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IT’S appropriate that the masks are off as the US marks its semiquincentennial on Saturday. Many of the fairytales about liberty, equality and democracy, perpetuated across the centuries as an exceptional nation’s founding myths, lie shattered at the altar of autocracy.
Ironies abound. The founding myths of America suggest that the war of independence was chiefly about banishing the tyranny associated with British colonial rule. Yet, as the nation turns 250, it wallows in the shadow of a would-be tyrant. There is resistance now as there was then, but this time the malaise is self-imposed.
Even back in 1776, the triumph extended beyond the justifiable demand for ‘no taxation without representation’ to the right to retain slaves. Slavery would not be abolished for nearly 90 years, following a civil war that cost up to 750,000 lives. The mildly hopeful period of Reconstruction that followed entailed a horrific backlash. Exactly 100 years separated the Emancipation Proclamation of 1865 from the Voting Rights Act of 1965, seen as the culmination of a civil rights movement whose hard-gained achievements are being reversed by an administration dedicated to the concept of white supremacism.
In 1852, called upon to deliver an Independence Day oration, the celebrated African-American intellectual Frederick Douglass informed his largely white audience: “What to the American slave is your fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him … the ... injustice and cruelty to which he is the ... victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy licence; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are ... heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and ... thanksgivings … mere ... hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes... .
Who can confidently say that worse might not lie ahead?
“There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.”
That powerful diatribe still rings true. It was 125 years later that another great orator, Martin Luther King Jr, described his country as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today”. King was assassinated precisely a year after that 1967 speech, in which he also declared: “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defence than on programmes of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”
Many nations fall in that depressing category, but none of them even remotely approaches the $1.5 trillion demanded for America’s inefficient war machine, with supplementary billions sought for Donald Trump’s Iranian misadventure.
Meanwhile, Princeton historian Eddie Glaude’s book America, USA: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, published just five weeks ago, begins with the brutally honest sentence: “I do not love America, and never have, especially now.” Alongside race, one can’t ignore the disparities of gender and class.
The resistance against these trends is best encapsulated in Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. Over the decades, victories have been accompanied or followed by monumental defeats. On the international front, Chalmers Johnson’s American Empire trilogy offers evidence of imperial disasters during the so-called Pax Americana.
It would be unfair to say that America has no redeeming features. A few politicians might serve as counter-examples, alongside a plethora of authors, poets and musicians — most of the latter ancestrally linked to enslaved Africans and Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. Until recently, the US could boast of reputedly outstanding educational institutions. But, in many respects, progress is going down the drain, with an open war against diversity, equity, inclusion, women’s rights, freedom of speech and peaceful resistance. Any clarifying approach to history is now effectively verboten.
It’s inconceivable that official historians will reflect on the genocide of Native Americans that accompanied independence, the brutal legacy of slavery, the wars of conquest that sliced off half of Mexico and appropriated much else, the support for military dictators and other tyrants, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the unrelenting efforts to control or crucify freedom-seeking forces across the Global South, the depredations inflicted on Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and now Iran, and the backing that has enabled Israel to perpetrate a genocide.
One could assume that with some of its worst instincts on display under Trump, the US has ascended to the apogee of its malevolence at home and abroad. But who can confidently say that worse might not lie ahead? For the moment, it should suffice to echo Douglass from 174 years ago: “This Fourth July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.”
Published in Dawn, July 1st, 2026
