Right wing presidential candidates, such as Trump, have loved to claim that if we elect them to office that they will make America great again. The simple truth is that America has never been great, except for the wealthy white men who have exploited both the people and the environment of the country. This is their nation after all, not yours.
As a lot of you know I am an American who has lived in Europe for about the last eight years. I spent my first 41 years mostly in the San Francisco Bay Area. Despite being one of the most left wing areas of the entire country schools still taught a lot of American propaganda. This is something that every single person in America has experienced in one way or another, you can’t escape it.
The very first thing you are taught is to repeat the Pledge Of Allegiance every morning before class starts. You stand in class, put you hand over you heart, say it and then sit down. During the pledge you may or may not be watched closely by the teacher. Some of them will get angry if you don’t say it and others don’t really care at all. If you don’t say it you will usually get crap from the other students for not loving America etc…The modern pledge added the words ‘under god’ in 1952, and legally you are under no obligation to have to actually say it. School districts that still make children say it are routinely sued by parents. The supreme court, in 1943, ruled that it is against the 1st amendment to be made to say it. By the time I was a teenager I mumbled it or changed the words. Countries that make their citizens say pledges of loyalty have been historically fascist and nationalistic in nature. Places in which not everybody is treated equal.
Next in this indoctrination comes being taught that America is the greatest nation on the planet that every existed. You are told this outright and in parables, such as George Washington never lied. I actually don’t remember being taught a lot about the slave trade and how America was built upon the backs of them. What I know about slavery and the Civil War I learned from reading books and watching the Ken Burns documentary The Civil War which aired in 1990, the year after I graduated from high school. I imagine that some schools probably show that documentary in history class, or at least I hope they do.
I remember a lot of time being spent leaning about WWII, and how America entered it because we supposedly hated Hitler and wanted to defeat Germany. Nothing could be further from the truth. The only reason why America went to war against Germany is because America declared war on Japan, their ally, after their attack upon Pearl Harbour. Germany felt obligated to then declare war on America because of this. The majority of Americans did not want to even enter WWII, partially because of the devastation caused by WWI and also because a whole lot of people actually liked Hitler. In fact there was a large group called The German American Bund who held a pro-Nazi rally in New York City at Madison Garden in 1939 in which 20,000 people attended. America was dragged kicking and screaming into war against Germany. Remember, this ‘greatest generation’ of people were also the ones that approved of segregation and largely didn’t want it to end.
I also don’t remember learning that much about segregation, and how people gave their lives in order to end it. If we learn anything about that era of American history it’s usually about Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have A Dream’ speech and then how he was assassinated. We aren’t really taught about the long struggle that people of colour have had to fight against racial prejudice, one that they are still fighting today.
So, knowing all of this I have a question. When was America ever great for all Americans? The simple answer is that it has never been great for anybody besides wealthy white men. So, when Trump says that he is going to make America great again he actually means that he is going to help wealthy white men stay in power. Wealthy white men have been losing their grip on power because the white population of the country has been falling, and minorities are now more represented than ever before.
This doesn’t mean that wealthy white men are going to go down without a fight. They try to corral the rights and power of women by attempting to control their reproductive rights. They try to hold black people down by funding and condoning militarized police forces that openly murder and antagonize people in black communities. They try to stop immigrants, illegal and otherwise, from coming into the country by separating families and locking the children in cages. Remember, only wealthy white people from selected countries should be approved to live in the US because they are the sort of fine people who made America great in the first place.
America will only ever be great if every single person in that country is treated as an equal. When the blatant use of the ‘other’ isn’t used as a scare tactic to divide the underclass of society. Americans should be fighting against these wealthy white men in power instead of against each other. If the vast underclass of America was to openly fight against the policies that these wealthy white men create then things would change for the better for everybody.
In the very wise words of Public Enemy, FIGHT THE POWER.
