I like to think of our country as - generally - good and benevolent....

[Bigmack]

.. and that things like the atrocities of the Vietnam War and those of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are anomalies.

Then I read a little more history... and have my doubts.

Not that we don't do good... stopping Hitler has to be one of our finest hours, for example. The Marshall Plan literally saved Europe after WWII.

It's just that when we are racist, cruel, and imperialist, we never seem to learn that those things just aren't us... or I hope those things aren't us. And then we do it again.

I'm reading "Imperial Cruise" by James Bradley. He's the author of "Flags of Our Fathers"... his father raised the flag on Iwo Jima.

The major US political and educational figures around the turn of the 20th Century were incredibly racist. They used the term "Aryan" constantly, and spoke of the "manly" act of war.

The Filipino Insurrection was a nightmare, with US troops killing men, women, and children by the hundreds of thousands. The water torture was the favorite method of interrogation. Politicians, including Teddy Roosevelt, spoke casually about the "Pacific Niggers".

Substitute "ragheads" and "waterboarding", and add some high-tech weapons, and you have the current wars.

We are either a flat-out racist, imperialist nation... or we are a benevolent nation that forgets its humanity at regular intervals.

[BainsBane]

1. We are an empire

that has justified interventions abroad through a variety of ways: from racism and cultural superiority to "democracy" and anti-communism. We sadly fail to live up to the rhetoric the country espouses. The more you study diplomatic history, the more you see that.

[Brigid]

2. You should find this book interesting:

"God and Empire" by John Dominic Crossan. In it, he discusses the dangers of power and empire.

[nadinbrzezinski]

3. Thanks, one to read myself

[nadinbrzezinski]

4. We are a young Empire...we left our Republican roots by 1900

At the latest. And we are also quite possibly a failing empire as well. Our apex was 1945.

[hfojvt]

5. why does it have to be either, or?

and why treat a "we" like it is a single entity?

By 1900, the US was a nation of 76 million people. Some of them racist and some of them not.

And when it comes to racism, well in terms of ideas, 1900 was a time of the rise of Darwinism - or Spencerism, social Darwinism. The world was seen as a battlefield where only "the fittest" survived. The fittest what? Well, the fittest species, but then within that species, why not the fittest race?

It was only when the German Nazis took that idea to its logical conclusion that the whole world stepped back and said "whoa, holy crap is THAT one really bad idea".

But below the politicians and intellectuals, you had the mass of ordinary Americans, in 1900, they were mostly farmers, but some blacksmiths, carpenters and joiners, shopkeepers, inventors and manufacturers. They were too busy planting crops, milking cows and raising large families to give much of a fig about the words coming from a politician or some ivory tower.

And another part is - a lack of education. The 1940 census was recently released, and indexed, so I have been using it to extend my family histories. It includes a new category not seen in other censuses. It lists "highest grade of school completed". It is really amazing to me how UNeducated America was, by and large, even as recently as 1940. Start with my grandparents. Mom's dad - 8th grade education. Mom's mom - 7th grade education. Dad's mom had a college degree, class of 1926, still pretty rare for a woman in those days! But dad's dad only had an 8th grade education. Dad's maternal grandfather only had a 4th grade education. His grandmother had a 6th grade education.

I would say that bigotry, in the sense that it is UNlearned, that generally happens either in a practical way, or in higher education, something that was generally lacking even by 1940.