The outrageous things that Donald Trump says and does must be understood in the context of the society that spawned him. While it is not actually possible to get something for nothing, that doesn’t stop millions of Americans and potential immigrants to America from believing that such a thing is possible and that they are in fact entitled to it. What is possible (and constitutes a big part of American heritage) is that great wealth awaits those who steal or inherit it from others, kill others who stand in the way, kidnap others to work the land for them, and plunder the land at all cost to extract that wealth without regard for the future or their neighbors. Every single modern nation in North America and South America originally began as Criminal Enterprises.
Even before the maritime nations of Europe realized that one or more large land masses lay in the path of the expected shortcut to the spice producing countries of Southeast Asia, some Europeans began to exploit the riches that lay here. The first two resources to be extracted actually involved some honest labor: fishing on the Grand Banks of what became New England and Canada and timber cutting from the nearby shores. Contrary to popular belief, most of the inhabitants of both continents were not primitive hunter-gatherers; they were mostly farmers who lived in villages and had a Neolithic level of technology and only a limited use of some mostly decorative metals. To the detriment of the people of both continents, the Spanish quickly stumbled onto the two most advanced New World civilizations that happened to produce large amounts of gold, silver, and some copper. Instead of mining it themselves, they first resorted to armed robbery, mass murder, and enslavement. The Spanish also discovered a poisonous, highly-addictive drug plant called tobacco and proceeded to produce and distribute it throughout the world. The worldwide tobacco drug traffic that the Spanish started but failed to control has resulted in an annual death toll equal to a 20th Century world war.
The English, French, and Dutch found a lot less gold than the Spanish, so they first engaged in the lucrative beaver fur trade with the native people and also did some fishing, logging, and farming in the north coastal areas. To this day, standard American History books over-emphasize the tales of the New England religious refugees and their attempts to farm the rocky soil while fighting off counter attacks from the unhappy local tribes that were being displaced. But the biggest and richest colonies were the English tobacco plantations further south. The English invaders not only defeated the locals, but also brought deadly diseases that made large scale enslavement of the survivors impossible. In order to establish a major drug producing operation with sufficient volume to satisfy their newly addicted customers, the new Drug Lords chose to kidnap and import millions of Africans to work as slave labor. Later, the invention of the cotton gin made large scale production of cotton possible, and the slave labor plantation was well suited for this crop. The planters’ only major expense was to conquer and drive out the original inhabitants from the South so their land could be stolen and exploited. The invention and construction of railways made possible large-scale farming of grain in the Midwest, cattle ranching on the Great Plains, and mining and logging in the western mountains. To accomplish these great feats of industry first required bloodshed and armed robbery under the banner of “the land of the free and the home of the brave” and a political doctrine of Manifest Destiny. Our westward expansion was no different than the Dark Ages when horsemen from Central Asia galloped west and the Norse sailed south to plunder the farms, cities, and churches of Europe except that Anglo-Americans were much better armed and organized than classic barbarians. A few years ago, a personal DNA test and accompanying records search verified that my ancestors participated and benefited from such criminal behavior. While I am not responsible for the crimes of my ancestors, I do have to live with the aftermath, and as a good citizen, it is my duty to make the world a better place to live.
American History books glorify our European-American technology and work ethic and the bravery of our warriors, but from the standpoint of those whose ancestors were murdered and their land stolen, or whose ancestors were kidnapped and their labor stolen, America has been one big Criminal Enterprise. Indeed, the prophet of many of today’s “free” enterprise extremists is the mean-spirited, mediocre novelist and essayist Ayn Rand whose works include “The Virtues of Selfishness.” I have not yet mentioned America’s noble experiments in Human Rights and democracy because those things were originally meant just for rich, white, male property owners and could be taken away from society as a whole if we voluntarily re-elect a fascist whose father was a slumlord and whose grandfather was a brothel owner and allow him and his henchmen to carry out their criminal plans.
This brief history of the Americas is unflattering but entirely true. I left out the stories of our inventors, builders, and heroes because those are just brief footnotes in a long saga of criminal acts whose overwhelming success inspired Hitler’s amateurish efforts of conquest, slaughter, enslavement, and plunder. My nation did not invent crime and is only the most recent and most successful culprit to darken human history. What is remarkable is how the notion of getting something for nothing is still the guiding principle of my society from top to bottom yet is never mentioned.
Will Trump succeed in becoming the greatest criminal mastermind in human history in what could be the perfect storm of fascism and unfettered capitalism? This diary began as a one-liner back in 2016 to explain Trump’s get rich quick schemes and scams, and I quickly realized that it also explained a good bit about the dark side of American History as one big crime spree above all else.