The American Empire: Grotesque Inequity is Corrosive to Democracy & Grotesque Conspicuous Consumption is Global Genocide

The American Empire: Grotesque Inequity is Corrosive to Democracy & Grotesque Conspicuous Consumption is Global Genocide

by Gil Villagrán, MSW
Lecturer, School of Social Work
San Jose State University

The eloquent words of our founding fathers were that: “all men are created equal, endowed by the Creator with inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” (changed from property (in the original draft).

The initial inconsistency is that our nation was founded upon pre-existing nations of native peoples, robbed of their land by our founding fathers, sometimes enslaved, eventually forced off their lands, millions killed by war.

The next contradiction of “all men are created equal’’ arrived with kidnapped and enslaved Africans forced to build the roads and cities, raise the crops, even to build our nation’s capital. The compromise written into our Constitution that declared enslaved humans as only 3/5ths of a white person poisoned our nation in such a manner that so-called moral, god-fearing men and women grotesquely profited from owning, breeding, and selling human beings, tearing families apart, raping women and then selling their children for further profit.

The continued slavery in this nation of free men (and women—without equal rights) led to a Civil War, but not before another war—a war of conquest of Mexico fomented by slave owners desperate to ensure additional slave states west of the Mississippi River. Our nation won that war—taking half of Mexico as war booty, and would have taken all of Mexico, but for Congressional concern of what to do with all the Mexicans, who were viewed as a mongrel race of Indians, negroes and who knows what else mixed into these “lower beings…”

Manifest Destiny—a manic delusion that God himself willed that the U.S. reach “from sea to shining sea” contributed to this war and further land grabs that transmogrified our nation to a replication of the empires of European monarchies. Thus we grabbed Hawaii, Cuba and the Philippines for a while, and Puerto Rico to this day, and we now have more than 737 military bases throughout the world. America is an empire, surpassing those our founding fathers once despised.

As historian Howard Zinn explains, “If our starting point for evaluating the world around us 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 we are not likely to question a 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.

The subject for a future companion article: Grotesque inequity is corrosive to Democracy, as conspicuous consumption is suicidal genocide that much of the world uncritically embraces in our time.