American hedonism closes its eyes to death, and has been
incapable of exorcising the destructive power of the moment
with a wisdom like that of the Epicureans of antiquity.

- Octavio Paz
Death is un-American, and an affront to every citizen's inalienable
right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

- Arnold Toynbee
the_band_huge
the_band_huge
"As long as such self-serving hypocrisy
motivates America's response, Ukraine will
only sink further into needless bloodshed,
and that blood will be on America's head."
JOIN THE DISCUSSION
the_band_huge
In America everybody is of the opinion that he has no social superiors,
since all men are equal, but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors,
for, from the time of Jefferson onward, the doctrine that all men are equal
applies only upwards, not downwards.

― Bertrand Russell
Global Coke
Global Coke
"What those 'racists' are reflexively and rightly reacting
to is the soulless chill as the fire goes out beneath the
melting pot. Those who think America can thrive as a
'cultural mosaic' are worse than fools; they're Canadians."

JOIN THE DISCUSSION
Global Coke
Two centuries ago, a former European colony decided to catch up with Europe.
It succeeded so well that the United States of America became a monster,
in which the taints, the sickness and the inhumanity of Europe
have grown to appalling dimensions.

― Frantz Fanon
What the United States does best is understand itself.
What it does worst is understand others.

- Carlos Fuentes
Poor Mexico, so far from God
and so close to the United States.

- Porfirio Diaz
the_band_huge
the_band_huge
"Indeed, everything about the American southland was magical
and exotic to the young Canadian musicians, from the sights
and smells to the drawling manner of speech to, especially, the
central role that music played in people’s everyday lives."

JOIN THE DISCUSSION
the_band_huge
America is a mistake, a giant mistake.
- Sigmund Freud
America is an adorable woman chewing tobacco.
- Auguste Bartholdi
chimerica
chimerica
"This is the tone of the China Century, a subtle
mix of Nazi/Soviet bravado and 'oriental'
cunning -- easily misunderstood, and
never
heard before, in a real enemy, by the West."

JOIN THE DISCUSSION
chimerica
Coke and 'America the Beautiful'
Coke and 'America the Beautiful'
"And for the others who argued for English-only
patriotism, I note that there are more than
57 million Americans (about 20% of the nation)
whose first-language is not English...."

JOIN THE DISCUSSION
Coke and 'America the Beautiful'
predator-firing-missile4
predator-firing-missile4
"This is the behavior, and the fate, of paranoid
old-world tyrants like Hitler or Saddam, not liberal new-world democracies like America pretends to be."

JOIN THE DISCUSSION
predator-firing-missile4
America is the only nation in history which
miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to
degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.

- Georges Clemenceau
I found there a country with thirty-two religions and only one sauce.
- Charles–Maurice Talleyrand
A people who are still, as it were, but in the gristle,
and not yet hardened into the bone of manhood.

- Edmund Burke
America is the only country ever founded on the printed word.
- Marshall McLuhan
"The removal of racist sports nicknames (and mascots) seems outrageously belated
-- why, exactly, has this civil rights cause
taken so long to gain momentum?"

JOIN THE DISCUSSION
The atom bomb is a paper tiger which the
United States reactionaries use to scare people.
It looks terrible, but in fact it isn't.

- Mao Tse-tung
They made us many promises, more than I can remember, but
they kept only one; they promised to take our land, and they did.

- Red Cloud
In America sex is an obsession,
in other parts of the world it is a fact.

- Marlene Dietrich
I would rather have a nod from an American,
than a snuff-box from an emperor.

- Lord Byron
One day the United States discovered it was an empire.
But it didn’t know what an empire was.
It thought that an empire was merely the biggest of all corporations.

- Roberto Calasso
Americans are so enamored of equality, they would rather
be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom.

- Alexis de Tocqueville
newtown
newtown
"No one, I thought, could watch those scenes, of young children slaughtered en masse, and so many parents grieving, without thinking that this, finally, would tip some kind of balance in the country."
JOIN THE DISCUSSION
newtown
If you are prepared to accept the consequences of your dreams
then you must still regard America today with the same naive
enthusiasm as the generations that discovered the New World.

- Jean Baudrillard
I am willing to love all mankind, except an American.
- Samuel Johnson
America, thou half brother of the world;
With something good and bad of every land.

- Philip Bailey
"What can be more powerful than disinformation in the Information Age?"
JOIN THE DISCUSSION
England and America are two countries separated by the same language.
- Sir Walter Besant
Christopher Columbus, as everyone knows, is honored by
posterity because he was the last to discover America.

- James Joyce
Now, from America, empty indifferent things
are pouring across, sham things, dummy life.

- Rainer Maria Rilke
If the United States is to recover fortitude and lucidity,
it must recover itself, and to recover itself it must
recover the "others"- the outcasts of the Western world.
- Octavio Paz
The youth of America is their oldest tradition.
It has been going on now for three hundred years.

- Oscar Wilde
"America really is, for most Americans, all things considered, a good place to be, and all they really want is for everyone to enjoy the same privilege and pleasure."
JOIN THE DISCUSSION
When good Americans die they go to Paris;
when bad Americans die they go to America.

- Oscar Wilde
jobs drug dealer
jobs drug dealer
They're nothing more than traffickers; and as the smart traffickers'll tell you, you don't use the merchandise. They are just inoculating their kids with a tech-drug serum, to immunize them against the very merchandise that put the **** bowling alley in their basement.
jobs drug dealer
America is therefore the land of the future, where, in the ages that
lie before us, the burden of the World's History shall reveal itself.

- Georg Friedrich Hegel
America is a large, friendly dog in a very small room.
Every time it wags its tail, it knocks over a chair.

- Arnold Toynbee
Americans always try to do the right thing after they've tried everything else.
- Winston Churchill
The thing that impresses me most about Americans
is the way parents obey their children.

- Edward, Duke of Windsor
Americans are apt to be unduly interested in discovering
what average opinion believes average opinion to be.

- John Maynard Keynes
Europe was created by history.
America was created by philosophy.

- Margaret Thatcher
America is God's crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of
Europe are melting and reforming!... The real American has not yet arrived.
He is only in the crucible, I tell you - he will be the fusion of all races.

- Israel Zangwill
American dreams are strongest in the hearts of those
who have seen America only in their dreams.

- Pico Iyer
America: It's like Britain, only with buttons.
- Ringo Starr
The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer.
It has never yet melted.

― D.H. Lawrence
I have two conflicting visions of America.
One is a kind of dream landscape and the other is a kind of black comedy.

― Bono
The American mirror, said the voice, the sad American mirror
of wealth and poverty and constant useless metamorphosis,
the mirror that sails and whose sails are pain.

― Roberto Bolaño

April 14, 2024

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Author Topic: "America is for Americans"


alana_rach-
el
New Member
Posts: 4
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"America is for Americans"
on: December 7, 2015, 20:55

America is a country founded on immigration, however many “Americans” these days seem to forget that. Since the horrible acts of terrorism that happened in Paris last month, racism and prejudice are running rampant in the U.S. Many American’s are pushing for the government to close their borders and not allow Syrian refugees into the country, and many are committing hate crimes on Muslims already living in the country. Donald Trump, in one of his many lunatic speeches, said that: “America is for American’s.” He seems to forget that America is founded on what can be considered as the partial genocide of Native Americans, hence at one time, what Trump calls “real” American’s were terrorists themselves. You can see this in the large majority of Native American literature. As a country that claims to be ‘humanitarian,’ it is interesting that the response to terrorist attacks has been to trample on the rights of those fleeing their country to escape this terrorism.
I understand that people fear for the safety of their country in a world where terrorism is becoming more and more prevalent in the media - because let's be realistic, acts of terrorism happen every day, they just don't get the same amount of attention in American media - however, they should not be discriminating against all Syrians for the deplorable actions of one group.
Should we assume that all Germans are Nazi's? Or, that all white people are members of the KKK? This is the same line of reasoning after all.
Hundreds of thousands of Syrians are fleeing their country because they too are victims of terrorism ... Hundreds of thousands!!
Refusing refuge to the Syrians is essentially condemning them to death and whilst many believe this shouldn't be their problem, whose problem should it be then?
Categorizing all Syrians as terrorists miss the point of humanitarianism completely. Of course safety is an extremely important issue, but it goes both ways.
Why are Americans’ human rights more important than others? There is a reason they are called universal fundamental human rights, because EVERYONE is entitled to them.



MPasha
Novice Their American
Posts: 6
Avatar photo
Re: "America is for Americans"
on: December 8, 2015, 20:37

I feel like this recent article is relevant to this discussion:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/trump-immigration-laws-history-1.3355142
The article provides a short history on the five times that the U.S. and Canada have barred entry to immigrant based on prejudice.

America is definitely a country founded on mass immigration, and the "the partial genocide of Native Americans" as you say.
As a country, the U.S. has a terrible track record when it comes to humanitarian causes, especially during a time of war or when irrational panic for the safety of citizens is running rampant.

Take the Jewish refugees desperately trying to escape the cruelties of the Nazi regime during World War II for example. The prevalent attitude in the states then was to deny them entry as well, because there was a culture of xenophobia and antisemitic beliefs present. American Jews themselves were facing the scorn and persecution of their fellow Americans. The delayed reaction to the cruelties that the Jews faced under the Nazi regime was partly a result of this prevalent environment of antisemitism. By the time the war ended as many know, it was far too late for millions of Jews.
.
So refusing refuge and entry to those escaping terrorism based on their nationality or religion is exactly what the world can expect from America. The idea that America has ever stood for humanity over "America" reads as a joke. No matter how many times the government has acted unjustly towards those of other nationalities, there is no progress. Cultural genocide of Aboriginal peoples during the founding of the Americas, slavery and continued racism against black Americans, rampant anti-Semitism, the exploitation of the ethnic Chinese under indentured servitude, the Japanese shoved in internment camps, ill-treatment of illegal South American immigrants, blatant and open prejudice against Muslims: it's never ending. Every time there is a crisis or perceived crisis by the majority of Americans, some ethnic or religious group or another takes the blame and as a result is persecuted. It is often the innocent who suffer.
The somewhat bleak conclusion of history and the present dialogue occurring in America seems to be that American human rights have never been the same as fundamental human rights. So in response to the disbelief that there is such a strong rhetoric in the U.S. to deny entry to Syrian refugees: what did we expect?



MonikaPecz-
ko
Novice Their American
Posts: 8
Avatar photo
Re: "America is for Americans"
on: March 28, 2016, 01:56

This notion of "America is for Americans" seems to be ever relevant, and it would appear that no lessons are taken from the pages of history. When we are taught about the Holocaust, there is this constant repetition of the phrase, "Never again." Holocaust Memorials have been erected across the world, widely in America. The tragedy was memorialized, with the sentiment that we are reminded so that such crimes, and such negligence to help people suffering at the hands of such terror, would ever occur again. Whenever this issue is raised, I am reminded of a line from Alan Bennett's play/film, The History Boys.

"It's not "lest we forget", it's "lest we remember". That's what all this is about -the memorials, the Cenotaph, the two minutes' silence-. Because there is no better way of forgetting something than by commemorating it."

These things fade into history, and old notions of nationalist thinking rise as the dust settles on past tragedies. It is a tragedy that Syrians should face the same rejection and be condemned to their horrible fates, but the tragedy also lies in the fact that these attitudes are no longer shocking. This happens all over the world. It happened in Canada, with the Aboriginal peoples, suffering at the hands of our government in the residential schools. It is briefly discussed in classes, that they were treated poorly, and never again. The government has now admitted and apologized for their crimes, and as the words were said they were already moving to the back of our consciousness. It is a good question you ask, why are American's human rights more important than anyone's? The media is certainly not helpful in seeking answers to these questions. Each country is concerned with its own identity, and it seems one of strength is more important than an identity of peace and tolerance. America and Canada are two countries entirely built on the backs of immigrants, and this rejection of Syrians is unspeakably wrong, and at the same time, entirely unsurprising.

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