Living in the United States means living in a nation whose rulers have always been intent on expanding their wealth and their reach. This fact of history has created a legacy of death, destruction, and theft. It has also enabled a majority of the citizens in the nation to benefit from these crimes; a fact which has encouraged them to ignore the sources of their relative well-being. Of course, the dynamic involved in the creation of this collaborative populace is one that involves an ever more sophisticated system of propaganda. It is a system which plays on the arrogance and racism of the population and can be seen most graphically in the treatment of the indigenous peoples of northern America and the enslavement (and the legacy thereof) of Africans and their descendants. Similarly, this attitude is transmitted overseas via military aggression, trade deals and treaties. Perhaps the most obvious example of the latter is the 1923 doctrine named after President James Monroe. Known as the Monroe Doctrine and originally made policy in Monroe’s annual letter to Congress, it claims the Western hemisphere as Washington’s own. More

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