Everybody loves a good story, not just in movies, not just in fiction novels or even in video games, but in real life. The complexities of reality drive us nuts, and there’s nothing like a soothing story to make it simpler, more digestible, and more favorable towards ourselves, our tribe, our nation, or our belief system.
Nearly everyone on Earth, unless they were raised by wolves in the forest, has been imbued with some story about themselves, their people, their place in society, their history, and their role in the world at large.
The story I was raised with, as an American, is already well known and rather cliché to much of the world. Since Elementary School (maybe even preschool, though I don’t exactly recall much of those days) I was taught to believe that I live in the greatest country on Earth, that Americans have an innate quality that makes us “the good guys” from the moment we are born, and that we should be proud to be from “America the great”, the number one civilization in existence.
This story is not unique. Children in Russia, China, and Israel are raised to believe the same qualities about themselves, as are people in many other nations across the globe. This is particularly so in civilizations that have garnered a certain degree of power in modern history.
In the US, as “the good guys” that we are and have always been, it is and has always been our duty to spread democracy -the only godly political system that exists- across the globe, by any means necessary. So the story goes.
For this reason we have accrued a massive amount of the planet’s deadliest weapons, gracefully bestowed upon us by the Lord himself -yes, the story continues- to make sure all the other savage nations obey the chosen leader of all civilizations, the United States of America.
The story vs the reality
This tale has been brought to the foré and has dictated American foreign policy in recent history. In 1961, US president John F. Kennedy said to the New York Times: “We have a problem in trying to make our power credible, and Vietnam looks like the place.”
This memorable quote from the 35th president of the United States was a prelude to his country’s intervention in Vietnam, with the goal of preventing the so-called “domino effect” of the spread of communism, a story about “good guys” and “bad guys” that was easily sold to the American public, a narrative that would end with the tragic deaths of over 2 million Vietnamese civilians and more than 58,000 members of the U.S Armed Forces who were either killed or missing in action, not to mention the carpet bombing campaigns in Cambodia, brought about by the late Henry Kissinger, which brutally claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of Cambodian civilians and displaced over a million more in a country that had been deemed a neutral player.
U.S troops would eventually be forced to abandon their “operation” and the country’s worst fear would nevertheless materialize as Vietnam became a communist country, a falling domino that the American “good guys” of this never-ending chronicle would rather not be reminded of.
A history of “good guy” savagery
Such a costly and tragic war, followed by an embarrassing loss, should have deterred the United States, the global “good guys” in their self-professed story, from invading other nations that don’t pose a threat to their own national integrity.
But it didn’t.
In 1983, then President Ronald Regan ordered the unilateral invasion of the sovereign nation of Grenada, a small island between Puerto Rico and Venezuela, which resulted in the deaths of approximately 100 people. The goal was, again, to “stop communism” and insert a pro US government.
On the same hemisphere, the United States and Panama had been disputing control over the Panama Canal. In 1989, President George H.W. Bush ordered the invasion of Panama by US armed forces. Some estimates have the Panamanian death toll (military and civilian) at around 1,000.
A few years prior to the invasion, the Panamanian leader Omar Torrijos, remembered for his successful campaign to regain Panamanian control over the strategic canal and resisting US pressure to let American corporations take advantage of Panamanian resources and workers, died in a plane crash in 1981, which many believe was orchestrated by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
Manuel Noriega, a Panamanian military leader who became more powerful after Torrijos’ death, was part of the pretext for the US invasion, since he was found guilty of drug trafficking and murdering his opponents.
Ironically enough, Noriega had been on the CIA’s payroll for years, despite common knowledge of his work in the international drug trade. The moment he began showing unwillingness to help the US maintain the upper hand in the region, Noriega was declared persona non grata and subsequently arrested, yanked from the pedestal of one of the US government’s favorite leaders, and suddenly dubbed a criminal.
The CIA has a documented history of orchestrating the arrest and/or murder of world leaders who ended up on the “bad guy” list, not necessarily the result of their deeds as evil dictators but because they refused to bow down to US corporate interests.
The global purveyors of “freedom” and “democracy” also have a history of murdering democratically elected leaders and imposing dictators in other parts of the world, simply because they were more favorable to US ideological and corporate interests.
Such was the case of Salvador Allende, the once democratically elected president of Chile who was deeply committed to improving the lives of the country’s poor, including workers, peasants and women. Allende made sure Chile maintained ownership of its own natural resources. Of course, this went against US corporate interests, which has considered Latin America its very own “backyard” for decades.
The United States labelled Allende a “communist” and helped in the execution of a coup which would leave Allende dead. The military General Augusto Pinochet, whose views were much more favorable to US interests, would be subsequently propped up as the new leader.
Pinochet would lead a brutal authoritarian right-wing dictatorship that would last 17 years, during which over 3,000 Chileans would “disappear” and 38,000 would become political prisoners and victims of torture which would last years.
So much for “freedom” and “democracy”.
The post 9/11 era
Fast forward a few decades to the post-911 era, a time when most Americans were desperate for revenge after a sadistic and tragic event that left thousands of innocent people dead.
We would later learn that the attack was planned by Osama Bin Laden, the Saudi Arabian founder of the terrorist organization Al Qaeda.
Oddly enough, then President George W. Bush and his coalition decided to invade Iraq while trying his best to blame the attacks on Iraqi leader Sadam Hussein.
The pretext for the invasion, as most informed individuals today probably remember, was the notorious “weapons of mass destruction”, which were never found. Plus, Sadam Hussain was also an evil dictator who tortured his citizens, and those people needed to be liberated by the “the good guys”, the United States of America.
Yet Saudi Arabia has also had a horrific human rights record for years, and 15 of the 19 terrorists who hijacked the airliners used to kill thousands of American women, men, and children in New York City and elsewhere were also from Saudi Arabia, not Iraq.
But the Bush administration downplayed the exorbitant amount of evidence of a connection between powerful Saudis and the Islamic extremists who plotted and participated in the 9/11 attacks, including Bin Laden. Could it have something to do with the fact that Saudi Arabia and the US have a very important strategic business relationship which dates as far back as the middle of the 20th century?
Could Mr. Bush’s deference to Saudi Arabian royalty have to do with it being the US’ number one client in the purchase of US manufactured weapons, regularly spending billions of dollars for Made in America missiles and other arms, which over the years have been used to massacre hundreds of thousands of civilians in Yemen, an atrocity to which the US government has not exactly objected to this day?
A bombing Blitzkrieg across the globe, otherwise known as the “War on Terror”
But why stop at Iraq and Afghanistan when there are so many other impoverished countries around the globe patiently waiting for the honor to be bombed by those prestigious explosives with the golden Made in America stamp?
On September 20, 2001, then President George W. Bush announced the global “War on Terror”, telling the world that “Our war on terror begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated.”
What better way to prevent terror than by inflicting terror?
The “War on Terror” would spawn a 20-year military campaign against 14 countries, killing at least 900,000 people and costing at least 8 trillion dollars. The bombing campaigns initiated by Bush junior began in Afghanistan, then Iraq (you mean there were no weapons of mass destruction? Oops, sorry) and would eventually go as far as Somalia.
Towards the end of Bush’s presidency, Barack Obama campaigned as a man seeking equality for all human beings and would become the first African American president in US history. At the time of Obama’s inauguration, many people felt the days of racism, bigotry, and hatred would come to an end, and we were entering a period of tolerance, enlightenment, and world peace led by the United States of America.
Just three days after being sworn in as the “leader of the free world”, President Barack Obama authorized his first, and not last, military strike in Waziristan, Pakistan, killing approximately 20 civilians. During his eight-year tenure, Obama would conduct another 540 (as far as we know) strikes by way of armed drones, namely in places like Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia.
According to the Council on Foreign Relations, Obama would authorize the killing of 3,797 people, including 324 civilians, reportedly admitting to senior aides in 2011 that it “turns out I’m really good at killing people. Didn’t know that was gonna be a strong suit of mine.”
There were also plenty of US drone strikes against supposed “terrorists” who actually turned out to be civilians celebrating a wedding or social occasion. But it didn’t matter, because to many people, especially the US soldiers directly behind the attacks, they were all “the bad guys”, as the story goes.
Trump to save the day
Donald J. Trump came into office promising to focus on the United States and the United States only, which perhaps meant getting out of other countries with his “America First” policy. To many, Trump was nothing more than a racist nationalist bigot, to others, especially white rural Americans, he was “the good guy”, quite unlike that black Islamic homosexual satanist who had previously inhabited the White House, so the story goes.
But instead of getting America out of the tentacles of global conflicts, he just went ahead and changed the rules to allow military commanders more “autonomy” behind the trigger, so they could simply give the green light to have an entire family suspected of being “terrorists” bombed to shreds without the need for that pesky White House authorization.
He also increased the amount and geographic scope of airstrikes carried out by the US military, killing more civilians during his first year in the White House than Obama did during his entire eight-year presidency.
Trump would then go even further by signing an executive order eliminating the requirement that US intelligence officials “must publicly report the number of civilians killed in CIA drone strikes outside declared war zones,” as reported by The Conversation.
This would conveniently obscure Mr. Trump’s final death count, but if he had already killed more civilians in one year than Obama’s eight years, we can only imagine how much suffering and death his leadership inflicted in four years, without having access to the numbers.
The pretext for these “targeted killings”, as the US government liked to call them, was to “keep America safe” from foreign threats, particularly Islamic terrorists. But prior to the 9/11 attacks, Islamic terrorism on US soil was not very common at all, with the only notable Islamic attack within US borders being the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
After 9/11, the US Extremist Crime Database noted that of all the violent attacks on US soil categorized as “terrorist” activities (from September 12, 2001, through December 31, 2016), 26% were carried out by “radical Islamic violent extremists”, while 74% were from “far-right violent extremists”, mostly white men born and raised in the United States of America.
If the international “targeted killing” campaign was meant to protect US citizens from terrorist attacks, why isn’t the US government authorizing strikes against America’s biggest and most statistically proven threat, rural America?
(It should be noted that most of the Islamic attacks carried out inside the US have been perpetrated by extremists who were US citizens living in the US, not the Middle East or Africa, where most of the “targeted killings” were taking place. And nearly half the deaths considered to be caused by Islamic terrorism during the time period mentioned were caused by one individual, Omar Mateen, born and raised in the US to Afghan parents. Mateen killed 49 people at Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, Florida in 2016)
Israel, America’s embattled son
It’s no secret that Jews have been among the most persecuted people on Earth. Even long before Hitler’s diabolic campaign to torture and exterminate them, they have been the victims of dreadful forms of oppression, especially in Europe.
After World War II, when it was discovered that the Nazis, led by Adolph Hitler, had brutally and systematically tortured and killed over 6 million jews, there was talk of the urgent need for the establishment of a Jewish state, a place where Jews could live free from persecution for the first time in history.
Several places were thought up, such as Argentina and even what is today Kenya, but it would eventually be agreed that they should go back to the place they believed to be their mother homeland, a place called Palestine, from where they had been reportedly exiled thousands of years prior.
Israel would officially be declared the first Jewish state in 1948. But what was meant to be a kind of refuge for Jews would lead to a seemingly endless array of bloody territorial and religious disputes and all out wars between Jews and Muslims for decades to come.
In the name of hate
On October 7, 2023, the terrorist group Hamas executed one of the most tragic and sinister attacks on Israeli soil, massacring civilians in Israeli communities and brutally terrorizing, kidnapping and raping people who had simply been attending the Nova Music Festival.
The attacks resulted in approximately 695 Israeli civilian deaths, according to Wikipedia, including 36 children. Hamas terrorists took approximately 250 Israeli civilians and soldiers hostage, including 30 children, back to the Gaza Strip, where numerous reports of rape and sexual assault by Hamas members have been reported.
Then came the military response by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netenyahu, a right-wing hawk with a history of blocking any attempt at a peace agreement between Israel and Palestine while vehemently refusing to accept any notion of Palestinian sovereignty.
Ever since that atrocious day, Israeli leaders -spearheaded by Mr. Netanyahu- have relentlessly bombarded the Gaza Strip in what they call their “War Against Hamas”. Unfortunately, they seem convinced “Hamas” is every single human being that walks and breathes in Palestinian territory, including children.
Missiles have been indiscriminately launched into hospitals in the Gaza Strip, with thousands of men, women and children dead or, worse, alive but slowly dying of disease and starvation, while Israeli forces do their best to block aid from getting into the region, wilfully ensuring the Palestinian people, whether they have links to Hamas or not, suffer in some of the worst possible ways.
The Israeli Foreign Ministry has said the death toll from the October 7 attacks, including both Israeli soldiers and civilians, is 1,200. As of March 17, 2024, the death toll in Gaza, of both Hamas soldiers and civilians since October 7, 2023, is reported to be at just over 31, 600 and counting, according to the Ministry of Health in Gaza.
One would expect the United States of America to put on its cape and fly to the rescue of the Palestinian civilians being mercilessly tortured by Israeli leadership. The problem is, Israel is more than a US ally, it’s basically America’s very own child, similar to Saudi Arabia, but even closer when it comes to religion and political ideology, for numerous historical reasons.
Since the end of World War II, Israel has received hundreds of billions of US dollars in economic and military assistance, and today, even as the cherished Jewish state sets Palestine ablaze, the Biden administration continues to send money and weapons to Israel while, and quite ironically, claiming to show concern for Palestinian civilians.
In November of 2023 a New York Times investigation revealed that Israeli leadership had been well aware of Hamas’ diabolic plan to attack Israel, down to the exact date, October 7, 2023. Not surprisingly, the narrative goes that “Israel didn’t take their plans seriously” because they believed Hamas wasn’t sophisticated enough to carry out such an elaborate attack.
But it’s quite plausible to suspect Netanyahu and more than a few generals were well aware that Hamas would achieve its goal and needed this as a pretext to make Palestine crumble under fire and misery. Afterall, Israeli leadership had been helping to keep Hamas in power in Palestine for years to make sure a Palestinian state would never come to fruition, long before the October 7th attacks.
The land of democracy and free speech, unless…
Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the United States has sent massive amounts of aid to the latter, including enormous amounts of weaponry. Protests for peace in the region have been encouraged in the US, with rallies in solidarity with Ukraine taking place throughout much of America and the western world.
And yet, not long after it became clear that the Israeli response to the October 7th attacks were no longer about “self-defence” and more about revenge and hatred, as Israeli forces have continuously and deliberately bombarded civilian areas, including schools and hospitals, protests in solidarity with Palestine have often been silenced and suppressed in the US, the land where free speech is religiously enshrined in the constitution.
Any form of protest or open demonstration of concern for Palestinian civilians has been dubbed “antisemitic”.
Actress Melissa Barrera’s starring role in the movie Scream VII was literally cancelled after she wrote on her Instagram that “Gaza is currently being treated like a concentration camp,” while universities in the US have faced threats of direct cutoff by powerful financial backers if they allow students to protest or simply voice their concerns in public about the atrocities being committed by Israeli leadership.
But why isn’t there such backlash in the US for protesting against the Russian invasion of Ukraine as there is for condemning Israeli atrocities in Palestinian territories? Could it be, at least in part, because the wealthy and powerful members of the Jewish community in Manhattan, Washington D.C, and Miami drastically outnumber those of the Russian community in the US centers of power?
If the US and Russia were on better terms and had stronger economic ties, with a much more significant population of wealthy Russians living in major US cities, would protesting against the Russian invasion of Ukraine be equally discouraged in all 50 US states?
Perhaps we can compare the situation to how the US reacts to human rights violations perpetrated by places like Iraq compared to those committed by those like Saudi Arabia, where wealth and power play a key role in who gets condemned and who gets applauded for the most horrific human rights violations.
The Military Industrial Complex
On January 17, 1961, former military officer Dwight D. Eisenhower, who had served as the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe during World War II, gave his farewell address after having served as the 34th president of the United States of America from 1953 until then.
“Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea,” he expressed.
“Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defence; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defence establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.
“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
Mr. Eisenhower’s words were prescient, as the US weapons industry would become so freakishly powerful it would practically dictate foreign policy for decades to come.
In 2022, the US spent 877 billion dollars to strengthen its military, much of which went towards the purchase of new tanks, missiles, machine guns and other weapons meant to kill large amounts of people. This is more than ten times what the country spent on education.
The reasoning for such exorbitant sums of money going towards apparatuses designed to end human lives is to “defend the homeland” and to maintain the global order and to help “spread democracy”. These claims are indeed part of the reason the US invests so much in the most up to date weaponry, but a lot also has to do with one simple thing… money.
In 2021, Business Insider reported how at least 15 US lawmakers “who shape US defence policy have investments in military contractors” such as the billion-dollar weapons companies Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and Boeing, which profit enormously every time the US declares war on another country, or at least sells weapons to a country already at war.
These companies also spend millions annually lobbying the US federal government to convince elected officials to give them lucrative government contracts whenever there is a conflict they can profit from, and the elected officials often profit as well.
It’s a large part of the reason presidents and members of congress, both democrats and republicans, don’t seem to hesitate before giving contracts to billion-dollar weapons corporations so they can send their mass killing machines to places like Saudi Arabia, Israel, and over 100 countries in total, not to “spread democracy” but to earn a monstrous profit.
Aside from weapons, oil and “post-war recovery” companies also profit, as was the case with the oil giant Halliburton, of which Dick Cheney was chairman and chief executive officer before becoming vice-president of the United States and a key proponent of the Invasion of Iraq in 2003, thanks to which his former company reaped around $40 billion (at least) from the war.
And yes, Mr. Cheney still had plenty of stock in Halliburton when he and Mr. Bush decided to invade Iraq in search of those infamous “weapons of mass destruction” which must be in some other dimension because nobody ever found them.
Indeed, war is profitable, especially for people in the right position, or at least with the right amount of stocks from the right corporations. These are often the same people making the decisions to start wars, or at least to feed existing conflicts with their lucrative appliances that spread misery and death, not democracy.
Who’s to blame?
Is the United States to blame for all these deadly wars across the globe? Or should we blame the powers of the Western Hemisphere, plus Israel, as though they were one united front of evil greedy white men?
If only it were that simple.
Placing the blame on wealthy and greedy white westerners is a severe oversimplification of the world we live in, as is accrediting it all to a single factor, like religion, nationalism, or just greed alone.
A more realistic way to decipher the world is to understand that a combination of greed, ideology, religion, nationalism, and history, among others, are usually the main drivers of the world’s conflicts, be them perpetrated by Americans, Israelis, Russians, Chinese, Afghans, Somalians or Tasmanians.
If there was one culprit in the overwhelming majority of the world’s problems today, I would blame human nature.
No single nationality, religion, ethnic group or race is inherently evil or inherently good. As the well-respected Jewish Israeli intellectual and author Yuval Noah Harari (who I truly admire) has inferred: those who have been victims at one point in history can become victimizers during another.
The reason I chose to focus on the United States, and to some extent Israel, as the main subject of this article is not to call them out as inherently evil or hypocritical. It’s to highlight how the story about the US -the most famous country which brought the world jeans, McDonald’s, Michael Jackson, and Taylor Swift- being a natural force for good and a purveyor of democracy and freedom excludes many dark secrets that aren’t exactly secret anymore.
I would like to make clear that I have no unique love or hate for the US or Israel or Saudi Arabia, or any other country or religious or ethnic group, for that matter. I truly despise hatred in all its forms, whether it be against Jews or Muslims or anyone, and I have no particular sympathy or bias for or against any given group, and I genuinely condemn any acts of violence against anyone, especially innocent civilians, for any reason, no matter who they are.
I am just here to state some facts about our world today and provide some historical context, and to remind my readers that the world isn’t as rosy as many would like to believe.
(I myself have many Jewish family members, who I love dearly, but that will not stop me from speaking about certain truths, which I know some of them find uncomfortable).
A story for everyone
When we look at the grand scheme of things, we realize the case of the United States isn’t as special or unique as we may have thought.
The leaders of most civilizations, from the smallest tribes in the Amazon to the wealthiest and most powerful nations today, have created stories of both grandeur and victimhood to justify some of the worst atrocities they have committed against other tribes, ethnicities, and entire nations.
Just look at the histories of places like Russia, China, Japan, Colombia, and Ancient Egypt.
Sadly, it’s human nature to see the world in simplistic binomial terms, divided between good and evil, them and us, or between “good guys” and “bad guys”, part of the reason we have been unable to evolve away from the habit of inflicting mass suffering on one another (either the result of genuine hatred or mere profit-seeking).
A prime example is how much of the world has interpreted recent global tragedies, with a large percentage of left-wing liberals justifying the atrocities committed by Hamas against the people of Israel, and right-wing conservatives justifying the blatant war crimes being committed by Israeli leaders against the people of Palestine as I write this article, with little appreciation for nuance.
The thing is, by supporting these atrocities, who’s to say in a different situation one would not actively participate in atrocities geared toward a different group?
If born and raised in a different environment, would both the Jews and non-Jewish conservative right-wingers who are currently cheering on the massacre of Palestinian women, men, and children just as easily have taken on the role of Nazi soldiers in Hitler’s Germany if they had been born and raised to hate the Jews (and gypsies, and homosexuals, etc.) during the first half of the 20th century?
Would the far-left liberals who claim Hamas terrorists are “freedom fighters” just as easily have taken on the role of Hamas or even ISIS terrorists, actively participating in some of the worst crimes in history if they had been born and raised in an impoverished environment in the Gaza Strip or Afghanistan or Iraq, and indoctrinated since birth to passionately hate a certain group of individuals who they can blame for all their woes?
Reflecting deeply on the subject, there may very well be a Nazi soldier or ISIS terrorist in all of us, ready to be let out under the right circumstances.
Will it ever end?
Greed, ignorance, and hatred are inherent aspects of human nature. No matter what the utopia-minded optimists like to think about humans “evolving” into some peace-loving species of the future, the reality is that our brains have not really evolved much in the last several thousand years.
This is evident in how we continue to massacre one another (along with nearly every living thing on Earth), a pastime we’ve been engaging in for those several thousand years mentioned above. The only difference is our weapons have become much deadlier on a much more massive scale.
If only we could learn to love one another, or at least respect each other, the world would be a much better place.
But such an idea may very well be beyond our primitive mental capacity.
Either way, when we and the members of our own tribe collectively look in the mirror, regardless of how greedy and murderous we can be, we will always see “the good guys” looking back at us.
That’s just how the story goes.
