The previous blog post focused on how the general public and their reaction (and influence) to USA foreign policy.
This blog post will focus on how my views on USA foreign policy (and imperialism) has evolved over the years.
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I was born in 1980 in Hawaii, a land that was taken over by the US in 1898.
While there is an independence movement here, the propaganda in favor of remaining in the US is so strong that I basically didn't even question it.
Our schools and history books are so focused on "we are part of the United States" that we are basically brainwashed into thinking "we are part of the USA" without much time to consider that we don't really need to be a part of the USA. Depending on the school or their teacher (there really is no unified policy on this), the students might pledge allegiance to the USA flag every morning without being given time to ask "why can't we be independent again?"
I grew up in a home with a lot of history books and encyclopedias. They were all written from a pro-USA point of view.
And being that I'm on the same island as Pearl Harbor, I remember going there as a kid, fascinated by the video shown to us before we go on the boat to the memorial itself.
Because of the trauma of the Pearl Harbor attacks and vulnerability Hawaii feels, many of us here feel we need USA protection.
Also, we have allowed ourselves to be dependent on federal funds, it's basically like a drug addiction.
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In elementary education, teachers do tend to sugar-coat certain things. I have been a sub teacher with different age groups and I can definitely tell you that the impulse to sugar-coat things is totally correlated with the age group you are teaching.
Elementary school textbooks tend to have a theme of "be proud of your country" (in this case, the USA), and "our country has overcome some of the sins of the past to be a better nation".
High school textbooks tend to be a little more skeptical of those visions, and college textbooks tend to over-the-top super-skeptical of those visions.
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So basically, I grew up thinking "Hawaii should remain part of the USA". I did sort of experiment with pro-independence thought in the first year in college (1999-2000), thought the most vocal pro-independence activist Haunani-Kay Trask was a lunatic who viewed non-natives as "uninvited guests" and showed zero sympathy for an Anglo-American student who wrote that he was being harassed due to his ancestry.
Around the same time, I was reading Jesse Ventura (wrestler turned governor of Minnesota), Source Magazine (a hip-hop magazine) and learning about libertarian politics, so I became more skeptical about USA foreign policy.
However, being that college campuses are more left-leaning, any non-leftist thought automatically gets you stereotyped as a right-winger even though I was ALWAYS pro-sex-ed, ALWAYS pro-choice, ALWAYS pro-immigration. But expressing criticisms of Haunani-Kay Trask, disagreeing with Democrats on certain issues will get you tagged as a "right-wing Republican" as if there weren't more than two ways of looking at the world! It's as if you're either "right-wing" or "left-wing" with no in-between. Let's not forget that "right-wing" and "left-wing" are Western social constructs imported here by Western imperialism.
Then 9/11 happened! It was my third year in college. It was a time of severe national trauma. US Americans of all political persuasions (except the radical fringes) came together to unite against a deadly enemy.
The trauma was so deep that even a foreign-policy skeptic like me supported Bush's war on terror, and I even wrote articles in the university newspaper criticizing the anti-war rhetoric.
That led to a notorious troll Tobin Jones accusing me even more of being a "right-wing Republican" even though I've never agreed with that party's religious conservative agenda, and I had the nerve to acknowledge and praise Bush for his pro-immigration stance.
At the time, many people bought USA flags and USA flag pins. I even wore them for a while, before they kept coming off. Then I put them away.
As it became time for the USA to go to war in Iraq, I totally under-estimated what a trap that would be! I was thinking "America did defeat two industrial powers in WW2, plus Iraq doesn't have the jungles like Vietnam, didn't have the mountain ranges like Afghanistan, winning over Iraq shouldn't be that hard"
But as time went on, the anti-war skeptics were correct. Iraqi was the total opposite of Japan & Germany being that the latter two were relatively homogeneous and conformist societies whose populations were easier to control than the heavily divided tribalist society that is Iraq. The hard part wasn't overthrowing Saddam Hussein, the hard part was keeping control of the chaos afterward. In such tribalist societies, there is no such thing as patience when a leader gets overthrown, all the different factions literally fights to the death to take control.
As I look back now, the USA should've just left Iraq alone. Saddam Hussein was an evil menace, no doubt about it. But sometimes, the proposed cure is worse than the disease.
While the ideal is that USA should stop being the world's police-officer, even just sticking to using our air force to enforce the no-fly zones would've been enough to contain Saddam Hussein with causing the chaos that actually happened with a land invasion.
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As the years passed, I have become even more skeptical about US foreign policy. I no longer support having the US getting involved with suppressing foreign dictators. For what?
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Also, as the years passed, I get more angry at the Jones Act (US shipping law that restricts access to international trade), I get more disillusioned with USA interference with world affairs, I began to feel that Hawaii would be better off independent already.
Plus, why should we send our tax revenues to Washington DC to have representatives argue over what to do with it, when our tax revenue can just stay here.
Yeah, I know Barack Obama was born here. I think that fact alone has kept people here reluctant to become independent. His election brought so much joy in Hawaii, it was a matter of pride that the US president came from Hawaii.
But that wasn't the first time Hawaii help raised those who eventually became foreign leaders. Sun Yat-sen, the Chinese revolutionary who became his homeland's leader in 1912 actually spent part of his adolescence in Hawaii.
That all being said, Hawaii might've influenced Obama in a positive way in that he experienced a multi-racial environment growing up, but still, the fact remains that his private school (Punahou) was originally built for European-American missionaries, and therefore influenced their students to be "proud Americans" instead of having their students questioning why they should be part of the US.
My public school (McKinley High School) was named after the US president who took over Hawaii. His real legacy wasn't discussed much at the school, it's as if the school had a shameful secret that they didn't want the students to think much about.
