A great many of us who are properly grateful to the US for saving us from the Nazi and Nipponese empires in World War 2, and for championing democracy in the subsequent Cold War against Chinese and Soviet Communism, used to be total fans of what we saw as the genial, generous and apparently genuine Uncle Sam.

But since then, we’ve had to face the reality that, as much affection as we still feel for our erstwhile hero, Uncle Sam’s a bit of a sham. In fact, as the merest glance at history reveals, he always has been.

For example, take the glorious proclamation in the Declaration of Independence that "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness".

A monstrous sham if ever there was one, considering that many of the Founding Fathers who signed this document owned slaves, for whose descendants it took a century, a civil war and another hundred years of struggle to win recognition that they were created equal.

If the situation was black for imports from Africa, it was arguably even worse for "redskins", who were considered so lacking in entitlement to life, liberty and happiness that they were relentlessly pursued and slaughtered or locked up and left to rot on so-called "reservations".

And though admittedly these days some of the tribes and artifacts are tokenised in the names of football teams, military helicopters and missiles, for a great many Native Americans, the American dream remains a nightmare.

If the Home of the Brave is hardly a paradise for the braves who originally lived there, it also fails to live up to its image as the Land of the Free. A domestic prison population of over two million seems to me a pretty poor effort, freedom wise. And Camp X-Ray at Guantanamo Bay, where al-Qaeda suspects are caged like animals in flagrant breach of the Geneva Convention, gives the lie to rhetoric about liberty.

It also laughs at the concept of the "unalienable right" to life, given that Camp X-Ray inmates are facing the threat of not just detention without end, but also execution.

Despite the abolition of the death penalty by more than 100 other countries, and considerable evidence that a proportion of death-row inmates are innocent, mentally deficient or were "children" under international law when they committed the crimes of which they’ve been convicted, the US federal government and many states continues to condone and conduct capital punishment.

This puts Uncle Sam in the company of not just Iran, Iraq and North Korea, the well-known Axis of Evil, but also such paragons of life and liberty as Belarus, China, Egypt, Equatorial Guinea, India, Japan, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Malaysia, Nigeria, North Korea, Pakistan, the Palestinian Territories, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Taiwan, Tajikistan, Thailand, Uganda, United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, Yemen and Zimbabwe.

Willfully jeopardising lives

Denying killers, rapists and other criminals their constitutional right to life is one thing, but willfully jeopardising the lives of innocent or at least unconvicted citizens is another.

Yet that’s precisely what the US resolutely persists in doing by going along with the gun lobby’s support of the "right to keep and bear arms", ensuring more civilian deaths by shooting than all the military casualties the US has suffered in all of its wars put together.

Speaking of which, the US is nowhere more at odds with its avowed principles than in the arena of armed conflict. The great defender of peace, freedom and democracy has also fought a good many wars of aggression, many of them on very thin pretexts indeed.

George Bush’s ruinous Iraq War, for example, waged on false claims of imminent danger from non-existent weapons of mass destruction. And, like many others of Uncle Sam’s wars and proxy-wars in half-forgotten locations like El Salvador, it’s being fought in conjunction with "friends" that, like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, are arguably as evil as the enemy.

Of course Uncle Sam doesn’t always rely on naked aggression to bend the world to his will. He also wields a big stick in the areas of aid and trade.

Much of the aid, however, as liberal as it seems, is doled-out very cynically indeed. A great deal goes straight into the pockets of the dictators and other oppressors of the people it’s ostensibly spent on helping.

And much of the rest comes with the condition that it be spent only on US goods and services, witness the way the Bush administration is currently lavishing funds for the "rebuilding" of Iraq on corrupt crony corporations like Bechtel and Haliburton.

Then there’s the global "free trade" scam, in which poorer nations are bribed or strong-armed into dropping protective tariffs against US goods while Washington subsidises whole sectors of its own economy ranging from agriculture to arms manufacture.

So even the neediest nations subsidise US greed, as vividly illustrated right now by the global effects of the scandalous sub-prime mortgages "meltdown".

As selfish and hypocritical as the US has been shown to be, especially under the influence of George Bush and his gang of Neo-Con nasties, it’s no wonder that far less respectable and even outright pariah regimes increasingly dispute its right to criticise and coerce them into changing their ways.

Witness Mugabe’s continued defiance of State Department demands that he step down, Iran’s determination to go nuclear no matter what, the Burmese Generals’ contemptuous disregard of sanctions, and Barisan Nasional’s rejection of calls by Condoleeza Rice for fair and just treatment of Anwar Ibrahim.

That’s the ultimate shame of Uncle Sam’s behaving like such a sham. More and more billions of people in the family of man no longer have a friend with the moral authority, credibility and clout to help them out when they get in a jam.