Independence Day Hypocrisy Revisited

by Stephen Lendman (stephenlendman.org - Home - Stephen Lendman)

On July 4, 1776, everything in the US changed but stayed the same under new management.

The nation's 55 self-serving wheeler-dealer framers planned it this way.

Instead of democracy as it should be, a fantasy version was established.

Until the Constitution's 13th Amendment was adopted by Congress and ratified by 27 of 36 states in 1865, Black Americans were considered property, not people.

Until enfranchised by the 19th Amendment in 1920, women were largely relegated to homemaking and child-bearing.

When the US Constitution was ratified a dozen years after the nation's independence, only 39 of 55 framers signed a document far short of what it's cracked up to be.

Most important is how the US ruling class ignores the rule of law in pursuing its aims.

Neither the supreme law of the land, international law, or anything else deters it from doing whatever serves its interests — no matter how extrajudicial or harmful to others at home or abroad.

The nation's history is pockmarked by one genocide after another, exterminating countless tens of millions of people at home and abroad.

Native Americans were harmed most, reduced to at most around 3% of their original numbers.

Ward Churchill explained that from 1492 – 1892, millions were "hacked apart with axes and swords, burned alive and trampled under horses…"

They were "hunted as game and fed to dogs, shot, beaten, stabbed, scalped for bounty, hanged on meathooks and thrown over the sides of ships at sea…"

They were "worked to death as slave laborers, intentionally starved and frozen to death during a multitude of forced marches and internments, and, in an unknown number of instances, deliberately infected with epidemic diseases."

America's genocide remains unparalleled in history. 

The African holocaust was much the same.

For hundreds of years, Black Africans were captured, branded, chained, force-marched to ports, beaten, kept in cages, stripped of their humanity, and often their lives.

Around 100 million or more humans were sold like cattle.

Many millions perished during the Middle Passage.

The horrifying experience packed human cargo under deplorable conditions in spaces the size of a coffin.

In some cases, one lay atop another in extreme discomfort, with poor ventilation and sanitation. 

Dysentery, smallpox, ophthalmia (causing blindness) and other diseases became epidemics. 

Conditions below deck were dark, filthy, slimy, full of blood, vomit, and human excrement.

Women were beaten and raped. For some, claustrophobia caused insanity. 

Others were flogged or clubbed to death. 

Anyone thought to be diseased was dumped overboard like garbage. 

Ship arrivals with three-fourths of departing cargos were considered successful voyages. 

The Middle Passage claimed as many as half of those trafficked, estimated by some at up to 50 million.

Howard Zinn called American slavery "the most cruel form in history."

He explained the frenzy for limitless profit that comes from what's now called agribusiness. 

Slaves were virtually considered nonhumans where whites were masters.

A century of endless US wars begot more of the same. 

New millennium conflicts rage with no signs of ending. 

Torture and atrocities are US weapons of war. 

John Dower's "War Without Mercy" documented viciousness by both sides in the Pacific during WW II. 

America is as unprincipled as the worst of its adversaries.

US forces mutilated Japanese war dead for souvenirs, sank hospital ships, and shot sailors trying to abandon them.

They murdered pilots who bailed out of aircraft, killed wounded soldiers and tortured prisoners. 

Some enemy combatants were buried alive, civilians attacked mercilessly — how the US wages all its wars from inception to now.

Gratuitous slaughter is longstanding US policy. 

So are crimes of war, against humanity, other atrocities and genocide on an unparalleled scale.

Expressing outrage over the US rape and slaughter of America's Spanish American dirty war, Mark Twain said the following in October 1900:

"I have seen that we do not intend to free, but to subjugate the people of the Philippines." 

"We have gone there to conquer, not to redeem."

"And so I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land."

"We have pacified some thousands of the islanders and buried them, destroyed their fields, burned their villages, turned their widows and orphans out-of-doors, (and) subjugated the remaining ten million by Benevolent Assimilation, which is the pious new name of the musket."

He proposed a new American flag "with white stripes painted black and stars replaced by the skull and cross-bones."

He condemned General Jacob Smith's order to:

"Kill and burn...take (no) prisoners," adding:

"The more you kill and burn, the better." 

"Kill all above the age of ten…turn (the country into) a howling wilderness."

US world wars and what followed were much the same — dirty, unprincipled and lawless.

Operation Iron Triangle during Bush/Cheney's Iraq aggression was much like what went on earlier and what followed.

"Kill all military age males" on sight, Col. Michael Steele ordered.

Much the same occurs in all US wars. No-holds barbarism reflects them.

As Americans celebrate the nation's independence at barbecues, picnics, ballgames, watching fireworks, and other activities, they're largely unaware of its history and worst of how it operates today.

The US was always governed by privileged men, some women in more recent decades, not laws.

Elections are farcical when held, mocking legitimacy, an illusory veneer of democracy. 

America's sham system disregards the real thing. The framers designed it this way.

A free and open society is illusion, not reality.

Totalitarian rule runs things, tyranny a hair's breadth away.

Celebratory weekend festivities distract from what's most important. 

Notably it's at a transformational time in the nation's history after seasonal  was renamed covid. 

Brave new world dystopia-eroded freedoms are disappearing with few people paying attention.

Life as once known is vanishing in plain sight.

Dystopian new world order harshness replaced it, further hardening planned ahead.

Independence Day weekend and all other days should be a time of resistance to save what's too precious to lose.

Daily events should scare everyone. 

People power alone can save us. 

The alternative is ruler-serf rule —  a nation unfit and unsafe to live in without rising up to prevent what no one should accept.

VISIT MY WEBSITE: stephenlendman.org (Home - Stephen Lendman). Contact at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

My two Wall Street books are timely reading:

"How Wall Street Fleeces America: Privatized Banking, Government Collusion, and Class War"

https://www.claritypress.com/product/how-wall-street-fleeces-america/

"Banker Occupation: Waging Financial War on Humanity"

https://www.claritypress.com/product/banker-occupation-waging-financial-war-on-humanity/

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