A Sorry Independence Day

From an article in Counterpunch by Lawrence Velvel on October 5, 2006:

Iraq is by far not the first time this country has suffered a moral meltdown. Other examples are, unhappily, legion. This country approved of slavery for nearly 90 years and reviled abolitionists for decades. Southerners murdered black prisoners of war during the Civil War. The country allowed Jim Crow to be imposed by a brutal South for 90 years (and allowed the South defacto to run Congress and therefore the country, as it still does). The country allowed the South to lynch blacks by the thousands. The country has railroaded, and hung or electrocuted, so-called radicals who likely were innocent of, or at least some of whom were innocent of, the charges against them. (E.g., the Haymarket socialists, and maybe Sacco and Vanzetti too, though opinions differ about the latter two.) This country acted unspeakably in the Philippines Insurrection, when it tortured people, burned down villages and engaged in mass murder — all of which our historians cavalierly ignored, reprehensibly ignored, for 65 or 70 years, until Viet Nam was well advanced. The country acted unspeakably in Viet Nam, which is too close in time for American actions to need detailing.

Moral breakdowns are, it appears, a regular phenomenon of American national life. And, without getting into it very deeply, they are always accompanied, as today, by false protestations that what is being done is in the name of a higher civilization, is in the name of an asserted moral imperative: slavery was claimed to be a positive good; Jim Crow was claimed to be a desirable and necessary separation of the races; socialists had to be eliminated lest they destroy the nation; we were civilizing the benighted in the Philippines; we were stopping the march of worldwide Communism in Viet Nam; today it is claimed we fight in Iraq to stop the march of worldwide jihadism, worldwide Islamofascism, etc., etc.

As said, this country’s moral derelictions are not looked at as, or described in terms of being, moral delicts. They are looked at and described in other ways, and by the use of other terms. Why the country shies from using the word immoral does not seem hard to guess — who, after all, wants to describe his or her own conduct as immoral, or the conduct of those he/she votes for and supports as immoral, or his or her own country as immoral. What American historian wants to say, and does not fear the consequences to himself of saying, that the actions of this country have been or are immoral?   [more]

And from May 5, 2007:

 But are we going to stop, any time soon, the American participation which opened the door to this disaster, to this creation of killing fields, and which remains so much a driver of the disaster? No, we almost certainly are not going to stop it any time soon. The incompetent fools at the top of the Administration desire to continue it — indefinitely, no less, and they desire this even though to accomplish their aims would be likely to take 10 years and at least a quarter million more American soldiers. Meanwhile the Democrats don’t have the guts to do what is necessary to stop it — which could easily be done by merely refusing all further funding of any type for the military (or, more limitedly, for Iraq) except for funds needed to finance the protection of troops during a withdrawal. Washington and the media also are filled with pundits and advisers who invent one reason after another why it would be bad to stop our participation even though to begin our participation was a terrible mistake. (In business such excuse mongering is called throwing good money after bad.) Out in the country, among Republican at least, and probably more heavily in the militaristic states of the old Confederacy than elsewhere, there are still people who think we should fight, no doubt to the last Iraqi. The lessons from Britain’s war in Iraq in the 1920’s are still a secret to most Americans. And one of the perhaps two or three greatest lessons of Viet Nam is still no less a secret to most Americans — such lesson being that as was easily discernible, to those with eyes to see and wit to understand, as early as the final four or five years of that misbegotten military adventure, America would do better (as occurred), both at home and in the world, when it ceased participating in its Indo China debacle.   [more]