Imagine No Countries

[beetbox]

Imagine No Countries
by Kim Petersen
www.dissidentvoice.org
August 29, 2005


Most progressives would probably agree that in many contexts “blind, unquestioning faith” in a president or other person is “foolish and obsequious.” In this respect, Ken Sanders was right on in his recent article “Love Your Country? Demand Impeachment.” <1> Sanders considered such faith to be “contrary to the fundamental principles of this country, as set forth in the Constitution.” Sanders instead advocated patriotism, which he defined as demanding “truth and honesty.” To be brutally honest, “this country” that Sanders loves is an occupied, ethnically cleansed, annexed, conquered, or illegitimately purchased landmass referred to by the colonialists as the United States of America. A landmass birthed so inauspiciously might give pause to professions of love by many self-designated liberals or progressives.

The landmass of the United States of America is a betrayal of the rights of first settlement and represents the theft and occupation of the territory from its Original Peoples. So, historically, it is difficult to grasp “the promise” of what such a landmass “stands for”; certainly, it is a demonstration that military might can translate to territorial expansion through genocide.

The vaunted Declaration of Independence of 1776, which preceded the 1783 constitution, rings promisingly enough in its early stanzas, as when it declared: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness .” But then it devolved into contradiction, referring to one group of people as “merciless Indian Savages.”

It was an early parchment issued by Pope Alexander VI in 1493, Inter Caetera, which granted Catholic Church sanction to the racist European conquest of other non-Christian lands. The Euro-centric church ordered its envoys “to instruct the in the Catholic faith and train them in good morals.”

http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Aug05/Petersen0829.htm

Conceit, arrogance and egotism are the essentials of patriotism... Patriotism assumes that our globe is divided into little spots, each one surrounded by an iron gate. Those who had the fortune of being born on some particular spot, consider themselves better, nobler, grander, more intelligent than the living beings inhabiting any other spot. It is, therefore, the duty of everyone living on that chosen spot to fight, kill, and die in the attempt to impose his superiority upon all others.
 
-- Emma Goldman

[Jim Sagle]

1. Imagine no w.

[patrice]

2. People usually assume that the genocidal policy of the U.S.

government against the indigenous people's of this continent "happened then, this is now". Then and now are separate. At this point, any effect is indirect at best.

Everything about "us" is tainted by certain aspects of our history, like crushing our native peoples, and lynching Black Americans. Not only are there direct consequences, e.g. property rights changed, but, maybe more important, the emotional and psychological consequences of that genocide are poisoning the U.S. as we speak.

I couldn't believe that the House Resolution to apologize for the government not doing more to stop the racial lynchings, which occured in the first half of this century, didn't succeed in the House.

The truth is everything is connected. Our history lives on in us, ALL of it.

[wli]

3. It lives on in rethugs, who are sadistic genocidal maniacs. n/t

[patrice]

4. Yes, but my point is that it lives on in ALL of us in various ways

too idiosyncratic to describe here.