.


The Cold War

In his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, President Obama justified our many violent actions during the Cold War like this:


That statement is partly true. But it leaves out a great deal. Let’s consider some of these “mistakes” we made, and how we sought to help “underwrite global security” and help other countries to “live in freedom and prosperity” during the Cold War:

Iran 1953
In 1953 our CIA intervened in Iran to overthrow a popular prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, who had done much to improve the lot of the Iranian people. Here is how Stephen Kinzer describes Mossadegh in his book, “All the Shah’s Men – An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror”:


In Mossadegh’s place we installed the dictatorship of Mohammad Reza Shah. The stated reason for our overthrow of Mossadegh was that we were concerned that he would open his country to Communist influence. His nationalization of the Iranian oil industry was also undoubtedly part of the reason.

Indonesia 1965
A power struggle in Indonesia in 1965 resulted in the overthrow of Achmad Sukarno and the installment of a military dictatorship. That led to the massacre of up to a million people, mostly civilians, including a substantial portion of women and children – which the New York Times called “one of the most savage mass slayings of modern political history.” With respect to this episode it was later reported by Kathy Kadane that:


Vietnam 1954-73
The Geneva Conference Agreements, which officially ended the war between France and Vietnam in 1954, provided for general elections which were to bring about the unification of Vietnam. However, the United States, fearing a Communist victory in those elections, intervened to prevent the elections from taking place – and so began our long and bloody involvement in Vietnam, culminating in an eventual Communist victory, but not until two million Vietnamese and 58 thousand Americans were dead.

South and Central America
As described by William Blum in his article, “A Concise History of US Global Interventions, 1945 to the Present”, the United States intervened in eleven different South and Central American countries during the Cold War, including Guatemala, Costa Rica, British Guyana, Ecuador, Brazil, Peru, Chile, Bolivia, Honduras, Nicaragua, and El Salvador. The main purpose of these interventions was to facilitate changes to regimes that were friendlier to the United States (and in almost all cases less friendly to the indigenous populations of those countries). For this purpose, we developed the School of the Americas, which was used to train native personnel in the techniques and ideology of insurgency and counter-insurgency.

An article on reasons to shut down the School of the Americas (SOA) provides a good description of what was involved, and can be summarized as follows: It describes numerous atrocities committed by graduates of SOA, which are consistent with the SOA curriculum. While SOA torture manuals were withdrawn, their content was never repudiated by SOA. In an attempt to disassociate the ignominious reputation of the SOA from the U.S. government, SOA was renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC) in 2001 by the Bush administration.

School of the Americas training was oriented to support the military and political status quo in each country, which placed the U.S. in opposition to any who seek free speech to discuss problems, alternative means to solve problems, or democratic means to change governments. More specifically, the enemy was identified as the poor, those who assist the poor, such as church workers, educators, and unions, and certain ideologies such as “socialism” or “liberation theology”. All of this was done just to make sure that Communists or “leftists” didn’t get a foothold in any of these countries.


The Afghanistan War

Like the good majority of U.S. presidents before him, President Obama seeks to justify our military interventions, past and present. Indeed, a major purpose of his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech was to justify his escalation of our war in Afghanistan. He directly acknowledged this when he said:


And to drive home his point, he compared al Qaeda to perhaps the most infamous, violent, and inhumane regime of all time: Adolph Hitler’s Nazi Third Reich:


Well yes, evil does exist in the world. And it may even be true that al Qaeda is as evil Hitler’s Nazi regime. But that completely misses the main point: Hitler’s Nazis posed a threat to the world that was many orders of magnitude greater than the threat that al Qaeda poses. To equate those threats is ridiculous. “Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms”? Well, consider this:

On October 1st, 2001, the Taliban agreed to extradite bin Laden to Pakistan – an American ally – to stand trial for charges of participation in 9/11. They agreed that if the court found sufficient evidence, then bin Laden would then be extradited to the United States. And bin Laden even agreed to that. But George W. Bush turned down all Taliban offers, saying “We know he’s guilty. Turn him over”. Bush later elaborated further on that, saying, “When I said no negotiations, I meant no negotiations”. In other words, the whole basis for the war was a fraud – just like so many other American wars and other violent actions. And so is the absurd idea that we need to conduct a war against a whole nation in order to deny a “safe haven” to a minute fraction of its inhabitants. The editors of The Nation summarize the problems with our war in Afghanistan:



Our nation’s contradictions in perspective

Are the above litany of actions something that Americans should be proud of? Should we say about them that we have “helped underwrite global security for more than six decades”; that “We have borne this burden not because we seek to impose our will”; or that our many invasions of foreign lands were undertaken so that their inhabitants could “live in freedom and prosperity”, as President Obama tells us? I don’t think so. Rather, many of these actions represent the darkest side of human nature.

Richard J. Walton, in his book, “Henry Wallace, Harry Truman and the Cold War”, summarizes U.S. actions during the Cold War, for example:


The first step in righting our wrongs of the past would be to admit to our nation’s dark history and acknowledge the need to do something to change course. But when our leaders continue to ignore, prettify, and even brag about these things, they impose a great barrier on us to positive meaningful change. Unfortunately, they often win big political points by perpetuating the myth of American exceptionalism. William Kleinknecht, in his book, “The Man Who Sold the World – Ronald Reagan and the Betrayal of Main Street America”, explains what happens when a U.S. President has the temerity to challenge the accepted status quo:


Of course, the United States of America is not alone in its contradictions and long history of coercion, hypocrisy, violence and general inhumanity to other peoples. History is chock full of similar and worse events. President Obama was correct when he said in his Nobel acceptance speech that “War, in one form or another, appeared with the first man. At the dawn of history, its morality was not questioned”.

But so what? Does the fact that war’s morality was not questioned at the dawn of humankind mean that we shouldn’t question it now? Shouldn’t we seek to improve upon the tragic history of man’s inhumane treatment of his fellow humans rather than ignore or attempt to justify it?