167 year old quote is still true — is it just that power corrupts?

© 2019 Peter Free

 

23 September 2019

 

 

With the United States vigorously provoking an unnecessary war with Iran . . .

 

. . . I recognize (again) how little "bad" things change from one era to another.

 

For instance, one hundred-sixty-seven years ago, Frederick Douglass said that:

 

 

Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the Old World, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay our facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me that,

 

for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.

 

© 1852 Frederick Douglass, "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?" (speech in Rochester, New York, 05 July 1852) in The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881) — reproduced in Junius P. Rodriguez (editor), Encyclopedia of Emancipation and Abolition in the Transatlantic World (M. E. Sharpe, 2017; Routledge 2015) (at page 773) (reformatted)

 

 

Douglass' observation is arguably still true

 

Certainly so, if one evaluates the damage that the "official United States" does on an absolute scale.

 

An interfering superpower does a larger volume of harm — even when it acts on the basis of the same proportion of nastiness that is assigned to most people and cultures.

 

 

The moral? — It may not just be that power corrupts

 

It takes persistent public effort — willful ignorance — not to learn moral and strategic lessons that History floods us with.

 

Ergo, Douglass' exasperation.