Role of USA in wars, rasism and terrorism - Essay Example

This reasserted, in gendered analysis, America’s role as a masculine protector, while effeminizing its enemies by demonstrating their inability to protect their own soil. This gendered construct of war continued through to the abuses in Abu Ghraib, where American personnel, both men and women, had to rape (literally and metaphorically), and feminize their inmates to reinforce positions of masculine, patriarchal power. 2. In the Cold War, America was in a heightened state of fear unlike it has been since, with the possible exception of the immediate aftermath of September 11th. . Thus aspects of American society deemed traditional, like respect for authority, for hierarchy and patriotism, racial division, and so on all became an integral ingredient to national defense.

The most important of these “values” was family – and anything that threatened traditional family threatened America to its heart. Thus, gays and lesbians were constructed as being even more dangerous than they previously were, because of the false perception that they undermined family and family values, and thus naturally supported communism through the destruction of the bulwarks that stand against it. This fear was symptomatic of the wider fear that any weakness, any at all could lead to eventual communist victory, and that not even the smallest gap could left for communism to spread into.

This line of thinking led to Johnson’s decision to enter Vietnam in 1965 – his belief in the “domino theory,” that a small country’s regime change half way around the world could eventually cause America to fall to communism lost thousands of lives. 3. Capitalist economic power has enshrined itself as being at the heart of America’s existence, its very way of life, and thus has made itself a priority of “national defense.” In recent history, America has frequently held the expansion of capitalism as a higher priority than the expansion of democracy, and his repeatedly felled democratically elected regimes in order to install dictatorial, but more capitalist, ones.

In Brazil in 1964, for instance, America successfully toppled the government of Joao Goulart, to be replaced by a military government. This coup was mirrored a year later by the coup engineered in Argentina in 1976,