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July
08
2023

This Anti-American Bullshit Needs To Stop!
Wallace Garneau

The following post was on a Christian Facebook group. You’ve heard this kind of anti-American claptrap before, so if you want to skip it, feel free – my response is just below the post below. The next time someone talks about the ‘crimes’ the ‘American People’ are ‘guilty of,’ feel free to show them this article. This anti-American bullshit needs to stop.

JULY 4TH  –

Birthday of the United States of America

It seems to bother people that I don’t get all rah rah sis boom bah over celebrating the 4th of July – so I’ll skip the cake and join you for the candles  – –

But let’s do it like this – instead of all the sparkling candles of a Birthday Cake – lets do memorial candles – lets do one memorial candle for every one of the millions of Native American men – women – children – including UNBORN children who were murdered in the process of colonizing the Americas and through the expansion of the United States from Columbus down to today – – and one for every African man  – woman – and child who died as a result of the slave trade – in Africa – during the middle passage – or on American plantations or on American soil at all – – And I could go on – –

But how can we – how DARE we – celebrate and glory in the birthday of this nation without first acknowledging – and memorializing – and repenting before God for the death – the murder – of EVERY Native American – of every Black – and of others – [more to come]

Pastor Dan

It’s funny, but I don’t remember seeing Christopher Columbus’ signature on the Declaration of Independence, nor on the Constitution. For that matter, Christopher Columbus was Italian and sailed for Spain, so it seems a bit silly to blame British colonists for the things Christopher Columbus did. It was, however, Italians that enslaved my French, German, and Dutch ancestors. Can I blame Christopher Columbus for that as well? Given that Christopher Columbus was working for Spain, can I blame the atrocities committed by the conquistadors who followed him on the Hispanic population of South, Central, and North America, which is largely descended from them?

Kalpakidis sounds Greek. The Ancient Greeks gave us many good things, but really only the ones from Athens, whereas the ancestors you got your name from came from Thessaly, known as Aeolia, way back when the Greek army exterminated Troy. Are you personally responsible for the extermination of Troy? Should you send an apology to the people of Turkey for killing off the largest city their ancestors had at the time? How about the role your people took in conquering everything between the rest of Greece and Afghanistan, including Egypt and India? How many people did your bro Alexander the Great kill? Of course, the Persians also utilized slavery, so perhaps he was fighting to liberate the Persian slaves? If so – he should probably have taken fewer of his own slaves with him.

Can we blame the Berbers who spawned the Barbary Pirates (and who the name ‘barbarian’ comes from) for all of the evils of chattel slavery as well? They were the ones, after all, Europeans bought the slaves from. Berbers also sold white people, taken primarily from the Slavic lands of Eastern Europe. The Berbers took so many Slavic slaves that they derived the word ‘slavery’ from it. The Berbers were black, and you seem to be focusing on color more than country, though. Perhaps we should blame all black people for it, lest we forget that there was never a day when there were more black slaves in the Americas than there were White slaves in the Islamic nations of Northern Africa and the Middle East.

Perhaps we should blame religion. The world’s greatest practitioners of slavery were Islamic – again, the people the Europeans bought slaves from to take to the new world.

It’s too bad the Berbers preferred white slaves to black ones. Had the white slaves been the same price, we might have seen equal representation amongst slaves in the Americas. Instead, the Berbers sold white slaves to Islamic slave owners for more money – which was somewhat ironic given that the Berbers were black. Interesting historical sidenote, huh?

But you are blaming a nation formed from BRITISH colonies, so let’s focus on the British role in slavery. Do you know who the first nation on Earth to ban slavery was?

That’s a trick question. The first country to ban slavery was France.

But it took France a while to ban slavery in its colonies. Britain was the first to do that, after which England used its armies and its navy to start stamping it out over the rest of the world. How about after we blame Britain for slavery (along with the rest of the world – including the African nations, some of which still practice slavery today), we also thank Britain for being the first nation in the history of the world to use its military to END slavery?

Do you know who else used its military to end slavery? The very United States you are denigrating. We did it to stamp out slavery in our own nation after Americans noticed that slavery was completely incompatible with the nation they had formed (which really they knew right away – one of the first abolitionists was Thomas Jefferson, who, ironically, also owned slaves).

You want history? There – you have it. Perhaps you should be a little more gracious when it comes to our nation’s history on the subject.

Let’s move to genocide. I’ve already pointed out some of the atrocities committed by your ancestors, so we are talking about the near extermination of the Native American. I could point out, again, what Spain did to the Aztecs and the fact that most of the people we call Hispanic are descended both from Native Americans as well as from the conquistadors who conquered them. But let’s talk about where I live – Michigan. When the French first came into Michigan (note my name – it’s Quebecois, so we are now moving into some of my ancestral history), there were fewer than 100 people living in the entire state. That’s because, at the time, the Iroquois would send large raiding parties into Michigan once a year and exterminate anyone they ran into. The French put an end to that. Perhaps instead of blaming the Iroquois for that, though, we should blame the Native American tribes who taught them how to do it by doing it to them – pushing them into the Northeast portion of the United States. It turns out that though the Native Americans did not have guns (or the wheel), they did have war. Being a ‘brave,’ or ‘soldier’ was, in fact, the primary profession in most Native American tribes – though not all. Some were truly peaceful, but most of them were exterminated by the tribes who were not.

Should we talk about some of the unique ways the Apache used to kill other Native Americans, and later Europeans moving into the same lands?

The Native American people were stone-age tribes, and while there were certainly wars and atrocities committed by and against them, they were actually killed mostly by smallpox – brought, of course, by the Europeans, but by accident. Should we thank the British doctors who invented the smallpox vaccine? As for blame, smallpox originated in Egypt, one of the same lands the Berbers later sold the British slaves from. Perhaps we should blame Egypt for not only all the Native Americans who died from it but half of all Europeans who died from it as well. Smallpox, after all, killed not just Native Americans, but people all around the world. Did you know Mozart and Lincoln both had it? Of course, they recovered – but many others did not.

Here is an idea. How about instead of blaming white people today for what white people did in the past – which was no different from what other people were doing at the same time and for all of recorded history before them – how about we blame the people of the past for the atrocities of the past and try to learn from those atrocities such that we don’t see them committed again in the future? If we do that, it’ll lead us right back to the words, “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” and suddenly, the 4th of July becomes worthy of a birthday cake again.

And while we are at it, how about you stop being a racist yourself before you castigate the rest of us?

And while we are at it, how about you stop calling yourself a pastor until you start to follow Christ and stop making stupid posts?

 

Wallace Garneau is a two-service military veteran, with four years in the United States Marine Corps Reserve, and four years in the US Army. He has twenty-three years of experience in process improvement roles, having served as the E-Commerce Manager, IT Manager, and Director of Business Systems for a variety of medium to large manufacturing companies. Wallace holds a Bachelors of Science from the University of Phoenix, and an MBA in Lean Manufacturing from the University of Michigan. Wallace is currently finishing a Masters of Science in Lean Manufacturing, at Kettering University.

Wallace is a published poet and essayist, and recently finished his first book - The Way Forward: Lean Leadership and Systems Thinking for Large and Small Businesses.

 

 

 

 

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