Melville Cooke
'So soon we'll find out who is
The real revolutionary'
Bob Marley, Africa Unite
ABOUT SEVEN years ago, while still employed as a sub-editor to this newspaper, I printed a part of the United States' Declaration of Independence on a broadsheet-sized page, taped it on a wall of a room where I lived and memorised it.
That was not a light undertaking, as my memory is about as good as Dawn Ritch's elegance with a pen. And it was not taken because of the 'self-evident truths' that most of us should be familiar with, but because of two sentences (the second moreso than the first) in unanimous Declaration of the 13 United States of America, July 4, 1776:
"Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind is more likely to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than right themselves by abolishing a form to which they are long accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpation's, pursuing invariably to the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government and provide new guards for their future security."
PRESCRIPTION FOR REVOLOUTION
It is their duty indeed and, for those four words, I dubbed the Declaration a prescription for revolution. Hardly a Morris Cargill gem (he once called the NDM a bowel movement), but sufficient to sum up the document that was celebrated on Monday in the U.S.
For that 'oiligarchy's' and wanna-be monopoly's celebration of its 229th year as an independent nation is more a celebration of the theory on paper rather than the actuality of its actions. In fact, the U.S. has never made the slightest pretension of living up to the ideals contained in its Declaration, as there was the strictest exclusion of any mention of white people being responsible for slavery. (I got that from the History Channel and wrote the date on the print-out of the declaration, but the ink has faded so I cannot give you the exact date and time.)
And it is self-evident that for the founding fathers 'men' excluded women, Blacks and Native Americans. And it is also self-evident that the 'duty' was reserved for the U.S.
It is something that continues today, as the country that overthrew Mossadeq of Iran in 1951 and installed the notorious Shah in its blueprint regime change is, as I write, busy slaughtering the inhabitants of two countries that it invaded to overthrow its friends, the Taliban and Hussein.
RABID PATRIOTS
It is a bloody irony that Martin Luther King Jnr. expressed close to four decades ago, much to the outrage of the rabid patriots who believed - and still do - that if they scream "USA, USA, USA" loud enough it will bring to pass their will.
Speaking in 1967 about the Vietnam War he said: "They must see Americans as strange liberators. The Vietnamese people proclaimed their own independence in 1945 after a combined French and Japanese occupation and before the Communist revolution in China. They were led by Ho Chi Minh. Even though they quoted the American Declaration of Independence in their own document of freedom, we refused to recognise them. Our government felt then that the Vietnamese people were not ready for independence and we again fell victim to the deadly Western arrogance that has poisoned the international atmosphere for so long."
In the same speech he went on to say: "It is a sad fact that due to comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch-anti-revolutionaries."
True, but the U.S. cannot wipe out its own words to its former colonial cousins, also contained in the Declaration: "Nor have we been wanting in attention to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislation to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our separation, and hold them as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in war, in peace friends?.
Happy birthday America and thank you for your prescription, which provides an antidote for your own poison, whether administered directly or through 'interim' and 'friendly' governments.
'Cock mout kill cock'. A Jamaican saying that Karl Samuda should be familiar with.
Melville Cooke is freelance writer.
