Is the United States of America a blessing or curse to mankind?

The latest episode of the Citizens Party’s Citizens Insight YouTube program addresses this question in an interview with a uniquely qualified American historian and political activist, Anton (Tony) Chaitkin.

Click here to watch: The United States of America: A blessing or curse to mankind?

Tony Chaitkin is the co-author of George Bush: The Unauthorised Biography, the author of Treason in America, and in November 2020 published an important new work, Who We Are: America’s Fight for Universal Progress, from Franklin to Kennedy: Volume I — 1750s to 1850s. This latest book is the subject of his Citizens Insight interview with Citizens Party Research Director Robert Barwick.

In this interview, Tony gives a historical perspective of the USA that every Australian needs to hear. The USA is the most dominant country on earth, and Australia is its most loyal ally, but since WWII, when that alliance was forged to defeat Japan’s fascist empire, the alliance has dragged Australia into a series of military disasters and immoral regime-change wars, and is now drawing us into potentially the most disastrous war of all—against China. The alliance’s increasingly destructive path has coincided with America’s economic decline. It is no longer the productive powerhouse that allied with Russia and China to win WWII, but is a post-industrial rustbucket run into the ground by the financial predators on Wall Street. Now it seems incapable of building or even maintaining its own infrastructure, its political class is gripped by paranoia over invented fears of Russian and Chinese “interference”, and it is lashing out at a country that is applying America’s own historical methods to build stunning, transformative nation-building infrastructure and raising hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.

Australians may ask: what happened, and what is the value of the US alliance?

Tony Chaitkin is uniquely qualified to comment on this issue. As well as being a historian, he is from a Jewish family of political activists. More than 50 years ago, Tony was one of the co-founders of American physical economist Lyndon LaRouche’s political movement and its weekly magazine Executive Intelligence Review. In the 1930s, his father Jacob Chaitkin was the strategist for the Jewish community’s campaign in New York City to boycott Hitler’s Germany. (In a must-watch part of the interview, Tony reveals that the recent baseless attacks on the Citizens Party as “anti-Semitic” comes from organisations associated with the American Jewish Committee which represented Wall Street, not Jewish people, and which opposed his father’s boycott campaign against Hitler.)

Tony describes his book as a history of American progress, the story of how the USA became the world’s most powerful nation, under the leadership of a handful of great presidents, whom he identifies as George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy. His book spans the period of the first two—Washington to Lincoln—but it reveals enough of how America actually progressed to provide a stark contrast to its current political and economic dysfunction.

In the interview, Tony explains:

• The real nationalism that motivated America’s founding fathers, which was very different to the twisted nationalism of Hitler;
• The international cooperation between nation-builders in Britain and America, led by Benjamin Franklin, which created and advanced the American nation;
• The fight between Alexander Hamilton, who invented national banking and fought for America’s industrial development, and Thomas Jefferson, who degenerated throughout his political career, from making a crucial contribution through his drafting of the Declaration of Independence, to choosing to represent southern slave-owning interests and opposing industrial development;
• The role of some of the lesser-known historical figures and institutions that contributed to America’s progress, including the West Point Military Academy and the West Point Foundry that led the development of canals and railways;
• The commitment of America’s nationalist leaders to scientific and technological progress.

In a review for Who We Are on Amazon.com.au (where it can be purchased in either paperback or Kindle e-book formats), Robert Barwick wrote:

“The long arc of collaboration between the circles around these individuals that Tony documents is a profound insight into how history is made. From conspiring to achieve specific political outcomes involving everything from the writing of the US Constitution, the outcome of John Quincy Adams’ presidential election, and the passage of important acts of Congress relating to tariffs, national banking, and infrastructure projects, to their more general shared commitment to national economic development and scientific progress, these remarkable statesmen reshaped the world, defining new standards of human welfare and human progress, which made America a ‘beacon of hope and temple of liberty’ for all mankind. For instance, it was this progress that inspired Australia’s great republican statesman the Rev. Dr John Dunmore Lang to call for the establishment of the United States of Australia, the ‘Great Republic of the South Seas’.”

Addressing the contrast between the way America once progressed, and its dysfunction today, Barwick concluded: “We may well ask, which is the real America? Was the greatness of the USA a myth, and should we be cynical that nations would ever act for the greater good of humanity (as, for instance, Americans and Australians are cynical of China’s Belt and Road intentions today)? Who We Are lays a foundation to answer those questions—America was truly great, but that greatness was not perfection, nor was it ordained by heaven in some supernatural way; rather, its greatness was the commitment, vision, and accomplishments of the heroic human beings profiled in this book, and it’s the insight Tony provides into the nationalist, but universal, ideology that motivated them that, if re-embraced today, can truly make America great again, and indeed make any country great.”

Please take the time to watch Tony Chaitkin expand on these themes in “The United States of America: A blessing or curse to mankind?”, and read Who We Are, for historical insights that can and must be applied today to avert the current danger of war and instead embark on a new era of progress.

Click here to watch: The United States of America: A blessing or curse to mankind?