We “Americans” have been fast and loose with words for a long time. And we’ve downplayed our own crimes against the rest of humanity for a very long time. We may be “the land of the free and the home of the brave” but that description fits the original Native Americans we lied to, brutalized, and stole from with self-righteousness and apparent impunity far better than it fit us colonizers. We not only stole their land and their food supply, the majestic buffalo, we stole their name.
There were “Americans” for many centuries before we got here. These people were not respected and their rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” were grossly violated despite our sanctimonious declarations and self-aggrandizing assertions. There are “Americans” all over North and South America and yet the governments in our “Americas” do not represent governments elected by the people. Our own government is such an example. Hillary Clinton got 3,000,000 more votes for the office than our current President, yet our antiquated, male-dominated system “elected” the losing candidate. And President-Elect Joseph Biden got 7,000,000 more votes than the same representative of the wealthy male-dominated minority who ran for a second term and yet a fairly large minority of our “representatives” STILL support this same man who calls the children of the original Americans “murderers and rapists” because we have never supported “democracy” in any of the Latin American countries filled with murderers and rapists we’ve created with our drug money and our unfair foreign policies.
These people pretend to be a “democracy,” but don’t protect it in our own country let alone in other countries. And this is not a new phenomenon. We weren’t even CLOSE to being a democratic society until 1920 when we finally allowed the distaff side of our population to participate in this “government of the people, by the people and for the people” to vote and to serve as leaders and representatives in our government. And we have yet to ratify the “Equal Rights Amendment” to give all citizens in our “democracy” equal respect, rights and privileges. And the two-party system, the electoral college, the Constitution, and the structure of our government itself are not truly democratic, either. They don’t give the people of our “United” States equal representation except in the House of Representatives and even there, the elections are biased by massive advertising budgets, special interest groups allied with various wealthy and influential individuals and organizations and gerrymandering by a party in the state wishing to maximize their influence in Congress. The Senate, which often has the final say in how our government is constituted, does not represent people equally and never has. And the Electoral College is an intermediary, undemocratically-elected body of “representation” which selects leaders that represent one of two organized groups whose leaders are elected within their party’s elite and have never been democratic in form or practical responses to the will of the majority.
Let’s face the fact that our government has been struggling against strongly anti-democratic forces throughout the 245 years it has existed and this struggle is far from being over and in many ways. “Under God” showed up in the pledge of Allegiance in the 1950s, when many of us wanted to exclude socialists, communists, atheists and agnostics from our “democracy.” The “Cold War” was against self-determination and equal sovereign rights in the “Third World.” Its almost immediate successor, the “War on Terror,” asserted our own longstanding right to terrorize Third World populations while ignoring their attempts to reply in kind. And our current economic and political warfare shuns and isolates Third World populations that have tolerated or supported rulers that dared to stand up to our bullying and self-righteous behaviors.
The Cuban people are not represented fairly by the wealthy and politically active exiles in Florida, yet all our news sources allow them to be the voice of the Cuban people in our politics. For 62 years, we have followed their lead in shunning the Cuban people. And yet this new Cuban government has, from the start, reasserted those same principles we pretended to champion in 1776 when we declared our undemocratic “democracy.” They reversed the unfair ownership of land and the grossly unfair practices that kept a small, wealthy, elite group of heirs to the fruits of the original colonization in power against the progeny of the original “Americans.” They instituted universal health care and have since developed a system that supports all of their citizens right to life and health without having to sell their children’s liberties and health to “earn” it. And they have created and expanded an educational system that supports learning for all the people of their entire nation.
The people of North Korea didn’t elect their three successive dictators, but they still survive despite our embargo against them. The closing of trade and culture with the US has supported this longstanding dictatorship as has our bribes to the North Korean government. In no way have we supported the people of North Korea since the cease fire in 1953. Instead, we have kept a standing army in South Korea, our colony. There are currently something like 23,500 US fighting personnel occupying our colony, South Korea, and another 50,000 still occupying Japan. Then there are an unknown number of warships and stealth submarines carrying nuclear weapons menacing North Korea 200 miles or more from her shoreline. We still are officially at war with them. And yet, despite this massive show of overwhelming power and destructive capacity, we believe that North Korea is being unfair and unreasonable by attempting to provide a much smaller balancing menace to our own population.
In the Middle East, the colonization of Palestine in 1919 with laws that dispossess subsistence populations and favor European and American immigrants as well as foreign enterprises and military forces from occupying countries (US and England) have completely destabilized the entire region. And the colony of Kuwait (traditionally a part of Iraq), with its deep water port on the Persian Gulf bordering on Saudi Arabia, (ruled by a cartel of wealthy American oilmen and the Saudi Arabian royal family) has been stealing Iraq’s oil by slant-drilling across the border. Kuwait’s population are mostly dilettantes who employ Africans and Asians to work for them and enjoy the highest per-capita income in the world by cooperating with wealthy English and American businessmen and allowing 6 American military installations on Kuwaiti soil.
The US does NOT support democracy on its own soil OR abroad. Our elections (as the recent Georgia runoffs demonstrate) are bought and paid for. The Republicans dumped massive monetary resources from all over the country to elect Senators to represent about 4 million voters and Democrats tried to match them. Over $100 per voter, about half a billion dollars, poured into this election, much of it from PACs that represent narrow and biased interests like the NRA that have nothing much to do with Georgia and everything to do with being in the party that controls our political processes behind the scenes. In the case of Georgia, vested interests (including two donations from me) created a climate of accusations, enmity, and deceit and tipped the balance of power from one party to the other – but NOT to the people but to the political party that now controls the presidency and the Congress while the laws of our country are firmly in the control of people who maintain that our antiquated Constitution and our biased laws are to be rigidly followed rather than the needs or wants of its population or the vastly different situation that we have in a world dominated by corporate capitalism, a system of dehumanized greed and unfettered exploitation of those same “ownership rights” that dehumanized, dispossessed, and exploited the original Americans.
©David Ney Dodson, Phoenix, AZ, January 2021
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