Exceptional America, did you say?

Only someone who is woefully ignorant of history would subscribe to the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of ‘exceptional’.

Ever so often, you come across public pronouncements by leading US politicians that their country is truly exceptional. If you were to look up the meaning of the word ‘exceptional’ in the Cambridge Dictionary, you will find the following entry – ‘the idea that a person, country or political system can be allowed to be different from, and perhaps better than others’. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) has a much broader definition of the term based on politics, viz., “The theory that the peaceful capitalism of the United States constitutes an exception to the general economic laws governing national historical development, and esp. to the Marxist law of the inevitability of violent class warfare”.

Peaceful capitalism of the US? Only someone who is woefully ignorant of history would subscribe to OED’s definition of ‘exceptional’. The word ‘exceptional’ was first used in 1929, the same year the decade-long Great Depression began – one which devastated the economy of the industrialised West and seeded the start of World War II. Fast forwarding almost 100 years, OED’s 2022 word of the year was ‘Goblin mode’ – our recognition of a desire, especially in light of the Covid-19 pandemic, to engage in ‘unapologetically self-indulgent, lazy, slovenly, or greedy’ behaviour that typically ‘rejects social norms or expectations’. If Elon Musk and Donald Trump do not come to mind, something is sorely amiss.

In its 250-year history, American exceptionalism has always focused on the betterment of a primarily Christian white population to the detriment of other races, be it the Native Americans who were forcibly relocated once their lands were stolen, the Hispanics who resided in areas formerly part of Mexico, the enslaved Blacks imported from Africa whose free labour immensely enriched the southern US states, or the Chinese who found themselves disenfranchised once they had built the railroads of America’s western states. Americans of German and Italian extraction were not interred during the Second World War, only the Japanese. It was Japan on which the atom bombs were dropped, not Germany. America did nothing to help the Jews in Europe during much of World War II even though it was well aware of the savagery inflicted on them in Germany and elsewhere.

You can see American exceptionalism in action when Donald Trump proposes relocating 2 million Palestinians from Gaza to Jordan and Egypt so that the vacated lands can be turned into ocean-front resorts for wealthy Americans and Israelis. Seems to me that such a move would be labelled as ethnic cleansing only if other countries do it but not when self-righteous America advocates it.

Isn’t it exceptionalism when US troops raze entire villages in order to save them, as happened during the Vietnam War? Or nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki to save more Japanese lives? Isn’t it exceptionalism when the US is the only country which refuses to join the International Criminal Court lest it be charged with war crimes committed in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan? Isn’t it exceptionalism when the US insists on immunity from prosecution for crimes committed by its defence personnel stationed at their over 750 military bases in foreign countries but has no qualms about shackling and handcuffing migrant workers for deportation to their homelands? Isn’t it exceptionalism when the US accuses South Africa of mistreating white landowners and cuts off aid when it did nothing to stop apartheid in the country when the white Afrikaners were in power for well over a century? Isn’t it exceptionalism when the US forces the Ecuadorian president’s plane down to make sure Julian Assange wasn’t being spirited out of the country from Ecuador’s embassy? Isn’t it exceptionalism when US servicemen and diplomats fleeing Kabul and Saigon willingly forsake their Afghan and Vietnamese friends, who were hanging on to planes and helicopters, desperate to flee as well?

Exceptionalism can also operate in goblin mode. As reported by
The Guardian in April 2020, a shipment of 200,000 N95 masks intended for the German police was diverted to the US as the masks were being transferred between planes in Thailand. If terrorists can be subjected to extraordinary rendition, why not masks?

Can American exceptionalism lead to the US grabbing the Panama Canal in the near future and choking off the principal shipping lane between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans? Or, for that matter, seizing the Suez Canal and controlling shipping between Europe and Asia? Can American exceptionalism lead to waging war on China in the near future? The US military industrial complex is betting on it. As are all the countries heavily indebted to China for their cheap goods. It is easy to forget that old sins cast long shadows.