“Make America Great Again.” Four magic words that get millions of Americans fired up. So making America great again, why not? But before we go any further, just one innocent little question: What era are some nostalgic folks referring to when they talk about past greatness? Because you see, depending on whether you’re privileged or just a regular citizen, the perception of “American greatness” varies pretty dramatically.

For the ultra-rich, it’s true that America has ALWAYS been great. In the past there was Rockefeller, Carnegie, Ford… And currently Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg… All these names represent colossal fortunes built on… well, hold on a bit, we’ll get to that! America is probably even greater for today’s billionaires than it’s ever been before. Record inequality, legalized tax evasion, and total political influence. These people are swimming in happiness.

But for the middle and working classes? That’s a whole different story! A story that doesn’t get told in Hollywood movies or political speeches. A story of violence, exploitation, state lies, and blood. Lots of blood and sweat.

So let’s take a few minutes to think about this. To do that, we’re going to take a little time travel journey into this supposedly glorious America. And that way, we’ll see together what this famous “greatness” everyone talks about really looked like.

Bloody Foundations: When Greatness Rhymes with Mass Massacre

Let’s start at the beginning. America was built on genocide. This isn’t a metaphor or an exaggeration: we’re talking about actual genocide. Because it’s an established fact that Native American populations, estimated between 5 and 15 million human beings before Europeans arrived, were decimated through massacres, deliberately spread diseases, and deportations.

And because killing humans wasn’t enough, they also had to destroy their way of life. Like the buffalo, for instance. Sixty million animals massacred between 1830 and 1890! Not to eat them but just to starve the Great Plains tribes. So we’re talking about a methodically orchestrated genocide by starvation. That’s how the foundations of a nation “blessed by God” were built.

But the real economic pillar of this emerging greatness was slavery. Four million people reduced to the status of merchandise. Colossal fortunes built on the backs of these slaves. Southern cotton enriched Northern bankers. Plantations created dynasties. America was building itself on corpses, whippings, and chains.

Now, during this time, were white workers better off? Were they living in some kind of proletarian paradise? Let me doubt that. A worker’s life expectancy was 10 to 20 years shorter than a bourgeois person’s. Children worked from age 6 or 8. Twelve to fifteen hours a day, six days a week. And vacations? A completely unknown concept.

Wages? Calculated to barely cover basic needs. 85% of a working family’s budget went to rent and food. Under these conditions, saving was unthinkable. Getting sick was a death sentence because there was no social protection before 1880. Workplace accidents were frequent, often fatal, and never compensated.

In 1878, the British Association revealed that 11-12 year old boys from working-class backgrounds were 12 centimeters shorter than those from the bourgeoisie. Twelve centimeters! That’s what American “greatness” produced back then: stunted bodies, broken lives, and institutionalized misery.

The Civil War: The Poor Die, The Rich Get Richer

Then came the Civil War. Official history will tell you it was a noble war for the abolition of slavery. When in reality it was a conflict between a Southern far-right slave-owning class and Northern liberal capitalists. Two economic models fighting each other, two elites battling for control of the country.

And who died in this civil war? Mainly the poor. On both sides, hundreds of thousands of young men were cut down in their prime. Meanwhile, the Northern rich got richer selling weapons, uniforms, and supplies to the armies. Ah war, what a fantastic profit accelerator!

The Wild West and the Golden Age of Savage Capitalism: Violence as a Model

After the war came what people call without irony the “Gilded Age.” The golden age for who exactly? For the robber barons like Rockefeller in oil, Carnegie in steel, and Morgan in finance. With these three, there was a totally scandalous concentration of wealth and power.

Between 1897 and 1904, 1,800 companies restructured into just 157 corporations. This represented a dizzying concentration that controlled transportation, food processing, lumber, paper, insurance… Was this the free market or a Soviet-style monopoly system? Actually, I’d call it crony capitalism.

But this is also the Wild West era. That period America loves to fantasize about in its westerns. Violence, greed, lone cowboys. A myth that still fascinates today. Now, the reality of the Wild West was massacres, land theft, and unspeakable brutality. In short, it was the law of the strongest erected as a founding principle.

Because while the robber barons were getting rich, workers lived in abject conditions. In 1880, over a million children under 15 worked daily. Children who would never go to school and would never know childhood.

And for adults, sixty hours of work per week minimum. In 1900, steelworkers worked twelve hours a day for a wage that, I quote from documents testifying to that era: “far below the minimum to live decently.” And still no health insurance, no unemployment, and no retirement. You worked until your body gave out. That was the social contract of great America.

Ultra-Violent Repression: When the State Massacres Its Workers

Obviously, workers tried to resist. To organize. To create unions. And obviously, the response was incredibly violent. For example, in 1877 when railroad workers went on strike. Over 100,000 people stopped working. The repression was extremely brutal. A hundred deaths and a thousand imprisonments. That’s how great America treated those who dared ask for better conditions.

But the crowning achievement, the most representative of that era, is the Pinkertons. A private security agency, or rather a corporate militia that infiltrated unions and broke strikes using the most brutal means. Jay Gould, a cynical and ruthless tycoon, even openly bragged about being able to hire half the working class to kill the other half.

On May 1, 1886, a massive strike was launched across the country to obtain the eight-hour workday. Four hundred thousand workers stopped work. Three days later, in Chicago, a striker was killed during a police charge. The next day, during a protest demonstration at Haymarket Square, a bomb exploded. Police fired on the crowd. The toll from this operation: Dozens dead and wounded. Plus the case of eight anarchists who were heavily sentenced, four of whom were hanged to make an example.

1892, in Homestead, Pennsylvania. Three thousand workers went on strike at the Carnegie steel mills. The manager, Henry Frick, recruited three hundred armed Pinkertons. On the night of July 5 to 6, this led to a thirteen-hour battle between strikers and Pinkertons. Official toll: Sixteen deaths (including seven Pinkertons and nine strikers) and over sixty wounded. The angry crowd beat the captured Pinkertons. Women, men, children, all were united in rage against these mercenaries of capital.

1894, the Pullman strike in Chicago. The city was paralyzed. Democratic President Grover Cleveland declared the strike illegal and sent in federal troops. Violent clashes occurred. Toll: thirteen worker deaths. The strike was broken and Eugene Debs (the union president) was sentenced to six months in prison. He would later become one of the faces of American socialism.

1914, the Ludlow Massacre in Colorado. Striking miners had set up a camp with their families. The National Guard attacked. At nightfall, they set fire to the camp and shot those who fled. Twenty-six people murdered, including eleven children and two women. This class war would ultimately total seventy-four deaths, just because they’d asked for better working conditions. That’s American greatness in action right there.

The 1920s: America and Its Heavy Flirtation with Fascism

The Roaring Twenties… Roaring for who? Certainly for the ultra-rich who were speculating on the stock market. While for workers it was more like the leaden years.

1919: four million strikers across the country. The government’s reaction? A hysterical anti-communist campaign. Attorney General Palmer and his young protégé, a certain Edgar Hoover, arrested ten thousand people in six weeks. Three thousand five hundred activists were detained for months. Five hundred fifty-six were deported from the country.

In 1927, Sacco and Vanzetti, two Italian anarchists, were executed in the electric chair after seven years of legal battle. Their crime? Simply being anarchists and immigrants. The evidence of their guilt? Nonexistent or fabricated. But no matter. Another proof that the so-called land of the free doesn’t tolerate dissent.

But the juiciest, most revealing thing about the era is Henry Ford. Yes, the industrial genius, the inventor of the assembly line, the democratizer of the automobile. He’s an American hero, right? Well, this hero was also a visceral anti-Semite and a Nazi sympathizer. In 1918, Ford bought the Dearborn Independent, a newspaper he transformed into an anti-Semitic platform. For eight years, from 1920 to 1927, he published hateful texts there. Including the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The paper was distributed in all Ford dealerships and reached seven hundred thousand readers. Among them, a certain Adolf Hitler.

Because yes, Hitler admired Ford. He even kept a portrait of him in his private office. He called him “Heinrich Ford” and saw him as the leader of the growing fascist movement in America. In 1938, for his 75th birthday, Hitler gave Ford the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, the highest Nazi decoration for foreigners. Ford accepted it. Without flinching.

Even better: Ford financed the Nazi party from the early 1930s. Fifty thousand dollars every year on Hitler’s birthday. And during World War II, his German subsidiaries produced vehicles for the Wehrmacht. Ford supplied both sides. Because business is business, right?

A Nazi party existed in the United States. The American government dragged its feet about entering the war against Hitler. Because honestly, fascism didn’t bother them that much. What bothered them was just losing money.

The Great Depression: Guess Who Pays the Bill

1929: The stock market crash. The economy collapses. Millions unemployed, families on the street, and endless lines for a bowl of soup. And who pays the bill for the delirious speculation of the Roaring Twenties? Once again, the poor! The middle classes see their savings evaporate. Workers lose their jobs. And the bankers responsible for the disaster? They get bailed out. As always! Because it’s an immutable principle of American capitalism: Profits are private while losses are socialized. In other words, when things are good you stuff your pockets, and when things are bad the taxpayer foots the bill.

The “Glorious” Fifties: The Happy Days Myth

After World War II came the 1950s. The so-called American golden age. Suburban neighborhoods, a car in every garage, and a TV in every living room. The American Dream incarnate. But were these really “Happy Days”?

Because for African Americans it was more like nightmare years because of Jim Crow laws, in effect since 1877, which were in full swing. “Separate but equal,” said the shameless 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision. Separate but equal. What a brazen lie! What a shame for a supposedly civilized country!

Separate toilets, separate water fountains, separate buses, separate schools, separate restaurants… People of color couldn’t sit next to whites at the movies, couldn’t marry whites… And most importantly, they couldn’t vote! In Louisiana in 1910, less than 0.5% of Black men had the right to vote. Just 730 men out of the entire Black population of the state.

The Ku Klux Klan? Going strong! In 1925, thirty thousand members paraded in broad daylight in Washington without hoods, proud of their hatred. Lynchings? Common currency! In 1955, Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old teenager, was tortured and murdered in Mississippi for allegedly whistling at a white woman. His killers were acquitted. Obviously!

But for whites, was it paradise then? Not really! It was mostly suffocating conformism. With the suburban neighborhood as a gilded cage. The man in a suit and tie, commute-work-sleep, drowning himself in alcohol to bear his alienating existence that made him an interchangeable cog in the capitalist machine.

And women? Ah, women! Confined to the role of housewife, perfect mother, and smiling spouse. No right to have a bank account without the husband’s authorization. As for domestic violence, it was more than tolerated. And what about marital rape? The concept didn’t exist legally because you can’t rape your wife. Yeah, right!

So to bear this imposed happiness, women drugged themselves. There’s even a Rolling Stones song that calls them “mother’s little helpers.” Anxiety medication, antidepressants… An entire generation of women on tranquilizers. Because for many, the American Dream looked an awful lot like a nightmare they couldn’t wake up from.

And meanwhile, the McCarthyist witch hunt was in full swing. It was full-blown anti-communist paranoia. With lives destroyed on mere denunciation. Careers broken, families torn apart. All because Senator McCarthy saw communists everywhere. So Hollywood was purged, universities monitored, and unions infiltrated.

Not to mention nuclear terror. The ridiculous drills in schools where children were taught to hide under their desks in case of atomic attack. As if a wooden desk was going to protect them from a thermonuclear bomb. But hey, you had to do something to manage the existential anxiety of a generation raised in fear of nuclear apocalypse.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot. This is also when overconsumption became therapy. You’re not happy? Buy stuff! You feel empty? Buy stuff! Your life has no meaning? Buy stuff! In short, it was shopping as an antidepressant and rampant consumption as a reason for being. All the foundations of modern American society were laid.

The 60s-70s: The Golden Age? My Ass!

The 1960s. America sends men to the Moon. Fantastic! Meanwhile, it also sends hundreds of thousands of poor young men to die in Vietnam.

On March 16, 1968, in the hamlet of My Lai, Vietnam, American soldiers massacred between 347 and 504 civilians according to estimates. Women, children, and babies killed in horrible conditions. Gang rapes, mutilations. Entire families exterminated. Villagers who raised their hands in surrender were shot anyway. The wounded were finished off with bayonets. And the sinister General William Westmoreland, commander of American forces in Vietnam, congratulated Company C for “exceptional action” and for having “dealt the enemy an enormous blow.” No comment.

Those responsible? Of 26 soldiers initially accused, only one was convicted: Lieutenant William Calley. For twenty-two murders he was sentenced to life imprisonment. Which he served in… three and a half years. Under house arrest… Three and a half years for orchestrating a massacre! Especially since My Lai wasn’t an isolated incident at all. In Quang Ngai province where the massacre occurred, up to 70% of all villages were destroyed by aerial and artillery bombardment. Napalm and Agent Orange on the menu. Vietnam was used as a laboratory for all atrocities.

A Pentagon investigation revealed 320 potential war crimes between 1967 and 1971, including seven massacres killing at least one hundred thirty-seven civilians. Seventy-eight other attacks targeting non-combatants. One hundred forty-one cases of torture of civilians or prisoners of war. Of the 203 military personnel indicted, only twenty-three were convicted. And all these numbers are just the tip of the iceberg.

Because you see, the American military had an unofficial doctrine called the “Mere Gook Rule”: soldiers wouldn’t be prosecuted for killing or injuring Vietnamese civilians. So they had carte blanche to massacre innocents. And the body count was the measure of success. Didn’t matter who you killed, as long as the numbers were good.

Thousands of poor young Americans died there. Not the sons of the rich, no! Those guys had exemptions: college, opportune medical problems, connections… So it was mainly working-class kids who came back in body bags. Or came back traumatized for life, hooked on heroin, and unable to reintegrate into a society that had sent them into the meat grinder.

But for the others, those at home, it must have been the golden age, right? With that prosperous America of the Glorious Thirty you could at least hope to touch a bit of paradise? For the answer, let’s look at history. Inflation ate away purchasing power. Economic crises followed one after another. In 1973, there was the oil shock. Then stagflation causing unemployment and inflation. A real explosive cocktail that destroyed millions of families’ savings.

And women? Still in the shit! Until 1974, they couldn’t have a credit card without a male co-signer. Marital rape was legal in most states until the 1970s-80s. Salaries were 40% to 60% lower than men’s for the same work. Abortion was completely illegal until 1973. As a result, thousands of women died every year from clandestine abortions. But hey, those were the glorious years. Right?

Social violence was widespread. Political assassinations followed one after another: JFK in 1963, Malcolm X in 1965, Martin Luther King in 1968, and Robert Kennedy in 1968. Four years, four major assassinations! The country was on the brink of implosion. Let’s also talk about urban riots in Watts in 1965, Newark in 1967, and Detroit in 1967. Entire cities in flames. The National Guard in the streets. Dozens dead. The American Dream… nightmare version.

And the environment? Nobody gave a shit. Rivers literally caught fire. In Cleveland the Cuyahoga River burned several times, including one in 1969 that finally triggered awareness. The air in big cities was unbreathable. Toxic spills numbered in the thousands. And I’m leaving out plenty more, much worse stuff.

That’s the reality of the glorious years. That’s the American golden age! State lies, massacres, assassinations, pollution, inflation, unemployment, and endemic violence. So when people say “glorious,” every time I wonder if there wasn’t a gross error in choosing that adjective.

The 80s: Reagan’s Unbridled Capitalism

The 1980s marked Ronald Reagan’s arrival and the triumph of neoliberalism. Unions were destroyed. Reagan broke the air traffic controllers’ strike in 1981. The message was clear: capitalism no longer needs to pretend to negotiate. So inequality explodes! The rich become immensely rich. The poor become poorer. And the middle class starts to crack. But the important thing, apparently, is that the economy “trickles down.” Except nothing ever trickled down, except upward where money always flowed abundantly.

This is also when crack arrived and the never-ending war on drugs began. A war that was actually a war against the poor and African Americans. The CIA itself was involved in cocaine trafficking to finance its illegal operations in Central America. So crack floods the ghettos. Tens of thousands of young minorities are incarcerated. Thousands of lives are destroyed. I still don’t see the greatness. But maybe it’s coming next?

The 90s-2000s: The Era of State Lies

1991 is the first Iraq war. Based on lies. The incubator story in Kuwait? Made up from scratch. Forty-five thousand civilian casualties! But hey, Saddam Hussein was bad, so it’s fine. It slides right by.

2001: September 11th. Three thousand deaths. Tragic, horrible, inexcusable. America’s response? Come up with freedom-killing laws for its population. Invade Afghanistan. Then, in 2003, Iraq again. On February 5, 2003, Colin Powell appeared before the UN Security Council. He brandished a vial containing white powder. The proof, he said, that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. He presented satellite photos, audio recordings…

Except it was all false. Absolutely everything! The Center for Public Integrity would count 935 lies in public statements by Bush, Cheney, Rice, Powell, and Rumsfeld. 935 deliberate lies to justify a war whose unstated objective was to get their hands on oil resources. Paul Wolfowitz, number two at the Pentagon, would later admit: “We settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the only thing everyone could agree on.” Translation: We were looking for a pretext, any pretext.

Hans Blix, the UN inspector, indicated there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. But no matter! The United States went to war anyway. Result: hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis. A destroyed country. Chaos in the Middle East. And the birth of ISIS! Congratulations on this fiasco, admirers of America’s greatness.

And those responsible for these lies? None were punished. None! They wrote books, gave lectures, and made millions. Powell died respected in 2021. Bush paints pictures in Texas. Cheney lives quietly. Rumsfeld died peacefully in 2021. What a disgrace!

Afghanistan? Twenty years of war. To return exactly to the starting point. The Taliban in power once America left with its tail between its legs. Two thousand four hundred American soldiers dead. One hundred fifty thousand Afghans killed. Thousands of billions of dollars spent. For nothing. Absolutely nothing.

But the crowning achievement is 2007-2008 with the subprime crisis. Banks lent money to people who could never repay it. Then they transformed these rotten loans into “safe” financial products. Then they sold these toxic products to the whole world. Fraud on a planetary scale. And when everything collapsed, millions of people lost their homes. Their savings. Their retirement. Lives destroyed. And the bankers responsible? Bailed out with public money! Seven hundred billion dollars. Not a single bank CEO in prison. Not one.

Even worse! The same bankers paid themselves bonuses with the bailout money. Because hey, they had to “retain talent.” The same talents who had almost destroyed the global economy. Makes perfect sense.

The 2010s-2020s: Welcome to Idiocracy

Inequality reaches historic records. Three billionaires own as much as 50% of the American population. Public schools are in ruins. Forty million Americans have no health coverage. Student debt crushes an entire generation. Infrastructure is literally collapsing. Racism and violence are still as virulent. In short, more than ever, America displays all the signs of its decline.

But apparently everything’s fine. The Dow Jones is rising. The rich have never been richer. The system works. For them. Only for them. Like always, greatness only accompanies the privileged. And too bad for the others, the 99% of the rest of the population who can always take refuge in historical myths to give themselves the illusion that everything will be better tomorrow.

Oscar for Best Actor Goes to Uncle Sam: The CIA for Its Life’s Work

Let’s now talk about the Central Intelligence Agency. American pride. The agency that defends democracy everywhere in the world. Well, supposedly. Because the reality is more like it’s a real state within the state. A kind of criminal organization with unlimited budget and total immunity.

Let’s start with MKUltra. A program launched in the 1950s to develop mind control techniques by drugging people with LSD. Without their consent, while we’re at it. The guinea pigs for this experiment? Soldiers, prisoners, but also ordinary American civilians.

Frank Olson, a biologist employed by the military, was drugged with LSD by his superior in 1953. Ten days later, he fell from a ten-story building in New York. The CIA concluded it was suicide. Decades later, the exhumation of his body would reveal he was under the influence of LSD at the time of his death.

George White, a federal narcotics agent, rented apartments for the CIA. “Safe houses” where prostitutes lured unsuspecting clients. They were drugged with LSD, their behavior observed through two-way mirrors, and everything was recorded. This was Operation Midnight Climax. Funded by American taxpayers.

In Lexington, in a supposedly medical facility, volunteers were recruited from drug addicts. They were kept under LSD for seventy-seven days. At a rate of one hundred forty micrograms per day. Their payment? Heroin doses!

Thousands of Americans served as guinea pigs. How many exactly? We’ll probably never know. Because in 1973, CIA Director Richard Helms and MKUltra mastermind Sidney Gottlieb destroyed most of the documents to cover up their crimes. But MKUltra is just the tip of the iceberg. The CIA’s budget? Kept secret. Its funding sources? Opaque. Its democratic oversight? Virtually nonexistent.

The CIA also spies on its own population. The COINTELPRO program targeted civil rights activists, pacifists, and union members. Ten thousand files on American citizens were revealed in 1975. How many are there today? Mystery! The CIA systematically infiltrates political organizations. It even sent anonymous letters to Martin Luther King to push him toward suicide. It assassinated Fred Hampton, the Black Panthers leader, in 1969. Yes! State murders committed on American soil.

And abroad, it’s even worse! Coups, overthrows of democratically elected governments, and installation of dictators. Pinochet in Chile. The Shah in Iran. Mobutu in Zaire. The list is long… Very long. Torture, kidnappings, black sites all over the world. Guantanamo. Abu Ghraib. Hundreds of prisoners tortured, held for years without trial and without lawyers. Some innocent. But no matter. It’s supposedly for national security.

And let’s not forget drug trafficking. Because yes, we’re back to this subject: The CIA financed its illegal operations by selling drugs. The Iran-Contra scandal. Crack in American ghettos. All to finance death squads in Central America. As for the FBI, it’s hardly better. J. Edgar Hoover ran the agency for forty-eight years, from 1924 to 1972. Forty-eight years accumulating blackmail files on all politicians. Spying, harassing, and destroying lives.

That’s the real American deep state. This isn’t another conspiracy theory. It’s documented, admitted, and even assumed reality. Because ultimately, no one was punished. And no one ever will be. So there’s no point looking for reptilians or Illuminati. The conspiracy is right there. Right under our eyes.

Artificial Paradise: When the Happiness of Being American Goes Through Chemistry

Let’s now talk about a fascinating paradox. If America is really the greatest country in the world, if it’s really paradise on Earth, then why do its inhabitants need to drug themselves so much?

The 1950s-60s saw the explosion of anxiety medications and antidepressants. Millions of Americans, especially women, were on tranquilizers. To bear the imposed happiness, the required perfection, and the mandatory smile.

The 1970s-80s: cocaine invaded Wall Street. The “masters of the universe” had to get high to keep up the pace. Because capitalist paradise apparently requires white powder up your nose to be bearable. Meanwhile, crack ravaged the ghettos. Two weights, two measures. Cocaine for the rich and crack for the poor. And prison sentences? A hundred times heavier for crack. Simple coincidence?

The 1990s-2000s marked the beginning of the opioid crisis. Orchestrated by Big Pharma with Purdue Pharma and its OxyContin. We’re witnessing mass legal addiction because doctors prescribed these pills like candy. And patients became addicted by the millions. While Purdue Pharma knew! Internal documents prove it. They knew their drug was highly addictive. But they deliberately hid it. They lied. They corrupted doctors. To sell more. Always more. And make more profit. Result: since 1999, over five hundred thousand Americans have died from opioid overdoses. Five hundred thousand! The equivalent of a city like Atlanta completely wiped off the map.

Were those responsible punished? Purdue Pharma filed for bankruptcy in 2019. The Sackler family who owns it agreed to pay six billion dollars in exchange for immunity. Six billion sounds like a lot. But actually they made thirty-five. So contrary to popular belief, it seems crime does pay well.

Today, it’s fentanyl that’s killing. Entire territories are ravaged by this crap. More in deep America, the one you see little of. The one that big city urbanites mock. With this drug, communities are destroyed. Families are broken. An entire generation is lost.

Life expectancy in the United States? It’s declining! It’s the only developed country where this happens. Three consecutive years of decline between 2015 and 2017. Mainly because of overdoses and suicides. Deaths of despair, as economists call them. So let’s ask the question: why? Why does the richest country in the world need to drug itself this much? Why do its inhabitants have to anesthetize themselves to bear their existence?

Because sorry, when you’re happy you don’t need hard drugs. When your life has meaning, you don’t need to put coke up your nose to feel effective. When your existence is fulfilling, you don’t need Xanax to sleep. So here’s the answer: The American Dream is so nightmarish you have to anesthetize yourself to live it. That’s the truth. A truth no one wants to look in the face.

The American Dream: The Biggest Marketing Stunt in History

But how did America manage to sell this nightmare as a dream? Very simple: With its entertainment industry, the most effective propaganda machine ever created. John Wayne embodying the lone, virile cowboy. Elvis the tamed rebel. Marilyn Monroe, tragic beauty. Manufactured, marketed icons sold as a dream to the whole world. With the hamburger as a symbol of freedom. Big cars as proof of success. The house with a yard as an unsurpassable horizon, and consumer society erected as a civilizational model.

And it worked! For decades, the whole world swallowed the big myth of the American Dream. The self-made man. The land of opportunity. Anyone can become a millionaire. Just work hard. Except it’s false! Because social mobility in the United States is lower than in most European countries. Proof: If you’re born poor in America, you’re highly likely to die poor. The American Dream? Just a big lottery with lots of players and very, very few winners.

The cultural industry with Hollywood at the helm never spared any effort to sell the myth using movies, series, and music. So much easy-to-swallow entertainment giving the image of a world where everyone is beautiful, everyone is cool, and everyone is rich. When all this is just manipulation on a planetary scale with colossal means to impose its codes on the whole world. And it’s so well done that even Americans started believing they were superheroes. That they saved the world. That they always embodied Good against Evil. Now the world has woken up. American imperialism is unmasked. The arrogance has become unbearable. Too many lies and disrespect have accumulated… The veneer has finally cracked: Once the makeup comes off, America isn’t sexy at all.

The American model is so rotten that even Iraqis and Afghans didn’t want it. After years of occupation and billions of dollars spent on “reconstruction,” these countries rejected the model people wanted to impose on them. Because ultimately, just because America decided its values were all the good ones doesn’t necessarily make it true. Because America has a way of imposing its values that’s a real turn-off. Because America wants to impose its culture by destroying others’. Because in the end, America doesn’t propose, it doesn’t exchange… No, it crushes everything without any compromise!

American soft power? It’s just a bad joke. America never did soft power. It’s always been ultra-violent and ultra-selfish. It has no word. It keeps no promises. It only acts for its own interests. Never to save the world, never to defend democracy. Always out of opportunism. End of story.

So America in the 2020s, whether you like it or not, has the face of its orange-complexioned president. Arrogant, selfish, paranoid, violent, vulgar, egocentric, narcissistic, sexist. That’s the image of Americans in the world today. Not Hollywood’s. Not the one in political speeches. The real one. The one it can’t hide anymore.

Conclusion

So “Make America Great Again”? What greatness are we talking about exactly? That of the Rockefellers and Bezoses who get rich on the backs of millions of exploited workers? That of wars waged on state lies that killed hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians? That of workers who worked twelve hours a day without social protection and died twenty years earlier than the rich? That of eight-year-old children working in mines instead of going to school? That of strikers massacred by private militias paid by employers? That of African Americans lynched, segregated, and deprived of their rights for a century after slavery’s abolition? That of women drugged on tranquilizers to bear their gilded cage? That of the CIA drugging, torturing, assassinating, overthrowing governments, and installing dictators? That of a country drowning in hard drugs because its inhabitants need to anesthetize themselves to bear their existence? Seriously, what greatness are we talking about? Unless I didn’t understand the question properly. If you think that’s the case, say so in the comments.

This piece took me a long time to write and many hours researching documentation. So if you enjoyed this content, if you found it useful, please take a few seconds of your time to share it around you. And please take a few more seconds to support NovaFuture by buying us a coffee. Unfortunately it’s not to go on a sunny vacation but simply to cover the site’s operating costs. We’re counting on you for sharing and support 🙂 And see you soon for new adventures.