The liberation of the American peoples cannot be achieved without the shedding of imperial weight, writes the Pulitzer prize-winning author in this somber essay marking the semiquincentennial
The word I think of to describe the United States on its 250th anniversary is cruelty. There are other words, of course, that could describe a country of such size, power, and diversity.
One could be optimistic and choose to emphasize words like hope and audacity in an effort to summon up the angels and illusions of American history and culture. There are undoubtedly Americans who are doing their best to hear those angels and who struggle to turn the illusions into reality, who believe that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” Martin Luther King Jr said that, and it is comforting, but there is also the possibility that the gravity of American history bends that arc towards something far worse than justice.
That is what we are witnessing at the moment: the black hole of cruelty that has always been there from the very beginning of the United States, or “America,” or the “New World.”
The late anticolonialist poet and politician, Aimé Césaire, had none of the investment in American possibility that an American intellectual like King had, or was forced to have. Césaire described the age of American imperialism this way: “The hour of the barbarian is at hand. The modern barbarian. The American hour. Violence, excess, waste, mercantilism, bluff, conformism, stupidity, vulgarity, disorder.” The persuasiveness of American propaganda about being the greatest country in the world has never worked on everyone, but increasingly that propaganda is failing to work for ever greater numbers of people.
American propaganda has always been about the spectacle of the city upon a hill on whom the world’s eyes are turned, a brightly lit extravaganza marked by Hollywood and lubricated with Coca-Cola. Now the spectacle is about the demonization of immigrants, the sickening rituals of hunting them down in the streets with masked government enforcers, the lurid punishments of inhuman detention that spur cheers and glee from a significant part of the American people, encouraged by the would-be American Nero and his fawning minions who take pleasure in their taunts and insults. The bullying of the weak and the desperate inside American borders is matched by the lobbing of missiles outside those borders, the flexing of admittedly enormous muscles that is not matched by intelligence.
Imperial Fantasies
Is the cruelty of the American bully the result of a declining empire or the cause of it? The cruelty was always there, from the slaughter of Indians to the exploitation, murder, torture, and rape of Black African enslaved peoples to the abuse and mockery of Mexicans and Chinese, Latinos and Asians, who were forcibly incorporated into American empire or brought in as cheap labor. American empire was also erected on the labor, subservience, and silencing of women, and the suppression of sexual diversity. If some idea of American exceptionalism is to be saved – this idea that Freedom is the greatest American invention and export – then the liberation of all peoples inside American borders will have to be realized, regardless of race, gender, sex, religion, nationality, or any other feature that is used to single out elements of humanity.
This liberation of the American peoples cannot be achieved without the shedding of imperial weight. Carrying an empire is a burden, certainly one that has enormous economic, social, and moral costs for Americans who are deprived of their fair share of American wealth, which has been diverted to the American war machine. This war machine functions best with a decrease in democratic possibility, an increase in economic inequality, and a destruction of an educational system that could enlighten Americans about their true history and their country’s present role as an ill, wounded, and angry giant, symptoms manifest among too many Americans who take delight in cruelty, since they cannot take delight in generosity, hospitality, and possibility.
That empire has other costs for the rest of the world. Perhaps nowhere is this more vividly realized than in the American support for Israel, a bipartisan effort since at least 1967 and the Six-Day War, which turned Israel from a curiosity to a mirror image of the United States. The U.S., stung by its failure and humiliation in the war in Viet Nam, which shredded American ideals as well as Southeast Asian bodies, saw in Israel’s triumph an inspirational model of militaristic masculinity and self-professed moral democracy. Israel seemed to be a reminder of what the United States once was, a small frontier country of settlement and self-aggrandizement, waging virtuous war against innumerable enemies and savages.
Israel blew up its own propaganda by going Biblical on Gaza, calling down the Old Testament fire and brimstone of divine genocide on the Palestinian people. The United States of both Democratic and Republican leadership went along. The Republicans and the far right see in Israel a realization of Biblical prophecy, the triumph of apocalyptic Christian redemption against nonbelievers. The Democratic leadership sees in Israel a smaller version of American hegemony, exercised through military power, technological innovation, capitalistic desire, and democratic freedom and inclusion. The fact that this is all an imperial fantasy that overrides how Israel’s “right to exist” cannot happen without perpetual war, occupation, and apartheid is also a reflection of American fantasy – that the United States as it is currently constructed on its 250th anniversary is not possible without forever war, and would not have been possible without the same genocidal foundations on which Israel is built.
Crippling Blows to an Empire
I arrived in the United States as a refugee a year before its bicentennial. There was something innocent about its fireworks, its costumes, its celebrations of George Washington and the Minute Men and Valley Forge and on and on, all of which were infused into me as a new American subject from an American war that was too perplexing for many Americans to deal with. The bicentennial marked both a selective remembering of the American past and a will to forget all the troubling aspects of American history, extending from the colonial era up to the very present of the war that brought me to this country. Looking back 50 years later, it is clear that the bicentennial marked a concerted American effort to ignore what the war in Viet Nam should have taught the United States, and instead to erase those lessons in order to renew American empire.
The result is the catastrophic American support for an Israeli genocide, which has also brought the United States into inflicting a war on Iran that is a strategic and tactical failure, as well as a collective war crime on the Iranian people. If the bicentennial marked the immediate aftermath of a crippling blow on the American empire, the 250th anniversary marks yet another such blow. In both cases, the damage to the United States was inflicted by others but also by Americans themselves, who deluded themselves with fantasies of American might and benevolence. Unless Americans are willing to acknowledge such fantasies and give them up, it is difficult to imagine a 300th anniversary of the country where the American empire will still be as dominant as it is today, given how Iran and Palestine – not to mention North Korea and China – have shown how the American empire can be halted.
Empires do not often share power or decline gracefully. The idea that the United States might save itself from itself seems far away, just as the idea that Israel could do the same looks impossible. Change will come mostly from external defeats and pressures and from the explosions of internal contradictions. The role of patriotic Americans is not to participate in the cruelty and to call out that cruelty for what it is. But too many Americans believe that patriotism means continuing to exert American power and violence, masked by the rhetoric of democracy and freedom, in order to keep a staggering giant on its feet. Much of the rest of the world sees the Orwellian reality that a country so committed to democracy and freedom really only wants that democracy and freedom for itself and not for the rest of the world. The internal contradiction of the United States is that even this democracy and freedom is being reserved for fewer and fewer people.
Like Israel, the United States is being led by its worst. The solution is not to assume that a new leadership will be better, if that new leadership still believes in Israeli and American exceptionalism, in the self-serving delusion that these two countries are the chosen peoples. What will save the United States is giving up the intoxication of superiority and domination and choosing to instead emphasize the virtues of humility and repentance. These enlightening virtues might help the United States escape from the gravity of its own cruelty. Without them, there will be no possibility of justice, both for American policies towards the countries with which it is engaged and for the American people themselves.
https://zeteo.com/p/250-america-birthday-cruelty-viet-thanh-nguyen
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This is quite an assortment of US American writers that The Observer asked to reflect on the best and worst moments of American history on the 250th anniversary. Marilynne Robinson, Jennifer Egan, Rumaan Alam, and many more, including yours truly. This is the second of three pieces I was asked to do on the 250th (the first was for The Nation), and it’s not even the darkest.
VIET THANH NGUYEN
Where to begin? The US has always been two-faced, a Janus of the quiet American and the ugly American. Bill Clinton and Obama are among the quiet, well-spoken liberals also willing to invade or bomb the unruly natives. The Bushes and Trump just went straight to bombing and invasion without the pleasant rhetoric.
To see the two faces of this country, we could go back to the original sins of genocide and enslavement, the nightmare lining of the American dream. Give credit to Indigenous and Black peoples who have survived and built the cultures of memory, struggle, and liberation that other subordinated peoples have drawn from. These movements are among the best of American cultures, forcing the US to live up to its rhetoric of democracy, freedom and equality. Since I am a refugee from an American war, however, I choose immigration as my theme for the best and the worst of the country.
The US would not exist without the unwanted migration of white settlers – at least from the perspective of Indigenous peoples – with Christopher Columbus and the pilgrims being the original, celebrated, heroic boat people (I am among the unheroic boat people). Desiring immigration by white people is a tradition renewed by Trump’s fascination with encouraging white South Africans to come as refugees from a country justly ruled by Black Africans. But immigration by non-white people, or the human trafficking of non-white peoples, epitomised by the enslavement of Black Africans, is much more ambivalently received by a white-dominated US that knows it needs non-white people to exploit but does not want too many at the same time. This tricky balance between racist hate and racist love is central to American tradition.
Racist hate towards immigrants reached a symbolic and legal culmination with the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and its eventual sequel, the 1924 Immigration Act. Chinese immigrants, without whom the transcontinental railroad could not have been built, became the victims of the first exclusionary immigration law aimed at a national or racial population. Xenophobic fears in the US led to outlawing almost all non-white immigration in 1924. If this was the worst moment in American history when it comes to immigration, the passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act may be the best moment.
Racially and nationally discriminatory quotas were ended, and family reunification was allowed (crucial, since the prevention of Chinese women from immigrating was key to preventing Chinese American families from being formed). The designers of this law thought that more European immigrants would come through family reunification.
Instead, Asians, Latinos, and Africans took advantage of the new liberalism and the US was transformed demographically.
Of course, I believe this to be for the good of the US, infusing the country with new ideas, new cuisines, new customs, and new energy – not to mention new labour – that helped it to come a little closer to approximating the rhetoric of the American dream. Trump and his acolyte Miller believe the opposite; that these waves of non-white peoples are instead an invasion, an enactment of the “great replacement” that will eradicate white people. So it is that the US has turned, once again, from the face of ambivalent love to the face of outright hate, expressed through deportations, family separations and detention camps. I hope one day soon that enough Americans will understand that xenophobia is a form of domestic violence that only hurts the US, possibly fatally, while the reality is that it is immigrants and refugees who make America great.
NB: Both the above essays have been sourced from the author’s FB page
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Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam
From colonialism to Covid: Viet Thanh Nguyen on the rise of anti-Asian violence
The violent new world being born is going to horrify you
Chris Hedges: The Rule of Idiots
Lying and history: Hannah Arendt and the Viet Nam war (2009)
Seyla Benhabib: Breaking Silence, Hannah Arendt, and Martin Luther King
After the truth-shower 