“American
Exceptionalism and American Innocence – A People’s History of Fake News-From
the Revolutionary War to the War on Terror,” by R. Sirvent
and D. Haiphong, 2019
This book
was written for new activists. It is
not about how the bourgeois press covers U.S. politics, domestic or
international. It is a brief political history
of the U.S.
from a left-wing point of view, up to the Trump administration – so actually past
the ‘war on terror.’
 |
| For new activists |
The focus
is on the colonial and imperialist character of the U.S. – topics that exist outside
the mainstream of Republican and Democratic party thought. The authors argue
against the idea that the U.S.
is the most exceptional country in history, something put forward by corporate politicians
and media to this day. This is the
elixir that allows repeated crimes by the U.S. to be committed, unseen or
unremembered. As such, it enables an
essential political innocence for the population, especially some citizens of pink and beige skin. Spotless minds, as
they say.
The usual
issues are taken up – native American genocide, African-American slavery and
the dark sides of the American revolution, WWII and Korea. The authors discuss Charlottesville, the
‘meritocracy’ and black wealth; imperialism and Black Lives Matter; U.S.
inequality; the NFL and black labor; U.S. military involvement in Africa;
‘human rights’ hypocrisy; white saviors; the Russia-gate diversion; the failure
of the ‘politics of inclusion’ under Obama; the faltering nation-state and its’
borders and finally, the repressive role of the U.S. military.
Quite a lot
of topics. There is a certain amount of
repetition and mixing of topics within chapters. There are 50 pages of end notes listing the
quotes used, as they frequently quote other writers. The
style is rhetorical. The book is
inspired by the history of black radicalism in the 1960s and 1970s. This is not
a book for people who have covered these topics before, as nearly all of this
will be familiar to them. It is a book
for people who are unfamiliar with the topics of imperialism, racism and
colonialism as they relate to the U.S.
Of most
interest to me was the current Democratic Party strategy of identity
‘inclusion’ – even into the most repressive institutions in the U.S. – the
police, the military, corporate board rooms and the Democratic and Republican parties themselves. ‘Inclusion’ means for instance celebrating
browner people having roles in those institutions, while at the same time those
institutions shape them. Ultimately the
skin color, gender, sexual orientation, religion, nationality and even class of
those included can no longer matter, as they carry out the role the institution has
for them. Inclusion puts a smiley face …
on what
the author’s call ‘racial capitalism.’
‘Fun’ facts
from the book:
2. The original native-American
population of the U.S.
was about 15M. By 1890 fewer than 250k
still lived on just 3% of the land.
3. The white-supremacist legal system
in the U.S.
under Jim Crow inspired Hitler to create his own.
4. During the Korean War, the U.S. leveled
large parts of 18 of 22 northern cities and blew up every large dam. Dracarys!
5. The founder of Citibank became the
richest man in the U.S.
through trading slaves from New York to Cuba.
6. “Oprah Winfrey has accumulated a
billon-dollar fortune by prescribing individualist solutions for systemic
problems.”
7. Black Lives Matter sent delegates to
Palestine – an
example of ‘black internationalism.’
8. A 1999 jury in Memphis concluded that MLK’s assassination
was the work of various government agencies.
(See book reviews of the MLK
killing below.)
9. Matt Taibbi describing an NFL
draft: “creepy slave-auction vibe with
armies of drooling, flesh-peddling scouts…”
10. “…more
wealth leaves Africa than enters it, by a
figure of more than $40B.”
11. $18B
of the $32B in ‘aid’ to Africa in 2015 was
used to pay outstanding interest to corporate lenders.
12. Dambisa
Moyo: “China treats Africans not as
charity cases but business partners.”
13. Gaddafi
presented a plan to the African Union for an African military alliance and a currency
independent of the U.S. dollar - right before Libya was bombed by NATO.
14. Vice
Admiral Moeller said that AFRICOM’s true purpose is to maintain “a free flow of
natural resources from Africa to the global
market.” (AFRICOM is the U.S. military organization in Africa.)
15. U.S. nuclear arsenal contains almost
7,000 nuclear weapons.
16. 5
corporations control 90% of U.S.
media.
17. Most
NGO’s are an arm of U.S.
policy. In Haiti,
the “NGO Republic,” the NGOs number between 3,000
and 10,000 and almost run the country.
18. The
Clinton’s role in Haiti: Discouraged domestic food production; helped
with coup against Aristide; aid money used to build hotels; opposed a
minimum wage increase.
19. Even
Jimmy Carter called the U.S.
an ‘oligarchy.’
20. In
2017, Rachel Maddow spent 53% of her show talking about Russia-gate.
21. One-quarter
of all Democratic Party challengers in the 2018 midterms were former State
Department, military or national security intelligence operatives.
22. By
2014 Obama had transferred ¾ of a billion dollars in military weaponry to
police departments.
23. The
increase of ‘black faces in high places’ has not changed the condition of the U.S. black
proletariat.
24. Clinton recruited 50 GOP officials,
billionaires and national security hawks to her campaign in 2016.
25. “The
concept of inclusion has fit nicely into the neo-liberal framework of
individualism and meritocracy.”
Trump is
dealt with as an extreme symptom of “American” exceptionalism, but not the
cause. His case as a corrupt capitalist and vicious white nationalist is clear.
Other books
on this topic reviewed below, use blog search box, upper left: “American
Theocracy,” “The Open Veins of Latin America,” “The Secret History of the
American Empire,” “Why the U.S.
Will Never be a Social Democracy,” “Whitewash of the Vietnam War,” “Land
Grabbing,” “There Is Only One Race,” “How to Kill a City” and “MLK.”
And I
bought it at May Day Books!
Red Frog
May 24,
2019
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