How long will the U.S. beg for forgiveness?
By Orestes Martí Read Spanish Version
From Canaria Insurgente, July 31, 2008
Recently,
the U.S. House of Representatives asked African-Americans for
forgiveness for slavery [1]. On July 29, 2008, in what some media
described as "an unprecedented decision," the House
approved a bill introduced by (white) Senator Steve Cohen,
representative for Memphis, Tenn., whose majority population is
African-American, in which he asked for forgiveness for the years of
slavery blacks endured in the country.
They
say this is the first time a branch of government of the Union asks
for forgiveness for the days of slavery. Cohen said the resolution
was explicit recognition of "the injustice, cruelty, brutality
and lack of humanity of slavery and Jim Crow," the period
1865-1960 when, after slavery was abolished, African-Americans were
denied the right to vote and many other civil liberties and were
legally separated — segregated — from the whites.
It
has also been reported that the resolution stresses that
"African-Americans continue to suffer the consequences of
slavery and the Jim Crow era in the form of numerous damages and
losses, both tangible and intangible." Among the damages, the
document highlights "the loss of dignity and liberty, the
frustration in people’s professional lives and the longtime loss of
earnings and opportunities."
In
April 2008, the U.S. Senate passed another resolution that asked
forgiveness from the North American natives (the "bad"
Indians in cowboy movies) for "the many cases of violence, ill
treatment and abandonment." In 1993, the Senate asked for
forgiveness for the United States’ participation in "the illegal
overthrow" of the Kingdom of Hawaii, one century earlier.
U.S.
resettlement camps (1942)
Even
earlier, in 1988, during the Reagan administration [2], Congress
asked forgiveness from the tens of thousands of Japanese-Americans
who were interned in concentration camps set up in the United States
in 1942 by Executive Orders 9066 and 9102, signed by President
Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Those orders mandated the largest forced
transfer in the history of the Japanese people.
Rep.
John Rankin of Mississippi, one week after the attack on Pearl
Harbor, said on the floor of the House: "I propose that all the
Japanese in America, Alaska and Hawaii be captured and be interned in
concentration camps, and that they be sent as soon as possible to
Asia. This is a racial war. White man’s civilization has entered into
war with Japanese barbarity. One of the two will have to be
destroyed. Let us condemn them! Let us get rid of them now! (Ten
Broek, pg. 87.)
Another
member of Congress proposed the sterilization of all Japanese. About
120,000 persons — 77,000 U.S. citizens of Japanese origin (the
Nisei) and 43,000 Japanese citizens (Isei) — were interned in the
so-called "relocation" camps in California, Washington,
Oregon and Arizona. The 23,000 Japanese who lived in the Western
coast of Canada (75 percent of whom were Canadian citizens) were also
hounded. They were not allowed to return to British Columbia until
March 1949, seven years after the evacuation and three-and-a-half
years after the end of the war.
The
U.S. Department of State forced the Latin American countries to round
up the Japanese who lived there. Approximately 2,000 Japanese were
shipped from 12 countries to various concentration camps in the U.S.
Most of them were sent by Peru, which wanted to eliminate all the
Japanese on its territory, and even after the war refused to take
back those who had been deported to the U.S.
Brazil,
Uruguay and Paraguay established their own internment programs.
Argentina and Chile did not break diplomatic relations with the Axis
until almost the end of the war, but in their territories the
Japanese were neither detained nor interned.
Well,
it seems to me fine that "the champions of democracy" have
asked for forgiveness for the barbarities and abuse they committed
against their minorities, but — when will they asked for forgiveness
for their illegal activities throughout the world — through their
special services, such as the CIA and organizations that always do
the opposite of what their name says, like the National Endowment for
Democracy [3]? When will they apologize for their dozens of worldwide
interventions [4] and the overthrow of legally constituted
governments and the assassination of their leaders, as in the case of
Salvador Allende in Chile [5], to mention just one?
And
when will they apologize to the people of Cuba for their criminal
dirty war that includes a blockade whose application — according to
Cuban Foreign Minister Felipe Pérez Roque, when he introduced
Cuba’s Report on Resolution 61/11 of the United Nations General
Assembly, a document that was discussed on Oct. 30, 2007, for the
16th time, in the plenum of the General Assembly — "has reached
schizophrenic levels in the attempt to subjugate our people through
hunger and disease"? That blockade has been rejected by almost
all member countries in all the votes carried out in the U.N. since
1992.
[1]
La Vanguardia.
[2]
Wikipedia: Concentration camps in the United States.
[3]
The networks of "democratic" interference.
[4]
On Dec. 17, 1962, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, in order to justify
the armed invasion of Cuba, submitted to Congress a report in which
he mentioned the times the U.S. had intervened militarily in other
countries, between 1798 and 1945. Rusk’s report listed 158 such
interventions. Domínguez Lima, Roberto. "Alberdi, the
Basque." ISBN-13: 978-84-611-6242-0. Las Palmas de Gran Canaria,
2007, pg. 23.
[5]
In Chapter 17 of his book ‘Rogue State,’ William Blum analyzes ("A
concise history of global interventions from 1945 to the present")
67 U.S. interventions in the period 1945-1998. Blum, William. Rogue
State. ISBN 959-210-354-2. Havana, 2005.
Orestes
Martí writes regularly for several Spanish publications.
