SATISH SHARMA - not just Rotigraphy.: They called it the "American Dream" and exported it to every corner of the earth. The dream: work hard, play by the rules, and you will succeed.

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They called it the "American Dream" and exported it to every corner of the earth.

The dream: work hard, play by the rules, and you will succeed.

Your success will be proportional to your effort.

Your failure will be proportional to your inadequacy.

The system is fair. The system is open. The system rewards merit.

This dream required a specific kind of blindness to function.

It required not seeing that the rules were written by the people who already had everything.

It required not seeing that the "level playing field" of American capitalism was built on stolen land, built by enslaved labor, maintained by the systematic exclusion of entire populations from the wealth they generated.

It required not seeing that the prosperity Americans enjoyed throughout the twentieth century was directly connected to the extraction of resources and labor from the rest of the world, enforced by the military power and financial architecture of empire.

It required not seeing that when poor countries tried to write their own rules, tried to nationalize their resources, tried to redistribute land, tried to build welfare states that served their own populations rather than American investors, those attempts were systematically destroyed.

The dream was real for enough people, enough of the time, to function as proof of concept.

But the dream was also a management tool.

It told working Americans that their interests were aligned with the wealthy Americans who owned the system.

It told them that the enemy was not the domestic billionaire class but the foreign ideology that threatened the system in which they too might one day succeed.

It turned solidarity with the poor of the world into a threat to be feared rather than a kinship to be claimed.

The Vietnamese rice farmer who wanted land reform and the American factory worker who wanted a union were natural political allies.

The empire's greatest domestic achievement was ensuring they never recognized each other.

Instead, the factory worker was taught to see the rice farmer as the threat.

And sent to kill him.

And came home broken.

And the man who sent him got a library named after him.