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Q. How does the US destabilize foreign countries?A. Lots of leftist propaganda here. Analysis later. Welcome comments. Ultimate question - United States is force for good? What would the world be like without the US as the dominant power?How the American Empire Is Destabilizing the Globe – Just World Order – MediumUnited States involvement in regime change - WikipediaMapped: The 7 Governments the U.S. Has Overthrown (Foreign Policy)Destabilizing The Middle East: A Historical Perspective of US Foreign Policy (dailyjournalist.com)When Will the US Military End its Pattern of Destabilizing Entire Regions? (the Nation)How the American Empire Is Destabilizing the Globe – Just World Order – MediumJun 7, 2017The Risk of Nuclear War Is GrowingBrett S. MorrisThe One Thing Causing Climate Change No One Wants to Talk AboutBrett S. MorrisIt’s Time to Talk to North KoreaBrett S. MorrisThe United States is the world’s greatest threat to world peace. That was the opinion of 24 percent of respondents to a global poll conducted by WIN/Gallup International in 2013. Trailing behind the United States was Pakistan with 8 percent, China with 6 percent, and North Korea, Iran, and Israel all tied with 5 percent.Where does this perception come from? It can’t be Trump, as this poll was conducted years before his ascension to power, though he has surely increased this perception with his bellicose rhetoric and threats. No, this poll was conducted during the years of Obama, a president who was relatively popular abroad compared to his immediate predecessor and successor and from a party supposedly more dovish than the hawkish Republicans.Many Americans still cling to a mythology about their country being “the leader of the free world,” carrying on the tradition of being “a city upon a hill,” first proclaimed by John Winthrop, the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. In reality, the United States has an appalling record of violence and aggression dating back to its founding, but especially since the end of World War II, when the United States emerged as the world’s leading superpower.“We have about 50% of the world’s wealth but only 6.3% of its population…In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment,” noted George Keenan, one of the primary postwar planners, in State Department policy planning documents in 1948. “Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security.”This “pattern of relationships” over the course of the Cold War consisted of support for numerous right-wing dictatorships that suppressed the aspirations of the local population for a more just and equitable distribution of wealth, as well as supporting numerous terrorist and insurgent groups against left-leaning governments. The pretext given for U.S. military and covert interventions was to prevent the spread of “communism,” supposedly an evil conspiracy directed from Moscow to dominate the globe and wipe out democracy.In reality, most of the movements labeled as communist by the United States were largely concerned with achieving independence and democratic control over local resources and were usually represented by the vast majority of each respective country’s population. In its quest to stop communism, the United States was actually waging a war on independence and democracy—in many cases literally overthrowing democratically elected governments—to serve the interests of U.S.-based corporations and banks.Latin America was particularly devastated by U.S. interventions during the Cold War. In 1954, the Eisenhower administration orchestrated a coup against the democratically elected government of Jacobo Árbenz after he instituted badly needed land reform and other social democratic measures, such as introducing a minimum wage and expanding voter rights. United Fruit, a U.S.-based corporation, was unhappy with the loss of “their” land in Guatemala to Guatemalan peasants and lobbied the U.S. government to overthrow Árbenz.After the coup, a brutal civil war erupted between the U.S.-backed dictatorship and rebel groups seeking to establish a government that would serve the interests of the poor majority. The Historical Clarification Commission, established at the war’s end, found that U.S.-backed security forces were responsible for more than 90 percent of the atrocities that occurred during the war, which included:The killing of defenceless children, often by beating them against walls or throwing them alive into pits where the corpses of adults were later thrown; the amputation of limbs; the impaling of victims; the killing of persons by covering them in petrol and burning them alive; the extraction, in the presence of others, of the viscera of victims who were still alive; the confinement of people who had been mortally tortured, in agony for days; the opening of the wombs of pregnant women, and other similarly atrocious acts.The pattern repeated itself elsewhere in the region: In Cuba, the United States began a campaign of sabotage and economic strangulation after Fidel Castro’s movement took power in 1959 and overthrew the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista.In Brazil, the Johnson administration assisted in overthrowing the democratically elected government of João Goulart in 1964. (“We ought to take every step that we can, be prepared to do everything that we need to do” to get rid of him, as Johnson said.) The administration backed the newly installed right-wing military government with its policies of widespread torture repression.In Chile, the Nixon administration supported the overthrow of the democratically elected Salvador Allende in 1973, and supported the dictator Augusto Pinochet, who presided over the torture and killing of tens of thousands of Chileans.Nicaragua and El Salvador were targeted by the particularly savage policies of the Reagan administration. The leftist Sandinistas were elected in 1984 on the basis of popular programs that they instituted after their revolution against the U.S.-backed Somoza dictatorship in 1979, including programs that dramatically expanded access to health care and reduced the illiteracy rate from 50.3 percent to 12.9 percent. The Reagan administration endeavored to punish the Nicaraguan people by funding and arming a right-wing terrorist group known as the Contras, who were “major and systematic violators of the most basic standards of the laws of armed conflict, including by launching indiscriminate attacks on civilians, selectively murdering non-combatants, and mistreating prisoners,” as Human Rights Watch documented. (Reagan considered the Contras “the moral equal of our Founding Fathers.”)In El Salvador, the Reagan administration provided the Salvadoran government and military forces with more than $4 billion in its war against leftist guerrillas, which killed 75,000 people. The vast majority of atrocities (85 percent) that occurred during the war were committed by U.S.-backed forces, according to the truth and reconciliation commission. In El Mozote, for example, the U.S.-trained Atlacatl Battalion raped and tortured hundreds of people before exterminating everyone and burning the village to the ground.Other regions of the world were similarly devastated. In the Middle East, the Eisenhower administration overthrew the democratically elected government of Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran because he had nationalized the oil industry, upsetting the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (now BP). In Afghanistan, the Carter and Reagan administrations supported the fanatical extremists known as the mujahideen to keep the Soviets bogged down in an “Afghan trap” and destroy Afghanistan’s most progressive government in its history, which had declared equality of women and instituted literacy and health programs.But perhaps no region was as ruined by U.S. intervention during the Cold War as Indochina — Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. The United States was determined to keep the right-wing dictatorship in South Vietnam in power, which ultimately resulted in millions dead. Over the course of the war, the U.S. military dropped 7.5 million tons of bombs on the region, as well as 400,000 tons of napalm and 19 million gallons of herbicides. Beyond the direct devastation these bombings caused, they also aided in the rise of the Khmer Rouge, as the previously marginalized insurgent group gained support from peasants who were angry over the effects of the bombings. They went on to kill a further 1.7 million people in the Cambodian genocide. Decades later, people are still suffering and dying as a result of the war. Tens of thousands of people have been killed or injured since the war’s end from “unexploded ordnance” — bombs that did not explode when initially dropped. Many of the victims are children, who pick up the small, round-shaped munitions known as “cluster bombs” because they believe they are toys. Diseases and birth defects continue to be passed down through the generations as a result of the spraying of Agent Orange and other herbicides.Interventions since the end of the Cold War have been conducted on some other pretext. Since 9/11, it has often been terrorism. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 was justified in part on Iraq’s fictional ties to al-Qaida and its supposed responsibility for 9/11. The invasion and occupation resulted in the deaths of a million Iraqis, as well as spawning the terrorist group ISIS. The interventions in Afghanistan and Libya have been similarly devastating.The system of American hegemony is maintained in various ways. First, the United States maintains a massive military budget that far surpasses any other country’s on the planet — $611 billion, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, more than the next eight highest spenders combined (most of which are U.S. allies anyway) and accounting for more than a third of the total worldwide military spending.Second, the United States maintains a system of military bases around the globe — a modern empire — that allow the United States to project its power. According to the Defense Department’s Base Structure Report, the United States maintains 587 “sites” — ranging in size from small buildings to sprawling bases with living quarters, gyms, and restaurants — in foreign countries (the total increases to 700 if we include U.S. territories like Puerto Rico and Guam). More than 199,000 military personnel are deployed to these bases abroad. No other country in the world has anything remotely comparable.Another way the United States dominates the world is through arms exports. The United States exports more weapons to others than any other country, accounting for 33 percent of the world’s total. (Russia is second with 23 percent.) Its chief client is the theocratic dictatorship Saudi Arabia, which has been using American weapons to slaughter thousands of innocent civilians in Yemen.The U.S. system of global hegemony achieved through military dominance and violence results in horrendous consequences for innocent people worldwide as well as potentially destabilizing the planet in even worse ways. The trillion-dollar nuclear “modernization” program launched by the Obama administration “creates exactly what one would expect to see, if a nuclear-armed state were planning to have the capacity to fight and win a nuclear war by disarming enemies with a surprise first strike,” as analysts for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists point out, causing Russia and other nuclear powers to take countermeasures.The violence perpetuated by the United States abroad and its support for brutal dictatorships often returns home in the form of terrorism, as Western intelligence agencies and academics have amply documented. “Muslims do not ‘hate our freedom,’ but rather, they hate our policies,” as the Pentagon’s Defense Science Board noted in a 2004 report: “American actions and the flow of events have elevated the authority of the Jihadi insurgents and tended to ratify their legitimacy among Muslims.”Given the immense cost of maintaining a modern empire, Americans must ask themselves if this is the moral and wise thing to do. Both major political parties are committed to it, though the Republicans tend to be somewhat more militaristic (the Trump administration being particularly bellicose). The financial cost is obvious, and the massive military budget is one reason Americans lack the basic social services that other comparable countries have, such as a national health system. The network of bases, arms exports, and support for dictatorships wreaks havoc, generates resentment and violence in return, and quite literally increases the risk for human extinction due to the dangerous nuclear modernization programs.Such issues are usually not on the ballot box. Even Bernie Sanders, the most viable populist candidate to be on the national stage in a century, opted to emphasize mostly domestic issues in his campaign. However, these issues could be on the ballot box if Americans educate themselves on them and demand that they be addressed.Brett S. MorrisWriter whose work has appeared in Jacobin, Vox, and CounterPunch. Email: [email protected]. Patreon: Brett S. Morris is creating freelance writing | Patreon.United States involvement in regime change - WikipediaUnited States involvement in regime change has entailed both overt and covert actions aimed at altering, replacing, or preserving foreign governments. In the latter half of the 19th century, the US government undertook regime changeactions mainly in Latin America and the southwest Pacific, and included the Mexican–American, Spanish–Americanand Philippine–American wars. At the onset of the 20th century the United States shaped or installed friendly governments in many countries including Panama, Honduras, Nicaragua, Mexico, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic.In the aftermath of World War II, the US government expanded the geographic scope of its regime change actions, as the country struggled with the Soviet Union for global leadership and influence within the context of the Cold War. Significant operations included the US and UK-orchestrated 1953 Iranian coup d'état, the 1961 Bay of Pigs Invasion targeting Cuba, and support for the Argentinian Dirty War, in addition to the US's traditional area of operations, Central America and the Caribbean. In addition, the US has interfered in the national elections of many countries, including in Japanin the 1950s and 1960s to keep its preferred center-right Liberal Democratic Party in power using secret funds, in the Philippines to orchestrate the campaign of Ramon Magsaysay for president in 1953, and in Lebanon to help Christian parties in the 1957 elections using secret cash infusions. The US has executed at least 81 overt and covert known interventions in foreign elections during the period 1946–2000.Also after World War II, the United States in 1945 ratified the UN Charter, the preeminent international law document, which legally bound the US government to the Charter's provisions, including Article 2(4), which prohibits the threat or use of force in international relations, except in very limited circumstances. Therefore, any legal claim advanced to justify regime change by a foreign power carries a particularly heavy burden.Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the United States has led or supported wars to determine the governance of a number of countries. Stated US aims in these conflicts have included fighting the War on Terror as in the 2001 Afghan war, or removing dictatorial and hostile regimes in the 2003 Iraq War and 2011 military intervention in Libya.Mapped: The 7 Governments the U.S. Has OverthrownThe era of CIA-supported coups dawned in dramatic fashion: An American general flies to Iran and meets with “old friends”; days later, the Shah orders Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh to step down. When the Iranian military hesitates, millions of dollars are funneled into Tehran to buy off Mossadegh’s supporters and finance street protests. The military, recognizing that the balance of power has shifted, seizes the prime minister, who will live the rest of his life under house arrest. It was, as one CIA history puts it, “an American operation from beginning to end,” and one of many U.S.-backed coups to take place around the world during the second half of the 20th century.Several national leaders, both dictators and democratically elected figures, were caught in the middle of the U.S.-Soviet Cold War — a position that ultimately cost them their office (and, for some, their life) as the CIA tried to install “their man” as head of state. The U.S. government has since publicly acknowledged some of these covert actions; in fact, the CIA’s role in the 1953 coup was just declassified this week. In other cases, the CIA’s involvement is still only suspected.The legacy of covert U.S. involvement in the seven successful coups below (not to mention a number of U.S. military interventions against hostile regimes and U.S.-supported insurgencies and failed assassination attempts, including a plan to kill Fidel Castro with an exploding cigar), has made the secret hand of the United States a convenient bogeyman in today’s political tensions. Even now, despite waning U.S. influence in Cairo, conspiracy theories suggesting that both the Muslim Brotherhood and the military-backed government are in cahoots with the United States abound in Egypt.Here’s a brief history of the confirmed cases of the CIA’s globe-spanning campaign of coups.Iran, 1953: Despite continued speculation about the CIA’s role in a 1949 coup to install a military government in Syria, the ouster of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh is the earliest coup of the Cold War that the U.S. government has acknowledged. In 1953, after nearly two years of Mossadegh’s premiership, during which time he challenged the authority of the Shah and nationalized an Iranian oil industry previously operated by British companies, he was forced from office and arrested, spending the rest of his life under house arrest. According to the just-declassified CIA-authored history of the operation, “It was the potential … to leave Iran open to Soviet aggression — at a time when the Cold War was at its height and when the United Sates was involved in an undeclared war in Korea against forces supported by the U.S.S.R. and China — that compelled the United States [REDACTED] in planning and executing TPAJAX [the code name of the coup operation].”Guatemala, 1954: Though the United States was initially supportive of Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz — the State Department felt his rise through the U.S.-trained and armed military would be an asset — the relationship soured as Árbenz attempted a series of land reforms that threatened the holdings of the U.S.-owned United Fruit Company. A coup in 1954 forced Árbenz from power, allowing a succession of juntas in his place. Classified details of the CIA’s involvement in the ouster of the Guatemalan leader, which included equipping rebels and paramilitary troops while the U.S. Navy blockaded the Guatemalan coast, came to light in 1999.Congo, 1960: Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of the Congo (later the Democratic Republic of the Congo), was pushed out of office by Congolese President Joseph Kasavubu amid the U.S.-supported Belgian military intervention in the country, a violent effort to maintain Belgian business interests after the country’s decolonization. But Lumumba maintained an armed opposition to the Belgian military and, after approaching the Soviet Union for supplies, was targeted by the CIA once the agency determined he was a threat to the newly installed government of Joseph Mobutu. The Church Committee, an 11-senator commission established in 1975 to provide oversight of the clandestine actions of the U.S. intelligence community, found that the CIA “continued to maintain close contact with Congolese who expressed a desire to assassinate Lumumba,” and that “CIA officers encouraged and offered to aid these Congolese in their efforts against Lumumba.” After an aborted assassination attempt against Lumumba involving a poisoned handkerchief, the CIA alerted Congolese troops to Lumumba’s location and noted roads to be blocked and potential escape routes. Lumumba was captured in late 1960 and killed in January of the following year.Dominican Republic, 1961: The brutal dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo, which included the ethnic cleansing of thousands of Haitians in the Dominican Republic and the attempted assassination of the president of Venezuela, ended when he was ambushed and killed by armed political dissidents. Though the gunman who shot Trujillo maintained that “Nobody told me to go and kill Trujillo,” he did in fact have the support of the CIA. The Church Committee found that “Material support, consisting of three pistols and three carbines, was supplied to various dissidents…. United States’ officials knew that the dissidents intended to overthrow Trujillo, probably by assassination…”South Vietnam, 1963: The United States was already deeply involved in South Vietnam in 1963, and its relationship with the country’s leader, Ngo Dinh Diem, was growing increasingly strained amid Diem’s crackdown on Buddhist dissidents. According to the Pentagon Papers, on Aug. 23, 1963, South Vietnamese generals plotting a coup contacted U.S. officials about their plan. After some fits and starts plus a period of U.S. indecision, the generals seized and killed Diem on Nov. 1, 1963 with U.S. support, which by some accounts partially came in the form of $40,000 in CIA funds.“For the military coup d’etat against Ngo Dinh Diem, the U.S. must accept its full share of responsibility,” the Pentagon Papers state. “Beginning in August of 1963 we variously authorized, sanctioned and encouraged the coup efforts of the Vietnamese generals and offered full support for a successor government…. We maintained clandestine contact with them throughout the planning and execution of the coup and sought to review their operational plans and proposed new government.”Brazil, 1964: Fearing that the government of Brazilian President Joao Goulart would, in the words of U.S. Ambassador Lincoln Gordon, “make Brazil the China of the 1960s,” the United States backed a 1964 coup led by Humberto Castello Branco, then chief of staff of the Brazilian army. In the days leading up to the coup, the CIA encouraged street rallies against the government and provided fuel and “arms of non-US origin” to those backing the military. “I think we ought to take every step that we can, be prepared to do everything that we need to do,” President Lyndon Johnson told his advisors planning the coup, according to declassified government recordsobtained by the National Security Archive. The Brazilian military went on to govern the country until 1985.Chile, 1973: The United States never wanted Salvador Allende, the socialist candidate elected president of Chile in 1970, to assume office. President Richard Nixon told the CIA to “make the [Chilean] economy scream,” and the agency worked with three Chilean groups, each plotting a coup against Allende in 1970. The agency went so far as to provide weapons, but the plans fell apart after the CIA lost confidence in its proxies. U.S. attempts to disrupt the Chilean economy continued until Gen. Augusto Pinochet led a military coup against Allende in 1973. The CIA’s official account of the seizure of power on Sept. 11, 1973, notes that the agency “was aware of coup-plotting by the military, had ongoing intelligence collection relationships with some plotters, and — because CIA did not discourage the takeover and had sought to instigate a coup in 1970 — probably appeared to condone it.” The CIA also conducted a propaganda campaign in support of Pinochet’s new regime after he took office in 1973, despite knowledge of severe human rights abuses, including the murder of political dissidents.J. Dana Stuster is a policy analyst at the National Security Network.Destabilizing The Middle East: A Historical Perspective of US Foreign Policy(I wrote the first version of this essay in June 2014. I decided to update it partly because of some elements of neo-isolationist proposals from the Republicans Party and presidential candidate Trump who claimed that Obama and Clinton were the founders of ISIS. More importantly, I see a downward spiral in US foreign policy whether the White House is under a Democrat or Republican administration.)IntroductionFrom 1953 when the CIA staged a coup in Iran to topple the democratically elected government of Mohammad Moddeq in 1953 until the Obama administration’s endeavors to replace the Assad regime in Syria, destabilization has been at the core of how the US policy toward the Middle East. US destabilization policy is not a post-9/11 phenomenon that can be defaulted to the ‘war on terror’ nor is it an aberration from US foreign policy and the mainstream media and various analysts claim.Regardless of warnings by neo-isolationist and anti-interventionist critics that the costs of such destabilization policies rooted in counterinsurgency operations and militarism are unsustainable for the economy, the US is unlikely to change course in the near future not only because such policies serve certain corporate interests in the US and Europe, but because the political culture in the US is immersed in a ‘military-solution mode’ to political crises in developing nations and especially the Middle East.Neo-conservatives advocating the preservation and expansion of Pax Americana and neoliberals interested in securing global market share for US and EU-based multinational corporations realize the gradual decline of the West amid the ascendancy of East Asia. In 1918 Oswald Spengler warned about the decline of the Western World. Europe’s decline took place because of the wars of Imperialism (1880-1914) that led to WWI, followed by the Great Depression and WWII. Inadvertently, Europe’s decline in the first half of the 20th century helped to propel US global ascendancy by leaving a global power vacuum after 1945. The US is not in a comparable position as post-WWII Europe. Nor does the ‘social cycle theory’ of repeating cycles of historical patterns adequately explain the complexities and uniqueness of the global power structure in the 21st century. Peter Turchin, Historical Dynamics: Why States Rise and Fall, 2003)The demise of the Soviet bloc and rise of Asia with China at the core of the world economy and the inevitability of global power shifts at a time of relative US economic decline actually coincided despite academics, media and politicians alike celebrating America’s winning the Cold War and enjoying ‘the peace dividend’. All indications are that the ‘American Century’ is winding down, though this does not mean the US would lapse very far from the core of the world economy in the evolving cycle that Asia will dominate.Cycles of rising and declining empires are nothing new in history. People who live through such cycles hardly notice the subtle changes that appear to evolve at a snail’s pace; a theme developed by Fernand Braudel in his analyzing the transition from the feudal/manorial structure to capitalism (La Méditerranée et le Monde Méditerranéen à l’Epoque de Philippe II (1949). Militarism and destabilizing policies are archaic policy modes of a declining empire from the Roman Empire to the British Empire. Despite losing its global power status after WWII, Great Britain for example remained militaristic as a NATO member. The irony in transitions of global power shifts is that the entrenched elites in the declining country revert to militarist policies of the past when the country enjoyed preeminent power that the economy could support. The reason is not only ideological but it also serves the privileged interests of the political and socioeconomic elites to preserve the status quo.Naturally, policies that have been successful when a country is at the zenith of its power will actually hasten the decline simply because the economy cannot sustain the costs thus irreparably damaging the civilian economy. This is exactly the case of the US that experienced the zenith of its power during the Truman administration but began the long road to decline shortly after the Suez Crisis of 1956-1957 when the IMF secretly warned the Eisenhower administration that the dollar as a reserve currency was artificially overvalued because of chronic balance of payments deficits. Despite the warning that Eisenhower issued regarding the dangers of the military-industrial complex absorbing capital from the civilian economy and weakening the US, this monster dictating foreign policy remained alive and well, determining in large measure US foreign policy no matter the scope of the crises it has been creating since the early Cold War.The driving force behind US foreign policy has been to maintain the economic, political and social status quo at home by keeping its hegemonic role in the world. This is a foreign policy that the US adopted from the mother country – the sort of Empire as a Way of Life, as William Appleman Williams argued when explaining the historical continuity in US foreign affairs from the early years of the Republic until the Vietnam War. Destabilization as a modality of foreign policy in essence serves a multifaceted purpose, everything from maintaining the imperial network with military bases throughout the world and regional alliances, to securing a global market share and keeping the dollar as the dominant reserve currency. Above all, it serves to maintain the status quo at home by placing security above social justice and the need to address social justice and economic justice issues of the citizenry.Post-Cold War Crisis ConvergenceThe post-Cold era was supposed to mark the triumph of American capitalism and its hegemonic role in the world – hyperpuissance as some French analysts labeled the US to describe its comprehensive superpower status. The end of the Soviet-American confrontation did not mean the end of US-Russian rivalry but rather its revival through client states allied with one side or the other. This was inevitable as the US and Western Europe scrambled to secure former Soviet republics into the Western political, economic and strategic zones of influence.Crisis convergence in the Ukraine and the Middle East during the Obama administration posed challenges for US foreign policy and its future prospects as the world’s policeman since the early Cold War. This seemingly irresolvable crisis with millions of victims in the theaters of military operations also demonstrates glaring contradictions and credibility gap in US foreign policy not just today, but as a historical phenomenon that has been evident since the early Cold War. This is not to suggest there is no logic to the Truman Doctrine for the time it was promulgated in 1947 amid the Greek Civil War and US goal of creating a security zone across Greece, Turkey and Iran (Northern Tier) to make sure that the Middle East remains free of Communist influence and the oil keeps flowing West.Similarly, there is an imperial logic to the strategy of “Military Keynesianism” introduced during the Truman administration (increased defense spending that would in turn result in broader economic growth) as part of a containment strategy of the Communist bloc and the acquisition of nuclear weapons by Russia that led to the arms race. However, there is a price to be paid for remaining the world’s number one military power and pursuing an interventionist foreign policy as leverage for global economic hegemony when the dollar as a reserve currency is so artificially high for more than half a century and the public and private sector debt undermines the real economy. The result is the inevitable relative economic decline of the US in relationship to East Asia and Europe, and the four-decade decline of the American middle class.In the post-Communist era (the New World Order), US foreign policy is impractical given the status of the economy and its prospects. Sailing in turbulent ocean without any sense of direction or realism of where it wishes to go and for what purpose and resting on the foundations of a manufactured ‘war on terror’ that has only been expanding without any end in sight, US foreign policy has nowhere to go except to anachronistic Cold War models. Containment of Russia, a policy with roots in 19th century Britain and France, combined with US-NATO attempts to deny Moscow any role in influencing the balance of power in the Middle East and even with its own neighboring states have proved unsuccessful and costly for the West. This is partly because Russia is nearly self-sufficient in natural resources. Moreover, China that may have an interested in a weaker Russia than when it was part of the USSR cannot permit the weakening of its neighbor to the degree that it would afford the US and NATO hegemony in Eurasia.The situation in the Ukraine clearly poses challenges for Russia’s regional strategic interests that the US and its EU partners have been working to undermine during the second term of Obama’s presidency. Although there was no military solution for the situation in the Ukraine, just as there was none for Syria, which Russia, China and Iran supported, the US and its EU partners, especially Germany and Poland, pursued covert military means to bring down a corrupt pro-Russian government only to have it replaced by an equally corrupt pro-West billionaire totally dependent on the West for everything from military to economic assistance.In the absence of reaching an agreement with Moscow on natural gas supply and a host of other economic and strategic issues, as well as protection of the Russian-speaking minority, the Ukrainian crisis was as hopeless a failure for the Obama administration as regime change in Syria, even if Bashar al-Assad ultimately leaves as the US demands. As the power behind the client regime in Kiev, the US refused to reconsider a confrontational course reviving the Cold War that was destructive for the vast majority of Ukrainians given the horrible state of the economy and state finances. Western sanctions on Russia have proved a two-edged sword impacting Europe’s low-growth economies as well. Given the political opposition to any Keynesian measures to stimulate economic growth, the only course of action to stimulate growth amid a relative slump since the great recession of 2008 has been to increase defense spending, justifying on the basis of the threats that Russia and jihadist terrorism pose. Eventually the EU and the US will return to the negotiating table once there is no choice other than pursuing a political solution because the costs are too great to withstand.Similarly, the US is not backing down on the reckless military solution it has been pursuing in Syria, a manufactured civil war crisis that in June 2014 spilled over to Iraq and threatened regional stability even more than it was prior to the US and its European and Middle East allies trying to secure Syria as a Western satellite. Why has the US been pursuing destabilizing policies toward the Middle East and Ukraine? If the answer is containing Russia and Iran to determine the balance of power in the Middle East then the question is whether destabilization of existing regimes is the best course of action.I do not subscribe to theories that the people conducting US foreign policy are asleep at the wheel, dumb, uncreative, and lack the experience of their brilliant critics inside and outside of the US government. Nor are policymakers and professional diplomats implementing detrimental policies to US interests because they lack common sense. Foreign policy bipartisan consensus has been the rule rather than the exception since Truman, bringing into account geopolitical as well as corporate interests. The US has opted for covert operations, destabilization and militarism as a first option when dealing with developing countries while a multilateral approach that involves the United Nations has largely been a last resort only when it was absolutely necessary and the outcome favoring the US.Only when there was no other way but to negotiate a political solution with tangible political, military, and economic advantages, as in the case of the deal with Iran on the development of nuclear weapons, have the US and its partners abandoned the military option and destabilization policy (March-April 2015 – Permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany). The ‘Iran—P5 + 1 deal’ proved that the people conducting and implementing US policy follow certain perimeters and conforming to guidelines from top down after political consensus is reached between government and disparate business interests that stand to gain either by a military or political solution to US policy. While one cannot disregard ideological reasons behind US policy, invariably they serve to justify military/strategic and economic interests that play a catalytic role.Causes of Destabilization in the Middle EastThere are many causes that account for instability in the Middle East both internal and external. One long-term external cause stems from the fact that in 1916 the European colonial powers drew the regional map arbitrarily to serve their geopolitical and economic interests, rather than permit any sort of self-determination for the people affected in artificially-created nation-states. As the Ottoman Empire had lapsed into an economic dependency of Europe unable to retain control of its Arab provinces after the Greek War of Independence in 1821, England and France reduced the Middle East into economic dependency. In 1916, the French and British governments drafted the Sykes-Picot Agreement that drew the map of the Middle East along Europe’s neo-colonial interests. The Treaty of Serves in 1920 formalized the end of the Ottoman Empire and forced the Turks to renounce any claim in the Middle East and North Africa where the European imperialist powers had already laid claim.Despite the wish of some Arabs throughout the the 20th century for solidarity if not unity, pro-Western Arab rulers and a comprador bourgeoisie were content with neo-colonial conditions. At the same time, the Western European, Israeli, and American governments have been undermining any chance of Arab solidarity. However, the main sectarian divisions, which predate Western interventions, remain a major internal cause of regional instability. Besides tribal identity, religious fanaticism does extraordinary things to the human mind, including driving people to sacrifice themselves while taking down their brothers and sisters in suicide bombings. Added to religious sectarianism that has fanatics on all sides embracing military solutions, there are tribal and ethnic identity issues intertwined with alliances based on the cult of personality and clientist relationships built around it.Although there is no clash of Civilizations (Samuel Huntington, 1996) inherent between Islam and the Christian West that is divorced from political, military and economic motives on both the colonial powers and colonized, the concept of national identity is very different in Iraq, Libya and Yemen than it is in Norway, Canada or Germany. In the Middle East, alliances and alignments with disparate interests from the socioeconomic elites to the military are complex and often contradictory. In part, this is because capitalist integration entails broader societal integration in the culture while maintaining strong ties to Islamic institutions and traditional identity. This is evident not just in Turkey struggling to keep the legacy of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (founder of the Republic of Turkey and modernizer during the interwar era) but also Egypt once a non-aligned leader under Gamal Abdel Nasser where the Muslim Brotherhood and the military have long-standing historic roles influencing society. Authoritarian regimes based on consensus of domestic elites and foreign alliances have been the mechanism to keep society together in most countries.Another chronic source of division is the gap that exists between the Muslim-based culture, values system and way of life opposed to the forces of modernity identified with the increasingly xenophobic Christian West which is more materialistic/hedonistic in practice and much less spiritual than its religious and political leaders proclaim. Modernity encompasses everything from science and technology necessary for material progress and the ability to remain competitive in the world, to consumerist culture and value system that help to buttress capitalism in the age of globalization.It is difficult to adjust to the modern economic system that creates a middle class and materialistic values while clinging to traditional values and institutions rooted in religion at the core of society. This ideological clash was evident in Arab Spring uprisings in the first half of the 2010s and it continues to manifest itself among political opposition groups. Clearly, governments use Islam as a means of social conformity and political manipulation just as Western countries have used religion as a conformity mechanism. For example, under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey has been playing the Muslim card by forging a coalition of nationalists looking back to the glory of the Ottoman Empire and counterbalancing the entrenched Kemalist elements.Another cause of internal divisions in the Middle East is directly linked to perpetual foreign influences through international financial and trade organizations, including the International Monetary Fund that promotes austerity and neoliberal policies resulting in wealth concentration and rising rich-poor gap. Geopolitics and political motivations primarily by the US have determined IMF and World Bank lending policies geared to open domestic markets to Western corporations. (J. Harrigan and H. El-Said, Aid and Power in the Power in the Arab World: IMF and the World Bank Policy-based Lending in the Middle East and North Africa, 2014). Along with the impact of economic integration that benefits a few wealthy nationals and foreign corporations, covert and overt military intervention by the US and its NATO partners has historically kept the Middle East structurally underdeveloped even in oil-rich nations.Largely because of the importance of oil and Israel’s regional role that the US identifies historically with its own national interest, the influence of Western powers has been much higher in the Middle East than any other part of world. During the era of the non-aligned bloc when Nasser’s Egypt played a major role in the 1960s, nationalism and Arab autonomy gained some momentum but it was short-lived both because of regional and Western influences undermining it. As a nationalist reaction to the domestic (comprador) bourgeoisie and US support of the puppet Shah regime, the Iranian Revolution of 1979 was as much a reaction to the West as the non-aligned despite the heavy reliance on Islam as a catalyst on the part of Iran.The M idle East-North African reaction to the hegemonic West continued to manifest itself with regimes that embraced strong nationalist leaders that the US adamantly opposed. Although under a corrupt dictatorship, Libya under Muammar al-Qaddafi was relatively stable as was Syria and Iraq when compared with what took place after US-Western military intervention. With all of his considerable shortcomings as a dictatorial leader, Qaddafi had managed to forge a popular consensus since 1969 and kept the country unified; a challenging task as history proved after the US, France and the UK toppled the Qaddafi regime and left the country deeply divided and in perpetual chaos in every sector from the political arena to the economy.This is not to say that Libya’s population was enjoying social justice and human rights before 2011. However, neither did Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States that the US and its EU allies have been supporting. Of course, it is now well documented that much of the funding sources for what the US identifies as Islamic terrorism originated in Saudi Arabia, while Qaddafi was secretly working with Western intelligence to combat jihadists in his country and abroad. Choosing what regime to overthrow and what regime to preserve was never about freedom and democracy, but about economic, political, and military advantages accruing to the West.In the years after the US-NATO intervention in 2011, justified supposedly on the basis of enforcing a 1973 UN Security Council resolution, Libya remained chronically unstable. Suffering a marked absence of any human rights, Libya’s national sovereignty surrendered to the West and its prospects for economic development that would help its population were much worse than under Qaddafi. Worse of all, the country was reduced in a semi-civil war conditions with regional-local-tribal divisions and political violence raging on, and thousands of people trying to cross the sea over to Europe as refugee that Europeans do not want. Jihadist activity, symptomatic of the US-NATO intervention considering that the US and its allies assisted to remove Qaddafi from power with jihadist collaboration, backfired on the West and its puppet regime in Tripoli. The West found itself having to assist its newly-acquired satellite militarily to combat ‘domestic terrorism’ that Western destabilization (regime change) policy emboldened, while Italy was left to deal with Libyan refugee problem that became a European-wide political issue impacting British voters’ decision to leave the EU.Like Libya, Egypt is now under a façade of a democratic regime, a very thin facade. The BBC was correct to label General el-Sisi’s regime something of a giant company running the country on the basis of a corrupt and decadent clientist system with ties to foreign corporations. As of August 2016, the IMF struck a deal with this corrupt regime to bring about austerity and neoliberal policies that would in fact transfer even more income from the lower classes to the wealthy. Everything from basic foodstuffs to utilities is much higher, adding to the political turmoil that the pro-Western regime has created. Even the pro-business magazine Fortuneheadline betrayed the ugly truth of what the IMF is doing in this poor country: In Egypt, IMF Deal Brings Austerity Few Can Afford. (fortune.com/2016/08/20/imf-egypt-austerity-consequences)Following the Egyptian uprising of 2011 that set off Arab Spring, the US proclaimed that it was on the side of popular democracy and against authoritarianism. Like Libya, Egypt surrendered its sovereignty along with any trace of social justice, merely because this was the way to survive for the Sisi government and it was what the US and its allies demanded. The West refused to accept the Islamic Mohammed Morsi regime that took power in June 2012 and deposed in July 2013 by the armed forces and army chief General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. The Islamic Brotherhood which Morsi represented was marginalized and repressed even more than it was under Mubarak, while the human rights situation is no better than it was before Arab Spring.What has taken place in Egypt under General el-Sisi is hardly much different in terms of forging a democratic facade than what existed under Hosni Mubarak. It is true that the ultimate goal of the US and its EU partners was to create more opportunities for multinational corporations and not have the economy under the tight control of Mubarak’s cronies. However, the assumption is that more globalization under neoliberal policies would benefit the majority of the people and strengthen the national economy; assumptions that have proved totally false as much in developing nations as in the advanced capitalist countries. Therefore, we have in Egypt as much a suppressed minority situation as in Libya with lesser commitment to democracy and human rights than what existed under the previous authoritarian regimes.Both Libya and Egypt are in this current state of affairs in part because of deeply divided social-political groups but also owing to US-EU interference, with the participation of Saudi Arabia and some of the Gulf States. In both Egypt and Libya the end result was that the people were much worse off after the formation of pro-Western regimes than they were before Arab Spring that the West manipulated to make sure a pro-West regime secures power. Largely because of covert and overt foreign intervention, all of North Africa and the Middle East became far less stable than it was before Arab Spring.This is not to suggest the futility of popular uprisings or a Western conspiracy is operating in the Middle East, but rather a systematic US-NATO policy intended to keep the region politically, economically, and strategically subservient to the West, and its natural resources and markets secure. This precludes any attempt at national sovereignty Nasser-style of the 1960s, or Iranian style that resists integration under the ‘patron-client model’ with the hegemonic West. It further means denying Russia and China the region as a sphere of influence, and maintaining a containment policy toward Iran. In short, US destabilization policy makes perfect sense if one considers that its goal is to keep the region dependent on the West as it has been since the Sikes-Picot agreement in 1916.US invasion of Iraq and its Consequences1. As the British ‘Chilcot Inquiry Report’ (July 2016) made very clear, blatant lies on which the US and UK invaded the country, namely: a) Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and b) There was a link to al-Qaeda, when it was well known that the al-Qaeda organization was made up primarily of Saudis with which the Bush family as well as a number of well-connected Republicans had multi-billion dollar interests. The real reasons were the oil reserves, the US obsession to counterbalance Iran, and strengthen the defense industry in which Republicans and Democrats had personal financial interests. It is interesting to note, that the US defense and intelligent budgets skyrocketed as a result of this war combined with Afghanistan, while the US economy continued losing ground to China.2. War and occupation destroyed Iraq, resulting in millions of people displayed as refugees spread through neighboring nation s and others fleeing for the West. During the occupation, US forces committed war crimes, but the International Court has not dared to charge any US official. Just as the US destroyed Vietnam where it committed war crimes, and just as Vietnam has taken many decades to rebuild and it is still in the process of doing so, similarly it will take many decades to rebuild Iraq that the US and UK left in ruins. Yet, there is no talk about helping with the reconstruction of Iraq as there was with Japan, Germany and Italy after WWII; only about dividing and exploiting Iraq’s oil reserves and using the country as a strategic satellite.3. US tax payers paid for a war in order to advance the profits of Republican party-linked corporations in which the Bush family, Dick Cheney, Jim Baker, Donald Rumsfeld and others in the Republican administration were connected to corporations such as the Carlyle Group and Halliburton that defrauded the US government of millions of dollars in contract work in Iraq. This is the same Halliburton against which Nigeria filed corruption charges against Cheney as CEO, and the same company that was partly responsible for the Deep Horizon oil disaster in autumn 2010. This does not mean that Democrats, including the Clinton Foundation, have been above the money that influenced Republicans in their pursuit of a militarist foreign policy.4. Before the US-UK invasion of Iraq was not among the top 20 most corrupt countries in the world, but it advanced to the number #2 spot during the occupation! The US reduced the country into a concentration camp where corruption was the way of doing business. Focused only on oil and counterbalancing Iran, the US was unable to do anything with Iraq other than leave a devastated country that its people must rebuild.5. The issue of federalism and/or breaking up Iraq was one that concerned American politicians, think tanks, journalists, and academics after the US invaded. The question is why? While the Kurdish population has historically wanted autonomy, the US has never been interested in this minority group, otherwise it would demand that Turkey also submit to some type of federalist system. The goal is to keep Iraq weak and dependent on the US so that it can exploit its oil and counterbalance Iran, while also determining the regional balance of power.Iraq and Afghanistan represent the twilight of Pax Americana, the last vestiges of an imperial democracy operating on a foreign policy based on a predominantly Protestant missionary pretext about the White Anglo-Saxon Christians ‘saving’ the weaker dark-skinned non-Christian brethren whose land just happens to have natural resources that the West needs, and it just happens to be located in a place of strategic interest. The larger issue here is the credibility gap in US foreign policy, considering that ISIS would not exist if it were not for the US and its allies trying to remove Assad from power. ISIS was made possible by the US and its allies, including Sunni-dominated Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia.US Divide and Conquer Policy in Syria and IraqTo demonstrate the logic of US destabilization policy, greater analysis is needed on the multifaceted reasons for US-led interference and intervention. Demonizing the US and the West, deflecting focus from internal political problems and regional conflicts owing to religious, political, and geopolitical reasons, or implying that the US and its allies are solely responsible for all the divisions among Muslims who are no different than Christians when it comes to sources of divisions does not explain underlying policy motives. By the same logic, modern versions of “White Man’s Burden” theories intended to blame the victim of imperialism as the Israelis blame the Palestinians for the latter’s chronic subjugated condition hardly reflects the realities of very complex problems.Having engaged in many wars since the founding of Islam, Muslims are not strangers to conflict in the last fourteen centuries; not much different in this respect than Western Christians who undertook the crusades (1095-1291) not just for the glory of God, but trade routes that Arabs and Byzantines controlled. In so far as wars go, it is Christians who have been responsible for some of the bloodiest conflicts from the era of the Crusades to the present, mostly against each other over land, ethnicity, spheres of influence, military, and political hegemony. The ‘Sacking of Constantinople’ and the creation of the Latin Empire (1204-1261) proved that the Western crusaders were in the last analysis more after land, trade, and power and much less for the glory of God.It is hypocritical for Western politicians, the media and analysts that reflect mainstream views to argue that Muslims create political problems entirely on their own for no apparent reason other than the historic Shiite-Sunni differences, innate personal traits rooted in Islamic culture, or the whole Middle East-West conflict is rooted in a clash of civilizations owing to religious/cultural issues.There were no Muslims during the Vietnam War when the US became involved in a covert war (CIA operations via AIR AMERICA) in Laos and Cambodia and backed the Khmer Rouge because Washington was losing the military conflict with North Vietnam. Just as the US created a catastrophic situation in Cambodia because of its covert operations intended to win the unwinnable Vietnam War, similarly, almost half a century later the US has created another monstrous mess in the Middle East. This is in part because it has been trying unsuccessfully to determine the regional balance of power where Iran is at the core in the region.One result of US destabilization policy is the Jihadist offshoot of al-Qaeda known as ISIS (Islamic State in Iraq and Syria). Part of the blame for the people failing to unite behind their governments must go to the corrupt and divisive regimes in Damascus and Baghdad for pursuing clientism and crony capitalism that neglect to serve the broader public interest. In this sense, Western critics are correct to argue that governments in question ultimately have the responsibility for their policies that only feed sectarianism and social strife. At the same time, however, it is reprehensible that Washington, London and apologists of Western imperialism without any sense of historical context and self-criticism insist that the ongoing civil war and rebel activity is a problem solely created by the Arab political leadership and disparate factions. Without the money, guns and ammunition, political support, and covert operations to facilitate such rebel operations intended to secure the goal of regime change how far would ISIS succeed in carrying out its operations?No one should be surprised at the arrogance of Western politicians and well-paid consultants and analysts echoing official policy when it comes to the Middle East and victim blaming which is official policy in Israel regarding the Palestinian Question and adopted by both Republican and Democrat politicians and the US media. This is archaic imperialist mindset applied by the West to the non-Western World dating back to the era of European colonialism. The Nixon administration, which created the tragedies of Laos and Cambodia in the 1960s and early 1970s, turned around and condemned the very monstrosity it had created, blaming the very people it had been supporting against Vietnam. Even more hypocritical, the US covertly cooperated with the Khmer Rouge remnants during the Reagan administration at a time that the US was castigating terrorist activity by Iran, a country with which it also secretly collaborated in order to undermine Nicaragua’s duly-elected regime.In November 1986, the world discovered that the US had made an arms sales deal to Iran to finance the Nicaraguan Contra rebels and in exchange for release of US hostages held by Lebanese-based Hezbollah. Despite the numerous legal violations, including the Boland Amendment (1982-1984) prohibiting arms sales to the contras, as well as failure of congressional oversight in this Watergate-style scandal involving a number of top Reagan administration officials, the bottom line is that the US accomplished nothing other than to destabilize both Central America and the Middle East through its double-dealing that violated US laws. Parenthetically, one could point out that defense companies, consultants and right-wing ideologues benefited but at what cost to the broader interests of the US? (L. E. Walsh, Firewall: Iran-Contra Conspiracy and Cover-Up, 1997)In the summer of 2014, the US and Western European governments announced that they had done all they could to “help Iraq”, just as they “helped” Afghanistan. Considering that the thorough destruction of both countries by the US and its allies, the term ‘help’ must have been a reference to achieving the goal of regime change. It seems that the history of US interventionism and double-dealing is repeating itself in Iraq where there was a secular regime under Saddam Hussein, albeit a dictatorship aided by the US in the 1980s against the war with Iran. When Saddam became too independent of US policy, the latter decided to topple him because of the possession of non existing weapons of mass destruction and ties to al-Qaeda. In June 2014, President Obama claimed: “We can’t fix Iraq”, reference to nation-building policy.It was indeed ironic for the US and Europe to argue that they had done ‘all they could to help Iraq’ at a time that they were doing all they could in Syria as well. Responsible for destroying Iraq during the first decade of the 21st century at a cost of $2 trillion dollars and half a trillion owed to veterans ($3.7 trillion when the wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan are included), and incalculable catastrophic costs to Iraqis, the US and Western Europe were prepared to ‘help’ in so far as securing the country as a strategic satellite. These grandiose proclamations were made was more than two years ago. Western ‘help’ promises for the people of Iraq have yet to materialize. (www.reuters.com/article/us-raq-war-anniversary-idUSBRE92DOPG201303)Arrogantly, the US and the Western Europeans declared in 2014, as they were deeply immersed in the destabilizing campaign against Syria, that it was time for the government in Baghdad to defend itself if it was under attack by ISIS Jihadists. This was indeed ironic, considering that Western allies Saudi Arabia and Turkey were helping ISIS logistically and financially while proclaiming they were trying to bring down the tyrant Assad. Two years later Turkey would turn on ISIS, but that was because of Western-Russian pressure and ISIS turning against Turkey.Until November 2015, the convergence of the goals of ISIS Jihadists to destabilize Syria converged with those of the US and its EU partners. Naturally, the ISIS goals went beyond the struggle against Assad to include the campaign to carve out a larger Islamic fundamentalist state in the Levant. Not until they started using operatives in a number of countries including Libya and even in Europe to carry out attacks against civilians did the West change its tune to contain ISIS. When the jihadists started targeting Europeans in the heart of their cities with Paris hit first in November 2015 with 137 dead, the US was forced closer to Moscow’s position on ISIS, while never abandoning the goal of regime change in Damascus.US volte face from collaboration with jihadists to confrontation is all too familiar a story. In the 1980s, the US-backed Mujahedin in Afghanistan fighting against the secular regime backed by the Soviets. After 9/11, the war on terror had replaced the Cold War as a permanent institutional structure of US foreign policy. However, the continued practice of selectively opposing and collaborating with terrorist groups remained. Even as the US and the West publicly proclaimed their resolve on the war on terror and opposition to ISIS, in June 2015 the Wall Street Journal carried a headline calling al-Qaeda affiliate Nursa Front in Syria a lesser evil and proposing that: “In the three-way war ravaging Syria, should the local al Qaeda branch be seen as the lesser evil to be wooed rather than bombed?” http://www.wsj.com/articles/to-u-s-allies-al-qaeda-affiliate-in-syria-becomes-the-lesser-evil-1434022017 In November 2015,When ISIS bombed a civilian Russian plane in over northern Sinai on 31 October 2015, followed by an attack on Hozbollah in Beirut two weeks later, Western governments and media had no problem because the targets were pro-Assad. In fact, the Western media criticized President Vladimir Putin for striking ISIS targets, prompting the US to assist ISIS indirectly by providing air cover to protect certain pro-West assets in Syria along the Turkish border. Always reflecting US official position, the US media sent the message to the world that the problem at hand was really Putin and Assad, rather than the barbaric ISIS that Russian fighter planes were targeting; that is until the Paris massacre. The double-standard behind which rested the destabilization policy as a priority was revealing. It was one reason that eventually prompted even some Republican isolationists to accuse the Obama administration of promoting ISIS.Contradictions of US Policy GoalsIt is much more revealing of US goals in the Middle East top actually follow real practices, including logistical support, military aid diplomatic and intelligence support rather than following political rhetoric that does not always correspond to actions. What exactly are US policy goals in the Middle East depends whom you ask in different branches of government, in Congress, think tanks and various analysts.A) Deliver freedom and democracy? B) Fight terrorism? C) Closer economic, political and military integration with the West, while also safeguarding the interests of Israel that is not always in agreement with US goals? D) Redraw the map so it can determine the balance of power and limit Russia and China influence? E) Patchwork of different goals at any given week, mired in contradictions? F) A combination of all of the above with instability at the core to preserve its historically hegemonic role?From the Iranian Revolution (1979) to the present (2016), the US and its junior strategic partners in NATO have been trying to determine the balance of power in the Middle East based on the early Cold War model that divided spheres of influence, a model itself based on 19th century European and American Imperialism in Asia. The US and its partners contend that the goals of interference at the very least and military intervention at worst is to ‘help’ stabilize the region economically by integrating it into the Western-based market economy, promote “freedom and democracy” and secular institutions accordingly, and to secure strategic alliances that ‘help’ stabilize the region as part of the Western zone. Public statements notwithstanding, independent analysts assess policy based on results and the impact on societies at the receiving end of US-NATO actions rather than rhetoric intended for propaganda purposes.1. Have the US and its partners achieved any of their publicly-stated goals, including democratizing and stabilizing the Middle East?2. Has the US and the West delivered social justice, greater national sovereignty and economic prosperity to the region since Truman or has their only goal been to exploit its natural resources and geopolitical importance in the global power struggle with its rivals Russia and China?3. Is the Middle East more stable because of US-NATO interference and aggressive intervention in the late 20th and early 21st century, or has the refugee crisis and chronic internal exposed the myths of the West?4. With the exception of a handful of corporations, has US-NATO intervention helped to stimulate economic growth and sustainable development in the Middle East?5. Has Iran, Russia and China, all rivals of the US and NATO, been weakened or strengthened as a result of US-led interference, military intervention and destabilization policies?6. Has the US-led interference and intervention in the Arab Spring revolts engendered greater democracy or simply resulted in recycled dictatorships of various types, massive refugee problem, and economic hardships for the people involved?Even the most pro-Western and pro-Israel analyst of US-Middle East relations would not conclude that the US and its allies have achieved their stated goals. Instead, they strengthened Islamic fanaticism and destabilized the Muslim areas from Pakistan to the Middle East and North Africa to parts of sub-Sahara Africa. This is in part because of the very selective course of action at times fighting against jihadists and others siding with them because of common goals centered on destabilization of regimes. At the same time, the US war on terror has given all countries around the world the pretext of defining their own terrorists that often include political opposition groups fighting for human rights, ethnic minority rights, and social justice. China for example has its own domestic enemies Uyghurs Muslim separatists it deems terrorists, while the US has refused to add this minority group in Xinjiang into the terrorist list. Moreover, the US has demanded that China join US war on terror and stop taking advantage of the spoils of war as in the case of Pakistan and Afghanistan. China’s response has been to promote ‘stability’ so it can continue its global trade expansion.One could argue that the US is destabilizing the Middle East because it is becoming increasingly integrated under Chinese economic influence and to some degree Indian. Meanwhile, Russia has also been striving to keep its foot in the door as a regional power. Engagement and containment is official US policy toward China which uses its considerable economic power to capture market share in the Middle East and Africa. While the US continues to promote globalization under a neoliberal model, it is interested in doing so under its aegis rather than China’s in the Middle East and Africa. For the US to weaken nuclear-club members China and Russia directly would be self-destructive. However, it is practical, although costly, resorting to destabilization policies of countries under the influence of the Kremlin and Beijing.The nexus of power between economic and military hegemony is very real to Washington while for Beijing, at least judging by the fact it spends ten times less on defense than the US, much less so as they are focused on economic expansion. This is not to suggest that Russia and China are not imperialistic or just as determined to secure market share and have access to raw materials. They are just as intent on securing zones of influence to enhance their power and deny them to the US as the Western countries. In this respect, Spengler’s social cycle theory has a modicum of validity considering that some patterns of the early 21stcentury global power structure resemble those of the early 20th century when wars of imperialism led to the Great War.From Axis of Evil to Rapprochement: US-Iran RelationsOn 29 January 2002, President George W. Bush made the following statement in his “State of the Union Address”: “Iran aggressively pursues these weapons [of mass destruction] and exports terror, while an unelected few repress the Iranian people’s hope for freedom. … States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world.”If Iran was part of the Axis of Evil and at the core of world terrorism in 2002, why collaborate with that country to stabilize Iraq during the second term of the Obama administration, even before the conclusion of the deal on nuclear weapons development? If Bush was promoting war propaganda in order to secure public support for US military solutions to ‘manufactured crises’ of Islamic terrorism, what does the current ISIS crisis reveal about US policy failures?In 2012, I wrote an article arguing the assumption that Western governments have the arrogance to decide the kind of regime in Baghdad, Kabul, and other Muslim countries, while they would hesitate to do the same for predominantly Christian-Caucasian European countries, Canada or Australia. If Russia or China were doing exactly what the US has been doing in the Middle East since the invasion of Iraq, the US and Western media would label it imperialism, just as they label Moscow’s conflict with Ukraine as such and Beijing’s role in the South China Sea.In 2012, it was difficult to predict that the fiendish imperialist scheme to divide Iraq would actually backfire on the US and its allies, resulting in the situation of summer 2014 when ISIS was threatening to draw the map of the Middle East and targeting Western European civilian targets in suicide bombings. All along, Iran and Russia were fighting against the jihadists, not out of humanitarian principles, but national interest to deny US hegemony over Syria in a post-Assad era. US foreign policy actually brought Iran uncomfortably closer to Russia over the Syrian/ISIS crisis, just as it did China.After years of negotiations, the US-Iran nuclear deal, which Israel and American right wing politicians and the media for the most part adamantly opposed, was an integral part of cooperation to stabilize Iraq and contain ISIS. Examined in isolation of the broader US-middle East policy, the Iran nuclear deal was a deviation from the long-standing US destabilization policy. The nuclear deal, which includes an Iranian commitment to further economic integration with the West – massive capital goods purchases to benefit Western multinational corporations – does not mean however, that the US has abandoned its policy of containment toward Tehran or giving up on its long-time US allies Saudi Arabia and Israel counterbalancing Iran’s role in the region. Besides the $40 billion dollar US aid for the next ten years that the Obama administration offered Israel, which it rejected as unsatisfactory, Washington has also been selling weapons to Saudi Arabia that is as anti-Iran as Israel, if not more so as the lingering civil war in Yemen has demonstrated in 2015 and 2016.On 16 June 2014, the US accepted Iran’s proposal for collaboration to stabilize Iraq by working together against ISIS. When the Islamic Republic of Iran is trying to maintain Middle East stability by respecting the status quo and fighting Sunni jihadists, while the US and its allies, which accuse Iran of destabilizing the region, has in fact been a major source of instability, though by no means the only one given the many regional players at work, the only conclusion is that US, Israel and Saudi Arabia benefit from instability.There is something seriously wrong that the US is in the odd position of having no choice but to selectively go along with Iran’s goal of stabilizing Iraq from ISIS jihadists, an admission of US policy failure both in Syria and Iraq. The glaring contradictions of US foreign policy have in fact resulted in Iran determining the balance of power, a point on which Israel and Saudi Arabia agree and vehemently object. If the goal of the US was to determine the balance of power in the Middle East and exploit its resources, then it has failed miserably toward that goal and in the process it has only created more problems for itself.ISIS and the Western MediaAfter the jihadist Paris attacks on civilians in November 2015, the Western mainstream media began investigating the sources of ISIS financing and Turkey’s role. One question is why did the US tolerate its closest allies – Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, all Sunni and all under a form of dictatorship – money transfers to ISIS going through Turkey? The US refused to listen to Iraqi premier Nouri al-Maliki about ISIS financing sources because the enemies of the Jihadist offshoot of al-Qaeda were against Iran and Syria that the US and its junior partners adamantly opposed. Therefore, it was not until after the Paris massacre of innocent civilians by jihadists that the issue of financing sources for ISIS began to concern the US. Once the imminent break up of Iraq and the consolidation of Jihadists who are greater enemies than Iran or Syria became a clear threat and once the ISIS operatives began to attack Europeans where they live, there was a policy adjustment, but only an adjustment.Just as the US had turned a blind eye to ISIS financing until the Paris jihadist attacks, the Western media hardly covered ISIS as the world’s menacing terrorist organization. Even after the Paris attacks received world-wide publicity, the media’s attention only focused on the organization’s role in Iraq, not the devastation it caused in Syria and the millions of people displaced. After the Belgium suicide bombings in March 2016, the focus was on the influx of Middle Eastern refugees and Muslim immigrants in general as the root cause of terrorism in Europe. Ignoring Western counterinsurgency operations In Syria as a root cause of the refugee crisis, governments and the media focused on xenophobia and Islamophobia as the real problem confronting Europeans.Mainly backed by Saudi Salafi-Wahabi elements and covertly the Turkish government, ISIS have been spreading terror not just among Shias, but anyone standing in their way, including Sunnis. Yet, the media had not revealed anything about the Saudi-Turkish-ISIS connection, or the US indirect links to ISIS through third parties, including Ankara and Riyadh. Once the destabilization problem seemed to be affecting Western European interests, the Western media changed its tune about ISIS, following the main line of their governments.One of the most blatant lies to come out of Washington and repeated by the media was that the US intelligence agenies were taken by surprise when Jihadists moved in so aggressively against Iraq, coming so closely to the capital in June 2014. The Pentagon and CIA, among other agencies had tons of information not just about the movements of the Jihadists, but also their sources of financing and their ambitions to establish an autonomous state. In other words, the media was at the core of creating and perpetuating public distraction, blaming lack or faulty intelligence, misrepresentations of analysts’ reports, and other such details intended to cover up the obvious role of the US government and its allies in order to keep silent about the Jihadists until they became a serious threat to Iraq and hit European civilian targets. Manufacturing Consent is nothing new for the corporate media that has served to promote conformity to imperial policies since the Spanish-American War.It is understandable that journalists and analysts receiving a paycheck from an employer who reflects the US or a Western government official position simply present the official version, concealing from the public all sides of the issue. Some of the journalists and analysts have a poor command of the history of US-Middle East relations or even of the facts regarding the ‘war on terror’. Others, cover up the role of the US and its allies in the destabilizing campaign of the Middle East because if they do not their editors will not approve the story and eventually they will have no job. The credibility gap in US foreign policy is not just with the US government but the media as well, although one could argue that opportunism is imposed by the institutional structure and that the first responsibility of the individual is to her/his survival and not to social justice and human rights principles.US Foreign Policy Credibility Deficit at Home and AbroadWhen Obama was elected president in 2008, many people in the US and around the world believed a new era in US foreign policy would begin; a sort of a Good Neighbor Policy applied globally and in sharp contrast to the military interventionism by the Bush presidency. There was the assumption that the US learned its lessons from the Iraq-Afghanistan-Pakistan wars that failed to achieve publicly-stated goals and left the occupied nations seriously damaged. After eight years of Obama, the world discovered the harsh reality of continuity in US policy and an even greater inclination to pursue destabilization after Arab Spring than under Bush. Obama resenting himself as a US president presumably less inclined to embrace military solutions to crises and more open to political negotiations and conflict resolution by addressing root causes of problems was nothing more than pre-election campaign slogan. The reality was drone warfare in East Africa, Pakistan and Afghanistan where civilians were often casualties (collateral damage not war crimes), and military operations to destabilize North Africa and Syria.In the summer of 2014, the US and its NATO partners found themselves in the unusual position of sending military assistance to the Shiite Iraqi regime in order to stabilize it and protect the oil fields that ISIS Jihadists coming in from northwest Syria were threatening. Just a few days before the ISIS crisis in Iraq erupted in late spring 2014, Obama candidly admitted that it would be naïve to assume that the US can fight global terrorism on its own, proposing instead a broader partnership and putting $5 billion on the table toward that end. Although the new “terrorism” assistance program was in addition to others, it was extraordinarily naïve to believe that those programs mostly aiming at police/military solutions would be any more effective than spending one trillion dollars in Iraq and Afghanistan chasing ghosts that have returned with real guns and threaten the very regimes the US set up through military means.When ISIS insurgents were threatening to take control of major parts of Iraq and disrupt oil flows, the question was where do they stop and what about the symbolism of their victories? Having seized Nineveh that includes Mosul, ISIS was disrupting cities and villages and planning to head south to complete their conquest of more territory. Although Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and the semi-autonomous Kurdistan Peshmerga had been helping Iraq against Sunni Jihadists, preventing them from taking over the strategic city of Kirkuk, the government in Baghdad appealed for broader assistance to preserve the country’s territorial integrity. The approach from the EU and US was not to repeat the mistakes of the past by becoming involved with ‘boots on the ground’ as was the case under Bush in Iraq and Afghanistan.Iran had repeatedly suggested helping in cooperation with the US, a prospect that entailed the US would have to be on the same side with its arch-enemy in the region. Furthermore, it would mean that the US finally recognized Iran had been and would continue to determine the regional balance of power. In other wor4ds, stability actually benefited Iran not the US. The Jihadists that the US helped to create in the Syrian civil war seized major towns and oil refineries were roughly 60 miles from the Iraqi capital by summer 2014, prompting the US and its NATO allies to consider yet another form of intervention but still focused on bringing down Assad by military means. One problem for the West was that the Erdogan government was secretly facilitating the transfer of ISIS-produced oil, while also focusing on its own historic enemy the Kurdish minority and its political arm PKK as the real terrorist organization rather than ISIS.Mired in contradictions of strategy and goals, US policy makers were scrambling to justify why ‘limited intervention’ was the only option and it was up to Iraq to solve the problem that the US created. The irony of all this was that US intervention this time resembled the manner that the US helped to create al-Qaeda in its nascent stage in the 1980s when the Soviets were helping the secular regime in Afghanistan. Confronted with home grown jihadists given birth more by endemic poverty than ideology, many Middle East and African governments were seriously concerned that what had taken place in Syria and Iraq could easily take place in their own countries. Al-Shabab in Somalia and Boko Haram in Nigeria, for example have been among the more active jihadist guerrilla organizations, though the West hardly pays much attention to them in comparison to ISIS that has hit Western cities.ConclusionsIn the second decade of the 21th century, the world power structure resembles the “Wars of Imperialism” era (1870-1914) when the Great Powers were in a struggle for spheres of influence, global markets and access to raw materials. The small wars of that era eventually led to a global conflict. The ‘long fuse’ (1870-1914) finally lit in summer 1914 because the Great Powers, especially Germany, did not see an alternative to war. One key difference today in comparison with the ‘Age of Imperialism’ is that the Great Powers possess nuclear weapons which impose self-restraint, forcing governments to step back from the madness of the planet’s destruction.Promulgated a year before the founding of the state of Israel, the Truman Doctrine afforded the US status as the world’s policeman, using Communism as the ideological justification for the struggle for raw materials, markets, and geopolitical advantage. How different the world would have been if the US had chosen the East-West co-existence path of Commerce Secretary Henry Wallace and how different the Middle East would have been if Washington pursued an even-handed policy toward Palestinian and Israelis. One could argue that in the early 21st century the US needs a new doctrine to reflect its actual economic power in the world and the reality that the global power structure is very different in the second decade of the 21st century than it was in the 1940s when Truman promulgated his doctrine of the US as the world’s policeman. The old Cold War policy intended to keep Pax Americana alive hardly has much relevance in the post-Communist era China at the forefront of the world economy enjoys such immense leverage in determining the balance of power.Ever since the Vietnam War, Pax Americana’s decline preserved itself by diminishing the national political, economic, and military sovereignty of other countries over which it exerted inordinate influence. Yet, the American middle class and workers are now paying a heavy for the privilege of maintaining America’s global role under the New World Order in which the US desperately tries to retain its superpower glory of the past. One of the reactions for the globalization process under US hegemony is nationalist reaction from other countries, an underlying cause of jihadist terrorism, among others related to local, national and regional issues. One has to wonder if Western militarism and economic imperialism, complemented by Western racism and religious prejudice is the most effective method of combating jihadist terrorism. If the only issue is to perpetuate a counterterrorism culture for a variety of reasons already discussed in this essay, then of course imperialism, militarism and destabilization make sense.By the end of the Obama administration, there were much greater and wider forms of terrorism than when the Bush announced the war on terror after 9/11. Intended to project the idea that government has the solution at hand and it is in position of protecting its citizens, public diplomacy and media propaganda run against the reality of rising terrorism. Jihadists already reside within the nations that they wish to strike and history has demonstrated that unconventional war has never been won by conventional military means.It is difficult to know the number of jihadists around the world, but estimates have it between 100,000 and 200,000 identifying with a group out of a total Muslim population number 1.6 billion. Even the US State Department statistics on “Foreign Terrorist Organizations” has the number of jihadists under 200,000, or roughly 25% fewer than the Homeland Security workforce. Meanwhile, 72% of Muslims in opinion polls disagree with violence as a political weapon, although this number can change depending on the perceived or real Western threats to Islamic societies. Alienating the vast majority of Muslims around the world with racist conduct and interventionist policies coupled with economic imperialism is hardly the way to win the war on terror on the part of the US and its European allies. Nevertheless, this is exactly what will continue to take place because it serves the Western elites and even some Muslims who are on the outside and want to be part of the power structure. (http://www.cnn.com/2014/09/26/opinion/bergen-schneider-how-many-jihadists/; https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140506/14033627137/how-many-terrorists-are-there-not-as-many-as-you-might-think.shtml)The prospects for the future of the Middle East, at least for the next five to ten years, do not look very good even under the most optimistic scenario. Part of the reason for pessimism is that there is low likelihood of any kind of resolution to the Palestinian Question. Historically, Arab governments, especially Saudi Arabia, have opportunistically used the Palestinian Question to show perfunctory solidarity when in fact they did absolutely nothing to democratize their own societies or help with a constructive solution in the Palestinian case. Blaming Israel as the ‘devil of the Middle East’ served as a distraction from problems Arab governments were unwilling to confront. At the same time, it is highly unlikely the US will change its pro-Israel policy or its Cold War militarist orientation and destabilization methods to embrace a multilateral approach through the offices of the UN General Assembly. As China becomes economically stronger and Putin consolidates power under nationalist policies driven in part by the anti-Russian US-led campaign, the US will continue to seek ways to destabilize Muslim countries. Destabilization is here to stay, until there are uprisings in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States where the US has vested interests.Destabilization is part of a larger policy to expand NATO and SEATO as a means of containing Russia and China as well as their regional allies has been set and it will absorb higher resources in defense and intelligence allocations. Brown University’s Watson Institute estimated the costs of US wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan at just under $4.4 trillion, an amount is roughly a quarter of the US public debt when Homeland Security is included. Over 7.6 million have been displaced and reduced to refugee status and more than 210,000 civilians killed. This does not include the numerous human rights violations and charges by governments and international human rights organizations about wars crimes. The US and NATO always defaulted crimes to individual soldiers carrying out the acts and never to governments who conduct policy. http://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/The prospect of militarism hastening Pax Americana’s decline is not a perceptible reality for the vast majority of the political and socioeconomic elites any more than for the majority of the American people who accept the official policy version that the media constantly hammers into peoples’ heads. Although the majority of Americans polled want less military involvement, they favor greater defense spending because they view Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, and Muslims as a national security threat. Of course, the media, consultants, academics, pundits and lobbyists, preachers and politicians mold public opinion in the process of manufacturing consent, as Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky argued in the late 1980s. Because opinion makers have vested career interests, they rarely bother with the cost-benefit analysis of militaristic policies impacting society in general. Instead, they focus narrowly on militarism advancing security and corporate profits identified with the ‘national interest’ as defined by Wall Street and the Pentagon.Just as there was a culture of anti-Communism that existed throughout the Cold War and it was responsible for shaping American society and its institutions that revolved around it, similarly the government and private sector created a culture of counterterrorism after 9/11. It is not just the Department of Homeland Security, all intelligence and law enforcement agencies that revolve around this culture, but hundreds of billions of dollars flowing into everything from foreign mercenaries and intelligence outsourcing to domestic consultants and companies selling the latest high tech equipment whose fortunes depend on the existence of a counterterrorism culture.Contrary to the impression of some critics that half-crazed ideologues in their cubicles in the State Department, Pentagon, and CIA are trying to figure out how to destabilize the next Syria and Libya, the reality is far more disturbing. There is an entire institutional structure with hundreds of thousands of people working toward a common goal as an integral part of the culture of counterterrorism used to justify the continued strength of the military industrial complex. Whether policymakers or ordinary citizens, it would never occur to the people immersed in the counterterrorism culture to ask if a foreign power subjected the US to destabilization and militarist policies how they would react and whether a small segment of their countrymen would engage in armed resistance against foreign intervention.Because of the long history of American Exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny rooted in American society, not just the political and socioeconomic elites, but ordinary Americans believe that the US is unique among nations and it has a mandate to transform the world after its own image. Moreover, conduct it condemns on the part of other nations and/or groups is excused and justified in the case of the US because its transformation doctrine justifies it. After all, implicit in American Exceptionalism is the concept of superiority of other nations. Since the US-Mexico War in the 1840s, outward expansion was attributed to the mandate from divine providence.As integral parts of US foreign policy, American Exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny are unfolding horrifically before the eyes of the entire world that reduces them to the lowest common denominator as ideological justifications for imperialism. The political and socioeconomic elites immersed in this ideology and driving policy are wearing institutional/cultural blinders deceived themselves that the mythology of American Exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny inherited from the early 19th century is the road to greatness. They refuse to accept America’s inability to carry out transformation policy on a world scale as it did from the end of WWII until the end of the Vietnam War. They are blind to the dangers ahead resulting from such policies as much for countries on the receiving end of US conduct as for the US itself.Jon Kofas Retired university professor--Academic Writing -- International Political Economy – FictionAn Afghan policeman destroys poppies during a campaign against narcotics in Kunar province. (Reuters/Parwiz)This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com.Let’s play a game, the kind that makes no sense on this single-superpower planet of ours. For a moment, do your best to suspend disbelief and imagine that there’s another superpower, great power or even regional power somewhere that, between 2001 and 2003, launched two major wars in the Greater Middle East. We’re talking about full-scale invasions, long-term occupations and nation-building programs, first in Afghanistan and then in Iraq.In both countries, that power quickly succeeded in its stated objective of “regime change,” only to find itself mired in deadly conflicts with modestly armed minority insurgencies that it simply couldn’t win. In each country, to the tune of billions and billions of dollars, it built up a humongous army and allied “security” forces, poured money into “reconstruction” projects (most of which proved disasters of corruption and incompetence) and spent trillions of dollars of national treasure.Having imagined that, ask yourself: How well did all of that turn out for this other power? In Afghanistan, a recent news story highlights something of what was accomplished. Though that country took slot 175 out of 177 on Transparency International’s 2013 Corruption Perceptions Index, though its security forces continue to suffer grievous casualties, and though parts of the country are falling to a strengthening Taliban insurgency, it has for some years proudly held a firm grip on one record: Afghanistan is the leading narco-state on planet Earth.In 2013, it upped its opium poppy cultivation by 36 percent, its opium production by almost 50 percent, and drug profits soared. Preliminary figures for this year, recently released by the UN, indicate that opium cultivation has risen by another 7 percent and opium production by 17 percent, both to historic highs, as Afghanistan itself has become “one of the world’s most addicted societies.”Meanwhile, where there once was Iraq (171st on that index of kleptocracies), there is now a Shiite government in Baghdad defended by a collapsed army and sectarian militias, a de facto Kurdish state to the north, and in the third of the country in-between a newly proclaimed “caliphate” run by a terror movement so brutal it’s establishing records for pure bloodiness. It’s headed by men whose West Point was a military prison run by that same great power and its bloodthirstiness is funded in part by captured oil fields and refineries.In other words, after thirteen years of doing its damnedest, on one side of the Greater Middle East this power has somehow overseen the rise of the dominant narco-state on the planet with monopoly control over 80–90 percent of the global opium supply and 75 percent of the heroin. On the other side of the region, it’s been complicit in the creation of the first terrorist mini-oil state in history, a post–Al Qaeda triumph of extreme jihadism.A Fraudulent Election and a Collapsed ArmyThough I have no doubt that the fantasy of relocating Washington’s deeds to Beijing, Moscow, Tehran or any other capital crumbled paragraphs ago, take a moment for one more experiment. If this had been the work of any other power we thought less well of than we do of ourselves, imagine the blazing headlines right now. Conjure up—and it shouldn’t be hard—what the usual war hawks would be spouting in Congress, what the usual suspects on the Sunday morning talk shows might be saying and what stories cable news networks from CNN to Fox would be carrying.You know perfectly well that the denunciations of such global behavior would be blistering, that the assorted pundits and talking heads would be excoriating, that the fear and hysteria over that heroin and those terrorists crossing our border would be somewhere in the stratosphere. You would hear words like “evil” and “barbaric.” It would be implied, or stated outright, that this avalanche of disaster was no happenstance but planned by that same grim power with its hand on the trigger these last thirteen years, in part to harm the interests of the United States. We would never hear the end of it.Instead, the recent reports about Afghanistan’s bumper crop of opium poppies slipped by in the media like a ship on a dark ocean. No blame was laid, no responsibility mentioned. There were neither blazing headlines, nor angry jeremiads, nor blistering comments—none of the things that would have been commonplace if the Russians, the Chinese, or the Iranians had been responsible.Just about no one in the mainstream excoriates or blames Washington for the thirteen years leading up to this. In fact, to the extent that Washington is blamed at all for the rise of the Islamic State, the focus has been on the Obama administration’s decision not to stay longer in Iraq in 2011 and do even more of the same. (Hence, President Obama’s recent decision to extend the US combat role in Afghanistan through at least 2015.)All in all, we’ve experienced a remarkable performance here when it comes to not connecting the dots or feeling the need to assign responsibility or accountability for what’s happened in these years. In some fashion, we Americans continue to see ourselves, as we have since 9/11, as victims, not destabilizers, of the world we inhabit.To add to this spectacle, the Obama administration spent endless weeks helping engineer a fraudulent Afghan presidential election—funded in part by the opium trade—into a new, extra-constitutional form of government. The actual vote count in that election is now, by mutual agreement of the two presidential candidates, never to be revealed. All of this took place, in part, simply to have an Afghan president in place who could ink a new bilateral security agreement that would leave US troops and bases there for a further decade. If another country had meddled with an election in this fashion, can you imagine the headlines and commentary? While reported here, all of this again passed by without significant comment.When it comes to a path “forward” in Iraq, it’s been ever deeper into Iraq War 3.0. Since a limited, “humanitarian” bombing campaign began in August, the Obama administration and the Pentagon have been on the up escalator: more air strikes, more advisers, more weaponry, more money.Two and a half weeks ago, the president doubled the corps of American advisers (plus assorted other US personnel) there to 3,000-plus. Last week, the news came in that they were being hustled into the country faster than expected—specifically into dangerous, war-torn al-Anbar Province—to retrain the American-created, now thoroughly sectarian Iraqi army, reportedly in a state of remarkable disarray.In the meantime, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey, the Pentagon and the White House continue to struggle over whether American boots can be put on the ground in a combat capacity and, if so, how many and in what roles in a “war” that essentially may have no legal basis in the American system of government. (Shades of Afghanistan!) Of course, much of this internecine struggle in Washington is likely to be obviated the first time US advisers are attacked in Anbar Province or elsewhere and boots end up hitting the ground fast, weapons firing.Vietnamizing Iraq, Iraqicizing VietnamIn the meantime, think about what we would have said if the Russians had acted as Washington did in Afghanistan, or if the Chinese had pursued an Iraq-like path in a country of their choosing for the third time with the same army, the same “unified” government, the same drones and weaponry and, in key cases, the same personnel! (Or, if you want to make the task easier for yourself, just check out US commentary these last months on Ukraine.)For those of a certain age, the escalatory path the Obama administration has set us on in Iraq has a certain resonance and so, not surprisingly, at the edges of our world, familiar words like “quagmire” are again rising. And who could deny that there’s something eerily familiar about it all? Keep in mind that it took less than three years for the Kennedy administration to transition from the first several hundred American advisers it sent to Vietnam to work with the South Vietnamese Army in 1961 to 16,000 armed “advisers” in November 1963 when the president was assassinated.The Obama administration seems to be in the grips of a similar escalatory fever and on a somewhat similar schedule, even if ahead of the Vietnam timetable when it comes to loosing air power over Iraq and Syria. However, the comparison is, in a sense, unfair to the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. After all, they were in the dark; they didn’t have a “Vietnam” to refer to.For a more accurate equivalent, you would have to conjure up a Vietnam scenario that couldn’t have happened. You would have to imagine that, in May 1975, at the time of the Mayaguez Incident (in which the Cambodians seized an American ship), just two weeks after the South Vietnamese capital Saigon fell, or perhaps even more appropriately in terms of the dual chronologies of the two wars, in December 1978 when the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia, President Gerald Ford had decided to send thousands of American troops back into Vietnam.Inconceivable as that was then, only such an absurd scenario could catch the true eeriness of the escalatory path of our third Iraq war.Four More Years! Four More Years!Try to imagine the reaction here, if the Russians were suddenly to send their military back into conflict-ridden Afghanistan to refight the lost war of the 1980s more effectively, bringing old Red Army commanders out of retirement to do so.As it happens, the present war in Iraq and Syria is so unnervingly déjà vu all over again that an equivalency of any sort is next to impossible to conjure up. However, since in the American imagination terrorism has taken over the bogeyman-like role that Communism once filled, the new Islamic State might in one sense at least be considered the equivalent of the North Vietnamese (and the rebel National Liberation Front, or Vietcong, in South Vietnam). There is, for instance, some similarity in the inflamed fantasies Washington has attached to each: in the way both were conjured up here as larger-than-life phenomena capable of spreading across the globe. (Look up “domino theory” on the meaning of a Communist victory in South Vietnam if you doubt me.)There is also at least some equivalency in the inability of American leaders and commanders to bring the nature, or even the numbers, of the enemy into sharp focus. Only recently, for instance, General Dempsey, who has played a crucial role in the launching of this latest war, rushed off on just the sort of “surprise visit” to Baghdad that American officials often made to Saigon to proclaim “progress” or “light at the end of the tunnel” in the Vietnam War. He met with American Marines at the massive US embassy in that city and offered an assessment that seemed to capture some of Washington’s confusions about the nature of its newest war.Keep in mind that, at the moment the war was launched, the Islamic State was being portrayed here as a monster movement engorging itself on the region, one that potentially imperiled just about every American interest on the planet. In Baghdad, Dempsey suddenly insisted that the monster was faltering, that the momentum of battle in Iraq was “starting to turn.” He then labeled the militants of the Islamic State as “a bunch of midgets running around with a really radical ideology” and concluded that, despite the nature of those formerly giant, now-puny fellows and the changing momentum of the war, it might nonetheless take “years” to win. On his return to Washington he became more specific, claiming that the war could last up to four years and adding, “This is my third shot at Iraq, and that’s probably a poor choice of words.” Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Michael Vickers recently offered a similar four-year estimate, but tagged an “or more” onto it. (Four more years! Four more years! Or more! Or more!)Despite their sudden access to crystal balls some eleven and a half years after the initial invasion of Iraq, such estimates should be taken with a grain of salt. They reveal less a serious assessment of the Islamic State than just how shaky America’s top leadership, civilian and military, has become about what the United States is capable of achieving in the wake of an era of dismal failure in the Greater Middle East.In reality, unlike North Vietnam in 1963, the Islamic “State” is a wildly sectarian rebel movement that sits atop what is at best a shaky proto-state (despite recent laughable news reports about claims that it will soon mint gold or silver coins). It is not popular across the region. Its growth is bound to be limited both by its extreme ideology and its Sunni sectarianism. It faces enemies galore. While its skill in puffing itself up—in Wizard of Oz fashion—to monstrous size and baiting the United States into further involvement may be striking, it is neither a goliath nor a “midget.”General Dempsey can’t know how long (or short) its lifespan in the region may be. One thing we do know, however: as long as the global giant, the United States, continues to escalate its fight against the Islamic State, it gains a credibility and increasing popularity in the world of jihadism that it would never otherwise garner. As historian Stephen Kinzer wrote recently of the movement’s followers, “To face the mighty United States on Middle Eastern soil, and if possible to kill an American or die at American hands, is their dream. We are giving them a chance to realize it. Through its impressive mastery of social media, the Islamic State is already using our escalation as a recruiting tool.”Awaiting Iraq War 4.0Given all this, it should amaze us how seldom the dismal results of America’s actions in the Greater Middle East are mentioned in this country. Think of it this way: Washington entered Iraq War 3.0 with a military that, for thirteen years, had proven itself incapable of making its way to victory. It entered the latest battle with an air force that, from the “shock and awe” moment it launched fifty “decapitation” strikes against Saddam Hussein and his top officials and killed none of them but dozens of ordinary Iraqis, has brought none of its engagements to what might be called a positive conclusion. It entered battle with an interlocking set of seventeen intelligence agencies that have eaten the better part of a trillion taxpayer dollars in these years and yet, in an area where the United States has fought three wars, still manages to be surprised by just about any development, an area that, in the words of an anonymous American official, remains a “black hole” of information. It has entered battle with leaders who, under the strain of fast-moving events, make essentially the same decisionagain and again to ever worse results.In the end, the American national security machinery seems incapable of dealing with the single thing it was built to destroy in the 9/11 period: Islamic terrorism. Instead its troops, special ops forces, drones and intelligence operatives have destabilized and inflamed country after country, while turning a minor phenomenon on the planet into, as recent figures indicate, an increasing force for turmoil across the Greater Middle East and Africa.Given the history of this last period, even if the Islamic State were to collapse tomorrow under American pressure, there would likely be worse to come. It might not look like that movement or anything else we’ve experienced thus far, but it will predictably shock American officials yet again. Whatever it may be, rest assured that there’s a solution for it brewing in Washington and you already know what it is. Call it Iraq War 4.0.To put the present escalating disaster in the region in perspective, a final analogy to Vietnam might be in order. If, in 1975, you had suggested to Americans that, almost four decades later, the United States and Vietnam would be de facto allies in a new Asia, no one would have believed you, and yet such is the case today.The Vietnamese decisively won their war against Washington, though much of their country was destroyedand millions died in the process. In the United States, the bitterness and sense of defeat took years to recede. It’s worth remembering that the first president to launch a war in Iraq in 1990 was convinced that the singularly tonic effect of “victory” there was to “kick the Vietnam Syndrome once and for all.” Now, all of official Washington seems to have a postmodern, twenty-first-century version of the same syndrome.In the meantime, the world changed in few of the ways anyone expected. Communism did not sweep the Third World and has since disappeared except in Vietnam, now a US ally, tiny Cuba and that wreck of a country North Korea, as well as the world’s leading state on the “capitalist road,” China. In other words, none of the inflamed fears of that era panned out.Whatever the bloody horror, fragmentation and chaos in the Middle East today, forty years from now the fears and fantasies that led Washington into such repetitively destructive behavior will look no less foolish than the domino theory does today. If only, in a final thought experiment, we could simply skip those decades and instantly look back upon the present nightmare from the clearer light of a future day, perhaps the next predictable escalatory steps might be avoided. But don’t hold your breath, not with Washington chanting, “Four more years! Four more years!”Tom Engelhardt created and runs Tomdispatch.com, a project of The Nation Institute where he is a Fellow. His next book, A Nation Unmade by War(Dispatch Books), will be published later this month.

The Pious Cause Narrative claims the North’s anti-slavery was motivated by a moral humanitarian concern for the black race. Hear the words of the movers and shakers in the antebellum North:“By God, sir, men born and nursed of white women are not going to be ruled by men who were brought up on the milk of some damn Negro wench!” Congressman David Wilmont of Pennsylvania. Famous for the Wilmont Proviso.“The dark man, the black man declines, it will happen by and by that the black man will only be destined for museums like the DoDo.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, Northern writer, abolitionist, and humanitarian. Expressing his desire that blacks “die out.”“Southerners have retarded progress because of the direct influence of so large a population of half barbarous Africans interspersed among them, GT and who had instructed them in the structures and principles of African despotism.” Thomas Goodwin, Northern author and abolitionist.“I’ve heard you have abolitionists here, we have a few in Illinois and we shot one the other day.” Abraham Lincoln, 9/1848. Spoken in a jocular tone revealing his disdain for abolitionists.“Canada is just to our North, and offers a fine market for wool.” Gov of Conn. William Alfred Buckingham. His response to the need to take in black war contrabands.“There is in the great masses of the people a natural and proper loathing of the negro, which forbids contact with him as with a leper.” Chicago Times.“Confine the negro to the smallest possible area, hem him in, coup him up, sloth him off, preserve just so much of North America as it possible for the white man and to free institutions.“ The Atlantic Monthly.“I went through the State of Illinois for the purpose of getting signers to a petition, asking the Legislature to repeal the Testimony Law, so as to permit colored men to testify against white men. I went to prominent Republicans, and among others to Abraham Lincoln and Lyman Trumbull, and neither of them dared to sign that petition to give me the right to testify in a court of justice! If we sent our children to school, Abraham Lincoln would kick them out, in the name of Republicanism and anti-slavery!… I care nothing about that anti-slavery which wants to make the Territories free, while it is unwilling to extend to me, as a man, in the free States, all the rights of a man.” H. Ford Douglas, free negro abolitionist in Chicago, Illinois.“The white man needs this continent to labor upon. His head is clear, his arm is strong, and his necessities are fixed. He must and will have it. To secure it, he will oblige the Government of the United States to abandon intervention in favor of slave labor and slave States, and go backward forty years, and resume the original policy of intervention in favor of free labor and free States...Mr. President, this expansion of the empire of free white men is to be conducted through the process of admitting new States, and not other- wise. The white man, whether you consent or not, will make the States to be admitted, and he will make them all free States. Sec of State William Seward, Speech before the US Senate 3/3/1858.“The negro is a foreign and feeble element like the Indians, incapable of assimilation, a pitiful exotic unnecessarily and unwisely transplanted into our field, and which it is unprofitable to cultivate at the cost of the desolation of the native vineyard.” William Seward, in a speech at an 1860 political rally.“In the State where I live we do not like Negroes. We do not disguise our dislike. As my friend from Indiana (Mr. Wright) said yesterday, ‘The whole people of the Northwestern States are, for reasons, whether correct or not, opposed to having man among them, and that principle or prejudice has been engraved in the legislation of nearly all the Northwestern States.’ “ Ohio Senator John Sherman, on April 2, 1862. “Keeping slaves out of the West will confine the negro to the South.” Abolitionist Charles Elliot of Massachusetts.This is just a sampling of Northern quotes, revealing that “anti-slavery” in the North meant “anti-black.” A neutral anti-slavery Englishman you may have heard of had this to say about Northern “anti-slavery” -“I take the facts of the American quarrel to stand thus. Slavery has in reality nothing on earth to do with it…that the North hates the negro, and until it was convenient to make a pretense that sympathy with him was the cause of the war, it hated the Abolitionists and derided them up hill and down dale.” Charles Dickens, 1862.Forgotten Connections to Slavery: the North’s Dirty Little Secret.Several years ago the Hartford Connecticut Courant published a story titled “Aetna Regrets Insuring Slaves”. Courant’s reporters began to investigate the newspapers role in slavery. The Sunday magazine staff investigated slavery roots in the northern states and found “ what appeared to be unshakable proof of Connecticuts complicity in slavery. What’s more, it quickly became obvious that our economic links to slavery were deeply entwined with our religious, political and educational institutions. Slavery was a part of the social contract in Connecticut. It was the air that we breathed”.“For most Northern whites in the 1850’s, the desire to end slave labor did not equate with a belief in racial equality. Thus blacks might be freed, eventually, but they would not be welcome to remain.” In Connecticut and New York state laws enlarged the male electorate while reducing the black male voters by property requirements and harsh residency laws. Scholar David Roediger revealed that Northern free blacks stood alienated both literally and figuratively with white workers who violently chased them from public parks. It is worth remembering that In the Supreme Court in the Civil Rights Cases of 1883 brought charges of national, not just southern discrimination, suing establishments in NY, San Francisco, Kansas and Tennessee. In the 1940’s thru the 1960’s the fight to end Jim Crow and disenfranchisement would be fought not only in Southern cities but also in northern cities.“Somehow In popular perception, slavery has been cut out of the trade triangle transferred forward to the Civil War, where it became a moral problem confined to the south. Just as Connecticut was thought not to have had slavery because it did not have many slaves or Southern style plantations, it was thought not to profit from slavery as much as the south did. The truth, however, which out to have been plain, is that Connecticut derived a great part, maybe greatest part of its early surplus wealth from slavery.” Hartford Courant.“The truth is that slavery was a national phenomenon. The North shared in the wealth it created and the oppression it required.” The nations financial institutions and manufacturing centers like New York and Massachusetts spun gold from them slave fields in of the south.In 1775 Connecticut held 5,000 Africans as slaves. In 1790 most prosperous merchants owned at least one slave and 50% of the clergy owned at least one slave according to census records. While in the south a few people owned a lot of slaves, in the North a lot of people owned a few slaves.“The effects of the New England slave trade were momentous. It was one of the foundations of New England’s economic structure, it created a wealthy class of slave trading merchants, while profits derived from this commerce stimulated cultural development and philanthropy.” ..The Negro in Colonial New England, page 3“Horses and barrels, fish and flour-the Norths earliest traffic in slavery commerce ran from Plymouth Rock to the West Indies.” ....Connecticut CourantNew England gained their economic rise because regions grew and shipped food to help feed millions of slaves in the West Indies. What’s more, Northern merchants, shippers and financial institutions were crucial players in every phase of the national and international cotton trade. Land all over New England were crowded With textile mills. Well before the Civil War, the economy of the entire North relied heavily on cotton grown by slaves. Starting before the Civil War and lasting until the 20th century two Connecticut towns were international centers for the production of ivory milling hundreds of thousands of tons of elephant tusks procured through enslavement of Africans and caused the death of as many as 2 million people in Africa.Harriet Beecher Stowe said this was the way the northerners liked it...all of the benefits and none of the screams.In America’s infancy it was discovered that the West Indies and Caribbean were perfect for growing sugar. Island were stripped of forests and all land was used to grow sugar cane.Between 1640 and 1650 19,000 Africans were brought to the West Indies. By 1700 there were 134,000 in Barbados alone.In 1645 the son of John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony saw riches in the slave trade. That year a Boston ship made the first known slave voyage to Africa, picking up slaves and delivering them to Barbados. This began what’s known as the Triangle Slave Trade. Northern colonies sent food, livestock and wood to West Indian sugar plantations where slaves harvested sugar cane that fed the refining mills. Sugar, molasses and slaves were shipped north. Northern distilleries turned molasses into rum to trade for Africans who were then shipped to sugar plantations. The triangle trade was complete.The scale of trade from New England was astonishing. In 1775 80% of New England exports went to the West Indies. Flour, corn, potatoes, dried fish, onions, cattle and horses were all exported because the West Indies only grew sugar, they grew little food. When ships could not get through during the Revolution a famine swept across the Caribbean starving tens of thousands.The Narragansett areas of Rhode Island developed its own plantation system using slave labor to keep up demand of supplying the West Indies. Both in acreage and in number of slaves they matched the plantations of Virginia in the 19th century. Connecticut also had plantations. In New London archaeologists are surveying one plantation that was 4,000 acres in size. The owners of small farms in New Jersey, New York including Westchester, Long Island, Staten Island all used slaves to grow crops to supply sugar plantations in the West Indies. West Indian sugar was distilled into rum in New England and traded for Africans who were then dropped off in the West Indies and America. The survival of a slave on a sugar plantation in the West Indies was less than a year. But Africans sold into slavery were plentiful and New England ships were bringing in a constant supply of replacements.By the Revolution there were at least 41,000 slaves in New York and Pennsylvania and Delaware. It soon became accepted that slavery was benign, loosely defined like a mutually agreed upon indenture, the attitude was that slavery was as beneficial to the slave as the owner. Slaves of the North served at the whims of their masters and could be sold or traded. They lived in unheated attics, basements, outbuildings and barns. They often slept on floors and were subject to a harsh system of black codes that controlled their movements, prohibited them from being educated and limited their social contracts.Lining the New England Coast were 40 “slave castles” or “slave factories” that were warehouses where traders could select and buy captive human beings.John Atkins was a British surgeon on a slave ship. He describes the captives of Cape Coast Castle....”In the areas of the Quadrangle are large vaults with an iron grate at the surface to let light and air on these poor wretches, the slaves who are chained and confined there til a demand comes. They are all marked with a burning iron on their breast.”Among the 13 colonies only one plunged into the slave trade in a huge way...Rhode Island. In sheer volume US participation in the slave trade may have seemed insignificant. European ships transported 11.5 million Africans sold over 3 centuries into New World Slavery with only a small percentage sent to the colonies. On this side of the Atlantic, however Rhode Island was the leader. In 1775 it controlled two thirds or more of the colonies slave trade with Africa. After the Revolutionary War Rhode Island had a monopoly in the slave trade.While Rhode Island and its neighbors found ways to profit by trading with slave plantations in the West Indies, Rhode Island went further, competing with European powers in the slave trade itself. Rhode Island shipped more slaves than any of the 13 other colonies combined. In 1772 merchants who owned slaving vessels occupied 8 of the top 10 positions on Newport’s tax rolls. Newport launched 70 percent of all American slave voyages.In the last years the slave trade was legal, John Brown and Captain James DeWolf joined forces to protect the slave trade. Brown entered Congress in 1799. But DeWolf had a reputation as especially cruel on his ships. He once threw a slave tied to a chair overboard then complained about losing a good chair. One of his captains cut off the hands if two slaves clinging to the railing. But it was Brown who would become famous in New England for starting Brown University.“After Congress outlawed the importation of slaves, ship captains began to hide their boxes of shackles but little else about the slave trade changed except that it’s center shifted to Manhattan and it’s conditions became even more horrific. “ Connecticut CourantBy the eve of the war hundreds of businesses in New York and countless more businesses throughout the North were connected to or dependent on cotton. As New York became the center of the US cotton trade, merchants , shippers, auctioneers, bankers, brokers, insurers and thousands of others made their living off the backs of southern slaves growing cotton. New York City became the center of the cotton trade for thee world. The Lehman brothers, Junius Morgan (father of J Pierpont Morgan), John Jacob Astor, Charles Tiffany all had their wealth begin in the cotton trade.On the eve of secession New York City Mayor declared that his city should also secede, for the most part because New York’s economy depended on the cotton trade. Before the election of 1860 Boston area manufacturers were desperately currying favor with southern politicians and planters. Their financial survival depended on slavery.New England was home to almost 500 textile mills scattered through New York State, New Jersey, Connecticut and Massachusetts. The powerful group of Massachusetts businessmen historians call the Boston Associates established Americans own industrial revolution. By the 1850’s their enormous profits had been poured into a complex network of banks, insurance companies, and railroads. Their wealth was anchored to the mammoth textile mills in Massachusetts, Maine, and New Hampshire.In the 1850’s 10 major cotton states were producing 66 percent of the world’s cotton. Raw cotton accounted for more than half of all US exports, all exports that benefitted New York brokers, New York banks, northern ship builders, exporters, ship crews. All business involved in the export of cotton ran through the north. In 1860 the US produced 2.3 billion pounds of cotton. Of that amount, half was exported. The other half fed northern textile mills.On the eve of secession New York City Mayor declared that his city should also secede, for the most part because New York’s economy depended on the cotton trade. Before the election of 1860 Boston area manufacturers were desperately currying favor with southern politicians and planters. Their financial survival depended on slavery.At the same time the Union Committee called a meeting for 200 people to discuss what could be done to stop the south. Two thousand people showed up. The office building across the street was commandeered to hold the overflow, but merchants and bankers, politicians and shipping magnates spilled into the street. This was not the first time a worried business community had met, but this meeting was the most panicky by far. The south had to be persuaded to stay. They very spine of 19th century business, money and power attended the meeting includingAT Stewart, owner of the nations first department store and the wealthiest man in New YorkMoses Taylor, sugar importer, bankers and coal and railroad magnate and for nearly half a century, the most influential businessman in New York.Ariel Abbot Low, whose A.A. Low and Brothers was the most important firm in the China trade.William B Astor, son of John Jacob Astor, the nation’s first millionaire.August Belmont, American agent for the Rothchilds of Germany, and creator of the Belmont Stakes.Wlilliam H. Aspinwall and his partners Robert Minturn and Henry Grinnell, editors of the Journal of Commerce and the New York Herald.Also in attendance were politicians who included two former mayors, presidential candidate Samuel J Tilden, and former president Millard Fillmore.For half a century before the war cotton was the backbone of the economy of America. Cotton was king and the North ruled cotton. From seed to cloth Northern business was involved. Only large banks, located mostly in New York could extend credit to plantation owners needed between planting and selling their crops. Any plantation owners wishing to expand depended on Northern Banks to lend him money for additional equipment and additional labor. Slaves were usually bought on credit. Other Northerners made up the long chain between planter and manufacturer.the “factor” helped the planter get the best price, advised him, and often took care of his finances. Ships that carried cotton to market were Northern owned, northern built, captained and crewed by northerners.But that was not the only use of northern ships. By 1860 New York was notorious as the hub of an international illegal slave trade. It was too lucrative and too corrupt to stop. Ships to carry slaves were built and sold in New York complete with crates of shackles and supersized water tanks. During its peak in 1859 and 1860 at least 2 slave ships left from New York harbor every month , able to hold 600- 1,000 slaves each. At this point most slaves were sold to Bermuda and Cuba. In the summer of 1860 the traffic from Africa was so heavy that the US Navy seized The Storm King, carrying 620 Africans, half of which were children and the Cora loaded with 700 Africans along with the Erie with a hold filled with 900 Africans. All three ships were New York ships.By 1861 the illegal trade had grown so daring that anyone who read a NY paper knew how it worked. NY ships sailed to Rio or Later, Havana where they might take aboard a second captain or crew. For the crossing to Africa the US ship would list foreigners as passengers. On the African Coast came a switch in nationality. Just before slaves were loaded the foreigners would declare themselves owners of what had been only moments before a US vessel. The American captain and crew made the return voyage as working passengers on the now foreign slave ship. In its final years as abolition threatened national economies dependent on slave labor, the illegal slave trade became more profitable and more horrific. Ships grew larger, able to hold 1,000 Africans chained in pairs to its decks. Slave ships were insured to lose 10% of their slaves but the actual rate was much higher, usually topping 20% or more.After the Revolution white prejudice against blacks began to harden into an aggressive racist ideology. Shortly before the Civil War the science of the “American School of Ethnology “. It’s reining geniuses enjoyed the prestige rained upon them by elite Northern scholars and colleges. Nineteenth century race scientists made the slavery circle more vicious by equating blacks with subhuman biology. Their cutting ideas of racial purity supported the self image of the nations white supremacist majority. Samuel Morton was a leading race scientist who used measurements from his famous skull collection to show that black people had the smallest “cranial capacity” of all humans and were therefore doomed to inferiority.By this death on 1851, Philadelphia physician Samuel Morton Hans achieved international fame for his reserach on skulls that seemed to prove that blacks were mentally inferior to whites and not even of the same species as whites. In 1854 Types of Mankind, a book based on his work the respected Putnam’s monthly Magazine noted that Morton’s investigations “evinced a scientific sagacity of the most extraordinary research and penetration, coupled with a judicial severity of judgement”...Ewell Sale Library, The Academy of Natural Sciences Of Philadelphia.Close behind Morton were Josiah Mott, a University of Pennsylvania graduate and Louis Agassiz, a professor at a Harvard. In the 1850’s they collaborated on “Types of Mankind”. All three were considered among the brightest minds of their times.. “Seeing their black faces with their fat lips and their grimacing teeth, the wool on the heads, their bent knees, their elongated hands, their large, curved fingernails and above all the livid color of their palms, I could not turn my eyes from their face in order to tell them to keep their distance” wrote Agassiz upon first encountering Africans.The federal government sought the advice of Agassiz during the Civil War on the best way to deal with millions of freed slaves, he said the first priority should be to avoid the catastrophe of increased mixing with blacks, “Beware of any policy which may bring about our own race to their level” he wrote. Nearly a century earlier Dr Benjamin Rush of Philadelphia, a leading abolitionist believed that Africans were effected with a mild strain of leprosy that made their noses flat and their skin black. He also thought it made blacks less sensitive to pain. When a sideshow sensation named Henry Moss became a sensation by exhibiting himself as a black man turning white, Rush held out hope that a cure could be found for blackness. He recommended as treatment the juice of unripe peaches, tight fitting clothing and bleeding, purging and abstinence.Morton published a sequel to his first book called “Crania Aegyptiaca” in 1844. In it Morton added that data from the embalmed heads of Egyptians that, according to home, proved racial differences. Morton was achieving international fame. Among scientists who praised Morton was a Swede who wrote that Morton did “more for ethnography than any other living physiologist.”By this death on 1851, Philadelphia physician Samuel Morton Hans achieved international fame for his reserach on skull that seemed to prove that blacks were mentally inferior to whites. In 1854 Tyoes of Mankind, a book based on his work the respected Putnam’s monthly Magazine noted that Morton’s investigations “evinced a scientific sagacity of the most extraordinary research and penetration, coupled with a judicial severity of judgement”...Ewell Sale Library, The Academy of Natural Sciences Of Philadelphia. Dr Samuel Morton’s collection of 600 skulls provided what may be the Norths most insidious contribution to slavery...the “proof of black inferiority”In 1831 the only kind of abolitionism that had popular support was the American Colonization Society with chapters in the north and the south. The society’s goal was to send freed blacks to Africa. Few white people in America thought blacks and whites could coexist in the same society. Prudence Crandall wanted to educate young black women in rural Connecticut. The violence she encountered was life threatening. White parents withdrew their daughters from her school. In Canterbury, nearly everyone opposed Mrs Crandall and her belief that education would prove blacks equal to whites. Andrew Harris, a doctor who lived nearby refused to treat her black students. Gubernatorial candidate Andrew Judson spoke at a town meeting . No school for “nigger girls” would ever be across the street from his house, he promised that if black students showed up he would, use the law to have them arrested. When abolitionist Samuel May asked to speak he was confronted with fists and driven from the meeting. Through the next year and a half Crandall and her students increasinglybecame targets of community anger, local merchants refused to do business with the school and the stage driver refused to transport its students, boys threw manure in the schools while neighbors refused requests for pails of fresh water, Rotten eggs and rocks were thrown at the school building. Prudence Crandell was forced to give up her school.Northern hostility to black education was not limited to Connecticut. Noyes Academy in Canaan was not only shut down, but a demolition crew hitched a train of oxen to the school and pulled it off its foundation. In New Haven residents voted 700-4 against allowing a school for young black men to open near Yale. One of the rationales was that the education would do blacks more harm than good. “ What benefit can it be to a waiter or coachman to read Horace, or be a profound mathematician.” Read a local editorial.In May 1833 the Connecticut legislature passed black law making it illegal for out of state students of color to attend school without local permission. A phrenologist testified that Negroes could not be educated beyond a certain level and could never be fit citizens.New England slave trading went on to supply slaves to Bermuda and Cuba until almost 1890. But transporting slaves between countries was hardly the only connection New Englanders has to slavery.“. Two little Connecticut river towns helped produce music for the middle class, at a cost of as many as 2 million African lives, sacrificed to harvest elephant ivory”. Hartford CourantIvorytown, Connecticut, situated between two Connecticut river towns shaped, refined and turned ivory into the stuff and substance of everyday life. Starting with piano keys, baubles, combs, ivory refinement also made billiard balls, hair combs, shaving kits. New England merchants sailed to Africa then traveled inland to Zanzibar where “it is custom to buy a tooth of ivory and slave to carry it to the seashore” wrote Michael W Shepard, a merchant who visited Zanzibar and communicated with Connecticut’s ivory merchants. “Then the ivory and slaves are carried to to Zanzibar and sold”. The ivory going to America and the slave were usually sold to Arab slavery traders or slave traders headed for Cuba or Bermuda. During the second half of the 19th century and well into the 20th 75% of the ivory exported from Zanzibar on the backs of slaves went to only two piano key manufacturing centers in Connecticut. (Deep River Historical Society)Alfred J Swan, a English missionary described the horrors if the ivory caravans he saw in 1880’s. He describes “the feet and shoulders of ivory’s black porters were a mass of open sores, made more painful by the swarms of flies that followed the march and lived on the flowing blood”.. Swan said the porters were “a picture of utter misery” and were covered in scars left by the chipotle, a leather whip made of rhinoceros hide.In 1843 a New England buyer describes seeing “several gangs of slaves just as they came in from the interior of Africa “thin almost as skeletons. They had an iron ring around the neck and a chain went through it, thus connecting 50 or 50 in a line.”Explorer David Livingstone describes what he saw while exploring the Zambesi River in Southeast Africa. “A long line of manacled men, women and children came winding their way round the hill and into the valley, on the side where the village stood. The black drivers, armed with muskets, and bedecked with various articles of finery marched jauntily in the front, middle and rear of the line; some blowing exultantnotes out of long tin horns”.Joseph Conrad worked as a steamboat captain in the Belgian Congo and invented his plot line for “Heart of Darkness”, his classic novel of the search for a doomed ivory trader up river. He insisted that his description of what he saw in the Congo were accurate. “Black shapes crouched, lay, sat between trees leaning against the trunks, clinging to the earth, half coming out, half e faced within the dim light, in all attitudes of pain, abandonment and despair....They were dying very slowly-it was very clear. They were not enemies, they were not criminals, they were nothing earthly now-nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation, lying confusedly in the greenish gloom”.The suffering that accompanied ivory fills more than half a century of eyewitness accounts for the 1830’s to the 1890’s. The Civil War ended slave labor in the US but not the notion that black people were inherently suited only to hard labor. In his address to the New Haven Historical Society in 1875, scholar William C Fowler discussed the status of black people on Connecticut since their introduction into the colony in the 17th century. Fowler said that blacks “being an imitative race readily adopted the customs of the whites” and that the New World slavery was an improvement over the “moral degradation” of their African homeland. Fowler’s views were not regarded as racism but common sense. The America these men knew was in the process of freeing itself from the system of slavery , but the reality of involuntary labor was familiar to them, particularly the involuntary labor of black people.Hard work was what one historian calls “the bifurcated mind” of the 19th century commerce. Human rights were good, but a successful business always rested on somebody’s back and even abolitionists like Read and Pratt understood that. An inferior people, living in untamed wilds were part of ivory’s African supply system and was instrumental in maintaining the flow of high quality ivory.Enslaved Africans who managed to survive the trek carrying 100 pound ivory tusks on their shoulders for New England ivory merchants up the Ivory Coast ended up in the slave marketplace in Zanzibar. They were then sold into forced labor on plantations in Indian Ocean Islands or on huge sugar plantations in Brazil where the life expectancy was less than a year. Or they were sold into agricultural slavery in Arabia and North Africa.Abolitionists like Julius Pratt and George Read went to Zanzibar to promote slave trade to help build a market that would make his fellow New Englanders rich. As elephant populations dwindled, ivory had to be harvested farther from coastal Africa and the trek for enslaved Africans became longer. Under the weight of the tusks they were forced to carry men and women taken from their villages by force walked hundreds of miles to the coast.Ernst D Moore, native New Englanders and ivory merchant lived in luxury for years in Africa. Moore wrote that at the height of the ivory trade the ships that lay at anchor off the town were packed with slave awaiting transport to Arabia and Persia after New England merchants had bought them and forced them to walk 700 plus miles with 100 pound ivory tusks on their backs. This only stopped when the demand for ivory stopped.The south’s connection to slavery ended with the Civil War. The north’s connection to slavery and the money made off the backs of slaves continued for at least another 40 years. This article list only a minute portion of the severity and size of the Northern United States connections to profiting on the backs of enslaved Africans, nor does it delve into the horrors those enslaved in the North suffered.“Slavery has long been identified in the national consciousnesses a Southern institution. The time to bury that myth is long overdue. Slavery is a story about America, all of America. The nations wealth, from the very beginning depended upon the exploitation of black peoples on three continents. Together, over the lives of the millions of enslaved men and women, Northerners and Southerners shook hands and made a country. “ Hartford Courant.Here is an article I wrote for an online history community. Hope you’ll learn a little history from it.Forgotten Connections to Slavery: the North’s Dirty Little Secret.Several years ago the Hartford Connecticut Courant published a story titled “Aetna Regrets Insuring Slaves”. Courant’s reporters began to investigate the newspapers role in slavery. The Sunday magazine staff investigated slavery roots in the northern states and found “ what appeared to be unshakable proof of Connecticuts complicity in slavery. What’s more, it quickly became obvious that our economic links to slavery were deeply entwined with our religious, political and educational institutions. Slavery was a part of the social contract in Connecticut. It was the air that we breathed”.“For most Northern whites in the 1850’s, the desire to end slave labor did not equate with a belief in racial equality. Thus blacks might be freed, eventually, but they would not be welcome to remain.” In Connecticut and New York state laws enlarged the male electorate while reducing the black male voters by property requirements and harsh residency laws. Scholar David Roediger revealed that Northern free blacks stood alienated both literally and figuratively with white workers who violently chased them from public parks. It is worth remembering that In the Supreme Court in the Civil Rights Cases of 1883 brought charges of national, not just southern discrimination, suing establishments in NY, San Francisco, Kansas and Tennessee. In the 1940’s thru the 1960’s the fight to end Jim Crow and disenfranchisement would be fought not only in Southern cities but also in northern cities.“Somehow In popular perception, slavery has been cut out of the trade triangle transferred forward to the Civil War, where it became a moral problem confined to the south. Just as Connecticut was thought not to have had slavery because it did not have many slaves or Southern style plantations, it was thought not to profit from slavery as much as the south did. The truth, however, which out to have been plain, is that Connecticut derived a great part, maybe greatest part of its early surplus wealth from slavery.” Hartford Courant.“The truth is that slavery was a national phenomenon. The North shared in the wealth it created and the oppression it required.” The nations financial institutions and manufacturing centers like New York and Massachusetts spun gold from them slave fields in of the south.In 1775 Connecticut held 5,000 Africans as slaves. In 1790 most prosperous merchants owned at least one slave and 50% of the clergy owned at least one slave according to census records. While in the south a few people owned a lot of slaves, in the North a lot of people owned a few slaves.“The effects of the New England slave trade were momentous. It was one of the foundations of New England’s economic structure, it created a wealthy class of slave trading merchants, while profits derived from this commerce stimulated cultural development and philanthropy.” ..The Negro in Colonial New England, page 3“Horses and barrels, fish and flour-the Norths earliest traffic in slavery commerce ran from Plymouth Rock to the West Indies.” ....Connecticut CourantNew England gained their economic rise because regions grew and shipped food to help feed millions of slaves in the West Indies. What’s more, Northern merchants, shippers and financial institutions were crucial players in every phase of the national and international cotton trade. Land all over New England were crowded With textile mills. Well before the Civil War, the economy of the entire North relied heavily on cotton grown by slaves. Starting before the Civil War and lasting until the 20th century two Connecticut towns were international centers for the production of ivory milling hundreds of thousands of tons of elephant tusks procured through enslavement of Africans and caused the death of as many as 2 million people in Africa.Harriet Beecher Stowe said this was the way the northerners liked it...all of the benefits and none of the screams.In America’s infancy it was discovered that the West Indies and Caribbean were perfect for growing sugar. Island were stripped of forests and all land was used to grow sugar cane.Between 1640 and 1650 19,000 Africans were brought to the West Indies. By 1700 there were 134,000 in Barbados alone.In 1645 the son of John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony saw riches in the slave trade. That year a Boston ship made the first known slave voyage to Africa, picking up slaves and delivering them to Barbados. This began what’s known as the Triangle Slave Trade. Northern colonies sent food, livestock and wood to West Indian sugar plantations where slaves harvested sugar cane that fed the refining mills. Sugar, molasses and slaves were shipped north. Northern distilleries turned molasses into rum to trade for Africans who were then shipped to sugar plantations. The triangle trade was complete.The scale of trade from New England was astonishing. In 1775 80% of New England exports went to the West Indies. Flour, corn, potatoes, dried fish, onions, cattle and horses were all exported because the West Indies only grew sugar, they grew little food. When ships could not get through during the Revolution a famine swept across the Caribbean starving tens of thousands.The Narragansett areas of Rhode Island developed its own plantation system using slave labor to keep up demand of supplying the West Indies. Both in acreage and in number of slaves they matched the plantations of Virginia in the 19th century. Connecticut also had plantations. In New London archaeologists are surveying one plantation that was 4,000 acres in size. The owners of small farms in New Jersey, New York including Westchester, Long Island, Staten Island all used slaves to grow crops to supply sugar plantations in the West Indies. West Indian sugar was distilled into rum in New England and traded for Africans who were then dropped off in the West Indies and America. The survival of a slave on a sugar plantation in the West Indies was less than a year. But Africans sold into slavery were plentiful and New England ships were bringing in a constant supply of replacements.By the Revolution there were at least 41,000 slaves in New York and Pennsylvania and Delaware. It soon became accepted that slavery was benign, loosely defined like a mutually agreed upon indenture, the attitude was that slavery was as beneficial to the slave as the owner. Slaves of the North served at the whims of their masters and could be sold or traded. They lived in unheated attics, basements, outbuildings and barns. They often slept on floors and were subject to a harsh system of black codes that controlled their movements, prohibited them from being educated and limited their social contracts.Lining the New England Coast were 40 “slave castles” or “slave factories” that were warehouses where traders could select and buy captive human beings.John Atkins was a British surgeon on a slave ship. He describes the captives of Cape Coast Castle....”In the areas of the Quadrangle are large vaults with an iron grate at the surface to let light and air on these poor wretches, the slaves who are chained and confined there til a demand comes. They are all marked with a burning iron on their breast.”Among the 13 colonies only one plunged into the slave trade in a huge way...Rhode Island. In sheer volume US participation in the slave trade may have seemed insignificant. European ships transported 11.5 million Africans sold over 3 centuries into New World Slavery with only a small percentage sent to the colonies. On this side of the Atlantic, however Rhode Island was the leader. In 1775 it controlled two thirds or more of the colonies slave trade with Africa. After the Revolutionary War Rhode Island had a monopoly in the slave trade.While Rhode Island and its neighbors found ways to profit by trading with slave plantations in the West Indies, Rhode Island went further, competing with European powers in the slave trade itself. Rhode Island shipped more slaves than any of the 13 other colonies combined. In 1772 merchants who owned slaving vessels occupied 8 of the top 10 positions on Newport’s tax rolls. Newport launched 70 percent of all American slave voyages.In the last years the slave trade was legal, John Brown and Captain James DeWolf joined forces to protect the slave trade. Brown entered Congress in 1799. But DeWolf had a reputation as especially cruel on his ships. He once threw a slave tied to a chair overboard then complained about losing a good chair. One of his captains cut off the hands if two slaves clinging to the railing. But it was Brown who would become famous in New England for starting Brown University.“After Congress outlawed the importation of slaves, ship captains began to hide their boxes of shackles but little else about the slave trade changed except that it’s center shifted to Manhattan and it’s conditions became even more horrific. “ Connecticut CourantBy the eve of the war hundreds of businesses in New York and countless more businesses throughout the North were connected to or dependent on cotton. As New York became the center of the US cotton trade, merchants , shippers, auctioneers, bankers, brokers, insurers and thousands of others made their living off the backs of southern slaves growing cotton. New York City became the center of the cotton trade for thee world. The Lehman brothers, Junius Morgan (father of J Pierpont Morgan), John Jacob Astor, Charles Tiffany all had their wealth begin in the cotton trade.On the eve of secession New York City Mayor declared that his city should also secede, for the most part because New York’s economy depended on the cotton trade. Before the election of 1860 Boston area manufacturers were desperately currying favor with southern politicians and planters. Their financial survival depended on slavery.New England was home to almost 500 textile mills scattered through New York State, New Jersey, Connecticut and Massachusetts. The powerful group of Massachusetts businessmen historians call the Boston Associates established Americans own industrial revolution. By the 1850’s their enormous profits had been poured into a complex network of banks, insurance companies, and railroads. Their wealth was anchored to the mammoth textile mills in Massachusetts, Maine, and New Hampshire.In the 1850’s 10 major cotton states were producing 66 percent of the world’s cotton. Raw cotton accounted for more than half of all US exports, all exports that benefitted New York brokers, New York banks, northern ship builders, exporters, ship crews. All business involved in the export of cotton ran through the north. In 1860 the US produced 2.3 billion pounds of cotton. Of that amount, half was exported. The other half fed northern textile mills.On the eve of secession New York City Mayor declared that his city should also secede, for the most part because New York’s economy depended on the cotton trade. Before the election of 1860 Boston area manufacturers were desperately currying favor with southern politicians and planters. Their financial survival depended on slavery.At the same time the Union Committee called a meeting for 200 people to discuss what could be done to stop the south. Two thousand people showed up. The office building across the street was commandeered to hold the overflow, but merchants and bankers, politicians and shipping magnates spilled into the street. This was not the first time a worried business community had met, but this meeting was the most panicky by far. The south had to be persuaded to stay. They very spine of 19th century business, money and power attended the meeting includingAT Stewart, owner of the nations first department store and the wealthiest man in New YorkMoses Taylor, sugar importer, bankers and coal and railroad magnate and for nearly half a century, the most influential businessman in New York.Ariel Abbot Low, whose A.A. Low and Brothers was the most important firm in the China trade.William B Astor, son of John Jacob Astor, the nation’s first millionaire.August Belmont, American agent for the Rothchilds of Germany, and creator of the Belmont Stakes.Wlilliam H. Aspinwall and his partners Robert Minturn and Henry Grinnell, editors of the Journal of Commerce and the New York Herald.Also in attendance were politicians who included two former mayors, presidential candidate Samuel J Tilden, and former president Millard Fillmore.For half a century before the war cotton was the backbone of the economy of America. Cotton was king and the North ruled cotton. From seed to cloth Northern business was involved. Only large banks, located mostly in New York could extend credit to plantation owners needed between planting and selling their crops. Any plantation owners wishing to expand depended on Northern Banks to lend him money for additional equipment and additional labor. Slaves were usually bought on credit. Other Northerners made up the long chain between planter and manufacturer.the “factor” helped the planter get the best price, advised him, and often took care of his finances. Ships that carried cotton to market were Northern owned, northern built, captained and crewed by northerners.But that was not the only use of northern ships. By 1860 New York was notorious as the hub of an international illegal slave trade. It was too lucrative and too corrupt to stop. Ships to carry slaves were built and sold in New York complete with crates of shackles and supersized water tanks. During its peak in 1859 and 1860 at least 2 slave ships left from New York harbor every month , able to hold 600- 1,000 slaves each. At this point most slaves were sold to Bermuda and Cuba. In the summer of 1860 the traffic from Africa was so heavy that the US Navy seized The Storm King, carrying 620 Africans, half of which were children and the Cora loaded with 700 Africans along with the Erie with a hold filled with 900 Africans. All three ships were New York ships.By 1861 the illegal trade had grown so daring that anyone who read a NY paper knew how it worked. NY ships sailed to Rio or Later, Havana where they might take aboard a second captain or crew. For the crossing to Africa the US ship would list foreigners as passengers. On the African Coast came a switch in nationality. Just before slaves were loaded the foreigners would declare themselves owners of what had been only moments before a US vessel. The American captain and crew made the return voyage as working passengers on the now foreign slave ship. In its final years as abolition threatened national economies dependent on slave labor, the illegal slave trade became more profitable and more horrific. Ships grew larger, able to hold 1,000 Africans chained in pairs to its decks. Slave ships were insured to lose 10% of their slaves but the actual rate was much higher, usually topping 20% or more.After the Revolution white prejudice against blacks began to harden into an aggressive racist ideology. Shortly before the Civil War the science of the “American School of Ethnology “. It’s reining geniuses enjoyed the prestige rained upon them by elite Northern scholars and colleges. Nineteenth century race scientists made the slavery circle more vicious by equating blacks with subhuman biology. Their cutting ideas of racial purity supported the self image of the nations white supremacist majority. Samuel Morton was a leading race scientist who used measurements from his famous skull collection to show that black people had the smallest “cranial capacity” of all humans and were therefore doomed to inferiority.By this death on 1851, Philadelphia physician Samuel Morton Hans achieved international fame for his reserach on skulls that seemed to prove that blacks were mentally inferior to whites and not even of the same species as whites. In 1854 Types of Mankind, a book based on his work the respected Putnam’s monthly Magazine noted that Morton’s investigations “evinced a scientific sagacity of the most extraordinary research and penetration, coupled with a judicial severity of judgement”...Ewell Sale Library, The Academy of Natural Sciences Of Philadelphia.Close behind Morton were Josiah Mott, a University of Pennsylvania graduate and Louis Agassiz, a professor at a Harvard. In the 1850’s they collaborated on “Types of Mankind”. All three were considered among the brightest minds of their times.. “Seeing their black faces with their fat lips and their grimacing teeth, the wool on the heads, their bent knees, their elongated hands, their large, curved fingernails and above all the livid color of their palms, I could not turn my eyes from their face in order to tell them to keep their distance” wrote Agassiz upon first encountering Africans.The federal government sought the advice of Agassiz during the Civil War on the best way to deal with millions of freed slaves, he said the first priority should be to avoid the catastrophe of increased mixing with blacks, “Beware of any policy which may bring about our own race to their level” he wrote. Nearly a century earlier Dr Benjamin Rush of Philadelphia, a leading abolitionist believed that Africans were effected with a mild strain of leprosy that made their noses flat and their skin black. He also thought it made blacks less sensitive to pain. When a sideshow sensation named Henry Moss became a sensation by exhibiting himself as a black man turning white, Rush held out hope that a cure could be found for blackness. He recommended as treatment the juice of unripe peaches, tight fitting clothing and bleeding, purging and abstinence.Morton published a sequel to his first book called “Crania Aegyptiaca” in 1844. In it Morton added that data from the embalmed heads of Egyptians that, according to home, proved racial differences. Morton was achieving international fame. Among scientists who praised Morton was a Swede who wrote that Morton did “more for ethnography than any other living physiologist.”By this death on 1851, Philadelphia physician Samuel Morton Hans achieved international fame for his reserach on skull that seemed to prove that blacks were mentally inferior to whites. In 1854 Tyoes of Mankind, a book based on his work the respected Putnam’s monthly Magazine noted that Morton’s investigations “evinced a scientific sagacity of the most extraordinary research and penetration, coupled with a judicial severity of judgement”...Ewell Sale Library, The Academy of Natural Sciences Of Philadelphia. Dr Samuel Morton’s collection of 600 skulls provided what may be the Norths most insidious contribution to slavery...the “proof of black inferiority”In 1831 the only kind of abolitionism that had popular support was the American Colonization Society with chapters in the north and the south. The society’s goal was to send freed blacks to Africa. Few white people in America thought blacks and whites could coexist in the same society. Prudence Crandall wanted to educate young black women in rural Connecticut. The violence she encountered was life threatening. White parents withdrew their daughters from her school. In Canterbury, nearly everyone opposed Mrs Crandall and her belief that education would prove blacks equal to whites. Andrew Harris, a doctor who lived nearby refused to treat her black students. Gubernatorial candidate Andrew Judson spoke at a town meeting . No school for “nigger girls” would ever be across the street from his house, he promised that if black students showed up he would, use the law to have them arrested. When abolitionist Samuel May asked to speak he was confronted with fists and driven from the meeting. Through the next year and a half Crandall and her students increasinglybecame targets of community anger, local merchants refused to do business with the school and the stage driver refused to transport its students, boys threw manure in the schools while neighbors refused requests for pails of fresh water, Rotten eggs and rocks were thrown at the school building. Prudence Crandell was forced to give up her school.Northern hostility to black education was not limited to Connecticut. Noyes Academy in Canaan was not only shut down, but a demolition crew hitched a train of oxen to the school and pulled it off its foundation. In New Haven residents voted 700-4 against allowing a school for young black men to open near Yale. One of the rationales was that the education would do blacks more harm than good. “ What benefit can it be to a waiter or coachman to read Horace, or be a profound mathematician.” Read a local editorial.In May 1833 the Connecticut legislature passed black law making it illegal for out of state students of color to attend school without local permission. A phrenologist testified that Negroes could not be educated beyond a certain level and could never be fit citizens.New England slave trading went on to supply slaves to Bermuda and Cuba until almost 1890. But transporting slaves between countries was hardly the only connection New Englanders has to slavery.“. Two little Connecticut river towns helped produce music for the middle class, at a cost of as many as 2 million African lives, sacrificed to harvest elephant ivory”. Hartford CourantIvorytown, Connecticut, situated between two Connecticut river towns shaped, refined and turned ivory into the stuff and substance of everyday life. Starting with piano keys, baubles, combs, ivory refinement also made billiard balls, hair combs, shaving kits. New England merchants sailed to Africa then traveled inland to Zanzibar where “it is custom to buy a tooth of ivory and slave to carry it to the seashore” wrote Michael W Shepard, a merchant who visited Zanzibar and communicated with Connecticut’s ivory merchants. “Then the ivory and slaves are carried to to Zanzibar and sold”. The ivory going to America and the slave were usually sold to Arab slavery traders or slave traders headed for Cuba or Bermuda. During the second half of the 19th century and well into the 20th

No it is a lie meant to hide the Fascist Neo-Con Agenda.Slavery in New YorkForgotten Connections to Slavery: the North’s Dirty Little Secret.Several years ago the Hartford Connecticut Courant published a story titled “Aetna Regrets Insuring Slaves”. Courant’s reporters began to investigate the newspapers role in slavery. The Sunday magazine staff investigated slavery roots in the northern states and found “ what appeared to be unshakable proof of Connecticuts complicity in slavery. What’s more, it quickly became obvious that our economic links to slavery were deeply entwined with our religious, political and educational institutions. Slavery was a part of the social contract in Connecticut. It was the air that we breathed”.“For most Northern whites in the 1850’s, the desire to end slave labor did not equate with a belief in racial equality. Thus blacks might be freed, eventually, but they would not be welcome to remain.” In Connecticut and New York state laws enlarged the male electorate while reducing the black male voters by property requirements and harsh residency laws. Scholar David Roediger revealed that Northern free blacks stood alienated both literally and figuratively with white workers who violently chased them from public parks. It is worth remembering that In the Supreme Court in the Civil Rights Cases of 1883 brought charges of national, not just southern discrimination, suing establishments in NY, San Francisco, Kansas and Tennessee. In the 1940’s thru the 1960’s the fight to end Jim Crow and disenfranchisement would be fought not only in Southern cities but also in northern cities.“Somehow In popular perception, slavery has been cut out of the trade triangle transferred forward to the Civil War, where it became a moral problem confined to the south. Just as Connecticut was thought not to have had slavery because it did not have many slaves or Southern style plantations, it was thought not to profit from slavery as much as the south did. The truth, however, which out to have been plain, is that Connecticut derived a great part, maybe greatest part of its early surplus wealth from slavery.” Hartford Courant.“The truth is that slavery was a national phenomenon. The North shared in the wealth it created and the oppression it required.” The nations financial institutions and manufacturing centers like New York and Massachusetts spun gold from them slave fields in of the south.In 1775 Connecticut held 5,000 Africans as slaves. In 1790 most prosperous merchants owned at least one slave and 50% of the clergy owned at least one slave according to census records. While in the south a few people owned a lot of slaves, in the North a lot of people owned a few slaves.“The effects of the New England slave trade were momentous. It was one of the foundations of New England’s economic structure, it created a wealthy class of slave trading merchants, while profits derived from this commerce stimulated cultural development and philanthropy.” ..The Negro in Colonial New England, page 3“Horses and barrels, fish and flour-the Norths earliest traffic in slavery commerce ran from Plymouth Rock to the West Indies.” ....Connecticut CourantNew England gained their economic rise because regions grew and shipped food to help feed millions of slaves in the West Indies. What’s more, Northern merchants, shippers and financial institutions were crucial players in every phase of the national and international cotton trade. Land all over New England were crowded With textile mills. Well before the Civil War, the economy of the entire North relied heavily on cotton grown by slaves. Starting before the Civil War and lasting until the 20th century two Connecticut towns were international centers for the production of ivory milling hundreds of thousands of tons of elephant tusks procured through enslavement of Africans and caused the death of as many as 2 million people in Africa.Harriet Beecher Stowe said this was the way the northerners liked it...all of the benefits and none of the screams.In America’s infancy it was discovered that the West Indies and Caribbean were perfect for growing sugar. Island were stripped of forests and all land was used to grow sugar cane.Between 1640 and 1650 19,000 Africans were brought to the West Indies. By 1700 there were 134,000 in Barbados alone.In 1645 the son of John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony saw riches in the slave trade. That year a Boston ship made the first known slave voyage to Africa, picking up slaves and delivering them to Barbados. This began what’s known as the Triangle Slave Trade. Northern colonies sent food, livestock and wood to West Indian sugar plantations where slaves harvested sugar cane that fed the refining mills. Sugar, molasses and slaves were shipped north. Northern distilleries turned molasses into rum to trade for Africans who were then shipped to sugar plantations. The triangle trade was complete.The scale of trade from New England was astonishing. In 1775 80% of New England exports went to the West Indies. Flour, corn, potatoes, dried fish, onions, cattle and horses were all exported because the West Indies only grew sugar, they grew little food. When ships could not get through during the Revolution a famine swept across the Caribbean starving tens of thousands.The Narragansett areas of Rhode Island developed its own plantation system using slave labor to keep up demand of supplying the West Indies. Both in acreage and in number of slaves they matched the plantations of Virginia in the 19th century. Connecticut also had plantations. In New London archaeologists are surveying one plantation that was 4,000 acres in size. The owners of small farms in New Jersey, New York including Westchester, Long Island, Staten Island all used slaves to grow crops to supply sugar plantations in the West Indies. West Indian sugar was distilled into rum in New England and traded for Africans who were then dropped off in the West Indies and America. The survival of a slave on a sugar plantation in the West Indies was less than a year. But Africans sold into slavery were plentiful and New England ships were bringing in a constant supply of replacements.By the Revolution there were at least 41,000 slaves in New York and Pennsylvania and Delaware. It soon became accepted that slavery was benign, loosely defined like a mutually agreed upon indenture, the attitude was that slavery was as beneficial to the slave as the owner. Slaves of the North served at the whims of their masters and could be sold or traded. They lived in unheated attics, basements, outbuildings and barns. They often slept on floors and were subject to a harsh system of black codes that controlled their movements, prohibited them from being educated and limited their social contracts.Lining the New England Coast were 40 “slave castles” or “slave factories” that were warehouses where traders could select and buy captive human beings.John Atkins was a British surgeon on a slave ship. He describes the captives of Cape Coast Castle....”In the areas of the Quadrangle are large vaults with an iron grate at the surface to let light and air on these poor wretches, the slaves who are chained and confined there til a demand comes. They are all marked with a burning iron on their breast.”Among the 13 colonies only one plunged into the slave trade in a huge way...Rhode Island. In sheer volume US participation in the slave trade may have seemed insignificant. European ships transported 11.5 million Africans sold over 3 centuries into New World Slavery with only a small percentage sent to the colonies. On this side of the Atlantic, however Rhode Island was the leader. In 1775 it controlled two thirds or more of the colonies slave trade with Africa. After the Revolutionary War Rhode Island had a monopoly in the slave trade.While Rhode Island and its neighbors found ways to profit by trading with slave plantations in the West Indies, Rhode Island went further, competing with European powers in the slave trade itself. Rhode Island shipped more slaves than any of the 13 other colonies combined. In 1772 merchants who owned slaving vessels occupied 8 of the top 10 positions on Newport’s tax rolls. Newport launched 70 percent of all American slave voyages.In the last years the slave trade was legal, John Brown and Captain James DeWolf joined forces to protect the slave trade. Brown entered Congress in 1799. But DeWolf had a reputation as especially cruel on his ships. He once threw a slave tied to a chair overboard then complained about losing a good chair. One of his captains cut off the hands if two slaves clinging to the railing. But it was Brown who would become famous in New England for starting Brown University.“After Congress outlawed the importation of slaves, ship captains began to hide their boxes of shackles but little else about the slave trade changed except that it’s center shifted to Manhattan and it’s conditions became even more horrific. “ Connecticut CourantBy the eve of the war hundreds of businesses in New York and countless more businesses throughout the North were connected to or dependent on cotton. As New York became the center of the US cotton trade, merchants , shippers, auctioneers, bankers, brokers, insurers and thousands of others made their living off the backs of southern slaves growing cotton. New York City became the center of the cotton trade for thee world. The Lehman brothers, Junius Morgan (father of J Pierpont Morgan), John Jacob Astor, Charles Tiffany all had their wealth begin in the cotton trade.On the eve of secession New York City Mayor declared that his city should also secede, for the most part because New York’s economy depended on the cotton trade. Before the election of 1860 Boston area manufacturers were desperately currying favor with southern politicians and planters. Their financial survival depended on slavery.New England was home to almost 500 textile mills scattered through New York State, New Jersey, Connecticut and Massachusetts. The powerful group of Massachusetts businessmen historians call the Boston Associates established Americans own industrial revolution. By the 1850’s their enormous profits had been poured into a complex network of banks, insurance companies, and railroads. Their wealth was anchored to the mammoth textile mills in Massachusetts, Maine, and New Hampshire.In the 1850’s 10 major cotton states were producing 66 percent of the world’s cotton. Raw cotton accounted for more than half of all US exports, all exports that benefitted New York brokers, New York banks, northern ship builders, exporters, ship crews. All business involved in the export of cotton ran through the north. In 1860 the US produced 2.3 billion pounds of cotton. Of that amount, half was exported. The other half fed northern textile mills.On the eve of secession New York City Mayor declared that his city should also secede, for the most part because New York’s economy depended on the cotton trade. Before the election of 1860 Boston area manufacturers were desperately currying favor with southern politicians and planters. Their financial survival depended on slavery.At the same time the Union Committee called a meeting for 200 people to discuss what could be done to stop the south. Two thousand people showed up. The office building across the street was commandeered to hold the overflow, but merchants and bankers, politicians and shipping magnates spilled into the street. This was not the first time a worried business community had met, but this meeting was the most panicky by far. The south had to be persuaded to stay. They very spine of 19th century business, money and power attended the meeting includingAT Stewart, owner of the nations first department store and the wealthiest man in New YorkMoses Taylor, sugar importer, bankers and coal and railroad magnate and for nearly half a century, the most influential businessman in New York.Ariel Abbot Low, whose A.A. Low and Brothers was the most important firm in the China trade.William B Astor, son of John Jacob Astor, the nation’s first millionaire.August Belmont, American agent for the Rothchilds of Germany, and creator of the Belmont Stakes.Wlilliam H. Aspinwall and his partners Robert Minturn and Henry Grinnell, editors of the Journal of Commerce and the New York Herald.Also in attendance were politicians who included two former mayors, presidential candidate Samuel J Tilden, and former president Millard Fillmore.For half a century before the war cotton was the backbone of the economy of America. Cotton was king and the North ruled cotton. From seed to cloth Northern business was involved. Only large banks, located mostly in New York could extend credit to plantation owners needed between planting and selling their crops. Any plantation owners wishing to expand depended on Northern Banks to lend him money for additional equipment and additional labor. Slaves were usually bought on credit. Other Northerners made up the long chain between planter and manufacturer.the “factor” helped the planter get the best price, advised him, and often took care of his finances. Ships that carried cotton to market were Northern owned, northern built, captained and crewed by northerners.But that was not the only use of northern ships. By 1860 New York was notorious as the hub of an international illegal slave trade. It was too lucrative and too corrupt to stop. Ships to carry slaves were built and sold in New York complete with crates of shackles and supersized water tanks. During its peak in 1859 and 1860 at least 2 slave ships left from New York harbor every month , able to hold 600- 1,000 slaves each. At this point most slaves were sold to Bermuda and Cuba. In the summer of 1860 the traffic from Africa was so heavy that the US Navy seized The Storm King, carrying 620 Africans, half of which were children and the Cora loaded with 700 Africans along with the Erie with a hold filled with 900 Africans. All three ships were New York ships.By 1861 the illegal trade had grown so daring that anyone who read a NY paper knew how it worked. NY ships sailed to Rio or Later, Havana where they might take aboard a second captain or crew. For the crossing to Africa the US ship would list foreigners as passengers. On the African Coast came a switch in nationality. Just before slaves were loaded the foreigners would declare themselves owners of what had been only moments before a US vessel. The American captain and crew made the return voyage as working passengers on the now foreign slave ship. In its final years as abolition threatened national economies dependent on slave labor, the illegal slave trade became more profitable and more horrific. Ships grew larger, able to hold 1,000 Africans chained in pairs to its decks. Slave ships were insured to lose 10% of their slaves but the actual rate was much higher, usually topping 20% or more.After the Revolution white prejudice against blacks began to harden into an aggressive racist ideology. Shortly before the Civil War the science of the “American School of Ethnology “. It’s reining geniuses enjoyed the prestige rained upon them by elite Northern scholars and colleges. Nineteenth century race scientists made the slavery circle more vicious by equating blacks with subhuman biology. Their cutting ideas of racial purity supported the self image of the nations white supremacist majority. Samuel Morton was a leading race scientist who used measurements from his famous skull collection to show that black people had the smallest “cranial capacity” of all humans and were therefore doomed to inferiority.By this death on 1851, Philadelphia physician Samuel Morton Hans achieved international fame for his reserach on skulls that seemed to prove that blacks were mentally inferior to whites and not even of the same species as whites. In 1854 Types of Mankind, a book based on his work the respected Putnam’s monthly Magazine noted that Morton’s investigations “evinced a scientific sagacity of the most extraordinary research and penetration, coupled with a judicial severity of judgement”...Ewell Sale Library, The Academy of Natural Sciences Of Philadelphia.Close behind Morton were Josiah Mott, a University of Pennsylvania graduate and Louis Agassiz, a professor at a Harvard. In the 1850’s they collaborated on “Types of Mankind”. All three were considered among the brightest minds of their times.. “Seeing their black faces with their fat lips and their grimacing teeth, the wool on the heads, their bent knees, their elongated hands, their large, curved fingernails and above all the livid color of their palms, I could not turn my eyes from their face in order to tell them to keep their distance” wrote Agassiz upon first encountering Africans.The federal government sought the advice of Agassiz during the Civil War on the best way to deal with millions of freed slaves, he said the first priority should be to avoid the catastrophe of increased mixing with blacks, “Beware of any policy which may bring about our own race to their level” he wrote. Nearly a century earlier Dr Benjamin Rush of Philadelphia, a leading abolitionist believed that Africans were effected with a mild strain of leprosy that made their noses flat and their skin black. He also thought it made blacks less sensitive to pain. When a sideshow sensation named Henry Moss became a sensation by exhibiting himself as a black man turning white, Rush held out hope that a cure could be found for blackness. He recommended as treatment the juice of unripe peaches, tight fitting clothing and bleeding, purging and abstinence.Morton published a sequel to his first book called “Crania Aegyptiaca” in 1844. In it Morton added that data from the embalmed heads of Egyptians that, according to home, proved racial differences. Morton was achieving international fame. Among scientists who praised Morton was a Swede who wrote that Morton did “more for ethnography than any other living physiologist.”By this death on 1851, Philadelphia physician Samuel Morton Hans achieved international fame for his reserach on skull that seemed to prove that blacks were mentally inferior to whites. In 1854 Tyoes of Mankind, a book based on his work the respected Putnam’s monthly Magazine noted that Morton’s investigations “evinced a scientific sagacity of the most extraordinary research and penetration, coupled with a judicial severity of judgement”...Ewell Sale Library, The Academy of Natural Sciences Of Philadelphia. Dr Samuel Morton’s collection of 600 skulls provided what may be the Norths most insidious contribution to slavery...the “proof of black inferiority”In 1831 the only kind of abolitionism that had popular support was the American Colonization Society with chapters in the north and the south. The society’s goal was to send freed blacks to Africa. Few white people in America thought blacks and whites could coexist in the same society. Prudence Crandall wanted to educate young black women in rural Connecticut. The violence she encountered was life threatening. White parents withdrew their daughters from her school. In Canterbury, nearly everyone opposed Mrs Crandall and her belief that education would prove blacks equal to whites. Andrew Harris, a doctor who lived nearby refused to treat her black students. Gubernatorial candidate Andrew Judson spoke at a town meeting . No school for “nigger girls” would ever be across the street from his house, he promised that if black students showed up he would, use the law to have them arrested. When abolitionist Samuel May asked to speak he was confronted with fists and driven from the meeting. Through the next year and a half Crandall and her students increasinglybecame targets of community anger, local merchants refused to do business with the school and the stage driver refused to transport its students, boys threw manure in the schools while neighbors refused requests for pails of fresh water, Rotten eggs and rocks were thrown at the school building. Prudence Crandell was forced to give up her school.Northern hostility to black education was not limited to Connecticut. Noyes Academy in Canaan was not only shut down, but a demolition crew hitched a train of oxen to the school and pulled it off its foundation. In New Haven residents voted 700-4 against allowing a school for young black men to open near Yale. One of the rationales was that the education would do blacks more harm than good. “ What benefit can it be to a waiter or coachman to read Horace, or be a profound mathematician.” Read a local editorial.In May 1833 the Connecticut legislature passed black law making it illegal for out of state students of color to attend school without local permission. A phrenologist testified that Negroes could not be educated beyond a certain level and could never be fit citizens.New England slave trading went on to supply slaves to Bermuda and Cuba until almost 1890. But transporting slaves between countries was hardly the only connection New Englanders has to slavery.“. Two little Connecticut river towns helped produce music for the middle class, at a cost of as many as 2 million African lives, sacrificed to harvest elephant ivory”. Hartford CourantIvorytown, Connecticut, situated between two Connecticut river towns shaped, refined and turned ivory into the stuff and substance of everyday life. Starting with piano keys, baubles, combs, ivory refinement also made billiard balls, hair combs, shaving kits. New England merchants sailed to Africa then traveled inland to Zanzibar where “it is custom to buy a tooth of ivory and slave to carry it to the seashore” wrote Michael W Shepard, a merchant who visited Zanzibar and communicated with Connecticut’s ivory merchants. “Then the ivory and slaves are carried to to Zanzibar and sold”. The ivory going to America and the slave were usually sold to Arab slavery traders or slave traders headed for Cuba or Bermuda. During the second half of the 19th century and well into the 20th 75% of the ivory exported from Zanzibar on the backs of slaves went to only two piano key manufacturing centers in Connecticut. (Deep River Historical Society)Alfred J Swan, a English missionary described the horrors if the ivory caravans he saw in 1880’s. He describes “the feet and shoulders of ivory’s black porters were a mass of open sores, made more painful by the swarms of flies that followed the march and lived on the flowing blood”.. Swan said the porters were “a picture of utter misery” and were covered in scars left by the chipotle, a leather whip made of rhinoceros hide.In 1843 a New England buyer describes seeing “several gangs of slaves just as they came in from the interior of Africa “thin almost as skeletons. They had an iron ring around the neck and a chain went through it, thus connecting 50 or 50 in a line.”Explorer David Livingstone describes what he saw while exploring the Zambesi River in Southeast Africa. “A long line of manacled men, women and children came winding their way round the hill and into the valley, on the side where the village stood. The black drivers, armed with muskets, and bedecked with various articles of finery marched jauntily in the front, middle and rear of the line; some blowing exultantnotes out of long tin horns”.Joseph Conrad worked as a steamboat captain in the Belgian Congo and invented his plot line for “Heart of Darkness”, his classic novel of the search for a doomed ivory trader up river. He insisted that his description of what he saw in the Congo were accurate. “Black shapes crouched, lay, sat between trees leaning against the trunks, clinging to the earth, half coming out, half e faced within the dim light, in all attitudes of pain, abandonment and despair....They were dying very slowly-it was very clear. They were not enemies, they were not criminals, they were nothing earthly now-nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation, lying confusedly in the greenish gloom”.The suffering that accompanied ivory fills more than half a century of eyewitness accounts for the 1830’s to the 1890’s. The Civil War ended slave labor in the US but not the notion that black people were inherently suited only to hard labor. In his address to the New Haven Historical Society in 1875, scholar William C Fowler discussed the status of black people on Connecticut since their introduction into the colony in the 17th century. Fowler said that blacks “being an imitative race readily adopted the customs of the whites” and that the New World slavery was an improvement over the “moral degradation” of their African homeland. Fowler’s views were not regarded as racism but common sense. The America these men knew was in the process of freeing itself from the system of slavery , but the reality of involuntary labor was familiar to them, particularly the involuntary labor of black people.Hard work was what one historian calls “the bifurcated mind” of the 19th century commerce. Human rights were good, but a successful business always rested on somebody’s back and even abolitionists like Read and Pratt understood that. An inferior people, living in untamed wilds were part of ivory’s African supply system and was instrumental in maintaining the flow of high quality ivory.Enslaved Africans who managed to survive the trek carrying 100 pound ivory tusks on their shoulders for New England ivory merchants up the Ivory Coast ended up in the slave marketplace in Zanzibar. They were then sold into forced labor on plantations in Indian Ocean Islands or on huge sugar plantations in Brazil where the life expectancy was less than a year. Or they were sold into agricultural slavery in Arabia and North Africa.Abolitionists like Julius Pratt and George Read went to Zanzibar to promote slave trade to help build a market that would make his fellow New Englanders rich. As elephant populations dwindled, ivory had to be harvested farther from coastal Africa and the trek for enslaved Africans became longer. Under the weight of the tusks they were forced to carry men and women taken from their villages by force walked hundreds of miles to the coast.Ernst D Moore, native New Englanders and ivory merchant lived in luxury for years in Africa. Moore wrote that at the height of the ivory trade the ships that lay at anchor off the town were packed with slave awaiting transport to Arabia and Persia after New England merchants had bought them and forced them to walk 700 plus miles with 100 pound ivory tusks on their backs. This only stopped when the demand for ivory stopped.The south’s connection to slavery ended with the Civil War. The north’s connection to slavery and the money made off the backs of slaves continued for at least another 40 years. This article list only a minute portion of the severity and size of the Northern United States connections to profiting on the backs of enslaved Africans, nor does it delve into the horrors those enslaved in the North suffered.“Slavery has long been identified in the national consciousnesses a Southern institution. The time to bury that myth is long overdue. Slavery is a story about America, all of America. The nations wealth, from the very beginning depended upon the exploitation of black peoples on three continents. Together, over the lives of the millions of enslaved men and women, Northerners and Southerners shook hands and made a country. “ Hartford Courant.Here is an article I wrote for an online history community. Hope you’ll learn a little history from it.Forgotten Connections to Slavery: the North’s Dirty Little Secret.Several years ago the Hartford Connecticut Courant published a story titled “Aetna Regrets Insuring Slaves”. Courant’s reporters began to investigate the newspapers role in slavery. The Sunday magazine staff investigated slavery roots in the northern states and found “ what appeared to be unshakable proof of Connecticuts complicity in slavery. What’s more, it quickly became obvious that our economic links to slavery were deeply entwined with our religious, political and educational institutions. Slavery was a part of the social contract in Connecticut. It was the air that we breathed”.“For most Northern whites in the 1850’s, the desire to end slave labor did not equate with a belief in racial equality. Thus blacks might be freed, eventually, but they would not be welcome to remain.” In Connecticut and New York state laws enlarged the male electorate while reducing the black male voters by property requirements and harsh residency laws. Scholar David Roediger revealed that Northern free blacks stood alienated both literally and figuratively with white workers who violently chased them from public parks. It is worth remembering that In the Supreme Court in the Civil Rights Cases of 1883 brought charges of national, not just southern discrimination, suing establishments in NY, San Francisco, Kansas and Tennessee. In the 1940’s thru the 1960’s the fight to end Jim Crow and disenfranchisement would be fought not only in Southern cities but also in northern cities.“Somehow In popular perception, slavery has been cut out of the trade triangle transferred forward to the Civil War, where it became a moral problem confined to the south. Just as Connecticut was thought not to have had slavery because it did not have many slaves or Southern style plantations, it was thought not to profit from slavery as much as the south did. The truth, however, which out to have been plain, is that Connecticut derived a great part, maybe greatest part of its early surplus wealth from slavery.” Hartford Courant.“The truth is that slavery was a national phenomenon. The North shared in the wealth it created and the oppression it required.” The nations financial institutions and manufacturing centers like New York and Massachusetts spun gold from them slave fields in of the south.In 1775 Connecticut held 5,000 Africans as slaves. In 1790 most prosperous merchants owned at least one slave and 50% of the clergy owned at least one slave according to census records. While in the south a few people owned a lot of slaves, in the North a lot of people owned a few slaves.“The effects of the New England slave trade were momentous. It was one of the foundations of New England’s economic structure, it created a wealthy class of slave trading merchants, while profits derived from this commerce stimulated cultural development and philanthropy.” ..The Negro in Colonial New England, page 3“Horses and barrels, fish and flour-the Norths earliest traffic in slavery commerce ran from Plymouth Rock to the West Indies.” ....Connecticut CourantNew England gained their economic rise because regions grew and shipped food to help feed millions of slaves in the West Indies. What’s more, Northern merchants, shippers and financial institutions were crucial players in every phase of the national and international cotton trade. Land all over New England were crowded With textile mills. Well before the Civil War, the economy of the entire North relied heavily on cotton grown by slaves. Starting before the Civil War and lasting until the 20th century two Connecticut towns were international centers for the production of ivory milling hundreds of thousands of tons of elephant tusks procured through enslavement of Africans and caused the death of as many as 2 million people in Africa.Harriet Beecher Stowe said this was the way the northerners liked it...all of the benefits and none of the screams.In America’s infancy it was discovered that the West Indies and Caribbean were perfect for growing sugar. Island were stripped of forests and all land was used to grow sugar cane.Between 1640 and 1650 19,000 Africans were brought to the West Indies. By 1700 there were 134,000 in Barbados alone.In 1645 the son of John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony saw riches in the slave trade. That year a Boston ship made the first known slave voyage to Africa, picking up slaves and delivering them to Barbados. This began what’s known as the Triangle Slave Trade. Northern colonies sent food, livestock and wood to West Indian sugar plantations where slaves harvested sugar cane that fed the refining mills. Sugar, molasses and slaves were shipped north. Northern distilleries turned molasses into rum to trade for Africans who were then shipped to sugar plantations. The triangle trade was complete.The scale of trade from New England was astonishing. In 1775 80% of New England exports went to the West Indies. Flour, corn, potatoes, dried fish, onions, cattle and horses were all exported because the West Indies only grew sugar, they grew little food. When ships could not get through during the Revolution a famine swept across the Caribbean starving tens of thousands.The Narragansett areas of Rhode Island developed its own plantation system using slave labor to keep up demand of supplying the West Indies. Both in acreage and in number of slaves they matched the plantations of Virginia in the 19th century. Connecticut also had plantations. In New London archaeologists are surveying one plantation that was 4,000 acres in size. The owners of small farms in New Jersey, New York including Westchester, Long Island, Staten Island all used slaves to grow crops to supply sugar plantations in the West Indies. West Indian sugar was distilled into rum in New England and traded for Africans who were then dropped off in the West Indies and America. The survival of a slave on a sugar plantation in the West Indies was less than a year. But Africans sold into slavery were plentiful and New England ships were bringing in a constant supply of replacements.By the Revolution there were at least 41,000 slaves in New York and Pennsylvania and Delaware. It soon became accepted that slavery was benign, loosely defined like a mutually agreed upon indenture, the attitude was that slavery was as beneficial to the slave as the owner. Slaves of the North served at the whims of their masters and could be sold or traded. They lived in unheated attics, basements, outbuildings and barns. They often slept on floors and were subject to a harsh system of black codes that controlled their movements, prohibited them from being educated and limited their social contracts.Lining the New England Coast were 40 “slave castles” or “slave factories” that were warehouses where traders could select and buy captive human beings.John Atkins was a British surgeon on a slave ship. He describes the captives of Cape Coast Castle....”In the areas of the Quadrangle are large vaults with an iron grate at the surface to let light and air on these poor wretches, the slaves who are chained and confined there til a demand comes. They are all marked with a burning iron on their breast.”Among the 13 colonies only one plunged into the slave trade in a huge way...Rhode Island. In sheer volume US participation in the slave trade may have seemed insignificant. European ships transported 11.5 million Africans sold over 3 centuries into New World Slavery with only a small percentage sent to the colonies. On this side of the Atlantic, however Rhode Island was the leader. In 1775 it controlled two thirds or more of the colonies slave trade with Africa. After the Revolutionary War Rhode Island had a monopoly in the slave trade.While Rhode Island and its neighbors found ways to profit by trading with slave plantations in the West Indies, Rhode Island went further, competing with European powers in the slave trade itself. Rhode Island shipped more slaves than any of the 13 other colonies combined. In 1772 merchants who owned slaving vessels occupied 8 of the top 10 positions on Newport’s tax rolls. Newport launched 70 percent of all American slave voyages.In the last years the slave trade was legal, John Brown and Captain James DeWolf joined forces to protect the slave trade. Brown entered Congress in 1799. But DeWolf had a reputation as especially cruel on his ships. He once threw a slave tied to a chair overboard then complained about losing a good chair. One of his captains cut off the hands if two slaves clinging to the railing. But it was Brown who would become famous in New England for starting Brown University.“After Congress outlawed the importation of slaves, ship captains began to hide their boxes of shackles but little else about the slave trade changed except that it’s center shifted to Manhattan and it’s conditions became even more horrific. “ Connecticut CourantBy the eve of the war hundreds of businesses in New York and countless more businesses throughout the North were connected to or dependent on cotton. As New York became the center of the US cotton trade, merchants , shippers, auctioneers, bankers, brokers, insurers and thousands of others made their living off the backs of southern slaves growing cotton. New York City became the center of the cotton trade for thee world. The Lehman brothers, Junius Morgan (father of J Pierpont Morgan), John Jacob Astor, Charles Tiffany all had their wealth begin in the cotton trade.On the eve of secession New York City Mayor declared that his city should also secede, for the most part because New York’s economy depended on the cotton trade. Before the election of 1860 Boston area manufacturers were desperately currying favor with southern politicians and planters. Their financial survival depended on slavery.New England was home to almost 500 textile mills scattered through New York State, New Jersey, Connecticut and Massachusetts. The powerful group of Massachusetts businessmen historians call the Boston Associates established Americans own industrial revolution. By the 1850’s their enormous profits had been poured into a complex network of banks, insurance companies, and railroads. Their wealth was anchored to the mammoth textile mills in Massachusetts, Maine, and New Hampshire.In the 1850’s 10 major cotton states were producing 66 percent of the world’s cotton. Raw cotton accounted for more than half of all US exports, all exports that benefitted New York brokers, New York banks, northern ship builders, exporters, ship crews. All business involved in the export of cotton ran through the north. In 1860 the US produced 2.3 billion pounds of cotton. Of that amount, half was exported. The other half fed northern textile mills.On the eve of secession New York City Mayor declared that his city should also secede, for the most part because New York’s economy depended on the cotton trade. Before the election of 1860 Boston area manufacturers were desperately currying favor with southern politicians and planters. Their financial survival depended on slavery.At the same time the Union Committee called a meeting for 200 people to discuss what could be done to stop the south. Two thousand people showed up. The office building across the street was commandeered to hold the overflow, but merchants and bankers, politicians and shipping magnates spilled into the street. This was not the first time a worried business community had met, but this meeting was the most panicky by far. The south had to be persuaded to stay. They very spine of 19th century business, money and power attended the meeting includingAT Stewart, owner of the nations first department store and the wealthiest man in New YorkMoses Taylor, sugar importer, bankers and coal and railroad magnate and for nearly half a century, the most influential businessman in New York.Ariel Abbot Low, whose A.A. Low and Brothers was the most important firm in the China trade.William B Astor, son of John Jacob Astor, the nation’s first millionaire.August Belmont, American agent for the Rothchilds of Germany, and creator of the Belmont Stakes.Wlilliam H. Aspinwall and his partners Robert Minturn and Henry Grinnell, editors of the Journal of Commerce and the New York Herald.Also in attendance were politicians who included two former mayors, presidential candidate Samuel J Tilden, and former president Millard Fillmore.For half a century before the war cotton was the backbone of the economy of America. Cotton was king and the North ruled cotton. From seed to cloth Northern business was involved. Only large banks, located mostly in New York could extend credit to plantation owners needed between planting and selling their crops. Any plantation owners wishing to expand depended on Northern Banks to lend him money for additional equipment and additional labor. Slaves were usually bought on credit. Other Northerners made up the long chain between planter and manufacturer.the “factor” helped the planter get the best price, advised him, and often took care of his finances. Ships that carried cotton to market were Northern owned, northern built, captained and crewed by northerners.But that was not the only use of northern ships. By 1860 New York was notorious as the hub of an international illegal slave trade. It was too lucrative and too corrupt to stop. Ships to carry slaves were built and sold in New York complete with crates of shackles and supersized water tanks. During its peak in 1859 and 1860 at least 2 slave ships left from New York harbor every month , able to hold 600- 1,000 slaves each. At this point most slaves were sold to Bermuda and Cuba. In the summer of 1860 the traffic from Africa was so heavy that the US Navy seized The Storm King, carrying 620 Africans, half of which were children and the Cora loaded with 700 Africans along with the Erie with a hold filled with 900 Africans. All three ships were New York ships.By 1861 the illegal trade had grown so daring that anyone who read a NY paper knew how it worked. NY ships sailed to Rio or Later, Havana where they might take aboard a second captain or crew. For the crossing to Africa the US ship would list foreigners as passengers. On the African Coast came a switch in nationality. Just before slaves were loaded the foreigners would declare themselves owners of what had been only moments before a US vessel. The American captain and crew made the return voyage as working passengers on the now foreign slave ship. In its final years as abolition threatened national economies dependent on slave labor, the illegal slave trade became more profitable and more horrific. Ships grew larger, able to hold 1,000 Africans chained in pairs to its decks. Slave ships were insured to lose 10% of their slaves but the actual rate was much higher, usually topping 20% or more.After the Revolution white prejudice against blacks began to harden into an aggressive racist ideology. Shortly before the Civil War the science of the “American School of Ethnology “. It’s reining geniuses enjoyed the prestige rained upon them by elite Northern scholars and colleges. Nineteenth century race scientists made the slavery circle more vicious by equating blacks with subhuman biology. Their cutting ideas of racial purity supported the self image of the nations white supremacist majority. Samuel Morton was a leading race scientist who used measurements from his famous skull collection to show that black people had the smallest “cranial capacity” of all humans and were therefore doomed to inferiority.By this death on 1851, Philadelphia physician Samuel Morton Hans achieved international fame for his reserach on skulls that seemed to prove that blacks were mentally inferior to whites and not even of the same species as whites. In 1854 Types of Mankind, a book based on his work the respected Putnam’s monthly Magazine noted that Morton’s investigations “evinced a scientific sagacity of the most extraordinary research and penetration, coupled with a judicial severity of judgement”...Ewell Sale Library, The Academy of Natural Sciences Of Philadelphia.Close behind Morton were Josiah Mott, a University of Pennsylvania graduate and Louis Agassiz, a professor at a Harvard. In the 1850’s they collaborated on “Types of Mankind”. All three were considered among the brightest minds of their times.. “Seeing their black faces with their fat lips and their grimacing teeth, the wool on the heads, their bent knees, their elongated hands, their large, curved fingernails and above all the livid color of their palms, I could not turn my eyes from their face in order to tell them to keep their distance” wrote Agassiz upon first encountering Africans.The federal government sought the advice of Agassiz during the Civil War on the best way to deal with millions of freed slaves, he said the first priority should be to avoid the catastrophe of increased mixing with blacks, “Beware of any policy which may bring about our own race to their level” he wrote. Nearly a century earlier Dr Benjamin Rush of Philadelphia, a leading abolitionist believed that Africans were effected with a mild strain of leprosy that made their noses flat and their skin black. He also thought it made blacks less sensitive to pain. When a sideshow sensation named Henry Moss became a sensation by exhibiting himself as a black man turning white, Rush held out hope that a cure could be found for blackness. He recommended as treatment the juice of unripe peaches, tight fitting clothing and bleeding, purging and abstinence.Morton published a sequel to his first book called “Crania Aegyptiaca” in 1844. In it Morton added that data from the embalmed heads of Egyptians that, according to home, proved racial differences. Morton was achieving international fame. Among scientists who praised Morton was a Swede who wrote that Morton did “more for ethnography than any other living physiologist.”By this death on 1851, Philadelphia physician Samuel Morton Hans achieved international fame for his reserach on skull that seemed to prove that blacks were mentally inferior to whites. In 1854 Tyoes of Mankind, a book based on his work the respected Putnam’s monthly Magazine noted that Morton’s investigations “evinced a scientific sagacity of the most extraordinary research and penetration, coupled with a judicial severity of judgement”...Ewell Sale Library, The Academy of Natural Sciences Of Philadelphia. Dr Samuel Morton’s collection of 600 skulls provided what may be the Norths most insidious contribution to slavery...the “proof of black inferiority”In 1831 the only kind of abolitionism that had popular support was the American Colonization Society with chapters in the north and the south. The society’s goal was to send freed blacks to Africa. Few white people in America thought blacks and whites could coexist in the same society. Prudence Crandall wanted to educate young black women in rural Connecticut. The violence she encountered was life threatening. White parents withdrew their daughters from her school. In Canterbury, nearly everyone opposed Mrs Crandall and her belief that education would prove blacks equal to whites. Andrew Harris, a doctor who lived nearby refused to treat her black students. Gubernatorial candidate Andrew Judson spoke at a town meeting . No school for “nigger girls” would ever be across the street from his house, he promised that if black students showed up he would, use the law to have them arrested. When abolitionist Samuel May asked to speak he was confronted with fists and driven from the meeting. Through the next year and a half Crandall and her students increasinglybecame targets of community anger, local merchants refused to do business with the school and the stage driver refused to transport its students, boys threw manure in the schools while neighbors refused requests for pails of fresh water, Rotten eggs and rocks were thrown at the school building. Prudence Crandell was forced to give up her school.Northern hostility to black education was not limited to Connecticut. Noyes Academy in Canaan was not only shut down, but a demolition crew hitched a train of oxen to the school and pulled it off its foundation. In New Haven residents voted 700-4 against allowing a school for young black men to open near Yale. One of the rationales was that the education would do blacks more harm than good. “ What benefit can it be to a waiter or coachman to read Horace, or be a profound mathematician.” Read a local editorial.In May 1833 the Connecticut legislature passed black law making it illegal for out of state students of color to attend school without local permission. A phrenologist testified that Negroes could not be educated beyond a certain level and could never be fit citizens.New England slave trading went on to supply slaves to Bermuda and Cuba until almost 1890. But transporting slaves between countries was hardly the only connection New Englanders has to slavery.“. Two little Connecticut river towns helped produce music for the middle class, at a cost of as many as 2 million African lives, sacrificed to harvest elephant ivory”. Hartford CourantIvorytown, Connecticut, situated between two Connecticut river towns shaped, refined and turned ivory into the stuff and substance of everyday life. Starting with piano keys, baubles, combs, ivory refinement also made billiard balls, hair combs, shaving kits. New England merchants sailed to Africa then traveled inland to Zanzibar where “it is custom to buy a tooth of ivory and slave to carry it to the seashore” wrote Michael W Shepard, a merchant who visited Zanzibar and communicated with Connecticut’s ivory merchants. “Then the ivory and slaves are carried to to Zanzibar and sold”. The ivory going to America and the slave were usually sold to Arab slavery traders or slave traders headed for Cuba or Bermuda. During the second half of the 19th century and well into the 20thLincoln led Republicans controlled both houses of the 37th Congress. One of their select committees was the “Committee on Emancipation and Colonization.” The following resolution from that committee explains exactly what motivated Northern “anti-slavery.” Anti-slavery meant nothing more than “anti-black;” and to rid the country of an “inferior race” to prevent amalgamation. It was this kind of immoral racism that led to Southern secession in the first place. Is it any wonder that the MISSISSIPPI Declaration of Secession laments that the North “seeks not to elevate or to support the slave, but to destroy his present condition without providing a better.” If this is why the South was “pro-slavery,” in order to protect their black neighbors from Northern racism, what else are we not being told about the cause of secession and war?37th Congess.No. 148. REPORT OF THE SELECT COMMITTEE ON EMANCIPATION AND COLONIZATION,In the House of Resentatives, July 16, 1862:“It is useless, now, to enter upon any philosophical inquiry whether nature has or has not made the negro inferior to the Caucasian. The belief is indelibly fixed upon the public mind that such inequality does exist. There are irreconcilable differences between the two races which separate them,as with a wall of fire. The home for the African must not be within the limits of the present territory of the Union. The Anglo- American looks upon every acre of our present domain as intended for him, and not for the negro. A home, therefore, must be sought for the African beyond our own limits and in those warmer regions to which his constitution is better adapted than to our own climate,and which doubtless the Almighty intended the colored races should inhabit and cultivate.Much of the objection to emancipation arises from the opposition of a large portion of our people to the intermixture of the races, and from the association of white and black labor. The committee would do nothing to favor such a policy; apart from the antipathy which nature has ordained, the presence of a race among us who cannot, and ought not to be admitted to our social and political privileges, will be a perpetual source of injury and inquietude to both. This is a question of color, and is unaffected by the relation of master and slave.The introduction of the negro, whether bond or free, into the same field of labor with the white man, is the opprobrium of the latter... We wish to disabuse our laboring countrymen, and the whole Caucasian race who may seek a home here, of this error... The committee conclude that the highest interests of the white race, whether Anglo-Saxon, Celt, or Scandinavian, require that the whole country should be held and occupied by those races.”General Lee exclaimed:"The best men in the South have long desired to do away with the institution of slavery, and are quite willing to see it abolished. UNLESS SOME HUMANE COURSE, BASED ON WISDOM AND CHRISTIAN PRINCIPLES IS ADOPTED, you do them great injustice in setting them free.”CSA Governor Henry W Allen Jan 1865"To the English philanthropist who professes to feel so much for the slave, I would say, come and see the sad and cruel workings the scheme.--Come and see the negro in the hands of his Yankee liberators. See the utter degradation--the ragged want--the squalid poverty. These false, pretended friends treat him with criminal neglect. William H. Wilder, He says the negroes have died like sheep with the rot. In the Parish of Iberville, out of six hundred and ten slaves, three hundred and ten have perished. Tiger Island, at Berwicks Bay, is one solid grave yard. At New Orleans, Thibodaux, Donaldsonville, Plaquemine, Baton Rouge, Port Hudson, Morganza, Vidalia, Young's Point and Goodrich's Landing, the acres of the silent dead will ever be the monuments of Yankee cruelty to these unhappy wretches. Under published orders from General Banks, The men on plantations were to be paid from six to eight dollars per month, In these orders the poor creatures after being promised this miserable pittance, were bound by every catch and saving clause that a lawyer could invent. For every disobedience their wages were docked. For every absence from labor they were again docked. In the hands of the grasping Yankee overseer, the oppressed slave has been forced to toil free of cost to his new master. I saw a half-starved slave who had escaped from one of the Yankee plantations, he said "that he had worked hard for the Yankees for six long months--that they had 'dockered' him all the time, and had never paid him one cent!" The negro has only changed masters, and very much for the worse! And now, without present reward or hope for the future, he is dying in misery and want. Look at this picture ye negro worshippers, and weep, if you have tears to shed over the poor down-trodden murdered children of Africa.”