Source: Replant the American Dream. “Your USA Today is The World’s Most Hated Nation”. Why?
Excellent article by Larry Romanoff I highly recommend it.
American Mythology
All nations have their myths or what can be considered a cosmology. America is no different except that it is more insidious and has been embraced as a religious belief that many believe is secular in nature since allegedly the “founders” believed in the “separation of Church and State”. Something that can be proven as a complete fallacy in Steven Newcomb’s excellent book Pagans in the Promised Land cited in my previous article.
Another book that shatters the national religion of “American Greatness” and that the nation is a “force for good in the world” is American Exceptionalism and American Innocence by Roberto Sirvent and Danny Haiphong.
Two books I’ll be reviewing along with several others that shatter the creation myth of America. One in particular that is alluded to in the above books is the one that we live in the “New World”. Actually the truth is that what is called America or Turtle Island by many of its indigenous residents is actually a very old world. One that saw the rise and fall of civilizations at least as old if not older than the Babylonians and Egyptians.
This fact is well documented in Charles Mann’s 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus.
Recently the current President rightly caused world wide outrage and received well justified opprobrium when he proposed destroying various religious and cultural sites in Iran which in ancient times known as Persia. Yet this is exactly what the US Government has been doing with indigenous religious and cultural sites here in America with the help of their corporate cronies pretty much since its inception.
Even worse they have defaced the sacred Black Hills of the Sioux with the monument to the four Indian Haters Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt! Yet the politically correct crowd that demands that every Civil War heroes statue be torn down has never once mentioned this desecration of a religious site.
Probably because the hagiography and iconography associated with Abraham Lincoln the man who allegedly “freed the slaves” and “saved the Union”.
Actually the indigenous author Mark Charles of Unsettling Truths has a few choice words to say about Lincoln’s legacy. How he ethically cleansed Minnesota of the Dakota, was responsible for the Sand Creek Massacre and the genocidal march of the Dine’ also known as the Navaho away from their homelands and into a stockade and prison under Kit Carson.
Greater detail of these shameful incidents are covered in his book and others that I’ll be reviewing in the near future such as David Stannard’s American Holocaust and Richard Drinnon’s Facing West; The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating & Empire Building . The title in the latter derived from Herman Melville’s book the Confidence Man. An insightful book that never got the recognition it deserved when compared to his classic novel Moby Dick.
There are also other reasons to question Lincoln’s legacy mentioned in other histories that accurately tell actual history instead of portraying Lincoln as some kind of savior and messiah. Some of these truths escape from the most unexpected places such as in the Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York. One memorable scene in particular is the bombardment of the city of New York by American Naval canons.
Was the evil Confederacy able to launch such a devastating attack? No. The truth is the Union’s Navy under Lincoln’s orders fired on the city because the residents protested against being conscripted for a war they had no interest in fighting.
One can say the “Great Emancipator” bombed his own people because they rejected another form of slavery known as conscription which dissipates the even greater myth that the Civil War was fought over slavery. Actually as many wars its basis was purely economic as Paul Craig Roberts points out in article How We Know The So-Called “Civil War” Was Not Over Slavery.
Slavery for Everybody
Again as Mark Charles and Soong-Chan Rah point out in Unsettling Truths, The Ongoing, Dehumanizing Legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery amongst others slavery continued after the Civil War under the disingenuous Thirteenth Amendment which says:
“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” (emphasis mine)
It doesn’t even say what a person has to be convicted of for this exception to kick in. For instance there are prisoners who have been convicted for such heinous “crimes” as possession of marijuana or for stealing a loaf of bread like Jean Val Jean in Victor Hugo’s classic Les Miserable which has been subverted into a musical thus losing much of its social intensity intended by the author or some other minor offense that has been intensified to “felonies” under various draconian “three strikes and your out” laws popular in so called “Law and Order” states such as the bastion of liberalism, California.
Also in many cases the person doesn’t even have to be convicted to be subjected to hard labor or more accurately corporate slavery while serving in County jail awaiting trial because he or she couldn’t afford bail.
I say “corporate slavery” because under that great progressive liberal President William Jefferson Clinton who’s darling wife referred to black youth as “super predators” turned many prisons over to the tender mercies of profit motivated corporations. Regressing or one could say progressing the prison system back to the days of Charles Dickens and debt prisons.
Slavery by any other name is still slavery to paraphrase Shakespeare.
Yet the myth that slavery was abolished after the Civil War and was the reason why it was fought is one of those endearing enduring myths that has been embraced by the American public at large despite all contrary evidence.
Just as the one that America was some “untamed wilderness” before the Pilgrims arrived and found nothing but “savage Indians” something that can be proven by archeological evidence and historical records to be absolutely false.
So Who Were the Real Savages?
Strange that the historical records are sparse on the alleged “savage” attacks by various Indian nations on the settler colonialists but replete with the settlers and the army’s own savagery against the various Indian nations. Even their own accounts show how they rejoiced in their savage total war against the indigenous population culminating with Wounded Knee.
Again I refer to the above books especially Stannard’s American Holocaust and Drinnon’s Facing West. Especially the latter because Drinnon shows how the savagery continues even today under the guise of bringing “freedom and democracy” and acting as a “force for good” throughout the world.
More dangerous myths.
America’s Lost War
I was reading an otherwise excellent book the other day actually with only minor flaw that I took up with one of the authors personally in a letter but it amounted to the premise that America has never lost a war and that’s what makes it dangerous.
My contention with the authors whom I both respect is that America has only given the impression that it has not lost a war which is a false image really. One perpetrated by the US Government itself particularly the Military to give other nations the aura of invincibility but in reality is not true.
For instance there have been various wars fought here with the Indigenous population that US Government lost that were ended by treaty. Two that immediately come to mind are the ones fought against Red Cloud and the Sioux and Cochise’s Chiricahua Apache where the Government sued for peace. Of course they violated the treaties made afterward but that’s another story.
Another one was the two Seminole wars fought neither ended with the Seminole surrendering to the US.
Internationally after the US defeated the Spanish in the Spanish American war and assumed control of the Philippines the Huks continued to fight and resist US occupation. Much the same as the Cubans did until they eventually gained their independence.
Then of course there is Vietnam, what would be considered a ignoble defeat much like Napoleon’s disastrous invasion of Russia. One that caused what George HW Bush called the “Vietnam Syndrome” in other words a more circumspect and more noninterventionist foreign policy. Not to fear though Bush would kick that “Vietnam syndrome in the butt” and get the US involved in a endless war in Iraq that has gone through its sequel already with his scion at the Nation’s helm and is now heading for another engagement with the Iraqi Government demanding that the US forces leave post haste.
This on top of the on going war that is now going into its second decade in the famous “boneyard of Empires” Afghanistan. One like Vietnam the brass has continued to give rosy estimates about but isn’t anywhere nearer to being won than when it first started.
The irony of the current low intensity war in Iraq is that it has continued almost as long after Bush jr. declared “Mission Accomplished” within the first two weeks. Yet if one looks at the US Casualty numbers never mind the number of Iraqis killed they actually increased after Bush declared victory!
So it is not necessarily true that the US has won every war it has fought. Not admitting defeat is not winning. It’s being deluded. Yet worse than being deluded about actually losing is claiming nonexistent “victories”. As in the case just mentioned with Iraq and in the more egregious case such as World War II.
America still claims that it defeated Nazi Germany while embracing much of its political philosophy by the way in regard to corporatism but I digress. The truth is that it was actually Russia then the Soviet Union that actually defeated Hitler’s Germany in what they call the Great Patriotic War at the decisive Battle of Stalingrad which basically destroyed the Germany’s Wehrmacht as a fighting force.
So the idea that America is invincible is also dangerous propaganda.
In this case the authors were trying to make the point that the victors write history which is true to an extent but there is another factor and that America has one of the most efficient propaganda engines in the world as well as a sales force that as the old saying goes could sell ice-cream to eskimos or the idea that America is the most “exceptional” nation on earth. One that is a “force for good”. One that win or lose makes America seem to come out on top. Thanks mainly to Edward Bernays the nephew of Sigmund Freud who was a master of the relatively new art of Public Relations who was able to make warmongering racist autocrats like Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson seem like real people.
Then of course there is or was Hollywood as well that helped in what is now called perception management. Making movies that justified the genocide of the indigenous population with such gems as “How the West was Won” and others portraying the Indians as “savages” and the “settlers” as victims of their “savagery” when historically the opposite was true.
The fact is even without the help of Eddie Bernays, Madison Avenue and Hollywood America always has had to portray itself as something different than it was. Such was the case with the War of “Independence”. The fact is that the revolution was well underway with fighting at Lexington, Concord and Bunker Hill before the so called “founders” wrote that deceptive document that stated “All men are created equal” yet in Orwellian Animal Farm style didn’t mention the fact that they considered some to be more equal than others and while claiming to be a secular Republic where Church and State were allegedly separated was in fact a Judaeo Christian theocracy that believed that it was in fact the New Israel which in reality was an extension British Israelism which has come to known as the Anglo-American Empire.
This is evident in the fact the the Supreme Court of this alleged “secular” Republic still upholds the racist religious Doctrine of Discovery that has not only used to abrogate treaties between the various Indian Nations in many case in direct violation of their own Constitution but has also given the justification for running amok and rampant around the world spreading “freedom and democracy” that is anything but.
So one can say that America has won and lost many wars but the biggest one was the War of Independence.
JOHN CHUCKMAN COMMENT: AMERICA’S DISTURBING MODERN HISTORY WITH IRAN – AND NOW WE CAN ADD STATE TERROR – A FEW WORDS ON MURDERED GENERAL QASEM SOLEIMANI – IRAQ IS ORDERING THE AMERICAN MILITARY OUT – A BIG STEP IF IT CAN BE ENFORCED AGAINST THOSE STILL HAPPILY STEALING OIL IN SYRIA – PUTIN’S REACTION TO THE SET OF THREATS AGAINST IRAN WILL BE IMPORTANT
I totally with Chuck’s assessment here. Nothing more to add except that what we are seeing is the end of US Imperialism.
John Chuckman
EXPANSION OF COMMENTS POSTED TO AN ARTICLE ON CBC NEWS
“Iran abandons nuclear deal limits as thousands mourn general killed by U.S.”
My total sympathy is with this ancient society, one of earth’s great cradles of civilization much like China or Egypt, and a modern country which has started no wars. They are a lovely people, but they have suffered a great deal from outside interference.
Since the Revolution of 1979, ending the Shah’s government, the United States has engaged in 40 years of pure hatred against Iran, and it has taken many ugly actions along the way, including encouraging and supplying Saddam Hussein’s Iraq during the terrible long war (1980-88) inflicted upon Iran.
About a million died, including thousands from the poison gas Iraq used heavily, know-how and components having been supplied from either the United States or one of its European allies. The ruthless…
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Veterans of the Deepstate Today
I started this blog sometime back as the echoic title of this blog suggests is basically a practice in free form writing about something that doesn’t fit into any particular category or to discuss a variety of topics without fully exploring them. Mostly just to let off steam or the use the more commonly used word these days to vent.
Actually for some time of been “venting” in the comments section of various alternative media publications which has pretty much been a waste of time especially on Veterans Today which might as well change its name to Common Cause since it seems to have totally gone in the tank with the Democrats and this travesty and circus that has been called an “impeachment” that is deceptively being done to cover up their chosen candidate’s crimes and corruption.
This should be evident to anyone who has an IQ higher than room temperature but obviously has eluded the senior editorial of Veterans Today who according to Gordon Duff support the effort which anyone can see is based on nothing but lies and obfuscations.
Worse the so called articles of impeachment support the illusion that Ukraine is an ally. One ridiculously involved in fighting Russia so “we” don’t have to.
Like that old joke about the Lone Ranger and Tonto being surrounded by hostile Indians. The Ranger turns to Tonto and says “Looks like we’re surrounded.” Tonto’s classic reply is “What do you mean by “we” white man?”
Supposedly according to Schiff’s star chamber Trump threatened to withhold funding from Zelensky the Ukrainian President if he didn’t reopen the investigation of corruption into a company known as Burista that has Hunter Biden on its board of directors who just happens to be son of Joseph Biden the Presidential Candidate mentioned earlier.
Of course there is no actual tangible evidence that Trump made such threat nor carried it out. Since no investigation of Burista’s corrupt activities was continued and Ukraine received funding. So where’s the beef?
The fact that Trump never received no quid pro quo should prove to anyone other than a complete moron that there wasn’t any abuse of power. The fact is that even it was intended or implied it never happened.
Trump may have less than happy to have released the funds but he released them anyway. Yet it seems that he wasn’t enthusiastic enough by their lights to support an “ally” in need. One that aligns itself with the terrorist state of Israel by the way.
So for the last several months while Americans are starving in the streets, as the infrastructure crumbles and a large percentage of Americans can’t afford healthcare, never mind a home. “Our” representatives in congress have been trying to pin what amounts to a thought crime on the duly elected president.
Rubbing ironic salt on the gaping wound irony here they also charged him with “obstructing justice” by refusing to cooperate with the “committee” or more accurately inquisition . Something like charging a condemned man with “obstructing justice” by refusing to help construct his own gallows.
Yet this abuse of the Constitution and travesty of justice seems to be totally fine with the senior staff over at Veterans Today. In fact Gordon Duff seems to be it’s biggest cheerleader. A man who thinks that Mena was only an airport in Arkansas and that the Clintons never did anything wrong and that anyone who questions his divine wisdom must be an “Israeli Troll”.
A conclusion that is almost as ridiculous as this hoax they call an “impeachment’.
Maybe should call themselves Veterans of the Deepstate.
UK Professor Under Probe for Claiming Israel, ‘Zionists in US Gov’ Behind 9/11
So much for academic freedom in what has ironically been called the “Free West”. Reading this recent article tells us that the UK has become Orwell’s “Airstrip One” not for America but the Israelis. Seems in Britain one can be investigated for stating what has become increasing evident once one stops believing the fairy tale about box cutter wielding terrorists hijackers not only able to circumvent airport security but also the entire North Eastern Air Defense Network and fly their Boeing Seven Series planes with great skill into three out of four selected after a few flying lessons. Not only that but magically penetrate their aluminum and plastic composite planes into high tempered steel girders and box beams like “a hot knife through butter” while igniting fires that brought down three of the highest towers while only hitting two of them.
The fact is that all evidence points to Israel’s involvement in Operation 9/11 from the five dancing Israelis to the Israeli Art Students and the gleeful response of Bibi Netanyahu who was almost dancing over the graves of three thousand Americans buried in the radioactive rubble of “ground zero” which was a term only used at the time to describe the area above or below a Nuclear explosion.
Yet now it seems that any mention of these obvious facts in jolly old England will cause someone to be accused of being “anti-semitic”.
Just as anyone opposing the various wars America is now involved in at the behest of Israel is accused of being “Anti-American”.
The same nation that aside from their involvement in 9/11 attacked one of our ships while sailing in International waters killing thirty eight crew members and injuring over a hundred. In other words doing far worse than what Johnson claimed the North Vietnamese did in the Gulf of Tonkin before unleashing the full force of the US Military on that tiny nation and dropping more bombs on them than were ever dropped in World War II
Yet despite their perfidy Israel is still considered our “greatest ally” in the Middle East to the tune of thirty eight billion dollars a year that they use to kill innocent Palestinians and spy on and harass American students who object to their blatant violations of civil rights.
With “friends” like that who needs ENEMIES!
(National) Social(ist) Media, Twitter, Facebook, Youtube and the Google Gestapo
Anyone who isn’t living under a rock and is somewhat conversant with the Internet such as it is these days knows that Twitter, Facebook, Youtube and now even Vimeo is on some kind of censoring jihad. They say that they are removing individuals for being “uncivil” and “insensitive” and now “anti-Semitic” while various other posters i.e. the ones who fantasize assassinating the president, raping his wife and molesting his children are allowed to stay for some reason by those silly con artists.
Seems like a double standard to me.
Of course if it wasn’t for double standards it seems that the naked emperors of the Internet wouldn’t have any standards at all. One looks at who’ve they’ve censored so far and it is pretty much all voices on the left and right who are exposing the deep state narrative for the lie that it actually is and has nothing to do with civility, insensitivity or “anti-Semitism” which has been redefined as any criticism of the state of Israel and their genocidal actions under the shibboleth of “self defense” against the Palestinians and any other unarmed populace be it Moslem, Christian or Jew in the Middle East that they consider a threat to their “National Security”.
We live in interesting times.
For instance Gab, Twitters biggest competitor has been shut down even though those who contribute specifically are admonished against posting violent, threatening or inciting posts. Something that some on Twitter do and continue as a matter of course.
I can’t count the number of times that Twitter has allowed tweets that promote violence, threaten certain individuals or groups or incite hatred against them but if I did and had a dime for every one I’d probably be a billionaire by now. Just like the clowns who currently run the Social Media circus right now specifically Facebook and Twitter.
It’s easy to see that this has nothing to do with creating a more civil and friendly Internet and everything to do with social control. Specifically controlling the narrative.
Interesting that despite the fact that the shooter in Philadelphia was a constant user of Facebook and Twitter and even made threats while on there. It was Gab where his account was practically dormant that was censored.
Of course anyone who proposes that there is a two tiered “Justice” system here in America would be accused of being a “conspiracy theorist”. Yet there is Hillary Clinton who has done more to violate and damage National Security as Secretary of State using a home brew server than any other employer of the US Government yet is allowed to walk because her grossly negligent actions in direct violation of the Espionage Act were considered “extremely careless”.
Yes mince a few words and the guilty walk free.
But I digress. The social media giants and Google have been caught red handed for direct involvement in various crimes, such as human trafficking, child prostitution and selling users personal information to criminals. Not to mention other insidious crimes like trying to undermine democratic elections here and overthrow a democratically elected regimes. Not just in other countries but here as well. An act that would be considered Treason according to the Constitution.
Think about that.
