Declare Independence from the American Empire

According to American legend, on July 4, 1776 the U.S. was formed when 13 colonies of the British Empire declared independence from that empire. Looking back at the Declaration of Independence, it seems like their gripes were trivial and self-serving.

The eventual loss of the Colonies did not set the British Empire back very much. The British were a cruel, barbaric and greedy people. They just kept pillaging and raping until they owned about 1/3 of the world by 1900. Eventually the Empire fell apart as a byproduct of World War II and the twin rise of communism and the United States new model global empire.

With the exception of Iran, no nation has been able to successfully declare independence from the U.S.A. without teaming up with the communists. Britain and the European states have basically become a pack of U.S. trained dogs.

In Africa, Asia and the Americas a dictator can grasp power, or people can have an election, but if the U.S.A. does not approve, someone is going to die and be replaced by a U.S.-approved puppet. Mostly this is done through economic power, but the U.S. military is always ready to kill a few hundred to a few million people if that is what it takes to line up a pro-U.S. government. Anti-U.S. governments (and rebel groups) are automatically labeled terrorists. Another U.S. lapdog, the United Nations (U.N.) routinely rubber-stamps American decisions.

The world would be a better place if the people of its various nations would show a little backbone and set up their own governments. There are a lot of gray areas, but the only nations independent of the U.S. empire at this point seem to be Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran. U.S. resources are strained, so a friendly neutrality is tolerated in a number of nations.

As I have analyzed in prior posts, ordinary American people don't benefit any more from the American Empire. It costs more in tax dollars than it provides. A few ruling class families like the Bush clan and the Goldman and Stanford gangs do well, but that does not help the average American citizen.

Yesterday President Barack Obama said that the U.S. annual federal budget deficit has been halved since he came into office. What a pile of crap. It is a huge deficit compared to any time in the history of the U.S. except the first year of the Great Recession, 2008, and Obama's first year in office, 2009. Sure, when you have run up over $17 trillion in debt, another half trillion a year may seem minor. But its not. The federal government is bankrupt. Only foolish investors who are willing to lend it vast sums of money at low interest rates are hiding that fact.

The feds are running out of money to repair highways in August. Our vast military structure, (including Homeland Security and the pension payments for 100 years of war) now sucks up almost all of the regular federal budget (aside from Social Security collection and payments).

Sure, revolt is painful. Your own leaders will try to suppress you, and if they fail they will ask the U.S. to send in drones and advisors and perhaps ground troops. But if enough countries revolt at the same time, you will find the U.S. won't be able to do much. Defeating nations one at a time (or installing puppets one at a time) is the key to imperial success.

America is now as weak as Great Britain was in the 1950s. Who knows when there will be another opportunity this ripe? Declare independence now. Don't wait for instructions.

And know that many Americans are tired of our ruling class and their imperial games. We too are waiting for an opportunity to cast them off and free ourselves from their yoke.

Obama: Crimea Doesn't Need Any Stinking Election

United States President Barack Obama is against having an election in the Crimea to determine whether that peninsula (practically an island) should rejoin the Russia it had been a part of until it was switched to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic by communists who thought it would be easier to administrate through Kiev.

Obama called the plans for an election a violation of international law: "And that includes standing up for the principle of state sovereignty. The proposed referendum on the future of Crimea would violate the Ukrainian constitution and violate international law. Any discussion about the future of Ukraine must include the legitimate government of Ukraine. In 2014, we are well beyond the days when borders can be redrawn over the heads of democratic leaders." [March 6, 2014 Statement by President Barack Obama on the Ukraine]

This is a President who supports a fiercely anti-woman and anti-religious freedom regime in Saudi Arabia [See Dictator of Saudi Arabia]; who pays for mercenaries for a half dozen nations to rape Somalia [See Rape of Somalia]; who executes American citizens without trial; and who comes from a long line of Presidents who have acted like global dictators, installing puppet governments and overthrowing democratically elected governments whenever that furthered the purposes of the U.S. corporate security state.

The "democratic leaders" Obama refers to in his statement are an interim government put in place by a mob after the mob forced the elected government of the Ukraine to flee the capitol.

Perhaps someone should remind President Obama that our nation is based on illegal elections. The Founding Fathers held elections against the will of Parliament and the King of Britain.

I thought our ancestors had established that it is the people, not the rulers, who get to decide when an election is appropriate.

A majority of people in Crimea don't like being part of the Ukraine, especially now that right-wing thugs organized by neo-Nazis have overthrown the legitimately elected government. Let me be clear that I understand that many of the people who protested the former government were not right-wing thugs. People have a right to protest. But they don't have a right to overthrow an elected government that plans to continue to hold elections. They could have waited for the next election; if the government were that unpopular, it would have fallen peacefully.

The situation in the Ukraine looks like Algeria, Palestine, and Iran all over again (and many more national elections if you look further back in history, particularly in Latin America). In each of those cases the people elected anti-American governments. In Algeria the U.S. backed a military coup; in Palestine we backed a coup by the PLO, favoring them over Hamas; and in Iran we simply demonized the regime, shot down a civilian airliner, paid Iraq to attack and kill millions of Iranians (including using poison gas and mass electrocutions), and organized illegal international economic measures to try to strangle the regime.

In the U.S. it is illegal for a foreigner to donate to a political campaign (though of course it happens on occasion). But the U.S. funnels vast sums of money to parties it likes in foreign nations. If Obama really cared about sovereignty, he would stop interfering in so many nations' elections. He'd stop using military donations to bribe leaders. He'd shut down the CIA torture centers and fix the massive problems of the U.S. instead of keeping 12 aircraft carriers and their fleets circling the oceans as floating bullies.

I am not a fan of Vladimir Putin or Russian society. But it is their society. If people in the Crimea want to try being part of Russia instead of the Ukraine, it is their inherent human right. In the words of the U.S. Declaration of Independence: "Whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it." The "Ends" mentioned are, among others, Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.

If the people of Crimea think they will by happier and more free as part of Russia, it is their inalienable right to take action on that Pursuit.

If any other oppressed or misgoverned group, wants autonomy, or independence, or to merge with some other nation, that is their right as well.

Citizens of the U.S. should think about their right to "alter or abolish" the government of the United States of America, because it sure as hades could stand some major improvements.

Martin Luther King, Slavery and the Joseph Knight case

The American Revolution was as much about slavery (keeping it, not ending it) as anything else. I realized that as a young man back in the 1970's when I came across the Somersett Case*, a ruling by Lord Mansfield in England in 1772. Slavery could not exist on English soil, according to English law. Hence a Virginia slave who set foot on English soil became free. This led a bunch of slave owners in Virginia to set up their Committees of Correspondence to join in the independence movement started in Boston for other reasons.

Most Americans still have not heard of the Somersett case, but at least among academic historians the Mansfield ruling is better known, though of course many are still in denial about its role in motivating Washington, Jefferson and their crew.

I only recently learned (from How the Scots Invented the Modern World by Arthur Herman, published in 2001) about a case ruling in Scotland (part of Great Britain, but with a separate legal system). In the year following the Declaration of Independence, 1777, Lord Kames and colleagues ruled that an African-born man, Joseph Knight, who had been a slave in Jamaica (then a British colony; sugar grown by slaves was a major source of British wealth) was free once he was brought to Scotland. The court wrote "The dominion assumed over the negro, under the law of Jamaica, being unjust, could not be supported in this country to any extent."

It is important to distinguish between the Somersett ruling and the Knight ruling, although they both resulted in slaves being set free. Lord Mansfield made his ruling as a point of law: slavery (serfdom) had been abolished in English law. Since there was no basis in law for slavery, a slave coming from the Americas or elsewhere became free in England.

The Scottish notion was more radical. Due to work already done by Lord Kames and others, the judges believed that slavery was against nature and human nature. They believed that any law allowing for slavery was itself invalid. They prized justice and liberty over mere legal precedence and rulings by parliaments and kings.

Sadly, rather than learning from the Knight ruling (which the many lawyers who led the independence movement in the U.S. would have known about), the new ruling class in the former colonies allowed slavery to continue. When the U.S. Constitution was written, they wrote slavery into it.

Which leads us to the question of racism. Ethnic groups belief in their own superiority goes back to pre-history, but modern racism is a modern phenomena, and it was developed in the United States. Slavery was a product of greed and the use of force. Once the slaves became an essential part of the economy of the U.S., and of the owned wealth of the southern aristocracy, there was a an incentive to keep slavery in place. The flowery words of the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights of the new Constitution indicated that the Enlightenment doctrines of liberty and equality were well known in the U.S.

To keep the slave system intact a new doctrine, an aristocrats' trump card, was needed. That was the inferiority of non-white humans; racial inferiority. In fact, the racist theory of southerners for the most part denied that Africans were human. They were at best sub-human. Hence they could not have human rights. Hence the reasoning of the Knight case could not apply in the U.S. Hence slaves were property, a theory confirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court in the Dred Scott Decision.

All the evidence to the contrary did not matter. It is important to keep in mind that when people have an economic interest at stake, they can become purposefully blind to questions or justice or even of factual reality.

The Democratic Party was founded explicitly as a racist, pro-Slavery party by the slave trader and eventually President Andrew Jackson and his friends. The party did not truly reject racist doctrines until after Lyndon Johnson became President in 1964.

After the Civil War and the anti-slavery amendments to the U.S. Constitution the myth of racial inferiority continued to damage people and society. Segregation of the races was substituted for liberty and equality.

When we celebrate Martin Luther King day it is important not to forget that many, many people fought to end slavery and racism. It was a process that started long before the American Revolution. It had many heroes and heroines, but in the long run what mattered was changing the hearts and minds of the vast majority of Americans.

The Somersett and Knight cases should be added to the texts on civics and history used in American public schools. As far as I know this has not happened, and it shows how false patriotism and phony history still misshape our society.

*not a consistent spelling; also mentioned as Somerset and Sommersett in texts and law books.

Jefferson's Nails, Morsi's Mishap, and Democracy Dilemmas

Thomas Jefferson famously penned the Declaration of Independence and went on to become Governor of Virginia, U.S. Ambassador to France, and eventually the third President of the United States. The Declaration had some very fine words borrowed from republican, Enlightenment thinking and writings of Britain. The guys who supervised Jefferson and approved it were politicians interested in increasing their own economic and political power, which was being cramped by the elite of the British Empire.

Thomas Jefferson may have been brilliant compared to his peers, but he had many faults and weaknesses. A lot of trouble came from his spendthrift ways. He was born to a fairly prosperous slave plantation owner and can be fairly said to be the founder of the shop-till-you-drop American tradition. He constantly bought expensive horses and wines, scientific gadgets and uber expensive clothing. Later there would be the never-ending construction and reconstruction of MacMansion Monticello.

To pay for all this Jefferson owned roughly 200 slaves (they multiplied over time, but he occasionally sold some off to make ends meet). The British tried to free all American slaves during the Revolution, not just as a war measure but because that was the law of Britain (no slavery can exist on British soil, as had been recently confirmed in the Somerset case). The success of the Revolution confirmed Jefferson and other slaveholders in their human property. While Vice-president (under John Adams), Jefferson attempted to wring more profit from his slaves by setting up a nail factory. Adult slaves were needed to grow tobacco, so the children were employed cutting iron rod and shaping it into nails.

We tend to idealize Democracy, but sometimes a more cynical view gets us closer to the truth. Democracy could just be the best way for certain people to get what they want. Democracies may not be quite so different from dictatorships (or monarchies) as we Americans like to think.

Consider the very recent military/judicial coup against the elected leader of Egypt, Mohamed Morsi. President Morsi does not represent my views. I would like to see a secular, modern Egypt, relatively free of religious nonsense. Morsi is a leader of the Islamic Brotherhood, a puritanical reform group. It is fair to say that Morsi only did what many American Presidents have done: he interpreted winning an election as meaning he could implement his party's agenda and ignore other parties. He was wrong. He should have imitated George Washington. He should have been more moderate and inclusive. His job (from a Democracy theory viewpoint) was to make democracy work, to insure it would work in the future.

But Morsi had a lot of pressure from below, from his own followers. They had never held power, and their views had been dissed by others for decades. He chose to satisfy his base.

The real problem was not with Morsi, but with my fellow secular democrats. They lacked patience. They should have let Morsi rule until the next election, and griped the whole time. They would likely have won the next election. Then they could have tried to fix an overpopulated, undercapitalized nation themselves.

People often want democracy until it does not get them what they want. American foreign policy history is littered with examples. American Presidents have almost always favored only pro-American democracies. Anti-American democracies got the cold shoulder, or financing for opposition (but pro-American) parties, or a CIA-managed coup.

Now it is likely that if the Islamic Brotherhood makes a comeback, they will abandon democracy. Why shouldn't they? At this point bloody revolution looks like a better option, if they can pull it off. Even if they re-establish a democracy in the sense of allowing for elections, at the very least they would be idiots if they did not try to execute the coup leaders.

Back in Jefferson's United States, democracy is under control. All men and women may be created with equal rights, but they start life with such vastly different amounts of wealth that we might as well be governed by an aristocracy. Social mobility has sunk to the lowest level since the founding of this Republic. There are plenty of bright ideas around for improving the situation, but the Aristocracy makes sure such ideas never get off the ground.

Imperialism made most Americans comfortable for several decades after World War II. The Great Recession and our astonishing current national debt (which will balloon further as interest rates rise) should have inspired reforms, but almost the only thing that got patched up was the banking system. We aren't broke yet. We'll think about fixing things if we ever reach that point.

At which point worrying about who would make America's best puppet in Egypt won't seem very important.

Agree? Disagree? You can comment on this post at Natural Liberation Blog at blogger.com

The Philippines, Independence, and National Bias

When did the Philippines become an independent nation?

July 4, 1946?
October 14, 1943?
Or maybe June 12, 1898?

The United States of America granted the Philippines its independence on July 4, 1946. The Philippines had been de facto governed by the United States since the battle of Manilla Bay on May 1, 1898, and in the eyes of the U.S. government, legally since the Treaty of Paris was signed with Spain on December 10, 1898.

But long before the U.S. did its first big land grab since the Mexican-American war, there was a movement in the Philippines seeking independence from Spain. If you chose June 12, 1898, that was the day they declared independence from Spain. Imperialists like President William McKinley and soon-to-be President Theodore Roosevelt (both Republican Party leaders) did not just choose to ignore a few Philippinos whining for the chance to govern themselves. They had the U.S. army murder hundreds of thousands of Filipinos in order to establish their enslavement of the island [See The U.S. Conquest of the Philippines for details].

I like the June 12, 1898 date myself. That makes almost everyone who was in the ruling class of the Philippines a traitor and collaborationist who later helped the United States repress and exploit their people.

The third date, Octover 13, 1943, is the day the government of the Philippines became de facto independent without the permission of the United States. They felt safe doing that because Japan appeared to have defeated not just the United States, but the entire gamut of imperialist nations (Holland, Great Britain, France, and the United States) all in one swoop. This government was called the Second Philippine Republic.

What prompts this post is my reading of American Caesar
by William Manchester, which is a biography of General Douglas MacArthur. Manchester is a good writer. I got American Caesar because I enjoyed his The Arms of Krupp
and The Glory and the Dream
. I figured a book on MacArthur would be very readable and lend much insight into my own U.S. War Against Asia. But Manchester has an American national bias that colors his factual presentation and his interpretation even of the facts that he presents.

The section on the Japanese military occupation of the Philippines is skimpy partly because the book dwells in such intimate detail on MacArthur. For the most part he was in Australia during the occupation, after failing to provide food, medicine, and ammunition for his army but insisting that they fight on against the Japanese until they were all dead. The book deals with the aftermath of the occupation because MacArthur had to deal with the members of the "Japanese puppet government" after he defeated the Japanese in the archipelago.

Wait a second, William. You say they were the same people, almost to a man. They were the ruling class of the Philippines under the bosseration of the United States. They all signed up to be in the "Japanese puppet" government, during the occupation. [See also Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere]. They were lucky most of them were personal friends of Douglas MacArthur, who had grown up in the Philippines while his father General Arthur MacArthur killed every rebel, I mean freedom fighter, his soldiers could find. MacArthur had also been the War Lord of the Philippines prior to World War II.

And they pretty much all became part of the new American puppet government of the Philippines, which became "independent" on July 4, 1946. Within, of course, the American-Asian Co-Exploitation sphere [my term], which Japan itself was part of by then as well.

The new President of the Philippines, Manuel Acuña Roxas, had collaborated closely with the Japanese. One of the nationalist groups, the Hukbalahap, fought Roxas's new government because of its class nature and Roxas's previous cooperation with the Japanese and Americans. What did the U.S. do? It helped the new Republic of the Philippines to fight the Huks, which was a fine prelude to John F. Kennedy's war against the Vietnamese people.

I try not to be nationalist, but I understand the nationalism of people who want to throw off foreign oppressors. What I don't understand is how historians like William Manchester get away with saying that the U.S. governed the Philippines well, and was beloved by Filipinos. In contrast on page 375 he states: "While the vast majority of the captive population ignored its new masters [the Japanese] , there were two conspicuous exceptions: the guerrillas and the collaborators." But the same can be said to be true about the American masters both before and after the Japanese interlude. The size of the guerilla resistance against the Japanese was dwarfed by the size of the resistance against the U.S. invaders when they first replaced the Spanish.

If the Philippines were independent of the U.S. as of October 14, 1943, then they had to be resubjugated in order for the U.S. to "grant" independence on July 4, 1946.

Vietnam by Stanley Karnow, a review

I picked up a used copy of Vietnam by Stanley Karnow to help with my current book project, The U.S. War Against Asia. I found the book to be well written, but focussed on history in the context of what we call in the United States the War in Vietnam. In my generation that was frequently just called The War.

There is a general history of Vietnam leading up to the French colonial period that emphasizes the various independence struggles in the area we now call Vietnam. If you want a cultural history of Vietnam, or a detailed look at Vietnam before 1500, this book does not cover that adequately.

If you want to understand the motives of the Vietnamese independence movement and major players like France, China, Japan, Russia, and the United States, this book is great. Karnow views everyone with an eye that is capable of both compassionate understanding and a hard gaze. He does not gloss over any parties attrocities or stupidities. On the whole it seems like a fair, balanced, factually-based book.

Karnow shows that there were times when France and the United States came quite close to at least a temporary defeat of the Vietnamese communists. In a sense the book supports the hypothesis that America lost the war because of its lack of intelligence (that is, spying capabilities). It creates a strange symmetry with the War against Japan (part of World War II) in which it is fair to say that the U.S. won the war because it had better intelligence capabilities. In Japan's case, the U.S. broke Japan's encryption, and simply new everything Japan would do in advance. In Vietnam encryption was not an issue: on the Vietnamese end it was a low-tech war, and intelligence was provided mostly by sympathisers inside the domestic establishments of the South Vietnamese regime and the American invaders.

We tend to see the war as a two-sided affair, with the communists on one side and the U.S. and its local allies on the other. But in fact is was extremely complicated, with many groups trying to maintain an independence from both the U.S. and the communists. In a civil war groups and individuals flip sides; the winner is usually the group that is best at gaining the support of formerly neutral groups.

The effects of politics in the United States are well-documented. President Eisenhower, a Republican, tried to avoid involvement in Vietnam largely in reaction to Truman's policy in Korea, which itself was in reaction to accusations that President Truman lost China to the communists. President Kennedy greatly increased involvement in Vietnam. A member of one of the most successful capitalist families in the United States, he lacked Eisenhower's gravitas and allowed himself to be pressured by the Pentagon. Lyndon Johnson inherited the war and felt the Republicans and his enemies in the Democratic Party, in particular Robert Kennedy, would crucify him if he lost Vietnam. Richard Nixon actually started pulling troops out of Vietnam soon after his election in 1968 and was still in office after they were all withdrawn, yet the liberal establishment still insists on blaming Nixon and the Republicans, rather than themselves and the Democrats, for the war.

The French come out looking badly as well. When Hitler conquered France and set up the Catholic, nationalist, racist Vichy regime, the French colonial structure in Vietnam simply agreed to follow orders from Japan. So the Japanese did little fighting in Vietnam in World War II. To the extent there was fighting, it was with the Vietnamese resistance movement that was already fighting the French. The U.S. encouraged the resistance even though it was dominated by communists (we were allied with the communists in World War II) and implied Vietnam would become independent when Japan was defeated. Of course Vietnam was handed back to the French just as Britain was given Hong Kong and the U.S. and Russia divided up Korea.

This book is probably the single best book on the Vietnam War. It was fascinating to read. I would recommend it to anyone interested in Vietnam or in U.S. history.

This book should be generally available in libraries and used book stores, but you could also pick up a copy of Vietnam at Amazon.com.

Independence and the 200 Year Hangover

The first independence day was July 4th, 1776. The Declaration of Independence, written by committee but attributed with some cause to Thomas Jefferson, was meant to explain to the world why the gentlemen assembled in Philadelphia did not want to be ruled by Great Britain.

The Declaration carefully skirted at least two of the main reasons that select group of mostly rich men were so eager to split up with England. Before examining them in detail let me say clearly: I believe in democracy. I believe that the U.S. colonies of England should have become independent. I just believe that much bad policy was packaged up in the independence deal.

The idea of independent colonies, bound together or not, was not new in 1776. It had had advocates for decades. But interestingly, until 1772, agitation for independence had gotten nowhere. Why did things change in 1772? Because of a court case in Great Britain.

A slave of African descent from Virginia, named Somerset (or Sommerset or Somersett; spelling was no exact science in those days) had run away from his master, who had taken him to be his servant in London. After lengthy procedings a British judge, Lord Mansfield, declared Somerset to be free. He declared that slavery did not exist in England; that English soil was free soil; that whatever you prior status, when you stepped on English soil you became free. [See Slave Nation by Alffred and Ruth Blumrosen].

This decision, which Ben Franklin wrote about, endangered the livelihoods and thus the liberty of slave owners in Virginia and other U.S. colonies. Thomas Jefferson and other slavers formed the now famous Committees of Correspondence, linking up with certain New England merchants who were also keen on independence. They did not demand representation in Parliament, for that would have made it even clearer that American soil was English soil and that the slaves would have to be freed. Instead they moved the country steadily and inexorably towards independence and their own liberty to continue to own slaves. The American Revolution was underway.

Another thing that was bothering a great number of wealthy (and some not so wealthy) Americans, and here George Washington is the perfect example, was something called the Line of 1763. Most wealth in America was accumulated by land speculation; native American Indian land had to be seized for this game to continue. But the British Crown had negotiated with various Indian tribes for peace and guaranteed that no land would be stolen beyond this line of 1763. State legislatures, being even more corrupt back then than they are now, had granted certain individuals vast lands that lay past the line. Washington belonged to such an investment group. To make the claims good the land speculators had to convince king and Parliament to forget about the treaties and line. The king and Parliament did not want the expense of another Indian war, so they protected the Indians from the colonists.

The two-hundred year hangover came not from independence itself, but from the institution of slavery and greed for other people's land. During the American Revolution the British freed American slaves (funny how we know about the Emancipation Proclamation, but not the earlier granting of freedom), but the freed slaves were handed back to their owners, including Washington and Jefferson, when England lost the war.

The treaty ending the war also ceded lands beyond the 1763 line to the the United States. The fact that these lands belonged to Indian nations was immediately forgotten. The grabbing did not even stop at the Pacific Ocean; the government of the greedy, by the greedy, for the greedy eventually grabbed Hawaii and the Philippines.

For the most part the Native Americans were simply exterminated, but the African slaves became an internal problem, such were there numbers. The Dred Scott decision held the opposite of the Somerset case: in the U.S. you remained a slave even if you lived on the soil of a state that had abolished slavery. In theory slavery was abolished after the Civil War, but the Democratic Party (the party of slavery and the Confederacy) enacted Jim Crow (segregation) laws in the states it controlled that lasted until the 1970's.

Now we celebrate Independence Day (the Fourth of July) in an era of global interdependence. Green house gas emissions in the United States caused global warming that expands deserts in China; plastics manufactured in China accumulate their toxic burden in America's landfills.

Independence Day should be a day for somber reflection and for resolutions to do better. The hangover from today's foolishness looks like it will last much longer than a mere 200 years.

More data:

Line of 1763
Declaration of Independence
Somerset case