“As has been stated by numerous legal scholars, I have the absolute right to PARDON myself . . .” So tweeted President Donald Trump, proclaiming the inherent right to absolve himself of any and all crimes, past, present and future—the quintessential “American.” Trump perfectly embodies the historical personality and character of the nation over which he presides. The land huckster and child of unearned wealth had discovered yet another fact of governance and history, whose truth is self-evident, since it serves his interest: that U.S. presidents are living, breathing exceptions to the rule of law—meaning U.S. law, the only law that counts, except when it doesn’t, as determined by the president. International law is a nonentity, the codified carping and whining of inferior races.
Under Trump’s convenient legal construct, U.S. presidents are eternally innocent, if they choose to proclaim that they are. Half the country—the whitest half, which until relatively recently was the only part that counts—finds nothing outrageous in Trump’s self-exoneration. The great bulk of whites in the U.S. reflexively absolve all previous presidents of any crimes egregious enough to stain the national innocence, because innocence is what these citizens cling to as their personal and collective “American” patrimony and dispensation. They are fiercely jealous of this cleansing (whitening) elixir of innocence. It’s what makes them exceptional and sets them apart from the “un-Americans,” who are easily recognizable by the traits that are assigned to them by white people.
Innocence is central to these Americans’ identity; it’s what makes them believe they are unique in the world. They are the people of good intentions: they don’t commit crimes, they make “mistakes,” for which they instantly forgive themselves, whether anybody else does, or not. And they are constantly under siege by those with bad intentions, and by evil inferiors, the defectives, the damnable people that can’t see how innocent and good “Americans” really are.
Their American creed is a circular insanity that excretes an infinity of lies to justify the most heinous of crimes. Yes, these are “white” crimes, precisely because they are crimes that white people reserve for themselves the right to forgive—or forget, if they ever acknowledge that such things happened. Crimes of colonialism, genocide, mass chattel enslavement of human beings, culminating in the global crime of imperialism, are thus wiped clean, even before they become past. History is rewritten, even as it unfolds, converted to a lie, nicely arranged to fit the master lie mythology.
In 1776, the white settlers of the English colonies on the eastern seaboard divorced themselves from both the British Crown and the reality of their own past and present. From now on, the world would be on notice that the “Americans”—those pale people occupying a slim slice of two connected continents who reserved for themselves the designation “Americans,” brandishing it like a title and deed to the whole hemisphere—were building an “Empire of Liberty” and must be judged by the advertised merit of their of their grand project, whose beneficence was Manifest and inarguable. And they would be the judges of how well the quest was going, and which facts were relevant to that assessment, or qualified as facts, at all. They would write their own history—forward and backward—and revise it as they saw fit, as a catechism for new Americans.
King George, just yesterday their beloved sovereign and protector, now stood in the way of the “liberty” project, the apex of all humanity’s previous endeavors, which required that the newly transformed Americans have free rein to expand their wars against Natives beyond the Allegheny mountains so that “liberty” would have room to grow. (Another visionary would call this lebensraum, the eradication of millions for a higher goal, to serve a superior people.) The right to own and invest in Black chattel slavery, the primary source of wealth for the leading citizens of the lower half of the newly declared nation, must be secure beyond challenge.
The English could not be trusted on either count. King George had not the power, inclination or vision to restrain a Parliament that tolerated talk of creeping abolition, and the King “. . . has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.”
These “rules of warfare” were well known to the “Americans,” since that is how they had secured their beachhead in the “New World,” the launching pad for an “Empire of Liberty” whose dimensions they could barely imagine. But theirs was the civilizing mission, and all resistance was aggression against the greater human good. The British colony to the north, which the empire builders had sought to absorb by force early in their jihad, was framed as the aggressor, compelling “the American union” to create “a barrier against the dangerous extension of the British Province of Canada and add to the Empire of Liberty an extensive and fertile Country,” Thomas Jefferson told his future chief land pirate, George Rogers Clark, while the war of independence still raged.
The Americana myth holds the English as aggressors, although the settlers shot first. The Canadian Brits were scheming evil-doers for having successfully repelled a Yankee invasion the year before the Declaration of Independence. The Native Americans were monstrous impediments to the march towards liberty, refusing to succumb easily to extermination. The Black slaves, numbering one-fifth of the breakaway colonies’ non-Native inhabitants, were insufficiently grateful to be in the unpaid service of the nascent Empire of Liberty. The Blacks sided overwhelmingly with the Crown, which offered actual liberty to those who would take up arms against the rebels. When the British evacuated their beaten forces from Yorktown, on the Chesapeake Bay, including 5,000 Black soldiers and their families, George Washington’s men lined the shore, braying, “Give us back our niggers!”
The settlers fought for the “freedom” to enslave millions; to slaughter every people in their path; to claim and steal a continent they had not even properly mapped.
Orwell was two centuries late. In pursuit of unlimited accumulation, the Founding Ideologues turned the English language on its head, transforming every human value and aspiration into its opposite, all to serve their fevered project of unlimited accumulation.
They are still at it. Contemptuous of the restraints imposed on their imperial ambitions by international law, U.S. rulers superimpose their own pop-up, pseudo-legal doctrine of convenience: the right of strong nations to militarily intervene in the affairs of others for “humanitarian” reasons. It is, of course, a privilege the U.S. reserves for itself. Rights of national sovereignty, the inviolability of borders, and the universal right of all peoples to self-determination—the codified rules of organized human conduct that are the best evidence that something called “civilization” exists—are dismissed as impediments to the Empire of Liberty, now in deep decline.
Civilization can no more live with the 21st century American empire than the Native Americans could coexist with the 18th century white settler state. The ideology of American exceptionalism, as Danny Haiphong and Roberto Sirvent have explicated so masterfully, is the distilled and weaponized expression of white supremacy—a rationale for criminality as a birthright, with no guilt or regrets. Of course Donald Trump believes himself to be innocent. He is doing the work of America, which is the world’s most virtuous project because Americans are the most virtuous people—a “self-evident truth” of the circular kind.
You can bet your Manifest Destiny on it.