Book summary: American exceptionalism and American innocence

Summary: American Exceptionalism and American Innocence?examines the stories we’re told that lead us to think that the U.S. is a force for good in the world, regardless of slavery, the genocide of indigenous people, and the more than a century’s worth of imperialist war that the U.S. has wrought on the planet.

Sirvent and Haiphong detail just what Captain America’s shield tells us about the pretensions of U.S. foreign policy, how Angelina Jolie and Bill Gates engage in humanitarian imperialism, and why the Broadway musical?Hamilton?is a monument to white supremacy.

American imperialism

Competing interests among Western capitalist nations in Europe, Africa, and Asia led to World War I. The American capitalist class benefited from the imperial division of the world by laying the foundations for its own empire. While Europe scrambled to colonize Asia and Africa,

American enterprise invaded lands East, West, and South of its border. Large territories of French Louisiana, Mexico, and South America came under the economic and political dominion of the U.S. empire as it awaited the time where it could compete with the older European empires.

And like the genocide of Indigenous nations and the enslavement of Africans that created the foundations of European empire, the American ascent into the realm of imperialist power relied on state violence.

Untold numbers of people were killed under the same banner of “Manifest Destiny” that presupposed American civilization superior to that of “backward” people residing in Mexico, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines.

The Monroe Doctrine declared South America an extension of the American Republic and thus gave the U.S. government the right to “defend” South American nations and peoples from European colonization.

American exceptionalism was thus adjusted to fit the global vision of American politicians and businessmen who saw expansion as a necessary precondition to the preservation of the American way of life.

America's savior complex

The savior complex inherent to the ideology of American exceptionalism was altered to justify the assumption of control over nations and regions of the world thought of as European colonial domain. American influence abroad would not only protect the interests of the American people but also people living in all corners of the globe.

American democracy, according to the American political and economic establishment, was a civilizing order destined for world dominance.

The Second World War is a prime example of the ways in which American exceptionalism has shaped historical memory by divorcing it from material reality. Said differently, American exceptionalism and innocence are not merely ideas, but also weapons.

The notion of American superiority masks the realities of U.S. policy and thus detracts us from a true understanding of the system that designs such policy. American exceptionalism and innocence are connected in that the presumption of the U.S. as an “Empire of Liberty” and arbiter of “democracy” deifies its existence and absolves the U.S. of its crimes.

So why do so many Americans still cling to the idea that the United States saved the world? Perhaps it reflects the fact that the United States cannot claim any positive role in any other war. In addition, the U.S. had the advantage of becoming the most prosperous capitalist economy shortly after. This excites people. It gets them thinking it could happen again.

Of course, this is not to deny that individual soldiers in the battlefields may have had virtuous motives for fighting in the war.

But it is to say that the United States may not be as benevolent, exceptional, or innocent as we once thought.

In the 1930s the United States, as the Nazis frequently noted, stood at the forefront of race-based lawmaking. American immigration and naturalization law, in the shape of a series of laws culminating in the Immigration Act of 1924, conditioned entry into the United States on race-based tables of “national origins.”

It was America’s race-based immigration law that Hitler praised in Mein Kampf . . . and leading Nazi legal thinkers did the same after him, repeatedly and volubly.

The United States also stood at the forefront in the creation of forms of de jure and de facto second-class citizenship for blacks, Filipinos, Chinese, and others; this too was of great interest to the Nazis, engaged as they were in creating their own forms of second-class citizenship for Germany’s Jews.

Attracted to Adolf Hitler’s suppression of German labor unions and communists, as well as his overarching goal of destroying the Soviet Union, many of America’s most powerful corporate interests gave critical support to the German fascist regime.

General Motors, Ford, and Standard Oil of New Jersey (Exxon) were just a few of the major American monopolies to invest in Nazi Germany’s economic and military development.

By the time of the strike on Pearl Harbor, American investments in Nazi Germany were estimated at $475 million dollars. And it was none other than Prescott Bush, banker and grandfather to George W. Bush, and famed industrialist Henry Ford who provided decisive financial support for Hitler’s rise.

Until 1941, Nazism was seen as not only a profitable investment but also a bulwark against the Soviet Union.

The illusion of American heroism in the Second World War helped prepare the way for a permanent American war agenda against both foreign and domestic challenges to imperialism while at the same time strengthening the notion that America was in fact an exceptional, democratic nation.

This is all that the myth of the “good war” has ever been good for.

Rhetoric of an irrational enemy with whom the “rational” West cannot negotiate makes it hard for us to understand why North Korea seeks nuclear capabilities. And while media pundits assert that the DPRK cannot be trusted with a nuclear weapon or to uphold a joint agreement, rarely is the question ever asked:

Why should the United States be trusted with a nuclear weapon, let alone 9,600 of them? Or, to take it one step further, why is the DPRK expected to “demilitarize” but the United States is not?

As offensive as these questions might sound to many Americans, such sensitivity only exposes the historical amnesia and sense of moral superiority one must have to find these questions offensive in the first place.

Protecting Whose Speech?

Most students educated in the United States learn at an early age that the right to free speech and assembly are protected rights under the First Amendment of the American Constitution. These rights are heralded as hallmarks of American “democracy” that exist nowhere else in the world.

The dominant narrative holds that Americans are the only people in the world who have a “free press” and the right to vocalize their beliefs without persecution,

despite the fact that the U.S. ranks 41st in the recent World Press Freedom Index.

Just like other aspects of American exceptionalism, the free speech and assembly debate has been guided by the economic and political interests of U.S. imperialism rather than the amorphous and abstract ideals of the American democratic project.

Barack Obama’s presidency was a byproduct of the desperate need for the American ruling class to both conceal and intensify the policies that produced such a condition.

The Obama Administration raided Occupy Wall Street Movement encampments and used the FBI to conduct surveillance on the Black Lives Matter movement. American intelligence agencies, most notably the National Security Agency (NSA), were given free rein to expand their surveillance dragnet to include every call, text message, and digital communication made by as many people worldwide as possible, including leaders of the “free world” such as Angela Merkel. The Obama Administration presided over a full-scale erosion of civil liberties through a record shattering use of the Espionage Act to prosecute whistleblowers of government misconduct.

It is from such a vantage point that the questions of “free speech” and “assembly” must be approached.

Far from a land of tolerance and “free speech,” the U.S. has developed into the most formidable police state in human history.

American Economic Decline and the rise of the Unexceptional Majority

Americans have become much poorer and economic crises have lasted a lot longer as a result of the hegemony of American capitalism. These developments are not unrelated. The poorer that workers become, the more difficult it is for investments in technology and production to yield profit from labor’s surplus.

That is, most Americans and indeed much of the world are unable to purchase what is being sold in the global market. This inevitable outcome of capitalist production produces periodic economic crises.

The numbers do not lie. More than half of Americans make under $30,000 per year. A similar percentage can’t pay for a five-hundred dollar emergency should it arise. Wages in the American nation have been stagnant for nearly four decades. Wealth disparities have widened significantly over the same period to the point where the bottom 90 percent of income earners in America hold just 23 percent of the nation’s wealth.

Such immense poverty has left American workers out to dry, sometimes literally. Philip Alston, the UN’s special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, spent two weeks touring the United States to get a sense of the economic conditions that make up the “greatest nation on earth.”

The results were damning. Around 18.5 million Americans live in “deep poverty,” or one-half of the federal poverty line, which itself has historically been seen as an underestimation of poverty.

Nearly 45,000 Americans die each year from a lack of health care. The number of homeless Americans is estimated to be over 500,000 in 2017, which, as Philip Alston reported, is a number “widely considered to be an undercount, as illustrated by estimates of 21,000 in San Francisco [alone] provided by various experts with whom I met.”

To buttress the empty pockets of American workers, debt has become an extremely important mechanism for economic survival.

Students in the U.S. are mired in a $1.3 trillion student loan debt bubble that will never be paid.

One in five Americans cannot afford their medical bills, with hundreds of thousands declaring bankruptcy as a result. The biggest debts that Wall Street banks lend, however, are mortgage debts. These debts caused the American capitalist economy to crash in 2008 when the inability of Americans to pay off their fraudulent loans caused a tidal wave of layoffs and foreclosures across the country.

As journalist Jon Jeter notes, the 43.8 trillion additional dollars that households, businesses, and governments have taken out in credit since 2008 is proof that the American capitalist economy has yet to recover from the crash.

“Is American ‘Aid’ Assistance or Theft? The Case of Africa”

Imperial motivations are very clearly outlined in the actual operative frameworks of U.S. “foreign aid” institutions. When the American dollar became the global exchange rate in 1944 and then replaced gold as the reserve currency in the early 1970s, American financiers were given free reign over the Bretton Woods institutions of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

These institutions were originally advertised as agents of “assistance” and “development” in a post-World War planet, but became nothing more than agents of American empire.

It is important to note that the U.S. has historically held disproportionate influence over the IMF and World Bank. The U.S. has by far the largest vote at nearly 18 percent in both institutions.

U.S. influence is reflected in IMF and World Bank policy, especially in the Structural Adjustment Programs (SAP) that have ravaged nations in Africa, Latin America, and Asia.

These programs began in 1980 as measures of assistance to relieve poor and formerly colonized countries from debts imposed on them from their colonizers during the post-war period. Instead of lending assistance, however, SAPs have only increased the economic burden imposed by U.S. imperialism by forcing indebted countries to privatize state industries, open up their economies for corporate investment, and restructure their political systems to benefit American and Western monopolies.

Nowhere is this burden more apparent than on the resource-rich African continent. The imposition of American “aid” in the form of SAPs was not embraced but rather imposed with the help of military “aid.” In the mid-20th century, Africa was ablaze with the spirit of independence and Pan-Africanism. Nations such as Algeria, Ghana, and Zaire (now Congo) waged heroic anti-colonial struggles, often with success.

Revolutionary leaders like Patrice Lumumba of Zaire and Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana were assassinated in coups organized by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). What were their crimes? They had decided to organize the national economies of their respective countries around the needs of the African people and not those of European and American corporations.

Thus, early military “aid” to independent African nations—a.k.a. violent overthrows of revolutionary leaders—created the political conditions necessary for “economic” aid in the form of SAPs.

Because of SAPs, American and Western corporations have made enormous profits from the debt forced upon the African continent.

New research from a coalition of UK and African development campaigners shows that in a given year, more wealth leaves Africa than enters it, by a figure of more than 40 billions dollars.

The coalition found that $18 billion of the $32 billion in “aid” given to African countries in 2015 was used to pay outstanding interest to lenders. African countries have been deeply impoverished by American-led “foreign aid” arrangements despite the enormous wealth in their possession. The Democratic Republic of Congo alone possesses over $24 trillion worth of mineral wealth yet is one of the most underdeveloped nations worldwide.

What the coalition does not mention is the role of the American-led IMF and World Bank in fostering these conditions.

NGOs give a human face to U.S. imperialism’s plunder of Africa. However, in the last few decades, American economic influence in Africa has eroded despite the presence of American NGOs and American-led IMF financial arrangements.

African nations indebted to the IMF and plundered by corporations with the support of NGOs have looked to China for an alternative model of development. Chinese trade with Africa currently dwarfs the United States by more than double at $220 billion dollars.

Western leaders like Hillary Clinton accuse China of practicing a “new colonialism,” “as if China was an invader in a zone that ‘naturally’ belongs to Europeans and Americans.”

Yet while American and Western nations have focused on repatriating profitable raw materials from Africa to feed the production cycles of monopoly corporations, leaving African countries in debt, China has focused on providing technical support and infrastructure development to African countries in exchange for access to their natural resources.

As Zambian economist Dambisa Moyo points out, it also helps that China treats Africans not as charity cases but business partners.

China’s economic partnership with Africa has caused the American ruling class to panic and shift their focus in the continent.

Rather than presenting Africans as poor and helpless, the U.S. has casted the continent as a “security” threat that requires American military “aid” to eradicate. “Africa as a zone of risk, cast as a source of looming threats,” writes Maximilian Forte, “has been one of the central tenets of U.S. policy statements, refurbishing the colonial ‘Dark Continent’ narrative.”

Lest we forget, however, by “good governance” they mean “regimes that are supportive of U.S. policy and that model their political systems in some fashion on the American one.” And by “human rights” they mean a particular notion of “freedom,” one tied directly to “free” markets, “free” trade, and “the relatively unrestrained ability of wealthy private interests to operate and act to maximize their gains.”

“Western liberalism’s multiple myths of humanitarianism, which include the benevolent spread of democracy, the protection of innocent civilians, the benign building of nations, and the liberation of peoples suffering under dictators,” Maximilian Forte writes, “are myths that fabricate a world where there are rightful actors and those acted upon.”

To ask African countries permission to intervene in their affairs would be to affirm the humanity of African people. However, American innocence and American exceptionalism have worked together in Africa to erase African existence. When Africa does exist, it is viewed through the prism of inhumanity where uncivilized Africans require American “humanitarianism” to advance their societies. American “aid” is dependent on the legitimation of “humanitarianism,” which occurs in all channels of American society.

“Does the U.S. Really Care about Human Rights?”

Americans tend not to see what the world sees because “human rights” is often described in U.S. foreign policy circles as a righteous motivation for global action.

American expansionism has become buried by a “human rights” discourse which assumes the well-being of people around the world is the primary concern of American foreign policy. Exceptionalist assumptions about human rights have rendered the U.S. not only an innocent global actor, but a benevolent and just one as well.

Where the real problem lies is in the ideological framework of American exceptionalism and American innocence. These ideologies have prevented too many Americans from understanding just how much damage U.S. imperialism has spread around the world. Few Americans question U.S. foreign policy abroad since it is assumed that the U.S. upholds “human rights” around the world.

When the U.S. does mess up, then it is simply that—a “mess up.” If people die along the way, then it must have been for good reason.

If the country that the U.S. invaded is worse off than before, then at least it was done with good intentions. Whatever the result, America is always on the right side of history.

A number of scholars have commented about the selective way that U.S. imperialism defines human rights. The politics of genocide are case in point. Acts of genocide—or “the deliberate killing of a large group of people, especially those of a particular ethnic group or nation”—committed or aided by the U.S. are rarely questioned and often times ignored. Yet the term “genocide” has been used selectively to justify “humanitarian” interventions abroad while absolving imperial powers like the U.S. of their own crimes against humanity.

The idea that the U.S. is a bystander to genocide further perpetuates the myth of American innocence. When it comes to genocide, American innocence compels a national admission to the sin or mistake of “looking away,” but never of perpetrating it.

Recall that one of the ways this myth functions is by painting the U.S. as a victim of other countries’ aggression. The U.S. is never the aggressor. It is either retaliating for something that was (supposedly) done to Americans or something it anticipates will be done to them.

Either way, the U.S. is, as Captain America’s shield suggests, always on the defensive. But this fantasy becomes much harder to believe when we take into account just how involved the U.S. military is in the world. The U.S. is constantly playing the role of aggressor. Its war-apparatus is constantly “doing something.”

So while Iran continues to face economic sanctions and Syria continues to see death and displacement tolls rise beyond a million, U.S. imperialism maintains its “innocent” and “exceptional” position as the world’s dictator of “human rights.”

This despite the fact that the majority of American “allies” receive American aid to commit the most heinous human rights violations around the world. Israel, for example, receives nearly $4 billion per year in military aid from the U.S. to colonize the Palestinian people.

During Israel’s invasion of Gaza in 2009, the U.S. stood by Israel by blocking any UN resolutions from forming in opposition to the 21-day assault that murdered over 1,300 Palestinians.

Israel invests heavily in American politics through the lobby organization AIPAC, which bribes American officials with campaign financing to support Israeli policies in the Middle East and Africa. Furthermore, Israel possesses over 200 nuclear warheads that have been kept secret from the public while the United States’ nuclear arsenal approaches 7,000.

A critical piece of American warfare is the support of brutal, oligarchic dictatorships around the world. Indeed, a significant part of the U.S.’s modus operandi involves propping up ruthless right-wing formations to prevent the rise of popular movements from taking power in a given country.

Often, these oligarchic arrangements are satisfied with exporting national wealth to American corporations while importing dependence on U.S. military and corporate arrangements.

For U.S. imperialism, Saudi Arabia is a long time friend while Cuba is a long time foe. Saudi Arabia’s human rights record is rarely mentioned in American corporate politics or media, while Cuba has been subject to American economic, military, and political warfare since 1959, the year of the Cuban Revolution.

Human rights discourse has been used flexibly by American political and military officials to demonize Cuba on the one hand and ignore Saudi Arabia’s egregious human rights record on the other.

In the case of Saudi Arabia, the U.S. has not merely “looked away” from the human rights abuses of one of its key allies in the Middle East.

A deep economic and military partnership exists between U.S. imperialism and the Saudi monarchy.

For over seventy years, the American ruling class has provided the Saudi Royal Family with military protection in exchange for access to Saudi Arabia’s large oil reserves for American corporations such as Chevron, Exxon, and Dow. American corporations currently possess hundreds of billions of dollars worth of assets in Saudi Arabia. From 2009–2015, President Obama facilitated over $100 billion worth of arms deals to Saudi security forces.

Since 2015, Saudi Arabia has been engaged in a bloody invasion of neighboring Yemen in an attempt to maintain hegemony over the insurgent and independent Shia-led Houthi movement. American weapons traded to Saudi Arabia are drenched in Yemeni blood.

Saudi Arabia has used American-produced F-15 fighters and an array of weapons to carpet bomb Yemen’s schools, hospitals, and water supply systems. Several thousands of civilians have been killed and 80 percent of the country’s population needs some form of humanitarian assistance.

Not only has U.S. military weaponry facilitated the Saudi war on Yemen, but it has also directly participated in it. American military advisors have given extensive logistical support to Saudi Arabia and coalition forces invading Yemen in so-called opposition to unverified claims that its long-time foe, Iran, is backing the Houthi movement.

“The American Corporate Media and the White Savior Mentality”

American corporate media outlets have historically promoted white savior ideology in its coverage of major events relating to U.S. foreign policy. In the process, it has produced what Grewal calls “humanitarian citizenship.”

Humanitarian citizenship has its basis in post-World War II politics when American leadership in the global sphere required an institutionalized basis for the promotion of “values” that justified American domination abroad.

Take the example of Malala Yousafzai. Yousafzai was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014 for her work detailing the atrocities she experienced from the Taliban. A young Pakistani girl, Yousafzai has become the corporate media’s white savior subject. She has received New York Times documentaries, accolades, and funds from the West to forward her goal in bringing education to young girls in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Neither Yousafzai nor her white savior backers in the corporate media raise the fact that it was the U.S. and the West that funded and armed the Mujahideen, the predecessor of the Taliban, to destroy the Soviet-supported Afghan government beginning in 1979.

In fact, the Soviet-supported government of Afghanistan was not only secular but also committed to eradicating illiteracy and other educational hurdles imposed on young girls in the country. These efforts were in full effect prior to the proxy war that then-National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinsky hoped would give “the USSR its own Vietnam War.”

Yousafzai’s backers within the White Savior Industrial Complex hail her stance against the Taliban as a worthy humanitarian cause, but have omitted the U.S. role in enabling the Taliban’s rise, all in an attempt to maintain its image as the world’s saviors.

Furthermore, many Americans believe that simply by being born in the U.S. or by being white, or by attending an American university, that they have a unique, God’s-eye perspective as to how other countries should be governed.

Such hubris is commonly found among many U.S. college students, prompting Maximilian Forte to outline some questions he asks his students who want to change the world: “Do you really have any special skills to offer other than the ability to articulate good intentions? Has your assistance been requested by those who would presumably benefit from it? How well do you understand a different society that you can permit yourself to undertake potentially transformative action?”

Theologian William Cavanaugh takes this a step further and explains why he would never be invited to deliver a U.S. college commencement address. “Please don’t go out and change the world,” he would tell the graduates. “The world has had enough of well-meaning middle class university graduates from the U.S. going out and trying to change the world and the world is dying because of it . . . go home.”

“If It’s Bad, Blame Russia”

Blaming Russia for undermining so-called American democracy has given the U.S. a convenient foe to justify its military expansion worldwide.

If everything “bad” is Russia’s fault, then the U.S. is the only force of “good” available in the world.

Russia has been labeled a “bad country” not only for its alleged interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential elections.

Americans are also repeatedly told that Russia is “bad” because it imprisons journalists, oppresses the LGBTQ community, and poisons former intelligence operatives in other countries. These accusations have either gone unverified or exaggerated for political aims; and even if they were true, their impact would pale in comparison to the war crimes that the U.S. has committed in Iraq alone. Since 2004, it is estimated that 2.4 million Iraqis have been killed as a result of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Yet we are told that “bad” Russian meddling is the reason why Trump was forced by Congress in 2017 to sign a “good” military budget larger than the one even he proposed, with billions added in military operations along the Russian border to “deter Russian aggression.” “Bad” Russian meddling also led to a unanimous Congressional vote to renew “good” sanctions, forcing Trump to renew sanctions against Russia and North Korea and impose new ones on Iran.

American military encroachments, whether in the form of murdering Russian pilots in Syria or moving American military installations closer and closer to the Russian border, are thus “good policies” seeking to punish a “bad” Russia regardless of the fact that such an orientation threatens human existence with a new world war of nuclear proportions.

What is important to realize, however, is that when it comes to war, there really is no contest between the U.S. and Russia (or China).

The U.S. is hands down the most violent war-maker in human history.

This means that punishing Russia is not the only consequence of the Russia blame game. Some authors and activists such as the late William Blum have characterized the United States’ obsession with Russia as a new Cold War. The war has two fronts. The first is international in scope.

Demonizing Russia prepares the American public for another war abroad, this time with a foe in possession of an equal if not greater nuclear capacity than the American military. The second front of the new Cold War is domestic.

The new and old Cold wars have promoted American citizenship as the leading force for “good” on the political stage. “Evil” is defined by imperial script writers. Russians play the “evil” role in the new Cold War, replacing the communists of the old Cold War.

The replacement of communists with Russians beginning in 2016 comes at a time when the American ruling class needs an “inauthentic” non-citizen to blame for the misery it has imposed on the planet. And like the first Cold War, this has led to the suppression of radical political alternatives and the expansion of dangerous wars that masquerade as crusades against the great Russian “threat” to American civilization.

Who Exactly Does the Military Serve?

As of this writing, it not a stretch to conclude that the U.S. military is at war with nearly the entire world.

At least 800 U.S. military bases are scattered across the globe and, with a budget of nearly a trillion dollars per year, there is no shortage of money to maintain its deadly arsenal of troops and weapons around the world.

Continued U.S. military presence in the Korean peninsula, Syria, Ukraine, and the Baltic region threatens the existence of humanity with the potential of nuclear war.

The threat of such a war is heightened by the fact that the American military doesn’t wage war randomly. Every drone strike, every invasion, and every occupation has a reason behind it.

The U.S. military unleashes terror in all corners of the planet for precious resources that are required to keep the U.S.-led system of global capitalism profitable. Nations around the world must be forced to acquiesce to American economic interests, which is why the U.S. military often has as its goal the overthrow or containment of governments unwilling to allow their nations to be plundered and forced into subservience.

The U.S. military has labeled Russia and China the greatest threat to “national security” at the present moment. Many of its war efforts are aimed at ensuring that these two rising powers are under the constant threat of annihilation.

The imminent threat of a nuclear global confrontation has found expression in the U.S. “pivot” to Asia as a means to “contain” China.

Other flashpoints for nuclear showdown include the American use of NATO to provoke Russia and the potential clash of Russian and U.S. forces in Syria. Still, the American anti-war movement remains small and inconsequential.

The U.S. military and its supporters often avoid accountability by complaining about so-called dictators in places like Syria who “kill their own people.” Usually these claims cannot be verified and even if they possess a shred of truth, they wouldn’t make the actions of the U.S. military any less illegal under international law. Legal issues aside, it is puzzling how such an accusation can be made with a straight face, given how easy it is to find evidence of the U.S. killing “its own people.”

The difference between U.S. allegations of “dictators” killing “their own people” and its own actions is that when the U.S. kills, such as the hundreds of migrants who are killed crossing the U.S. Mexico border each year, it doesn’t consider the victims to be people at all.

One could only imagine what the American response would be to China, Iran, or even its ally Germany if one of them decided to intervene militarily in the U.S. because it was “killing its own people” and committing human rights abuses. This event sounds absurd on many fronts.

For one, these countries have no interest in provoking a nuclear power like the U.S. with a proven record of bellicosity nor do they possess the capability of carrying out a first strike on U.S. borders.

But we have to ask ourselves, why does the U.S. military have free reign to dictate how other nations conduct themselves, while other countries aren’t allowed to critique the U.S. for the very same actions? And if the U.S. really cared about protecting our “freedom,” why is nothing done to alleviate the declining living standards of ordinary Americans?

The right to wage war seems to be the exclusive right of the U.S. It is easy for Americans to feel exceptional when the millions of people who die from U.S. military interventions around the world are deemed “collateral damage.”

It is also easier to cheer on the military as it punishes foreign leaders for (allegedly) killing their own citizens when Americans are completely disconnected from the millions of people within their own borders who succumb daily to premature death.

American troops are constantly thanked for their “service” while the victims of war are stripped of their humanity. Thanking U.S. troops deifies them and legitimizes the wars they fight on behalf of the ruling class. Wars are effectively sanitized as heroic operations that defend the “freedom” and “democracy” of all.

Soldiers represent such heroism in the flesh and are celebrated for supposedly protecting the interests of Americans from the inferior nations and peoples seeking to harm them. As explained throughout the book, inferiority has been a mark placed on communists, nationalists, and most recently “terrorists” to justify the plunder, power, and profit that the ruling class derives from U.S. military expansionism.

U.S. troops represent “whiteness” in the form of heroism as opposed to the “threat” posed by darker nations and peoples.

The same could be said about the environmental justice movement. U.S. imperialism has indeed run the world’s ecology into a state of catastrophe.

Why is it that one of the biggest polluters of the world, the U.S. military, is rarely condemned by environmental justice advocates? Where is the moral outrage for its failure to acknowledge “what would appear to be obvious: that saturating the environment with toxic materials will have repercussions on both environmental and human health, including the health of the United States”?

Narratives of American exceptionalism and American innocence have limited the efforts of progressive and radical forces in this country by diverting their attention away from the trillion dollar military albatross in the U.S. and its many connections to the racist, capitalist, and imperialist ambitions of the U.S. state.