Are We (the U.S.) the Bad Guys?

In our comic book conception of the world, did we unwittingly become the villains?

There’s a great moment in Henry James’s short story The Aspern Papers, when the reader realizes that the narrator—who seems like a cultured and sympathetic scholar—is actually a ruthless and deceptive weasel. Because James was such a cool and subtle writer, the reader doesn’t see it coming until the old woman whose privacy the narrator is plundering declares that he is a scoundrel. At that moment the reader realizes, “Holy smokes, the lady is right. This guy is a self-serving jerk.”

Years ago I knew a very brave Austrian journalist who covered Iraq after U.S. forces withdrew and let ISIS walk into the place and turn it into hell on earth. Listening to his tale of horror, I asked myself, “Is it possible that Saddam Hussein—for all of his tyranny—was, relatively speaking, the good guy, while we Americans—who wrecked the place and turned it over to devils—are the killer angels?

I had the same thought years later while visiting wounded soldiers at the VA Hospital in Palo Alto. They were just a few of the tens of thousands of men who’d sustained traumatic brain injuries in Iraq and Afghanistan. By the by the time I visited them in 2012, they been largely forgotten by their people, while their families—often young mothers with children—were left to deal with the wreckage. We, the American public, had moved on from Iraq and didn’t want to hear about it anymore.

I got to be pals with their treating psychiatrist, who told me privately over dinner that most of his medical colleagues at the VA were, in his experience, the most dishonest careerists he’d ever encountered.

Recently I’ve been following the news that, since the “bad guy” Assad was overthrown in Syria, the place has been taken over mostly by former Al Qaeda terrorists. Again, who is the “bad guy”—Assad or the U.S. who supported a band of homicidal fanatics?

Then there is the news the U.S., British, and German intelligence agencies have known all along that SARS-CoV-2 was engineered in a lab with U.S. biotechnology, mostly developed by Professor Ralph Baric at UNC Chapel Hill. Over the years, Baric has received hundreds of millions of grant money from Anthony Fauci’s NIAID. Again, who are the bad guys?

Now we come to the ultimate question, the mere posing of which will likely cause a large cohort of Americans to lose their minds—namely, is it possible that we (the United States) are the bad guys in this showdown with Russia over Ukraine?

By many accounts, Vladimir Putin has long been one the most moderate, pro-Western politicians in Russia. Oh, I know, I know, Putin is a ruthless character with a shady KGB background.

On the other hand, do the American people really think that an idealistic liberal who listens to NPR and just wants everyone to be friends is going to assume power in Russia and govern the vast, multi-ethnic, multi-religion country? The 19th century Czar, Alexander II, was an idealistic, liberal chap who freed the serfs in 1861. In return, a student revolutionary assassinated him.

Since World War I, when we celebrated that the “Yanks are comin’” (bearing Spanish Flu) to save the world from Prussian militarism, we Americans have become far too conditioned to believe—in the most unexamined way—that we are the good guys, and that the rest of the world is infested with bad guys.

Is it possible that we (the U.S.) are the bad guys?

The Swiss psychiatrist, Carl Jung, once pointed out that none of us can grow up and achieve full moral maturity unless we are willing to examine our own dark side and consider that maybe we are not as nice as we think we are. Maybe our desire to congratulate ourselves for our virtue causes us to overlook our own vices and selfishness.

The idea was comically captured in the following British skit.