Murican ’Cepshunulizm

It makes sense for someone to feel guilt or shame based upon things—good or bad—that he has personally done, but being proud of things you had no control over (such as your race, what country you were born in, etc.) is just silly. When Americans try to revise, whitewash and “pretty up” American history, that’s an illustration of how irrational patriotism and nationalism can make people. Why should anyone be psychologically or emotionally invested in what happened before they were even born?

A lot of very evil crap, and a lot of very good stuff, has been done by human beings residing on the big piece of dirt now known as “the United States of America.” People today should be able to learn from the good and from the bad. We should not exaggerate or gloss over either. Unfortunately, “American exceptionalism” seems to mostly be about how all the nationalistic flag-wavers in the U.S. are exceptionally oblivious to reality, past and present.

What makes this particularly sad—and ironic—is that many Americans think that “Old Glory”—the red, white and blue—represents liberty. As a result, they proudly wave the symbol of an authoritarian ruling class, while repeating bunk about the “land of the free.” If you are comfortable and content feeling pride and loyalty based on fabrications and bogus mythology, you might want to stop reading now, because the following indisputable facts expose the silliness of all those uber-nationalistic Americans.

1 - This was never a “free country.” In fact, there is no such thing as a free country at all since the word “country” refers to the territorial jurisdiction of a ruling class. Every “country” has a “government”; freedom and authoritarian domination are incompatible, and “government” is always the latter.

2 - Whether measured based on economics or social issues, several nations have more freedom than the United States. Therefore, the claim that the United States is special because it is the freest country in the world is patently false.

3 - Being a democratically-elected constitutional republic does not make the United States special, nor does having a “bill of rights.” Many other countries, including the most murderous regimes in history—such as communist China under Mao Tse Tung, the Soviet Union under Stalin, the Weimar Republic which gave rise to Nazi Germany, and modern day North Korea—are or were all democratically-elected constitutional republics, each with their own version of a “bill of rights.” So such qualities do not at all make the United States unique or special.

4 - Those who think we just need to get back to how things were right after the nation was formed have to ignore some pretty horrendous stuff, including: a) slavery—the absolute antithesis of freedom and individual rights; b) the forced evictions and genocide inflicted upon the people who were living here before Europeans showed up; and c) several almost immediate violations of the spirit and the letter of the Constitution, including the crushing of the “Whiskey Rebellion,” the Aliens and Sedition Act, and the Louisiana Purchase.

5 - The annual celebration of “Independence Day” in the U.S. is extremely ironic given the fact that Americans are now drastically less free than they ever were as the subjects of a king, when these were still a collection of British colonies. Indeed, as predicted by the anti-federalists, the new constitutional republic very quickly became more oppressive and less free than life under the rule of a monarch. The list of grievances found in the Declaration of Independence is pretty damn trivial compared to what Americans have to put up with today.

6 - There have been quite a few American tyrants who have made mince-meat of the constitution, including Lincoln, FDR and LBJ. It is beyond lame to argue that the U.S. is special because of what the U.S. Constitution says, when the U.S. government has not acted in accordance with that document at any point in the last two centuries.

I could go on, but that will suffice for now. And no, this isn’t about “blame America first.” Obviously injustice and oppression is not at all unique to the U.S., and state-sponsored murder and oppression in other countries has often been far more blatant than it is here. The point is not that one authoritarian regime is nastier than another. The point is that all countries, all nations, all governments, and all systems of political power and man-made “law,” are—and have always been—immoral, anti-freedom, and horribly destructive. Proudly waving the symbol of a ruling class, and pledging allegiance to its flag, is not a sign of bravery or greatness. If anything, it is a sign of a profound case of Stockholm Syndrome.

So given the choice, do you prefer the comfortable, familiar fairy tale? Or do you prefer the sometimes ugly reality? As Patrick Henry put it, we human beings “are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth, and listen to the song of that siren till she transforms us into beasts.” But Mr. Henry went on to proclaim that “whatever anguish of spirit it may cost,” he was willing “to know the whole truth; to know the worst, and to provide for it.” If you share that view, and want to know how the “land of the free” really measures up, today and in the past, then I invite you—no, I DARE you—to carefully watch and absorb my video entitled "It Can't Happen Here!"