I have just finished reading Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States”, and from it I have learned the following:
The government is not your friend. It does not have the average citizens’ best interests at heart, and it never has. Specifically, I speak about the U.S. government, but much of what I say likely applies to any government.
The purpose of the U.S. government, since its inception, has been to protect the business and financial interests of the wealthy. Every single one of the Founding Fathers was fantastically wealthy, particularly compared to the average American of the time. Each of them stood to gain a lot of money if Britain and their taxes were replaced with a more sympathetic government. The poor had little interest in independence from Britain and stood to gain almost nothing from the revolution; oppression by one wealthy minority is the same as any other. Yet, it was the poor people who died on the front lines of the American revolution, conscripted by a U.S. government they may not have supported at all.
the rich must, in their own interest, either control the government directly or control the laws by which government operates (p. 90)
The government has pitted the people against each other, using every one of our differences (race, class, gender, level of education, etc.) to divide us, and keep the people of the lower classes fighting each other instead of the wealthy elite that hold all the power. The government has helped foster this division through its policies and propaganda: refusing to punish white settlers for encroaching on land promised to Native Americans, slavery, enforcing minimum property requirements for voting, prohibiting poor blacks from owning guns, treating women as property, bringing in desperate immigrants as strike breakers, allowing the rich to buy their way out of the draft, villainizing communism, labeling dissenting voices as “commies”, drumming up fear of drugs and drug users. Without these constant diversions and encouragement to feel superior to your fellow citizens, the people might wake up to the fact that they are being oppressed, or their rights violated.
The occasional protest of angry citizens at offenses so flagrant that they cannot stay silent any longer, rarely results in any meaningful change.
If the government thinks it can get away with it, they have often stamped out civil disobedience with incredible and unnecessary force. Poor industrial workers striking for living wages in the 1920s and 30s were often violently broken up by the national guard. Prisoners who had taken control of a section of a prison in Attica that demanded basic access to healthcare, books, and better food (among other things) were massacred at the order of the state governor.
The government doesn’t play by its own rules, often knowingly breaking the law and then lying about it. In the rare instance that the government is caught in its lie, it never faces any consequences greater than a slap on the wrist for a scapegoat. Most famously, in the Watergate scandal president Nixon ordered the petty burglary of a political rival’s campaign office. He resigned, was pardoned of any crimes, and lived a life of comfort in retirement, leaving the system that allowed his behavior completely unchanged. The few people who were criminally charged got short jail terms, unusually low fines, and special privileges not afforded to other prisoners.
one Wall Street financier said that if Nixon resigned: “What we will have is the same play with different players.” (p. 546)
Less famously, but more nefarious, was the U.S. government’s consistent violation of its treaties with Native Americans for white profit. All through the 1700s and 1800s, numerous treaties were made with native tribes promising the sovereignty of their remaining lands in exchange for something the government wanted from them (typically more land or a cease of hostilities), and each time it was the U.S. government that attacked unarmed villages or annexed more land with no provocation. Even as late as JFK, the government was still violating its own treaties; a reservation on land pledged to natives in a treaty from the 1800s was unilaterally decided by the U.S. government to be flooded for the building of a dam.
Any concessions that are made to the people are often small, token gestures to appease us and make us forget our anger, to make us believe our problem has been solved, when in reality, little to no action has been taken. The Civil Rights act of 1964 was passed only because the establishment was worried about large-scale riots and the threat the protesters posed to the government. To this day it continues to be trimmed down and declawed, rather than improved. Even the 14th amendment, a cornerstone of our constitutional (and really human) rights, looked more impressive on paper than it was in practice. After the reconstruction period, due to an agreement between northern and southern politicians, the 14th amendment went completely unenforced, allowing for Jim Crow laws and anti-black racism to spread. The law is only as good as the government that is charged with upholding it.
Over the course of reading this book, I have lost any and all respect for every U.S. president. Each and every one dutifully upholding the status-quo, never doing anything that businesses or Wall Street might suffer from, if it could be helped.
Even the venerated Lincoln, though he did personally believe slavery was wrong, did not think it was constitutional to end it. Far from the liberal, pioneering firebrand that many school history books paint him as, Lincoln was the typical two-faced politician; he told abolitionists that he was an abolitionist, and he told slave holders that he had no intention of ending slavery. When the civil war began, Lincoln did not courageously end slavery then and there. In fact, he didn’t even make the first move. It was the people’s abolitionist movement in the north that flooded Congress with emancipation petitions, leading them to pass the Confiscation Act, which enabled the freeing of slaves of those fighting the Union. It was not enforced by Union generals, and Lincoln ignored the non-enforcement completely (p. 190). When he finally did issue the famous Emancipation Proclamation, it was more military threat than declaration of freedom, proclaiming that any states still in revolt against the Union would have their slaves freed. “The principle [of the Emancipation Proclamation] is not that a human being cannot justly own another, but that he cannot own him unless he is loyal the the United States” (p. 191).
Lincoln’s policy [is] “stumbling, halting, prevaricating, irresolute, weak, besotted,” … Lincoln was “a first-rate second-rate man.” (p. 190)
Not only is the government indifferent to the needs of the people, many (if not all?) presidents were war criminals, guilty of the very same atrocities we condemn Putin for committing in Ukraine today. And the government committed them all in the name of petty and selfish reasons, like the economy or politics.
All of the early presidents, particularly Andrew Jackson (still on our $20 bill), enacted a brutal genocide against Native Americans in order to steal their valuable land.
Truman dropped two atomic bombs in quick succession on civilian targets in Japan (while lying and calling them military targets, of course). On top of that, there were American prisoners of war that were known to be held in Hiroshima; upon learning this, Truman’s response was that the planned target for the atomic bomb was not to be changed. And the reason Truman didn’t wait for a response from Japan after the first bomb was dropped was because he didn’t want to risk the USSR joining the war in the Pacific (as it was set to do in a few weeks) therefore justifying another joint occupation.
Every president since Truman (at the very least through Reagan) has had their bloody hands in Latin and South America, supporting authoritarian regimes and crushing revolutions because those dictators in-turn support the U.S. and allow profitable exploitative business practices by American companies, like United Fruit (now Chiquita).
Every president involved in the Vietnam war knowingly bombed civilian targets for the sole purpose of preventing the Vietnamese from choosing communism over the oppressive governments installed by capitalist countries.
George H.W. Bush chose to make a display of military prowess rather than diplomatically settling the invasion of Kuwait. Civilian targets were hit. Unnecessary damage was caused. And the purpose? To show that the U.S. was not weak after Vietnam and to gain power over the oil barons of the middle east.
Russia recently used a cluster bomb in Ukraine, killing many people at a train station that was evacuating civilians. To this day, the United States still has not joined the Convention on Cluster Munitions (created in 2008), an agreement not to use cluster bombs due to the indiscriminate damage they often cause to civilian targets.
The two-party system, caused by the structure of U.S. elections, perpetuates a government of establishment; it doesn’t matter much whether democrats or republicans have control of the government, either way very little will change and the system is left intact. The checks and balances of the three branches of government ensure that if one branch (or a few members of said branch) get too radical, they can be “checked” by the other branches to ensure that no real change to the system ever occurs.
Voters are told they hold all the power in deciding the direction of the country and its policies through elections, but that’s a half-truth at best. The rich throw their monetary weight around every election, funding massive propaganda campaigns to sway the people’s votes by putting click-bait leaflets and commercials in front of every possible person. How many voters are truly making their “own” choice when they’ve been primed with often misleading information about each candidate by biased parties? After votes are cast in presidential elections, the people only have faith that the electoral college will even chose to give their voting power to the candidate who won the majority, there’s no requirement for them to do that (although historically they typically if not always have). Beyond the election, the rich, corporations, and their lobbyists are the ones that disproportionately hold the power to sway the government. Sending a letter to your congress person will not have the same effect as a lobbyist threatening to withhold campaign funding, or cashing in on the favor of having already provided said funding. For this reason, voting alone will never be enough to change the system in a radical enough way to fix its problems. That said, I’m not advocating for people to stop voting; we shouldn’t throw away what little power we are given.
Human rights have always come second to business profit in the U.S., and I am deeply saddened by the high probability that they will forever.
Edit:
A minor clarification; the purpose of this post (aside from fun) is to bring the ideas of U.S. nationalism, pride, and patriotism down a few pegs, and to present some perspectives of American history that aren’t often mentioned in school history books.
While the U.S. government is far from perfect (see above article), there are good parts of it. Civil rights in the U.S. have come a long way since the founding of the nation, and are better than those in some other nations. I’m not saying every aspect or member of the U.S. government is corrupt, what I am saying is that our history is far from clean (even in recent years) and we as citizens need to be vocal and active to keep pushing our flawed system in the right direction. We can’t rest on our laurels, not only because many Americans don’t have symbolic laurels to rest on, but because silence and inaction let the worse parts of the government regain lost ground.