EDITORIAL COMMENT: The Judas kiss of American exceptionalism

05 Jul, 2015 - 00:07 0 Views

The Sunday Mail

Uncle Sam turned 239-years-old yesterday.

That’s plenty. Enough time to create plenty of enemies around the world.

America has few genuine friends.

It has allies, many of them cowed into toeing Washington’s line out of fear of its sheer economic and military might.

It has admirers, many of them students of power and its exercise.

It has acolytes, countries it has more or less created in the image it would prefer. But genuine friends? Those are few and far between.

Which is why much of the world takes great exception to the claim of exceptionalism that America bestows on itself by way of July 4.

This exception to American exceptionalism is well highlighted in the latest issue of Jacobin magazine, which says: “…the actual politics of the American Revolution are too often obscured by … self-serving reinterpretations…

“The American Revolution was not a noble war fought in the service of progressive democracy, destined to irrigate the entire planet with its ideology of inalienable freedoms.

“Nor was it a social revolution from below. Rather, it was the first chapter in an inter-imperial war between Great Britain and its dissident elites in North America.

“And the American state, even in its earliest incarnations, was more concerned with limiting popular democracy than securing and expanding it.”

In essence, the American Revolution was a power grab by elites who wanted to wrest control of the slave economy from Britain. And that is what they did, and then proceeded to try and grab — directly and indirectly — the rest of the world.

But America does have its friends.

One of them is Liberia, which is really an American creation on African soil. Liberia was formerly a colony of the American Colonisation Society and a protectorate of the US after Washington sent ex-slaves there.

At independence in 1847, it modelled its constitution along America’s.

In 1848, Joseph Roberts became the first African-American president in the world after having for years served as high sheriff in charge of organising militias to forcibly collect taxes from indigenous Africans and put down anti-colonial uprisings. (Shades of Obama, perhaps?)

Another close friend of America is the Kingdom of Morocco.

Since 1950, Morocco has been the second-largest recipient of American money in Africa.

This is because ties between the two date back to 1787 when Morocco became the first country in the world to formally recognise the United States through the Treaty of Peace and Friendship.

This is America’s longest-standing international friendship agreement.

So Morocco receives US money. And Morocco is a major ally in the so-called war on terror.

Oh, and Morocco — according to some solid accounts — facilitated the busting of the façade of sanctions the West imposed on Southern Rhodesia after UDI.

And don’t forget that Morocco is the coloniser of Africa’s last remaining colony, the Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic, where it has sought to make 200 000 people live in a mega-ghetto.

May we add that Morocco pulled out of the OAU, now the African Union, back in 1984 because two years earlier, good men like Brigadier Hashim Mbita (MHSRIP) had recognised the Saharawi people as an independent nation?

Those are the kind of friends the US likes, the kind of regimes it feels most comfortable with.

It cannot be comfortable with Zimbabwe. After all, if Washington’s constructive engagement with apartheid South Africa and Southern Rhodesia had succeeded, we would have spent even longer before becoming Zimbabwe.

So why is all this important?

There is much talk of re-engagement with the US at present. There is a flurry of delegations from Uncle Sam to tiny Zimbabwe, many of them with dubious agendas.

And all this is happening at a time that America and Cuba are trying to have normal, non-hostile ties for the first time in both countries’ histories.

We should face the reality: America will never tolerate a country that believes in ownership of its resources and is not cowed by America’s mythical exceptionalism.

We remain an “unusual and continuing threat” to US foreign policy.

It remains incumbent on us to midwife our development through judicious and innovative exploitation of our resources.

So in all engagements that our politicians and businesspersons have with the US, let us always remember that America is never going to be an agency for our socio-economic transformation, no matter how sweet the promises made are.

After all, it was with a kiss that Judas betrayed Jesus.

 

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