America: Imagine the World Without Her Page #2

Taking stuff that is not yours.

We can say thievery was a critical element

to the expansion of American empire

and the establishment of

the American way of life.

150 years ago at the

height of slavery,

another man made an even more

passionate indictment of America.

The American slave,

what is your 4th of July?

I answer a day that reveals to him

more than all other days in a year,

a gross injustice.

Your celebration is a sham.

You profess to believe that of

one blood God made all nations

and hath commanded all men

everywhere to love one another.

Yet, you notoriously hate

and glory in your hatred all men whose

skin are not colored like your own.

Meet Frederick Douglass.

Born a slave, he escaped to freedom

and became a champion of

the antislavery movement.

You can bare your bosom to

the storm of British artillery

to throw off a three-penny tax on tea

and yet wring the last

hard-earned farthing

from the grasp of the black

laborers of your country.

There is not a nation on the earth

guilty of practices more shocking

and bloody

than are the people of the United

States, than on this 4th of July.

We like to think of ourselves

as a peace-loving people.

If they said, "We're going in for the

oil," we'd say, "No, don't do it."

But instead they say,

"We're going in for democracy."

Has the United States been a force

for good or ill in the world?

For the people we conquer,

the Vietnamese, we killed

a couple million of them,

not a force for good.

MIT professor Noam Chomsky is a

leading critic of American imperialism.

There's a reason why most of the

world regards the United States

as a predatory colonial power.

We overthrew the democratic

government of Guatemala in 1954,

Iran in 1953, Cuba in 1961.

Then Brazil, Chile,

Uruguay, Argentina,

on through the world.

It's not a pretty record.

We are the 99%!

Whose street? Our street!

Occupy Wall Street!

We've never had anything

like this in this country

where we take on

economic issues like this.

If you want money, after you get

that million, you want a billion.

After you get a billion, you want a trillion.

After you get a trillion, you want a zillion.

There is no end. There is no line.

The charge against capitalism is

that greedy, selfish business owners

steal from people.

They create gross inequality by

depriving people of their fair share.

And it's only right that we ask

everyone to pay their fair share.

Asking everyone to

pay their fair share.

Pay their fair share.

There is nobody in this country

who got rich on his own.

Nobody.

You built a factory out there.

Good for you.

But I want to be clear,

you moved your goods

to market on the roads

the rest of us paid for.

You hired workers the rest

of us paid to educate.

You were safe in your factory

because of police forces and fire

forces that the rest of us paid for.

It doesn't matter whether

you're making profits

from a hot dog stand in Times Square

or if you're the biggest

company on NASDAQ,

capitalists are under fire.

Until we change the system,

and let's use the C word here.

We're talking about capitalism.

If it's a more comfortable

word for you, greed.

That's just another word for it.

This ultimately has to change.

How much more are you

going to make them suffer?

Because some day they're

not gonna take it anymore.

These are the indictments

against America.

We stole the country from

the Native Americans.

We took half of Mexico

in the Mexican War.

We stole the labor of

the African Americans.

And today our foreign policy and our

free market system are forms of theft.

These indictments developed separately

and each has been around for a long time.

But now they've come together in a

single narrative of American shame.

One professor pulled

this narrative together.

His name is Howard Zinn.

I prefer to try to tell the story

of the discovery of America

from the viewpoint of the Arawaks.

Of the Constitution from the

standpoint of the slaves.

Of Andrew Jackson as

seen by the Cherokees.

Matt Damon and Ben Affleck

grew up in the same

South Boston neighborhood as Zinn.

They gave him a nice plug in

their movie Good Will Hunting.

You want to read a real history book,

read Howard Zion's People's

History of the United States.

That book will knock you on your ass.

Zion's book has made

him quite the celebrity.

What I didn't realize is that

from the very beginning,

from when Columbus met the Arawaks,

there was... It was just nonstop, um,

violence and, uh, and,

uh, just taking over.

They're bullying people and

taking over their resources.

Howard Zinn is the most influential

historian of the past 50 years.

His book has sold over

two million copies,

becoming required reading in most

colleges and many high schools.

Even Tony Soprano's

kid had to read it.

His history teacher, Mr. Cushman,

is teaching your son that if

Columbus was alive today,

he would go on trial for

crimes against humanity,

like Miloevi in, you know, Europe.

Your teacher said that?

It's not just my teacher.

It's the truth.

It's in my history book.

This is the new story

of American shame.

Are our lives,

innocent on the surface,

part of a ruthless engine of

looting, exploitation and murder?

It's a powerful critique.

We can't just dismiss it with chants

of liberty, freedom, rah, rah, rah.

The critics are raising the

primary question of justice.

...with liberty and justice for all.

Read the Declaration of independence.

It's a cry against injustice.

For the American founders, liberty

was the solution to that injustice.

This is not just an attack on the 1%.

It's an attack on all of us.

We are a nation of

immigrants and settlers.

And we are the ones

accused of these crimes.

If these things are true,

something has to be done about them.

- There he is.

- How's it going?

- Good. Come on in.

- Good to see you.

- Been a while, hasn't it?

- It has been.

Reagan had called the Soviet Union,

you remember, an evil empire.

- Yeah.

- And the Soviet Union has dissolved.

So, who's the new evil empire?

Well, you're sitting in it.

One of the most vocal

critics of America

is Professor Ward Churchill.

He gained notoriety right after 9/11

by suggesting some of the people

in the World Trade Center

were like Nazi war criminals

and deserved what they got.

If the US had the

atomic bomb earlier,

chances are pretty good it would

have dropped it on Nazi Germany,

and certainly, for a Jew,

that would be a good idea

because to destroy an evil

regime is a good thing.

Yeah.

So if you could drop a bomb on the

United States, would you do it?

Well, if it would be justifiable

in the context you just described,

then by the same logic,

it would be justifiable here.

It's not one set of rules

for everybody else

and another set of rules

for the United States.

That is American suicide.

But there is an alternative remedy

for this theft and injustice.

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