August 28, 2006
The
myth of Manifest Destiny, Take Two
“In the field of world policy I would dedicate this nation to the
policy of the good neighbor--the neighbor who resolutely respects himself and,
because he does so, respects the right of others.”
President
Franklin D. Roosevelt, 32nd US president, Inaugural Address, March 4, 1933
"Politically speaking, tribal nationalism always insists that its
own people is surrounded by "a world of enemies", "one against
all", that a fundamental difference exists between this people and all
others. It claims its people to be unique, individual, incompatible with all
others, and denies theoretically the very possibility of a common mankind long
before it is used to destroy the humanity of man."
Hannah Arendt,
The Origins of Totalitarianism
"Where you have a concentration of power in a few hands, all too
frequently men with the mentality of gangsters get control."
Lord Acton
(1834-1902)
In March 1885, John Fiske wrote an essay
for the magazine Harper’s, called "Manifest Destiny", in which
he contended that the so-called "English race" was destined to dominate
the entire world during the coming 20th Century. Then, according to this
hubristic theory, there would be a millennium of peace and prosperity. However,
it is the expansionist editor John L. O'Sullivan, who in 1845 coined the famous
expression when he wrote of "our manifest destiny to overspread the
continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly
multiplying millions."
Such scary thinking was echoed half a century later by
German fascists who thought their fascist Reich would last a millennium and
that they could control the world. It would seem that delusional imperialists
often think they have discovered the "millennium" magic recipe for
dominance. They cloak their insane ambitions in notions of German or American Exceptionalism.
Fundamentally, any 'Exceptionalism' among peoples is deeply rooted in racism
and the self-serving hatred of "the other". Imperial nazi Germany was
race-conscious and it went on extermining people because they were of the
'wrong' race and were declared "Untermensch" (undermen). More than
fifty million people died to dispel these dangerous myths.
When religious excesses reinforce ideology and imperialist
instincts, things can get even more hallucinatory. For some, the "divine
doctrine" of Manifest Destiny originates in the sanctimonious conviction that the
Christian 'God' intended the world to be under the control of white European or
American Christians. It is the old colonialist idea that dark-skinned people in
foreign lands are unable to govern themselves and need external intervention.
For example, according to Puritan millennialism, or the theory of Anglo-Saxon
or Teutonic racial superiority, some religious Americans, in the 19th Century,
saw themselves in their delusion as some sort of a "New Israel", and
they persuaded themselves that they should fight savages for the sake of a
higher Christian civilization. According to this racial theory of history,
popular in late 19th Century America and in early 20th Century Germany, the
Teutonic nations [are destined] "to carry the political civilization of
the modern world into those parts of the world inhabited by unpolitical and
barbaric races",
as explained by historian John Burgess.
In 1886, a period fertile with delusional authors, Josiah
Strong published a book titled "Our Country", in which he opined that
the English speaking peoples have the "mission" of evangelizing the
world. A few years later, Brooks Adams published a similar ethno-centric theory
of history in a book titled "The Law of Civilization and Decay",
whose main thesis was that nations oscillate historically between barbarism and
civilization. In a surprising development, the author then went on to extoll
barbarism, arguing that barbarism was necessary to develop empires and
subjugate colonies. Adams went on to envisage the emergence of an Anglo-Saxon
alliance between the U.S. and Great Britain that would dominate the world.
Such eccentric ideas are not inconsequential, for sooner or
later opportunistic politicians think of using them as stepping-stones to
power. For instance, an imperialist American politician, Theodore Roosevelt, wrote a book in 1889 titled
"The Winning of the West" in which he said: (The 1864 slaying of
several hundred Cheyenne women and children was) "on the whole as
righteous and beneficial a deed as ever took place on the frontier." For this politician drunk with
millennium ideas, the extermination or genocide of the Indians was done to
advance "civilization".
When he became president after the assassination of William
McKinley, in 1901, Theodore Roosevelt applied his racial theories of
civilization in the Philippines, where the United States fought a nationalist
insurgency for fourteen years, not unlike what mission-bound George W. Bush is
doing today in Iraq. Maybe not surprisingly, the American Protestant missionary
press was most supportive of the brutal Philippines war
(1899–1913), a war that resulted in hundreds of
thousands of deaths. Of course, in the realm of genocide, Adolf Hitler outdid
all millennium imperialists when he undertook, in the 1930's, to exterminate
the Jews and Gypsies in Germany, and in many parts of Europe. It took a world
war to stop this insane fool.
At the beginning of the 21st Century, a similar wind of folly blows in
certain quarters.
In Israel, for instance, religion-based "manifest
destiny" thinking is widespread. For instance, the popularly accepted theory of Zionism
is based, to a large extent, on the self-serving myth of the "chosen"
people. The judaist Bible is supposed to have given present day Israelis a
godly right to all of Arab territory in Palestine. This myth is then used to
justify the building and expansion of illegal Israeli settlements on Arab
lands, in Gaza and the West Bank.
One can also better understand the causes of perpetual war
in the Middle East when it is known that according to Halacha (Jewish religious law), the term
"human beings" according to Halacha refers solely to Jews. Indeed, a
decisive majority of Talmudic sages view goyim (the derogatory Hebrew term for non-Jews)
as either animals or sub-humans. With such extremist views, it is
understandable that some Orthodox rabbis in Israel consider that international
conventions, such as the 4th Geneva Convention which outlaws the deliberate
killing of civilians and the destruction of civilian homes and property, are
part of "Christian morality" and are not binding on Israel.
In the U.S., the powerful neo-conservative
movement is also driven by a sense of moral superiority and by an
apology of imperialism for the "good cause".
The cause this time that conceals more down to earth
interests is the spread of democratic universalism, especially in the oil-rich
Middle East. Irving Kristol, one of the original neocons, advanced the idea
that America needs a 21st century version of democratic Manifest Destiny. For
him and his cohort of Neocons,
just as it was Manifest Destiny for the United States to reach the Pacific
Ocean in the 19th Century, so it is today's American Manifest Destiny to
control oil-rich regions like the Middle East, under the pretexts of spreading
'democracy' or fighting terrorism around the world. Thus is constructed the
intellectual foundation for building a ruthless and plutocratic empire under
the guise of spreading a 'one-size-fits-all' democracy.
The shaky assumption behind such thinking is that
people, and especially Americans, will not see the fundamental contradiction of
wanting to impose democracy through undemocratic means (i.e. using military
power to spread democracy). Nevertheless, for neocon missionaries, it is
legitimate to use force to convert the world to some sort of American
supervised 'democracy'. —This is the new religion. This is, of course, a
hoax; in a democracy, power originates from the people, not from armed foreign
invaders, and the law, not force, regulates the interactions between individuals
and between nations. In fact, imperialism is the very antithesis of democracy.
Nevertheless, with such open-ended patronizing and
condescending hubris, there lies the seeds of many imperialistic wars to come,
—wars that may suit the agendas of some powerful special interests.
Indeed, the new neocon theological version of Manifest Destiny is also a
theology of permanent war. As such, these old theories in new clothes represent
the gravest danger to world peace. And since George W. Bush
subscribes to this flawed ancient geopolitical theory, the world should pay
special attention.
As for Bush Jr. himself, indeed, while protesting that the
U.S. has no plan to stay long in Iraq, after the so-called
"liberation" he illegally engineered on his own in the spring of
2003, he takes great care to stress that the decision of when to remove US
troops from Iraq will rest with ''future presidents and future governments
in Iraq",
not with him. This is understandable since his administration is currently busy
building a Middle Ages-type fortress in Baghdad, disguised as an embassy.
This new Carcassonne fort will have a 15-foot thick perimeter wall and will
be spread over a 104-acre site. The Pentagon is also busy building 14 permanent
American military bases
in occupied Iraq, capable of hosting 50,000 American soldiers and their
families. Some temporary expedition! —As General Anthony Zinni, former US
Middle East commander, has put it, there could not be a more ''stupid"
provocation to the Muslim world than building permanent military American bases
in a Middle East Arab country. This is a sure guarantee of decades of war and
unrest. —In a repetition, one hundred years apart, of the Philippine
invasion, U.S. war commanders now think some level of American forces will be
'needed' in Iraq until 2016.
"Plus ça change, plus c'est pareil."
Such duplicity does not escape the attention of the world,
even though many Americans keep their heads buried deep in the sand, and refuse
to face the reality and consequences of their "imperial" government.
A recent poll taken in Great Britain,
for example, found that Britons have never had a lower opinion of the
leadership of the United States than presently. Indeed, a June 26-28, 2006 survey
found that only 12 per cent of Britons trust the Bush-Cheney administration to
act wisely on the global stage. This is half the number who had faith in the
post-Nixon Vietnam-scarred White House of 1975. Today, a large majority of the
British see America as "a cruel, vulgar, arrogant society, riven by
class and racism, crime-ridden, obsessed with money and led by an incompetent
hypocrite." —Let's
keep in mind that Tony Blair's Britain is supposed to be George W. Bush's
staunchest ally. It is therefore reasonable to believe that America's
reputation in other countries, under Bush II, is probably much lower.
Rodrigue Tremblay is professor
emeritus of economics at the University of Montreal and can be reached at rodrigue.tremblay@yahoo.com.
He is the
author of the book 'The
New American Empire'.
Visit his
blog site at www.thenewamericanempire.com/blog.
Author's
Website:www.thenewamericanempire.com/
Posted,
August 28, 2006, at 5:30 am
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