The Hypocrisy of American Democracy

[XXPANTHAXX]

By Solomon Comissiong

"I'm not going to sit at your table and watch you eat, with nothing on
my plate, and call myself a diner. Sitting at the table doesn't make you
a diner, unless you eat some of what's on that plate. Being here in
America doesn't make you an American.... No I'm not an American; I'm one
of the 22 million black people who are the victims of Americanism. One
of the 22 million black people who are the victims of democracy, nothing
but disguised hypocrisy.... I'm speaking as a victim of this American
system. And I see America through the eyes of a victim. I don't see any
American dream; I see an American nightmare."
—Malcolm X

There are numerous blatant symbolic hypocrisies riddled throughout the
fabric of American society. Most of them are so ingrained within the
tapestry that if you were to mention them to the “average” US citizen
they would react in a rather bellicose manner to your announcement. One
of these symbols of hypocrisy is the annual celebration of the 4th of
July and the signing of the Declaration of Independence. This shallow
holiday continues to serve as a direct affront to all people who truly
seek justice, freedom, and equality for everyone and not just those who
have a lack of melanin in their skin or those who are considered the
“elites”.

At this particular juncture in life I am much more interested in being
myself and being honest than I am in perpetuating some ridiculous lie
that America is the gold standard (for all) when it comes to life,
liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I am pretty certain that when the
signers of the Declaration of Independence placed their “John Hancock”
on that superficial piece of paper that the rights of enslaved Africans
was the furthest thing from their narrowly focused minds.

I don’t know about you but when I think of life, liberty and the pursuit
of happiness I don’t think that being enslaved fits within that
category. Being stolen from your native land, forcibly worked to death,
placed into chattel slavery, beaten, murdered, raped, and the stripping
away of one’s culture does not seem like life, liberty, and the pursuit
of happiness in any shape, form or fashion. If it did, to the signers of
that hypocritical document, I certainly did not read about too many
white men signing up for that “good ole American form of slavery”. Why
not?

There is a simple answer to what should be a rhetorical question---the
founders of this nation (America) never had the liberating interests of
Africans in mind when they drafted documents like the Declaration of
Independence, the Federalist Papers, or the Constitution. And as we
approach the 4th of July this 2009 we should all be reminded by the mere
presence of this “holiday” of how utterly hypocritical this nation’s
policies, so-called values, holidays, and sacred documents are.

In all honesty, if most history, civics, and social studies classes were
doing a good job, most sincere “Americans” would know what a
hypocritical country they truly live in. If the corporate mainstream
media was worth anything, most “Americans” would know of the hypocrisy
of American “Democracy”. However, due to the fact that the corporate
mainstream media and public educational system are supposed to program
the masses, they are doing their jobs quite well. They are two of the
most effective tools of pro-American propaganda.

While people whose homes, communities, and families were destroyed by US
military drone airstrikes are mourning, most of us will be whistling
sweet Dixie this 4th of July. And while scores of black and brown
skinned men & women sit within the bowels of a vastly racist and unjust
criminal “justice” system, many of us will be grilling up hot dogs and
hamburgers laden with chemically engineered growth hormones brought to
you by Monsanto and Cargill.

Where is the life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness for the families of
Sean Bell, Oscar Grant, Timothy Stansbury and so many more black men who
perished at the hands of an unrepentant and pernicious white supremacist
police institution? How often does America, collectively, really ask
itself these questions? How often have these extremely important issues
been brought up, in context, by the corporate media? Never! If they did,
white America, and this nation in general, would have to face up to some
very despicable truths.

And if they face up to the truths about what has really been going on
within its “house”, and why, they would probably be forced to repair it.
After all, if the US did not clean up its issues after airing its dirty
laundry in front of the entire world, it would be guilty of showing
purposeful malice and complicity in the knowledge of willful evil that
exists within the so-called “Land of the Free”.

Scary thing is---many American elected officials know very well of the
various forms of evil, through injustice, that linger within its’
borders, as well as the malevolence America perpetuates outside its’
artificial borders. Unfortunately this evil is sustained by American
apathy, white supremacy, and imperialism. America has myriad of social
issues that reek. The stench of American hypocrisy is undeniable. We all
smell it, especially those of us who have been adversely affected by it
and its innumerable double standards.

Fredrick Douglas was right on point when he said: Go where you may,
search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of
the Old World, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and
when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday
practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting
barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.

You see America does not like her dirty, funky laundry aired out there
for the rest of the world to see, smell, and speak on. Damn----she does
not even like those who live within her man-made borders to speak on it,
even though they “smell” it. However, something very curious happens
when one does not air out and wash their “dirty laundry”; it becomes
dirtier, and more infectiously dangerous to those who come in contact
with it.

When the malodorous stench of white supremacy, imperialism, and
institutional racism are not aggressively addressed publically they will
indeed be passed on as soon as they touch the nascent psyches’ of
younger generations of naïve children. America’s white children will
then become the new wave of purveyors of those aforementioned evils, and
children of color will almost certainly inherit the nefarious wrath of
systemic oppression. However, America’s oppressive “qualities” do not
only limit themselves to her stolen shores.

Some of the least talked about examples of American hypocrisies are the
ones that take place in other countries. This is where the silent cancer
of apathy reigns pervasive and metastasizes throughout America. The
sickness of American “democracy” even causes delusion, amnesia, as well
as a baseless feeling of superiority and self-righteousness. This
version of the sickness has ostensibly become an epidemic throughout
congress, and the white house, regardless of who occupies that dwelling.
This is evidenced every time one turns on their corporate media laden TV
where you will most certainly notice some mainstream politician
lecturing another country on how to administer “free” , “fair” and
“democratic” elections.

They seem to forget that it looks much better when your own country
executes free, fair, and democratic elections where truly every vote
counts. However, given the fact that thousands of black voters from
Florida and Ohio were disenfranchised in the presidential elections of
2000 and 2004, respectively, they might want to take a long hard look in
the mirror before they volunteer any advice to other countries. And
when it comes to human rights America might also want to refrain from
giving advice out to other countries.

Within the first five months of the cultish “Change You Can Believe In”
administration they have executed airstrikes on everything from civilian
communities to funerals, killing hundreds of innocent civilians in
Afghanistan and Pakistan. You think those evil deeds might qualify as a
violation of human rights? You’re damn right they do. If you only listen
to most American elected officials, or the corporate media, you might
not think so because the genius of this American “democracy” is to make
sure you don’t think about those types of things within their proper
context.

After all, this is a democracy that makes heroes of the likes of the
white minority ruled South African regime supporting Ronald Reagan. It
is a government that placed the African National Congress and Nelson
Mandela on the “terrorist” list all the while supporting and funding
organizations like RENAMO (Mozambican National Resistance) and UNITA
(National Union for the Total Independence of Angola). These two groups,
along with the white ruled South African Defense Forces, were
responsible for killing over one million black Southern Africans. Reagan
and the American government supported all three. Ronald Reagan was the
furthest thing from a good man, yet in America characters like him are
celebrated on a daily basis, along with their morally challenged
“principles”.

The celebration of these people, and their ways, continues to happen in
America because, unfortunately, many Americans hold no point of
reference when it comes to history, historical figures, or hypocritical
holidays like The 4th of July. They hold no point of reference because
the corporate media is farce and the public school system’s history
books are also infected with myopia and white supremacy.

If there has ever been a time to turn our backs on these holidays and
the celebrations of slave holders and Indian killers like George
Washington, Andrew Jackson and so many more, the time is now. The
celebration of the 4th of July and the Declaration of Independence will
only be superficial symbols as long as the US government is continually
using its military might to dominate, intimidate and destroy countries
infrastructure and their innocent civilians, all in the name of a
misguided “war on terror”.

How does one fight such a broad based ideology (terror) in the first
place? Any sensible person can tell you that you can’t fight it with
more terror. Have we forgotten that terror is in the eyes of the
beholder? When US made bombs are being dropped onto communities by US
made aircraft flown by ill-advised American pilots, that is very much
terror to those people dying wholesale at the hands of our government.
We need to bury this notion that terrorism mainly happens to Americans
or that it started when Reagan coined the phrase “war on terror”.

Have we forgotten that it was European invaders of the Western
Hemisphere that practically created and revolutionized the art of
terrorism? After all, terrorism has reared its odious head for a long
time on “American” soil dating back to when indigenous natives had their
land, and lives, stolen from them by imperialist minded Europeans. Then
those same lazy Europeans systematically enslaved, and killed, tens of
millions of Africans. The day the Declaration of Independence was
signed countless Africans were living under the hell of white supremacy
and within the system of American chattel slavery!

If I had one request this 4th of July “holiday” it would be for all of
us to step outside of our collective and individual comfort zones and
think about the millions of people who are suffering in places like
Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Africa, Central America, South America, the
Caribbean, Detroit, Oakland, DC, Baltimore, and Harlem, to name several.
Many of the people within those aforementioned places are suffering at
the hands of American styled “democracy”, capitalism, xenophobia,
imperialism, and social apathy in the US.

We all need to give a damn, continue to give a damn, protest and
organize to change this broken wretched system so that it no longer only
benefits the plundering elite. Putting a brown face on the same ole war
mongering system does not mean that the injustice based evils are
magically whisked away. That superficial change is nothing more than a
façade meant to pacify the masses who, collectively, can invoke the real
tangible change the world needs to see. As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
said, “He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who
helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against
it is really cooperating with it.”

Solomon Comissiong is an educator, community activist, author, public
speaker and the host of the Your World News radio program
(Your World News on Blog Talk Radio). He may be reached at:
sunderland77@hotmail.com.

[Pragmatic]

"In the 1921 riot in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in which whites dropped dynamite from airplanes onto a black ghetto, killing more than 75 people and destroying more than 1,100 homes, have completely vanished from our history books." "Lies My Teacher Told Me" pg 158. James W. Loewen

pg.1 "Mansfield's decision, which resulted in the uncompensated emancipation of as many as fourteen thousand blacks residing in Britian, not only made it clear that slaves automatically gained their freedom the instant they arrived on English soil, it also asserted an even more fundemental principle: that slavery could have no "legal" standing in a society unless "positive law" existed that provided it with an unequivocal legislative mandate." from "Alienable Rights" by F.Adam & Barry Sanders

The Fourteenth Amendment adopted on July 9, 1868 (Amendment XIV) to the United States Constitution Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.


"...Aliens of African nativity and descent may become citizens." 1870 Naturalization Act approved July 14 1870



A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation: U.S. Congressional Documents and Debates, 1774 - 1875

When you swear on the Bible, in a court of law, you are actually swearing allegiance to the Kingdom of Great Britian since the
the Act of Supremacy 1559. The Kingdom of Great Britian owns the crown copyright to the Bible, the Christian faith, and belief. In your testimony you are declaring,. . . .in your consciencenous that
I, A. B., do utterly testify and declare in my conscience that the Queen's Highness is the only supreme governor of this realm, and of all other her Highness's dominions and countries, as well in all spiritual or ecclesiastical things or causes, as temporal... the Act of Supremacy 1559.

Act of Supremacy 1559 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


Crown copyright applies to all works produced by the British Government, subject to the condition that the qualification "Where a work is made by Her Majesty or by an officer or servant of the Crown in the course of his duties" is met. The Crown can also have copyrights assigned to it. There is also a small class of materials where the Crown claims the right to control reproduction outside normal copyright law due to Letters Patent issued under the royal prerogative. This material includes the King James Bible, and the Book of Common Prayer.


Under the Doctrine of Reception English serfs landed in America under British Jusidiction. After murdering the nations of indigeoneous Americans in the millions. The Kingdom of Great Britian claimed America as conqueured soil. Thus, Making Africans bought and sold as slaves in America not only illegal, since there was not a operating Statutes at Large (positive law), but prisoners of war and not slaves.

The United States Statutes at Large, commonly referred to as the Statutes at Large and abbreviated Stat., is the official source for the laws and resolutions passed by United States Congress.
United States Statutes at Large - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Why did it take The Government Printing Office or "GPO" 86 years to document legislation?

The Government Printing Office began operations in accordance with Congressional Joint Resolution 25 of June 23, 1860. The activities of GPO are defined in the public printing and documents chapters of Title 44 of the United States Code. The joint committee was created by the 1946 Legislative Reorganization Act and combined the functions of the United States House Committee on Printing and the United States Senate Committee on Printing.

Can the Constitution be a "legal, binding instrument" if it's operation wasn't even functional until 1946, and codified as the official source for the laws and resolutions passed by United States Congress?


Peace be upon you