Here’s a link to part 2 of Ira M. Leonard’s America, The Violent essay for The Black Commentator.
…The development and use by Americans of the “just-war ideology,” intriguingly, is one of the major themes in a significant new reinterpretation of the 400-year American historical experience. In Dominion of War: Empire and Liberty in North America , 1500-2000 (Viking Press, 2005), by two prize-winning historians, Fred Anderson and Andrew Cayton, the authors say: “We construct a history of North America that emphasizes wars and their effects and stresses the ‘centrality’ of imperial ambition to the development of the United States.”
Americans should “see the imperialist adventures of 1812 [war with England], 1846 [war with Mexico], and 1898 [war with Spain], and the wars of liberation that began in 1775 [the Revolution], 1861 [the Civil War], and 1941 [World War II] as related.” They continue: “our purpose” is to emphasize “the importance of the wars Americans have fought less to preserve liberty than to extend the power of the United States in the name of liberty.”
Pointing up the book’s contemporary relevance, they write, “To this day the tendency persists … to justify war as an altruistic determination to rid the world of tyrannies that would crush the human spirit.”
War and imperial expansion, they argue in this engrossing and highly readable 420-page volume, have been the “central engine” of American economic, social and cultural development, but Americans still tenaciously retain the self-image of being a peace-loving people, who only respond to attacks upon them: indeed, “Americans … constructed their conquest of North America as a collective sacrifice in the service of human liberty.”
As a peace-loving people, “it is an article of faith that their wars have been forced upon them by those who would destroy their freedom,” and thus, “Americans tend to believe that by winning wars, they made the world a better, safer, freer place…”
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