Wake up America! :Why Americans Need to Acknowledge the Gap between America’s Ideals and its Actions

[Time for change]

As the moderator for the first Republican presidential debates for 2008, blowhard Chris Mathews’ very first question to them was “How do we get back to Ronald Reagan’s morning in America?” The whole purpose of asking that question, of course, was to perpetuate the toxic myth that Ronald Reagan was a great U.S. President. And why was he a great President? Because he made America feel good about itself by “not running it down”, “leading from optimism”, and solving problems “from our strengths, not our weaknesses”, as Rudi Giuliani informed American viewers of the debate in response to Matthews’ question.

Whether Giuliani knew it or not, his answer summed up one of the greatest defects of the American character: such a great need to feel good about ourselves or our country that we would rather bury our heads in the sand and deny the obvious than look reality in the face. As for Reagan’s presidency, forget the fact that the poor got poorer while the rich got richer; forget the ballooning of our national debt; forget his union busting that greatly set back the cause of the working men and women of our country; and forget his financing and fomenting of an illegal war in support of right wing death squads. The important thing is that he made us (at least some of us) feel good about ourselves.

Chris Matthews, Rudy Giuliani and most other Republicans would have us believe that optimism will make our problems go away – or at least hide them from view so we don’t have to feel bad about them. In solving our problems, why think about our weaknesses? All that does is make us feel bad, and our problems certainly don’t have anything to do with our faults. Heaven forbid that we should criticize our government! That would strengthen our enemies.

By saying all this I’m not trying to imply that Americans (of which I am one) are worse than other people. What I am trying to say is that we have a strong element in our culture that discourages introspection and self-doubt to the point of arrogance, that that is not good for us, and that its long term effects could be catastrophic for us, as well as for the rest of the world.


What is special about the United States of America?

Unlike almost all the other countries of the world, the United States of America is not the least bit racially or ethnically homogeneous. So we can’t (or shouldn’t) define ourselves in racial or ethnic terms. Rather, we define ourselves by our IDEALS, which are expressed in the documents which founded our nation, and which we are taught from an early age to revere, as well we should be. Specifically, those ideals are found in the U.S. Declaration of Independence, which founded our nation, and in our Constitution, which supposedly provides the legal foundation upon which our nation exists and functions.

Our Declaration of Independence contains two great principles that were at the time (I believe) unique among the founding principles of nations. The first speaks of the unalienable rights of mankind to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; the second, and related principle, speaks of the rights of people to cast out their government and form a new one when their current government becomes destructive of their inalienable rights.

The creation of our Constitution was an initial attempt to make the great principles of our Declaration into a living reality. Our initial Constitution contained many safeguards against repression by government, the most important one being the clause which describes how we can remove from office a chief executive who abuses his power. A “Bill of Rights” was added in quick order to provide more substance to the unalienable rights proclaimed in our Declaration. And it took about 90 years and a Civil War for us to add the amendments to our Constitution that began to expand those unalienable rights to our former slaves.


But the ideals that define Americans are lost to many of us

Unfortunately, too many Americans today have either forgotten our ideals, never learned of them, or simply believe that they are disposable.

Consider for example the reaction of Republicans (and some others) to former President Jimmy carter’s emphasis on “human rights” upon his election as President of our country in 1980. Carter’s re-emphasis on human rights as a crucially importing issue for guiding our foreign policy was meant both to express solidarity between Americans and other peoples of the world and at the same time to reclaim some of our lost ideals. An important part of this effort was the ceasing of support by the United States for repressive dictatorships in their efforts to withhold human rights from their own people. Carter put his money where his mouth was when he withdrew support for the repressive Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua, thus eventually leading to Somoza’s overthrow.

Yet too many Republicans felt and expressed nothing but contempt for Carter’s emphasis on human rights. They belittled his basing of foreign policy on human rights considerations, claiming that such policies were not “realistic” and that they went against the interests of our nation. But Carter’s emphasis on human rights was nothing less than a valiant attempt to better align our nation with the great ideals upon which it was founded. The attempts to belittle him for that were simply un-American.

And the same can be said about the way that our country treats its prisoners in its “War on Terror”. We capture thousands of “terrorist suspects” through a variety of means, most commonly by paying bounties for them; we render thousands of them into the custody of tyrannical regimes to be tortured; thousands of others we hold indefinitely in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay, or various secret CIA prisons, without even charging them with a crime; we allow them no access to legal counsel or their own families, who aren’t even notified of their disappearances; we torture them repeatedly; and for those who are tried for crimes, we don’t allow them to see the evidence against them or to contest that evidence. According to Stephen Grey, award winning journalist for Excellence in Human Rights Reporting for Amnesty International, in “Ghost Plane – The True Story of the CIA Torture Program”, we have done such things to about 11,000 human beings since September 11, 2001. These abominations against human rights are conducted in the name of our country under policies promulgated by the George W. Bush administration and enacted into law by our Republican Congress in 2006. Yet only a minority of Americans appears to be outraged about these gross and repeated abuses of human rights, and many appear to approve of it.

As with our Declaration, the Republican Party has virtually told us that our Constitution is expendable. The leader of the Republican Party himself described our Constitution as “just a goddamned piece of paper”. And he has proven over and over again that he was dead serious about that.


A brief and partial description of the dark side of American history

The failure of our country to live up to its ideals has been with us from the very beginning of our sovereignty.

Our nation was conceived as a slaveholding nation – or at least large parts of it were. Our push to settle the western lands of the continent showed that many or most Americans cared no more for the human rights of the original natives of our continent, whose population they decimated, than they did for our African slaves. Both groups were frequently treated brutally, and that treatment was rationalized by dehumanizing them. Even after our Civil War, when we formally recognized our former slaves as humans and accordingly began to grant them legal rights, several White racist organizations were formed in coordination with the Southern Democratic Party to withhold those rights by intimidating and murdering politically active Black men and their families, as described in detail by Nicholas Lemann in “Redemption – The Last Battle of the Civil War”.

Beginning in the latter part of the 19th Century we began to expand our imperial reach overseas, thus depriving other human beings of their rights all over the world: In 1893 the American Marines helped to overthrow the Queen of Hawaii for the benefit of a small minority of wealthy White Hawaiian landowners.

In 1898 we went to war against Spain for the stated purpose of “liberating” Cuba. But instead of liberating them we forced a treaty on them which facilitated our occupation of their country and the supporting of U.S. friendly repressive regimes in their country for many decades. We also used the Spanish-American War to justify the landing of U.S. marines in Puerto Rico and consequently making them into an American protectorate. And then we embarked on a vicious guerilla war against the former Spanish colony of the Philippines, which lasted three and a half years and was characterized by widespread torture, rape, and pillage, with the consequent deaths of 36 thousand Filipinos. In 1909 the American military instigated the overthrow of the President of Nicaragua, and in 1911 it assisted in the overthrow of the President of Honduras, all for the benefit of wealthy American businessmen.

With the creation of our Central Intelligence Agency it became common practice to intervene in the affairs of and overthrow democratically elected governments. That happened in Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954 and Chile in 1973.

After Vietnam threw off the colonial rule of the French we intervened in that country to prevent a Communist government from being elected, and then we went to war against them, eventually resulting in the deaths of 58 thousand American soldiers and two million Vietnamese.

We also intervened in numerous South and Central American countries in the decades following World War II in order 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, our CIA developed the School of the Americas, which was used to train native personnel in the techniques and ideology of insurgency and counter-insurgency, thus resulting in many years of widespread atrocities in Central and South America.

The list goes on and on. But rather than continue with the list, let’s consider the meaning of this history.


The meaning of the above noted historical events

None of the countries involved in the episodes noted above posed the slightest military threat to us. Our meddling resulted in tens of millions of deaths and untold suffering of the populations whose governments we overthrew or invaded. The reasons for those interventions had nothing to do with the defense of American ideals, though some of our leaders who participated in them may very well have believed that they did or made themselves believe so. On the contrary, the actions depicted above represent the very antithesis of American ideals. Many or most were undertaken in support of wealthy American businessmen. Many or most were undertaken in accordance with our ideological war against Communism. Not that most of the involved countries were Communist. Far from it. But most or all of them contained large elements of socialism or were “leftist”, meaning that the governments that we overthrew tried to improve the lives of the poor and the powerless in their country. As such, our government rationalized that they were “susceptible to Communist takeover”, which often provided the excuse for our interventions.

Why do I say that those actions represented the antithesis of American ideals? Because they proclaimed to the world that the unalienable rights that our Declaration of Independence speak of do NOT apply to the people of the sovereign countries whose democracies we undermined. We were implicitly saying by our actions that those rights apply only to Americans. But that is not at all what our Declaration says. On the contrary, it says that those rights are universal. If our Declaration of Independence was meant to apply only to the people of a single nation, it wouldn’t be anything special at all – it would merely be a worthless piece of paper. Thus, when our government acted to deprive the people of other nations of their rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, it was being about as un-American as it could possibly be.


Why this is so important

In a recent DU post, a fellow DUer insinuated that the assassinations of some of our more liberal American leaders (including JFK, RFK, MLK, and some leaders of the Black Panther Party) may have been politically motivated and carried out by highly conservative, organized, wealthy, powerful groups in our country, and he added “I hope I don’t sound like a crackpot”. I found that last statement very telling – not of him but of the state of our nation today. Our government and our corporate news media would (and does) indeed portray anyone making such statements as a crackpot – and that assessment would likely be accepted by many or most Americans. But to me it sounds absolutely absurd that anyone familiar with the history of our country would think of such ideas as being “crackpot”.

As I said before, I am not writing this to “run down America”, as Rudy Giuliani and all the other Republicans would undoubtedly accuse me of if they read this. Most or all nations have a dark side to their history. That is sadly the current state of the human race – evil mixed with good and even with heroism. We cannot change the past. So why forsake the “optimism” espoused by Ronald Reagan, Rudy Giuliani, George W. Bush, and their ilk?

The bottom line is this: Though we cannot change the past, if we have the will to do so we can make the future better than the past. But we cannot do that if we refuse to learn from or to accept the past as it is, rather than as we would like to imagine it. That is, those who cannot learn from the past are doomed to repeat it – over and over again. With today’s modern weaponry that is not something that the world can afford.

The good majority of the American people know little of our dark history. Or to the extent that they do know about it they fail to acknowledge its meaning or they rationalize it to put their country in the best light.

Few Americans, past or present, have directly participated in the dark history summarized above. That history has been waged mostly by and for the benefit of a minority of wealthy and powerful Americans. But by hypocritically spouting “patriotic” slogans to justify their actions, those wealthy and powerful Americans have convinced (maybe “fooled” is a better word) most other Americans to act as passive enablers of their evil actions.


Relationship to the present day

The presidential administration of George W. Bush has taken our dark history to a new level. It is no longer sufficient to merely covertly overthrow the governments of the nations we wish to control. Now we must preemptively invade other nations on the mere suspicion that they may some day pose a threat to us.

As long as Americans are unable to recognize the dark side of their country they will be susceptible to all manner of tyranny.
As long as they adhere, against all evidence to the contrary, to the fairy tale version of their country that they learn about through their corporate news media, they will not recognize a tyrant even when he stares them right in the face.
When a George W. Bush tells them that we must go to war to “defend freedom” or “spread democracy” or whatever, they will readily believe him.
When their tyrant admits that he spies on millions of American citizens without obtaining a warrant as required by our laws and Constitution, but claims he is only doing it to protect them, they will believe him.
When their government strips its prisoners of all their human rights and tortures them, and justifies those actions by claiming that they’re the “worst of the worst”, even though they haven’t even been charged with a crime, Americans won’t see anything wrong with that reasoning.
When Americans go to vote on voting machines that count their votes in secret they won’t care about that because they know that elections cannot be stolen in the “Land of the Free”.

No, Chris Matthews and Rudy Giuliani and all you other Republicans – Ronald Reagan’s presidency was no “Morning in America”. Burying one’s head in the sand so that one can pretend that all is well does not make it morning. It just hastens the onset of tyranny.