America, nation of torturers: Stop saying “this isn’t who we are”

Torture and total war are not the work of a few bad people, but the product of a system that from its inception treated human beings as property and the right to property as more important than the rights of women and men – it’s who we are, and if we want the violence wrought by our system to end, we must honestly address the systemic cause.

I just love it when these so called "historians" go out of their way to take facts out of their historical and cultural context in order to paint the United States as evil.

The native tribes of the Americas were a stone age culture that were inevitably going to be conquered by the European nations. It happened in both North and South America. The North American tribes fared far better in my opinion.

The author seems to think that human rights and property rights can some how be separated. They can not. There can be no human rights with out property right. If property rights are not guaranteed no other rights are guaranteed. If property can be confiscated by the government at will then all other rights are negated because the government can take your property retaliation for some perceived misdeed.

The taking of slavery out of its historical context to condemn the founding of this country and deny exceptionalism the founding is such a common shibboleth that it has become a cliche.

Up to the time of our Civil War slavery was a world wide institution and a world wide market existed for slaves. To this date the United States is the only nation to fight a civil war to eliminate slavery. And an important fact almost universally neglected in this type of article is that slavery still exist in this world and is still often found in this country. It might also be mentioned that slavery is enshrined in the Koran (non-believers may be taken as slaves) and in the Muslim countries of North Africa they are this very day.

The author seems to be placing property rights at the root of our country's misdeeds. This is laughable. The very root of this country's exceptionalism and its strength is property rights. Without property rights there is no freedom. If your property can be taken from you by the government on any pretext property becomes worthless. If property is worthless then commerce and trade become impossibly complex because the measure of worth is difficult and there is little in which wealth can be stored. Property rights and liberty are inseparable.

I was unusually well-developed for a 12 year old.

I looked great in my fairly modest two-piece bathing suit as I went to the public swimming pool in Hyde Park MA.

While i was innocently enjoying the pool, two teenage boys suddenly held me under the water and “copped a feel”.

I almost drowned, and the boys were gone before i could point them out to the lifeguard.

The point of this narrative is that I went through something far worse than waterboarding, I was an innocent little girl, and I was sexually assaulted at the same time. I had not undergone any “training”, was not a terrorist, and was not responsible for the death of thousands of Americans.

And I survived the experience quite well and turned out ok, thank you very much.

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