A Legend In Its Own Mind

I’M HAVING TO REVISE MY VIEW OF AMERICA

I’m starting to realize that Americans have accepted a certain mythology. America is a legend in its own mind, to paraphrase the old insult.

We came here from England and Europe and built it up from nothing is what we believe. Only, we did take help from the real Americans who lived here before us. Then, we shanked them, basically, by rounding them up and plopped them down on the shittiest, most godforsaken land we could find, obviously hoping they’d die off, which largely is what happened to them. The ones that didn’t want to be settled on reservations were either hunted down and killed or forced onto reservations.

So, the saying that “America was founded as a criminal enterprise” is starting to ring true to me.

Our current government’s founding fathers bought kidnapped Africans and worked them, often to death, while treating them like shit. Don’t tell me I’m committing the historical fallacy of judging actions of the past by today’s standards. If you read Jefferson’s writings on slavery, he knew it was wrong and lamented that it would come back to haunt the country someday, which it has.

I’m sad to say that Trump is making it obvious that racism is very much still with us. All it took was some basic permission from Trump to bring all of the roaches out into the night resulting in a racist Hispanic hunt in El Paso that left 22 Americans and Mexican visitors dead. While the more foolish of the racists march in “You will not replace us” marches, clearly for every one of them, there are many that express their hatred at the ballot box.

Founded on racism, clearly racism is still central to America’s story.

Another aspect of America being a legend in its own mind is the notion that the US somehow won WW2 on its own, when as a matter of fact, it’s probably Russia that deserves the most credit for beating the Nazis. We often forget that Brits, Aussies, and others fought by our side. In the war against Japan, we can take the bulk of the credit, but the decisive factor in the end was a bomb no one had ever seen used before, a weapon we may now dearly wish had never been developed, because it transformed the power politics of the world.

• This topic was modified 6 years, 8 months ago by Unseen.
• This topic was modified 6 years, 8 months ago by Unseen.