Dinesh D'Souza is an idiot.

I'm not sure how many of you have heard about Dinesh D'Souza's new movie, 2016: Obama's America, but it looks like a piece of jingoistic garbage to me.  After hearing that it is setting box office records for documentaries, I decided I had to check out the trailer.  Here's what I found:

"Obama has a dream, a dream from his father: that the sins of colonialism be set right, and America be downsized... America has a dream, from our founding fathers: that together, we must protect liberty, and America must grow, so with it, liberty grows."

Whenever I hear statements like this, about how America is some bellwether of liberty, my first reaction is always confusion.  Dinesh D'Souza is a very successful man; he's been a writer and intellectual for many years, he's a Dartmouth graduate, and currently heads Kings College in New York.  For someone with that storied of an academic career, making such a sensational and ahistorical comment is perplexing.   The way I see it, either D'Souza is ignorant of American imperial history, or he's maliciously misrepresenting the facts in order to elect Romney.  Because I don't like to pin evil motives on people without good evidence, I'm going to opt for the other possibility, that D'Souza is an idiot.

Just off the top of my head, here's a brief history of how when America grows, so with it, liberty grows:

1492: White people "find" America.  Within decades, a once glorious civilization is reduced to less that 10% of its former size.  The extent of disease and famine ravishing the native communities cannot be fully known, but most historians estimate that untold millions of indigenous people lost their lives in a very short period of time.  Using alcohol and unfair bargaining techniques, settlers systematically rob native peoples of their lands.  Contract after contract is signed with the United States, and each is subsequently broken by "the land of the free."  This theft of land comes to a head under Andrew Jackson, the man who I consider to be the most reprehensible president of all time, who made a name for himself killing natives in order to drive them away from valuable farmland in the south.  (Doesn't that sound a lot like "protecting American interests?"  The same rationalizations are around today)  I'm sure you are familiar with the Cherokee nation's Trail of Tears, a grueling march in which many suffered and perish.  And to even think of glorifying General Custer and his "brave" last stand.  Custer provoked violence, and got himself into a stupid situation.  I cannot do the tragic history of American indigenous peoples true justice, but if you are unfamiliar with the extent of our nation's actions, a little research will be sobering.

Remember how glorified the battle of the Alamo was made out to be in school?  Why do you think the Mexican army was attacking the Alamo in the first place?  Because they hate "American exceptionalism?"  Absolutely not.  The lone star republic robbed the Mexican government of hundreds of square miles of land, upon which lived many Mexicans and indigenous peoples.  The Texans basically just declared that a vast swath of land was their right, and then proceded to kill and rob the owners of that land.  So much for America's sacred property rights.

Beyond the actions of a rogue state like Texas (who wants to take responsibility for Texans, anyway?), America has been far from a liberating force in Mexico.  From sacking cities to stealing Arizona, New Mexico, California, and more, America has been the exact opposite of liberators.  Even in the 20th century, American naval vessels were bombarding coastal towns in the Gulf of Mexico to dissuade the Mexican government from impeding American trade.  What harbingers of peace and liberty.

But Manifest Destiny was not enough for America.  After the frontier was closed, and we had taken all the land we could from Mexico, Spain, France, England, and millions of indigenous peoples, we had to turn our sights abroad.  Why do native Hawaiian's resent so many white tourists?  Because they represent the conquest over a once-free people.  We have holdings in Guam, in the Philippines, in the US Virgin islands, in Puerto Rico, in Cuba, in nearly every island group in the Caribbean and South Pacific.  Do you think that we gained those lands because the natives invited us to liberate them?  America was an imperial nation, plain and simple.  Anyone who tells you different either does not know their history, or is purposefully distorting the facts.  There is no gray area.

In WWI, America passed the Alien and Sedition acts, perhaps the least free laws that have ever been on the books.  Speaking out against the war effort, or even just making anti-American proclamations, was enough to get you jailed.  In the case of Saccho and Vanzetti, it got them hung.  The sheer amount of propaganda that was released in order to stir up a desire for war is staggering - it reeks of fascism. As a nation, we declared an official stance of neutrality only to continue selling arms to both sides of the war.  Today I read that America's arms sales have skyrocketed, to over $66 billion per year, by far the highest in the world.  Some things never change, do they?  The most pressing reason we entered the war was that the side we were most heavily invested in, the British especially, were losing.  We needed to hedge our financial bets.  Think of it in terms of a bailout: the British war profits were "too big to fail."

In WWII, America acted astonished when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, but there is insurmountable evidence that the White House had been repeatedly warned of Japanese aggression.  Because of our colonial holdings in the Pacific ocean, Japan was cut off from valuable resources like oil, steel, and rubber, all vital to an industrializing economy.  The Japanese made clear that they were being hemmed in by ABCD, or the Americans, British, Chinese, and Dutch.  They claimed that the colonial powers represented an existential threat to their nation and, after repeated warnings, attacked America.  It was then, and only then, that we entered the war in Europe.  We did nothing when the Alsace-Lorrain was conquered, nor when France was pummeled, nor when Eastern Europe was decimated.  Once again, it was only when American economic interests were threatened that we took action.

After WWII, having secured our place as one of the two largest world powers, we quickly antagonized the other.  The Soviet Union was a terrible regime also, but was it really so much worse than America? Think back on the Cold War, how often did Communists attack Americans?  When were we, unprovoked, threatened with invasion or bombing?  Then consider all of the times we enacted a policy of intervention, citing fears of a "domino effect" or worrying about "regional stability?"  The Cuban missile crisis was provoked by the Bay of Pigs boondoggle, the Korean war was never declared and never ended, Vietnam is a tragedy of epic proportions, and the even more extensive bombing of Laos and other Southeast Asian nations is appalling.  And at home, McCarthyism, Red scares, and xenophobia is the name of the game.  Thousands of artists, playwrights, musicians, academicians, and regular citizens were rounded up on charges of sedition.  So much for free speech, I suppose.

I can't write an article on American imperialism without mentioning NAFTA and our continued rape of everything else in the Western hemisphere.  NAFTA is free trade only by name, and is prejudiced against those who can least afford it.  Low-income people, especially from Mexico, resent this agreement because it has done nothing to improve their prospects.  The profits are all being bled back to wealthy individuals in the United States.  The history of CIA interference in Central and South America is disgusting, and much of it is still classified and unknown.  We have overthrown and opposed many popularly elected leaders in the last 50 or 60 years, and replaced them with brutal dictators and imposed regimes that are more friendly to American economic expansion.  I'm no expert on this part of history, but what I have read is truly horrifying.  We have become the agents of oppression and have opposed the popular will of millions of peoples only to more thickly line our pocket books.

I won't even get into the last 20 years of our history, except for one comment.  I have never understood how pre-emptively striking another nation is morally defensible.  How does the need to protect one nation's interests supercede the sovereignty of the other?  To millions of people, Americans do not represent liberty, equality, or brotherhood, but rather guns, bombs, and civil unrest.  Mission accomplished.

Now, I'd like to repeat: I did no extra research for this blog post, but simply wrote down what I could remember about America's bloody past in this world.  If you want to know where I am drawing most heavily from, check out Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States of America," Kenneth Davis's "Don't Know Much About History," and James Loewen's "Lies My Teacher Told Me."  They lay out, in much more extensive detail, exactly how despicable our nation's past has been.

So, Mr D'Souza, as America has grown, has liberty grown?