A Heritage of Hypocrisy

Front Cover
Pleasant Mount Press, Inc., 2005 - 324 pages
In the dark says since the attack on the World Trade Center, the question that many Americans have asked is: Why? Why do 'they' hate us as they do? Is it, as our leaders would have us believe, because they hate our freedom? To understand what others find objectionable in us, we must take a long and brutally honest view of how we act, versus what we like to say about ourselves. The facts, as this book demonstrates, are incontrovertible: Our history is an unbroken progression of atrocities, betrayals of trust, and abuses of the rule of law, both to our global neighbors as well as our own citizens. Since the arrival of the first settlers, we have cheated and swindled, committed the most sweeping genocide in history (100,000,000 members of the indigenous populations), attacked civilian populations with nuclear weapons, promoted conflicts at home and abroad, supported brutal right-wing regimes, bullied those weaker than us, and performed gruesome experiments on the most defenseless of our own citizens: poor southern blacks, retarded teens, and pregnant women. These, sadly, are the facts, and are what others see when we say our proud slogans about peace and promoting democracy. But who among us is actually responsible for this ignominious state of affairs? As Perni argues, all of these iniquities can be traced to three sources: big business, fundamentalist, right-wing Christians, whom he characterizes as our own domestic Taliban, and a corrupt government that serves the corporations while manipulating the easily swayed voters.

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Contents

Introduction
3
The Civil War
19
The SpanishAmerican War
35
World War II
53
The Korean Conflict77
77
The McCarthy Witch Hunts
97
U S Rejection of World Court
117
Panama and Manuel Noriega
131
HIV
169
A Dictionary of American Intervention
193
Business as Usual
231
Capital Punishment
247
The Hague Draft Rules of Aerial Warfare
255
The Franck Report
269
McCollum Memo 8 points for provoking Japan into war
283
Andrew Jacksons Second Annual Message
297

MOVEBombing Citizens in Philadelphia
149

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