6 shitty things the US government is responsible for
6 shitty things the USA has done that will turn your idea of history upside down
Few people are surprised by the fact that the United States has done some shady crap, but the extent of our crappy dealings might be news to some. It's important to look at the shitty parts of history if we are going to learn and grow. This article won't mention the big stuff like slavery, invading Mexico or nuking Japan—everybody already knows about that, and attacking the really obvious flaws is never that interesting. It's the little things. For example:
1. We screwed over a bunch of revolutionary war veterans
Mistreatment of veterans might sound to most people like a recent problem. And it is a serious problem in contemporary US society, but the tradition of screwing over men who fought for the United States has gone back almost since before the country was…a country. Many veterans were offered land west of the Appalachians after the war. Transporting crops from there back east was difficult over the mountains, so many frontiersmen distilled their crops into whiskey which was easier to transport, and which they also used as currency. The whiskey tax imposed by congress was often ruinous to small-time farmers, which actually prompted a rebellion and a creation of a new state where furs and whiskey were legal currency. The rebellion was crushed by Washington though, and while Jefferson eventually repealed the tax years later during his presidency, the poor veteran farmers were left to languish for years.
https://www.ttb.gov/public_info/whisky_rebellion.shtml
http://northcarolinahistory.org/encyclopedia/state-of-franklin/
2. Bullied Japan into international trade
The Japanese usually enter into American history books with the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, which caused the Unites States to enter WW2. But our mutual history goes back farther, to about the 1850's when Commodore Mathew Perry, on the behalf of the US government, sailed into Tokyo harbor and demanded that the Japanese open trade to the US. Otherwise, the Japanese would have to face the modernized United States' navy, which owing to the centuries-long Japanese shunning of modern technology would have been a slaughter.
http://afe.easia.columbia.edu/special/japan_1750_perry.htm
3. Annexed Nicaragua
The 1840's and -50's were a time of expansionist ambition for the US, as can be seen with the better-known invasion of Mexico in 1846, when in what now seems like a very ironic turn of events, the vast number of US citizens illegally immigrating into Mexican territory in Texas helped make tensions between the two countries worse. But Mexico wasn't the only Central/South American country that Americans had their eyes on. It became common practice for private citizens, called filibusterers, to invade and annex Caribbean and Central American nations with ambiguous federal support. One such example is William Walker, who led an expedition to Nicaragua in 1855 and ruled the country for about two years. Eventually most of the locals had turned against him and support from the government dwindled. He had to leave, and a few years later when he attempted to re-enter the country he was promptly captured and executed.
https://history.state.gov/milestones/1830-1860/territorial-expansion
4. Concentration camps in the Philippines
During the Spanish-American war, the United States destroyed Spain's grasp on the Philippines, a fact which made Filipinos very happy due to their suffering at the hands of the Spanish for years. Initially the Filipinos thought that the US was on their side in throwing off the shackles of oppression and helping restore Filipino liberty, to which the US officially fidgeted nervously and responded "of course that's what we're helping you to do…" After the Spanish presence was dealt with, the US soon placed their own shackles of oppression on the island instead, in a brutal crackdown against the military and the people in the Philippines that would last more than a decade. Among the atrocities that the US forces committed were the slaughter of entire villages of innocent women and children, as well as the establishment of concentration camps where thousands of people were imprisoned and starved. At the end, the US forces had killed more Filipinos in 15 years than the Spanish had in 300 years of occupation.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jason-ditz/remembering-a-forgotten-o_b_3447598.html
http://www.worldfuturefund.org/wffmaster/Reading/war.crimes/US/U.S.Philippines.htm
5. Supported fascist regimes (oil to the Nazis)
Until earlier this year, it may have seemed that being anti-Nazi would be a given for most Americans and even US official policy. Not only does that fall on its ass given recent developments, but also a quick read of business transactions during and around the time of WW2 reveals that a lot of businessmen and government officials at the time were sort of lukewarm on the whole Nazi issue. One shining example is GM Ford, which had factories running in Nazi Germany and helped manufacture several types of German war vehicle. Bradford Snell, who spent decades researching the business dealings of the time, even claimed that "The Nazis could have invaded Poland and Russia without [the banks in] Switzerland. They could not have done so without GM." This gets even darker when you realize that Henry Ford was the only American mentioned in Hitler's Mein Kampf by name, where Adolf even says that he regarded Ford as one of his greatest inspirations.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/daily/nov98/nazicars30.htm
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/religion/the-dark-legacy-of-henry-fords-anti-semitism-commentary/2014/10/10/c95b7df2-509d-11e4-877c-335b53ffe736_story.html?utm_term=.f61c804876db
6. Supported fascist regimes part 2 (strong-armed United Nations into accepting Franco's Spain)
The idea of the US being an anti-fascist liberation force that fought Germany to free the world from tyranny is easy to maintain since, after all, we ended up winning the war in 1945. But the shady business dealings with the Nazis before the war weren't the end of it. While Spain was neutral during the war, Franco, who had just won a civil war and established a fascist regime in his own country, was closely aligned with Hitler and Mussolini. When the Axis was defeated, Franco remained, and because of Spain's neutral status no Allied forces made their way down there to topple the fascist government. Being the last bastion of Authoritarianism in Western Europe didn't sit very well with, well, the rest of Europe, and Spain was not allowed to join the United Nations. This changed in 1955 when the US, in exchange for use of air bases on the Iberian Peninsula, forced the UN to accept Spanish membership. Franco would remain in power for the next 20 years, and US aid to the fascist government in Spain would continue for the entire time.