Last Friday, the broadcast of Democracy Now! included an example of a shared liberal and conservative myth and an example of it’s devastating refutation.  The myth came in reporting a questioning of Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez by Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy (chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee) speaking of Maher Arar, an innocent Canadian citizen detained and sent to Syria for torture by the Bush administration:

Attorney General, I’m sorry. I don’t mean to treat this lightly. We knew damn well if he went to Canada, he wouldn’t be tortured. He’d be held; he’d be investigated. We also knew damn well if he went to Syria, he would be tortured. And it’s beneath the dignity of this country, a country that has always been a beacon of human rights, to send somebody to another country to be tortured. You know and I know that has happened a number of times in the past five years by this country.

It is a black mark on us. It has brought about the condemnation of some of our closest and best allies. They have made those comments both publicly and privately to the President of the United States and others. And it is easy for us to sit here comfortably in this room, knowing that we’re not going to be sent off to another country to be tortured, to treat it as though — well, Attorney General Ashcroft said, “We’ve got assurances,” though assurances from a country that we also say now, “Oh, we can’t talk to them because we can’t take their word for anything”…

There is both something true and something laudable in Sen. Leahy’s statements, of course, but I want to focus on one specific part of what he said here and later in the questioning of the Attorney General.  He speaks of the “dignity of this country, a country that has always been a beacon of human rights” and later says to Gonzalez “you know and I know we are a country with a great, great tradition of protecting people’s individual liberties and rights.”

The next segment of the show featured an extended interview with Harriet Washington[1], author of Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present, on the disgusting history and contemporary continuance of the practice of experimentation on specifically black Americans, especially children. 

And so, in succession, we have a Senator speaking of our “great, great tradition” and always being “a beacon” of human rights, and an author and scholar talking about our tradition of racist exploitation.  Both of them have aspects of American tradition and history that they are appealing to, though Washington is much more specific and detailed. Given this seeming contradiction, one has to ask: what is the evidence for such assertions as made by Sen. Leahy and so many on the Left as well as the Right?  Does historical research or contemporary analysis support this shared liberal and conservative myth?  With respect to historical research, a strong challenge would seem to be posed not only by such continuing history as Harriet Washington recounts, but also by the institution of African-American slavery [2] and the genocide of America’s native population [3], both of which continued long after 1776 and still have repercussions today[4].  Beyond this, there is the second-class treatment of women [5], which has improved but which is still with us in many identifiable forms[6].  One could also mention the poor treatment of workers, immigrant laborers, homosexuals[7], and others that continues on to today.  There is also, then, the issue of foreign policy[8], where America really could be a “beacon” to the world, but unfortunately has not in most cases, given its history of overthrow of democratically elected governments[9] and support for brutal dictators (including Saddam Hussein at one time[10]) in the name of the “national interest” (which might easily translate as ‘temporary interest of the ruling group in the U.S. government and business world’)[11].  ‘9/11′, the first attack on official U.S. soil since the early 1800s, was in part ‘blowback’ for half a century of aggressive U.S. involvement in the Middle East, including support for early Islamic militant groups, or “Islamo-fascists” (to use the president’s term)[12].  The evidence for all of this, even if it is for the most part kept out of public discourse through a process of self-censorship and ‘patriotism’, is overwhelming[13], certainly strong enough to refute such hasty statements as Leahy, our president, and pundit after pundit across the spectrum keep making.

What can we offer in place of this shared liberal and conservative illusion, if the evidence is so much against it?  Really we face a choice between inventing apologetics for a self-serving illusion and coming to terms with reality and learning to live within it.  There is nothing special about “us” or “our country” except what we as a people and as individuals can realize through hard work and years of ongoing struggle against the less-desirable aspects of ourselves and our consciousness and behavior as a nation (but this goes for any nation, does it not?).  What would perhaps make us historically and ethically unique, if anything would, is if we truly gave up the illusion of our own inherent superiority and accepted that we are human beings like everyone else throughout history and in the world today, and that violence, self-deception, dominance, and other evils are tendencies we as members of the human species have.  When we can understand ourselves and come to terms with the reality of our own dirty hands as a nation, then perhaps we will be ready to move on and make ourselves some sort of “beacon” to the world.  Until then, I suggest that we at least try to avoid such excessive and undeserved self-congratulation presenting itself as ‘patriotism’. 

- Peter Broady

Peter Broady is a regular guy out of Wasilla, Alaska who reads and writes in his free time.  He can be contacted at his website or at pbroady@gmail.com. 

[1] Visiting Scholar at DePaul University School of Law. Previously she was a Fellow in Medical Ethics at Harvard Medical School and at Stanford University.

[2] See Horton and Horton, Slavery and the Making of America (later made into a PBS series), or Davis, Inhuman Bondage

[3] See Eating Fire, Tasting Blood, a good collection of readings on contemporary and historical perspectives on America’s genocide

[4] ibid., or Olson and Wilson, Native Americans in the Twentieth Century

[5] Recently, Collins’ America’s Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines

[6] A recent popular treatment is Rowe-Finkbeiner, The F Word, see also Schnier, Feminism in Our Time: The Essential Writings, World War II to the Present    

[7] On these and so many histories, a good place to start is Zinn, A People’s History of the United States

[8] The most relentless and vocal criticism of foreign policy, as well as source materials, is found in the work of Noam Chomsky over the last 40 years, beginning with American Power and the New Mandarins and most recently Failed States and Perilous Power (w/ Gilbert Achbar), see The Chomsky Reader for a good collection of examples and sources

[9] See Kinzer, Overthrow

[10] See Blair, The Control of Oil

[11] ibid, and Yergin, The Prize; Klare, Blood and Oil

[12] See Kinzer, The Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror, and on ‘blowback’, see Chalmers Johnson’s Blowback 

[13] for more evidence, there are hundreds of other books and many websites that provide reliable evidence and analysis; see www.foreignpolicy.com; a library of documents at http://www.lib.umich.edu/govdocs/forpol.html, or Foreign Policy in Focus