Fazeem_Blackall
New member
[FONT=geneva,verdana][SIZE=-1]From Outright Theft to Glorious Empire[/SIZE][/FONT]
[FONT=geneva,verdana][SIZE=-1][/SIZE][/FONT][FONT=geneva,verdana][SIZE=-1]By the turn of the 20th Century, with the Indians dead or subjugated and African Americans forced into the long nightmare of Jim Crow, soon-to-be president Teddy Roosevelt - who called Blacks "a perfectly stupid race" - summed up the great American adventure with the guilelessness of a pure psychopath. In the BC contributing writer Paul Street described Roosevelt's "massive, four-volume 1899 study Winning of the West" as "a white-supremacist paean to Anglo-America's near-eradication of North America's original civilizations." [/SIZE][/FONT]
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[FONT=geneva,verdana][SIZE=-1][/SIZE][/FONT][FONT=geneva,verdana][SIZE=-1]By the turn of the 20th Century, with the Indians dead or subjugated and African Americans forced into the long nightmare of Jim Crow, soon-to-be president Teddy Roosevelt - who called Blacks "a perfectly stupid race" - summed up the great American adventure with the guilelessness of a pure psychopath. In the BC contributing writer Paul Street described Roosevelt's "massive, four-volume 1899 study Winning of the West" as "a white-supremacist paean to Anglo-America's near-eradication of North America's original civilizations." [/SIZE][/FONT]
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[FONT=geneva,verdana][SIZE=-1][/SIZE][/FONT][FONT=geneva,verdana][SIZE=-1][/SIZE][/FONT][FONT=geneva,verdana][SIZE=-1]"During the past three centuries," Roosevelt opined, "the spread of English-speaking people over the world's waste spaces" (meaning spaces not occupied by "progressive" capitalist-developmental Caucasians) was a great and welcome "feat of power," for which the "English-speaking race" could justly feel proud. No such "feat" of "race power" was more laudable, however, than "the vast movement by which this continent [North America] was conquered and peopled" - the "crowning and greatest achievement of a series of mighty movements." [/SIZE][/FONT]
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[FONT=geneva,verdana][SIZE=-1]This is still the song that is sung, the imperative to supremacy that cannot but lead to endless war and massacre. Paul Street presents a long but necessarily incomplete chronicle of the mass murder exclamation points in U.S. history that polite white society now shakes its head in regret about, but which remain the operative events and premises on which U.S. behavior in the world is justified - celebrated! - today.[/SIZE][/FONT]
[FONT=geneva,verdana][SIZE=-1][/SIZE][/FONT][FONT=geneva,verdana][SIZE=-1]Roosevelt became a "hero" in the Spanish-American War of 1898, a pushover conflict in which a decrepit Spain was ejected from Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. The U.S. was now a full-fledged imperial power with tens of millions of "natives" under its boot - and proud of it. American Manifest Destiny had gone truly global, as white as ever.[/SIZE][/FONT]
[FONT=geneva,verdana][SIZE=-1][/SIZE][/FONT][FONT=geneva,verdana][SIZE=-1]But the Filipinos, who had surrounded and almost run out the Spanish before the Americans arrived, insisted on claiming their independence. The U.S. embarked on a scorched earth and bodies strategy - as usual. [/SIZE][/FONT]
[FONT=geneva,verdana][SIZE=-1][/SIZE][/FONT][FONT=geneva,verdana][SIZE=-1]The American soldiers were confused, however. What would they call these people who lived in the thousand-island archipelago "free-fire" zone? With the Indian wars (massacres) still fresh in their minds, and the lynching of thousands of American Blacks the favorite pastime for many back home, U.S. soldiers wrote to family and friends of the fun they were having killing the "******s" and "injuns" of the Philippines.[/SIZE][/FONT]
[FONT=geneva,verdana][SIZE=-1][/SIZE][/FONT][FONT=geneva,verdana][SIZE=-1]"Gooks," "chinks," and "hajis" would come later, once the Americans got their feet wet in the blood of the world.[/SIZE][/FONT]
[FONT=geneva,verdana][SIZE=-1][/SIZE][/FONT][FONT=geneva,verdana][SIZE=-1]Mark Twain, an anti-war activist, wrote of how 30,000 U.S. troops caused the deaths of a half-million Filipinos. One episode of many in the imperial butchery occurred in 1906 when a whole village sought refuge from the invaders in a dormant volcanic crater on the southern island of Jolo. Sixteen-hundred were massacred by American artillery, rifles and machine guns. U.S. officials reported: [/SIZE][/FONT]
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[FONT=geneva,verdana][SIZE=-1]This is still the song that is sung, the imperative to supremacy that cannot but lead to endless war and massacre. Paul Street presents a long but necessarily incomplete chronicle of the mass murder exclamation points in U.S. history that polite white society now shakes its head in regret about, but which remain the operative events and premises on which U.S. behavior in the world is justified - celebrated! - today.[/SIZE][/FONT]
[FONT=geneva,verdana][SIZE=-1][/SIZE][/FONT][FONT=geneva,verdana][SIZE=-1]Roosevelt became a "hero" in the Spanish-American War of 1898, a pushover conflict in which a decrepit Spain was ejected from Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. The U.S. was now a full-fledged imperial power with tens of millions of "natives" under its boot - and proud of it. American Manifest Destiny had gone truly global, as white as ever.[/SIZE][/FONT]
[FONT=geneva,verdana][SIZE=-1][/SIZE][/FONT][FONT=geneva,verdana][SIZE=-1]But the Filipinos, who had surrounded and almost run out the Spanish before the Americans arrived, insisted on claiming their independence. The U.S. embarked on a scorched earth and bodies strategy - as usual. [/SIZE][/FONT]
[FONT=geneva,verdana][SIZE=-1][/SIZE][/FONT][FONT=geneva,verdana][SIZE=-1]The American soldiers were confused, however. What would they call these people who lived in the thousand-island archipelago "free-fire" zone? With the Indian wars (massacres) still fresh in their minds, and the lynching of thousands of American Blacks the favorite pastime for many back home, U.S. soldiers wrote to family and friends of the fun they were having killing the "******s" and "injuns" of the Philippines.[/SIZE][/FONT]
[FONT=geneva,verdana][SIZE=-1][/SIZE][/FONT][FONT=geneva,verdana][SIZE=-1]"Gooks," "chinks," and "hajis" would come later, once the Americans got their feet wet in the blood of the world.[/SIZE][/FONT]
[FONT=geneva,verdana][SIZE=-1][/SIZE][/FONT][FONT=geneva,verdana][SIZE=-1]Mark Twain, an anti-war activist, wrote of how 30,000 U.S. troops caused the deaths of a half-million Filipinos. One episode of many in the imperial butchery occurred in 1906 when a whole village sought refuge from the invaders in a dormant volcanic crater on the southern island of Jolo. Sixteen-hundred were massacred by American artillery, rifles and machine guns. U.S. officials reported: [/SIZE][/FONT]
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[FONT=geneva,verdana][SIZE=-1][/SIZE][/FONT][FONT=geneva,verdana][SIZE=-1][/SIZE][/FONT][FONT=geneva,verdana][SIZE=-1]"This action was absolutely necessary to the welfare of the people of Jolo. The position was first shelled by a naval gunboat and then assaulted by the troops and constabulary. The Moro women fought alongside the men and held their children before them, having sworn to die rather than yield. In this way a number of women and children were among the killed - an unfortunate but necessary evil."[/SIZE][/FONT]
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[FONT=geneva,verdana][SIZE=-1][/SIZE][/FONT][FONT=geneva,verdana][SIZE=-1][/SIZE][/FONT][FONT=geneva,verdana][SIZE=-1]The same script we hear today had been written, even then, just as the U.S. was stepping fully onto the global stage. We will not list the atrocities that U.S. soldiers have committed against (almost always) non-white peoples in the 100 years since the Jolo Crater Massacre, the Philippines. They are legion, as were the massacres that occurred in the previous centuries of the evolution of American Manifest Destiny.[/SIZE][/FONT]
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[FONT=geneva,verdana][SIZE=-1]The rabid expansionism at the core of the American national personality has never been bound by fixed borders, international law, or any other constraints. Steeped in racism, it places no value whatsoever on non-white lives. That's why the Bush administration gets away with not counting the civilian casualties in Iraq - only the American dead matter. And that's why contemporary Americans feel perfectly normal speaking of "exporting American values" and other nonsense to cloak the atrocities of nation-stealing that are but a "necessary evil" in the fulfillment of some God-given mission - wherever it leads.[/SIZE][/FONT]
[FONT=geneva,verdana][SIZE=-1][/SIZE][/FONT]
[FONT=geneva,verdana][SIZE=-1]The rabid expansionism at the core of the American national personality has never been bound by fixed borders, international law, or any other constraints. Steeped in racism, it places no value whatsoever on non-white lives. That's why the Bush administration gets away with not counting the civilian casualties in Iraq - only the American dead matter. And that's why contemporary Americans feel perfectly normal speaking of "exporting American values" and other nonsense to cloak the atrocities of nation-stealing that are but a "necessary evil" in the fulfillment of some God-given mission - wherever it leads.[/SIZE][/FONT]
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