American History

Basic and fundamental are the rights declared in the Constitution that the state itself, acting through the body politic puts a limit to its supposed limitless powers. The constitution does not grant these powers nor convey the same to the people, however, the constitutional provisions act as limitations on the part of the government and its officials as against the defenseless citizens for unwarranted abuses on their rights. Among the rights protected by it is the freedom of religion including the corollary right to freedom of irreligion and the non-establishment clause. As opposed to the sovereign power of the state, the constitution guarantees that there shall be separation of church and state. This paper shall look into the origin and rationale of the doctrine on separation of church and state, the response of early Americans and the consequent impact of the same on religion or irreligion.

History
 Prior to the days of liberation, there were still scattered American people. They were ruled under the crown of England, which administration was directly governed by the laws of the church. The rule of the Crown was not appealing to the people, abuses on the rights on one hand and limitations on the acts of the people were unreasonably imposed. In this regard, the government was highly reflective of the abusive religious practices; and the rulers being officers of the Church at the same time, the government was seen as a reflection of the church or at least as an extension of the church. To this end, Thomas Paine advocated the American liberation and encouraged revolution against the abusive crown. This prompted the creation of a unified America as it is now. He advocated the principle that religious practices must not enslave the people to the point of doing injustice to them and curtailing the basic natural rights. Liberation came and the declaration of independence was advocated by Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. While both claim for divine providence, the declaration and subsequent statements gave emphasis on the creation of a wall between the church and the state. The basic natural rights of the people in relation to the government can not be interfered by abusive acts of religion.

Rationale
 Jefferson opined that the powers of the government extend only to the actions and not to opinions and beliefs of the people. Thus, the reach of governmental regulation could not limit or control one of the basic tenets of liberation – freedom of religion. Religion is a delicate relationship limited between the church and the people, it being a rule of conscience. It is personal right which the state has no right to interfere. It has been noted that governmental actions are at times opposed to the rules of the conscience, thus, one can not interfere with the other. The concept of the separation of church and state has thus founded on the laws of nature. It can be noted however that the laws on nature in part is a recognition of a Supreme Being who has ruled over the universe and upon the acts of man. The seemingly opposing concepts can be reconciled. The evils brought about by abuses using supposed religious teachings, practices and beliefs can not be used to corrupt the minds of the people in an attempt to govern and lead them towards a progressive nation. The present wordings of the Constitution are implicit recognition of the fear of early and present day Americans that the unwarranted abuses of the Crown and the struggle during the period of liberation would not be repeated in the history of America.

Interpretation/Amendments/Exceptions
Having established the separation of church and state clause, the Constitution explicitly recognized the seeming contrast between the reach and the consequent powers of the church and the state. The constitution is explicit in declaring that the legislature can not enact laws that would require any form of entanglement between the church and the state. Thus, Congress can not enact laws that would require for instance certain religious qualifications for any governmental position. Considering the opposing roles each have, allowing otherwise would allow clergymen to participate in the performance of governmental functions. Consequently moreover, it would result in the active participation of government officials to interfere on purely ecclesiastical matters, matters which are supposed to be beyond the reach of governmental regulation. This rule on non-entanglement of religion and state prevents the evils from either power to interfere with the other and in no way control or unreasonably limits the rights of man particularly the very solemn right to freedom of religion#.
Another point is the provision prohibiting Congress from adopting any religion, favoring one religion over another or favoring religion or irreligion. This provision is aimed at preventing the Church to make use of governmental powers to achieve its goals. Otherwise, men’s civil rights would directly be prejudiced. The requirement of religion over irreligion or one religion over another would limit the right to unlimited freedom of belief and faith – the very evil sought to be prevented by the Constitution.

A contrary rule of the foregoing provision would consequently impose punishments and acts of man in case of non-compliance. This would run counter to the very essence of the freedom itself. It is worth to emphasize that the freedom of belief on religion or irreligion for that matter is limitless. One can not be penalized and required to suffer solely by reason of his beliefs.

While the Constitution prevents any act from Congress that would require excessive entanglement between religion and the state, the provision could not be interpreted as an iron-clad rule. The law allows the state to grant allowances for instance for clergymen who work for the government. This could not be said to be one of an intrusion over ecclesiastical matters with purely secular regulations. In fact, it is considered as one way of preventing any entanglement between the two. Preventing clergymen to receive compensation from the government would only create a conflict on the interpretation of governmental policies which have the effect of unreasonably excluding them from the benefits of rendering services to the government. Otherwise stated, to allow the opposite view would only stimulate the evil which the Constitution seeks to prevent.

Another exception to the rule is the provision allowing religion to be taught in public schools provided that it should not be to the expense of the government. While supportive of any religion, this can be explained under police power of the state aimed at promoting the general welfare of young children. This moreover does not involve excessive entanglement between religion and the state.

Current jurisprudence moreover has prohibit the state from prosecuting students from saluting while singing the national anthem as this would be contrary to the teachings of the religious church. These and other jurisprudential developments show the broadening of the scope of freedom of religion and the principle of the separation of church and state.
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Price, R. (2004). History of the Separation of Church and State in America. Retrieved from http://www.rationalrevolution.net/articles/history_of_the_separation_of_chu.htm
Price, R. Ibid
Robinson, B. (200hurch and State (sponsored link by Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance). Retrieved from http://www.religioustolerance.org/scs_intr.htm7). Separation of C
No Author. (2009). Separation of Church and State retrieved from the site of AllAboutHistory.org: http://www.allabouthistory.org/separation-of-church-and-state.htm
Zavalleta, J. (1997). Original Intent and the Free Exercise of Religion retrieved from http://www.earlyamerica.com/review/fall98/original.html.

Defending and even blessing the institute of slavery in our days is barbarous. However, this was not so obvious in America less than two centuries ago, and the voices of advocates of slavery were not less loud than the ones of abolitionists. This paper is to analyze and compare the arguments of both parties presented in “The Blessings of Slavery” by George Fitzburg (pro slavery) and the works of Frederick Douglass presented in his “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave” and his Independence Day Speech at Rochester in1841. In order to avoid confusions I will refer to Douglass’s book as “Douglass” with stipulation of the page number, and his speech shall be referred as “Douglass, 1841”.

The first striking difference between the arguments of the two mentioned authors is that Fitzburg attempts to provide logical justification of slavery as “natural, normal and necessary status, under the ordinary circumstances” (Fitzburg, George “The Blessing of Slavery”. Google docs. Web. 9 Dec. 2009), which is not so brutal, as one may think. In contrast, Douglass is very emotional in his view of slavery as a degrading institution which humiliates man and ruins social virtues. Fitzburg asserts that under the existing condition slavery is justifiable, although it can be abolished in a remote perspective, while Douglass rejects slavery as itself, whatever the justification of slavery may be as “great sin and shame of America” (Douglass Frederick. “Independence Day Speech at Rochester”. Libertynet. Web. 9 Dec. 2009).

Fitzburg starts by assuming that “the negro slaves of the South are the happiest, and in some sense, the freest people in the world” (Fitzburg). His first issue is description of working and living conditions of slaves, and he presents them in a very attractive manner, including only nine hours of work daily (this was indeed a good condition at the time), work in sunny days only, protection and care by masters, opportunity to celebrate and spend the free time in leisure. The argument develops from rational description to admiration of the minor fact that slaves have an additional hour to sleep. Further in the course of his other mediations in the Fitzburg repeats this argument about better working conditions for slaves than for free workers of the North where “capital…taxes, oppresses and persecutes free laborer” (Fitzburg). Surprisingly, the argument about relatively easy work for laves children is supported by Douglass who writes of his childhood: “I had a great deal of leisure time. The most I had to do was to drive up the cows at evening, keep the fowls out of the garden, keep the front yard clean, and run of errands for my old master's daughter, Mrs. Lucretia Auld” (Douglass Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave. Forgotten Books. Web. 9 Dec. 2009. 30). In chapter VI he describes his new mistress as “a woman of the kindest heart” (Douglass 43). More than that, his masters do care about teaching teenage Douglass to read and write.

Fitzburg would, probably, eagerly refer to Douglass’s book to prove his point, in case the book contained such idealistic visions only. However, Douglass was simply lucky enough to have good masters. Most of the other slaves were not so happy. They performed work for an allowance of food and clothing, while the masters felt free to do whatever they wanted to their slaves. At the beginning of his book Douglass hints that his father was, probably, his white master who had sexual intercourses with Douglass’s mother, yet refused to recognize the baby. Throughout his life Douglass how masters inflicted severe punishments on their slaves (“I have seen him whip a woman, causing the blood to run half an hour at the time; and this, too, in the midst of her crying children, pleading for their mother's release” (Douglass 24) and suffered this himself later in his life when his master “Mr. Covey gave me a very severe whipping, cutting my back, causing the blood to run, and raising ridges on my flesh as large as my little finger” (Douglass 66). So, perhaps certain slaves did enjoy the relatively bearable living conditions described by Fitzburg, however, they were completely dependent on their master’s whims and their wellbeing was illusory. Fitzburg’s argument about harsh working conditions of the northern laborers is, in fact, irrelevant, for it is related to the rights of the northern workers, but not to limitation of rights of southern slaves.

Fitzburg’s second notable argument is reference to the Bible and history as justification of slavery. As he puts it, “to insist that a status of society, which has been almost universal, and which is expressly and continuously justified by Holy Writ, is its natural, normal and necessary status…is on its face a plausible and probable proposition. To insist on less is to insist…that a Bible cannot be true” (Fitzburg). He further asserts that having slaves from other races is much more tolerant than having slaves from own race as, according to Fitzburg, the capitalists of the North do, and that the attitude towards negroes is much better on the South.
There is no direct response to this “Biblical argument” in Douglass’s works, yet he does write about moral consequences of slavery, which can hardly be justifiable by the Bible. His kindhearted mistress, who, in the most Christian manner, “had bread for the hungry, clothes for the naked, and comfort for every mourner” (Douglass 47) was very soon corrupted by owing a single slave and “slavery proved as injurious to her as to me” (Douglass 47). In his Independence Day Speech Douglass provides another counterargument: slavery ruins national unity, for the day of the Independence Day is a mockery for millions of those who are unable to feel themselves Americans. Here Douglass rises to the epic level when he turns to the passage from the Bible, asking “How can we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?” (Douglass, 1841). In the book Douglass adds that “the religion of the south is a mere covering for the most horrid crimes” (Douglass 82). Thus, according to Douglass, the nation will be torn and sinful until slavery continues to exist. Here Douglass’s argument appears to be stronger, since Fitzburg refers to some abstract idea of the Holy Writ, while Douglass ties Christian ideas to the concrete circumstances.

The third argument introduced by Fitzburg is that “our Southern slavery has become a benign and protective institution” for negroes “unfitted for the mechanic arts, for trade and all skillful pursuits” (Fitzburg). Thus, slavery turns out to be a mechanism that defends slaves against the cruel and competitive world by granting them certain firmly established status in which they are able to satisfy their minimal vital requirements.
The first counterargument to this argument is provided by Douglass merely by description of his late years in slavery when he worked at the shipyard and earned as much wages as his white colleagues (Douglass 95). The second counterargument can be found in his Independence Day speech, when he notes that “we are plowing, planting, and reaping, using all kinds of mechanical tools, erecting houses, constructing bridges, building ships, working in metals of brass, iron, copper, and secretaries, having among us lawyers doctors, ministers, poets, authors, editors, orators, and teachers…we are engaged in all manner of enterprises common to other men” (Douglass, 1841). It can be observed that Fitzburg’s argument is based on abstract assertion that “blacks will not be able to successfully compete with the whites”, while Douglass provides particular examples proving that Fitzburg’s argument is futile.

The last week, but quite curious Fitzburg’s argument is that the North is hypocritical in its abolitionists moods. As he puts it, “the aversion to negroes, the antipathy of race, is much greater on the North than on the South” (Fitzburg). To this he adds that southern landowners were opponents of slave trade ever since Revolution, while northern states benefited from slave trade, as well as from goods produced by slaves labor. Yet, this is another irrelevant argument, since it deals with the vices of the North, but not with advantages of slavery itself.

Douglass never treated Northerners as saints. His opinion is that until slavery exists in the country, “for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival” (Douglass, 1841). It is the guilt of all Americans, not only of the Southerners. Yet, at least in the times of Douglass, the North was a great opportunity for the slaves, of what he writes: “I found many, who had not been seven years out of their chains, living in finer houses, and evidently enjoying more of the comforts of life, than the average of slaveholders in Maryland” (Douglass, 113). Perhaps antagonism between blacks and whites did exist on the North, yet it originated from slavery, but not from abolitionism.

The core difference between Fitzburg and Douglass is that Douglass was a slave once, so he practically knew what slavery is, while Fitzburg’s reasoning is purely theoretical. This predetermined the difference in their arguments. Fitzburg justifies slavery with abstract mental constructions (like referring to the Holy Writ) or prejudices (like the one that blacks will not be able to compete with the whites). In contrast, Douglass, although being emotional, still explains his position from factual point of view. This ability to link arguments to life makes his arguments stronger.

There is nothing at all new or original about this entire debate about whether the United States is a republic or an empire, or indeed a republican empire. During the years of the Vietnam War and for two decades afterward, there was a major historical debate between the revisionists like William Appleman Williams and Gabriel Kolko and realists like John Lewis Gaddis over the exact same questions, and the revisionists in that debate were rephrasing the same ideas as an earlier generation of Progressive historians like Charles Beard. For that matter, people were arguing the republic versus empire question back in the days of Mark twain and William Jennings Bryan—or of Thomas Jefferson and John Quincy Adams for that matter. Given the recent catastrophe of the Bush II presidency, the capitalist meltdown and the ongoing disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan, it was inevitable that there would be yet another spate of books about the American Empire and the roots of its foreign policy. All three books used in this essay: Stephen Kinzer’s Overthrow, Chalmers Johnson’s The Sorrows of Empire, and The Secret Histories by John S. Friedman are all unabashedly of the revisionist-Progressive-anti-imperialist school, and uncompromising in the view that the United States is indeed and empire. They have marshaled a tremendous amount of evidence to prove their case, most of it very familiar to students of American history.

Stephen Kinzer’s book Overthrow describes how the U.S. government carried regime change in twelve countries long before the term became popular, starting with Hawaii in1893 and ending with Iraq in 2003. In the first part, “The Imperial Era”, he discusses the America takeover of Hawaii, the Philippines, Puerto Rico and Nicaragua”, when the United States behaved like an old-style empire, no different from Britain, France, Germany or Japan. After World War II, its empire was much larger but its methods of maintaining and expanding changed, which is why he calls the second part of the book “Covert Action”.

In 1963, for example, the Kennedy administration believed that President Ngo Dinh Diem was so corrupt and unpopular that he was about to lose the war in South Vietnam, and might even attempt to negotiate with Ho Chi Minh in the North, so John F. Kennedy approved his overthrew by the South Vietnamese military in November 1963, just three weeks before his own assassination in Dallas (Kinzer, pp.207-10). In recently declassified audio tapes obtained by the National Security Archive, Kennedy was considering a coup against Diem as early as August 1963, and “agreed with other senior U.S. officials that under the existing Saigon leadership there was no chance of success in the Vietnam War.” He stated that “We’re up to our hips in mud out there” and that Congress would be “mad” if he supported a coup by the generals, but “they’ll be madder if Vietnam goes down the drain” (National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 302. 2009).

Another important example was the overthrow or Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953 by the CIA in Operation Ajax, after he had angered the British and American governments by nationalizing the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (renamed British Petroleum after the coup). American backing for the Shah for the next twenty-five years had the unintended consequence of stimulating an Islamic Revolution led by the Ayatollah Khomeini in 1978-79, and the U.S. is still living with the fallout from Operation Ajax (Kinzer, 117-28; 200-01). In 2000, the National Security Archive received a CIA after-action report of the coup. Written by Donald Wilber in March 1954 which had been “long-sought by historians”, especially as the Agency had claimed to have destroyed most of the records on Operation Ajax in the 1960s—a supposedly “unauthorized” act of destruction. In its lessons learned section, Wilber’s report singled out the Communications and Psychological Warfare (PW) Senior Staff for special commendation, who had worked a great deal of overtime and “displayed commendable zeal”. It also noted that the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) “was quite ready to act as the junior partner in this operation”, and that the CIA operatives were convinced that when faced “with a choice between following the orders of the Shah or those of Mossadeq, the rank and file of the army and its officers would obey the Shah” (National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 28. 2000). James Risen found that “the Shah’s cowardice nearly killed the CIA operation. Fearful of risking his throne, the Shah repeatedly refused to sign CIA-written royal decrees to change the government” and “still fled the country just before the coup succeeded” (Risen, 2000, New York Times Special Report).

After the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, the U.S. government launched the largest CIA operation in history to support the guerillas and insurgents battling the Red Army. Once again, it did not consider the long-term consequences of its actions, and its ‘allies’ Pakistan and Saudi Arabia used American money to support the Taliban and other jihadists, with results that came back to haunt America on September 11, 2001. This leads to the final part of the book in which he covers direct military action in Grenada, Panama, Iraq and Afghanistan, which resemble a return to the old-style, direct imperialism of 1890-1930, and, except for Grenada in 1983, examples of post-Cold War hubris. For Kinzer, the reasons for this type of foreign policy include the desire of presidents to appear tough and decisive, especially at election time, corporate interests that want to control markets and raw materials overseas, ignorance, arrogance and short-term thinking among policymakers, such as Henry Kissinger saying that nothing of importance ever came out of the Southern Hemisphere in history after the CIA overthrew President Salvador Allende of Chile in 1973 (Kinzer, pp. 173-78).

Chalmers Johnson wrote that the United States today is like the Roman Empire, which was originally a republic but turned into a militaristic dictatorship as it gradually acquired more bases and colonies abroad, and like the Caesar’s, American presidents have the right to wage wars wherever and whenever they want without having to give much thought to the Senate (Congress). Indeed, the U.S has become constantly more aggressive, arrogant and openly imperialistic since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989-91 and claimed credit for “winning” the Cold War, even though the real reasons for the demise of the Soviets were internal, especially their failed economy and Mikhail Gorbachev’s desire to end the Cold War and become part of the European Community. In all this, American leaders “did not have either the information or imagination to grasp what was happening” (Johnson, p. 19).

Once the Cold War was over and it no longer had containment of Russia as cover for maintaining its empire, the U.S. had to find new enemies and threats to justify the existence of its empire, such as Iraq, Iran, North Korea, weapons of mass destruction, and terrorism. Johnson exaggerates when he writes that in 1989-2002 “there was a revolution in America’s relations with the rest of the world”, since much of its foreign policy was really not all that different from the past fifty or one hundred years (Johnson, p. 22). To be sure, with the USSR gone, its sense of unilateralism increased culminating in the aggressively imperialistic administration of George W. Bush. After September 11, 2001, Bush asserted that the United States would take military action around the world anywhere it deemed necessary and overthrow any government it perceived to be hostile, and would even use nuclear weapons on Iraq, Iran, Syria, and North Korea if they got out of line (Johnson, p. 283). There was nothing particularly new about any of this, apart from the open and brazen way the American president expressed himself on this subject.

In the 19th Century, when it conquered the West, exterminated the Native Americans and annexed half of Mexico, the United States was a traditional empire like every other in history. This changed in the 20th Century, though, especially after World War II. It only had a few outright colonies like Hawaii, Puerto Rica, the Panama Canal Zone, Guam and the Philippines, while most of its empire was informal and indirect, ruling through proxies, client states and friendly dictators. In addition, it built a chain of military bases all over the world, which became American enclaves, insulated from the host countries through Status of Forces Agreements (SOFA’s). These mini-states were “consumerist Sparta’s” that taught “American youth arrogance and racism” for others outside their military caste (Johnson, p. 25). Assorted think tanks, global corporations, high tech companies and bureaucrats all earned their livings from this empire, which is why it has endured for decades.

Johnson agrees with Kinzer that the preventative war against Iraq in 2003 was just a continuation of longstanding American imperial policies, no matter that Americans would prefer to use just about any other term to describe their foreign policy and do not like to think of themselves as imperialists in the old fashioned Roman or European sense. America under the Bush II administration was openly seeking to “dominate the world through absolute military superiority and wage war against any possible competitor” (Johnson, p. 285). He also regarded the empire as a grave threat to democracy at home and abroad, and he was correct to be worried, as the documents in John S. Friedman’s book The Secret Histories demonstrate in great detail.

Eileen Welsome, a journalist in New Mexico, published her information on the plutonium injection experiments in the Albuquerque Tribune in November 1993, and caused President Clinton to appoint an expert panel chaired by Ruth Faden to report on all Cold War radiation experiments. During World War II, doctors with the Manhattan Project feared a cancer epidemic due to plutonium exposure, since it was still a relatively new and unknown element, so they began secretly injecting it into eighteen hospital patients around the country to study its effects. Over 4,000 more such secret radiation experiments followed in the decades ahead, including giving pregnant women radioactive “cocktails” to drink, feeding radioactive oatmeal to children and a school for the developmentally disabled, and subjecting cancer patients to lethal doses of full body radiation, all so the military and scientists could plan and prepare for a nuclear war (Welsome, 2005, in Friedman, pp. 60-90).

John Dinges called Operation Condor “the first war on terrorism” in which the CIA organized the police and intelligence services in Chile, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay to fight a “dirty war” against leftist movements all over South America. Indeed, the U.S. provided “strategic leadership” in this covert war, which led to torture on mass scale and thousands of assassinations and ‘disappearances’. On orders from General Pinochet, Chile’s intelligence agency (DINA) assassinated former foreign minister Orlando Letelier and his assistant Ronnie Mofitt with a car bomb in Washington In September 1976, which Dinges calls “the most egregious act of foreign inspired terrorism ever committed in the U.S. capital” before September 11, 2001. Colonel Manual Contreas, the head of DINA, was on the CIA payroll, and Pinochet himself received millions of dollars from the United States government. In all of this, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s main concern was never human rights, but only maintaining friendly, right-wing governments in South America and stopping any possible electoral swing to the left, as with Allende in Chile. In Argentina, the ruling military junta was “ecstatic” when he told them that they had to “get their terrorism problem under control as soon as possible” (Dinges, “The Condor Years”, in Friedman, ed., pp. 353-67).

John Marks obtained 16,000 pages of CIA documents on its mind control project MK Ultra through a Freedom of Information Act Request in 1978 although the project’s director Dr. Sidney Gottlieb told the Church Committee that he had destroyed most of them. In the program, the CIA conducted a wide variety of experiments in hypnosis, brainwashing, use of mind-altering drugs like LSD, and interrogation methods (Marks, “Manchurian Candidate” in Friedman, 2005, pp. 124-50). CIA Director Allen Dulles was “almost frantic” to find out how the Russians and Chinese had evidently broken the will and morale of America POWs in the Korean War and forced them to sign false confessions, and hired the world-famous neurologist Dr. Harold Wolff to investigate. Wolff and his associate Lawrence Hinkle determined that Russian and Chinese methods were crude but very effective, using a combination of “intense psychological pressure and human weakness.” They did not employ drugs or psychiatrists, but the CIA and the military did in their experiments, often on convicts and mental patients who had no idea what the real nature of the program was and who was really in charge of it. Some researchers attempted to wipe out the human personality through drugs, hypnosis and electric shock and then “reprogram” the individual, but by the time MK Ultra ended in 1963 “agency researchers had found no foolproof way to brainwash another person”. They did manage to make people catatonic or amnesiac, though, not to mention introducing drugs like LSD to wider public (Marks, “Brainwashing” in “Manchurian Candidate”).

Dr. Frank Olson was a scientist working on biological weapons for the Army Chemical Corps’ Special Operations Division at Fort Detrick, Maryland. Part of his story came out in the 1970s, when Dr. Gottlieb admitted that he had put LSD in his drink at a cocktail party, supposedly to test its effects, and that Olson later became depressed and suicidal and finally jumped out of a hotel window in New York in 1953. In 1999, Olson’s son Eric had his father’s body exhumed, and an autopsy showed that he had been hit in the head prior to his death and very likely thrown out the window—a method suggested in a CIA assassination manual of the time. As it turned out, Olson was having moral qualms about his work on anthrax and other such weapons, as well as experiments with nerve gas and mind-altering drugs that were causing death and injury to the test subjects. Dr. Gottlieb and other CIA officials were concerned that he was becoming a liability and might even go public with what was then top secret information. In the 1950s, the American public would have been far more shocked by such revelations than today. (Kurtis, 1999, Investigative Reports).

Created by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover in the 1950s, COINTELPRO (Counter-Intelligence Program) was directed against many groups and individuals that Hoover regarded as a threat to the United States, including the Communist Party, Socialist Workers Party, New Left, Black Nationalists and Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. From 1962-68, the FBI used a wide variety of tactics to “’neutralize’ him as an effective civil rights leader”, such wiretaps, microphones hidden in his hotel rooms, planting informants in SCLC offices, and an active disinformation campaign to discredit him with supporters and donors in the U.S. and abroad. In January 1968, Senator Robert C. Byrd told Catha DeLoach, an senior FBI official, that the time had come for King to “meet his Waterloo”, and in March the FBI included him in its Black Nationalist-Hate Group COINTELPO. So great was Hoover’s personal animus against him, that even after his assassination, the FBI used its influence in Congress to prevent King’s birth day from being declared a national holiday. (Church Committee Report. 1976.)

In 1979, the House Committee on Assassinations found “on the basis or circumstantial evidence available to it, that there is the likelihood that James Earl ray assassinated Dr. Martin Luther King as the result of a conspiracy.” Although the committee cleared the FBI and other government agencies of any direct involvement in the assassination, it went on to say that the FBI “grossly abused and exceeded its legal authority and failed to consider the possibility that actions threatening grievous bodily harm to Dr. King might be encouraged” by COINTELPRO (House Select Committee on Assassinations. 1979).

Moving forward into the post-Cold War Era, Philip Gourevitch discussed the lack of American action to prevent genocide in Rwanda in 1994. In “The Genocide File”, he wrote about how General Romero Dallaire, commander of the United Nations contingent in Rwanda, had informed the UN in advance that the “preparations were underway to carry out the extermination campaign” and pleaded for more troops, but the UN forbade “any preventative action”. Both the members of the General Assembly and the Security Council opposed any intervention, while the Clinton administration wanted no repeat of its recent experience in Somalia, and so over half a million people were killed. In this situation, humanitarian intervention truly was necessary, but it was not in the political or foreign policy interests of the other great powers to become involved (Gourevitch, in Friedman, pp. 437-50).

As Seymour Hersh knows very well, there was plenty of torture and murder going on during the Vietnam War, and he publicized a great deal of it, including the massacre at My Lai. Of all people, he would have had no reason to be shocked or surprised it was all happening again in Iraq, although he did the public a great service by breaking the story of Abu Gharib. For that matter, there was plenty or torture and murder going on in the Korean War or the Philippines War, and wars like these have always stimulated revisionist historians who denounce the policies and methods of the American Empire. Indeed it is an empire, and the evidence for that is absolutely overwhelming. There are no great or surprising revelations in this essay or in the primary and secondary sources used as evidence, and most of it has been known for decades: the coups in Iran, Chile, Guatemala, the CIA’s Operation Condor, MK Ultra, Olson’s very probable murder, secret medical experiments, the military-industrial complex, COINTELPRO, Hoover, the FBI’s likely complicity in the King assassination, all of it is very well-documented, and even has an ‘old hat’ quality. For this reasons, the recent policies of the Bush II administration are part of a continuity going back a hundred years or more, about the only difference being that his administration was far more blatant about what it was up to than most of the others. None of this is ever going to change until some other empire like China finally supplants the United States as global hegemon. Indeed, that is already happening.

The movie “Glory” is a 1989 film about the civil war wherein an unrecognized black regiment led by Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, played by Matthew Broderick, made a significant impact to the course of the civil war, even if the regiment got decimated at Fort Wagner during the last part of the movie. Initially, some members of the Union thought of it as a bad idea to recruit and train blacks in their army. When the officials agreed on the terms, these black soldiers were not placed on the battlefield but were assigned to menial and auxiliary duties such as digging up roads and cleaning up the messes left on the battlefield. They even got lesser pay for their effort than their white counterparts. At times, the soldier named Trip, played by Denzel Washington, would convey and represent what the entire regiment felt about the unfair treatment towards their regiment, as well as to all other black soldiers fighting for the Union and their freedom. However, this did not make them quit their dreams and soon enough, they were engaged in a battle against the Confederates. After several successful engagements, they faced the heavily defended Fort Wagner wherein they volunteered to lead the way and capture the fort. However, they failed and all of them died, including Col. Shaw and their white officers.

This is probably one of the first American civil war movies wherein black soldiers played a big role. These soldiers became an inspiration to all other black freemen to join the Union army and fight for them. In my opinion, the story of the movie that concentrates on the heroic black regiment and their honorable colonel became its key strength. At the time of its release, it was something that has not yet been done before in such a way that it gave recognition to the black soldiers that fought throughout the civil war, as well as celebrated their contribution to the cause of freedom for all slaves. The movie tends to highlight their significance in the Union’s victory over the Confederates since recruiting Black Americans increased their military strength over the Confederates. During the movie, a certain level of racism can even be sensed from the Union side which showed that not all members of the Union—soldiers, politicians, and the like—tend to appreciate the efforts of the Black American soldiers, nor would they give them an opportunity to show their talents on the battlefield.

The only weakness that can be seen in the movie is its addition of fabricated elements that may seem necessary to add more drama to the entire movie. If it were to be historical and worth noting, then “Glory” could have just skimped on these elements. Of course, war movies tend to over-exaggerate some parts to make it more dramatic which may be the same case for “Glory.” However, its primary strength already conveys its message that black soldiers during the American civil war should also be recognized for their valiant efforts. Therefore, the heightened sense of drama becomes an expendable appendage of the movie.

Overall, the movie features a great story which can move people and educate them about the impact of Black Americans during the civil war when they decided to volunteer in the Union army as an active soldier. The Fort Wagner assault also conveyed a sense of courage and heroism that the Black soldiers possessed during the civil war, wherein they valiantly sacrificed their lives for the sake of freedom. Therefore, “Glory” defined the instrumentality and overall impact of black soldiers during the civil war