America is Coming to Help!
Part One of Two
I laughed to myself…Here we go. I'm starting a war under false pretenses. – Navy Captain (later, Admiral and Vice-Presidential candidate) James Stockdale, flying over the Gulf of Tonkin, August 5th, 1964
I will never apologize for the United States of America. I don’t care what the facts are. – George H.W. Bush
In August of 2025 we noted several anniversaries. August 28th was the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington for Civil Rights. Sixty years ago, on August 6th, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act.
In 1974, Richard Nixon resigned on August 8th. In 1945, the U.S. became the only country in history to use atomic bombs on Hiroshima (August 6th) and Nagasaki (August 9th), allegedly to force Japan to surrender.
On August 7th, 1964, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. The Senate gave him the power “to take all necessary steps, including the use of armed forces,” to fight the spread of communism in Southeast Asia and assist our ally in South Vietnam “in defense of its freedom.”
The story was false but simple and easy for Americans to consume: North Vietnamese torpedo boats – off their own coast – had attacked American ships without provocation. A minor altercation with no injuries was all America needed to come and defend freedom.
America was coming to help!
Understanding this phrase – indeed, understanding any aspect of American history – requires know-ledge of our mythology. We are talking about the America of Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, Buffalo Bill, Kit Carson and George Custer – but also of Zane Grey, Louis L’Amour, Ned Buntline, P.T. Barnum, Mickey Spillane, Dashiell Hammett, Mike Hammer, Philip Marlowe, Sam Spade, John Wayne, Rambo, Clint Eastwood, Charles Bronson, Chuck Norris, Superman, Batman and all the other heroes who charge in at the last moment to save the innocent community from the clutches of the evil, inscrutable (usually dark-skinned) Other.
It is critical to understand the difference between the classic, archetypal heroes that Joseph Campbell wrote about, and the radically individualist hero figures who, from the 17th century, began to populate and eventually dominate the American imagination. In my essay series The Hero Must Die, I write:
The classic hero undergoes the torments of initiation so that both he and his community may suffer into knowledge, that the world may be re-created. It is a pagan and tragic vision; something must die – his old self – in order for new life to grow. But the American hero cares only for the selfless redemption (Latin: “to buy back”) of others. Born in a monotheistic vision, he saves Eden by combining elements of the sacrificial Christ and the zealous, omnipotent Yahweh. Both he and his community begin and end in innocence, because evil, defeated or not, is out there.
But individualism has its shadow: conformism. One of our greatest paradoxes is that a nation of radical individualists with no innate purposes but their own selfish interests became an individualist among nations with a divinely inspired mission to make the world a better place. It was a fallen world, and only Americans had the know-how, the strength, the spiritual motivations and the altruistic ideals to make a difference.
It was also, however, an open world, offering irresistible opportunities to those capitalists and colonialists who could justify getting rich through military intervention. But their problem then and now was how to mobilize public opinion in a democratic nation with an allegedly free press. From very early on, many of America’s best and brightest minds were charged with the responsibility to do exactly that.
By the late 19th century, America’s mission (known variously as manifest destiny, the white man’s burden, bringing the good news, making the world safe for democracy, nation-building, etc.) had taken on four fundamental assumptions:
First: unique, divinely sanctioned purpose.
Second: generous, idealistic intentions, never any thought of financial gain.
Third: Third-World people suffering under local oligarchs and criminals who longed for salvation.
Fourth, a pretext for intervention: unprovoked attack.
Since, by definition, American violence must stem from the noblest of motivations, our actions are usually presented as re-actions to nefarious attacks from the Other, who, in various forms since the early 17th century, has hated us out of purely evil intent and conspired to despoil the innocent community of the elect.
Hence, no movie cowboy heroes ever strike the first blow. They intervene only after the Other has threatened someone’s freedom. Similarly, no American President ever strikes at the enemy without first having been attacked, or so the stories go. In these narratives, the Other always strikes first, with a “sneak” attack. At the very least, he is preparing to attack, or merely capable of doing so. That, in our myth, is justification for American “pre-emptive” violence.
The events in the Tonkin Gulf fit a tradition extending backwards, past Pearl Harbor, the Palmer raids of 1919, the sinkings of the Lusitania and the Maine, countless Indian threats, the Mexican War and the Witch craze, and stretching forward to interventions in Central America, the Gulf War, 9/11 and all the alleged danger from Iran, Afghanistan, Venezuela and other nations unwilling to comply with the aims of the American empire.
The gunboat diplomacy of the 1890s didn’t begin this pattern; it was already enshrined in American myth. Between 1798 and 1895 (the year conventional historians consider the beginning of American empirical designs), the U.S. had already intervened in other countries over 100 times. Such policies protected business while allowing white Americans to innocently believe that they benefited mankind. In 1907, however, future President Woodrow Wilson admitted without irony or metaphor:
Concessions obtained by financiers must be safeguarded…even if the sovereignty of unwilling nations be outraged…the doors of the nations which are closed must be battered down.
The story remains deeply embedded in our psyches. And the actions have been remarkably consistent. When economic pressure, sanctions, clandestine operations or political assassinations fail, American leaders fabricate provocations and proceed to attack. This has been a regular pattern, regardless of whether Republicans or Democrats have inhabited the White House, for over 170 years.
Our self-image, however, remains staunchly innocent because the myth of American Innocence teaches that both redemption and regeneration (for both ourselves and those we would save) comes not through peaceful means but through righteous, crusading violence. “The distance between such noble principles and such self-serving aggressiveness,” wrote historian Walter Nugent, “is the measure of hypocrisy.” But it is also the measure of how profoundly a nation, or at least a significant majority of its people, take its own rhetoric and mythic narratives literally.
But Americans, though naïve, belligerent (and despite our unique patterns of mass shootings), may not be any more inherently violent than other peoples. The state and the major media must regularly administer massive dosages of indoctrination to reanimate our sense of innocence and purpose as well as our rage and willingness to use force. Propaganda merges with belief; every student learns that America never starts wars but always aids those in need. The mythic appeal is so fundamental that occasional disclosures of the truth rarely alter popular consciousness. Our media gatekeepers – the New York Times, the Washington Post, all the major broadcast networks, Internet news providers and all major social networks – make sure of that. Still, the narrative of innocence – and our willingness to offer up our children as sacrifices for the cause – requires regular ceremonial maintenance.
In August of 1964, Congress (with only two “nay” votes) permitted Johnson to wage a war that would last another eleven years, killing some 60,000 Americans (and generating over a hundred thousand veteran suicides) and between three and four million Asians, the vast majority of them civilians.
Are we seeing a mythological theme here? Yes indeed. The Greek god Apollo sent his arrows to kill from a distance. Similarly, American military violence is rarely an intimate affair.
Whether it comes from the barrel of an artillery cannon, from a fighter jet, from airborne tankers dropping defoliants on peasants, from a B-52 carpet-bombing entire regions from five miles off the ground or from the joystick of a computer nerd who directs drone-fired missiles flying over another continent, it is usually perpetrated from a distance.
Distanced violence accomplishes three things. First, it is usually far cheaper than sending large, fully equipped armies into the field. Second, it limits casualties (and, therefore, public protest) to a tiny fraction of those that happen in traditional warfare. And third, it allows both perpetrators and civilians to de-sensitize themselves to the reality of death. In addition, our constant diet of TV crime dramas and semi-comic superhero movies convinces us that violence isn’t real, or that, despite our fears – and because of the privileges shared by most white, middle class persons – it only happens elsewhere, to people who (we convince ourselves) must have done something to deserve their fates.
My book Madness at the Gates of the City: The Myth of American Innocence argues that American myth has divided the world into “red, white and black” – the external, red other (originally the native people, then communism); the internal, black other (originally the four million slaves in 1860, then impoverished, angry residents of the inner cities); and the innocent, privileged, white community.
In Viet Nam, America enacted this old narrative, with white generals sending black and brown soldiers into what everyone called “Indian country.” The U.S. dropped seven million tons of bombs. Significantly, most of these bombs were dropped from 30,000 feet, so most pilots never heard the explosions or saw the results. They took Apollonic killing at a distance to its extreme: attempting to bomb a nation “back to the Stone Age.” And they experienced very little of the PTSD that was so common among the ground troops.
On the ground, however, obsession with the body count, rather than control of territory, became an end in itself. General Westmoreland set the tone by smugly dismissing civilian casualties: “It does deprive the enemy of the population, doesn’t it?” With this kind of implied permission coming from the top, massacres became commonplace by 1968, as they had been in the Philippines, Nicaragua, Haiti and Korea, and would continue to be wherever the U.S. would be opposed by dark-skinned people. Since the end of World War Two, the U.S. has bombed nearly forty countries and intervened in countless others through coups and economic sanctions.
Sanctions, though non-military, are anything but harmless. The U.S. has imposed sanctions on one-third of all countries on Earth, including over 60% of poor nations. It had 15,373 active sanctions as of April 2024. A study by The Lancet estimates that sanctions killed over 500,000 people annually between 1971 and 2021. In Venezuela alone, a former UN Special Rapporteur estimated over 100,000 deaths as a result of sanctions by early 2020. In truth, sanctions are the essence of long-distance violence.
In 1970, sociologist Phillip Slater observed this pattern of good intentions justifying mass, distanced slaughter in his classic book The Pursuit of Loneliness: American Culture at the Breaking Point, especially in his chapter “Kill Anything that Moves”:
…the extent of the killing is so vast that the killer tends to think in terms of areas on a map instead of individuals…one must explain why America has developed more elaborate, complex and grotesque techniques for exterminating people at a distance than any nation in the history of the world…This transfer of killing from a means to an end in itself constitutes a practical definition of genocide…Do Americans hate life? Has there ever been a people who have destroyed so many living things?
Decades before the Internet, cell phones and social media, Slater was on to something very significant:
…perhaps the distance itself carries special meaning. Perhaps Americans enjoy the mass impersonal killing of people who cannot fight back because they themselves suffer mass impersonal injuries from mechanical forces against which they, too, are powerless…Since injury comes to us from remote sources, we must find a remote victim on which to wreck our vengeance.