American exceptionalism abroad requires forgetting domestic conquest and subjugation

Evidence

One productive resource for addressing such questions is Robert Vitalis’s richly archived history on U.S.-Saudi relations, America’s Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier. Although Vitalis does not engage the novel as a genre, he is profoundly engaged, as his subtitle announces, by frontier mythologies. Vitalis uses ARAMCO archives and private correspondence to dispel the myths of American exceptionalism promulgated by the oil consortium’s richly funded propaganda machine. The consortium habitually contrasted enlightened American practices in the Middle East with those of the benighted British, using the language of partnership, mutual respect, benign incorporation, development, and nation building to advance the story line that U.S. expansion into the Persian Gulf was anticolonial in spirit and thereby consistent with a long, honorable tradition of sensitive cross-cultural uplift that animated American exceptionalism. Yet as Vitalis succinctly puts it: “America can only be seen as avatar of a more humane twentieth-century abroad against the atavism of European empire by leaving out the unbroken legacy of conquest and subjugation at home.” — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 255

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to settler-colonial critique strand and ch14’s argument that the resource curse is manufactured by Western-designed international law. — connects to: American exceptionalism’s self-image erases the country’s own colonial and imperial history; American exceptionalism erases the country’s settler-colonial and imperial wars while projecting benevolence; American exceptionalism repackaged empire because it could not inherit old imperial language (+6 more)

Broader Connections

• American exceptionalism’s self-image erases the country’s own colonial and imperial history #corroborates (0.95)
• American exceptionalism erases the country’s settler-colonial and imperial wars while projecting benevolence #corroborates (0.95)
• US postwar security state disguised imperial expansion as defensive exceptionalism #corroborates (0.85) — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 732
• Selective historical forgetting about racism is an American tradition #corroborates (0.82) — Tamara Lanier, From These Roots, 778
• American exceptionalism repackaged empire because it could not inherit old imperial language #qualifies (0.80)
• US post-war hegemony repurposed Orientalism and modernization theory to justify empire. #expands (0.78) — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 28
• American empire inherited and reformulated European Orientalism after World War II #expands (0.78) — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 724
• American nationalism has suppressed foreign-coded dissent since the republic’s founding #expands (0.72)
• Challenging American exceptionalism is required to change the nation #expands (0.70) — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 557