Ashok Dhillon
Jun 16, 20206 min
Arguably, America started to break its worldwide image as a heroic iconic country with its pivotal participation, and performance, in the Second World War, after it fought to a draw in the Korean War. Later, its loss in the Vietnam War added significant impetus to the fractures that were deepening, internally and externally. During that time, in the 1960’s, internally, the protests against the Vietnam War by its change seeking young people further shattered its image as a cohesive free society, truthful and peace seeking.
Additionally, the inhumane repression of its Black population brought Civil Rights marches led by Dr. Martin Luther King, demanding basic rights for African Americans, as American citizens. Those peaceful protests also triggered similar violent response from the authorities as today’s President Trump and his supporters, would have liked to have employed - suppression with ‘dominant’ and overwhelming force - from its heavily armed police, National Guard, and its active duty Armed Forces on American citizens.
Obviously, decades later nothing much had changed.
After the 1960’s, America’s internal problems mounted with the Watergate Scandal and the forced resignation of its sitting President, Richard Nixon. That was followed by the disastrous rescue mission of American hostages in Iran, during Jimmy Carter’s Presidency. The election of Ronald Reagan and his assertive foreign policies, especially against Libya’s Muammar al-Gaddafi, and America’s real arch rival, the other ‘Super Power’ the USSR (Russia), restored in a significant way its international image denting, but then it slowly started to lose it again.
There was the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky Scandal, and the disastrous 9/11 incident when a rising global terrorist group attacked and destroyed the World Trade Center in New York, as Americans and the World watched in mute horror.
In America’s eyes, and the World’s, this was inconceivable, but there it was, happening live on worldwide television for all to see, how 19 young men (the majority from its ally Saudi Arabia) flew high-jacked American planes into the buildings of the Trade Center and the Pentagon. America was shell-shocked, and it had most of the World’s heartfelt sympathy and backing. But instead of being in righteous-rage and setting things right by attacking the primary perpetrators, mostly Saudi, America attacked and destroyed Iraq, and its ruler Saddam Hussein, under shamefully contrived lies, along with attacking Afghanistan. Those wars then destroyed its own credibility as millions of innocent Iraqi’s and Afghani’s lost their lives on pretexts that targeted them wrongly.
In Afghanistan, in chasing Al Qaeda Chief Osama Bin Laden, the US didn’t employ surgical strikes or even its legendary covert Special Forces to takeout Osama Bin Laden, or bring him to justice, but chose to invade the entire country, with a mixed ‘Mission’ of bringing Bin Laden to justice, morphing into liberation of the Afghani people from the Taliban. It eventually succeeded in killing Bin Laden, but failed miserably in liberating the Afghan people from the Taliban, and after more than 15 years, and more than a few ‘Trillions’ spent, and tens of thousands innocent Afghanis dead, the US is desperately trying to extricate itself from the morass of another unwinnable war it rushed into, on very questionable motives.
In one external misadventure after another, spouting noble intent but showing less than noble actions, America continued to lose its moral high ground, and its hard won WWII credibility.
Today, America has become the high profile International example of a once exemplary world leader which has completely lost its way, and is at open war with itself. Its political and racial divides are at dangerously high levels, and its current President and his administration are the most inept and openly divisive in memory. An unfit Donald J. Trump came along and today represents a Nation untethered from its fundamental democratic moorings.
America is facing the moment of truth, in its widely divergent life from what it has been steadfastly preaching to the World from its truly amazing founding doctrines of democracy, freedom, equality of all, and equal justice before the law - and its historical reality:
America is a highly flawed democracy, where majority popular vote has been effectively rendered as immaterial through ‘Electoral College’, and general voting is actively and selectively suppressed by gerrymandering, and other nefarious activities by the a particular political party, to disenfranchise minorities.
America says it stands for ‘Freedom’, but obviously not entirely for all. What it preaches and practices internally has not been quite uniform, as Native American and African American populations have known only too well.
Externally, through its CIA operations and military interventions, America installed and supported Dictators in other countries over decades that were vicious and brutal for their people, but they served ‘American economic and political interests’, and so were ‘fully backed’ by America (in current times Saudi Arabia and its highly repressive regime comes to mind).
America really falls down on its much touted ‘equality for all’, as the brutality and shameful prejudices against parts of its various racial populations show, even now.
And, there is no ‘equal justice for all before the law’, as its incarceration ratios from the Courts and deaths at the hands of police amply show daily. Both the incarceration ratio from the justice system and deaths at the hands of police are overwhelmingly tilted against Indigenous, Black and Latino Americans.
The other myth that America has actively propagated abroad has been that it is a country and a people that are ‘peace loving’. Nothing could be further from the truth, and America’s relatively short history and daily life proves it, unquestionably and graphically.
Its birth was blood soaked, as initially it killed Native Americans indiscriminately to take their land. Then, it fought off its former masters from Europe who had carved out their respective stakes in the New World. Then it fought a brutal Civil War between the South and the North. And it never really stopped fighting ever since. For almost all of its 400 hundred years America has been in a war, or two, or more, almost endlessly.
Today is no different. America is still at war in almost all parts of the world – covertly and overtly. America is a war machine and revels in it, while professing incessantly how it is just seeking peace for itself, and the world. The reality does not square with its actions of the last 400 years. And this is above and beyond its internal shooting war, where its citizens, overloaded with guns and ammo, shoot other Americans regularly at a pace that outdoes almost all foreign enemies.
As we mention, throughout its short history (compared to older Nations), American leadership has professed commitments to peace and equality while presiding over one of the most violent, warlike countries in the world, and one of the most historically racially divided and unequal. And today, in Trump and the Republican Party, America is led by a President and a political party which accurately represents its self delusional hypocrisy and its commitment to safeguarding that dichotomy of preaching one thing, while doing entirely another.
To them both, reality and facts are mere inconveniences to be ignored while they advance ‘alternate facts and alternate reality’ as their facts and reality.
In the daily lies that Trump puts forward as ‘his’ truth, backed solidly by the almost unanimous approval of the Republican lawmakers, and his supporters - blatant racism, inequality in wealth, justice and policing - are the ‘true American values’ to be safeguarded and fought for, even with the help of the Armed Forces.
Trampling on the civil-rights of its protesting citizens with ‘dominant force’ is the American way. Peaceful protests such as taking a knee are unpatriotic, while shooting, macing, clubbing and otherwise brutalizing citizens is ‘genuinely American’ and truly ‘patriotic’. Violently ‘dominating’ peaceful protesters is Trump’s particular fancy, as he actively exhorts ‘his Generals’, and supporters, to react violently to Americans that dare to oppose him or his undemocratic and at times illegal policies.
The Republican Party with their ready support, denials and acquiescence fully back Trump’s vision of America as a multi-tiered society with those at the top (preferably white-skinned and Christian) with full privileges, as the ‘Best of America’, and those below, mid-level or below, as god-ordained sheep destined for the sheering for the benefit of those at the top, or be kept out entirely.
That vision of his extends to the environment, politics, foreign policy and everything else, it is all for the few, at the expense of the many, even if it breaks all Constitutional principles and the laws of scriptures, which he is quite unfamiliar with, though he comically pretends otherwise.
Trump as the 45th President of the United States is the quintessential leader that truly represents the ‘Spirit of America’, which has been its true reality, throughout its history, rather that the idealized version that has been faithfully preached, even while brutally suppressing certain parts of its own population, and while carpet-bombing, napalm-scorching, or ‘bombing them back to the stone age’ foreign lands, in the name of the sanitizing ‘American interests’.
Trump is the right President to personify the current broken and hypocrisy ridden America, and since he professes his views openly, backed by the Republican Party, finally there is American leadership that does not want to hide its true intentions even while denying them publicly. According to his actions and policies, there is the America that is unfair and brutal (‘wish police would use more force’), undemocratic (‘it’s all rigged’ - how true), unequal (and how), flexing its military muscle while threatening any one, or any country that dare defy it (‘obliteration from the face of the earth’, and shock & awe), and always ready to exercise its full political and military power on foreigners, and its own citizens, in equal measure - just ask Trump.