Matthew McKenna
Donald Trump may have just provided the catalyzing spark for a rejuvenation of effective history education in the United States. Counterintuitive as it may sound, the polarizing orange man may have just brought to national attention some grave flaws with our American approach to teaching out own history. With his platform of instituting “Patriotic Education,” in the what he has described as the “1776 Commission,” the president and his acolytes are seeking to reverse what they see as left wing brainwashing, akin to “child abuse” in the classrooms. The apparent goal expressed by the 45th president, is that education would be a tool utilized to reinforce and invigorate patriotism in the populace, and given Trump’s own trajectory, bolster an American nationalism.
The Donald apparently did not realize that a doctrinal propagation of American exceptionalism is already very much the rule in our schools and culture writ large. It may not be the overt, worship of the American experiment that the MAGA crowd might desire, but a closer inspection would reveal that American exceptionalism, and thus a sense of American superiority, is infested in our schools and institutions. The evidence is present in many ways but none more evident than the continued violence this nation exerts on the globe, unabated by its own populace. Even an imperial entity such as the United States can only engage in the unprecedented violent project that it has, to the degree to which it maintains pliant citizenry. That is, an aggressive empire requires a domestic population that either:
A. Supports its government’s actions, believing them to be benevolent in nature
OR
B. Does not care about the results of US policy, believing loyalty to one’s country to be the supreme attribute
OR
C. Remains ignorant enough about them so as to register them benign or harmless.
This is far from just a belief limited to the average red state voter but also a disease that infects the minds of liberal and conservatives alike, though in different ways. This attitude is propagated from a young age through the curriculum history teachers provide, and thus we as teachers are at least somewhat culpable for this intergenerational ignorance. We need to develop a populace that refuses to consent to the imperial and domestic violence that the United States engages in. Furthermore, it necessitates educating the citizenry to reject the notion that their nation has the inherent right to dictate world affairs through force. To that end, we have a responsibility to not just reject “patriotic education,” but to make it our active goal to teach in such a manner that renders American exceptionalism an obsolete, extinct philosophy. The vision for education presented by The Donald is the antithesis of how educators need to teach in order ensure a global peace and security.
The Limits of “Both Sides”
The United States suffers from a peculiar affliction but one that deeply affects the collective view of this nation’s history. The issue is, the United States has never been forced to confront its own past. The destructive nature of America’s constant wars have been (with only a couple of exceptions) experienced by far away countries or on the violently expanding frontiers of the nation. Our leaders have never faced Nuremberg-style trials for their sins, as Nazi Germany did. We have had no truth and reconciliation hearings induced by internal and external pressure, as South Africa did. We have not undergone a military occupation due to defeat in war, as Germany and Japan did. Americans have never been forced to confront the mass scale violence inflicted on populations both inside and outside of its borders. The result of this is a view of innocence, and American exceptionalism persists unabated from generation to generation, leaving the world at risk of the empire’s wrath. Although the country has not won a war in a traditional sense since World War II, (and has lost many) Americans remain unaffected by the forces of international pressure or legality to reform the way they think of their nation’s actions. It is precisely because of this, that those who educate Americans on the subject of their own history, have a special responsibility to do so in a way that does not reaffirm a blind patriotism. A change in behavior being externally induced, as occurred in Germany and South Africa, is not currently feasible, and so it must come from within.
Nuance and Context is Only for Americans!
It is true that we do acknowledge some grave transgressions committed by our nation in the past, but we only do it to a degree. We acknowledge the original sins of slavery and indigenous displacement and genocide, without offering any form of material recompense to reflect an acknowledgement of those great crimes.
We honor with statues, faces on currency, and give context to our own historical perpetrators of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and imperialism, while never considering the simplistic manner by which we describe foreign perpetrators of similar acts. We grant nuance to figures who initiated aggressive wars and occupations like Woodrow Wilson did in Haiti, Mexico, and Russia. We ascribe without evidence “good intentions” to men who initiate mass slaughter based on false grounds, such as Lyndon Johnson did in Vietnam. Theodore Roosevelt’s face is carved into a rock formation on stolen land, and the man is still lauded as a friend of the people and father of the national parks. This is despite being an ardent militarist, white supremacist, and unapologetic imperialist partially responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands in his instrumental role in initiating war with Spain in the South Pacific. Henry Kissinger and Barack Obama were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, despite the former’s well known history of support for extermination campaigns, and the latter being at war for every single day of his presidency and boasting a personal “kill list.”
The Very Uncomplicated Nature of America’s Enemies
The same nuance we grant our commissioners of mass scale violence is almost never given to leaders of alleged enemy nations. When discussing the alleged repression of the Soviet Union, Castro’s Cuba, or Chavista Venezuela, rarely is it ever brought up that from their beginnings those nations were subject to attempted and sometimes successful violent sabotage by the United States. In efforts to bring down the socialist experiments, the United States intervened on the side of the czars in the Russian Revolution, made countless attempts to violently overthrow the Castro government, and nearly succeeded in a coup against Hugo Chavez in 2002. In that latter case, the Venezuelans have paid the price for their rejection of US hegemony, with perpetual sanctions, continued threats, and subversion. When these historical and current governments are portrayed in both US news and entertainment, rarely is the role of the constantly intervening superpower brought up. This omission of pertinent facts occurs as these same nations are demonized for their alleged suppression.
Americans only need some slight self examination to provide some context for these allegedly tyrannical governments. After 9/11, Americans supported (or tolerated en masse) mass scale violence perpetrated abroad against millions who had nothing to do with the attacks. Domestically, Americans also gave a pass to mass scale government surveillance, restriction of civil liberties, outright torture, indefinite detention, and a host of other constrictions of freedoms. This was all under the highly exaggerated threat of “terrorism.” Simultaneously, we seem to not comprehend why other governments might feel pressure to restrict certain liberties in their own nation when they face the proven very real and threat of US infiltration and violence.
When Democratic Republic of Korea makes headlines in US media, it is always because of the latest transgression, missile test, or perceived act of aggression by the Kim government. Very rarely is the historical fact brought up, that the United States reigned hell on every major North Korean city and country side. The US dropped 635,000 tons of bombs, 32,557 tons of napalm in total, and slaughtered roughly 1/5th of the population in the “forgotten war.” Also remaining “forgotten” to most Americans is the fact that the US-backed South Korean government, headed by dictator Syngman Rhee, had been threatening to invade the North to “unite” the country before the war started. His government had been conducting violent purges of hundreds of thousands of South Korean leftists prior to the 1950 hostilities. Currently, when the allegedly repressive nature of the DPRK is discussed in American media, it is not often mentioned that its Southern neighbor was a US supported military dictatorship until the 1980s, replete with censorship and violent persecution of dissidents. Seeing as the DPRK is surrounded by US clients in its well-armed southern neighbor and its former occupier, Japan, it is not that surprising that there exists a collective sense of fear in the populace. The US invasion and genocidal bombing campaign is a mere 70 years old, and it is likely fresh in the minds of many citizens who either lived through it or have family members that survived the conflict or perished in it. The perpetrator, of what some have described as a genocidal bombing campaign, still occupies the land just south of its border with 30,000 troops and continues to rehearse a rebut of the attacks of the 1950s in plain sight of the Korean border. Is it possible that might play a role in the external posturing and internal policies of the DPRK? That history is not taught, and thus Americans often buy into the simple narrative of unprovoked North Korean aggression against the United States. This is a narrative that continues to manufacture consent amongst Americans for a bellicose position toward the nation, rendering peaceful negotiations mute and putting millions at risk.
Some Dogs Just Need More Restraint!
Recently, my wife and I adopted a dog. We are very fortunate that our puppy has a very friendly temperament. She loves being around people, particularly children. Needless to say, we have not had to spend much time teaching her to control her aggression. However, if we discovered early on that she was prone to aggressive behavior against other dogs or people and presented behavior evidentiary of a tendency toward violence, then we would of course have to spend much more time training her to limit that aggression. At a much larger scale, this dynamic needs to be adopted for countries and relative necessity for self-scrutiny of their historical actions.
A History of Violence
An objective reading of the history of the United States reads that it is an incredibly violent and dangerous power. Since the initial intrusion of English colonizers in Virginia and Massachusetts, the imperial project has grown in size, violently conquering the continent. The settler colonial nation exterminated, ethnically cleansed, and attempted cultural genocide on the indigenous inhabitants of the land. Within 130 years of its beginnings, the imperium had not only conquered land that spanned ocean to ocean, but also sought to dominate the governments of regional neighbors in Central America. In this vein, the US conducted business at gunpoint and overturned governments on behalf of private US financial interests. With the American imperial appetite not yet satisfied with the cross-continental and hemispheric dominance, it pursued overseas hegemony in the Philippines and South Pacific Islands, killing hundreds of thousands in the process. Decades later, when those overseas interests were attacked by a rising Japanese empire, the United States reacted with a violence never before seen on the planet, denoting two atom bombs over civilian cities and removing some 60 others off the map via “conventional” bombing. The US victory in World War II granted the leader’s of the empire a deeper sense of entitlement and hubris. In an attempt to control global affairs in Korea, Vietnam the superpower killed 6 million at very least, and that only counts the overt actions of the Cold War. Covert support for violence in places like Iran, Pakistan, East Timor, Chile, and El Salvador claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands more, while the participation in outright genocides in Indonesia and Guatemala increased the aforementioned body count exponentially. “But they were fighting communism,” is not a rationale that holds up when considering the Third Reich presented that exact same rationale for many of their crimes. With no enemy remaining after the Cold War, the United States created new ones in the form of Saddam Hussein, the Taliban, and a “Shiite Crescent.” In combatting these alleged existential threats, the United States has invaded half a dozen nations and killed millions through the devastation of civilian infrastructure, crippling sanctions, and destructive bombing campaigns.
To put it bluntly, the nation that has been at war for the disproportionate majority of its history, requires vastly more scrutiny and self-regulation of its actions than a country that does not regularly demonstrate a regular propensity for violence against other nations. Therefore, there is a special responsibility on American history educators to provide the check on this behavior compared to educators in say, Trinidad; whose country is the good natured analogue to my affectionate canine, with no demonstrated history of violence.
Not Exactly “Defensive” in Nature
To further illustrate the necessity of teaching a history that is antithetical to reinforcing American exceptionalism, is the fact that nearly all of US wars have been offensive, unjustifiable, and internationally illegal acts of violence. Despite the hyper-adulation of the US military on constant display, if one puts aside the Civil War and World War II (and those are more complicated stories on their own), then there are no wars in America’s long history of violence that meet the standards of Just War Theory, the Geneva Convention, the UN charter, or even basic principles of self defense. The larger affairs such as the Mexican-American War and the Spanish-American War can uncontroversially be categorized as flagrant wars of aggression; with the former having the effect of conquering a third of Mexico while expanding the slave economy, and the latter conquering the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico. The comparably small but frequent military interventions in Latin America were entirely motivated by US private financial interests and of course could not ever be portrayed as defensive. How about the consistent US border shaping wars against the indigenous nations? These wars would more accurately be described as extermination campaigns in service of the settler colonial project. The US entrance into World War I was wholly unjustified and the US populace knew it, hence the need for extreme government repression to silence dissent and shape public opinion. The wars in Vietnam, Korea, and both US wars in Iraq were abject exercises in decimation of far weaker countries that presented no discernible threat to the United States. In an Orwellian twist, no war conducted by the Department of “Defense,” since its reaming from the more fitting Department of War, has been fought for anything resembling defense of the homeland.
A Pattern of Pathological Lying
Not only are the overwhelming majority of US wars not justifiable by the standards of international law or concepts such as the Just War Theory, it has also frequently been that the stated justifications for war have been based on falsehoods. It was exaggeration of threats or outright lies that US leadership used to martial public support for its wars on Mexico (1846), Spain (1898), Vietnam (1964), Grenada (1983), Iraq (1991), Serbia (1999), Iraq (again, 2003), and Libya (2011). As a subset of the larger mission of destroying American exceptionalism, it is essential to teach, in exhaustive detail, this pattern of pathological lying to justify imperial violence. The historical consequences of believing these lies has been that a significant enough portion of the US populace supported these aforementioned unjustifiable wars. The failure to educate enough of the citizenry to understand this history of deception and thus greet new claims for war with extreme skepticism, has led to the US government maintaining a tacit approval to kill millions around the globe.
The Consequences of Not Understanding US Violence
The domestic population’s perception of a nation’s history will inform the level of skepticism and critical thinking it does when evaluating the current actions of its government. The “Vietnam Syndrome” is the ultimate expression of American exceptionalism. This particular narrative asserted that the lasting harm generated by the US war of aggression that killed millions of Vietnamese, was not the continued effects of the Agent Orange that mutilates babies born decades later. Nor was it the unexploded ordinance that continue to kill and maim the children of rural farmers. In this narrative, the true cost of that affair can be measured in its effect on the American psyche. That is the psychological effect on the American populace, which might dissuade them from engaging in another aggressive military intervention. President Bush celebrated his perceived victory over this pathology after the devastation of the civilian population of Iraq with asymmetrical military power in a matter of weeks. After bombing the country back to a preindustrial age, the 41st president proclaimed “By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam Syndrome once and for all.” Apparently the cure for getting over a campaign of mass murder was another campaign of mass murder. Sort of a “hair of the dog” type solution for an aggressive war hangover. The reason this logic was able to persist, that Americans were able to view their nation as the bereaved party after Vietnam, and why they could tolerate the 1991 utter destruction of Iraqi society as some sort of comeback story for their inherently heroic nation, is because of ineffective education. The full nature of America’s disproportionately destructive, immoral roles in these wars is either not taught or obfuscated by those that teach US history, and thus these actions continue largely unchecked by the populace. This is to say, American students learned of the policies of containment, maybe the Paris Peace Accords and anti-war protests at US college campuses, but rarely are taught about the extermination campaigns of operation Speedy Express or the Phoenix program wherein the CIA executed some 25,000 Vietnamese. Similarly, Americans were neither curious nor concerned about the bombing of civilian shelters, the use of depleted uranium, or the wholesale slaughter, or retreating troops when the US fought in Iraq some 20 years later. Once again, learning the wrong history or an incorrectly focused history, allows the populace to give consent to the continued imperial behaviors.
Reminder: You live in the Empire
So what does all of this mean for our present situation? We stand at an especially dangerous point in time, and not solely because of the racist orange man. The asymmetrical power the United States has on the world stage should present a call to action for social studies teachers. To present just a few details, the United States garrisons the globe with its military bases. While the US possesses 800 bases on foreign territory, the rest of the world has a combined 30. While the US spends $740 billion on its military, outgoing the next 10 nations combined, most of which are allies. In a call back to the Roman consulate, the United States divides the Earth into different “commands” to which it must police. At any given moment the United States is bombing up to six countries while its special forces operate in nearly 135 nations. The global financial institutions operate out of the United States and function off of the US dollar. That is not even mentioning how exactly this global monopoly on violence is currently being wielded. The United States currently is entering its 20th year of fighting in and occupying Afghanistan. It continues to illegally occupy Syria, consistently risking war with Syria or Russia. Most egregious, the United States continues to be complicit in inflicting the worst humanitarian crisis on the planet in Yemen. According to the UN, roughly 233,000 Yemenis have been killed in the ongoing war due to both US supported bombing and blockade campaigns. In addition to direct war, the United States sanctions a quarter of the world’s population, with severely deadly results in Venezuela, Iran, and Syria. This economic terrorism remains unrestrained by a global pandemic, in spite of pleas from the United Nations. Perhaps most alarming about this behavior is no international body has proven itself capable of restraining the global superpower. The International Criminal Court, the institution designed to apprehend the very criminal actions taken by US, has been subject to US belligerence since its inception and rendered incapable of completing even basic inquiries into the empire’s transgressions. The US regularly ignores other international decrees, be them by the UN or the International Court of Justice, and thus there is little hope that our government’s behavior will be reformed from outside pressure.
This is What We’re Up Against… But There’s Hope
The above proposed mission of the history teacher is not an easy one, and we should have no illusions about this task. There is an American exceptionalism and militarism built into almost every aspect of our society. At any random professional sporting event, an American will witness an unquestioned adulation of the military, the adjacent jet flyovers, the national anthem (and sometimes “God Bless America”), and the giant flags across the field. Additionally, there are the constant positive portrayals US empire and US militarism presented in American film media, for which the Pentagon pays heavily. There have been heavily funded but benign sounding organizations like the “Foundation for the Defense of Democracies” and “Office for Public Diplomacy,” designed to influence American opinion to support a hawkish foreign policy. Then there is the fact that US mainstream media often acts as stenographers for the national security state, often pushing aggressive positions and even war against other nations. This devotion to the US national security agenda has resulted in the flagship networks providing an audience for ex intelligence and military officials who are overwhelmingly concurrently employed by the private defense industry. Their views of issues of war and peace are then presented as unbiased.
Then, there is the additional challenge that America’s imperial violence is largely invisible to the average American. This had been a trend since Nixon learned his lesson from Vietnam and did away with the draft. The all-volunteer fighting force assured that very few American families would bear the brunt or even the risk of military service. The families that do bear this task are disproportionately of lower socioeconomic status. Long gone are the days where Harvard graduates or progeny of congressmen or CEOs fought in America’s imperial wars, and thus the conflicts remain invisible to those in power. Nixon started the trend, but Bush and Obama perfected this during the War on Terror. As mentioned earlier, the death and destruction of Americas’s wars are felt mostly elsewhere. The use of drones, aerial bombing, cyber warfare, and proxy forces all serve to enhance this phenomenon and distance the average American from the violence their government inflicts. Efforts have been taken by those in power to ensure that even the Americans who were killed in these affairs remained far from the public conscience, with the images of coffins being prohibited from display in media. And, in the rare case where conscientious people like Chelsea Manning, John Kiriakou, or Daniel Hale attempt to alert the American people to the grave crimes their nation is committing, they are pursued ruthlessly by the Justice Department in efforts to dissuade such valiant outbursts of truth telling.
A Five Point Plan for Destroying American Exceptionalism in the Classroom
As should be clear by now, the standard of education of an American, both in school and out, already overwhelmingly trends toward Trump’s vision of a “Patriotic Education.” There are the more egregious displays of this in the continued practice of having students day after day reaffirm their “allegiance” to an apparently very insecure government. We should be equally concerned about the less overt, but more harmful practice of teaching a version of history that reaffirms American exceptionalism, innocence, and superiority. That is why the fight against this narrative is imperative. Even if the United States was a benign power, whose great military might and potential for violence had remained dormant for generations, it would still be incumbent on history teachers to go to battle against the narrative of “patriotic education.” As more of the populace drifts toward nationalism, the closer that nation comes to proving its superiority through violence. As it is though, American exceptionalism has already proven to be among the most dangerous belief systems in human history. Educators can do their part in rendering this phenomenon obsolete. To succeed at this monumental task, teachers must embrace the following:
1) Understand the asymmetrical nature of US global power. The United States possesses, historically, unrivaled abilities to exert military, economic, and diplomatic coercion on the world’s peoples, and thus requires a disproportional amount of scrutiny of its past from its own citizens.
2) Teach with an emphasis on nuance and context when discussing alleged US enemies. Do not accept binaries of good and evil. When studying the behavior of nations that the United States is in conflict with, place special attention on the historical US interventions into those nations. This history is always (at least partially) explanatory for that countries’ actions.
3) Explore the unjustified nature of American wars and study how the role of lies and deception have played in manufacturing consent for US violence on the world. In America’s long history of violence, nearly all of its wars fall short of international standards for justified war. Additionally and overwhelmingly, US conflicts have been products of outright fabrication, lies of omission, and disinformation purposed toward deceiving the public into consenting to US state violence. Teaching this history is especially important as it will teach students to be skeptical of any government narrative purporting a need to take aggressive violent action against Country X.
4) Understand that “patriotic education” has already been expressed through nearly all of our cultural institutions, and remains the status quo. That is why a counter narrative is necessary. In other words, we should feel no compulsion to present “both sides” of figures like Andrew Jackson, organizations like the CIA and US military, or other entities representative of American imperial violence. We already have the other side. It’s been presented through statues, faces on currency, names of streets, parks, bridges, and the dominant historical narrative that is presented in news and entertainment media.
5) Take ownership and understand the power teachers have in controlling the events, figures, and questions that are emphasized in the curriculum. Emphasis shapes a narrative. The incorrect focus of curriculum can sanitize and exonerate the actions of the powerful. Conversely, placing emphasis on events that illustrate the violent, imperial nature of the United States will develop a skepticism, critical thinking, and global empathy in students. Special focus should be placed on incredibly consequential events that are almost always glossed over, if covered at all, in traditional surveys of American history. For example, when studying the Spanish-American War, rather than emphasizing the “the charge up San Juan Hill,” focus on the (rarely discussed) 15 year genocidal war the US waged on the independence seeking Filipinos. When studying the Cold War, teachers should not just cover the Vietnam War and Cuban Missile Crisis but also focus on the role of the United States played, violently crushing self determination in places from Indonesia, Chile, and Central America. When it comes to historical figures, disproportionate time should be given to historical dissidents. These are people that represent examples of individuals that challenged the American imperial project, but rarely appear in textbooks. Less time should be spent detailing the actions and positions of the founding fathers and the presidents, while more should be granted to studying the heroic examples of Daniel Shays, Chelsea Manning, Tecumseh, Eugene Debs, Emma Goldman, Paul Robeson, Lucy Parsons, David Fagen, and the Saint Patrick’s Battalion.
Lastly, teachers can decide what issues are worth “debating” or exploring “both sides” on. Obviously, some questions are deemed to not have two acceptable answers, and thus would never be posed in the classroom because of the risk of one side of the argument tacitly lending support to a disproven and immoral ideology. (Think questions of the utility of eugenics.) If we identify American exceptionalism as the pathological ideology that it is, then teachers need to frame questions, debates, and projects in such a way that students could not come away with the conclusion that this ideology is acceptable, true, or legitimate.
Addressing the Counter Argument
“But, but.. by doing this, aren’t you guilty of the same type of agenda driven education that the president is advocating with ‘patriotic education’?” asks a hypothetical person. To that, we need to explain that it is a matter of consequences. The outcome of teaching a history that rejects American exceptionalism and scrutinizes the asymmetrical power and violence possessed by the US, will at worst create a generation of skeptical citizens that will be hesitant to support their nations’ next imperial action. Meanwhile, we already have the evidence that the curriculum that reaffirms American greatness while omitting its destructive role in world affairs creates a populace that continues to permit their government to drive the world closer to global disaster. These are not at all equally desirable outcomes. The very fact that the US continues its perpetual imperial violence around the world with minimal pushback from its citizenry is indicative that the “patriotic education” Trump desires has already been instilled in the American population. It is incumbent on the history teacher to answer with the counter narrative in every lesson they teach.