American Imperialism

I threw up figurative hands reading Joshua Sooter's THE BEST CLASSROOM IS THE STRUGGLE:

When I ask students to define what an empire is, they typically picture Rome or the British Empire, not the United States. Imperialism, expansion, and colonialism have been integral to every period of America’s existence, including the present. Much of my work as a historian and an educator focuses on conveying and exploring this fact. Every year, however, I witness students struggling to internalize it.

Used to be I had this idea:  that what I saw as reality being not shared by people whom I knew meant I was out of touch with reality. Except time and events often enough proved me right. Not that this profited me any. Alienation and frustration fed my self-destructive ideas. 

Now, I think differently. Americans are undereducated idiots.

I read Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee on my own during high school. Yet modern American college students cannot see how alike we are with King Leopold's Congo?

Some deny it completely or make comforting historical comparisons. “At least we aren’t like the Nazis or the Belgians in the Congo,” a student told me during class. Generally, the responses—and this is particularly true of white American students—are powerfully emotive. Their cultural memory tends to place them on the side of empire’s agents. The idea is threatening to their very egos, their identities, and their ways of relating to the world....

About the same time as I read Dee Brown, I read John Toland's Adolf Hitler. Toland pointed out how the Nazis drew upon American genocide and American eugenics for the Holocaust.

Jimmy Carter pointed out our wrongs towards Central America. The Clash recorded Sandanista!. I read on my own William James' essay protesting the imperialism post-1898. All of that happened while I was in high school and starting college.

Before that I saw the Vietnam War on tv.

The writer's conclusion may answer my own question:

It turns out, then, that I had been pushing in the wrong direction. It is through collective, direct action—led by those who have been most harmed by American empire—that the country’s past can be raised to the surface and confronted. Studying and reading books that provide the language and analytical frameworks necessary to recognize and describe America’s empire has merit, and I would like to think that the hard work of teachers and scholars helped to make the 2020 protests possible. However, although I still plan to teach and write, I’m going to remember that the streets are the best classroom.

And if we let conservatives dictate the teaching - the whitewashing - of American history, matters will only get worse. See, I think there exists along with the malignity of our empire an opposing thought of repairing the harm done, even a duty to follow our better angels. Hiding the horrors of American history will obscure the duty to clean up our messes. We might have better relations with Iran if we did not hide the justice of their grievances  with our government 

sch 6/13/22