US and Cuba: Slavery, Jim Crow, and Revolution
by T.P. Wilkinson / April 8th, 2015
No later than the Wilsonian propaganda campaign to bring ordinary US citizens and the world to support US intervention in World War I, did the inhabitants—at least the “white” ones—become convinced that not only was their nation the new Eden but that merely by virtue of being an American one was loved and/or envied throughout the world. It is crucial to mention this ideological transformation because until 1917, when the US entered the war on the side of the British elite, most inhabitants of the US could be seen as despised. Ex-slaves were despised because of their skin-colour and despite the 13th amendment, previous condition of servitude, and all the rest but the tiny in-bred colonial elite were absorbed from countries whose regimes were glad to be rid of them.
America as a holy land and Americans as sanctified people, blessed by democracy and a special way of life, were an invention of the budding advertising and public relations industries that even today control the way Americans and much of the world see themselves and the “land of opportunity”. Today it is literally inconceivable for the vast majority of US citizens to imagine that their country is not the supreme gift to civilisation and moreover that the rest of the world shares this delusion…
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