America's 'independence' celebrates 250 years of jingoism and genocide
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Joseph Massad
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Thu, 06/25/2026 - 12:49
The myth of US freedom, retold by nationalist historians, politicians and corporate media, erases the slavery, dispossession and white supremacy on which the republic was built
A view of the "UFC Freedom 250" event hosted by US President Donald Trump on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington on 15 June 2026 (Saul Loeb/Pool via Reuters)
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American jingoism remains the ruling ideology of the United States, on the right as well as the left and centre. The upcoming 250th anniversary of independence, which the country will celebrate on 4 July 2026, is yet another occasion to express America's ultranationalism and rewrite the country's sordid history of oppression and genocide as a story of "freedom".
President Donald Trump, the hero of white supremacists and conservatives, has declared that "With a single sheet of parchment and 56 signatures, America began the greatest political journey in human history."
Former president Barack Obama, the best thing that ever happened to white American liberals, enthusiastically agrees: "Since we're a few weeks away from America's 250th birthday, it is worth remembering just how radical the whole idea of self-government really was back in 1776."
He adds that the Declaration of Independence asserted "that we are all created equal, endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights".
Obama then offers a mild reprimand for what seems to be an oversight on the part of the white slave-owning settlers who declared independence:
In forming our union, the founders fell terribly short of the Declaration's promise, leaving slavery intact, allowing states to restrict the franchise to white men who owned property, but in drafting a constitution and a bill of rights, they did have the foresight, the genius to provide us with a framework that allows each generation to make our union more perfect... And over more than two centuries... "We the people" came to include not just some of us, but all of us.
If a white South African claimed that the establishment in 1910 of the white supremacist settler-colonial Union of South Africa was the first step towards making South Africa, a century later, inclusive of non-white people, such a person would deservedly face ridicule and condemnation.
Americans are shamelessly taught by their educational and political institutions and leaders, not to mention their subservient and monotonous corporate media, that America is the best thing that ever happened to the world.
With the 250th anniversary of US independence upon us, the hegemonic mythology of US benevolence continues to dominate political discourse as incontrovertible truth.
The unceasing terror that this first independent state has imposed - and continues to impose - on its own Black and Indigenous population, its working classes, and the imperialised rest of the world is rewritten as a story of "American freedom".
The truth, however, is that the independence of the United States was, and remains, the best thing that ever happened not to the world, but to the white supremacists in it. Even the Nazis celebrated US independence as a precursor to their own regime. German historian Albrecht Wirth (1866-1936) wrote in his 1934 world history for Nazi readers that "the most important event in the history of the states of the Second Millennium - up until the [First World] War - was the founding of the United States of America."
He confidently added that "The struggle of the Aryans for world domination received thereby its strongest prop."
Adolf Hitler himself found inspiration in the US republic. He viewed the history of US expansion - where settlers "shot down the millions of Redskins to a few hundred thousand, and now keep the modest remnant under observation in a cage" - as an inspirational precedent for the Slavic peoples of eastern Europe, particularly the Russians, whom he referred to as "Redskins".
A slaveholders' revolution
The white supremacist call for the independence of the 13 North American British colonies was no call for universal freedom at all, despite the rewriting of America's ignominious history as one of freedom.
Before independence, the white settler-colonists' disenchantment with the British Crown had been increasing alongside the concentration of wealth in the hands of English capitalists, who competed with settler merchants in North America.
In a context where profits depended on the expropriation of Native land and slave labour, the 1763 Royal Proclamation prohibiting colonists from settling lands west of Appalachia inflamed tensions.
New taxes, such as the Sugar Act and Currency Act of 1764 and the 1765 Stamp Act, further reduced the settlers' profits in favour of the Crown.
Facing dispossession, most Native Americans chose to fight alongside the British during the "Revolutionary War", judging that victory for the racist colonists would bring even greater devastation. Tens of thousands of them died fighting for the British, while white colonists targeted Indigenous communities allied with the Crown, destroying towns, killing thousands and expelling entire communities.
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Both the northern colonists and the British Crown promised enslaved Black people freedom if they joined their respective armies. Upwards of 20,000 joined the British, including the Ethiopian Regiment in Virginia, after Lord Dunmore, the royal governor, promised them freedom in a proclamation in November 1775 if they joined the British to quell the brewing settler rebellion. They bore the inscription "Liberty to Slaves" on their chests.
It was the 1772 anti-slavery court ruling in London, in a case involving a Virginia-purchased slave, James Somerset, who was set free, that infuriated white slave-owning settlers in the 13 North American colonies and accelerated their anti-British revolt.
The Dunmore Proclamation was the culmination of this process - a historical progression of abolitionism that rendered the settlers' quest for independence, according to historian Gerald Horne, "a counterrevolution of slavery".
Adamant in their commitment to slavery, the white settler rebels, urged by the "founding father" James Madison, mandated in their 1788 US Constitution (Article IV, Section 2, Clause 3) that enslaved fugitives who had joined the British be "delivered up" to their US owners.
As for the independent Americans, only 5,000 enslaved and free Black people served with them - as cooks, labourers, spies and soldiers - and most were returned to slavery after the war.
Among the rebel southern colonies, by contrast, Virginia, Georgia and the Carolinas promised land and a slave to white male volunteers who fought the British. After the British defeat, thousands of the formerly enslaved who had joined them were settled in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone.
Liberty for settlers
British incitement of enslaved Black people to rebel against the independence-seeking colonists, which so horrified another founding father, Thomas Paine, would be denounced in the Declaration of Independence, which stated that the king "has incited domestic insurrections against us".
Historian Tyler Stovall concludes that the "American war for liberty thus became equally a war for slavery," and that "the American Revolution was a war fought for the right to enslave others in the name of liberty."
This white supremacist basis of the US republic became law in 1790 in the first Naturalization Act, which limited the right to citizenship to any "free white person" resident in the country for two years and their children under the age of 21.
For Paine, the enemies of independence were the enemies of white settler colonialism. He warned: "Ye that oppose independence now, ye know not what ye do; ye are opening a door to eternal tyranny, by keeping vacant the seat of government. There are thousands, and tens of thousands, who would think it glorious to expel from the continent, that barbarous and hellish power, which hath stirred up the Indians and Negroes to destroy us, the cruelty hath a double guilt, it is dealing brutally by us, and treacherously by them."
The "us" Paine invokes excludes "Indians" and Black slaves. The latter constituted about 20 percent of the 2.5 million inhabitants of the newly independent US. Although he opposed slavery and recognised the theft of Indigenous lands, Paine's call for American independence remained rooted in white supremacy, omitting both enslaved groups as irrelevant to the colonists' pursuit of independence.
The British commissioned a rebuttal in the form of an "Answer to the Declaration of the American Congress", by John Lind, a young lawyer and pamphleteer. In his "Answer", Lind mocked the hypocrisy of the white colonists who proclaimed their commitment to the equality of all mankind while keeping enslaved Africans in chains.
The English abolitionist Thomas Day was harsher: "If there be an object truly ridiculous in nature, it is an American patriot, signing resolutions of independency with the one hand, and with the other brandishing a whip over his affrighted slaves."
Manifest Destiny
In 1783, the US issued the Northwest Ordinance, opening lands north of the Ohio River and the Great Lakes to white colonial settlement - territories from which the British had barred them.
Historian Jeffrey Ostler sees the ordinance as the start of official US genocidal policies against Native Americans, noting that its Article 3 asserts that "Indians" shall not be "invaded or disturbed" except in "just and lawful wars authorized by Congress".
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Indigenous resistance to this land theft served as the pretext for genocidal campaigns in the Northwest Territory from 1787 to 1832. Ostler argues that the 1832 genocide was "an intended consequence of a policy option that had been codified in New York City forty-five years earlier". This paved the way for President Andrew Jackson's 1830 "Indian Removal Act".
All of this was rooted in the Christian idea of "Anglo-Saxon" uniqueness - a racialised term applied to all white colonists and their descendants, who were believed to descend from Teutonic tribes.
Their supposed white superiority was seen as a justification for territorial expansion and the subjugation of "inferior" races, forming the core of the popularised mid-19th century project of "Manifest Destiny".
According to some estimates, one-third of the colonial population were loyalists who opposed independence. About 4 percent of the white colonial population - some 100,000 people - fled the 13 colonies by boat, taking 15,000 enslaved people with them during and after the "American Revolution". Half went to Nova Scotia, while the rest dispersed across Britain, the Caribbean and their original European homelands.
They sought refuge from severe persecution by the revolutionaries, including the loss of life and property, and discriminatory laws that remained on the books until 1812.
This severe repression neutralised many of the loyalists who remained after the Revolution, helping institutionalise the narrative of independence from British "tyranny".
The mythology endures
That the story of American independence continues to be told by nationalist US historians and their followers, the jingoist corporate media, and the ruling political and economic class as a story of "freedom" is an affront to the millions oppressed by those who presided over the American republic-turned-empire.
That the history of this republic is one of a century of slavery followed by a century of apartheid; that women were denied suffrage for a century and a half; that Indigenous Native Americans became citizens only in 1924 and could not truly vote until after 1948, and in some states until after 1955, all seem inconsequential to these ongoing celebrations.
The terror of McCarthyism in the 1950s, the repression of the student and civil rights movements in the 1960s, and their continuation today make no appearance in this mythology of America's "freedom".
Neither does America's imperialist slaughter of tens of millions of civilians across the globe since World War Two, not least the Iranian schoolgirls murdered in cold blood just a few months ago.
Rather than calling on America's citizenry to celebrate a regime that historically oppressed most of them and seeks to oppress more in the future, as Trump and Obama do, critical historians, journalists, activists and oppositional politicians must insist on condemning the white-supremacist, sexist and classist project of the founding fathers and disavowing them once and for all as the anti-freedom crusaders that they were - seeking freedom exclusively for white Anglo-Saxon property-owning and slave-owning men.
It is the millions of Americans who resisted, and continue to resist, this oppressive system in the hope of bringing about a veritable democracy who must be celebrated on the Fourth of July, not the system that oppresses them.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
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