America’s Blinders（ハワード・ジン）

America’s Blinders

By Howard Zinn

08/02/08 "ICH"
- First Published, April 2006 Issue Of The Progressive Magazine

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?

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.

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. 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. 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.”

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

One is in the dimension of time, that is, an absence of historical
perspective. The other is in the dimension of space, that is, an inability
to think outside the boundaries of nationalism. 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 history, then we are ready meat for carnivorous
politicians and the intellectuals and journalists who supply the carving
knives. 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. I mean a history
which is honest about the past. 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. 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.

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. 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.

We would remind whoever we can that President Polk lied to the
nation about the reason for going to war with Mexico in 1846.
It wasn’t that Mexico “shed American blood upon the American soil,”
but that Polk, and the slave-owning aristocracy, coveted half of Mexico.

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. 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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

And he lied again about the reason for attacking Iraq in 1991
―hardly to defend the integrity of Kuwait (can one imagine Bush
heartstricken over Iraq’s taking of Kuwait?), rather to assert
U.S. power in the oil-rich Middle East.

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

A careful reading of history might give us another safeguard against
being deceived. 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. This thought startles most
people, because it goes against everything we have been taught.

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. 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.

Our culture demands, in its very language, that we accept a
commonality of interest binding all of us to one another.
We mustn’t talk about classes. 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.

Our present leaders are not so candid. 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.

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

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

The deeply ingrained belief―no, not from birth but from
the educational system and from our culture in general―
that the United States is an especially virtuous nation makes us
especially vulnerable to government deception. It starts early,
in the first grade, when we are compelled to “pledge allegiance”
(before we even know what that means), forced to proclaim
that we are a nation with “liberty and justice for all.”

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.”
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.
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.

These facts are embarrassing, but must be faced if we are to be honest.
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 our long history, still not behind us, of slavery,
segregation, and racism. 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.
And the lingering memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
It is not a history of which we can be proud.

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. 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.”

Both the Republican and Democratic parties have embraced this
notion. George Bush, in his Inaugural Address on January 20, 2005,
said that spreading liberty around the world was “the calling of our time.”
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 live as you have lived,
to fulfill your God-given capacities.”

What is the idea of our moral superiority based on? Surely not on
our behavior toward people in other parts of the world. Is it based on
how well people in the United States live? 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. One of five
children in this, the richest country in the world, is born in poverty.
There are more than forty countries that have better records on
infant mortality. Cuba does better. 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.

A more 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. 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.

Howard Zinn is the co-author, with Anthony Arnove,
of “Voices of a People’s History of the United States.”