Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com
Decolonize This Place
“Colony” is a value-neutral expression but this useful
denotation has been force-fitted with a negative connotation which serves no
purpose except the shallowest sort of propaganda.
Hong Kong, for instance, was until this century a British
Crown Colony in which freedom of speech, movement, and economic activity were
guaranteed. Now it is part of Communist China in which the only thing
guaranteed is brutal oppression.
The label is not important; the reality of freedom is. We
are a republic, but then so are North Korea, Haiti, and Viet-Nam. Canada, God’s
second-favorite nation, is a dominion within the British Commonwealth, and they
seem to get on just fine.
Still, facts are not allowed to influence the lemmings who
chant slogans that begin with that intellectual thesis statement, “Hey! Hey!
Ho! Ho!”
A ‘way cool thing now is to claim that everything and every
concept is colonized and now must be decolonized in order to be restored to
some sort of pre-lapsarian golden age that never was. “Decolonize this place”
is now extended to art, music, literature, and for all we know beagles and
flashlight batteries.
Well, I propose a decolonization of this nation. We have a
national flag. The red, white, green, and black of the mythological state of Palestine
isn’t it.
Decolonize this place.
When we see thousands of idle, uninformed, and apparently
unemployable oafs marching and menacing in this country’s streets under a
polluted sea of Palestinian flags we are reminded of the Ku Klux
Klanner-bananers and the Nazi-nasties who in the 1920s and 1930s strutted and
bellowed in our streets waving their hateful rags, shouting their hateful
ideologies, and demanding our submission. A lot of Americans bought into that
doo-doo too.
Why do we now see more Palestinian – which is in effect a
camouflage for Hamas – flags in our streets than our own?
How is it that so many people now regard our republic as a
colony of Hamas, and demand that we colonials obey the dictates of a foreign
power that hates all of us?
Decolonize this place. Not with violence or those stupid
bullhorns, but with a quiet, stern refusal to indulge Hamas. Don’t accept any
arguments about a false equivalence. There is no equivalence between an
ideology of genocide,, murder, hostage-taking, lying as an art form, torture,
and a one-world empire [Hamas’s Genocidal Intentions Were Never a Secret - The
Atlantic], and our concepts of dignity and equality (though we could
be better at living those concepts).
Decolonize this place.
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