INTRODUCTION

The Spanish Menace . . . The Red Menace . . . The Axis of Evil: Convenient Menaces to Justify War

In 1898, a majority of American citizens were convinced that Spaniards were inherently evil. In possibly the first actual instance of “fake news,” yellow journalism utilized sensationalism, opinionated exaggeration, and eye-catching headlines to sell millions of newspapers and paint Spain as an international menace. Following the loss of 260 US servicemen killed in an explosion on the USS Maine, which sank while docked in the Havana, Cuba harbor, President McKinley and Congress declared war on the European nation. Within a matter of weeks, the United States acquired Cuba, Guam, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and the Philippines, where almost 250,000 Filipinos perished while fighting the American occupation for three years.

Just one year after the end of the Filipino War, Chauncey Depew, general counsel of the Vanderbilt Railroad, president of the New York Central Railroad, and a United States Senator, stated at the 1904 Republican National Convention:

The American people now produce $2 billion worth more than they can consume and we have met the emergency, and by the providence of God, by the statesmanship of William McKinley, and by the valor of Roosevelt and his associates, we have our market in Cuba . . . in Puerto Rico, in Hawaii . . . in the Philippines, and we stand in the presence of 800 million people, with the Pacific as an American lake, and the American artisans producing better and cheaper goods than any country in the world. . . . Let production go on . . . let the factories do their best, let labor be employed at the highest wages, because the world is ours.¹

Two hundred sixty American sailors had perished just six years prior, a quarter-million Filipinos had died defending their homeland, but the US government had markets for its $2 billion surplus exports, and thanks to God, President McKinley, and Roosevelt and his associates, the world was ours.

Many Americans have lived and died under the threat of the Communist menace. The Korean and Vietnamese Wars, and the ensuing Cambodian and Laotian conflicts killed around 100,000 Americans, injured and maimed hundreds of thousands of its soldiers, and killed and maimed millions of local militia and inhabitants. The toll on America’s national debt was staggering, and, in the case of Vietnam, America’s social and moral consciousness was ripped apart. All for what—this communist menace? The Vietnam War ended in 1975, yet a mere seventeen years later in 1992, the United States government and Hanoi began trading with one another, currently exporting and importing billions of dollars of merchandise each year.

And those feared Russian and Chinese commie dogs? According to the 2017 Hurun Global Rich List, China now has more billionaires than any country in the world with 609, followed by the US with 552, while Russia boasts 68!² New York has a professional basketball team—the Brooklyn Nets—owned by one of those Russian billionaires until owner Mikhail Prokhorov sold it in late 2019 for $3.5 billion to Taiwanese billionaire Joe Tsai. The Berlin Wall fell in 1989, and in 2009, a “Communist” purchased a US sports franchise (the seventh most valuable NBA team) and its home—the Barclay Center in downtown Brooklyn, valued at $1.8 billion in December 2017.³ Just a little over twenty years prior, Americans were programmed to fear a Soviet Union nuclear attack, but now those same people run an NBA team. That Commie menace has since been replaced by the terrorist menace, which has justified more wars, this time in Afghanistan and Iraq, and additional incursions into other Middle Eastern and African nations.

Most Americans remember President George W. Bush’s axis of evil. The United States had just come out of one of the most profitable and peaceful decades in its history. On September 12, 2001, nothing in the world had changed but for a horrific act committed the day before by a maniacal terrorist group that desperately needed to be stopped from ever performing such a heinous and treacherous deed ever again, anywhere on the face of the Earth. Yet suddenly, the president of the United States, the so-called leader of the free world, was calling for a war against an “axis of evil”—Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. Forget containing the Red Menace; now the United States and its allies were going to fight evil.

What’s wrong here? Doesn’t it seem that every major event in the last half century has been distorted, most often to justify the deployment of American troops? Believe it or not, the United States has been at war for roughly 40 of the last 120 years, almost always accompanied by an imaginary menace. America’s men and women have been sent into battle an average of once every three years since 1898, and the amount of wealth and strategic power gained from these wars is staggering. When you think about it, though, this makes a whole lot of sense, all boiling down to control—economic control. If America doesn’t control an industry or a strategic area or a natural resource (like, maybe, oil), then someone else will. Russia? China? A friendly ally?

Although the 1800s were certainly a preamble, real American economic history effectively skyrocketed in the early 1900s. The 1913 passing of the Sixteenth Amendment allowed the IRS to begin collecting a federal income tax. The wealthiest Americans—among them the so-called robber barons of the nineteenth century—in apparent collusion with the US Congress, arranged for charitable contributions to be deducted from gross incomes. This allowed vastly wealthy individuals to place a substantial portion of their fortunes in IRS-untouchable nonprofit foundations exempt from 7 percent taxation. Two of the most notable are the Carnegie Foundation (chartered in 1906) and the Rockefeller Foundation (1913). These foundations not only provided tax shelters for fortunes but created think tanks that would form policy and tactics for even further gains in wealth and influence (as you’ll learn in the next chapter).

It should be noted here that Congress’s passing of the Tax Reform Bill in 2017, beginning with 2018 taxes, lists the charitable deduction as one of the few remaining deductions still available for taxpayers to itemize. It is no surprise that not only did Congress retain this all-important tax deduction for the ultra-wealthy to protect a good portion of their income as tax-free, but also that they knew to do it. Ironically, since fewer middle and lower-class Americans will most likely not itemize beginning in 2018 due to the eradication of most of their previous deductions and the corresponding increase of their standard deductions, many taxpayers possibly will discontinue contributing to worthwhile nonprofit organizations.

Although the 1898 Spanish-American War was a global affair, with the United States assimilating additional territory spanning two oceans, the people of the United States generally had only one concern—the freedom of the people of Cuba. Isolationist by nature, as our forefathers desired, the average American citizen simply wanted to stay out of the affairs of other countries. Having formed their wealthy and powerful trusts in the early 1900s to avoid their tax burden, the American economic elite presumably had another agenda. And as will be seen, two of those agendas were the control of the American education system and the US State Department.