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The Deceptive Nature of the Stars and Stripes

The Deceptive Nature of the Stars and Stripes

7/4/2020

Matthew McKenna

Today is July 4th, and despite being the capital of the COVID-19 afflicted world, you will still see signs of celebration in the United States. On this day commemorating American independence, the red, white, and blue stars and stripes designs will be on display; gracing houses and town centers, as well as adorned on t-shirts, tank tops, and the occasional bathing suit. Ask the average American what the colors represent. They will likely respond with “freedom.” Perhaps some might respond with “liberty” or “human rights.” However, in this unprecedented moment of the newly invigorated Black Lives Matter protests, against the backdrop of the pandemic, along with the adjacent failures of our political system, it is worth examining how the common perception of the flag’s symbolism compares to what it represents to large swaths of humanity. 

The claim that the colors of the flag elicit the idea of freedom is a testament to how effective American propaganda has been on its own subjects. With this holiday in particular, Independence Day, the term “freedom” will elicit the historical memory of the upstart British colony daring to defy the mighty British empire to attain its independence, and thus self determination from the autocrat across the Atlantic. If one’s perception of freedom is narrowly limited to the largely aristocratic led fight for self determination of the late 18th century, then I suppose it has merit. However, if freedom is tied to a global appreciation for self determination, independence, and a nation’s right to govern its own affairs, then the US falls far short of the bare minimum to meet this standard. 

For millions of people globally, the United States is not a nation that values freedom in the self determination sense, but rather the nation that uses its overwhelming military, economic, and diplomatic force to squelch the efforts of other peoples demanding for themselves the ideals of freedom and independence so often repeated by self proclaimed American patriots.

A narrow examination early United States and its relationship with Latin America will contradict the idea that it has historically stood for the sovereignty of peoples, even just beyond its borders. From the Monroe Doctrine and its update, the Roosevelt Corollary, to our present day, the US has stood for the self determination of countries in this hemisphere, so long as those nations determined that it was best to remain subservient to US economic and military interests. Those peoples whose governments challenged the hemispheric hegemony of the United States had their sovereignty blatantly violated. The victims of the burgeoning global hegemon’s wrath included Honduras, Mexico, Haiti Nicaragua, Columbia, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba.  All of the aforementioned states were at some point subject to invasions, occupations, or meddling in their internal affairs to forcefully realign their agendas with the (mostly business) interests of the United States.

These overt and covert assaults on sovereignty also extended beyond the Western hemisphere. The blatantly imperial Spanish American War saw the budding empire ruthlessly crush hopes for self determination in the Philippines, After opportunistically siding with local Filipino leaders against the Spanish overlords, president William McKinley had the epiphany that the people of the islands were less suited for self determination than they were for conquest. When Filipinos resisted the subjugation, the US illustrated its stark dedication to freedom by waging a merciless mass murder and torture campaign on the civilian population, lasting over a decade. The islands remained a US colony until 1946, and presently remain largely economically and militarily subservient to, and dependent on their former colonizer.

At the tip of the spear in many of these incursions on behalf of US capital, was Major General Smedley Butler, who served in military interventions on several continents. He accurately characterized his career in the marines as having been a “High class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers….a racketeer; a gangster for capitalism.” The offensives waged against self determination that Butler was party to, all occurred in the era of pre-superpower status for the United States. They serve as an instructive preview of Washington’s forthcoming behavior, as the country would later emerge from WWII as the most powerful nation on earth. 

Any honest analysis of the United States’ foreign policy since the Cold War’s beginnings will disavow one of the notions that the United States stood for, or currently stands for, freedom. The 44 year standoff saw the United States consistently side against self determination in much of the former colonized world; overwhelmingly, nations of black and brown populations. The newly minted superpower’s policy was steeped in aligning itself with colonizers, genocidaires, torturers, and fascists. In efforts to stamp out any movement for self determination in the global south, that would include land redistribution, nationalization of resources, the United States resorted to actions that when committed by other nations, we brand as severe violations of international law, if not outright war crimes.

The government of the the stars and stripes, supported mass murder campaigns in Indonesia, East Timor, and Pakistan. Just years after assisting the Soviets defeat the Nazis and Japanese Empire, the nation of the “Colors That Don’t Run” supported fascists and former axis power collaborators in Greece, Albania and the Philippines. The US proved itself time and again to be the enemy of democracy, the concept many consider to be adjacent to freedom, overthrowing  democratically elected governments in Iran, Chile, and Brazil, to name just a few.

Additionally to outright overthrows, the US constantly interfered in elections and internal affairs of sovereign governments to assure that policies that represent the interests of the United States were defended and promoted. (One might ask whose interests? But that is another discussion.)

While proxy forces were often effective killers and oppressors, Uncle Sam also saw it suitable at times to dirty its own hands with military action as it intervened in the internal disputes of Korea and Vietnam, with adjacent campaigns in Laos and Cambodia; killing millions of people with napalm, mass bombing campaigns, and Agent Orange, all of which still kill children in those nations today.

While Ronald Reagan was referring to the US as the “beacon of hope,” he was simultaneously attempting to return Nicaragua to the dictatorial feudal state reliant on brutal repression of peasants that his predecessors had supported. Ever the ardent supporter of freedom, the “Gipper” approved arming, training, and funding right wing death squads that murdered entire villages, tortured, and committed mass rape. While the alleged freedom haters in Cuba fought in solidarity with black Africans against racial apartheid in South Africa and Angola, the United States joined in solidarity with the white subjugators, aiding the white ethno-state in South Africa and in its incursions into Angola and Namibia. The country that labeled itself the leader of the free world to purposely contrast to the Soviet Republics, saw no need to make its actions consistent with the self appointed title. 

Ok… well, there is an ugly past for the red white and blue, but we have since evolved and more recently the colors of the flag are now synonymous with freedom and self determination for all peoples, right? The answer is an emphatic “of course”… with the fine print, “so long as one agrees to submit to US hegemony.” The people of Iran have not been permitted to pursue their own path free of US interference since choosing the path of overthrowing the brutally repressive, and US supported, Shah Pahlavi. This interference has come in the form of arming Iran’s enemies (Iraq in the 80s’s, Israel, and Saudi Arabia now) and imposing brutal sanctions and constant threats of invasion. The recognition of the American flag as being synonymous with freedom has also not been obvious for Yemenis, whom the US has supported the bombing and starvation of since 2015 (this following years of conventional and drone bombings which killed civilians regularly). The American promise of freedom is unlikely to ring true in Venezuela either, where since the Chavista Revolution that accompanied massive land reform and nationalization of the oil industry, there has been persistent belligerence from the United States. This has  entailed an attempted coup in 2002, the ongoing coup attempt since 2019, and of course, the brutal sanctions campaign which according to the Center for Economic Policy Research, has killed 40,000 people since 2017.  

Of course in recent decades we were also informed that freedom itself is actually one of the main causes of some of the animosity emanating from the formerly colonized world. Forget the more tangible grievances that were articulated prior to 9/11/01 regarding US support for Arab dictatorships, military occupations of Arab countries, and sanctions that killed hundreds of thousands of children. It was actually antipathy toward some nebulous definition of freedom that led to the most iconic national tragedy in US history. When those 19 allegedly liberty averse terrorists attacked and murdered 3,000 Americans in 2001, the United States demonstrated its commitment to freedom by intervening militarily in half a dozen nations, leaving over a million dead, and displacing millions more. Liberty’s greatest apostle further promoted the concept by employing programs of extrajudicial kidnapping, torture , and assassinations, and ensuring that the promise of freedom from the US will for many generations be associated with terror and trauma.

In 2020, it is safe to say that Old Glory fails to elicit feelings of freedom for much of the world, and polls repeatedly show that the feeling is quite the opposite. Or maybe freedom is just anathema to these foreign born people? Perhaps it is a uniquely American construct? As noted freedom lover George W. Bush said of the 9/11 attackers and Anti-Americanism more broadly, “They hate progress, and freedom, and choice, and culture, and music, and laughter.” Well, of course to people outside of our borders whose values are so different, the whole freedom concept is flimsy to begin with!

But then again, borders are also a flimsy concept. How is it that a set of 13 states located on the Atlantic coast became a cross continental behemoth, and later a multi-continental empire? Did it achieve this territory through means that most of us would identify in the same vein as freedom? That idea would seem very odd to the millions of Native Americans dispossessed of their land, stripped of their culture,  imprisoned on reservations and otherwise murdered as collateral damage to the Manifest Destiny project. The idea would also seem strange in Mexico, of which roughly a third of the current United States now sits on its former territory, gained through a war of conquest. Would Hawaiians attest to the project of freedom that was in place when the United States, under the influence of the Dole Fruit company, overthrew their sovereign government in the 19th century? In spite of Jefferson’s early fantasies of an “Empire of Liberty,” it is hard to imagine that any nation that forged a multi-continental empire through coercion and dispossession would be viewed as the epitome of freedom by its global contemporaries. 

But what about inside these American borders that were established through the aforementioned actions? Sure, even a despondent defender of America can acknowledge that the US attained its largess of territory and wealth through means that were less than noble. However ugly the past is though, currently freedom is prevalent in all the areas influenced by Uncle Sam, right? If another nation was in possession of the world’s largest prison population, a massive domestic surveillance program, and had thousands of people dying annually due to lack of healthcare, then the above self-assessment would indeed seem odd. If that same nation also was garrisoning the globe with 800 foreign military bases, refusing to participate in the International Criminal Court, boasting a department of war whose budget accounts for nearly 40 percent of the world’s budget, and literally dividing the Earth (and now space!)  into special commands to police, the aforementioned statement would become Orwellian in nature.

It is Independence Day in America today. Seeing as this is the birthday of the United States, then maybe it is also a day for reflection and honesty. To eliminate self deception, a reflection on the words we use to describe our own nation becomes imperative. It is true that Americans do enjoy many freedoms today that their predecessors did not, and often their contemporaries in other nations do not. However, believing that the flag of this nation symbolizes freedom, with so much countervailing evidence available, becomes an exercise in self deception, and thus the enemy of progress. If the definition of freedom entails supporting the self determination of people globally to choose their own economic and political paths, then the red, white, and blue has, to this point, been the antithesis of the idea.