 And my topic is that I gave Hans is the Curse of American Exceptionalism. And I'm working on a book on the political economy of war. And this is something I read across that I'm going to include in there. And there's not a lot of economics in what I'm going to have to say today, even though I'm an economist. But I keep trying to be more like Murray Rothbard and be interdisciplinary. And so I'm going to talk about American Exceptionalism. There are at least two different views of this. Phenomenon. And one of them basically says that one of the reasons why Americans might be exceptional is that once upon a time it was a relatively free society compared to many other places in the world. And that allowed a lot of good things to happen, a lot of entrepreneurial innovation, a big civil society, and so forth. But that view of American Exceptionalism was long ago eclipsed by a very different view. And a very different view is sort of an imperialistic view, a very arrogant view that Americans are exceptional. And that gives them the right to pretty much order other people around, all around the world. There's a bumper sticker in the United States that some libertarians are selling that says, do as we say, or we will bring democracy to your country. And that view of American Exceptionalism is what has prevailed for decades now in America. And even if you watch American news shows, television shows with the talking heads nowadays, and they're talking about politics, the kiss of death to a political aspirant, someone who aspires to get elected office, is to have one of the big shot talking heads say, he doesn't believe in American Exceptionalism, that you're dead meat, you can't get elected to Congress if they say that. And let me give you some examples of the rhetoric of American Exceptionalism. Abraham Lincoln was one who started this out. He claimed that the U.S. government, which essentially meant him because there are historians, American historians who are pro-Lincoln historians who call him a dictator, but he was a good dictator, they say. And he's called the U.S. government, quote, the last best hope of earth. Fast forward to Ronald Reagan. He claimed that America is the result of a divine plan to create a shining city on a hill. So he claimed to know what was in the mind of God. And God told him that he has a divine plan. Reagan, again, into the hand of America, God has placed the destinies of an afflicted mankind. Of course, Reagan himself probably didn't write that. It was one of his neo-conservative speechwriters who wrote this sort of thing. George W. Bush. We have a calling from beyond the stars to stand for freedom. Yet again, God told me. It was George W. Bush, by the way, when he ran for president, he said he was sitting in church one day and God spoke to him and told him to run for president. He actually said that. Bill Clinton, somebody else who talks to God a lot. United States is indispensable to the forging of stable political relations in the world. And of course, we see these stable political relations on display today in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, and places like that. Journalist named Michael Hirsch, who's one of the big spokesmen for the regime, said he talked about United States primacy in one of his articles. And the translation of that is imperialism, primacy, imperialism. United States primacy is the greatest gift the world has received in many, many centuries, possibly all of recorded history. And then finally, Dick Cheney, the former vice president and American defense secretary, just came out with a new book about a month ago. And the title is exceptional. And I think the subtitle is something like why America must rule the world or something like that. But here's one from the first page, page one. We are, as a matter of empirical fact and undeniable history, the greatest force for good the world has ever known. Okay, so these are examples of the rhetoric of American imperialism. And all of this, all of this, all of these things by Lincoln, Cheney, Bush, Clinton, they were all set in the context of proposing to bomb somebody, some war. I tell people when you hear these American politicians, when they start quoting Abraham Lincoln, somebody somewhere in the world is gonna be bombed. Because that's always used as the moral authority, you know, the moral authority. In a Wall Street Journal article by Dick Cheney some years ago, he advocated the invasion and conquest of Iran, Libya, Syria, Lebanon, and North Korea. And I think the title of the article, this is when Bush was president, was Lincoln and Bush. He made the argument in the Wall Street Journal, well Abe Lincoln would probably, if he was alive today, he would do this. So therefore it must be the thing to do, of course. So the rest of my time, I wanna spend, talk about the history of this idea. Where did this idea come from in America that Americans somehow are the most morally superior people on earth and therefore have a right to rule over the whole planet? This is a very old idea. It comes from the New England Puritans, basically. It never was all Americans. It has a pedigree. And I'm gonna quote several of my favorite authors on this. Clyde Wilson, Forrest McDonald, who's a well-known American historian. Thomas Fleming, who's not the paleoconservative Thomas Fleming, but the famous author of The New Dealers' War and 50 Other Books, and also Murray Rothbard on this topic. Clyde Wilson wrote about this, and he referred to it as the Yankee problem. And a Yankee in America started out as a particular type of New Englander. It wasn't just somebody who lived in the Northern States, the Northern part. It was a particular type of person who was dominant in that part of the United States. And here's what Clyde Wilson says. These people are that particular ethnic group descended from New Englanders, who can easily be recognized by their arrogance, hypocrisy, greed, lack of congeniality, and pension for ordering other people around. Puritans long ago abandoned anything that might be good in their religion, but have never given up the notion that they are the chosen saints whose mission is to make America and the world into the perfection of their own image. Hillary Rodham Clinton, raised a Northern Methodist in Chicago, is a museum quality specimen of the Yankee. Self-righteous, ruthless, and self-aggrandizing. Then he goes on to say, the Yankee temperament, it should be noted, makes a neat fit with the Stalinism that was brought into the deep North. He's talking about New York City, New England, by later immigrants. And in the 1950s, in New York City, there was sort of a communist cult that was known as, there was bread, and they were known as the red diaper babies, or parents were all Stalinists, and that's who he's referring to. Clyde Wilson again, right up to the American Civil War, Northerners who were opposed to the conquest of the South blamed the conflict on fanatical New Englanders out for power and plunder. So there were a lot of people in the Northern States who recognized that these Yankees, so-called, were a problem. And Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American writer, became, says Clyde Wilson, the American philosopher who proclaimed the American to be the new man. This all reminds me of Soviet man during the Cold War, the Russians thought communism would create a new socialist man. And finally, by Clyde Wilson, anything that stood in the way of American perfection must be eradicated. This includes liquor, tobacco, the Catholic Church, the Masonic Order, meat-eating, eating meat, and marriage. And so what he's referring to is there were cults of these divisions of these, that's so-called Yankees, the New England Yankees, who crusaded against all of these things in for vegetarianism, against marriage, and so forth. Now, Clyde Wilson is not the only one. Forrest McDonald, I said he's very well known, he's retired now, American historian. The National Endowment for the Humanities once gave him an award as the most prestigious historian in America. So he was quite a renowned American academic in his day. And he wrote about these same people. He's in the same idea, this American exceptionalism idea. He said this, the first thing to understand about the Yankee, he is a doctrinal Puritan characterized by what William McLaughlin has called pietistic perfectionism. Unlike the Southerner, he is constitutionally incapable of letting things be, of adopting a live and live attitude. No departure from his version of the truth, and the truth is capitalized, is tolerable. And thus when he finds himself amid sinners, as he invariably does, he must either purge and purify the community, or join with his fellow saints and go into the wilderness and establish a new Jerusalem. The Yankees embraced totalitarian republicanism, Forrest McDonald said, and thought thereby to establish God's kingdom on earth. So man, God needed help from man to establish his kingdom on earth. Men had to do it. He goes on to say the Yankees, they're always wrong. And yet they are always utterly certain and utterly impervious to argument, end quote. And this passage reminded me of a book by Thomas Sowell called The Vision of the Anointed. And in this book by Thomas Sowell, The Economist, he goes chapter after chapter after chapter, has different public policy topics, crime, economic policy, and he does chapter and verse of a particular issue is where the interventionists, if you will, are wrong, whether you call them liberals, leftists, whatever you're gonna call them, they're wrong and their policies are proven to be counterproductive for decades and decades, but they never ever admit that they were wrong ever. And that's the theme of Sowell's book, The Vision of the Anointed. And that's also what Forrest McDonald is referring to here. And he goes on to say because of this attitude, the Yankee has a great deal of suppressed anger and hostility by becoming soldiers for Christ and warring against the unregenerated people of the world they could vent their anger and aggression suppressed for so long. Oliver Cromwell as the Yankees prototype, seek the heathen out, give him a chance to save himself by embracing the prevailing truth. And if he rejects the opportunity, then run him through with a bayonet. That's a much more fanciful way of saying that bumper sticker that I alluded to. Do as we say or we will bring democracy to your country. And so, and then he goes on, finally concludes by saying the Yankees so-called form the backbone of the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln and ever since, ever since then. I just quoted Dick Cheney and Reagan and these people claiming God has spoken to them and told them his purpose. Okay, now Thomas Fleming, he's the author of 50 books including a good anti-war book called The New Dealers' War. And his latest book is called A Disease in the Public Mind, A New Understanding of Why We Fought the Civil War, the American Civil War. And he touched upon this whole, this same thing, this idea of American exceptionalism and its roots in this, in basically New England, the Yankees, so-called Yankees. He said in the 1860s, the so-called Yankees were dominated by 25 or so wealthy and influential people who had abandoned Christianity. They condemned Jesus Christ and in his place, they embraced a man named John Brown as their savior. I call him the mentally ill John Brown who declared himself to be a communist. And he adopted a mantra that blood must be shed and lots of it to eradicate all sin from America and the world. And so, and of course John Brown became a hero to the Northern side of the American Civil War as he went on a sort of a murderous rampage in the state of Kansas. And then he made his way to West Virginia where he broke into a, he and his band of followers broke into an arsenal, a federal government arsenal to attempt to steal firearms all in the name of ending slavery. And he was apprehended and hanged eventually. But that's the sort of thing he was doing and he's sort of a terrorist. And William Lloyd Garrison was also a famous newspaper editor. He edited the New York Tribune, which is the biggest newspaper of the day during this era. He was a follower. He said, the prevailing attitude was that these people were inclined to believe in the moral depravity of anyone who disagreed with them. Okay, and Thomas Fleming goes on to say that these people were insanely jealous of Southerners in America who did not go along with their ideology. He said they denounced them for decades as quote, guilty of foreign forgivable sins, violence, drunkenness, laziness, and sexual depravity. He says, this is all strikingly familiar to the public frenzy that gripped Massachusetts during the witch trials. These are the same people who accused women in Massachusetts of being witches and tied them down and set them on fire in the 1600s. That's where some of these people came from. Fleming also writes of the spectacular hypocrisy of the New Englanders who rediscovered the sacred American Union after they tried to secede from the Union after Thomas Jefferson was elected. Now moving on to Murray Rothbard. Murray Rothbard wrote about the same phenomenon. In his essay, Just War, he recognized the exact same things that the North's driving force during this war was the Yankees. So that ethno-cultural group who either lived in New England or migrated from there to upstate New York, northern and eastern Ohio, northern Indiana, northern Illinois in the United States, had been swept by a new form of Protestantism. He said this was a fanatical and emotional neopuritanism driven by a fervent post-millennialism which held that as a precondition for the second advent of Jesus Christ, man must set up a thousand year kingdom of God on earth. So he was pretty much saying the same thing that was recognized by force McDonald and Clyde Wilson that this attitude was man must eradicate all sin because only then can we be saved and go to heaven. And that's what motivated the so-called Yankees who waged the American Civil War. And then after the American Civil War, of course, this idea spread to saving the whole world. How hypocritical could we be just saving America? How selfish of us to just save America from sin? We must save the whole world from sin. And Woodrow Wilson was a pietist, by the way. The man who inserted the United States into World War I was a part of his tradition. He was a post-millennialist pietist from Virginia. The kingdom, and Murray Rothbard goes on to say, the kingdom is to be a perfect society. In order to be perfect, this kingdom must be free of sin. Sin therefore must be stamped out as quickly as possible. Moreover, if you don't try your darndest to stamp out sin by force, you yourself will not be saved. It was very clear to these neo-puretans, Rothbard wrote, that in order to stamp out sin, government in the service of the saints is the essential coercive instrument to perform this purgative task. As historians have summed up the views of all the most prominent of these millennialists, government, quote, and he quotes these historians, government is God's major instrument of salvation. And so that fits in, doesn't it? With those quotes that I read at the beginning from Cheney and Abe Lincoln and Bush of claiming to know what's in God's mind. And this is one of the reasons why the American Civil War, these all these men said, partook of this, this all of massive death and destruction and the waging of total war on civilians. The more blood the better, John Brown said. And then when it was all over, a pietist named Julia Ward Howe wrote a song about it at the Battle Hymn of the Republic and called all the death and destruction, the glory of the coming of the Lord. And my eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord is the first words of that song. I remember being forced to sing that every morning in elementary school in the state of Pennsylvania where I grew up, even 100 years after the war was over. Another person who, a very famous author who recognizes the roots of this American exceptionalism idea was the author Robert Penn Warren. Now Robert Penn Warren is probably most famous for his novel, All the King's Men. He wrote 19 other novels and in 1960, he was asked to write a book on the legacy of the Civil War, the American Civil War, which he did. And it's a very interesting little book. And the main point he makes on this topic in this little book, The Legacy of the Civil War, is this. He says, the war left the Yankees, so-called Yankees, with a treasury of virtue. Okay, he says, this is the, I'm quoting him. This is the psychological heritage left to the North. The Northerner with his treasury of virtue feels redeemed by history. He has in his pocket not a papal indulgence peddled by some wandering partner of the Middle Ages, but an indulgence, a plenary indulgence for all sins past, present, and future. They saved the Union, they ended slavery. Well, everyone else in the world ended slavery too. The British ended slavery, the Spaniards, the French, the Dutch, the Swedes, but only the Americans have some sort of special favor from God because they eventually did it. They were the only ones who did it unpeacefully, by the way. Also, there was no massive war when Britain ended slavery in the British Empire. Only in America was there a war associated with it. And so Robert Penn Warren goes on to say that this moral narcissism was the justification for the Crusades of 1917 to 1918, and 1941 to 1945. So this moral narcissism that came out of the American Civil War, the Yankee ideology, was the justification for American entry into World War I, and I would argue all other wars, all other military interventions to this very day that the US government is involved in and has been involved in. And he also, there's a whole section of Robert Penn Warren's little book on what must be forgotten. We must forget almost all of real history in order to deify not only Abe Lincoln, but the whole regime that came out of the American Civil War. I'll just read a little bit of it. It is to be forgotten that the Republican Party platform of 1860 pledged protection to the institution of slavery where it existed, and that the Republicans in 1861 were ready to guarantee slavery in the South as a bait to return to the Union. It must also be forgotten that Lincoln in his 1858 speech said, quote, I am not or ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races. So you have to forget all of this, not only the rhetoric, but the actions of Lincoln himself and the American regime during the Civil War, and you have to believe in this myth that has been perpetrated by the American state about the deification of the American state. Finally, Robert Penn Warren, he says, armed with these myths, most Americans are, quote, prepared to see the Civil War as the fountain head of our power and prestige among the nations, among the nations. And when I reread that in preparing this little talk, it reminded me also of when Musharraf declared martial law in Pakistan, who did he quote as justification, well, Abe Lincoln, of course. He said, Abe Lincoln did it in America during their Civil War, therefore, it must be morally right for me to do this. Now, there always has been what economists call a bootlegers and Baptist connection here. That is, there's these ideological imperialists, what do you call them, Yankees, or American exceptionalists, or whatever. They've always been joined in with businessmen who saw money in this, okay? And it's called Bootlegers and Baptists, my old friend Bruce Yandel, the economist. He wrote about alcohol prohibition in America in the 1920s. The two groups that were for it were bootlegers, people who illegally sold alcohol because they made money in it. And the Baptists, that was just a sort of a general term to describe religious people who were against to drinking of alcohol for religious reasons, okay? And so you always had the pietists, these people who wanted to save the world and force our values and everybody else. And then you've got the military industrial complex who understands there's a lot of money in this. And they've always joined together in the United States. That's why you have people like Reagan and Cheney and Clinton and Bush all quoting, or their speechwriters quoting Abe Lincoln and claiming God tells us to intervene in the world. We're the biggest force for good and all that. And of course, the military industrial complex cheers them on. And so among some of the good they've done, the latest updated research on the American Civil War is that the death count may have been as much as 850,000. For 100 years, the historians thought it was 620,000. But the newer forensic research has led to our understanding that it was as much as 850,000. And this was a time when the population of the United States was about one-tenth of what it is today. So a few standardized for today's population would be the equivalent of eight and a half million people dying in just under four years in a civil war. And then as soon as the war was over, the US government turned to Indian genocide, which I talked about here on this stage a few years ago, one of my talks, where in order to make way for the transcontinental railroads, they massacred at least 60,000 of the American Indians. And then there was the Spanish American War to civilize the Filipinos by killing them. And the conquest of Hawaii. And then the Filipino insurrection, where the Americans' military killed at least 200,000 Filipinos in order to give them democracy. And Theodore Roosevelt, the president, Theodore Roosevelt, called the peace advocates, you know, there were many, there was a great opposition to this, of course, but the opposition did not prevail. And Teddy Roosevelt called the peace advocates, quote, senile idiots and unhung traitors. And traitors would not be hung, hanged, okay? And he warned of what he called the menace of peace. And he said, he also said this, the United States must intervene when a nation failed to behave. Isn't that almost perfectly the same as that bumper sticker I mentioned too? Do as we say or we will bring democracy to your country. And all of this, of course, is why Bill Crystal claims that Teddy Roosevelt is his favorite Republican president in all of history, is the neocon Bill Crystal. And one other thing that Teddy Roosevelt said was, quote, all the great master races have been fighting races. He said, of course, he never did much fighting himself. He had his picture taken on a horse a few times after the Spanish-American War, but, and he used to shoot wild game in Africa. But that's pretty much, he was quite the crazy man. When he was president, this is a true story, he would get on his horse at daybreak and ride through a neighborhood called Rock Creek Park in Washington, D.C., which is still a park, with a pistol shooting wildly into the air, pretending he was a cowboy. And one day he had somebody put a wire across the Potomac River and he would grapple his way across the Potomac River. There was a president of the United States at like six o'clock in the morning, making his way across his wire across the Potomac River. And when he was asked why he would do such a thing, he said he thought his wrists needed strengthening. And a true story, kind of a crazy man, elected president. And so the same story, after the Filipino insurrection, World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, today's Middle East, it's all based on this idea of American exceptionalism. And so this is why I'm working on this book on the political economy of war and I'm planning a couple of chapters on the advocates of war and people who use ideology to instigate wars, and this is gonna be a part of it. And this has been going on for a very long time. And so, and of course, this has been noticed by people around the world for a very long time. You know, how could they not know and how could the Filipinos not notice this or are all of the victims of American imperialism. And so I'm gonna end with a short quote from by Otto von Bismarck, who once said, God has a special providence for fools, drunks, and the United States. I think these are the people he was referring to. Not all Americans, but these people, the Yankees, so-called. And that's my time is up, a half hour is taken up.