IS AMERICA’S 250th “BIRTHDAY” WORTH CELEBRATING?
By John McLean
On 4th July, 2026, is the United States 250th anniversary of its Declaration of Independence in 1776. It is being celebrated in America and around the world with a whole lot of ra-ra-ra, coloured balloons, silly hats and endless entertainment in Washington’s National Mall by various Z-List performers. Should we celebrate?
Over the years there has been much to admire in America – its economic advance, the energy of its people, their successful work practices, the excellent service in their hotels and restaurants, the kindness and hospitality of individual Americans, and their wonderfully entrenched free speech by virtue of the First Amendment to their Constitution.
After the Second World War, in which so much of London had been destroyed in the Blitz and subsequent bombings, groups of Americans came together and demonstrated their goodwill by paying for some of the reconstruction – members of the U.S. Air Force and their families paying for the new organ in the bombed out church of St . Clement Danes, the American Bar Association giving generously to the restoration of the bomb-damaged Halls of two of the Inns of Court (Middle Temple and Gray’s Inn), the Wesley Chapel in the City of London which bears a plaque stating for “The generous assistance given by the Methodists of the United States of America through the Council of Bishops toward the restoration of this Mother Church of World Methodism after the War of 1939-45” while the restoration of the church of All-Hallows-by-the-Tower was financed almost entirely with American donations.
At the official level the American government gave large amounts of grants and loans to Britain and to other European countries. However, this was not entirely altruistic as in the post-war chaos there was a growing support for the Communist Party in elections in Western Europe – especially in France and Italy. As a result of Roosevelt’s unfortunate behaviour at the Yalta conference Stalin was already occupying eastern and central Europe and the new administration of President Truman did not share Roosevelt’s softness towards communism. It realised that it must not allow any further extension of communism in what remained of Western Europe and so the purpose of the Marshall Plan was to boost the economies and societies of Western Europe so as to keep communism at bay and that purpose was achieved.
These are some of the positives of America and Americans; the other side of the coin is not so attractive – a superficial education system, organised crime and corruption, a tacky entertainment industry, garish fashions, the loud and domineering American wife and the pathetic, docile husband, all the boasting and the prevalence of PR over substance, an unhealthy obsession with “law enforcement” both within their borders and beyond, a crass republican system of government, and an ugly streak of intolerance that has manifested itself in such things as the Salem witchcraft trials, Prohibition in the 1920s, the “anti-smoking” crusade and the “war against drugs” which has generated so much violence and organised crime.
Theoretically New Zealanders, Australians, Canadians (and British) should have a lot in common with the English speaking United States which, like our own countries, was founded and developed by British people with a sound love of freedom and individual rights. However, as we shall see, while on a social level we have always been able to get along with Americans, the dealings by their government over the years with the other English speaking countries have not been sufficiently friendly or trustworthy to justify us in getting excited about their much vaunted “250th Birthday”.
To start with we need to go back to the 1700s and understand why they chose to rebel against the lawful authority of constitutional monarchy under which they had lived and prospered for 170 years and which still serves so well the people of the other English speaking countries.
As I wrote in my recently published book, The British Empire; A Force for Good, “A pre-condition for a successful uprising by the colonists was the removal of the French threat to their colonies and particularly to their desired expansion to the west, which was blocked by the French occupation of the Mississippi Valley. French power in North America was ended by General Wolfe’s famous victory on the Plains of Abraham at Quebec in 1759. This was followed by the Treaty of Paris 1763 by which all French territory in North America east of the Mississippi was ceded to Great Britain.”
The most serious issue between Britain and the colonists was their differing views on the Indians and of western expansion. In 1763 several of the Indian tribes collaborated and raided frontier forts and even houses from north to south. This was the most serious and destructive Indian uprising in the whole of the eighteenth century, with more than 200 settlers being killed. It was put down by regular British troops with very little assistance from the colonists themselves, thus creating a debt of gratitude which the colonists repaid just over a decade later by rising up in rebellion and fighting the very soldiers who had protected them, their families and their properties from the Indian raids.
The British authorities were faced with a dilemma; they needed to look after the Indians’ interests on the one hand but also to face the colonists’ natural desire to extend their settlements westwards into the huge and largely empty centre of the continent which was inhabited by only a few Indian tribes as well the buffaloes on which these tribes depended for their food.
More land was needed as the generations passed, large families being the norm. They did not want to be hemmed in forever along the Atlantic seaboard. In their eyes the British authorities showed too much consideration for Indian interests and not enough for those of the settlers.
Their fears were realised in 1763, the same year as the Indian raids, when the British authorities issued the Great Proclamation. This delineated a boundary (where there was not one before) to separate the settled colonies from the wild lands further west, which were reserved for the Indians. There were colonists who had already established farms and other operations west of this new line and naturally they had no intention of obeying that part of the Proclamation that required them to vacate their properties and move back east of the new line.
In the eyes of the colonists who, by their numbers as well as their economic importance, were the most important factor in the equation, it seemed that London preferred and would continue to prefer the rights of wandering natives over those of the hard working and productive settlers.
In deciding to take up arms in rebellion the colonists were motivated not only by their calculation that, with the removal of the British power, they would have a free run to chase the Indians as far west as they liked, but also by their fear that the growing anti-slavery movement in Britain would soon outlaw slavery in its American colonies. In 1772 the case of Somerset v Stewart prohibited slavery in Britain. The very next year the “war of independence” began with the Boston Tea Party. If the colonists could throw off British rule, they would be able to keep their slaves – which is exactly what they did until the Civil War of the 1860s. Of the 56 men who signed the Declaration of Independence, 41 of them were slave owners, including Washington and Jefferson. This was their power grab.
Of course, they never put it like that. Instead they fought this war to give them the power to chase Indians and keep slavery in the name of “freedom”
and “democracy”. The Declaration of Independence by this nation of slave owners and slaves stating that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that amongst these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” is one of the greatest absurdities and most extreme instances of hypocrisy that history has yet recorded. As the famous Doctor Johnson put it: “How is it that the loudest yelps for liberty come from the drivers of Negroes?” And this is what everyone is being expected to celebrate on 4 July!!
The founding of the United States as a haven of liberty and democracy has always been a hoax. That the fraud has survived for so long is due to the greatest propaganda exercise of all time: the 200 year plus history curriculum of America’s education system which has produced generations of misinformed, biased, anti-British people. The truth is that the founding of the American republic by means of revolution and war was not one of the more noble or uplifting instances in the human story.
The rebels’ main professed gripe was that they were being taxed while being unrepresented in the legislature at Westminster. For many years the British Exchequer had been paying for the protection of their lives and properties against the French while British soldiers were still providing them with their security from Indian raids. Despite this considerable expenditure the colonists were less heavily taxed than people of similar means in England while under their local legislatures – especially those of Connecticut and Rhode Island – they had more rights over a broad area than people in any country in Europe. The contentious taxes were not onerous. Nor were the colonists so unbearably oppressed as to justify an armed rebellion against the lawful authority and subsequent war that killed so many people on both sides.
The taxes that they allegedly felt so bitter about were relatively minor impositions. The fees imposed by the Stamp Act 1765 and the Townshend Act 1767 taxed imported glass, paper, tea and one or two other commodities and were lower than the overall taxes paid by people in Britain. As a result of the colonists’ complaints Britain revoked the taxes of the Townshend Act on all commodities except for tea. The tax on tea was kept solely to maintain the precedent for the principle that the Parliament at Westminster had the legal right to tax the colonists.
However, even this single tax on tea was unacceptable to the excitable and easily manipulated colonists who raided the shipping in Boston harbour, destroying 92,000 pounds (weight) of tea worth about 10,000 pounds belonging to the East India Company. Benjamin Franklin and others said that the perpetrators should compensate the East India Company for this act of theft – but they didn’t. In America’s education system this event, glorified as the “Boston Tea Party” stealing and destroying such a cargo, is taught as the ultimate in courage and nobility!!! With this sort of indoctrination over the centuries it is not surprising that United States governments have been applauded by their voters for stealing other countries’ property – and often their territory as well.
In the words of Paul Johnson in his masterly book, A History of the American People, “The mainland colonies were the least taxed territories on earth. Indeed, it is probably true to say that colonial America was the least taxed country in recorded history. Government was extremely small, limited in its powers, and cheap. Often it could be paid for by court fines, revenue from loan offices, or sale of lands.
New Jersey and Pennsylvania governments collected no statutory taxes at all for several decades….Until the 1760s at any rate, most mainland colonists were rarely, if ever, conscious of a tax burden. It is the closest the world has ever come to a no-tax society”. So, since the Revolution was obviously not about taxation – whether with “representation” or without – it must have been about something bigger and that “something” was the colonists’ determination to keep their millions of slaves unaffected by the growing anti-slavery movement in Britain. The decision in the 1772 case of Somerset v Stewart scared the living daylights out of the slave owners of America who regarded it as the harbinger of the destruction of their own property rights in their slaves. Much of this might be understandable but not the hypocrisy of posing forever more as the champions of “freedom” and “democracy”.
William Pitt the Elder was one of the few politicians in London who could see things clearly and he urged that all the colonists’ demands be met with the sole exception of full independence and separation from the Mother Country. It was a tragedy for humanity that this course was not followed for, if the Thirteen Colonies (and their later extended territories to the Pacific) had remained in a constitutional link with Great Britain and its empire (as Canada, Australia and New Zealand did at a later stage and still do satisfactorily), the two world wars of the twentieth century would never have taken place since Germany would never have dared to go to war with such a powerful entity as a Britain permanently linked to the entire North American continent.
Had the trans-Atlantic union held, the one great Anglo-Saxon country (along with all the other British settler colonies) under a single sovereign could have directed the affairs of the world for the betterment of mankind for the rest of time, Britain’s unique achievement of individual freedom within an orderly society being the highest point of civilisation that the deeply flawed human race has yet achieved.
Despite the post-World War Two mantra of the United States and Britain having a “special relationship” of trust and friendship the record of history shows the opposite. It began in the aftermath of the Revolutionary War when the victorious rebels were anything but gracious and magnanimous to those who had fought on the losing side or had expressed support for the established British order in any way at all; many of these were persecuted, stripped of their properties and forced to flee elsewhere – mainly to Canada. “Many left because their activities against the rebels or their outspoken opinions made it impossible for them to continue in a country where they were hated and despised as traitors…..All were victims of persecution at the hands of the rebels. Their properties were confiscated, debts owing to them were cancelled, some were tarred and feathered, a few were hanged. Small wonder that their preference for British forms of government developed into a bitter hatred of things republican”, wrote G.G. Campbell in his book, A History of Nova Scotia. (P. 168)
This was an early instance of what Paul Johnson wrote in his A History of the American People: “a utopian, intolerant, and fundamentalist streak which leaped at any opportunity to crusade and impose its creeds. It was that streak which had brought about the Civil War and then waged it with relentless ferocity”. (P. 536) President Woodrow Wilson pointed out: “Once lead this people into war and they’ll forget there was ever such a thing as tolerance….The spirit of ruthless brutality will enter into every fibre of our national life”. (Ibid)
This was also noticed by Lord Salisbury, Queen Victoria’s Prime Minister in the 1890s, who wrote: “As soon as real danger touches her, the surface gloss of liberty falls off, and the latent image of despotism develops itself with startling directness”. (Victorian Titan, Andrew Roberts, P. 49) For example, during the Civil War President Lincoln arrested his political opponents, closed down opposition newspapers and suspended habeas corpus, which resulted in the internment without trial of 14,000 persons.
In the nineteenth century Britain had no more committed or troublesome enemy than the United States. “Wherever on the ocean the British merchantmen sailed, thither the American privateers followed…..They swarmed in the West Indies, where they landed and burnt small towns, leaving behind them proclamations that they had avenged the burning of Washington”. (The Royal Navy; history of the earliest times to the present, William Laird Cowes, P. 153)
Britain was the country that ended the trans-Atlantic slave trade, starting in 1807 and ending in 1861 by which time the Royal Navy had captured or destroyed approximately 1,600 slave ships and had freed around 150.000 slaves at sea. This involved working with other nations, the least co-operative and most obstructive of which was the United States. In 1841 the U.S. Secretary of State, John Forsyth, told Congress that the “persistence” of British cruisers of the anti-slavery patrol was “unwarranted….destructive to private interests” and would “inevitably destroy the harmony of the two countries”.
From the very beginning the United States was a lawless and aggressive nation, fighting its neighbours to grab more territory – Mexico in the south-east and Spain in the Caribbean. All this was done in the name of “manifest destiny” – the ideology that the republican United States had the right to grab ALL of the North American continent – not unlike Hitler’s Lebensraum policy – invading other nations in southern and eastern Europe so as to grab “living room” for Germans to settle in.
President Lincoln’s Secretary of State, William Seward, was typical of these aggressor types when he declared: “Nature designs that this whole continent, not merely these 36 states, shall be, sooner or later, within the magic circle of the American Union”. (as quoted in Heaven’s Command, J, Morris, P. 360) The individual British colonies in Canada were particularly attractive to American greed and would have been incorporated against their will into the American republic but for the continuing presence of protective British troops.
In 1812 the United States declared war on Britain. As in the Revolutionary War it was over a minor matter that should never have led to war. During the Napoleonic War Britain put a blockade on all French and French occupied ports in Europe, insisting that neutral vessels such as American ones must first call at British ports and pay duties. Britain was also stopping United States ships at sea and taking off deserters from the Royal Navy. But Britain was fighting for her life and – as in 1940 – for the world cause of freedom from aggression. For the United States government to declare war over such relatively minor matters, which could have been resolved diplomatically, showed its immaturity as well as its greed for Canada, which latter was the main cause of the war.
On 12 July, 1812, an American force commanded by William Hull invaded Upper Canada to “free” its people from the “tyranny” of British rule. He said that he would give them “the liberty, security and wealth” that the United States enjoyed unless they preferred “war, slavery and destruction”. He was laughed back to the other side of the Detroit River by the colonists who preferred the “tyranny” of British rule to anything that the United States had on offer. Hull surrendered to British forces on 16 August.
On the eastern end of Lake Erie another American cowboy, General Stephen van Rensselaer, tried another invasion across the Niagara River but was defeated in the Battle of Queenston Heights. In 1813 a U.S. force of 5,700 troops advancing on Montreal was stopped by about 400 Canadian militia men and Indians at Chateauguay.
This was not the end of what the British called “the American Difficulty” as in 1859 a heavily armed American force under Captain George Pickett invaded the small islands of San Juan, near Vancouver Island; these islands were inhabited by British people and were regarded as part of Canada. To try to defuse the situation Captain Hornby of HMS Tribune invited Pickett on board for a discussion. Captain Hornby described him as “more quiet than most of his countrymen but he seems to have just the notion they all have of getting a name by some audacious act” – a common judgement of the typical American of the time – brash, barbaric and brutal in pursuit of their interests.
The United States has always been primarily devoted to the Almighty Dollar, and the constant chant from Washington about “freedom” and “democracy” is nothing more than window dressing as a mask for their territorial aggrandisement and exploitation of resources.
This was noticed by Charles Dickens when he visited the United States in the mid nineteenth century. He described Americans as “vulgar and insensitive, braggarts, hypocrites and acquisitive beyond all imaginings”. The country he described as “a vast counting-house full of nothing but humbugs and bores” while the leaders in Washington were “the lice of God’s creation” with their “despicable trickery at elections, under-handed tampering with public officers, and cowardly attacks upon opponents”. So, what has changed?
And Lord Salisbury, Queen Victoria’s last Prime Minister: “Money lust prevails universally and operates to the exclusion not only of literature and refinement but to the destruction of good faith, honour, gentlemanliness, and high feeling”. (Victorian Titan, Andrew Roberts, P. 46)
Never was America’s love of money on display more clearly than in both world wars when, completely ignoring the rights and wrongs of the issue, they refused to come in on the side of the Allies, preferring to make money out of trading with both sides. This was in contrast to the British Empire where both Britain and the dominions declared war against the German aggressor as soon as it invaded Belgium in the First World War and Poland in the Second. In other words, we went to war for a principle – that a small nation should not have its sovereignty violated by a larger one such as the Kaiser’s Germany and Nazi Germany.
However, for all their fine words and eternal boasting about their supposed virtues, America and its people were not motivated by such a noble principle. In the First World War the U.S. government of the Democrats depended very much on the bloc votes of the Germans and the English-hating Irish and it seems that this political factor overrode all others. For some weird reason Irish-Americans have always hated England much more than the Irish in Ireland ever did.
Despite German submarines sinking American shipping the government of President Woodrow Wilson stayed out of the fighting until almost the very end
when it looked as if the British and French were going to win and so Wilson wanted a place at the eventual Peace Conference so as to be in a position to advance the interests of America’s large corporations in the post-war rebuilding.
It was on 6 April, 1917, that the United States finally declared war on Germany. It did so more out of compulsion than choice as three months earlier Germany had declared unrestricted submarine warfare against all shipping in the Atlantic, including American ships.
Despite having had nearly three years’ warning “the United States was not prepared for war, and the build-up of its forces across the Atlantic was slow”, wrote Encyclopedia Britannica in 1985. However, towards the end of the fighting they played a valuable role in reducing the salients and contributing to the Allied victory. By the time of the Armistice, signed on 11 November, 1918, some 112,432 Americans had paid the ultimate price with their young lives. This was a mere fraction of the French and British losses.
The United States might have been our ally in the later stages of the war but it was never our friend – as was shown by their attitude to war reparations. While refusing to take a cent of reparations from Germany, the aggressor that caused all the trouble, the American government and its Congress insisted that its allies, especially Britain and France, pay their war debts to America in full and with interest.
“The British government had proposed at the Peace Conference that all inter-Allied debts be canceled on the principle that money lent during the war was a contribution to the common victory. The French, heavily in debt to both Britain and America agreed. President Wilson rejected the very idea,” wrote the American author, Willliam Shirer, in his book, The Collapse of the Third Republic. (P. 151) “Britain and France during the war had both ‘hired’ money and lent it. The British government had borrowed $4 billion from the United States and lent its allies, chiefly France, nearly twice that amount. When, in 1922, being pressed by Washington for repayment, Britain announced that she would ask only enough from her Allied debtors and from German reparations to cover her payments to the United States, this was equivalent to canceling three quarters of the total amount due her. France had borrowed $3.5 billion from the United States and had lent HER allies over $5 billion….The French felt that their own sacrifices in human life, so much greater than those suffered by the Americans, to achieve Allied victory might be somewhat compensated for by the sacrifice of Yankee dollars.
But Washington was adamant. It demanded that its former allies pay up. By 1929 most of them had reluctantly agreed; the British to pay over 62 years some $11 billion on their $4 billion debt (the accrued interest nearly trebling the original debt) and the French $6.75 billion on their original debt of half that amount. Cries of Uncle Shylock!” (P. 151)
In 1939-40, as the Nazis invaded Poland, Norway, Denmark, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg and France, the United States clung to its “neutrality” and looked on with a mix of both amusement and horror. France had traditionally been the United States’ “oldest friend”. However, when France was fighting for its life and eventually fell to defeat in 1940, the United States sent neither a single gun nor even a spade to help its “oldest friend”.
At the same time the United States was such a “friend” to Britain that, when the latter was being bombed every night by the Luftwaffe and was on the verge of being defeated, the U.S. government required that Britain’s purchases of planes and other war equipment from America had to be paid in cash on an adverse exchange rate. If Britain required expanded purchases, they had to pay cash up front for the construction costs of expanding American factories where these things were to be made – to cover “structural and equipment costs”. The Americans drained every ounce of gold out of Britain and it was only when Britain’s foreign exchange and gold reserves were utterly empty that the Americans came in with trumpets blowing and announced “Lend-Lease” – they would pass us equipment but in return would take 99 year leases on military and naval bases in British colonies such as Bermuda and some Caribbean colonies. Under this scheme they flogged Britain outdated military equipment with loans that Britain was still repaying as late as 2006.
The United States came into the Second World War only because it was so treacherously attacked by Japan at Pearl Harbour on 8 December, 1941. Had that not occurred, it is speculative as to whether it would have lent any assistance against Japan’s aggressive moves down East Asia and into the Pacific with Australia and New Zealand as potential targets. After all, it had not done anything to help Britain and France in 1940. Of course, Australians and New Zealanders are and should always be eternally grateful to the U.S. Marines and other brave American servicemen who turned the tide at Midway and Guadalcanal and so saved our country from enemy invasion. However, this was done not out of any affection for our two countries but to win the war that the United States was at last engaged in.
In 1956, when Egypt’s quasi-communist dictator, Nasser, seized by force the largely British owned Suez Canal, Britain and France invaded the Canal Zone in order to retrieve what had been stolen. Because a presidential election was about to be held in America and Eisenhower did not want any trouble on the world stage to distract the voters, he sided with the Soviet Union to support this act of international piracy against such a vital Western interest. No different from Woodrow Wilson being reluctant to come into the First World War because of the wretched German and Irish votes.
“Millions of Britons and Frenchmen will never forget that America turned upon them and joined with the Russians to humiliate them….Since Suez it has been impossible to discuss world affairs in France without the inevitable interjection: ‘Et Suez?’….Nothing that de Gaulle has done has had a greater impact on allied relations than America’s application of power against Eden to force him to retreat from Suez”, wrote the American author, David Schoenbrun in his book, The Three Lives of Charles de Gaulle. (P. 207) As U.S. Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, later said, “To be America’s enemy may be dangerous, but to be its friend is fatal”. (Daily Telegraph, 17 January, 2024, article by Madeline Grant)
Over the 250 years since it declared its Independence the government of the United States has not often been our friend and in this third decade of the 21st century is so corrupt, greedy and untrustworthy that it is less the friend of Western interests than it has been since 1945. On its 250th “birthday” it is run by a crass and corrupt president who has sold out the United States’ true interests to foreign governments such as those of Israel and Russia and so even America has very little to celebrate.
Since the government represents the country it can be said that the United States as a nation is not our friend and never will be unless it should so suit itself in any particular circumstance such as the Second World war after Pearl Harbour. However, the grubbiness of its government should not detract from the friendliness and honesty of so many American people, many of whom would secretly agree with the words of Lee Cohen, the founder of the U.S. Congressional U.K. Caucus, writing in London’s Daily Telegraph on 15 November, 2023: “The British are deeply fortunate in having the monarchy as well as elected politicians. We did away with all that in 1776 when we chose to become a constitutional republic. But in the process we lost something precious. No matter how divisive or turbulent the state of politics, in the monarchy Britons have a symbol of national identity that reminds them of their shared values, their history and their way of life….and we Americans have nothing like it.”
John McLean is the author of the recently published book, “The British Empire; A Force For Good”. Available from: www.trosspublishing.com