In 1961, William Lederer wrote “A Nation of Sheep,” a book now largely forgotten that documented the ignorance and apathy of the American people in regard to foreign policy. Lederer knew his subject well. He was a US Naval Academy graduate in 1936, and his first appointment was as the junior officer of a river gunboat on the Yangtze River. In 1958, he wrote, along with Eugene Burdick, the bestseller, “The Ugly American.” 

“We are acting like a nation of sheep—not a vigorous community of bold, well-informed Americans,” Lederer wrote, and added, Americans at the time were “uneasy, but too apathetic and uninformed to know why.” 

More than 60 years later, this situation has persisted. The Fourth of July, formerly a celebration of liberty and independence—no matter how short-lived and restricted to wealthy white male landowners of the time—is now nothing if not a meaningless national holiday of fireworks, parades, barbecues, carnivals, fairs, picnics, concerts, and baseball games, all of it devoid of a commemoration of the ratification of the Declaration of Independence by the Second Continental Congress. 

Ignorance of the founding principles is widespread among Americans. 

The Cato Institute’s 2025 4th of July National Survey of 2,026 Americans, conducted by Morning Consult, reveals 53% of surveyed Americans are unaware that the Declaration of Independence was adopted to separate the colonies from Britain on July 4, 1776. Moreover, 54% are unaware that only Congress can declare war.

This last point is critical. Since the Second World War, Congress has not issued a formal declaration of war—and many undeclared wars there has been: Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and a score of lesser conflicts across the world, often described as “police actions,” many covertly orchestrated.

The scorched earth policy of the Pentagon during the Korean War resulted in the death of millions of Koreans (and 40,000 US soldiers), while the disastrous Vietnam War claimed the lives of more than three million people in Southeast Asia (and 60,000 US soldiers). 

In 2007, a Lancet poll estimated a total of 1,220,580 deaths after the US invaded Iraq in 2003 (other estimates put the number over 1.5 million). While the exact number of people killed in the US-NATO invasion of Libya may never be known, some put the estimate at more than 30,000. Likewise, the number of civilians killed in Afghanistan is not known, although it is presumed to be in the thousands. 

“The post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, the most violent conflicts in which the U.S. government has engaged in the name of counterterrorism since September 11, 2001, have taken a tremendous human toll. Indirect deaths are estimated to be 3.6-3.8 million, bringing the total death toll, including direct and indirect deaths, to 4.5-4.7 million and counting. Precise mortality figures remain unknown,” The Watson School of International and Public Affairs noted in June, 2025. 

Most Americans are unaware of these staggering numbers, primarily due to a corporate media that works to keep such horror and complicity hidden. Lederer wrote that

“the common man is blocked from finding out what the bureaucrats [at the Pentagon, State Department, et al] are doing, let alone controlling them.” 

Furthermore, according to Noam Chomsky, the average American, if aware at all of the crimes perpetuated by his or her government, is unable to effectively interpret such information. Chomsky wrote that the “sign of a truly totalitarian culture is that important truths simply lack cognitive meaning.” 

Former CIA officer John Stockwell claimed in 1987 (before the invasions of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya) that the US and CIA had killed “at minimum” six million people following the Second World War. James A. Lucas, writing in 2007, however, cited a study that put this number far higher:

the “U.S. military forces were directly responsible for about 10 to 15 million deaths during the Korean and Vietnam Wars and the two Iraq Wars. The Korean War also includes Chinese deaths while the Vietnam War also includes fatalities in Cambodia and Laos.”

The vast majority of Americans, celebrating a “national holiday” today (minus context), are woefully ignorant of the violent and illegal history of U.S. interventions and wars, all without formal declaration, as stipulated by the Constitution. However, this may be changing somewhat now that war is transmitted in real-time over social media, specifically in the case of the genocide in Palestine, conducted with direct participation of the United States. A Gallup poll conducted in March revealed

“Americans now oppose the campaign [in Gaza] by a solid margin. Fifty-five percent currently disapprove of Israel’s actions, while 36% approve.”

However, according to a poll by The Chicago Council on Global Affairs, “a plurality of Americans [are] not informed enough to opine (42%),” thus revealing that Lederer’s conclusions still apply to a large extent, although this may be changing. 

The American public is more well-informed than they were in 1961 when William Lederer published “A Nation of Sheep,” but this has yet to translate into effective action to put an end to the hegemonic and profit-oriented wars of the United States. 

Donald Trump’s repeat of Richard Nixon’s “peace through strength” ideology has moved the nation closer to participation in a catastrophic war in West Asia and also the possibility of war with China and Russia, although Trump’s rhetoric on foreign policy and the use of US military power has fluctuated, often in bizarre and contradictory ways. 

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Kurt Nimmo is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image: A Fourth of July fireworks display at the Washington Monument. Location: Washington, District of Columbia (DC) United States of America (USA) (Public Domain)

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