History

CONCLUSION 231

It is fi tting that we regard the documents and the sanctuary that enshrines them as symbols of indispensable principles. But at bottom the texts remain mere scraps of paper in the absence of a genuine commitment to the values they assert as the birthright of all peoples, not only Americans.

If millions of fellow Americans are still ill-housed or ill-fed, if lies are the medium by which presidents manipulate the citizenry into war against peoples who have done us no harm and our policies rain death, desolation and despair upon innocents in foreign lands, to what degree can we really claim adherence to the creed we profess?

The prosperity and freedoms of favored American citizens has always required that others be deprived, and has always been premised on exploitation in the forms of land grabs, slavery, low wages, the repression of labor rights, currency and interest rate manipulations and direct corporate and military involvement in other nations. Resistance to these measures, at home or overseas, has always been met with violence or war.

Americans delude themselves when they insist that we are a peace-loving people who will go to any extreme to avoid violence. War is the American way of life. The American project began in violence, the nation was born amidst blood and the growth of the American republic is matched by a corresponding chain of carnage from the Pequot Massacre to Wounded Knee to My Lai and to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; all alleged to be the fault of others. When the events of 9/11 killed 3,000 people the nation was profoundly traumatized, primarily because Americans could not understand how such outrages could happen to them. Yet the American people, through their government’s policies, have been visiting horror throughout the world since the US attained the pinnacle of the global power hierarchy in 1945. These are facts well remembered where they took place, yet all but unknown, or forgotten, in America.

Few voices are raised in condemnation of the suffering we have brought literally to millions. At every turn the bloodbaths were carried out in the name of ‘freedom and democracy’ over the forces of darkness, led by the only people capable of defending such principles. Yet, ulterior motives lay behind every American war, primarily to enhance the license and material plenty of some Americans, never all, at the expense of those whose land, resources, self-determination or very lives were taken, including the Americans who constituted the armed forces. Thus we delude ourselves that

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