“America is a weapons factory, the White House a war room, and the president the manager of the neoliberal conspiracy to re-colonize the planet. It exports war and mass poverty. On the economic front: usurious neo-liberalism; on the military front: illegal wars. These are the trenches of America’s battle for world domination in the 21st century. If not stopped, it will be a short century.”

The above was written by film critic and Edinboro University Pennsylvania professor Luciana Bohne in a documented essay on the aggressiveness deployed by the US to assert its global hegemony.

In the 19th century, the United States posed as the nation chosen by God though Manifest Destiny to expand its domination throughout the world for the good of humanity. It decided to exterminate the internal “red menace” writing and shredding treaties, stealing lands, massacring, and herding indigenous populations into concentration camps (known as “Indian reservations”), in the name of civilizing the “savages.”

In 1890, with the massacre of Lakota at Wounded Knee, the frontier land grab completed Washington’s internal imperialist aspirations. But there remained a world to conquer, and the US trained its exceptionally covetous eye on Cuba and the Philippines, then part of Spain’s decadent colonial system. US external imperialism was born, wrote Bohne.

“Then, in 1917, something happened: a successful socialist revolution in Russia, the second major attempt, after the French Revolution of 1789, to try to redistribute the wealth of the few to the advantage of the many. The rulers of the world –the US, Britain, France and sundry acolytes– put aside their differences and united to stem the awful threat of popular democracy rising and spreading. They invaded Russia, fomented a civil war, funded and armed the counter-revolutionary forces, failed, and tried again in 1939,” wrote Bohne.

“But Hitler’s war of extermination against the USSR ended in a spectacular victory for Moscow.

For a while, after 1945, the US had to behave as a civilized country, formally. It claimed that the USSR had a barbarian, all-conquering ideology, rooted in terror, disappearances, murder, and torture. By contrast, the US was the shining city on the hill, the beacon of hope for “the free world.” Its shrine was the United Nations; its holy writ was international law; its first principle was the inviolability of the sovereignty of nations.

All this was rubbish, of course. It was an apartheid society. It nuked Japan not once but twice, deliberately selecting civilian targets. It shielded top Nazi war criminals from justice in order to absorb them as partners in its intelligence structures. It conducted virtual “show trials” against dissidents during the hysteria of the McCarthy congressional hearings, seeding the country with a harvest of fear.

It waged a genocidal war on Vietnam to prevent that country’s independence and unification. It assassinated African independence leaders and bestowed fascist dictators on Latin America. It softly occupied Western Europe, tied it to itself through military “cooperation” through NATO, and continued its ruthless effort to take out the Soviet Union and crush self-determination in the colonial world.

The Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, and the US went berserk with triumphalism. The conquest of the world, interrupted in 1917, could resume.

The benign mask dropped. “History had ended, ideologies had died, and the messianic mission of the US to become the steward of God’s property on earth could be fulfilled.”

An ambitious neo-conservative conspiracy drafted “The Plan for a New American Century” (PNAC). It envisaged the 21st century as a unilateralist drive to entrench American values globally through pre-emptive wars and regime change.

This frenzied delirium of US military domination turned into official foreign policy with the Bush Doctrine after the terrorist acts on 9/11 in New York. But it would be the Clinton administration’s Doctrine of Humanitarian Warfare –combining the liberal principles of “democracy and freedom” with policies of human rights– that induced the liberal left to embrace war and imperialism as the method of defending human rights.

“Since 1945”, wrote Bohne,” America’s Manifest Destiny, posing as the Free World’s Crusader, has claimed 20 to 30 million lives worldwide and bombed one-third of the earth’s people.”

May 30, 2016.

- Manuel E. Yepe http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/

A CubaNews translation. Edited by Walter Lippmann.