Edited by author 07-05-2003 06:20 AM
Being a student of history, I'm able to distinguish between, say, Nazi Germany and modern America. For some reason, much of the left isn't able to do this, and tends to imagine tyranny where there is none. This ignorance of history leads to bizarre associations where anything you dislike = fascism, with no real understanding of the frame of reference. q.v. "Bush = Hitler," "King George" et alia. 'Starting before then,' spouting off rhetoric as if you currently lived in a repressive totalitarian hellhole, only shows you for the paranoid loon you are.

I have read enough to see that any supposed infringement of rights happening today is nothing - utterly nothing - compared to the injustices that spurred on the American Revolution. Until you can prove any of the grievances in the Declaration apply today - and I mean seriously prove, not just "Rumsfeld plans to send every dissenter who won't Sig Heil to secret death camps" as an example of depriving the right of trial by jury. You take your rights for granted, and despite what you may think, no one has taken them away from you in your lifetime. You don't know how good you have it - which is probably not a bad thing; it means no real tyrant, no goose-stepper, no Islamofascist freakjob has yet been successful in their attempts to destroy or conquer America. Need more, Mr. Ignorant?

And, William, you may want to check your statistics - while Liberia did originate in that manner, the numbers I've seen say its population of American birth or descent was never greater than about 5%. Today, it's 2.5% "Americo-Liberians," with 2.5% of Carribean origin, and the other 95% indigenous tribal populations. The freedman population that established it as a country has had influence, sure - but not that much.

It was never an American colony in any meaningful sense. It never belonged to the 'mother country;' there was never responsibility for it or administration of it, as, for instance, Puerto Rico or the Phillipines. It is no more an American colony at the moment than Tanzania is a German colony, or the Congo a Belgian colony. It's an African country that like most African countries has been a dictatorship to a greater or lesser degree for quite some time, and its citizens see themselves as oppressed Africans, not opressed African-Americans.