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I have tried my damndest to keep this review short. I wanted to read something critical to modern America for the 4th of July weekend but there is no audiobook for “When Abortion Was a Crime: Women, Medicine, and Law in the United States, 1867-1973” (1996) so I got this one.
The first third was interesting, covering a lot about anti-federalism, pre-revolutionary stuff, the war of 1812, and other things I didn't really know about. Then we get to Lincoln, reconstruction, and the 20th century and it's just more stuff I've heard a thousand times.
This is like baby's first “US Bad” book. It's a broad overview of things our US history textbooks whitewashes, ignores, or covers in half a paragraph. The content is decent, but it has to keep moving to cover ~400 years of crap. It was written by a history professor and really reads like a guy going through his lesson plan.
Once the book got to the 20th century it was just “then we got this president and he sucked because XYZ and the things his detractors said about him weren't true but he definitely wasn't as great as people remember” rinse and repeat from until we get to Obama. He's no Marxist (he teaches at West Point, the military academy), but he does criticize all presidents despite the color of their tie.
Definitely read this if you want to understand why American Exceptionalism is bad. If you already know that, check it out to fill in some gaps to that knowledge, as this does cover a lot.
The long short of it is: The US is an empire, the Civil War was about slavery, the revolutionary war was about slavery, the Mexican-American war was about slavery and imperialism. The Spanish-American War, WW1, WW2, and all the rest of the US wars were about imperialism. The US was built upon white supremacy and it stands as a white supremacist nation to this day. All presidents are war criminals. Obama was also bad and a war criminal.
Alright I lied. There were some provocative quotes. Here are my favorites:
~~ 1600s to 1700s~~
Bacon's Rebellion (1676-1677) was “a populist army savagely assaulted hated Native Americans and aristocrats alike. A mix of black and white former indentured servants demonstrated the fragility of Virginian society. The planter class was terrified. To avoid — at all costs — a repeat, the landed gentry made a devil's bargain. To ensure stability, they realized they must co-opt some of the poor without ceding their own privileged status. Enter America's original sins: racism and white privilege. Plantation owners simply hired fewer indentured servants and became more reliant on black African chattel slaves for their labor force. [...] Bacon's Rebellion linked land, labor, and race in nefarious ways. Landownership remained the path to freedom. Labor remained essential to profiting from the land, and race came to define the relationship between land and labor. After 1676 a class-based system morphed into a race-based system of labor and social structure.“
“Colonial New England was inhabited by zealots — conformist and oppressive fundamentalists who strictly policed the boundaries of their exalted theocracy. Forget the Thanksgiving feast: this was Islamic State on the Atlantic!”
George Washington started the tradition of US Presidents all being War Criminals. He started the French and Indian War (1754–1763) “This was supposed to have been as much a diplomatic as a military mission, and no state of war had been declared. Washington's choice to open fire was strategically and ethically questionable; however, his inability to control his native allies and the assassination of a prisoner must certainly constitute a war crime.”
We've been an empire since before we were even an independent country. “Despite contemporary memories to the contrary, in the coming revolution against Britain the colonists hardly rebelled against the concept of empire itself. Rather, they desired a new, expansive American empire, unhindered by London and stretching west over the Appalachians and deep into native lands.”
Most people of the colonies weren't even on board with independence. “Probably no more than one-third of all colonists were actually anti-imperial ‘patriots.' Our Founding Fathers and their followers weren't even in the majority.” One third wanted independence, one third supported the British Empire, and one third were fence sitters. Not a ringing endorsement for bloody revolution.
“Some colonists simply resented military occupation. The British decision to send uniformed regular army troops to rebellious hotbeds like Boston had an effect opposite to what was intended. This is an old story. American soldiers in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq have learned this lesson again and again as foreign military presence angered the locals and united disparate political, ethnic, and sectarian groups in a nationalist insurgency.” Burn.
“The patriot minority used threats and violence to enforce their narrative and thrust their politics on the loyal and the apathetic alike. There was little that was democratic about it. Discomforting as it may be, the patriot movement was hardly a Gandhi-like campaign of peaceful civil disobedience. Patriots were passionate, they were relentless, and they were armed. Firearms were ubiquitous in the colonies, more so, even, than in Britain. Guns are as American as apple pie. So is street violence.” Remember that the next time the White Moderate tells you to be peaceful.
The Revolutionary war was about slavery. The Brits were on their way to abolish the practice, and slavery kept the colonies' economies flowing and kept the wealthiest colonizers (the “founding fathers”) obscenely wealthy. George Washington was the richest person in the newly founded country:
“The ostensibly tyrannical British practiced very little chattel slavery within the United Kingdom itself. In fact, in the Somerset v. Stewart case of 1772, England's highest common-law court ruled that chattel slavery was illegal. This judgment spooked many southern colonial gentlemen, who began to fear that the British metropolitan authorities were ‘unreliable defenders of slavery,' and this convinced many to join the patriot cause.”
Native Americans and black people weren't stupid. They were fighting against the “patriots” because the “patriots” were going to genocide and/or continue to enslave them. “In proportion to their numbers in the population, black men were more likely than whites to serve as combatants in the Revolution, only by and large they fought against the side that had proclaimed all men were created equal.”
“Lord Dunmore raised eight hundred to a thousand slave volunteers by offering freedom to those who would flee their masters and gather under his banner. Word of Dunmore's proclamation spread rapidly through the colonies, giving hope to slaves and striking fear in planters throughout the Americas. It convinced many fence-sitting slaveholders that there could now be no reconciliation with the Crown. As Edward Rutledge, a South Carolina signer of the Declaration of Independence, wrote, the Dunmore proclamation effected ‘an eternal separation between Great Britain and the colonies...more than any other expedient.'”
Blah blah blah Genocides, systematic rape, backstabbing the natives, slavery, blah blah blah. Tale as old as time.
The founding fathers really did not like Democracy. They were elitists. They wanted the rich and powerful and white and male people to be in charge. The Constitution was written in secret by (and for) those of wealth and power. They wanted to keep their wealth and power so they wrote the rules accordingly. And don't give me that “it was just the way things were back then” because there were plenty of people who recognized the indefensibly unjust reality these elitists were forcing upon them at the time.
There was a lot of interesting stuff about federalism vs anti-federalism, and apparently the Constitution was treasonous at the time because the Articles of Confederation were in effect at the time. My thoughts on federalism have wavered over the years and now I might just have to support US Balkanization, as that would result (at least in the short term) in less global imperialism, which would be better for the 3rd world.
~~~Okay but how many US wars were started with false flags, exactly?~~~
I kept getting this recurring theme popping up as I read. A LOT of US wars were started under false pretenses.
• War of 1812, supposedly declared because Britain was commandeering US merchant vessels which they claimed were full of British deserters. (The Brit's were correct in this). So the US declared war first, the Brit's rescinded the law that let them commandeer ships, but the rambunctious young empire would never let a good war go to waste, and used it to do more Native genocide, colonizing, and even tried to conquer Canada. But by golly those Canooks came down and lit the White House on fire. Hilarious. The powers that be claimed the Brit's were trying to take their colonies back (false).
• Mexican-American War - “Until 1836, Texas was a distant northern province of the new Mexican Republic, a republic that had only recently won its independence from the Spanish Empire, in 1821.” Mexico had abolished slavery, but a bunch of Yankees kept crossing the border south into Texas, the province of Mexico, bringing their slaves. The Mexican government tried to enforce their own country's laws (about how you can't have slaves any more) within their own country's borders (Texas, a part of Mexico). Santa Anna marched his army north, so a bunch the invading Yankees held up in the Alamo (a fort). “The men inside the Alamo walls were pro-slavery insurgents. As applied to them, Texan, in any real sense, is a misnomer. Two-thirds were recent arrivals from the United States and never intended to submit to sovereign Mexican authority. What the Battle of the Alamo did do was whip up a fury of nationalism in the United States and cause thousands more recruits to illegally ‘jump the border' — oh, the irony — and join the rebellion in Texas.” So we claimed we were attacked when we were the aggressors...hmmmmmm.......
The US stole Texas from Mexico because the migrants weren't obeying the laws. Oh god I hate irony so much my head hurts. Manifest Destiny is just Imperialism. Amerika Bad.
• Spanish-American War - USS Maine blew up on its own, but we didn't let that tragedy go to waste, so we declared war and scooped up more colonies.
• WW2 - We were already helping the allies well before the Japanese attacked.
I'm keeping this review short so I'm cutting this off here.
