Oliver Stone: The myth of American exceptionalism

Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick | USATODAY

When Vladimir Putin chastized Barack Obama for invoking "American exceptionalism" to justify a unilateral military strike against Syria, Americans protested vehemently. Putin's dismal human rights record made many join Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Robert Menendez in wanting to "vomit."

But Americans ought not dismiss this message. Whatever moral authority the United States gained for helping the Soviets defeat Germany in World War II or for its "victory" in the Cold War has faded in a narrative of unpopular wars and repression that includes Iran, Guatemala, Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Greece, Indonesia, Chile, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan.

As Samuel Huntington aptly reminded readers in a statement of particular relevance to the United States, "The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion … but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do."

Americans, however, can't forget what they never learned in the first place. The National Report Card issued in June 2011 found that high school seniors tested worse in U.S. history than in any other field, including math and science. Only 12% were judged "proficient."

Devoid of historical knowledge, Americans substitute myths like exceptionalism -- a belief that dates back to John Winthrop's 1630 declaration that the new colony will be a "city upon a hill" for all the world to follow. Exceptionalism underlay embrace of "manifest destiny." Woodrow Wilson stated it most directly when he gushed after the Paris Peace conference, "At last the world knows America as the savior of the world!"

The belief in America's unique altruism and single-minded commitment to freedom and democracy propelled the early Cold War, despite George Kennan's top secret 1948 memo explaining: "We have about 50% of the world's wealth, but only 6.3% of its population. . . . We cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity. ... To do so, we ... should cease to talk about vague and ... unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization ... we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts."

Since the 1980s, exceptionalism has become American leaders' mantra. Henry Kissinger, despite having blood on his hands from Vietnam, Cambodia, Chile, Bangladesh and East Timor, wrote that the U.S. acts for "the well-being of all mankind," explaining that "Americans have always seen their role in the world as the outward manifestation of an inward state of grace."

Ronald Reagan propounded this repeatedly, even while supporting death squads in Central America and unleashing the tides of Islamic extremism across Central Asia.

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright had the temerity to declare, "If we have to use force, it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation."

Earlier this year, Hillary Clinton stated, "We are the indispensable nation. We are the force for progress, prosperity, and peace," which might seem an odd statement from a woman who supported the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya as well as the bombing of Syria.

But even more galling was Obama's Fort Bragg address to troops returning from Iraq. He commended their willingness to sacrifice "so much for a people that you had never met," which, he insisted, was "part of what makes us special as Americans. Unlike the old empires, we don't make these sacrifices for territory or for resources. We do it because it's right ... a unique willingness among nations to pay a great price for the progress of human freedom and dignity. This is who we are. That's what we do as Americans." Towards the end Alan Greenspan, the long-serving chair of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, thought such statements absurd. "I am saddened," he wrote, "that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil."

But when viewed through the lens of exceptionalism, even the worst atrocities can become tolerable to the historically challenged. The U.S. invasion of Vietnam is the most egregious case of external aggression by any nation in the post-WWII era. Martin Luther King, America's greatest moral voice since the Second World War, said, "If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read: Vietnam." However, a recent Gallup poll found that 51% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 believe the war was "not a mistake." In May 2012, Obama announced a 13-year "commemoration" of the Vietnam War, honoring those Americans who fought "heroically to protect the ideals we hold dear as Americans."

We wonder which ideals, exactly, Obama was referring to. A few years before his death, former secretary of Defense Robert McNamara told students at American University that 3.8 million Vietnamese died in that war. Most college students, when asked in informal surveys, place the number at a quarter of that amount or less. The Vietnam Memorial Wall in D.C. contains the names of 58,272 Americans who died in the war. Its message is that the tragedy of that wretched war was that 58,000 Americans died. The wall is 146 feet long.

Imagine a wall that also contained the names of all the Vietnamese, Cambodians, Laotians, and others who died. Such a wall would be over 4 miles long. It would not only be a fitting memorial to all the victims of "American exceptionalism," it would be a perfect tombstone for that most dangerous of American myths.

Oliver Stone is a director, screenwriter, and producer. He has won numerous Academy Awards for his work on such iconic films as Platoon, Wall Street, JFK, Born on the Fourth of July, Natural Born Killers, and Nixon. Peter Kuznick is a professor of history and director of the award-winning Nuclear Studies Institute at American University.

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