Todd Rado ‘26
Opinions Editor
With the passing of the American election, the messages Americans are left with are of the conflict of division and unity, regression and preservation, and pride in our national identity as free Americans. However, there comes a time to ask: What good has America done to be proud of, when the rhetoric of the day is swept away? The answer many of us are forced to reckon with, at every point in history, is not an absolute, single thing. America has baked within its 248 years of existence not a nanosecond of righteous history. The charged rhetoric of rallying ‘round the flag America wants you to cheer for exists for a reason — one completely devoid of heart, and only serving those that rule.
Answering the question of a nation’s position in history requires two things: the means and the ends. Those who justify any atrocity will point to the ends, and they may well be right to do so. Point aside, the first thing to do is understand the means. This requires asking one simple question: how did America establish itself as the world’s strongest? The answer is simple: overwhelming violence, until the deed was done. Many know the story of the Manifest destiny. However, an in-depth analysis of these events is generally foregone. Russell Thornton, a Cherokee-American anthropologist, estimates this toll, from 1800-1890, to about a total of 350,000 deaths. No effort has been undertaken to atone for this. Further, it cannot be ignored that America built itself on slavery. There seems to be an unkillable myth that the origination of wage-labor made the slave trade a largely inefficient engine, and that slavery was a sin that would write itself out of American history inevitably. This, however, could not be further from the truth. According to Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development (2016) by Sven Becker, quote, “Between 1790 and 1860, more land, a vast and highly capitalized slave trade, punishment, increased surveillance, decreased breaks, and lockstep labor…made possible a vast increase in the number of cotton plants being tended…The amount of cotton produced in the United States grew from 20 million pounds around 1805…to over two billion pounds of cotton in 1860.” (Becker, 40-41) This increase made the United States a world leader in the cotton trade. This is crucial to acknowledge because this very well means that slavery, were it not for the South’s paranoia, could have continued long past the Civil War, and thus established that the history of American capitalism is the history of slavery. As a matter of fact, Lincoln had every intention of ratifying the Corwin Amendment, a proposed amendment to the Constitution preventing federal intervention against slavery. In essence, the only reason America abolished slavery — years late — is because the North was forced to.
Fast-forwarding into the 20th century, dissent in the United States was and is not tolerated. through operations like COINTELPRO, quite overtly, generally pro-left, pro-equality groups were put down by force. During Martin Luther King Jr.’s rise, he was sent a letter urging him to take his own life by the FBI. They assassinated Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton. Lastly, The government’s involvement in the Iran-Contra scandal devastated black communities due to Contra involvement in drug trafficking into black inner cities. The conditions of Indigenous people is still no better today, with Ehlers et.al (2023) demonstrating that historical trauma plays a large part in both indigenous suicidal thoughts and acts. It is the ultimate irony that the “arbiter of democracy” we know today swelled in growth solely through imposing itself on others through extermination and oppression. The continued history of this violence shows that this is not a dark chapter of American History, this is the whole book.
This trend only continues — and worsens — as we broaden the focus to America’s international bid for superiority. America, focusing on the last century, has not been involved in a single conflict on the right side of history, that it hasn’t been dragged into kicking and screaming. And even when it has found itself on the right side of history, it still managed to perform as selfishly as is humanly possible. America knew about the Holocaust ever since 1941, but did not concern itself with it. Even armed with this knowledge, America did not enter the European theater until 1942, a full year later. The Marshall plan recovery efforts existed in large part to maintain US oil markets. With the little “good” out of the way, shifting attention to the ugly is in order. American foreign policy in the 20th century crowned it king as the worst regime of the century. During Operation Bloodstone and Paperclip, many high-ranking, war-criminal Nazi officials were hired in Eastern Europe by America based on their anti-communist allegiances to perform destabilization work in the USSR. American activity in North Korea killed an estimated fifteen percent of the entire North Korean population — one and a half million. Right-wing paramilitary groups in Indonesia, backed by the CIA, underwent a bloodbath of 500,000 to one million targeted and slaughtered. During the course of Operation Rolling Thunder alone, 186,000 North Vietnamese civilians were killed by American bombings, and Agent Orange chemical attacks still impact the Vietnamese populace today. This figure does not include the number of North Vietnamese killed in war crimes, such as My Lai or the actions of Tiger Force. Today, American Imperialism still very much lives, as the global south still remains hundreds of millions of dollars in unforgiven debt to the World Bank — an arm of American hegemony. According to the same World Bank, 15,000 children die every day in Africa alone due to preventable causes.The means have been made clear. But what are the ends? Freedom? Capitalism? Democracy? What good is American freedom if it’s shallow? What good is the American flavor of democracy if it does not promise a voice to those its policies violate? What good is American Capitalism if it serves singly to guarantee elite power? The only “end” that can truly be seen is simply more of the same. This is fascism. It prunes itself by infecting hearts and minds through the cult of patriotism, concealing that we walk the roads of the most bloodlusted, covert empire on the face of the earth. As I have written of previously, even now all of us are complicit in a genocide in Gaza, that our government enables. There is no candidate that could ever change this trend, for when the institution is immoral, immorality becomes an institutional value, and the American system essentially becomes where empathy goes to die. This cycle needs to end. It starts within you to break it.
Featured image courtesy of Google Images
Leave a Reply