The Power and the Glory

It is the Fourth of July, that annual celebration of America’s birthday. The Declaration of Independence, a document largely crafted by Thomas Jefferson to formally sever ties with Great Britain, was officially adopted by the Continental Congress on July 4, 1776.

“Taxation without representation,” was the major compliant of the 13 colonies in America that were forced to pay taxes to England's King George III with no representation in Parliament. As dissatisfaction grew, British troops were dispatched to quell any signs of rebellion, and repeated attempts by the colonists to resolve the crisis without war proved fruitless.

Although Jefferson was considered the strongest and most eloquent writer of his generation, the committee that drafted the Declaration of Independence included Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Roger Sherman and Robert R. Livingston.

Howard Zinn, the contemporary American historian and playwright, reminds us of our past so we might better understand the present. The following essay is adapted from a lecture he gave for MIT's Special Program for Urban and Regional Studies, and originally appeared in the on-line edition of the Boston Review.

What Zinn has to say is extremely important on the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

“The notion of American exceptionalism—that the United States alone has the right, whether by divine sanction or moral obligation, to bring civilization, or democracy, or liberty to the rest of the world, by violence if necessary—is not new. It started as early as 1630 in the Massachusetts Bay Colony when Governor John Winthrop uttered the words that centuries later would be quoted by Ronald Reagan. Winthrop called the Massachusetts Bay Colony a “city upon a hill.” Reagan embellished a little, calling it a “shining city on a hill.”

The idea of a city on a hill is heart warming. It suggests what George Bush has spoken of: that the United States is a beacon of liberty and democracy. People can look to us and learn from and emulate us.

In reality, we have never been just a city on a hill. A few years after Governor Winthrop uttered his famous words, the people in the city on a hill moved out to massacre the Pequot Indians.

Here’s a description by William Bradford, an early settler, of Captain John Mason’s attack on a Pequot village:

Those that escaped the fire were slain with the sword, some hewed to pieces, others run through with their rapiers, so as they were quickly dispatched and very few escaped. It was conceived that they thus destroyed about 400 at this time. It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fire and the streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stink and scent thereof; but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they gave the praise thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully for them, thus to enclose their enemies in their hands and give them so speedy a victory over so proud and insulting an enemy.

* * *

The kind of massacre described by Bradford occurs again and again as Americans march west to the Pacific and south to the Gulf of Mexico. (In fact our celebrated war of liberation, the American Revolution, was disastrous for the Indians. Colonists had been restrained from encroaching on the Indian territory by the British and the boundary set up in their Proclamation of 1763. American independence wiped out that boundary.)

Expanding into another territory, occupying that territory, and dealing harshly with people who resist occupation has been a persistent fact of American history from the first settlements to the present day. And this was often accompanied from very early on with a particular form of American exceptionalism: the idea that American expansion is divinely ordained.

On the eve of the war with Mexico in the middle of the 19th century, just after the United States annexed Texas, the editor and writer John O’Sullivan coined the famous phrase “manifest destiny.” He said it was “the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.”

At the beginning of the 20th century, when the United States invaded the Philippines, President McKinley said that the decision to take the Philippines came to him one night when he got down on his knees and prayed, and God told him to take the Philippines.

Invoking God has been a habit for American presidents throughout the nation’s history, but George W. Bush has made a specialty of it. For an article in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, the reporter talked with Palestinian leaders who had met with Bush. One of them reported that Bush told him, “God told me to strike at al Qaeda. And I struck them. And then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did. And now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East.”

It’s hard to know if the quote is authentic, especially because it is so literate. But it certainly is consistent with Bush’s oft-expressed claims. A more credible story comes from a Bush supporter, Richard Lamb, the president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, who says that during the election campaign Bush told him, “I believe God wants me to be president. But if that doesn’t happen, that’s okay.”

Divine ordination is a very dangerous idea, especially when combined with military power (the United States has 10,000 nuclear weapons, with military bases in a hundred different countries and warships on every sea). With God’s approval, you need no human standard of morality. Anyone today who claims the support of God might be embarrassed to recall that the Nazi storm troopers had inscribed on their belts, “Gott mit uns” (“God with us”).

Not every American leader claimed divine sanction, but the idea persisted that the United States was uniquely justified in using its power to expand throughout the world. In 1945, at the end of World War II, Henry Luce, the owner of a vast chain of media enterprises—Time, Life, Fortune—declared that this would be “the American Century,” that victory in the war gave the United States the right “to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit.”

This confident prophecy was acted out all through the rest of the 20th century. Almost immediately after World War II the United States penetrated the oil regions of the Middle East by special arrangement with Saudi Arabia. It established military bases in Japan, Korea, the Philippines, and a number of Pacific islands. In the next decades it orchestrated right-wing coups in Iran, Guatemala, and Chile, and gave military aid to various dictatorships in the Caribbean. In an attempt to establish a foothold in Southeast Asia it invaded Vietnam and bombed Laos and Cambodia.

The existence of the Soviet Union, even with its acquisition of nuclear weapons, did not block this expansion. In fact, the exaggerated threat of “world communism” gave the United States a powerful justification for expanding all over the globe, and soon it had military bases in a hundred countries. Presumably, only the United States stood in the way of the Soviet conquest of the world.

Can we believe that it was the existence of the Soviet Union that brought about the aggressive militarism of the United States? If so, how do we explain all the violent expansion before 1917? A hundred years before the Bolshevik Revolution, American armies were annihilating Indian tribes, clearing the great expanse of the West in an early example of what we now call “ethnic cleansing.” And with the continent conquered, the nation began to look overseas.

On the eve of the 20th century, as American armies moved into Cuba and the Philippines, American exceptionalism did not always mean that the United States wanted to go it alone. The nation was willing—indeed, eager—to join the small group of Western imperial powers that it would one day supersede. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge wrote at the time, “The great nations are rapidly absorbing for their future expansion, and their present defense all the waste places of the earth. . . . As one of the great nations of the world the United States must not fall out of the line of march.”

Surely, the nationalistic spirit in other countries has often led them to see their expansion as uniquely moral, but this country has carried the claim farthest.

American exceptionalism was never more clearly expressed than by Secretary of War Elihu Root, who in 1899 declared, “The American soldier is different from all other soldiers of all other countries since the world began. He is the advance guard of liberty and justice, of law and order, and of peace and happiness.” At the time he was saying this, American soldiers in the Philippines were starting a bloodbath which would take the lives of 600,000 Filipinos.

The idea that America is different because its military actions are for the benefit of others becomes particularly persuasive when it is put forth by leaders presumed to be liberals, or progressives. For instance, Woodrow Wilson, always high on the list of “liberal” presidents, labeled both by scholars and the popular culture as an “idealist,” was ruthless in his use of military power against weaker nations. He sent the navy to bombard and occupy the Mexican port of Vera Cruz in 1914 because the Mexicans had arrested some American sailors. He sent the marines into Haiti in 1915, and when the Haitians resisted, thousands were killed.

The following year American marines occupied the Dominican Republic. The occupations of Haiti and the Dominican Republic lasted many years. And Wilson, who had been elected in 1916 saying, “There is such a thing as a nation being too proud to fight,” soon sent young Americans into the slaughterhouse of the European war.

Theodore Roosevelt was considered a “progressive” and indeed ran for president on the Progressive Party ticket in 1912. But he was a lover of war and a supporter of the conquest of the Philippines—he had congratulated the general who wiped out a Filipino village of 600 people in 1906. He had promulgated the 1904 “Roosevelt Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, which justified the occupation of small countries in the Caribbean as bringing them “stability.”

During the Cold War, many American “liberals” became caught up in a kind of hysteria about the Soviet expansion, which was certainly real in Eastern Europe but was greatly exaggerated as a threat to western Europe and the United States. During the period of McCarthyism the Senate’s quintessential liberal, Hubert Humphrey, proposed detention camps for suspected subversives who in times of “national emergency” could be held without trial.

After the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, terrorism replaced communism as the justification for expansion. Terrorism was real, but its threat was magnified to the point of hysteria, permitting excessive military action abroad and the curtailment of civil liberties at home.

The idea of American exceptionalism persisted as the first President Bush declared, extending Henry Luce’s prediction, that the nation was about to embark on a “new American Century.” Though the Soviet Union was gone, the policy of military intervention abroad did not end. The elder Bush invaded Panama and then went to war against Iraq.

The terrible attacks of September 11 gave a new impetus to the idea that the United States was uniquely responsible for the security of the world, defending us all against terrorism as it once did against communism. President George W. Bush carried the idea of American exceptionalism to its limits by putting forth in his national-security strategy the principles of unilateral war.

This was a repudiation of the United Nations charter, which is based on the idea that security is a collective matter, and that war could only be justified in self-defense. We might note that the Bush doctrine also violates the principles laid out at Nuremberg, when Nazi leaders were convicted and hanged for aggressive war, preventive war, far from self-defense.

Bush’s national-security strategy and its bold statement that the United States is uniquely responsible for peace and democracy in the world has been shocking to many Americans.
But it is not really a dramatic departure from the historical practice of the United States, which for a long time has acted as an aggressor, bombing and invading other countries (Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Grenada, Panama, Iraq) and insisting on maintaining nuclear and non-nuclear supremacy. Unilateral military action, under the guise of prevention, is a familiar part of American foreign policy.

Sometimes bombings and invasions have been cloaked as international action by bringing in the United Nations, as in Korea, or NATO, as in Serbia, but basically our wars have been American enterprises. It was Bill Clinton’s secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, who said at one point, “If possible we will act in the world multilaterally, but if necessary, we will act unilaterally.” Henry Kissinger, hearing this, responded with his customary solemnity that this principle “should not be universalized.” Exceptionalism was never clearer.

Some liberals in this country, opposed to Bush, nevertheless are closer to his principles on foreign affairs than they want to acknowledge. It is clear that 9/11 had a powerful psychological effect on everybody in America, and for certain liberal intellectuals a kind of hysterical reaction has distorted their ability to think clearly about our nation’s role in the world.

In a recent issue of the liberal magazine The American Prospect, the editors write, “Today Islamist terrorists with global reach pose the greatest immediate threat to our lives and liberties. . . . When facing a substantial, immediate, and provable threat, the United States has both the right and the obligation to strike preemptively and, if need be, unilaterally against terrorists or states that support them.”

Preemptively and, if need be, unilaterally; and against “states that support” terrorists, not just terrorists themselves. Those are large steps in the direction of the Bush doctrine, though the editors do qualify their support for preemption by adding that the threat must be “substantial, immediate, and provable.” But when intellectuals endorse abstract principles, even with qualifications, they need to keep in mind that the principles will be applied by the people who run the U.S. government.

This is all the more important to keep in mind when the abstract principle is about the use of violence by the state—in fact, about preemptively initiating the use of violence.

There may be an acceptable case for initiating military action in the face of an immediate threat, but only if the action is limited and focused directly on the threatening party—just as we might accept the squelching of someone falsely shouting “fire” in a crowded theater if that really were the situation and not some guy distributing anti-war leaflets on the street. But accepting action not just against “terrorists” (can we identify them as we do the person shouting “fire”?) but against “states that support them” invites unfocused and indiscriminate violence, as in Afghanistan, where our government killed at least 3,000 civilians in a claimed pursuit of terrorists.

It seems that the idea of American exceptionalism is pervasive across the political spectrum.
The idea is not challenged because the history of American expansion in the world is not a history that is taught very much in our educational system.

A couple of years ago Bush addressed the Philippine National Assembly and said, “America is proud of its part in the great story of the Filipino people. Together our soldiers liberated the Philippines from colonial rule.”

The president apparently never learned the story of the bloody conquest of the Philippines.

And last year, when the Mexican ambassador to the UN said something undiplomatic about how the United States has been treating Mexico as its “backyard” he was immediately reprimanded by then–Secretary of State Colin Powell. Powell, denying the accusation, said, “We have too much of a history that we have gone through together.” (Had he not learned about the Mexican War or the military forays into Mexico?) The ambassador was soon removed from his post.

The major newspapers, television news shows, and radio talk shows appear not to know history, or prefer to forget it. There was an outpouring of praise for Bush’s second inaugural speech in the press, including the so-called liberal press (The Washington Post, The New York Times). The editorial writers eagerly embraced Bush’s words about spreading liberty in the world, as if they were ignorant of the history of such claims, as if the past two years’ worth of news from Iraq were meaningless.

Only a couple of days before Bush uttered those words about spreading liberty in the world, The New York Times published a photo of a crouching, bleeding Iraqi girl. She was screaming. Her parents, taking her somewhere in their car, had just been shot to death by nervous American soldiers.

One of the consequences of American exceptionalism is that the U.S. government considers itself exempt from legal and moral standards accepted by other nations in the world. There is a long list of such self-exemptions: the refusal to sign the Kyoto Treaty regulating the pollution of the environment, the refusal to strengthen the convention on biological weapons.

The United States has failed to join the hundred-plus nations that have agreed to ban land mines, in spite of the appalling statistics about amputations performed on children mutilated by those mines. It refuses to ban the use of napalm and cluster bombs. It insists that it must not be subject, as are other countries, to the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court.

What is the answer to the insistence on American exceptionalism? Those of us in the United States and in the world who do not accept it must declare forcibly that the ethical norms concerning peace and human rights should be observed. It should be understood that the children of Iraq, of China, and of Africa, children everywhere in the world, have the same right to life as American children.

These are fundamental moral principles. If our government doesn’t uphold them, the citizenry must. At certain times in recent history, imperial powers—the British in India and East Africa, the Belgians in the Congo, the French in Algeria, the Dutch and French in Southeast Asia, the Portuguese in Angola—have reluctantly surrendered their possessions and swallowed their pride when they were forced to by massive resistance.

Fortunately, there are people all over the world who believe that human beings everywhere deserve the same rights to life and liberty. On February 15, 2003, on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, more than ten million people in more than 60 countries around the world demonstrated against that war.

There is a growing refusal to accept U.S. domination and the idea of American exceptionalism. Recently, when the State Department issued its annual report listing countries guilty of torture and other human-rights abuses, there were indignant responses from around the world commenting on the absence of the United States from that list.

A Turkish newspaper said, “There’s not even mention of the incidents in Abu Ghraib prison, no mention of Guantánamo.” A newspaper in Sydney pointed out that the United States sends suspects—people who have not been tried or found guilty of anything—to prisons in Morocco, Egypt, Libya, and Uzbekistan, countries that the State Department itself says use torture.

Here in the United States, despite the media’s failure to report it, there is a growing resistance to the war in Iraq. Public-opinion polls show that at least half the citizenry no longer believe in the war. Perhaps most significant is that among the armed forces, and families of those in the armed forces, there is more and more opposition to it.

After the horrors of the first World War, Albert Einstein said, “Wars will stop when men refuse to fight.”

We are now seeing the refusal of soldiers to fight, the refusal of families to let their loved ones go to war, the insistence of the parents of high-school kids that recruiters stay away from their schools. These incidents, occurring more and more frequently, may finally, as happened in the case of Vietnam, make it impossible for the government to continue the war, and it will come to an end.

The true heroes of our history are those Americans who refused to accept that we have a special claim to morality and the right to exert our force on the rest of the world. I think of William Lloyd Garrison, the abolitionist. On the masthead of his antislavery newspaper, The Liberator, were the words, “My country is the world. My countrymen are mankind.”

Report from Barcelona

Just returned from a pleasant four-day vacation in Barcelona. The Mediterranean city is certainly a hopping place, and attracts a generous quota of college students, eccentrics, grifters, misfits and weirdos. Most of this folly is displayed daily on La Rambla, a major promenade that extends from Placa de Catalunya to la Mirrador de Colon near the harbor.

La Rambla offers a fair share of sidewalk cafes, yet without the grimy beggars one encounters in Mexico. Five years ago, when we stayed in Veracruz, our base was the stylish Hotel Imperial, built on the Zocalo in 1796.

Sitting in the sidewalk cafe of the Hotel Imperial each evening was like being in Fellini’s La Dolca Vita. Within 20 minutes, an assortment of 40 vendors: beggars, panhandlers, cripples and people with appalling deformities, paraded by our table. The vendors were predictable, selling cigars, hammocks, T-shirts, pure vanilla. pencils, straw sombreros. Yet perhaps the most unusual spectacle was the women dressed as nurses, offering blood pressure tests for a modest price. Quite amusing. Of course the circus freak candidates also paid us a visit: the midget shoeshine boy, the blind accordionist, though the woman with the disfigured arm really took the prize. The senora was so repulsive all she had to do was appear before each cafe table, and one quickly paid her to scram. Yet the toothless woman selling gum was also quite memorable.

Between La Rambla and the edge of Ciutat Vella (Old Town) is the Arabic quarter, with row after row of narrow streets of apartments with long-shuttered doors and wrought-iron balconies used to escape the hot-house atmosphere of the tiny, crowded rooms. These scenes resemble a slightly improved version of dilapidated Cairo. All along this area are cheap internet cafes, operated by young men in Punjab suits from Pakistan. Apparently, the Pakis who did not land in the Middle East have made their way to the Iberian Peninsula.

We stayed in a modest two-star hotel on the other side of the Arabic quarter. Early every morning, I walked the streets just to absorb the multicultural flavor of the port city. On the last morning of our stay, I ventured back into the Arab quarter because it reminded me of Bahrain and the Middle East. On the outskirts of the neighborhood, I discovered a bar that had never bothered to close after a long night of patronage. It was barely 7 a.m. and at least a half-dozen men were perched on barstools, grasping some aqua vitae or other equally beneficial spirits; hardcore alcoholics, each and every one. I thought I heard an older man brag that he had “fought in a major world whore.”

Across from the bar on the side of a brick building, there was a giant sprayed painted figure of a nude male pig with a clenched fist and an erect appendage, spewing some half-Spanish, half-Catalunyan diatribe. The artist, however the work managed to be rendered across the better part of a two-story building, was obviously not a Muslim.

London-to-Bavaria

To wake up in Central London one morning and do the plane, train and car routine to rural Bavaria by late night makes for a hectic day, especially when you throw in a series of job interviews.

The people I held discussions with where all pleasant and unassuming; nothing overtly stuffy about anyone. There were no requests or questions like 1) describe your strengths and weaknesses; 2) what is your proudest accomplishment; 3) where do you see yourself in five years. I appreciated the absence of such dreck.

Q: Why do you want this position?
A: Frankly, I’m excited about this challenge.

[Real answer: Look folks, I just want to earn some decent, FUCKING money for once in my life.]

Essentially, I was simply myself – for better or for worse. Who else can I be? My background for the position is solid enough. The rest is human chemistry and the quick appraisal of personalities. Can we make a go of it?

I really don’t expect this to go anywhere – though it is flattering to be invited to the party; especially when the host picks up the travel tab.

However, if I jumped the hoops properly, I will be called back for a second-round of interviews. This could happen again next week.

I left feeling there was very good chemistry between me and the overall director. But, who knows? My instincts have betrayed me countless times in the past. If it happens, it happens.

The commute from near Cambridge to Central London would be daunting: probably 90 minutes one way. Yet it’s common for people in Brighton – on the Channel, to make the daily commute.

Sunday evening, while I had plenty of time, I meandered a few blocks in St. John’s Wood and stopped in Cottage Chicken – a third-world restaurant you’d expect to find in the food court of a shopping mall in Riyadh, Paris or Los Angeles. This place is operated by Turks. As I sat near the opened doorway, people casually cruised along the sidewalk. I lost track of how many foreign languages I heard. London is chock full of people from every corner of the earth. It’s hard to pick out a regular English bloke, anymore.

Anyway, it was a taxi back to Paddington Station (and London taxis are wildly spacious – not to mention expensive: it cost $22), the Heathrow Express to the airport, and a 90-minute flight to Frankfurt. By 7:20 p.m., I was back in Germany. I waited about an hour, and then caught the next train to Wurzburg. My son met me at the train station, and I was home by 11 p.m. A long day, to say the least.

Early the next morning, my wife and I headed back to Frankfurt on the autobahn to meet her parents at the airport. I have not seen my in-laws in two years; that’s how long I’ve been away from the United States. I always enjoy being with them; at first my mother-in-law didn’t think I’d last a year as a husband. Now I like rubbing it in that I have set the record as the son-in-law.

My sister-in-law is a serial bride and has been married four times already. That spam-sucking, trailer trash slut is merely reality impaired. At first she loves to keep her legs up in the air, and then she throws the switch – this drives the husbands away every time. So far, we’ve missed all four weddings, but remain optimistic about more opportunities.

My in-laws are visiting because today is the big day for our son: high school graduation, and then his real education begins. Graduation night will start off with a test for him: his current girlfriend is also a senior and last year’s girlfriend – the student at Washington University, will also attend the ceremonies with her parents.

I’m so glad I’m not 17-years-old. Though if I could figure out what I want to be when I grow up, maybe I’d be happy.

Ask Me If I Care

America’s fourth estate has fallen so badly since the hay day of the Watergate era that all facts about the obscenity and atrocities of our War on Terrorism are ignored in favor of the "mishandling" of the Koran at the Guantánamo Bay gulag.

The Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld junta is a shameful disgrace for all Americans, and these men are war criminals; no better than Osama bin Laden and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

Yet when a holy book is desecrated, ask me if I care. There are far more important issues at stake.

Do you think I care that a copy of the Koran was mistreated when an American soldier kicked it or got it wet? Well, I don't care.

I'll start caring when bin Laden turns himself in and repents for incinerating all those innocent people on 9/11.

I'll care about the Koran when the fanatics in the Middle East start caring about the Holy Bible, the mere possession of which is a crime in Saudi Arabia.

I'll care when al-Zarqawi tells the world he is sorry for hacking off Nick Berg's head while Berg screamed through his gurgling, slashed throat.

I'll care when the mindless zealots who blow themselves up in search of nirvana care about the innocent children within range of their suicide bombs.

When I hear that a prisoner is complaining that his holy book is being "mishandled," you can absolutely believe in your heart of hearts that I don't care.