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this post was submitted on 16 Nov 2023
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Considering the British Crown ended slavery in its colonies in 1833, a full 3 decades before an independent America ended slavery with a civil war? Yes! But that's neither here nor there. I'm not arguing nor have I argued against the American "revolution," though I will say it was a bourgeois nationalist independence struggle waged by the colonial ruling class against the ruling class in the mother country because the ruling class in the mother country taxed the commercial profits of the ruling class in the colony too much and wouldn't let them expand west against indigenous people as quickly as they wanted to. That's not really a "revolution." War of Independence is a lot more accurate. What happened in Haiti in the 1790s and 1800s was a revolution, and it involved the oppressed class, the slaves, rising up against the ruling class, their masters. Interestingly the American "revolutionaries" for all their talk of "freedom" and "liberty" and "revolution" and "refreshing the tree of liberty with the blood of patriots and tyrants" (Jefferson quote) never supported that revolution. In fact they were highly in favor of crushing it (along with Daniel Shay's rebellion), because they were slave owners. And they were in favor of forcing that enslaved people to pay reparations, amounting to most of their annual national GDP, to their former masters, for the better part of 2 centuries. A tax far more tyrannical and impoverishing than anything the British leveled against the likes of the American tobacco planters. And now they are blamed for being poor and underdeveloped despite those absymal economic conditions that was enforced by America and France jointly. Two "democracies" shaking hands as they make sure a state of liberated slaves is in permanent debt.... very interesting how these things are framed.
Ask an indigenous American that question. No. In general I don't think it was a "net benefit" to humanity. And I'm an American. I live here. I am part indigenous but being indigenous is more about culture than blood quantum. I wasn't raised in that culture, which was decimated long before I was born.
Yes it's possible for good men to do bad things and vice versa. But I don't think they were good men in the first place. I think they were bourgeois slave owners who liked to wax poetic about "Freedom" and "Liberty" as though they were the ones who invented these concepts. That's a big part of the American civil religion. The idea that these men somehow invented the representative republican form of government. Like it was some kind of innovation they brought to the table. Their "net benefit to humanity" as you said earlier. But they didn't invent that. They were a bunch of Rome revivalists attempting to resurrect ideas from classical antiquity, which is why America loves the fasces and the marble statues and the ionic columns and the latin phrase mongering. And even if they had somehow invented these concepts, they were still realizing these concepts in a completely hypocritical and incomplete way that was obvious to every abolitionist even back then.
While there is certainly some truth to what you are saying, I feel that your interpretation of events and motivations is way too cynical. But regardless, it's pretty tough to argue that the US has not provided a net gain to humanity, given the advancements in technology, medicine, arts, and so on that could not have occurred in a different society.
I certainly don't have any good reason to feel optimistic about the past, present, or future of this imperialist, settler-colonial, capitalist nation which would rather start WW3 than give up a shred of its post WW2 hegemony.
What supernatural qualities does the United States have such that, were it removed from history, a bunch of "technology, medicine, arts and so on" would have never been invented? Take the nuclear bomb for example. An American invention. Had America never existed, it still would have been invented, eventually, just somewhere else. Splitting the atom would have occurred to some physicist eventually. Using it as a weapon would have occurred eventually. I'm a staunch materialist about these things. America is just a geopolitical construct. Everything invented in America, by Americans, could have been invented somewhere else, by someone else, under similar circumstances. Technology comes about because a need/desire for it arises, and the materials to create it are available. Not because of the supernatural qualities of the nation.