2. According to christians, god created man in his image. So is god brown, red, yellow, black, or white? I know, I know - he is all colors at once - whatever in the hell that means - all in keeping with the magic show. Nevertheless most christians think he's white - the all colors thing is just to cover their asses. In fact most christians in the US think the people here are god's favorites - but only if you're white, and only if you're christian, and only if you are a US citizen.
3. Columbus did not discover North America, nor did anyone with an education at his time think the world flat. His ideas were universally rejected by Spain, Portugal, England. His estimate of the distance to the Spice Islands - 2000 miles traveling west - was off by a factor of five from accepted estimates of the time of 8 -10,000 miles, estimates that turned out to be roughly correct. He finally received his funding from Spain, but not because of his persuasive arguments - in fact he was laughed at by most for his ignorance and poor rationale - but due to the political rivalry and greed of Spain against Portugal.
4. In the US slaves ate out of a trough just outside the kitchen, even at the most 'humane' plantations. They slept on dirt floors, were commonly raped - even by national leaders. Husband and wives and their children were routinely separated, sold off, or traded. They were not treated as family from their masters and for the most part they did not love their masters.
5. Americans stole native American and Hawaiian lands - killing them off with guns or disease in the process. Interpret that as you may, to include rolling your eyes - your response does not change that it happened.
6. Pearl Harbor. An aggressive action by Japan against the US was expected. We just weren't sure where and when it would occur. Japan was a supreme colonizer, ruthless, cruel. We enacted an embargo against them and took other measures that made it nearly impossible for them to continue their hegemonistic agenda that they thought was ordained by god. They considered our actions akin to war, and we knew that. I'm not saying we should have not done what we did. I'm saying we knew it would provoke the Japanese, we knew they were likely to retaliate. And so this idea that Pearl Harbor was completely out of the blue, completely unprovoked, and 'sneaky', is simply not true.
7. There were not 58,220 deaths in Vietnam. That is US military deaths. Our actions killed between 2.5 to 4 million people - most of whom were civilians on both sides. You will still see estimates published of 35 - 64,000, which is a ridiculous lie. We bombed North Vietnam in Operation Rolling Thunder from 2 March 1965 until 2 November 1968 almost continuously - that alone is estimated to have killed 1.5 million civilians. Most estimates from third party sources since the war are between 1- 4 million. And we killed most of them, innocents - babies, children, women, old men - and we lost.
8. Even after discovering Germany's WWII death camps, and coming to grips with the unbelievable atrocities done to Jews by Hitler, the US denied them immigration to the US - as did most of the Allies to their respective countries. Not wanting them in their neighborhoods the world found them one that couldn't fight back - Palestine. And hence the birth of Israel, as a place to put them all, deliberately robbing the Palestinian's of their land - people who had lived there for thousands of years.
The allies's and Israel's oppressive rule against these people subsequently prompted a mass exodus and the permanent displacement of an entire people. Pain, born of pain, born of pain.
Israel was a direct result of Hitler's evil, then subsequently the Allies's evil, and then even Israel's evil. Today it is the only country in the middle east allowed to stockpile nuclear weapons, has been and continues to be involved in terrorism and illegal acts abroad, to include the murder of civilians. It continues to take land away from the Palestinian people illegally, and continues to oppress them, too frequently using violence to do so.
While it is true that this entire subject is much more complicated - Israel is in fact not all to blame and is not all evil - nevertheless, what I have said here is true, and almost never spoken of, and needs to be.
9. To be continued....
No comments:
Post a Comment