“America was created by philosophy.” ~ Margaret Thatcher.
It is tempting to believe Thatcher’s aphorism, for it flatters the American founding by placing it in the lineage of liberal modernity. Yet history resists such easy romanticism. America was not born of philosophy—it was born of conquest, dispossession, and enslavement.
The pantheon of American founders—Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Madison, Hamilton—were not Platonic guardians animated by universal ideals of liberty. They were statesmen of a settler aristocracy, architects of a republic that codified exclusion.
The Declaration of Independence, so often invoked as humanity’s charter of freedom, did not extend its blessings to enslaved Africans or to the Native nations who had walked the continent for millennia. Behind the rhetoric of “unalienable rights” stood chains, whips, muskets, and treaties designed to dissolve entire civilizations.
From its inception, the United States was an expansionist project. Its destiny, proclaimed as “manifest,” was not to safeguard philosophy but to seize land. Even in the eighteenth century, the republic wielded a formidable army, while militias and armed settlers advanced the frontier through campaigns of extermination.
In this respect, the Americans of that age resembled less the philosophers of the Enlightenment than the conquistadors of Spain—merciless inheritors of a logic that saw continents as vacant and their inhabitants as obstacles to be erased.
At the ratification of the Constitution in 1789, the United States encompassed thirteen colonies across 864,746 square miles. Within a century, through purchase and conquest, it sprawled across more than 3.5 million. Laws such as the Indian Removal Act of 1830 enshrined ethnic cleansing as state policy.
California provides a grim vignette: before conquest, some 300,000 Native hunter-gatherers lived in small, unarmed tribes. The gold rush sealed their fate—many were enslaved, starved, or worked to death. The Yahi tribe, once numbering two thousand, was annihilated in a series of raids between 1865 and 1868, erased not by great armies but by a handful of settlers who believed destiny licensed murder.
This, too, is America’s origin story: treaties broken, tongues silenced, bones scattered beneath the soil. Yet the myth persists that the United States was founded on philosophy. Thatcher’s claim, echoed by admirers of the “American experiment,” functions as a philosophical alibi—it shifts attention from the conquest that made the nation possible to the Enlightenment texts that offered it legitimacy.
But ideas did not clear the forests, build the plantations, or mine the rivers of gold. Guns, chains, and greed did.
Here lies a cautionary lesson for India. If we look to America or Western Europe as the fountainhead of liberty and progress, we mistake rhetoric for reality. Their liberty was purchased through the enslavement of others; their progress was built on plunder, colonization, and erasure.
To imagine that freedom and justice flow outward from Washington, London, or Paris is to accept a distorted history written by the victors. India’s own civilization, with its millennia of philosophical reflection, political organization, and cultural resilience, offers a deeper and more authentic resource for thinking about liberty.
Philosophy can inspire; it can console; it can refine the conscience of a people. But philosophy did not create America. What created America was the ruthless will to possess land—a will that cloaked itself in the rhetoric of freedom even as it annihilated the freedom of others.
If people of India seek liberty by mimicking such examples, they risk confusing violence for virtue, conquest for creativity, and domination for destiny. Thatcher was wrong: America is not the child of philosophy but of power and violence. And India will commit a grave mistake if it forgets this distinction.
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