Every year on the 4th July, Americans commemorate the adoption of the Declaration of Independence on July 4th 1776. Thirteen American colonies regarded themselves as a new nation, the United States of America and were severed from the British Empire. There’s no doubt that the current generation of America will be indoctrinated with US patriotism and a false sense of pride. Following the footsteps of its predecessors, America has left no part of the world without political, economic, military and cultural subjugation. America will do anything it takes in the pursuit of its interests including the use of weapons of mass destruction such as nuclear weapons and napalm, create alliances with tyrannical rulers, indebt nations including its own, use its security and intelligence to overthrow regimes, torture political prisoners, indiscriminately bomb civilians, spy on its own citizens and lie to the masses by peddling false historical and political narratives.
Abolition of Slavery
Americans pride themselves of ending slavery, however the reality is that slavery in the United States was not ended on moral or humanitarian grounds. Rather, the objective was the restoration of the Union due to the North-South divide in which the anti-slavery movement was impeding Lincolns ambitions to unite the Union and over Britain’s attempts to control the commerce that flowed in an out of the colonies. Ships in New England took goods to the French West Indies where they were exchanged for rum. The rum was then transported to West Africa and traded for slaves. In 1764, the British parliament passed the Sugar Act in an effort to control trade with the French West Indies. More attempts by the British to control the colonies took place until 1774 when the First Continental Congress suspended trade with Britain. In 1776, the Continental Congress passed an act that banned importation of slaves into any of the thirteen United Colonies. The colonies had used the inhumanity of slavery as one of their causes during the American Revolution, however, when it was over, they became reluctant to end slavery and the slave trade. Abraham Lincoln supported colonisation throughout his political career, citing an inability for African-Americans to assimilate into white society. Thomas Jefferson, another early supporter, was concerned that white and African-American people could not co-exist. Whilst slavery as was known for the last century eventually ended, the attitude support discrimination against Black people has remained up until this day and is witnessed by millions of African Americans.
American Wars
America since its inception in 1776 has been at war 214 out of her 239 calendar years of existence. To put this into perspective, if you pick any year since 1776 there is a 91% chance that America was involved in some war during that calendar year. Moreover, no US President qualifies as a peacetime president and can all be classed as “War Presidents”. The US has never gone a decade out of war and the only time the US went five years out of war (1935-1940) was during the isolationist period of the Great Depression. The inferiority complex of America has led it to justify every war under the pre-text of an “existential threat”. The American Indians were thought to be an existential threat to the United States. John Quincy Adams, for example, wrote that “the savage Indians” were out to “wage an exterminating war” against the “peaceful inhabitants” of the United States. It was the same propaganda then as it is now: we must attack them before they attack us. In reality however, American governments have used trillions of dollars of taxpayer’s money to bulk up its military and use it to pursue geopolitical interests over competing nations.
Nuclear Weapons
It took a lot of “exceptional” Americans to develop the atomic bomb. But when just two of those weapons of mass destruction were dropped on Japan, it’s estimated that 220,000 men, women and children were killed by those blasts. That’s a heavy cost to bear by the only nation to use such a weapon — a country that routinely questions whether other nations can be trusted with its destructive power. It is also estimated that since 1945, the United States has produced more than 70,000 Nuclear Warheads, which is more than all other nuclear states combined.
Debt
The global financial crisis has brought to the forefront how much the US lives beyond its means. The US generated nearly $14 trillion in 2007, however the national debt – this is money the central and federal governments owe to the US public and the world through the bonds they have sold – stands at $9.7 trillion. The US citizenry have a huge appetite for imports and real estate; as a result consumer debt stands at $11.4 trillion. The debts of US companies amounts to $18.4 trillion. This makes the US indebted to the tune of just under $40 trillion – nearly 75% of what the world produces. In a Harvard report it was calculated that 10% of the US population owned 71% of the nation’s wealth, whilst the top 1% controlled 38%. On the other hand, the bottom 40% owned less than 1% of the nation’s wealth, this has created 37 million Americans who live below the poverty line. The US is only able to live in this way because it has the US dollar, which is the world’s reserve currency, however this massive wealth fracture is not sustainable and the sustainability of living today and paying for the lifestyle tomorrow is becoming untenable.
Rendition
The Open Society Justice Initiative’s (OSJI) 213-page report into the CIA’s global rendition program has revealed that nearly a quarter of the world’s governments were involved in the covert movement, detention and subsequent torture of dozens of people during the post 9/11 ‘War on Terror’. It has become clear that without the co-operation of the global community the US would have been unable to carry out its rendition program, making all those involved complicit. It has always been known that other countries were involved as the American sub-contracted the torture to countries such as Syria, Libya and Uzbekistan. In truth the United States runs what is akin to an organised mafia cartel that goes around the globe for nothing more than colonial and economic interests. The talk of human rights, international law and organisations such as the International Criminal Court are just a smoke screen to fool the world. On the one hand the US pushes for freedom, democracy and the implementation of their ideology in the Muslim world, whilst on the other they use this same ideology to render innocent individuals for torture.
Torture
In December 2014, the CIA published a 500 page sample of a thousand page dossier that showed a systematic, deliberate and prolonged torture of prisoners by the CIA held in secret locations across the world. This was no ordinary maltreatment of prisoners in order to gain confessions or extract information. What the CIA’s ‘Enhanced Interrogation Techniques’ (EIT) did was truly medieval and barbaric. Developed in a post 9/11 world when the US administration and its agencies felt they had carte blanche to do whatever they wanted with the Muslim world and Muslim suspects, EIT was used as a frontline tool against those abducted and rendered around the world for torture. The Senate report highlights shocking cases of repeated waterboarding, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was water boarded some 182 times, he was made to sleep in a coffin and often confined to a box too small for his body size It was also reported that more than one detainee almost drowned from repeated waterboarding. Other prisoners were subjected to severe sleep deprivation not being allowed to sleep for days on end. Of the most shocking techniques was the forced rectal feeding and hydration of prisoners for no apparent reason but the enjoyment of the perpetrators. Some of the other techniques included: being stripped naked and dragged through filthy corridors, sexual threats to prisoners and their families, beatings, slapping, psychological torture and being kept in stress positions for hours. There is one case in which a prisoner was chained to a cold concrete fall overnight and died of possible hypothermia. All this is taken from what has been revealed in the report, the mind finds it difficult to comprehend what has been hidden from public consumption!
Police State
In June 2013 a former CIA operative, Edward Snowden exposed US surveillance activities which revealed much about the inner workings of the US government. The revelations by Snowden uncovered PRISM, a clandestine electronic surveillance program that allowed the NSA to access email, web searches and real-time internet traffic. It involved collecting millions of emails and content from social media and was effectively spying on its own citizens on an industrial scale. The NSA leaks also claimed that the US hacked Chinese mobile phone companies to collect millions of text messages as well the Asian fibre-optic network operator Pacnet. These revelations caused international embarrassment for the US and publicised hypocrisies and double standards. The US has always accused China of cyber espionage yet it has now come to surface that they are guilty of hacking and are of the best hackers in the world. All of this shows that spying rather than freedom is how social cohesion is maintained in America.
Ever since the inception of the United States of America, billions have suffered from American capitalistic policies. America’s status as the leading nation is now being challenged and questioned by political commentators and indeed the nation itself. Moreover, as the Muslim world awakens from its trauma and regains her political conscience, America fears the rise of the Khilafah that will challenge its global hegemony. This is the reason for its global “war on terror” that it has dragged the world into which is a pre-text to uproot the pure uprising of the Muslim World.
Kasim Javed