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American Exceptionalism and American Innocence

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between 1513 and 1900, an Indigenous population of fifteen million people was reduced to 250,000 in what now belongs to the United States and Canada. — location: 682 ^ref-40366

Thanksgiving officially began after the massacre of the Pequot people in what is now Connecticut in 1637. The Pequot war led by Governor Winthrop killed upwards of 700 Pequots and ended with the colonists feasting in celebration of their spoils. — location: 699 ^ref-24070

the spoils of colonialism and the eradication of Indigenous people were organizing principles in the country’s formation. — location: 710 ^ref-11450

This is why it becomes problematic when some Americans say they don’t necessarily believe in the exceptional nature of the U.S. but that they believe in its exceptional ideals and values. The ideals of U.S. society cannot be separated from the society itself. American “ideals” and “values” are fundamentally rooted in classical liberal thought. “Western notions of freedom, liberty, individual rights, and property are all profoundly bound up with the enslavement of the racialized Other.” — location: 721 ^ref-22820

The memorialization of settler incursions on Indigenous territory cemented the portrayal of Indigenous people as criminal threats to the enlightened, white citizens of the colonizing Republic. — location: 750 ^ref-62833

mass incarceration might be better described as mass elimination. — location: 782 ^ref-37768

American innocence casts the elimination of Indigenous people as a “necessary evil,” — location: 786 ^ref-50134

The first is that it glorifies the so-called founding values of the nation, making institutions such as slavery appear as nothing more than a mere aberration in a larger, redemptive journey. — location: 861 ^ref-17771

the origins myth provides a framework for social change in America where the redemptive promise of the American nation-state is the ideal goal set for future reform projects. — location: 864 ^ref-45783

“Better to begin with American slavery and tell a story not of progress against failures,” he writes, “but of continuing domination and struggles (partly effective) against it.” — location: 880 ^ref-47947

“Western notions of freedom, liberty, individual rights, and property are all profoundly bound up with the enslavement of the racialized Other.” — location: 913 ^ref-60493

The foundations of U.S. imperialism rest in the genocide of Indigenous Peoples and the enslavement of Africans. — location: 1016 ^ref-28735

the American imperialist myth of “liberation and rehabilitiation.” According to this myth, the losses and damages brought on by U.S. military violence are deemed “prepaid debts” incurred by those liberated by American — location: 1083 ^ref-34347

The United States imposed itself as the hero of the Second World War despite the leading role that the Soviet Union played in defeating Nazi Germany at the cost of 27 million Soviet lives. — location: 1178 ^ref-16377

“the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.” — location: 1415 ^ref-22381

“Few speak of U.S. policies as genocidal because the dominant tendency is to analyze national policies as the byproduct of specific administrations or political parties not as the consequence of a state apparatus built on and seeped in racial animus.” — location: 3020 ^ref-374

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. — location: 4745 ^ref-38082

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. — location: 4759 ^ref-18598

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.” — location: 4791 ^ref-2209

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. — location: 4818 ^ref-48505

very real military-style occupation of majority Black cities by local police departments. — location: 4824 ^ref-32482

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. — location: 4842 ^ref-44912

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. — location: 4846 ^ref-37371

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. — location: 4856 ^ref-2217

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. — location: 4864 ^ref-26256

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.” — location: 4876 ^ref-36772

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. — location: 4886 ^ref-4416

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. — location: 4903 ^ref-21235

American troops are constantly thanked for their “service” while the victims of war are stripped of their humanity. — location: 4920 ^ref-60309

“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. — location: 4952 ^ref-21582

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, — location: 4960 ^ref-58749

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. — location: 4968 ^ref-46676

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. — location: 5003 ^ref-18758

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. — location: 5017 ^ref-11213

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. — location: 5019 ^ref-62193

Innocence is central to these Americans’ identity; it’s what makes them believe they are unique in the world. — location: 5091 ^ref-30882

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. — location: 5092 ^ref-39110

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. — location: 5100 ^ref-63503

The Canadian Brits were scheming evil-doers for having successfully repelled a Yankee invasion the year before the Declaration of Independence. — location: 5119 ^ref-38832

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!” — location: 5123 ^ref-8269

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. — location: 5126 ^ref-47605

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. — location: 5135 ^ref-25132