American Empire: Fun for the Whole World

First and foremost, this book makes the following point quite clearly: regardless of how we learned American history, Americans had the ideas of racial purity and ethnic cleansing down to a science centuries before the Nazis were even an idea, much less a reality. This is oversimplification, perhaps, but the book goes through and catalogs the crimes committed in the expansion of America, but merely as facts and not as condemnation. I feel like this history, as laid out in the book, of America being the hope for the world; the Other, free from the Old Ways of corruption and despotism, and so forth - only we as Americans can save the world, either by being the example for all or by direct intervention. This trend is clearly still an active force in our national psyche today: we are always going in to liberate people, implicitly stating that their government and leadership are inferior to ours and need to be corrected. While this is something we have done for most of our history, I feel like it is short-sighted and arrogant of us to continue in this manner. Even in seemingly simple cases, like giving aid to poor nations - we should not see it as we are helping them since they cannot help themselves because of implicit inferiority - instead, we as a nation should refocus our aid domestically and internationally to work towards development in a sustained fashion: feeding a family for 6 months is good, but helping that same family start producing their own food (thereby adding to the local economy) is far better. I am by no means saying that giving aid is a bad thing - I just feel as though our motives (when drawn out to their final conclusions) should reflect a desire to help other human beings of equal worth, something that has historically (and in many cases, currently) tarnishes the aid this nation provides to others.

Secondly, I wanted to speak to the author's discussion of religion playing a role in manifest destiny. While throughout the book he mentions the importance of Christian religion (which was the dominant religion of this nation for quite some time), he misses a vital point. The religious wars in England and Europe (which he does discuss) spawned the huge chasm between Catholics and Protestants, and later between the individual denominations therein. Many of the religious intellectuals of Europe disliked this intensely, and made speculative Masonry, or the Freemasons (something he does not discuss) in order to combat this religious hatred. Many of these individuals came to America, being against the status quo of Europe. Many of these same immigrants played vital roles in the foundation of this nation, and their aims have forever guided the path America has taken. Masonry, being an institution of civil religion, aimed to make religiously-grounded, pro-America, pro-fellow-man citizens. Therefore, many individual Christian denominations were swept up by this idea of America's importance in offering aid to other nations, there was also the more generalized religious Masons who forwarded this aim as well. This is not speaking to the rampant pro-Anglo-Saxon thoughts that prevailed, merely a statement that the author may have missed some important evidence in the cohesive, American motives of "helping" other nations and people (whatever that meant in a given time period).

Fare thee well

-Mike