I agree with the author. rwaller please indicate which words indict the author as a racist. Surely not his stating that the USA is racist? I myself struggle with not being racist. The USA military services, especially marines, ingrain racism in their bootcamps against the current target of imperialism. One interesting fact is Hitler considered Afghans to be the purest Ayrians, and in fact they are for the most part light skinned and green eyed. But of course racism is a matter of preconceived perceptions

"The author appears to be a prejudiced racist."

As opposed to a blatant racist and warmonger like Barack Obama?

Agreed. Playing the tired old race card only weakens his argument. If anything the racism tag applies to the author.

S.r., their is a 2 hour documentary about JFK which makes it onto TV once or twice a year and not on any media channel. During an exchange between JFK and then Chief of the Air Force General Curtis [Dr. Strangelove]LeMay delivers a not so veiled threat to JFK, "that if JFK didn't go to war in Vietnam it would be the end of his, JFK's Presidency". JFK was taken back, needless to say. The MIC wanted war in Vietnam badly and was not confident that JFK give them their war. JFK did not refer to south Vietnam, but instead just Vietnam. He realized their was no south Vietnam there.LeMay's threat and a remark made by Jackie Kennedy, "they've killed him". when she was retrieving a piece of JFK's skull on the trunk. Taken together and the fact that JFK had a long list of enemies in the USG; FBI, CIA,DIA just to name a few. Also, the Federal Reserve/International bankers, JFK was going back to a silver certificate and trash the Federal Reserve note. Also, the Zionists wanted JFK dead, he had called the Israeli PM and told him to stop Israel's nuclear weapons development, enter MOSSAD. The Texas oil men, Nixon and LBJ had met in Texas the day before the assassination. J. Edgar Hoover immediately called George H.W.. Bush, who was not in the government, to notify Bush about the murder.

Good point.
Humans are compassionate and we should expect a revision to the mean - eventually.

You traffic in statements of gross misjudgement. I wonder if you just operate as a troll or are otherwise paid to invert the dialog?

I immigrated from America to N.Z. in 2004, when it became clear that we were following the path of Nazi Germany. I didn't want my children to mature in a society that celebrates the assassination of the boogie man (OBL), like its spring break in D.C. For years, I second guessed myself as being paranoid....but not anymore.

Troop transports back to USA would be a ducky plan. The Colonials especially Washington were thinking empire, for one British law they wished to discard was that against stealing Native trans-Appalacian lends, rebels were paid, at wars end, by Washington in trans-Appalacian lands. The first governor of Conneticut purposely gave Natives smallpox blankets as presents ( Europeans definitely knew which diseases were communicable and which werre not).The history of USA slavery is still rebounding on prison walls and in inner cities thats why its pertinent. Almost the whole world dealt in slavery at one time, Europeans enslaved Europeans. Finally humankind has always known love and justice, as they have always known ignorance and viciousness.

Zanrak,

Like most people, you live an ideology and confuse it with facts. You believe the USA ideology of a revolution with saintly founding fathers who wanted equality for all, when in fact most of our "leaders" during and after the revolution came from the 1%, supported only the 1%, and deliberately wrote the constitution to keep the 99% out of government and to keep blacks in slavery. These people met in a secret convention and presented a fait accompli to the hoi polloi. Many protested, but to no avail. Virtually the entire upper class in America supported slavery.

Racism continues unabated in the USA. Only deluded white Americans believe it has ended. The USA has the largest prison population in the world in sheer numbers and as a percentage of their population. Read Michelle Alexander's "The New Jim Crow" if you want to understand.

But you won't, because white Amerikans do not live in a fact based universe. Amerikans lynched blacks until 1968 and continue to treat them like half humans.

You made this comment, which has no basis in historical fact:

"The people who kicked out the oppressive English were not thinking of "empire"! They just wanted a country free of taxing totalitarian masters. Yes, the US does this now, but, John Adams and many other founders of the US were not slave owners and wanted it stopped."

John Adams, like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, Martin Van Buren, William Henry Harrison, John Tyler, James K. Polk, Zachary Taylor, and Franklin Pierce all supported slavery.

In 1819, Robert Walsh wrote "An Appeal from the Judgments of Great Britain Respecting the United States of America," in which he wrote the longest and most extensive defense of slavery in Amerika. James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and other pro-slavery racist Amerikans praised it. John Adams wrote, "it is the most able, the most faithful, and the most ample apology for the United States," and that "indeed it is a book after my own heart."

Madison called the book "a triumphant vindication of our Country against the libels which have been lavished on it."

Jefferson wrote, "Your work will furnish the first volume of every future American history."

Adams said the "book is worthy of being translated into the Modern Languages and dispersed in all the Courts and Nations in Europe, at our National Expense."

Walsh corresponded with Adams, Madison, and Jefferson while writing the book, and with Madison and Jefferson in particular on the subject of slavery.

All from "Proslavery: A History of the Defense of Slavery in America, 1701-1840," by Larry E. Tise.

As to your comment that the founders didn't think about Empire, read the anti-federalist papers on this subject. They warned against a standing army and centralization of government because it would lead to Empire:

http://mises.org/journals/jls/4_3/4_3_1.pdf

Rubbish> Many of the Native Americans were used as slaves by your beloved Colonists and worked to death. Indeed the State of Georgia used to raid down into Florida (which was then part of Spain) to seize The Seminoles and other Natives to be used as slaves after they had slaughtered the ones in Georgia.

Thomas Jefferson wrote quite clearly as per letters in your own Library of Congress of his desire to clean the eatsern USA of Natives and of his desire to extend the US Empire to the Western Coast.

Indeed in the war of 1812 he wrote that all the USA had to do was march on Canada and the Canadians would join the USA.

AS to your "revolt against taxes". This another myth. Here is a fact. Taxes in the newly born United States of America were 5 and 10 times HIGHER then they had been under the British. Indeed the taxes paid In Canada to the British Crown were a fraction of what US Citizens were paying their newly formed Government.

One of the resons Jefferson thought it was merely a matter of marching so as to annex Canada was that Canada was filled with ex residents of the United States of America. He failed to understand that many of those residents migrated to Canada to escape high taxes.

While these ex Americans did not rise up to fight the Americans, neither did they join them. Indeed it was only after the soldiers for the United States of American began plundering their farms, burning down their towns and claiming any Canadian caught fighting alongside an Indian (more of that RACISM) would be hung that these ex americans started taking up arms.

The number of Natives claimed to have been killed by diseases is vastly overstated. Indeed the United States Governemtn deliberately advanced this notion so as to justify the stealing of the lands. In Eastern States people who claimed Native Ancestry were marked down in the records as of MIXED race so that the Governmnet could claim their land rights extinguished.

During the Potato Famine in Ireland many Irish died of typhus. Thousands of them in Ireland and many more thrown overboard on the trip to the new world or in quarantine area on islands built to accept them.

They tended to succumb to typhus because they were sufferring from malnutrition.

George W Washington made it a point of destroying the food crops of the Natives of the Villages he attacked as did your hallowed founders. Those Bison on the prairie were slaughtered by the US GOvernment so as to remove the Natives food supply.

That persons weaked by malnutrition due to having their food supplies and sources of food destroyed might have succumbed to a disease in their weakened state hardly means that those destroying their supplies of food "were just nice people trying to evade taxes".

"The people who kicked out the oppressive English were not thinking of "empire"! "

-- Um, yes, they were thinking of empire. Some of the founders even used direct words like empire to describe what they wanted this country to be. You can delude yourself all you want, but the words and actions that came directly out of their mouths make it clear that they were thinking of building an empire. Many great political and historical scholars have written extensively on this fact.

Professor Chomsky had this to say about American imperialism, “[Talking about American imperialism] is a rather challenging task. In fact, talking about American imperialism is a little bit like talking about triangular triangles. The United States is the one country that exists, as far as I know, and ever has, that was founded as an empire explicitly. According to the Founding Fathers, when the country was founded, it was a “nascent empire.” That is George Washington’s [words].”

George Washington wasn’t the only Founding Father using the word empire to describe the newly created nation. In the Federalist Papers #1, Alexander Hamilton wrote about the need for creating of a new Constitution to protect “the fate of an empire in many respects the most interesting in the world.”

The westward expansion started from the very first moments of the creation of the United States. Sheldon Wolin, professor emeritus of politics at Princeton University writes, “Virtually from the beginning of the nation the making of the American citizen was influenced, even shaped by, the making of an American imperium. The nineteenth-century expansion of the country to the west and southwest was achieved by military victories over various Indian nations and Mexico. It brought new opportunities for enterprise, exploitation, and ownership. It made conquest and violence familiar, part of everyday experience.”

“The American empire is repressed in the national ideology.”

"The people who kicked out the oppressive English were not thinking of "empire"!"

You're trying to ignore that one reason the founding fathers broke away from Britain was because they were afraid various British court judgment that found slavery illegal in Britain:

Shanley v Harvey (1763):
"soon as a man sets foot on English ground he is free."

and R v Knowles (1772):

"es, the US does this now, but, John Adams and many other founders of the US were not slave owners and wanted it stopped. "

Irrelevant. They might have wanted it stopped, they did not stop it. Intentions are worthless, actions are what matter. Instead America built its economy on the cheap labour of black slaves.

"That they couldn't, well Mr. Ford, how about you, personally, get the US out of Afganistan!."

You are being disingenuous. Your precious founding fathers had the political power to stop slavery. The writer does not.

"Mr. Ford is rewriting history. "

No, you're trying to rewrite history, because you're offended by criticism of your beloved sacred founding fathers.

"why doesn't he talk about the blacks in Africa who captured & sold other blacks to Arab & European buyers. That sounds like it was an atrocity - and racist. Racism permeates most countries one way or another. Perhaps Mr. Ford also has a plan to stop all racism in Africa.... and stop the killing of animals for their ivory, etc., too! Likely just republicans wearing shoe polish."

Nope. Racism and the slave trade once existed. That does not refute the argument that America profitted from racism and the slave trade, and built its economy on the cheap labour of black slaves.

"s far as eliminating all the native americans merely to build an empire, some 90% died of disease at a time when not one human understood the pathogen process of diseas"

You're lying. Settlers and colonialists deliberately spread smallpox to Native Americans via contaminated blankets.

"As most humans today are still immature, clearly, most of them from hundreds or thousands of years ago didn't have a clue as to real ethics and morals, and change, unfortunately, is slow"

It is clear that you're a racist without a clue to real ethics and morality.

You have, unconsciously, proven Mr. Ford's point about an abiding racism in the USA which weakens any "progressive" anti-war movement or any other social or environmental justice movement in the US for that matter. You forget, to name just a few, Manifest Destiny doctrine and the fact that Native Americans were also deliberately infected with disease with the infamous small pocks blankets. And you also forget that indigenous people did not invite the white invaders who carried their bible in one hand and the rifle in the other: An invading horde of hypocrites and genocidal maniacs. Manifest Destiny IS the doctrine of American Empire one it built on the enslavement of the African and the genocide of the Native peoples after the theft of their land. Time for white folks in the USA to come to term with these originating crimes which have made all the rest possible. Time to demand that the USA deal with them honestly and withdraw from its economic and militaristic global reach.

I suggest a few days camping in the wilderness, without the rifle or booze.

Thank you for the enlightened post, Pueo. I agree with its thesis; however many in this forum regard any spiritual matters as superfluous to the battle between labor and "owners." They prefer that conjecture adapt to that theme.

rwaller has been around for awhile, usually posts on abortion issues.