American exceptionalism — A survey

By William Blum excerpted from his latest Empire Report.

The leaders of imperial powers have traditionally told themselves and their citizens that their country was exceptional and that their subjugation of a particular foreign land should be seen as a "civilizing mission", a "liberation", "God's will", and of course bringing "freedom and democracy" to the benighted and downtrodden. It is difficult to kill large numbers of people without a claim to virtue. I wonder if this sense of exceptionalism has been embedded anywhere more deeply than in the United States, where it is drilled into every cell and ganglion of American consciousness from kindergarten on. If we measure the degree of indoctrination (I'll resist the temptation to use the word "brainwashing") of a population as the gap between what the people believe their government has done in the world and what the actual (very sordid) facts are, the American people are clearly the most indoctrinated people on the planet. The role of the American media is of course indispensable to this process — Try naming a single American daily newspaper or TV network that was unequivocally against the US attacks on Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, Panama, Grenada, and Vietnam. Or even against any two of them. How about one? Which of the mainstream media expressed real skepticism of The War on Terror in its early years?

Overloaded with a sense of America's moral superiority, each year the State Department judges the world, issuing reports evaluating the behavior of all other nations, often accompanied by sanctions of one kind or another. There are different reports rating how each lesser nation has performed in the previous year in the areas of religious freedom, human rights, the war on drugs, trafficking in persons, and counterterrorism, as well as maintaining a list of international "terrorist" groups. The criteria used in these reports are mainly political, wherever applicable; Cuba, for example, is always listed as a supporter of terrorism whereas anti-Castro exile groups in Florida, which have committed literally hundreds of terrorist acts, are not listed as terrorist groups.

• "The causes of the malady are not entirely clear but its recurrence is one of the uniformities of history: power tends to confuse itself with virtue and a great nation is peculiarly susceptible to the idea that its power is a sign of God's favor, conferring upon it a special responsibility for other nations — to make them richer and happier and wiser, to remake them, that is, in its own shining image." — Former US Senator William Fulbright, The Arrogance of Power (1966)
• "We Americans are the peculiar, chosen people –– the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of the liberties of the world. ... God has predestined, mankind expects, great things from our race; and great things we feel in our souls." — Herman Melville, White-Jacket (1850)
• "God appointed America to save the world in any way that suits America. God appointed Israel to be the nexus of America's Middle Eastern policy and anyone who wants to mess with that idea is a) anti-Semitic, b) anti-American, c) with the enemy, and d) a terrorist." — John le Carré, London Times, January 15, 2003
• "Neoconservatism ... traded upon the historic American myths of innocence, exceptionalism, triumphalism and Manifest Destiny. It offered a vision of what the United States should do with its unrivaled global power. In its most rhetorically-seductive messianic versions, it conflated the expansion of American power with the dream of universal democracy. In all of this, it proclaimed that the maximal use of American power was good for both America and the world." — Columbia University Professor Gary Dorrien, The Christian Century magazine, January 22, 2007
• "To most of its citizens, America is exceptional, and it's only natural that it should take exception to certain international standards." — Michael Ignatieff, Washington Post columnist, Legal Affairs, May-June, 2002
• Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Peters, US Army War College, 1997: "Our country is a force for good without precedent".
  Thomas Barnett, US Naval War College: "The US military is a force for global good that ... has no equal." — The Guardian (London), December 27, 2005
  
• John Bolton, future US ambassador to the United Nations, writing in 2000: Because of its unique status, the United States could not be "legally bound" or constrained in any way by its international treaty obligations. The U.S. needed to "be unashamed, unapologetic, uncompromising American constitutional hegemonists," so that their "senior decision makers" could be free to use force unilaterally.
  Condoleezza Rice, future US Secretary of State, writing in 2000, was equally contemptuous of international law. She claimed that in the pursuit of its national security the United States no longer needed to be guided by "notions of international law and norms" or "institutions like the United Nations" because it was "on the right side of history." — Z Magazine, July/August 2004
• "The president [George W. Bush] said he didn't want other countries dictating terms or conditions for the war on terrorism. 'At some point, we may be the only ones left. That's okay with me. We are America'." — Washington Post, January 31, 2002
• "Reinhold Niebuhr got it right a half-century ago: What persists — and promises no end of grief — is our conviction that Providence has summoned America to tutor all of humankind on its pilgrimage to perfection." — Andrew Bacevich, professor of international relations, Boston University
• In commenting on Woodrow Wilson's moral lecturing of his European colleagues at the Versailles peace table following the First World War, Winston Churchill remarked that he found it hard to believe that the European emigrants, who brought to America the virtues of the lands from which they sprang, had left behind all their vices. — The World Crisis, Vol. V, The Aftermath, 1929
• "Behold a republic, gradually but surely becoming the supreme moral factor to the world's progress and the accepted arbiter of the world's disputes." — William Jennings Bryan, US Secretary of State under Woodrow Wilson, In His Image (1922)
• Newsweek editor Michael Hirsch: "U.S. allies must accept that some U.S. unilateralism is inevitable, even desirable. This mainly involves accepting the reality of America's supreme might — and truthfully, appreciating how historically lucky they are to be protected by such a relatively benign power." — Foreign Affairs, November, 2002
• Colin Powell speaking before the Republican National Convention, August 13, 1996: The United States is "a country that exists by the grace of a divine providence."
• "The US media always has an underlying acceptance of the mythology of American exceptionalism, that the US, in everything it does, is the last best hope of humanity." — Rahul Mahajan, author of: The New Crusade: America's War on Terrorism, and Full Spectrum Dominance
• "The fundamental problem is that the Americans do not respect anybody except themselves," said Col. Mir Jan, a spokesman for the Afghan Defense Ministry. "They say, 'We are the God of the world,' and they don't consult us." —Washington Post, August 3, 2002
• "If we have to use force, it is because we are America! We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future." — Madeleine Albright, U.S. Secretary of State, 1998

This Is What Conspiracy Really Looks Like

Click here to access article by Lincoln Stoller posted on OpEd News. 

Once in a while individuals are able to escape their cultural conditioning (also known as "brainwashing") that has trained them to believe that the political facade that surrounds their daily life is real. The braver ones, such as this author, wander behind this facade to find a totally different reality, and try to make some sense of it.

He concludes his essay with this statement:

This is the nature of our system which has private corporations buying influence in systems that are supposed to be democratic. This cannot be changed by singling out specific groups or erecting single-issue fire walls. This is not the result of a few rotten apples. It is the fungus of international corporate capitalism operating in the "fruit salad" of selectively democratic republics.

Although this is a good start, I don't think that he quite grasps the reality of today's governance issues. I don't pretend to have a monopoly of understanding of this reality, but I feel that I have had more time to explore it. 

As I see it, ruling classes which have existed for the last ten to fifteen thousand years--less than 2% of human history--have always erected phony systems of belief to justify their existence, their privileges, and wealth. The latest class rulers, the capitalist class, several hundred years ago first saw great opportunities to accumulate wealth and power under a system of private ownership of socially produced wealth that could be possible if existing property was not limited by the rule of the landed aristocracy. 

So, they had to usurp power from the latter class, and to do this they had to enlist the support of ordinary working people who they needed to fight in their armies. They appealed to them with all sorts of radical ideas about democracy, such as those espoused sincerely by Thomas Paine and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Once this was accomplished, first in the American Revolution followed closely by the French Revolution, the new capitalist class were stuck with all these notions of liberty, justice, and democracy. Thus, they had to erect political institutions that appeared to embody these ideas. Thomas Paine was henceforth ignored and died in obscurity. Fortunately, Rousseau escaped this fate by dying a natural death just before the French Revolution. 

To prevent any real liberty from happening, our benevolent (sarcasm) Founding Fathers (they have been deified) carefully limited the vote to only owners of large properties, and found that mixing people into large voting areas tended to dilute any real democratic pressures from below. (Remember that roads were poor and the means of communication was limited.) It has been taught to us, along with a lot of other garbage, that the system of checks and balances that is a part of the design of our government was to protect against autocrats from coming to power. The truth is, the new American ruling class led by Hamilton and the banker Morris had a terrible fear of citizens and designed the new government to protect them from the "unwashed masses". (Read Unruly Americans by Woody Holton and An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States by Charles Beard.) 

Since then we have witnessed the extension of voting rights to most of the rest of the population, but this was only allowed because the new ruling class had a tight grip on the media, education, and control over what political parties were allowed to participate. They never had the slightest hesitation to hire private hooligans (for example, the Pinkertons), the FBI, aggressive police forces, or even the National Guard (for example, the Kent State massacre) to insure that their interests and policies were protected.

What is now placed on the shoulders of mostly young people throughout the world is the necessity of finally fulfilling the democratic dreams of working people to emancipate themselves from class rule. This is a huge task to ask of any generation, but nothing less will insure the survival of the human race. Should they succeed, they will surely become history's greatest heroes.

Occupy Homes lauds a radical new phase for the movement

Click here to access article by Jérôme E. Roos from Reflections on a Revolution.

...this Tuesday activists all over the United States will be taking the struggle indoors: to the homes of poor families who are under threat of being evicted by large and powerful Wall Street banks. The move from occupying public space to reclaiming private property marks a radical escalation of civil disobedience, striking the capitalist system right at its institutional heart.

Outside of New York City or San Francisco Bay Area, I am not sure that other Occupier activists are ready for this stage of activism--but, we shall see. It has to start sometime and somewhere in the US. On the other hand, we could just "throw in the towel", and pledge allegiance to the Empire and its global financial ruling class. 

I am proud to report that Occupiers here in the Seattle area seem to be ready for this phase of the revolution. Read this piece entitled, "Occupied Warehouse on Capitol Hill!". 

Let us be clear: this is only the beginning, a hint of what might come. If we are arrested, if we are removed from this building with guns in our faces and our hands bound behind our backs, it is neither unexpected nor a sign of failure. It is instead a sign that we constitute a real threat to capitalism and to the very concept of private property. There is no other option left but to recognize which side we are on. We say this not as martyrs, but as those who have chosen to live.

From Occupation to “Occupy”: The Israelification of American Domestic Security

Click here to access article by Max Blumenthal from al-Akhbar. 

There is not only collaboration among police/security agencies within the US as reported here: this article exposes the collaboration of the Empire's militarized polices across the globe, particularly influenced by the Israeli model.

The Israelification of America’s security apparatus, recently unleashed in full force against the Occupy Wall Street Movement, has taken place at every level of law enforcement, and in areas that have yet to be exposed. The phenomenon has been documented in bits and pieces, through occasional news reports that typically highlight Israel’s national security prowess without examining the problematic nature of working with a country accused of grave human rights abuses. But it has never been the subject of a national discussion. And collaboration between American and Israeli cops is just the tip of the iceberg.

Coal study names top 20 'climate killer' banks

Click here to access article by Fiona Harvey from The Guardian. 

After destroying the economy the financial elites, who form a core part of our ruling class, are now busy destroying our climate to satisfy their addiction to profits.

However, Africans and concerned people from all over the world are still fighting back. Read this piece entitled, "Thousands to Protest at COP 17 in Durban: Demanding Action to Save the Planet."

Feinstein Amendment Punts Issue of Indefinite Detention of Americans to Courts

Click here to access article David Dayen from FireDogLake.

Can Americans be indefinitely detained by the military on suspicion of terrorism if arrested on American soil? Thursday evening the Senate added a compromise amendment to the defense spending bill that states: Maybe.

It seems that the corporate sponsored US Senators just won't give up on an attempt to impose a police state on the US. They must be getting worried about a domestic insurrection. Meanwhile, mainstream media omits this coverage and encourages people to just go Christmas shopping (with their credit cards).

See also this piece from Wired entitled, "Senate Wants the Military to Lock You Up Without Trial".

See also yesterday's assessment of this bill by Glenn Greenwald who has a background in constitutional law. He rightfully says that the government is already doing what this bill proposes. Still, it is another nail in our civil rights coffin.

NAFTA - the Neo-Liberal Destruction of Mexican Culture & Anarchist Responses from Zapatistas to Drug Cartels

Click here to access article by John Kelley posted on OpEd News.

This article provides a good history of the Mexican people's struggle against the privatizing of their lands, and the more recent devastating effects of NAFTA on both US and Mexican workers--a good illustration of how neoliberalism plays off one nation's workers against another for the enrichment of corporations and their owners and ending in the exploitation of workers and the destruction of their lives.

Occupy Wall Street: The Enthusiasm Gap

Click here to access article by Bob Burnett from OpEd News. 

The latest polls indicate that approximately 75 percent of Americans agree with the goals of Occupy Wall Street.  Nonetheless, only 29 percent consider themselves supporters of OWS.  What accounts for this enthusiasm gap?

I also greatly worry about this. I think that my fellow Americans have been subject to so many years of indoctrination that filters down from the ruling class into every institution--schools, mainstream media particularly the "boob tube" (TV), corporate employers, non-profit administrators, churches, etc, that they will be very slow to respond to ruling class imposed crises. People have been taught to believe that it is far better to defer to authority than to think critically, that bad things happen to you when you start to question. "Better to go along to get along."

The shadow war in Syria

Click here to access article by Pepe Escobar from Asia Times Online. 

It's fair to argue that masses of Syrians want something other than the Assad regime - but certainly not some variant of humanitarian bombing, not to mention civil war. They saw NATO's legacy in Libya - virtually the whole infrastructure of the country destroyed, cities bombed to dust, tens of thousands of dead and wounded, al-Qaeda-linked fanatics wielding power in Tripoli, widespread ethnic hatred. They don't want a brand new massacre. But NATOGCC does. 

Student Protests Spread Throughout Region [Latin America]

Click here to access article by Pamela Sepúlveda from The Indypendent. 

In support of Chile’s ongoing student protests, and voicing their own demands, thousands of people took to the streets in more than a dozen cities in Latin America Thursday demanding quality public education.

Thawing permafrost vents gases to worsen warming

Click here to access article by Seth Borenstein of AP posted in Yahoo News.

Massive amounts of greenhouse gases trapped below thawing permafrost will likely seep into the air over the next several decades, accelerating and amplifying global warming, scientists warn.

The future of growing old in America

Click here to access article by James Ridgeway from The Guardian. 

The ruling One Percent have absolutely no shame in going after the most vulnerable people in our society--the poor, the disabled, and the elderly--in order to pursue their wars and protect their profits.

It's hard to argue that social security benefits are too generous, or that retirees enjoy extravagant lifestyles. The average social security benefit currently stands at just over $1,100 a month. As the Center for Economic and Policy Research's Dean Baker notes, "More than 75% of benefits go to individuals with non-social security income of less than $20,000 a year and more than 90% of benefits go to individuals with non-social security income of less than $40,000 a year."

Fed bailing out the Euro

Click here to access article from Russia Today. 

Markets are rallying, traders are full of optimism and the Euro is up. The only loser is the dollar: the good old buck has weakened compared to other currencies. The reason? An announcement from the Fed, the European Central Bank, the Bank of Canada, the Bank of Japan, the Bank of England and Swiss National Bank reveals that they are going to provide troubled European banks with massive amounts of cash – cheaper and faster than ever before. Obviously, the lion’s share of assets will be provided by the US Federal Reserve.

For more details and a deeper analysis of the latest European bank bailout by the Fed, read this piece by Naomi Prins, formerly of Goldman Sachs, in which she states:

...we...know from the US bailouts in phase one of the global meltdown, that providing ‘liquidity' or ‘greasing the wheels of ‘ banks in times of ‘emergency’ does absolute nothing for the Main Street Economy. Not in the US. And not in Europe. It also doesn’t fix anything, it just funds bad trades with impunity.

Well, should we be surprised? The Empire's ruling class is there to serve the one percent, and that is what they are doing. The solution, broadly speaking, is to remove the one percent from power and create classless societies designed to serve the needs of everyone. Until that happens, we will continue to see the 99% serving the needs of the one percent (in this case, covering their bad bets), more extremes of wealth and poverty, more wars, and more environmental degradation.

Here, in a nutshell, is the way I understand this whole bailout phenomenon. The controlling center of capitalism are the financial elites in the US, Europe, and Japan under the leadership of US bankers. Their top controlling institution is the Federal Reserve which creates money backed largely by the power of the US and NATO military, and their Arab oil cronies . The financial elites have no problem creating money to bailout members of their class who made bad bets on mortgage securities and all kinds of derivative bets, but they have an almost obsessive fear of that money circulating among the general population. You see, if that money circulates widely, money cheapens, prices rise, inflation results and the value of the bonds that mostly elites buy are devalued.

Britain's Massive Anti-Austerity Strike: Could It Happen Here?

Click here to access article by Richard Eskow from Huffington Post.

This event was almost totally ignored in US media--it might give workers the wrong ideas!

Millions of employees mounted Great Britain's first General Strike in many years today after the government threatened to impose more cuts in retirement benefits and pay for public workers.

It was a smash success. As many as two million strikers proved that the public's patience with the unjust fiscal regime known as 'austerity economics' has its limits. It highlighted the important role unions can and must play in the fight for a more just and stable economy.

Dardari: The Trojan Horse of Neoliberal Syria

Click here to access article by Ghadi Francis from Al-Akhbar.

This piece provides an interesting thesis that Abdallah Dardari, the former Syrian Deputy Prime Minister for Economic Affairs, functioned as a neo-liberal Trojan Horse. But when the usual destructive effects of neoliberalism occurred in Syria, he wisely "hopped into a lifeboat and paddled safely to the UN." He is now a part of the opposition. 

With the wrecked economy, (in my opinion) NATO imperialists see another splendid opportunity to move another chess piece in place to put Iran into checkmate. 

Global rebellion: The coming chaos?

Click here to access article by William I. Robinson from Al Jazeera. 

I am not posting this piece because I think it provides precise insights on our current social-economic and war disasters, but because it is broadly accurate and requires urgent action by the 99%. It is a liberal interpretation of crucial world events produced by an academic who consciously or unconsciously provides a more bland analysis of world events in order to keep his job or to enhance his career prospects. For example, he uses concepts like "social reproduction" to cover over unpleasant realities that you and I face--loss of pensions, loss of homes, huge debts, loss of jobs, standing in line at food banks, etc. 

And there are many other parts of his analysis that I would interpret quite differently. However, I really don't have the time or interest to do so. What is important is his main conclusion with which I agree:

Global elites are confused, reactive, and sinking into the quagmire of their own making. It is noteworthy that those struggling around the world have been shown a strong sense of solidarity and are in communications across whole continents. ...As global elites regroup and assess the new conjuncture and the threat of mass global revolution, they will - and have already begun to - organise coordinated mass repression, new wars and interventions, and mechanisms and projects of co-optation in their efforts to restore hegemony.

Occupy Wall Street's anarchist roots

Click here to access article by David Graeber from Al Jazeera.

"How are you going to get anywhere if you refuse to create a leadership structure or make a practical list of demands? And what's with all this anarchist nonsense - the consensus, the sparkly fingers? Don't you realise all this radical language is going to alienate people? You're never going to be able to reach regular, mainstream Americans with this sort of thing!"

The author provides some excellent answers to people who are confused about the Occupy movement and its practices. He does this by reviewing anarchist movements throughout history and their struggles with all class ruled societies, and by offering insights on what anarchism really is: a radical form of democracy which all governing classes of hierarchical systems loath. 

It is clear to me that the re-birth of this model of social organization offers the last best hope for humanity to survive in any form other than barbarism--indeed, to survive at all in the face of planetary destruction by profit-addicted capitalist ruling classes.


(Note: It appears to me that there is one minor typo in the following sentence: "Perhaps this is not surprising: We are facing conditions that rival those of the 1930s, the main difference being that the media seems stubbornly willing [unwilling] to acknowledge it.")

The Power of Occupy Wall Street Is Not Just What They're Doing, But How They're Doing It

Click here to access article by Sarah Jaffe from AlterNet. 

The people who seem unable to comprehend horizontalism are mostly those who come from hierarchical institutions themselves. (There isn't a more hierarchically structured media organization than the New York Times, for instance, which also sits at the top of the hierarchy of mainstream media as the “paper of record.”) But horizontalism has proved appealing to the Occupy protesters, I think, because those same hierarchical institutions, from Congress to churches to universities, and obviously, corporations have utterly failed most Americans.

She provides a very good discussion of the contribution of direct democracy (horizontalism) that the Occupy movement is practicing.

UK public sector stages national one-day walkout

Click here to access article from World Socialist Web Site.

More than two million workers across the public sector in the UK are taking part in today’s Day of Action against the Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition’s attack on their pensions. For the first time since the government took office 18 months ago, working people have the opportunity to show their opposition to its policies, and they are doing so in their hundreds of thousands.

This major UK event is being given scant coverage here in the US--for obvious reasons.

Ruth Marcus reveals another journalistic value

Click here to access article by Glenn Greenwald from Salon. 

This piece is about prominent journalists who espouse values of US mainstream journalism--it's all about "respect for authority". If you want a career with corporate media, it would be useful to adopt these values. 

Every hierarchical social system, other than totalitarian systems of governance, realizes the importance of indoctrinating its subjects in the values of deference to authority. The latter system is much more efficient in bringing about compliance with the policies of ruling classes than the former which require a  huge, expensive security apparatus (police, surveillance of citizens, prisons, etc) to enforce compliance. It seems that our ruling class is playing it safe by promoting both.