Friday, May 24, 2019

The Spotless Minds

“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:
1.    Wesley Clark, former NATO commander, pointed out that the 2001 U.S. plan to intervene or overthrow governments in 7 countries in the middle-east and north Africa happened by 2007.
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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