Reviewing the essays written over the years by critics of US foreign policy, one thing stands out immediately: the obstinate sameness and continuity of America’s warmongering against enemies big and small, most of them manufactured by America itself (or imagined). Indeed, except for very brief interludes, America has been continually at war since its inception.

Why is there no change or let up in this invariably horrendous script, equal parts high-handed hypocrisy and arrogant sanctimoniousness, and always lavishly buttressed by jingoist exceptionalism and the most outrageous fabrications? The only rational answer is that US foreign policy is not so much a true adaptive and honorable response to changing world events in an effort to safeguard the authentic national interest, but the playing out of American capitalism’s sordid quest for global supremacy, a project that inevitably implies enormous imperial crimes that benefit no one but a puny plutocratic minority in control of the US government.

Since few people would be willing to spill their blood or allow the national treasure to be plundered for such ignoble purposes, none of this colossal scam is possible without the aid of American imperialism’s numerous self-serving myths so reliably served by its ideological outgrowth, the corporate controlled media, easily the most devious propaganda machine ever seen in history. Unfortunately, although it’s clear the mainstream media is losing traction in its ability to sell lies with impunity, relief from this imposture does not appear possible in the near future. Thus, as is the case with US foreign policy, which recognizes only force, never morality, and which, as a curse on humanity will not be stopped until the vampire system that engenders it is eliminated, the prostitution of the American media—from its ostensible “entertainment” sector to its so-called “news” programmes—will not disappear until corporate power itself, and its venomous influence on mass communications, is broken.

Many well-intentioned people wonder how this ludicrously malevolent state of affairs came to be. The explanation is mundane. In most cases, the widespread collaboration of American media figures with the imperial lies issues not so much from harsh coercion, as in an openly despotic regime, but from simple selfish careerism and self-preservation, selfishness being a well-entrenched and even admired “virtue” in the upside down world of US capitalist values. Says Paul Street, sagely, in a recent piece:

American “mainstream” journalists who want to keep their paychecks flowing and their status afloat know they must report current events in a way that respects the taboo status of the nation’s underlying inequality and oppression structures and its savage and relentless imperial criminality. Those topics are understood as off limits, as beyond the narrow parameters of acceptable and polite discussion. They are subjects that serious reporters and commentators have the deeply indoctrinated common sense to avoid.

That such careerism causes the death of untold millions and the destruction of the planet’s essential ecosystems and quite possibly its incineration in an imbecilic nuclear war is apparently a bargain most Western journalists are quite prepared to tolerate.

The above is aggravated by the epidemic of complacent ignorance and unquestioned belief in the national mythology we observe among mainstream journalists, regardless of social background. Thus, while many who hail from small-town “patriotic” America, folks like Dan Rather and Charlie Rose, two prominent CBS “journalists”, are apparently proud to put what they perceive as their patriotic duty (as dictated by the State Dept.) above truth or fairness, their Ivy League, Big City colleagues are scarcely exempt from the same vice.

Confronted and clearly exasperated with this universe of pseudo-facts and decontextualized news fueling the incorrigibly vile nature of US foreign policy, John Gerassi, himself a former journalist, fired the following evaluation:

A great deal is being written in America these days about Pax Americana and American hegemony in the underdeveloped world. No longer able to blot out the obvious, even calm, rational, conscientious academicians are publicly lamenting America’s increasingly bellicose policies from Vietnam to the Dominican Republic. Suddenly, as if awakened from a technicolor dream, intellectuals are discovering such words as “imperialism” and “expansionism.” And they are asking: Why? Who’s to blame? What can be done to stop all this?

The questions are childish, the assumptions false, the implications naïve. They reflect a liberal point of view, one that claims that there is a qualitative difference between U.S. policies today and yesterday. In fact, American foreign policy has varied only in degree, not in kind. It has been cohesive, coherent, and consistent. What has varied has been its strength—and its critics.

The basic difference between American imperialism today and American imperialism a century ago is that it is more violent, more far-reaching, and more carefully planned today. But American foreign policy, at least since 1823, has always been assertive, always expansionist, always imperialist. Of course, it has rarely been pushed beyond America’s capabilities. Thus, when the United States was weak, its interventions abroad were mild. When its strength grew, so did its daring. Today, as the most powerful nation on earth, with a technological advance over other countries of mammoth proportions, the United States can be imperialistic on all continents with relative security. (John Gerassi, Violence, Revolution, and Structural Change in Latin America).

Gerassi wrote this assessment in the early 1960s. Plus ça change, uh?

Salvador de Madariaga, a liberal and cynic of the old school, quoted in the same piece by Gerassi, was also struck by the robotic course of US foreign policy. His explanation found the roots of the phenomenon in native capitalism’s sacralization of American foreign policy. Consistent with this view, Madariaga argued that American foreign policy cannot be questioned because it is no so much a policy as a religious tenet: the dogma of the infallibility of the American President and the dogma of the immaculate conception of American foreign policy. The illustrious de Madariaga gave us his opinion in the 1930s.

CONCLUSION

In the excellent essay reproduced below by John LaForge, first published in January of 2016, we see, once again, the malignant reality of US exceptionalist foreign, cynically piling up threats and quite possible a huge deal of pain on a small nation the United States has tortured for well over half a century, all the while pushing the world ever closer to a tragic conflagration. For obvious reasons, now that Donald Trump’s own military emissary, Secretary for War Gen. James Mattis, has flown to South Korea to issue the usual carefully choreographed “assurances of support” by the US against some manufactured threat, we find LaForge’s essay all the more compelling. Hence this repost.

It bears repeating: None of this revolting cowardice and ugliness will stop until the American people see through this carefully maintained claptrap and dismantle the vicious empire behind it, to the last toxic brick. One can only hope that if that great day ever comes, those who have plotted and committed so many crimes against humanity, and nature itself, will be arraigned before a Nuremberg-type tribunal and dealt swift justice. I should think that, for the sake of fairness and comprehensiveness, that judgment will also should include their virtual army of media flacks and accomplices.

Meanwhile, as long as we have a supremacist capitalism at the helm of America’s ship of state we’ll have a sociopathic foreign policy.

—P. Greanville