Showing posts with label immigrants. Show all posts
Showing posts with label immigrants. Show all posts

Thursday, March 06, 2025

White Invaders Injustices to the Indigenous People

      

        In some recent online videos about the history of the American West, the content creators quoted from diaries written by soldiers who served in the U.S. Cavalry during the mid to late 1800s. During this encroachment into Native territory, the soldiers constantly use the word "hostiles" to describe the Natives they encounter. They seem mystified. 

Now, what would make those people hostile? 

        It is bad enough U.S. history books are filled with derogatory references to Natives as - Indians, redskins, injuns, heathens, savages, pagans, and barbarians. Even our Declaration of Independence refers to them as "merciless indian savages." But to be baffled by their hostility? It never seems to occur to those troopers that the Natives are hostile precisely because those troopers are invading their land, taking their food, and killing their family members. If Natives regularly pushed their way into the various forts the US military had established along what was called the frontier and were taking off with all the goods they could carry, how would the troopers react? Would they be hostile toward people who did that to them? Why were the people who already lived on that land considered the invading culture? Why were they required to give up their land just because white intruders under their self-appointed Manifest Destiny decided they owned whatever they could see or grab? In the United States, white trespassers still occupy Native lands.

        "Where did they come from?"
            For example, here is the most likely scenario that happened along the coastal area of what became Virginia on May 13, 1607, when a Powhatan native came across the first English invaders. In basic sign language, this occurred:

Native: Who are you?
Immigrant: We're here to build a settlement named after our king, called Jamestown, on this land.
Native: Why?
Immigrant: Is this your land?
Native: Yes, we hunt and fish here. Who is your, uh, king to give you this permission?
Immigrant: We're here on his orders. See, here is the signature of King James.
Native: Is he with you?
Immigrant: No. But his name is on this piece of paper, making it legal.
Native: So, you're guided only by marks on a piece of what looks like thin skin of some sort. The man who made them is not with you. There seems to be just a small group of you with no females, and many are doing nothing...
Immigrant: Most of us are sick.
Native (looking around): Unaccompanied, seems to be a minor bunch who are in poor health. To do anything else would be inhumane...so, alright, you can stay here for a while. We'll send over some food. The water in that river is no good...too salty. There is a spring not far that way with good water. The trees provide plenty of cover for protection - and for heat and cooking. We'll check up on you.
Immigrant: We can never repay you.

And they never did. As a matter of fact, they took it away from the natives.
         The same scenario played out on November 11, 1620 (per the Julian Calendar), near what became Plymouth Rock in Massachusetts. There, the circumstances were even more problematic and dire for the Pilgrims. (They had put the 'grim' in their religious identification due to their own intolerance for other viewpoints, which is why they were now seeking a new homeland.) Winds had blown them off course, so they did not get to where they were attempting to reach in the "New World." Now, it was almost winter, and they had used up most of their supplies to get to this uncharted place. The Wampanoags were the only reason the Pilgrims survived the first winter. The Pilgrims had tried to pray their food, safety, care, and well-being into existence. But, whatever they were praying to took no note of them. The Natives took pity on the strange invaders and extended to them far more "Christianity" and Christian character than the Pilgrims ever reciprocated.

        "Our king and our church said we own you people now...and your land, too!"
        Meanwhile, down in the territory being vandalized by the ever-so-compassionate conquistadors of Spain, St. Augustine had been established in 1565 as a Catholic mission. It was a foothold for the Spanish conquest of the territory. To really get things off on the wrong foot, since 1513, there had been lots of barbaric treatment of - and violent contact with - the local natives, like the Timucuans and the Calusas, as the conquistadors fought their way into this new land. This would foment an even more hostile living environment that would be the future of interaction between the two cultures in what became Florida.
    The conquistadors had the noxious habit of enslaving any person who fell into their hands because the church ruled that they could. The people they met were heathens. They were not to be afforded God's mercy and treated as equals. They were sub-humans in the eyes of the church because they didn't worship the same god, they spoke a weird language, and they had different customs. How dare they?
     The Spaniards abused them in every way they could: they used them as targets, to ride on like animals, and forced at swordpoint to mine metals or ores out of the ground, or plant and farm crops. The Natives were not malleable at all and resisted every effort of the Spaniards to subjugate them. All that was left was to kill the indigenous men and rape their women. That would spread their "friendly-to-whites-only" diseases throughout the local population, and then they'd just wait for nature to take its course. The same callous attitude was displayed toward the indigenous by the English, French, Dutch, and Portuguese as well.
    Naturally, they couldn't have known that the diseases they carried, that they were immune to from centuries of living in Europe, these people had no defenses against. Even a simple cold was lethal to many of the indigenous. But the invaders didn't know, nor did they care. They assumed the Indigenous land was theirs for the taking, so if the inhabitants got the sniffles and died, then the white invaders could justify it by saying, "It was an act of God and was meant to be!" 
        That is what made the butchery, cruelty, and hostility so disturbing: the cold-blooded treatment of all Natives by these invaders based solely on their holy book, the Bible, which they all claimed guided them. Since these indigenous people were different in enough ways, the invaders asserted that their God's attitude was "do whatever you want to them." Such Christian compassion and charity!
        Enslavement was condoned. Barbarity was approved of. Seizing land without verifying if anyone lived there first was seen as a noble thing to do for their king and god. It spread their gospel...while spilling blood everywhere it was carried and preached. It didn't matter that the natives couldn't understand a word of what the Spaniards were babbling at them. The church leaders had told them all should hear the word of God. That meant the monks and priests with them read it out of their books - because of course God would intercede and make the natives understand Latin in their own language - so they had to stay and be quiet, then profess to grasp and accept whatever was shouted at them. When that failed over and over and over, the church ordered them slaughtered. Better no heathens at all, especially those who heard the word and rejected it. This scenario was played out everywhere these European Christian-influenced invaders set foot...the Caribbean Islands, Mexico, Brazil, Australia, New Zealand, Africa, India, Singapore, China, Hawaii...etc. In a little over 100 years, North, Central, and South America became the testing ground for all the appalling and criminal actions these invaders could think up in dealing with a new race of people. If it was the wrong thing to do, these invaders did it.
        The Tainos couldn't understand why the Columbus crew needed so much material draped over them.
        
        When Columbus and his followers stumbled upon the Caribbean Islands and the Americas, he and the Spanish hooligans who came after him instituted a bloody legacy reputedly established much earlier by the Vikings. In those Norse legends, Leif Ericssen and Eric the Red fought men called skraelings in their encounters far to the west of their Northern European homelands. Not to be outdone, the conquistadors came up with a variety of ways to terrorize anyone they encountered that would humble whatever violence the Vikings unleashed.
The British, French, Dutch, and Portuguese enhanced that blood-thirsty reputation when they got to the New World. In many cases, they were almost giddy about their barbaric treatment whenever they came in contact with the indigenous people.
    And then, on top of all that, the hypocritical Americans insisted on calling the native people they encountered while pushing westward into their lands...savages!
       And yet some people don't think any reparations are owed to the indigenous people, to those who are descendants of the African Slave Trade, and to the descendants of the Asian 'Coolie' Trade. How in the hell can any person look at the information that is currently available - information that white people recorded without any embarrassment - and not think these abused people are due SOMETHING for all they have suffered and been subjected to at the hands of our Caucasian ancestors? To deny them that is a strikingly undiluted example of white privilege.
        The people who endured the barbarism of that white privilege deserve justice. It is long, long overdue.

Wednesday, December 26, 2018

Trump turns the U.S. into a Ghoul Nation

Thanks to Trump, the United States has become a ghoul nation. Actions taken by this administration seem to be guided by a sinister side of Trump, especially one that feeds on ‘dead bodies.’ The word ghoul is also applicable in the derogatory sense when referring to a person who delights in the macabre, or is indifferent to someone else’s death. Has Trump expressed any sorrow or concern for anyone who has died or been killed on his watch? Not at all.

          Everyone, from CPO William Ryan Owens the Navy SEAL killed in Yemen less than a week into the Trump presidency, the four Green Berets, ambushed and gunned down in Niger on October 4, 2017, to the three U.S. Special Forces soldiers killed by an IED, November 27, 2018, near Ghazni in Afghanistan produced no reaction from Trump. Not one tweet from him about their sacrifice, and in most cases, Trump couldn’t even bother to be at Joint Base Andrews when the bodies were flown home. Ghouls are unconcerned with death.
        Just a few days after 7-year-old Guatemalan Jakelin Caal Maquin died in Border Patrol custody, 8-year old Felipe Gomez Alonso, also a Guatemalan died just before midnight Monday at a government facility in Albuquerque NM. CBP says it doesn’t know the cause of the boy’s death. Records show he was sent to a hospital, diagnosed with a cold, sent back to Border Patrol care and began having seizures soon after arriving there. He died later that evening while being transferred back to the hospital.
Trump supporters are secretly thrilled that these little sub-humans are now dead after illegally entering US territory…and it’s all their parent’s fault. If the immigrants hadn’t entered the U.S. through the desert they wouldn’t have lost their child. “Go die on someone else’s dime” is the Trump supporter’s attitude regarding the children’s deaths while in U.S. custody. There is no sympathy except for how it makes Trump look. That’s where their ghoulish sympathies lie.
A U.S. military report was released in December 2018 stating foreign civilian casualties during U.S. Drone strikes have dramatically increased under the Trump administration. Last year, Trump ordered all caps removed (in a simplified manner, caps were to be the maximum allowable number killed during U.S. actions hopefully restricted to maybe a dozen). Drawing on Defense Department memos and collateral damage assessments, so far in 2018, almost 3,500 civilians have been officially reported as killed - but governments in the countries where the strikes occurred claim the number is substantially higher and that the Trump administration is deliberately under-reporting the civilian slaughter. Meanwhile, the Trump administration pedals it as the price paid for America's freedoms. Ghouls do not care about collateral damage deaths.
In mid September 2018, Yahoo News is the first to report on a release that shows the Trump administration had transferred $13 million from Childhood Cancer Research and over $16 million from Head Start in order to give it to ICE for the supplying and construction of more detention centers and holding facilities for immigrants and their children. Why help kids when you can incarcerate…and possibly accelerate the death of…illegal immigrant children? Only a Ghoul nation would do this.
Even though FEMA has admitted fault for the thousands of pallets of now-undrinkable bottled water left on a runway in Puerto Rico as CBS reported in mid September, FEMA confirmed that it moved the bottled water in a cost-saving measure as a part of its effort to provide “the maximum support to disaster survivors, while also being mindful of our responsibility as stewards of taxpayer dollars.” Leaving it on the runway for months saved FEMA money and Trump gave their effort an A+. The supplied-and-lost-water could have saved some of the lives of the almost 3000 Puerto Ricans who died as a direct result of the effects of Hurricane Maria in the fall of 2017, and the inadequate response of the Trump administration. Trump denied the death toll from Hurricanes Maria and Irma in a series of tweets stating "3000 people did not die in the two hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico. When I left the island, AFTER the storm had hit, they had anywhere from 6 to 18 deaths." Trump then blamed Democrats for the figures, "to make me look as bad as possible." It is always…ALWAYS…someone else’s fault, never the Ghoul that was directly responsible for making the tragedy worse.
The world judges the United States by what Trump does. We will pay for this for generations…long after we’ve paid for Trump’s tax cuts for the wealthiest 1%.

Friday, November 02, 2018

How Trump Can Further Show Just What an Extraordinary Military Commander He Is


               There’s a caravan walking at about 2 to 3 miles an hour through Mexico at this moment made up of primarily impoverished families who are escaping the violence and lack of job opportunities in the Central American countries where they are from. Donald Trump is insisting at his rallies, at press conferences, and at brief encounters with reporters outside the White House, that they are a brutal invasion force. They are still over 800 miles from the southeastern border of Texas, but the general direction suggests they are heading toward California which is over 2000 miles from their present location. (They are near a strange place in Mexico that Fox’s Lou Dobbs called ‘Juar-ll-daaaaaaa.' I haven’t been able to find it on a map of Mexico either.) At the rate they are travelling, it will take them at least 2 weeks to a month to reach the U.S. if they come here at all. But to Trump, the danger is now, today, immediately, so he has told Defense Secretary James Mattis to send armed troops…5000, 5200, 10,000, no 15,000…to meet the threat. That’s more than the U.S. has deployed in Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq to fight ISIS.
If you don’t look too closely, the men in that caravan are…(maybe they’re Middle Eastern, who knows?)…of military age, strong and virile (but unarmed, except for some rocks they might be able to throw). Reporters actually travelling with the caravan describe them as mostly thin, underfed young fathers, and teenage boys who are desperately trying to avoid being forced into joining a gang. Trump along with Fox news claims the women are being cowed into marching in the front of this invasion force in order to form a human shield for those men. And even worse, the women are keeping their babies close to themselves, and the young children nestled around them to provide an extra layer of bodies for the mass of terrifying invaders behind them, and those kids are riddled with diseases like smallpox, leprosy, aids, tuberculosis, and even STDs. According to Fox news hosts, Fox news guests, and many Trump supporters, they are all being paid by billionaire George Soros or the Democratic Party. How do they know? They say it is just so obvious and hinting that members of our own congress must also be going down there and urging them on, encouraging them to sweep into the U.S., and make sure to vote for Democrats…so they can rip health care away from law-abiding white Christian Americans, take over our cities, take away all our jobs…and kneel when the National Anthem is played!
These are the dangerous invaders Trump is warning about

From the Oval Office Trump admitted that “nobody knows for sure” whether there are gang members, ISIS soldiers, or Middle Eastern terrorists in among the caravan, but it’s possible…anything is possible. Why he doesn’t say that their pockets are all stuffed with millions in gold coins and they are coming to give it to Americans, free…is unknowable. But isn’t’ that also possible if anything is possible? He says he “tries to tell the truth” but the qualifier is he “tries”, not “does.”
If Trump really thinks this is truly a dangerous invasion force, why doesn’t he use the same tactic that has worked so well for him in the past? The tactic that makes disreputable news anchors wax poetically about how beautiful their launch is, how their use makes him appear more presidential to certain members of Congress, how Ivanka thinks it makes him…I mean, how Melania thinks it makes him more manly and desirable, how the use of them showcases what a strong, powerful, forward-thinking leader he is, all from the safety and comfort of one of his golf resorts?
Launch Tomahawk cruise missiles at them.
Trump insisted that Syria, a country far, far away and no threat to us, deserved to have cruise missiles launched at them…twice. If they were a threat, how much more is a threat just 2000 miles away and getting closer to our border? Since Trump is using the language of war, why not use our weapons of war? Just don’t distract him with a beautiful piece of chocolate cake or he’ll forget at which country he was supposed to launch them. We don’t need to wake up and find we’re now at war with Uruguay because Trump can’t tell the difference between that country and Mexico.
Not just cruise missiles either. Trump has no problem having our military and CIA launching missiles from drones over countries we are not at war with. If U.S. Predators and Reapers can send Hellfire missiles into wedding parties in Pakistan and schools in Yemen, then he can ignore Mexican sovereignty and launch missiles at the migrant caravan, too. Yemen, Pakistan, Mexico…what’s the difference?
But he mustn’t stop there. The world needs to see how tough Trump is. So send U.S. carrier groups into the Gulf of Mexico and down the Mexican Pacific coast to launch air attacks on the caravan. Maybe Trump can even ask for help from the Saudi Arabian Air Force which has lots of experience blowing up kids on buses and in schools in Yemen using U.S. weapons and hardware Trump sold to them. They’ll be able to show our pilots how and where to lay down ordinance to cause maximum damage. U.S. submarines can be included to add their missiles and firepower to the defense of the nation from this dangerous hoard of…poor people trying to escape the same war-like setting in their own countries.
Our F-117s, F-35s, A-10s, B-1s and B-2s can gain valuable experience dropping bombs on them or flying in low and slow and machine gunning them as they are strung out along Mexican roads. Sure, there will be some collateral damage and unintended casualties of Mexicans who happen to be too near a drop zone or target area, but innocent dead Mexicans is the price we have to pay to be free. Last year, Trump claimed he authorized our military in Afghanistan to drop a 21,000-pound non-nuclear bomb called a MOAB onto a suspected terrorist site. It was never confirmed that it was, but that’s immaterial. Plus, two innocent Afghani civilians were killed by it. However, dead Afghanis mean about as much to Trump as dead Mexicans. He can do the same to these violent migrant people. With a blast radius of over a mile, a MOAB will kill a good one-quarter of the first wave and make the rest of them think long and hard about wanting to come to the U.S. for anything.
                   Monkey see...monkey do!
It is certain Trump’s base will love this idea. Nothing makes them happier than to think Trump is killing thousands if not hundreds of thousands of non-white, non-English speaking people. They get giddy with the thought that, even with the massive tax cut that added $1.5 trillion dollars to the national debt - and there’s now GOP talk about gutting Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid to make up for some of that debt - that there’s still plenty of money laying around to throw at a military solution to the immigration issue…specifically these immigrants. What difference does a few billion dollars added to that deficit make if Trump can get a couple thousand dead immigrants out of it?
And as a last resort, if any of them do happen to reach the Rio Grande or the New Mexico, Arizona, or California border, and if they can be goaded into throwing a rock, Trump has ordered the 15,000 deployed soldiers there to consider that a weapon and then can now shoot-to-kill the migrants. Because in Trump’s way of thinking, a hand-thrown rock is as lethal as an AR-15 and deserves the return fire from one. That is what happens when you don’t serve in the military and make wild assumptions based on your feelings.
Military genius such as this can only come from someone who avoided service altogether with five draft deferments, suffered from a painful bone spur (or spurs…who knows for sure) in his foot, has never spent a day in the military, but overcame all that, and, using his vast military school background, has deployed the world’s mightiest military force to kill unarmed immigrants walking toward our southern border. We see this in every great military leader down through history. Leaders like…………..well, they must be there because how else would we know how great a military genius Trump is?
Remember, on June 16, 2016, Trump told Bill O’Reilly on Fox News that “No one is bigger or better at ‘the military’ than I am.”

If these migrants really are part of an invasion force, show us you are up to the task of defending the nation by the application of your Constitutional and presidential powers to stop them. Here is your chance to prove you understand it, Trump.