A Completely Unfair History

of the United States of America

Nota Bene: The following is not a fair summary of the history of the United States. It is not intended to be accurate or objective. It is calculated to be just as slanted, and just as unfair as the usual tale. It differs in its unfairness in that it is unfair to a different set of people and institutions than those who are usually lionized and excused by the accepted fabulist parable.

It is not a counterargument, it is a bad example. But from a bad example, lessons can be learned.

America was a forgetting place; a dumping ground for the unwanted, or a place that people who wanted to be forgotten fled to. Renegade children who embarrassed their families, religious fanatics that no one could abide, criminals escaping justice, disruptive exiles and the unsocial and uncivil who simply could not tolerate any authority whatsoever – these were your first “Americans.”

The natives who saw them arrive knew these new “settlers” were trouble. In fact, they were settlers only in name – they never settled on anything. In the eyes of the natives, the newcomers were greedy- they insisted on keeping others off “their” land, even if they weren't using it. They were clearly stupid – who moves to a wilderness who doesn't even know how to farm or hunt? And they were violent and dangerous. The wisest of the natives took one good look at the immigrants and moved beyond the mountains. But this only bought them a bit of time. Greed is never satisfied.

Most of the religious “pilgrims” who came to America did not come to escape religious persecution, they came to practice persecution. The Protestant fanatics who swarmed out of heathen Europe, not far removed from the horrors of the Thirty Years War had hardly built their first church out of sticks before they started forcing religious conformity on everyone in reach with the pillory, noose and sword.

Soon after, the most unfortunate of immigrants arrived, and it was on their backs that the new society would be built. They were, legally speaking, not people, but property. The tears, pain and blood of their dehumanization would water the fields, mortar the bricks, and grease the machines that built this new, powerful society. And in the end, they would be rewarded by being mythologized as the folk demon of America; prone, by the curse of Ham to sexual violence, debauchery, criminality and mopery in as many forms as the fertile mind of a hypocrite can invent. It was thought suitable – the will of god, that the descendants of these slaves should be subject to lynching, summary execution, torture and enforced poverty long after the formalities of slavery ceased to be observed.

The obvious necessity of demonizing those whose ancestors we enslaved is based in the fact that when you have done someone a monstrous wrong, you must make those whom you inflicted your atrocities upon into monsters. After all, if they were, by nature horrible, untrustworthy and vicious, you are justified in whatever you can excuse as necessary to keep them under heel. So the more terrible your crimes against them, the more inhuman you must make them.

Some of them are angry about this. Quelle surprise.

But it was not only the slaves and their descendants that were so treated. The natives of the continent were massacred, forced into concentration camps, and saw their children stolen from them. But that was acceptable to the conquerors, since some of their victims fought back when we forced them to flee before their “manifest destiny” at gunpoint.

Even the women of the conquerors were treated like property – bought and sold, worshiped in the abstract, beaten and raped in the concrete, expected to submit to the bearers of the holy, life-giving phallus. Failure to do so with sufficient enthusiasm saw them shoved into madhouses, or, of they were sufficiently drapetomaniac, or “hysterical,” their doctors mutilated their brains with icepicks.

Some of them are angry about this, too.

But there were accomplishments.

Perhaps the most impressive accomplishment of this nation was the creation of a founding document that carefully protected the republican form of government – and the property rights of the wealthy, including their right to own other people, by carefully balancing different interests and putting institutional roadblocks in the way of ambition. It also gave legal protections to important rights, such as freedom of speech, religion and assembly, and protected everyone within its borders from illegal searches, seizures, and arrest.

This group of men, visionaries, slaveholders, murderers of indigenous people, draftsmen of real genius, and above all, anxious property owners, wrote a magnificent document designed to “Provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty...”

And barely one lifetime later, they killed 750,000 of their fellow countrymen.

There have been only a handful of years in which the United States has not been at war. Total U.S. military casualties from 1866-2025 have been over 1,500,000 in over 50 military actions. Some of those wars are arguably justifiable. Some, such as the Vietnam War, the Spanish American War, the Philippine Insurrection, the various Indian extermination campaigns, the constant “interventions” in Central and South America and the Iraq War were morally outrageous expenditures of our own people's lives and treasure, not to mention the destruction inflicted on other nations.

The point is, the U.S. has always been a nation that never saw a war it didn't like.

This is not to say that the U.S. did not have accomplishments to its name. Great cities were built, amazing buildings, roads, public works and structures rose to Babelarian heights. Productivity soared to levels undreamt of. The amount of wealth created beggared belief.

But if you look in the alleyways between those towers of glass and steel, you'll find thousands upon thousands of people, including children, the disabled, veterans and the elderly living in cardboard boxes with no protection from the cold, while those impressive buildings are largely empty for most of the day. They provide excellent facilities for the wealthy and their most trusted minions, but a person without shelter can't even go in to use the bathroom.

Over eleven million of the children of this impressive nation live in poverty. 37 million people live on less than the local poverty level. Many of the citizens, including most of those who work, can't afford basic health care. Partially due to this, the United States ranks 48^th in life expectancy, and 33^rd in infant mortality. 47.4 million Americans live in households described by the U.S. Department of Agriculture as “food insecure.”

But the U.S. is at the top of several indexes. The United States ranks highest in health care costs. It also has the highest number of school shootings, with 288. The next highest country is Mexico, with six.

But we have more billionaires than any other country, with more than twice as many than our nearest competitor, China, with 400. The 10% wealthiest Americans own 93% of the stock market. The U.S. also spends more on its war machine than the next nine countries combined, five of which are our allies.

The response to these obviously unfair and dangerous conditions has been, by and large, nothing. It has been so for decades now, and will continue to be so because the American voter, largely bamboozled and propagandized by hundreds of billions of dollars in advertising continue to elect wealthy, careerist politicians who care little about anything other than their personal political advancement and protecting the privileges of the already massively privileged.

In the most recent election, they elected a billionaire convicted of multiple felonies, found liable for sexual assault, twice impeached, and busily engaged in destroying the few services that the government has traditionally provided. They knew he would do this, he made it very clear, but he managed to convince them that the real threat they were facing was people using the gendered bathroom they prefer, drag queens reading stories to schoolchildren (who face far greater peril from maniacs with military grade weaponry, and the their ministers and coaches) and immigrants who were alleged, falsely, to be flooding the borders to take their jobs picking strawberries, anxious to sell them the illegal drugs they willingly use. Oh, and they eat dogs and cats.

Are we great again, yet?

The pattern is a very old one – as old as the collapse of the Athenian and Roman Republics, the self-destruction of the first French Republic, the Weimar Republic, and so many others. A complacent, decadent population that values fame over achievement, entertainment over education and comfortable lies over difficult truths forgets the fact that liberty has a cost – not paid in coin, or even blood, but in diligence and work. They weary of their liberties, and when the nation suffers a painful reverse in war or commerce, they clamor for someone to take the burdens of freedom away from them – to tell them what to believe, what to do, and what to live for.

Cometh the hour, cometh the man. Veni the demagogue, making promises, flattering them in their complacency, telling them they are special, chosen, heirs to a great legacy that was stolen from them by the corrupt, blameworthy, evil and vicious others. He promises them return to the golden age, to their destiny, if only they will put all power, all trust, all law in his hands.

And they do. They rush to give him not only their nation, but their loyalty, even to the destruction of what they hold dear. They will trample, and grind under their heels anyone who tries to stop them. He has promised them many things, but the promise they value most is the promise to remove from them what they have come to consider an intolerable burden – the burden of responsibility for their own beliefs.

This moment has come in America. The canoe is over the falls now, and the rocks below do not care where you sat, or how hard you paddled. And while historians, if there are any, will say what is soon to come to us was tragic, none will say it was unavoidable, unforeseen, or unjust.