“. . . we are Black peoples in the wake with no state or nation to protect us, with no citizenship bound to be respected . . .”
—Christina Sharpe1
“What we recall has as much to do with the terrible things we hope to avoid as with the good life for which we yearn. But when does one decide to stop looking to the past and instead conceive of a new order? When is it time to dream of another country or to embrace other strangers as allies or to make an opening, an overture, where there is none?”
—Saidiya Hartman2
“Whenever we try to envision a world without war, without violence, without prisons, without capitalism, we are engaging in speculative fiction. All organizing is science fiction. Organizers and activists dedicate their lives to creating and envisioning another world, or many other worlds . . .”
—Walidah Imarisha3
In an article titled, “Why Do We Keep Thanking the Troops?” former army ranger Rory Fanning raises questions about a tradition celebrated everywhere from sporting events and beer commercials to church sanctuaries and airport terminals. “Since 9/11,” Fanning writes, “thank yous have been aimed at veterans with the regularity of the machine gun fire that may still haunt their dreams.” As one of the many U.S. soldiers around the world who has filed for conscientious objector status, Fanning has heard harsh criticisms of American foreign policy from numerous fellow veterans. “They often grasp the way in which the militarized acts of imperial America are helping to create the very enemies they are then being told to kill,” he says. As for the common tendency to label members of the armed service “heroes,” Fanning says that the term makes many veterans feel uneasy, which is why they often reject it. And not just out of false modesty. “Most veterans who have seen combat,” he explains, or “watched babies get torn apart, or their comrades die in their arms, or the most powerful army on Earth spend trillions of dollars fighting some of the poorest people in the world for 13 years feel anything but heroic.”4
This book has explored the narratives of American heroism, exceptionalism, and innocence and how they have influenced the way we think about the past, present, and future of U.S. empire. These interrelated ideologies have been wielded by the ruling class in a way that clouds historical memory and diffuses resistance to oppression and exploitation. In other words, ideologies of exceptionalism and innocence shift communities away from practices of solidarity, self-determination, and revolution and instead steer them toward the politics of inclusion, humanitarian intervention, and multicultural citizenship. The belief that the U.S. and its citizens are superior and serve as a force for good in the world has been promoted by the ruling class to subdue radical political thought and action. One of the biggest promoters of U.S. superiority and exceptionalism is the U.S. military.
The U.S. military is the armed body of the American state that enforces exceptionalism and innocence by way of ideological and material violence. Perhaps at no other moment has it become more important for progressive and radical scholars, activists, and organizers to come together and oppose the endless wars waged by the U.S. military. We believe this book equips a new generation of progressives and radicals to do just that. As of this writing, it not a stretch to conclude that the U.S. military is at war with nearly the entire world. At least 800 U.S. military bases are scattered across the globe and, with a budget of nearly a trillion dollars per year, there is no shortage of money to maintain its deadly arsenal of troops and weapons around the world. Continued U.S. military presence in the Korean peninsula, Syria, Ukraine, and the Baltic region threatens the existence of humanity with the potential of nuclear war.
The threat of such a war is heightened by the fact that the American military doesn’t wage war randomly. Every drone strike, every invasion, and every occupation has a reason behind it. The U.S. military unleashes terror in all corners of the planet for precious resources that are required to keep the U.S.-led system of global capitalism profitable. Nations around the world must be forced to acquiesce to American economic interests, which is why the U.S. military often has as its goal the overthrow or containment of governments unwilling to allow their nations to be plundered and forced into subservience. The U.S. military has labeled Russia and China the greatest threat to “national security” at the present moment. Many of its war efforts are aimed at ensuring that these two rising powers are under the constant threat of annihilation.
The imminent threat of a nuclear global confrontation has found expression in the U.S. “pivot” to Asia as a means to “contain” China. Other flashpoints for nuclear showdown include the American use of NATO to provoke Russia and the potential clash of Russian and U.S. forces in Syria. Still, the American anti-war movement remains small and inconsequential. Actor Morgan Freeman can line up behind U.S. intelligence leaders such as James Clapper and declare “we are at war” with Russia and few in the U.S. express outrage.5 The Trump Administration can bomb Syria like it did in April of 2017 and 2018 and the silence of the American public continues to deafen.
American exceptionalism and American innocence have been largely to blame for the widespread silence that exists in the U.S. around questions of war and peace. This book has attempted to place such silence in the context of the following questions: Who does the U.S. military serve? Does it keep us safe and protect our “national interest”? Does it “give us our freedoms”? Whose freedoms are these? Does it really fight for our rights? Who does the U.S. military protect? How we answer these questions will determine whether the U.S. remains on its current course of global destruction or is stopped by a new anti-war movement that joins the world in condemning American military aggression.
But first we need to define we. In a class society, the ideas of the dominant class represent the dominant ideas of society as a whole. Class society in the U.S. is also a racist society which possesses the most formidable capitalist empire in human history. The American nation-state enforces complex relations of exploitation and violence between workers and bosses, Black Americans and white Americans, and oppressor and oppressed nations, to name a few. The American capitalist class, simply by virtue of being a large chunk of the dominant class, has already answered our questions posed above. Dominant class ideologies such as American exceptionalism and American innocence have developed a solid base of support in the U.S. for the military and its wars, which is why a resurgent anti-war movement cannot develop unless these ideologies become a central focus of critique.
If we are not answering questions about U.S. military domination from the perspective of the American capitalist class, then we are answering them from the perspective of those victimized by that class. We choose to answer them from the perspective of the oppressed. Our opposition to American exceptionalism and American innocence is shaped by an intentional decision to take a stand against U.S. militarism. This isn’t the norm in the U.S., where, as Trevor McCrisken writes, “it appears automatic for American public officials to conceive their policies in terms that represent some notion of the exceptional nature of the US. They do so not simply because it will be politically advantageous but because those terms form a natural part of the language they use to understand the world around them.”6 The ideologies of American exceptionalism and American innocence certainly reflect the way the dominant class understands the world around them. These ideologies purposely drown out the perspective and lived experience of the oppressed through the many mouthpieces of the ruling class: the American corporate media, the two-party political system, and the monopolies, banks, and war industries that control the state.
Consciousness of who and what is behind the dominant narratives of American exceptionalism and American innocence is a prerequisite for the development of an alternative narrative that can be popularized widely. Put simply, if state violence is at the center of one’s experience, then it is more likely that state violence will be at the center of one’s analysis. Likewise, if state violence is not at the center of one’s experience, then it is highly unlikely that state violence will be at the center of one’s analysis. As this book has tried to show, state violence is fundamental to the creation, spread, and survival of American exceptionalist logics. To be blinded by narratives of American exceptionalism and innocence is to be blind to the everyday violence perpetrated by the structures, institutions, and ideas of “America.” This is why victims of U.S. state violence are uniquely positioned to critique American exceptionalism and American innocence. Over the course of history, many have refused to see such violence as a mere aberration, a deviation from who “we really are” as a nation. They have rejected any claim to benevolence—that our government, its leaders, or even some “national creed” will protect us. And they’ve always remained skeptical whenever legislation is passed and wars are waged under the auspices of so-called “good intentions.”
Perhaps no institution embodies American exceptionalism and American innocence more than the U.S. military. According to these mythologies, there is no question about who the military serves: The U.S. military serves the interests of the American people and, even further, the good of humanity. The fact that military service is called “service” at all is a case in point. Enthusiasts of the U.S. military often portray the most heavily armed body of the state appear as a charitable organization. Maximilian Forte discusses this effective propaganda tool in his study of the Department of Defense’s Flickr photostream. Although they are “tenuously emptied of political overtones,” he writes, “the photographs produce a political effect, for political purposes—they do not tell the horror stories of war, of bloodshed and lives lost, of destruction and grief, but rather portray something like a birthday party. Indeed, gift giving is a central feature of most of the photographs featuring US military personnel and citizens of other nations.”7 The images represent merely one aspect of a carefully crafted public relations campaign outlined by the U.S. military in documents such as the U.S. National Strategy for Public Diplomacy and Strategic Communication, published in 2006. Mass distributed photos of U.S. military personnel playing with children in nations like Cambodia, Haiti, and the Philippines transform the military from the most murderous entity on the planet to an organization that innocently comes to the aid of people all over the world, bearing the gifts of “freedom” and “democracy.” What most people around the world experience as a reign of terror is viewed as a birthday party by America and its allies.
The U.S. military has come under increasing pressure to maintain the illusion that it is in fact a force for good in the world. One will never catch the U.S. military discussing the one million-plus Iraqis murdered by the U.S. military over the course of the invasion that began there in 2003. U.S. military leaders will also never be caught publicly celebrating the Iraqi children who continue to be born with deformities and deadly cancers caused by the constant use of U.S. weapons stocked with toxic depleted uranium.8 To do so would be to challenge the dominant narrative that the U.S. military keeps us safe, that it rescues poor women and children from evil tyrants, and that it is in the business of bringing peace, not wreaking havoc. The reality of American intervention abroad, however, disrupts the dominant narrative that the U.S. military keeps “us”, or anyone, safe by protecting “our freedoms.”
That the military protects “freedoms” and keeps us “safe” is laughable from the perspective of those who have always been on the receiving end of U.S. state violence. This includes Black Americans, Native Americans, and “illegal” immigrants right here inside of the U.S. The U.S. military is a direct product of the colonial origins of the state. Enslavement and genocide of Black and Indigenous people formed the core of the military and the nation at large. The U.S. military has since globalized its colonialist and imperialist system. U.S. military expansion has also ensured the militarization of American society as well. The U.S. military transfers hundreds of millions of dollars worth of weaponry to local police departments each year through the 1033 program. Local police departments stay true to their roots as former slave patrols by murdering Black Americans at an alarming rate. A Department of Justice study in 2015 found that between 2007 and 2015, Philadelphia police shot at suspects 390 times, killing 65 of them. Of the 65 killed, 55 were unarmed and 80 percent were Black.9 This is just a snapshot of the very real military-style occupation of majority Black cities by local police departments.
Much has been made about the racial disparities produced by the mass incarceration of Blacks in America. Police departments act as the armed body of the state in much of the same way as the U.S. military does, so it should not come as any surprise that the two institutions share a special relationship. Local police departments conduct a daily reign of terror in Black cities in the U.S. to fill up body bags and prison cells in a similar manner that the U.S. military fills up body bags and imprisons entire nations under its de facto rule in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. American exceptionalism claims that the police and the U.S. military alike “protect and serve” Americans to mask the terror they inflict on humanity. American innocence claims that the military and the police provide freedom for all rather than strip a large section of the population of its freedom to live and determine its own destiny. The commonalities between the military and police as institutions of mass death become erased and replaced by the perception that they represent the pinnacle of an exceptional nation’s sacrifice for the betterment of humanity. The ideology of innocence also frames incidents like the Mai Lai massacre as the U.S. military going “off script,” when it fact it is no deviation at all from the script of U.S militarism. Similarly, ideologies of innocence also frame policing as “police brutality.” This renders “brutality” as antithetical to real police work when in fact “brutality” is at the very core of the job description.10
If the U.S. ensures mass death, incarceration, and terror for oppressed people within its own (colonial) borders, then the U.S. military cannot possibly provide freedom for nations abroad. As Lisa Lowe notes, the U.S. has been stealing the freedoms of oppressed people throughout its history, “from the destruction and dispossession of Indigenous peoples to the enslavement of Africans and the unfinished work of emancipation, from the stolen labors of indentured and immigrant workers to the losses of life as the US waged wars in Latin America, East, Northeast, and Southeast Asia, and now Central Asia and the Middle East.”11 Again, the point isn’t that many Americans are unaware of these conditions and that we therefore need to teach people what really happened, and how history informs the present. While certainly necessary, this focus on “teaching better history” often ignores a close examination of the ideologies that inform the way we remember, excuse, or justify U.S. traditions such as enslavement, dispossession, and empire. Following Lowe, it is equally important, if not more so, to examine how these “conditions have been more often elided by an official history of American exceptionalism, the promise of freedom through citizenship, and progress through pluralism and expansion.”12
American exceptionalism promises freedom, citizenship, and progress to render the U.S. military innocent of wrongdoing and strip it from any responsibility for its actions. U.S. forces deployed abroad are therefore granted impunity in the destruction it has leveled upon nations such as Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and Syria. U.S. military interventions have led to a massive wave of migration from the Middle East and North Africa. Catastrophe-induced mass migration abroad is a product of the same relations that compel Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers to deport so-called “illegal” migrants from the U.S. The destruction caused by U.S. imperialism leaves millions uprooted and consigned to an early death, whether it is Indigenous people in the U.S. being murdered by police at a rate higher than Black Americans or in Syria where the U.S. military’s arsenal has destroyed homes, hospitals, and schools.
The U.S. military and its supporters often avoid accountability by complaining about so-called dictators in places like Syria who “kill their own people.” Usually these claims cannot be verified and even if they possess a shred of truth, they wouldn’t make the actions of the U.S. military any less illegal under international law. Legal issues aside, it is puzzling how such an accusation can be made with a straight face, given how easy it is to find evidence of the U.S. killing “its own people.” The difference between U.S. allegations of “dictators” killing “their own people” and its own actions is that when the U.S. kills, such as the hundreds of migrants who are killed crossing the U.S. Mexico border each year, it doesn’t consider the victims to be people at all. The U.S. also does not consider the hundreds of Black Americans killed by police each year to be people either. America has never been “exceptional,” “innocent,” or a “force for good” for these populations. Yet most Americans remain blind to the state-inflicted violence perpetrated on their neighbors every day. Given the moral outrage of the American military at the Syrian or Iranian governments for “killing their own people,” it makes one wonder why the same outrage isn’t leveled at its own government.
Of course, to do so would threaten any claim to exceptionalism or innocence. Comparing U.S. crimes to those purportedly committed by Syria or Iran—or even admitting that the U.S. commits crimes!—is bad for PR. It is not as if there aren’t other countries that kill its own citizens, like Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. Yet we would hardly ever find the U.S. military threatening to bomb their capital cities. It’s almost as if the U.S. military is pointing its fingers at Syria and Iran, not because of some special, unforgivable crime they have committed, but because they happen to be two of the countries whose destruction the U.S. ruling class has deemed critical to the fulfillment of its economic and strategic interests in the region.
That Americans express outrage when their government accuses Syria, for example, of using chemical weapons to kill people is unsurprising. After all, the corporate media does not hesitate to repeatedly remind us that chemical weapons induce a painful and excruciating form of death. There is no objection to this (other than the fact that chemical weapons are highly inefficient as “mass killers” as compared to conventional weapons). What the corporate media doesn’t report, however, is how unverified chemical weapons attacks pale in comparison to the excruciating and painful death that capitalism creates by way of the U.S. state. The corporate media accuses other countries of atrocities but ignores the millions of casualties that capitalism has produced within America’s own borders. Perhaps it is because a death by chemical weapons is easier to see; it’s easy for a CNN photojournalist to snap a picture of writhing children to invoke popular sympathy. It’s much harder for a camera to capture the devastating violence wreaked slowly, painfully, and lethally by racial capitalism. Saidiya Hartman describes these often unseen “forms of structural violence” as ones that “continue to make large sectors of the population vulnerable to premature death, not as the result of frontal assault, or war, or anarchic violence but as the slow and enduring violence that allows people to die every day from poverty, neglect, incarceration, and extreme forms of exploitation and social marginality.” To many Americans, “this might appear to be violence without an agent or fail to register as violence at all,” Hartman concludes, “but it produces a regular death toll.”13
One could only imagine what the American response would be to China, Iran, or even its ally Germany if one of them decided to intervene militarily in the U.S. because it was “killing its own people” and committing human rights abuses. This event sounds absurd on many fronts. For one, these countries have no interest in provoking a nuclear power like the U.S. with a proven record of bellicosity nor do they possess the capability of carrying out a first strike on U.S. borders. But we have to ask ourselves, why does the U.S. military have free reign to dictate how other nations conduct themselves, while other countries aren’t allowed to critique the U.S. for the very same actions? And if the U.S. really cared about protecting our “freedom,” why is nothing done to alleviate the declining living standards of ordinary Americans? The right to wage war seems to be the exclusive right of the U.S. It is easy for Americans to feel exceptional when the millions of people who die from U.S. military interventions around the world are deemed “collateral damage.” It is also easier to cheer on the military as it punishes foreign leaders for (allegedly) killing their own citizens when Americans are completely disconnected from the millions of people within their own borders who succumb daily to premature death. In short, the American military’s so-called mandate to “protect freedom” doesn’t apply to the millions of Americans who suffer from the laws of capitalism.
The U.S. military murders millions in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya but pays little attention to the tens of thousands of people who die each year in the U.S. from a lack of health insurance.14 The U.S. military receives $700 billion a year to intervene in “terrorist” states and overthrow “dictators” accused of human rights atrocities but fails to intervene on behalf of the 50 percent of the American population categorized as “near poor.” The U.S. military has facilitated dozens of coups abroad in the name of “democracy” but appears disinterested in the fact that many observers have concluded that the U.S. operates more like an oligarchy than a democracy.15 No U.S. troops have been sent to assist the residents of Flint, Michigan, who were found to be drinking poisoned drinking water in 2014. Nor have they been deployed to Lowndes County, Alabama, where a UN Special Rapporteur study in 2017 found that one in three people were infected with hookworm, a condition associated with the underdevelopment of so-called “Third World” countries.16
It is no wonder that most Americans have a distorted understanding of violence. U.S. capitalism forces millions of people, many of them white, to commit suicide from a combination of addiction, mental illness, and unemployment.17 This concern is considered outside the scope of the U.S. military’s job description. Still, the U.S. military is seen as the arbiter of freedom even when it collaborates with local police departments to brutalize Black Americans, sends American soldiers to fight wars abroad then brings them home to a life of homelessness, and collaborates with U.S. intelligence in the deployment of drones to spy on American citizens.18 Ideologies of American exceptionalism and American innocence have inoculated the U.S. population from making the connection between the death imposed by modern day U.S. capitalism at home and the misery the U.S. military reigns on nations abroad.
The U.S. military does not protect “our freedoms.” It might protect the freedom of some but definitely not the freedom of most. The U.S. military protects the freedoms of those who benefit from white supremacy and U.S. imperialism. A secondary beneficiary of these related systems are individuals classified as white, those who receive the nominal privilege of not being consigned to a life of imminent death just by way of their racial identity. However, many ordinary white Americans feel “war fatigue” amid a decline in living standards. The primary beneficiaries of war, then, are the rich, the owners of property, and most importantly, the owners of corporations and banks. Ideologies of American exceptionalism and American innocence have always been white supremacist ideologies at their very core, utilized in the service of the rich. And white supremacy’s primary function is to universalize ruling class interests under the banner of whiteness to weaken the potential of a unified, class-based resistance to oppression and exploitation.
American exceptionalism and American innocence universalize the powerful interests behind the military. We are tricked into believing that the “prosperity” and “freedom” that the U.S. military protects around the world applies to poor people and oppressed people. The opposite is true. Wars boost the stock market numbers and profits for Raytheon and other military contractors but not the incomes or job prospects of most Americans. Wars boost the productivity of oil corporations and help leverage lending opportunities for Wall Street banks but do not liberate American students from trillions in student loan debt. The U.S. military offers nothing but poverty, misery, and violence for the majority of the world’s population. It relies on the incessant marketing of its exceptional and innocent nature and the dehumanization of its targeted enemies to maintain legitimacy.
The relationship between the glorification of the U.S. military and the dehumanization of nations and peoples targeted by the U.S. military reinforces the function of white supremacy. This is especially true when it comes to the way troops are talked about in the United States. American troops are constantly thanked for their “service” while the victims of war are stripped of their humanity. Thanking U.S. troops deifies them and legitimizes the wars they fight on behalf of the ruling class. Wars are effectively sanitized as heroic operations that defend the “freedom” and “democracy” of all. Soldiers represent such heroism in the flesh and are celebrated for supposedly protecting the interests of Americans from the inferior nations and peoples seeking to harm them. As explained throughout the book, inferiority has been a mark placed on communists, nationalists, and most recently “terrorists” to justify the plunder, power, and profit that the ruling class derives from U.S. military expansionism. U.S. troops represent “whiteness” in the form of heroism as opposed to the “threat” posed by darker nations and peoples.
No other day reflects the racialization of U.S. soldiers than Veterans Day. Every year in November, a good number of Americans are given the day off from work to reflect on the heroic sacrifices of war veterans. The president or vice president makes a speech and the corporate media runs endless programming telling tall tales of bravery in the U.S. military. In 2014, the Obama Administration amplified the celebration with the help of a host of corporate partners. Starbucks, Chase bank, and HBO organized the “Concert for Valor” on the National Mall in Washington D.C. The concert featured hosts such as Oprah Winfrey and popular musicians like Bruce Springsteen.
Former Army Ranger Rory Fanning had some very important questions to ask before the concert took place. Among them were:
Will the “Concert for Valor” mention the trillions of dollars rung up terrorizing Muslim countries for oil, the ratcheting up of the police and surveillance state in this country since 9/11, the hundreds of thousands of lives lost thanks to the wars of George W. Bush and Barack Obama? Is anyone going to dedicate a song to Chelsea Manning, or John Kiriakou, or Edward Snowden—two of them languishing in prison and one in exile—for their service to the American people? Will the Concert for Valor raise anyone’s awareness when it comes to the fact that, to this day, veterans lack proper medical attention, particularly for mental health issues, or that there is a veteran suicide every 80 minutes in this country? Let’s hope they find time in between drum solos, but myself, I’m not counting on it.19
Fanning’s questions went unanswered during the concert. Such a gaudy celebration of Veterans Day teaches Americans to forget the millions of people around the world who have suffered at the hands of the U.S. military by privileging the deaths of U.S. troops. Because U.S. troops are held up to almost a divine status, it is automatically assumed that the wars they fight are “good” wars, “just” wars, and wars that benefit Americans as a whole rather than the very rich. As another Iraq War Veteran, Vincent Emanuele, puts it, Veterans Day is “one of the most hollow and absurd holidays in American society. Unless you have stock in Lockheed Martin or Goldman Sachs, there’s really no reason to thank me for my ‘service.’ We destroyed Iraq and killed innocent people. We mutilated dead bodies and tortured prisoners. And we did it all for geopolitical and corporate interests.”20
Testimonies from military veterans like Fanning and Emanuele show that some of the fiercest and most insightful critics of U.S. foreign policy come from those who were asked to fight its wars. It is often those that have seen the military’s destruction firsthand that can best mobilize peace efforts. As Rory Fanning observes, citing the approximately 50,000 war resisters who have joined the military since 2001, “I think the potential for veterans who come back to become positive influences in the fight against exploitation and oppression is really high. Reaching out to veterans to organize and to call out injustices that they see is high. Communicating with veterans is really important.”21 Vincent Emanuele shares a more personal take from his experience in Iraq, one that serves as a powerful condemnation of the U.S. war machine. “More marines from my platoon have killed themselves since returning home than died overseas,” he writes. “But vets get to go home, at least most of them. The Iraqis have to live with the legacy of Uncle Sam’s madness for the rest of their lives.”
However, since ideologies of American exceptionalism and innocence have largely gone unchallenged, many Americans have actually come to enjoy U.S. militarism, even as part of their entertainment consumption. As Henry Giroux explains, the Disney corporation has a long history of working with the U.S. military in projecting favorable images of U.S. political, economic, and military supremacy.22 While Giroux focuses on the Disney corporation’s promotion of films such as The Incredibles in the post-9/11 political climate, it is important to note that even so-called “progressive” Disney films like the box-office hit Black Panther reproduce dangerous glorifications of U.S. militarism. In the film, a CIA agent, played by Martin Freeman, works with the leader of a fictional African country to save it from a deadly “civil war.” A Black American male is painted as the villain while the benevolent CIA agent murders and maims Africans to free them from his tyrannical rule. This film, like many other Disney productions, clearly delineates the U.S. military as heroic and villanizes its target, which in this case was the Black American antagonist, “Killmonger.” This representation completely negates the fact that the CIA has historically played a significant role in sowing chaos in Africa through the repression of revolutionary independence movements from Ghana to South Africa.
Resistance to the American system of monopoly and finance capital, or imperialism for short, is currently at a low point precisely because American exceptionalism and American innocence have glorified the U.S. military as the standard bearer of everything that Americans should hold dear about their fabled nation, regardless of the oppression, exploitation, and terror it has spread throughout the planet. The subjects covered in this book were intentionally chosen to demonstrate the critical role played by American exceptionalism and American innocence in the reproduction of U.S. imperialism. Narratives of exceptionalism and innocence promote the U.S. nation-state as the most exceptional social order to have ever been born. Its imperfections, however stark, are but blemishes that stain an otherwise innocent design. Injustice and oppression are not seen as foundational to the nation’s very structure, but rather unfortunate occurrences for us to ignore or discredit. An effective resistance to U.S. imperial warfare must challenge the ideologies that sustain it.
We have used this book as an opportunity to analyze the ideologies of American exceptionalism and American innocence as they apply to historical memory and contemporary questions of race, class, and empire. We focused on the American nation’s roots in slavery, genocide, and corporate theft to demonstrate the ways in which the dominant narratives of American exceptionalism and innocence have caused many Americans to forget, distort, or excuse the crimes of the nation. Such distortion has led to a white-washed picture of the American nation-state and its imperial system, even when social movements that oppose racism, poverty, and other important issues come to the fore. That many Americans believe that the U.S. is inherently “democratic” and that its military spreads “freedom” around the world holds many social movements back from condemning the system of U.S. imperialism itself. This book held as its main objective the development of a broad critique of American exceptionalism and innocence that can push Americans to imagine a world without U.S. wars and without the exploitative institutions of Wall Street and white supremacy that wage them.
What should this resistance look like? It should ultimately move away from debates about narrow American nationalism or “globalization” and instead focus on the development of international solidarity. The notion of American superiority ultimately isolates Americans from the rest of the world. Past examples of movements that espoused international solidarity in the U.S. and around the world can provide fruitful lessons for the long struggle ahead. In the 1960s and 1970s, groups like the Black Panther Party made connections with the people of Vietnam struggling to free their country from U.S. aggression. Native activists in Hawaii also made common cause with the Vietnamese in the same period. Both Black Panther and Native Hawaiian activists saw their struggles against oppression as linked to the Vietnamese by a common root. That root was U.S. imperialism.23
These movements ultimately had to reject American exceptionalism and American innocence to differentiate themselves from the politics of the U.S. empire. The Black Panther Party saw the murder of Black people by the police as no different than the murder of Vietnamese civilians by the U.S. military. Native Hawaiian activists were similarly politicized by the theft of land at the hands of the U.S. military that was then used to help occupy and bomb Vietnam. As Simeon Man explains, it was
liberalism and war, “paradise” and “genocide”—that radicalized the antiwar and anti-eviction struggles of the early 1970s and transformed them into a broader movement for Hawaiian sovereignty. In 1976, as Native activists occupied the island of Kaho’olawe to protest its sustained use for military bombing, they reworked the earlier call at Kalama Valley of preserving land for “local” people into a more urgent demand to protect Native land from military use and destruction. These assertions of Native claims to land and sovereignty based on Indigenous birthright continued to animate the Hawaiian Movement into the 1980s, inspiring other transpacific alliances “with American Indian activists on the mainland, antinuclear independence struggles throughout the South Pacific, and international networks in Asia and at the United Nations.” Indeed, if the saga of Hawai’i’s Vietnam War reveals the processes by which the US state mobilized the legacies of race and empire in the Pacific to wage war in Vietnam in the name of “liberation,” then the movements it spawned would strive not only to make visible the erasures and disavowals that made the US Empire possible but to realize a different kind of liberation altogether.24
Resistance efforts against U.S. warfare must therefore reject the U.S. military’s definition of liberation in place of its own. The Black Panther Party defined liberation as the replacement of U.S. imperialism with a new, socialist system entirely. Connections were made with the American Indian Movement (AIM) and correspondences sent to Vietnam, Mozambique, and other liberation struggles around the world that the Black Panther Party believed were fighting for the same thing. These actions would never have occurred if the Black Panther Party believed that the U.S. was an exceptional nation whose imperfections were mere aberrations that could be reformed away. The rejection of American exceptionalism and American innocence, then, are important first steps for the development of international solidarity with oppressed nations around the world.
This book is intended to be a tool to help rebuild the U.S. anti-war movement currently on life support. Heroic efforts of groups such as the Black Alliance for Peace and Veterans for Peace have kept the spirit of anti-imperialism alive in a period where it seems like American exceptionalism has won the day. These groups have emphasized the importance of solidarity regardless of the political climate. There is no shortage of reasons to support these groups as the U.S. continues to go deeper and deeper into endless war around the world. Numerous social movements have arisen in recent years that point to an increase in popular disillusionment with the status quo. More and more people are becoming dissatisfied with the miserable conditions that U.S. imperialism has produced on the homefront. Due to the centrality of race in the reproduction of U.S. imperialism, this book paid close attention to the connection between U.S. militarism and movements against racism such as Black Lives Matter. It is not often that militarism is connected to these conditions or the movements that have emerged from them.
What we have shown is that social movements cannot be relegated to a single issue if they are to be successful. More importantly, social movements that fail to fight U.S. militarism and empire will fall short in their efforts for social change. Since the 1970s, a number of social movements have attempted to enact change on important issues without a thorough examination of empire and war. The prison abolition movement has demanded alternatives to the mass caging of 2.3 million people, nearly half of whom are Black. This movement rightfully sees the prisons system as an extension of chattel slavery and a product of the political repression and disposability of Black labor. Few prison abolitionists have connected their demand to scale back the mass incarceration dragnet in the U.S. to the need to scale back U.S. military adventurism abroad as well. Yet the U.S. military and the U.S. prison system are byproducts of a broader war against oppressed people, a war that serves the interests of the same social order from which they arose. Prisons could very well be considered domestic sites of torture and prison guards domestic soldiers at times armed with the same weapons possessed by the U.S. military. 25
The same could be said about the environmental justice movement. U.S. imperialism has indeed run the world’s ecology into a state of catastrophe. Why is it that one of the biggest polluters of the world, the U.S. military, is rarely condemned by environmental justice advocates? Where is the moral outrage for its failure to acknowledge “what would appear to be obvious: that saturating the environment with toxic materials will have repercussions on both environmental and human health, including the health of the United States”?26 The fights for $15 an hour and a union, while worthy causes, also doesn’t target the U.S. military for its role in forcing other countries to enact free-market policies that emphasize low wages. Nor does the movement to preserve public education question the fact that the U.S. military budget receives over 50 percent of all discretionary federal spending and eclipses the education budget nearly ten times over. And rarely does the movement to preserve public education oppose the targeting of poverty stricken schools for military recruitment;27 or how, as scholars like Connie Wun have shown, today’s “school discipline policies help to create militarized ‘prison-like’ conditions for students.”28
To question the U.S. military’s inherent virtuosity is seen by the ruling elites as not only a threat to the legitimacy of war, but also to the legitimacy of the American system of profit and power that requires war. Narratives of American exceptionalism and American innocence have limited the efforts of progressive and radical forces in this country by diverting their attention away from the trillion dollar military albatross in the U.S. and its many connections to the racist, capitalist, and imperialist ambitions of the U.S. state.
So when it comes to dismantling U.S. militarism, what is to be done? First, progressives and radicals need a program that can unite a broad section of the U.S. population struggling to meet basic needs. As Aziz Rana states, such a program would “oppose American international police power—the presumptive right of intervention—and refuse to treat any community as an instrument in the service of state security ends.” His demands are simple: a global commitment to social democracy as opposed to free-market capitalism, the demilitarization of the U.S. and its allies, and the institution of a “do no harm” principle where U.S. intervention no longer is debated but prohibited. Also included is the demand to transform the security state apparatus through the development of alternative institutions focused on human need rather than war and profit.29
However, a truly radical anti-war movement will have to go even further than this. Social democratic demands for health care, employment, and education must of course be raised to appeal to the material interests of a broad section of the U.S. population. Opposition to racism and the afterlives of slavery must also be part of the agenda due to the critical role that mass incarceration, policing, and surveillance play in American society. But war and militarism should not merely be opposed for the potential benefits that the demilitarization of U.S. society would bring to people living in the United States. Opposition to war and militarism should also be advocated out of solidarity with people all over the world who certainly are owed an immeasurable debt for the destruction of their homelands. Transnational solidarity is essential given that such destruction has its roots in the plight of Native and Black Americans who have also been robbed of their wealth and humanity through slavery, dispossession, and genocide. Of course, this does not require that we equate the oppression caused by slavery on the one hand with the U.S. military on the other. Rather, as Sara Ahmed reminds us, “Solidarity does not assume that our struggles are the same struggles, or that our pain is the same pain, or that our hope is for the same future. Solidarity involves commitment, and work, as well as the recognition that even if we do not have the same feelings, or the same lives, or the same bodies, we do live on common ground.”30
This book is a call to imagine and fight for a new society where the U.S. military is no longer necessary. This new society requires that we dismantle ideologies of American exceptionalism and American innocence. Dismantling these ideologies isn’t necessarily about learning new things or more things, or being taught what really happened in history or what really drives American wars abroad. Rather, it involves a long, painful process of unlearning. The process of unlearning is messy and unsettling. It is unsettling because there is a lot at stake in holding on to these convenient and seductive narratives. Thus, there is a lot at stake in abandoning these narratives as well. To abandon our attachment to American exceptionalism, American innocence, and to “America” itself requires transformative change. It isn’t just that it would require us to relinquish all the political and economic benefits that come from one’s “American-ness.” It isn’t just that we would have to admit to being wrong about how our country was founded or would have to relinquish political power to oppressed peoples and nations at home and abroad. More unsettling is that that it would require a totally different way of thinking, perceiving, and feeling. It would entail a radically different way of being in the world.
What makes the process of unlearning even harder is that the ideologies of American exceptionalism and American innocence are intricately tied to capitalist, imperialist, liberal, settler colonial, and anti-Black imperatives. These imperatives are backed by powerful interests in Wall Street, the Pentagon, and the instutions of the state. Again, it is not just that our minds have been shaped by these accompanying ideologies and their backers. Rather, our material way of “being in the world” has been profoundly shaped by them as well. They have restricted our ability to think “otherwise.” And while it is true that dismantling ideologies of American exceptionalism and American innocence will not lead to a dismantling of injustice altogether, it is also true that our struggles for collective liberation must always reject the “fake news” of a benevolent, freedom-loving United States.
That said, our book is best read as an invitation to consider the new kinds of questions and new kinds of possibilities that might emerge once the ideologies of American exceptionalism and American innocence are debunked and discredited. To imagine a world without these ideologies requires not just an un-learning on our part, but an un-doing as well. Many Americans find it difficult to think and breathe otherwise,31 to imagine a world without an exceptional and innocent America. It’s even harder to imagine a world without an “America” altogether, a world where one’s primary attachments and loyalties are not tied to the nation-state, its borders, and its imperialist practices. Breaking such ties would demand a rupture of the soul, an apostasy of sorts. It would require that we stop worshipping at the altar of American nationalism, that we stop praying God Bless America, and that we stop pursuing a “more perfect union.” It would require us to renounce what Lincoln called the “last best hope of earth.” It would require us to place our hope elsewhere, to be on the lookout for disruptive practices “that may hint at political potentials, gesture to alternative narratives, and enable an openness to multiple futures.”32 In short, renouncing our ties to “America” would force us to rethink whose lives we mourn, who is my neighbor, and what worlds are possible.