Every year on the 4th of July, the United States celebrates the day she secured independence from the British Empire after the Revolutionary War. It’s on this day, the 4th of July 1776 that the Declaration of Independence was signed, even though fighting continued some time after this. Thirteen American colonies regarded themselves as a new nation and became the United States of America.

There’s no doubt that the current generation of Americans will be indoctrinated with US patriotism and a false sense of pride. After two hundred plus years of US independence there is very little to be proud of. Following the footsteps of her predecessors, the US has left no part of the world without political, economic, military and cultural subjugation exceeding the tyranny of all empires in the history of mankind. The US will do anything it takes in the pursuit of her interests including the use of weapons of mass destruction such as nuclear weapons and napalm, create alliances with tyrannical rulers, indebt nations including its own, use her security and intelligence to overthrow regimes, torture political prisoners, indiscriminately bomb civilians, spy on her own citizens and lie to the masses by peddling false historical and political narratives.

Abolition of Slavery
The US prides herself on ending slavery, however the reality is that slavery in America was not ended on moral or humanitarian grounds. Rather, the objective was the restoration of the Union due to the North-South divide in which the anti-slavery movement was impeding Abraham Lincoln’s ambitions to unite the Union and over Britain’s attempts to control the commerce that flowed in an out of the colonies. Ships in New England took goods to the French West Indies where they were exchanged for rum. Rum was then transported to West Africa and traded for slaves. In 1764, the British Parliament passed the Sugar Act (i.e. the American Revenue Act or Duties Act) in an effort to control trade with the French West Indies. More attempts by the British to control the colonies took place until 1774 when the First Continental Congress suspended trade with Britain. In 1776, the Continental Congress passed an act that banned importing slaves into any of the thirteen United Colonies. The colonies had used the inhumanity of slavery as one of their causes during the American Revolution, however, when it was over, they became reluctant to end slavery and the slave trade. Abraham Lincoln supported colonisation throughout his political career, citing an inability for African-Americans to assimilate into white society. Thomas Jefferson, another early supporter, was concerned that white and African-American people could not co-exist. Whilst slavery, as it was known for the last century, eventually ended the attitudes and indiscriminate legislation against black people remained the same and is witnessed by millions of African Americans, up until this day.

American Wars
Since 1776 the US has been at war 222 out of her 241 calendar years of existence (over 92% of her time since inception). Moreover, no US President qualifies as a peacetime president and can all be classed as “War President”. The US has never seen a decade out of war and the only time the US was out of war for five years (1935-1940) was during the isolationist period of the Great Depression. The inferiority complex of USA has led her to justify every war under the pre-text of an “existential threat”. American Indians were thought to be an existential threat to the United States. John Quincy Adams, for example, wrote that “the savage Indians” were out to “wage an exterminating war” against the “peaceful inhabitants” of the United States. It was the same propaganda then as it is now: “we must attack them before they attack us”. In reality however, American governments have used trillions of dollars of taxpayers’ money to bulk up her military and use it to pursue geopolitical interests over other competing nations.

Nuclear Weapons
It took a lot of “exceptional” Americans to develop the atomic bomb. But when just two of those weapons of mass destruction were dropped on Japan, it’s estimated that 220,000 men, women and children were killed by those blasts. That’s a heavy cost to bear by the only nation to use such a weapon -a country that routinely questions whether other nations can be trusted with its destructive power. It is also estimated that since 1945, the United States has produced more than 70,000 Nuclear Warheads, which is more than all other nuclear states combined.

Debt
The global financial crisis has brought to the forefront how much the US lives beyond her means. The US generated nearly $14 trillion in 2007, however the national debt – this is money the central and federal governments owe to the US public and the world through the bonds they have sold – stands at $9.7 trillion. The US citizenry have a huge appetite for imports and real estate; as a result consumer debt stands at $11.4 trillion. The debts of US companies amounts to $18.4 trillion. This makes the US indebted to the tune of just under $40 trillion – nearly 75% of what the world produces. In a Harvard report it was calculated that 10% of the US population owned 71% of the nation’s wealth, whilst the top 1% controlled 38%. On the other hand, the bottom 40% owned less than 1% of the nation’s wealth and nearly 5% of Americans live below the poverty line. The US is only able to live this way because she has the US dollar, which is the world’s reserve currency, however this massive wealth fracture is not sustainable and the sustainability of living today and paying for the lifestyle tomorrow is becoming untenable.

Rendition
The Open Society Justice Initiative (OSJI) published a 213-page report into the CIA’s global rendition programme. The report revealed that nearly a quarter of the world’s governments were involved in the covert movement, detention and subsequent torture of dozens of people during the post 9/11 ‘War on Terror’. It has become clear that without the co-operation of the global community the US would have been unable to carry out the rendition programme; this makes all those involved complicit. It has always been known that other countries were involved as the US sub-contracted the torture to countries such as Syria, Libya and Uzbekistan. In truth the US runs what is akin to an organised mafia cartel that roams around the globe for nothing more than colonial and economic interests. The talk of human rights, international law and organisations such as the International Criminal Court are just smoke screens to fool the world. On the one hand the US pushes for freedom, democracy and the implementation of her ideology, whilst on the other she uses this same ideology to render innocent individuals for torture.

Torture
In December 2014, the CIA published a 500 page sample of a thousand page dossier that showed a systematic, deliberate and prolonged torture of prisoners by the CIA held in secret locations across the world. This was no ordinary maltreatment of prisoners in order to gain confessions or extract information. What the CIA’s ‘Enhanced Interrogation Techniques’ (EIT) did was truly medieval and barbaric. Developed in a post 9/11 world when the US administration and her agencies felt they had carte blanche to do whatever they wanted with Muslim nations and Muslim suspects: the EIT was used as a frontline tool against those abducted and rendered around the world for torture. The US Senate report highlights shocking cases of repeated waterboarding; such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed who was water boarded some 182 times. He was made to sleep in a coffin and often confined to a box too small for his body size. It was also reported that more than one detainee almost drowned from repeated waterboarding. Other prisoners were subjected to severe sleep deprivation not being allowed to sleep for days on end. Of the most shocking techniques was the forced rectal feeding and hydration of prisoners for no apparent reason but the enjoyment of the perpetrators. Some of the other techniques included: being stripped naked and dragged through filthy corridors, sexual threats to prisoners and their families, beatings, slapping, psychological torture and being kept in stress positions for hours. There is one case in which a prisoner was chained to a cold concrete fall overnight and died of possible hypothermia. All this is taken from what has been revealed in the report, the mind finds it difficult to comprehend what has been hidden from public consumption!

Police State
In June 2013 a former CIA operative, Edward Snowden exposed US surveillance activities which revealed much about the inner workings of the US government. The revelations by Snowden uncovered PRISM, a clandestine electronic surveillance programme that allowed the NSA to access emails, web searches and real-time internet traffic. It involved collecting millions of emails and content from social media and was effectively spying on its own citizens on an industrial scale. The NSA leaks also claimed that the US hacked Chinese mobile phone companies to collect millions of text messages as well the Asian fibre-optic network operator Pacnet. These revelations caused international embarrassment for the US and publicised hypocrisies and double standards. The US has always accused China of cyber espionage yet it has now come to surface that they are guilty of hacking and are of the best hackers in the world. All of this shows that spying rather than the freedoms is how social cohesion is maintained in America.
The 4th of July is a day that should be remembered with regret and shame rather than celebrated. Ever since the US of 1776, the world has seen barbarity like it has never seen before. The result of the US status as the leading nation has led to the suffering and death of billions of people through her adoption of the capitalist system and her imperial foreign policy. The US status as the leading nation is now being challenged and questioned by political commentators and indeed the nation herself. Moreover, as the Muslim world awakens from her trauma and regains her political conscious, the US fears the rise of the Khilafah that will challenge the her global hegemony. This is the reason for the global ‘War on Terror’ that she has dragged the world into. It is indeed a pre-text to uproot the pure uprising of the Muslim World.