Independence
Day Hypocrisy
By Stephen Lendman
02 July, 2007
Countercurrents.org
Along
with Christmas, no federal holiday is more celebrated than the day a
new nation declared its independence from the British Crown on July
4, 1776. Coming in the summer with good weather across the country,
it's a day or long weekend of parades, outings, various other celebratory
events, and baseball at all levels that many years ago often meant major
league "double-headers" that was a big occasion for young
boys, like this writer, growing up in "big league" cities
whose dads took them out for an endless day at the ballpark. It's also
a day commemorating the nation's history, liberation and traditions
most people don't know or forgot. That's just as well because they were
never taught the truths about them, just the acceptable illusions learned
in school to the highest levels. They're extolled by the dominant media,
most in academia, and by the clergy and others in high places as well
who are willing to spread acceptable myths for the status and benefits
doing it affords them.
Young people are never taught
our real history, only what's falsely portrayed about it with all ugly
parts suppressed. It's to program their minds and train a new generation
of "good citizens" to believe what serves the privileged best
benefits everyone and assure they won't resist to keep it that way.
So we're taught to accept the myth of America's exceptionalism, our
special nature, goodness, and democratic way of life, in the best of
all possible countries with the best of all possible leaders running
a government of, for and by the people serving everyone. If only it
were true.
We're also taught to commemorate
our Founders' glorious achievements and their liberating Revolution
from the repressive British Crown and aristocracy. They replaced it
with an experimental system of government never tried before in the
West outside its imperfect earlier form in ancient Athens for a few
decades only. After the war of independence, the Founders met in 1787,
in the same Philadelphia State House where the Declaration of Independence
was signed 11 years earlier. They came to frame a Constitution they
hoped would last into "remote futurity" - for their interests
alone.
Yet, they managed to include
unimaginable freedoms in it as well, including real democratic ones
in the Bill of Rights, ratified in 1791. It gave people the rights of
free expression, religion, peaceable assembly, protection from illegal
searches and seizures, due process and more. We still have them, but,
in the age of George Bush, they hang by a thread and can be revoked
by a "unitary" executive authority in the name of national
security if he says so.
Noted political scientist
and social critic Michael Parenti wrote of our Founder's achievement
in the 8th and earlier editions of his important book, "Democracy
for the Few." In it, he states "the Constitution was consciously
designed as a conservative document" with provisions in it, or
omitted by intent, to "resist the pressure of popular tides"
and protect "a rising bourgeoisie('s)" freedom to "invest,
speculate, trade, and accumulate wealth" the way things work for
capital interests today. It was to codify in law what politician, founding
father, jurist and nation's first Chief Supreme Court justice, John
Jay, said the way things should be - that "The people who own the
country ought to run it (for their benefit alone)."
Benjamin Franklin was reportedly
asked at the end of the Constitutional Convention whether the 55 attending
delegates created a monarchy or republic. He responded "A republic,
if you can keep it" without acknowledging notions of an egalitarian
nation were stillborn at its birth. It was true then and now in spite
of all the pretense contrived to portray an idealized society, in fact,
always out of reach for most in it. Republican America was created as
a nominal democracy Adam Smith said should be "instituted for the
defense of the rich against the poor."
The nation's founders achieved
mightily handing down their legacy to succeeding generations of leaders
always mindful of who gave them power and who they were there to serve.
At the nation's birth, only adult white male property owners could vote;
blacks were commodities, not people; and women were childbearing and
homemaking appendages of their husbands.
Religious prerequisites existed
until 1810, and all adult white males couldn't vote until property and
tax requirements were dropped in 1850. States elected senators until
the 17th amendment in 1913 gave citizen voters that right, and Native
Americans had no franchise in their own land until the 1924 Indian Citizenship
Act gave them back what no one had the right to take away in the first
place. Women's suffrage wasn't achieved until the 19th Amendment passed
in 1920 after nearly 100 years of struggling for it.
The 1865 13th Amendment freed
black slaves, the 1870 15th Amendment gave them the right to vote, but
it wasn't until passage of the landmark Civil and Voting Rights Acts
in the mid-1960s, abolishing Southern Jim Crow laws, that blacks could
vote, in fact, like the Constitution said they could decades earlier.
Today those rights are gravely weakened for all through unfair laws
still in force and a nation growing more repressive and less responsive
to the needs of ordinary working people and the nation's least advantaged.
The limited high-water mark of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society has steadily
eroded since in loss of civil liberties and essential social benefits.
It's hardly a reason for those harmed and people of conscience to celebrate
July 4 or any other day commemorating a nation unresponsive to them
and most others.
The nation's Native Indians
have the least to celebrate. Few once remained of the 100 million or
so throughout the Americas and around 18 million in our America. Long
before the nation was liberated from the British Crown, white settlers
began slaughtering them mercilessly. Our Native peoples lived peacefully
on these lands for thousands of years. They developed proud cultures
"Western civilization" began eroding when it arrived.
When the first European settlers
came in the late 15th century, Native peoples helped them adjust to
a hostile unfamiliar new land. They weren't repaid kindly in our great
push West and South that exterminated millions of them given no rights
or quarter in our grand "democratic" experiment excluding
them. Survivors today enjoy few freedoms only gotten grudgingly, and
most suffer severe repression and deprivation in a land they once thrived
on.
Today, our original inhabitants
live in more desperate poverty and despair than any others in the nation.
Their needs are shamelessly unaddressed and virtually ignored. No day
honors them for what they sacrificed for the privileged few to enjoy
alone. For them, justice long delayed is justice never gotten.
They have no reason to commemorate
the nation's founding that cost them their rights and destroyed their
proud heritage, culture and lives. Today, their traditions aren't taught
in schools and are unknown by the public. They're ignored by the dominant
media that mocks and demonizes them in films and society as drunks,
beasts, primitives and savages, noble or otherwise. Their legacy is
one of made and broken treaties, stolen lands, rights denied, welfare
ignored and lives taken for 500 years. They're still repressed and denied
in a shameful attempt to "Americanize" them against their
will and destroy their proud cultures doing it.
Many others in the nation
have no reason to celebrate either on this or any other day. It's truer
than ever in an age of extreme greed, unprecedented wealth disparity,
loss of civil liberties and essential social services, a state of permanent
imperial wars of aggression, galling corruption, and virtual abandonment
of the rule of law by a government complicit in all its branches serving
the privileged alone. Through lies, deceit and imperial arrogance, they
created conditions hostile to the rights of ordinary people everywhere.
They ignore the needs of
millions in the country enjoying few of the fruits available to a shrinking
number of people in the "land of opportunity" offering less
of it to growing numbers in it. Today tens of millions of poor and deprived,
especially those of color, are practically condemned as criminals for
their disadvantaged state. Through no fault of their own, they're ignored
by a heartless state worshiping wealth and privilege at the expense
of those having little or none.
Newly arrived immigrants
have little to celebrate either, especially the undocumented and exploited
forced here by repressive trade agreements like NAFTA and DR-CAFTA.
They destroyed their livelihoods at home enriching corporate giants
at the expense of working people where they're in force. Their choice
was stay at home and perish or risk coming north to survive in a hostile
unwelcoming climate uncaring of their plight and exploiting and persecuting
the ones getting here and able to stay.
Muslims as well have little
to celebrate, including citizens whose rights are nominally protected
by the laws of the land. Instead, their government defiles Islam in
the age of George Bush calling its believers "militants,"
"terrorists" and "Islamofascists" threatening the
nation's security because the president says so. Thousands have been
illegally hounded in witch-hunt roundups since 9/11, held in secret
detention, unjustly deported, and given no rights including due process
to clear their names. Their "crime" is their faith and color
in a nation nominally guaranteeing all its people can worship freely.
That right's now voided for those of the wrong faith. They're demonized,
unwanted, condemned and persecuted in "the land of the free"
but not for them. Shame on the nation that strayed from its founding
principles, never granted to all, still only afforded a chosen few,
and now denied anyone designated an enemy of the state even if they
aren't one.
Finally, African Americans
have little to celebrate this independence day that gave them none at
all at first, precious little thereafter, and still treats them as second
class citizens at best. They were first commodified and sold into bondage
as human property. Their worth and status were then degraded in Article
1, Section 2, Clause 3 of the Constitution. That was the infamous "three-fifths
clause" euphemistically referring to slaves as less than people
(and Indians as non-people) that remained the law of the land until
voided by the 13th Amendment in 1865.
Black Americans are now nominally
free, but along with Native Americans suffer the highest rates of poverty,
deprivation, and incarceration and get the least amount of government
aid for essential social services. That includes decent affordable health
care, education and housing and enough food to eat for the poorest and
most deprived with single mothers with children most harmed.
This July 4, at holiday outings,
picnics, barbecues, ballgames, outdoor concerts, parades, fireworks
displays, visits to the shore on vacation, and other celebratory events,
remember the growing millions of victimized and deprived Americans in
need. The state ignores them, denies them, even condemns them for their
plight. Those most desperate are helped the least so the most privileged
and well-off can be advantaged the most. As we give thanks and count
our blessings this and every day, think of the poor and desperate who
have few or none of what we take for granted. Remember, but for the
grace of the Almighty, their plight could be ours.
Finally, remember as well
on our "day of independence" the many tens of millions worldwide
we deprived of theirs. Included are the people of Iraq, Afghanistan,
Palestine and every nation living under US-imposed neoliberal unfair
free-market rules exploiting the many for the interests of a privileged
few. Those harmed range from the southern tip of Chile to the vastness
of Africa to the Asian continent and throughout Europe, most notably
in the East once under Soviet control. People everywhere pay for our
nation putting wealth and power interests above basic humanity.
On this "independence
day" and all others, think of them and our own deprived millions
at home. Then imagine a future time free of that condition because enough
people mobilized to change things bettering everyone. That would be
something worth giving thanks for and celebrating.
Stephen Lendman
lives in Chicago and can be reached at [email protected].
Also visit his blog site
at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to The Steve Lendman News and Information
Hour on TheMicroEffect.com Saturdays at noon US central time.
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