Americans are deprived of memory and history. This is the point that Herman Melville makes in _Benito Cereno_ (1856). Melville mercilessly indicts American blindness & obliviousness through his portrayal of Captain Amasa Delano. Here's the crucial dialogue near the end of the story:
***** "You generalize, Don Benito; and mournfully enough. But the past is passed; why moralize upon it? Forget it. See, yon bright sun has forgotten it all, and the blue sea, and the blue sky; these have turned over new leaves."
"Because they have no memory," he [Benito Cereno] dejectedly replied; "because they are not human."
"But these mild trades that now fan your cheek, do they not come with a human-like healing to you? Warm friends, steadfast friends are the trades."
"With their steadfastness they but waft me to my tomb, _senor_," was the foreboding response.
"You are saved," cried Captain Delano, more and more astonished and pained; "you are saved: what has cast such a shadow upon you?"
"The Negro." *****
The cheery absence of memory and history (as well as an inability to confront the wages of whiteness), Melville suggests, makes Americans (especially of the master class) "not human."
The story works as an allegory of the American assumption of imperial hegemony, replacing the declining European empires, especially Spanish colonialism symbolized by frail Don Benito (the trades waft him to his tomb). Don Benito cannot put down the slave rebellion led by Babo. He becomes a prisoner of ruthlessly intelligent Babo on the slave ship named _The San Dominick_ (an allusion to Haiti, and the story is set in 1799). When Captain Delano comes on board, thinking that the ship was in distress & trying to offer succor out of his "good nature," Babo has Benito play the Master, and he plays the faithful & devoted Slave. For Babo knows how men like Delano think: each time Delano suspects something is amiss (on the _San Dominick_, a black boy hits a white boy, labor discipline is lax, and so forth), his suspicions are disarmed by "charming" pictures of selfless devotion that Babo presents. Delano thinks himself more compassionate than Don Benito and feels slaves are ill used -- alternately oppressed & spoiled -- by the tyrannical & temperamental Spaniard. Eventually, with the desperate flight of Don Benito, however, Delano realizes that the slave rebellion has overthrown the Spanish, cajoles his sailors into attacking the _San Dominick_ with the promise of gold, puts down the rebellion, and brings the rebels to justice. The rebel leader Babo gets executed in Lima, but the shock of having been overthrown -- even temporarily -- by the slave rebellion, and made a slave of a black man, eventually kills Don Benito as well. _Benito Cereno_ uncannily foreshadows developments in real history, in which the USA puts down (or coopts, as the case may be) anti-colonial struggles -- the Spanish-American War of 1898, to take just one example -- and in the process becomes the foremost imperial power that reduces the Europeans to subordinate positions, all the while believing, like Amasa Delano, that it has & will always act out of boundless generosity & compulsion to help peoples in distress.
The present stage of "humanitarian" imperialism is, in one sense, a resumption of the American self-image temporarily torn asunder by the Vietnam War and the anti-war movement. Americans bring criminals of the periphery to justice, for Americans are, you see, the only righteous people in the world.
American leftists used to laugh at Amasa Delanos -- oppressors who think of themselves as do-gooders -- of the evil empire. Nowadays, American leftists act like Amasa Delano, with one twist -- believing that they are saving Babos from Benito Cerenos. What has not changed, however, is the idea that it is Americans who should bring criminals of the world to justice. It goes without saying that this self-image makes Americans forget the fact that they are the biggest criminals: the only remaining superpower that acts with impunity, for there is no one in the world who can bring Americans to justice.
Yoshie