by Don Via Jr, The Free Thought Project:
Upon reading the title of this article many might reflexively click off, going straight to the comments section to voice their disapproval, to vitriolically chastise the perceived lack of patriotism and the insinuation that the United States of America is anything but the greatest bastion of freedom and liberty in the world. A beacon of light in the dark protecting democracy from the dregs of despotism.
It is a reaction that has been programmed into many of us, one that even among the “liberty community” many, including yours truly, espoused at one time or another. Since birth we are programmed via nationalistic propaganda to have such a worldview.
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Every single day of our schooling for at least 12 years we are indoctrinated to place our hands over our hearts and pledge our allegiance to the nation, in other words our loyalty to the government, or more specifically — given the origins of the pledge itself — the ideologies of colonialism in honoring Christopher Columbus, Anglo-American ethno-nationalism, and later, a reinforcement of US political and religious moral superiority, that is itself inherent to the government and its systemic norms.
Denoting these sentiments under a negative connotation will as well likely spark the ire of many who still refuse to acknowledge the role of settler-colonialism in the American experiment, but we digress.
The point is, we as Americans have been institutionally inculcated our entire lives with sentiments of nationalism and American exceptionalism which have subsequently, with assistance in no small part from the heavily controlled corporate mainstream media and the centralized education system, blinded huge swaths of the population from the realities of the innumerable crimes committed by the American government. Both in the past, and the present day.
Chief among these misbehaviors would be the ways in which America would behave itself with regard to it’s foreign policy, both early in its existence as a burgeoning superpower and today as the leader of a globe spanning unipolar hegemon.
Beginning with the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 wherein the US asserted itself as being the sole authority in the entirety of the Western Hemisphere, It would slowly go on to refine this doctrine as justification for intervention and expansionism, first in Latin America and expanding outward to the rest of the world.
As the US would continue to expand its power and influence over its global neighbors the destabilization of sovereign governments that Washington viewed as being at odds or potentially deleterious to its agendas of regional control became standard procedure.
We recently elaborated upon this briefly with regard to the century of US intervention in Haiti and the long history of US backed regime change.
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