The Crimes Of This Guilty Land

"Ignorance Is Bliss" scene from the 1999 film The Matrix 

YouTube video posted by imteddygammell

Excerpts below from Lies My Teacher Told Me by James W. Loewen, published by Simon & Schuster, 2007:

"I had once believed that we were all masters of our fate - that we could mould our lives into any form we pleased. ... I had overcome deafness and blindness sufficiently to be happy, and I supposed that anyone could come out victorious if he threw himself valiantly into life's struggle. But as I went more and more about the country I learned that I had spoken with assurance on a subject I knew little about. I forgot that I owed my success partly to the advantages of my birth and environment. ... Now, however, I learned that the power to rise in the world is not within the reach of everyone." - Helen Keller

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This notion that "we" advanced peoples provided for the Natives, exactly the converse of the truth, is not benign. It reemerges time and again in our history to complicate race relations. For example, we are told that white plantation owners furnished food and medical care for their slaves, yet every shred of food, shelter, and clothing on the plantations was raised, built, woven, or paid for by black labor. Today Americans believe as part of our political understanding of the world that we are the most generous nation on earth in terms of foreign aid, overlooking the fact that the net dollar flow from almost every Third World nation runs toward the United States.

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This process of rationalization became unofficial national policy after the War of 1812. In 1845 William Gilmore Simms wrote, "Our blinding prejudices ... have been fostered as necessary to justify the reckless and unsparing hand with which we have smitten [American Indians] in their habitations and expelled them from their country." In 1871 Francis A. Walker, Commissioner of Indian Affairs, considered American Indians beneath morality: "When dealing with savage men, as with savage beasts, no question of national honor can arise." Whatever action the United States cared to take "is solely a question of expediency." Thus, cognitive dissonance destroyed our national idealism. From 1815 on, instead of spreading democracy, we exported the ideology of white supremacy. Gradually we sought American hegemony over Mexico, the Philippines, much of the Caribbean basin, and, indirectly, over other nations. Although European nations professed to be shocked by our actions on the western frontier, before long they were emulating us. Britain exterminated most Tasmanian aborigines; Germany pursued total war against the Herrero of Namibia. Most western nations have yet to face this history. Ironically, Adolf Hitler displayed more knowledge of how we treated Native Americans than American high schoolers today who rely on their textbooks. Hitler admired our concentration camps for American Indians in the west and according to John Toland, his biographer, "often praised to his inner circle the efficiency of America's extermination - by starvation and uneven combat" as the model for his extermination of Jews and Gypsies (Rom people).

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"I John Brown am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away, but with blood." - John Brown

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... Thus schools have put into practice Woodrow Wilson's recommendation: "We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class of necessity in every society, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks."

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Why leave our involvement open to question? Historians know that the CIA had earlier joined with ITT to try to defeat Allende in the 1970 elections. Failing this, the United States sought to disrupt the Chilean economy and bring down Allende's government. The United States blocked international loans to Chile, subsidized opposition newspapers, labor unions, and political parties, denied spare parts to industries, paid for and fomented a nationwide truckers' strike that paralyzed the Chilean economy, and trained and financed the military that staged the bloody coup in 1973 in which Allende was killed. The next year, CIA Director William Colby testified that "a secret high-level intelligence committee led by Kissinger himself had authorized CIA expenditures of over eight million dollars during the period 1970-73 to 'destabilize' the government of President Allende." Secretary of State Kissinger himself later explained, "I don't see why we have to let a country go Marxist just because its people are irresponsible." Since the Chilean people's "irresponsibility" consisted of voting for Allende, here Kissinger openly says that the United States should not and will not respect the electoral process or sovereignty of another country if the results do not please us.

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Even in the 1960s Hoover remained an avowed white supremacist who thought the 1954 Supreme Court decision outlawing racial segregation in Brown v. Board of Education was a terrible error. He helped Kentucky prosecute a Caucasian civil rights leader, Carl Braden, for selling a house in a white neighborhood to a black family. In August 1963 Hoover initiated a campaign to destroy Martin Luther King Jr., and the civil rights movement. With the approval of Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, he tapped the telephones of King's associates, bugged King's hotel rooms, and made tape recordings of King's conversations with and about women. The FBI then passed on the lurid details, including photographs, transcripts, and tapes, to Senator Strom Thurmond and other white supremacists, reporters, labor leaders, foundation administrators, and, of course, the president. In 1964 a high FBI administrator sent a tape recording of King having sex, along with an anonymous note suggesting that King kill himself, to the office of King's organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). The FBI must have known that the incident might not actually persuade King to commit suicide; the bureau's intention was apparently to get Coretta Scott King to divorce her husband or to blackmail King into abandoning the civil rights movement. ...

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... My Lai was the most famous instance of what John Kerry, formerly of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, now U.S. senator, called "not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command." Appearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in April 1971, Kerry said, "Over one hundred and fifty honorably discharged and many very highly decorated veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia." He went on to retell how American troops "had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam." All this was "in addition to the normal ravage of war," as Kerry pointed out in his testimony.

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... Even more important to understanding 9/11 were our actions in Iran. Chapter 8 tells of our repeated interventions on behalf of the shah, interventions that explain that country's enmity toward us today. The Iranian Revolution that overthrew the shah is key to the subsequent history of the Middle East. ... Just as we supported the shah in Iran in the 1970s, we cast our lot today with repressive regimes in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Egypt, Uzbekistan, and elsewhere, which prompts most Arabs and many other Muslims to consider the United States "a great hypocrite," in the words of historian Scott Appleby. We preach democracy while supporting dictatorships.

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... Economics played an even more obvious role. Many of the Bush family's friends have long been involved in the construction of the oil industry and armed forces projects. In April 2003, the Bush administration put the international community on notice that U.S. companies and government agencies, not those of other nations, would rebuild Iraq. To no one's surprise, Vice President Cheney's former firm, Halliburton, has gotten more government money for this rebuilding than any other company - and has been charged with more fraud and malfeasance. Meanwhile, Cheney continues to receive $150,000 a year in deferred compensation from Halliburton and has stock options worth more than $18 million in it. Conversely, to help ensure Cheney's reelection and that of his allies, Halliburton funneled more than half a million dollars to the Republican Party.

... If anyone still doubted that oil played a key role, in 2007 Dow Jones announced that Iraq's puppet parliament was considering a law "which the U.S. government has been helping to craft" that would give giant Western oil companies thirty-year contracts to extract Iraqi oil. Moreover, 75 percent of the profits in the early years would go to the foreign companies, compared to an average of 10 percent in other oil-producing countries.

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... "If our sources of energy are not infinite, which seems likely since we live on a finite planet, then at some point we will run up against shortages." ... Given these circumstances, most social and natural scientists concluded from the 1973 energy crisis that we cannot blithely maintain our economic growth forever. "Anyone having the slightest familiarity with the physics of heat, energy, and matter," wrote Mishan in 1977, "will realize that, in terms of historical time, the end of economic growth, as we currently experience it, cannot be that far off." This is largely because of the awesome power of compound interest. Economic growth at 3 percent, a conventional standard, means that the economy doubles every quarter-century, typically doubling society's use of raw materials, expenditures of energy, and generation of waste.

The energy crises of 1973 and 1979 pointed to the difficulty that capitalism, a marvelous system of production, was never designed to accommodate shortage. ...

... Because the economy has become global, the commons now encompasses the entire planet. If we consider that around the world humans owned ten times as many cars in 1990 as 1950, no sane observer would predict that such a proportional increase could or should continue for another forty years. According to Jared Diamond, in 2005 the average American consumed thirty-two times as much of the world's largesse and produced thirty-two times as much pollution as the average Third World citizen. Our continued economic development coexists in some tension with the corollary of the archetype of progress: the notion that America's cause is the cause of all humankind. Thus, our economic leadership is very different from our political leadership. Politically, we can hope other nations will put in place our forms of democracy and respect for civil liberties. Economically, we can only hope other nations will never achieve our standard of living, for if they did, the earth would become a desert. Economically, we are the bane, not the hope of the world. Since the planet is finite, as we expand our economy we make it less likely that less developed nations can expand theirs.  Today, increasing demand for fuel for Chinese vehicles is already creating a worldwide oil shortage.