I see that someone at UCLA claimed that my message Number Two “lacked nuance” in its exposure of just some of the monstrous crimes committed by this country. In other words, I am supposedly not looking at the full picture. Yes, the U.S. has done bad things, this person admits, but then they insist that this is true of all countries. And, they argue, America is different, and special, because of its “idea” of “freedom and equality for all.”

This is nothing more than a well-worn attempt to justify those monstrous crimes— this so-called “nuance” is really just “excuse-ance” for those crimes— and it concentrates so much of the mind-numbing nonsense and outright brainwashing that people are bombarded with under this system.

In answering this, it has to be said that there is something truly perverse about claiming that the U.S. is different and special—“exceptional”—in a positive sense, when it was founded on slavery and genocide against Black people and Native Americans, and the towering crimes of this country have continued ever since. Besides my message Number Two, in Number Three I examine more of the atrocities committed by this country and the very real horrors built into this system of capitalism-imperialism; and at revcom.us there are other works— in particular the “American Crime” series—which present an even fuller picture of these horrors. No honest person could read this and continue to parrot the perverse notion of the USA as exceptionally good!

And you can’t have it both ways: If you claim that America is different and special in a positive way, then you can’t excuse the terrible things it does by arguing that “others do it too.” This argument sounds like a toddler whining when they get caught doing something wrong (“Johnny did bad things too”)...or, much worse than that, it is like a serial killer who says:“Yes, I have kidnapped, mutilated, and murdered many people, but others have done the same—and, anyway, I am different and special because I have written a declaration proclaiming the importance of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness!”

Still worse, the “serial killers” who rule this country have maimed and murdered not just a few dozen but literally millions and millions of human beings, here and all over the world.

As for that old fairy tale about “freedom and equality for all,” the fact is that this country has never come close to making that a reality—and, so long as the capitalist-imperialist system rules in this country, it never will—because “freedom and equality for all” is impossible in a system based on exploitation, and all the oppression that goes along with that exploitation, of masses of people. And, there is the whole international dimension, in which this system of capitalism-imperialism, and the U.S. above all, has for generations viciously exploited and oppressed literally billions of people, slaughtering millions in order to violently enforce this situation.

In future messages, I will get into this further, but I will end for now by referring to the conclusion of my work Communism and Jeffersonian Democracy: the communist revolution represents the struggle for a freedom, for an emancipation of humanity, that is far beyond the narrow horizon of the “ideal” capitalist notions of freedom and rights, which in reality are bound up with, and limited by, all the relations of exploitation and oppression that are built into and fundamentally define the capitalist system.