US aggression is nothing new!

Some conspiracy theorists are fond of the idea that US aggression against the rest of the world was the product of a so-called "Secret Government" that came into being after the Second World War. Some of these people are simply naive and misinformed. The rest, neither naive nor misinformed, are in fact highly worldly and knowledgeable. They know very well that (a) the criminal atrocities of the United States began long before the last world war, and that (b) the scale of those crimes has been several orders of magnitude larger than the relatively minor crimes that these individuals choose to enumerate.

So, why do they do it? Why do they try to minimize the spatial and temporal dimensions of American criminality? The answer should be obvious: (a) as long as their audience has the impression that the crimes began at a relatively recent period, it can easily be kept under the illusion that the United States was “good” prior to that time, and that the recent deviation can be corrected within the system; and (b) as long as people do not know the actual scale of the crimes and their systemic nature, they can be kept under the illusion that the crimes were the work of a few “bad apples.” To cite a recent news item, the revelation about the murder of some hundreds of Korean refugees by American soldiers during the Korean War serves to reinforce the false impression that this was somehow an aberration peculiar to a particular situation in a particular war. It was not. Even in that war, it was not peculiar to that situation. America’s wanton bombardment of Korea killed hundreds of thousands of Koreans who had nothing to do with the war. And the criminality began long, long, before the Korean War…

Simon Bolivar, the liberator of several South American countries, was one of the early targets of American aggression. Nearly two hundreds years ago, he had to detain two US frigates who were carrying a shipment of arms to the Spanish! Yes, the US was trying to keep South America subject to Spanish colonialism! Bolivar complains: “What brothers are these that fail to recognize our independence even after Europe has done so?” At about the same time, he wrote in a letter that “The United States of North America seems destined by providence to plague [Latin] America with misery in the name of liberty.” Nearly two hundreds years have passed, yet those words could have been written yesterday!