America's Blinders

...Acareful reading of history might give us another safeguard against being deceived...

...It becomes necessary then, if we are going to protect ourselves and our fellow citizens against policies that will be disastrous not only for other people but for Americans too, that we face some facts that disturb the idea of a uniquely virtuous nation...

...He also lied about the reasons for our war in the Philippines, claiming we only wanted to "civilize" the Filipinos, while the real reason was to own a valuable piece of real estate in the far Pacific, even if we had to kill hundreds of thousands of Filipinos to accomplish that...

...In it, Powell confidently rattled off his "evidence": satellite photographs, audio records, reports from informants, with precise statistics on how many gallons of this and that existed for chemical warfare...

...There is also the unofficial national anthem "God Bless America," and you are looked on with suspicion if you ask why we would expect God to single out this one nation-just 5 percent of the world's population-for his or her blessing...

...If your starting point for evaluating the world around you is the firm belief that this nation is somehow endowed by Providence with unique qualities that make it morally superior to every other nation on Earth, then you are not likely to question the President when he says we are sending our troops here or there, or bombing this or that, in order to spread our values-democracy, liberty, and let's not forget free enterprise-to some God-forsaken (literally) place in the world...

...Reagan lied about the invasion of Grenada, claiming falsely that it was a threat to the United States...

...Howard Zinn is the co-author, with Anthony Arnove, of "Voices of a Peoples History of the United States...

...Surely not on our behavior toward people in other parts of the world...

...We must face our record of imperial conquest, in the Caribbean and in the Pacific, our shameful wars against small countries a tenth our size: Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Afghanistan, Iraq...

...rather to assert U.S...

...We must face our long history of ethnic cleansing, in which millions of Indians were driven off their land by means of massacres and forced evacuations...

...And he lied again about the reason for attacking Iraqin1991-hardly to defend the integrityofKuwait (can one imagine Bush heartstricken over Iraq's taking of Kuwait...

...And our long history, still not behind us, of slavery, segregation, and racism...

...President Woodrow Wilson-so often characterized in our history books as an "idealist"-lied about the reasons for entering the First World War, saying it was a war to "make the world safe for democracy," when it was really a war to make the world safe for the Western imperial powers...

...America's Blinders By Howard Zinn Illustration by Red Nose Studio Now that most Americans no longer believe in the war, now that they no longer trust Bush and his Administration, now that the evidence of deception has become overwhelming (so overwhelming that even the major media, always late, have begun to register indignation), we might ask: How come so many people were so easily fooled...

...Only Marxists do that, although James Madison, "Father of the Constitution," said, thirty years before Marx was born that there was an inevitable conflict in society between those who had property and those who did not...

...A small example of the innocence (or obsequiousness, to be more exact) of the press is the way it reacted to Colin Powell's presentation in February 2003 to the Security Council, a month before the invasion, a speech which may have set a record for the number of falsehoods told in one talk...

...There are more than forty countries that have better records on infant mortality...

...Both the Republican and Democratic parties have embraced this notion...

...Our leaders have taken it for granted, and planted that belief in the minds of many people, that we are entitled, because of our moral superiority, to dominate the world...

...He will say that the nation is in danger, that democracy and liberty are at stake, and that we must therefore send ships and planes to destroy our new enemy, and we will have no reason to disbelieve him...

...This thought startles most people, because it goes against everything we have been taught...

...power in the oil-rich Middle East...

...One of five children in this, the richest country in the world, is born in poverty...

...But if we know some history, if we know how many times Presidents have made similar declarations to the country, and how they turned out to be lies, we will not be fooled...

...It is not a history of which we can be proud...

...Our present leaders are not so candid...

...It might also inspire us to create a different history for ourselves, by taking our country away from the liars and killers who govern it, and by rejecting nationalist arrogance, so that we can join the rest of the human race in the common cause of peace and justice...

...Is it based on how well people in the United States live...

...And there is a sure sign of sickness in society when we lead the world in the number of people in prison-more than two million...

...If we don't know history, then we are ready meat for carnivorous politicians and the intellectuals and journalists who supply the carving knives...

...The question is important because it might help us understand why Americans-members of the media as well as the ordinary citizen-rushed to declare their support as the President was sending troops halfway around the world to Iraq...

...We have been led to believe that, from the beginning, as our Founding Fathers put it in the Preamble to the Constitution, it was "we the people" who established the new government after the Revolution...

...The New York Times was breathless with admiration...

...The Washington Post editorial was titled "Irrefutable" and declared that after Powell's talk "it is hard to imagine how anyone could doubt that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction...

...George Bush, in his Inaugural Address on January 20, 2005, said that spreading liberty around the world was "the calling of our time...

...In the history of secrets, withheld from the American people, this is the biggest secret: that there are classes with different interests in this country...

...Cuba does better...

...Years before that, in 1993, President Bill Clinton, speaking at a West Point commencement, declared: "The values you learned here . . .will be able to spread throughout this country and throughout the world and give other people the opportunity to liveasyou have lived, to fulfill your God-given capacities...

...These facts are embarrassing, but must be faced if we are to be honest...

...It starts early, in thefirst grade, whenweare compelled to "pledge allegiance" (beforeweeven know what that means), forced to proclaim that we are a nation with "liberty and justice for all...

...They bombard us with phrases like "national interest," "national security," and "national defense" as if all of these concepts applied equally to all of us, colored or white, rich or poor, as if General Motors and Halliburton have the same interests as the rest of us, as if George Bush has the same interest as the young man or woman he sends to war...

...If we as citizens start out with an understanding that these people up there-the President, the Congress, the Supreme Court, all those institutions pretending to be "checks and balances"-do not have our interests at heart, we are on a course towards the truth...

...It wasn't that Mexico "shed American blood upon the American soil," but that Polk, and the slave-owning aristocracy, coveted half of Mexico...

...The elder Bush lied about the invasion of Panama, leading to the death of thousands of ordinary citizens in that country...

...It seems to me there are two reasons, which go deep into our national culture, and which help explain the vulnerability of the press and of the citizenry to outrageous lies whose consequences bring death to tens of thousands of people...

...I am not speaking of the history we learned in school, a history subservient to our political leaders, from the much-admired Founding Fathers to the Presidents of recent years...

...Everyone lied about Vietnam- Kennedy about the extent of our involvement, Johnson about the Gulf of Tonkin, Nixon about the secret bombing of Cambodia, all of them claiming it was to keep South Vietnam free of communism, but really wanting to keep South Vietnam as an American outpost at the edge of the Asian continent...

...The World Health Organization in 2000 ranked countries in terms of overall health performance, and the United States was thirty-seventh on the list, though it spends more per capita for health care than any other nation...

...Harry Truman lied when he said the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima because it was "a military target...

...And the lingering memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki...

...We would point out that President McKinley lied in 1898 about the reason for invading Cuba, saying we wanted to liberate the Cubans from Spanish control, but the truth is that we really wanted Spain out of Cuba so that the island could be open to United Fruit and other American corporations...

...Would we not instinctively rebel against the sacrifice of lives for oil...

...Although some of us may pride ourselves that we were never fooled, we still might accept as our civic duty the responsibility to buttress our fellow citizens against the mendacity of our high officials...

...If we can understand those reasons, we can guard ourselves better against being deceived...

...I mean a history which is honest about the past...

...We would remind whoever we can that President Polk lied to the nation about the reason for going to war with Mexico in 1846...

...We mustn't talk about classes...

...When the eminent historian Charles Beard suggested, a hundred years ago, that the Constitution represented not the working people, not the slaves, but the slaveholders, the merchants, the bondholders, he became the object of an indignant editorial in The New York Times...

...To ignore that-not to know that the history of our country is a history of slaveowner against slave, landlord against tenant, corporation against worker, rich against poor-is to render us helpless before all the lesser lies told to us by people in power...

...The other is in the dimension of space, that is, an inability to think outside the boundaries of nationalism...

...Surely, in the history of lies told to the population, this is the biggest lie...

...We are penned in by the arrogant idea that this country is the center of the universe, exceptionally virtuous, admirable, superior...

...If we don't know that history, then any President can stand up to the battery of microphones, declare that we must go to war, and we will have no basis for challenging him...

...The deeply ingrained belief-no, not from birth but from the educational system and from our cultureingeneral-that the United States is an especially virtuous nation makes us especially vulnerable to government deception...

...Given the overwhelming record of lies told to justify wars, how could anyone listening to the younger Bush believe him as he laid out the reasons for invading Iraq...

...Not to know that is to make us helpless before determined liars...

...Amore honest estimate of ourselves as a nation would prepare us all for the next barrage of lies that will accompany the next proposal to inflict our power on some other part of the world...

...What is the idea of our moral superiority based on...

...At the end of World War II, Henry Luce, with an arrogance appropriate to the owner of Time, Life, and Fortune, pronounced this "the American century," saying that victory in the war gave the United States the right "to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit...

...Our culture demands, in its very language, that we accept a commonality of interest binding all of us to one another...

...And then come the countless ceremonies, whether at the ballpark or elsewhere, where we are expected to stand and bow our heads during the singing of the "Star-Spangled Banner," announcing that we are "the land of the free and the home of the brave...

...It would make clear that there has always been, and is today, a profound conflict of interest between the government and the people of the United States...

...One is in the dimension of time, that is, an absence of historical perspective...