That the United States of America is the good guy

That the United States of America is the good guy.

You’d be hard pressed to find a US school that teaches true history of the US, or of it’s foreign policy. The same is true in many Western countries; the acceptance of the US myths about it’s behaviour is wide spread and pervasive.

For years this myth was deliberate - the US spread propaganda through various means - and that propaganda stuck. Now that propaganda is much less global and much less pervasive, but the notions are still rampant.

America might be relatively good, but it’s not good, relative to anyone’s notions of what a good country would be… I hope that’s clear.

A few modest examples that you’ll never hear about in any school:

• The US military engaged in medical testing, illegally and secretly, on US civilians.
• The US secretely and illegally sterelized poor and minority women for decades.
• The US military engaged in mass weapons testing on American cities, secretly and illegally
  
  You can read about that here, for starters: Unethical human experimentation in the United States
• The US has committed many thousands of war crimes, involving killing many hundreds of thousands of civilians. These continue to this day.
• When they’ve been caught they have a LONG history of trying to cover up these crimes, and have more than once actually publicly blamed the victims.
• They have used their clout to prevent international blowback - to some degree - for these crimes - this has often involved manipulating the UN to prevent investigations of crimes.
• The US has a long history of lying to it’s own people about other countries, other political systems, other economic systems, etc. This is why you’ll see so many Americans misuse the term “socialized”. They largely haven’t been taught the truth, are fed endless propaganda, and are therefore ignorant.
  
  These are just a few small examples, but they make the point clearly I think. The US isn’t a “good” country and should stop believing it is, because maybe then it could become one. But in order to change it needs to be honest about it’s past and current policies and histories.
  
  NOTE: Before you think I’m saying Americans aren’t good, I’m not. I am specifically talking about the US government.

The reality is different - British government issued enclosure acts to shut down commons - rivers, forests, common land to peasants in order to force them out of villages to make them into a cheap labor force in cities, and also force them to buy things instead of making their own - shoes, clothes and so on.

People ended up living in smoke-filled unhealthy suburbs, underpaid, overworked, unhealthy, underfed, with no rights or prospects they had before. One of the things which a lot of ladies from this class lamented, was how they lost the time which they were using for reading books and engaging in literature, after they became laborers as opposed to their earlier status as peasants.

It was brutally implemented through military/legal power, and the advocates of this process were quite rabid in their advocacy and intent:

“Poverty is therefore a most necessary and indispensable ingredient in society…It is the source of wealth, since without poverty, there could be no labour; there could be no riches, no refinement, no comfort, and no benefit to those who may be possessed of wealth.”

One of the biggest myths is that the Emancipation Proclamation freed all the slaves. It didn't; it freed only those in the Confederacy and moreover had fled to the Federal lines. Four slave states in the Union were therefore excluded: Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware. All the slaves weren't freed until the 13th Amendment was passed.

And although it isn't actually taught in schools, it is the firm belief of most Americans that the Pilgrims were the first English settlers in the New World. They weren't; the first settled at Jamestown 13 years before the Pilgrims arrived. There were about a thousand English people living in Virginia in 1620 when the Pilgrims landed. The popularity of Thanksgiving has probably led to this misconception.

Modern scholars who try to psychoanalyze people from the past do not have a couch large enough.  While what people said a century ago about historical events may be as near the truth as some of the modern "corrections" made.   Any short claims made about history are pretty invariably wrong <g>.

Amazingly enough, for example, the Mayflower "Pilgrims" were not all separatists - while the core group was, they were perfectly happy to have others in a community based on Congregational principles rather than on Episcopal principles.  They left Leyden not because of fear of the Dutch (in fact, some descendants of the English community are still in the Netherlands) but because they wanted their children to speak English.   The Plymouth church eventually led to two congregations - the modern Unitarian Church and the Congregational Church (which is theologically the same as Presbyterian, with a long and intertwined history).

Early settlers brought diseases to the natives - but not out of malice - Pasteur was not born until 1822, so for early settlers to know a lot about spreading smallpox would have made them way ahead of their time.  In fact, about half the Pilgrims died - from an Indian disease.  If one looks at malice towards Indians - one should have to note the large number of "old New England families" with Indian blood <g>.

As for seeking wealth in the New World - it turns out that those who thought of this as "easy money" soon lost it.   The wealth seekers were more commonly the French trappers further north.

Roger Williams, who much later became a Baptist and later rejected that creed, was exiled  from Massachusetts Bay Colony,  not for being a Baptist, but for rejecting the Episcopal tradition of church governance (Puritanism and Congregationalism are not the same thing),   and Plymouth did not "exile" him in 1632 - Williams decided the Congregationalists were not separatist enough.  In short, his "exile" to Rhode Island and Providence Plantations was not at the behest of Plymouth and the Congregationalists, nor on the basis of religious beliefs as such.

Sorry - but history involves human beings, and is invariable several orders of magnitude deeper than, say, Turner's "frontier thesis" or any other shortcuts to understanding history.