AMERICA IN SEARCH OF AMERICAN CIVILISATION
The promise of a novel American frontier of human civilisation was either suspended or betrayed,
‘’The image of America is breaking’’, said a Chinese businessman. The confluence of victim George Floyd’s murder and President Donald Trump’s ending Confederate America’s economic backwardness as reward for giving him power, associated America with habitual barbarism. It outraged peoples in lands as diverse as Finland, Australia and South Africa. Mass demonstrations in England tossed the statue of a 17th Century slave merchant into a river presumably to send it to meet skeletons of millions of Africans thrown from slave ships into the Atlantic Ocean. President Trump called protestors ‘’thugs’ and ‘’terrorists’’.
The European immigrants who landed on America’s coast were saved from starvation by being given maize (or ‘’corn’’) as a food crop. That expression of human solidarity remains as a rock to turn to; not the European feudalism and ruthless industrial revolution their ancestors fled from.
The transplanting to the American main land the brutalities of European feudalism and working children and women to death in industrial machines assumed forms as genocide against indigenous peoples and the exploitation of Africans imported as tools for economic prosperity. However, a proclamation promised a new civilization for an American political union.
The civil war between Southern rulers anchored on slave labour and Northern leaders anchored on industrial productivity was that of two inheritances of European barbarities in social relations. The promise of a novel American frontier of human civilization became a promise either suspended, at best, or betrayed, at worst.
In 1898 Commodore George Dewey attacked and defeated a Spanish fleet at Manila Bay in the Philippines. Liberation fighters for independence mistakenly welcomed the Americans as helpers. Dewey, however, slaughtered over 250,000 Filipino fighters and turned the former Spanish colony into a protectorate. Guam, Cuba and Puerto Rico were added.
Engagement in major wars in Europe, China and Japan reinforced racial impulses of Southerners, while expansionism became anchored in subsequent rebuilding of an economically, socially and politically devastated Western Europe as a future shield against Communist Russia after 1945.
The fear of Russian Communism and a growing confidence in the power of capitalism as an engine of war mixed dangerously in foreign policy. The 1949 triumph of Mao Zedung’s guerrilla army in China turned fear of Communism into hysteria which drove complicity in the 1965 killing of ONE MILLION individual members of the Communist Party in Indonesia; collaboration with military generals and officers (who were children of big land owners in Brazil), in the destruction of the Socialist regime of Goulart, assassination of patriotic
THE UNITED STATES MUST CARRY OUT A ‘GEORGE FLOYD REPARATION PLAN’ FOR DREDGING SWAMPS AND CLEARING ENTANGLED JUNGLES OF RACISM; WHILE REINCARNATING A ‘MARSHALL PLAN’ FOR ERADICATING TOXIC ECONOMIC AND CULTURAL POVERTY IN FORMER CONFEDERATE STATES
leaders in South America and Sweden.
The United States rejected the notion of collaborative capitalist development with Latin America, Africa and parts of Asia located faraway from Communist China and Russia. The reflex had roots in homeland enclave capitalist development under racism and genocide. Bill Moyers (a former Press Secretary to President Lyndon Johnson), said in an interview with Christiane Amanpour on CNN), that after the Vietnam War, President Richard Nixon campaigned for re-election by appealing for ‘’Making America Great Again’’ by deepening racism in America.
‘’People are saying ‘BLACK LIVES MATER’ all over the world’’, said the son of Martin Luther King Jr., in hopeful surprise. America’s capital in ‘’Soft Power’’ has been severely punctured. Repeated posturing by American officials as self-appointed global guardians of ‘’democracy’’ and ‘’human rights’’ was deeply eroded by George Floyd dying under a televised casual whim of a white American policeman. It recalled a long macabre list of murders similar to pre-2015 police killing of Black males as an apparent election campaign ritual to excite ancient tribal Ku Klux Klan orgies for arousing manhood in poor whites by giving them a people to hate. The global revulsion also murdered the visibility of demonstrations in Hong Kong loudly supported by President Trump.
The United States must carry out a ‘’GEORGE FLOYD REPARATION PLAN’’ for dredging swamps and clearing entangled jungles of racism; while reincarnating a ‘’MARSHALL PLAN’’ for eradicating toxic economic and cultural poverty in former Confederate States.
A top Republican Party leader unfairly asserted that Trump ‘’is missing a compassion gene’’. President Truman roasted hundreds of thousands of Japanese in Nagasaki and Hiroshima; Eisenhower ordered the assassination of Patrice Lumumba and shattered Congo; George Bush directed precision missiles into nostrils of Iraq’s babies; Obama wrecked Libya and Syria and got Egypt bleeding. Only 53 per cent of Americans have faith in capitalism.
Insightful historians assert that America became a nation only 60 years ago when President Johnson signed the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Bills: making African-Americans citizens. AfricanAmericans await her ancestral promise to transcend inhumanities of European feudalism and youthful industrial productivity. They crossed the Atlantic with ‘’FAMILYHOOD’’ and ‘’UBUNTU’’ now bubbling as ‘’BLACK LIVES MATTER’’ matching towards that promise; and an American government that welcomes Adewumi Adesina (as President of the African development Bank, (AfDB), driving Africa’s development.