the United States of America
I know this is incredibly lazy of me, but I think Phillip Adams summed up why not many people look to the United States as "the best nation on earth".
United states of affray
By Phillip Adams
HOW do I kill thee? Let me count the ways Americans have killed others and each other throughout their history. Oh, the body count might have been higher in Hitler's war or Stalin's Soviet Union or Mao's China. Nonetheless, no nation has a more bloodstained history than the US. And no other nation has such a culture of violence.
We can never know how many tens of millions of Native Americans died as a consequence of the white man’s arrival, but the Indian Wars took a massive toll as Europeans took possession of what would become the United States. The slaughter of the men, women and children of the Indians’ “500 nations” got the new white nation off to a bloody start. Massacre, famine and disease on a genocidal scale. The Revolutionary War? A skirmish in comparison. As was the war between North and South, though the US “Civil” War remains one of the most devastating in modern history.
That 19th century conflict would, of course, lead to the end of slavery – a vast act of violence that destroyed the lives of generations of Africans. How many died in the African round-ups? On the slave boats? In the oceans? How many were worked to death in the cotton fields? The crime of slavery, on which America based its burgeoning economy, resonates today. It is directly connected to the self-destructive rage within the ghettos, and to the 1.4 million, or 13 per cent, of black men who’ve been jailed, paroled – and ever after denied the vote.
After slavery, the era of the lynch mob. Tens of thousands of “niggers” were hanged from city lampposts – or from trees in southern townships. It wasn’t just the KKK. Lynchings were popular public occasions – celebrations that decent white folk took their children to see. And we’re not talking the ancient past. On the very day the Reagan family moved into a new home with young Ronnie there was a lynching a few blocks away. Variations on the theme persisted through the ’60s as white racists fought the civil rights movement.
Official lynchings still occur, though the noose is rarely involved. Having abandoned capital punishment in the early ’70s, the US brought it back with a vengeance a few years later, adding lethal injection to the gas chamber and electric chair in the menu of state murder. Only China executes more citizens. Thirty-eight US states have the penalty on the statutes, with Texas holding the record for executions – achieved during the governorship of George W. Bush. Blacks are killed in numbers out of all proportion to the population. But many don’t make it to Death Row. They’re killed by the LAPD or the NYPD, often in circumstances provoking race riots and an abiding mistrust of the police and the entire judicial system.
An uncivil war rages throughout America with an immense number killed by handguns. Or assault rifles in convenience store robberies or drug dealers’ turf wars. Attempts to disarm criminals – let alone civilians – are thwarted by the most effective lobby group in the US, the National Rifle Association. The number of guns in the possession of gangs and “citizens’ militias” exceeds 100 million.
Some are used to kill white residents, others leading African Americans. No other nation has seen so many of its most exalted cut down by assassins, sometimes crazed loners, sometimes members of conspiracies. When JFK was assassinated his brother Bobby, soon to be killed himself, accused the CIA and the Mafia of organising “the hit”. As a crusader against the Mob – and a critic of an out-of-control CIA – he knew of the links between them; of their plans to collaborate in the assassination of Fidel Castro. He also wondered whether the Secret Service team that was supposed to protect his brother had been implicated.
Bobby’s war against organised crime – which J. Edgar Hoover insisted was a myth – had made the brothers targets. They’d regularly been threatened by Jimmy Hoffa and the notorious Teamsters Union. The Kennedy administration genuinely feared a Mob takeover of the US – the sort of outcome we’d see in countries like Colombia. Such concerns had a long history, dating to the violence and corruption of the Prohibition years.
The 9/11 attacks? They’d been pre-imagined in so many Hollywood films. Which brings us to the culture of violence in US films, TV and now video games, in the fan clubs for serial killers, in the celebration of the Mob in series such as The Sopranos. No other nation devotes such creative energy to the pornographies of violence in its mass entertainment.
And that’s before we look at America and war, from Mexico to Iraq. Yes, the US is the best and worst of nations, giving the world both the loftiest and most awful of examples. When I made these points after 9/11 – warning Australia not to be swept up in the Bush Administration’s response – I was dragged before the Press Council. These days my column looks understated and prescient.
- The Weekend Australian, September 15, 2007.
United states of affray
By Phillip Adams
HOW do I kill thee? Let me count the ways Americans have killed others and each other throughout their history. Oh, the body count might have been higher in Hitler's war or Stalin's Soviet Union or Mao's China. Nonetheless, no nation has a more bloodstained history than the US. And no other nation has such a culture of violence.
We can never know how many tens of millions of Native Americans died as a consequence of the white man’s arrival, but the Indian Wars took a massive toll as Europeans took possession of what would become the United States. The slaughter of the men, women and children of the Indians’ “500 nations” got the new white nation off to a bloody start. Massacre, famine and disease on a genocidal scale. The Revolutionary War? A skirmish in comparison. As was the war between North and South, though the US “Civil” War remains one of the most devastating in modern history.
That 19th century conflict would, of course, lead to the end of slavery – a vast act of violence that destroyed the lives of generations of Africans. How many died in the African round-ups? On the slave boats? In the oceans? How many were worked to death in the cotton fields? The crime of slavery, on which America based its burgeoning economy, resonates today. It is directly connected to the self-destructive rage within the ghettos, and to the 1.4 million, or 13 per cent, of black men who’ve been jailed, paroled – and ever after denied the vote.
After slavery, the era of the lynch mob. Tens of thousands of “niggers” were hanged from city lampposts – or from trees in southern townships. It wasn’t just the KKK. Lynchings were popular public occasions – celebrations that decent white folk took their children to see. And we’re not talking the ancient past. On the very day the Reagan family moved into a new home with young Ronnie there was a lynching a few blocks away. Variations on the theme persisted through the ’60s as white racists fought the civil rights movement.
Official lynchings still occur, though the noose is rarely involved. Having abandoned capital punishment in the early ’70s, the US brought it back with a vengeance a few years later, adding lethal injection to the gas chamber and electric chair in the menu of state murder. Only China executes more citizens. Thirty-eight US states have the penalty on the statutes, with Texas holding the record for executions – achieved during the governorship of George W. Bush. Blacks are killed in numbers out of all proportion to the population. But many don’t make it to Death Row. They’re killed by the LAPD or the NYPD, often in circumstances provoking race riots and an abiding mistrust of the police and the entire judicial system.
An uncivil war rages throughout America with an immense number killed by handguns. Or assault rifles in convenience store robberies or drug dealers’ turf wars. Attempts to disarm criminals – let alone civilians – are thwarted by the most effective lobby group in the US, the National Rifle Association. The number of guns in the possession of gangs and “citizens’ militias” exceeds 100 million.
Some are used to kill white residents, others leading African Americans. No other nation has seen so many of its most exalted cut down by assassins, sometimes crazed loners, sometimes members of conspiracies. When JFK was assassinated his brother Bobby, soon to be killed himself, accused the CIA and the Mafia of organising “the hit”. As a crusader against the Mob – and a critic of an out-of-control CIA – he knew of the links between them; of their plans to collaborate in the assassination of Fidel Castro. He also wondered whether the Secret Service team that was supposed to protect his brother had been implicated.
Bobby’s war against organised crime – which J. Edgar Hoover insisted was a myth – had made the brothers targets. They’d regularly been threatened by Jimmy Hoffa and the notorious Teamsters Union. The Kennedy administration genuinely feared a Mob takeover of the US – the sort of outcome we’d see in countries like Colombia. Such concerns had a long history, dating to the violence and corruption of the Prohibition years.
The 9/11 attacks? They’d been pre-imagined in so many Hollywood films. Which brings us to the culture of violence in US films, TV and now video games, in the fan clubs for serial killers, in the celebration of the Mob in series such as The Sopranos. No other nation devotes such creative energy to the pornographies of violence in its mass entertainment.
And that’s before we look at America and war, from Mexico to Iraq. Yes, the US is the best and worst of nations, giving the world both the loftiest and most awful of examples. When I made these points after 9/11 – warning Australia not to be swept up in the Bush Administration’s response – I was dragged before the Press Council. These days my column looks understated and prescient.
- The Weekend Australian, September 15, 2007.
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