America's History of Intolerance

[marmar]

from Consortium News:




America's History of Intolerance

By Robert Higgs
January 29, 2011


Editor’s Note: Despite America’s self-depiction as the “land of the free,” the reality is often much different, with millions of citizens having faced legal action and incarceration for engaging in personal acts like drug use that the political system has deemed criminal.

This hostility toward “immoral” choices is also not new to U.S. society, which has shown this repressive tendency periodically throughout the nation’s history, as the Independent Institute’s Robert Higgs recounts in this guest essay:


“Live and let live” would appear to be a simple, sensible guide to social life, but obviously many Americans reject this creed with a vengeance.

They find toleration so unpleasant that they support the imprisonment of hundreds of thousands of individuals whose personal behavior they regard as offensive.

Why do so many Americans favor the use of coercive sanctions to enforce repression? Perhaps the answer lies in our history.

Politicians and other patriotic posturers like to declare that the Europeans came to America seeking freedom. The claim is at best a half-truth. ...............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.consortiumnews.com/2011/012911a.html

[glowing]

1. I would say that most Americans are live and let live types of people..

However, they are incredibly marketed to and propagandized to. Americans are told they are number 1; that every country wishes to be just like America. This reality is a farce. The United States is a large land mass with very different types of people inhabiting the country with different concerns and needs. Each state sets up its own mini-country and has to compete against one another while also being within a country that must act as one.

I believe that creating a regional govt would be a good way to help states with similar issues and needs to be heard and helped in a more meaningful way. As it is now, states with larger populations are more represented than other states, but in the Senate the smaller state populations can hold the more populated states with greater need of social order and sturcture hostage.

Americans have little access to the outside world. The news media is hardly a helping hand to understand what is actually going on within our own country, let alone the world. History is confined within Texas school board approval.. and we all know the biggest manufacturer of text books is a BushCo scheme. Would either Bush's be elected President if the American people knew that their grandfather conspired against America with Germany and Hitler or that him and his rich friends tried to take over the govt against FDR? Would we allow many of our elected officials with their spotty, connected pasts into our representative body if we knew their ties to corporations and connections with one another?