"I think we must save America from the missionary idea that you must get the whole world on to the American way of life. This is a big world danger." --Gunnar Myrdal

uman rights crimes of magnitude have marked the history of the United States of America since its creation following the arrival of European settlers to the North American continent. The USA was built on land stolen from indigenous peoples and developed by the labor of enslaved Africans. Colonizers seized land that the Native peoples had lived on for centuries, massacred the inhabitants, and forced survivors onto concentration camps known as reservations. They visited upon the native peoples a holocaust parallel to those perpetrated by the Nazis and Stalinists. Moreover, they kidnapped millions of Africans and used them as slaves on plantations.

Nonetheless, successive United States governments still cannot summon the will to extend an official apology to the descendants of these victims, who suffer ongoing socio-economic and politico-cultural discrimination due to official U.S. government policies which institutionalized the oppression and destruction of their ancestors. The statement by former President Ronald Reagan that Americans "are a proud nation, with much in our history of which to be rightfully proud" reflects the extent to which Americans, themselves, remain trapped in their own mythology and wilfully blind to their actual history.

Since the arrival of European settlers on North American soil, the Euro-American population has been marked by its presumption of an ever-expanding frontier, and its right to dispose of non-European populations. In the early days of expansion on the American continent, this predisposition gave rise to the ruthless seizure of indigenous lands and an official state policy of African enslavement. As the frontier closed at last on the North American continent, Euro-American leaders looked outward to a new global frontier, and the no less bloody American imperial period -- what Amaury de Riencourt has termed "The American Empire" -- began.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the crushing of the Asian tigers, the world has entered into yet another era, which is witnessing the effort to institutionalize a new -- American -- world order, as American Manifest Destiny goes global. What, given its socio-cultural antecedents, will this mean for the world? It is a question the world community must seriously consider.

[...]

The United States has always had global ambitions. The Monroe Doctrine of 1823 declared the entire Western Hemisphere to be a U.S. sphere of influence. Leaving aside its continuous record of aggression against American Indians, its expropriation of Florida from Spain during the early nineteenth century, and subsequent war of conquest against Mexico in 1847-48, the United States carried out 103 military interventions prior to the Spanish-American War. These included actions against Tripoli (1800-1805), Algiers (1815), Sumatra (1832, 1838), Argentina (1833, 1852, 1890), Mexico (1836, 1842, 1859, 1866, 1870), Fiji (1840, 1855, 1858), Samoa (1841, 1888), Drummond Island (1841), Tourane (1845), Jaffa (1851, 1858), Japan (1853), Nicaragua (1853, 1854, 1857, 1867, 1894, 1896, 1898), Uruguay (1855, 1858, 1868), Columbia, mainly the Province of Panama (1856, 1865, 1873, 1885, 1896), China (1859), Paraguay (1859), Angola (1860), Shimonoseki Island (1863), Korea (1871, 1888), Hawai'i (1874, 1889, 1893), Egypt (1882) and Haiti (1888, 1891). In addition, the U.S. Navy continuously patrolled China's Yangtse River from 1841 onward.

As Senator Cabot Lodge was quoted above as so correctly observing, America's record of belicosity during the nineteenth century was unequaled by any other country. Thus, the U.S. war against Spain in 1898, and its initial seizure of colonies abroad, simply marked the crystallization of attitudes and behaviors which had been evident from the outset. And, although President William McKinley cast American policy in the Philippines in the most glowing terms -- as a "civilizing mission" devoted to the "Benevolent Assimilation" of Filipinos (he also described the colonization of Puerto Rico as "anti-colonialism") -- the wanton slaughter occurring in those islands even as he spoke painted an obviously different picture of U.S. intentions. With Theodore Roosevelt's pronouncement of his "Corollary" to the Monroe Doctrine in 1904, the intensity of American aggression, if anything, increased. In the corollary, President Roosevelt proclaimed that the United States, because it was a "civilized nation," had the right to stop "chronic wrong doing" throughout the world. "God," declared Senator Beveidge of Indiana in January 1900, "has made us master organizers of the world to establish system where chaos reigns. He has given us the spirit of progress to overwhelm the forces of reaction throughout the earth... Were it not for such a force such as this the world would relapse into barbarism and night." Perhaps the proudest achievement of Roosevelt's presidency was setting in motion construction of the Panama canal, an expedient not only to rendering U.S. commerce more efficient (and thus profitable), but to transferring American naval force between the Atlantic and Pacific with a minimum of delay. Of course, to accomplish this it was first necessary to strip Columbia of Panama, its most northerly province, and then carve an effectively permanent zone of U.S. military occupation across the resulting "nation."

Altogether, during the thirty years from the Spanish-American War to the Great Depression, the United States sent its troops into Latin American countries thirty-two times. Apart from the expedi-tionary force it dispatched to fight in World War I, it intervened militarily in other locales on a further dozen occasions during the same period. And, in the aftermath of the Second World War, possessed of a temporary nuclear monopoly and with its primary opponents in shambles, the scope of such activities was extended still further as U.S. policymakers endeavored to finally attain a truly global reach.

For nearly five decades, the United States has used its status as the dominant military and economic power to intimidate rival nations around the world as it pursues the interests of American big business. There is no other country whose government talks so endlessly of peace and engages so precipitously in acts of war -- largely undeclared as such. For years, the government of the United States has willfully inflicted agony, death and destruction on the peoples of other countries, most of whom were militarily weak or defenseless. During the Vietnam War, U.S. General Curtis Lemay advocated -- and almost achieved -- the goal of bombing the enemy into the Stone Age. Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos may never recover from the economic and ecological devastation brought on by U.S. bombing in its war of aggression in Southeast Asia. In Cambodia alone, between 1969 and 1973 the US air force dropped more than 530,000 tons of bombs, killing more than 600,000 people and displacing nearly 2 million.

Tens of thousands have been slaughtered by direct U.S. military actions against the Dominican Republic, Grenada, Nicaragua, Libya, Lebanon, Panama, and Iraq. Besides direct attack by the U.S. military, people in many countries are also subject to the state terror of governments supported by the United States. Palestinians, for example, are regularly murdered by Israel's military forces supplied and financed by the U.S. Government. The United States sells arms and provides military aid to dictators and totalitarian regimes around the world. President Jimmy Carter allowed the U.S. to train the Shah of Iran's despicable Savak "security" police, a veritable torture club.

The U.S. supported Indonesia's Suharto dictatorship even though it had become common knowledge that the Indonesian military practiced genocide against the people of East Timor. The Indonesian armed forces, known as ABRI, have long been the chosen instrument of American foreign policy for bolstering its preferred totalitarian regime in the world's fourth largest country. The United States collaborated with ABRI (providing it with lists of suspected communists) in 1965, when General Suharto slaughtered a half-million people in the process of coming to power. It also condoned ABRI's invasion of East Timor on December 7, 1975, and its subsequent elimination of 200,000 East Timorese through what the State Department in its 1996 Human Rights Report calls "extrajudicial killings." Since Indonesia lacks external enemies, its armed forces are devoted almost entirely to maintaining internal security. For most of the period of the Suharto regime, the CIA has actively trained ABRI special forces in a variety of lethal tactics, including advanced sniper operations, close quarters combat, containing street demonstrations, and psychological operations.

The United States spent billions of dollars to overthrow the Soviet-backed government in Afghanistan, supporting the most reactionary and fanatic Taliban forces in that country. The CIA had supported a mercenary army recruited of feudal warlords and their servants for a "holy war" against the communists. These forces received huge amounts of weapons, military training, and other aid from the U.S. -- it was the largest CIA operation in history.

The U.S. Government does not like Castro's Cuba, although that country is impotent to threaten any American interest. Nevertheless, the U.S. imposed an embargo designed to bring Cuba back under its thumb. The U.S. Congress enacted the 1996 Helms-Burton Act to punish Cuba by punishing foreign enterprises that do business there. This effort to assert U.S. law outside its territory was received with outrage by other nations who resented the American attempt to dictate their trade policies with Cuba. In October 1998, the United Nations General Assembly voted 157 to 2 in favor of the United States dropping its embargo against Cuba. The only two votes in favor of continuing the embargo were those of the United States (of course) and Israel. While U.S. deputy UN ambassador Peter Burleigh called the sanctions "an important foreign policy tool ... aimed at promoting a peaceful transition to democracy in Cuba," properly speaking, this methodical program to deny food, clothing, educational supplies, building materials and medical supplies to an entire nation for thirty-five years amounts to economic warfare and terrorism. It is like mercilessly starving another human being, then referring to the deprivation as an important human relations tool.

Now free from the constraints that were once imposed upon it by the opposition of another global superpower, the U.S. government operates today in a belligerent and bullying manner. "Never before in modern history has a country dominated the earth so totally as the United States does today," the German newsmagazine, Der Spiegel, reported in 1997.

The expected peace dividend that was to be reaped at the end of the Cold War has not been realized. The U.S. still has weapons, aircraft, battleships and tens of thousands of troops stationed at bases all over the world ready to attack any country at a moment's notice -- in what mainstream American scholarship seeks to legitimize as the role of a global hegemon in the maintenance of peace. ...

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