The United States celebrates, in a jingoistic and bombastic style, an independence obtained as a rebellion against unfair taxation following the Sugar Act (1764), the Stamp Act (1765), the Townshend Acts (1767), and, subsequently, the Tea Act (1773) and The Intolerable Acts (1774). Yet, The Boston Massacre (1770) resulted in exactly 5 deaths, which can hardly be considered a massacre, especially by the standards of the era. By contrast, in the Kent State massacre of 1970 (officially and euphemistically called the “Kent State shootings”), the American police killed 4 students and wounded 9. Which one is the real massacre?

What bothers me most is the use of slogans like “250 years of freedom” and “250 years of democracy.” Nothing could be further from the truth.

America, land of the free and home of the brave?

Black people were slaves, not citizens, until the ratification of the 13th Amendment in December 1865 (although the celebrated date is June 19, 1865, Juneteenth). Imbeciles nearly destroyed the country due to the stubbornness of some who considered slavery to be their inherent right, which led to the American Civil War (1861–1865). And today, instead of commemorating this civil war as a national disgrace, morons celebrate it and even reenact some famous battles!

However, a hundred years later, segregation and discrimination were so widespread that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was needed. How can America be considered a democracy when it was necessary to legislate in 1964 that Black citizens have equal rights to everyone else?

And even after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the repealing of the Jim Crow laws in the Southern states was not immediate. During the Jim Crow era, interracial marriage was forbidden. In the Jim Crow era, buses had seats in the back for Black people; shops and restaurants for white people did not admit Black people; public restrooms and waiting rooms for Black people were separate, if they existed at all. Ambulances for white people could not pick up Black patients, and hospitals could not accommodate Black people in wards meant for white people. Education was also segregated, and despite famous cases like that of James Meredith, who in 1962 managed to be admitted to the University of Mississippi only as a result of a Supreme Court (SCOTUS) decision. Even then, the governor of Mississippi, Ross Barnett, refused to respect the ruling, and President Kennedy had to send US Marshals and later federal troops so that Meredith could enter the campus; violent riots followed, two people died, and over 160 were injured.

It is interesting how America often passes judgment only halfway. Brown v. Board of Education (1954) established that segregation in public schools was illegal, but it did not address segregation in higher education! Nor did the legislature resolve the issue until 1964. Despite the SCOTUS ruling, when nine Black students tried to enter Little Rock Central High School in Arkansas in September 1957, Governor Orval Faubus deployed the National Guard to stop them. It took the US President sending the 101st Airborne Division and federalizing the National Guard to protect the students!

America was not a democracy, and the American people have always been racist and fascist in the Southern states. Remember the Ku Klux Klan. Rewatch In the Heat of the Night (1967) and Mississippi Burning (1988). Read the excellent novel Darktown (2016) by Thomas Mullen, set in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1948. The novel follows the first eight Black police officers in the city’s history against the backdrop of a young Black woman’s murder. The Black officers are not allowed to arrest white people, are not allowed to enter the main precinct, have no patrol cars, and cannot officially investigate murders. The death of the young Black woman is treated with contempt and indifference by the white officers. The book explicitly describes the existence of “ambulance services for Negroes” and other elements of segregation unimaginable today.

By the way, also rewatch 12 Angry Men (1957) and To Kill a Mockingbird (1962). All of these illustrate an era and, much more importantly, a mindset.

There is also talk of the famous “American Dream.”

Only fools still believe in such a thing, and some polls suggest that a third of Americans still do. But a very large portion of Americans are extremely ignorant. They have never stepped out of their country in their lives, they imagine that Europe is communist and Canada is socialist, and they believe their country is the most advanced in the world. This is exactly what the Russians believed during the USSR. Right during the Trump 2.0 mandate, a Danish citizen was asked by a CBP (Customs and Border Protection) officer if she was sure she didn’t want to stay in the States and was actually going back home. Astonished, she asked: “Why would I want to stay here?” The officer, completely serious: “Because it’s the best country in the world!” The Dane: “But what other countries have you visited?” The officer: “None.”

The American Dream promised a lot, but the only part of it that has largely remained valid is this: “Here, the State sticks its nose into my business less than in other countries. Here, I can develop a business more easily.” But is that enough?

When the American Dream was a reality for white people, it was impossible for Black people. When segregation truly ended, I don’t know how it happened, but somewhere in the 1970s, after the First Oil Shock, the American Dream ceased to be attainable for everyone.

Since 1980, despite technological progress, American society has rapidly moved away from the American Dream.

Fewer and fewer Americans today can transcend their social class or the income bracket they were born into. Quite the opposite, a majority of young people are living worse off than their parents did.

The cost of higher education, the price of housing, and healthcare rates have increased far beyond the rate of inflation, which actually means that the standard of living has dropped, even if food is cheap.

The American Nightmare.

An American is afraid to call an ambulance, for fear of being billed $1,000. Health insurance is very expensive and covers very little, which is why some people accept a poorly paid job just because it offers health insurance they couldn’t otherwise afford. Despite all the reforms from Obama onward up to and including Trump 2.0, medical services are the biggest scam in the entire American economy. Not only are the rates unjustifiably high, but the billing system is deeply rigged. An uninsured patient is charged the massive full price. Conversely, a hospital will bill an insurance company only half of that same price, and since the insurance covers half of that, the insured patient ends up paying merely a quarter of the initial amount out of pocket! How can the uninsured patient be fleeced to this extent? It’s not a matter of “retail versus wholesale,” because every patient is an individual case.

Most of the time, an insured American patient pays more for a complex procedure requiring hospitalization than they would pay out-of-pocket as an uninsured patient in Europe. It’s no wonder that some Americans schedule various surgeries in hospitals in Ecuador or Peru.

A country where life itself is a luxury cannot be a civilized country.

Yet America is the country where Kinder eggs are illegal even for adults because they might contain elements that toddlers could choke on, while at Walmart you can buy rifles and ammunition.

America is the country where it is illegal to drink alcohol in public and which accepts the lie that a brown paper bag hiding a container transforms an illegal act into a legal one. Anyway, “land of the free,” eh? Not like those socialists and communists…

America is the country where it is illegal to drink or buy alcohol before the age of 21, but you can buy firearms at 18, and you can drive tank-sized cars at 16.

Where is the logic?!

America is the country where it is impossible for today’s people to decide what they want today and establish what should be understood by the Second Amendment. Surely, the freedom to buy a pistol or a rifle does not transform you into a member of a “well-regulated militia.”

Furthermore, in most countries around the world, many constitutional rights have the addendum: “under the conditions of the law.” This means that an organic law will establish exactly how that right is to be exercised. The right to bear arms is not a constitutional right in other countries, even if gun permits are issued in most of them—usually after providing a valid reason (“I live in an isolated or dangerous place, I am rich or famous, I have enemies”), and always after a series of psychological tests and proficiency exams on gun use.

The US Constitution should include the right to drive a car. Without a car, you are dead across most of the American territory! This right is not guaranteed by the Constitution, yet it can be exercised after passing a driving test which, let’s be realistic, is incredibly simple compared to those in European countries.

Therefore, you cannot drive a car without passing a test, because you could kill other people. You cannot fly an airplane without obtaining a pilot’s license, because you could kill other people. You cannot be a doctor without being certified as such, because you could kill other people. You can, however, buy a firearm—even though you can kill people with it—because the Second Amendment exists, and because “guns don’t kill people; people do.”

Speaking of the American Dream, new cars today are almost entirely just stunningly massive pickup trucks compared to those from 1980, or SUVs the size of tanks. When a new car costs $55k + Sales Tax, where is the American Dream anymore?

Returning to rights, the US Constitution is among the few constitutions that do not outline any rights within the main body of the text, but only as amendments. Modern constitutions often guarantee fundamental rights in their very first articles. The history behind this is interesting.

In 1787, when the Founding Fathers drafted the US Constitution, their approach was purely structural, like engineering. They just wanted to create the “mechanism” of the state (Congress, the President, the Supreme Court). Initially, figures like Alexander Hamilton vehemently opposed including a list of rights in the body of the Constitution. His argument (from Federalist No. 84) was that including a specific list of rights would be dangerous: the government might later deduce that any rights not on that list simply did not exist. A few years later, under pressure from states that refused to ratify the Constitution out of fear it would devolve into a tyranny, a compromise was eventually reached: the first 10 amendments were added in 1791 (the famous Bill of Rights). Hence the fact that in the US, rights are a legislative “patch” added on later.

What kind of country is it that, in its immense imbecility, completely banned alcohol for decades, with the effect of creating the Italian-American mafia and increasing corruption in law enforcement to the level of the Gilded Age, another era of massive, generalized corruption?

But, perhaps I am repeating myself, what kind of “most wonderful Constitution in the world” is one where you cannot write “all people are equal in rights regardless of gender, race, religion, and other personal attributes or beliefs” directly into the Constitution, but instead required multiple laws, culminating in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, just to ensure equal rights?

It is the most overrated Constitution in the world!

America is the country where the defendant has a multitude of constitutional rights and guarantees, more on paper than in other democracies, but in America, a police officer can fatally shoot you in the back, or shoot you from the front or the side when you are unarmed, and that officer is either not indicted or is acquitted of all criminal liability.

American prisons are the most populated in the world. Nowhere else in the world is there such a high percentage of the population incarcerated. And the majority are non-violent offenders! How did it come to this?

Starting in the early 1990s, the “three-strikes law” principle began to be adopted in the States. In most jurisdictions, this means that a third offense, even if it’s just possession of 5 grams of drugs, leads to a de facto life sentence, or “25 to life” without the possibility of parole!

The US has the harshest penal laws of all civilized countries, much harsher than in Europe, yet violence in society has not decreased. Only the prisons have filled up.

And with prison administration being a nationwide business, the private management of some facilities has led to countless abuses. But even state-run prisons are full of violence, human rights are not properly respected, and medical care is deficient.

Not that long ago, the Metropolitan Detention Center Brooklyn, a federal facility run by the Bureau of Prisons, literally froze its prisoners in January–February 2019, following a combination of a fire, a power outage, and chronic heating system failures. Some 1,600 people won compensation in court.

There are, however, around 3,000 jurisdictions for various forms of incarceration in the US, and conditions are anything but uniform. In the South, you fry in prisons like you’re in an oven.

Within the American carceral environment, there is a culture of homosexual rape and heterosexual sexual assault. Carl Weiss’s book, Terror in the Prisons: Homosexual Rape and Why Society Condones It (1974), may have generalized too much, but the cases presented are shocking, and the work has never been republished. I wonder why. Mark S. Fleisher and Jessie L. Krienert’s debunking attempt, The Myth of Prison Rape (2009), is pathetic. It is known that the risk of being raped in prison is enormous. There have been senatorial commissions, massive amounts have been written on the subject. And nothing has been resolved.

Speaking of prisons, add to the list Cool Hand Luke (1967). “What we’ve got here is failure to communicate.”

250 years of democracy, right?

Between 1932 and 1972, 600 African Americans were infected with syphilis and treated with a placebo as a result of a secret clinical study known as the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment. This is just one of the numerous human rights violations discreetly executed by the federal government or the military. Other such abuses have included plutonium injections, radiation exposure, exposure to biological agents (hi, Dr. Mengele!) or toxic substances, various tests on vulnerable groups (often psychiatric patients), as well as mind control programs like the CIA’s MKUltra (1953–1972). I would also single out Operation Sea-Spray (San Francisco, 1950): between September 20 and 27, 1950, the US Navy sprayed Serratia marcescens and Bacillus globigii over San Francisco, and the wind carried the bacterial cloud over the city, where more than 800,000 people lived. In Operation Large Area Coverage, a.k.a. LAC (1957–1958, but with other tests spanning 1950–1963), the Army sprayed tens of tons of radioactive and bacterial particles over the Midwest, the southern US (Operation Dew, 1951–1952), and even over Canada. In St. Louis, between 1953 and 1963, the military mounted spraying devices on schools and apartment blocks that released zinc cadmium sulfide, a toxic and potentially carcinogenic compound, explicitly targeting neighborhoods inhabited by poor African-American families. The military released Bacillus globigii in the New York subway (1966) and the Chicago subway (1950–1960). The results were kept secret until the 1990s.

It is estimated that the US military conducted 239 biological tests on American soil between 1949 and 1969!

Otherwise, America has been spreading democracy across the planet, eh?

Through coups d’état and assassinations in Latin America.

Through the inhumane and illegal embargo against Cuba (el bloqueo).

Through war crimes in Vietnam and Laos.

Through various “minor” invasions like those in Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, Grenada, and Panama, or “larger” ones like the invasion of Iraq. Then, the kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela.

And I almost forgot about the kidnapping, jailing, and torturing of “enemy combatants” in Guantanamo; this unprecedented “innovation” was meant to remove all legal rights from those people. They cannot be granted any rights as per the Geneva Conventions because they are not prisoners of war, and they cannot have the right to a fair trial because Guantanamo belongs to the US Navy, but it’s not US territory. Brilliant invention! As for the kidnapping, doesn’t the US have global jurisdiction? It claims it does, and it can even kidnap presidents, especially if such a president has been elected through questionable elections. (Putin doesn’t, however, risk anything.)

The attack on Iran, carried out together with Israel, is based on justifications very close to those invoked by Putin for attacking Ukraine in 2022. Moreover, it created more problems than it solved, carrying the potential to have irreparably damaged the global economy through the situation created in the Strait of Hormuz.

For that matter, the US has fully supported the expansionist, genocidal, and bellicose policies of the state of Israel in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon.

As the cherry on top, the Donald J. Trump 2.0 Administration has proven, if there was any need to, the fragility of the grand US constitutional framework. Various federal judges are struggling to block this or that stupidity from the orange moron, without much success. And I don’t even want to list the unbelievable, shameful acts of this gibbon, from the global tariffs against the entire planet to the border persecutions and killings carried out by ICE agents. This world-class cretin demolished half of the White House and destroyed the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. After awarding the pool’s reconstruction contract without a tender for over $14 million, in his characteristic nepotistic style (the most corrupt president in US history!), the work was naturally executed poorly, the blue paint peeled off, and with the blue color absorbing heat, green algae proliferated. The global incompetent sought and found scapegoats who are completely innocent. Will the Justice system save them from the wrath of Supreme Leader, Comrade Joseph Trump?

The American Dream is dead.

R.I.P., America, at age 250.