By Hermon Rock Hackshaw
A major section of the world’s inhabitants is anxiously awaiting the result of the following US presidential elections in November.
The reality, as advised on the marketing campaign path itself, is moderately controversial. In the event you don’t imagine me, then let me refer you to a feminine spokesperson (Kelly-Ann Conway) for former US president Donald Trump. She stated that there’s something referred to as “different details.”
REALLY! Any evaluation of the up to date US political local weather should acknowledge {that a} most cancers has unfold by means of the political discourse, and its potential for an eventual civil struggle is right here once more.
It didn’t begin when Donald Trump descended an escalator to announce his run for the presidency in 2015.
Method again within the day, within the USA (United States of Amnesia), political disagreements would lead outstanding politicians to duel to the loss of life. That’s a historic truth. Lately, a wannabee murderer tried to take out one of many present presidential candidates. Bullets got here inside millimeters of taking the lifetime of Donald Trump.
President Joe Biden went on nationwide tv to state that “this isn’t who we’re as Individuals.” Sorry, Mr. Biden. We’re at an important level in World Historical past. We now have peregrinated to a spot that’s extra precarious and dangerous than the day earlier than nuclear bombs have been first dropped on Japan.
Many subscribe to the idea of “Mutually Assured Destruction” (M.A.D). They insist that since a nuclear struggle is unwinnable for any single nation, then the possession of stated weapons serves as a deterrent to a nuclear struggle. Suppose, nevertheless, we should cope with a narcissistic sociopath because the chief of a rustic with nuclear weapons. What then? Would that idea maintain up?
In response to some spiritual people, a World Struggle the place nuclear weapons are used might be “Armageddon.” To non-religious people. it will likely be a cataclysm of limitless potentialities. Both means it wouldn’t be fairly.
We obtained right here by means of half-truths, lies, hypocrisy, dishonesty, deception and contradictions. The humorous factor is we now have all the time had the receipts. We now have had writings by means of books, newspapers, magazines and different periodicals. We now have additionally had radio, tv, audio and videotapes
We are able to debunk lies and half-truths. We are able to additionally expose hypocrisy, dishonesty, deceit and contradictions. All it takes is a bit frequent sense; the power to be rational, some training and logic.
When President Biden made that absurd comment about Individuals, I recalled the tragic deaths of 4 US presidents: Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley and John F. Kennedy. I additionally recalled the tried assassinations of Teddy Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford.
And don’t neglect the deaths of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Medgar Evers and Robert Kennedy; simply to call just a few outstanding Individuals who have been additionally assassinated.
Let’s face it: Individuals are a violent folks with a fascination for weapons and different weapons. We’re additionally fearful and xenophobic. Our cussed historical past of racism has led to this. The minimizing and trivializing of “her-story” is of no assist on this regard.
The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was the period that Europeans arrogantly deemed “The Age of Discovery”. However how do you uncover one thing that’s already there?
When Portuguese sailors began exploring the West-African shoreline, it created some envy and resentment from different nations in Europe, since a complete new world was opening, and a few felt not noted of the happenings and potentialities.
And when Christopher Columbus sailed to the West Indies underneath the flag of Spain, nations like England, France, Belgium, Holland and others, have been incensed. In any case, the Roman Catholic Pope had issued a Papal Bull, “The Treaty of Tordesillas” in 1494, which divided the New World between Spain and Portugal. One Englishman stated: “present me the place in Adam’s will, it says the Pope can do that?”
Which brings me to “faith”, particularly because it performed a heavy hand in European parlor-games again then when monarchs and prelates from the varied European nations sanctioned colonialism. Their imperialistic targets facilitated man’s inhumanity to fellow man, which was already in existence given the atrocities of struggle everywhere in the “outdated” and “new” worlds. Thus, we are able to actually say that whites don’t have a lock on inhumanity, because it is available in all races, ethnicities, tribes, genders and religions.
As soon as European explorers got “carte-blanche” to beat the “ungodly savages” of the brand new world, racism took a brand new flip. One historian wrote that “with callous brutality and wanton rapacity” Europeans depopulated the Americas, Indies, Asia and the Far East.
The hubris of whites throughout this period is nauseating. That they had no respect for the cultures they encountered. The customs, rituals and practices of aboriginal folks(s) have been met with disdain and condescension. From Aztecs to Incas, from Indians (East and West) to natives in Australia, New Zealand, Africa, Asia, the Center and Far-East: no actual distinction.
One of many foreign-policy targets of Spain’s Queen Isabella was to “Christianize” the brand new world by way of “Catholicism”. Different European monarchs adopted go well with. They haughtily believed that they’d a “God-given proper” to lands and assets of the native peoples. That is the place those that subscribed to the views of “white supremacy” discovered their voices and so they certainly used violence to specific and perpetuate this ideology.
Hermon Rock Hackshaw is a Trinidad-born college lecturer and political activist, based mostly in New York.
