THE UNITED STATES OF AMNESIA, Part 1

American military intervention since 1950. Author: Andrew0921. In the public domain.

by Stefan Schindler

America has the largest empire in world history, guarded by a thousand military bases around the world; yet most Americans don’t know there is such a thing as the American empire, even though they’re paying for it.  Most Americans don’t know that dismantling the empire would be the single most important step toward world peace and the solving of our ever deepening federal deficit and domestic financial crisis.

Gore Vidal coined the phrase “The United States of Amnesia.”  Of course, citizens can’t forget what they never knew.  Here are some facts to compensate for the American system of compulsory miseducation, political disinformation, and mainstream news media distortion:

1 – If U.S. naval commander Commodore Perry had not sailed his warships into Tokyo harbor in 1853, forcing Japan to end two centuries of international isolation, Japan could not have industrialized so quickly as to invade China in 1936, bomb Pearl Harbor a few years later, and launch the Second World War in the Pacific.

2 – Mark Twain, witnessing America’s eight-year terror campaign against the people of the Philippines in the so-called “Spanish-American War,” declared: “America’s flag should be a skull and crossbones.”  During the Spanish-American war, America never went to war with Spain, but simply took for its own the former Spanish colonies of Puerto Rico and the Philippines.

3 – American troops invaded Russian in 1918 in an effort to reverse the Russian Revolution of 1917, which overthrew centuries of Tsarist dictatorship and economic apartheid.  American soldiers were ordered to side with the remnants of the Tsar’s army, thereby helping create and sustain a devastating Russian civil war, preventing Lenin from instituting democratic reforms, and giving rise to Stalin’s dictatorship.  Woodrow Wilson’s invasion of Russia sought to prevent the rise of “social democracy” as a political, egalitarian alternative to capitalism.  This agenda was furthered by Harry Truman, who, after WWII, demonized Russia to frighten the American people into paying for a monstrous and unnecessary war machine.

4 – President Truman created an unaccountable national security state in 1947, when he sanctioned a secret government in the form of the National Security Council and the Central Intelligence Agency.

Co-founder of The National Registry for Conscientious Objection, a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, a recipient of The Boston Baha’i Peace Award, and a Trustee of The Life Experience School and Peace Abbey Foundation, Dr. Schindler received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Boston College, worked one summer in a nature preserve, lived in a Zen temple for a year, did the pilot’s voice in a claymation video of St. Exupery’s The Little Prince, acted in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” and performed as a musical poet in Philadelphia, Boston, and New York City.  He also wrote The Peace Abbey Courage of Conscience Awards for Howard Zinn and John Lennon.  He is now semi-retired and living in Salem, Massachusetts.

Remembering Pearl Harbor

On December 8, 1941, in a speech to the people of the United States, President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared: “Yesterday, December 7, 1941—a date which will live in infamy—the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.”

Rescuing a survivor of Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor
Rescuing a survivor of Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor (Photo in public domain; from Wikimedia Commons)

As most people in the U.S. learn in school, the nation fought a victorious war against Japan, “pacified” it (in part through the world’s first and only use of nuclear weaponry), and directed its transformation into a peaceful and successful democracy.

Following   9/11, President George W. Bush framed the invasion of Iraq in the rhetoric of Pearl Harbor and  its aftermath, arguing that once again American force could bring peace and democracy to an aggressive nation.

John W. Dower, in an unheeded message to the U.S. government in the February/March issue of the Boston Review in 2003, warned that Iraq was not Japan, and that an attack on and occupation of Iraq was not the route to democracy in that country. He pointed out that “What made the occupation of Japan a success was two years or so of genuine reformist idealism before U.S. policy became consumed by the Cold War…,” which he contrasts sharply with the prevailing conservative philosophy.

It is appropriate for Americans to continue mourning the loss of lives at Pearl Harbor, and the years of violence and death that Pearl Harbor unleashed. At the same time, it is  important to gain a better understanding of the events that led to Pearl Harbor, the events that led to 9/11, and the events that led to the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

John W. Dower’s latest book, Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor / Hiroshima / 9-11 / Iraq, offers considerable food for thought on these issues. In this book, Dower warns Americans again about “how pressures and fixations multiply in the cauldron of enmity and war; how reason, emotion, and delusion commingle; how blood debts can become blood lusts, and moral passion can bleed into the practice of wanton terror.”

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology