Op-Ed

Trump’s UFC Cage Fight Is an Apt Metaphor for a Nation Built on Colonial Violence

The White House’s Freedom 250 spectacle grotesquely exposed the settler-colonial legacy of 1776.

By Jesse Hagopian ,

 Truthout

July 2, 2026

Fireworks go off during "UFC Freedom 250" mixed martial arts event on the South Lawn of the White House on June 15, 2026, in Washington, D.C.Saul Loeb - Pool / Getty Images


“On July 4th, 1776 … the United States became the greatest force for freedom, justice, equality, and prosperity in the history of the world,” President Donald Trump declared in a promotional video for the Freedom 250 campaign, the administration’s flagship initiative commemorating the U.S.’s semiquincentennial. Among the centerpiece events planned for the nation’s 250th birthday celebration was an Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) cage fight on the grounds of the White House.

The June 14 event, which occurred on Trump’s birthday and Flag Day, delivered exactly what he promised: a pageant of power, violence, and nationalism staged at the seat of U.S. power. Thousands gathered around an octagonal cage erected on the White House grounds; cabinet secretaries mingled with senators, tech billionaires with celebrity athletes, media personalities with corporate sponsors, all beneath military flyovers and pyrotechnic displays. Under the lights, fighters bloodied one another as the crowd roared its approval.

Liberals found the event crass. Sen. Patty Murray called it “out of touch.” New York Times opinion columnist Michelle Goldberg wrote, “On the 250th anniversary of our country’s founding, America’s increasingly senescent president turned the White House lawn into a tacky, bloody gladiatorial arena.” Meanwhile, CNN quoted one historian who asked, “What does a UFC fight have to do with America’s greatness?”

The historian’s question assumes that the values represented by the spectacle — domination, hierarchy, and the glorification of power — are fundamentally at odds with the ideals of the founding of the United States. But what if the contradiction lies not between the cage match and the American Revolution, but between the history that people in the U.S. are taught and the history that actually unfolded? To answer that question, it helps to begin with an observation from Martinican poet and anti-colonial theorist Aimé Césaire: “No one colonizes innocently.”

By fusing combat, militarism, celebrity culture, and nationalism into a single public performance, the White House cage match endeavored to cast repression, xenophobia, and extreme inequality not as threats to freedom but as expressions of national strength.

Americans are taught that their nation was born in the cradle of liberty. But Césaire’s insight requires us to confront a more disquieting truth: The U.S. republic emerged from another womb altogether — the smoke of burning villages, the holds of slave ships, and the ambitions of a colonial elite willing to unleash unspeakable violence in pursuit of wealth and power. Indeed, what better way to party like it’s 1776 than with a spectacle of combat staged at the center of U.S. empire?

The cage fight, surrounded by representatives of every branch of the armed forces, was part of Trump’s effort to cultivate a cult of personality. Writing under Nazi rule, cultural theorist Walter Benjamin described fascism as the “aestheticization of politics” — the transformation of political life into spectacle in order to generate emotional attachment to authority. By fusing combat, militarism, celebrity culture, and nationalism into a single public performance, the White House cage match endeavored to cast repression, xenophobia, and extreme inequality not as threats to freedom but as expressions of national strength.

As the United States approaches its 250th anniversary, the country faces rising authoritarianism, ongoing state violence against Black communities, a worsening affordability crisis, widening wars, climate catastrophe, attacks on immigrants and LGBTQ+ people, and an escalating siege on critical education. We can no longer afford to leave the meaning of 1776 to Donald Trump, establishment Democratic Party politicians, billionaire-funded media outlets, or the sanitized narratives found in many textbooks. Only by confronting the republic’s colonial foundations — and recovering the traditions of freedom forged by those who resisted them — can we pursue a different future.


National Innocence or Colonial Brutality?


Trump’s over-the-top jingoism obscures a deeper truth: The refusal to reckon with the United States as a settler-colonial project is a bipartisan affliction. As President Barack Obama declared: “The patriots of 1776 did not fight to replace the tyranny of a king with the privileges of a few or the rule of a mob. They gave to us a republic, a government of, and by, and for the people, entrusting each generation to keep safe our founding creed.” President Joe Biden similarly argued, “Deep in the heart of America burns a flame lit almost 250 years ago — of liberty, freedom, and equality.” Trump did not invent the founding fairytale of innocence; he inherited and radicalized this bedtime story that has from the beginning called the United States the “fairest of them all” to obscure its colonial origins.

The U.S. republic emerged from the smoke of burning villages, the holds of slave ships, and the ambitions of a colonial elite willing to unleash unspeakable violence in pursuit of wealth and power.

It’s clear Trump has exploited the bipartisan faith in American exceptionalism to suppress dissent and concentrate executive power. Yet his authoritarianism is less an aberration than the latest expression of a recurring pattern. From slavery and Indigenous dispossession to Jim Crow, Japanese American incarceration during World War II, McCarthyism, COINTELPRO, and NSPM-7 today, authoritarianism has repeatedly resurfaced. Its roots lie in the colonial foundations of the republic, where conquest, racial hierarchy, and state violence became enduring instruments of governance. The 20th century’s most infamous authoritarian movements did not emerge from nowhere. They drew upon centuries of colonial practice. For example, Adolf Hitler openly admired the United States’ genocide of Indigenous peoples. In a 1928 speech, he praised white American settlers for having “gunned down” millions of Indigenous people until only a “few hundred thousand” remained. As James Q. Whitman, author Hitler’s American Model, notes, “Beyond its laws, the Nazis also admired America’s conquest of the West.” Nazi leaders viewed the United States’ seizure of Indigenous lands and westward expansion as precedents for their own project of Lebensraum (“living space”) — the conquest and ethnic cleansing of Eastern Europe.

The Nazi fascination with the U.S. frontier was rooted in a historical reality that many accounts of 1776 still minimize. As historian Nick Estes, a citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe, writes, the Haudenosaunee remember George Washington as the “town destroyer” for ordering the destruction of dozens of Haudenosaunee towns during the Revolutionary War. “In a very real sense,” Estes concludes, “the founding of the United States was a declaration of war against Indigenous peoples.” One of the principal grievances driving many advocates of independence was the British Crown’s attempt to restrict westward expansion after the Seven Years’ War. The Declaration of Independence itself denounced Indigenous peoples as “merciless Indian Savages,” revealing that Native nations were viewed as obstacles to colonial expansion rather than sovereign peoples. Independence swept aside those restraints and accelerated a centuries-long project of dispossession, forced removal, and genocide.

For anti-colonial thinkers such as Aimé Césaire, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Walter Rodney, fascism was not a departure from colonialism but one of its logical destinations. As historian Robin D. G. Kelley argues in his introduction to Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism, one of the book’s most important contributions was its effort to “locate the origins of fascism within colonialism itself.” Kelley and the anti-colonialists he draws on have shown that white supremacy, dispossession, dehumanization, and state violence did not begin with fascism. Those methods had long been refined through colonial conquest, empire, and racial domination before they were turned inward against Europe itself.


Only by confronting the republic’s colonial foundations — and recovering the traditions of freedom forged by those who resisted them — can we pursue a different future.

Most people in the U.S. have been taught to view 1776 as the starting point for understanding the origins of freedom. But the choices confronting enslaved people during the American Revolution reveal the limits of the “patriot” vision. In 1772, Lord Mansfield ruled in favor of James Somerset, an enslaved African who resisted being returned from England to slavery in Jamaica, alarming colonial slaveholders who feared Britain might eventually restrict slavery. Those fears intensified in 1775 when Lord Dunmore, Virginia’s royal governor, offered freedom to enslaved people owned by rebel colonists if they escaped and joined the British side. Thousands fled to British lines. So threatening was the prospect of enslaved people claiming freedom that the Declaration of Independence condemned George III for having “excited domestic insurrections amongst us” — a phrase widely understood as a reference to Dunmore’s proclamation. For many colonial elites, one of the gravest dangers posed by British rule was that it might undermine slavery itself.

The American Revolution looked very different from the tobacco and cotton fields than it did from the plantation house or Independence Hall. Take the question Frederick Douglass asked in his famous speech, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” and consider his conclusion:

This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, [is] inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony.

More than a century later, the Black revolutionary and anti-colonial thinker Malcolm X advanced a similar critique, urging Black people to reject the assumption that their freedom originated with the American founding:

We are Africans, and we happen to be in America. We are not Americans. We are a people who formerly were Africans who were kidnapped and brought to America. Our forefathers weren’t the Pilgrims. We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock; the rock landed on us. We were brought here against our will … We were not brought here to enjoy the constitutional gifts that they speak so beautifully about today.

Malcolm X’s challenge forces us to confront the reality that the American Revolution was shaped by conquest, slavery, and elite rule. Once we abandon the assumption that 1776 represents the highest expression of freedom, another revolution comes into view — one that pushed the ideals of liberty and equality far beyond anything the U.S. founders were willing to imagine.


Fear of a Black Republic


To understand the limits of the American Revolution, we need only compare it to the Haitian Revolution, which erupted shortly thereafter in the same Atlantic world. The Haitian Revolution breached the walls U.S. and European empires had erected around the idea that freedom was the sole property of white people, and rescued the idea of emancipation as the natural human condition.

Beginning in 1791, enslaved people in the French colony of Saint-Domingue revolted against one of the most brutal slave systems in the world. Under the leadership of figures such as Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines, they defeated French, Spanish, and British armies and, in 1804, established Haiti — the first Black republic and the only nation ever created through a successful slave revolution.


At a moment when the United States restricted citizenship and political power along racial lines, Haiti offered a strikingly different vision — one in which solidarity with the struggle against slavery and colonialism mattered more than ancestry or skin color.

The contrast with the United States is striking. Haiti’s 1805 Constitution declared that “Slavery is forever abolished” and that “all acception of color” was “necessarily to cease,” while the U.S. Constitution protected slavery and racism through the Three-Fifths Clause and the Fugitive Slave Clause. Haiti’s commitment to freedom was not limited to people of African descent. After independence, Haitian leaders granted citizenship and full rights to many Polish soldiers who had defected from Napoleon’s army and joined the revolutionary cause. At a moment when the United States restricted citizenship and political power along racial lines, Haiti offered a strikingly different vision — one in which solidarity with the struggle against slavery and colonialism mattered more than ancestry or skin color.

Yet Haitian revolutionaries also understood that freedom’s greatest enemies often masqueraded as its guileless defenders.

Toussaint Louverture, the brilliant Haitian general who led the revolution, understood that systems of domination rarely announce themselves as such and prefer to hide behind a mask of innocence. Writing in 1799, Louverture warned of “the unity that exists between the proprietors of St.-Domingue who are in France, those in the United States, and those who serve under the English banner.” These slaveholding interests from powerful nations, he argued, were united behind an “unequivocal and carefully constructed” plan for “the restoration of slavery.” Yet they did not openly proclaim themselves enemies of freedom. Instead, he observed, they sought to “envelop themselves in the mantle of liberty in order to strike it more deadly blows.”

As historian Leslie M. Alexander explains in her book, Fear of a Black Republic, Haitian independence “transformed global conceptions of freedom and challenged existing assumptions about who possessed human rights and who did not.” The revolution exposed the lie that slavery was natural or permanent and proved that enslaved people could overthrow their oppressors and govern themselves.

The panic was immediate among enslavers and the leaders of the new United States. As historian Brian Jones notes in his book, Black History Is For Everyone, over a nearly two-year period from 1791 to 1793, U.S. officials sent approximately $726,000 to Saint-Domingue to support enslavers attempting to crush the uprising.

As the uprising spread across Saint-Domingue in 1791, President George Washington declared, “Lamentable! To see such a spirit of revolt among the Blacks.” Alexander Hamilton described the Haitian Revolution as a “calamitous event.” In 1793, Thomas Jefferson — the author of the July 4, 1776, Declaration of Independence — feared that the Haitian Revolution threatened the entire slave system of the Americas, worrying that “all the West India Islands will remain in the hands of the people of colour” and that slaveholders south of the Potomac might one day have to “wade through” similarly “bloody scenes.” Fearing that the rebellion would inspire enslaved people in the United States, Jefferson warned that unless slaveholders and the U.S. government acted quickly to contain its influence, they would bring ruin upon themselves: “If something is not done, and done soon, we shall be the murderers of our own children.”

By 1802, Jefferson expressed the great fears of freedom-loving enslavers everywhere when he said that Haiti had already “given considerable impulse to the minds of the slaves” and that “a great disposition to insurgency has manifested itself among them.”

The hostility was not merely rhetorical. After becoming president, Jefferson imposed an economically devastating embargo on Haiti, and the United States refused to formally recognize Haitian independence until 1862. Haiti’s greatest crime, in the eyes of enslavers, was that it cracked open history and revealed another future waiting inside — a future in which Black people not only won their freedom but established their own sovereign nation.

This history undermines one of the most common defenses of the founders: that they were merely people of their time. The Haitian Revolution demonstrates that the brutality of slavery was not beyond the moral imagination of the 18th century. Enslaved people, abolitionists, Maroons, and Indigenous resisters understood it well. Haiti proved that a republic could be built on abolition rather than slavery. The question was never whether a broader vision of freedom was possible, but whether those who benefited from oppression would surrender power.

The fact of the Haitian Revolution also demolishes the claim that the United States led the world toward abolition. As PragerU — the far right propaganda organization that produces videos for children — asserts, “America was one of the first places on earth to outlaw slavery.” Or as one of their flagrantly inaccurate videos proclaimed, “White people were the first to formally put an end to slavery … white men led the world in putting an end to the abhorrent practice.”


If the next 250 years are to bring us closer to freedom than the last, we must reject the colonial lie that the founding of the United States marked the fulfillment of freedom.

The truth is the United States maintained slavery longer than every independent nation in the Americas except Brazil and Paraguay (with the Spanish colonies of Cuba and Puerto Rico abolishing slavery later as well). Black Haitians abolished slavery in 1804 — long before Britain, France, or the United States — and helped spread emancipation throughout the Americas, including through its support for Simón Bolívar’s anti-colonial struggles. It took the bloodiest war in U.S. history to finally destroy the institution of slavery in 1865 because so much of the nation’s political and economic system was built upon it.

The history of emancipation in the Americas reveals that the most expansive visions of freedom emerged not from white men with silver shoe buckles and powdered wigs, but from barefoot Black revolutionaries with natural curls and the scars from leg irons. At stake in our interpretation of the American Revolution is more than the reputation of the founders; it is the kind of society we believe is possible and the future we are struggling to create.

The Fight for the Next 250


If the next 250 years are to bring us closer to freedom than the last, we must reject the colonial lie that the founding of the United States marked the fulfillment of freedom. Yet rejecting that lie does not mean denying its significance.

The American Revolution did help demonstrate that kings could be overthrown and challenged hereditary rule. Its language of liberty was seized upon by women, laborers, abolitionists, and democratic radicals who insisted that freedom meant far more than independence from Britain. Take formerly enslaved Boston abolitionist Prince Hall, who seized upon the American Revolution’s own language to demand the abolition of slavery. In a 1777 petition to the Massachusetts legislature, Hall and seven other free Black men insisted that enslaved people possessed “a natural and unalienable right to that freedom” bestowed “equally on all mankind.” Thomas Paine was another such radical. His bestselling pamphlet Common Sense helped ignite the American Revolution, while his 1775 essay “African Slavery in America” denounced slavery as “an outrage against humanity” and called for its abolition. As Hall and Paine demonstrate, the American Revolution raised expectations for freedom that many of its most powerful leaders worked just as fiercely to keep from becoming universal.

To decolonize our understanding of 1776, however, is not simply to recover missing voices to the story of the American Revolution. It is to recognize that the most expansive traditions of freedom were not the product of a colonial elite, but instead lived in Indigenous resistance to conquest, in slave rebellions, in the Haitian Revolution, in abolitionism, in Reconstruction, and in the many social movements for collective liberation.

It is no accident that these traditions are being targeted today. Voting rights are under attack. State violence continues to be inflicted on Black communities. The United States continues to occupy Native land and refuses to honor treaties it signed with Indigenous nations. Educational gag orders and book bans seek to prevent people from learning about racism, colonialism, and inequality. As the United States celebrates its 250th birthday, it also celebrates an economic order that has produced both 44 million people living in poverty and, however briefly, the world’s first trillionaire, Elon Musk — whose fortune has been propelled in part by his investments in SpaceX, a company dedicated to colonizing Mars.


Once we understand that some of the deepest roots of authoritarianism lie within the colonial foundations of the republic itself, we can better grasp the scale of the transformation necessary to achieve genuine freedom.

Perhaps the deepest legacy of colonialism is not only the conquest of land, but also the conquest of political imagination itself. Two hundred and fifty years after 1776, we are still taught that the highest expression of freedom is expansion — ever more power, ever more wealth, ever more conquest. The colonial imagination of the U.S. elite can conceive of colonies on Mars more readily than justice on Earth. We are asked to believe that colonizing another planet is a realistic and noble ambition while guaranteeing housing, health care, education, and dignity for every person is dismissed as utopian fantasy.

More than 70 years ago, Aimé Césaire warned that “a civilization that chooses to close its eyes to its most crucial problems is a stricken civilization.” His warning remains our own. Once we understand that some of the deepest roots of authoritarianism lie within the colonial foundations of the republic itself, we can better grasp the scale of the transformation necessary to achieve genuine freedom. Decolonizing 1776 therefore requires more than rethinking the past; it requires reclaiming our capacity to imagine a different future that can guide the struggle for the next 250 years.

As Louverture declared during the Haitian Revolution: “I want Liberty and Equality to reign … I work to bring them into existence. Unite yourselves to us, brothers, and fight with us for the same cause.”

This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.

Jesse Hagopian

Jesse Hagopian is a Seattle educator, the director of the Zinn Education Project’s Teaching for Black Lives Campaign, an editor for Rethinking Schools, and the author of the book, Teach Truth: The Struggle for Antiracist Education. You can follow him at IAmAnEducator.com, Instagram, Bluesky or Substack.

Historian dismisses Trump Independence Day rhetoric as 'Red Scare idiocy'

Bennito L. Kelty
July 4, 2026

RAW STORY



U.S. President Donald Trump delivers a speech during a celebration for the 250th anniversary of U.S. independence, at Mount Rushmore in Keystone, South Dakota, U.S., July 3, 2026. REUTERS/Kylie Cooper REFILE - QUALITY REPEAT TPX IMAGES OF THE DA

A presidential historian slammed Trump's Independence Day speech as nothing more than "Joe McCarthy Red Scare idiocy."

During an appearance on MS NOW on Saturday, Doug Brinkley tore into the speech that Trump gave in front of Mount Rushmore to kick off the Independence Day weekend. In particular, Brinkley found it "deeply offensive" that Trump would spend time warning about communists because of recent primary victories by democratic socialists.

"It was just Joe McCarthy red scare idiocy because he's out there talking about this communist menace as if it's the early Cold War years," Brinkley went off. "It's just what he wants the Republicans to run on in this election cycle."

MS NOW anchor Alex Witt agreed, adding, "When the president says, 'America will never become a communist country,' I was thinking to myself, 'Well, who said it was going to anyway?'"

Brinkley compared Trump's speech to "McCarthy starting to have his list in Wheeling, West Virginia, waving it, that they are infiltrators all over." McCarthy famously tried to root out alleged communists during a period called the Red Scare.

Trump's speech was "utter nonsense," Brinkley continued, while admitting that "politicizing" is "natural in our days."

However, he optimistically viewed most Americans "watching on Main Street" as having the "spirit" of "a red, white and blue blast, and let's have a barbecue, let's see some family, see some friends, and then we'll get on to the bickering of politics during Monday or Tuesday."]

He also suggested, "I think our inclination for this weekend should be to try to transcend Donald Trump's rhetoric and just sort of block it out for 48 hours."

Trump’s assault on nation’s founding promise hands the left perfect opportunity: historian

Alexander Willis
July 4, 2026 
RAW STORY

A sticker depicting U.S. President Donald Trump, next to security barricades near the Washington Monument ahead of Fourth of July celebrations, marking the 250th anniversary of U.S. Independence, in Washington, D.C., U.S., July 4, 2026. REUTERS/Nathan Howard

Donald Trump's assault on the nation's founding democratic promise has handed the political left a perfect opportunity to reclaim its legacy, argued historian Harvey Kaye in an analysis published in Zeteo on Saturday.

Kaye, professor emeritus of democracy and justice studies at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, wrote that the nation is marking its 250th anniversary even as "Donald Trump and his minions" pursue their "reactionary ambitions" – a timing he called "nothing less than ironic, as if history were playing a cruel joke on us."

“Hardly the grounds for a grand celebration. And yet, the 250th comes at the perfect time for the Left,” Kaye wrote.

“Indeed, rather than dismiss or scorn the occasion as we may be wont to, we progressives, populists, and democratic socialists should step up and embrace it. For are we not also finally seeing the beginnings of a real democratic surge – a surge that might actually lead to taking back the Democratic Party from the neoliberals and billionaires?”

Kaye called on Americans to remember they are "heirs to the promise and project of the American Revolution," invoking Thomas Paine's declaration that "we have it in our power to begin the world over again."

Kaye pointed to past national crises – the Civil War and the Great Depression – as models for how Americans previously responded to authoritarian threats, writing that each generation made the country "radically freer, more equal, and more democratic than ever before."

“Reminding ourselves of all of that, and sensing the democratic possibilities that are emerging, let us toast the 250th with words from the man who first turned us into radicals,” Kaye wrote.

“Angered by misrepresentations of the American Revolution in a history published in 1782 by the famed French writer, Abbe Raynal, Paine replied, ‘It is yet too soon to write the history of the Revolution.’”

In Independence Eve Speech, Trump Warns of Communism Then Promotes One-Party Rule

“If we terminate the filibuster as we should do and immediately vote for the SAVE America Act then we will not lose an election for a hundred years,” the president said.


US President Donald Trump speaks during a rally at Mount Rushmore National Memorial on July 3, 2026 in Keystone, South Dakota.
(Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Olivia Rosane
Jul 04, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

President Donald Trump spent his address to the United States the night before its 250th birthday fearmongering about the “communist menace” and suggesting that his Republican Party should govern the nation for a century.

“America will never be a communist country,” he said from Mount Rushmore, South Dakota Friday night. “We can only lose the midterms if we allow ourselves to lose the midterms, if we are foolish, stupid, and unwise. But if we terminate the filibuster as we should do and immediately vote for the SAVE America Act then we will not lose an election for a hundred years.”

His remarks clearly implied a false link between communism and the Democratic Party and promoted a bill that critics say will make it harder for millions of eligible voters to participate in elections. The SAVE America Act claims to address the documented non-problem of noncitizen voting by requiring voters to show documents such as passports and birth certificates, which can be expensive and difficult to obtain, especially for low-income voters. Such requirements would also impose added burdens on rural voters and married women who have changed their names.

Melanie D’Arrigo, executive director of the Campaign for New York Health, wrote on social media that with his remarks, Trump was “clearly defining the effects of voter suppression bills.”

“What message could be more unifying on the nation’s 250th birthday weekend than touting one-party rule?” writer Michael Freeman posted on social media.

California state Sen. Scott Wiener (D-11) wrote: “The thing about Trump is he tells us what he wants & what he intends to do. He wants to end democracy. Freeze MAGA in power forever. Have zero accountability to the people. Just seize power & keep it. We are so close to true authoritarianism. We must use every ounce of power & leverage we have to stop them.”

Before arguing for 100 years of Republican rule, Trump continued the exaggerated anti-communist rhetoric he has employed in the weeks since progressive and Democratic-Socialist candidates won a series of Democratic primary victories.

“There is now a resurgence of the communist menace in our land, including from newcomers to our country who embrace ideas totally opposed to our way of life and our great success,” Trump said on Friday. “These are not mere political disagreements like differences over taxes or regulations. Communism is a mortal threat to American liberty. It is the greatest threat to our country, including World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor, or even 9/11.”

In fact, the Democratic Socialists who won primary elections in New York City last month ran on a platform of affordable housing, Medicare for All, stronger unions, and an end to US military support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza, policies backed by large numbers of ordinary Americans.

Trump doubled down on an opposition between communism and US values and also linked his anti-communist to his anti-immigrant stance, threatening to send communists into “exile.”

“You can be a communist or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both,” Trump said in a quote later posted from the White House X account.



“This July 4th, the Trump regime is pushing a new Red Scare. This is an actual White House post. The regime is pretending that communism is a serious threat to America,” Tom Joscelyn, who served as a senior professional staffer on the January 6 Committee, responded on social media.

MeidasNews editor in chief Ron Filipkowski argued that Trump was leaning on anti-communism to divert attention from his own disastrous policies.

“Trump fucks up the economy with his tariffs, raises gas prices for every American with his foolish war, piles on to the national debt with his budget & wasteful spending on vanity projects, covers up Epstein, makes billions for himself, then starts yelling about communism to distract,” he wrote on social media.

Journalist Mark Chadbourn agreed, writing on social media that the speech reflected Trump’s “new strategy.”

“Now he’s failed completely abroad, he’s looking to the Enemy Within to create new Hate Figures to unite his wavering followers,” Chadbourn said. “Can’t stop Iran’s threat so let’s have a 2026 Red Scare to turn neighbour against neighbour. A new HUAC on the way? Very dangerous.”

Trump’s July 3 remarks contrasted with those of New York Democratic Socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani earlier that day, who uplifted the country’s immigrant heritage, decried greed and racial supremacy, and argued that “time and again, including 250 years ago, those forces of division have been vanquished by the forces of progress.”

What is There to Celebrate on the 250th Anniversary of the United States of America?

By C.J. Polychroniou

June 30, 2026

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

Image by John Trumbull/Wikimediacommons, in public domain

On July 4, 2026, the United States of America turns 250 years old. Should the Left celebrate the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States with the signing of the Declaration of Independence? After all, this is a nation with a very dark and ugly past — with racism, genocide, and imperialism deeply embedded in its psyche.

Surely Native Americans have no reason to celebrate. The history of the United States government’s treatment of Native Americans is one of cruelty, oppression, and extermination. Leaving aside the 56 million indigenous people that were killed by European settlers across the Americas by 1600, since its independence in 1776, the U.S. government has launched more than 1500 attacks against various indigenous people, slaughtering them, and taking their lands. Native Americans in the U.S. continue to face oppression, poverty, and discrimination, and rank near the bottom of all other groups in terms of health, education, and employment.  

What about blacks? Do they have a reason to celebrate a nation that denied them their humanity for much of those 250 years, while they continue to experience racial discrimination to this day? Racism against blacks remains very much widespread in the Good Ol’ USA.

Should American women have a reason to celebrate the nation’s 250th birthday? They have been treated as second-class citizens until fairly recently, and while many countries around the world have or had female leaders, it is a widely shared belief that the U.S. is still not ready for a woman president.

If anything, a major milestone like the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence should be an opportunity to confront the nation’s dark and ugly past and reflect on what has gone wrong with U.S. democracy and what we can do about it. After all, isn’t it a tragic irony that the celebration of America’s 250th birthday, which is supposed to honor the principles of liberty and equality upon which the nation was allegedly founded, will take place with an administration in power whose own beliefs and actions embody the very tyrannical rule that the Declaration of Independence sought to overthrow?

What manner of national progress is this?

But history is not a linear progression. Nor is it guided by the realization of freedom and rationality, as Hegel thought. Human history moves in a spiral, and irrationality makes up a great part of human life and history. Moreover, not only does the value of ideals vary greatly (Nazism and imperialism were as potent ideals as those of democracy and self-determination), but there is usually a disconnect between ideals and political reality. Some of the lofty principles in the Declaration of Independence, such as “all men are created equal,” collided with the facts on the ground and, in fact, had a very narrow interpretation when they were written, as they applied only to white, propertied men.

Indeed, in 2026, we have a president who likes to govern like a king, or a dictator. As a matter of fact, the Supreme Court has given Donald J. Trump king-like powers. Thus, it is hardly surprising that Trump 2.0 has demolished democracy by initiating a new age of authoritarian rule with civil and human rights rollbacks, weaponizing the federal government against the president’s political rivals, and unleashing a paramilitary squad of fascist thugs into communities across the nation. It is also hardly surprising that Trump has become the most corrupt president in U.S. history. He is exploiting shamelessly the highest office in the land to enrich himself and his family.

Trump’s enablers extend beyond today’s Supreme Court, which has moved so far rightward that it qualifies as the most reactionary in the nation’s modern history. It includes the plutocrats, media conglomerates, evangelical Christians, and pro-Israel political networks. Retail corporations, major law firms, and academic institutions capitulated with such ease to Trump’s bullying tactics that they made a mockery of liberal ideals.

All that being said, it is difficult not to appreciate the importance of the Declaration of Independence. It is indeed one of the most important documents in the history of politics and ideas for the simple but radical fact that, by articulating the intention of the American colonies to separate from British rule, it established the principles of self-government and individual rights while connecting equality and freedom.

Being profoundly influenced by the philosophical thinking of John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (unlike contemporary U.S. leaders, the likes of Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and John Adams were deeply learned men and had extensive knowledge of history and philosophy), the Declaration of Independence solidified the claims of social contract theory—that is, the idea that governments receive their just powers from the consent of the governed—and justified rebellion against tyranny. Within just a couple of decades, the Declaration of Independence inspired revolts across the globe. It had great impact on political and philosophical debates leading up to the French Revolution (1789) and served as a reference point behind the slave revolt against French colonial rule in Haiti in 1791 and the Irish rebellion against British rule in May 1798.

When Ho Chi Ming declared Vietnam an independent nation on September 2, 1945, he paraphrased the U.S. Declaration of Independence. He opened his declaration of independence with the statement from the 1776 Declaration “All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness,” But then he updated those words by saying “In a broader sense, this means: All the peoples on the earth are equal from birth, all the peoples have the right to live, to be happy and free.”

Indeed, the Declaration of Independence served as a “universal blueprint” for the anti-colonial struggles that occurred after World War II. It is indeed a radical document. One of its foundational principles is that “it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish” governments that become destructive to their fundamental rights. This principle is a cornerstone of democratic theory and should never be forgotten.

Ironically enough, all U.S. administrations have largely abandoned the fundamental principles underpinning the Declaration of Independence–and none more so than President Donald Trump’s administration. The country is on a very slippery path under Donald Trump’s imperial proto-fascism. Democracy is dying before our very own eyes and Trump’s desire to reshape the world order not only creates more uncertainty and instability but risks opening a Pandora’s box.

It is in this context that the Declaration of Independence should serve as a stark reminder of the need for a call to action when a government, like the one represented by Donald Trump, acts illegally and unconstitutionally to weaken democratic institutions and engages purely in self-dealing while endangering our communities. We have a monstrous, tyrannical government in power that the People must stand up to with all their might before it ruins everything.  

If we must, what we need to celebrate on the 250th anniversary since the signing of the Declaration of Independence is nothing more and nothing less than the basic principles and ideas behind this document, in an updated manner, of course, à la Ho Chi Ming, while being fully cognizant of the fact that we still have a long way to go to achieve equality in this country. That was not the intention of those who drafted and signed the Declaration of Independence; nonetheless, they gave the world a political and philosophical document for the ages.

250th: Their Heroes Are Monsters to Us

Ishmael Reed
July 3, 2026


Stereoscope photograph of the slave quarters at Monticello, 

James C. Sawders, Keystone View Company, Keystone-Mast Collection, UCR/California Museum of Photography, University of California at Riverside.

The segregated American media spent the week leading up to the Fourth of July praising the founding fathers and paying tribute to other American heroes. Heroes to them. Monsters to us.

For CNN, Kit Carson is a hero. They showed a scene in which Carson walked miles, nearly barefoot, to rescue his men. We grew up watching the exploits of Kit Carson on cartoon shows. Our Settler education didn’t inform us that Kit Carson committed atrocities against the Navajo. How did the Navajo regard the American hero, Kit Carson? From a site called Partnership with Native Americans.


In 1863, General James Carleton began a renewed effort to eradicate the Navajo. In charge of the operation was Colonel Kit Carson. Knowing he couldn’t defeat the Navajo militarily, Carson began to destroy the Navajo homes, crops, and livestock. More than two million pounds of corn, a staple of the Indian diet, were burned. Forced to survive on nuts and berries many families, starving during the long winter months, began turning themselves into the military. About 8,000 men, women, and children were forced to make the “Long Walk” to Basque Redondo, a reservation in New Mexico about 300 miles away. Many died on the way of hunger and cold. Others drowned when they were forced to cross the Rio Grande during the spring floods.

Douglass Brinkley is a good guy. I spent a couple of days with him in New Orleans under a grant he’d received to bring writers to New Orleans. But now, he’s become a TV historian instead of someone who would challenge the decadent old boy Historical establishment, now under attack from a generation of women, Black, and Native American historians. But he’s right at home in a media that considers Confederacy apologist Ken Burns a historian. On a Wed.TV show, he expressed his admiration for Theodore Roosevelt.In 2021 Brinkley was named the inaugural historian in residence at the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library.

How do Blacks feel about Theodore Roosevelt?


America’s Black Holocaust Museum’s Post

On December 30, 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt ordered the dishonorable discharge of 167 Black soldiers from the U.S. Army’s 25th Infantry Regiment following what became known as the Brownsville Affair—one of the most consequential racial injustices in American military history.

The events that led to the order began months earlier, on the night of August 13, 1906, in Brownsville, Texas. A white bartender was killed and a police officer wounded by gunfire. Almost immediately, white residents accused Black soldiers stationed nearby at Fort Brown. Despite testimony from commanding officers that the soldiers were in their barracks at the time, and despite glaring inconsistencies in the physical evidence, local authorities focused exclusively on the regiment.

… No individual soldier was identified as a suspect, and no court-martial ever took place.

Nevertheless, under political pressure and citing a supposed “conspiracy of silence,” Roosevelt imposed collective punishment. His order stripped all 167 soldiers of their honor, pensions, and the possibility of future federal employment. Many of the men had served honorably for years, including during the Spanish-American War. Some were nearing retirement and lost the economic security they had earned through decades of service.

The consequences were lifelong. Families fell into poverty. Reputations were destroyed. The Army’s decision reinforced a painful contradiction: It was not until 1972 that the U.S. Army formally acknowledged the wrongdoing and exonerated the soldiers.”

I asked one of Theodore Roosevelt’s biographers why he omitted Roosevelt’s role in the Brownsville incident. He said that he didn’t have space to include it. Booker T. Washington tried to persuade Roosevelt to give the soldiers a fair trial.

Francine Prose showed up in the Guardian on July 2nd, where she expressed her reverence for Thomas Jefferson, a hypocrite who found slavery ”excreable,” yet bred Slaves like livestock and consigned them to cramped quarters that were unsanitary. He broke up families and had his slaves beaten. Indeed, he might have beaten them himself. A visitor from France said that he accompanied Jefferson as he reviewed his slaves and that while walking up and down, he slapped a riding crop in his hand. The slaves responded to this gesture by trembling. Though much has been made about his having a Black mistress, another oral tradition describes him as a promiscuous rapist. Why would feminists honor this man? I think Jefferson is admired for his Hollywood Raj look, the name given to Cary Grant and other British actors who acted in films that promoted British imperialism.

Benjamin Franklin was called “Old Double-Face; ” yet he was smarter than the other Founding Fathers. Franklin began opposing slavery in the late 1750s after visiting a school for Black children and realizing their lack of education was due to their environment, not nature. His opposition peaked at the end of his life. He became the president of the Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery in 1787. He petitioned Congress to end slavery in February 1790. While Washington, Jefferson, and Hamilton advocated the extermination of Native Americans, Franklin protested the massacre of Native Americans.

Benjamin Franklin protested the 1763–1764 slaughter of 20 peaceful, unarmed Susquehannock (Conestoga) Indians by writing a fiery pamphlet titled A Narrative of the Late Massacres in Lancaster County. He condemned the killers as a “barbarous mob” and passionately argued against collective racial punishment.

So if the country needs a founding father, maybe it should be Franklin?

Priapic Ambitions: Notes on George Washington

Jeffrey St. Clair

 July 3, 2026

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Portrait of George Washington (detail) by Charles Willson Peale (1776).

+ I excavated my way through Ron Chernow’s bulging, semi-woke (by the standards of the Texas Schoolbook Commission)  biography of George Washington. I say, “semi-woke,” because while it discreetly admits that Washington was a patrician dandy of no exceptional military or administrative genius, who abused his troops, committed war crimes, bought his first election to public office with booze, and held 100s of slaves, often treating them cruelly in response to his own ineptitudes as a gentleman planter, it is quick to balance any evidence of fault in the character of the founding father with a statement to the effect that “while this may sound extreme to our ears, it was fairly typical for the time.” Which is, of course, exactly the point.

+ While Chernow’s text is rather elliptical on these decisive episodes in Washington’s life (there’s little risk of it being pulled from libraries in most of the states, at this point), the book is generously foot-noted with primary sources, many of them in Washington’s own hand (he was a prolific self-promoter of his own exalted life), which fill-in the more tenebrous aspects of his character.

+ The first member of the Washington clan to step foot in Virginia was John, who came ashore in the Tidewater area in 1676. George’s great-grandfather wasn’t much of a farmer (after all, he only owned three slaves and some Irish “servants”), but he did amass thousands of acres of land along the Potomac and received a military commission to kill Indians in Maryland, where he earned a reputation for treachery and slaughter. In one notorious incident, Washington murdered five Indian leaders who had come to negotiate a treaty, then claimed their land. He was known by the Potomac tribes as Conotocarious, “destroyer of villages, devourer of homes.”

+ It turns out George Washington could have easily run a CIA black site or the Gitmo torture camp. As an officer of the VA Regiment in the French & Indian wars, he proved a sadistic disciplinarian inflicting as many as 1500 lashes a day for relatively minor offenses: “drinking in and informed another officer he “was determined to hang two or three at a time as an example to the others. (ie., his soldiers).” He kept his condemned prisoners in iron chains in total darkness. In a letter to Robert Dimwiddie, the Lt Governor of VA, with whom he would later clash in the revolutionary war, Washington wrote coldly: Your honor will, I hope, excuse my hanging instead of shooting them. It conveyed much more terror to others and was for example’s sake we did it.”

+”To live in Virginia without slaves is morally impossible.”

– Rev. Peter Fontaine, 1757

+ Though they can’t be blamed for its pompous and derivative neo-classical design, seven master black carpenters built most of the plantation house at Mount Vernon. They were all enslaved by Washington. The overseer of the construction, Humphrey Knight, wrote Washington, assuring the young land baron that he wasn’t light with the whip when he spotted a loose board or crooked plank: “As to the carpenters, I have minded ’em all I posably could and has whipt ’em when I could see a fault.”

+ Martha Washington kept her own sister, Ann Dandridge, as a slave. Ann was the daughter of Martha’s father John Dandridge and a young, enslaved woman, who was half-black, half-Cherokee. Ann lived as a slave at Mount Vernon until 1802, after first George, then Martha died.

+ Re: Pentagon contracts & high-tech weaponry, when Washington learned the Continental Army only had 300 barrels of gunpowder–not the 10k he’d been promised–Benjamin Franklin urged him to arm the troops with bows and arrows. “They’ve worked pretty well for centuries,” Franklin wryly noted. If only the bow-makers had had a PAC!

+ George Washington had a brilliant aide-de-camp during the final three years of the Revolutionary War. No, not Alexander Hamilton. His name was John Laurens. Laurens was that rare thing: a wealthy abolitionist from South Carolina. Even rarer, his father had amassed the family fortune through the slave trade, purchasing and selling as many as 10,000 people captured in Africa and shipped in chains to Charleston. Laurens had already developed plans to free his own family’s slaves and eagerly approached Washington with a daring scheme to shift the balance of power in a stagnating war, especially in the South, where British forces had just ransacked and torched Savannah. Laurens proposed emancipating at least 3,000 blacks who would be willing to serve in a South Carolina regiment to confront the marauding troops of Banastre Tarleton, who had terrorized the southern coast from Virginia to Georgia. Members of the Continental Congress warmed to the plan and some even wanted to go further, emancipating all slaves who’d be willing to serve in the American army.

After all, at that point, the Continental Army was already more integrated than any US army until the Vietnam War, with free blacks accounting for more than six percent of the total force. But Washington, who still owned or controlled as many as 300 slaves, recoiled at the idea of arming emancipated blacks in the South. He rejected Laurens’ plan and quietly contemplated a scheme, typically reactionary, of his own: sell off the slaves of Mt. Vernon and his other properties and loan the proceeds to finance the maintenance of his bedraggled army. In a letter to his plantation overseer (and distant cousin) Lund Washington, the general wrote that if the Americans lost the war

it would be a matter of little consequence to me whether my property is in Negroes or loan certificates, as I shall neither ask for, nor expect, any favor from his Most Gracious Majesty…the only points therefore for me to consider are…whether it would be most to my interest, in case of a fortunate determination of the present contest, to have Negroes and the crops they will make, or the sum they will fetch and the interest of the money.

So the war dragged on another three years, until finally the decisive blow was struck at Yorktown, where the nearly all-black First Rhode Island Regiment made one of the most audacious raids. As for Laurens, who dreamed of abolishing slavery across the Americas, he soon became one of the last casualties of the war, shot in the head during a skirmish with British troops pillaging a rice field along the Combahee River, a couple of weeks after the British fled Charleston.

+ George Washington’s First Inaugural Address was written by James Madison. Congress’s Response was written by James Madison. And Washington’s rejoinder was written by…James Madison. At the operational level, America’s politics has always been a charade.

+ Even George Washington drew the line at separating the families of the people he “owned”…

+ Baron Johann de Kalb, a German mercenary whom Lafayette recruited to aid the American Revolutionaries on Washington’s military acumen:

He is the most amiable, obliging, and civil man, but as a General he is too slow, even indolent, much too weak and is not without his portion of vanity and presumption. 

+ George Washington railed incessantly against the war profiteers and speculators during the Revolution, calling them “plundering scoundrels,” while today’s members of Congress (and sons of Trump) make millions trading in weapons and oil stocks, as their states and districts get gouged at the pump.

+ For all of his faults, Washington was no nativist. He encouraged mass immigration to the young Republic, writing  to the radical Dutch republican Francis Van der Kemp in 1788: “I had always hoped that this land might become a safe & agreeable asylum to the virtuous & persecuted part of mankind, to whatever nation they might belong.”

+ Tom Paine, that Che Guevara of the 18th century, in a letter to George Washington, May 1, 1790: 

Our very good friend, the Marquis de Lafayette, has intrusted to my care the key of the Bastille, and a drawing handsomely framed representing the demolition of that detestable prison. I feel myself happy, and being the person through whom the Marquis has conveyed this early trophy of the spoils of despotism, and the first ripe fruits of American principles transplanted into Europe….

Soon, the nation Washington was building would be putting its own dissidents into similar prisons, under the Alien and Sedition Acts.

+ During the war, Tom Paine served as George Washington’s chief propagandist. His fiery pamphlets kept the money flowing and the popular spirits elevated even as the Revolutionary Army stumbled and stuttered up and down the Atlantic seaboard. After the Brits called it quits and Washington assumed power, he turned his back on his old friend. When Paine, the trans-Atlantic rebel, faced the guillotine in Revolutionary France for refusing to endorse the execution of the King, Washington failed to intervene, ignoring the urgings of Jefferson and Franklin. (Paine survived the Terror by a freak accident, as the prison guards mismarked his cell door.) Paine came to consider Washington a “counter-revolutionary” (he coined the term), denouncing the former revolutionary-turned-imperious leader as either “an apostate or an imposter.” 

+ Washington wasn’t a religious man. He countenanced religion, but didn’t practice it. He saw himself, a little grandly perhaps, as a figure of the enlightenment, a man of reason and science. If anything, he was a Deist, who believed in a Supreme Being and saw Jesus as a moral teacher, not a god. Still, he wasn’t hostile to religion in the manner of his fellow Virginian Thomas Jefferson, who, in an 1816 letter to the writer Horatio Gates Spafford, described the divinity schools of Harvard and Yale as “seminaries of despotism.” For Jefferson, the Church was as oppressive as the monarchy.

Jefferson and Washington certainly were no Christian Nationalists. Jefferson wasn’t even a Christian. His biographer Joseph Ellis describes him as a secular humanist, though I don’t know what kind of humanism can rationalize holding other humans in bondage. Perhaps a future Supreme Court decision from Alito or Thomas will explain.

+ Hirsute historical note: The powdered wigs worn by European and American elites in the 17th and 18th centuries were originally designed to cover hair loss from syphilis and only later became such powerful symbols of status and high station that most of George Washington’s portraits depict him wearing one, though he never did. He did use scented powder on his hair, though that was mainly to prevent lice and to disguise the smell of the animal lard pomade used to flatten and sculpt his naturally red locks. (See: Entanglement: The Secret Lives of Hair by Emma Tarlo.)

+ In reading about Washington, I’ve become increasingly distracted by Peggy Shippen, wife of Benedict Arnold. Washington was so entranced by her that, even after evidence of her complicity in Benedict’s treason came to light, he refused to believe it. Shippen was reportedly the highest-paid British spy of the Revolutionary period. Aaron Burr was almost certainly right in charging that Shippen was not only central to the conspiracy but also enticed Arnold into becoming a British agent and surrendering West Point. This image of Shippen, whose coif would have shamed Madame Pompadour, gives you some idea of what charged the erotic fantasies of the nation’s first president, who called himself “a votary to love.” He remained in the thrall of a similar “Georgian era” English beauty, Sally Fairfax, who fled the nearby Belvoir plantation at the start of the Revolution for Bath, England, for most of his life…

+ Speaking of Burr, in Gore Vidal’s novel the slight that prompts the fatal duel on the Heights of Weehawken is Hamilton’s assertion that Burr regularly had incestuous relations with his daughter Theodosia, these maulings occurring at roughly the same time Burr’s other hated rival, Thomas Jefferson (who had manufactured evidence against Burr at his treason trial), was raping his enslaved house servant Sally Hemings. So when the Originalists piously ask about some Constitutional nuance, what was the intent of the Founders? It was probably something designed to indemnify their own felonious predilections.

+ There’s no question Washington obsessed over sex. On his bookshelves lurked two of the age’s most notorious sex tutorials, The Lover’s Watch: or the Art of Making Love by Aphra Benn and Daniel Defoe’s Conjugal Lewdness: or Matrimonial Whoredom. The question is why the father of the country failed to father any children by Martha or any of his hundreds of enslaved women? (Martha gave birth to four children in her first marriage, so the lack of fecundity in her relations with George probably didn’t originate with her.) Was it sterility or impotence? If you’d been able to peek inside Washington’s medicine cabinet at Mount Vernon, you’d have found it well-stocked with Spanish Fly, the sex potion made from dead blister beetles, purchased, like Viagra today, by mail order. In Washington’s case, it came from chemists in London in four-ounce jars.

+ But Spanish Fly often proved lethal, especially when administered to women orally. (Men tended to rub the mixture on their penises, hoping to swell and prolong their erections.)  In 1772, the Marquis de Sade fatally poisoned five Parisian prostitutes when, in anticipation of a weekend orgy (at which he longed to spend hours with his nose between their buttocks sampling their farts), de Sade compelled the young women to eat anise seed cupcakes liberally laced with Spanish Fly. Since Martha outlived George, we can perhaps assume that the orders of Spanish Fly were meant to fortify his own faltering Priapic ambitions.

+ While George Washington, the Father of the Country, didn’t have biological progeny that we know of, during his second term, his favoritism toward Alexander Hamilton led to charges that Hamilton was actually his illegitimate son. (This might give new subtext to “The Room Where It Happened.”) American politics has always featured this scurrilous element. It’s one of its most endearing features and, at least until Trump, has helped to serve as a check on the development of cult-like followings for American presidents. (See The George Washington Scandals by John C. Fitzpatrick.)

Washington’s false teeth, some of which were extracted from enslaved people. Photo: Mount Vernon.

Jeffrey St. Clair is co-editor of CounterPunch. His most recent book is An Orgy of Thieves: Neoliberalism and Its Discontents (with Alexander Cockburn). He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net or on Twitter @JeffreyStClair3. 

From Independence to Interdependence

By Lawrence S. Wittner

July 3, 2026

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

As Americans and people of other former colonies recognize, there’s a great deal to be said for national independence.

But, at times, we might also wonder: is it sufficient?

Until recently in human history, imperialism was widespread. In 1939, Britain’s Empire and Commonwealth alone had direct or de facto political and economic control of 25 percent of the world’s population and 30 percent of its land mass. In fact, only a century ago, nearly half of today’s independent nations were European colonies.

Imperialism, of course, had severe drawbacks. For the colonized, these drawbacks included genocide, enslavement, exploitation, and the looting of resources. But the colonizers, too, despite the vast riches acquired by a small minority among them, suffered losses. They perished in imperialist wars, died of starvation and diseases, and became infected by arrogance, brutality and racism. Above all, imperialism denied people in the colonies the right to self-government and, therefore, the right to determine the future of their own nations.

But World War II destabilized the imperialist system and, also, discredited it. As a result, a vast wave of decolonization occurred in the aftermath of the war, especially in the 1950s and 1960s. Although there are still holdouts from the worldwide anti-imperialist approach―Vladimir Putin, committed to annexing Ukraine, Benjamin Netanyahu, battling to prevent Palestinian statehood, and Donald Trump, constantly demanding new territory―for the most part national independence has become the acceptable norm.

The problem, however, is that although national independence is preferable to imperialist domination, it does not get us very far toward solving some of the world’s most pressing problems.

Perhaps the most serious of the problems facing us today is war, with wars currently raging throughout large portions of the world. Global military spending continues to soar (reaching $2.9 trillion in 2025), with enormous increases already slated for the future. The result is―and seems likely to continue to be―an enormous loss of lives and economic resources. 

Nuclear weapons, of course, threaten to turn war into a catastrophe almost beyond human comprehension, annihilating virtually all life on earth. And yet, in a sharp break with the nuclear arms control and disarmament measures of past decades, the nuclear powers have recently abandoned their commitment to reducing and, ultimately, abolishing the nuclear menace. Having increased their nuclear spending by 19 percent in 2025, they are currently developing a dazzling array of new nuclear weapons.

How are nations going to deal with the immense problem of war and modern weaponry without collective action? Certainly, the solution to the problem does not lie in the hands of any one nation.

If human beings, as well as other species, are not exterminated in the near future by war, they are likely to face gradual extinction by environmental catastrophe. Global warming, the loss of biodiversity, air pollution, deforestation, melting ice caps, sea level rise, soil degradation, overfishing, and a host of other ills are already here and leading to an increasingly unsustainable, unlivable future. Meanwhile, intense heat, raging wildfires, and massive floods are destroying agriculture and sending millions of desperate climate refugees fleeing from their homelands.

Effective protection of the world’s environment surpasses the ability of any one nation, however well-meaning. Surely it is a global matter, requiring global cooperation.

Diseases, of course, also transcend national lines. The COVID-19 pandemic, for example, caused between 15 million and 18 million deaths in nations around the world. But, of course, in recent decades there have been other disease epidemics and pandemics that have shown no regard for national boundaries, including HIV/AIDS, malaria, influenza, hepatitis, SARS, swine flu, dengue fever, Western African Ebola, mpox, MERS, and cholera.

When it comes to diseases, there has been widespread recognition that a global approach is necessary. As a result, 192 nations belong to the World Health Organization (WHO). Three nations, however, stubbornly resist WHO membership. The United States is one of them, thanks to the decision of U.S. President Trump to withdraw from it.

Numerous other challenges―including widespread poverty, the irresponsible behavior of multinational corporations, mass migration, resource scarcity, and the risks of advanced technologies like artificial intelligence―also suggest the need for global collaboration.

These kinds of global issues are frequently discussed at the United Nations, leading to statements made by the UN Secretary-General and other UN officials that appeal for remedial action. But, unfortunately, some nations, and especially the great powers, which seem less committed to global betterment than to their own national agendas, have seen to it that the United Nations is denied the authority and the resources to adequately address these challenges. Russia, for example, has repeatedly vetoed UN Security Council resolutions calling for an end to its continued military invasion, occupation, and annexation of Ukraine. For its part, the United States has compiled a debt of nearly $4 billion to the cash-strapped United Nations by halting its payments for UN dues and UN peacekeeping operations.

The logical solution to the frustration of collective action is to strengthen the United Nations. Several proposals have been advanced along these lines, including enhancing the power of the General Assembly and limiting the veto in the Security Council. In addition, a campaign has recently been launched to reduce the obstacles to more effective UN action in global affairs by employing Article 109 of the UN Charter to hold a UN Charter review conference. If this conference were held and the Charter revised, it could transform world organization into what the campaign calls “a stronger, fairer, and more inclusive international system.”

But the strengthening of the United Nations won’t occur automatically. It will require worldwide public pressure, driven by citizens’ organizations committed to peace, environmental sustainability, public health, and other global imperatives. Ultimately, it’s up to these organizations and to their allies among wise public officials to secure the next great shift in human consciousness and behavior―a shift from a parochial national independence to the interdependence of nations.Email

Lawrence S. Wittner

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Lawrence ("Larry") Wittner was born and raised in Brooklyn, NY, and attended Columbia College, the University of Wisconsin, and Columbia University, where he received his Ph.D. in history in 1967.  Thereafter, he taught history at Hampton Institute, at Vassar College, at Japanese universities (under the Fulbright program), and at SUNY/Albany.  In 2010, he retired as professor of history emeritus.  A writer on peace and foreign policy issues, he is the author or editor of twelve books and hundreds of published articles and book reviews and a former president of the Peace History Society.  Since 1961, he has been active in the peace, racial equality, and labor movements, and currently serves as a national board member of Peace Action (America's largest grassroots peace organization) and as executive secretary of the Albany County Central Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO.  On occasion, he helps to fan the flames of discontent by performing vocally and on the banjo with the Solidarity Singers.  His latest book is Working for Peace and Justice: Memoirs of an Activist Intellectual (University of Tennessee Press).  More information about him can be found at his website:  http://lawrenceswittner.com.