Broadcasting Dissent, Investigative Journalist Abby Martin

‘We are here for your fucking freedom!’ a US soldier bellows, pointing a gun at a crowd of sceptical locals. The nineteenth-century concept of manifest destiny propelled American settlers across the expanse of their own fledging country, and its legacy lives on in modern-day Fallujah. It’s easy to see how the less-sullied manifest destiny of earlier times, which powered the penetration of the west, farming and building along the way, remains an important aspect of the American psyche, how it served as moral engine to the unification of both coasts and the completion of a country according to a utopian idea of the rural idyll following revolution and civil war. This concept underpinned the creation of the modern world’s most powerful nation state, a new Rome.