Yes and no. It's not an exaggeration to say it's no worse than any country on the planet, and less built on lies than most. If you look at things France, Britain, Germany, China, or even smaller countries like Kuwait or Yemen have done, we've never matched that kind of brutality. Not only that, but we haven't tried as hard to cover up the things we did wrong in the past.

You start talking to a Brit about how they massacred entire villages and hung their body parts from buildings in South Africa, just to blame the Spanish and make them look bad, and people don't know what you're talking about.

You talk about slavery in the US, and our own textbooks say we're terrible people for it and we eternally apologize.

America isn't built on an especially large amount of violence. Really small, actually. Other countries have more restrictions on media and much more effective propaganda though.