[FreeTheHostages]

Is this a tirade against "anything and everything American"? Far from it. First, I hasten to remind you that "American" refers to all of the Americas, not merely to the United States, as U.S. imperial chauvinism would have it. More importantly, my rejection of U.S. nationalism is an appeal to liberate our own political imaginations such that we might usher in a radically different world in which we will not remain the prisoners of U.S. global domination.

Looks like a tirade against all things American to me. He wants a revolution. The only thing he appears to want from the old America is its land and resources and the radical 10 percent he seeks to lead.

[bvw]

Well, technically the traitorous professor is right.

Martin Waldseemüller was the man who named AMERICA.

He named it after the Florence Italy native, Amerigo Vespucci who had written about his travels to the new world. Martin printed a wood block map with his own invention of a name "AMERICA" across what is now called South America. (See Amerigo Vespucci, about.com).

However it is common, historically-established since people had names, and all-in-all quite proper to call the biggest and most influential member of a set of things by the name of that set. In this case, "America" is a perfectfectly fine alternate way of naming the "United States of America".