Democracy has never existed in the United States. A de facto aristocracy has dominated our constitutional republic dating back to the Continental Congress. Capitalism is a brutal, pitiless economic system that encourages and rewards greed, selfishness, exploitation, and annihilation of the competition.
Obsessed with materialism, conspicuous consumption, convenience, physical appearance, and winning, many Americans gorge themselves on the abundant fruits of Capitalism, oblivious to the fact that billions of human beings live in abject poverty and misery to make their feast possible.
America is a nation of the wealthy, by the wealthy and for the wealthy. Its ruling elite class is buttressed by the poor and working people who have been rendered politically impotent by the allure of conspicuous consumption (which further enriches the elite), the illusion of democracy, and the extremely remote possibility that one of them could be the next Bill Gates.
Running out of real estate (and victims)
Overthrow captures the essence of the zeitgeist in America in the late Nineteenth Century with an apt quote from American historian Frederick Jackson Turner:
"For nearly three centuries the dominant fact in American life has been expansion. With the settlement of the Pacific Coast and the occupation of the free lands, this movement has come to a check. That these energies of expansion will no longer operate would be a rash prediction; and the demands for a vigorous foreign policy, for an inter-oceanic canal, for a revival of our power upon the seas, and for the extension of American influence to outlying islands and adjoining countries, are indications that the movement will continue."
According to Kinzer's historical analysis, the United States cut its imperial fangs on Mexico in the 1840's, but Hawaii marked America's initial push beyond the North American continent. Two American missionaries, Amos Starr Cooke and Samuel Castle zealously worked to convert native Hawaiian "savages" into "civilized" Christians, but eventually abandoned their missionary work for the profits of the sugar trade. Cooke and Castle were the fathers of the White American aristocracy in Hawaii. This group eventually came to wield powerful economic and political influence on the islands by virtue of the huge sugar plantations they owned. Manipulation of a pliable Hawaiian monarch whom they had educated enabled them to engineer land reform which stripped indigenous people of their traditional communal form of land ownership.
On January 17, 1893 the Marines landed in Hawaii with a small contingency. In a bloodless coup, the 6220 Whites (on an archipelago populated by 41,000 native Hawaiians and 28,000 Asian laborers) seized control of the government and appointed none other than Sanford Dole (cousin to pineapple magnate James Dole) to lead. By 1897 the United States had formally annexed Hawaii.
Remember the Maine".And a few hundred thousand Filipinos
Fueled by the mainstream media lie that Spain had caused an explosion aboard the USS Maine, a battleship President McKinley had dispatched to Cuba in 1898, the United States declared war on Spain, won, and quickly acquired Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines in the process. Despite the Teller Amendment in which Americans had promised Cuban sovereignty, President McKinley justified American rule of Cuba through the "law of belligerent right over conquered territory." The Platt Amendment eventually became the US tool to give outward appearances of Cuban autonomy without actually ceding full self-determination.
Having defeated Spain in the Philippines, Americans encountered another enemy. It seems the indigenous people were prepared to forcefully resist their new masters. Viewing the Philippines as crucial to its business interests in Asia, the United States fought vigorously to retain its new colony. Sending an occupation force of 126,000 (eerily similar to the number of troops in Iraq), America suffered fewer than 5,000 casualties. At least 16,000 Filipino troops and 250,000 civilians were slaughtered by the United States military. Rampant and blatant atrocities committed by American soldiers were white-washed by a compliant mainstream media and farcical Senate hearings in which Henry Cabot Lodge justified American torture, cruelty and murder by characterizing Filipinos as "semi-civilized people with all the tendencies and characteristics of Asiatics."
Better dead than red? Not necessarily".
Throughout its history as an imperial power, the perpetuation of United States corporate interests abroad has been its primary motivation. However, no analysis of America's malignant impact on the world would be complete without addressing its fixation with crushing movements and governments showing even a hint of Socialist or Communist tendencies.
Champions of American Capitalism triumphantly proclaim that the totalitarian and barbaric regimes of Stalin and Mao are "absolute proof" that any socioeconomic system based on "leftist" ideologies dooms its people to torture, despotism, and mass murder. Stalin and Mao were indeed murderous dictators, but the evolution of their regimes do not negate the possibility of a socioeconomic system placing a reasonable degree of power in the hands of the working class and affording a more equitable distribution of wealth.
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