As of 2020, the population of Alaskan Indians and Native Americans accounted for 9.7 million in the US, according to the US Census, and 9.7 million have fallen prey to cultural and environmental genocide at the hands of Corporate America and the government of the US. More than 360 reservations are 'home' to Indigenous tribes across almost all states, ranging from the Navajo in Utah and the Oglala Sioux in South Dakota to the Western Shoshone in Nevada and the Kickapoo in Oklahoma. The majority of these so-called 'homes' significantly lack access to clean water, sanitation, services in proximity, and adequate healthcare, all belonging to a list of violations of international human rights law by the same government of Uncle Sam that lectures the globe on the concept of democracy. 

Columbus: America's 'history hero' 

Manifest Destiny paves the way for global hegemony

The dawn of what once thought itself to be the world's greatest power did not leave behind the era of the colonial weltanschauung, as it remains rooted in its name and intrinsic in its political DNA from one administration to the next, and from one massacre to the next - beginning from as far back as 1492.

Rising from a history tarnished by the atrocities of America's favorite "hero" Christopher Columbus, Indigenous tribal nations in the land of what was before North America, endured land theft, rape, murder, and torture in techniques that stretched from enslavement to a "scorched earth" policy leaving no human alive and no land fertile. That, nonetheless, was the surface. Centuries later, boarding schools were crafted for Indigenous children specifically to culturally assimilate them into the new Euro-Christian society. Cultural assimilation was never meant as a choice but was more of an intrusion and primarily an imposition. 

The settlers built schools to strip the Indian children of their identities, religions, language, cultures, and values to turn them into proteges serving the needs of Washington. Unfortunately, hundreds and thousands of those children were murdered while attending these schools as a result of not complying with those needs, and many of those are buried in unknown places and some under the now-demolished schools. 

According to a report by the US Department of Interior in May, there are marked or unmarked burial sites at more than 50 locations, out of a total of more than 400 that made up the Federal Indian boarding school system between 1819 and 1969.

The "discoverer" of what is now the US, exploited the term Territorium res nullius, Latin for “no man’s territory”, to frame the perimeters of the Doctrine of Discovery which stipulated that uninhabited territory can be declared by whoever discovered it as one’s own. 

In abusing this term’s definition and aim, Columbus and those who followed his footsteps used the term to justify why the land they had set foot on was now theirs. The Doctrine is plainly and intrinsically induced by beliefs of racial and religious superiority - what was not of white skin or Euro-Christian, was not worthy of the right to self-determination. America was built on the sweat, tears, and blood of a slaughtered people only to be replaced by the labor, blood, and tears of the enslaved people of Africa. 

Endorsed Christian superiority gave leverage to the emergence of Manifest Destiny, the second bible of the US that dealt with validating America’s expansion across Indigenous America, which the Euro-Americans considered to be their destined mission, chosen destiny, and emanating from their superior nature. Its rhetoric epitomized an ethnological hierarchy: an outlook of war that validates all its tactics and methods, symbolizing a God-sent assignment to embody a nonpareil of social order to other states and nations, much like the US still strives for today. The expansion of American forces first in North America, then later in Asia such as Afghanistan and Iraq, and Central American nations like Nicaragua and El Salvador, was instigated by the jingoistic philosophy of Manifest Destiny.

To understand the how and why of US imperialist policies today, it is essential to trace back the origins of this jingoistic philosophy and its implications. It bore the 1823 Monroe Doctrine which declared the end of European affairs in the Western Hemisphere and the beginning of American imperialism in the region and the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement after the fallout of the Ottoman Empire and the division of the Middle East among European powers. This is not to review a relevant course in history, but to demonstrate the invariable trait engraved in the nature of Western hegemony, politics, and law. The American assaults in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Afghanistan, and Yemen showcase the application of the ‘us-and-them’ formula that it inherited from its European ancestors. 

Cowboys dressed as police 

Resurrecting neo-caudillismo in the age of Biden 

The US is signing its own death warrant, causing the fall of its global hegemonic order, from the beginning of the past few years starting with the brutal and illegal murders of African Americans at the hands of the police – as history repeats itself, but instead, the age of the cowboys has ushered in that of police authorities. What pushes its fall even further is the fact that the US has been throwing any alibi to legitimize its actions as if it was not a thing of their doing - from blaming African-American murders on account of suspicious activity, invading Asian land on account of exporting democracy, to blaming Indigenous peoples' deaths on diseases brought by travelers "coincidentally". 

In a nation that claims to be the role model of beaming democracy and human rights equality, demographic groups such as Latinos, African-Americans, Pacific Islanders, and Indigenous peoples bear the brunt of inequalities, facing greater repercussions parallel to the underrepresentation of their needs in legislatures and movements such as the feminist movement (nowadays mostly dominated by white liberals) which do not take Indigenous women and women of color into consideration. 

While the Ukrainian government says "jump" with weapon packages and US President Joe Biden asks "how high?", the latter deliberately seems to forget (as he does with things like how to walk off a stage or call out for a dead lawmaker in a crowd) about the damages of his own policies and those of his ancestors his people and the rest of the globe dragged deeper into mounting debt, food shortages and political failures and humiliations. And the original inhabitants of the US? Suffering the harshest of these setbacks and bound to be sidelined. 

In light of the war in Ukraine that took off in February, the US refuses to deploy its troops to serve in the war in Ukraine, but it gift-wraps and ships more than $15.2 billion worth of ammunition, HIMARS missiles, weapons, and military defense systems as long as the US can play Ukraine like a puppet show. This ploy is not new, as military might and media domination are the US’ weaknesses – the only means maintaining the grasp of its hands on the Global South that it still believes relies on for survival in the world of the Wild, Wild West. 

Bills, such as one introduced in Texas in 2021 called SB3, are aiming to ban the inclusion of critical race theory and civil rights historical figures such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Cesar Chavez in instructional materials in classes – with the excuse of avoiding “ridiculous leftist narratives”. Running away from responsibilities is one thing, but covering up the systemic racism infested in a whole social foundation is on another level of burying a history of imperial aggression and bloodshed. 

The illusion of American justice

The US is digging its own grave

American law has become nothing more of a placebo or an equivalent to a morphine injection, catering to an institutional system that portrays the illusion of the justice system being in favor of the individuals deprived of human rights when in truth it may as well be just lip service. Biden is playing the devil’s advocate by not batting an eye about his country’s own crimes against humanity in the East but by attempting to preach to Russian President Vladimir Putin what they themselves don't practice.

Why would it make sense to bring other nation-states to the International Criminal Court for criminal tribunals pertaining to war crimes and crimes against humanity in their pasts, but not to bring the US for its genocidal past and continuous oppression against the indigenous peoples and populations of the world? In a world that plays at the hands and strings of the US, the world order remains wobbly on the scales of the West and the "Rest". The US built the world order, and the US will be the fall of the world order to its knees.

In the aftermath of World War II, British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, French Premier George Clemenceau, and US President Woodrow Wilson convened in 1919 at the Paris Peace Conference in Versailles, France, after World War I to configure the reshaping of borders following the fall of the Ottoman Empire. With Wilson's famous Fourteen Points that gave rise to the term "self-determination" for the creation of new states, the last Point bore the formation of the League of Nations as the coalition for international cooperation and the predecessor of what is now the United Nations.

The United Nations, founded in 1945 by former president Franklin D. Roosevelt, claims to be the place where "nations can gather together, discuss common problems, and find shared solutions that benefit all of humanity." Be that as it may, America pays so America plays, meaning that not only does the US control what the UN does, but it takes both the UN and the world for a ride on its gambling track to global destruction - all at the price of democracy and human rights. 

The US is nothing more than a gravestone of a genocidal history of a nation that preaches democracy, human rights, and individual freedom to the rest of the world. It only craves domination, viewing values of nature, humanity, and culture with money signs in its eyes.