Will History Come to Regard the United States As a Colossal Villain?

Your tips are greatly appreciated! Upgrade at 30% offDuring my days as a reckless youth, I once found myself riding a bus up a mountain in South America. Except for a tiny abandoned hut, the landscape consisted of nothing but rocks and sand as far as the eye could see.There were no people, no signs of civilization. You couldn’t even discern any lights on the horizon that might indicate the proximity of a settlement. Yet there, on the side of the hut, was an enormous advertisement for a carbonated soda.A billboard in the middle of nowhere.Who put it there and why?In that moment it struck me as absolutely ridiculous. Seeing that absurd example of propaganda made me realize the extent to which we’re all drinking from the fountain of collective delusion.Americans revere powerhouse global brands. We talk about how great they are. Students in business school look at the history of those companies and tremble with approval. There’s so much money! There’s so much momentum! But, at the end of the day, what do these brands really contribute? How is humanity advanced by their labors?Ultimately, that’s the measuring stick by which all organizations are measured, even nations.What would happen if these brands stopped advertising? How long would it take for people to forget they ever existed? In the 90s, Blockbuster was one of the most recognizable names in the country, today there are people who have never even heard of it.Poof! Gone!Twenty years isn’t that much time.The United States of America, too, has its own corporate advertising campaign. Our nation has a globally recognized brand. We claim to be “the land of the free.” We claim to be a “moral authority.” We think of ourselves as “the good guys.” We kill anyone who says different.The truth is, there are plenty of human beings both now and throughout history that have been exploited, tormented, and oppressed by the ideology and actions of the United States.When the advertising budget dries up, when America is gone, what will historians say about our country? Will they claim that we were “great?” Will they even say that we were “good?”Or will they perceive us as the worst villain of all time?Perhaps now, while we still have influence, we should make the effort to see past the propaganda and make an honest attempt to improve our society’s contributions to humanity.Can you really find fault with that aspiration?When there’s no longer a propaganda budget blasting our mythology of “greatness,” how will history regard our behavior?This is a question that responsible people must embrace. Perhaps we need to recognize that the lie of “American Exceptionalism” is the most undeserved participation trophy in history.How many writers do you know from authoritarian regimes?Like any writer, my aspirations are to say something of significance. That’s how I would like to be of service to the human race. I wish to make a contribution.This is why it concerns me to speculate that I might be living in a corrupt society.“Oh Walter, you shouldn’t trouble yourself! You live in the best society ever! You are fortunate to be here. In fact, be careful what you say because any criticism of America is often met with terrible consequences…”Yeah, exactly.What horrors are contained within the children’s books that were written during the Nazi regime? Genocide was just a way of life at the time (don’t try and tell me that average people didn’t know what was going on — they did).Did authors pen the propaganda of justification? Did illustrators create lovable characters with round, glistening eyes to help children “accept” what “had to be done?”Kids in classrooms were made to stand and give a pledge of allegiance.Think about that for a moment.How do atrocities happen?People establish “thought boundaries” for themselves, and within these boundaries are the things they allow themselves to contemplate. For the majority of United States citizens, “Is my country the worst villain of history?” is a question that’s firmly out of bounds.If you maintain those boundaries, you’re actively enabling your own entitled delusion.I propose that no country can be good unless it’s constantly fearful of descending into evil. We must also assume that a country that insists its goodness cannot be questioned has already become an agent of evil.Celebration is the enemy.Patriotism is a form of celebration.You cannot hand authority to a police force and then never consider that the police force itself might fall into corruption. You must be constantly vigilant.This is basic.The crimes of the United StatesThere is no way to hide the transgressions the United States has made against the human race. These transgressions will appear in the history textbooks of the future.Let’s start with an easy one, we have the largest military in history. We spend more on the machinery of death than the next 10 countries on the list combined.To make matters worse, our police force would be the third largest military in the world. In the history of the human race, no society has dedicated as many resources to authoritarian control over other human beings as the United States of America.It’s not the “land of the free” at all.We could have spent our resources on food. We could have spent our resources on education and health care. We could have spent our resources ensuring that other people had the right to basic human dignity.But we don’t. Look at the ledgers. Numbers don’t lie.We cannot hide the size of our military and police from history. We’re not even trying! We brag about it. When future societies judge us, they’ll see that our objective, no matter what the propaganda says, was to control our own citizens and the rest of the world by force.Look at the numbers! This is not hidden!The only country to detonate a nuclear bomb on civiliansThe plot of every film or book involving terrorists for the last 50 years has been, “What would happen if terrorists got a hold of a nuclear weapon?” Then these stories go on to discuss what a crime it would be to detonate those weapons in a city full of innocent people.That’s fiction.In history, there is only one country that has detonated a nuclear bomb on a city full of civilians. That country is the United States, and we did it twice. They weren’t military targets, they were cities. We killed moms and grandmothers and children. We vaporized them, we destroyed their homes, and we gave the survivors cancer so they could die a slow, lingering, painful death.This is our history.This is our shame.I still remember my 6th grade science teacher standing in front of the class attempting to justify the war crime of murdering civilians with a nuclear bomb.“We called them up, we told them, we warned them!” he said. “But they wouldn’t surrender, so we did what had to be done.”So we dropped a nuclear bomb on innocent people.Evil always uses different phrasing to justify their acts of aggression. We warned them, the same way a drunken husband “warns” his wife not to “give him any lip,” right? So then, when he hits her, “It’s okay?” or “It’s her fault?”One day she’ll write her own account, and then we’ll have “both sides” of the story.Do you fear that day? Do you want to suppress those stories? The United States of America does.I remember having a sick feeling in my stomach when my teacher tried to justify America’s murder of civilians. That’s when I first began to perceive the cracks in the armor of the American “greatness” narrative.You can’t hide the fact that the United States dropped a nuclear bomb on innocent people.It happened.The murder of civilians is just one of the crimes that will haunt this country beyond the day when our nation has perished from this Earth.That’s just one crime in a very, very long list.Human slaveryContrary to generally stated propaganda, the United States was not a nation conceived in liberty. It is a nation that was conceived in slavery.Throughout our history, there has been an ongoing effort to erase or misrepresent our nation’s crimes against humanity. The latest manifestation of this objective can be seen in the legislative bans designed to prevent public schools from presenting true history.Textbooks often teach propaganda rather than fact.Most Americans go through life and make their decisions based on completely fraudulent assumptions. Most Americans have no awareness of how slavery in the United States differed from slavery throughout the world.Citizens of the dominant culture in our country insist “slavery has always been part of humanity” because it’s mentioned in the Bible. But most Americans are willfully ignorant of the fact that Biblical slavery is a punishment for crime and bears few similarities to the horrors and atrocities that would emerge out of the American system of human enslavement.Biblical slavery wasn’t based on race!That came later. That’s one of America’s most deplorable contributions to the world history of abuses against humanity.Again, this is a fact that cannot be erased.Racially based slavery had its roots in Virginia in 1662 with the Partus Sequitur Ventrem decision. This came about because so many white owners were raping their Black slaves that they had to address what to do about the babies.Breeding farms became a part of the American system of human slavery after the slave trade was outlawed in 1807. Even outlawing the slave trade was an act of cowardice because it was Jefferson’s hope that the current slave population would “die out,” and thus the “entanglement” of slavery would resolve itself “naturally.” Keep in mind Jefferson was a man who was content to condemn his own children to slavery.We’re taught to revere that monster. He enslaved his own children! You carry his portrait in your pocket.History books of the future will note that the United States is a country that pursued economic prosperity by raping women, stealing their children, denying them all human rights, and working them to death.The propaganda of today can deny that reality all it wants, but what happens when the advertising budget runs dry? When there’s no longer any incentive to plaster the lies on billboards on the farthest reaches of the globe, there will be nothing left but the truth.The truth about the United States is not pretty.People who deny the truth are not free of it. Instead, it stains them. The people in our society who feel their willful, defiant ignorance will save them on the day of judgment are sorely mistaken.Some might argue that deniers are enablers, and are thus the most guilty.Genocide, white supremacy, exploitation, hatred, concentration campsThe United States is guilty of genocide against the indigenous people of this continent. Racism born of white supremacy is allowed to go unchecked. Labor is either stolen or exploited. Marginalized communities are denied their right to vote. This is a nation that put innocent people into concentration camps, and there are current political candidates running on the promise that they will do so again.Who could have guessed that addictive, tooth-rotting sugar water could be such an apt metaphor for the truth about the United States?Today, many people are frustrated because there doesn’t appear to be any inclination to build a future that will allow our children to thrive. Our society has made education unaffordable. There are those that chortle at the thought of every baby that falls ill because they know the parents will work themselves to exhaustion and death in order to pay off the inflated medical bills.Then politicians claim they care about human life because they deny women the right to life-saving reproductive health care. The breeding farms have returned.We allow this treatment! We allow it. You there reading this article, you allow it! That’s what history is going to reflect. There aren’t going to be any asterisks in the textbooks of the future. All it will say is that the United States was conceived in slavery, descended into abomination, and committed all its resources to excessively funding a mechanism of ignorance, control and death.If we’re unwilling to even question whether or not our country has been committed to evil, then we make evil inevitable. That will be our legacy.There’s still time to changeThe solution is to embrace compassion over hate, education over ignorance, health over sickness, peace over war, truth over lies, cooperation over competition, and the right to basic human dignity over authoritarian control.This needs to become our national commitment.Look at that list. At every opportunity, when faced with a choice, our country has picked wrong. We can’t change the past. We can’t deny the past. However, we still have the option of adding a footnote to whatever inconsequential entry about the United States might exist in the history textbook in the future.“And then… they took responsibility for their mistakes and resolved to become an asset to humanity.”That’s our objective. The lies we tell ourselves about the past are tooth-rotting sugar water with no nutritional value. We must let them go. If you strip away the propaganda, our national legacy contains nothing but shame.You all make this newsletter happen! Thanks for your sponsorship! I have payment tiers starting at as little as twenty dollars a year.Upgrade at 30% offUpgrade at 40% offUpgrade at 50% offUpgrade at 60% offI'm so happy you're here, and I'm looking forward to sharing more thoughts with you tomorrow.My CoSchedule referral linkHere’s my referral link to my preferred headline analyzer tool. 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