John Gast, American Progress, 1872
“Netanyahu has damaged first and foremost, Israel” - Hillary Clinton
The political and media landscape in the US is steeped in a dishonesty and selfishness that inflicts devastating, criminal harm on the world. Clinton’s recent words reflect a particularly evil manifestation of this reality: the worst part about a genocide of brown people is the PR nightmare for their murderers. This worldview enables the empire to wreak destruction at will and without consequence, seen throughout American foreign policy since WWII. Critically, this ugliness reveals and reinforces passivity among the privileged subjects of the imperial core, the only people who have the power to stop the violence of the empire.
The American Declaration of Independence states that “all men are created equal”, but this only ever existed in writing. Settler colonies always get their start in racism, violence, and dehumanization. This is most visible today in the Israeli settler terrorism inflicted on Palestinians in the West Bank. In a recent interview, a settler claimed that one Jewish life is worth millions of Palestinian lives. When challenged on his supremacism, he responded “Yes, I know. But this is the truth, because God chose us and because of this you are jealous.”
The American version of this is that white American lives are worth millions of nonwhite people’s lives abroad. Americans are exceptional, Western civilization is far superior to any other, and Americans have a God-given mission to spread democracy and civilize the savages of the world. This ideology drove the genocide of Native Americans and slavery of Africans, which accompanied the birth of the country. To see it in action today, we need look no further than the illegal US-Israeli war on Iran.
The start of the war on Iran was a blatant violation of international law. The various justifications, ranging from a preemptive strike in anticipation of Israel attacking Iran to regime change, display the incompetence and impunity only afforded to the global hegemon. The lack of effort to at least try to appear honorable is representative of Trump’s transfer of what used to be a masked barbarism of the US into the open, later seen in his threats to bomb Iran “back to the stone age”.
The first 24 hours of the war on Iran saw the assassination of the leader of a sovereign state along with dozens of other officials, the massacre of 168 people, including over 100 children, in the bombing of a school in Minab, and the destruction of governmental, military, and civilian infrastructure. Following near-daily Israeli violations of the ceasefire with Lebanon, the outbreak of the Iran war saw Israel engage in a full-scale invasion of Southern Lebanon, conducting a Gaza-style genocidal and ecocidal onslaught that has murdered thousands and displaced a fifth of Lebanon’s population. The war has killed 3600+ in Iran and 4300+ in Lebanon, with a corresponding 15 American deaths and 57 Israeli deaths.
Economically, the naval blockade and intensification of American sanctions are collectively punishing the Iranian people, who are facing record-breaking inflation. Sanctions as a tool are often ignored due to their relative invisibility compared to military force but are arguably more brutal, inflicting slow deaths from disease and starvation and tearing apart the fabric of societies. Western sanctions have killed an estimated 38 million globally over the last 50 years.
The war has also seen extensive damage to cultural and historical heritage, with damage to Iranian UNESCO World Heritage sites like Golestan Palace and the Jameh Mosque of Isfahan. In their invasion, Israel has demolished entire villages in Southern Lebanon, destroying centuries of history and people’s livelihoods.
The damage is not limited to the immediate region as the economic impacts of disruptions to global shipping in the Strait of Hormuz impact around a third of the world’s oil, gas, and fertilizer. In a dark irony, the US is the top producer of oil and gas by double the second top producer, on top of recently stealing Venezuela’s oil. As the top exporter of oil and gas, the US is hardly impacted, despite being the world’s largest consumer of oil.
Meanwhile, countries that rely on energy imports have been driven into economic crisis. Pakistan, who gets 80% of their energy imports through the Strait of Hormuz, immediately launched austerity measures aimed at conserving energy use. These included cutbacks on the work week, school closures, online work and school, and restrictions on travel and social gatherings. Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Egypt, Senegal, and more poor countries in the Global South are facing the same pain.
The UN’s World Food Programme back in March estimated that the Iran War would plunge 45 million people into food insecurity. To add insult to injury, the UN in April estimated that the Iran war disruptions would lead to over 30 million people being plunged into poverty. The worst of the effects on fertilizer being limited during planting season have yet to be felt.
Considering the devastating impacts around the world of the US’s latest illegal war adventure, surely domestic politics must mention this, right? Nope.
Republicans, as usual, lick the President’s boots, parroting talking points about Iran not being able to get a nuclear weapon (despite no evidence they were pursuing one and Trump’s pulling out of the JCPOA) and this being a war against terrorism.
As for Democrats, their statements have followed the usual anti-Trump playbook of blaming all problems on Trump while maintaining their support for the status quo. The Democratic talking points consist of claiming Trump went into the war with no plan and is failing strategically, the lives of American military personnel are at risk, and gas prices are hitting American wallets, demonstrating Trump doesn’t care about affordability.
Even the “progressives” of the party like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), stick to these talking points though with more of an emphasis on the illegality of the war and how the money spent on war could be better spent on Americans. The focus is always on how America’s crimes affect Americans, not anyone else.
It’s not that these politicians are wrong to point some of these things out. The illegality of the war, risks to American military personnel, and domestic economic impacts should be mentioned. The problem is that these should all be far behind the primary point which is that it’s wrong to murder thousands of people in other countries and destroy the lives of millions.
In neither party is there mention of the war being bad because of its devastating consequences for the rest of the world. I wonder what would happen to a politician if they claimed that the life of an Iranian is equal to the life of an American. Would they be laughed out of the room? Labeled a terrorist-sympathizer? Are these politicians correct in calculating that their constituents only care about domestic impacts?
Selfishness is a Two-Way Street
Statements like Hillary Clinton’s reflect how the elites do their best to maintain the selfish atmosphere in politics, but it would be too simplistic to stop there. While the corruption and censorship widespread within the political and media establishment certainly has a powerful effect in shaping American discourse, it can’t all be attributed to top-down influence. The masses must take responsibility as well, as they are the ones who elect the politicians.
While many Americans refuse to even acknowledge the criminality of the empire, others find it tempting to blame it all on the elites, to absolve themselves of complicity. This is best characterized by the liberal who pledges blind allegiance to the Democratic party, sees Trump and Netanyahu as bad apples in otherwise well-functioning democracies, and espouses a false feminism that is loud about abortion but silent in the face of the genocide of brown, Muslim women.
It’s easy to see that a president who is fueled by greed and is willing to lie and cheat to get ahead is a natural outcome of a neoliberal society focused on money, materialism, and individualism. One where the richest man owns more than the bottom 50% of the country, we lack universal health care, and we spend more than the GDP of every country beyond the top 20 on a military with 861 bases in 95 countries.
Elon Musk, the pinnacle of the illusion of the self-made man and winner of the American dream, actively bashes empathy as weakness. As cartoonish as it sounds, my conservative coworkers literally drive loud gas-guzzling trucks with “don’t tread on me” bumper stickers, think illegal immigrants are the source of all our problems, and brag about buying assault rifles. Then there’s the liberal who puts on a facade of being more empathetic but is simply virtue signaling while doing whatever they can to protect their privilege. In short, the American people are not free of blame. Top-down reflects bottom-up and vice versa.
American Exceptionalism
Surface-level manifestations of selfishness are just that: symptoms, not causes. To truly understand it, we have to dig deeper and reveal an underlying psychology. From the start of the country, the American ruling class has sought to inculcate a sense of American exceptionalism in the populace, the idea that America is the pinnacle of democracy and human achievement.
Manifest destiny in the mid-1800s was the concept that America was destined by God to occupy the North American continent and was predicated on a racial doctrine of white supremacy. It was used to justify the US invasion of Mexico then dozens of subsequent land invasions since. This has been essential because only through supremacy and dehumanization of the other can an entire country get behind perpetrating such heinous crimes.
That is why in a war of choice murdering thousands and causing tens of millions to suffer and starve, the US discourse is only concerned about “bad strategy”, “losing” the war and domestic economic concerns that are nothing compared to the rest of the world’s.
In a recent interview with geopolitical analyst Glenn Diesen, Iranian professor Seyed Marandi explained the supremacist mindset that accompanies US atrocities:
“Everything becomes justified because they’re exceptional. Because they are above the rest. So when they invade Iraq and kill a million people and destroy the country, and then it fails, you won’t see the elites and the media saying ‘we are war criminals’, they’ll say it was a flawed policy. If someone is assassinated in Europe, they’ll immediately say ‘who is behind it? Let’s prepare for some sort of war’ but if they go and wipe out a country and it causes inflation to go up, that was a failed policy. It isn’t that ‘we are the war criminals’, that ‘our government is evil’”.
We recently passed the 25th anniversary of 9/11. The 2,977 victims of 9/11 continue to be used as political capital, to justify further islamaphobia and the “war on terror”. The wars of terror launched by the US since 9/11 have caused at least 4.7 million deaths, widespread destruction of environmental and societal fabric, and the displacement of 38 million people in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and the Philippines. This kind of asymmetry can only happen when a people believes its myths of supremacy.
The Stakes Are High
Regardless of the source of the selfishness, the important part is combating it. Macklemore’s recent response to being removed from Ed Sheeran’s tour embodies the seriousness of this. He immediately centered the plight of the Palestinian people, emphasizing that was what needed to be talked about. The same goes for this conversation. What matters is not an intellectual conversation about selfishness, but the plight of the world at the hands of the American empire.
There’s a comfortable illusion we get used to in the US, where as the unipolar power, nobody else can hold us to account. So we suffer no consequences. It’s like a murderer feeling good about themselves because there are no police, courts, or jails to enact any justice. As a result, there is no reckoning or accountability. 23 years on from the illegal war in Iraq, nobody has been held accountable. This only creates impunity that engenders further destruction.
Now for the uncomfortable truth. By not calling out this deadly self-centeredness in our country’s discourse, we are abandoning our responsibility as imperial subjects to stop the devastation that the empire creates. In a sense, we are abandoning our humanity by allowing material comfort to supersede moral obligation. Once again, we are led by murderers running around with no law enforcement. We, the American people, need to become that law enforcement. We can’t blame everything on the elites. The blood of the victims of the empire is on our hands too if we don’t do what we can to fight it.
The US is the richest country in the world. Despite real economic issues of insane wealth inequality and poverty, even poor Americans are materially well off compared to most of the world. Americans have implicitly accepted that their luxurious standard of living is worth the destruction of the wretched of the earth, primarily in the Global South. We also have no idea what it feels like to have bombs raining down over our heads. That being said, I don’t have any sympathy for an American complaining about higher gas prices without first acknowledging the far more severe impacts this American war of choice is having globally.
The politicians are mirrors of public sentiment, at least eventually. If we start caring about human life more than expensive gas, our politicians will notice and begin mirroring those values. We need to stop seeing the destruction of entire countries as “bad strategy”. We need to stop equating the life of one American military personnel to 1,000 foreign civilians. We need to actually believe that “all men are created equal” and start paying reparations to the victims of the empire. Only then, can we fulfill our responsibility and redeem our humanity.
Very well written Mr. Fisher. Empire and its' atrocities thrive on the indifference and distraction of its populace. The myth of exceptionalism is multifaceted in its' danger, as it not only threatens the people of the world with harm and destruction if they question it and stand in its' way, but also numbs the hearts of those who fall under its scope in the centers of empire.
Great reminder too about how, just because one lives in a nation with tremendous wealth, material resources and influence, one should not fall victim to the trap that they somehow are "Greater" than those around the world because of their skin color, race or socioeconomic status. I long for the positive social change you hint it, but I sadly won't hold my breath considering how the barons of empire do their utmost to silence criticism of their wrongdoings, further enrich themselves and extract wealth from the global south, and profit off the misery and efforts of those they deem "beneath" them.