America's Blinders
By Howard Zinn
The Progressive
April 2006 Issue
<http://progressive.org/mag_zinn0406>
Now that most Americans no longer believe in the war, now that they no
longer trust Bush and his Administration, now that the evidence of
deception has become overwhelming (so overwhelming that even the major
media, always late, have begun to register indignation), we might ask:
How come so many people were so easily fooled?
The question is important because it might help us understand why
Americans--members of the media as well as the ordinary citizen--rushed
to declare their support as the President was sending troops halfway
around the world to Iraq.
A small example of the innocence (or obsequiousness, to be more exact)
of the press is the way it reacted to Colin Powell's presentation in
February 2003 to the Security Council, a month before the invasion, a
speech which may have set a record for the number of falsehoods told in
one talk. In it, Powell confidently rattled off his "evidence":
satellite photographs, audio records, reports from informants, with
precise statistics on how many gallons of this and that existed for
chemical warfare. The New York Times was breathless with admiration.
The Washington Post editorial was titled "Irrefutable" and declared
that after Powell's talk "it is hard to imagine how anyone could doubt
that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction."
It seems to me there are two reasons, which go deep into our national
culture, and which help explain the vulnerability of the press and of
the citizenry to outrageous lies whose consequences bring death to tens
of thousands of people. If we can understand those reasons, we can
guard ourselves better against being deceived.
One is in the dimension of time, that is, an absence of historical
perspective. The other is in the dimension of space, that is, an
inability to think outside the boundaries of nationalism. We are penned
in by the arrogant idea that this country is the center of the
universe, exceptionally virtuous, admirable, superior.
If we don't know history, then we are ready meat for carnivorous
politicians and the intellectuals and journalists who supply the
carving knives. I am not speaking of the history we learned in school,
a history subservient to our political leaders, from the much-admired
Founding Fathers to the Presidents of recent years. I mean a history
which is honest about the past. If we don't know that history, then any
President can stand up to the battery of microphones, declare that we
must go to war, and we will have no basis for challenging him. He will
say that the nation is in danger, that democracy and liberty are at
stake, and that we must therefore send ships and planes to destroy our
new enemy, and we will have no reason to disbelieve him.
But if we know some history, if we know how many times Presidents have
made similar declarations to the country, and how they turned out to be
lies, we will not be fooled. Although some of us may pride ourselves
that we were never fooled, we still might accept as our civic duty the
responsibility to buttress our fellow citizens against the mendacity of
our high officials.
We would remind whoever we can that President Polk lied to the nation
about the reason for going to war with Mexico in 1846. It wasn't that
Mexico "shed American blood upon the American soil," but that Polk, and
the slave-owning aristocracy, coveted half of Mexico.
We would point out that President McKinley lied in 1898 about the
reason for invading Cuba, saying we wanted to liberate the Cubans from
Spanish control, but the truth is that we really wanted Spain out of
Cuba so that the island could be open to United Fruit and other
American corporations. He also lied about the reasons for our war in
the Philippines, claiming we only wanted to "civilize" the Filipinos,
while the real reason was to own a valuable piece of real estate in the
far Pacific, even if we had to kill hundreds of thousands of Filipinos
to accomplish that.
President Woodrow Wilson--so often characterized in our history books
as an "idealist"--lied about the reasons for entering the First World
War, saying it was a war to "make the world safe for democracy," when
it was really a war to make the world safe for the Western imperial
powers.
Harry Truman lied when he said the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima
because it was "a military target."
Everyone lied about Vietnam--Kennedy about the extent of our
involvement, Johnson about the Gulf of Tonkin, Nixon about the secret
bombing of Cambodia, all of them claiming it was to keep South Vietnam
free of communism, but really wanting to keep South Vietnam as an
American outpost at the edge of the Asian continent.
Reagan lied about the invasion of Grenada, claiming falsely that it was
a threat to the United States.
The elder Bush lied about the invasion of Panama, leading to the death
of thousands of ordinary citizens in that country.
And he lied again about the reason for attacking Iraq in 1991--hardly
to defend the integrity of Kuwait (can one imagine Bush heartstricken
over Iraq's taking of
Kuwait?), rather to assert U.S. power in the oil-rich Middle East.
Given the overwhelming record of lies told to justify wars, how could
anyone listening to the younger Bush believe him as he laid out the
reasons for invading Iraq? Would we not instinctively rebel against the
sacrifice of lives for oil?
A careful reading of history might give us another safeguard against
being deceived. It would make clear that there has always been, and is
today, a profound conflict of interest between the government and the
people of the United States. This thought startles most people, because
it goes against everything we have been taught.
We have been led to believe that, from the beginning, as our Founding
Fathers put it in the Preamble to the Constitution, it was "we the
people" who established the new government after the Revolution. When
the eminent historian Charles Beard suggested, a hundred years ago,
that the Constitution represented not the working people, not the
slaves, but the slaveholders, the merchants, the bondholders, he became
the object of an indignant editorial in The New York Times.
Our culture demands, in its very language, that we accept a commonality
of interest binding all of us to one another. We mustn't talk about
classes. Only Marxists do that, although James Madison, "Father of the
Constitution," said, thirty years before Marx was born that there was
an inevitable conflict in society between those who had property and
those who did not.
Our present leaders are not so candid. They bombard us with phrases
like "national interest," "national security," and "national defense"
as if all of these concepts applied equally to all of us, colored or
white, rich or poor, as if General Motors and Halliburton have the same
interests as the rest of us, as if George Bush has the same interest as
the young man or woman he sends to war.
Surely, in the history of lies told to the population, this is the
biggest lie. In the history of secrets, withheld from the American
people, this is the biggest secret: that there are classes with
different interests in this country. To ignore that--not to know that
the history of our country is a history of slaveowner against slave,
landlord against tenant, corporation against worker, rich against
poor--is to render us helpless before all the lesser lies told to us by
people in power.
If we as citizens start out with an understanding that these people up
there--the President, the Congress, the Supreme Court, all those
institutions pretending to be "checks and balances"--do not have our
interests at heart, we are on a course towards the truth. Not to know
that is to make us helpless before determined liars.
The deeply ingrained belief--no, not from birth but from the
educational system and from our culture in general--that the United
States is an especially virtuous nation makes us especially vulnerable
to government deception. It starts early, in the first grade, when we
are compelled to "pledge allegiance" (before we even know what that
means), forced to proclaim that we are a nation with "liberty and
justice for all."
And then come the countless ceremonies, whether at the ballpark or
elsewhere, where we are expected to stand and bow our heads during the
singing of the "Star-Spangled Banner," announcing that we are "the land
of the free and the home of the brave." There is also the unofficial
national anthem "God Bless America," and you are looked on with
suspicion if you ask why we would expect God to single out this one
nation--just 5 percent of the world's population--for his or her
blessing.
If your starting point for evaluating the world around you is the firm
belief that this nation is somehow endowed by Providence with unique
qualities that make it morally superior to every other nation on Earth,
then you are not likely to question the President when he says we are
sending our troops here or there, or bombing this or that, in order to
spread our values--democracy, liberty, and let's not forget free
enterprise--to some God-forsaken (literally) place in the world.
It becomes necessary then, if we are going to protect ourselves and our
fellow citizens against policies that will be disastrous not only for
other people but for Americans too, that we face some facts that
disturb the idea of a uniquely virtuous nation.
These facts are embarrassing, but must be faced if we are to be honest.
We must face our long history of ethnic cleansing, in which millions of
Indians were driven off their land by means of massacres and forced
evacuations. And our long history, still not behind us, of slavery,
segregation, and racism. We must face our record of imperial conquest,
in the Caribbean and in the Pacific, our shameful wars against small
countries a tenth our size: Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Afghanistan,
Iraq. And the lingering memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is not a
history of which we can be proud.
Our leaders have taken it for granted, and planted that belief in the
minds of many people, that we are entitled, because of our moral
superiority, to dominate the world. At the end of World War II, Henry
Luce, with an arrogance appropriate to the owner of Time, Life, and
Fortune, pronounced this "the American century," saying that victory in
the war gave the United States the right "to exert upon the world the
full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by
such means as we see fit."
Both the Republican and Democratic parties have embraced this notion.
George Bush, in his Inaugural Address on January 20, 2005, said that
spreading liberty around the world was "the calling of our time." Years
before that, in 1993, President Bill Clinton, speaking at a West Point
commencement, declared: "The values you learned here . . . will be able
to spread throughout this country and throughout the world and give
other people the opportunity to live as you have lived, to fulfill your
God-given capacities."
What is the idea of our moral superiority based on? Surely not on our
behavior toward people in other parts of the world. Is it based on how
well people in the United States live? The World Health Organization in
2000 ranked countries in terms of overall health performance, and the
United States was thirty-seventh on the list, though it spends more per
capita for health care than any other nation. One of five children in
this, the richest country in the world, is born in poverty. There are
more than forty countries that have better records on infant mortality.
Cuba does better. And there is a sure sign of sickness in society when
we lead the world in the number of people in prison--more than two
million.
A more honest estimate of ourselves as a nation would prepare us all
for the next barrage of lies that will accompany the next proposal to
inflict our power on some other part of the world. It might also
inspire us to create a different history for ourselves, by taking our
country away from the liars and killers who govern it, and by rejecting
nationalist arrogance, so that we can join the rest of the human race
in the common cause of peace and justice.
Howard Zinn is the co-author, with Anthony Arnove, of "Voices of a
People's History of the United States."
This email was forwarded to you by:
Tom Lash
Coastal Convergence Society
Huntington Beach, CA
714-964-2162
Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Website: http://tokyoprogressive.org.uk/~ccshbca/
Mark Hull-Richter, U.S. Citizen & Patriot
U.S.A. - From democracy to kakistocracy in one fell coup.
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution
inevitable." - JFK
http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0416-01.htm
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