American Exceptionalism and American Innocence: A People’s History of Fake News, from the Revolutionary War to the War on Terror
by Roberto Sirvent and Danny Haiphong
(Skyhorse, £19.99)

THIS important work of Marxist sociology and history relentlessly unpicks the foundational myths of the United States which, with their accompanying ideology of exceptionalism and innocence, act as a “cultural drug” that serves to pacify and deceive the masses.

Picking up the historical baton from Howard Zinn, its authors Roberto Sirvent and Danny Haiphong expose the extraordinary violence and cruelty that accompanied the colonial settlement of the Americas and the establishment of the United States.

While children in the US are made to recite sugar-coated fairy tales about the “founding fathers” and “pilgrims,” they instead highlight the “violence, empire, genocide, slavery, dispossession and white supremacy” that constitute the real origin story.

Particularly interesting and original is the authors’ discussion of the assumption of political innocence, which means that Americans tend to “remember slavery and settler colonialism as events of the past, not as structures of domination that haunt our present.”

Similarly, illegal wars and coups can be considered “aberrations” and “mistakes,” as opposed to being clear examples of the fundamentally imperialist and predatory nature of US capitalism.

The idea of American exceptionalism provides another cloak for capitalist marauding. If any political movement or oppressed country opposes the actions of the US government or armed forces, it must be because they “hate our way of life.”

US values and beliefs are so wonderful and exceptional that it’s only fair and correct that they be spread throughout the world, delivered by weaponised drones if need be.

The more subtle variants of American exceptionalism and innocence assert that while the US and its predecessor colonies used to do some bad things — genocide, slavery, colonialism, racism, war — the trajectory has been towards a state of democracy, freedom and justice.

Such a narrative ignores uncomfortable truths such as the fact that the US, with around a 20th of the world’s population, holds a quarter of its prisoners, and that 40 per cent of these are of African origin. Since 2001, nearly one-third of all young black males are, or have been, incarcerated or on parole.

Prisoners are forced to work for large corporations for practically no payment under a system that can reasonably be described as a form of modern slavery. Meanwhile, people like Leonard Peltier and Mumia Abu-Jamal remain behind bars, having spent decades locked up because of their commitment to indigenous and black rights.

Wars in Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia, along with a proxy war in Syria and support for regime-change coups in Venezuela and elsewhere, show that US imperialism is still very much a phenomenon of the present.

By exploding the myths of exceptionalism and innocence, Sirvent and Haiphong aim to break down apathy and help build a powerful movement of opposition to capitalism, racism and war and thereby to participate in the fundamental task of our era — constructing a path towards socialism.