Will Home Grown Terrorism Be Nurtured In The USA For Political Power At National Expense?
Tomorrow, 20th January, 2021, the USA will teach the world whether election is a tool to ensure unity in diversity, accelerate the perpetual drive of nations towards peace and sustainable development, ensure liberty, dignity and prosperity for their sovereign peoples. Or is it an opportunity to sow the seed of antagonistic contradictions that consume lives, properties and future of citizens, who, by virtue of misguided convictions and ill-counseled minds, aim to alter the irrevocable verdict of history, to the detriment of the innocent majority?
Peaceful protest should be an aid to democracy as a catalyst for national awakening and not a pretext to externalise conviction and hatred that defy reason, justice and conscience and eventually translates into senseless violence that reduces nations into ashes.
The Federal Republic of The United States of America is not a nation state as is the case for many countries in the world. It is a multinational and multi ethnolinguistic Republic commonly referred to as the melting pot of the populations of the world. The vicissitudes of history brought its settlers, founders, toilers and builders together. There was the battle against social and gender inequality, slavery and threats of national disintegration into states of slave owners and industrialised states. This was during the prime of its agrarian and industrial revolution, when the country needed unity most inorder to ensure linkage between its raw material producing Southern states and its manufacturing industrialised Northern state. A civil war had to be fought and a defiance campaign unleashed against the remnants of injustice that plagued the Union, to keep the Federation together and move it closer to its founding vision of promoting life liberty and the pursuit of happiness for all.
The 21st Century Republican Party should take cue from the 18th Century anti-slavery Republican Party which accompanied Abraham Lincoln to the Presidency in 1860. Fearing that the Federation was moving towards the abolition of slavery, the plantation owners in the 11 Southern states seceded from the Union, in the aftermath of Lincoln’s democratic election, to establish the Confederated States of America under Jefferson Davies without any democratic mandate or a vision of a United America. They were even ready to link the confederated states with other manufacturing nations of the world at the expense of the USA. Lincoln was compelled to defend the Union but initially vowed to do so by peaceful means.
The Republicans of today should remember that it was the violent act of the Confederal forces against the citadel of the federal forces at Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861 which marked the beginning of the US Civil war. Instead of rolling back the tide of democracy, freedom and liberty, the civil war accelerated it with powerful gyration.
Despite hesitation to abolish slavery throughout the United States, the demands of necessity compelled Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation on 1st January, 1863, to declare the beginning of the end to enslavement by asserting that all persons held as slaves within any state in rebellion against the United States shall be free forever.
These former enslaved persons of African American identity who earned their freedom were received in the Federal forces to defend the Union. 180,000 served as soldiers in the Union army before the end of the war in 1865, constituting ten percent of the total fighting forces of the Union and thus earning their descendants the right to be citizens of a Union they sacrificed to save despite their past and their discrimination. History records the death of 40,000 African American Union soldiers in the civil war.
The lesson is clear. Each generation establishes its own foundation of unity, justice and civil rights, with scaffoldings made out of the planks of judicial precedence that keeps the pillars from crumbling for more than a century. This is despite the earthquakes and hurricanes of national distress and civil strife , which serve as the midwife of every outdated political situation pregnant with a new one.
Awakened by the Storms and stresses of the times, each historical period tends to nurture the leadership that is capable of calming nerves and putting the broken pieces together to enable the people to keep hoping for a better tomorrow.
That is why when George Floyd was murdered, I emphasised that a defining moment for the USA has dawned, ushering in an era that is finally bidding good riddance to colour discrimination which has no basis any more, especially after an African American, occupied the highest office in the land and did not govern in anyway different from how mainstream USA expected itself to be governed. Some would have been prouder if he governed a bit more differently but are satisfied that he did his best, as the times and circumstances would allow.
I emphasised that the battle to put an end to the colour bar to justice, equity and sense of belonging to the USA is a battle to change the mindset of those who are entrusted with the instruments of the state to govern and those who are supposed to be served by the trustees of state power.
I summoned all the logic at my command to explain that colour discrimination is a byproduct of a mindset that is nurtured by the cultural skeleton of a defunct era which classified some as chattels and others as owners of human beings. It was an era of dehumanised slave owners and the dehumanised enslaved human beings. Such an era governed by dehumanisation witnessed the greatest brutality and savagery ever perpetrated by dehumanised settlers on the face of the earth.
