American singer-songwriter Toby Keith has a bombshell of a song for the Fourth of July. No, not an unpleasant one, if you ask me. If you haven’t already, you can listen to it and judge for yourself.
He is a 59-year-old U.S. heartlander. Sure, he had better days; everybody was as good as their word where he comes from.
Regarding why he wrote this song, Mr. Keith says: "It just feels like the politicians aren't getting the job done on either side and it just feels like the democracy is in danger. We’ve fought and divided almost to the point it’s only about power and winning. I’m thinking, God save us all from politicians."
Democracy in danger?
One of the reasons it feels that democracy is in danger is that whatever is left of it is being subjected to what is called the critical race theory (CRT).
I don’t believe that in those all-white towns that all folks are racist as suggested by the CRT; like the woke culture and the cancel movement, the CRT is a half-baked science. All those pseudo sciences do just two things: They cannot convince people – instead they create militias – and they cast doubt on the real science.
The root of CRT, the 1619 Project, has as its main tenet the idea that people migrated to the "new world" so that they could own slaves.
The project came to a point where it is creating ideologues who see the continuation of the U.S. Constitution (even the union itself) impossible because "the Representatives of these united states of America, in General Congress, Assembled, and appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions" were lying about the equality of men (and women). "If the basis of a polity was racism, then the whole establishment is baseless."
This is not consistent with the historical facts: the U.S.’ founding fathers in the south supported slavery so that their agriculture could survive; slave-based agriculture was more competitive because it was cheaper.
They were not lying about their belief that African people possessed "different behavioral traits" which made them inferior to the European people (or the European people superior to the Africans); in other words, racial prejudice was their very common belief in Europe.
Some people had begun to abolish slavery not because one morning they had this enlightenment that what they were doing was unethical, un-Christian or inhuman; they pushed for abolition because slavery had become hard to maintain.
It was ingrained in their culture. Many scholars call it the "culture of settler-colonial societies." For example, Hamid Dabashi, the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, writes that people from England, France, Turkey (he means Ottomans), India and China – who were "coming from across the world and overpowering the original inhabitants of a vast or small territory to form a garrison state around themselves" – created the "culture of settler-colonial societies."
I respectfully disagree here. Dr. Dabashi puts all his "settler-colonialists" into one basket and judging them by the 19th-century law of the state, calls them land thieves.
Yes, France called Algeria as "Algérie française" (French Algeria) and Belgians called the Congo "Belgisch-Congo" (The Belgian Congo), but in fact, all the occupiers knew the land they occupied was not an extension of the motherland.
When Queen Victoria chose the name "British Columbia" to distinguish what was the British sector of the Columbia District from the United States (which became the Oregon Territory in 1848), she knew it was someone else’s country.
The Ottoman conquest of the Balkans had introduced a new concept: The Ghaza State. The Ghaza thesis (from the Ottoman Turkish "raid") is a historical paradigm formulated by Paul Wittek that was used to interpret the nature of the Ottoman Empire during the earliest period of its history, the fourteenth century,
When the Ottomans took Adrianople (modern Edirne today) in 1362, they showed the whole world that they did not own those countries, they were only going to run the daily affairs there. This is not a wordplay by Prof. Wittek – the Ottomans were going to create an "empire without a motherland." Istanbul or Bursa or any other part of the Empire was the Ottoman homeland; there was no colonialism here.
There are three components of colonialism: